The Hunger

Recovery is strange because I never thought I was lost and I have no idea what kind of man will appear from the wreckage, assuming I can get to him before the seven days are up.

—Lost? Far from it, Lincoln. You are absolutely in touch with your essence but I’m so concerned that you’re in danger of forgetting who you are and what makes you happy. I fear you’ve already forgotten your one, true friend.

Being sober is like peeling away a thick layer of skin. It doesn’t fall away all at once. Bits of it break off here and there and, as they do, I notice things. This morning I was running along the Embankment and my head was clear. I thought about new ways to leverage relationships with the concierges to bring more punters into The Club. I thought about doing a Jet Set in the South of France and I called my Mum to tell her I would come round to build her a small rock pool in the back garden. She said:

That’s the thing about clarity in drunks. It shocks people. They get used to your hazy, virtual life, then you mess up their world with a shocking display of sobriety. Some people want you to stay clean. Most can’t take it and fear they might get contaminated. These are the people who touch me all over, looking for the skin we used to share and, when they can’t find it, they think:

—He’s lost his skin! Does that mean I will lose mine too? But I don’t want to lose it. I’m not ready to lose it, and I don’t want to be around him until he grows it back.

When I go into The Office, the boys are split. After a week of drinking water and chamomile tea, Maynard and I are having lunch at our usual table near the bar. He says:

—Thank fuck for that. At least a little bit of the Old Lincoln is still with us.

• I pound for hours just like I always did.

• I find this reassuring.

• In fact, I do my best to break more beds than ever.

• I find this reassuring too.

• Wraps and broken beds are less important to me than they were before.

• I find this worrying.

• I sometimes feel I can’t be bothered with Wraps.

• I find this even more worrying.

• When I feel this I go out of my way to fuck two or three of them at a time.

• For old times’ sake.

• I find myself connecting with them.

• I know this because I feel grateful.

• I think I have feelings for some of them.

• I like talking to them.

• I cry with some of them.

• They massage me and tell me they love me.

• I want to hold them in my hand and keep them safe from harm.

• I take some of them away from Soho.

• Away from Soho!

• We go walking in the Lake District or we go to Southend for a day by the sea or we visit my Mum.

• I notice I am using Paid-Fors less often than I used to.

• One day I think:

There’s not much left of the Old Lincoln.

• This thought frightens me, so I hire four Paid-Fors and we go to the Sanderson Hotel.

• I bang them but it doesn’t feel like it used to.

• I wonder if I should have a drink to get that feeling back. Esurio says:

—Have one, Lincoln, have one. Just one.

• I consider it, then I think:

Maybe the Old Lincoln wasn’t that great.

• I spend a few minutes thinking about the difference between the Old and New Lincoln.

• I make a list of the bits of the Old Lincoln that are still with me. I can think only of:

• Vanity

• Anger

• Pounding

• I think about what I like most about the New Lincoln. I write:

• Clarity

Because I like having a clear head, I decide to stick with the New Lincoln, so I say to Steve:

I decide to keep going to the meetings. They tell me the best way to do it is to go for ninety meetings in ninety days. I wonder how many I can get to in the ninety hours I have left to change my life. I’m indifferent to what happens in the meetings. When I’m there I drift in and out. No one intrudes and no one touches me, which is great. I sometimes speak to people at meetings. They tell me stories. I don’t like these conversations. I want to get away. I want a drink and a line. I look at my watch often, counting the minutes away. Some of the people in the group don’t speak. Others fill the time with Tales of Misery and Despair. I find these Tales reassuring. They are like fairy tales that teach me that my life at its worst doesn’t seem too bad by comparison: Once upon a time there was a man who lived all his life on the streets. His wife left him. His kids disowned him. So he drank and drank and drank until he couldn’t drink anymore and that’s when he slashed his wrists with a broken beer bottle. When he was discharged from hospital he went back on the streets and drank all night and cried all day. Lincoln, on the other hand, was having a Great Time banging all the Wraps in Soho and snorting coke off their arses . . .

By the end of the second meeting I’m pretty sure I don’t have a drink problem and if I do it’s as mild as a common cold, while the rest of the poor fuckers in the meeting have a serious dose of the plague. However, I am changing my life, so I will stick to Abstinence until the end of the week and I’m surprised at how good I feel. After one of the meetings, I share a bottle of water on the top floor of Soho House with John, who has been in recovery for two years. I never liked Soho House. Too full of pissed-up actors. We sit on a couple of battered leather chairs. The place is heaving. Someone bumps into me as I walk across the creaking floorboards. Someone else touches my glass before I can pick it up off the bar. I want to kill them both but the feeling passes. It passes. Without any broken bones or bleeding noses. I like John. He is in his mid-forties, dressed in jeans and a casual brown jacket. I admire his indifference to how he looks. He used to work as an A&R man at a big record label before he lost his job for turning up pissed to work once too often. I say:

—I thought being pissed was part of your employment contract in that industry.

I don’t ask what happened. I don’t need to. When he cleaned himself up, he began working at an art gallery.

—I don’t really enjoy it. Looking all day at conceptual crap that could have been done by failed art college students.

—That’s the last thing I want. I need every ounce of energy I have to keep me dry, so having a job that takes nothing out of me is just what I need.

—It happens all the time and I love being bored at work. Gives me time to think, prepare for a meeting if I’m leading it. I don’t know, just lots of space, lots and lots of space, that’s what I need.

—Surely you can’t go on forever like this? There has to come a time when you want more.

—Forever? Most days I can’t look forward twenty-four hours. Recovery isn’t something I can bolt on to my life. It is my life. It has to be. If I had cancer or motor neurone disease or I was paralysed from a stroke, I would put everything I have into my recovery. Drinking like I do is a terminal illness. If I forget that I’m fucked. So what more do I need in my life than getting through another day without killing myself?

I leave Soho House just after ten to go to The Club. As I walk down Old Compton Street I can smell aniseed. I turn and Esurio is walking with me:

—I’m not trying to be difficult but sometimes I feel compelled to speak truthfully.

—Yes, truthfully. If there’s one thing you can rely on me for, it’s honesty, and I have to say the more of these people I see, the more I’m certain they’re not good for you, Lincoln, not good for you at all.

—And so, may I remind you, was every martyr who ever walked the face of the earth before leaving it in a blaze of stupidity.

—Life is for living, Lincoln, not for dying, and these new friends of yours may be walking and breathing but they are dead. They died the day they gave over their lives to one small, sneaky, dirty little word.

He keeps on at me until we get to The Club but I stop listening to him. When I leave him, he is standing in the drizzle outside The Club going on about the Truth. Inside there’s not many punters. They tend to turn up from about midnight onwards. Two guys in front of me walk into The Club. They’re pounced on by Wraps. It’s White Lingerie Night, and they disappear into a snowstorm of barely covered tits and pussy. I don’t like it, it’s too much, so when the guys are trapped in a booth with a couple of Russian Wraps, I let a few of the girls know what I think:

—Always give the guys time. If you keep doing that they’ll all fuck off and then you won’t earn anything.

They ignore me. I don’t like being ignored. I need a drink. The Boss is sitting on his throne in his restaurant. He calls me over.

I forget I need a drink. The Boss matters to me. There’s not a lot of people that do, but he’s one of them. He gets up and puts his arm around my shoulder. He’s wearing a turquoise suit with Ziggy Stardust written down the outside of one trouser leg. The glitter in his hair and on his clothes glistens in the roller-ball lights. All the Wraps look at him. He ignores them. He leans into my ear:

—Don’t let this go. It’s the right thing for you to be doing. I never want to see you hammered in here again. Who’s coming tonight?

—I’ve got more bankers than usual and a lot of punters, sorry, Gentlemen, coming from the hotels. I’ve been sending three girls out every day to get at the concierges.

Sometimes I hope I’m right. Usually I’m too pissed to care whether I’m right. Tonight I know I’m right. That’s what being sober does for me. Instead of thinking I’m the best Sales Director in the universe, I know I’m the best Sales Director in Soho because I’m sober. The Boss’s mantra bounces around my head:

Rik and his gang turn up at about one in the morning. I haven’t seen him since he was banging a Wrap in my bed. He offers to buy me a drink. I tell him I’m not drinking. I think he doesn’t hear me because he offers again. I tell him I’m not drinking. He can’t hear me, so he buys me a drink anyway. I sit him at one of the best tables downstairs, right in front of the stage, and order two bottles of house champagne on my account. I sit with him for a few minutes. He pours me three glasses. I don’t drink any of them. When I get up to leave they’re still standing in a row on the table. He can’t see them. He asks me if I enjoyed them, tells me he’s glad I’m drinking again and gets back to the Wraps.

The night goes well. It was the most profitable White Lingerie Night The Club has ever run. The following morning I walk into The Office. I do not lean on the door. I am not sweating. I spend a few minutes running through the numbers with Mark. The Boss calls me into his office. I’ve prepared a schedule of parties for him running until the summer.

—I’ve put two parties for the concierges, four parties for the bankers, a Poker Night and maybe we could introduce some new themed nights like this one.

I’ve prepared a flyer for a party I’ve called Heels and Wheels, showing a couple of topless Wraps spread all over a Porsche 911.

—I thought we could go to Porsche or Ferrari and get them to park a car outside The Club and inside we can theme it like the sexiest car showroom in the world. I might even talk to McLaren and see if we can get a Formula 1 car in The Club.

—How about a Dinners for Sinners party and we can get Marco in to do the food? There’s loads, but what I want to do is hammer the Diamond Card Holders. We’ve got maybe four thousand of them on the database and we don’t work them like we should. They’ve got the card because they spend the money. They buy the Cristal champagne, they get a dozen girls in for sit-downs, so I’ve thought about a special club just for Big Spenders. I’ve called it the Secret Society. It’s a step on from the Jet Set. They pay maybe ten large each to join and we hold parties for them in The Club but also in villas in Cannes, Palma or the Algarve. We’ll fly the girls out and maybe twenty society members will pay an extra ten grand each for the weekend.

The next day The Boss calls in before he flies to Ibiza. He puts a contract in front of me.

I sign it. Five days and my life is already changing. What will it be like after seven?

It feels too good to be sober. I have started doing two hours instead of one every day in the gym. I’m bench-pressing over a hundred kilograms and doing over three hundred press-ups. I run at least five miles a day and there are even days when I don’t have sex. I’m shocked by my own thoughts. When I was running across the Heath before going into work, this is what came into my head:

I’ll pay Bruno the money I owe him this afternoon. I’ll throw in a bottle of champagne as a thank you.

I want to give Suzie a grand. She’s struggling with her rent. I don’t want the money back.

I’ll keep going to the meetings even though I don’t really need them anymore.

—One day I’ll marry you, Lincoln. It might be five or ten years from now but I will.

I am thirty-eight. She’s nineteen. Her mother kicked her out of the house when she was a teenager and she went to live in a caravan on the south coast. She says:

—After the seven days are up I’ll keep going to the meetings. It’ll just be occasional. Maybe once or twice a month. I don’t need them but Tales of Misery and Despair are good for my soul.

I catch my reflection in the glass of the Curzon Cinema and adjust my handkerchief.

In the afternoon before the meeting I went to dig the rock pool at my Mum’s house. I was relentless. The early spring sunshine was beating down on me and I pounded the earth for maybe two or three hours without stopping. As I was beating the ground I smiled at how, even now, without a drop of alcohol or a grain of gear in my body, I still couldn’t stop. It took me three hours. Mum said:

But underneath what? And how far does she have to dig to find a seam of decency?

We never had any money when I was growing up, and after Dad died things got even worse. So I used to go to school and boast about how rich we were, how we could afford anything we wanted. My Mum said:

—It’s no use lying all the time. It doesn’t change anything. She was wrong. It changed everything. I learned that if my world was breaking apart, I had the power to put it back together again in any way I wanted. This is how the process works:

Their Lie:		We haven’t got any money.
My Truth:		We can afford anything we want.
Their Lie:		You’ll get caught.
My Truth:		I’ll always get away with it.
Their Lie:		My Mum can see through me like glass.
My Truth:		I can hide anything from anyone.
Their Lie:		If you carry on drinking and using, you’ll have a heart attack like your Dad.
My Truth:		I’m going to live forever.
Their Lie:		You’re in pain.
My Truth:		I love pleasure.

And there was another reason I didn’t have to lie. We were, in fact, rich in ways I couldn’t see, as my gaze was lost in the search for the money we never had. Here’s the evidence I missed as I struggled to solve The Mystery of the Missing Money:

• My Dad took me dog-racing at Dalston and we ate pies and jellied eels.

• My parents never argued.

• They laughed together. A lot.

• Dad took me to the seaside and we ran down a long pier and played on the fruit machines.

• My Dad knew Marty Wilde and we all played golf together.

• My parents took me to the Tower of London and didn’t leave me there.

• My Dad had a great sense of humour.

• He made me laugh. A lot.

But when you’re a wounded detective and you can’t stop trying to solve The Mystery of the Missing Money, you can’t see the truth because you’re too busy laying down one false trail after another and following them all as fast as you can, in the hope that one day you can find a reason to stop running.

I’m in a meeting and, as I look around the room, I feel sorry for the people who have been coming to these meetings for years, so at the end of the meeting I stand up and say:

—I want to thank everyone here and those who aren’t here today for helping me stop drinking. I couldn’t have done it without you.

I feel a bit of a toady because the truth is I know I could have done it without them but this is the New, Nicer Lincoln. I like him and so do they. I tell them that Esurio has a special party organised for me on The Seventh Day, so I won’t be at tomorrow’s meeting but, before I sit down again, I add:

—You’ve helped me rediscover my True Self. Thank you. I don’t know where that came from, but when I’m walking along Wardour Street after the meeting Esurio is chuckling at my shoulder.

He is swinging his cane as he walks. He’s brighter than I’ve seen him for some time. He sneers at me:

—Don’t get all clever with me. I’m just saying, being sober feels like being me.

—If there is such a thing as a True Self, I imagine yours to be . . . mud-coloured

—Let me put it another way. How can you be sure that the man walking along this street with me right now, taking in the lights and ladies at a safe distance, is the real you? Are you not a murkier man than that, Lincoln?

—I grant you that a change has taken place in you, but how can you be sure that this change isn’t taking you away from your True Self, as you like to call him?

I wipe the back of my right hand across my lips. I can hear Esurio laughing. When I turn to smack him, he is nowhere to be seen.

I don’t like that question, so I ignore it, although I can’t shift it completely out of my head. Danielle comes into my mind. She was a Wrap who worked in Soho. She started as a dancer and ended up as a Paid-For. Then she fell in love with a punter. They were married within three months and before the wedding all she could talk about was what she would be wearing, how her little nieces were going to be bridesmaids and how she wanted a ‘chocolate box’ wedding. The Big Day was her wall, too thick and tall for her to see past it, so she got married. The beatings started on her honeymoon and within a month she was back in Soho. Three weeks later she was dead. As I leave the meeting, I think:

When I come out of the meeting, I find myself standing outside The Office. I can’t remember walking there. One minute I’m in the meeting. The next I’m outside The Office. I can see the boys at the back, laughing. A few Wraps are hanging around, waiting for some coke and taking cock as payment. Esurio puts his hand on my shoulder.

I walk towards Oxford Street. I feel Doubt. Not about anything in particular, just a gnawing, mud-coloured Doubt twisting in my gut. Seven Days? Is it enough? Does the Geek with Glasses really know what he’s talking about?

On the night of The Sixth Day I go to bed early and dream of snorting some gear off a Wrap’s back. As my head touches her skin, her spine, in the form of a snake, breaks out of her body and twists around my throat. I wake up gasping for breath. Then I’m in The Office and I order a vodka tonic. I’m alone at the table when Mario brings it to me. He serves it to me as if he’s been expecting me for some time. He seems pleased I’m back. I look at it forever. I can feel the smell rising up into my nostrils and circulating through my body. I inhale deeply and hold my breath. Then I let go. I dare not touch the glass. I know if I touch it I will be lost. I need a drink. I need this drink. NOW. I sit there for maybe half an hour then something pulls me out of my seat and within seconds I’m running through Soho. I’m laughing. People stare at me then lower their heads. They think I’m insane. They’re right. I’m mad with happiness. I passed the test. I sat there and I didn’t drink. I am Immortal. Powerful Beyond Measure. I wake up sweating and smiling. My chest hurts. I ignore it and wipe my hand across my lips.

I begin the Seventh Day with a trip to the best Thai massage parlour on Brewer Street. A stunning Asian Wrap bends me like a doll before giving me the happiest of happy endings. When she’s done I wonder if I should stop thinking of young women as Wraps. They can be Girls. Simple, beautiful Girls. I walk out of the massage parlour and Esurio is standing on the opposite side of the road. He’s smiling.

—It’s the Seventh Day, Lincoln, and I want you to see just how much your life has changed. Tonight you will have as many young ladies as you wish without a drop of alcohol passing your lips. I feel you are ready to start a new life where you have more control over your impulses, where you can indulge one pleasure without being overrun by another. Let’s meet in the Townhouse on Dean Street and take it from there. Bravo, Lincoln, bravo!

I smile back at him, proud of how far I’ve come in such a short time. I spend the rest of the day getting myself ready. I go for a facial in Mayfair and, when I get back to the flat, I take a couple of hours removing surplus body hair before going to the gym.

In the evening I am not hungry. I get a sandwich from Starbucks and on my way back I think of how my life has changed over the last Seven Days. A week ago there was me and the drink and the drugs and we were all heading in the same direction. Then I took a small step on a different path and now we are worlds apart. I guess it’s what happens when parallel lives go their separate ways. That is the Truth. My Truth. How difficult can that be to grasp?

Truth and Other Lies