The Afterparty Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Publicity

  Friday, April 1 2005 21:44

  Friday, April 1 2005 21:02

  Friday, April 1 2005 21:01

  Friday, April 1 2005 22:32

  Saturday, April 2 2005 01:23

  Saturday, April 2 2005 03:09

  Saturday, April 2 2005 05:54

  Saturday, April 2 2005 06:22

  Saturday, April 2 2005 06:55

  Saturday, April 2 2005 07:28

  Saturday April 2, 2005 11:23

  Saturday April 2, 2005 11:52

  Saturday April 2, 2005 12:44

  Saturday April 2, 2005 14:02

  Deleted Scenes

  Don Scarlett’s spring collection

  Mellody’s early years

  Hugo’s struggle with fame

  Tweets

  Copyright

  About the Book

  ‘Hi,’ the man said, stepping forward. ‘I’m such a big fan.’ No one had briefed Hugo about him.

  This book is different. You’ve really never read a book like this before.

  It’s the story of an April night that never happened. A night that changes everything for nerdy Michael, a Fleet Street worker ant, when he agrees to take his boss’s invitation to an A-list party at a London club.

  Inside, reclusive movie star Hugo Marks is announcing his re-entrance to society. And the last thing Hugo needs is Mellody, his junkie supermodel wife, deciding now’s the time to swan-dive off the wagon. Or drop-dead-gorgeous pop pup Calvin, hoping he can screw himself into their league.

  Yet not one of them sees the real crisis coming. The moment that will tangle their four lives into an intricate disaster. It happens at the afterparty. But then, perhaps you knew that already …

  About the Author

  Leo Benedictus is a features writer with the Guardian. He lives in London with his wife and two sons.

  www.leobenedictus.co.uk

  for Sarah

  * * *

  From:[email protected]

  To:[email protected]

  Subject: Book Submission – Publicity by William Mendez

  Date: Wednesday, 15 July 2009 02:18:40

  Publicity chapter 1, Michael

  Dear Valerie

  My name is William Mendez. I’m a freelance journalist from London, and in my spare time I’ve been working on a novel called Publicity, which tells the story of one night at a decadent celebrity party in 2005. Please find the opening chapter enclosed with this email. At the moment I have no literary agent, so if you think the book has promise I would be delighted if you would agree to represent me in selling it to a publisher.

  Before you begin, however, I feel I ought to warn you briefly about the opening scene. Speaking as a reader myself, I must say I’ve never abandoned anything because of a bad first page, and I doubt that many others have. Nevertheless, I do find many novels quite difficult to ease into. What’s going on? Where am I? Who are you? I’m so busy asking all these questions that I often can’t absorb the answers. This, no doubt, is why it is ‘a truth universally acknowledged’ by novelists that the first few lines are crucially important. (Though actually, I’d say one should think more carefully about how a book can engage readers *before* they even pick it up – otherwise, why would they?) To grab people’s attention, therefore, Publicity begins with something bold, blunt and moderately shocking: a graphic description of its hero Michael defecating. Please understand that I don’t mean this to seem confrontational – to you, or any other reader. Although if you do feel confronted by it, I’m sure we can find a way of softening the blow. The scene could easily be relocated later in the book, for instance. Or we could add some kind of preface in front of it?

  But you’ll be keen to get on. Please email me if you want to see chapter two.

  Regards

  William Mendez

  Publicity

  A novel

  by William Mendez

  Friday, April 1 2005

  21:44

  THEY WOULD HATE him if they knew he was afraid, all those easy people out there. So he must not let them know. Michael pulled the toilet door shut with his trailing hand and dialled home the bolt. He heard its quiet click declare his safety. Time to be alone.

  Yet he was diverted by the sudden beauty of the lavatory. It was an old found thing, with a delicately fluted pan and painted cistern, no doubt a grubby scavenge from the carcass of a wonder pub. It was certainly Victorian, at any rate; no craftsmen since those patriotic days had ever tried so hard. (Or all had learned, at least, to hide their trying.) And look at all that depth and width! How gloriously inaccurate the Empire’s drinkers must have been! Although, ahem, the nudging in his entrails had not brought him here to look. So, unbuckling his belt, Michael lowered himself on to the seat. The trousers of his suit, united with his underpants, slopped into a fabric puddle on the tiles. He stirred them with a foot, and the spoon in his pocket clinked in a limestone groove. Finally, he relaxed.

  And straight away, a premonition rose within him. Some warm dark power was gathering its mass. His body clenched. Forgotten fibres twanged and snapped. Jaws shook, knees shook, teeth shook, until at last, when surely all must shatter, a knobbled cosh declared its independence and set forth, stately and momentous as an ocean liner, through the last elastic inches to the pool below.

  Lightened, eyelids flickering with ecstasy, Michael peed like a king.

  It was hard to say how much time had passed when a noise in the adjacent cubicle brought him back into the world. Rising dizzily, he twitched out half a dozen sheets of tissue from the roll, and wiped himself. Wad: immaculate. Then he turned to see what he had done.

  It was the stool of his dreams.

  Plump, gently curled, and quite comically vast, the thing reared a good three inches through the waterline as though in mockery of its home. For a moment, Michael felt so proud he almost wanted witnesses. He had to fight away an impulse to unlock his stall and usher people in.

  But then he heard the whispering. A gleeful sibilance next door. A voice, fast and skilful, and a tapping sound. Discarding his tissue, he crouched down to peer under the partition. The spoon in his pocket clinked quietly again.

  He saw four feet. Two were male, in leather boots, creased forward at the toes, as if the owner were leaning on the toilet to be sick. The other pair was female, tanned and painted, grown from lissom ankles on to show-off shoes. These ones seemed to straddle the boots, as though this glamorous woman was stood above her vomiting companion to protect his haircut from the stream. But no retching could be heard.

  Then: ‘Oh come aaahn!’ the woman’s voice said, American and now not whispered.

  Michael stood up suddenly as if he had been spotted, grabbing pants and trousers by the waistband, zipping fast.

  ‘Keep your hair on, love,’ the man replied, in loud London. Tap tap. ‘There you go.’ Tap tap.

  Someone flushed, and Michael felt safe again behind the sound. And happier. Fascinating as his neighbours were, it belittled him to spy on them.

  The flush had reached its cruise.

  So what else was he going to do?

  The turd said nothing.

  He took out his phone. 21:46. Too early to leave the party, and too shameful, without having even spoken to another guest.

  No, tonight he must be bold. He must be bolder than himself, or take his slow fears home. Do it! he almost shouted. Strike back into the scene and speak! Ten minutes’ fortitude, then outside to Chinatown, to subside into a bowl of noodles. He would eat a hero’s dinner if his courage could be brave.

 
He looked back at the toilet, at his splendid waste, at the painted garden scene upon the handle of the chain. A drop of Doulton, strung up for admiring. He pulled, and left the roaring mechanism to unwind.

  Michael sat in traffic. And he was already late.

  21:03, said the driver’s display.

  No movement, said the road. Just a clotted thread of transport working up a smoke. The constant coitus interruptus of confinement and release.

  If this went on, Michael wondered hopefully, perhaps he might not make it at all? The thought was childish, so he let it drop.

  21:04.

  Michael sat in traffic.

  The taxi nibbled up another metre. Stopped again. The contained compartment air grew warm beneath the driver’s rage.

  And Michael had not even been invited.

  Hugo Marks is thirty-one

  said the card in his pocket,

  Cuzco, 12 Malt Street W1

  8pm, Friday, April 1 2005

  On the back was a picture of a bunch of flowers, and in the corner had been written, Camille McLeish, the name of his boss. Actually, not his boss. But still someone he was frightened of. She was a gossip columnist on the Standard, and a fairly celebrated one, a regular at these kinds of things. Whereas Michael just subedited her column, and subeditors were never celebrated, so he had no experience at all of stars like Hugo Marks. Even so, he was surprised that Camille herself had been invited. With witty little chisellings in her column, she had made it clear what her opinion was of Marks’s reclusiveness (affected and self-indulgent, typical of an actor) and his creaking marriage (finished). So perhaps, suspecting hidden vengeance, she had not trusted the invitation to his party? This would be why she had got rid of it, on the pretext that her son was ill. But why then give the card to Michael? Because he had once said that Marks’s films were good? Because he was desperate for the opportunity to write something for the paper, and the party might afford it? Both motives seemed too considerate to be hers. And at first, trying to understand the offer, Michael had merely stared back dumbly.

  Then Sally had intervened. Lovely Sally.

  Oh Michael, you’ll never get this chance again! You must go! she had exclaimed, handing back the invitation.

  And looking at her face, he had known that he must.

  Free drinks, famous faces, and the longed-for chance to see his words in print: the offer was so unarguably good that it would only advertise his timidness if he refused.

  So now Michael sat in traffic, and he worried.

  21:07.

  He would know absolutely no one there. Worse: he would know half of them from TV and have to hide how impressed he was. Worse still: he was supposed to make friends and pick up indiscretions.

  £8.60, said the driver’s screen. £8.80.

  And the radio was on.

  … me coming out of the show, Will Young was saying. But to be honest, you can’t have everything, you know, at once. I mean I had a very quick rise to being very well known as a singer with actually no material behind me. And I got a record contract and paid off my student loan. And I don’t think life works like that. You can’t have everything.

  The driver listened with interest. Tight mown grey hair sprouting densely from a roll of neck stodge. Michael would not have picked him as a Will Young fan.

  £9.40.

  At last the road was clearing. The cab accelerated to a red-cheeked British clatter.

  As long as he had something to report to Sally. That was all that mattered. As long as he went home with something, he might escape disgrace. No need to impress her any more – that adolescent wound had healed over. Just the safe disposal of the night would do.

  £11.20.

  It was time for the news and sport.

  … condition of His Holiness John Paul II, said the female newsreader, at full seriousness, is reported to be grave.

  Michael listened. He had spent the whole day laying out a suite of commentaries and encomiums on the dying Pope, which the senior editors, bored of waiting, had decided to run in the Saturday paper. It had been his flippant guess, in a discreetly organised office sweepstake, that death would occur at 13:13 tomorrow. Which was looking good. Laughing when he asked her, Sally had said 08:12.

  £14.00.

  The taxi rattled into Malt Street through drifts of Soho drinkers. Loose-limbed and dressed up, out on a Friday night.

  Michael sat forward on his seat. He did definitely need the loo.

  Now, through the windscreen, a flash of colour caught his eye. Drawing near, he saw it was a length of carpet – mauve carpet, the colour of the flowers on his invitation – that someone had unfurled across the pavement, over the kerb, and out on to the street. At its edge was a chain of crowd-control barriers, battered and grey. And behind them … Michael’s body tightened. He had not considered this. Behind the barriers were paparazzi. They leaned against the rail in various attitudes, listlessly equipped. Nobody was leaving or entering the club at that moment, and many of them had taken the opportunity to smoke cigarettes or talk on mobile phones. Seeing the cab arrive, to Michael’s horror, first one of them, then two, then three, slapped their embers to the ground, readied cameras, and dug in for his approach.

  ‘£14.80, mate,’ the cab driver said, stopping six feet from the carpet’s edge.

  The door mechanism bounced open.

  ‘Right.’

  Michael unzipped the pouch in his wallet to investigate its coins. Arriving by taxi had been Sally’s idea too – to puff you up, she had said. It had also proved expensive. He straightened, and a brisk volley of flashes caught him through the window. In clownish synchronisation, three photographers all checked their screens.

  ‘There you go,’ Michael said, handing the driver a £20 note still flat from its withdrawal.

  ‘Ta. Big party, is it?’

  ‘Yes. Hugo Marks’s birthday.’

  ‘Hugo Marks the actor?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Right.’ The driver slithered out a metal handful into the tray between them. ‘Are you in movies too, then?’

  ‘No,’ Michael said. ‘I’m a journalist.’ Which sounded good.

  ‘OK … Here to write about what they all get up to, is it?’

  ‘Yes. I hope so.’

  ‘All right then. Good luck.’ He grinned enthusiastically, revealing a network of wrinkles baked deep into his skin. Then he added, ‘I could tell you some stories about that lot, no problem.’

  Yes please, Michael wanted to say. Tell me your stories. Just drive me somewhere else and I’ll write it all down.

  But, ‘I bet,’ he said instead. And, ‘Thanks a lot,’ as he stepped out of the cab.

  The photographers seemed calmer now, studying him without interest. Even so, Michael trembled as he hurried up the carpet. Each step he took, each swing of arm and knee, felt counterfeit. Like a marionette’s.

  Sorry, this is a private party, he kept expecting somebody to say.

  He must reek of fraud.

  But the photographers just watched.

  Michael reached the door and pulled.

  Then he pushed, and went in.

  A beautiful young woman, draped with elegance in black, stood behind a distressed lectern.

  ‘Good evening,’ she said pleasantly. Behind her, a large man nodded in support. He guarded a thick mauve curtain, through which the overlapping clinks and bickers of a party could be heard. Music too.

  ‘Hi,’ Michael said.

  He handed her the card.

  The woman smiled and consulted her list.

  She looked at him, and the invitation, and him.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ she said, smiling once again.

  And Michael found that he was smiling too.

  Now the big man was pulling the curtain back, heavy on its rings. Michael nodded and stepped through. After three paces, he stopped. He collected himself. For the moment, it was all too much.

  The room was large, its walls crazy-paved with mirrors – dec
o, baroque, rear-view, shaving – scattering each a separate snippet of the scene below. On every table stood a vase of flowers, ungathering their colours in a spurt. And rolling in between: the human lake. In Michael’s eyes, it seemed actually to pitch and yaw as teams of costumed waitresses worked tributaries of glass around the room.

  I’m losing my edge, sang-spoke an amplified voice above a pumping beat. I’m losing my edge. To the kids from France and from London.

  He felt giddy.

  But I was there! A crass bassline split the room.

  That was Gordon Ramsay, sipping at a cocktail, listening to a woman’s views, desperate for his turn. And there: a younger woman having her picture taken with Tracey Emin. Their faces frozen in defiling light. And there: another kind of camera, making film or television from the conversation of two men. And there: was that Mark Wahlberg? Marky Mark? Michael waded closer.

  ‘This other guy over here keeps talking about Gary Glitter,’ Wahlberg, unmistakably, was chuckling to a man, whose hand was on his shoulder. ‘I don’t know what that means.’ The next sentence was inaudible. Then: ‘But we didn’t think that the entourage fighting amongst themselves – like hitting each other with bottles and shit was going to, like, work.’

  Was that gossip, Michael wondered? Should he write it down?

  A waitress was standing in front of him, speaking words.

  They were: ‘Care for some champagne, sir?’

  She was dressed as Goldilocks.

  ‘Thanks,’ Michael said, and swept a glass up from her tray.

  Sip.

  She left.

  The crowd was thick. Sip.

  ‘Scuse me, sorry,’ he said to a gate of jackets and bare backs.

  They opened without interest, and he slipped through to explore.

  Down one wall stood a line of generous booths, each filled with the disporting limbs of Marks’s guests like dolls rush-jumbled in a toy box. A young man even sat cross-legged on the surface of the final table, his fingers strolling idly among the paths of his laboriously landscaped facial hair. Distracted by the sight, Michael missed a plate of morsels that circulated past him on the other side. They were china spoons, containing some brown liquid of great deliciousness to judge from the transcendent grins on the faces of the people tasting it. And doors. There were doors everywhere, surreptitiously recessed into the perimeter. Behind the glass in one, the DJ bobbed above his lights. Through another flowed the Goldilockses with full or empty trays. Michael sidled up and loitered with intent. He was hungry.