The Afterparty Page 3

  A lanky character began to sift towards them through the crowd.

  ‘He’s not called Clive,’ Caspar explained with a wink. ‘But I call him Clive for the film.’

  ‘Why?’ Calvin asked.

  But Caspar did not hear him. He had turned away to do something to the lens.

  ‘It’s from Keith Floyd,’ Rich explained quietly. ‘An old TV chef, who was always drunk.’

  ‘So!’ Caspar was back. ‘Why don’t you tell us a bit about yourself?’

  The lens was in Calvin’s face. The little red light was on.

  Rich nodded his approval.

  ‘OK, well, my name’s Calvin Vance,’ Calvin said. ‘I’m twenty years old, from Leeds, and I’m a singer. My first single, “Smoothly”, reached number three in the charts in January. And, erm, what else would you like to know?’

  ‘That’s great, Calvin. And I like that you put your age in there. Very nice. Close-up of the handsome young man, please Clive. So what brings you to Cuzco tonight? Just wandered in for a drink?’

  ‘No. It’s Hugo’s thirty-first, and we’re here to celebrate!’ Calvin stretched the last three words into a whoop.

  ‘I see. And are you having a good time?’

  ‘Yay! Tip-top, man. Rich introduced me to Elton John, which was pretty cool.’

  ‘Ah! The big EJ! How was he hanging?’

  ‘Oh he was great. A really good bloke, actually. He said how he was always rooting for me on X-Factor.’

  ‘Is that so? Well we all were, Calvin. Weren’t we, Clive?’

  The cameraman nodded the lens up and down.

  ‘And tell me, dear boy,’ Caspar continued. ‘How do you know Mr Marks?’

  ‘We were on The Paul O’Grady Show together. They made us try Morris dancing.’

  ‘Morris dancing, eh?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  And it was true. But besides complimenting him on his performance, Hugo Marks had barely spoken to him that day, climbing instead into his car as soon as the recording had finished. Calvin’s invitation owed more to the persistence of the people at Warehouse, in fact, than to any imagined friendship. As the people at Warehouse had often reminded him.

  ‘So you waved your hankies at each other?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Morris dancing. That is what you do, isn’t it? With bells and beards.’

  ‘Oh right. Yeah, we did. With sticks, actually.’

  Calvin laughed. Mum always said he could be a bit ‘slow on the uptake’.

  ‘Can you show me some of this Morris dancing then?’

  ‘What, now?’

  ‘Absolutely. Clive, have you got a hankie?’

  The camera shook from side to side.

  ‘OK,’ Calvin said. ‘Well, I can’t remember much, and this music isn’t right, but we link arms like this, then we spin round together. That’s it. Then I face you and hit your stick on both sides.’ He tapped Caspar on the arm. ‘Then you hit mine on both sides.’ Caspar cheered as he did so. ‘And erm, I can’t remember what happens next.’ Calvin laughed loudly at himself. ‘Sorry, LCD Soundsystem isn’t really the right music.’

  ‘No, that’s great. I’m craving cider already. Calvin Vance, thank you very much.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  The little red light went off.

  ‘Thanks Calvin. That was great.’ Caspar swigged at his beer. ‘So do you guys want to come and meet some people?’

  Rich was studying his phone. ‘I can’t, thanks,’ he said. ‘It sounds like there’s a bit of a meltdown going on at home. You’ll be all right without me, won’t you Calvin?’ He was smiling.

  ‘Yeah, I’ll be fine,’ Calvin said, secretly exultant. ‘I’ll just stick around for a bit longer if that’s OK?’

  ‘Fine by me. But look after your voice. And no controversy, OK?’

  Calvin sighed. ‘Controversy’ at Warehouse meant ‘drugs’, and he was supposed to be the only person there who didn’t take any. Or the only person not to get seen. Either way, he resented being told what to do. Especially now that he was famous and had his own flat.

  Rich held his smile still. Then he left.

  ‘He been keeping an eye on you?’ Caspar asked.

  ‘Fuck yeah.’ Calvin sighed with relief. ‘I got this tour of the Far East coming up – you know, Korea and that. Everyone at Warehouse is being really manic about it.’

  ‘Course they are. Course they are. They depend on you. You could do their job if you really had to, remember, but they know they could never do yours. It makes them nervous.’

  Calvin had never thought of it that way before.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said.

  ‘Mmm. Want a line?’

  ‘You fucking bet.’

  Caspar laughed. And the raucous confidence of the sound dislodged more memories: that his dad was an earl, that he had been to Oxford University. It was incredible really, thought Calvin, that he, a lad from east Leeds, a media and communications student who worked in Top Man on Briggate, had become the playmate of these types … But then, just four months after his rejection from The X-Factor, incredible things had now become routine. The celebrated people, their fabulous parties, the happy obligations of his fame; it exhilarated him almost into numbness. He had actually received the life that he auditioned for, queuing hours last summer with his number in the Yorkshire grey, sucking in his nerves as drizzle tiptoed on his zipped-up mac. Simon Cowell had given him a chance, and he had taken it. He had taken it with ‘Smoothly’. He had taken it despite his televised defeat. And now he lived among the winners. A life so wonderful that sometimes it did not feel like his. Which must be the reason, he supposed, that still, when he slept, he dreamed in Leeds.

  ‘Hey Calvin! Mate!’

  They had reached the door to the toilets. But Caspar was walking past it.

  ‘This way!’ he shouted, pointing.

  Calvin’s brow crumpled in confusion, but he followed, treading lightly on his trainers’ puffy tips, as if this might make him less visible.

  The next door was marked PRIVATE, and Calvin hesitated. He had never been to Cuzco before, and he wanted to be careful.

  ‘It’s fine,’ Caspar insisted, in answer to his face.

  They pushed through together.

  On the other side, the lights were brighter, stripping out the comfort from a corridor that was white and undecorated, with a waft of coolness in its air. At the far end, a couple stood connected by some quiet drama.

  ‘I don’t like interesting stories,’ the woman was protesting. ‘Boring is good!’

  Caspar was paying no attention. With a complete smile, he was pointing to another door.

  They went in.

  There was smoke. Smoke and people making smoke. Perhaps twenty or thirty people, thick and noisy in the room. They gathered, most of them, around a large trestle table by the tiled wall, on which sat glasses and ashtrays and bottles. Mike Skinner – was that Mike Skinner? – was holding forth, with what would be a brandy in his hand. While opposite, along the other wall, some kind of counter ran, stitched with stripes of powder, variously prepared. Above one hovered a girl, attempting both to sniff and keep her balance as she leant in from her position on a metal sink. Below, her shins swung in the void. If you knew parties (and Calvin thought he knew parties) then you knew when you had reached the core.

  Boldly, Caspar put his wallet on the counter by the girl. She shifted three polite inches, and he went to work beside her thigh.

  ‘How did you know about this place?’ It was lame to ask, but Calvin needed to know.

  ‘My brother’s a member,’ Caspar said. ‘Everybody comes in here. It’s like a kind of rule.’

  ‘Oh right.’

  The room was hot and windowless. And really very loud, with conversations escalating over one another to the point where Calvin’s hearing range began to falter at a yard. And he was glad, or else the others surely would have heard the happy stompings of his heart.

  ‘Sku
nk is the worst,’ the girl next to him was saying to a man. ‘Three of my friends have been sectioned. One of them forever. He tried to rape his sister, and then they put him in this home, and then he did rape two girls. I’ve known him since he was six.’

  She was wasted, but still pretty tidy. There were a few nice girls in here.

  ‘But skunk can’t make you do that,’ said the man after a pause, plainly reluctant to contradict someone so attractive.

  The girl lifted a hand to her face and stroked away a panel of hair.

  ‘It’s Peruvian flake this stuff,’ Caspar remarked loudly. He was tipping a little heap of powder from an oblong packet on to the countertop.

  ‘Mmm, yeah,’ said Calvin, appraising every granule with a wanton eye. He did not know that there were kinds of coke. No one had ever mentioned that at college, or when he used to score a weekend gramme to work through with his brother Jason.

  Caspar set about the pile with his credit card, crunching little boulders into mist, talking quickly about the lovely Jaguar, which now, it seemed, lay wounded in a French garage. Expertly, his hand coaxed a pair of snowy eyebrows from the debris, then offered up a shortened drinking straw for use. Calvin took it, and chose what he guessed to be the smaller helping, vacuuming its length into a nostril. The powder whistled pleasantly through his head.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, with a connoisseur’s frown. ‘Nice.’

  Caspar took back the straw, paused mid-sentence, and traced his own three-inch slug from crumb to crumb.

  Sssshhhnift.

  Getting out his Marlboro Lights, Calvin offered one to Caspar, and both men drifted momentarily through the pleasure of their virgin puff. A zipper trail of satisfaction. The anxious anticipation of an approaching good time.

  ‘You seen these?’ Calvin said at last, slipping out his phone.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Sony Ericsson K750i. It’s not out until the summer, but they sent me one this week. Two megapixel camera and tons of other stuff. Fucking sweet.’

  ‘Very nice,’ Caspar said, smiling at the lens. ‘Best not take any pictures in here though, mate.’

  Calvin seethed. ‘No, sure,’ he said. ‘I’m just saying.’

  How stupid did people think he was? Just because he was young, and they said he was attractive. He blamed it on the way that Warehouse chose to market him, with boy-band dance routines and bubblegum pop tracks, though he had proved his range on X-Factor – as even Cowell agreed. In some ways, it had been almost grimly pleasing when ‘I Wanna B With U’, the silly follow-up to ‘Smoothly’, bombed. That had made his point. (Except in the Far Eastern territories, where Calvin’s tween appeal remained strong enough to take him back to number one.)

  He sucked on his cigarette.

  They had even tried him on the gay scene, but he wasn’t having that. Not that he was homophobic or anything; he just liked girls. And being ogled made him feel like one.

  Then he saw Susie. In here. Small, dark hair. Susie Farstein.

  ‘Susie!’ he shouted.

  But she did not notice.

  ‘Susie!’ again.

  Now she did, and pinned him with an amused stare.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ he explained to Caspar as she walked their way. ‘It’s my old stylist.’

  ‘Really?’ Caspar said. He didn’t sound very interested.

  The first cold droplets of cocaine began to flow in Calvin’s throat.

  ‘Cal-vin. Vance.’ Susie, it seemed, was still getting used to the idea.

  ‘Hi Susie,’ he said, and kissed her on both cheeks as he had learned to. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Great, Calvin. Great. You’re looking fabulous, of course.’

  ‘Of course. Well I’ve got a great new stylist these days. So much better than my last one.’ It was Susie who had left him to go and work full-time on Kylie Minogue’s Showgirl tour, otherwise he would not have dared to joke about it.

  ‘Oh do you?’ She pressed four fingers of mock-reproach into his yummy tummy. ‘Well it’s nice to see you’re in good hands.’

  ‘This is Caspar,’ Calvin said. ‘He’s a director.’

  ‘Yeah, hi,’ said Caspar, shaking hands. ‘Just videos and commercials so far, but we hope to start shooting on a feature in September.’

  ‘How do you do.’ Susie nodded, asking no further questions. Instead she leaned in close to Calvin and said, ‘Thank God you turned up.’

  He gazed back pleased.

  ‘I was stuck with some awful bloody comedy man, but here you are: to the rescue!’

  ‘No problem.’ Calvin did not feel much like a rescuer, but it was nice that Susie thought him one. She looked up with admiration, wriggling in her punkish ballgown. Very rescuable indeed.

  ‘I can’t remember the guy’s name,’ she said, ‘but he started doing his bloody act right there in the middle of the fucking party. Thought I’d got rid of him by coming in here. And there he is again! Don’t look!’ A meaningful twitch of Susie’s eyebrows indicated that the person to ignore was behind her back. ‘And I had to fucking laugh at his jokes, of course. You can’t not, can you? Very not funny. Very tedious. Very embarrassing.’ She flicked a grateful kiss through the smoke of his cigarette. ‘They’re all dreadfully insecure, aren’t they, comedians? That’s why they do it. Real me-me-me-artists.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Calvin said, although he did not think he’d ever met one.

  There had been a time when Susie still fussed daily round his seams that he had thought he had a chance with her. She was twenty-eight – perhaps now twenty-nine – but Calvin did not mind that. And there was always something in her eyes, as if they shared a little secret. Then suddenly she left to work for Kylie, and became a could-have never once converted to a did. It might just be the Charlie, but seeing her had instantly brought back the warmth of that erotic thwarting. A second chance to tick her box.

  ‘Time for a line?’ Susie said.

  Calvin was not going to say no.

  ‘Sure,’ he grinned. ‘Sorry, mine’s run out.’

  ‘No, no. Mine’s fine.’

  Caspar had now begun a conversation with the people at the sink, so they left him to it.

  Susie snapped open a mirror from her clutchbag and placed it on the central table. A dainty wrap appeared, cut from Wallpaper*. Calvin recognised the *. Inside sat a pallid slab, moulded to a pillow by the paper’s swell, and whiskery with cracks. Slicing off a third, Susie chopped it with her gym card.

  ‘So how are things at Warehouse?’ she asked.

  ‘Not bad. Not bad. The new single’s nearly out.’

  ‘Mmm. I heard.’

  ‘And we finished recording the album last week, which was great. Then there’s just the final mixes before I go on tour.’

  ‘Wow! When’s that?’

  ‘Two months, I think. It’s all happened really quickly, so they’re still setting a few dates up. It’s in several different countries, so it’s quite complicated.’

  ‘Fantastic. Where?’

  ‘Erm … Korea, Singapore … Philippines …’ Calvin could never remember them all.

  ‘That’s terrific!’ She fetched back two pieces of escaping rubble. ‘They’ll love you out there.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Calvin said. ‘I hope so.’

  He could feel the first line’s energy begin to rise. A flickerish awakening in his limbs.

  ‘After you,’ said Susie.

  A rolled-up twenty was in his hand. Calvin aimed himself, left nostril this time, at the nearer portion on her upstretched palm. It vanished, piece by piece.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, handing back the note and lighting up again.

  ‘So how long will you be away for?’ Susie asked, poised above the loaded mirror.

  ‘Maybe three months or so, they reckon. Depends on ticket sales.’

  ‘OK.’ She sniffed her share, then mopped the remnant particles with a moistened finger. ‘So quite a while?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  It was
quite a while. Just as he was starting to feel settled too. Not as a Londoner – that would never be – but as a customary little groove, perhaps, in London’s stone. And now he was to be displaced again, to be recast as the outsider, and in an even stranger land. As though Leeds had not been hard enough to leave, and then revisit, seeing how the place had changed without him. Watching as it shrank and darkened, its sights familiar from memory, no longer from habit. Even Mum and Jason seemed a little different when he saw them up there. Nervous of him, maybe? Maybe proud. They had eaten Sunday lunch at Mum’s house several weeks ago, and later watched the football live on Sky. And as he boarded his departing taxi in the dark, Calvin wondered whether either of the pair had noticed when he said that he would call ‘when I get home’.

  ‘So how do you know Hugo?’ Susie asked.

  ‘Oh, we did some TV together.’ He made it sound like no big thing. ‘How about you?’

  ‘Well I don’t really. I designed the outfits for the serving staff tonight.’

  ‘Those cartoon girls?’

  ‘Spring milkmaids, yes.’

  ‘They’re great!’

  ‘Thanks.’ She sniffed. ‘No, so Hugo was at the meeting when I presented the designs, but we never really got a chance to talk.’

  ‘Shame. He’s a nice guy. I should introduce you some time.’ A spike of boldness rolled the words spontaneously out.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Sure,’ Calvin had to say,

  ‘I mean I’ve got some ideas I’d love to talk to him and Mellody about.’

  ‘Uh-huh?’

  ‘I think I saw him up in the mezzanine bar a minute ago.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Would you really give me a quick intro? That would be supercalifragilistically kind.’

  He had meant some time soon. Like maybe one day next year. It was just a thing to say.

  ‘No problem,’ he said.

  And in an instant, Susie had packed up all her things and faced him with a perky grin that said, ‘Let’s go.’

  So he grinned strenuously back, and led her out.

  In the corridor, the distant leak of music rose into a flow. And then became a gush, as Calvin heaved them through the final door, piercing a shell of sound and temperature. The sudden warmth made him shiver. Good, though. It felt good. Skin tingling with successfulness. He blinked, and sent his eyes, refreshed, to sweep the scene. Faces registered, such as Mike Skinner’s again, talking eagerly to Damon Albarn’s. And yes, there, upstairs, was Hugo Marks. He was standing by the railing on the balcony sipping beer and talking to an old man whose sour face was clipped to a cigar. Calvin’s gaze swooped back to Susie’s upturned hope. The music was ‘Mr Brightside’ by The Killers. He swallowed and his ears popped. Fuck, he was so coked up.