CHAPTER 9 — GROWTH

I remember that, remember the feeling of his warm, cooling, sunlit juice on my hand, slippy becoming sticky, but I can't think about it any more without thinking of gorilla man and the little guy tied to the chair. I think they were surprised when I threw up; I hope they were, I hope they were surprised and very interested and thought, "Ullo "ullo "ullo it wasn't "im then after all; he ain't the villain, he's been fitted up so help me… Oh God, I hope my belly spoke for me better than my fucking brain, in other words.

Not guilty, didn't do it that's why what gorilla man did sickened me; no blood well hardly any blood literally a drop, a drip, a fucking pixel on the screen and the only thing slicing into flesh was a needle, tiny and delicate not a chainsaw or an axe or a knife or anything, but it's that image that idea that old devil meme, I keep dreaming about it, keep having nightmares about it, and I'm the trapped one, I'm the man in the leather-and-chrome chair and he's there with his gorilla face and his squeaky baby voice, explaining to the camera that what he has in this bottle and in this syringe is sperm; the crazy fucker's loaded it up with jism man looks like half a fucking milk bottle of the stuff and he's going to inject it into the little guy's veins and he ties something round the naked upper arm of the little guy strapped to the chair and pulls it tight and waits for the vein to show while the little guy howls and screams like a child and tries to shake the chair to bits or rip it apart but he's too well strapped in there no purchase no leverage and then the man in the gorilla mask just does it; sinks the needle into the little guy's skin with a bit of blood and empties the whole syringe into him. I throw up onto the floor and they pause the video for me and somebody goes to get a mop.

After I've stopped chucking and coughing they restart the video and we cut to the other scene and the tall hospital chair and the little guy again with empty eyes and McDunn says his bit about Persistent Vegetative State.

Well, indeed. They did a DNA-fingerprint test and found he had a bus-load of people in him, linked it to some guy who was in the toilets under Centre Point the day before hiring rent boys but he didn't want the full business just wanted them to wank into this bottle thank you for your contribution young man every little bit helps going to a good home thank you mind how you go…

I'm thinking.

"This is the trickle-down effect in action, is it?"

"No, this is the show-off effect in action," Clare tells me, having to shout over the din. Everybody else seems to be cheering. Andy and William are standing on a seat; Andy leans out over a table laden with glasses, a champagne bottle in one hand and his other arm held by William, who leans out the opposite way to balance him.

The table Andy is perched over is stacked with several hundred champagne glasses, forming a glittering pyramid rising a couple of metres from the table's surface. Andy is filling the single champagne glass at the apex of the pyramid with champagne; it is overflowing, filling the three glasses beneath it; they in turn are overflowing, filling the glasses on the level beneath them, which are also full and so spilling over to the level underneath, and so on and so on down almost to the bottom; Andy is on his eighth magnum. He glances down at the final layer of glasses.

"How we doing?" he roars.

"More! More!" everybody shouts.

"William!" somebody yells from the crowd. "Fifty quid if you just let him go!"

"Don't you fucking dare, Sorrell!" Andy shouts, laughing, upending the magnum over the topmost glass as the bottle empties.

"Not for a measly fifty," William laughs, as he and Andy pull together and draw together, tottering on the seat while Andy throws the emptied bottle to someone in the crowd and is handed another full magnum by his partner in The Gadget Shop, a fellow ex-ad-man who's a few years older than Andy. It strikes me the symbolism of this whole venture would be better were it he and Andy balancing together on the seat, but I get the impression Andy's partner isn't fully into such flamboyance.

"Winch me out there, Will!" Andy bellows.

"God, though, it's tempting," William says, leaning back and letting Andy crane out over the pyramid of glasses again.

"This is infantile," Clare says, shaking her head.

"What's what?" Yvonne asks, making her way through the crowd. She clutches a bottle of champagne.

"This is infantile," Clare says, nodding at the pyramid of glasses. She sees the bottle in Yvonne's hand. "Oh, I say, well done that woman." She holds out her flute. Yvonne fills the glass.

"Cameron?"

"Ta."

She fills her own glass and stands beside Clare and me, watching Andy pouring the champagne onto the top of the pyramid. Yvonne's wearing a little black number that to my untutored eye looks like it could have cost ten quid or a thousand; Clare is rather more ostentatious in a short, sparkling, crimson creation that looks like it wants to be a ball-gown when it grows up. Andy and William are in monochrome, DJs removed for the bubbly-waterfall operation.

Yvonne grins. "Boys," she says, sounding long-sufferingly affectionate.

I look around. When Andy invited me to the launch of the The Gadget Shop I naively assumed it would be in the shop itself, in Covent Garden. But that didn't measure up to Andy's sense of showmanship; it wasn't glitzy enough, dramatic enough, or even big enough. Instead, he hired the Science Museum. Part of it, anyway. That got people interested. A shop is just a shop, and even a shop selling expensive executive toys is still just a shop, but a museum is, well, glamorous. People reckon the Natural History Museum is the most glamorous — partying in the shadow of all those dinosaurs in that huge space is just the business — but for The Gadget Shop the Science Museum along the road was the obvious venue, as well as being cheaper. Besides, everyone who matters has already been to some sort of bash at the Natural History Museum; this is new.

There's a full-size hovercraft held tipped on wires directly above us; a virtually circular thing with a tiny cabin and a huge fluted central air-intake. I vaguely recall making an Airfix kit of that thing when I was a kid. It floats above us, gleaming in the darkness as if supported on a cloud of talk and booze while the people below swarm and chat and roar Andy on; the champagne — already dripping down off the edges of the table onto the temporary matting beneath from spillages — is almost overflowing the second-last level of glasses.

"More! More!" people yell.

"Oh, less, less," Clare mutters, sniffing.

"Nearly there yet?" Andy shouts.

"More! More!" everybody roars.

I look at them all. These are people like me. Christ. Media people, people from the advertising company Andy has just left, a few politicians — mostly Tory or Social Democrats though there are a couple of Labour guys — bankers, lawyers, business advisers, investment experts, actors, TV people — at least one film crew, though their lights are switched off for now — various other city types, a scattering of people who are, well, just professionally famous, and the remainder seemingly either part of some enormous floating meta-party or hired from some agency to impersonate people having a whale of a time: Rent-a-Hoot or something similar. I'm mildly surprised we haven't had a kiss-o-gram, but maybe that's a little lo-rent for Andy. Clare told me he'd taken rather a lot of convincing — once he'd determined to do the slightly naff champagne-pyramid stunt in the first place — not to try doing it with proper champagne flutes but to use the perry glasses like everybody else did; too tall, too unstable otherwise.