Will Hill - Battle Lines

“Who is it?” asked McKenna, as a smile crept on to his boss’s face.

Jeremy Black was right: Johnny Supernova did indeed treat him like shit. But McKenna didn’t care.

Supernova was a legend, a freewheeling, anarchic genius who roared through the London night like a drug-fuelled hurricane. His writing was a reflection of the man, a furious avalanche of beautifully written invective, shot through with language and imagery that would have embarrassed Caligula: despatches from the bleeding edge of popular culture which served to define the time almost as much as the events they described.

The man himself was small and wiry, with pallid skin and a shock of black hair. He was older than McKenna, almost forty, maybe more. His eyes were narrow and piercing, and his appetites, for drink, drugs and debauchery, were famously prodigious. He greeted McKenna with obvious suspicion when they met for the first time, but allowed him to join him at his table in the Groucho Club, clearly still sufficiently connected to reality that he had no desire to be sued by The Gutter for breach of contract.

Back then, at that brief moment of cultural awakening, Johnny Supernova had been king. Pop stars, artists, actors, actresses and directors: they all flowed to his table and fawned over him. Kevin sat at his side, night after night, in the tall building in Soho, basking in his mentor’s reflected glory. He was older, and cleverer, and harsher than them all, and as a result, they worshipped him.

But it couldn’t last, and it didn’t.

The drugs, the booze, the endless girls and boys: all were fuel for the vicious self-loathing that burned inside Johnny Supernova, that drove him to examine the worst depths of human behaviour. What had been fun became hard to watch as Supernova’s edge began to slip, taking with it the hold over the glitterati he had once had. His table became a little more empty, his writing a little more soft, lacking the razor-sharp precision with which it had once slashed at its readers. Excess takes its toll eventually and, when it does, it either happens gradually, slowly, almost imperceptibly, or all at once, like an avalanche. For Johnny Supernova, it was the former. His star faded, rather than burning out.

McKenna was hanging on by his last fingernail by then; the craziness had ceased to be fun and had begun to feel like work. Johnny appeared to be shrinking before his eyes, week on week, month on month. Eventually, in late 2006, McKenna bought him dinner, told him that he was tired, that he wanted a little bit of stability, a little bit of normality, and that he had taken a job at The Globe .

The explosion he had expected didn’t come.

Instead, Supernova gave him a red-eyed look of disappointment that was infinitely more painful. “You’re the worst of them all,” he said, his eyes fixed on McKenna’s. “You could have been good. You could have mattered . But you’re just a whore like the rest of them.”

They never spoke again.

The phone on McKenna’s desk rang, making him jump. He had been lost in the past, drifting through the memories of a man he realised he had almost forgotten.

He reached out and picked up the receiver.

“Courier for you,” said the receptionist.

“Send him up,” said McKenna.

The courier arrived a minute later. Kevin signed for the package, thanked the man, and settled back in his chair to open it. He tore through the tape and the bubble wrap until he was looking at what Johnny Supernova had left him: an audio cassette, a thin folder and a sheet of thick creamy paper. McKenna placed the tape and the folder on his desk, lifted the sheet of paper, and read the short message that had been typed on it.

Kevin,

If there is still some tiny worm of integrity in that black void you call a soul, maybe this will give it something to chew on.

Johnny

McKenna couldn’t help but smile, despite the insult.

As he read the words, he heard them spoken in Johnny Supernova’s thick Mancunian accent, spat out as if they tasted bitter. He realised it had been four years since he had last heard that voice, seen the gaunt, narrow face from which it emerged. Supernova had died three months ago, from a heroin overdose that had surprised precisely no one.

McKenna had been too ashamed to go to the funeral.

He put the note down on his desk, considered the cassette, then decided it would be too much trouble to find a player at this time of night and picked up the folder instead. Inside was a small sheaf of copier paper, almost transparent, with faded black ink punched almost all the way through it. McKenna lifted the first sheet and read the header.

TRANSCRIPT

INTERVIEW WITH ALBERT HARKER. JUNE 12 2002

Barely a decade ago , thought Kevin. Jesus Christ, it seems so much longer .

In 2002 Johnny Supernova was past his prime: still famous, still infamous, still relevant, but fading fast, starting to realise, with disappointed bile in his heart, that his angry brand of burn-it-all-down cynicism was becoming a tougher and tougher sell in the New Labour wonderland. McKenna read the header again.

Albert Harker. Never heard of him.

He lifted another can of lager out of the bottom drawer of his desk, lit a new cigarette with the smouldering end of the last one, and began to read.

A minute later he paused, his drink forgotten.

“Jesus,” he muttered.

Five minutes later his cigarette burned down to the filter and hung, dead, in the corner of his mouth, spilling ash on to his lap.

McKenna didn’t even notice.

Donny Beltran leant back in his chair and stared up into the dark desert sky. Stars hung above his head, an infinite vista of flickering yellow and milky white that he could have watched for hours had Walt not announced that the burgers were ready, jerking him out of his awe and eliciting a loud rumble from his ample stomach.

Donny picked his chair up, lumbered to his feet and made his way over to where Walt Beauford was plucking burgers from a metal grill and placing them on a plastic plate beside white buns and sachets of ketchup and mustard. He fished another beer out of the cool box as his friend approached; Donny took it, twisted off the cap, and took a long swallow. He belched loudly, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and grinned at his friend. The two men settled into their chairs and began to eat their supper; they were completely at ease in each other’s company, the result of two and a half decades of friendship that had started at college in California, and had survived the pleasant, unavoidable diversions of marriages and children.

This weekend, though, was sacred.

It was the anniversary of the strange, surreal day in 1997 when they had sold five per cent of their shares in the search engine they had helped found to a private investment group in San Francisco, and realised with genuine bemusement that they had both become millionaires. They had celebrated by taking Donny’s old van out to Joshua Tree, where they drank whisky and smoked grass and reminisced, and it was now traditional for them to head into the desert for two days every year.

Donny wolfed his burger down in three bites. Walt ate slowly, savouring each mouthful, and was still finishing his first as his friend was attacking his third. They ate in companionable silence, their eyes fixed on the skies to the west, above the low hills that shielded Area 51 from unwelcome eyes. Their little clockwork radio sat on the desert floor between them; they had found a Las Vegas classic rock station at the edge of the dial and Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Highway Patrolman’ was crackling softly out of the speakers.