LITMIR.BIZ

      3

      SLOW NEWS DAY

      WAPPING, LONDON

      THREE MONTHS EARLIER

      Kevin McKenna dropped the last of his cigarette into the warm can of lager on his desk and checked his watch.

      It was almost nine thirty and he was the only member of The Globe’s editorial team still in the office. England were playing Portugal in Oporto and everyone else was either across the road in The Ten Bells, cheering and drinking and swearing, or on their way home, grateful for an excuse to leave the office at a reasonable time without appearing lazy. McKenna wanted to be in the pub with his colleagues, but the phone call he had received an hour earlier had been simply too intriguing to ignore. So, instead, he was sitting in his office with the door shut and the smoke detector unplugged, waiting for a courier to bring him a package from a dead man.

      The call had come from a lawyer McKenna didn’t know; it wasn’t one of the many to whom he regularly passed white envelopes of cash in return for five minutes alone with the case files of celebrity lawsuits and super-injunctions. The man had been polite, and had solemnly informed McKenna that his firm was discharging the estate of the late Mr John Bathurst. There had been a long pause, which McKenna had clearly been expected to fill with gratitude, or sorrow, or both. But he had not known what to say: the name was utterly meaningless.

      Then a flash of realisation had hit him, and he had laughed loudly down the phone.

      The lawyer’s voice, when it reappeared, had a hint of reproach in it, but the man remained smoothly professional. He told McKenna that he had been left an item in Mr Bathurst’s will, an envelope, and asked whether he would like it couriered to him. In any other circumstance, McKenna would have told the man to put it in the post and made his way to the pub. Instead, he gave the lawyer The Globe’s address and told him he would wait to sign for it.

      You’re dead and you’re still causing me grief, he thought, lighting another cigarette. Mr John bloody Bathurst.

      There was a simple reason why it had taken him a moment to realise he knew the name of the man who had remembered him in his will: he had only ever heard it spoken aloud a single time, and there was a reason for that as well.

      It was Johnny Supernova’s real name, and his most closely guarded secret.

      There had been a time when Kevin McKenna would have spat in the face of anyone who had dared to suggest that he might one day spend his time writing stories about minor celebrities for a publication as morally bankrupt and pro-establishment as The Globe.

      This younger, slimmer, angrier version of himself had arrived in London in 1995 at the age of nineteen, his ears ringing with guitar bands and house music and his veins full of working-class fire, to start work as a journalist for legendary left-wing style bible The Gutter. He strolled into the magazine’s offices off Pentonville Road to be greeted by a receptionist more beautiful than any girl he had ever seen in his nineteen years in Manchester. She held open the door to the editor’s office and gave him a ridiculously provocative smile as he walked through it.

      Sitting behind a huge glass desk, on which were arranged glossy colour spreads of the latest issue, was Jeremy Black. He wore a charcoal-grey suit, which McKenna knew without asking would be either Paul Smith or Ozwald Boateng, over a faded tour T-shirt for the Beatles. He glanced up as McKenna stopped in front of his desk.

      “Beer?” he asked.

      “Sure,” replied McKenna. It was barely eleven thirty in the morning, but he had no intention of looking like a lightweight in front of his new boss.

      Black reached down and pulled two cans from a fridge that McKenna couldn’t see. He handed one over, then leant back in his chair and folded his hands behind his head. “I don’t want to see you in here more than a couple of times a week,” he said. “If you’re in the office, you’re not doing your job. Yeah? The stories are out there.”

      “Got it,” replied McKenna, opening his beer and taking a long swig that he hoped was full of casual bravado.

      “Leave your copy at reception. I’ll give you a call if it’s good enough.”

      “All right.”

      “I got someone to agree to show you the ropes. He’s going to hate you, and he’s going to treat you like shit, but he owes me about ten thousand words I’ve already paid him for, so that’s his bad luck. Yours too, probably.”

      “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,

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