The Hunger Read Free Page A

Lincoln.
    Then, faint against the red brick of the school wall, I saw Esurio. Half his face was missing and so was most of the left side of his body, and it was like I could see through the rest of him.
His voice was a waspish whisper, not as strong as it is now:
    —Hit him again and again and again. Feed me, Lincoln, feed me.
    I saw fear in the kid’s eyes. I was a rabid dog. In seconds his head was like a ball on a spring. It spun in all directions as one punch then another clattered against his head. I knew I
was going to kill him. I could not stop. I wanted to splatter his blood on the schoolyard. Rip out his guts and impale them on the fence. Then he stopped moving. Esurio waved his hands
extravagantly:
    —Wonderful! Wonderful! Carry on like this and we’ll be partners for life!
    Mitch survived. He wore a bandage around his head for weeks. His left ear was shattered and he will never hear properly again. Whenever he saw me he lowered his head and hunched his shoulders.
His smile was the grimace of the defeated. Everyone thought I was insane. They were right. No one bothered me ever again.
    A year before I beat the fuck out of Mitch Walters, my Dad died and Esurio was with me there too. I was running through a caravan park where we were staying when Dad dropped dead of a heart
attack. I rushed into our caravan to get Mum, but she had already seen him collapse through the window. When I came back out again a man was trying to resuscitate my Dad. When I got to my father I
could hear Esurio:
    —We’ll be fine from now on, Lincoln, fine. Just the two of us.
    I turned to see where the voice was coming from but all I could see was a faint outline of a black morning coat a few yards away, with the white of the caravans and the blue of the sky pushing
through it to create a messy patchwork of colour.
    The first time I remember him fully formed like other people was when I was sixteen. I was shagging one of my Mum’s best friends. She was fifty-two. I didn’t have a place to live, so
we fucked either in her house or in the back of a knackered Ford Fiesta I lived in for three months. One night, there he was, sitting on the bonnet of the car as I was pounding away, a ridiculous
purple umbrella protecting him from the rain. He wiped the rain off the windscreen to get a better view.
    —That’s very impressive indeed. Quite the little pounder, aren’t we? I predict great things for you, Lincoln.
    And, to get great things, I needed great stages but selling vans can never be enough for a man with an appetite for Greatness. In 2009 I left the transport industry and took off to Ibiza to get
my head together. I knew the island well. When Lewis was twelve, my ex-wife took him to Spain to live. That was the first time I thought I would lose him. The second was when he turned fifteen and
I thought:
    —I’ve lived long enough to see him past the age I was when my Dad died. What use am I to him now?
    And one morning when I was having a coffee in Portals, looking out at the yachts in the harbour, this thought came back to me. It was one of those days that are so beautiful it hurts. The kind
that magnifies the feeling of being a useless cunt. I had been sitting there maybe an hour when The Boss came in. He lives in Ibiza, and I knew him well because I had brought hundreds of van
salesmen into his clubs. We had always got on and, before he left, he placed his business card on the table and said:
    —Come and help me promote the clubs.
    Even driftwood is going somewhere and, two months later, I arrived in Soho, the new Sales and Marketing Director of The Club. On the flight from Ibiza, Esurio sat next to me. He was no longer an
uncertain presence in my life, and on that flight he was radiant. He stroked the carnation in his lapel:
    —I got it especially for the flight. Rather beautiful, don’t you think?
    —Yeah, it’s OK.
    —Oh come on, don’t be a party pooper! We’re going to have the time of our lives. Sex,