My Biggest Lie (3 page)

He was introducing himself. ‘My name is Arturo,' he said. ‘You have just come to Buenos Aires?'

I nodded. It was calming to be in a real living room, without any calming electronic tango music playing. Arturo had a really good haircut. It shone. He shone. I asked him the question I already knew the answer to ‘How do you know Lizzie?' and he just smiled and turned around to look at her. I remember the phone she was talking into was an old-fashioned one with a rotary dial. Her legs were tanned and the soles of her feet looked like they would always be dirty. Some men wouldn't have liked that.
But not me and Arturo. In fact, I just didn't know which of them to look at.

He offered me his spliff and, still stunned, though I hated dope, I took it and inhaled. Twice. Again. And then we were grinning at each other and embracing, as if enacting the second stage of the unusual hello we had begun before. ‘You want a beer,' he told me.

While he was getting it, Lizzie hung up and tipped herself from the sofa like a slinky springing over a step. ‘Liam!' In the same motion, she fell forward into me and hugged me doggily, pushing her chest into me, all coconut smelling, tall and limber, freckled brown skin still radiating the afternoon's sun. ‘What fun.' It was a hug I was in no hurry to leave but we pulled apart as Arturo came back into the room with my beer.

He handed it to me and studied me more carefully. This alone should have been reason for him to relax if he was assessing me as a threat. He looked hard at Lizzie before turning back to me. ‘But you are not here with your girlfriend, Liam.'

‘She's had some work come up that was too good an opportunity to miss. She can't leave right now. Hopefully –'

‘Oh, yes, let's talk about Sarah,' interrupted Lizzie. ‘I want to hear all about what she's been up to – and how you met, what you do.'

And so, like the dutiful proud boyfriend I wanted to remain, I began to describe Sarah's blossoming career as a curator, her invitations to New York and Sao Paulo, how she had nearly finished her PhD, about the offers she had to teach short courses that summer at universities around the world. After years of having no money and having to admit at parties to being a student, she was suddenly in possession of a glamorous success story. I
knew what that felt like, how useful it was, how heady the opportunities, how excited and self-absorbed it had made me. She would survive it better. It was perfect poetic symmetry that I had fallen just as she had reached her peak. She could do whatever she liked with her success now.

‘And what do you do?' asked Arturo. ‘Why are you here?'

‘That's a good question,' I admitted.

I had tried to think of something plausible on the walk over. But if you are hiding some details of a story, it is always best to reveal others truthfully.

And so I started to tell them about my shame.

Chapter 3

I
was sent to meet Craig Bennett on the opening Monday of the London Book Fair. I don't need to mention in which year. That morning Sarah had left me. After an entire night begging her not to I was almost grateful when she slammed the front door behind her, leaving me with one fewer of the bags of clothes she had thrown all over our bedroom.

In the shower I let myself collapse, sob and pray to my childhood God who only existed now during aeroplane take-offs and girlfriend emergencies. I turned all that off with the water and put on my best new suit. I had work to do.

Within minutes of leaving the house for Earls Court I became terrified of the conclusions Sarah would reach without my constant interruptions. I called her whenever I had a moment between meetings but she never answered. Each minute was madness. I started drinking at lunch, quickly working out which of my appointments wouldn't mind moving to the bar. I still have my tattered schedule for that day: apparently I met with fifteen different people.
I can't remember who most of them are, let alone the books they talked to me about. There were many tall, wonderful-looking women from the Netherlands and Germany, from France and Italy. There always are. I must have nodded in the right places and delivered my lines correctly; somewhere in the middle of that afternoon Belinda materialised in a cloud of exquisite perfume to tell me what a good job I was doing, and could I meet Craig Bennett in a restaurant in Notting Hill and look after him for a couple of hours before delivering him safely to our party?

James Cockburn would have normally been the one to look after Bennett but he was in hospital with the broken legs he'd acquired when falling from the first-floor window of a flat in Soho. I would have been at the party and witnessed this for myself if I hadn't been pleading with Sarah not to leave me.

Cockburn's fall was the talk of the Fair that day. People flocked to our stand to find out what had happened. I heard six or seven different versions, including the most lurid: that Craig Bennett, gripping Cockburn's shirt, had leaned him out of the window, demanding his advance be increased, and when Cockburn only laughed, Bennett had shoved him, perhaps half in jest, straight out the window onto the street below. It was a good story, but I heard another that was far more in character for my hedonistic mentor, that Cockburn decided to climb out the window and scale the narrow ledge around the edge of the building – why? – to surprise two actresses known for their roles in BBC costume drama who were sitting on an adjacent windowsill. This was just the kind of idea Cockburn would have found
attractive, particularly as he had been drinking since the Sunday lunchtime kick-off of the QPR home game he'd taken some New York publishers and agents to.

There were other stories too.

Eighteen months earlier, when I had come to London to start my brilliant new job and move in with Sarah, I had done my best to correct my hedonism. I had been using my father's disappearance at sixteen for far too long to justify my excesses; I was no longer that damaged teenager. Sharing a flat with Sarah seemed to be the perfect point to give up the long boozy stimulant-filled weekends of the previous five years of our lives – and earlier too, when we had been best friends attached to the wrong people. Now we had our own living room in which to watch films and DVD box-sets on our own sofa. We could make love on a shaggy, purpose-bought shagging rug. The lies are so easy to believe in: I would read manuscripts and the canonical works of European literature; fresh coffee, jazz on the stereo, my drug dealers in Birmingham sending me promotional text messages I was too far away to take advantage of.

We moved into a flat in Hackney in an old council block. It didn't look much but I loved it. The sun came through our thin curtains and woke me up at five in the morning in the summer. I've never been much good at sleeping, never a member of what Nabokov calls ‘the most moronic fraternity in the world'. (I had my own moronic fraternity united by the refusal of sleep, with Cockburn our founder and spiritual leader.) I would quietly watch Sarah sleeping until I got bored, and then sneak into the living room to read a manuscript for an hour or two
before she woke up. I was good at my job then. Insomniacs make diligent readers as well as talented hedonists.

But Sarah liked the drugs too, and a couple of weeks into my well-intentioned abstinence, she began to wonder where they were. ‘Have you not got – literally, not got
anything
? Oh. Oh . . .
good
.' It was my fault. I'd always had something squirrelled away; I'd created expectations. (That euphemism: we were
expected
to drugs.) There was a point in every party when we realised how easy it would be to have
more
fun. How boring it would be not to.

We decided the sometime in the non-urgent future when Sarah got pregnant would be the new deadline for renouncing our lifestyle (or we'll regret it then, said Sarah) and we went back to normal. It was not hard to find new drug dealers. I asked a literary agent over lunch, and she pitched her entire list to me, central, south, west, east, north . . . I bought them all. And suddenly drugs were almost legal as mephe-drone appeared, combining the effects of cocaine and MDMA and speed, great pillows of which were available over the internet for almost nothing. Everyone was taking it. Everyone stupid was.

What I love (I am trying to say loved) about drugs is the way they engender the temporary suspension of disbelief, poetic faith, negative capability, whatever you want to call it. You can invent magical new characters for yourself when you're on them, and if you start to believe in them others will too. Perhaps an aspiring writer's instincts are riskier, more hospitable to the reader's desire for titillation, for secrets and extra-marital intrigue. Perhaps. This type of grand disingenuousness annoyed Sarah more than anything. So it should have. I just liked getting high. It isn't only writers who make themselves
into characters: it's one of the commonest failings, one of the purest joys. And you don't have to be a liar to be a writer: that's a book festival cliché you hear from midlisters aspiring to midlife crises. Becoming a vainglorious prick has never been fundamental to creating literary art. No. I did that because it was fun, because I was morally exhausted and it was easy to pretend my behaviour was separate from my essence. But if the man careering around town in my clothes wasn't me, then why did I feel so bad, and so proud, about the way he talked to women?

It hadn't always been this bad or good. I'd arrived in London from a small press in Birmingham with a reputation for frugality, integrity and luck. Everyone loves a plucky indie. It made people at the conglomerates trying to poach our successful authors feel good about themselves to know we existed, that there was room for us. I was embraced at book parties. Have you met my mate Liam? People thought I was a nice guy. I
cared
about writers. Well, I always had a lot of compassion but outside of work it mostly overflowed in the wrong directions, to the people who least needed it. To the people who exhibited moral failings, by which I mean the people with the option to. The carnal people, the libertines, the charmers. The lookers, the liars, the reckless. The success went to my head. That's the
point
of success. I was drawn to the promiscuous and the criminal, like my mentor and the other JC, and who knew London publishing would be such a fine place to find these two qualities? It was with my reputation in mind, and with Cockburn lying in an expensive private hospital – not his first trip to an expensive private medical facility paid for by the company – that they sent the ingénue out to look after Booker-winning Craig Bennett. We had never met but by coincidence we
shared the same literary agent, Suzy Carling – I had written one bad novel no one wanted to publish but she had managed to place a story of mine in
Granta
, and this had blown a gale into my inflating ego. I must have seemed just the man for the job. My task was to talk books, flatter, reassure him that in spite of the rumours, we knew he and Cockburn were the best of friends. I was to order the drinks as slowly as possible and
on no account allow him to take me with him to score drugs of any kind
. His publicist Amanda Jones briefed me. He was due at a party at ten; all I had to do was get him there, and then she and Suzy and the rest of the cavalry would take over. If there were any problems I was to call. Belinda hoped we would hit it off in a purely professional way, that I would be an option to take over the editing of his books if, despite our assurances, Cockburn's mysterious fall proved fatal to their working relationship. There was a lot riding on it: his last novel had sold nearly half a million copies.

I understood why they trusted me: I was polite, I was unpretentious (unpretentious for publishing, very pretentious for elsewhere) and I got on with people. They couldn't have known about the damage I successfully concealed. When Craig Bennett is written about in the press, his name is usually prefaced by phrases such as ‘combustible', ‘iconoclastic', ‘self-destructive', even ‘Bacchanalian', which tells you more about journalists than about Bennett. (I once heard a literary editor describe James Cockburn as a real-life ‘Dionysius', by which they meant he wore his shirt unbuttoned and took cocaine at parties.) Such tags were relative. Most novelists don't make good copy for the news pages. If Bennett wanted to turn up on stage in the middle of a seventy-two-hour bender and abuse crowd members for their ‘intellectual cowardice' then I was all
for it. If he wanted to grip Julian Barnes in a tight bear-hug whenever he saw him in a green room and repeatedly lick his face until prised away, then what of it? (Bennett was ‘not welcome again' at the Hay, Edinburgh and Cheltenham festivals.) He was a little old for such behaviour, but so are many people who behave this way. I am not in the first generation of men who refused to grow up. That evening I was expecting to meet someone completely normal. I wasn't at all worried about Bennett's reputation.

I arrived twenty minutes late at the glass-fronted French restaurant in Notting Hill. Or rather, I was on time, watching him through the window as he poured himself three consecutive glasses of wine. Sarah had finally answered her phone and was telling me it was over and to stop calling her so much. I pleaded with her to see sense and she objected to my definition of sense. Over the last twenty-four hours I had maintained a firm faith in the power of reason to defeat chaos. If I could just keep talking, if I could talk all day and all night, she would have to realise what I had done was not so bad, that it was not in fact
me
who had done it. I would have gone on for ever, listening to my voice grow more impassioned and articulate, wavering on the edge of real tears, if she had not begun to cry herself, something she hardly ever did, and in doing so remind me that she was something more than an obstacle to my will, an exercise in persuasion. She was Sarah and she was miserable. I would never have the right or the power to convince her otherwise.

I looked at my reflection in the restaurant window and listened to her cry. She was not a crier; I'd made her take on a role that wasn't hers. We criers are the moral infants of the world, the sensualists. We like the way it feels;
though we don't admit it, we're yearning to be miserable. We want a fix. Behind my reflection Craig Bennett was looking at me curiously. I waved at him and something in the friendly childishness of my gesture stabbed me: how far away I was from that pleasant boy I'd taken for granted and forgotten to stay in touch with. I wheeled around and after two minutes of desperate, abruptly terminated pleas to Sarah, I wiped my eyes on the sleeve of my shirt and entered the restaurant.

‘You look fucking awful,' he said, after I introduced myself and sat down. Some people may have thought the same of him. You will have seen the photos: the rich craggy drinker's face; its pink tributaries crawling through reddish stubble, sunken blue eyes, bleached of emotion by hot weather and late nights. A surly face. Well, that was the photos, or the photos the papers took, or the photos the papers used. He might have been trying to look surly but it didn't convince me, and I was glad to take his comment as friendly. I have a lot of friends who, if they don't have faces like his already, are working on getting them.

‘Yes, I do,' I said, nodding.

‘And you're twenty minutes late,' he said.

‘Yes,' I continued to nod gratefully, ‘yes I am.' I reached out and poured myself the last glass of wine in the bottle, immediately raising it towards the waitress. ‘Another of these, please.' I took a swig. ‘This is nice,' I said. ‘I'm sorry for being so late –'

And then I turned my face and just about swallowed another sob that threatened to spill over the table.

Craig Bennett continued to gaze at me curiously.

‘I am sorry,' I said, pouring the rest of the glass down my throat. ‘I'm not normally so incontinent.'

‘What's happened?'

‘Oh, I've just been dumped. Last night. She's not going to have me back.'

‘I'm glad about that.'

‘Pardon?'

‘Don't get me wrong. We'll get into that. At least we
can
talk about that – if you're not too boring about it. You may even be wrong. I mean, I thought for an awful moment that they'd sent someone whose mother had just died or something.'

‘We wouldn't put
that
on you,' I said, speaking as the company. ‘That'd be awful manners.'

‘A spurned boyfriend is far better than a grief-stricken son.'

‘Yes? You're probably right. They wouldn't have sent me if they'd known how miserable I was.'

The waitress came over and showed me the bottle of wine. ‘Just pour it please,' I said.

‘You're doing all right,' said Bennett, like a command.

‘Yes,' I beamed, as the waitress filled our glasses. ‘A shaky start but I feel much better.'