by Luke Brown
‘Are you saying we have different standards of intelligence?’
‘No!’
‘Liar.’
‘Well, we probably do,’ she said, ‘but that’s not what I meant.’
‘Thanks.’
‘I didn’t mean mine were superior.’
‘Just different.’
‘You probably have a much more intelligent idea of how to live and be happy than I do.’
‘Do you think? Christ, how miserable are you?’
She put her head to one side and seemed to think about this.
‘Do you go to these things with him much?’ I said.
‘No. I’m making an effort to get out more.’
‘For what reason?’
‘I ask myself the same question. The usual reasons, though. Other humans. The hope of stimulation.’
‘Stimulation?’
‘Stop it.’
‘Stop what?’
‘That grin.’
Leo strode towards us. ‘Hello, hello, hello! Aren’t you Emily Nardini?’
‘I am,’ she said.
‘Leo,’ he said. ‘I’m a big fan. I have my own novel coming out next year, actually.’
She shook his hand. ‘What do you mean, actually? Did I imply the contrary?’
‘We’re colleagues,’ I said.
‘I brought him down here, actually,’ said Leo.
‘Actually?’ she said.
‘Literally,’ I said.
Leo scratched his bald spot. ‘Did you enjoy the debate?’ he asked Emily, not me.
‘Yes, I did. But do you mind giving us a moment? I was just discussing something personal with Paul.’
‘Oh! Yes, of course. Ha ha! I’ll just join the queue to talk to the speakers.’
‘See you later,’ she said.
He went and stood in the queue and tried not to look at us.
‘I can’t stand men like that,’ she said.
‘I love you,’ I said.
‘Thank you.’
‘I really do.’
‘That’s your prerogative.’
‘You can do what I want to do,’ I sang.
‘That’s your prerogative,’ she sang back.
We looked at each other and grinned. We were from the same era with the same bad songs clogging up our memory.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t get back to your note,’ she said.
‘What note?’
‘The one you sent with the magazine.’
‘I’d forgotten I even sent one,’ I lied.
‘The photo came out well. I was too vain not to look at that. I couldn’t go any further but, like I say, Andrew says it was fine.’
‘Do you trust him to be honest about things like that?’ I said, and looked over to the table where his admirer was watching him sign books and talk to his fans.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said, following my eyes. ‘He’s very articulate about the things he considers stupid. It’s what I like most about him.’
‘Well, that’s reassuring. What are you doing now?’
‘I don’t know. Something. Drinks, dinner. His publisher Susannah is here; they’re old friends; we’re going on somewhere. Why? Do you want to come?’
‘I’m, er—’
‘You could come. It would be nice to have someone to talk to who isn’t here to worship Andrew. I’ll introduce you to him in a bit.’
We waited for the queue to run down and found a sofa to sit on. ‘This is my first glass of wine this year,’ she said to me.
‘It’s nearly not your first glass of wine any more. I’m going to get another.’
‘Go on then,’ she said, holding out her glass to me.
We’d drunk two by the time the queue had died down. The historians were keeping up an amicable disagreement throughout the signing, as those queuing directed further questions at them. Leo had reached the front and was opinionating about something, and while Andrew’s attention was occupied his student mistress had retreated a few paces to talk to a younger man I took for a fellow PhD student, or a disgruntled boyfriend. She was doing most of the talking, gesticulating and constantly twitching back to face the signing tables; he nodded, covered his mouth with his hand when he spoke.
‘It looks like she enjoyed Andrew’s performance.’
‘Chloe. Yes, she would have. His brightest student, apparently.’
‘I think that boy she’s with is worried she’s in love with him.’
‘With Andrew? Hmm.’
‘How’s the wine?’
‘Vicious.’
‘If you ever want to drink wine with me again, I can tell you that I’m pretty much always available.’
She had been watching Andrew but now turned to me. ‘Why is that, Paul?’
‘Are you asking what’s wrong with me?’
‘Precisely.’
‘I have stringent taste in other humans.’
‘I don’t believe that at all.’
‘Why?’
‘I imagine you’d knock about with just about anyone.’
‘Well, you’re insulting yourself there as well as me. Here, give me your number.’
I passed her my notebook and she studied it for a second before writing in it. She’d just finished and handed it back to me when we became aware of Andrew Lancaster standing over us.
‘Oh!’ she said, and stood up. ‘Andrew, this is Paul.’
He held out his hand, which I took after putting my book in my bag and standing up.
‘How do you do?’ he said.
‘Hi, Andrew.’
‘Did you just take my beloved’s phone number?’
‘He did,’ said Emily.
‘I shall keep my eye on you.’
‘You’ll remember: Paul came to interview me.’
‘White Jesus! You know, you’re very familiar-looking. I haven’t taught you?’
‘No, no. I wish. I went to the London College of Calligraphy. But Emily says you thought the profile was OK. Was she being polite?’
‘Not at all. If it was shit, I’d happily tell you. You asked some interesting questions. And printed a nice photo too. She looks as beautiful in it as she does in real life.’
‘Flatterer. I invited Paul to dinner with us,’ said Emily. ‘Is that OK?’
‘More than! Will you come?’
Leo was standing in earshot on his own, and looked up hopefully at me. I turned away from him and said, ‘Yes, thank you, I’d like to.’
*
There were eight of us. Emily, Andrew, his publisher Susannah, the event organiser and his wife, and Chloe and her grumpy companion. Emily and I took one end of the table, with Emily sitting next to Andrew and Susannah sitting next to me. Chloe got in next to Andrew on his other side, and her companion was wedged out on the end, talking to the event organiser’s wife, whose husband spent the meal facing in Andrew’s direction.
I watched Andrew, trying to get the measure of him. He cared about his appearance, that was clear – you’d have to if you had a girlfriend more than twenty years your junior. You wondered how the pontificating old Jeremies of this world could bear the photos that were taken with them and their young women. The contrast was too great to be explained by charm and intelligence, even if you didn’t already know that the men concerned had been punished by the moral universe with exactly the faces they deserved. Did they revel in the contrast or look away from the snapshots? The photos of these older men and younger women together looked like they belonged in plastic evidence bags, documents of the continuing crimes against women. It disappointed me that I could see no similar crime when I framed Emily and Andrew together. The suit and tie he was wearing for the occasion sat well on him, and if it made him look a bit formal, I imagined how that itself could be cool in the world of academia, adopting style and convention against a culture of sloppy iconoclasm. It irritated me that I could see what she saw in him. What they all saw in him.
I found myself talking a lot to Susannah, who ran a division of on
e of the big publishing houses. She interrogated me about which books were selling in the shop; which I thought were good and which were awful, telling me which she’d been involved with or had tried to buy and lost out on. She had published Andrew for years, and been friends with him for even longer.
Emily left at one point to use the toilet, and during this time Andrew turned his attention towards me.
‘Emily says you showed up drunk to interview her. Is this true?’
‘It was the magazine’s annual party the night before. It can’t be done sober.’
‘Oh, you write for a magazine! Which one?’ said Susannah.
I told her.
‘Isn’t that a fashion magazine?’
‘He does the books page,’ said Andrew. ‘That’s how he met Emily.’
‘Oh, that’s over now. The books page.’ I explained to them that they had axed the page last week, replaced it with a legal highs column, and tried to persuade me to write it.
‘It’s not that funny, you know,’ I said when faced with their amused reaction.
‘Are you sure you couldn’t have written the drugs column?’ Susannah asked me. ‘It might be great fun.’
‘I’m quite sure,’ I said. ‘I did some research into the matter.’
*
On the day I conducted this research I had been summoned for an emergency meeting at the office. The magazine was not doing well, of course it wasn’t doing well, no one bought style magazines any more apart from hairdressers, and it was only a matter of time before we worked out how to stick our head in a machine and download our haircuts.
I have always avoided the offices of White Jesus as much as possible. They’re just off Broadway Market on the edge of London Fields, the epicentre of newly rich Hackney, the street with the highest percentage of beautiful young people in all of London. The receptionist is a thirteen-year-old boy with the face of a torturer who we all call Macaulay Culkin. He was wearing a baseball cap backwards, an XS vest that was baggy on him and a thick gold chain that was either a joke or not a joke, either gold or fake gold, just like he was either a teenage rent boy or a diminutive adult journalist – blurred lines were the magazine’s aesthetic and the modus operandi with which it conducted its crimes. He gave me a complicated handshake and sent me off through the messy arrangements of desks to my meeting.
Jonathan shares an office in the basement of the building, the ‘bunker’, with Stev’n. I took the steps down and they both looked up from the table they were sitting round.
Stev’n is a mournful-looking man, with a shaved head and glasses, who looks like he has never seen sunlight. He was wearing one of his expensive shirts with intricate patterns involving skulls and bones. Jonathan, in contrast, has the year-round look of a man at a summer wedding in Italy; he is comfortable in the casual smartness of the wealthy class – he has mimicked their gestures to perfection.
Jonathan stood to shake my hand, the gesture of someone interviewing me rather than a man who currently lived on my sofa. ‘How are you, Paul? Thanks so much for coming in.’
Stev’n was still looking at the papers on the table. He spoke quietly. ‘We’ve got customer surveys, traffic figures from the site, feedback from advertisers. I’m annoyed with you, Paul. Why on earth do we have a books page? No one reads the thing. People who read books don’t know it exists. People who read the magazine don’t read books. Oh, it’s not even that. Some of them do read books. But every fucking magazine under the sun that doesn’t know how to fill a back page sticks a few book reviews on it, some cunt who aspires to be a literary critic. No offence, Paul.’
‘You can’t just say something really offensive and then take it back with three words at the end of the sentence.’
‘Now, Jonathan, didn’t I say? I worried he would be like this,’ said Stev’n.
‘We need to focus on what makes us original is what Stev’n’s saying,’ said Jonathan. ‘We need clickbait. The hair reviews, everyone loves the hair reviews. They’re funny. People want to be in them. That’s what we do that no one else does. But you on Norwegian literature? Get real, mate.’
‘If you feel so strongly about it, write a review on Amazon,’ said Stev’n.
‘Or don’t,’ said Jonathan.
‘We had an idea.’
‘We think you might like it.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘Paul,’ said Jonathan. ‘I know you’re upset about losing your book column. But let’s make something clear. This isn’t a negotiation. This isn’t your chance to win us over with a passionate speech. The books page has only lasted as long as it has because half of us didn’t even know it was there.’
‘It’s like the human eye has evolved not to register short reviews of literary fiction,’ drawled Stev’n.
‘If there’s a teenage girl with her legs open on the facing page.’
‘Exactly,’ said Stev’n. ‘We could have a teenage girl with her legs open on both pages. When you shut the magazine, it’s like they’re scissoring each other. And right underneath them, a big fuck-off advert for Uniqlo.’
‘So you see,’ said Jonathan, ‘that you will need to find another venue for your literary criticism. Or alternatively, you may decide to write something else for us instead. We’d even give you a small raise.’ Jonathan reached under his desk and slid a large Jiffy bag across the table towards me. ‘These might be the last days of legal highs,’ he said. ‘Don’t you think we need to document that? We can be the first mainstream publication to regularly review them, you know, with a bit of gonzo humour, the stuff you’re good at.’
‘We have a great respect for your ability to consume narcotics,’ said Stev’n.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to tell either of you your job. But aren’t the people who travel to work every day on the Tube more interesting to advertisers than nerds who stay at home inhaling Chinese chemicals?’
‘They don’t read the magazine, they don’t go on the site,’ said Jonathan. ‘Anyway, the brands aren’t targeting the people who take the Chinese chemicals, they’re targeting the people who get a thrill from reading about you taking the Chinese chemicals. It’s edginess that attracts the brands we want.’
‘Exactly,’ said Stev’n. ‘Now, we don’t want to tell you your job. But you’re the guy who takes the Chinese chemicals.’
I didn’t even argue. I had suddenly realised that all I had been doing for the last few years was writing an expensively produced blog. A blog might have had more readers.
‘Think about it,’ said Stev’n. ‘For five minutes. You’ll still have your haircut review, whether you take it or not.’
‘I don’t need to think about it,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you later, Jonathan, will I? Or has your wife taken you back?’
Jonathan looked away from me and said nothing. I turned around and started to walk back up the stairs.
‘Paul?’ said Stev’n. I turned back and caught the Jiffy bag he underarmed towards me. ‘Take it away and think about it.’ It was as heavy as an average-sized human’s ashes. I put it in my satchel and left.
Later that evening Jonathan knocked on my door and asked if I’d thought more about the package, if he could have a look at it. I pulled it out of my bag and tossed it to him, and he poured the contents onto my bed, sachets of capsules and pills, fake cocaine, weird herbs, lurid spice, all with garish packaging, connotations of radiation and supervillains, of the origin stories of mythical monsters.
‘I did consider it,’ I admitted. ‘I was thinking perhaps I don’t need to do the drugs, I could just imagine what they’re like from the packaging and the press release. I mean, drugs can only have so many effects, don’t you think? I can just describe them all in terms of what I’ve done before. I could actually become the great drug critic – I could supply the critical vocabulary by which all drugs are subsequently judged.’
‘You would have to do some first.’
He was shaking out a white powder now, onto my bedside table.
‘Man, if you want to be a lab rat, do it in your own bedroom. The living room, I mean.’
‘This is just a zingy alternative to the Bolivian marching powder.’
‘I bet it’s one molecule away from hillbilly bathtub crank.’
Jonathan rolled up the note he had pulled from his wallet and held the thin tube out to me. ‘You try,’ he said. ‘It’s your job.’
‘No. I am sacrificing my payday for the good of others.’
‘It would only be the people who read the legal high reviews in White Jesus who would suffer. You could argue they were asking for it. It’s not like anyone who really needed to live would die.’
‘You’re not making me feel better about my book column.’
‘Have you written the London Review of Haircuts yet?’
‘No.’
‘Well, why don’t we go out and do it together? Mary’s on at the bar. We can do it gonzo style.’
‘Absolutely not. And anyway, I always do it gonzo style. You don’t think I approach women and ask to take pictures of their hair when I’m sober, do you? I’m not a monster.’
*
The drugs were as bad as I’d imagined. But we were still soberish when we arrived at the bar to surprise Mary.
‘Wow, what a treat,’ she said.
‘You don’t mean that,’ I said.
‘I don’t not mean it yet.’
This was a bar called Catch down at the bottom of Kingsland Road. It’s a pitch-black dive bar with an upstairs room for dance nights and a little dance floor at the back on the ground floor too. Many of my briefest and nicest friendships have been initiated in the roped-off smoking area in the street.
Mary was wearing what looked like a vest of iridescent chain mail.
‘No one’s ever called it that before,’ she said.
‘It doesn’t look like it would provide you much protection,’ said Jonathan.
‘What need have I of protection with you two besides me?’
‘You really are delightfully naive,’ said Jonathan and placed his hand over hers on the counter.
She snatched it away, gave him a look and walked down to the other end of the bar to serve someone else.
‘You and her, you’re not—?’ I said.
‘No, no. Just flirting. Making sure I still know how to do it.’
