My Biggest Lie

by Luke Brown

  ‘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.’

  ‘Good man.’

  ‘My girlfriend would dispute that.’

  ‘Your ex-girlfriend.’

  ‘Oh, yes …’ My irony wasn’t robust enough to joke about that yet.

  ‘How old are you anyway?’

  ‘I’m thirty.’

  ‘You lucky bastard. So then you better tell me what happened. Be warned: I don’t have infinite sympathy for young lucky bastards.’

  I didn’t spend long telling him. It was mundane and predictable. I lied. I made out I was better than I was. And when it was obvious that I was worse than I’d pretended – to myself as well as her, with the poems, surprise gifts, underwear and holidays – I lied harder and was caught out in increments until I was worse than what I had concealed. When I finally told the truth, it was unrealistic.

  ‘What shall we eat?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m not really hungry. Why do you people always insist on meeting in restaurants? What’s wrong with pubs?’

  ‘We’d have to pay for our own meals then. But I’d have been very happy with a pub. I think I’ve given up food. I’ve thrown up everything I’ve tried to eat since Saturday.’

  He looked at me steadily. ‘Ah, mate,’ he said, and he reached out and patted me on the arm. ‘So it is serious? You love her? It’s mundane but I know it fucking hurts. I’ve been there too.’

  He was talking, I found out later, about Amy Casares, the half-Argentine novelist I had published. It was no coincidence that she would appeal to us both. Regardless of this chance connection a friendship was growing, or more precisely he was trying to rescue me, as I have been rescued by strangers before and since. The most cynical and duplicitous of us are often the kindest. There was no way, I knew, I could persuade Sarah of this. Because, probably, it isn’t true. But that night Craig Bennett and I were convinced it was.

  ‘Exactly,’ he roared, pouring the last of the third bottle. (We had realised that we did like food, as long as it was food you could consume like drugs: we liked oysters – and had been necking them like tequila shots for the last half hour. We were elated.) ‘Liars understand what people want, what they don’t have. They have imagination! Empathy! They understand complication and contradiction!’

  I was lapping it up. Instead of being a self-destructive liar I was now a self-destructive liar – in a good way. In the toilets, almost without thinking, I locked the cubicle door behind me and scraped out onto the cistern half of the remains of the coke that I had left in my wallet from the weekend.

  As I walked back into the dining room I felt I had turned the corner into a happier life. I had meant to keep to myself what I had done, but he had been so kind that before I knew it I had passed the wrap across to him and told him to finish it. I’m terrible at doing drugs on my own. They make me so generous-spirited. A flash of concern crossed his face, before he broke into a grin. ‘So,’ he said, ‘it’s like this.’ Then he was gone, leaving me to take in my surroundings properly for the first time: the inch of wine left in each of our glasses, the tall stems drawing the eye upwards, to the high ceiling, the glass chandeliers, and outwards, to the French waitresses and waiters, young people, in their early twenties, undaunted, poorly paid and incorrupt. My hands were shaking and I thought I could feel everyone looking at me.

  Is it really possible to fall in love over the space of a few hours, the way I fell in love with Craig Bennett? Easy to want to, to think you have – isn’t that what love is, the opposite of loss? The strength of the feeling is the proof against it having occurred too soon. What I felt that night was that I had found someone to reverse what I had lost. Someone who was pure gain.

  My father is ten years older than Bennett, though he looks younger, smoother, like the past has sheared off him in a wet shave. A kind man, his new friends tell me. He wasn’t always that man: there was another man who made decisions which neither he, my sisters nor I knew at the time would so blunt our memory of the father he had been before to us. We don’t bring up the three years in which he disappeared, the years when we only knew he was alive because of phone calls he made every few months to our grandma. He wouldn’t speak to his own father, divorced from grandma, or tell grandma where he was living, what country even – ‘It doesn’t sound like he’s in England,’ she’d say. (It’s been years since he’s sounded like he’s on fucking earth, I would reply.) Something had snapped in him during his second, awful marriage, two years after he left us, and after ‘an incident’ with his new family, an incident we were never told or would ever willingly ask about, an incident that even he, in the height of his madness, recognised as madness, he had simply run, and when all his madness had burnt out he had returned to earth, complete again and a stranger to us. He may have been a stranger to himself too. He certainly wanted to be. In that first year back from the dead we saw him once or twice around the table with his new fiancée, Shelley, who ran a New Age shop in Milton Keynes and on each occasion gave us a gift of a scented candle. Shelley had departed, but we still met with Dad around a table once or twice a year. There was often another woman there. Each time we faced again the absolute impossibility of asking him a serious question. He looked startled when we did, like he was about to run for the hills. We didn’t want to risk that. I was sixteen when he disappeared, my sisters thirteen and eleven. I was the lucky one; it’s normal up on the Blackpool coast to be drinking heavily by that age; my sisters were jolted into a more precocious start. It didn’t do us any superficial harm. All of us are (or have been) well-paid professionals. At the time I didn’t feel the lack of a guide; I could work out how a man behaved from my friends and reading the books I liked about the Rolling Stones and other swaggering outlaws. There are advantages to adopting such role models: a certain ch
arm or roguishness, the sad, warping half-truth that girls (and boys) like you more when you treat them badly; that some people get away with murders while others get broken. Most of all there was the glorious opportunity to blame someone else, someone absent, for my own self-indulgence. I met Craig Bennett on the night my dad, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had all let me down. I came to believe that he had knowledge to impart to me, knowledge that could save me: and I decided to love him.

  Chapter 4

  Lizzie and Arturo had been letting me speak but now Arturo interrupted. ‘How do you mean, you loved him? Like a woman or a brother?’ It was not an aggressive question but slightly exasperated. I had been careful not to reveal all I had been thinking, particularly the details about Sarah, and perhaps he could tell I was hiding something. I had probably revealed more than I meant to.

  ‘I’ve never had a brother,’ I said to him. ‘I loved him like a friend. Or like a father.’

  Perhaps I looked sad then because Lizzie reached over and put her hand on my shoulder. ‘What happened next?’ she asked.

  Craig and I were in a cab, heading to Soho, up some stairs to be greeted by a golden-haired actor. He looked shocked then surrendered to an open-mouthed grin. ‘Craig – you came back! What a delight! What chutzpah!’

  I hadn’t seen Bennett abashed before. He was staring past the actor at the two windows on the other side of the room.

  He hadn’t explained where we were going in the taxi, just that he’d made a new friend who’d be able to sort us out before we went to the party where we were due. ‘Now we’ve started, we’ll need it or it will seem like a dreadful evening,’ he’d insisted, though he didn’t have too much insisting to do. ‘And he’s a good man: Fergus, an actor, a pleasant host.’

  As Bennett fixated on the window I realised where we were. The cardboard crates full of empties confirmed it. We were all suddenly surprised at the situation. We probably needed more drugs. I had a sachet of mephedrone in my wallet, but it was a bit more engulfing and lasting than cocaine; not as socially acceptable. I bit my tongue and introduced myself to Fergus. ‘As you can see,’ he said, ‘the last party feels like it finished about three minutes ago.’ He pulled a mostly-full bottle of Prosecco from a cardboard box on the floor: ‘Sorry it’s not cold, fellas.’ He rinsed out three mugs – ‘God knows what became of all our glasses last night’ – and Bennett discreetly recovered himself and drew Fergus aside.

  As they conferred, I wandered over to the window and looked down to the pavement below. I don’t know what I thought I might see: a cartoon James Cockburn-sized imprint, perhaps. On the other side of the road Eros Videos and Soho Video Club seemed wildly anachronistic, as if they were funded by the council as tourist attractions. A thin ledge ran under the window and around the side of the building. Fergus was speaking into the phone now and Bennett came over to stand with me at the window. We both peered down. ‘Is this where … ?’ I asked. He didn’t answer. ‘Fifteen minutes,’ said Fergus, putting the phone down.

  Some people, some writers, like to lyrically describe the reveries they’ve experienced on drugs. It’s an even more boring and shameful habit than taking them. Cocaine was done and did what was expected of it. In the course of consumption we acquired two actresses and four missed calls from Bennett’s publicist, two from our mutual agent and one, worryingly, from my CEO. We had moved to an upstairs members’ club round the corner where the barmaid had greeted Bennett enthusiastically. I’d still made no contact with James Cockburn, suspecting, correctly, that I had been sent on a mission to betray him. It was midnight. We were two hours late to the party, but the party would go on late, and so I told myself that the situation wasn’t irretrievable. Bennett was perfectly happy where he was and didn’t share my CEO’s sense of the importance of meeting export buyers, foreign editors and the producers of TV book clubs. The actresses’ names were Lucy and Charlotte and they were the costume drama stars who had been at the party the night before. They were the kind of intelligent bohemian young women that a Cockburn would go to dangerous lengths to impress. My work credit card was behind the bar and we were drinking champagne. Bennett had stumped up the cash for an eighth of good coke and no one was being shy about taking it.

  Eventually, I got all five of us into a taxi. We would arrive with an hour left of the party. I texted Amanda to say we were on our way. The response was immediate: that would be very fucking wise of you.

  Leaving the taxi, we faced the usual gastro-enormo-bar in Kensal Green. In large part because of James Cockburn’s copy-friendliness and connections with film directors, conceptual artists and indie rock stars, our publisher’s yearly party was officially the place to be at the book fair. Part of the fun was guessing which rock and rollers would turn up to be drunk under the table by the real hedonists. A voluble chunk of the international publishing industry would be in there.

  A bouncer checked my name off and waved us all through. Inside, the cavernous first-room was decked out in what passes for classiness in posh pubs: wine-dark walls interspersed with flock wallpaper, oak tables and Chesterfield sofas. It was heaving; I immediately lost Bennett and the actors as I pinballed between double-and triple-kisses. The crowd was perhaps seventy per cent female and around a third of the remaining men were gay: to a man of imagination this was publishing’s great perk and peril. I grabbed a drink and fought my way outside onto the teeming smoking terrace. Here I found myself next to Olivia Klein, a literary reviewer I would rather have avoided. I had been trapped in a disconcerting conversation with her at a Christmas party. She had said the rudest things to me about the books I published, all the time smiling winningly and moving me closer against the wall. She was young, in her mid-twenties, one of those eerily tall Oxbridge girls with skin so pale as to be translucent. She would have grown up in the country, miles from her friends, with only her horse, her mother’s neuroses and her father the doctor’s well-stocked library of Russian novels for company. As a result of which, she was far cleverer than me.

  ‘Now when are you going to publish something a bit more avant-garde?’ she was asking. ‘Where’s the new Calvino? Where’s the new Borges?’

  ‘I’m trying to publish books that large numbers of people will buy,’ I explained. ‘It’s my job.’

  ‘So you’re happy to be complicit in the dumbing down of our culture?’

  ‘Where is this new Borges, anyway? He wasn’t in Birmingham.’

  ‘You probably wouldn’t recognise them if you saw them,’ she said dismissively.

  ‘You don’t have any recommendations? Nothing you’ve read recently in the original Catalan?’

  ‘Don’t be facetious.’

  I tried to change the subject. ‘I hear you’ve written a novel, Olivia.’

  (I had chatted to some literary scouts that day. Literary scouts are book spies employed by foreign editors: they always know everything that everyone is reading.)

  ‘Who’s your agent again? I could ask them to send it to me.’

  Her body tensed, so much that I prepared to jump out of the way. She breathed deeply. ‘Your broken-legged buddy has already anatomised what he perceives as its failures to my agent. Not enough tits, or something like that.’

  ‘Well, James does have quite an instinct for that kind of thing. Have you considered putting some more tits in?’

  ‘Oh, grow up. I’m looking forward to reviewing the next masterpiece you publish.’

  She walked away then and I wondered if I might be able to damage her career before she did any damage to mine. I didn’t know that I had only a few hours left of my career and at the time I quite relished the fight. An enemy can be more fun than a friend, more enlivening, more intimate. I didn’t have as many as I would have liked. People liked me, or at least the people I liked liked me, or at least I thought they did. Then I thought of Sarah crying on the phone and realised things might be about to change.

  ‘Liam Wilson!’ My agent was walking towards me. Suzy Carling is only a few years o
lder than me but seems at least two generations more advanced. She is striking in appearance and exhausting in conversation. She refuses to answer any questions or remarks that don’t interest her, regardless of how useful they are to me. Tonight she was glamorous in a sleek black dress and blue suede boots with frightening long heels. Behind her, I caught a glimpse of Bennett through a window, striding somewhere with Jay McInerney in tow. Suzy pulled a Gauloise out of her handbag and leaned over to me. I lit it for her and she straightened up.

  ‘How are you, Suzy?’

  She blew smoke at me. ‘Yes. So, what is the news with James? I can’t get through to him. Have you spoken to him yet?’

  ‘No, I haven’t but I spoke to Belinda this afternoon and he’s –’

  ‘Yes, yes. I’ve spoken to Belinda. I saw you come in with Craig – and by the way, Belinda sounded very exasperated you were so late – so of course you have heard the rumours going around about …’

  ‘Whether he was pushed?’

  ‘Or dangled?’ She laughed. ‘I heard some girls earlier saying they were at the door when Craig nearly dropped James on their heads. They had to dive for cover, they said.’

  ‘Who were they?’

  ‘Oh, some publicity assistants. Of course it wasn’t true – and if it was, it still wouldn’t be. They looked rather scared when I butted in and asked for their full names and where it was they worked. So how’s Craig holding up?’

  ‘He’s fine. I think. Actually, he took me to the flat where it happened earlier.’

  ‘When you were supposed to be here.’

  ‘Must you keep mentioning that?’

  ‘And what did he say about it?’

  ‘Nothing. He was staring down from the window where it happened, looking down at the ground.’

  ‘Liam, you said he was staring down, that’s where the ground’s kept. Is that all you’ve got? What you need is an editor. Talking of which, aren’t you nearly finished with that novel you’ve been promising me? I rather think you should meet Helen over here.’