My Biggest Lie

by Luke Brown

  ‘He was,’ said Suzy. ‘You can still blame him, though.’

  ‘Do you know where he’s going?’ said Amanda.

  ‘I can find him,’ I said.

  ‘Find him,’ said Belinda. ‘Stay with him. Has your phone got power?’

  ‘It has,’ I said.

  ‘If you fail to answer your phone to Amanda or me, your day will begin tomorrow with me taking a long look at your contract of employment – do you understand? I have never been so angry in my life. Just get him to his reading tomorrow, or get Amanda to him tomorrow morning in time to get him to the reading. Just take control of the situation, for fuck’s sake. Sober up, stay awake and go and find him.’

  I found him the first place we looked. I was in a cab with three of an endangered species, Irish booksellers, one of whom had been at the party the night before and knew exactly what had happened between Cockburn and Bennett. ‘He was fucking Cockburn’s wife,’ he told me. ‘It’s sure. I heard them arguing over her just before it happened.’

  ‘I know his wife,’ I said. ‘I’m pretty sure one maniac’s enough for her. There’s no way that was happening.’

  ‘Ah, you say that, but humans, you know – they’re always surprising you.’

  We pulled up at the scene of the crime and looked up. A man was leaning out the window, contemplating the ground beneath him. As we got out of the car he finished his cigarette, waved and bounced the glowing tip on the concrete.

  ‘Nice escape,’ I called up.

  ‘Is that what I’ve done?’ Bennett called back. ‘You better come in then.’

  Three more cabs showed up: Fergus was a friendly host. Half of the guests had been at the party the night before and immediately began to whisper the story of Cockburn’s fall to the half who had not, inclining their heads towards the famous window. I was busy talking to Bennett about our mutual friend Amy Casares, hoping he wouldn’t notice, and he was animatedly telling me about the adventures they had had in Buenos Aires. All of a sudden, he seemed very sad. ‘Can we get out of this room?’ he asked. ‘I know they’re talking about me.’

  We found a bedroom and Bennett shut the door behind him. We sat down on the bed. ‘It’s good to talk to a friend of Amy,’ he said. ‘Amy was always the one for me. When she moved to Madrid, I should have followed her. She would have let me, I’m convinced she would have. You can never know you were wrong if you never tried. That’s what we want most sometimes, to know we were wrong. I’ll never know. I had my set-up in Buenos Aires, I knew what I was doing there. I had attachments. But when she left, they were different, the attachments. They weren’t fun any more. I can see you’re being brave about your girlfriend. And you should be brave. But I wish I had been courageous earlier so I didn’t have to pretend to be now. That’s what being brave is: pretending to be brave. That’s what it’s for. What I’m trying to ask you is, do you love her?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘And have you thought about what that means?’

  ‘I’ve thought about it. I haven’t reached an answer.’

  ‘Do you want me to tell you what it means?’

  ‘I think I had better work that out for myself.’

  ‘There may still be some hope for you. Is there any chance you can win her back? Do you deserve her?’

  ‘There’s a chance. I hope so. I hope there’s a chance.’

  ‘Then my advice is – should you give advice if it hasn’t worked out for you? Nevertheless, I will. I am a romantic, Liam, as I see you are. People will tell you there are many more fish in the sea. And yes, there are. There will be more women if you want them, or men, some of them younger and physically more attractive than the one you love. You will always desire them. Accept that. You will always have opportunities. It is the most popular deviancy among young women: their attraction to old men. I don’t see the world changing in this way. It’s the imbalance of the species. I’ve benefited from it myself. Benefited? I’ve been kept young by it. When what I’ve wanted is to grow old. You see, the only way to grow old is to grow old with someone. Because the people who’ve grown old don’t recognise you unless you’ve grown old too, and you don’t get old hanging around with young women. But you’re not really young either. Tantamount though it may be to declaring my idiocy, I am a romantic and I believe in love. If there is something unique in you that recognises something unique in her, then that can never be repeated. You can never love in the same way, only less or only more. And for me it’s only ever been less. I made the mistake of fatalism. There is a finite amount of falling in love available to you. Don’t spread it too thinly. You cannot love a hundred more girls. I understand: you’re curious. You want to know all of them, all of their secrets and joys and sufferings, their unique qualities, but you will not have the energy. You will not even have the memory. Win her back if you can, and if you can’t, don’t fuck around for too long with too many. Or you’ll end up alone, and what’s worse, you won’t really care. I thought I was more alive when I was lying, preying. But it kills you, Liam, it makes you dead inside. It kills you. You are most alive when you love.’

  We were interrupted at the close of Bennett’s speech by the Irish booksellers staggering through the door, looking for somewhere to take cocaine. ‘You’ll join us for a line, won’t you, Craig?’ they asked. He looked at me sadly. ‘Do you see what I mean?’ he said. ‘Please don’t,’ I said. ‘Don’t what?’ he said, shaping his face to inflame to an insult like a Glaswegian on holiday in Blackpool. I decided it would only provoke him into taking more if I made an issue of discouraging him. ‘I’m going to look for a drink,’ I told him. ‘A rum and coke, please,’ he said. ‘With just a very tiny bit of coke?’ I asked. ‘Just a tiny bit,’ he sighed, in a calmer voice.

  More people had arrived in the lounge since I had left and I became caught up saying hello to friends and strangers. I found myself repeating the speech Craig had just delivered to me. After a while I began to feel guilty that I was making fun of him, that people thought I was being ironic. I was not laughing at him. I was laughing in delight because of him, because I’d come to know him. I went to find him. Bennett and the booksellers had been joined on the bed by the two actresses. A steady stream of people moved in and out to hear Bennett hold forth on various topics: the nature of love, the derangement of the senses, advances in vineyard machinery, the Australian literary scene, the importance of courage and its illusionary nature, where to buy cocaine in Palermo Viejo, house prices in the Gower Peninsula, etc., etc. I had lost him to the crowd. I couldn’t get near him.

  I told myself not to panic and rejoined the gathering in the living room. Time passed in a flurry of quick conversation. When I looked at my phone, it was late, 4.30 a.m. The party was thinning out. I went to use the toilet and bumped into Bennett at the door.

  ‘Come in here with me,’ he said. ‘I need a sensible fucking conversation.’ I went back in and sat on the bath. He pulled the toilet cover down and sat on that. ‘I don’t even need the toilet. I just wanted a fucking breather. Don’t these people on cocaine talk?’

  I couldn’t help laughing at this.

  ‘Hey, fuck you. There is less hypocrisy in that statement than you assume. At least I have given what I say some thought in advance. That’s the way to take cocaine – you need to have prepared some interesting conversation earlier. They have not. And they keep trying to nudge me onto the subject of Cockburn without just asking me straight out what happened.’

  There was an awkward silence. ‘So, what did happen?’ I asked.

  ‘They’re half right, some of them out there, you know? I was arguing with James about his wife. It was because we were arguing he ran off and tried to show off. But we weren’t arguing about her for the reasons I’ve heard. I do love her but I’m not in love with her. I think she’s wonderful. Do you know her?’

  I had met Ella a few times. She’s a quiet, satirical woman, a psychologist Cockburn has been with since they met at university, and I like her for the ec
onomy with which she ridicules James whenever he switches into his performance role. Just a word or a look to put his feet back on the ground. She’s from Manchester and has kept her accent, and it has enormous power as a corrective to his bullshit. I’ve neutralised my Northern accent, softening it while keeping my flat vowel-sounds. James picks and chooses his depending on his mood. When he plays James, laddish, down-to-earth football fan, who happens to be able to recite lines of poetry by Ezra Pound, he comes on like a Renaissance Gallagher brother. But in his publishing speeches, he elongates his vowels, becoming almost mid-Atlantic (apart from the rare occasions when he introduces a Northern writer, when he comes over like the manager of a cocky indie band from Salford). The difference between James and Ella disappeared when they were together: they played up to it and acquiesced to each other, they were a holiday from themselves. Ella was pregnant with their first child.

  ‘Yes, I love Ella too,’ I said.

  ‘And you know he was talking about leaving her?’

  ‘He’s not, is he? Who else would take him?’

  ‘Talking about it anyway. Who knows how serious that man is about anything? But if he was prepared to talk about it, I was prepared to take him seriously.’

  ‘But who for?’

  ‘For a woman not nearly as interesting a human being, not nearly as good for him. Whose very appeal is only that she’s not nearly as good for him. He wants to destroy his life, his happiness, so he feels more alive. Ah, fuck it, why did I think I had the right to get involved? In the end, this is how we measure our happiness, by how much dramatic unhappiness we have to narrate, by how much interesting misery we have inflicted on others. This is how we make our mark. Not by love but through cruelty. Isn’t that what tempted you to cheat on your girlfriend? To say, I inflicted pain. I abandoned conventional morality. People noticed me. Yes, people thought you were a vain tosser. Just like me. Like our awful role models. What more drugs do we have, Liam? We need more drugs. Let’s lift our spirits. What’s that stuff you were telling me about earlier that you had, the stuff the kids are buying off the internet these days? I’m so pleased about that, that someone’s worked out a use for the internet that isn’t wanking. Let me have a look at that stuff.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’

  ‘To look? Oh, come on, don’t patronise me. I’m not your granddad. Don’t you owe me some trust? There’s nothing wrong with me. They’re just trying to make you feel bad.’

  I was tired of arguing. I pulled the packet out and handed it to him. He held it to his nose and took a cautious sniff. ‘That’s quite disgusting,’ he said. It was. The powder smelled of gone-off eggs. ‘Do some,’ he said. I took a dab, hoping that would be enough for him. Someone was knocking on the door of the toilet. Another gang had arrived via a deviation to the Groucho. They’d brought two famous conceptual artists with them, friends of Cockburn’s. They looked past me as I opened the door. ‘Craig! How are you?’ they called and pushed past, squeezing me out of the door.

  *

  The mephedrone whooshed up in me straight away and I found myself in a corner of the kitchen with Lucy, one of the actresses, talking quickly about something and inviting her out to dinner. I offered her some mephedrone but couldn’t find my packet when she accepted. She had some coke anyway and we did a line of that. Her boyfriend meant she couldn’t come out for dinner with me. That was fine: I felt deranged, entirely separate from myself. I was doing my best to break the connection altogether, because when I remembered … We talked and talked and time went by. I was searching through my pockets, looking for the mephedrone, when I saw Bennett walk in the room, clutching and kneading the top of his left arm. He walked over to the kitchen sink and pulled the cold tap on full, looking around for a glass.

  I bounded over and hugged him. ‘Here,’ I said, handing him a pint glass from a cupboard. ‘Are you all right?’

  He filled the glass up and drank it down. He turned to me. His face was bright red, scared. ‘No, I’m not. Quietly, please, will you ring me an ambulance?’

  He was sucking for air, holding his shoulder and wincing. I knew immediately it wasn’t a joke, could see how scared, and yes, embarrassed he was. He was trying to deceive himself that he was simply making a shameful exit from a party. The rest of the guests were looking over at us. I put my arm round him and rang 999 with the other.

  Before they arrived he was on the kitchen floor, groaning. He had pulled my bag of mephedrone out of his pocket before collapsing. Fergus threw the rest of the guests out, even the actresses, and we could hear their voices rising up from the spot outside where James Cockburn had landed the night before. It was twenty past five. The paramedics would be getting used to this address, and the police too. Bennett could barely speak and neither the actor nor I knew what to do. I felt for his pulse: it was there, jumping. ‘I’ll stay with Craig, you just make sure you’re covered if the police come round – clean any drugs up,’ I told him and bent down over Bennett and held his hand. ‘Don’t speak,’ I said, from concern, but also because I could not imagine what I would say to him. ‘You’re going to be all right. You’re going to be fine.’ I remembered aspirins were good for heart attacks in some way. ‘Have you got any aspirin?’ I shouted through. ‘Shit, yes,’ he called back through, and came back with a tub. ‘Can you swallow?’ I asked Bennett. He nodded. ‘No, fuck that – will you crush it up?’ I asked the actor. ‘It’ll work quicker. Do a couple.’ It felt completely counter-intuitive, watching Fergus place a note over two aspirin and rake a credit card sharply over them, chopping the powder down finely as I had done so many times with ecstasy pills. I asked for some on the credit card and leaned over Bennett. ‘Can you snort? It’s aspirin – I think it will help, it thins the blood.’ I held the card against his nostrils and he rasped a breath in, blowing the powder over his chest, perhaps inhaling very small quantities. I mixed the rest up with a small amount of water and fed it to him. Then I tried once more with the card to see if he could inhale some, and that’s how the paramedics found us as they rushed in, a middle-aged writer, on his back, mid heart attack, being encouraged to snort powder from a credit card. It must have looked like attempted murder.

  Bennett lived on his own and so, in the absence of family to call, I phoned Suzy. I had never in my life been so rightfully attacked. She ordered me to ring Belinda to explain, and in a daze I tried to, but she didn’t answer. They would only let one of us go in the ambulance, and Fergus, who had known Craig for a couple of years, went instead of me. I stood on my own in a street in Soho. It was not light yet, but the sky was taking on a vibrant blue, something burning behind it. I had a day of meetings at the Fair beginning at ten. The police would have to be in touch, I realised, but no one had told me to wait for them here. The paramedics had taken my name and address, and we’d told them about the drugs Bennett had been taking. I’d given them the bag of mephedrone too. I wanted more than anything in the world to ring Sarah, who was staying at her friend’s in Camden. But I flagged a cab down instead and headed to our empty bed. Here I picked up one of her jumpers and fell asleep hugging it. It smelled of the wax she rubbed on her hair when she got out of the shower to control her curls. It smelled of Sarah.

  It must have only have been an hour or two later when I was woken by a knock on the door. Two police officers, a man and a woman, looked at me with distaste. On the other side of London, the Fair was about to resume. We were a long way away from there. I invited them in, but they didn’t want to come in. My good manners had no currency here. I had to go to the station with them. ‘How’s Craig?’ I asked. I knew the answer already from their presence, from the look on their faces, but I did not know I knew it then.

  Chapter 7

  When I finished the story, there was a silence.

  Understandably, they were deciding whether I had made most of it up. I was not as truthful then as I am now and I had left a few unfavourable details out.

  ‘I think I hear about him dying,’ said
Arturo.

  ‘He’s quite popular here in translation,’ said Lizzie. ‘He used to live here, didn’t he? The ending of the story, that’s not really what happened, is it? Is that a joke?’

  ‘I wish.’

  ‘God,’ said Lizzie. ‘No wonder you’ve decided to get away.’

  ‘It is not good to die of drugs,’ snapped Arturo. It was a comment of such obviousness it might have been uttered by a TV football pundit, if not for its brittle anger, as if Arturo had been personally inconvenienced by this dead man with the wrong idea.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’ll understand if you’d rather I left now. It’s a bit much.’

  ‘Oh, shut up and don’t be silly,’ said Lizzie. ‘It sounds like he was going to do what he did whether or not you gave him the drugs. You didn’t make him take them.’

  ‘Whether or not that’s true … I’ve lost my job and I’m hiding here in disgrace. So, I’m here on holiday, basically. It might be a long holiday.’

  ‘How long?’ said Arturo.

  ‘Oh, for ever, I guess. Until I run out of money or get bored. It could be as long as a year.’

  ‘On holiday for a year?’

  ‘I know, it sounds awful. I don’t even like being on holiday.’ I laughed, and Arturo blew a puff of smoke into the room and laughed with me.

  ‘You can do my job for me if you like. You can drive a motorbike?’

  ‘Ride a motorbike,’ Lizzie corrected.

  ‘I can’t drive or ride one, or a car.’

  ‘Sarah said you were a writer?’ she asked, prompted, I presume, by this statement of uselessness. Many writers and editors do not know how to operate a car.

  Arturo shrugged. ‘I ride a motorbike, make deliveries.’

  ‘I’m not a writer. I’ve had one story published, that’s all.’

  ‘You must have written it then,’ said Lizzie.

  ‘Or driven it,’ suggested Arturo with a grin. ‘It is not hard to ride a motorbike. I could teach you.’