by Luke Brown
I had never liked those writers who sonorously pronounced, ‘I am a writer,’ as if pretentiousness were qualification instead of side-effect, but in the end I confessed that I was writing a novel: it was slightly less embarrassing than continuing to admit that I had no idea of what I was doing there. Easier too than trying to explain the obscure penance I hoped to enact here for Bennett’s death.
‘It’s so good that you and Sarah can trust each other to be apart,’ said Lizzie enthusiastically, looking at Arturo.
Arturo shot me a wounded look as if I had conspired against him. It was a look familiar to me from watching international football. ‘Do you not miss her?’ he asked.
‘I’m used to it. She goes away for months at a time for her research.’
‘Arturo’s sad that I’m going to visit a friend in Rio next week without him,’ Lizzie chipped in. ‘You’ll have to keep each other company.’
‘Does she not miss you?’ Arturo persisted.
‘I hope she does,’ I said. ‘I miss her lots.’
After his initial suspicion, Arturo seemed to have hopes I could become a comrade in the struggle against inattentive girlfriends.
‘Lizze, look! This is what he looks like without his girlfriend!’
‘Oh, Liam, that’s sweet,’ she said, coming forward and throwing her arms round me again. I could see Arturo’s face over her shoulder. ‘You look so sad. It’s a sacrifice, isn’t it, to allow each other freedom? It’s so generous.’
Arturo shook his head in silent disgust and pulled out a packet of crayon-green marijuana from his pocket to roll a spliff.
‘What is your novel about, Liam?’ he asked viciously.
I’d planned for a while to write a novel set at the peripheries of the Rolling Stones and the art world in 1960s London. I’d spent years reading tall tales about these characters as a teenager and thought I could put them to good use. Suzy had already tried to sell a coming-of-age novel I had written in my early twenties set where I grew up in Blackpool. My alter ego’s life was far more rebellious than mine. He took drugs as a teenager in the amounts that I had only graduated to in my late twenties. Suzy had liked the novel but no one else was interested.
I tried halfheartedly to explain my new idea to Arturo and Lizzie, but even just talking about it was an act of impoverishing foolishness. I should have known from my once-promising career that if you ever try to explain the plot of a novel without gusto it always sounds like a very boring novel. It’s like making a tackle: you have to throw your whole weight into it.
‘Why do you write about this?’ asked Arturo. It had stopped being an aggressive question. He was curious. I started to tell him about what an interesting time it was historically – the end of empire, the breaking down of the class system, the last throes of the Establishment seeking to crush rebellion – but I was answering a different question to the one he asked: Why do you write about this?
‘I don’t really know,’ I concluded. ‘I think I’ve always had a weakness for bad role models.’
‘The Rolling Stones are very popular here,’ Lizzie said kindly.
Arturo – who, with his full, feminine lips, looked like a prettier evolution of Mick Jagger, like one of the fabulous Jagger daughters – asked, ‘When will you find out why you are writing this?’
‘Soon, I hope,’ I said before finally managing to change the subject and ask them about themselves.
They had met each other six months ago. Arturo’s band were playing in the bar next to Lizzie’s college and they had stared at each other throughout the set with the unabashed confidence of the beautiful at the beautiful. When they came offstage he had headed straight in her direction and asked her for her name, standing in front of her and letting his eyes do the work for him. His languid confidence annoyed her, suggesting he knew exactly how the evening would proceed from then on, and so instead of answering she had leaned forward, put a hand through the back of his glossy dark hair and yanked him in for a kiss. When she had finished his eyes had changed and his smile had grown from a playful smirk into a broad grin. He looked delighted, surprised, and she liked that, that he was happy to have lost his cool. She wasn’t the type of girl to fall for poseurs, no matter how handsome they were.
I got a simpler, more proprietorial version of this story from Arturo while Lizzie started to cook. She had gone to see his band, she had stared at him, she had run towards him and kissed him. ‘She surprised me,’ he said laughing, ‘she came out of nowhere!’
There was still something adversarial in the air when he spoke about Lizzie. ‘Tell me about your band,’ I said.
When he spoke I tried to avoid his eyes: as he relaxed they became so mouth-wateringly appealing I felt as guilty as if I was staring directly between a woman’s legs on the Tube. Out of a sense of propriety I found myself looking away to notice the way his thighs filled his skinny jeans, the calve-like curve of his biceps as they appeared beneath his T-shirt’s short sleeves, and then I gave up and surrendered to his gaze. When he finished I realised I had not listened to a word he said.
‘We are playing on Tuesday,’ he said.
‘You should go! Keep him company while I’m away,’ Lizzie said.
‘We’ll get wasted afterwards,’ he said. ‘I will have some cocaine and ecstasy.’
‘I’m sorry, I really meant what I said. I don’t do drugs any more.’
He studied me again and smiled. I realised that he was a perceptive man.
I spent that weekend thinking about Lizzie and Arturo on his mini motorbike, riding along the highway in the pampas, her tanned thighs squeezing his waist. To distract myself, I began to look for an apartment of my own. Lizzie had recommended starting on Craig’s List and here I was immediately drawn to the section ‘chica busca chico’. I thought it might teach me how to flirt in Spargentinean but all the adverts were in English, locals looking for foreigners, tourists, sugar daddies, a bit of fun, pampering, dinners. Less tentative posts offered the elite companionship of educated, discreet models. The ‘chico busca chica’ was far worse, American men offering to spend money on women who were sweet, didn’t play games, were a surrogate mother, weren’t materialistic or argumentative. The negotiations depressed the hell out of me. They were the opposite of love.
Lizzie had recommended a price region I should be paying for a flat but it took me hours of wading through tourist sites charging much more – feeling increasingly desperate as the electronic tango music in the lounge swelled like the theme from Countdown – before I found the places the locals used. After three or four excruciating phone calls with estate agents who couldn’t understand my diffident Spanish, I began to understand they were all asking about a garantia and talking about two-year contracts rather than the six months I wanted. I decided I would be better off waiting for Lizzie and Arturo to get back and holding out for longer in the hostel.
I was, I admit, reluctantly beginning to see some appeal in living in the hostel. Something had changed in me since meeting Lizzie and Arturo: I had begun to lust again. The shock of leaving Sarah, of losing Sarah, had temporarily overridden desire for anyone else. And now I realised how much better this had been, for as I began to look at the women, the girls, in the hostel and imagine myself with them I began to imagine other men with Sarah. Thoughts of what she could be doing with the artists and curators and students who had always surrounded her, thoughts of what she liked to do, appalled and delighted me. But any delight I felt was not worth the horror. Any delight was the horror.
It had been years since I had been jealous like this. I had quickly forgotten how fraught the first months had been, the constant worry that she would go back to the boyfriend she had left in Brazil. She still spoke to him and he wrote her long emails about his plans to move to Europe. It took months before she told me she loved me, and during this time I developed further my persona, the man who didn’t mind as much as I did, the man who looked at other girls and flirted and would spring into action if she ended things
suddenly.
As months and years went past and I came to know she loved me, and, by extension, so did the world, I became a complacent, un-jealous boyfriend. I had even said to her, jokily, seductively, towards the end, that she could sleep with other men as long as she told me. This became one of our favourite fantasies. The idea of her fucking another never filled me with the terror it seems to imbue in most men. I think I really believed this. A fantasy is not very powerful unless it is also a real possibility. There were times I watched her kiss another man on the dance floor in a club or at a festival, times when she watched me kiss another woman. Delicious, shocking and unsustainable: we would spring straight back to each other, delighted at our daring, relieved at our restraint.
I had of course brought this up in the arguments in which I made everything worse. ‘We had an understanding! I would have forgiven you! I wouldn’t have cared!’ This she chose to interpret as a sign I had never understood, had never cared for her, was incapable of caring for anyone. And, stupidly, unjustifiably, I exploded at this illogic. But it is not as simple as this, is it? This monogamous pact has not become the only definition of love, this selfish, fearful possession?
They make iPhone apps now for lovers so we can track each other’s position as we go about our day. It’s hard to imagine as a Christmas present but I bet they’re given. We abolish infidelity by making cheating administratively awkward. The opposite of love. Or the true test. Cheating gets hard. Casanovas drop out in droves. The ones still going for it, now that’s sexy.
And in my rage, because I thought we were better than this, I had oversimplified Sarah’s point. You can’t apply logic to fix betrayal. She had her own logic: I had lied, not just to cover my back but to mislead her in the extent of my devotion to her. It was not about my freely chosen moral system, it was about my refusal to admit to it, to wanting to have it both ways. I wanted to have my cake and have other cakes want me. She could have handled a revolutionary but not a petty criminal, not a con-artist, not an expenses cheat. It was just as bad as if I had fucked the girl I shared a bed with, the couple of girls I’d kissed on dance floors and never told her about. The only reason I didn’t was to leave me a loophole with which to lie to myself and to her.
I hated that she was right, picturing her with the conceptual artists she hung around with in London. Oh, I hated them. Their idealistic politics, Chomsky paperbacks, lack of jobs. Their activism, their outrage. Where did it come from? Hadn’t I once been like them?
Once, I had thought so. Now, I was in no state to judge anyone. I was becoming bitter. It had been years since I’d suffered the causes of bitterness. Lack of imagination, money, love: that’s what soured people. I had had love and money but forgotten how to imagine; now that love had gone and money was on its way after it I had nothing left but to try and reawaken my imagination. I decided to start by thinking kinder thoughts about the sad-eyed men in the hostel bar, the awkward gatecrashers at an international conference of children’s TV presenters.
And with my change of heart, I quickly found people to talk to. The TV never stopped showing football matches, wonderfully violent football matches, and I watched them with my notebook firmly shut besides a steady stream of litre bottles of Quilmes and harsher-than-normal Marlboro Lights.
‘That’s not normal, is it?’ I asked the guy next to me, as a game erupted into a full-pitch brawl and a referee was knocked out by a flying kick from a Mexican right-back.
‘From what I’ve seen over the last two days, it’s not abnormal,’ he said. He had the polite, efficient English of a North European.
‘If you were prone to stereotyping you might make conclusions about the Latin temperament from watching this.’
He smiled and pinged my lager bottle. ‘Or about the English temperament from watching you.’
This was Hans. He was German. We embarked on a conversation about Bayern Munich and their powerful midfielder, Bastian Schweinsteiger, which some Geordie lads began to take interest in too. I asked Hans if it was true that ‘Schweinsteiger’ translated literally into ‘Pig Fucker’.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you are absolutely right in this matter. It is a rural name.’
The tragedy of life was not only tragic, or it wasn’t yet; to smoke and drink and discuss football in all its exhaustive, erudite pointlessness was a convincing simulacrum of content.
I got smashed and somehow ended the evening on the roof terrace with Hans, talking to gregarious tattooed Danish teenagers, three girls and two boys, who asked me where they might be able to score some cocaine. The thought of it made me woozy, disgusted that it was so exciting. ‘Sorry, I don’t do coke,’ I said. Hans made the mistake of accepting large pulls on the joint they were passing round and wobbled away looking green. Then I made the same mistake. I stood up and tried to walk casually to the side of the building where I leaned over to look at the street below, thick with traffic and people on the pavement. It was not a place to be sick honourably, if such a thing is possible. My room was just across, so I let myself in, mumbling something at the Danes, and collapsed on the bed where, too late, I remembered there was no toilet or sink in my room. The girl I had been talking to, the single one, knocked on my door and called through to ask if I was all right. I lay on the floor next to the duty-free carrier bag I had vomited into and kept quiet until she went away. On Sunday morning, as I walked through the lounge with the same knotted carrier bag in my hand, I kept my head down. This kind of company was not good for me.
I spent the day in a corner of the roof terrace, dark glasses on, reading Bleak House. The digressions and never-ending parade of unlikely new characters were unsuited to my restless mind, but thank God the book was so long, nine hundred pages typeset in tiny print. I was dreading finishing it and having to resort to the least worst thing remaining on the hostel’s bookshelves. It was genuinely possible that I was going to read a whole novel by Paulo Coelho. I might even have to read two. Of the same novel. There were eight. At one point the nice Danish girl I had been chatting up came up to sunbathe, waved at me, but sat at the other end of the terrace. I lay there looking at her, pretending to read, and when I had just about worked up the courage to go over and apologise for my sudden disappearance, two French boys appeared and bookended her. One of them was carrying a copy of The Alchemist, perhaps now making that nine copies in the building. I watched them all laugh for ten minutes and dreamed of Sarah before I decided to go for a walk.
The sun shone through the jacaranda trees and onto the fruit stands and café terraces, reflecting off the window displays of bespoke T-shirts. On nearly every street was an independent bookshop adjacent to a lingerie store. Whenever I saw a woman reading I felt a stab in my heart at the thought of the baroque quality of the underwear she must be wearing. It was Paradise, but I was locked out of it by language or, as it felt at the time, by sin. I stopped for a coffee and a cheese and ham toastie. I was beginning to get the hang of ordering my coffee at least. ‘Café con leche, por favor,’ uttered in an English accent, would receive an incredulous, ‘Que?’ The trick was to utter it with the cadence of Bob Dylan berating a journalist backstage in his amphetamine-fuelled mid-Sixties heyday. Either that, or in the accent of an enraged Mafioso extorting protection money at gunpoint. This was how everyone spoke out here. It was taking some getting used to.
After I had threatened to smash the waiter’s skull in with my tone of voice, and he had called my mother a whore with his, I settled down to pretend to read Bleak House while the beautiful creatures from another world walked past.
When the loneliness became too great, I bought a phone card and called my mum, my sisters. It was lovely to hear their voices, but they weren’t the people I needed to talk to. I was still too cowardly to tell them about Sarah, that I was a cheat, an idiot, that I was suffering. I still believed I might be able to sort things out without disturbing them. It was Sarah’s voice I was missing. Even on her long trips away, I had spoken or written to her every day, kept a runnin
g account of all the interesting events and dialogue that became significant only in the telling of them to her. She was the shape in which sensation made sense. Now I was dispersing.
The last man I expected to need in a crisis was my father, but I was thinking about him more and more. He knew what it was to run away, to have done something shameful. I had not gone to him for advice since I was a teenager. I thought he might be grateful to be asked, might be grateful even to be listened to. But whenever I tried him, I got his answering machine.
‘Dad, it’s Liam. I’ve run away to Buenos Aires. Honestly. Send me an email. Tell me when I can call you. Answer the phone.’
I tried a few more times but had no answer. I was alone.
I was cheered up when I stopped at an internet café on the way back to the hostel and found that Amy Casares had replied to my email.
Dear Liam
How are you, my darling? But I know how you are:
Craig’s dead, poor Craig! And you blame yourself. Well, don’t do too much of that, Liam, no more than’s necessary. Craig was always perfectly capable of killing himself without assistance; but he did like to have people around to talk to when he was doing it.
You wrote about him beautifully to me, about the bit of him he showed people. His generosity, his childishness, his charm. He was a noble soul, a gentleman, but he was a mess too.
If it helps you for me to answer the questions about him and how he lived in Buenos Aires when I knew him there, then I’m happy to help.
But – and this is going to sound blunt and dismissive, but I’m risking it – you barely knew him and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t stay that way.
So I won’t answer unless you ask me again.
Enjoy the city. It’s a beautiful place.
Dangerous too. Don’t get lost.
And don’t let your guilt about Sarah get put onto Craig. It’s Sarah you should think about. You were so happy when I last saw you both, just before you moved to London to be with her and start your new job. Don’t you belong back there? Are you sure there’s nothing left to fight for? Can’t you go to her and sing your song?
