by Luke Brown
I’m very angry at you for fucking things up with her. That is your fault. Craig is not.
Now, listen, you’ll be just fine.
Love from Amy
So, that was me, off the hook and free to get on with my life. Good old Amy. If I could have believed her. But I couldn’t. Bennett died because I was too weak to challenge him. Sarah dumped me because I was too vain to resist being tempted by a beautiful woman, because I was both too cowardly to go through with it and too cowardly to come clean about it.
I wrote back to ask Amy to tell me more about how she had lived here with Bennett. I was no use on my own. He had walked these same streets when he was my age. I would try to invoke him and carry him with me.
Chapter 8
It was the day of Arturo’s gig. Lizzy had flown to Brazil that morning and Arturo had emailed a few days earlier: Liam, Black Kittens play on Wednesday – will you come? I didn’t need reminding or persuading: it was to be my first proper night out for weeks. I had a strong thirst, and not only for liquids. I was lonely and every day became worse at speaking Spanish and I was bored of pretending there weren’t pills and powders that might solve these problems. That they’d created these problems didn’t mean they couldn’t also alleviate them.
The Black Kittens were a three-piece. Arturo, the tallest and most desirable member, was on bass and backing vocals, sharing the front of the stage with Hernán, short, stocky with a cropped haircut, playing a Les Paul copy and singing lead in a high falsetto. Behind them, on the drums, was Aleman, the German, who was very Argentine and legendary, Arturo told me, for his habit of bribing bouncers at swingers’ clubs to let him in as a single man. He ran a bar and sold a bit of weed and coke, a useful man to know.
In a fit of restlessness, I had arrived at the venue two hours early, just in time to see Aleman’s van pull up. I received three different man-kisses in welcome, and helped carry in the amps and equipment. We did a lot of smiling at each other, Aleman, Hernán and I, more articulate and less stressful than our attempts to use each other’s languages. And Arturo translated when he could be bothered (and perhaps changed much to wind me up). He played the role of a pretty bimbo very much to his own advantage; I was beginning to see there was a sharp humour and cunning behind his ingenuousness.
Having to translate for me was ruining their dynamic so I told them to carry on with things while I tried to write my novel in the corner – but not before I’d placed an order with him for a hundred pesos’ worth of cocaine, a small amount of sterling that made a shockingly large amount of cocaine five times the strength of what we had back home.
I found this out just before the gig started. It was ten, the venue was half full, and some very attractive women were embracing members of the band. Arturo had pulled me into the toilets and handed me a small white pebble wrapped in a snipped-off corner from a carrier bag. He swiftly unwrapped a separate pebble of his own and delivered two key scoops to each of his nostrils. That was how he always did it, without any of the careful ceremony and portioning favoured by the English. He loaded it up again and held it out to my own nose. I sniffed it up.
And then he was on stage, pogoing with a big grin as Las Gatitas Negres began their English-sounding indie-rock. Arturo hit thumping bass lines over Aleman’s crashing symbals and Hernán sang Kurt Cobain-style vocals over them in a mixture of English and Spargentine. The coke arrived and immediately made me bilingual. ‘¿Que tal?’ I said to the girl next to me. She smiled and said lots of things very quickly. ‘Lo siento, no hablo Castellano. ¿Hablas Inglés?’ I said. ‘Oh, yes, you speak lovely English,’ I said. ‘No, I can’t hear you either,’ I said, and then we stopped speaking, not before, I thought, a certain rapport had been established.
Between songs I shouted fluent Spanish at the girl next to me, which made her giggle and answer in English. Her name was Ana-Maria. She was a fashion student and worked in a clothes shop on the Avenida del Libertador. She spoke good English, enough to understand me when I spoke clearly and slowly, and so chatting her up proceeded with much less pace than it might in England when I had a package of cocaine in my wallet. But that was nice. I was too frantic at the best of times. At one point, I swear I am telling the truth, she said to me, ‘I like your style.’
I wonder if I have sufficiently emphasised what a vain man I am, like any sensible man should be who isn’t blessed with the good looks of a Brad Pitt or the absence of a libido. Women have eyes too, even if they’re not as foolishly, sensually imbalanced as us. There’s no sense in squandering our slight advantage by not being able to dress ourselves. Knowing how to dress themselves is one of the reasons why women are indubitably, objectively, more attractive than men, whatever one’s sexual preference. It’s easy for me to say this, I know: my taste being mostly for the straightforward. The guys I liked, like Arturo, I liked because they were as pretty as girls. I liked that they weren’t girls too, but if they hadn’t been girlish I wouldn’t have noticed the opportunity for transgression, wouldn’t have lusted for it. Pretty boys were the exception that proved the rule. And I would accept any kind of attention. I was susceptible to flattery. I tried hard for it. I was still slim and fit from cycling and playing football. I spent money on suits, shirts, shoes. I aspired to be a tart and I was pleased she had noticed. I liked women who cared about these things, who thought surfaces were deep. You could run your fingers over a surface.
‘Thank you,’ I said. I was having a great time. Later, I asked her if she knew Arturo.
‘Oh, yes, I know Arturo,’ she said, smiling as if she had suddenly remembered something pleasant.
‘A man could get jealous seeing you pull that face for Arturo,’ I said, and I don’t think she quite understood or heard; but she looked past me to Arturo, who held his bass on stage in the position a discus-thrower holds himself before letting fly, frozen in the moment of taut energy before unravelling, staring at a point beyond his shoulder as though he had plans for someone waiting there.
‘Arturo, he is fun,’ she said. ‘Only fun.’
Then what contrast could I offer her? I tried to imagine the opposite of fun. Pain? Work? Love?
‘I’m only fun too,’ I admitted. ‘Just not as much fun.’
And then I leaned over and kissed her and she kissed back. Can you believe that women continue to do this? And it was an enjoyable kiss too, soft, nicely shaped, like a sip of the red wine she’d been drinking. When I looked back up at the stage Arturo was looking at me with an expression of theatrical surprise. It was only then I remembered I had a girlfriend.
He caught up with me at the bar and wrapped me in a damp hug. He was very happy. Now he stood back, raised his eyebrows and laughed. ‘You are enjoying your holiday.’ There was a new affection in his smile; he was less guarded. Perhaps it was only the elation of being on stage.
‘Oh, it’s not like that,’ I said.
‘How is it like?’
Now would have been the time to confess the truth. I’m good at spotting these moments in retrospect.
‘We have a sort of … open relationship,’ is what I managed to say.
He looked at me doubtfully. ‘You do not mind if other men fuck your girlfriend?’
‘Um …’
‘You do not mind if Sarah is being fucked by another man, by his big cock? It is hard for a macho Argentino to understand. But, OK, I believe you, you Englishmen, you like this, it is normal. Here we would not like that. Over there, you do. Where you are, it is fun, tradicional?’
‘Fuck off,’ I said, laughing.
He patted me on the back and looked at Ana-Maria. ‘Don’t worry. I don’t tell Lizzie.’ Then he winked. ‘And you don’t tell Lizzie.’ With that he turned and walked in the direction of a woman in a mini-skirt.
Events progressed quickly from then on. Ana-Maria and I kissed some more, I talked a lot between kisses and at some point she said, ‘I think you are on cocaine.’ I apologised and offered her some. She was polite enough to say yes and then the con
versation became less one-sided. I learned she was from Cordoba, moved to Buenos Aires to study, got work occasionally pattern-cutting, which was well paid and good experience, but she had to work as an assistant in a shop as it was sporadic. She had learned English at school, and had worked as an intern for Stella McCartney for three months in New York, an experience that had nearly bankrupted her. She had split up with a boyfriend six months ago but was enjoying being single now. She said that with the fierce expression of people enjoying being single now. Me? I had that to look forward to. I hated being single and told her so. She thought I was funny, I apologised too much, I was nervous, I was sad, I was very English, I was sweet.
Soon we were in a taxi to a club. Arturo sat in the front and I was sandwiched between Ana-Maria and Arturo’s new friend Lucila on the backseat. I learned almost nothing about Lucila; she was talking quickly across me to Ana-Maria while Arturo delivered a rapid pep talk to the driver. I was happy not to scratch the surface, to sit in the epicentre of two beautiful portenoritas, contained like a quote between feminine legs. “Lucky.” “Amazed.” “Very high.” Since I had stepped from the plane, I had thought all these people belonged to a completely different world to mine. I kept quiet, hoping not to scare them off.
Hernán and others from the gig followed us in Aleman’s van, and we met in the queue for the club. Inside it was booming, loud house music; the club just beginning to fill up at one in the morning.
I went to the bar with Ana-Maria. ‘Who’s the girl Arturo’s with?’ I asked, looking round to see him lean down and whisper something to her. She grabbed his arm and stood on her tiptoes to whisper back into his ears, pushing her high heels another two inches off the ground.
‘Just one of those girls, you know, you bump into, in the clubs, in the bars.’
‘She’s a friend of Arturo’s?’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘They are friendly now.’ Arturo was leaning on his forearm against the wall they were standing by, the back of her head brushing his arm. Their faces were only inches apart, kissing distance.
As the barman brought us our drinks I noticed something strange. Hernán, standing away from us, where he had been talking with Aleman, was now staring directly at Arturo and Lucila. He had a very intense look on his face, and I watched it change from incredulous disgust to a quiet, determined rage.
It could have been my imagination.
‘Hernán, does he know Lucila?’
‘I don’t think so. Why are you so interested in Lucila?’
‘It’s Arturo I’m interested in.’
‘I think I will find someone who is interested in talking to me.’
‘Oh, God, not like that. Come here. Come here.’
It could have been a more excessive night. The cocaine was strong but we only mixed it with alcohol. At least I was in my own – oh …
At four in the morning, Ana-Maria announced I was leaving with her. We’d been dancing for the last hour with Arturo and Lucila. We were all really drunk and I knew the feel of everybody’s body pressed against mine in an embrace. Lucila looked from Arturo to me with a grin of immense confidence. When she left us for a moment she would spin around with a flourish and stride away. Arturo, acting his part, would pretend not to notice, but I caught him following her with his eyes on a couple of occasions.
Before we left I took Arturo to one side. ‘Arturo. Remember Lizzie? Lovely Lizzie? Be careful.’
‘I am careful. And Sarah’s lovely too, right? I’ve seen photos on Facebook.’
‘You don’t understand – it’s not the same situation.’
‘Pah – why not? Don’t you worry about me. Worry about yourself.’
He hugged me again then. I felt his heart going under his T-shirt. I didn’t know him well enough to know if he was going to do something stupid with Lucila. It was arrogant of me to warn him against something he may have been too good a person to consider. That’s what I decided. ‘Before you go,’ he said, ‘take this,’ and he pulled out a large green bud of skunk and pressed it into my hand. I tried to give it him back but he wouldn’t take it. So I thanked him, kissed him goodbye and left with Ana-Maria.
The sex itself was great. Just the idea of an Argentine fashion student was mind-blowingly exotic to a man who had never stopped being amazed by underwear from Topshop. And we were high. Drugs don’t only improve our linguistic skills. People who don’t take drugs don’t realise how good at sex they make us too. It’s one thing us addicts can console ourselves with: we are genuinely better lovers. Fuckers, anyway. We go on for ages. We have no inhibitions. We’ll say anything.
It’s the aftersex and the afterdrugs that drugs don’t help with, when the revisionist history writes itself. Waking up with not one but two strangers. The words you hastily sketched your identity with last night exhausted and without them you feel … nothing. There is no you. Politeness remains, a diminished vocabulary, the lack of a subject, the urge to make a promise you won’t keep. The transactional I won’t tell if you won’t tell. Last night you had said everything and now you have to find something extra before the small talk gets smaller and smaller and disappears altogether and you begin again or run away. And sooner or later, you have to run away. Or they do.
This all came afterwards. We were excited as we found our way to her room in a shared apartment. It was a wonderful room, like one of Palermo’s boutiques: a desk with a turntable on it next to a two-metre slant of records on the floor. One wardrobe, one chest of drawers. A saucer used for an ashtray. Two dressmaker’s dummies, covered with cascading fabric, dresses in progress. Nothing on the walls but white paint. I was just part of the installation.
She was naked in seconds, completely unembarrassed. When I went down on her she held my head in a firm grip against her with her hands, rubbing against my face with wonderful selfishness until she came. Well, that was fun. Was that an Argentine thing? An English woman might think it bad manners. Not that I had any recent experience of English women besides Sarah. I thought sex was anyway too varied and personal a deviance to ascribe national characteristics; that was for TV sexperts and that awful American who wrote Sex and the City and had a grudge against English penises.
We fucked and I fell asleep and if someone had picked me up and carried me still sleeping back to my room, it would have been OK. But when I woke, she woke too and there we were, staring at each other with naked surprise. You. There hadn’t been much sleep, three or four hours, but the sun was pouring in through the windows and there wouldn’t be any more now, not for me. She pressed her face into the pillow so I didn’t have to. I hope she was thinking what I was thinking: get out of here. It’s not to say we didn’t like each other. But I think we both agreed that we didn’t have to demonstrate we liked each other now, unprepared, defenceless and surprised as children. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked. I had had to bite my tongue not to ask Sarah this every ten minutes in our last month together. It was always less a question than a statement to the reverse.
‘Mmph,’ she said, turning over onto her side, facing away from me.
‘I’ll let you sleep,’ I said. Then I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek, the casual, natural gesture of the long-term boyfriend I still was. I froze the second after my lips brushed the softness of her skin. She was the wrong woman. Sarah.
I’m sorry.
I fell out of bed, pulled my clothes on, most of them – there was a missing sock not worth the seconds – and I ran away.
I got lost trying to find my way out of the apartment block. It was like the Library of Babel. At one point I had to lean against the wall and force myself to breathe slowly, my hand holding my heart as it tried to escape my chest. A spiral staircase sunk abysmally below me and soared upwards to great distances. After I’d calmed myself, I found my way out into the sunlight and flagged down a taxi. When we pulled up at the hostel, the driver tried to charge me a cinquenta for what couldn’t have been more than a ten-peso trip. I gave him everything I had, twenty-three pesos, a
stern look, and walked out the door followed by a stream of gleeful abuse, la concha de tu madre! He had to act outraged, even though he had in effect received more than a 100% tip. The fucking drama of the place.
England. Sarah. Home.
I let myself go to pieces for a few days then. I felt a swoon of exhilaration, of swooping hard and fast. After that, the monotony of being miserable took over. I cried with the regularity that I smoked cigarettes. My heart was blackened, blasphemous; I thought in the language of a Cormac McCarthy novel. One of the dreams I’d been clinging to was that when I returned, chaste, to the UK, Sarah would have forgiven me and we would go on as normal. But now I would have to tell her about Ana-Maria, a month after we split up. I’d lost the ability to lie to her; she knew what I looked like now when I did.
After a week I began to pick up. I stopped trying to write magic spells to make Sarah go back out with me and started again with the novel. I had known all along that I was a comic rather than tragic character. I had wept for a week because I had slept with an Argentine fashion student. I imagined my friends’ reactions if I told them this, the incomprehension, the merciless piss-taking. Being cruel is one of the kindest things men are to each other. I normally preferred the company of women but I could never understand how they could bear so much sympathy from each other in the face of disaster. You had to keep thinking about the disaster then. The best thing, in my experience, if you had been dumped, was for a mate to make a joke about the woman in question being ecstatically fucked by a jazz musician. Because the thing is she might be, was what you were thinking: much better to make a cartoon rather than a documentary out of it.
I had decided one thing for certain: I was not going to risk sleeping with any more women if that’s how it made me feel. I would just have to hope my libido took notice.
