by Luke Brown
I shivered. It was getting colder. I took a deep breath, threw down my cigarette and asked the question I had given up asking him years ago.
‘Dad? When you went missing, where were you, what did you do? All those years, what were you thinking about?’
There was a long pause, a sigh I could draw by now. ‘I’m sorry, Liam,’ he said eventually. ‘I will. We need to talk. I’d like to talk actually. It might be good for us both. Not like this, though. Face to face. When are you coming home?’
I had not been greatly missed in my absence. Most people had finished their food, except for Cockburn. Lizzie and Dani were giggling as they bullied him into taking mouthfuls of octopus or perhaps kraken that he was doing his best to avoid. Arturo and Alejandro were watching them and laughing. A severed human heart lay on my plate, leaking blood. My stomach amazed me with a carnivorous lurch. I cut a piece off and chewed it, reached for a bottle of red and filled my glass rim-full.
I remember heading next to Mundo Bizarro … an argument, a drink being thrown … by a girl? At Arturo? Or was it Lizzie? A pill placed in my palm. El Coronel shouting. A punch aimed at James. Las Malvinas son Argentinas! We left. Lizzie and James in a taxi. Where was Arturo?
I was lying in a corner of a nightclub. Porteños were pointing at me and laughing. I staggered to my feet and checked my pockets. There were two packets of crushed cigarettes but I no longer seemed to own a wallet. I found my phone and saw someone else’s smashing against a wall, shiny innards glinting against the streetlamp. It was 3.45 a.m. now and I had seventeen missed calls.
In the bathroom mirror I checked my face. My lips were covered in black filth, but when I washed this off I was semi-presentable. With enough cigarettes and gin-and-tonics and hardboiled irony I hoped I could lose the permanent seen-a-ghost expression of the ecstasy overdosee. Incredibly, as I dug my fingers in the ticket pocket of my jeans, I found a small plastic bag that probably contained coke. There was a wedge of notes I had folded up and squashed in there too. They’d both help. I splashed more water on my face, smiled at the guy next to me and left.
I was at least two drinks below normal. Once I had headed to the bar to make a start on the gin-and-tonics, I began to look around me. I didn’t recognise the club, but in other, less disorientating circumstances I would have loved it. Heavy, Freudian house music played and blurred into the dry-ice and hot bodies dancing. The room I was in was dark, narrow and low-ceilinged, and seemed to stretch forever into the distance. Mirrors on each side of the wall drew all the dancers who had ever lived in a procession towards the centre of the earth. It was a club as Borges would have described it in one of his interminable stories. It was likely I would be here for all eternity.
Such thoughts, at first a relief, began to oppress me, and I headed through the endless dance floor in search of my friends. I hoped I still had them. I had a feeling bad things had happened. The E – yes, it was certainly an E I could feel, and there was an awful suspicion that I had had two – made me forget my predicament in short flashes, and I found myself grinning at the boys and girls I passed.
And, eventually, above me, unmistakably, was James Cockburn, shirt undone to the navel, dancing on giant speakers in the middle of the antechamber I had reached after several miles of dance floor. I watched him turn to hug the gleaming man in a pink musclevest beside him, and then he caught sight of me and held his arms aloft before stepping down from the speakers and mingling me in his damp embrace.
‘Where’ve you been?’ he shouted. ‘This place is incredible!’
‘I’m not dead, am I?’ I shouted back. ‘This isn’t actually the afterlife?’
‘No, mate,’ he shouted. ‘Afterlife’s in Rio, I think. We’re in Library of Babel!’
This didn’t seem strange then. ‘Where’s everyone else?’
‘There’s only you and me and Lizzie! We thought you’d left. Where’ve you been?’
‘Unconscious, on the floor.’
‘Nice one!’
‘Not really, no.’
The crossfader switched and a piano riff of simple, yearning optimism dropped into the room like the news in the midst of a natural disaster that your loved ones had survived. It took my breath away. We stopped talking and hugged and danced and the happiness I felt brought tears to my eyes. I wished Sarah was there so I could communicate my soul to her in the same joyful chords I would not remember tomorrow. It was at this point Lizzie arrived with a new girlfriend, a small brunette with a mod fringe and panda-eye make-up. I watched them dancing closer and closer, slowing down, gazing into each other’s eyes, and then … and then … and then they were kissing, and James and I didn’t dare move, and then we were all kissing, back and forward, the softness of Panda-eyes’ lips and open mouth a surrender, the muscularity of Lizzie’s tongue a carefully-controlled tour, the soaked sharp stubble of James an unpleasant joke we quickly laughed off. This was what I loved about ecstasy and as close as you could get to the emotion artificially. We had a kiss to remember when we were coming down. It was how the past could redeem the future. Or doom it.
We were still there at six. I’d given everyone another half E by then (I had found three in a back pocket). Lizzie had tried to tell me about the big argument she’d had with Arturo that I couldn’t remember – apparently he’d punched me after I stuck up for her in the middle of an argument they were having. I had struggled to hear her over the music. Arturo had taken Dani and Alejandro to another bar. It was just after he’d left that she’d thrown her phone against a wall in anger. ‘If he wants me to cheat on him, he’s made me feel completely up for it,’ she shouted. Cockburn moved in and put his arms round her waist. She pushed him away and kissed Panda-eyes again. Cockburn put his arms around both of them.
Later, when I was in a cubicle with Cockburn, my phone rang again and I realised it was Arturo, that he must have been trying to reach Lizzie on my phone for the last couple of hours. That, or apologise to me. That, or threaten me. ‘Shall I answer it?’ I asked.
‘What do you think he’s going to say to her if he finds out she’s in a club doing ecstasy with both of us?’ asked Cockburn, digging around in the wrap with his key.
I didn’t answer that. We silently watched the phone until it stopped ringing.
‘Quick, turn it off,’ said Cockburn.
I did. We each inhaled a quick keyload of coke and unlocked the door.
‘I can’t believe I’m in Buenos Aires, in Library of Babel, having just kissed two beautiful bisexual women,’ said Cockburn, looking in the mirror.
‘They’re no more bisexual than we are. It’s not real, it’s a dream. That’s just how people on ecstasy shake hands. We understand; others won’t. So don’t do anything else. Ella’s at home.’
‘Thank you, Liam,’ he said, suddenly thoughtful. ‘You’re right. Always looking after me.’ Then his face broke into a broad, excited grin. ‘Shall we go and find the girls again?’
It was dawn when we returned to James’ hotel, seeking his mini-bar. Our friend Panda-eyes was gone, frightened away by what in re-telling this story I will describe as Cockburn’s wandering hands; we hugged her goodbye and lamented her loss and would remember her for ever as perfect. James’ jetlag had finally caught up with him: the drugs weren’t working on him at all as we left the taxi. He was slurring something about having left his coat in the garden of forking paths as Lizzie and I propped him up and marched him across an enormous shiny foyer to the lift. The receptionists brightly called out to us in English, ‘Good morning!’ Perhaps the speakers in the foyer were broken; there was no electronic tango music playing. Once in his room, James collapsed on his bed immediately, and Lizzie helped him out of his jacket and shoes and tucked him up. It was important to keep moving at a time like this: we had had a wonderful time and perhaps it was worth it but there were many frightening consequences to face if we allowed ourselves to, not least this crisply cold dawning morning. ‘Have you got anything left?’ asked Lizzie. There was a tiny bit o
f coke left and a whole pill we didn’t dare wait to digest. We crushed it down and did the business. It was a big, spacious white room. That helped. Our noses stung horribly. We took a beer out onto the balcony and lay on the deck, watching the sun bleed through the night. The drug kicked in and made us feel incredibly nice again. We talked and talked. The air was chilly. I brought a duvet out and we lay under it, smoking fags, passing the beer back and forth between us, explaining to each other everything we had ever done or dreamed. The ecstasy magnetised our bodies, her legs across mine, my arm around her waist, her head on my shoulder. At one point I couldn’t resist kissing her again. It only lasted a few seconds and didn’t mean anything, but it felt wonderful. ‘That wasn’t romantic,’ she warned me, and I lay back with the new sun shining in my face and laughed. I was so happy.
I was alone when I woke up. For a few moments I didn’t know what I was, let alone who I was or where I was. The distant noise of traffic said this was a world where cars existed. The concept of what a car was – just. Turning onto my side, I found a note under an unopened can of Quilmes, scribbled in biro on what looked like a page torn out of my notebook. My satchel was open nearby, but when I looked inside it my notebook wasn’t there. This was a worry too awful to contemplate and so I pulled the note from beneath the beer, hoping for some instructions. Your name is Don Martinez. You do not remember anything. Not even about your wife, who is in grave danger. You must find her. Now, go to the bathroom.
No, it was not as useful as this.
Dear Liam (and James)
You fell asleep. Now I’ve started worrying and won’t be able to rest. I’m going back to face the music with Arturo. It will be easier now than later. Thank you for a very lovely evening.
Lizzie XXX
After I had read the note, in a gesture that was all to do with the coping mechanisms of style and little with desire, I opened the can of beer and took a swig. It was wet, I can say that for it.
‘Bravo!’ called James from the bedroom. He appeared out on the balcony in a clean shirt, wet hair and sunglasses.
‘What on earth do you look so pleased about?’ I asked.
‘You may well ask,’ he said, raising his clenched fists to his shoulders and gyrating his hips in a sickening motion as if he were hula-hooping.
‘Stop that,’ I croaked.
He complied but pulled out his BlackBerry and brandished it at me. ‘Email from Daniel’s agent, expressing her client’s desire to sign a contract with us. Job done.’
He put his phone back in his pocket and began to stretch his right arm behind his neck and over his left shoulder, repeating again the other way.
‘She probably wants to write you into a novel,’ I said.
‘And so she should.’
‘As a sort of grotesque Dickensian caricature.’
‘Now, Liam,’ he said, stopping stretching and returning inside the room, ‘that’s hurtful. I’m going to order us breakfast from room service, and then we can start.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Start what?’
He didn’t answer and I heard him back up the phone and order two desayunos Inglés, coffee and orange juice.
When he came back onto the balcony he was holding the notebook I had recently finished my novel in. He flourished it at me like a red card.
‘You know, I think this could make everyone a lot of money,’ he said. ‘And what’s best, in a way Craig would have just loved. A fitting tribute, if you will.’
‘You read it?’
‘I loved it. Well done, Liam: it’s really very fucking good.’
‘You mean it?’
‘Yes, I mean it.’
I felt my hangover lifting.
‘Do you think you might want to, er …’
‘Of course I want to publish it. There’s just one big stumbling block,’ James went on, ‘but I know just how to get over it.’
And then he told me his plan.
Chapter 19
Editor’s introduction to My Biggest Lie by Craig Bennett (October 2009, Eliot, Quinn)
The night when Craig Bennett won the Man Booker Prize in 2000 exceeded my wildest dreams. Not only was it the first time that a novel I commissioned won the prize; but it was won by a writer who had become my best friend. It was an achievement beyond any expectations for a debut writer whose talents nevertheless truly deserved it.
Bennett’s life was something of a boomerang (cultural stereotyping intended): flung from the UK to Australia as a young boy; continuing to spin onwards in his twenties to Latin America (a place that would be enormously important to his writing); before returning back to the UK and the success of first publication, at which point his profile, and the myth of his ‘bad behaviour’, spiralled out of control.
Bennett was born in Sydney after his parents emigrated from Yorkshire. He was the son of Ralph and Maureen. He lived with them and his sister until his mother left his father for another man. Craig alone continued to live with his father, who gave up his engineering job and moved them to the country, having bought a partnership in a vineyard in New South Wales.
Ralph Bennett is portrayed in Bennett’s memoir Juice (2008) as a domineering, unpredictable character, capable of great charm and compassion, but also of bleak depression, violence and mania. Ralph never forgave his wife for the affair that ended their marriage and so Craig saw very little of her and his sister. Instead, he was ‘home-schooled’ on the grounds of the vineyard his father was (only at times successfully) preoccupied with. Craig taught himself to drive at twelve, the same young age at which he describes beginning to drink wine regularly. The rhapsodic freedom he felt at that age – so different to most young people’s – is I think the key to understanding his work.
At thirteen the authorities caught up with him and he was sent to boarding school, where he was expelled in his second month, but the next attempt to educate him met with more success and he remained at Victoria Boys School for the next four years, alternating his holidays with his father at the vineyard and his mother in Sydney. It was here he met Alejandro Montenegro, who would be a close friend of Craig’s for many years. It is Montenegro who has unearthed this previously unseen ‘first novel’ of Bennett’s.
Montenegro’s family was from Buenos Aires, and after finishing school Alejandro and Craig moved together there. Bennett was to spend many years in Argentina and briefly worked in the film industry. After the success of his debut novel, his circle completed as he moved back permanently to the UK, settling on the Welsh coast. It is of great sadness to everyone that at this calmest period of his life he should die of a heart attack during the London Book Fair.
This novel, My Biggest Lie, was written in the mid-1990s, shortly before Talking to Pedro. The typewritten manuscript was long believed lost and Bennett was trying to reconstruct the novel from memory when he died. Ostensibly an autobiographical novel based on Bennett’s first years in Buenos Aires, My Biggest Lie explores prevailing themes in his work: the relationship between autobiography and fiction, between person and persona, between truth and lies. The hunt for other ‘new’ manuscripts continues.
Chapter 20
I wanted to go home but now I was trapped in Buenos Aires. I had work to do.
Seen from the outside, I may not have appeared to be a man in captivity. I had left my monk’s cell to move into a pleasant one-bedroom apartment in Belgrano sublet by the colleague of Lizzie’s who’d gone travelling for three months. After all the moaning I had subjected her to about the hostel, I should have bounced out the door. But I felt sad saying farewell to another familiar place, handing my key back to the same miserable man who had checked me in on the first day.
‘You’ve been with us a while, ché,’ he said mournfully. ‘Where are you going?’
In the background melancholic accordion filtered like a melodica through a dub beat. It was a suicide-inducing sound.
‘I’m renting an apartment in Belgrano,’ I said. ‘Listen, do you like this music?’
&nbs
p; He looked up. ‘Me, I like rock and roll. The Stones. Springsteen.’ I hadn’t seen him this enthusiastic before. ‘The boss – not Bruce, my boss – he makes us play this. For the atmosphere. The guests, you like it.’ He was slowing down again now. ‘Argentine, but contemporary. We have some CDs for sale if you like,’ he said, reaching for drawer beneath him.
‘No, no, please, gracias.’
He handed me my deposit and before I left I put El Diego back in the shelves. No one had taken up my old copy of Labyrinths, and so I returned this to my suitcase. Outside the taxi beeped its horn.
Cockburn had arranged for Eliot, Quinn to pick up the bill for my new apartment: expenses for my short-term contract as ‘on-site project editor’. To the strangers I met in bars now I could tell a story of why I was in Buenos Aires that implied no shame, no crisis, no breakdown. In searching to reverse loss I had found not love but profit. Lying had got me into this and now lying would get me out.
James’ arrival back in the UK made national headlines. Not only had he signed Dani Requena, the ‘new Borges’ (our night dancing in the Library of Babel had strongly affected Cockburn), but – sensationally – he had tracked down a never-been-seen lost novel from recently deceased Booker Prize-winner Craig Bennett.
I read out loud to Alejandro from the Guardian’s website:
‘It was an unbelievable find,’ said James Cockburn. ‘I’d heard a rumour from a colleague about an old friend of Craig’s living in Buenos Aires. Sadly, they had fallen out. There’s a love triangle described in the book which seems to be quite autobiographical. After a day running all over Buenos Aires and chasing leads, I managed to track down Alejandro Montenegro: we immediately became great friends.’
Bennett and Montenegro met in a private high school in Australia and had been inseparable until late in their twenties. They worked together on film scripts in Buenos Aires.
During Cockburn’s meeting with Montenegro he was given part of a photocopy of an early manuscript from Bennett. Fifteen years earlier, Bennett had given it over to Montenegro for his opinion. It was marked with crossings out and minor corrections in pen from Bennett.
