by Luke Brown
‘Alejandro had always assumed this was a novel that had already been published,’ said Cockburn. ‘He had always postponed reading Craig’s novels, not wanting to be reminded of their painful falling out. He confessed to me that he always hoped he would get a chance to read them once they were friends again. He knew it was worth money but it meant more to him than that.’
But this manuscript was actually the unpublished first-written novel by Craig Bennett, completed when he was thirty years old, a manuscript long believed lost. Cockburn was transfixed as he realised what he was reading.
‘This is a brand new Craig Bennett novel, every bit as surprising and brave an expedition into the human heart as his four others. A young man’s novel, it’s less guarded and more romantic than the later works, and it sizzles with the eroticism of the Buenos Aires nightlife.’
Cockburn and Alejandro are reconstructing a manuscript with the aid of an editor in Buenos Aires, and Eliot, Quinn will rush-release the novel in October this year. ‘This is without doubt the literary event of 2009,’ said James Cockburn, ‘and I will go as far as saying this century.’
This century. Not even this century so far. This century and the ninety years left of it.
Alejandro had not said anything while I read the story and when I finished I turned around to see him staring at me, holding a cafetiere and slowly shaking his head.
‘Your boss. He is an enormous arsehole, you know?’ he said eventually.
Alejandro had to be in on the plot.
It can be easy to forget how competent and single-minded Cockburn is when it comes to a publishing opportunity. His senses are super-tuned: he had made sure during our night to get a card from Alejandro with the name of the legal practice where he worked, and it was there we headed in the afternoon after our calls to his mobile went unanswered. After a brief argument, Alejandro agreed to let us buy him a drink after work. Here I kept quiet and felt nauseous while Cockburn explained his proposal. Alejandro stared at me throughout.
‘And how do you feel about this, Liam?’ he asked.
I was tired of feeling. I wanted nothing more than to surrender to instruction.
‘I’m in,’ I said.
Alejandro was all I could have hoped for in my first editor. We met every other night in the week and on Saturday afternoons at his apartment. He read my pages and corrected my imaginings of what life had been like in Buenos Aires in the early 1990s. Sometimes he would chuckle: ‘I wish it had been like that; leave that in.’ Other times he would be angry: ‘What species of charmless bore do you think we were?’ He added magnificent lunfardo swear-words and expressions and suggested ways to render them against English style. He told me long anecdotes over our coffee breaks and a few days later I presented them back to him in some reworked pages. My novel became better and less of my own. Alejandro breathed the ghost of Craig Bennett over it and I felt his laughter vibrate though its bones.
By the end of a month in which I worked longer than twelve hours a day, seven days a week, I had typed every chapter from my notebook onto my laptop and reworked each several times with Alejandro. We sent this to James. Now it was time for the next stage. On an old manual typewriter Alejandro owned, I copied the finished manuscript, including extra mistakes and sentences for Alejandro to scribble out and add notes to in a separate colour. This was the typewriter Craig used to borrow to write stories and film scripts. Alejandro had moved it and a sealed spare ribbon between the six different apartments he had lived in since Craig had left Buenos Aires fifteen years ago. As I pressed down on the old levers, I felt Craig’s fingers rattling, clashing against the ancient ribbon, tattooing the words onto the pale page. The machine gleamed in black metal and made a racket like a factory. I had hardly drunk while I had been writing on the laptop but now I started on whisky early after lunch, drinking most of a bottle and smoking two packs a day in my lonely apartment. The old hunger for cocaine spread through my body and I lay out on my bed, feeling the flames lick along my arteries and roar in my skull. I was not myself. I was being consumed.
But when the fires died down, there would still be something left of me. I would bring myself back, sit down again and type.
A week later, I brought the manuscript to Alejandro. We removed pages at random and crumpled them into balls, we set fire to their edges, we spat on them and covered them in cigarette ash, we splashed coffee and beer on them and ground them beneath our feet.
I photocopied them all and we gave this new copy the same treatment, scraping and scribbling, gouging and ripping.
I photocopied them again and FedExed these pages to James.
I had just finished my first publishing assignment since losing my job in April.
Despite my mixed feelings, as I posted the manuscript to England, I was proud of my work.
I was able now to go back home to England, as I’d resolved, but I had my apartment paid for another month and I decided to stay on. I had invoiced Eliot, Quinn for my work/unofficial advance, and James had promised to keep me topped up if I ran low. My money would go a lot further in Buenos Aires, and despite my homesickness it was hard to imagine living with my mum in Blackpool for more than a week or two.
More than anything, what stopped me from running to catch a flight was the feeling of having finished a job in Buenos Aires, of having had a colleague, a purpose, a desk. I was getting used to the place. I hassled James and he gave me a copy-editing job with the promise of some more; I began to toy with the idea of getting my own flat when this one ran out, making a living from doing freelance work for English publishers. The old fiction began to try and reassert itself over the reality I knew: I would write my second ‘debut’ novel from exile, live the life of a Beckett, a Joyce, a Gombrowicz … as drawn by a child with bright crayons. I was too much of a tart to even attempt to write like them; I cared too much about people liking me.
It was weeks later now, the end of August, and I had not seen Lizzie or Arturo since our night out with James and Dani. I was not very surprised and had anticipated a cooling-off period while Lizzie and Arturo tried to resolve or ignore their differences. I’d sent one email to Lizzie just after James had left, saying how much I’d enjoyed my night out with her and how sorry I was for any difficulties it had caused. She had replied briefly, telling me not to worry about it, but that it would be difficult to see me for a while. She’d get in touch. After a week passed I accepted the implications of this calmly. No one was going to save me from myself but me.
Channelling Craig had emptied me out and now I began to put myself back in. I made regular phone calls to my mother and sisters and reassured them that I was working, had a roof over my head, was seeing how things might go here but would be back in England soon. Their relief brought home to me for the first time how much I had worried them, how much they must have feared me repeating my dad’s disappearance. I kept meaning to phone my dad too, but I felt guilty that I was still here, that I’d gone back on my decision to go and see him. I resolved to go to see him as soon as I arrived back in England.
Dani Requena contacted me and I met her for lunch. We talked about – what else? – books, and she probed me about the new Craig Bennett novel James had discovered. When had he discovered it? Why hadn’t they mentioned it at the dinner? She knew there was something amiss, something entertaining, and I was very close to confessing to her. So close, I decided I could not be trusted to see her again and put her off when she next suggested meeting up.
This is not a story of a remarkable reform. There were times when the allure of cheap stimulation and easy sociability was too much and I ended up on sofas in strange apartments arguing with people whose names I could not remember in the morning.
On one occasion a man wanted me to fuck his girlfriend while he watched. It was so much the wrong thing to do I decided I really should do it, except: I really didn’t want to. I tried to sleep on their sofa, listening to them in the other room, appalled and compelled and crazy, before I ran out into the ni
ght, far lonelier than I had been before I met them.
Perhaps I needed those minor, controlled breakdowns that I could attribute the next day to a temporary chemical imbalance. I bled my madness in small doses.
In the hope that it would help me to avoid getting into such situations, I had started writing something else, a novel about a publisher who accidentally killed one of his novelists. And I had resumed my grand undertaking, the best love letter the world had ever seen. I was only beginning now to realise how much I had underestimated the task, just how many hours and drafts would be required. The codes of love had been exhausted, had exhausted her, and I had to break through them now, to the moments of loss and truth that I believed must lie beneath them, the feeling I had within me that it must somehow be possible to make her feel too.
The novel was my morning book. I lay on my bed, remembering and inventing conversations, writing a paragraph an hour, crossing it out an hour later. In the afternoon I copy-edited the biography of an indie-superstar Cockburn was publishing. It was not until the evenings that my work really began. I had my notebook, valentine-card red and leatherbound, the type favoured by pretend Hemingways and Picassos and myself – and I took it with me on walks around Buenos Aires, to cafés and bars, to cheap parrillas and pizza joints. The end of the night would often come with me sitting on a bar stool at Mundo Bizarro, straining to read my last sentence in blue sodium lighting while the disco ball spun brighter petals across the pages, autumn falling in the garden of forking paths. I wrote for hours each evening, and after two weeks I had barely ten pages left to fill, a madman’s diary. I knew that the greatest love letter in the world would not be this long, would be, at best, the average length of a short story in the New Yorker. Still, I continued to work. I would write out all the clichés of love and cross them out and with what was left form a concentrate of pure communicated love. I bought another notebook, and it was on one night when I was filling this in that I felt a pat on my back and turned around to see Arturo.
Alejandro had given me his version of our falling out: ‘It was most entertaining and then it wasn’t. The two English editors who could already not stand up somehow got hold of some ecstasy in Mundo Bizarro and didn’t offer any to Arturo. So when Cockshop had his hands all over the nice English girl, Arturo got angry. It was James he had meant to hit, not you, but you walked in the way and started delivering a lecture about old-fashioned attitudes towards women, and then, when your friend mentioned the Malvinas – he used, of course, a different word – it became, unsurprisingly, an issue of national pride. The house drug dealer took issue. If you hadn’t had such a dramatic bleeding lip I suspect Lizzie would have been on Arturo’s side, but as it was … it ruined a perfectly nice evening.’
I couldn’t remember being punched by Arturo, and there had been no pain anywhere on my face the next day, so I had put Alejandro’s story easily to one side. Now, as I faced Arturo’s dark-stubbled chin and implacable expression, I had no idea if he was planning to hit me, for the first or the second time. Perhaps he was also wondering. I decided to make it more difficult for him by smiling and standing up to embrace him, leaning over to kiss his cheek.
‘I am sorry I hit you,’ he said.
‘I had to have two teeth replaced,’ I said.
‘No!’ he said, trying only to look shocked and not slightly proud.
‘No, not really,’ I said. ‘Sorry. I didn’t even know you’d hit me.’
‘You knew I’d hit you.’
‘No, honestly.’
‘I think you know.’
‘OK, I know.’
‘I’m sorry I hit you.’
‘It was very painful.’
‘Vale.’
‘But I deserved it.’
‘OK.’
And then we were friends again. I asked how Lizzie was and he sighed.
‘It’s not good. She’s on holiday from the language school, travelling with her friend. I don’t want her to go. She says she has to, I have to learn to trust her. We are maybe broken up. We see when she gets back. Tell me, what happened at the end of that night when she got back to her flat so late?’
I told him the truth, omitting one small kiss, just as I had not mentioned one other small kiss to Lizzie.
‘That’s what she said,’ he said, shaking his head, as if disappointed to find out he had not caught his girlfriend, or whatever she was now, in a lie. I think he believed me. I was too poor a liar in his eyes to really represent a threat.
I offered him no more advice about Lizzie. I owed that at least to her. And to him. When Arturo invited me over to join him and his friends, I was tempted, but something made me stop.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I need an early night, I’ve got work to do tomorrow.’
‘How long are you staying here?’ he asked.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said, beginning to realise that wasn’t true.
‘I’ll see you again before you go?’ he asked. ‘You have my number?’
‘Just in case I don’t, come here,’ I said, and we kissed and embraced again. Perhaps I held on too long – it was him who pulled away first. ‘If not here, I will see you again in England,’ he said. ‘The drinks will be on me,’ I said, and we both smiled like we believed it would happen. ‘The drugs too, I hope,’ he said. He looked over his shoulder towards his friends. Then he winked and squeezed my arse and walked away. I sat at the bar and finished my drink, watching him laughing with his friends, sweeping his hair back and scanning the bar’s horizon for interest. He was beautiful and I was glad for him.
An hour later, when I got back to the apartment, I went online and booked a flight to Gatwick, leaving in a week’s time.
*
The next morning, after a Spanish lesson, instead of working on my novel I set off on a walk. I headed out into the Microcentro, through the elegant business women, through the wide shopping streets and out west, through Korean neighbourhoods, past desultory prostitutes looking for trade, cumbia smashing out from shop-front ghetto-blasters, bargain shops selling two-peso Marias, graffiti murals of streetcars, Che Gueveras, Frank Sinatras, a sudden white church in a tree-lined square, a kung-fu palace, life fading out into middle-class suburbs, quiet graveyards, end-of-the-line metro stations. North next day, designer shops into wide boulevards, packs of thirty dogs walking one human in the park, past a bronze Borges staring over a fountain at a manicured hedge, a lonely walk that found me turning sooner than I expected, northwest in a circle and back to the centre.
During my walks I would look at people and try to imagine their lives. I say people, I mean women. It was a kind of prayer I found easier than the ones I had been taught. What did she do with those shoes when she got in? Did she kick them off across the floor, collapse on a sofa and light a cigarette? Did she place them neatly in a shoe rack, have a shower and cook dinner? What book was she reading? What food did she cook? Did she go home at all?
Dreaming of such intimacy convinced me I was destined to live a life of solitude for ever. So I was delighted when I bumped into Ana-Maria, coming out of a clothes shop, her smile towards me turning into a look of delicious mock anger. It was almost impossible to imagine that this was a woman who had made love to me one night, who had taken command of me, in this city, a woman in a sleek dark blue dress with hard pointed feet, in the type of shoes that made me crazy, feet that had sloped and pressed into my back.
‘You are still alive,’ she said, coming forward and kissing me on both cheeks.
‘I am now. I had been wondering. You look incredible.’
‘I intend that,’ she laughed.
‘Do you know I once had a dream I went to bed with a woman as beautiful as you?’
‘It was a good dream!’
‘You would have thought so, wouldn’t you? I don’t always enjoy good dreams the way a normal man would.’
‘Practice, is what you need.’
‘Practice, that’s a good idea. Do you want to, er, meet up one –’
>
‘Ha ha! I am, er, with someone at the moment.’
I looked at her. I remembered her room, the dresses she made. She was talented. There were so many talented people. Perhaps I could become one myself.
She tipped herself even further forward on her toes and kissed me goodbye. ‘Go home and practise dreaming,’ she said, turning around and blowing me a kiss.
I got back to the flat late in the afternoon and settled down at my desk with the two red notebooks. I wanted to send my letter to Sarah before I left Argentina, announcing I was on my way back to see her. I was under no illusion she’d be delighted to hear this news. It really would need to be the greatest love letter in the world.
I looked at the notebooks, their many thousands of words in my neat handwriting, neat even when I wrote drunk. There was always one part I could hold still while the rest shook.
I shut the notebooks. I took a new sheet of paper and wrote my address at the top of it. Its exotic glamour did not escape me. But after that I tried to be direct and simple. I wrote that I was coming home, that I would like to see her. I wrote about the things I’d seen that day that had made me think of her, the way that she had made me see the things I’d seen that day. I wrote that it was becoming harder to imagine that we had lived together, that certain memories were fading and certain ones growing stronger. I admitted I had a stronger image of the first moment I realised she wanted me to kiss her than anything that happened later. That was probably a bad sign, but how to know?
After an hour and a half it was done. I re-read it, and though I knew I’d regret it in an hour, I put it in an envelope, went to buy a stamp and posted it.
It wasn’t that day, it was the next day, that my sister called me. I was relaxed now I knew I was going home, determined to enjoy my last few days in Buenos Aires. I’d been out having coffee and reading Borges, who I was pleased and surprised to find no longer made me want to vomit. No one ever rang my phone so I hardly ever took it out with me. But when I got back to the flat I had several missed calls from my sister and a text telling me to ring her. I remember flinging my book on the sofa and collapsing into it with a sense of great satisfaction. Then I called her up. Her voice was strange.
