to impress. My work credit card was behind the bar and we were drinking champagne. Bennett had stumped up the cash for an eighth of good coke and no one was being shy about taking it.
Eventually, I got all five of us into a taxi. We would arrive with an hour left of the party. I texted Amanda to say we were on our way. The response was immediate: that would be very fucking wise of you.
Leaving the taxi, we faced the usual gastro-enormo-bar in Kensal Green. In large part because of James Cockburn’s copy-friendliness and connections with film directors, conceptual artists and indie rock stars, our publisher’s yearly party was officially the place to be at the book fair. Part of the fun was guessing which rock and rollers would turn up to be drunk under the table by the real hedonists. A voluble chunk of the international publishing industry would be in there.
A bouncer checked my name off and waved us all through. Inside, the cavernous first-room was decked out in what passes for classiness in posh pubs: wine-dark walls interspersed with flock wallpaper, oak tables and Chesterfield sofas. It was heaving; I immediately lost Bennett and the actors as I pinballed between double- and triple-kisses. The crowd was perhaps seventy per cent female and around a third of the remaining men were gay: to a man of imagination this was publishing’s great perk and peril. I grabbed a drink and fought my way outside onto the teeming smoking terrace. Here I found myself next to Olivia Klein, a literary reviewer I would rather have avoided. I had been trapped in a disconcerting conversation with her at a Christmas party. She had said the rudest things to me about the books I published, all the time smiling winningly and moving me closer against the wall. She was young, in her mid-twenties, one of those eerily tall Oxbridge girls with skin so pale as to be translucent. She would have grown up in the country, miles from her friends, with only her horse, her mother’s neuroses and her father the doctor’s well-stocked library of Russian novels for company. As a result of which, she was far cleverer than me.
‘Now when are you going to publish something a bit more avant-garde?’ she was asking. ‘Where’s the new Calvino? Where’s the new Borges?’
‘I’m trying to publish books that large numbers of people will buy,’ I explained. ‘It’s my job.’
‘So you’re happy to be complicit in the dumbing down of our culture?’
‘Where is this new Borges, anyway? He wasn’t in Birmingham.’
‘You probably wouldn’t recognise them if you saw them,’ she said dismissively.
‘You don’t have any recommendations? Nothing you’ve read recently in the original Catalan?’
‘Don’t be facetious.’
I tried to change the subject. ‘I hear you’ve written a novel, Olivia.’
(I had chatted to some literary scouts that day. Literary scouts are book spies employed by foreign editors: they always know everything that everyone is reading.)
‘Who’s your agent again? I could ask them to send it to me.’
Her body tensed, so much that I prepared to jump out of the way. She breathed deeply. ‘Your broken-legged buddy has already anatomised what he perceives as its failures to my agent. Not enough tits, or something like that.’
‘Well, James does have quite an instinct for that kind of thing. Have you considered putting some more tits in?’
‘Oh, grow up. I’m looking forward to reviewing the next masterpiece you publish.’
She walked away then and I wondered if I might be able to damage her career before she did any damage to mine. I didn’t know that I had only a few hours left of my career and at the time I quite relished the fight. An enemy can be more fun than a friend, more enlivening, more intimate. I didn’t have as many as I would have liked. People liked me, or at least the people I liked liked me, or at least I thought they did. Then I thought of Sarah crying on the phone and realised things might be about to change.
‘Liam Wilson!’ My agent was walking towards me. Suzy Carling is only a few years older than me but seems at least two generations more advanced. She is striking in appearance and exhausting in conversation. She refuses to answer any questions or remarks that don’t interest her, regardless of how useful they are to me. Tonight she was glamorous in a sleek black dress and blue suede boots with frightening long heels. Behind her, I caught a glimpse of Bennett through a window, striding somewhere with Jay McInerney in tow. Suzy pulled a Gauloise out of her handbag and leaned over to me. I lit it for her and she straightened up.
‘How are you, Suzy?’
She blew smoke at me. ‘Yes. So, what is the news with James? I can’t get through to him. Have you spoken to him yet?’
‘No, I haven’t but I spoke to Belinda this afternoon and he’s –’
‘Yes, yes. I’ve spoken to Belinda. I saw you come in with Craig – and by the way, Belinda sounded very exasperated you were so late – so of course you have heard the rumours going around about . . .’
‘Whether he was pushed?’
‘Or dangled?’ She laughed. ‘I heard some girls earlier saying they were at the door when Craig nearly dropped James on their heads. They had to dive for cover, they said.’
‘Who were they?’
‘Oh, some publicity assistants. Of course it wasn’t true – and if it was, it still wouldn’t be. They looked rather scared when I butted in and asked for their full names and where it was they worked. So how’s Craig holding up?’
‘He’s fine. I think. Actually, he took me to the flat where it happened earlier.’
‘When you were supposed to be here.’
‘Must you keep mentioning that?’
‘And what did he say about it?’
‘Nothing. He was staring down from the window where it happened, looking down at the ground.’
‘Liam, you said he was staring down, that’s where the ground’s kept. Is that all you’ve got? What you need is an editor. Talking of which, aren’t you nearly finished with that novel you’ve been promising me? I rather think you should meet Helen over here.’
And with her marvellous, instinctive gift for a change of subject I was led around for the next twenty minutes, pitching my entirely fictional novel (in the worst way, in being unstarted) to editors, many of whom were friends of mine. This was excruciating, for there are few things more undignified than an editor who writes.
I should explain that, in general, we hated writers. Awful people. Scavengers. Needy little vultures, picking around in creative writing classes, sending in expenses for dinners they had eaten on different dates and in different cities to the events they had not turned up for. Fine artists, the lot of them, experts in cover art. Parasites. Imperiously rude and/or sleazy to editorial assistants. Lazy readers of their own work. Hungry bastards. Reviewers of their friends. Reviewers of their rivals. Making young women cry. Making them sick. Making advances. Not earning advances. Making them pregnant. Making line graphs of Amazon rankings. Sending you these line graphs. Seeking plot and motive in them instead of their own flimsy storylines and characters. Accidentally ccing you into correspondence berating you to another needy little vulture. Being ‘glad, in some way, that this
