take it?’
‘My deadline for my PhD’s this year and . . .’
‘Really?’
‘Stop saying really. You don’t know what really means. Anyway, I probably should take it. It’s only for six weeks and I could use their library for some stuff it’s hard to get over here.’
‘When does it start?’
‘Oh, er, not for a couple of months.’
‘We wouldn’t be that far away then, would we?’ I suggested.
‘Quite a distance.’
‘Same continent, though.’
‘Sort of from here to Moscow.’
‘Just round the corner. I could pop over for a weekend.’
‘Flights would be expensive. I don’t think we should get ahead of ourselves.’
She was wearing pyjama bottoms and a vest top and I leaned down and put my head against her neck, smelling her hair, cheap shampoo and carpet static, feeling the warmth of her skin, the shape of the line from her cheek to her shoulder. She was unique in a way I could never truthfully express. The idea of chemistry we rationalise in conversation is chaotic in sensation. I was infatuated. It was the sound of her voice on the telephone, the absence of her body in the clothes hanging up in the wardrobe, spread out upon the floor. The way she walked down the street when she didn’t know I was looking at her. It was true. She made me want to skip. I had made her believe that my love for her was perfect and never contradicted by other impulses. Isn’t this the lie that is expected of us? Isn’t this the lie we believe in ourselves? And for me, it could never for any other woman have been closer to the truth.
‘Sarah,’ I said, ‘please, you have to believe me.’
It took two weeks from Craig Bennett’s death for the funeral to be rearranged, but in the meeting in which I had agreed to resign in exchange for six months’ salary, my CEO Belinda Wardour made it a condition of the deal that I would not come to the funeral.
The distraction of Bennett’s editor having mysteriously fallen from a window the night before delayed journalists from seizing on my involvement. James Cockburn, the flamboyant publishing director for fiction at Eliot, Quinn, was a minor media celebrity in his own right, and the rumours suggested his broken legs were a result of Bennett having pushed him. The hypotheses were irresistible.
None of the few people who knew about my role in Bennett’s death spoke out. I was to disappear. So, ‘resigning to focus on my writing’, I received my pay-off with a contract that prohibited me from speaking to the media or publishing anything about Craig Bennett. Belinda, in the Bookseller’s ‘Moves’ section, delivered the quote-de-grâce: ‘It’s disappointing to have Liam leave so soon after he arrived, but he’s decided his career is not in publishing and we wish him all the best.’
It looked then like we had got away with it.
Cockburn was still in hospital. The man who gave me my job, my mentor, a role model. (He’s a whole other chapter, a bloody novella.) He sent his own quote for the papers from his bed.
I deeply grieve the loss of our friend Craig Bennett. He was one of the most charming, generous men we will ever know, and the fact that hundreds of thousands if not millions of us feel like we did know him is a testimony to his extraordinary writing. I can’t accept that I will never read a new book by him again, although many of his millions of readers who have not yet read his frank, acerbic and incredibly moving memoir Juice will be able to when it is published in mass market paperback in June this year. A fearsomely honest, original writer, we may never see his like again.
Rumours in the press make it important to clarify something: when I last saw him, the night before he died, before I drunkenly defenestrated myself at a party, we were the best of friends. It is rare in what has become sometimes a sterile publishing industry that writers’ lives are as fascinating as Craig’s, or their personalities as dramatic or exaggerated, and so we shouldn’t be surprised that such a born storyteller should spawn some shaggy-dog tales about his final hours. If Craig can see us now – I won’t say he’s exactly laughing – he’d be too annoyed about not being alive, but I know –
* * *
I couldn’t read any more of it, and avoided the papers for the rest of the month. It wasn’t the only subject I was avoiding; it became much harder for Sarah and me to pretend we were happy as our last month together wore on. Our smiles stuck as we tried to think of something to say to each other that wasn’t the thing we needed and refused to speak of. But as my flight approached, the panic overwhelmed me and I began to break the terms of our truce.
Sarah had finished eating and was staring out of the window again, watching the children play. Yes, we had imagined that too. She turned and looked at me.
‘Please stop, Liam. I’ve listened. We did this at the time. We’ve done it since. There’s nothing you can say to make things better. Perhaps being apart will work, I don’t know. Just please, for now, stop talking.’
The worst thing about those words was how calm and placatory she was when she said them. Everything was not going to be all right, but she stood and came towards me and we kissed like love was simple, and then, for what I hope was not the last time, she led me upstairs back to bed.
If I never get Sarah back, if I ever stop trying to, I wonder how long it will take me before I am unable to recall the exact detail of her face, the sound of her voice, the way she moves. It would be romantic to say that she will never leave me, that I will see her looking back at me whenever I close my eyes. Oh, don’t worry: I have said this to her.
Sarah is beautiful, though she’s not so pretty you would fall in love with her from a photo. She’s not the type of girl to practise how to come across best in 2D, and this was one of the things I liked least about her, her carelessness, her lack of artifice; it was not natural. Perhaps this is what love consists of: simultaneous repulsion and attraction to a feature of the beloved. I loved and hated that she was different to me, and because I didn’t realise this I spent my time trying to correct the things I liked least about her that were in fact the things I liked the most.
There are physical similarities between us. Her eyes are brown, mine blue, though we have the same brown hair, hers falling in curls to her shoulders, her superb shoulders, two of the only things that can distract me from her legs. It is not that her legs are the type you see on the front of tights-packets or on teenage models in Sunday supplements, they’re not as long as these, less exercised or less starved, no less the better for it, the legs I wrote poetry and cooked dinner for and lay between, the legs I watched to the detriment of road safety when we rode bikes together. They were her legs. I don’t care if they make me objectify her: she was here! She was once here! So close I could touch her.
I had been best friends with Sarah for many years before we got together, though from the very first day I met her it had been an ambitious friendship. I had wanted her, and I had always wished she would split up with whichever boyfriend she had at the time. If it was not an innocent friendship I began with Sarah, when I sat next to her and listened to her voice rise and fall, when I laughed involuntarily at her stories and character assessments, when I plotted our adventures together, our happy ending, then there was nothing corrupt in it either. It was never the right time for us: I was not as forceful then as I have been since, and she either had an unsuitable boyfriend or I had an unsuitable
