what do you do?’ asked Arturo. ‘Why are you here?’
‘That’s a good question,’ I admitted.
I had tried to think of something plausible on the walk over. But if you are hiding some details of a story, it is always best to reveal others truthfully.
And so I started to tell them about my shame.
Chapter 3
I was sent to meet Craig Bennett on the opening Monday of the London Book Fair. I don’t need to mention in which year. That morning Sarah had left me. After an entire night begging her not to I was almost grateful when she slammed the front door behind her, leaving me with one fewer of the bags of clothes she had thrown all over our bedroom.
In the shower I let myself collapse, sob and pray to my childhood God who only existed now during aeroplane take-offs and girlfriend emergencies. I turned all that off with the water and put on my best new suit. I had work to do.
Within minutes of leaving the house for Earls Court I became terrified of the conclusions Sarah would reach without my constant interruptions. I called her whenever I had a moment between meetings but she never answered. Each minute was madness. I started drinking at lunch, quickly working out which of my appointments wouldn’t mind moving to the bar. I still have my tattered schedule for that day: apparently I met with fifteen different people. I can’t remember who most of them are, let alone the books they talked to me about. There were many tall, wonderful-looking women from the Netherlands and Germany, from France and Italy. There always are. I must have nodded in the right places and delivered my lines correctly; somewhere in the middle of that afternoon Belinda materialised in a cloud of exquisite perfume to tell me what a good job I was doing, and could I meet Craig Bennett in a restaurant in Notting Hill and look after him for a couple of hours before delivering him safely to our party?
James Cockburn would have normally been the one to look after Bennett but he was in hospital with the broken legs he’d acquired when falling from the first-floor window of a flat in Soho. I would have been at the party and witnessed this for myself if I hadn’t been pleading with Sarah not to leave me.
Cockburn’s fall was the talk of the Fair that day. People flocked to our stand to find out what had happened. I heard six or seven different versions, including the most lurid: that Craig Bennett, gripping Cockburn’s shirt, had leaned him out of the window, demanding his advance be increased, and when Cockburn only laughed, Bennett had shoved him, perhaps half in jest, straight out the window onto the street below. It was a good story, but I heard another that was far more in character for my hedonistic mentor, that Cockburn decided to climb out the window and scale the narrow ledge around the edge of the building – why? – to surprise two actresses known for their roles in BBC costume drama who were sitting on an adjacent windowsill. This was just the kind of idea Cockburn would have found attractive, particularly as he had been drinking since the Sunday lunchtime kick-off of the QPR home game he’d taken some New York publishers and agents to.
There were other stories too.
Eighteen months earlier, when I had come to London to start my brilliant new job and move in with Sarah, I had done my best to correct my hedonism. I had been using my father’s disappearance at sixteen for far too long to justify my excesses; I was no longer that damaged teenager. Sharing a flat with Sarah seemed to be the perfect point to give up the long boozy stimulant-filled weekends of the previous five years of our lives – and earlier too, when we had been best friends attached to the wrong people. Now we had our own living room in which to watch films and DVD box-sets on our own sofa. We could make love on a shaggy, purpose-bought shagging rug. The lies are so easy to believe in: I would read manuscripts and the canonical works of European literature; fresh coffee, jazz on the stereo, my drug dealers in Birmingham sending me promotional text messages I was too far away to take advantage of.
We moved into a flat in Hackney in an old council block. It didn’t look much but I loved it. The sun came through our thin curtains and woke me up at five in the morning in the summer. I’ve never been much good at sleeping, never a member of what Nabokov calls ‘the most moronic fraternity in the world’. (I had my own moronic fraternity united by the refusal of sleep, with Cockburn our founder and spiritual leader.) I would quietly watch Sarah sleeping until I got bored, and then sneak into the living room to read a manuscript for an hour or two before she woke up. I was good at my job then. Insomniacs make diligent readers as well as talented hedonists.
But Sarah liked the drugs too, and a couple of weeks into my well-intentioned abstinence, she began to wonder where they were. ‘Have you not got – literally, not got anything? Oh. Oh . . . good.’ It was my fault. I’d always had something squirrelled away; I’d created expectations. (That euphemism: we were expected to drugs.) There was a point in every party when we realised how easy it would be to have more fun. How boring it would be not to.
We decided the sometime in the non-urgent future when Sarah got pregnant would be the new deadline for renouncing our lifestyle (or we’ll regret it then, said Sarah) and we went back to normal. It was not hard to find new drug dealers. I asked a literary agent over lunch, and she pitched her entire list to me, central, south, west, east, north . . . I bought them all. And suddenly drugs were almost legal as mephe-drone appeared, combining the effects of cocaine and MDMA and speed, great pillows of which were available over the internet for almost nothing. Everyone was taking it. Everyone stupid was.
What I love (I am trying to say loved) about drugs is the way they engender the temporary suspension of disbelief, poetic faith, negative capability, whatever you want to call it. You can invent magical new characters for yourself when you’re on them, and if you start to believe in them others will too. Perhaps an aspiring writer’s instincts are riskier, more hospitable to the reader’s desire for titillation, for secrets and extra-marital intrigue. Perhaps. This type of grand disingenuousness annoyed Sarah more than anything. So it should have. I just liked getting high. It isn’t only writers who make themselves into characters: it’s one of the commonest failings, one of the purest joys. And you don’t have to be a liar to be a writer: that’s a book festival cliché you hear from midlisters aspiring to midlife crises. Becoming a vainglorious prick has never been fundamental to creating literary art. No. I did that because it was fun, because I was morally exhausted and it was easy to pretend my behaviour was separate from my essence. But if the man careering around town in my clothes wasn’t me, then why did I feel so bad, and so proud, about the way he talked to women?
It hadn’t always been this bad or good. I’d arrived in London from a small press in Birmingham with a reputation for frugality, integrity and luck. Everyone loves a plucky indie. It made people at the conglomerates trying to poach our successful authors feel good about themselves to know we existed, that there was room for us. I was embraced at book parties. Have you met my mate Liam? People thought I was a nice guy. I cared about writers. Well, I always had a lot of compassion but outside of work it mostly overflowed in the wrong directions, to the people who least needed it. To the people who exhibited moral failings, by which I mean the people with the option to. The carnal people, the libertines, the charmers. The lookers, the liars, the reckless. The success went to my head. That’s the point of success. I was drawn to the promiscuous and the criminal, like my mentor and the other JC, and who knew London publishing would be such a fine place to find these two qualities? It was with my reputation in mind, and with Cockburn lying in an expensive private hospital – not his first trip to an expensive private medical facility paid for by the company – that they sent the ingénue out to look after Booker-winning Craig Bennett. We had never met but by coincidence we shared the same literary agent, Suzy Carling – I had written one bad novel no one wanted to publish but she had managed to place a story of mine in Granta, and this had blown a gale into my inflating ego. I must have seemed just the man for the job. My task was to talk books, flatter, reassure
