The most cynical and duplicitous of us are often the kindest. There was no way, I knew, I could persuade Sarah of this. Because, probably, it isn’t true. But that night Craig Bennett and I were convinced it was.
‘Exactly,’ he roared, pouring the last of the third bottle. (We had realised that we did like food, as long as it was food you could consume like drugs: we liked oysters – and had been necking them like tequila shots for the last half hour. We were elated.) ‘Liars understand what people want, what they don’t have. They have imagination! Empathy! They understand complication and contradiction!’
I was lapping it up. Instead of being a self-destructive liar I was now a self-destructive liar – in a good way. In the toilets, almost without thinking, I locked the cubicle door behind me and scraped out onto the cistern half of the remains of the coke that I had left in my wallet from the weekend.
As I walked back into the dining room I felt I had turned the corner into a happier life. I had meant to keep to myself what I had done, but he had been so kind that before I knew it I had passed the wrap across to him and told him to finish it. I’m terrible at doing drugs on my own. They make me so generous-spirited. A flash of concern crossed his face, before he broke into a grin. ‘So,’ he said, ‘it’s like this.’ Then he was gone, leaving me to take in my surroundings properly for the first time: the inch of wine left in each of our glasses, the tall stems drawing the eye upwards, to the high ceiling, the glass chandeliers, and outwards, to the French waitresses and waiters, young people, in their early twenties, undaunted, poorly paid and incorrupt. My hands were shaking and I thought I could feel everyone looking at me.
Is it really possible to fall in love over the space of a few hours, the way I fell in love with Craig Bennett? Easy to want to, to think you have – isn’t that what love is, the opposite of loss? The strength of the feeling is the proof against it having occurred too soon. What I felt that night was that I had found someone to reverse what I had lost. Someone who was pure gain.
My father is ten years older than Bennett, though he looks younger, smoother, like the past has sheared off him in a wet shave. A kind man, his new friends tell me. He wasn’t always that man: there was another man who made decisions which neither he, my sisters nor I knew at the time would so blunt our memory of the father he had been before to us. We don’t bring up the three years in which he disappeared, the years when we only knew he was alive because of phone calls he made every few months to our grandma. He wouldn’t speak to his own father, divorced from grandma, or tell grandma where he was living, what country even – ‘It doesn’t sound like he’s in England,’ she’d say. (It’s been years since he’s sounded like he’s on fucking earth, I would reply.) Something had snapped in him during his second, awful marriage, two years after he left us, and after ‘an incident’ with his new family, an incident we were never told or would ever willingly ask about, an incident that even he, in the height of his madness, recognised as madness, he had simply run, and when all his madness had burnt out he had returned to earth, complete again and a stranger to us. He may have been a stranger to himself too. He certainly wanted to be. In that first year back from the dead we saw him once or twice around the table with his new fiancée, Shelley, who ran a New Age shop in Milton Keynes and on each occasion gave us a gift of a scented candle. Shelley had departed, but we still met with Dad around a table once or twice a year. There was often another woman there. Each time we faced again the absolute impossibility of asking him a serious question. He looked startled when we did, like he was about to run for the hills. We didn’t want to risk that. I was sixteen when he disappeared, my sisters thirteen and eleven. I was the lucky one; it’s normal up on the Blackpool coast to be drinking heavily by that age; my sisters were jolted into a more precocious start. It didn’t do us any superficial harm. All of us are (or have been) well-paid professionals. At the time I didn’t feel the lack of a guide; I could work out how a man behaved from my friends and reading the books I liked about the Rolling Stones and other swaggering outlaws. There are advantages to adopting such role models: a certain charm or roguishness, the sad, warping half-truth that girls (and boys) like you more when you treat them badly; that some people get away with murders while others get broken. Most of all there was the glorious opportunity to blame someone else, someone absent, for my own self-indulgence. I met Craig Bennett on the night my dad, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had all let me down. I came to believe that he had knowledge to impart to me, knowledge that could save me: and I decided to love him.
Chapter 4
Lizzie and Arturo had been letting me speak but now Arturo interrupted. ‘How do you mean, you loved him? Like a woman or a brother?’ It was not an aggressive question but slightly exasperated. I had been careful not to reveal all I had been thinking, particularly the details about Sarah, and perhaps he could tell I was hiding something. I had probably revealed more than I meant to.
‘I’ve never had a brother,’ I said to him. ‘I loved him like a friend. Or like a father.’
Perhaps I looked sad then because Lizzie reached over and put her hand on my shoulder. ‘What happened next?’ she asked.
Craig and I were in a cab, heading to Soho, up some stairs to be greeted by a golden-haired actor. He looked shocked then surrendered to an open-mouthed grin. ‘Craig – you came back! What a delight! What chutzpah!’
I hadn’t seen Bennett abashed before. He was staring past the actor at the two windows on the other side of the room.
He hadn’t explained where we were going in the taxi, just that he’d made a new friend who’d be able to sort us out before we went to the party where we were due. ‘Now we’ve started, we’ll need it or it will seem like a dreadful evening,’ he’d insisted, though he didn’t have too much insisting to do. ‘And he’s a good man: Fergus, an actor, a pleasant host.’
As Bennett fixated on the window I realised where we were. The cardboard crates full of empties confirmed it. We were all suddenly surprised at the situation. We probably needed more drugs. I had a sachet of mephedrone in my wallet, but it was a bit more engulfing and lasting than cocaine; not as socially acceptable. I bit my tongue and introduced myself to Fergus. ‘As you can see,’ he said, ‘the last party feels like it finished about three minutes ago.’ He pulled a mostly-full bottle of Prosecco from a cardboard box on the floor: ‘Sorry it’s not cold, fellas.’ He rinsed out three mugs – ‘God knows what became of all our glasses last night’ – and Bennett discreetly recovered himself and drew Fergus aside.
As they conferred, I wandered over to the window and looked down to the pavement below. I don’t know what I thought I might see: a cartoon James Cockburn-sized imprint, perhaps. On the other side of the road Eros Videos and Soho Video Club seemed wildly anachronistic, as if they were funded by the council as tourist attractions. A thin ledge ran under the window and around the side of the building. Fergus was speaking into the phone now and Bennett came over to stand with me at the window. We both peered down. ‘Is this where . . . ?’ I asked. He didn’t answer. ‘Fifteen minutes,’ said Fergus, putting the phone down.
Some people, some writers, like to lyrically describe the reveries they’ve experienced on drugs. It’s an even more boring and shameful habit than taking them. Cocaine was done and did what was expected of it. In the course of consumption we acquired two actresses and four missed calls from Bennett’s publicist, two from our mutual agent and one, worryingly, from my CEO. We had moved to an upstairs members’ club round the corner where the barmaid had greeted Bennett enthusiastically. I’d still made no contact with James Cockburn, suspecting, correctly, that I had been sent on a mission to betray him. It was midnight. We were two hours late to the party, but the party would go on late, and so I told myself that the situation wasn’t irretrievable. Bennett was perfectly happy where he was and didn’t share my CEO’s sense of the importance of meeting export buyers, foreign editors and the producers of TV book clubs. The actresses’ names were Lucy
