in the room, his first action – before even opening the heavy oak doors of the TV cabinet to check if the pornography channel was hard- or soft-core – had been to take his Sony Vaio laptop out of its silver case, connect it to the Plug and Play wire, and go straight to www.theSangster.com in order to torment himself with what he did not have. Fourteen suites, he had discovered, feature Steinway or Baldwin grand pianos (‘in keeping’, said the unctuously written website, ‘with the hotel’s musical heritage’) tuned twice a week. Harvey didn’t play the piano (although he still had a faint sense of the absurd needlessness of tuning any piano twice a fucking week) but nonetheless felt, on reading this, the deep, deep deprivation of not having one in his room. Further picking away at the scab of his envy, he read about the ‘legendary’ New York suite, on the twenty-second floor, with its sizeable dining room, kitchen, traditional living room, fireplace with faux-quartz logs, antique books, sunburst clocks, Lars Bolanger lacquered boxes, sage velvet seating area, another fucking piano (Steinway – tuned, no doubt, every fifteen seconds), wall-mounted plasmas, state-of-the-art Bang & Olufsen acoustic system and, of course, a ‘two-storey view of the Manhattan skyline’. He closed the computer, wondering, if he had been certain his dad was paying for it, whether or not he would have demanded an upgrade.
These three reasons finesse his dissatisfaction, each one rising and falling at different times on the graphic equalizer of his anxiety. What would his present therapist – No. 8 – tell him to tell himself? I would really like to be in a better room, with a view and a set of Lars Bolanger-lacquered boxes, but the fact that I’m not is not the end of the world. Something like that. He gets up from the leather-topped desk and flops down on one of the two twin beds in his room. Harvey doesn’t much like that either. No matter how posh the Sangster is, the presence of the twin doubles makes it feel like a room at a Travellers’ Rest somewhere on the A41. Against his overhanging gut, he feels the dig of what should have been – according to the décor – an antique silver cigarette case, but is in fact his iPhone. He takes it out, noticing that another text has come in from Stella: Darling, hope you landed safely. Call me when you have a moment.
He remembers then that the phone had trilled again halfway through the journey from JFK, where he had ignored it, because it had arrived just as the taxi set wheel on the Brooklyn Bridge, allowing him to take in his first view for ten years of Manhattan Island. However much the overall idea of this journey has upped Harvey’s already monstrous anxiety levels, he had at least been looking forward to this: this packed vertical Oz, rust-brown and silver, rising from the sea in the limpid light of the morning. It always made him catch his breath, that such an urban sight could be so beautiful. He held the view, sliced across by the cables of the bridge, for some seconds, allowing its splendour to work some small massage on his migranous soul. Then he had caught sight of the gap where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center used to be, and the view became the mouth of a prize-fighter with two teeth knocked out.
Harvey wonders about calling home. Assuming that extras above and beyond the cost of the room are definitely going to be charged to him, he worries about the cost of the phone bill. He knows that phone calls from a five-star hotel are likely to be charged at an absurd number of dollars per minute. He considers using his mobile but then thinks that that too would be very expensive internationally. There is another option: one of the many bills that arrive daily on Harvey’s brown-as-dead-grass welcome mat at home, one of the many direct debits signed years ago and eating away at his solvency ever since, is for some company, who offer – for a small monthly payment – to provide a four-digit phone number that their customers can dial while staying at hotels, especially hotels abroad, before the number of their actual call, and which fix that call at a standard local rate. Which would now be marvellously useful for Harvey if at any point on any trip since signing up to this direct debit he had remembered to write down the fucking four-digit number and bring it with him.
Putting off the decision, he decides to check his email. Harvey gets anxious if cut off from the internet. He hears about writers – he just about considers himself one, even though collating the Dictaphonic outpourings of celebrities rarely seems to qualify him as such – who, as soon as they sit down to write, unplug the modem. Not Harvey: if his home modem freezes, as it periodically does, he panics, diving immediately down on his knees amidst the wires and discarded newspapers and sweet wrappers of his study floor in order to unplug and replug it. While waiting for it to restart, he cannot work – it is as if he himself has frozen. There is no rationale for this – occasionally he needs to Google some fact, but most of the information he needs is already provided by his subjects – but the possibility of exclusion on this worldwide scale is too much. He needs to feel he is in there, one of the myriad upturned mouths sucking on the global InfoMother’s billion teats.
The Sony Vaio rumbles for while, worrying him, and then Windows Mail opens: he hits Send and Receive, and watches the bar fill to a solid blue. He has nine messages. Eight of them are Spam – Ebony Anastasia Does Interracial Dicking Time, MILF Celestine Opens Her Sweet Ass Do You Want Some?, Superhot Trannies Notwithstanding, PlayPoker UK Exclusive Promotion, Hard Erecttion in 20 Minutes, Erectile Dysfunction?, ChitChatBingo, and one which makes him feel a bit weepy entitled Let Us Protect You, Harvey (from an insurance company) – and one from his agent, Alan. He knows what Alan’s email is going to say – he knows it will be delicately poised between expressing condolences for his father’s condition and wanting to know when Harvey is going to deliver the pitch for Lark’s autobiography – but still opens it with a tiny hope, as he opens all emails, that they will carry news of something stupendously positive. It is a message delicately poised between expressing condolence for his father’s condition and wanting to know when Harvey is going to deliver the pitch for Lark’s autobiography.
Harvey pitches for a lot of autobiographies these days, many more than he actually writes. Lark, though, is a tough one, as she has done, as far as he can make out, absolutely nothing. Lark is a pop star, but Harvey, like everyone else, has never heard any of her songs, nor even seen a picture of her. This is because Lark is being kept under wraps. Her record company, her management and her PR agency – who have decided, the way these people can now, that she is going to be huge – have created a new marketing strategy around Lark, whereby she is going to burst forth fully-formed onto the public, Athena from their combined Zeus-like forehead. On some so far unspecified date in the future, Lark will be brought forth to the world – her single, her video, her MySpace page will all be let out at the same time, followed closely by her album, and her autobiography. This is what Harvey is supposed to pitch for. He does have some information about her – Alan keeps on sending it, as attachments to his increasingly urgent emails – but every time Harvey remembers the only fact he does know about Lark – that she is nineteen – he cannot face opening any of them.
He shuts down Mail and opens a document file entitled IdeasJune. Harvey has many places in which he writes down ideas. In his hand luggage, along with a newly purchased copy of Solomon’s Testament – he had wanted, because she was pretty, to blurt out to the girl behind the till at WHSmith in Terminal Four at Heathrow, that he was Eli’s son, and had a first edition inscribed to him at home with the words ‘To Harvey, may you read it when you’re ready …’ and was only buying this one because he hadn’t read it for years and, well, he didn’t really know why he was buying it now but thought he should maybe read it again on the plane over because he was going to see his father on his deathbed – along with that, his father’s masterpiece, sits a Dictaphone, and two notebooks, one covered in gold leather, and one in moleskin. Harvey fetishizes notebooks. He has a drawerful of them at home in his study desk – covered in so many materials (velvet, cloth, zebra print, PVC); large hardbound ones and small; policeman-flicking-it-open-in-the-dock ones – and in all of them he has written thoughts for novels, films, plays, even – in one of them – business ideas. They are not empty. But they are not full either; each one has a series of scrawls, written in Harvey’s lazy script, which end after about five pages. It is partly the act of writing – that is, handwriting – that fails. Harvey likes the idea of opening the gilded notebook, and marking its embossed paper with the varied scents of his mind, but when it comes to it, writing with a pen has become a bit of a faff. More than that: writing
