My Biggest Lie (14 page)

‘The funeral, well, I couldn't make it, I was still lying up in hospital,' he said formally. ‘I was surprised to hear you weren't there.'

‘Really? But I wasn't allowed to be. No one would tell me where it was!'

He looked even more uncomfortable. ‘Don't be like that, Liam.'

‘I don't want to be protected from what people think about me. Belinda told me not to go. I know what she thinks about me. What about everyone else?'

‘Who is everyone else? The people who like you, like me, they still like you. The people who don't know you, they still don't know you.'

‘I just want to know what I have to do to be forgiven.'

James pursed his lips like he was disappointed with me. ‘You want acquittal, not forgiveness. You want your job back, you want your girlfriend back. Of course you do. You won't feel forgiven till you get a new job, a new girlfriend.'

‘I want the old ones, not new ones.'

‘Well, I certainly can't help you with Sarah.'

‘What about with . . . ?'

He turned his profile to me and gazed into the distance. When he turned back to look at me I noticed new lines in his face. ‘Liam,
you
resigned. If I could help, you know I would. My stock is not at its highest this year. A couple of big bets didn't pay off. My biggest-selling author is now dead and you are perceived as having had the power to prevent this. I am also perceived as responsible for this, as though you were my ambassador, my embodied bad practice. Well, yes. Nothing unusual, it all evens out. We'll have another Booker winner next year. But there was the thing about my office too, which pushed things with Belinda a bit too far.'

James had reacted badly when we had moved into the new open-plan office system that had been finished a month after I had started. I had been to his office to see him before I was his colleague, in the days when I was
‘punching above my weight' as an editor at a small press. We'd met at a prize ceremony and he'd invited me for breakfast the next day. His office was like a spoiled teen-ager's bedroom: a battered leather sofa, ripped music posters, an expensive stereo, a small fridge for beers and champagne and a locked desk-drawer containing two wraps of cocaine and some excellent ecstasy tablets. It was Friday. At 10 a.m. we had had a beer and a line each while the industrious women outside (one of whom I would become) began their working day. Then we had headed out for a fried breakfast that lasted twenty-four hours.

When Belinda decreed James was to lose his office, he had passionately argued that the authors he brought to the firm needed his space to hang out in. ‘Bring a different type of author to the firm, then,' she had finally warned him, ‘or find a different type of firm. It's like this now.'

He had made a go of it. It was weird to see him sitting at a desk in the corner of a long room, sending emails, and then it was less weird because he was rarely there. He began to take all his author meetings in the pub round the corner, rather than just half of them.

It was in one of these meetings that he joked about sneaking in one weekend to rebuild his office. Jeremy Deller loved the idea and offered do it with a team of technicians, provided he could film it. That night, they waited till ten and went back to the office with a tape-measure. Two weeks later the logistics were entirely plausible, and all that was needed then was for James, in a fit of hysterical realism, to give in and see what the consequences were.

I had only been at work there for a couple of months when I arrived that Monday to find a gang of around
thirty people staring at a perfect white hut enclosing the space where James' desk used to be. One of the walls was flush with the side of his nearest colleague's desk. People had been trying the lock but it wouldn't open and there was no sign of a key. The walls were smoothed off and painted the same white colour as the walls of the office. There was no sign of Cockburn. Belinda angrily sent everyone away but stayed herself, running her hands over the walls of the new structure and looking nonplussed. At eleven o'clock James walked briskly into work, turned a key in the lock of his office and shut the door behind him. When Belinda made him leave and accompany her to a meeting room, he left the door open. Inside was a meticulous reconstruction of his old office, the sofa, the posters, the old bookcases.

The story reached the trade press and then the nationals. James' aura increased and, as much as Belinda wanted to sack him, he was such a popular figure, such an extravagant self-publicist, it was easier just to discipline him. The marooned office remained for the rest of the week. James was not allowed to use it, but he had left the door unlocked, and for the rest of the week we took turns sneaking into it, lying on the sofa, reading manuscripts after-hours and taking beers out of the mini-fridge. The following Monday, it had disappeared again, and we didn't see Cockburn for the rest of that week either. Later, a film of the office being reconstructed appeared in a retrospective at the Hayward Gallery.

‘It was probably the right thing for you to stay away from the funeral,' Cockburn concluded. ‘There are some people, a publicist, a CEO, maybe one or two others, who think
you really fucked up with Bennett. Well, you did, he's dead. You and I admit that. We know there was little you could do to stop Craig doing whatever he wanted, but you drew the short straw when he did his stupidest thing yet.'

I didn't believe it. ‘I could have stopped him. We chose to believe he was as incorrigible as he pretended he was. Someone should have broken the chain. I was the one there,
I
should have.'

‘You're too hard on yourself. People will respect your courage in admitting you had a part – if you have to admit it. There'll be other jobs. Everyone loves a resurrection story. You know what I think? You want your crime to be greater than it is so you can excuse yourself from redeeming yourself. Excuse yourself from the hard work of getting on with your life.'

I kept quiet. It was possible he was right about Bennett. And my mind leapt with delight to the possibility that perhaps I was being too hard on myself about Sarah too. That I deserved her back. How easy it would be to succumb to my old good opinion of myself. Why was I resisting?

With Cockburn sat beside me I had begun to feel the thrill and satisfaction of what I had used to do, what I had really done in the office from half-nine to eight o'clock every day, the hard work and not the cartoon hedonism. I knew Cockburn, if he took Fridays off, was putting in at least four long days Monday to Thursday, working through the weekend and reading every hour he wasn't drinking. The drinking was the work too, it was with the agents and celebrities who gave him access to the books we maintained that only he could make happen. I remembered the less dramatic way I had worked, the buzz of reading a manuscript late at night that was worth telling
people about. It didn't happen all the time but it still happened. There are writers left who understand Bolaño's words, that literature is a dangerous calling, and Cockburn was here with me hoping to find one of them. It was time to find out more about that.

Cockburn smiled when I asked him to tell me more, relieved to be back on safe ground. ‘Liam, this is fascinating. Javi hasn't even spoken to him yet. Only his Argentine agent has met him, and I haven't even had direct contact with her. All I've got is a forwarded email from the sub-agent suggesting a restaurant to meet at this evening. And the manuscript. Javi says it's the best thing he's read for years. I haven't heard him this excited. The work-experience girl's done a rough translation of the first five pages for me . . . It's a bloody shame Craig's not around – he'd have read it for me. I've got the same feeling about it I had about
Talking to Pedro
before it won the Booker.'

‘Does Belinda know you're out here on the strength of this feeling?'

‘No.'

‘Translated Argentine fiction doesn't sound very commercial.'

‘There are more important things in life than that.'

‘I hope Belinda hasn't heard you talking this way.'

I looked at James and tried not to interpret his idealism as crisis. Belinda wouldn't tolerate another outright rebellion. Why was he really here? What had driven him onto that plane? If this was another breaking point, I hoped his survivor's instinct would see him through it – he'd go home to his wife and baby and might last a year or two before he felt compelled to do something stupid. He might be lucky all his life. Someone had to be.

‘And Ella, how is she really? How's the baby?'

He breathed out a sigh. ‘Ella's great. Mandy's great. I nearly made such a mistake there.'

‘Craig told me before he died.'

‘God, I miss Craig. He talked me out of it, you know. I didn't want to listen at the time so I made that stupid climb round the wall. “He who makes a beast . . .” It makes me feel so guilty sometimes. If I hadn't been such a prick, if I hadn't fallen . . . Ella's perfect, you know. She lets me stay out late in the week when I have to, knows it's part of the job. That's the problem, I get in the mood when I think I don't want perfection. She lets me fly off to Argentina on a whim. You know this is a whim, don't you? Of course you do. Sometimes I get this feeling in me, like I'm going to do something awful just so I can observe myself doing it. Do you know?'

I did.

‘So this came up and I knew you were here, and I thought this might be the lesser of two evils.'

‘Is the other woman Craig mentioned the greater of the two?'

‘No. That's over.'

‘Good. Look at me. This is how you'll end up.'

‘You don't look so bad.'

‘I'm thirteen years younger than you. But I'm unemployed, perhaps unemployable. I've lost the woman whom I loved unrequitedly for five years before somehow, incredibly, I managed to make her love me. Now I'm terrified to leave this country that I hate living in because of how little is waiting for me at home.'

James fidgeted impatiently. He sighed. ‘That sounds quite bad,' he admitted.

‘Exactly. So control yourself. We're not invincible. We're just untested.'

It was approaching one o'clock now. The beers we'd drunk made the sun hazy and rhythmic, a psychedelic pulse in a Seventies film. James' idea of scoring cocaine was more and more tempting. It is always tempting to feel invincible.

‘Let's go and try these places for Alejandro,' I suggested, to take my mind off the hunger. ‘He's probably having lunch somewhere.'

We drained our beers and set off. James leaned over and put an arm round me briefly.

Chapter 17

W
e walked along the waterfront in Puerto Madero, searching for Alejandro. The waiters knew who he was in two of the restaurants we tried. We left our phone numbers with messages to say that we wanted him to have dinner with us and translate the conversation of a ‘talented young author'. Cockburn tipped the waiters. (I had seen Cockburn tip a bus driver in the past.) All of this killed an hour, but soon we were having another drink. Cockburn was beginning to worry. If Alejandro didn't come through, the conversation with the new Bolaño might never take place. If Cockburn came back to the office without a book, he was going to have a lot of explaining to do. I had been thinking of Lizzie as we made the trawl round the cafés and bars, of how flawlessly she would have performed the role of vivacious translator. I knew Cockburn would adore her.
This is my great friend Lizzie; I've asked her to interpret tonight. Afterwards, perhaps we can go out dancing.
She would fit perfectly into the club of excellent people he used to sell membership to his own excellent club. And the more I thought of her the
more I was not prepared to have her dislike me, not without doing all I could to make her my friend again.

I described Lizzie to Cockburn as we made our way to the language school, how funny and intelligent she was and how – well, she
was
– beautiful.

‘Liam?' he asked, after a while. ‘Despite what you said earlier, are you sure you're not beginning to get over Sarah?'

Of course I was in love with Lizzie – but it didn't help.

‘I think I'm getting over Sarah every time a woman smiles at me,' I explained to him. ‘And it lasts for perhaps thirty seconds before I shut my eyes and see Sarah looking at me, the way she used to look at me.'

‘You fucking romantic.'

‘Well, don't you fall in love with Lizzie too,' I warned him as we walked up the steps to the school.

We strode purposefully down the corridor to the classroom I'd seen Lizzie coming out of most frequently. She was there, behind the closed door. I could hear her slowly conjugating English verbs before they echoed in Latin accents. James and I sat down on the floor against the corridor walls. It made me think of waiting for Sarah to come out of her lecture, of her new lover and what they would be doing if they were together now . . .

‘You know,' said Cockburn, ‘there's nothing like a quest.'

I gave him a weary headshake, but I had been enjoying myself before too, so much it had left me uneasy. I couldn't carry on as I had been doing, pretending that writing an unreadable love letter and a penitential novel was a purpose in life. Something had to change.

We sat there waiting for fifteen minutes. Cockburn filled me in on the activities of my old colleagues and the new boyfriends and girlfriends they had commissioned. Six
months ago I would have been very interested, but now . . . well, I wasn't naive enough to think it made me a deeper person that I'd lost interest in my fellow human beings. I should try harder. ‘So, you didn't really answer me before,' I said. ‘What's it like being a dad?'

He opened his mouth as if he was about to pitch, and I waited for a torrent of delightfuls and wonderfuls, but he shut it again and looked sad. ‘I'd be able to give you a much better idea if I wasn't here in Argentina, wouldn't I?'

At that moment, the door opened and a series of office-smart young men and women began to file out. My stomach lurched. I stood up and almost collided with Lizzie in the doorway.

‘You see,' said James, refilling Lizzie's glass, ‘there hasn't been an internationally popular Argentine novelist for, well, for ever.'

We were in a café over the road from the language school. I was only half listening as he carried on but it sounded plausible. You had living literary superstars from Peru, Colombia, Mexico, Chile (with Bolaño, dead for years, still managing to publish a book a month), and the backpackers' favourite from Brazil, but no Argentines had really made a sales impact in English since Borges, and he wasn't a novelist. Cortázar had been lauded, Sabato too, but how many English-speaking readers really knew who they were? What was it these people withheld from English?

Lizzie's initial anger at being ambushed outside her room had turned to confusion as she made out James swaying behind me in his Cuban-heeled boots, 36-inch-long skinny denims, half-undone shirt and greying hair. I
had pleaded passionately then for her to come and sit down and talk to us, to understand I had not meant to deceive her or cause problems with Arturo. My English sounded melodramatic, Argentine. She brushed aside my apology as if it was bad form. She was looking at James curiously, and so I introduced him and let him make his own speech, something about how highly I had praised her, how much he trusted my judgement, how little he now needed to due to the evidence of his own eyes and ears. (Cockburn's English, I realised, had always sounded Argentine.) He elaborated on the tremendous opportunity available that evening, the chance to speak to a prose-stylist of profound originality, to contribute to a mission which, if successful, would in some small way correct the philistine reading habits of the British reading public. Lizzie looked to me after hearing this, as if I would confirm whether or not it was a joke, and when I simply nodded, neither confirming nor denying, she agreed to have lunch with us and hear James out.

The waiter brought us our food and asked if we would like a second bottle of the Malbec. Of course we would.

‘So what's this guy's name?' she asked.

‘Daniel Requena.'

‘Never heard of him.'

‘He's not even published here yet. My friend Javi from Barcelona's just bought Spanish-language rights. The buzz about him is enormous, though.'

‘What's he like?'

‘As a person, no one knows. Even Javi hasn't spoken to him on the phone. I'll be the first European publisher to meet him face to face.'

This seemed to have less effect on Lizzie than James intended: ‘Look, this is all very appealing and interesting,
and I'd be happy to do my best. But I've made a promise to have dinner with my boyfriend this evening, and he gets upset enough when I do things without including him.'

‘Oh, well, look,' said James, sounding slightly deflated. ‘A boyfriend. I guess you can bring him too – why
don't
you? I mean, if you
want
him to come.'

Lizzie pulled out her phone and sent a text. And then my phone rang. This was still a rare enough occurrence for me to spend ten seconds returning other diners' smug disapproval before I realised the noise came from my own bag. My mum was the only person who rang regularly and, having been used to checking my phone every five minutes in England, where I had friends and purpose, I had accustomed myself to its new silence. But we had left this number alongside James in the places we had searched for Alejandro, and now an Argentine number was calling.

‘
Hola, esta
Liam,' I said.

Alejandro's voice said something long and rolling, and when I could only um and er in response, he switched to English. ‘I see your Spanish has not improved. So, Liam, what is the meaning of this elaborate trail you have left for me? You have realised by now that I do not enjoy remembering my old friend Craig Bennett. I will be very angry if this is a pretence for asking me more of your indelicate questions.'

‘It is not a pre –'

‘Who is this James Cockburn? Is he real? Is that a name, cock-burn? In my society it is the symptom of too pleasurable an evening.'

‘He pretends it's pronounced Co-burn. He is real. He's sitting next to me, frowning. He was the-man-whom-we'renot-talking-about's editor. Would you like to talk to him?

‘In a minute. And have you seen this beautiful young author?'

‘I –'

‘And by the way, I am not such a
tart
to accept an unusual assignment for the mere sight of a boy with talent, particularly when summoned by a crassly scribbled note on the back of a business card.'

‘I –'

‘I will come anyway. Will you present me with James Burningcock, please?'

I handed him over and James started up. ‘Hel-
lo
, I'm so glad you
called
. Liam's told me all
about
you.' He stood and strode outside. He couldn't conduct a phone conversation except at a brisk walk. I was alone with Lizzie for the first time in weeks.

‘Is he always like this?' she asked.

‘Only in the company of people.'

She made a wan smile and looked at her plate. There was a sudden shyness to her I hadn't noticed before.

‘Liam.' ‘Lizzie.' We said each other's names simultaneously.

‘You first,' I said first.

‘Sarah wrote to me. She said you'd written to apologise to her. She said you wouldn't be the type to be indiscreet. She said your problem is the opposite, that you think too much about the effects of what you say. She stressed the word
say
as a direct opposite of
do
.'

She trailed her finger in a circle in the crumbs of her tostada and looked down into the swirl she'd made.

‘I can't argue with that but can I tell you –'

‘Shut up,' she said, looking up. ‘I guess I should accept that if you let Arturo know about the business with Hernán it wasn't through carelessness.'

‘I didn't let Arturo know anything. I tried to defend you from Hernán's attempts to make Arturo jealous. I just pointed out Hernán seemed very keen on you himself.'

‘Which, if Sarah's right about how deliberately you think things through . . .'

‘You think I wanted to cause trouble deliberately?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Sarah said that?'

‘I wouldn't say that exactly. She said you're not malicious. Not on purpose.'

‘I don't think I'm malicious even by accident, even if you can be malicious by accident. I'm straightforward, really. An idiot, yes, but straightforward.'

‘You're not an idiot. You hide behind that. That's exactly the sort of self-deprecating non-straightforward statement I expected you would make. So why did you lie to us from the start about you and Sarah still being together?'

‘It wasn't simple. I hoped it wasn't over. I didn't want to help make it over by announcing it to everyone. If I hadn't skipped over that, we might never have had a chance to be friends, never had a conversation, let alone an honest conversation. But we did talk honestly, didn't we? I love talking to you. You're the best person I've met here.'

Despite herself, she made a weak smile. ‘You're not like me. I would have just told you. I would still have been your friend if you'd told me what had happened with Sarah.'

‘No, I'm not like you. But I didn't know that then.'

She looked at me suspiciously. I was so weary of wearing the wrong costume.

‘Please don't think I tried to screw you over,' I said. ‘Why would I try to cause trouble for you and Arturo? What would be my reason? I love Sarah. Can't you tell?
I flew all the way to Brazil for a day just to see her. Please, Lizzie, let's be friends. We make
good
friends.'

‘You know traditionally it's women who cry to manipulate men?'

I rubbed my eyes and looked directly at her. ‘Forgive me,' I argentined with a hand on my heart, ‘like a man forgiving a manipulative woman.'

People had begun to look over both curiously and approvingly at us. This was a good lunchtime scene. It might not be long before people started to offer us advice.

‘Okay, okay,' Lizzie sighed, embarrassed, ‘for God's sake, you're forgiven.'

I reached out and squeezed her hand. A woman at the next table beamed at me. James came striding back towards us. He sat down and took a swig of wine.

‘Go all right?' I asked.

He finished his glass. ‘Er, yeah. Friendly enough guy. I tried to tell him we didn't need him any more now we have the talented Lizzie at our disposal but he wouldn't listen and kept asking what time, what restaurant. Apparently, the food's magnificent, extremely expensive, and he will see us there at nine-thirty.'

‘Great, my boyfriend's looking forward to it too,' said Lizzie, looking at her phone.

‘I intend to bring no one but myself,' I declared.

‘Good,' said James, looking ruffled.

Lizzie had classes after lunch so, at four o'clock, I was left on my own with James.

‘You probably need a sleep?' I ventured.

‘Very kind of you to concern yourself, Liam, but I'm
not going to desert you so soon after our reunion. How about we try your mate's bar?'

So it was that, after five hours in Achtung!, we made our way to one of the finest restaurants in Latin America without the slightest hope of eating there. We had recently done another large line of cocaine to ‘sober us up' and when that had not made us sober we had smoked some luminous skunk with Aleman to ‘tone down our chat'. These cures had pasted us to the back seat of a speeding taxi.

We looked at each other warily. ‘We shouldn't really have done that to ourselves,' said James. ‘Are we really in Argentina?'

‘Probably not,' I replied.

The streets pulsed past like the beginning of a cinematic car chase. By the time the film had finished I hoped I might be able to speak properly again. The ride proceeded for a few moments in silence.

‘Are you ready to offer your theories to the table about the lack of internationally famous Argentine novelists?' I asked James. It was a sentence that had taken me no more than six minutes to prepare.

‘Oh, God.'

‘And what you propose to do to change this?'

‘Oh, God,' he said and scrambled to wind down the window and poke his head out. He held it there for five seconds while the driver addressed me with a stream of animated Spanish, then pulled it back in. ‘That helped a bit,' he said.