My Biggest Lie (17 page)

And, eventually, above me, unmistakably, was James Cockburn, shirt undone to the navel, dancing on giant speakers in the middle of the antechamber I had reached after several miles of dance floor. I watched him turn to hug the gleaming man in a pink musclevest beside him, and then he caught sight of me and held his arms aloft before stepping down from the speakers and mingling me in his damp embrace.

‘Where've you been?' he shouted. ‘This place is incredible!'

‘I'm not dead, am I?' I shouted back. ‘This isn't actually the afterlife?'

‘No, mate,' he shouted. ‘Afterlife's in Rio, I think. We're in Library of Babel!'

This didn't seem strange then. ‘Where's everyone else?'

‘There's only you and me and Lizzie! We thought you'd left. Where've you been?'

‘Unconscious, on the floor.'

‘Nice one!'

‘Not really, no.'

The crossfader switched and a piano riff of simple, yearning optimism dropped into the room like the news in the midst of a natural disaster that your loved ones had survived. It took my breath away. We stopped talking and hugged and danced and the happiness I felt brought tears to my eyes. I wished Sarah was there so I could communicate my soul to her in the same joyful chords I would not remember tomorrow. It was at this point Lizzie arrived with a new girlfriend, a small brunette with a mod fringe and panda-eye make-up. I watched them dancing closer and closer, slowing down, gazing into each other's eyes, and then . . . and then . . . and then they were kissing, and James and I didn't dare move, and then we were all kissing, back and forward, the softness of Panda-eyes' lips and open mouth a surrender, the muscularity of Lizzie's tongue a carefully-controlled tour, the soaked sharp stubble of James an unpleasant joke we quickly laughed off. This was what I loved about ecstasy and as close as you could get to the emotion artificially. We had a kiss to remember when we were coming down. It was how the past could redeem the future. Or doom it.

We were still there at six. I'd given everyone another half E by then (I had found three in a back pocket). Lizzie had tried to tell me about the big argument she'd had with Arturo that I couldn't remember – apparently he'd punched me after I stuck up for her in the middle of an argument they were having. I had struggled to hear her over the music. Arturo had taken Dani and Alejandro to another bar. It was just after he'd left that she'd thrown her phone against a wall in anger. ‘If he wants me to cheat on him, he's made me feel completely up for it,' she shouted. Cockburn moved in and put his arms round her waist. She pushed him away and kissed Panda-eyes again. Cockburn put his arms around both of them.

Later, when I was in a cubicle with Cockburn, my phone rang again and I realised it was Arturo, that he must have been trying to reach Lizzie on my phone for the last couple of hours. That, or apologise to me. That, or threaten me. ‘Shall I answer it?' I asked.

‘What do you think he's going to say to her if he finds out she's in a club doing ecstasy with both of us?' asked Cockburn, digging around in the wrap with his key.

I didn't answer that. We silently watched the phone until it stopped ringing.

‘Quick, turn it off,' said Cockburn.

I did. We each inhaled a quick keyload of coke and unlocked the door.

‘I can't believe I'm in Buenos Aires, in Library of Babel, having just kissed two beautiful bisexual women,' said Cockburn, looking in the mirror.

‘They're no more bisexual than we are. It's not real, it's a dream. That's just how people on ecstasy shake hands. We understand; others won't. So don't do anything else. Ella's at home.'

‘Thank you, Liam,' he said, suddenly thoughtful. ‘You're right. Always looking after me.' Then his face broke into a broad, excited grin. ‘Shall we go and find the girls again?'

It was dawn when we returned to James' hotel, seeking his mini-bar. Our friend Panda-eyes was gone, frightened away by what in re-telling this story I will describe as Cockburn's wandering hands; we hugged her goodbye and lamented her loss and would remember her for ever as perfect. James' jetlag had finally caught up with him: the drugs weren't working on him at all as we left the taxi. He was slurring something about having left his coat in the garden of forking
paths as Lizzie and I propped him up and marched him across an enormous shiny foyer to the lift. The receptionists brightly called out to us in English, ‘Good morning!' Perhaps the speakers in the foyer were broken; there was no electronic tango music playing. Once in his room, James collapsed on his bed immediately, and Lizzie helped him out of his jacket and shoes and tucked him up. It was important to keep moving at a time like this: we had had a wonderful time and perhaps it was worth it but there were many frightening consequences to face if we allowed ourselves to, not least this crisply cold dawning morning. ‘Have you got anything left?' asked Lizzie. There was a tiny bit of coke left and a whole pill we didn't dare wait to digest. We crushed it down and did the business. It was a big, spacious white room. That helped. Our noses stung horribly. We took a beer out onto the balcony and lay on the deck, watching the sun bleed through the night. The drug kicked in and made us feel incredibly nice again. We talked and talked. The air was chilly. I brought a duvet out and we lay under it, smoking fags, passing the beer back and forth between us, explaining to each other everything we had ever done or dreamed. The ecstasy magnetised our bodies, her legs across mine, my arm around her waist, her head on my shoulder. At one point I couldn't resist kissing her again. It only lasted a few seconds and didn't mean anything, but it felt wonderful. ‘That wasn't romantic,' she warned me, and I lay back with the new sun shining in my face and laughed. I was so happy.

I was alone when I woke up. For a few moments I didn't know what I was, let alone who I was or where I was. The distant noise of traffic said this was a world where
cars existed. The concept of what a car was –
just
. Turning onto my side, I found a note under an unopened can of Quilmes, scribbled in biro on what looked like a page torn out of my notebook. My satchel was open nearby, but when I looked inside it my notebook wasn't there. This was a worry too awful to contemplate and so I pulled the note from beneath the beer, hoping for some instructions.
Your name is Don Martinez. You do not remember anything. Not even about your wife, who is in grave danger. You must find her. Now, go to the bathroom.

No, it was not as useful as this.

Dear Liam (and James)

You fell asleep. Now I've started worrying and won't be able to rest. I'm going back to face the music with Arturo. It will be easier now than later. Thank you for a very lovely evening.

Lizzie
XXX

After I had read the note, in a gesture that was all to do with the coping mechanisms of style and little with desire, I opened the can of beer and took a swig. It was wet, I can say that for it.

‘Bravo!' called James from the bedroom. He appeared out on the balcony in a clean shirt, wet hair and sunglasses.

‘What on earth do you look so pleased about?' I asked.

‘You may well ask,' he said, raising his clenched fists to his shoulders and gyrating his hips in a sickening motion as if he were hula-hooping.

‘Stop that,' I croaked.

He complied but pulled out his BlackBerry and brandished it at me. ‘Email from Daniel's agent, expressing her client's desire to sign a contract with us. Job
done
.'

He put his phone back in his pocket and began to stretch his right arm behind his neck and over his left shoulder, repeating again the other way.

‘She probably wants to write you
into
a novel,' I said.

‘And so she should.'

‘As a sort of grotesque Dickensian caricature.'

‘Now, Liam,' he said, stopping stretching and returning inside the room, ‘that's hurtful. I'm going to order us breakfast from room service, and then we can start.'

‘Thanks,' I said. ‘Start what?'

He didn't answer and I heard him back up the phone and order two
desayunos Inglés
, coffee and orange juice.

When he came back onto the balcony he was holding the notebook I had recently finished my novel in. He flourished it at me like a red card.

‘You know, I think this could make everyone a
lot
of money,' he said. ‘And what's best, in a way Craig would have just
loved
. A fitting tribute, if you will.'

‘You read it?'

‘I loved it. Well done, Liam: it's really very fucking good.'

‘You mean it?'

‘Yes, I mean it.'

I felt my hangover lifting.

‘Do you think you might want to, er . . .'

‘Of course I want to publish it. There's just one big stumbling block,' James went on, ‘but I know just how to get over it.'

And then he told me his plan.

Chapter 19

E
ditor's introduction to
My Biggest Lie
by Craig Bennett (October 2009, Eliot, Quinn)

The night when Craig Bennett won the Man Booker Prize in 2000 exceeded my wildest dreams. Not only was it the first time that a novel I commissioned won the prize; but it was won by a writer who had become my best friend. It was an achievement beyond any expectations for a debut writer whose talents nevertheless truly deserved it.

Bennett's life was something of a boomerang (cultural stereotyping intended): flung from the UK to Australia as a young boy; continuing to spin onwards in his twenties to Latin America (a place that would be enormously important to his writing); before returning back to the UK and the success of first publication, at which point his profile, and the myth of his ‘bad behaviour', spiralled out of control.

Bennett was born in Sydney after his parents emigrated from Yorkshire. He was the son of Ralph and Maureen. He lived with them and his sister until his mother left his father for another man. Craig alone continued to live with his father, who gave up his engineering job and moved them
to the country, having bought a partnership in a vineyard in New South Wales.

Ralph Bennett is portrayed in Bennett's memoir
Juice
(2008) as a domineering, unpredictable character, capable of great charm and compassion, but also of bleak depression, violence and mania. Ralph never forgave his wife for the affair that ended their marriage and so Craig saw very little of her and his sister. Instead, he was ‘home-schooled' on the grounds of the vineyard his father was (only at times successfully) preoccupied with. Craig taught himself to drive at twelve, the same young age at which he describes beginning to drink wine regularly. The rhapsodic freedom he felt at that age – so different to most young people's – is I think the key to understanding his work.

At thirteen the authorities caught up with him and he was sent to boarding school, where he was expelled in his second month, but the next attempt to educate him met with more success and he remained at Victoria Boys School for the next four years, alternating his holidays with his father at the vineyard and his mother in Sydney. It was here he met Alejandro Montenegro, who would be a close friend of Craig's for many years. It is Montenegro who has unearthed this previously unseen ‘first novel' of Bennett's.

Montenegro's family was from Buenos Aires, and after finishing school Alejandro and Craig moved together there. Bennett was to spend many years in Argentina and briefly worked in the film industry. After the success of his debut novel, his circle completed as he moved back permanently to the UK, settling on the Welsh coast. It is of great sadness to everyone that at this calmest period of his life he should die of a heart attack during the London Book Fair.

This novel,
My Biggest Lie
, was written in the mid-1990s, shortly before
Talking to Pedro
. The typewritten manuscript was long believed lost and Bennett was trying to reconstruct the novel from memory when he died. Ostensibly an
autobiographical novel based on Bennett's first years in Buenos Aires,
My Biggest Lie
explores prevailing themes in his work: the relationship between autobiography and fiction, between person and persona, between truth and lies. The hunt for other ‘new' manuscripts continues.

Chapter 20

I
wanted to go home but now I was trapped in Buenos Aires. I had work to do.

Seen from the outside, I may not have appeared to be a man in captivity. I had left my monk's cell to move into a pleasant one-bedroom apartment in Belgrano sublet by the colleague of Lizzie's who'd gone travelling for three months. After all the moaning I had subjected her to about the hostel, I should have bounced out the door. But I felt sad saying farewell to another familiar place, handing my key back to the same miserable man who had checked me in on the first day.

‘You've been with us a while, ché,' he said mournfully. ‘Where are you going?'

In the background melancholic accordion filtered like a melodica through a dub beat. It was a suicide-inducing sound.

‘I'm renting an apartment in Belgrano,' I said. ‘Listen, do you like this music?'

He looked up. ‘Me, I like rock and roll. The Stones. Springsteen.' I hadn't seen him this enthusiastic before.
‘The boss – not Bruce, my boss – he makes us play this. For the atmosphere. The guests,
you
like it.' He was slowing down again now. ‘Argentine, but contemporary. We have some CDs for sale if you like,' he said, reaching for drawer beneath him.

‘No, no, please,
gracias
.'

He handed me my deposit and before I left I put
El Diego
back in the shelves. No one had taken up my old copy of
Labyrinths
, and so I returned this to my suitcase. Outside the taxi beeped its horn.

Cockburn had arranged for Eliot, Quinn to pick up the bill for my new apartment: expenses for my short-term contract as ‘on-site project editor'. To the strangers I met in bars now I could tell a story of why I was in Buenos Aires that implied no shame, no crisis, no breakdown. In searching to reverse loss I had found not love but profit. Lying had got me into this and now lying would get me out.

James' arrival back in the UK made national headlines. Not only had he signed Dani Requena, the ‘new Borges' (our night dancing in the Library of Babel had strongly affected Cockburn), but – sensationally – he had tracked down a never-been-seen lost novel from recently deceased Booker Prize-winner Craig Bennett.

I read out loud to Alejandro from the
Guardian
's website:

‘It was an unbelievable find,' said James Cockburn. ‘I'd heard a rumour from a colleague about an old friend of Craig's living in Buenos Aires. Sadly, they had fallen out. There's a love triangle described in the book which seems to be quite autobiographical. After a day running all over Buenos Aires
and chasing leads, I managed to track down Alejandro Montenegro: we immediately became great friends.'

Bennett and Montenegro met in a private high school in Australia and had been inseparable until late in their twenties. They worked together on film scripts in Buenos Aires.

During Cockburn's meeting with Montenegro he was given part of a photocopy of an early manuscript from Bennett. Fifteen years earlier, Bennett had given it over to Montenegro for his opinion. It was marked with crossings out and minor corrections in pen from Bennett.

‘Alejandro had always assumed this was a novel that had already been published,' said Cockburn. ‘He had always postponed reading Craig's novels, not wanting to be reminded of their painful falling out. He confessed to me that he always hoped he would get a chance to read them once they were friends again. He knew it was worth money but it meant more to him than that.'

But this manuscript was actually the unpublished first-written novel by Craig Bennett, completed when he was thirty years old, a manuscript long believed lost. Cockburn was transfixed as he realised what he was reading.

‘This is a brand new Craig Bennett novel, every bit as surprising and brave an expedition into the human heart as his four others. A young man's novel, it's less guarded and more romantic than the later works, and it sizzles with the eroticism of the Buenos Aires nightlife.'

Cockburn and Alejandro are reconstructing a manuscript with the aid of an editor in Buenos Aires, and Eliot, Quinn will rush-release the novel in October this year. ‘This is without doubt the literary event of 2009,' said James Cockburn, ‘and I will go as far as saying this century.'

This
century
. Not even this century
so far
. This century and the ninety years left of it.

Alejandro had not said anything while I read the story and when I finished I turned around to see him staring at me, holding a cafetiere and slowly shaking his head.

‘Your boss. He is an enormous arsehole, you know?' he said eventually.

Alejandro had to be in on the plot.

It can be easy to forget how competent and single-minded Cockburn is when it comes to a publishing opportunity. His senses are super-tuned: he had made sure during our night to get a card from Alejandro with the name of the legal practice where he worked, and it was there we headed in the afternoon after our calls to his mobile went unanswered. After a brief argument, Alejandro agreed to let us buy him a drink after work. Here I kept quiet and felt nauseous while Cockburn explained his proposal. Alejandro stared at me throughout.

‘And how do you feel about this, Liam?' he asked.

I was tired of feeling. I wanted nothing more than to surrender to instruction.

‘I'm in,' I said.

Alejandro was all I could have hoped for in my first editor. We met every other night in the week and on Saturday afternoons at his apartment. He read my pages and corrected my imaginings of what life had been like in Buenos Aires in the early 1990s. Sometimes he would chuckle: ‘I wish it had been like that; leave that in.' Other times he would be angry: ‘What species of charmless bore do you think we were?' He added magnificent
lunfardo
swear-words and expressions and suggested ways to render them against English style. He told me
long anecdotes over our coffee breaks and a few days later I presented them back to him in some reworked pages. My novel became better and less of my own. Alejandro breathed the ghost of Craig Bennett over it and I felt his laughter vibrate though its bones.

By the end of a month in which I worked longer than twelve hours a day, seven days a week, I had typed every chapter from my notebook onto my laptop and reworked each several times with Alejandro. We sent this to James. Now it was time for the next stage. On an old manual typewriter Alejandro owned, I copied the finished manuscript, including extra mistakes and sentences for Alejandro to scribble out and add notes to in a separate colour. This was the typewriter Craig used to borrow to write stories and film scripts. Alejandro had moved it and a sealed spare ribbon between the six different apartments he had lived in since Craig had left Buenos Aires fifteen years ago. As I pressed down on the old levers, I felt Craig's fingers rattling, clashing against the ancient ribbon, tattooing the words onto the pale page. The machine gleamed in black metal and made a racket like a factory. I had hardly drunk while I had been writing on the laptop but now I started on whisky early after lunch, drinking most of a bottle and smoking two packs a day in my lonely apartment. The old hunger for cocaine spread through my body and I lay out on my bed, feeling the flames lick along my arteries and roar in my skull. I was not myself. I was being consumed.

But when the fires died down, there would still be something left of me. I would bring myself back, sit down again and type.

A week later, I brought the manuscript to Alejandro.
We removed pages at random and crumpled them into balls, we set fire to their edges, we spat on them and covered them in cigarette ash, we splashed coffee and beer on them and ground them beneath our feet.

I photocopied them all and we gave this new copy the same treatment, scraping and scribbling, gouging and ripping.

I photocopied them again and FedExed these pages to James.

I had just finished my first publishing assignment since losing my job in April.

Despite my mixed feelings, as I posted the manuscript to England, I was proud of my work.

I was able now to go back home to England, as I'd resolved, but I had my apartment paid for another month and I decided to stay on. I had invoiced Eliot, Quinn for my work/unofficial advance, and James had promised to keep me topped up if I ran low. My money would go a lot further in Buenos Aires, and despite my homesickness it was hard to imagine living with my mum in Blackpool for more than a week or two.

More than anything, what stopped me from running to catch a flight was the feeling of having finished a job in Buenos Aires, of having had a colleague, a purpose, a desk. I was getting used to the place. I hassled James and he gave me a copy-editing job with the promise of some more; I began to toy with the idea of getting my own flat when this one ran out, making a living from doing free-lance work for English publishers. The old fiction began to try and reassert itself over the reality I knew: I would write my second ‘debut' novel from exile, live the life of
a Beckett, a Joyce, a Gombrowicz . . . as drawn by a child with bright crayons. I was too much of a tart to even attempt to write like them; I cared too much about people liking me.

It was weeks later now, the end of August, and I had not seen Lizzie or Arturo since our night out with James and Dani. I was not very surprised and had anticipated a cooling-off period while Lizzie and Arturo tried to resolve or ignore their differences. I'd sent one email to Lizzie just after James had left, saying how much I'd enjoyed my night out with her and how sorry I was for any difficulties it had caused. She had replied briefly, telling me not to worry about it, but that it would be difficult to see me for a while. She'd get in touch. After a week passed I accepted the implications of this calmly. No one was going to save me from myself but me.

Channelling Craig had emptied me out and now I began to put myself back in. I made regular phone calls to my mother and sisters and reassured them that I was working, had a roof over my head, was seeing how things might go here but would be back in England soon. Their relief brought home to me for the first time how much I had worried them, how much they must have feared me repeating my dad's disappearance. I kept meaning to phone my dad too, but I felt guilty that I was still here, that I'd gone back on my decision to go and see him. I resolved to go to see him as soon as I arrived back in England.

Dani Requena contacted me and I met her for lunch. We talked about – what else? – books, and she probed me about the new Craig Bennett novel James had discovered. When had he discovered it? Why hadn't they mentioned it at the dinner? She knew there was something amiss, something entertaining, and I was very close to confessing
to her. So close, I decided I could not be trusted to see her again and put her off when she next suggested meeting up.

This is not a story of a remarkable reform. There were times when the allure of cheap stimulation and easy sociability was too much and I ended up on sofas in strange apartments arguing with people whose names I could not remember in the morning.

On one occasion a man wanted me to fuck his girlfriend while he watched. It was so much the wrong thing to do I decided I really should do it, except: I really didn't want to. I tried to sleep on their sofa, listening to them in the other room, appalled and compelled and crazy, before I ran out into the night, far lonelier than I had been before I met them.

Perhaps I needed those minor, controlled breakdowns that I could attribute the next day to a temporary chemical imbalance. I bled my madness in small doses.

In the hope that it would help me to avoid getting into such situations, I had started writing something else, a novel about a publisher who accidentally killed one of his novelists. And I had resumed my grand undertaking, the best love letter the world had ever seen. I was only beginning now to realise how much I had underestimated the task, just how many hours and drafts would be required. The codes of love had been exhausted, had exhausted her, and I had to break through them now, to the moments of loss and truth that I believed must lie beneath them, the feeling I had within me that it must somehow be possible to make her feel too.

The novel was my morning book. I lay on my bed, remembering and inventing conversations, writing a paragraph an hour, crossing it out an hour later. In the afternoon I copy-edited the biography of an indie-superstar Cockburn
was publishing. It was not until the evenings that my work really began. I had my notebook, valentine-card red and leatherbound, the type favoured by pretend Hemingways and Picassos and myself – and I took it with me on walks around Buenos Aires, to cafés and bars, to cheap
parrillas
and pizza joints. The end of the night would often come with me sitting on a bar stool at Mundo Bizarro, straining to read my last sentence in blue sodium lighting while the disco ball spun brighter petals across the pages, autumn falling in the garden of forking paths. I wrote for hours each evening, and after two weeks I had barely ten pages left to fill, a madman's diary. I knew that the greatest love letter in the world would not be this long, would be, at best, the average length of a short story in the
New Yorker
. Still, I continued to work. I would write out all the clichés of love and cross them out and with what was left form a concentrate of pure communicated love. I bought another notebook, and it was on one night when I was filling this in that I felt a pat on my back and turned around to see Arturo.

Alejandro had given me his version of our falling out: ‘It was most entertaining and then it wasn't. The two English editors who could already not stand up somehow got hold of some ecstasy in Mundo Bizarro and didn't offer any to Arturo. So when Cockshop had his hands all over the nice English girl, Arturo got angry. It was James he had meant to hit, not you, but you walked in the way and started delivering a lecture about old-fashioned attitudes towards women, and then, when your friend mentioned the Malvinas – he used, of course, a different word – it became, unsurprisingly, an issue of national pride. The house drug dealer took issue. If you hadn't had such a dramatic bleeding lip I suspect Lizzie would have
been on Arturo's side, but as it was . . . it ruined a perfectly nice evening.'