My Biggest Lie (12 page)

Arturo had gone pale as I told him this story. He had his head in his hands. Hernán had come back and lost interest; now he was talking to Aleman.

‘Liam?' Arturo asked, eventually. ‘How are you alive?' He stood up and embraced me. I felt the strength of his arms, smelt the fruitiness of his shampoo, hugged back and held.

‘Thanks, Arturo.'

‘Will you break up now?'

‘I . . . it's my fault. I don't want to break up with her.'

‘Did you not hit him?'

‘I did not hit him.'

‘Strange.'

‘It was only a suspicion at this time.'

‘Still. A suspicion. Strange.'

‘So, you don't actually suspect me of desiring Lizzie.'

‘Why?'

‘Or you would have hit me.'

‘Ah.
Naturalmente
.'

‘Why not me?'

‘You're too . . .
nervous
, English. I am not jealous of you.'

‘Thank you.'

‘You sound upset.'

‘You should be jealous of me.'

‘That's funny.'

‘That's not funny.'

‘No, it
is
funny.'

‘What about Ana-Maria, then?'

‘You get lucky.'

‘Fuck you.'

Hernán turned round. ‘What are you laughing about?' he asked Arturo.

‘He thinks I am jealous of him.'

Hernán fixed Arturo with a
telenovela
star's pregnant stare.

‘Oh, for fuck's sake,' I said, and went out for a cigarette. When I came back they had begun to argue and I quickly lost track of what they were saying. I tapped Arturo on the shoulder, pointed at Hernán and said, ‘Ignore him.' Hernán spat an insult in my face. I got off my stool and went outside for another cigarette. The sky was dark now; we'd been drinking for hours. My heart was jumping and I breathed deeply, slowly, trying to put myself back into real time. I hadn't eaten all day, too sick with jealousy in the morning, too full now. If I kept this up, perhaps, like Bennett, my heart would just give up the fight. Was that what happened when you forgot what it was fighting for? When I collapsed, would anyone rescue me? Sarah had rescued me once already after Bennett had died. I couldn't keep expecting her to.

Back in the bar Hernán was at one side of the counter, talking to Aleman; Arturo was at the other, brooding.

‘Can I ask you something?' I said to Arturo.

‘What?'

I looked up at Hernán. ‘In keeping with your philosophy, why haven't you hit
him
yet?'

‘You think I should be jealous of him?'

‘He isn't as good-looking as you, I admit. Or me. But
doesn't he always want you to think bad of Lizzie? How much is it him? I saw him after your concert, watching you talk to Lucila. He looked at you like he hated you.'

‘No. Hernán is my friend.'

‘OK. Well, Lizzie is your girlfriend.'

‘You don't understand.'

‘Don't start that again.'

He screwed up his face. ‘I need something.'

I rummaged in my pocket.

‘This is not what I meant,' he said, and he walked away in the direction of Hernán.

I ordered another beer and listened to the sounds of the bar swarm into white noise. I shut my eyes and dropped my head and . . .

An outraged shout snapped me out of my trance. I looked up to see Arturo push Hernán. Hernán pushed him back and shouted something else, and in response Arturo swung and punched him in the face. Before Hernán could reply, Aleman had rushed from behind the bar, grabbed Artruo and bundled him out of the door. Hernán addressed the room, his hands outspread. There were only a few of us left and soon his eyes rested again on me, on my own at the bar.

I got up, unsteadily, looked around to see if I was leaving anything behind. Hernán strode up to me and pushed me. He said something nasty about my mother that I could understand by now. He was ridiculous. I had an urge to lean over and kiss him on the cheek. I stood up and pushed past him to the door but he grabbed my shoulder and spun me around. I blocked his punch but it knocked me back and I tripped over my feet. I was scrambling back up when he kicked me in the side.
Ooh
, I heard. He backed off then, unsure if he'd gone too far.
I stood up again and looked at him. He was smaller than me but tougher-looking. He came forward again and I blocked another of his punches with my arms. Next thing, we were rolling around on the floor together, grasping each other's wrists. Aleman arrived and pulled Hernán off me. My glasses had fallen off somewhere and a kind old man handed them back to me, shaking his head. It is very hard to be a hard man who wears glasses. That was my excuse. Hernán was struggling to break free from Aleman. ‘
Vamos
,' commanded Aleman, and even I understood that.

Outside, Arturo was preparing to do what was dramatically demanded: return to the bar to announce passionate threats to Hernán. I played my part and physically restrained him from this, while Hernán struggled with Aleman. Each struggling pair could see each other through the door and Hernán and Arturo shouted back and forth at each other. We were all performing well. Arturo wasn't struggling very hard. A few metres down the road, a phone box, or what I had thought was a phone box, opened, and a policeman stepped out, looked towards the commotion and strode towards us.

‘
La policia
,' Arturo shouted through the door, and led me calmly round the corner before breaking into a sprint. I ran after him. This was becoming fun.

Now we were in Mundo Bizarro, my favourite bar, just round the corner from the hostel. We'd slowed to a walk after running around a couple of corners and then hailed a cab. I'd thought the running was a bit excessive, but Arturo knew his police better than me. We were in the extremely good mood that comes from having had a fight
and successfully fled from a policeman. He was very pleased I had hit Hernán: ‘We are brothers now.'

We sat at the bar, drinking Fernet-colas and taking trips to the bathroom. I waved at a couple of women I recognised from the youth hostel. They came over and we flirted with them, we were charming and funny and deranged and stupid. We were some of these things. I bought us all drinks, and when the women gave us chaste kisses on the cheeks and went home it was disappointing but OK, like something awful had been avoided. The relief quickly vanished as I realised I was going to have to go home with myself again soon.

Half an hour ago it had been nine, but now it was two in the morning. I was out on the street with my arm round Arturo. He was slurring something about brothers in my ear. He stumbled and we fell against a shop front, laughing. He grabbed onto my belt and pulled himself upright. Careful, I said, as we walked past one of the phone boxes the policemen sat in. I wasn't sure where we were walking; I was just walking, with Arturo. When he disappeared into an alleyway and started pissing against the wall, I copied him. We finished and zipped up and then I came towards him.

He was surprised when I put my hands on his waist but not shocked. He smiled at me, a cocky smile. He didn't pull away when I kissed him. He let me kiss him. I put my hand in his hair and kissed him more firmly. He put his hand in mine and kissed back. We kept going. He took my hand and placed it on his stomach, pushed it down into his jeans. And just as I felt his cock and wondered how I was going to get out of this, and whether I wanted to, he spun away, laughing, spinning through two more circles back into the street. His hand shot up suddenly
and for a second I thought he was requesting permission to ask a question, that or making a Hitler salute – and then a taxi pulled up behind him. ‘
Adios, Inglés
,' he called, opening the door and getting in.

But before the car drove away he wound down the window and stuck his head out. ‘Remember,' he shouted. ‘Tell Lizzie we were at the game.'

Chapter 15

D
espite the unalterable pain of every breath in this foul Sarah-less world, I still went to Spanish class and was beginning to improve. I ordered my morning cortado and lunchtime ravioli with a disciplinary flourish and could comment, idiotically, on the weather to incredulous waitresses. I would normally run into Lizzie in the corridors of the language school, but after three days I still hadn't seen her. On the fourth, I saw her appear at the end of a corridor. She glanced in my direction, held my stare for a second without expression and walked back into a classroom. It wasn't a look that encouraged me to wait for her to come out again.

Later that afternoon, she sent me an email. The hostel's communal living room was quiet that day and I read it on the computer there. Lizzie knew what had happened in Sao Paulo; Sarah had written to her the next day while I was out with Arturo.

She hadn't wanted to tell me that you had split up because she realised you hadn't told us, but after you surprised her
like that she felt she had to. I don't want to have a go at you, Liam. It's weird you didn't tell me you and Sarah had split up, but I can see you hoped you hadn't. You cheated on my oldest friend and she dumped you: it's not the best basis on which to begin a friendship. I think you came close to telling me back at the gallery that day, and it sounds like you half-told Arturo at the weekend. I can see you're a mess
.
But you being a mess doesn't entitle you to mess up my life. Arturo came back ranting about what you said about Hernán, about how he'd worked out what was going on, how you'd helped him see what was happening. I can't understand why you'd break my confidence like that. I trusted you. Why would you do that? Sarah's obviously better off without you and so are we. You've left me with a pile of shit to deal with, but I will deal with it, and Arturo and I will be fine. There's nothing for me to hide any more. Thanks for that. I suspect that's not the case with you. So long, Liam. I hear Mexico City's nice this time of year. Lizzie.

Tangled together with the shame of being caught out in a lie was the usual relief. The slow doomy wait to be revealed as the person I like to think I'm not was now over. And just as I had feared, so too was my friendship with the person I liked more than anyone else I had met here.

I wrote back a quick reply, accepting her judgement of me. There was a moral certainty to the email I couldn't help thinking was sometimes dubious. Any moral certainty from our untested generation appeared that way to me, but that was probably my flaw and it wasn't the time to argue about that. I promised her I had never told Arturo her story about Hernán. I was sure I hadn't; I'm not one of those drunks who loses track of what they've said to
people. I'm too well-practised at being drunk to do that. I regret what I say with awful clarity. So I told her that I had seen Hernán bad-mouthing her and tried to protect her. I apologised that this had gone wrong, thanked her for looking after me, and then I retreated to my room to absorb myself in my sentimentally noble sign-off and feeling sorry for myself.

Lizzie didn't reply and the next day I skipped Spanish. Hans came to find me afterwards. It was his last week in the hostel; he was flying back to Germany on Saturday.

‘What have you done to that attractive teacher?' he asked me. ‘I said hello to her in the corridor today and she looked like she wanted to spit at me.'

I took him to a bar and told him the story. When I'd finished I waited eagerly for his put-down, for the insensitivity that might transmute the situation into comedy. It didn't come. Instead he reached over to give me a hug and I struggled to resist the urge to push him away. When he left two days later I was glad. We'd taken our friendship into the emotional territory it had been designed as a holiday from, and as we ‘celebrated' his last night, in Mundo Bizarro, we talked to everyone except each other.

The next week I started Spanish classes again. I needed something to concentrate on. Lizzie avoided me successfully and each time she did I grew more melancholy. I began to spend my afternoons in Alejandro's bar. I'd sit right up at the counter, drinking coffees for the first half of the afternoon and beer into the evening – adding new pages to Sarah's epic love letter but devoting more and more of my time to the other notebook, to piecing my novel together. I had to do something. I couldn't eat food
any more. Sleep was a pornographic dream, starring Sarah, Sarah, Sarah. I don't think I had ever been more miserable, more furious. Writing the novel was a distraction from that, a discipline in self-awareness, in forgiveness and contrition.

Alejandro arrived most evenings at six and sat at the other end of the bar. He would give me a curious glance and then pretend to ignore me while he bantered with the barman in his impregnable Spargie. For the first two evenings, we said nothing to each other at all. The young man I had seen him argue with before never appeared again and by the third evening Alejandro and I were smiling at each other. Our game had become quite amusing to ourselves. ‘
Uno mas cerveza para mi amigo aqui
,' he ordered and the bartender placed a small beer in front of me. ‘
Por favor
,' I asked the waiter, ‘
dices “gracias” de mi al Señor
.' ‘
El pibe dice gracias
,' the old bartender said solemnly to Alejandro after wincing at my Spanish. Alejandro turned to me and smiled and held his glass aloft. I mimicked him. ‘
Salud!
' we said simultaneously, and I went back to writing about him in my book.

That evening, with a polite nod towards me, he had left the bar before I had chance to buy him a beer back. I was ready the next day when he walked in and nonchalantly ordered him one, barely glancing at him. He grassy-assed and carried on his daily chat with the bartender. He was wearing a good suit, dark blue with a very faint, almost imperceptible grey stripe woven within, matched with a paler blue shirt and a dark tie loosened to undo the neck by one button. I noticed it because I was writing it down in my book. Alejandro wore a full beard that might have looked scruffy without the balance of his
impeccable tailoring. There was something in his smartness that was trying to rebel. That was one way to look good in a suit. I struggled to imagine him as a lawyer.

‘So, someone is writing the world another novel,' he announced suddenly.

‘How do you know I'm writing a novel?' I asked.

‘How do you know you are someone?' he said. ‘But look at you. I struggle to imagine you're doing something
useful
.'

I raised my beer to him. ‘Salud.'

‘What are you writing about?' he asked.

‘I'm trying to distract myself from writing the longest love letter in the world to my ex-girlfriend by writing instead about Amy Casares and Craig Bennett.'

He went quiet then. ‘How is Amy?' he said eventually. ‘You know her?'

‘She's a friend. She writes me nice emails telling me I'm not worthless.'

‘Do you write emails to her telling her you
are
worthless?'

‘Oh, God, yes, I suppose I do,' I admitted. ‘Poor Amy.'

‘Poor Amy . . .' he repeated absently. ‘Which makes me think, is this going to be a good novel?' he said, gesturing at my notebook.

‘It's going to be better than the love letter. Perhaps you could help me?'

‘And how could I do that?'

‘You could tell me about your friendship with Craig, with Amy, about the good times you had.'

‘You want the good times?'

‘The good times.'

‘I could tell you about the good times, I suppose. On the condition you promise not to ask about the bad times.'

I promised. But Craig and Alejandro's good times became samey after a while. Drugs, women, rebellion; the insulting of bores, the besting of the authorities; the stoical receipt of punishment, the avenging of slights . . . a chemical Don Quixote and Sancho Panza whose antics I could see stretching out for the same thousand pages.

‘So why would you stop being friends?' I asked.

He looked at me and seemed more relieved than angry I had broken my promise, but he said, ‘I really don't want to talk about this. If I give you a quick summary now, will you truly promise not to ask me any more questions?'

Again, I promised.

He sighed and signalled to the barman that he needed another drink.

‘This was Craig's place. He had never been as happy as he was here. It wasn't just that he felt free of his father. The atmosphere suited him, the chaos, the confusion, the bureaucracy. It was a stage for him to be exasperated on. Behaving nobly in the face of a culture that provoked all-consuming
bronca
, yes? It was the trick of his charm, his persona. And it suited him, because of that crazy upbringing alone on a vineyard with his father, it suited him to be a man apart from the culture, to always meet people from across a distance. So he didn't follow Amy when she left for Europe and, in order to make this seem logical, he continued to take his pleasure in Buenos Aires. But she had gone, and the pleasures he took now made it likely she was gone for good. But if he had followed her . . . he'd have left me behind for one, and I was so much part of his pleasure back then. Some states of mind can only occur in a certain space, in certain company. When she went, I was pleased. She'd been in the way. We worked better one to one. But when she was there I was
all the good things for Craig that she wasn't; as soon as she was gone I was all the worst things, a mirror reflecting what he had lost. It took such a short time for him to realise this, for me to realise what I had become for him. If he had gone with Amy, I think the reverse would have happened. He didn't want to have to choose and so when he did, he wanted what he hadn't chosen. And I do not want to think about what finally happened.'

He turned his face away in embarrassment.

‘What? I asked.

He looked hard at me now. ‘You are ruining our friendship,' he said quietly, but then he continued.

‘We were fighting in my kitchen and I waved a knife at him. I can't remember what we were fighting about – maybe money or drugs, or a lie one had told the other, a deflection most probably from what we were really arguing about. We were close to being drug addicts. As close as you get. And I was waving this knife, getting into the whole performance of it. I would never have used it on him, on anyone, and of course Craig knew this. And, what, to teach me a lesson he did what he did? This is why I stopped talking to him. I held the knife out and waved it, and I think we both then realised how ridiculous this was. He grinned, and then he jumped straight into the knife, as if to teach me a lesson. I don't know, as if to prove the knife did not exist, that I was not holding it up towards him, that his imagination was greater than mine. I pulled it away but it hit an artery in his arm. We were both covered in his blood. After the hospital patched him up he flew to Spain to try to make up with Amy and I never saw him again. I nearly killed him.'

‘I did kill him.'

‘Oh, yes, so you claim.' He chuckled bitterly. ‘He was
the kind of man to leap onto a knife. If I had been there I would have warned you. I would have tried to warn you.'

They were the people I thought I loved, the bad role models, the fearless, the futureless, the ones who jumped onto knives. Emulating them was bad faith, pure style, and dishonestly against my basic inclination to hard work and kindness – though that was easy to forget in bursts of delighted excess. It was harder to forget in my year of disasters, when my actions energised the persona I had tried on for size and began to efface the person who had been there before.

When I went back to the café the next day Alejandro didn't turn up, or the next. I felt guilty that I had deprived him of his routine and changed mine so he might think it safe to return.

I had been avoiding looking at my money after my expensive trip to Brazil and a few transactions with Aleman and El Coronel, which, while not particularly expensive in themselves, led to ruinous generosity in bars and impetuous dealings with taxi drivers. I was shocked to find out at the start of July that I had only enough money left to stay for another month. While I yearned for England, it was an England that no longer belonged to me – and I dreaded moving back to my mum's house in Blackpool. I imagined it as the beginning of the end of my life.

Thankfully a few days later I received notice that my application for a writing grant from the Arts Council had been successful. They were giving me nearly five thousand quid, enough to support six months more in Buenos Aires. It was the happiest thing that had happened to me since
I had arrived, and despite everything I tried to call Sarah to tell her. It felt like a sign that I could be something else, someone she would like more than the bad memory of me. After the fourth call rang out without answer I rang my mum instead and told her the good news. It wasn't such good news to her. I had finally come clean about my circumstances and she thought, quite sensibly, that I should come home and get another job. I did my best to reassure her I was OK and promised I would be back for Christmas.

Mexico City's nice this time of year.
I never saw Lizzie any more in the corridors of the language school. I thought of her all the time and wished I could share my good news with her, my good money with her, on a splendid night out to celebrate. She never replied to a second email when I tried again to present myself more positively; and so I had no choice but to leave her alone.

My Spanish course finished and without it my days lengthened and I grew more lonely. I began to work in the library, a short walk away. Being lonely, bad for myself, was good for the novel. I sat back and made Amy, Craig and Alejandro talk to each other. Craig said to Amy what I wanted to say to Sarah and Amy said to Craig what I wished she wouldn't. I was learning. I was hurting. I was writing, and I began to feel the thrill of approaching the end of a first draft.