My Biggest Lie (16 page)

James and I, pasty-faced, red-eyed, with droopy hair and dishevelled faces, were not obviously well-matched
opponents with the Argentines. But, as usual, if they had the skill, beauty, underhand tricks, we Brits would hope to win the day through sheer doggedness. James raised a non-existent cigarette to his lips and we left the table for a team-talk outside the restaurant.

‘Not very friendly this Alejandro, is he?' said James.

‘I don't think he likes
you
,' I said.

James spread his arms with the mystified innocence of an Argentine defender receiving a yellow card.

‘You're going on about Bennett too much. I told you he's touchy about him. Every question you think you're asking him is prefaced by such a long anecdote about one of the classic adventures of Cockburn and Bennett that it's a direct challenge for Alejandro to prove his stories are as good as yours. He's not interested in competing.'

‘Oh, well, thank you for reassuring me.'

‘I worry about you in that office without having me around to offer advice.'

‘I really wouldn't worry on that count, Liam: there's no shortage of people left who are happy to point out my shortcomings.'

‘How many more lines have you had?'

‘None! Well, one. And to be frank, I need another.'

‘No one
likes
Frank. At least wait until after dinner.'

‘Dinner. How unedifying.'

We went back in and James tried once again. ‘So, Alejandro, Liam tells me you and Craig used to get up to all sorts of trouble.'

‘Well, we were friends and we were young and brave and stupid,' he said and turned back to Arturo.

‘Well, go on, please tell us a story,' James persisted.

‘I am afraid,' said Alejandro, ‘that it was always Craig who told the best stories, certainly in public. I am shy,
you see.' He turned again to Arturo and said. ‘I need more intimacy to tell mine.'

‘Oh,
please
,' said James, and Lizzie and Dani joined in to ask Alejandro to tell us more.

‘Yes, tell us a story,' said Arturo.

Alejandro swatted an invisible fly. ‘Must I? It really was the usual shit. Heroin, cocaine, fraud, extortion. Young boys' games.'

‘Oh, come
on.
'

‘I do not know how to tell it without cliché. Liam? Perhaps you have found a way?'

Everyone looked at me.

‘Has he not told you, Cockblock, that he is researching the life of Craig Bennett in Buenos Aires and writing a novel about him? I have watched him writing it next to me at the bar. You write quickly, Liam. I have read it over your shoulder. There are some sentences I quite enjoyed.'

Cockburn had sobered up suddenly and was looking at me. Dani had become more alert too.

‘How do you do it, Liam?' Alejandro continued. ‘How should I tell our story? Any tips?'

I mumbled something glib about avoiding sex scenes and lyrical descriptions of taking ecstasy.

‘That doesn't leave us with much,' said Alejandro.

Dani spoke and Lizzie translated: ‘You never tell a story about someone else, only yourself.'

‘What about biographies?' asked Cockburn. ‘Don't you believe in them?'

‘I believe in their
existence
,' said Dani through Lizzie. ‘I have seen them in the biography sections.' She looked up at the unicorns on the wall. ‘They are not mythical creatures.'

‘Homosexuals,' said Alejandro.

‘Pardon?' James asked.

‘It's something we started at school. No women around then. It's what wrecked the friendship in the end. I didn't have as much trouble believing in it as a category of existence as he did.'

‘He never did settle down for long,' mused James. ‘But it was always Amy he talked about.'

‘Amy's a friend of mine,' I said. ‘He was talking about Amy on the night he died.'

‘You never write about someone else, only yourself,' said Dani, this time in English.

‘Oh, I know
Amy
,' said Alejandro. ‘I am sure you will want to tell it like he did,' he said, looking at me sadly.

The starters arrived – not for James or me – and I appreciated their quality as abstractly as I would that of a well-made violin bow.

Alejandro and Arturo went out and came back giggly and red-eyed from a cigarette break. Dani was increasingly having to interrupt James in English as she realised interrupting was the only tactic available to take part in a dialogue with him. Lizzie, however, was still contributing clarifications and explanations in English and Spanish, and I began to feel jealous. As James got into his flow, selling the imprint, his ambitions for the book, for her, for the future of modern letters, Lizzie, with her pithy summaries and asides, came across as his new, improved, more-talented lieutenant. While I knew this was only for tonight, I knew too that there was someone in London just like her, my real usurper.

Even surrounded by friends, I experienced the usual Buenos Aires loneliness, the unbelonging, the fear of waiters. As I watched Alejandro and Arturo giggle like
children under the skulls of legendary beasts, I felt as if it was me who had just smoked a spliff.

I could have done some coke, one can always do some coke, and that's exactly why I didn't.

Instead, I slipped out of my seat, out of the restaurant and round the corner onto the busy main road. Here I found a quiet neighbourhood bar, bought a beer, found the darkest corner and called my father.

I woke him up. I heard murmurs from a woman in the background before he promised to ring me back in five minutes. He had mentioned a new girlfriend before. In the minutes while I waited for him to ring me back, the bar's darkness began to oppress me and I walked outside to the street again. I leant back against a wall and looked out at the traffic flying past, so far from the woman I loved, and I tried to imagine the insensible vastness of so many other roads, so many versions of myself in every country staring at cars rushing past and seeking something other than fragments of their reflection in electric windows. I wanted home and I did not know where it was. Then Dad rang back.

‘Liam, how are you?' he asked. ‘It's nice to hear from you, even if it is so late.' He sighed the type of bone-weary sigh he had sighed on the phone shortly before and after he had disappeared for three years.

It was easier to forgive a sigh like that now. I hoped it wasn't how I had sounded to Sarah in the weeks before I left England.

‘Are you all right, Dad?' I asked.

As usual, he began to tell me about his work. After he had crashed out of teaching, he had become a freelance copy-editor, and now we were in the same industry he was always keen to talk shop. As I listened about his
deadlines for Sandra and Jonathan and the problems with Indian typesetters I found myself patting my pockets for a cigarette despite already having a lit one in my hand. Dad had become old without the support system, without the almost-paid-off mortgage, the wife, the salary. What could be passed off as light comedy for a younger man was dark and threatening to him. I see now he was looking to me for reassurance, for tips I could never give. But all his talk of money reminded me of my own dwindling resources and I couldn't help interrupting him.

‘Can we talk about something else, Dad?'

‘I'm sorry, Liam,' he said, sounding hurt. ‘What?'

‘It's not that I'm not interested,' I lied. ‘It's just I rang because I really needed someone to talk to and I haven't done any talking yet.'

‘Well, talk.'

‘Um . . .'

‘Where are you right now, for instance?'

‘I'm walking up and down a street outside a bar. It's about half-ten. Round the corner is a fancy restaurant I ran away from twenty minutes ago. I was having dinner with my old colleague James Co –'

‘I saw him on the telly last night discussing the future of the book.'

‘Really?' I was disappointed but not surprised. He loved being on TV. ‘How boring of him. Anyway, I was having dinner with him and the new Bolaño –'

‘The new Bolaño! What's he like?'

‘
She
. You sexist.
She
's all right.'

Dad chuckled. He had a good chuckle, stronger, more plausible than his sigh. He should have sounded like this a lot more. It was easy to make him laugh. He liked my stories, about my friends, about women I met, and especially
about publishing. He envied me for getting to meet novelists while he got to email academics. He would have liked me to spend more time telling him stories about them so he could relay them to his friends from the pub. We had a good time together in the pub. He wanted to be proud of me. We put on a show for each other. His friends would keep congratulating us on how close we were to each other.

‘You sound like you're having fun out there.'

‘I'm losing my mind, Dad, that's what I'm trying to say. I'm not joking. I'm losing it this very minute. I've got no one to talk to. Everyone's young and annoying or incomprehensibly Argentine. I miss Sarah. God, I miss Sarah.'

‘I'm sorry, Liam.'

‘Oh, I'm all right really.'

‘I bet you tell yourself that a lot.'

‘All the time. Always with a manly swig of a drink or pull on a cigarette.'

‘Ah,
cigarettes
. I've had to give up smoking.'

He'd been giving up for years, it was almost his hobby.

‘I just can't seem to get my blood pressure down,' he continued. ‘The doctor says I need to do more exercise, but when I do . . .' Dad's voice was tired out. He hadn't meant to cause all the pain he had. He just hadn't thought hard enough. My heart went out to him. I didn't mean it to, but it did. I wanted to tell him I understood. Subtract at least that from your sadness. You are forgiven.

‘I don't do much exercise here, either,' I said.

‘I've been getting DVDs, magazines,
Men's Health
, I've even started running. I can't do it. It's shown me how knackered I am. Really, Liam, I am.'

‘Perhaps you just need to try to accept you're slowing down. Tell me, is there any point after thirty when you
stop comparing how knackered you are with how much less knackered you used to be?'

‘Is there? Let me think. Certainly not after thirty-five. No. No, there isn't. It gets worse and worse.'

‘I thought it might.'

He laughed again. ‘Don't tell me
you're
worried about how old you are.'

‘Sometimes. But no, not really. I'm more worried about how young I am and what I'm going to do for the rest of my life now I've fucked up everything that mattered to me.'

I had tried to say that lightly. The line went quiet for a few seconds and then Dad spoke. ‘I don't think that hurts less when you get older.'

I shivered. It was getting colder. I took a deep breath, threw down my cigarette and asked the question I had given up asking him years ago.

‘Dad? When you went missing, where were you, what did you do? All those years, what were you thinking about?'

There was a long pause, a sigh I could draw by now. ‘I'm sorry, Liam,' he said eventually. ‘I will. We need to talk. I'd like to talk actually. It might be good for us both. Not like this, though. Face to face. When are you coming home?'

I had not been greatly missed in my absence. Most people had finished their food, except for Cockburn. Lizzie and Dani were giggling as they bullied him into taking mouthfuls of octopus or perhaps kraken that he was doing his best to avoid. Arturo and Alejandro were watching them and laughing. A severed human heart lay on my plate, leaking blood. My stomach amazed me with a carnivorous
lurch. I cut a piece off and chewed it, reached for a bottle of red and filled my glass rim-full.

I remember heading next to Mundo Bizarro . . . an argument, a drink being thrown . . . by a girl? At Arturo? Or was it Lizzie? A pill placed in my palm. El Coronel shouting. A punch aimed at James.
Las Malvinas son Argentinas!
We left. Lizzie and James in a taxi. Where was Arturo?

I was lying in a corner of a nightclub.
Porteños
were pointing at me and laughing. I staggered to my feet and checked my pockets. There were two packets of crushed cigarettes but I no longer seemed to own a wallet. I found my phone and saw someone else's smashing against a wall, shiny innards glinting against the streetlamp. It was 3.45 a.m. now and I had seventeen missed calls.

In the bathroom mirror I checked my face. My lips were covered in black filth, but when I washed this off I was semi-presentable. With enough cigarettes and gin-and-tonics and hardboiled irony I hoped I could lose the permanent seen-a-ghost expression of the ecstasy overdosee. Incredibly, as I dug my fingers in the ticket pocket of my jeans, I found a small plastic bag that probably contained coke. There was a wedge of notes I had folded up and squashed in there too. They'd both help. I splashed more water on my face, smiled at the guy next to me and left.

I was at least two drinks below normal. Once I had headed to the bar to make a start on the gin-and-tonics, I began to look around me. I didn't recognise the club, but in other, less disorientating circumstances I would have loved it. Heavy, Freudian house music played and blurred into the dry-ice and hot bodies dancing. The room I was
in was dark, narrow and low-ceilinged, and seemed to stretch forever into the distance. Mirrors on each side of the wall drew all the dancers who had ever lived in a procession towards the centre of the earth. It was a club as Borges would have described it in one of his interminable stories. It was likely I would be here for all eternity.

Such thoughts, at first a relief, began to oppress me, and I headed through the endless dance floor in search of my friends. I hoped I still had them. I had a feeling bad things had happened. The E – yes, it was certainly an E I could feel, and there was an awful suspicion that I had had two – made me forget my predicament in short flashes, and I found myself grinning at the boys and girls I passed.