My Biggest Lie (18 page)

I couldn't remember being punched by Arturo, and there had been no pain anywhere on my face the next day, so I had put Alejandro's story easily to one side. Now, as I faced Arturo's dark-stubbled chin and implacable expression, I had no idea if he was planning to hit me, for the first or the second time. Perhaps he was also wondering. I decided to make it more difficult for him by smiling and standing up to embrace him, leaning over to kiss his cheek.

‘I am sorry I hit you,' he said.

‘I had to have two teeth replaced,' I said.

‘No!' he said, trying only to look shocked and not slightly proud.

‘No, not really,' I said. ‘Sorry. I didn't even know you'd hit me.'

‘You knew I'd hit you.'

‘No, honestly.'

‘I think you know.'

‘OK, I know.'

‘I'm sorry I hit you.'

‘It was very painful.'

‘
Vale
.'

‘But I deserved it.'

‘OK.'

And then we were friends again. I asked how Lizzie was and he sighed.

‘It's not good. She's on holiday from the language school, travelling with her friend. I don't want her to go. She says she has to, I have to learn to trust her. We are maybe broken up. We see when she gets back. Tell me, what happened at the end of that night when she got back to her flat so late?'

I told him the truth, omitting one small kiss, just as I had not mentioned one other small kiss to Lizzie.

‘That's what she said,' he said, shaking his head, as if disappointed to find out he had not caught his girlfriend, or whatever she was now, in a lie. I think he believed me. I was too poor a liar in his eyes to really represent a threat.

I offered him no more advice about Lizzie. I owed that at least to her. And to him. When Arturo invited me over to join him and his friends, I was tempted, but something made me stop.

‘I'm sorry,' I said, ‘I need an early night, I've got work to do tomorrow.'

‘How long are you staying here?' he asked.

‘I'm not sure,' I said, beginning to realise that wasn't true.

‘I'll see you again before you go?' he asked. ‘You have my number?'

‘Just in case I don't, come here,' I said, and we kissed and embraced again. Perhaps I held on too long – it was him who pulled away first. ‘If not here, I will see you again in England,' he said. ‘The drinks will be on me,' I said, and we both smiled like we believed it would happen. ‘The drugs too, I hope,' he said. He looked over his shoulder towards his friends. Then he winked and squeezed my arse and walked away. I sat at the bar and finished my drink, watching him laughing with his friends, sweeping his hair back and scanning the bar's horizon for interest. He was beautiful and I was glad for him.

An hour later, when I got back to the apartment, I went online and booked a flight to Gatwick, leaving in a week's time.

* * *

The next morning, after a Spanish lesson, instead of working on my novel I set off on a walk. I headed out into the Microcentro, through the elegant business women, through the wide shopping streets and out west, through Korean neighbourhoods, past desultory prostitutes looking for trade, cumbia smashing out from shop-front ghetto-blasters, bargain shops selling two-peso Marias, graffiti murals of streetcars, Che Gueveras, Frank Sinatras, a sudden white church in a tree-lined square, a kung-fu palace, life fading out into middle-class suburbs, quiet graveyards, end-of-the-line metro stations. North next day, designer shops into wide boulevards, packs of thirty dogs walking one human in the park, past a bronze Borges staring over a fountain at a manicured hedge, a lonely walk that found me turning sooner than I expected, northwest in a circle and back to the centre.

During my walks I would look at people and try to imagine their lives. I say people, I mean women. It was a kind of prayer I found easier than the ones I had been taught. What did she do with those shoes when she got in? Did she kick them off across the floor, collapse on a sofa and light a cigarette? Did she place them neatly in a shoe rack, have a shower and cook dinner? What book was she reading? What food did she cook? Did she go home at all?

Dreaming of such intimacy convinced me I was destined to live a life of solitude for ever. So I was delighted when I bumped into Ana-Maria, coming out of a clothes shop, her smile towards me turning into a look of delicious mock anger. It was almost impossible to imagine that this was a woman who had made love to me one night, who had taken command of me, in this city, a woman in a sleek dark blue dress with hard pointed feet, in the type
of shoes that made me crazy, feet that had sloped and pressed into my back.

‘You are still
alive
,' she said, coming forward and kissing me on both cheeks.

‘I am now. I had been wondering. You look incredible.'

‘I intend that,' she laughed.

‘Do you know I once had a dream I went to bed with a woman as beautiful as you?'

‘It was a
good
dream!'

‘You would have thought so, wouldn't you? I don't always enjoy good dreams the way a normal man would.'

‘Practice, is what you need.'

‘Practice, that's a good idea. Do you want to, er, meet up one –'

‘Ha ha! I am, er, with someone at the moment.'

I looked at her. I remembered her room, the dresses she made. She was talented. There were so many talented people. Perhaps I could become one myself.

She tipped herself even further forward on her toes and kissed me goodbye. ‘Go home and practise dreaming,' she said, turning around and blowing me a kiss.

I got back to the flat late in the afternoon and settled down at my desk with the two red notebooks. I wanted to send my letter to Sarah before I left Argentina, announcing I was on my way back to see her. I was under no illusion she'd be delighted to hear this news. It really would need to be the greatest love letter in the world.

I looked at the notebooks, their many thousands of words in my neat handwriting, neat even when I wrote drunk. There was always one part I could hold still while the rest shook.

I shut the notebooks. I took a new sheet of paper and wrote my address at the top of it. Its exotic glamour did not escape me. But after that I tried to be direct and simple. I wrote that I was coming home, that I would like to see her. I wrote about the things I'd seen that day that had made me think of her, the way that she had made me see the things I'd seen that day. I wrote that it was becoming harder to imagine that we had lived together, that certain memories were fading and certain ones growing stronger. I admitted I had a stronger image of the first moment I realised she wanted me to kiss her than anything that happened later. That was probably a bad sign, but how to know?

After an hour and a half it was done. I re-read it, and though I knew I'd regret it in an hour, I put it in an envelope, went to buy a stamp and posted it.

It wasn't that day, it was the next day, that my sister called me. I was relaxed now I knew I was going home, determined to enjoy my last few days in Buenos Aires. I'd been out having coffee and reading Borges, who I was pleased and surprised to find no longer made me want to vomit. No one ever rang my phone so I hardly ever took it out with me. But when I got back to the flat I had several missed calls from my sister and a text telling me to ring her. I remember flinging my book on the sofa and collapsing into it with a sense of great satisfaction. Then I called her up. Her voice was strange.

‘Liam,' she said, ‘I'm really sorry. I've got some awful news.'

That morning my father had headed to his yoga class, as he did every Wednesday. It was a lovely sunny day, my
sister told me. I imagined the bright skies as he left the house, how he had been happy, alive. He felt better, and because he wanted to be better he had gone for a run on the common, determined to lower his blood pressure, determined to be as young as he looked and felt, determined that the mistakes of the past would not destroy the future.

A woman walking her dog found him and called an ambulance. By the time they arrived, it was too late.

Chapter 21

T
he last page of a long love letter:

remember when we came back that night on your birthday, late in that first summer, the smell of smoke and grass in your hair, the splayed trees caught like Christs? We danced around your room, the evening deeper bluing minute by minute, the day and the night stretched so thin we seeped into each other. Every one of the first nights was like that night when we felt like that. I can't imagine feeling like that now, but I can remember how it surprised us, how we surprised ourselves into someone new.

Now we have knackered spines and hangovers hurt more. We own nothing of any permanence. Which could mean: we are free. We could do it again, surprise ourselves by what's possible, into the new life.

I mean it, that dirty word love. When I say I love you it is selfish, hungry and manipulative. I owe you that, at least: you're gorgeous. You make a glorious possession. I want. The way you chew your hair. The way you smudge your stolen make-up. That dance of yours, which no one in the
world before had ever thought to do. I love. I want to make you happy too. I want to make you laugh. I want to be there for you. I want you to be you and for me to try but always fail to imagine what that's like. I want you to be not me. A mystery. I love you. Don't just hate me for it. Forgive me and have your revenge. Love me back.

I know it's hard to answer a letter like this. All I want to know is one thing for now. I'll be back next Wednesday. Can I come and see you?

Chapter 22

H
e was buried in a wicker coffin, a basket with a lid, with ivy and flowers threaded through the strands. I stood at the base, at the head, and with my sister's fiancé was the first to take the weight of his body from the hearse. He was heavy, heavier than he had looked the last time I had seen him, too long ago, heavier than I had ever realised. Nearly two hundred people lined the path to the hall, both his parents, my mum and the nice one of the two subsequent wives, my sisters, his sister, all the new friends he had made, and we shuffled through them, my shoulder burning, damage accruing. When I turned to my left I was shocked to find out I could see him through the strands of the coffin, his face covered in transparent white gauze like the packaging a new laptop or TV would come in. He had always looked young anyway and the gauze softened his features further; it was me I saw lying there. I had turned down the chance to see his body in the hospital. I didn't know if I would regret that. It was too late for that. I had to change my life or it could be me soon.

Later, when we lowered his coffin down into the grave, his friends from the bands he had played in began to sing. ‘Everyone hold hands and make a circle for Michael,' a woman shouted, too cheerily, too conventionally unconventional, and I pretended I had not heard and stepped forward closer to the lip of the grave. I shook off the hand of someone who tried to pull me back and held my head down, getting angry and relishing it, a lone figure inside an enlarging circle of people, pretending I was not aware of what was going on around me. Eventually his half-brother came and placed his arm around me and stood with me. I remained for a few seconds and let him lead me back into the circle. Someone sang
Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz.
It was something. It was as good as anything.

Afterwards, at the wake, I stayed by Mum while the many friends I had never met came and told me stories about a different man to the one I had known. There were a hundred fathers in the room: none of them sounded like him. The aunt I rarely saw told me what a mature brother he had been, how he'd tried his best to be the man of each of their houses, learning DIY, putting up shelves, fixing things – only for his own absent father, who paid the bills, to move them every couple of years, nearer to whichever new job he had taken. I hadn't thought about the damage done to my father, only of the damage he'd done to us. I had failed to imagine his life just as we had thought he'd failed to imagine ours.

My sisters and I stayed close, making jokes, laughing, drinking. We had all made our own separate speeches in the humanist service (we inherited our Catholicism only on our mum's side). The night ended somehow in a small-town disco, drunk beyond comprehension.

I caught a train the next day back up North, where I stayed with my mum for two weeks. It was a sunny September, and I walked the beach in the daytime while she was out teaching. How did my parents end up here, at the end of the world? It was a place to go to hide from the cops, a violent boyfriend, a drug deal gone wrong. They arrived here with me aged two, fresh-faced teachers in the full bloom of their optimism. So I simplify: I have no idea how they felt washing up at the end of a peninsula, staring across the wide, bleak, beautiful view to Morecambe Bay, the hills of the Lake District behind, all horizon and nowhere to go. It must have appealed to Dad. He found somewhere to stay put and managed to for fourteen years. It was the longest he would live anywhere in his life. I had been luckier than him, than my sisters. For sixteen years I had had my father with me. That was something. I would never again say that it wasn't.

The weeks went quickly. There was a date pressing on me, a date I never wanted the world to see. But no further apocalypses occurred and on that date I caught the train to London.

Chapter 23

L
ondon showed itself in the muted colours of an old TV set, a bad home video of itself.

But it was home. The damp air. The lack of emphasis in the grumbles of the pissed-off people on the Tube. The pushers, the shovers, the pigeons, the dickheads on daft bikes; their rudeness was a welcome-home hug.

I was just around the corner from my old office when the skies remembered me and I was washed into the London Review Bookshop to take shelter.

I'd accustomed myself to the constraints of the hostel's library, so the number of readable books on the shelves made me giddy. Then perverse: I bought
We Love Glenda So Much
, a collection of Cortázar short stories imported from the States, and settled down in the café to read. It turned out I could appreciate a high level of Latin originality with a proper English pot of tea beside me. I had completely disowned the barbarous taste of my man in Buenos Aires when I looked up and noticed my old publicity and marketing director Amanda Jones walk in. She was with a fashionable young man with dark hair
and glasses. He was either the newest young writer from Brooklyn I would soon hear about or a gleeful philistine from an agency about to reinvent ‘the book'. (Each week now brought joyful threats of violence to ‘the book'.) Amanda hadn't spotted me, and watching her I realised that I hadn't spotted that I knew other people in the room too. The agent Bill Flowers was busy talking in one corner with a dealer in rare books. He caught me looking in his direction and gave me a nod. I nodded back and carried on reading, but it was hard to concentrate. I was back in the world, in the book club. Confrontations were heading my way.

A shadow fell over Julio Cortázar, and I looked up.

‘Amanda,' I said. She was looking at me like she'd caught me watching pornography late in the office. Cockburn has a funny story about –

‘You're back,' she said.

‘I'm back,' I confirmed. ‘Amanda, I owe you an apology. Would you like to sit down?'

She harrumphed, but sat down anyway. ‘This won't take long,' she said.

‘Yes,' I said, ‘I agree about the uselessness of most apologies. But I never even attempted to explain to you what happened that night. Did you know my girlfriend left me in the morning? I couldn't think about anything else. If you told me that day that Craig had a heart problem, then it just did not go in. I wouldn't have just ignored that. By the time I knew, there was no stopping him. Or me, by then. It was much more difficult than it would have been earlier. Are you sure you told me about his heart?'

‘Both Belinda and I clearly said you were to keep him away from drugs. If this is an apology, it doesn't sound like it.'

‘I do remember that. I just assumed that was standard advice for all authors.'

‘It is!'

‘Well, see? I disobeyed you both, I'm sorry. But I thought I was just abandoning basic good practice, not endangering someone's life.'

‘You're welcome to defend yourself in whatever way you like. The man's dead. Do you even understand what that means? To be dead? He's
dead
.'

I flashed with anger and tried to stay calm. She didn't know about Dad. And neither, really, did I. I turned away from her. Was it my weakness that I found it so hard to condemn people, or hers that she found it so easy? Behind her the boy she was with had whipped out a laptop carved out of dull gunmetal. Bill Flowers was looking in our direction and I wondered if he had heard what I had said.

‘I'm sorry,' I said. ‘That's all. Thanks for listening.'

She shook her head. ‘I liked you, you know, when you first arrived. You went out of your way to be friendly, to find out how you could be helpful. That's what teamwork is. You and fucking Cockburn – that is not a team. Do you think he defends you in the office? Do you think it even occurs to him? You really did pick the wrong man to emulate.'

‘I really am sorry,' I said, beginning to get annoyed at being told what I already knew.

‘Yes, well. I presume it's coincidence you're here and you're not intending to come along tonight?'

‘What's on tonight, Amanda?' It came out like a challenge.

She pushed back out of her chair and was up. ‘Don't you dare think about it,' she said, and walked back to her table.

I would have left immediately if Bill Flowers had not arrived before I could get up. He peered at my book and raised his eyes.

‘Cortázar? Showing off? Bloody good writer, though. Where the fuck have you been?'

‘Argentina, actually.'

‘So that's why . . . Borges, labyrinths, Maradona . . .'

‘You seem to know as much as I do about the place.'

‘Right. Any good?'

‘No good at all.'

‘Thought as much. You know, I think I've just realised something. You're the “on-site editor” they mentioned in the
Bookseller
, aren't you? Was it you who really found this Bennett manuscript?'

‘Um . . . well . . .'

‘I knew it wasn't that
egregious
cunt. What a wanker, taking the credit like that.'

‘Well, it may as well have gone to a publisher. These days I'm just an unemployed aspiring writer.'

‘Nothing wrong with that.'

‘Apart from everything.'

‘Apart from everything. Do you have an agent?'

‘Probably not any more.' Suzy Carling had never contacted me again and I had never dared to contact her.

‘You know where I am.'

‘Thanks.'

‘Fucking convenient.'

‘What?'

‘Fucking convenient, that Bennett manuscript showing up, just when Cockburn needs a book that might sell some copies. Not a fake, is it? I wouldn't put anything past that cunt.'

‘Um, I, of course it's –'

‘Sounds like a fake to me. I'm joking. Tell Cockburn I'll be giving it a close read.'

‘Don't do that. I mean, yes, ha ha. I will.'

‘Bye then, Liam. Head up. Look after yourself.'

And then he was gone, back to his seat and his antiquarian bookseller, leaving me with an incipient panic attack. I left a fiver on the table for my tea and got out of there, avoiding eye-contact with Amanda. I didn't want to see anyone else from the literary world. I really didn't. But I was too late. As I opened the door to the shop, in came Olivia Klein and backed me up into the literary magazines. A copy of
N + 1
fell off the top shelf and hit me on the head.

‘Liam,' she said, looking shocked. I picked up the magazine and put it back. ‘How are you? I was at a party last night and saw James. I heard about your dad. I'm so sorry, are you all right?'

Dad was dead. I had begun to feel like this was a world where it was possible it would never be mentioned again. She came forward to kiss me on one cheek and I pulled back to kiss her on the other, like we did, but she held on and pulled me in for a hug. She was nearly as tall as me. The smell of her perfume, the softness of her cheek, it was too pleasant. I was so angry and this was so unexpected. Suddenly my chest was shaking against her shoulder. The same copy of
N + 1
fell off the shelf and hit me on the head again. It didn't help matters. ‘Oh, Liam, come on,' she said, ‘come out, come with me.'

She bought me a pint in the Museum Tavern.

‘What did James say?' I asked.

‘Just it was sudden, a heart attack – yes?'

‘Yeah, he was out running. He didn't know he was so ill.'

‘I'm sorry. My father died a year ago.'

Her father, the doctor, with his well-stocked library of European classics. It hadn't occurred to me that these people died too, or that they lived.

‘I'm sorry to hear that. How?'

‘Cancer.'

I was very sorry then. Comparatively I must have had it easy. I hadn't expected it so in many ways it was like it hadn't actually happened, I said. ‘I didn't speak to him enough. In some ways, things are just the same.'

‘I don't think it works like that.'

‘Why not? It has to work somehow.'

Up close, in daylight, you could see the pattern of freckles that seemed the only thing stopping her skin from being transparent. Her eyes were palest Alice blue.

She shrugged. ‘You'll find that out.'

‘I thought we didn't like each other,' I said.

‘I'm sure you loved each other.'

‘Thank you. But no, I thought
we
didn't like each other.'

‘I thought that too,' she said. ‘We probably
don't
like each other.'

‘You'll be pleased to hear that James and I have found the new Borges,' I told her. ‘The one you thought was missing.'

She laughed. ‘So where was he?'

I tutted. ‘Sexist.
She
.'

Sometimes it's the strangers who save you. It feels so light to shed an enemy, so simple when it's done. All our invented animosity turned into laughter. I made a friend. Two hours later, as arranged, I met up with Alejandro in the same pub. I hugged Olivia goodbye; she had been kind enough not to leave me on my own, and Alejandro
took over her shift. Eliot, Quinn had flown him over and put him up in a hotel for a week. It had been Cockburn's idea; Alejandro's presence here would authenticate the novel. No one really thought we could have been audacious enough to forge a Booker-winner's novel. I certainly wouldn't have had the courage to start the project on purpose.

When I had said goodbye to Alejandro before I caught my flight home I had told him about my dad. I don't remember much of the conversation afterwards, except that he was kind. I was drinking. He gave me a tight hug when I left for the flight. His dad was dead too. They all died. No one knew what a short time they lasted until it was too late.

We brushed over the subject now. The book was weighty enough and we spoke of it in whispers. Neither of us had seen it yet, apart from on Amazon. There was a strict embargo which no one had broken to review early. The reviews were all to appear in the weekend's papers. For now, it was still as unreal as it was on the morning when, after three hours' sleep and a morning beer, I had agreed to let James take command.

We had drunk a few drinks by the time Alejandro and I left for the launch, but I am good at drinking, it is my best skill, and so I wasn't too drunk when we arrived at the venue. As launches went, this was as formal as they came, rows of seating, and three different speakers. We had assumed I would get in easily as Alejandro's +1 but Amanda had posted a publicity assistant on the door to look out for me. As we mounted the steps to the entrance a slender Arabella whispered in the security guard's ear and he immediately stepped forward and pushed his palm out into my chest. ‘Are you Liam Wilson?' he asked.

‘I am a guest of honour and this is my invited friend,' began Alejandro, as the blonde girl raised her mobile phone to her ear.

‘Leave it,' I told Alejandro, walking back down the steps and beckoning him back to talk. ‘I'll never get in if I make a fuss.'

‘I'm going,' I announced to the bouncer, ‘you win', and I walked off away from the door.