My Biggest Lie (6 page)

* * *

The mephedrone whooshed up in me straight away and I found myself in a corner of the kitchen with Lucy, one of the actresses, talking quickly about something and inviting her out to dinner. I offered her some mephedrone but couldn't find my packet when she accepted. She had some coke anyway and we did a line of that. Her boyfriend meant she couldn't come out for dinner with me. That was fine: I felt deranged, entirely separate from myself. I was doing my best to break the connection altogether, because when I remembered . . . We talked and talked and time went by. I was searching through my pockets, looking for the mephedrone, when I saw Bennett walk in the room, clutching and kneading the top of his left arm. He walked over to the kitchen sink and pulled the cold tap on full, looking around for a glass.

I bounded over and hugged him. ‘Here,' I said, handing him a pint glass from a cupboard. ‘Are you all right?'

He filled the glass up and drank it down. He turned to me. His face was bright red, scared. ‘No, I'm not. Quietly, please, will you ring me an ambulance?'

He was sucking for air, holding his shoulder and wincing. I knew immediately it wasn't a joke, could see how scared, and yes, embarrassed he was. He was trying to deceive himself that he was simply making a shameful exit from a party. The rest of the guests were looking over at us. I put my arm round him and rang 999 with the other.

Before they arrived he was on the kitchen floor, groaning. He had pulled my bag of mephedrone out of his pocket before collapsing. Fergus threw the rest of the guests out, even the actresses, and we could hear their voices rising up from the spot outside where James Cockburn had landed the night before. It was twenty past
five. The paramedics would be getting used to this address, and the police too. Bennett could barely speak and neither the actor nor I knew what to do. I felt for his pulse: it was there, jumping. ‘I'll stay with Craig, you just make sure you're covered if the police come round – clean any drugs up,' I told him and bent down over Bennett and held his hand. ‘Don't speak,' I said, from concern, but also because I could not imagine what I would say to him. ‘You're going to be all right. You're going to be fine.' I remembered aspirins were good for heart attacks in some way. ‘Have you got any aspirin?' I shouted through. ‘Shit, yes,' he called back through, and came back with a tub. ‘Can you swallow?' I asked Bennett. He nodded. ‘No, fuck that – will you crush it up?' I asked the actor. ‘It'll work quicker. Do a couple.' It felt completely counter-intuitive, watching Fergus place a note over two aspirin and rake a credit card sharply over them, chopping the powder down finely as I had done so many times with ecstasy pills. I asked for some on the credit card and leaned over Bennett. ‘Can you snort? It's aspirin – I think it will help, it thins the blood.' I held the card against his nostrils and he rasped a breath in, blowing the powder over his chest, perhaps inhaling very small quantities. I mixed the rest up with a small amount of water and fed it to him. Then I tried once more with the card to see if he could inhale some, and that's how the paramedics found us as they rushed in, a middle-aged writer, on his back, mid heart attack, being encouraged to snort powder from a credit card. It must have looked like attempted murder.

Bennett lived on his own and so, in the absence of family to call, I phoned Suzy. I had never in my life been so rightfully attacked. She ordered me to ring Belinda to explain, and in a daze I tried to, but she didn't answer. They would
only let one of us go in the ambulance, and Fergus, who had known Craig for a couple of years, went instead of me. I stood on my own in a street in Soho. It was not light yet, but the sky was taking on a vibrant blue, something burning behind it. I had a day of meetings at the Fair beginning at ten. The police would have to be in touch, I realised, but no one had told me to wait for them here. The paramedics had taken my name and address, and we'd told them about the drugs Bennett had been taking. I'd given them the bag of mephedrone too. I wanted more than anything in the world to ring Sarah, who was staying at her friend's in Camden. But I flagged a cab down instead and headed to our empty bed. Here I picked up one of her jumpers and fell asleep hugging it. It smelled of the wax she rubbed on her hair when she got out of the shower to control her curls. It smelled of Sarah.

It must have only have been an hour or two later when I was woken by a knock on the door. Two police officers, a man and a woman, looked at me with distaste. On the other side of London, the Fair was about to resume. We were a long way away from there. I invited them in, but they didn't want to come in. My good manners had no currency here. I had to go to the station with them. ‘How's Craig?' I asked. I knew the answer already from their presence, from the look on their faces, but I did not know I knew it then.

Chapter 7

W
hen I finished the story, there was a silence.

Understandably, they were deciding whether I had made most of it up. I was not as truthful then as I am now and I had left a few unfavourable details out.

‘I think I hear about him dying,' said Arturo.

‘He's quite popular here in translation,' said Lizzie. ‘He used to live here, didn't he? The ending of the story, that's not really what happened, is it? Is that a joke?'

‘I wish.'

‘God,' said Lizzie. ‘No wonder you've decided to get away.'

‘It is not good to die of drugs,' snapped Arturo. It was a comment of such obviousness it might have been uttered by a TV football pundit, if not for its brittle anger, as if Arturo had been personally inconvenienced by this dead man with the wrong idea.

‘I'm sorry,' I said. ‘I'll understand if you'd rather I left now. It's a bit much.'

‘Oh, shut up and don't be silly,' said Lizzie. ‘It sounds
like he was going to do what he did whether or not you gave him the drugs. You didn't make him take them.'

‘Whether or not that's true . . . I've lost my job and I'm hiding here in disgrace. So, I'm here on holiday, basically. It might be a long holiday.'

‘How long?' said Arturo.

‘Oh, for ever, I guess. Until I run out of money or get bored. It could be as long as a year.'

‘On holiday for a year?'

‘I know, it sounds awful. I don't even like being on holiday.' I laughed, and Arturo blew a puff of smoke into the room and laughed with me.

‘You can do my job for me if you like. You can drive a motorbike?'

‘Ride a motorbike,' Lizzie corrected.

‘I can't drive or ride one, or a car.'

‘Sarah said you were a writer?' she asked, prompted, I presume, by this statement of uselessness. Many writers and editors do not know how to operate a car.

Arturo shrugged. ‘I
ride
a motorbike, make deliveries.'

‘I'm not a writer. I've had one story published, that's all.'

‘You must have written it then,' said Lizzie.

‘Or driven it,' suggested Arturo with a grin. ‘It is not hard to
ride
a motorbike. I could teach you.'

I had never liked those writers who sonorously pronounced, ‘I am a
writer
,' as if pretentiousness were qualification instead of side-effect, but in the end I confessed that I
was
writing a novel: it was slightly less embarrassing than continuing to admit that I had no idea of what I was doing there. Easier too than trying to explain the obscure penance I hoped to enact here for Bennett's death.

‘It's so good that you and Sarah can trust each other to be apart,' said Lizzie enthusiastically, looking at Arturo.

Arturo shot me a wounded look as if I had conspired against him. It was a look familiar to me from watching international football. ‘Do you not miss her?' he asked.

‘I'm used to it. She goes away for months at a time for her research.'

‘Arturo's sad that I'm going to visit a friend in Rio next week without him,' Lizzie chipped in. ‘You'll have to keep each other company.'

‘Does she not miss you?' Arturo persisted.

‘I hope she does,' I said. ‘I miss her lots.'

After his initial suspicion, Arturo seemed to have hopes I could become a comrade in the struggle against inattentive girlfriends.

‘Lizze, look! This is what he looks like without his girlfriend!'

‘Oh, Liam, that's sweet,' she said, coming forward and throwing her arms round me again. I could see Arturo's face over her shoulder. ‘You look so sad. It's a sacrifice, isn't it, to allow each other freedom? It's so
generous
.'

Arturo shook his head in silent disgust and pulled out a packet of crayon-green marijuana from his pocket to roll a spliff.

‘What is your novel about, Liam?' he asked viciously.

I'd planned for a while to write a novel set at the peripheries of the Rolling Stones and the art world in 1960s London. I'd spent years reading tall tales about these characters as a teenager and thought I could put them to good use. Suzy had already tried to sell a coming-of-age novel I had written in my early twenties set where I grew up in Blackpool. My alter ego's life
was far more rebellious than mine. He took drugs as a teenager in the amounts that I had only graduated to in my late twenties. Suzy had liked the novel but no one else was interested.

I tried halfheartedly to explain my new idea to Arturo and Lizzie, but even just talking about it was an act of impoverishing foolishness. I should have known from my once-promising career that if you ever try to explain the plot of a novel without gusto it always sounds like a very boring novel. It's like making a tackle: you have to throw your whole weight into it.

‘Why do you write about this?' asked Arturo. It had stopped being an aggressive question. He was curious. I started to tell him about what an interesting time it was historically – the end of empire, the breaking down of the class system, the last throes of the Establishment seeking to crush rebellion – but I was answering a different question to the one he asked: Why do
you
write about this?

‘I don't really know,' I concluded. ‘I think I've always had a weakness for bad role models.'

‘The Rolling Stones are very popular here,' Lizzie said kindly.

Arturo – who, with his full, feminine lips, looked like a prettier evolution of Mick Jagger, like one of the fabulous Jagger daughters – asked, ‘When will you find out why you are writing this?'

‘Soon, I hope,' I said before finally managing to change the subject and ask them about themselves.

They had met each other six months ago. Arturo's band were playing in the bar next to Lizzie's college and they had stared at each other throughout the set with the unabashed confidence of the beautiful at the beautiful.
When they came offstage he had headed straight in her direction and asked her for her name, standing in front of her and letting his eyes do the work for him. His languid confidence annoyed her, suggesting he knew exactly how the evening would proceed from then on, and so instead of answering she had leaned forward, put a hand through the back of his glossy dark hair and yanked him in for a kiss. When she had finished his eyes had changed and his smile had grown from a playful smirk into a broad grin. He looked delighted, surprised, and she liked that, that he was happy to have lost his cool. She wasn't the type of girl to fall for poseurs, no matter how handsome they were.

I got a simpler, more proprietorial version of this story from Arturo while Lizzie started to cook. She had gone to see his band, she had stared at him, she had run towards him and kissed him. ‘She surprised me,' he said laughing, ‘she came out of nowhere!'

There was still something adversarial in the air when he spoke about Lizzie. ‘Tell me about your band,' I said.

When he spoke I tried to avoid his eyes: as he relaxed they became so mouth-wateringly appealing I felt as guilty as if I was staring directly between a woman's legs on the Tube. Out of a sense of propriety I found myself looking away to notice the way his thighs filled his skinny jeans, the calve-like curve of his biceps as they appeared beneath his T-shirt's short sleeves, and then I gave up and surrendered to his gaze. When he finished I realised I had not listened to a word he said.

‘We are playing on Tuesday,' he said.

‘You should go! Keep him company while I'm away,' Lizzie said.

‘We'll get wasted afterwards,' he said. ‘I will have some cocaine and ecstasy.'

‘I'm sorry, I really meant what I said. I don't do drugs any more.'

He studied me again and smiled. I realised that he was a perceptive man.

I spent that weekend thinking about Lizzie and Arturo on his mini motorbike, riding along the highway in the pampas, her tanned thighs squeezing his waist. To distract myself, I began to look for an apartment of my own. Lizzie had recommended starting on Craig's List and here I was immediately drawn to the section ‘chica busca chico'. I thought it might teach me how to flirt in Spargentinean but all the adverts were in English, locals looking for foreigners, tourists, sugar daddies, a bit of fun, pampering, dinners. Less tentative posts offered the elite companionship of educated, discreet models. The ‘chico busca chica' was far worse, American men offering to spend money on women who were sweet, didn't play games, were a surrogate mother, weren't materialistic or argumentative. The negotiations depressed the hell out of me. They were the opposite of love.

Lizzie had recommended a price region I should be paying for a flat but it took me hours of wading through tourist sites charging much more – feeling increasingly desperate as the electronic tango music in the lounge swelled like the theme from
Countdown
– before I found the places the locals used. After three or four excruciating phone calls with estate agents who couldn't understand my diffident Spanish, I began to understand they were all asking about a
garantia
and talking about two-year
contracts rather than the six months I wanted. I decided I would be better off waiting for Lizzie and Arturo to get back and holding out for longer in the hostel.

I was, I admit, reluctantly beginning to see some appeal in living in the hostel. Something had changed in me since meeting Lizzie and Arturo: I had begun to lust again. The shock of leaving Sarah, of losing Sarah, had temporarily overridden desire for anyone else. And now I realised how much better this had been, for as I began to look at the women, the
girls
, in the hostel and imagine myself with them I began to imagine other men with Sarah. Thoughts of what she could be doing with the artists and curators and students who had always surrounded her, thoughts of what she
liked
to do, appalled and delighted me. But any delight I felt was not worth the horror. Any delight
was
the horror.

It had been years since I had been jealous like this. I had quickly forgotten how fraught the first months had been, the constant worry that she would go back to the boyfriend she had left in Brazil. She still spoke to him and he wrote her long emails about his plans to move to Europe. It took months before she told me she loved me, and during this time I developed further my persona, the man who didn't mind as much as I did, the man who looked at other girls and flirted and would spring into action if she ended things suddenly.

As months and years went past and I came to know she loved me, and, by extension, so did the world, I became a complacent, un-jealous boyfriend. I had even said to her, jokily, seductively, towards the end, that she could sleep with other men as long as she told me. This became one of our favourite fantasies. The idea of her fucking another never filled me with the terror it seems to imbue in most
men. I think I really believed this. A fantasy is not very powerful unless it is also a real possibility. There were times I watched her kiss another man on the dance floor in a club or at a festival, times when she watched me kiss another woman. Delicious, shocking and unsustainable: we would spring straight back to each other, delighted at our daring, relieved at our restraint.

I had of course brought this up in the arguments in which I made everything worse. ‘We had an understanding! I would have forgiven you! I wouldn't have cared!' This she chose to interpret as a sign I had never understood, had never cared for her, was incapable of caring for anyone. And, stupidly, unjustifiably, I exploded at this illogic. But it is
not
as simple as this, is it? This monogamous pact has not become the only definition of love, this selfish, fearful possession?

They make iPhone apps now for lovers so we can track each other's position as we go about our day. It's hard to imagine as a Christmas present but I bet they're given. We abolish infidelity by making cheating administratively awkward. The opposite of love. Or the true test. Cheating gets
hard
. Casanovas drop out in droves. The ones still going for it, now
that's
sexy.

And in my rage, because I thought we were better than this, I had oversimplified Sarah's point. You can't apply logic to fix betrayal. She had her own logic: I had lied, not just to cover my back but to mislead her in the extent of my devotion to her. It was not about my freely chosen moral system, it was about my refusal to admit to it, to wanting to have it both ways. I wanted to have my cake and have other cakes want me. She could have handled a revolutionary but not a petty criminal, not a con-artist, not an expenses cheat. It was just as bad as if I
had
fucked
the girl I shared a bed with, the couple of girls I'd kissed on dance floors and never told her about. The only reason I didn't was to leave me a loophole with which to lie to myself and to her.

I hated that she was right, picturing her with the conceptual artists she hung around with in London. Oh, I hated them. Their idealistic politics, Chomsky paperbacks, lack of jobs. Their activism, their outrage. Where did it come from? Hadn't I once been like them?

Once, I had thought so. Now, I was in no state to judge anyone. I was becoming bitter. It had been years since I'd suffered the causes of bitterness. Lack of imagination, money, love: that's what soured people. I had had love and money but forgotten how to imagine; now that love had gone and money was on its way after it I had nothing left but to try and reawaken my imagination. I decided to start by thinking kinder thoughts about the sad-eyed men in the hostel bar, the awkward gatecrashers at an international conference of children's TV presenters.

And with my change of heart, I quickly found people to talk to. The TV never stopped showing football matches, wonderfully violent football matches, and I watched them with my notebook firmly shut besides a steady stream of litre bottles of Quilmes and harsher-than-normal Marlboro Lights.