My Biggest Lie (9 page)

She laughed. ‘Aren't we boring? Surely we've got something more interesting to talk about than our other halves?'

‘We are boring. And think about that expression, “our
other half”. Does that mean we're half a person without them?'

‘I think I would be more of a person. I'd have a richer social life, that's for certain. I'd be able to talk to other men in public.'

‘Rather than skulking behind the back of buildings.'

‘Oh, you don't count.'

‘Thank you. I
am
a man, you know.'

‘No, of course you are. A whole man too, even without Sarah.'

‘No need to go that far. I'm happy to be half a man.'

‘
Really?
'

‘No, I am, really. I'm half the human being you are and Sarah's twice the human being I am. It's a rare instance of a clichéd phrase saying something particular and profound.'

We had been passing the joint back and forth.

Lizzie closed her eyes to think and giggled. ‘If Sarah's twice the person you are, she should call you “my superfluous half” then.'

I really didn't like that. I tried to giggle back.

‘Or do you become her other third?'

She giggled again. I was becoming stoned in a different way to her, feeling the weight of my predicament pressing down on me from overhead, screwing me into the ground. It's incredible that I forget so often that this is what being stoned feels like to me. Contemporary art galleries are usually the exception because they feel like the inside of spaceships, open space and no clutter, my life on earth far away. I passed her the joint back.

‘I'm going to need a beer or two to even me out.'

‘Don't worry,' she said. ‘You've still got two arms, two legs, a whole head of hair. So what do you have half of? A brain? A heart?'

‘We're still on this? I have both of those, half a brain, half a heart. But let's not carry on in this vein as I'm not about to admit to having half a penis.'

‘Good to hear.'

‘I'm glad you're pleased.'

‘I would feel sorry for Sarah otherwise.'

‘Probably don't let that alone stop you.'

‘Oh, enough of the self-deprecation. We're not in England now. It's not as charming as you think it is.'

‘Fine. Lucky you hanging out with brilliant me. Now please put out that spliff and come and have a beer with me.'

We sat outside on the café terrace and ordered beers. Lizzie pulled out her pack of Marlboro Reds. People don't often smoke full-strength Marlboros in England – the middle class are compromisers and the working class smoke cheaper stronger brands. But the Marlboro Red was the perfect cigarette for Argentines, colour-coded for the Malbec-and-red-meat candour of their desire.

She was telling me more about Arturo's jealousy, the hourly emails while she had been away, the arguments if she proposed to meet a male colleague for a drink without him.

‘It's hard working out if it's the culture or if it's him. He of course maintains it's the culture. The
correct
culture, the way things should be.'

But perhaps it is
you
, I thought. I was having a hard time trying not to stare at her too intently. She was a talkative doer of a stoner to my wistful spectator. I was very much enjoying spectating her face, a long face, freckly with her reddish-blonde hair held back in a loose ponytail, strands of which constantly escaped. She was always interfering with it, flicking the strands of hair away, fluttering her fingers
around to emphasise points or resting her chin on her hands for the briefest moments of contemplation. She was not elegant or demure but how she was sexy. I wanted to see her eat a steak, I wanted to see the blood run down her chin, I wanted to feel her sink her teeth into my arm.

She grinned at the waiter as he brought drinks and flirted with him, rolling her Rs with relish.

‘I can sort of see why you might make men jealous, you know,' I suggested.

‘Because I'm friendly?'

‘
Exactly
. You're friendly.'

‘Aren't you friendly to other women?'

‘I certainly am.'

‘Well, then, why can't I be friendly to other men?'

‘I'm not saying you can't. Of course you can. But not by comparing yourself to me. Who says my friendliness to women is proper?'

‘Isn't it?'

‘I mean it to be. Or more likely, I want something out of it.'

‘Friends.'

‘Yeah. But every time? Every time I talk to a woman in a bar I'm only after a friend?'

‘Are we talking about you or me here?'

‘I'm just saying it's easy to lie to yourself. I've spent my whole life trying to make people like me and I thought I'd got to be quite good at it. I feel at home with women. I love the conversation of women, the thoughts of women, the company of women. And I love the bodies of women, the touch of women. Being with Sarah hasn't stopped me from wanting to make women like me. It's addictive and vain. And sometimes it's friendly. And sometimes . . . I don't know.'

‘Liam?'

‘Yeah?'

‘That's you, that's not me.'

‘Well, maybe it's a male thing.'

‘Desire and vanity are not male things. I'm not even sure if self-indulgence is either, despite what often seems like overwhelming evidence. You sound like you're just being too hard on yourself.'

‘That's not what Sarah thinks.'

‘Liam, what have you done?'

I really wanted to tell her. I wondered if I could. ‘I . . . I don't know. I used to agree with you. I thought you could do things that aren't you, that are a lie in themselves, an experiment in character. And if you tell someone about them you make them more true than if you didn't.'

‘The thing is to not do them in the first place.'

‘Of course.'

‘But sometimes you do do them.'

‘Regrettably.'

‘Let's get some more beers,' she said, waving the waiter over. ‘I haven't told this story to anyone. Can I trust you?'

‘Of course,' I promised.

‘You've heard the beginning of the story, when you asked how I met Arturo.'

‘At his gig. You grabbed him to have your way with him.'

‘I grabbed him but I didn't have my way with him, not that night.'

‘Oh?'

‘He was, he is, such a sexy kisser. I wanted to. But it's a risk with you idiots, putting out on the first night. Some of you get bored if there's nothing to chase, start assuming that if it was that easy it can't be worth it.'

‘Not me. I'm always overwhelmingly grateful.'

‘Always? Anyway, you're aware of the phenomenon. So I didn't go back with him. I took his number and he had work early so he left. I don't think I mentioned I was on a pill when I first kissed him. I didn't tell Arturo at the time actually. But I
was
on a pill, a really strong one, and regretting not going home with him, feeling really, really horny. I got talking to this guy Hernán and he took me off for a line in the toilets and then I was in such a
wild
mood . . . I mean, it's OK to fuck people you don't really like, isn't it? It's people you do really like who you can't just fuck.'

I kind of admired her logic. A few months earlier I would have found it profound and true. But my rule was simple now: don't fuck anyone, ever.

‘Obviously it's important not to make the wrong impression,' I said.

‘I knew you'd understand. Except, you've met Hernán – the singer in Arturo's band.
That
Hernán. I was so out of it and wrapped up in Arturo I didn't even notice the guy I was getting off with was his singer until six weeks later when I saw Arturo's band again, sober, and watched Hernán stare right at me from the centre of the stage for the whole performance. I hadn't returned any of his calls, and by this time Arturo and me are properly together, have had this wonderful month exploring the city together. And Hernán has known all along who Arturo's new girlfriend is but doesn't seem to have said anything to him – I don't think he's told him, anyway, at least not directly. I think he likes having this secret over me, to insinuate he knows something about me. If he has said something, it's worse, and it's Arturo and him who like having this hold on me. But I don't think it's that. Arturo's too
confrontational to keep something like that to himself. I do my best not to go to the gigs now, to find excuses, but they keep playing more and more.'

I thought of the look on Hernán's face as he had watched Arturo flirt with the girl after his gig last week.

‘Lizzie, you didn't do anything that bad – why don't you just tell him?'

‘I think I missed my chance. It's so stupid, that embarrassment can grow something so small into such an enormous lie. I feel like I've got a bomb ticking under me. What do you think I should do?'

I didn't know. I was worried she was right, that there is a point beyond which telling the truth can still stand in your favour. I had been miles beyond this point when I had told the whole truth to Sarah about the half-night stand I'd had in Frankfurt, but who was to say Lizzie wasn't slightly beyond it now, with the same consequences? The people out there who never lied, they were so intolerant of we who did. Was it really their courage or just their lack of imagination?

I wanted to believe it was courage. I wanted to believe that this could be me. I decided then that I would tell Lizzie about my split with Sarah. In a minute I decided I would tell her.

Lizzie had stubbed the joint out before it was finished and she lit it again before we went back into the exhibition. This time I enjoyed the high and winked at the girl on the desk as we went past. We slid through the galleries, talking less, caught up in our own impressions. I could almost pretend I had a girlfriend again. I moved up to Lizzie, who was staring at an enormous mural, and I opened my mouth to speak –

‘Don't you dare tell me the name of the artist, where
he's from, who his sister was or how he faced the challenge of the military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983. I'm enjoying looking at this.'

‘Lizzie,' I said. ‘I have a confession to make.'

‘Yes,' she giggled, and I felt so happy at that moment I could not spoil it.

‘Lizzie. I know nothing about Latin American art.'

‘Is this you being charming again?' She pretended to yawn.

‘I came here yesterday and memorised all the texts on the placards. That's why I recognise so much of the art and know about the artists. I looked them up on Wikipedia.'

That stopped her yawning. ‘Why would you do that?'

‘To impress you with my erudition.'

‘But that would make you a complete psycho –'

‘“Beginning in 1957, coinciding with the space race, Forner's attention turned to imagined scenes of interplanetary travel” –'

‘Stop it! You
are
a psycho. So all that pointing and pondering before, that was all an act to impress me?'

‘It was.'

She screwed up her fact in disgust and looked me up and down. Then she punched me in the arm and laughed.

‘That's brilliant,' she said admiringly.

Chapter 10

L
iving begins to look possible when you have a friend; the world lightens. I hugged Lizzie goodbye, though it was perhaps more of a don't-go hug. She extricated herself in the end, and we arranged to go for dinner with Arturo later in the week. In the meantime she offered to ask around to see if she could find me an apartment; she thought she knew a colleague at her college who was looking to sublet his place for three months while he went travelling. She talked me through other practical matters too: where to buy a cheap mobile phone, what I would need to get a library card if I wanted somewhere quiet to work.

The mobile was a good idea and I immediately went and bought one. My mum would be happier now I had a number she could call me on. It hadn't escaped me that there was a precedent for my sudden flight: my father's disappearance. I worried I was making the past present again, that time when he left her for the woman who would so briefly become his second wife. His disappearance shortly after that completed the derangement and since I was sixteen I had
never slackened the pace of intoxication. I was making sure to call Mum every week from a payphone, to email regularly and keep in touch with my sisters. But it was hard to keep up a conversation because the one thing I needed to talk about was the one thing I was still too ashamed to admit. It wasn't that I minded admitting my faults but that I knew they'd understand and suffer any of my pain alongside me. I remembered looking at Mum the evening after Dad had gone, how the four of us multiplied by four every bit of sadness. I could still hear the echoes.

So I told them I had been suspended from the job, not sacked. I told them I was hoping Sarah would arrive soon. I changed the subject and made jokes. It must have worried them more than ever.

I had stopped trying to call Dad. I refused to chase him. But a couple of days after I had passed my new number on, one of my sisters must have had a rare conversation with him, for I was woken one morning at 5 a.m.

‘Hello. Dad? Do you know it's five in the morning?'

‘No, it's not, is it? It's midday!'

‘You're ahead of me.'

‘Definitely? I thought you were ahead of me.'

‘Definitely.'

‘Oh.' He sounded crestfallen.

‘But now you're here, how are you?' I said, trying to cheer him up.

‘How am
I
?
You're
in Argentina!'

‘I am that.'

‘And you've been suspended from your job?'

‘You're only just getting started.'

‘Wow!'

‘You sound exhilarated. It's generally regarded as a bad thing.'

‘It's just rather spectacular. What are you going to do?'

‘No fucking idea.'

‘What about Sarah?'

‘I cheated on Sarah, and now she's dumped me. It's a disaster. I didn't even do it properly, I just flirted with doing it and couldn't go through with it and then lied and got caught out. Not that it matters. She says it's the lying that destroyed things, not the cheating. And she doesn't really believe me about the not cheating anyway. I wouldn't if I were her.'

‘Ah,' he said. ‘Your sisters were concerned. They thought something might have happened. But you haven't told
them
this.'

‘No.'

‘Why not?'

‘Embarrassed? Ashamed? I don't want them to know how miserable I am.'

‘Oh, Liam.'

‘You're not allowed to tell them how miserable I am, by the way. Let's share that together, us
men
.'

‘You make men sound like a horrible word.'

‘
We
make men sound like a horrible word.'

It had been years since I'd attacked my dad. At first I hadn't dared to, in case he disappeared again. And after that, it was hard to summon the energy. The anger had retreated somewhere inside me, seeped into cracks and corners. Forgiveness, in its first stages, is more passive than active.

‘You don't sound like you like yourself much at the moment,' Dad said, eventually.

‘I'm trying to be a better judge of character. Do you like yourself?'

He sighed. The long sigh I recognised from years ago
whenever I asked if he had rung my sisters recently, if he had taken their calls, arranged to see them. The refusal-to-think sigh. The running-away sigh. The sigh that ended the call.

‘Don't fucking hang up,' I said.

The sigh again.

‘I'm listening, Liam,' he said. ‘For what it's worth, I'm sorry too. Tell me what happened.'

‘I don't want you to be sympathetic. I don't want you to make me feel better. I don't want to feel bet –'

‘Liam,' he said. ‘Tell me.'

The morning after the best day of my life – it must have been years, but it felt like a day – I woke up in bed in another country with the wrong woman. I wished I didn't remember how I got there but I did, meeting her that afternoon, staying out with her when the colleague I was sharing a flat with went home before me with the only keys. I had known full well that he would fall asleep drunk and not wake up. We'd ordered a bottle of champagne to her room in the Frankfurter Hof – just, I'd told myself, because I wanted someone to talk to; I had wanted someone to
talk
to. Cockburn, who had introduced me to her earlier, had seen his Frankfurt drug dealer Klaus earlier in the night and now neither Isabela, an Italian editor, nor I was ready to sleep. We lay on her bed and talked for hours and when she leaned over and kissed me I felt a surge in my heart, tasted rust on my lips, and let it go on and on, until I could not forget about her, until the lust for death turned into the perfect recollection of Sarah's face. When I said I had to go – I would sleep on a park bench if I had to – Isabela started to cry. I told
her I was in love with someone. She told me it was always the same, we were always in love with someone. She didn't know how we behaved the way we did when we were in love with someone. Nor did I. I put my arms around her and held her against my chest. I reassured myself that I had not gone too far. I tried to reassure myself. That was when she fell asleep. I lay there with the perfect awful weight of her head on my chest and then I was dreaming, falling, dreaming more than I should have.