We Are Now Beginning Our Descent

by James Meek

  ‘Series should’ve run in the Sunday Times magazine, but all the Iraq stuff bumped it,’ he was saying. ‘Big piece of crap about the fucking Kurds. Was some nice shots by starlight. I could’ve done it better for them but I don’t do the foreign shit, know?’

  Sophie laughed.

  ‘What’s funny?’ said Kellas.

  ‘Boys.’

  ‘I don’t see what’s funny. Is “foreign shit” funny?’

  ‘He’s not talking about you, Adam.’

  ‘I know, he’s talking about foreigners.’

  ‘Don’t have a problem with foreigners,’ said Betchcott. ‘It’s the fucking losers and timewasters and slackers and toerags in this country. All the meetings and debates and protests and votes.’

  ‘Votes?’

  ‘Yeah, I don’t see the point. We should have a dictatorship. Let the successful people get on with it.’

  ‘I hate to hear people talk that way,’ said Kellas. He noticed that his voice was rising and that there was nothing he could do to stop it. ‘You stand there in your dark glasses and your black sweater in a living room in Camden Town and you’re spitting on your ancestors’ graves, you fucking prick.’ These last words were very clear and sincere and loud enough so that the whole room went quiet. Betchcott’s face changed colour and he turned round and went out, with Lucy following a few steps behind. Cunnery came over and put his hand on Kellas’s shoulder. He was grinning.

  ‘I’m sure Joe said something obnoxious that I wouldn’t agree with either,’ he said, ‘but I’d rather you didn’t have a stand-up fight about it in our house today. This is no man’s land. There has to be one of those so we aren’t killing each other and screaming at each other all the time.’

  ‘We never do kill each other. And who’s “we”?’

  ‘Who do you want to kill? Joe?’

  ‘No. But he is a fascist.’

  ‘He’s not a fascist, he’s a photographer. He’s got views. The furthest he’s ever gone with political thought is to tell me once that not allowing a government which would abolish human rights was a breach of his human rights. You know I believe in resistance. But organised. It doesn’t start just because you lose your temper.’

  ‘And in the meantime the socialists and the fascists sit down to dinner together in the socialist’s nice big house in Camden.’

  The Greek comedy mask of Cunnery’s face didn’t change. His eyes behind the mask seemed to become darker and fiercer, as if the actor in the mask had heard something he didn’t like and was frustrated at not being able to express it with his face.

  ‘There aren’t any real fascists in London in 2002, Adam,’ said Cunnery. ‘It would be so much easier if there were. I think the food’s ready, so let’s go and eat.’ He led the way out. Cunnery didn’t like references to his property. It was true that he couldn’t be blamed for having well-off parents, or that a house he’d bought for £200,000 in the 1980s was now probably worth one and a half million. London was full of embarrassed millionaires. Socialists with mortgages: the whole history of Europe since the Second World War was contained in those three words.

  The M’Gurgans went ahead of Kellas and stopped in the doorway before Kellas could follow Cunnery downstairs. M’Gurgan was rosy. He had already filled and emptied his wineglass a few times. For a moment, the sources of M’Gurgan became invisible to Kellas. He saw him as he might appear to someone who hadn’t known him for thirty years, wise, funny, powerful, dangerous and vulnerable. The bulk and the scepticism, the silver hair on his crown, the new black jacket and Paul Smith shirt Sophie had made him buy with some prize money. The man who had explored deep inside himself and who had found the words to describe what he had seen. The unselfconscious bard of self. The big bad Celt in London. His lack of interest in exploiting it magnified his allure.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ asked Sophie.

  ‘Less than the sum of my experiences,’ said Kellas.

  ‘Wish I’d sworn at Betchcott,’ said M’Gurgan.

  ‘I know,’ said Sophie. ‘But Adam, maybe you should go home.’

  ‘Miss my dinner.’

  ‘Melissa being here, and then you raving with Captain Unpleasant. Don’t you think, Pat?’

  ‘Everybody’s full of darkness,’ said M’Gurgan. ‘Like everybody’s full of blood. You need it and it needs to stay on the inside. You try to keep your skin away from sharp blades and you try to keep your soul away from the kinds of cutting that could make you bleed your darkness over other people’s carpets.’ He laughed. ‘’Member that time you did bleed for a certain girl? Pricked your thumb in English, went over to her desk, smudged your blood on her paper, drew a heart around it with an arrow through it and walked out.’

  Sophie said quickly: ‘I know you like that girl, Lucy, but don’t get predatory, Adam. She’s stunningly bright but there’s something wounded about her. Since it looks as if you’re staying.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Kellas. ‘It’s OK. I decided when I got up this morning that I was going to be nice to everyone today. Listen, Pat, I know I’ve told you this in email and on the phone but I wanted to say it again to you now, your book is a marvel. A wonder. Everything is deserved. I’m proud to know you.’

  M’Gurgan laughed and went even redder than usual and mumbled a thank you, fiddling with his fingers and looking down at them. Sophie asked him to go downstairs and tell the others that they’d be a moment and M’Gurgan went. She turned back to Kellas.

  ‘You think I’m trying to organise you,’ she said. ‘You think I’m being one of those ordinary women who gets things done.’

  ‘I said that ten years ago,’ said Kellas. ‘You’re still making me pay a duty for it. I didn’t want you ever to hear me saying that about you. The language you use about people behind their back is a different language from the one you use to their face. Words don’t mean the same thing. You know that.’

  ‘How does it sound when you say it to my face again?’

  ‘Like this: “Sophie, you’re one of those extraordinary women who makes things happen.”’

  Sophie started to laugh and stopped. ‘Thanks for not being jealous of Pat. You’ll be where he is soon.’

  Kellas swallowed. ‘His work’s been an inspiration for the book I’ve just written,’ he said. ‘Did Pat tell you what it was?’

  ‘No, the two of you have been very secretive about it. We should go. You know everybody loves Pat’s book, it’s so peculiar and tragic and funny about his life. It’s all in there. You’re in there. Everything and everyone’s in there, except me. There’s no trace of a wife in there and no trace of me.’

  ‘Nobody should marry a writer,’ said Kellas. ‘They’ll always imagine someone better.’ Sophie bit her lips shut and began to blink and clumsily stroked a knuckle along the edge of one eye. Kellas put his arms around her and gave her a squeeze.

  ‘What about you?’ asked Sophie. She took a step away, clasped her hands together in front of her and looked up at him. She sniffed. ‘Are you seeing anyone? What about the woman you met in Afghanistan?’

  ‘She didn’t write back.’

  ‘And you wanted her to.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have mentioned her,’ said Kellas. ‘We have to go down to dinner.’

  The basement was floored in slate and the kitchen had granite surfaces and copper pans of all sizes. From the area where the oak dining table stood Kellas could see that there was another woman in the kitchen helping Margot. The table shone with silver and glass. On the mantelpiece over the granite fireplace stood family photographs in hardwood frames, some small sports trophies, a few of Cunnery’s prizes and some white lilies in a tall square-sided glass vase. The green stalks of the lilies gave the thick irregular glass their colour. The walls were hung with grainy A3 black-and-white photographs by Margot of white working-class life in England in the 1990s. Two floor lamps, translucent glass globes on slender chrome stalks, lit the table. Kellas took his place beneath a photograph of a young girl bending over, tryi
ng to rouse another girl who was lying in the gutter with her eyes closed. Kellas sat between Cunnery, at the head of the table, and Sophie on his right. Lucy and M’Gurgan were opposite. He had been well fenced-off from Melissa and Betchcott at the far end of the table.

  M’Gurgan was talking to Lucy too quietly for Kellas to hear. M’Gurgan’s eyes widened and narrowed, his smile came and went,his hands gripped and opened. Lucy kept nodding and starting to laugh and then stopping and nodding again. He had all her attention. Sophie was talking to Betchcott and Melissa. Margot and her helper, who wore a plain black dress and looked as if she might be from South America, handed out bowls of chestnut soup. The helper’s face had a curious, detached expression, as if she was actually somewhere else, as if she was dreaming the dinner party while she slept in a bed on the other side of the world. Kellas had hoped to taste the wine he had brought from France but the Cunnerys seemed to have bought a case of some Chilean red and they were having that. Kellas took a glug and gazed at Melissa in profile. That full mouth turned up at the corners. Sometimes it had been good to listen and sometimes he had kissed her just to try to stop her clever, fast, needling talk. She had been so insistent and sharp and cruel in her characterisations of everyone around her that he had come to feel more and more exposed in his own immunity. Sure enough, it ended.

  Melissa had excellent peripheral vision. He’d forgotten that. She noticed he was staring at her and looked over. She turned away, leaned forward on the table on her forearms and began speaking to Betchcott.

  ‘Great soup,’ said Kellas to Cunnery.

  ‘Thanks. Someone said they saw you learning how to put on a chemical warfare suit at a country house in Surrey a few weeks ago.’

  ‘I learned how the last time,’ said Kellas. ‘The Citizen wanted me to take the course again. That way they get a discount on the war insurance. It’s a week of sitting there being talked to by ex-squaddies about indirect fire and, you know, arterial bleeding.’

  M’Gurgan turned from Lucy and leaned in towards Kellas and Cunnery. ‘Adam was telling me about the squaddies,’ he said to Cunnery. ‘Apparently they’ll stand there and say: “Right. Now. You’ve just realised you’ve walked into a minefield. What’s the first thing you’re going to do? Anyone?” And at the end of the day they go home to single rooms and neatly made beds and letters from daughters they see once a fortnight and you wonder if maybe they need a course themselves. “Right. Now. You’ve just realised you’ve walked into a relationship with a woman. What’s the first thing you’re going to do? Anyone?”’

  ‘It hasn’t been easy for you in that way either,’ said Cunnery to Kellas.

  ‘I’m not trying to teach anyone,’ said Kellas.

  ‘Sorry about inviting Melissa.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Because of you, I mean.’ Cunnery asked him if he thought Iraq had chemical weapons.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Kellas. ‘But if I thought there was any chance of Saddam using them, I’d never have agreed to go. It’s academic now, I’m not going. I’ve left The Citizen.’

  Kellas didn’t intend to say this loudly or clearly yet the words travelled the length of the table at once. In the silence after the questions cleared he said that he’d sold a book for a decent amount of money and that he’d resigned from The Citizen. Cunnery raised his glass and proposed a toast.

  ‘Please don’t,’ said Kellas.

  ‘False modesty!’ shouted Melissa, and raised her glass and drank. ‘Sorry, I meant accurate modesty.’

  Sophie rubbed his shoulder and was saying well done, well done. Lucy was looking at him and smiling and he tipped the glass to her and smiled and drank.

  ‘Is that the one I think it is?’ said M’Gurgan. He looked as if he hoped it wasn’t.

  ‘Have you read it?’ said Lucy to M’Gurgan, resting her left hand on the edge of her chair and leaning into him. ‘What’s it about?’

  M’Gurgan didn’t say anything. He just nodded at Kellas and raised his eyebrows.

  ‘It’s a thriller,’ said Kellas. ‘About an imaginary war between Europe and America.’

  ‘Which side are we on?’ asked Cunnery.

  ‘Europe’s.’

  ‘That’s rubbish!’ called Melissa from the far end of the table. ‘PC and selling out!’

  ‘I’m intrigued,’ said Cunnery. ‘We should do a piece on it. Your last one was more literary, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Kellas, looking at M’Gurgan. ‘But the only people I know who read the books I’ve written till now are my girlfriends and other writers like Pat. I want to make some money. I want to be popular before I die. You’re thinking I’ve sold my soul. Have you seen my soul recently?’

  ‘I’ve never seen his soul,’ shouted Melissa, grinning. ‘Sell-out!’

  ‘If it’s popular, it doesn’t mean it’s poor work,’ said Cunnery, tearing a piece of bread in half and making precise gestures with the pieces. His frown deepened, and so did his voice. ‘Pat’s book’s selling well and he wasn’t trying to follow the money, were you? It’s still a great work of literature.’

  ‘I don’t know about great,’ said M’Gurgan.

  ‘Oh, take the praise, for God’s sake,’ said Kellas.

  ‘You can’t follow the money,’ said M’Gurgan. ‘It’ll always run ahead faster than you can catch it. You just have to go where you want to go, and if you hear the money rustling behind you, don’t look round. Wait for it to catch up.’

  ‘That’s your philosophy now, is it?’ said Kellas. ‘That wasn’t what you said a year ago.’ He became aware of a hand on his forearm and that everyone was looking at him. He probably had raised his voice a little. It was becoming hard to tell. It would be best to stop with the booze. The strange thing was that he hadn’t drunk much.

  ‘Adam,’ said Sophie, whose hand was on his arm. Why’d she been so upset to be described as ordinary? Getting things done, that was a compliment. As a radio producer, she held her station together. Lucy was staring at him with a dislike that astonished him. Margot called down to Cunnery to help her clear the soup bowls. Cunnery got up. Then M’Gurgan got up.

  ‘Do I have time for a fag outside before the next course?’ he said.

  ‘I might join you,’ said Lucy. The two of them headed off for the garden, carrrying their wineglasses with them. Melissa asked Sophie something and Sophie turned away from Kellas. Left by himself, Kellas picked up his side plate and weighed it in his hands and turned it over. The crockery was an attractive set of white china glazed with black line drawings by a post-Soviet caricaturist. Kellas clicked out a tune with the tip of his tongue on his palate. There was an old man called Michael Finnegan/ He grew whiskers on his chinnegan. Cunnery had bought the crockery from a famous Soviet kitsch restaurant in Moscow in the late 1990s. The collapse of the Soviet Union had made it possible for the cartoonist to celebrate the Soviet Union’s existence, and also to make money. Kellas had been to the restaurant: the crockery was expensive. He got up and went to the kitchen, asking if he could help, but the soup bowls were in the dishwasher already and Margot and the helper were starting to ladle stew onto dinner plates from a cast-iron casserole.

  ‘I’ll call the smokers,’ said Kellas. The stew smelled rich and fertile, like somebody’s happy ending. Kellas opened the back door and found himself in a small porch, made mainly of glass, darker than the kitchen and lighter than the night. He could see the shapes of Lucy and M’Gurgan on the patio, in their smokers’ poses, M’Gurgan holding the metal of the fire escape with one hand and his cigarette tip moving wide from side to side as he told his story, Lucy standing a few feet away, left arm across her chest and tucked in under her right elbow, taking her weight on one leg, head dropped back to blow a gust of smoke into the air.

  ‘Hey, tobacco lobby,’ called Kellas. ‘It’s time to eat.’ He waited until Lucy and M’Gurgan had put their cigarettes out and walked past him into the house before he went inside himself, closing the door behind him.
/>   Kellas heard Betchcott and Melissa praising the stew to Margot. It was venison. The only reason Kellas had wanted to join the Iraq enterprise was in the hope of meeting Astrid there. He’d called DC Monthly to see if they were sending her, and where was the best chance of bumping into her, in Baghdad, Kurdistan or Kuwait, but all they told him was that she didn’t work for them any more.

  ‘I did a fashion shoot deerstalking in Scotland a couple of years ago,’ said Betchcott. ‘Lots of fucking tweed. Gave all the models loaded shotguns. Look in their eyes, it was worse than giving cocaine, know? Plenty of that too. One of shot a fucking dog in the leg. Good shoot. The fucking spike heels on the carcass, it was classic. One of gave me a blowjob in the back of a Range Rover on the way down the mountain.’ Margot, Melissa and Sophie burst out laughing. ‘Did!’ M’Gurgan and Lucy turned away from their conversations and looked over. Sophie, Melissa and Margot were groaning and laughing and shaking their heads and demanding Betchcott name the woman, and he sat there with their faces reflected in his dark glasses, with his bold risking grin.

  ‘Worst thing was, could feel this little nose butting against my thigh when was down on me,’ said Betchcott. ‘Could tell had no septum left, about to collapse. Didn’t tell her. Shame, nice soft mouth.’

  ‘I can’t believe that you just said that,’ said Sophie.

  ‘Oh, Soph,’ said Melissa, through her laughing. Margot and Sophie had stopped. ‘It’s only a bit of ripe badinage. It’s what made English strong back in the Boswell and Johnson day, before the rot set in.’

  ‘Is that your next column?’ said Kellas. ‘Sanctity of family life and the lighter side of casual celebrity sex?’

  ‘What? I can’t hear you, Adam. You don’t speak very clearly.’

  ‘I didn’t realise we’d moved back to the eighteenth century already. That’s three centuries in two courses. We’ll be in the Dark Ages by the time the coffee comes round.’