My Biggest Lie

by Luke Brown

  ‘So, someone is writing the world another novel,’ he announced suddenly.

  ‘How do you know I’m writing a novel?’ I asked.

  ‘How do you know you are someone?’ he said. ‘But look at you. I struggle to imagine you’re doing something useful.’

  I raised my beer to him. ‘Salud.’

  ‘What are you writing about?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m trying to distract myself from writing the longest love letter in the world to my ex-girlfriend by writing instead about Amy Casares and Craig Bennett.’

  He went quiet then. ‘How is Amy?’ he said eventually. ‘You know her?’

  ‘She’s a friend. She writes me nice emails telling me I’m not worthless.’

  ‘Do you write emails to her telling her you are worthless?’

  ‘Oh, God, yes, I suppose I do,’ I admitted. ‘Poor Amy.’

  ‘Poor Amy …’ he repeated absently. ‘Which makes me think, is this going to be a good novel?’ he said, gesturing at my notebook.

  ‘It’s going to be better than the love letter. Perhaps you could help me?’

  ‘And how could I do that?’

  ‘You could tell me about your friendship with Craig, with Amy, about the good times you had.’

  ‘You want the good times?’

  ‘The good times.’

  ‘I could tell you about the good times, I suppose. On the condition you promise not to ask about the bad times.’

  I promised. But Craig and Alejandro’s good times became samey after a while. Drugs, women, rebellion; the insulting of bores, the besting of the authorities; the stoical receipt of punishment, the avenging of slights … a chemical Don Quixote and Sancho Panza whose antics I could see stretching out for the same thousand pages.

  ‘So why would you stop being friends?’ I asked.

  He looked at me and seemed more relieved than angry I had broken my promise, but he said, ‘I really don’t want to talk about this. If I give you a quick summary now, will you truly promise not to ask me any more questions?’

  Again, I promised.

  He sighed and signalled to the barman that he needed another drink.

  ‘This was Craig’s place. He had never been as happy as he was here. It wasn’t just that he felt free of his father. The atmosphere suited him, the chaos, the confusion, the bureaucracy. It was a stage for him to be exasperated on. Behaving nobly in the face of a culture that provoked all-consuming bronca, yes? It was the trick of his charm, his persona. And it suited him, because of that crazy upbringing alone on a vineyard with his father, it suited him to be a man apart from the culture, to always meet people from across a distance. So he didn’t follow Amy when she left for Europe and, in order to make this seem logical, he continued to take his pleasure in Buenos Aires. But she had gone, and the pleasures he took now made it likely she was gone for good. But if he had followed her … he’d have left me behind for one, and I was so much part of his pleasure back then. Some states of mind can only occur in a certain space, in certain company. When she went, I was pleased. She’d been in the way. We worked better one to one. But when she was there I was all the good things for Craig that she wasn’t; as soon as she was gone I was all the worst things, a mirror reflecting what he had lost. It took such a short time for him to realise this, for me to realise what I had become for him. If he had gone with Amy, I think the reverse would have happened. He didn’t want to have to choose and so when he did, he wanted what he hadn’t chosen. And I do not want to think about what finally happened.’

  He turned his face away in embarrassment.

  ‘What? I asked.

  He looked hard at me now. ‘You are ruining our friendship,’ he said quietly, but then he continued.

  ‘We were fighting in my kitchen and I waved a knife at him. I can’t remember what we were fighting about – maybe money or drugs, or a lie one had told the other, a deflection most probably from what we were really arguing about. We were close to being drug addicts. As close as you get. And I was waving this knife, getting into the whole performance of it. I would never have used it on him, on anyone, and of course Craig knew this. And, what, to teach me a lesson he did what he did? This is why I stopped talking to him. I held the knife out and waved it, and I think we both then realised how ridiculous this was. He grinned, and then he jumped straight into the knife, as if to teach me a lesson. I don’t know, as if to prove the knife did not exist, that I was not holding it up towards him, that his imagination was greater than mine. I pulled it away but it hit an artery in his arm. We were both covered in his blood. After the hospital patched him up he flew to Spain to try to make up with Amy and I never saw him again. I nearly killed him.’

  ‘I did kill him.’

  ‘Oh, yes, so you claim.’ He chuckled bitterly. ‘He was the kind of man to leap onto a knife. If I had been there I would have warned you. I would have tried to warn you.’

  They were the people I thought I loved, the bad role models, the fearless, the futureless, the ones who jumped onto knives. Emulating them was bad faith, pure style, and dishonestly against my basic inclination to hard work and kindness – though that was easy to forget in bursts of delighted excess. It was harder to forget in my year of disasters, when my actions energised the persona I had tried on for size and began to efface the person who had been there before.

  When I went back to the café the next day Alejandro didn’t turn up, or the next. I felt guilty that I had deprived him of his routine and changed mine so he might think it safe to return.

  I had been avoiding looking at my money after my expensive trip to Brazil and a few transactions with Aleman and El Coronel, which, while not particularly expensive in themselves, led to ruinous generosity in bars and impetuous dealings with taxi drivers. I was shocked to find out at the start of July that I had only enough money left to stay for another month. While I yearned for England, it was an England that no longer belonged to me – and I dreaded moving back to my mum’s house in Blackpool. I imagined it as the beginning of the end of my life.

  Thankfully a few days later I received notice that my application for a writing grant from the Arts Council had been successful. They were giving me nearly five thousand quid, enough to support six months more in Buenos Aires. It was the happiest thing that had happened to me since I had arrived, and despite everything I tried to call Sarah to tell her. It felt like a sign that I could be something else, someone she would like more than the bad memory of me. After the fourth call rang out without answer I rang my mum instead and told her the good news. It wasn’t such good news to her. I had finally come clean about my circumstances and she thought, quite sensibly, that I should come home and get another job. I did my best to reassure her I was OK and promised I would be back for Christmas.

  Mexico City’s nice this time of year. I never saw Lizzie any more in the corridors of the language school. I thought of her all the time and wished I could share my good news with her, my good money with her, on a splendid night out to celebrate. She never replied to a second email when I tried again to present myself more positively; and so I had no choice but to leave her alone.

  My Spanish course finished and without it my days lengthened and I grew more lonely. I began to work in the library, a short walk away. Being lonely, bad for myself, was good for the novel. I sat back and made Amy, Craig and Alejandro talk to each other. Craig said to Amy what I wanted to say to Sarah and Amy said to Craig what I wished she wouldn’t. I was learning. I was hurting. I was writing, and I began to feel the thrill of approaching the end of a first draft.

  As strong as the buzz of composition was, I craved company in the nights. I tried the bars but my confidence was shaken; I couldn’t find it in me to talk to anyone.

  The hostel contained more teenagers than ever before and I worried I would only be able to talk to gap-year students for so long before I was reduced to begging them to take me to bed and have mercy on me. I’m not sure I would have survived a refusal. Or an acceptance. Af
ter days of this, I logged on to the internet, intending to book my return flight. I never got that far, though, because of a surprising email waiting for me. It was from James Cockburn, and he was arriving in Buenos Aires in two days’ time.

  Chapter 16

  It was an extraordinary act to take two flights and eighteen hours to pitch to an author, so it was the kind of thing James Cockburn did regularly to justify his mythic reputation. That’s why people thought he did it. I knew these excursions were not always so rationally calculated and explainable.

  The last time I had been out of England with Cockburn was nine months ago at the Frankfurt Book Fair. There, in a toilet cubicle, I had held him in one arm as he sobbed into my shoulder about the suicide of David Foster Wallace, while, with my free hand, a zwanzig and a credit card, I tried to break into prelapsarian form the rocks of crack we had erroneously bought as coke from a street prostitute. I had wondered if we shouldn’t give up on the crack, but James was adamant: ‘We’re turning it back, we’re making it harmless!’ We were in Gleis 25, a twenty-four-hour dive bar by the Hauptbahnhof on the edge of Frankfurt’s red-light district. It was a popular hang-out for a certain type of publisher at 5 a.m. and beyond. It had more than a hundred Prince songs on the jukebox. What did the regulars think when we showed up each year? Perhaps in the week preceding there is always a group of insurance salesmen who would drink us under the table. I find that hard to believe and even if there were, they would lack our élan. There is a celebratory myth we tell to each other: that during the Fair all Frankfurt’s prostitutes go on holiday (so incestuously adulterous are we, the visiting bon vivants). I was glad it was a myth: we needed the prostitutes to score drugs off.

  I remember the moment that night that James disappeared with his friend Veronique, a French publishing director who would pop into the office every few months when she was in town, to show James her new shoes. I was chatting to a Swiss rights executive, Anneliese, when I saw him look over at me. I had met Anneliese and her wonderful fringe earlier that day in a meeting. She was intelligent and funny and spoke many languages: they are always intelligent and funny and speak many languages. She was explaining to me about the texture of Thomas Bernhard’s prose in the original German. It’s the kind of thing I ask women about when I’ve accidentally taken crack. There were more women in the room than men: there are always more women in the room than men. I was thinking it would be nice if Anneliese would make regular visits to my office to show me her shoes. They were turquoise, patent-leather, with three-and-a-half-inch heels. They were the type of shoes I had thought profound beautiful women did not need to wear. I was not letting her ankles distract me from her remarks about the texture of Thomas Bernhard’s prose in the original German. Or her calves, with their shop-front-dummy sheen of tan nylon. Matt-laminate. Sand meeting sea in the Caribbean. A perfect holiday read. Guilty pleasure. James smiled at me as he pulled his satchel over his shoulder. Just buy it. Take it off the table.

  My mentor. My shadow. Myself.

  It was an expensive cab ride to the airport but, a dutiful disciple, I went to meet Cockburn at the gate. His email announced he was arriving at eleven in the morning to ensure ‘the new Bolaño’ signed a contract with him. Who this new Bolaño was remained unclear.

  It was not hard to pick Cockburn out from the crowd of arrivals. He was in a typical publisher’s outfit: dark jeans, white shirt, three buttons undone, a skinny-fitting grey blazer and rapier-toed cowboy boots with Cuban heels, making his 6’3” into a frightening 6’5”. His dark hair reached his shoulders and divided in a parting over his high forehead, sharp nose and moist lips. Cockburn was forty-three and looked like a Top Gear presenter: like a midlife crisis. I was relieved to see he was still wearing his wedding ring.

  Despite the way James dressed, I looked up to him (literally, unless I wore his cowboy boots). It’s easy to believe that the whole world has heard of James Cockburn, but of course he’s a niche celebrity. Cockburn is ‘the coolest figure in British publishing’ (Guardian), adored by the geeks who write the literary pages and hated by at least half of those who publish books for a living in a more modest, profitable way.

  It was a joy to see him. I ran over and we hugged.

  ‘Liam, we weren’t sure you were still alive – it sounded too outlandish that you’d just fly away to Buenos Aires, look at you, you’ve got a tan, summer, no spring’s barely started back home. Though it’s ending here, right? Still, this isn’t so bad,’ he said, looking towards the door, where it was a sunny late autumn day. ‘How long’s it been?’

  ‘Three months.’

  I noticed he was struggling slightly with his wheelie case, limping alongside it, and I leaned over and took it from him. ‘Give me that. How are you recovering? I thought you might be in –’

  ‘A wheelchair?’

  ‘I didn’t know. Plaster, crutches?’

  ‘Ah, yeah, for a bit, then they whisk them off you and force you to walk around, even though each step hurts like a kick in the bollocks. But you know me, Liam, I have a powerful constitution. I rather think it is the curse of us both. So this is really the morning, hey? I don’t know what time it feels like. Fancy a beer? A beer in the morning, God, this could be a book fair.’

  When he mentioned book fairs, I bitterly wondered whether I had been to my last one, but I stopped myself from saying this out loud. I never let myself sound a negative note in Cockburn’s company; we spoke only of the successes we were having. Consequently, after jumping in a cab and accelerating away in the direction of his hotel, we took unequal shares of the conversation.

  ‘Now, Liam, buddy, you may be able to help me out with a small favour – but that’s for later, wow, look at this place, man – it’s been ten years since I was last here, the Buenos Aires book fair it must have been, I met this wonderful girl there, was it … Charlena? No, that sounds more like an Aussie – Charlotta? Yes, Charlotta. Wow … How are you finding the women here?’

  ‘Well, I –’

  ‘You don’t want to talk about that, of course you don’t want to talk about that. The favour I mentioned being – fuck me! – did you see that? – we nearly died! Anyway,’ continued James, fully recovered, ‘we’re going out for dinner tonight, the author, his name is Daniel Requena, the guy can’t speak any English, my Spanish is muy rustico, he’s fallen out with the Argies who were going to publish him; those handballers are being no fucking use at all. I did my best to persuade Javi to come out with me but he claims he has to work, so – how is your Spanish? I noticed the nifty way you directed our taxi driver.’

  ‘It’s basic. I can direct taxis, order steak sandwiches and score cocaine.’

  ‘Not a bad skill-set,’ he mused. ‘You may also be able to help me out with the second favour I was going to ask you … but first things first, are you good enough to translate for me over dinner?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘If you showed up with me as an interpreter, I think he would find it hard to take you seriously. Of course, he may have a very rich sense of humour.’

  ‘Well … naturally, we expect he will. But let’s not risk it. You must know someone out here who’d help. Someone Daniel Requena will be impressed that I know. Someone fascinating.’

  Of course, I thought immediately of Alejandro. There was symmetry in the betrayed friend meeting the wounded editor, Bennett’s ghost (and Bolaño’s?) floating above the filled ashtrays, envying the young hotshot, wishing we’d cool it with the cocaine and adjectives.

  ‘I know someone,’ I told Cockburn. ‘The only thing is, I think he’s hiding from me.’

  Cockburn kept quiet for once while I told him the story of Craig Bennett’s early twenties in Buenos Aires with his best friend Alejandro.

  ‘Jesus, that’s wonderful,’ he said, when I’d finished. ‘Heartbreaking!’ he declared with a broad smile. ‘What a story!’ And then, like a politician, his face set and he reached for the sombre notes. ‘I’m sorry
we haven’t spoken about Craig’s death,’ he said, reaching over and putting his hand on my shoulder. ‘We will, mate, we will. I fucking miss him. No one blames you. Except Belinda. And the estate. But no one really blames you. I wonder if we could work on the estate; you might be in a brilliant position to write the biography …’

  ‘The estate hates me? Who is the estate anyway?’

  ‘Oh, some sister in Australia. From what Craig had told me they didn’t see much of each other. They were separated when they were kids, Craig went with the dad, she went with the mum. He didn’t have a girlfriend. His parents are dead. I guess there wasn’t anyone else.’

  ‘That’s sad. And his sister hates me?’

  ‘She’s expressed certain sisterly anger towards the man who was supposed to be looking after him on the night he died.’

  ‘And I suppose Belinda supplied her with her impression of me.’

  ‘Well, Belinda wouldn’t have mentioned the drugs and nor have I. But you admitted to the police that you were taking drugs with Craig, so she knows from them you were in it together. Like I say, it’s understandable, and probably not irredeemable. You’re a charming lad. Don’t lose heart. We’ll see what we can do.’ He reached over and gave me a hug I didn’t want. ‘Come on, let’s find this Alejandro!’

  So I let things drop. James was excited. He could scent another book to hunt besides the one he was here to capture. And I wanted to be excited too. My old boss was back and we had some work to do.

  I gave the driver new instructions and we drove through to Alejandro’s bar. It was empty when we arrived. The polished wood, clean glasses and neatly aligned chairs shone with the optimism of an early-morning Eden. There was only a memory of beer beneath the pine air-freshener.