Eating Crow

by Jay Rayner

  “Go after him, Marc,” she whispered, her voice now thin and frail. I nodded and gently closed the door, as if it were to their bedroom.

  I didn’t catch him. Stefan walked out of the garden, out of the house, and out of my life. He returned to Bristol that evening on the last train. Two months after that he dropped his courses and joined the army. As proof of my impressive insight into the male condition I would like to be able to tell you that he was overcompensating for the blow to his machismo, but as we never spoke again I would only be speculating. I wrote to him a few times, at an address in Scotland provided by his parents, but he never replied and after a couple of years I gave up. A few years later I heard from his mother that he had left the army and now worked “in security” somewhere in West Africa. Gaby moved out of the house she had been living in, but only so she could move in with Gareth Jones and he quickly made it clear there was no space there for me. In those circumstances our relationship could do nothing other than wither on the vine. I had wanted to separate Stefan from Gaby. In the process I separated myself from them as well.

  I grabbed a handful of tissues from the box and tried to stanch the deluge. I knew my face would look a mess before the unforgiving lens of a television camera but there was nothing I could do about it. In any case there was no room for vanity now, for this was the last personal apology I had to make and this studio was the only place I was ever going to get the chance to make it. I could feel a camera bearing down on me. I turned and stared directly into the lens.

  “Stefan, I don’t know where you are or what you’re doing or even if you’re still alive.” A break of a few seconds, to wipe my nose. “But if somehow you’re watching this, I just want you to know … I want you to know I’m sorry. I’m so bloody sorry for what I did to you. I’m …”

  One of Treasure’s exquisitely manicured hands reached across and squeezed my knee. In a trembling voice she said, “Just take a moment …” I looked up. Tears were coursing through the layers of foundation on her face, like a flash flood turning dusty hillsides to mud. She grabbed some tissues from the box for herself and tried to mop her eyes but succeeded only in smudging her makeup, so that great black, misshapen shadows appeared beneath them.

  I took a deep breath and held up one hand, palm forward. “I’m okay, Helen. Really. I’m”—my breathing came in great, sobbing gusts—“I’m … fine.”

  A final statement to the camera. “I don’t expect you to accept my apology, Stefan, but it’s all I have left to give you.” My lips began trembling. I could feel the camera tightening on my face. In a whisper I said, “I’m so sorry.”

  And cut to Treasure. “From the boiling cauldron of emotion that is the Powertalk studio”—sob—“good night …” She raised a tight fistful of tissues to her nose and, for the first time in her career, turned her face away from the camera.

  As the limo drew up, Jennie was waiting for me on the steps of the Willard Hotel, holding my overcoat. She opened the door and, without saying a word, helped me out, throwing the coat loosely over my shoulders as if I were a prize-fighter who had just come out of the ring. I was drained and empty and it was a relief to be with someone to whom I did not need to say anything or explain myself. The silence was comforting. She led me through the lobby and into the lift. She led me along the corridor and through our suite and into my bedroom. It seemed entirely natural that she should stay here and sit me down on the edge of the bed and undress me, her fingers carefully unbuttoning buttons, and emptying sleeves and untying shoes; that she should fold back the covers and help me to slide between them. It was natural that she should remove her own clothes, and that having dimmed the lights and closed the door, she should climb into the bed next to me. It was exactly the way things were meant to be.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Marc, it’s fine. It’s …”

  “You’re laughing.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You are. You’re laughing at me.”

  “Well, it is quite funny.”

  “It isn’t funny. It’s not happened to me for a very long time.”

  “No, I mean, it’s just—”

  “What?”

  “I get into bed with the Chief Apologist and he immediately …”

  “What? Spit it out.”

  “Apologizes to me.”

  “I’m just a bit embarrassed, is all.”

  “You don’t have to be embarrassed. It was a stressful night. You were strung out. It was our first time together … well, almost our first time together, and—”

  “Anyway, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s quite sexy, actually.”

  “What is?”

  “You. Apologizing.”

  “Is sexy?”

  “A Chief Apologist apologizing is kind of sexy.”

  “You actually find the word ‘sorry’ sexy?”

  “Ooh, go on. Say it again.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Whisper it in my ear.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Hmm. And again. Breathe it on my neck.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Fancy another whirl?”

  “I refuse to apologize to you if it doesn’t work out again.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to.”

  “Promise?”

  “Shut up and come over here.”

  Twenty-five

  My father died in my sleep, and from the moment I awoke I knew by the silence that he was gone. There is never silence in the house of the dying, even in the darkest hours of the night. There are always people talking in muffled voices behind closed doors or spoons being clinked restlessly against mugs in the kitchen. The morning Dad died there was none of this, and long before I came downstairs and found my mother alone at the kitchen table, I knew what had happened. Even now, waking to silence, I can be flattened by the anxiety of loss. I am that child again, reminded anew that Dad has died and fearful that there is unfinished business between us, the nature of which I cannot quite recall. Then I hear the inane murmur of a radio in someone else’s kitchen, or the background soundtrack of birdsong, and the day begins. I distrust silence.

  In my thickly carpeted bedroom at the Willard Hotel in Washington, DC, I thought of my father only for a second or two, with a dull confusion about where I was, before the muffled sounds of chanting voices expanded through the fifteen-hundred-dollars-a-night quiet. Jennie lay asleep next to me. I slipped quietly out of bed and pulled on a bathrobe that did not fit me (they never do in hotels; the sleeves are always too short). In the suite’s sitting room I tried to see what was going on at street level, but the windows did not open and we were too high up for me to get any view.

  “What’s the noise?” Jennie was standing in the doorway yawning, wrapped in a sheet, her long hair in a tangled spray over her shoulders.

  “No idea. Demonstration of some kind. Can’t see.”

  She yawned again. “I’ll send Franky or someone from security to check it out.” She stumbled back into the bedroom.

  I stayed at the window, my cheek pressed lightly against the hard, cool glass, listening to the crowd, recalling the complex events of the night before with a gentle satisfaction. The phone rang but I didn’t move. Jennie picked it up.

  She shouted from the bedroom. “Will says turn on the TV”

  “Sorry?”

  “The television. Turn it on.”

  “Which channel?”

  To the phone: “Which channel?” A silence. Another shout: “He says a news channel. Any of them.” My finger was already on the button.

  It took me a few seconds to focus on the face: the pink, overflowing eyes, the tear-smeared cheeks, the lips on the edge of a child’s uncomprehending pout.

  “Jesus.”

  From the bedroom Jennie said, “Marc, are you getting this?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Which channel are you looking at?”

  I searched the screen for the ident logo. “Fox.”

  “Try CN
N. Channel fourteen.”

  “They’ve got me on both.”

  “Hang on. You’re on MSNBC too and”—I heard the soundtrack change on the television in the bedroom—“CBS.”

  There was a knock at the door. It was Satesh. “Have you seen …?”

  “We’re looking at it now. They’re all playing it.”

  “Where’s Jennie?”

  “In my bedroom. I mean … the bedroom.” Satesh looked at me quizzically. I said, “It was late last night and …”

  “Oh.”

  This was a new one on me. What is the correct procedure when one work colleague has just acknowledged that you spent the night in bed with another work colleague? All I could manage was, “Thank you.” He bowed his head graciously, the diplomatic Sherpa, here to serve.

  Another knock at the door. Will, followed by Franky. In his slow Southern drawl my bodyguard said, “I think you should go see what’s happenin’ outside.”

  “We’re a little busy right now.”

  He was insistent. “Hit channel one, dude,” he said.

  I did as I was told. A crowd at least a hundred strong was pictured standing outside the main entrance to the hotel. Some of them were holding homemade posters. One read, WE’RE SORRY TOO.

  A reporter was working his way along the crowd, microphone in hand. He stopped at two young women, all honey-chestnut hair and bleached teeth.

  “Why have you come down here today?”

  “We just wanted to show our support for the Chief Apologist,” the first girl said, nodding her head with sincerity.

  “Yeah?” said her friend, her voice rising in a questioning intonation. “We just think he’s, you know, so brave?”

  “Is there a message you have for Mr. Basset, if he’s watching?”

  The girls looked at each other, grinned, and then leaned into the microphone: “We’re sorry too!”

  I blinked at the screen, and flicked channels. “We need more televisions up here.”

  “There’s a media facility in the basement,” Will said. “Lots of TVs down there.”

  “What are we waiting for, then?”

  He looked me up and down. “You and Jennie to put on some clothes?”

  The room was a fully equipped television control room for outside broadcasts from the Willard Ballroom, where important men in dinner jackets regularly came to give implausibly dull speeches for broadcast on C-Span. There was a long mixing desk, and on the back wall, thirty-two plasma TV screens hung in rows four deep and eight across. We switched them all onto different channels. Five were showing reruns of The Simpsons. Three were carrying various parts of the Star Trek franchise, and one, reassuringly enough, was screening Sesame Street (“Today’s program is brought to you by the letter W”).

  The other twenty-three were covering the reaction to my appearance on Powertalk. It had, we discovered, become the highest-rated edition of the program in its history, as friends and family implored each other by telephone to stop whatever they were doing and switch over. In an age of reality television, when authentic emotion was so commonly sought but so rarely found, I was being praised for displaying feelings of such depth and intensity that commentators had been moved to reclassify the broadcast as, by turns, “ultra-reality television,” “meta-reality television,” and even “reality-max.”

  On one news channel a former US secretary of state was busily crediting me with ushering in a new era of peace and security.

  “With this guy in the Chief Apologist’s chair,” he said in a growl, “the world can get back in touch with its emotions.”

  On another they were running footage from New York of the United Nations secretary-general, a tiny Sri Lankan man, standing before a phalanx of news cameras, wiping the tears from his eyes.

  “Mr. Basset’s empathetic capacity shows the way forward for those of us struggling to mediate in today’s complex world,” he said. “We’ve got the right man for the job. Now I’m going to telephone my brother in Colombo to apologize for not making it to his wedding.” (I heard later that Schenke had also issued a statement through his publishers that day, but his comments about me were so vitriolic and so freighted with expletives that they had chosen not to release it.)

  I immediately recognized the people being interviewed on a third screen, even though it had been more than fifteen years since last I saw them, and time had been cruel. The on-screen caption read Swindon, England. And below that: Gaby and Gareth Jones. They were perched on the edge of a sofa and on their laps they each held a small blonde scrap of child, their eyes wide, presumably at the tangle of cables, lights, and people hiding behind the camera. Whatever soft summer fruit blush Gaby had once boasted was now gone. There was a fullness to her cheeks and a heavy curve to her shoulders and a general heft. The years hadn’t treated Gareth well either, nudging his razor-sharp frame far out of focus. (This proves what I always say: it is far better to start out overweight than to become so. That way you disappoint no one, least of all yourself.)

  “We want to thank lovely Marc Basset,” Gaby was saying, “because without him we would never have found each other. Isn’t that right, Gareth?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And if we hadn’t got together there’d be no lovely Vicky and no lovely Tom, would there?” She stroked her children’s hair. “Right, Gareth?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And like Marc, we want to send Stefan our love, wherever he is.”

  “Yeah. Wherever.”

  I scanned the screens for an interview with Stefan, but all anybody had was a shot of him as a student, all sharp jaw and crisp blue eyes and you-know-you-want-me smile. However, there was a live two-way with Robert Hunter, perched on the edge of an office desk in London. “Marvelous chap. All-round pro. And terrifically emotionally engaged.”

  “You bastard!” I shouted at the screen. “That’s why you sacked me.”

  I heard Jennie laughing. “Marc,” she said. “It doesn’t matter anymore, does it?”

  She was right, of course. I had entered a new phase in my job where what people who knew me thought of me was far less important than what people who didn’t know me thought of me. This is the definition of modern celebrity, and whether I liked it or not, this was now my status.

  “At the beginning,” she said, lecturing me on the flight back to New York, “you had legitimacy because people like myself and Max thought you’d be good at the job. Now you have legitimacy because the news networks have accepted that you are good at the job and my opinion is therefore irrelevant, which is as it should be. Although, for what it’s worth, I think you’re brilliant.” She kissed me lightly on the cheek, in full view of the rest of the team.

  There were huddles of media waiting to greet us wherever we went, asking for my response to the world’s response to my response to Helen Treasure’s questions.

  “It’s very humbling, actually,” I said, or “I just don’t want to let anybody down” or “If I can help other people to make the apologies they need to make, well, I’m pleased.” I meant it. I knew how good it felt to say sorry. I knew all about the tension and release. I was more than ready to turn a few more people on to it. In time we began to hear stories about apology clubs springing up across Europe and North America where friends and extended family would meet to conduct formal “apology ceremonies,” using versions of the Schenke Laws adapted to these more domestic circumstances. Newly videoed apologies began to circulate about the Net via email, just as mine had done, and people set up weblogs devoted entirely to saying sorry to friends that they had hurt. I was approached by a publisher to produce an apology handbook for a mass audience—outlines of apologies for specific circumstances, ideas for locations and ceremonies, that sort of thing—but had to decline due to pressure of work. The handbook was later, logically enough, published under Schenke’s name, although—thankfully—ghostwritten.* Apology clubs soon overtook reading groups as the community activity of choice.

  In New York the office filled up
with tumescent bunches of flowers and boxes of exquisite chocolates from well-wishers who had read about my passion in Time. We gave them away to hospitals and charities across the city. I was invited to the openings of Manhattan art galleries and cocktail bars, films and plays, to book launches and charity events. One evening Jennie and I were asked to the launch of a new caviar joint on the Upper East Side. Between us we dispatched half a kilo of golden Almas caviar, the most expensive foodstuff on earth at fourteen thousand dollars a kilo, which we ate off the back of our hands in the correct fashion, under the gaze of television news cameras crowding around the plate glass windows that gave onto the street.

  “This one I’m not going to apologize for,” I told the reporters outside as we left. “It’s my money and I can damn well spend it as I like.” I could tell the New York media appreciated this light, unstuffy approach to the heavy responsibilities my office carried.

  Most nights we went out in a big gang, Franky and Alex riding up front, the rest of us in the back with a bottle of something chilled on the go to help us wind down from the pressures of the day.

  And there were pressures. One morning Franky and Alex came to see me, faces as dark and brooding as a gray winter’s day.

  “Who died?”

  Alex said, “Nobody … yet.”

  They had received a letter postmarked Mississippi making death threats against me which they said they did not have the luxury to ignore.

  “What does it say, exactly?”

  Alex took a frail sheet of paper from the leather folder in his hand and in a deadpan voice began to read: “You nigger-loving Zionist scum …”

  “Zionist scum? I’m not even Jewish.”

  “… watch your back. We will get you and we won’t be saying sorry to no one. We will hang you from the trees like the scumbag—”

  “Let me see this.” It was a single piece of lined paper torn from a student notebook and scrawled upon in purple ink. There were a lot of words in capitals and some of them were underlined three times.

  “Boys, this is a nut. We used to get these all the time at the newspaper. Rule of thumb: colored ink on lined paper equals crazy person. I mean, what’s this stuff at the bottom about looking out for ‘kiddies in wheelchairs for they too may be the footmen in the coming Aryan militia’?”