by Will Wiles
‘It does more than that. It makes the event less harmful. No one should go out there and stick their head in the smoke. Police and fire service advice is to stay away. We’re clear about that. But do you know what could cause more harm? Much more harm? Worry. Worry can impact your health in a dozen ways. Worry can shorten your life. Worrying about this event is much more likely to cause us harm than the event itself. By reducing worry, we are directly reducing the harm associated with the event. What if someone is concerned by the air quality, so they stay at home and miss a day at work? That’s unnecessary economic damage, unnecessary concern, unnecessary harm. This is precisely what I meant by our role in managing perceptions of the event: we are not concerned with the cloud of smoke as much as we are with the cloud of psychological consequences the event has created. The emergency services can deal with the combustion incident, while a public relations department can address the action of the event on the minds of the public. We can change the nature of the event for the better. We can do good that way. Our intervention here is essentially therapeutic.’
The atmosphere in the cabin had become stifling. How did they stand it? The reek of smoke was everywhere. The back of my mouth tasted like a petrol station forecourt and a space in my head had been surrounded by hoardings promising that a tremendous migraine was coming soon. As we left, Lily gave us both a tote bag containing a press pack, a couple of police and fire service leaflets, a squeezy fire engine with tips for preventing house fires written on its side, and a pen and USB drive bearing the Metropolitan Police emblem. She thanked us for stopping by, and for our interest in the event, and took my business card, promising to sign me up for an email.
Pierce held the cabin door for me.
‘Patricia Highsmith,’ the policewoman at the desk said.
‘Excuse me?’ I said.
‘Patricia Highsmith,’ she repeated. ‘I enjoy a good Patricia Highsmith. In case your friend thought I didn’t read anything.’ She nodded towards Pierce.
‘Patricia Highsmith,’ Pierce said. ‘Me too.’
Colourful hieroglyphs on the pavement, spray-painted by contractors, arrows and boxes limning the subterrain: Blocked. No signal. By now I should have been deep in the bosom of Alexander De Chauncey. I didn’t want to look at my phone, to measure the fallout of my cancellation, but my conscience was able to briefly overpower my other inhibitions and I looked. There was an email from his PR. Three minutes after I sent mine. ‘Very inconvenient … Time very limited … Difficult to reschedule at this notice …’
Bad. Not maximum bad, and no worse than I could reasonably expect, but bad. Would they go straight to Eddie and complain? That might be the end for me. But there were no emails from Eddie or Polly, nothing else out of the ordinary. Would they email about something like that? Unlikely. It would be a phone call.
My phone sprang to life in my hand, throbbing with an incoming call, and almost flew out of my hand as I spasmed in surprise. Adrenalin thumped through my system. The passing chemical blitz made me woozy, and I felt the blackout grey crawling in at the corners of my vision.
Withheld number. That could mean one of the phones at the office.
I swiped to answer, thumb skidding on the drops of drizzle that had clung to the phone screen, little pinpricks of rainbow.
‘Jack Blick?’ said an unfamiliar voice, a confident drawl.
‘Bick,’ I said. ‘Yes. Hello.’
‘Alexander De Chauncey.’ He savoured every syllable of his name.
‘Mr Chauncey, Mr De Chauncey,’ I began, already stumbling. I was completely on the wrong side of this conversation, the one who needed a boon from the other, and the one who had just done wrong by the other, a double supplicant, and De Chauncey didn’t sound as if he was on the wrong side of anything, ever. ‘I’m so sorry about this afternoon, I had another interview and it has—’
‘Where are you?’ De Chauncey asked, drawing out the words again, a note of bemusement in the question, as if there was nowhere that I could reasonably be.
‘Er, Barking, as it happens,’ I said. He could probably tell that I was outside, and hear the wind against the phone mic. ‘I left a message with—’
A soft cluck or tut came over the line – perhaps no more than the sound of a man turning a Polo mint over in his mouth. ‘We were supposed to be meeting,’ he said. ‘The girl from the magazine said you were coming over this afternoon.’
His girling of Polly, my immediate manager and a terrifying force in my life, triggered conflicting emotions: a crackle of righteous anger on her behalf, a spark of amusement and delight. ‘As I said in my email—’ I began.
‘It’s difficult this week,’ he said with a sigh, as if I should feel sympathy for him. ‘Not a sliver of daylight …’
‘I appreciate that, and I really am sorry,’ I said. ‘I promise it won’t take long, if you can possibly spare just half an hour in the next day or two.’
‘Well, where are you now?’ he asked, as if I hadn’t just told him. ‘If you can make it over here in the next hour or so, we could still do it.’
I swallowed. ‘It might be tricky, I’m quite a way out.’
A sigh. I was pushing my luck. ‘It’s best we get it done today.’
‘OK, I’ll get moving now,’ I said. There was no reply, no closing acknowledgement. The call was over. I put the phone back in my pocket with quaking hands.
‘We should get moving,’ I said to Pierce, thinking more about my empty fridge, cold fear twisting inside me. Even within me, in my innermost core, there was a lie – that I would make every effort to get to De Chauncey’s office in Shoreditch – and, deeper, the truth – that I would not, and was already planning the heavy session I would need to anaesthetise myself against the consequences of that, and the rest of today’s events. I wanted to believe the lie. It would be a really heavy session. ‘This weather …’
‘There may be another way around,’ Pierce said. ‘We might be able to get a better view, even if we can’t get much closer.’
I looked up at the plume. A helicopter clattered overhead, tufting and tugging the sides of the column. Was it weakening, or simply losing contrast as the sky around it descended and darkened?
‘Light’s going,’ I said.
‘That might make the effect all the more dramatic,’ Pierce said. ‘There was a turning, back the way we came – if we go along there, we’ll be able to find another way back down to the river and the fire.’
‘No, I need to get back – that call …’
Pierce shrugged. ‘OK, let’s get back. It’d be good to get out of this.’
The puddles alongside the road had deepened and widened and the lorries, headlights on, tyres hissing, had sped up in the wet. To avoid getting drenched, we had to wait more often, and longer, and sometimes had to sprint.
‘It’s a shame to come out here and not to see a lick of flame,’ Pierce said.
‘Looks like they’ve got the place locked down tight,’ I said. ‘I doubt we’d be able to see anything.’
‘Keen to get back?’ Pierce asked, his tone a trace loathsome. I had forgotten that he knew about the drinking, and I disliked the possibility that he might be needling me about it. ‘It’s typical, though, isn’t it?’ he continued. ‘We come out here wanting a brush with disaster, something real, and end up being fed a bunch of bullshit by PRs.’
My irritation with Pierce jagged upwards. So I wanted to get back and drink, true, but he had no right to say it. Or imply it, anyway. Knowing about my problem didn’t mean he knew me. Perhaps I felt a little guilty – I was the one cutting the dérive short, even though it had been my idea. Perhaps these thoughts were all facets of the same general dismay about the way the day had turned out.
Anyway, hurt, I aimed for a spot on Pierce that I knew would hurt back.
‘Isn’t all this fussing over “authentic” urban experience a bit try-hard?’ I said. ‘A bit hipster-ish?’
‘Hipster-ish?’ Pierce said, and I was pleased at the affront in h
is voice. Bull’s-eye. ‘I’d say it’s the opposite—’
‘But it isn’t,’ I cut in. ‘It’s as anxious as the flannel shirt and the vinyl collection. An obsession with status, with defining yourself through experience. Getting mugged as some kind of artisanal treat. A pop-up that gives you something to Facebook about, something to define yourself to your friends. A marker of status, victimhood and depth.’
Pierce was glaring at me, but he didn’t respond.
‘When I read Night Traffic,’ I continued, ‘I loved it because I could relate it to my own experience; it took my memory, my trauma, and, without diminishing the ugliness of it, stripped away its ordinariness, gave it qualities I could appreciate.’
‘That’s exactly the kind of self-help bullshit people want from writers,’ Pierce spat back. ‘Exactly what I wanted to avoid. This idea that autobiographical writing has to inspire, which means everything becomes a lesson, so “how I got over this trauma” gets the unspoken addition “and you can too” and everyone’s lived experience turns into a Victorian lecture on moral fibre and self-improvement.’
‘But you didn’t live it! You didn’t overcome anything! It wasn’t autobiography, it was fiction!’
‘Nevertheless—’
‘No! There’s no nevertheless! A forged bank note isn’t worth half of its face value, it’s worth nothing!’
For the first time in our acquaintance I felt that something I had said to Pierce had really affected him. The indignation and pride that he had displayed moments earlier were gone, and he had the same haunted look he had at times when we first met, when he must have been weighing up the confession he was about to make. The squareness and bulk of him was unchanged, but now appeared baggy and tired, not a reservoir of force. I knew what it was: he wanted to salvage something, to retain some of his reputation as a writer, some of Night Traffic’s renown as literature. And he was seeing that it might not be possible.
‘If you want to go ahead and come clean,’ I said, ‘you’re going to have to get used to this kind of reaction. Worse. People won’t want a sympathetic interview. They will want me to beat you up on the page, and if I hold back, they’ll do it themselves. The days of good faith are over, my friend. Everything you did, it won’t just be considered a sin, it’ll be considered an insult, and that’s so much worse.’
My innards lurched. Not nausea, though that was coming – an instinct I had gone too far. However long and wrong this day had been, I still had to get a feature article out of Pierce. The truly great interview I had seen shining before me was still attainable, unless I drove Pierce away. He might simply decide to clam up; worse, he might decide that there was no value in having this pet magazine journalist if he wouldn’t even follow instructions, and go to one of our rivals, or a newspaper.
‘You do want to go ahead?’ I asked gently. We had reached the overgrown base of the stairs up to the footbridge. As we ascended, Pierce kept his head bowed, thoughtful rather than humble.
‘I do, I do,’ he said. ‘I have to. Quin, remember? And I have to get on with my life. There has to be a way to do it that minimises the backlash.’
This struck me as delusional, but I admired his commitment to the idea. Maybe it was just denial, or a natural but misplaced desire to weasel out of the full consequences of his fraud. However I thought there might be a little more to it than that: an urge towards literary experimentation. Pierce wanted to take an established prose form, the confessional interview, and screw with its boundaries and conventions. And, truly, I wanted to enable that in any way possible, even if it meant being a passive enabler of what he had in mind. What I did not want was for him to take fright and decide to do it the normal way with the Sunday Times.
‘You have to understand why people will be angry,’ I said. ‘It’ll be seen as romanticisation of crime. Genuine victims of crime will be angry, especially if they read the book.’
‘You’re a genuine victim of crime,’ Pierce said with a drop of acid. ‘What makes you angry about it?’
‘Well, you lied your way into my trust, which is a betrayal,’ I said. ‘Reading something like that is a two-way process: you, the author, are opening up to the reader, but in turn the reader feels as if they’re sharing something with you. Regardless of how adeptly you did it, you were taking a creative holiday in my misery. That’s as bad as fraud, really, because there’s this implication that you wanted to experience an attack; rather than merely finding the good in a terrible experience, you were making that case from nothing. And you really don’t want to experience an attack. The second time I was mugged, it … well, it really fucked up my life.’
We had reached the top of the stairs, disturbing a skulking pigeon. It fled up and out in an explosion of wings and scrambling claws. But before I clocked that it was a pigeon, I saw the pale burst of escaping feathers and a shining avian eye and imagined a rarer bird had been waiting for me.
‘Can you tell me about it?’ Pierce said. ‘That second time?’
No, I realised – it wouldn’t make sense and he wouldn’t understand. It was too open to interpretation, and might not obviously support what I had been saying. ‘I don’t think I can,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. Not now, or here.’
The encroaching gloom had made the footbridge a tunnel through Hades. Its few lights revealed enough of its slick, foul surfaces to make the threat clear. Another stunted winter day giving up. Coming through here alone, at night, was as unimaginably unwise to me as trekking solo through a crocodile swamp.
‘We know getting mugged is horrible, Pierce,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to go through it to know that. The fear of it spills out, infects the city. Places like this. It shuts down parts of the urban circuits, corrupts the operating system.’
‘I think you’d be pretty safe here,’ Pierce said. ‘No one in their right mind would have a good reason to come here at night. Not even muggers. I hear what you’re saying. But fear isn’t a good measure of a situation. We fear lots of things that turn out fine. And there are lots of other things that we should fear, but don’t.’
On the platform, huddled out of the steady, heavy almost-rain, we talked briefly and ambiguously about what would come next. I said I’d be in touch the next day. Pierce said he’d think about it. The pub excursion we had originally sketched out was forgotten. The pub is useless for determined drinking. I needed quiet, and privacy. The fridge had to be restocked. I needed to be away from people, all people, but especially Pierce. I needed the kind of clean that alcohol gave me, the dreamless sleep. Peace, alone on the sofa, a kebab or a box of chicken, that first beer, that nth beer. I could taste it – worse, I could not taste it, not yet.
Was there material to write a feature? Of some kind, sure. If 2,000 words could be woven out of fifteen PR-supervised minutes with a distracted celebrity in a hotel room, there’d be no trouble getting it from this sprawling wreck of a day. We had talked for hours. But at the same time I felt that he had told me very little. Most obviously, he had not even hinted at why he had faked the book. This waffle about ‘authentic urban experiences’ was not entirely convincing, not least because it contradicted itself. It had the smell of a smokescreen thrown up to obscure something else. Perhaps this was genuine journalistic instinct on my part. It hardly mattered because as I was thinking this, he stood beside me – jacket collar pulled up against the cold, hands crammed into pockets – and I didn’t ask him. Getting away was more important. The minutes creaked by. No device is slower than the orange-lit information display in an unimportant station. Out at the edge, among the hubs.
For the rest of the journey we spoke very little, and it wasn’t a long journey. Pierce got off the train at Barking in order to get the Tube back to Bow Road. I stayed on, aiming at Fenchurch Street. The train moved with little urgency, as if it could feel the rush-hour pressure building up in the city at the end of its line, and feared that approaching too fast could cause the whole place to rupture.
I checked my phone. More emails. I sk
immed the senders and subjects: there was an email from Polly but it was routine office stuff, no sign that De Chauncey or his press person had gone crying to Eddie. A couple of Twitter notifications, people favouriting things said by other people that happened to mention me. I hadn’t said anything worthwhile on Twitter for days. Just empty I’m-alive, Is-it-lunch-yet stuff. What would really set my feed alight would be to tweet something like: ‘Just spent day with @Oliver_Piercing. Major interview coming soon.’ But that might inspire other journalists to get in touch with Pierce, seeing that he had decided to ‘break his silence’, and he might talk to them. I could tweet a tease: ‘Spent amazing day with next interview subject. Rarely speaks with press. Going to be a big one.’ But that’s just annoying, isn’t it? Perhaps I could layer the tease with some ironic distance, serve it backhand: ‘I hate those teaser tweets, “secret meeting today, big story coming soon”, but today I really want to do one!’
But that just made me hate myself.
This is what I tweeted: ‘I am on a train. It is moving very slowly.’
Which was no more than the truth. I tried to bring up the @Oliver_Piercing feed, thinking – fearing – that Pierce might be coming out of his hole. But it was still blank, an error message.
Polly was in my notifications. She had favourited something I said about interviewing Bill Nighy back in early 2014. Why would she do that? Was it a deliberate message of some sort? Or just an accident, a slip of the finger? Either way, she was rooting about in the deep past of my timeline. Why? Looking for something? Evidence? She was unlikely to find anything. My online persona was a work of art. Modest, but without disingenuous self-deprecation. Always out doing interesting activities, but never boastful about them. Occasional wry jokes but no clowning or waggishness. Worldly without being jaded. Warm without being syrupy. Humane without being preachy. I liked to think that even my silences had a particular quality to them.
Not much was happening on Instagram. I took a photo of my copy of Murder Boards sitting on the stiff, worn fabric of the train seat next to mine, taking care to show its beard of bookmarks. That hit the right note. Literature. Work. Research. London. On the move somewhere. But not first class, oh no. Maybe the slightest hint at what I had been doing all day. Nothing that might contradict any later lies I might want to tell about missing the De Chauncey meeting. Perfect.