Plume

by Will Wiles

  Improving the connectivity of the human network, Quin said about Tamesis – setting up chance meetings and happy accidents, boosting social capital and creative collaboration. It was all in his TED Talk: Steves Jobs and Wozniak are introduced by a mutual friend, Lennon meets McCartney at a church fête. ‘You could call it fate,’ Quin puns, strutting around on the stage. Pause for laughter. ‘I call it the connectivity dividend. A day without an unexpected encounter is a day wasted. Loneliness, isolation, exclusion – that’s the noise in the human network. We need to boost the signal.’

  Well maybe, Quin, but in my experience connection caused plenty of noise of its own.

  Another Quin aphorism: ‘The only sure way to predict is to make things happen.’

  Make things happen. I found Alexander De Chauncey’s Tamesis profile and added him as a contact. Then I had second thoughts: if he looked at my Tamesis profile, if his account wasn’t handled by his PR, the first thing he would see would be that Quin post. What I was doing the previous evening, instead of seeing him. Did that look rude? Or did it look … high-powered? Might it raise his opinion of me?

  For good measure, I T-plussed him. That wouldn’t have any effect unless he followed me back, but if he did follow, I would be ready.

  Another Quin quote: ‘We rely on chance – why not make it reliable?’

  I really should get some work done, but I was down to my last can and I feared that if I didn’t go to the shop, my anxiety about the fridge might impair my productivity. And I couldn’t go to the shop without getting dressed, so for the time being I was staying put. My phone was beside me. Notifications still came in from time to time, new contacts on Tamesis, new Twitter followers. It was on vibrate, so when it was down the side of the sofa I had hardly noticed it in the din of power tools from next door. I might have missed Pierce’s call altogether had I not been holding the phone in my hand, dismissing notifications, when it rang.

  ‘Jack.’ His tone was business-like, unpromising.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘I’ve come to a realisation,’ Pierce said.

  Here it comes, I thought. I wondered if I should be recording the call, in preparation for a more hostile unauthorised article, or even to protect myself in court. This thought made me remember my voice recorders – and I was again skewered by panic. Had I laid eyes on either of my DVRs today? I had not. Where were they, post-bender? Where was Pierce’s confession? A wisp of data on an inexpensive storage device in a bag lugged about town by an erratic drunk – that was all that was supporting my career.

  ‘Go on,’ I said, dizzy once more, the grey curling in.

  ‘Well – first of all I want to apologise,’ Pierce said. His words, these and the following, sank in slowly, taking time to deposit meaning in me. ‘I behaved pretty badly yesterday. Rude, I mean. Putting you on the spot like I did, all that … I don’t know … I don’t want to say blackmail. It’s not like that. But I put a lot of pressure on you.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ I said.

  ‘I’m pretty stressed about all this,’ Pierce continued. ‘You know, Night Traffic. Quin pushing me, messing with me.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Quin’s, uh, Quin is …’ But I didn’t have anything to finish that with.

  ‘The truth is, I really am determined to set the record straight, to come clean – Christ, why is everything about this such a cliché? I don’t know – to confess, to tell the truth, to make amends – to atone, that’s it, that’s the literary word. I want to atone. And I think you’re the guy to tell that story.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. I felt as if I had to clear an obstacle course in my head to get a full sentence together. ‘That’s really great to hear.’

  ‘Something you said yesterday really stayed with me,’ Pierce said. Again he had the practised manner that I had noticed during our interview; he had thought through what he was saying, rehearsed it. ‘You said that when people find out about Night Traffic they’re going to be angry – they’ll want to see me get beaten up.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I mean—’

  ‘That’s it exactly,’ Pierce said. ‘What I was avoiding – the part I can’t avoid. So let’s do it. I can balance things out, show that I understand what I did wrong and that I want to put it right.’

  A weird thought occurred to me as I tried to figure out what Pierce meant by this. But it couldn’t be right.

  ‘I need to get beaten up,’ Pierce said.

  I had been right.

  ‘I’m going to get violently mugged,’ Pierce said. ‘The worse the better. And you’re going to watch.’

  SEVEN

  It all rested on Pierce’s confession. No: it all rested on my recording of Pierce’s confession. That was everything, my muscle, my back-up, my leverage. Without the recording, the confession was inconsequential. It might as well have never happened. It would be his word against mine, a proven liar accusing an unproven liar. A degenerate, desperate drunk, accusing an acclaimed author. I had two recordings of the interview, but only one included the confession, and little else mattered. Or rather, I assumed it included the confession. But I had blacked out. Had I lost or damaged the DVR? One evening a few months ago I had spilled most of a can of Stella into my then-laptop. What my reaction had been at the time, I don’t know. Maybe I hadn’t even been aware. I discovered the accident the next morning, confronted with a soggy, sticky keyboard and a black screen. Hundreds of documents, hundreds of photos and hundreds of pounds, gone.

  The other danger was that the recording had never happened. I was habituated to fuck-ups with interview recordings – it had happened with Quin. Button not pressed, wrong button pressed, low or dead battery and no spare, low memory, background noise, microphone in the wrong socket … In recent months I had made a comprehensive survey of ways to fail to do this essential part of my job.

  And there was … a fear. I had not laid eyes on the DVRs since parting from Pierce. I needed to check the recordings. But the other Need had me. I could not do it.

  It’s hard to explain this incapacity. Why not just look, find out? Because if I had fucked up, but I didn’t yet know that I had fucked up, the fuck-up had not truly happened, not yet. Drink helps see things this way – the drink, the Need, means that I can sit here on the sofa, paralysed with low-grade anxiety and fear, but able to deal with those problems because I have drink. Meanwhile the disaster, the possibility of disaster, is all conditional and abstract and positioned safely in a range of possible futures. It’s susceptible to the kind of anaesthesia that drink provides.

  What alcohol provides to the alcoholic is delay. It doesn’t make your problems disappear, but it does defer them – it delays the point at which you will have to care about them. The price of this service is steep, but it always looks like a good deal at the time. ‘At the time’ is all that matters. Addiction is a kind of time travel, or the opposite of time travel: the obliteration of all the bad decisions that have led to a moment, and all the possible consequences and horrible unfoldings of that moment, so that only the moment exists. The past is soothed and the future postponed.

  But this whole magical process only worked as long as there was beer in the fridge, and there was none left. The precious moment was dissolving. I would have to act, I would have to get up and go to the corner shop, and I would have to go out and see Pierce, and I needed to check the recordings of the interview. The commitments I had made were fading back in, a growing racket.

  The shoulder bag I took to work was in the living room, leaning against the seldom-used armchair with the poor view of the TV, the one heaped with dirty laundry. It troubled me, the bag. Its shape troubled me, its poor posture. It was guilty. Something had happened. An ill odour clung to the thought of the DVRs.

  I stood and – not thinking too much, trying to silence the awful thinking that was coming in now that I didn’t have anything to drink – picked up the bag. Then I returned to the sofa and sat with the bag in my lap.

  I stayed like that a while. Then I ope
ned the bag.

  It looked pretty good. There were my notebooks and assorted pens, and my copies of Murder Boards and Night Traffic. My laptop was there, safe in its padded side-pocket. The other worthless bits and pieces that float around in my bag were all present: a comb, a couple of memory sticks, a USB cable. There were no DVRs.

  The bag’s lining was black and quite loose, and it can be easy to miss objects. I took it through to the kitchen and started to methodically remove every item from the bag, laying them out on the kitchen table. There were no DVRs.

  I ran my hands around the insides of the bag, feeling every seam and pocket, feeling the whole thing in its unusually light and empty state – it’s never empty, this bag, never. I squeezed it, exploring if something might have slipped in between the lining and the fabric of the bag itself. There were no DVRs.

  They were gone, both of them. I had lost the recordings of my interview with Pierce.

  A period of numbness followed. I went to the corner shop and bought twelve cans of Stella. I smiled at the man behind the counter and said ‘cheers’ when he gave me my change. I walked back to the flat and put the cans in the fridge, except one, which I opened. I looked at the kitchen table, where the contents of my bag were still neatly laid out. I did not feel despair, or anger, or depression. I didn’t feel much of anything at all – just emotional tinnitus, a rising, meaningless clamour within, drowning out any effort to put together a coherent reaction. I did not feel that all was lost: on the contrary, one of the sickly aspects of alcohol’s deadening of consequence was that there was always hope, deluded hope – not hope at all but hope substitute, hope methadone, the dull synthetic buzz that left you thinking that perhaps you still might be able to turn around that 2,000-word profile that was due first thing in the morning, when it is already nine thirty in the morning and not one word has been committed to the screen. Not hope, then, but a continued flight from the implications of what had happened.

  One ugly truth: I was now obliged to go out and spend the evening with Pierce, on the possibility that I might be able to do something to recover from the loss of the recordings. I could get his confession again, maybe, or at least a couple of quotes that I might be able to use. Some shreds of a feature that I might be able to take in to show Eddie and Polly on Thursday, or Friday if I decided to go to ground tomorrow. Even as alcohol shuts down my ability to understand anything coherent about the future, it has the extraordinary effect of stretching out that future, so that the eighteen or so hours between now and my appearance in the office tomorrow might be for ever, enough time to do anything, to achieve anything, to right all the wrongs and mishaps that were piling up around me.

  Pierce had explained his plan to me over the phone. He wanted to recreate the circumstances of his invented mugging for real, in the hope of being attacked for real. The long, terrifying ordeal he had invented was unlikely to be replicated – or enacted, as it had never taken place – but he might at least get threatened and robbed. Maybe even roughed up. That, he figured, was enough: enough to show remorse, enough to show a willingness to atone, enough to show that he understood the reality of what he had created in fiction. What about the risk of more serious harm, I asked – what if he got himself stabbed? Well, it’s a risk, he said, but not very probable, especially with a witness there. Meaning me. He didn’t sound concerned. Indeed, I was left with the impression that he welcomed the risk. Did he want to get stabbed? Probably not, but he wanted the risk, he wanted it to be a real possibility. He wanted to put himself in the way of the blade.

  What I did not understand was my own role. In Night Traffic, Pierce had been alone when he was attacked; this time, I would be with him. That must affect the likelihood of becoming a victim. He dismissed my concerns with a ‘We’ll see, we’ll find out.’ I don’t want to get mugged again, I said. Fine, said Pierce. Run. But not too far. I need you to witness.

  That was the important part. He needed a witness. There could be no ambiguity about the facts. He needed proof. And so did I.

  ‘Anything I need to bring?’ I asked.

  ‘Your phone?’ Pierce said. ‘There might be a chance to document – you know, to film or something. Or photos, afterwards, of injuries.’

  This made me think of my scraped face. ‘Won’t they take my phone? If it happens.’

  A thoughtful pause. ‘Yeah, I suppose. Back up your files. You have insurance?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Then you’re fine,’ Pierce said merrily. ‘You get a new phone. Sorted. Everyone wins. Oh, and dress smartly. Jacket and tie. Like you’ve been to a posh party.’

  The fabrications in Night Traffic were set against a background of established fact. Pierce had been to a party, the launch of a friend’s book, and had drunk a good deal. Not as much as me on an average night, but a good deal for a civilian. Another friend, who lived further east, out in Leyton, had called a minicab, and had offered to drop Pierce along the way. They had expected to leave the centre via Whitechapel Road, which would ultimately pass by the end of Pierce’s street. But the driver had instead chosen Commercial Road. It had been a warm night, and rather than argue and demand a detour, Pierce had asked to be dropped at the bottom of Burdett Road, a long connecting street, intending to walk the rest of the way home. He was cheerful from drink and friendship. I remembered nights like those. Halfway, he deviated from the main road into a side street, trying to shave a minute or two off the walk.

  This much was real. The party had happened, the cab-ordering friend was real, the cab was real, the chronology to that point was easy to verify and check. So that was what we would do.

  I napped for a while before going out, the fog of horror at the loss of the recordings having manifested as a terrible tiredness. The alarm on my phone woke me at seven, and I was sure that I would have slept on without it. Changing into the jacket and tie that Pierce had mandated was an ordeal of heavy, aching limbs. Everything had frozen in place on the sofa, held with an aching frost, and moving shattered me anew. In the mirror, I studied the damage to my face. It had lost some of its delicatessen rawness and was adding smoky purple bruising at its edges and in the lower pocket of the eye. Tomorrow morning there would be some explaining to do in the office, if I made it in. The shirt and tie made it look worse, somehow. A bookie’s clerk on the wrong side of a gang, a low-rung City sort after a fracas in an Essex nightclub.

  I took some Stella on the Tube, poured into an aluminium water bottle I used to take to the gym. It held almost two cans, good for most London journeys. Anything to clear the sluggishness, the soggy fatigue in my bones.

  Pierce was waiting for me in a pub beside Limehouse Station – almost underneath the station, beneath the elevated line I had spent so much time on yesterday. He greeted me like a friend, springing up from his seat, gripping my hand, patting me on the shoulder. Just thirty-six hours earlier, this would have delighted me, but now it was disquieting. Energy crackled around him, a bright photo-negative to my lethargy. He was on edge, volatile, and I wondered if he had taken something, either licit or illicit. It could simply be adrenalin.

  ‘What happened to your face?’

  I decided to give the truth a go. ‘I was trying to get a plastic bag out of a tree in my back garden, and I fell.’

  ‘Last night?’

  ‘This afternoon.’

  Pierce examined me. ‘I thought maybe Quin had beaten you up.’

  This stopped me. It was said without malice, but the fact that Pierce knew about my encounter with Quin meant I had to adjust the pieces on the game board in my head. If, that is, he did really know – could this be a joke that doubled as a lucky guess? I had assumed that Pierce’s disappearance from social media meant that he no longer looked at it, but that was not necessarily true. My accounts, and Quin’s accounts, were all public, anyone could see them. Pierce might have anonymous accounts of his own for quietly keeping tabs on things. I thought of that rush of unfamiliar followers over the past twenty-four hours.
r />   ‘You saw that?’ I asked.

  Pierce nodded.

  ‘I ran into him,’ I said, trying not to sound guilty. On a technical level, I was pretty sure I had nothing to feel guilty about, but guilt came anyway. ‘I went into a pub for a quiet drink on my way home, and he came in a few minutes later.’

  ‘What an amazing coincidence,’ Pierce said, eyes wide, cartooning innocence. ‘Tamesis knew where you were, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes, I used it to find the pub.’

  Pierce stared at me, smiling, knowing. I had put together these ‘coincidences’ myself. I could readily imagine what Quin had done, but I still could not quite face the reality that he would misuse his own software like that. Why I couldn’t, I don’t know.

  ‘Happens a lot around Quin,’ Pierce said, ‘that kind of co-incidence. If I was still writing journalism I might be more interested in that.’ He gazed deep into his bitter.

  ‘Perhaps, in the piece, we can expose some of Quin’s involvement,’ I said. ‘Since he’ll no longer have any hold over you.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Pierce said. ‘I don’t relish the idea of making an enemy of him, mind. What did he want to talk about, anyway? Me, right?’

  Partial truth. ‘I don’t remember. But yeah, a bit about you. I think he might simply have been trying to mess with me.’

  Pierce smiled. ‘That might be 90 per cent of the reason he does anything. All the personal data he has amassed from his various projects gives him power, but …’ Here, he frowned. ‘What’s strange about Quin, for someone so successful, is that he’s terrifically angry. Maybe that’s not strange. I had success, I was celebrated, and it did weird stuff to me. Anyway. He’s made a lot of money. Millions, tens of millions. Maybe he thought that would give him the power to do what he wants. Not super-villain things, just … When we first met, he just raged about the city, about London. The cost of housing, how his staff couldn’t afford their rent and had to commute for hours, the expense of that building in Shoreditch, how money was killing everything. He’d go on and on about the 1980s and 1990s, how great it was, empty buildings everywhere, artists, designers, squats, crime … No wonder he was a fan of mine, no wonder he liked Night Traffic and Murder Boards; I suppose it was a link back to that kind of grungy, squatty stuff.’