by Will Wiles
‘Before my time,’ I said. I hated to think about it. Soon the city would spit me out, dead, half-dead, or alive. Without my job, it was over. And then what? No other job, that was for sure. If people like Quin couldn’t make it work, then … It made me angry, too. With Quin, as much as anyone. ‘I would have thought he was responsible, at least in part; he’s been the face of trendy Shoreditch for so long, him and his dazzle-pattern building and apps to help you find a good cold-press place and share photos of your ostrich burger.’
‘Yeah, and you’re a feature writer for a glossy magazine on Old Street, and I’m a Vice writer, a lapsed Vice writer anyway. We’re all to blame. Christ, what was the name of the guy who founded your magazine? Aaron …?’
‘Errol,’ I said.
‘Well, there you have it,’ Pierce said. ‘Didn’t he do the first pop-up shop?’
‘There’s some dispute about that,’ I said. Errol certainly believed he was the first, never having heard of market stalls or car-boot sales. But this didn’t seem an appropriate fact to bring into the conversation.
‘What’s he doing now?’ Pierce asked.
‘He has a creative consultancy,’ I said, fearing I was letting the defensiveness tell in my voice, and wondering why it was there at all. I revered Errol. His eye for the new, the pre-popular, was without parallel. He could make a magazine sing with metropolitan desire. He was the modern urban lifestyle, without doubt, and without visible effort. Eddie didn’t encourage the Errol cult too much, which I could understand. They had been difficult shoes to step into. But sometimes, when Kay or Freya or I were convinced an idea was interesting and could not be dissuaded, Eddie invoked Errol. What would Errol make of this? He was more than the first editor: he was the first reader, the perfect reader, the one we had to please.
But when this had to be explained to an outsider, it could sound stupid. What would Errol have made of Pierce?
‘And he publishes a magazine, Networth, for, uh …’
‘Very rich people,’ Pierce said. ‘Yeah, I know it. They asked me to write a piece about Hackney Wick just after the Olympics. “London’s Meatpacking District” or something.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said yes, what do you think?’ Pierce chuckled. ‘Pound a word, fucking phenomenal. It was funny. “So you want me to sell the place?” I said. “Make it sound good?” No, no, they said. Make it sound dirty, edgy. That’s what’ll sell it. Like it’s got potential.’
‘Quin said something similar,’ I said, not loudly.
Pierce drummed his fingers on the table, an impatient look coming over him. ‘Honestly,’ he said, ‘I thought you’d be more excited about this. Great colour for your piece, isn’t it? Better than a trip to Dagenham in the rain.’
Perhaps I should fake some enthusiasm, some crackle and verve, to make the excursion into the kind of zany adventure that I had once wanted to write about. But I could not. Since the loss of the recording, it was no more than an uphill slog, a Quixotic errand on the road to maybe avoiding losing my job. ‘It’s difficult for me,’ I said, choosing not to share those musings, and use my victimhood instead. ‘I really don’t want to be involved in another mugging. Even to watch. That’s assuming that it happens, and I don’t think it will.’
‘You don’t have to worry,’ Pierce said, without much sympathy in his voice. ‘You’ll be fine. I’ll make myself the focus. You can – I don’t know – recede. Not too far, though.’
I frowned. Pierce’s conception of what would happen clearly resembled a chat with a charity fundraiser or an encounter with a street performer, not a terror-based robbery. If it happened – if! – I sincerely doubted that it would be something I could just step back from. The whole art of mugging was to shut off the exits, to enclose the world and charge for readmission.
He thought that he would have some kind of control over events. But that’s what the attacker steals first, your control. And they never really give it back, even afterwards.
‘You’re very confident this is going to happen just the way that you want,’ I said.
‘Yeah, I’ve got a good feeling,’ Pierce said, still with that bubble of energy. ‘Really good feeling. I can see it perfectly.’
‘It’s not like imagining a scene,’ I said.
‘Well, it has happened to you twice,’ Pierce said. ‘It happens.’
‘Not on demand,’ I said.
Though the self-assurance in his words had hardly changed, Pierce had seemed diminished by my mild scepticism. But now he recovered, taking on that lecture-hall manner again.
‘When I was writing Night Traffic,’ he began (and I expected him to look from me to a spectral audience, as if we were on stage at Hay-on-Wye or Cheltenham), ‘I came across a brilliant essay by David Freeman about muggers in New York in the early seventies, real behavioural sink, Panic in Needle Park stuff – do you know it?’
I did not. I shook my head.
‘Anyway, there’s two of them, man and woman, Hector and Louise. They work as a team. Louise acts like bait. She walks down the street, and when someone tries to chat her up, she steers him towards Hector, who puts a knife to his throat.’
If this information had any relevance to our situation, it was impossible to see. It might as well have been a tale of knights and chivalry, or cattle rustlers in the Old West.
‘Yeah, but that’s New York in the early seventies,’ I said. ‘Not …’ I sat up in my chair and stretched out my arms, a gesture that took in the pub around us, the busy, bright, gentrified East End pub. After-work drinks that had turned into deep sessions, young flat-sharers enjoying midweek mini-breaks, sport on the telly, music. Maybe Pierce didn’t see it, but I meant to take in the wider city: its intense inhabitedness, its unaffordable dormitory towers filled with fair folk watching TV and heading to bed.
‘I know, I know.’ Pierce looked deflated – perhaps even disappointed. ‘It’s a horrible story, anyway. Cockroaches, miscarriages. Another pint? Before we set out.’
It was a gloomy prospect for me, as well, this pub. Too many young couples, not married yet but not far off, talking about their work day before heading back to a building with two or three front doors. They’d have something waiting in the fridge, the rest of a big batch of chilli made at the weekend, perhaps, or a couple of M&S ready meals for the microwave. Maybe that would seem like a bit much effort, and he’d suggest, all sly, they get something in, and the phone would come out. And in half an hour they’d be unloading tinfoil trays from a sweaty white bag.
I had done that. Elise and I left Divider within a couple of months of each other – her for a recently launched news and opinion website, me for the job I have now. There was a leaving party every other week, it seemed, as the financial crisis raged and anyone with prospects headed for a lifeboat. And we both had prospects. Her website was the UK arm of a fabulously well-resourced US institution, a name that brought eye-rolls among print journalists, but with tycoons lined up behind it. The print journalists don’t roll their eyes any more, and most of them aren’t journalists or in print any more. Meanwhile I was headed for the reading choice of the taste-makers, one of the few physical magazines that looked certain to weather the eschaton of the analogue, because business-class lounges would always need something to go on their Noguchi coffee tables. Our combined departure brought urgency to our long-running discussion about maybe getting a place together, and we did it. Pooling our resources meant we could afford a small place that was fairly central – Pimlico, near Victoria Station, a reasonable midway between her work in Hammersmith and mine in Shoreditch.
It felt like the start. Excellent new jobs, a comfortable flat on a side street that was just for us, savings and mortgages and marriage possible soon. In the meantime we could enter the dress rehearsal stage of adulthood, where you do all those things that adults do, with just a little too much awareness. Doing the generous, laid-back adulthood that I never saw my parents do, which I assumed was the stage before their st
olid permanence. Grown-up extravagances like ordering in food, which my parents did not do, but the adults do on TV. Going to the pub after work and talking about your day. Every day. Having wine with dinner. Every night. Not getting drunk, not really, just merry. But every night.
‘Just … act happy. Drunk, merry, off guard. A soft target. Well-off, privileged. We should have our phones out, maybe. Definitely.’
Acting merry was less of a problem than I anticipated. To my surprise, I was a little merry. Pierce’s fizzy enthusiasm had spread. Maybe my disco nap earlier was helping. Maybe it was my certainty that nothing would happen, that we were entirely safe, and I could simply observe Pierce, capture his erratic behaviour, and report it all.
Looking well-off was more of a challenge. My recent gauntness comes as a nasty surprise when I happen to see myself reflected. Today’s damage to my face didn’t help. Pierce was little better. He did not suit a suit – it was not a question of build or fit or cut, it was a problem at the level of mien that left every part of his outfit looking wrong, a beach inflatable in the back of a car. If we rolled along looking jolly, I suspected that the impression would be more threatening than vulnerable, precisely wrong.
I had, perhaps, put my fingers to my scraped cheek as I thought about it – in any case, Pierce picked up that I was thinking about it.
‘So how did that happen, really?’
I frowned at the implication. ‘Like I said. I was trying to get a plastic bag out of a tree, and I fell.’ Sometimes self-deprecation sweetens belief; why would you invent a story that puts you in a bad light? It worked well with lies, and it was disappointing that it did not work better with the truth. ‘It was stupid. The drink, I suppose.’
‘Why were you trying to get a plastic bag out of a tree?’
I hesitated. ‘It was bothering me.’
‘How?’
‘It kept catching my eye.’
Pierce smiled. ‘Well, that is pretty stupid. It wouldn’t work in fiction. People expect nice clear chains of cause and motive. In life, of course, stupid stuff happens for no reason. Or it only makes sense for a second, not before, and certainly not after …’
I felt the cheek under my fingertips – the skin unfamiliar, rough, hot. Pain from touching, the odd moreish pain that can be controlled and savoured. Once again, I resented being interrogated by Pierce. He could not help himself.
‘I have a question for you,’ I said.
‘Go on.’
‘What really happened that night?’
‘What night?’
‘The night you didn’t get mugged.’
Pierce frowned. ‘I got dropped off by the cab around here’ – we were on Commercial Road, under the spire of the Hawksmoor church – ‘and I walked home, exactly the way we’re going now.’
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s it. Nothing happened.’
‘When did you decide to invent the mugging and write the book? Was it on that walk? Before? Afterwards?’
My main intention in this line of questions had been to shift the subject away from me; I also wanted to guide Pierce into saying more about his fraud, in the hope that I might be able to jot down some relevant quotes, or perhaps even record something useful on my phone, some indisputable proof that he had invented the story. I was surprised to find Pierce’s manner becoming prickly and guarded – more than I would have guessed, given that he had already confessed, and I knew the truth.
‘I’m not sure I remember,’ he said, not with much confidence. ‘What do you mean?’
‘When did you decide to write Night Traffic?’ I asked, and I realised that it was the question I should have been asking all along. It was a remarkable thing to do, to commit a fraud like that, to sculpt such an enormous lie. It was not a project one embarks upon accidentally or innocently; there must have been a genesis, a moment of inspiration or decision, an intent. He might say that people did stupid things for no reason, but this wasn’t a drunken misadventure or a moment of madness. It was a book. It was 60,000 words of artfully constructed deception undertaken with total commitment. When? Why?
The longer I thought about it, the more vexing the chronology became. In the Night Traffic version of events, Pierce was traumatised by the attack and spent days and weeks shut up in his flat before deciding on using writing as a form of therapy. This period of seclusion was, again, verifiable fact: he had vanished from social media and stopped answering emails, a dry run for his later deliberate hermitage. The plan must have formed on the night, because he was already acting the role he had chosen the next morning. But the confusion with the minicab – that appeared to be genuine bad luck, a random event. Impossible to plan. Possibly the idea was already fermenting, and then fate proffered the perfect night … Nevertheless, it wasn’t clear.
‘Had you already had the idea to invent the attack? Or did you think of it while you walked this way?’
‘I mentioned …’ Pierce began, then halted. ‘I said … about being unhappy with the kind of work I was doing, the kind of writers I was being bracketed with. That was before.’ He was avoiding eye contact, thinking it through – or coming up with a plausible lie.
‘And then you had the mugging idea on that evening?’
‘Yes,’ Pierce said uncertainly. ‘The idea … Before that night, I wasn’t going to write the book. Afterwards, I was.’ He scowled.
‘So what gave you the thought?’
‘“Where do you get your ideas from?” Is that where this is going? I honestly … creativity really isn’t like that.’
Curious. ‘Even if nothing happens, it’ll be good to see the, uh, the scene of the crime,’ I said. ‘You might remember something. Besides, it’s on your way home, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah,’ Pierce said. ‘Like you say, I’m sure nothing will happen.’
Maybe not. But I saw it now: within the unravelling of Pierce’s big lie, another lie was being revealed.
I had thumbed through the streets on my phone while we were in the pub, and I had a rough sense of where we were, a pointer moving on a mental map. Commercial Road was an unloved artery lined with architectural hulks left over from the time of the docks. Even this late, traffic on the road was constant and the pavements not empty. Ahead was the lighted citadel of Canary Wharf, the watchtowers of the banks. Behind that – and for the second time that day I felt a queasy kink of surprise – the plume.
The sight of it caused me to miss half a step and scuff my unfamiliar smart shoe on the pavement. It was not the smoke column itself, although it had the baleful presence I knew well; this time, at least, it was where I’d expect it to be, maybe a little larger, a little wider, which gave it the illusion of being closer. No, it was the fact that I could see it at all against the night sky, against the solid dome of low cloud. It had the curious quality of being lit from below, perhaps by the ambient light of the city, perhaps by the fire itself. Perhaps it was a quirk of the atmosphere, an optical illusion – the plume could almost be somewhere in Canary Wharf itself, a towering inferno among the skyscrapers.
‘Still burning,’ I said.
Pierce had stopped a pace ahead of me. He glanced towards the towers and the plume. ‘The lights stay on all night,’ he said. ‘I was once at a party with someone who worked for one of the big Square Mile law firms, and he said that if they turned off the office lights, even in the wee hours, they got complaints from clients. Not giving it 110 per cent, you see, not burning the midnight oil.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s fucked up.’ And he kept walking. I followed.
We turned left, north, onto Burdett Road. If you had a paper map – the large one on Pierce’s wall, for instance – and a ruler, and you drew a straight line from the place he had been dropped by the cab and his house, you’d find that no roads came close to following that line. There were topographical accidents in the way, most significantly two canals. But we were also cutting across the grain of the East End, the main roads radiating out from the centre of London, the spider-
web connections traced between those spokes. This urban rhythm, this warp and weft, was against us. By main roads, a lightning-strike zigzag, a steep backwards N, was the only path, and this turn took us onto its middle stroke. Pierce’s shortcut – if it had happened as described – had been an effort to shave some of the distance from the zag.
My provincial childhood furnished me with memories of deserted midnight streets, sodium-sterilised, which gave a fugitive air to any lone cars that sped through, high above the thirty limit. Why linger? The last bus was at 11.08 and after that the place was a husk. The four city sixth-forms took it in turns to host the annual tragedy, two or three of their headcount lost, a sporty hatchback gift from Dad overturned between hedges, beaten into a ball of tinfoil, trails of fluid along the scarred road surface, special assembly. The title of Pierce’s book, Night Traffic, used ‘traffic’ to mean business, transactions, trade, human traffic. But there was traffic at night in London, car traffic, as my suburban soul had been startled to discover. Who were these people? Where were they all going?
Not long after I arrived in London – especially after the Christmas robbery – a place like Burdett Road might have scared me. The canal, gloomy terraces, slab blocks on both sides of the street, and our pavement passed between a high brick wall and a screen of trees. Fly-tippers had called between some of the trees, leaving odd little heaps of ungainly rubbish: crushed baby-buggies, black bags of polystyrene packing, bed headboards spattered with peeling Care Bear stickers. Blind alleys punctured the wall.
Today, however, I saw the security lighting, the bike hire racks, the cranes over it all, unsleeping red demon eyes to ward off low-flying aircraft. We passed a modern church, a divine electricity substation. ‘This is the Gate of Heaven,’ claimed the red letters set above its porch. Crossrail had swallowed a site on the far side of the road, giant machines behind glossy hoardings. Helping you make the great escape. Whitechapel to Heathrow in 36 minutes. I remembered a nugget from Pierce’s book: Burdett Road, one of the tower blocks along here, was the subject of Pulp’s song ‘Mile End’ – all squats and squalor, fights, burning cars. When was that, twenty years ago? Had it ever truly been like that? No doubt, but now it was hard to believe. It was before the colourful glass balconies had been added to these long, low blocks, that was for sure, before they sprouted the smart black railings and neat landscaped lawns, scattered with those tidy boulders that urban renewalists leave behind – regenoliths.