Plume

by Will Wiles

  Pierce grimaced. ‘Didn’t you get enough quotes yesterday?’

  ‘No,’ I said. The secret recording was gone, now, so the truth and the lie were the same. ‘You asked me to turn off my recorder, remember? Keep it off the record.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Pierce said unconvincingly. He had known this full well, and was simply trying to wriggle off the hook. ‘Can’t we keep it off the record?’

  ‘We’re out of time,’ I said. It was time to push hard, as hard as possible. ‘I have a deadline. I need it on the record.’

  ‘Why?’ Pierce said, squirming like a child, slipping the label of his beer around with his thumb. ‘You know the truth. I invented the whole story. It’s fiction. You know that from yesterday. Why do you need me to say it on tape?’

  ‘I need quotes. I can’t report a whole conversation from memory. A lot happened yesterday. I need it in your words, specifically about the fraud.’

  He winced at that last word. ‘What you want is blackmail material.’

  Another ugly word, but I controlled my reaction. Blunt was good. ‘I need material I can take to my editor, yes. Something that can stand up to lawyers. Something that stops you from going back on our deal and denying everything.’

  ‘Our deal,’ Pierce said, dragging out the word, mocking it. ‘I wasn’t really aware we had made a deal.’

  I took a deep swig from my own bottle, washing away this petulance, then woke my phone and brought up the voice recorder app. A wavy line jigged on the screen, picking up the merry noises around us, the chirpy music, the scrunch of Converse on woodchip.

  ‘Why did you decide to invent the story about being mugged?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Pierce said. ‘Everything in Night Traffic is 100 per cent true.’ He stared at me, expressionless, defiant.

  I stopped the recording. ‘You have to go on the record.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘What’s it going to take?’ I said, feeling anger flash up inside me. ‘I could just write a story without your cooperation.’ Pierce raised his eyebrows at this, taunting, daring. I felt the scorch in my lungs, in my throat. ‘I could go to Quin,’ I said, not really thinking, but I was rewarded with an immediate change in Pierce’s whole demeanour. ‘Yeah … Quin knows something, doesn’t he? He has information.’

  Pierce blanched. ‘Don’t do that.’

  I had no actual desire to go to Quin, and ensnare myself further with him, but I realised that Quin’s Tamesis post about me had materially shifted the balance of power between me and Pierce, and Pierce knew it. It was satisfying, at last, to have some traction. ‘What does Quin know, anyway?’ I said. ‘How did he figure it out?’

  ‘He didn’t,’ Pierce said. ‘I’m sure he would have – he was quizzing me about what happened. I don’t know. I told him the truth. I couldn’t stand it any more.’

  The patio heater was enough to make me uncomfortable in my winter coat, but Pierce shivered in his. His eyes flicked from point to point, mostly downwards: ground, barrel, bottle, phone. ‘It’s become so complicated in my mind,’ Pierce said. ‘I thought that a single night could be kept separate from everything else. That what I put there could be sealed up. But it has spilled, and it keeps spilling out, everywhere …’

  Like the plume, I thought. An uncontrollable reaction, spewing poison into the air, into the water, toxifying all it touched. And instinctively I searched for smoke in the dark sky, and there it was to the east, a rolling wall of mobile night, tanned by ten thousand streetlights. Closer, again? We had travelled a good distance west as well as south when we came here, away from the fire. And yet, if anything, I could have sworn it was closer. But London is curved: the bends of the river, the scoop of its wide valley, have distorting effects, so that what you imagine to be east is to the north, or two areas you believed to be far apart are in fact close together.

  No need to share any of this with Pierce. ‘I’ve found the same thing,’ I said instead. ‘Tell enough lies, or a big enough lie, and the truth gets corrupted. The boundary gets lost, it rots.’

  Pierce narrowed his eyes at me. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘So the falsehood corrodes what’s true. The true feels false. But what happens to the lies? Does their nature change as well?’

  I tried to look attentive and sympathetic – an interviewer face – but I didn’t follow what Pierce was saying. I let the silence open up, hoping he might elaborate.

  ‘I’ve had to pretend that the attack was real for so long, that it has begun to feel very real to me. It wasn’t really a performance, when I was talking about the book to people – I believed it. I inhabited it. So when I try to account for the lie, to trace it back to its beginning, like you keep asking me – it’s a blur.’

  ‘It can be very difficult to tell where an idea came from,’ I volunteered. ‘But there must have been a moment when you chose to commit to it, to write tens of thousands of words …’

  ‘That night,’ Pierce said. He looked exhausted. He had appeared tired earlier, in the pub, but that had disappeared during our stroll when there had been bursts of energy, and he had a brooding focus about him. That had expired, and I could see the dark crescents under his eyes, the unhealthy sheen of his face – he was starting to resemble me. How much sleep was he getting? What kind of pressure was he under?

  He reared as if trying to keep himself awake, and rubbed his stubbled chin with his knuckles. ‘What I’ve realised is that it was completely improbable,’ he said. ‘Night Traffic, I mean. That kind of attack. I don’t think it happens any more. It’s incredible that people believed me. I mean, look around.’ He cast out his arm at Winterzone. The whispery, plinky music was now a cover of ‘Debaser’ by the Pixies. Amid a constellation of corporate logos, the property consortiums promised All the grit, none of the grime … Bringing London’s vibrancy to a world-class residential destination. ‘The city’s changed.’

  ‘People did believe you, though,’ I said. ‘So it must have been realistic.’

  ‘People wanted to believe,’ Pierce said. ‘But it’s mopeds now, or identity theft. Fast. Not lingering. Not personal.’

  ‘It does happen,’ I said. ‘It happened to me.’ Twice, I didn’t add.

  ‘Because it’s part of the illusion. The frisson. All these wankers playing dress-up in the ruins. Acting out a kind of city that’s gone. And the people who lived here, where are they now?’

  Again, I felt the heat rising in me. ‘What, the people you want to get mugged by, as part of your Authentic Urban Experience? Fucking hell. You should take a look at yourself.’

  ‘Trust me, I have taken a long look at myself,’ Pierce said. ‘So we had a deal – I seem to recall that the deal involved recreating the mugging. We haven’t done that yet.’

  I sighed, almost a gasp of frustration. ‘It’s not going to happen,’ I said. ‘Not here, anyway – probably not anywhere. Not when there’s two of us. What do you want to do, pay a bloke in a pub?’

  ‘No, no,’ Pierce said. I knew his tone, I knew his whole stance: a writer in the Monday meeting whose pitch is bombing, and they’re trying to talk it back to life. ‘It has to be—’

  ‘Real?’ I said, and I didn’t edit the contempt from my voice.

  Pierce didn’t respond. He was gnawing on the problem, pinching his top lip, scowling at the eroding crowd. The T-Rex had made its final appearance in Jurassic Park and people were drifting home. One by one the shipping container boutiques were closing, doors clattering. ‘Maybe the streets around here,’ Pierce said. ‘I mean, they must be a good hunting ground, right? With all these …’ He stopped, groping for the right word.

  ‘Mumfords,’ I supplied, drawing a wolfish smile from Pierce.

  ‘Mumfords, yeah. The Nathans. If anyone deserves to get mugged—’

  ‘No one deserves to get mugged,’ I said sharply.

  Pierce cocked his head. ‘I know it’s a delicate subject for you, maybe you didn’t deserve it, but – no one, really?
You sure about that?’

  I frowned at him.

  ‘Not even me?’ he asked.

  I was stopped. I had something ready, some remarks on how I wouldn’t wish street crime on my enemies, Twitter-scented piety. But I was stopped.

  ‘I lied about being attacked,’ Pierce said. ‘I profited from that; quite handsomely, I might add. Wouldn’t it be fitting if I was mugged?’

  Although I wanted to disagree, I could not.

  Pierce leaned in to me, eyes dark and filled with conspiracy. The old Pierce. The man I had wanted to meet, and to interview. ‘If I deserve it, there must be others, right? You know there are. This is important – this is what I wanted to say in Night Traffic. The crime might be horrible in individual cases, but in general – in general it might be important, it might even be vital. The city needs it. It’s part of the ecology. The city needs fear. It keeps the balance, it stops the wrong sorts getting the upper hand. It stops the Mumfords taking over. And we’ve lost that.’

  ‘But it’s not the “wrong sorts” who get the worst of it, is it?’ I said. ‘It’s the terrified little old ladies in council flats, getting their jaws broken for two quid. It’s poor kids who know they won’t get a bike for Christmas because it’ll get taken off them while the tree’s still up.’

  Pierce closed his eyes, as if impatient with this objection. ‘Yes. Yes. And I said the same to Quin.’

  To Quin? Why was he talking about this to Quin?

  ‘It’s good that those people are less in danger now – that’s good. But the trouble is that it let the Mumfords off the hook; they can buy up the neighbourhoods, they can exploit places that had a reputation for crime to make a profit on the property market without ever fearing that crime themselves, and they can walk around at midnight, braying and accumulating. And the little old lady and the poor kids get robbed another way.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ I said.

  ‘Why did you buy my books, read my essays?’ Pierce asked. He didn’t stop for an answer. ‘Because you saw the city the same way I did. Just like a lot of other people. You’re angry too. That’s what I’ve been describing: the city out of balance, lost to the rich, the oligarchs, the hedgies, the trust-funders.’

  I thought of Pierce’s flat, bought with his inheritance, and I stayed silent, because being angry at Pierce was futile. He was a hypocrite, of course – and so was I, working at the magazine, paying my rent, peddling the modern urban lifestyle, taking part in the whole ghastly orgy of property and consumption even as it drained my pockets and my hope. I should just get out, fuck the lifestyle, but I wanted in, I wanted in so very much, I wanted to be one of the guys cheerfully necking one beer to wash down a £15 burger at 11 p.m., talking about boxsets and exhibitions; I wanted that so much, it had destroyed me. It made me hate them so very much, the ones who were in, the owner-occupiers, the owners, the occupiers, the ones who had raised the bar so high that only daughters of Russian gas tycoons could enjoy themselves, and even they were chasing around after a city that was dying, even as the developers raised parodic imitations of it for their amusement. So was Pierce right? Was fear all it needed?

  ‘You talked about this with Quin?’ I asked. ‘How did this come up with Quin?’

  ‘It’s like I said,’ Pierce said. ‘No one’s angrier than Quin. I think he’s trying to do something about it with Tamesis, but I can’t tell what. Are you angry?’

  I thought of my flat, and the dust that filled my mouth with every breath, the pulverised waste of my neighbours’ dedication to hammering every last pound of value from their plot. Sixty per cent of my salary went on that flat, and I couldn’t even repaint it to cover the hairline cracks that multiplied through its plaster. Yes, I was angry. Of course I was angry. But what was the remedy? Even if fear was needed, what did that mean in practice?

  ‘What are you getting at?’ I asked.

  ‘If it could be correctly targeted,’ Pierce said, ‘perhaps a little more street crime wouldn’t be a bad thing.’

  I stared at him. My beer was gone – I didn’t quite know how that had happened, and I didn’t like my chances of being served another, as a go-home vibe was building around the festival. And I wanted to go home, but first I wanted Pierce to finish his thought, to say what it was he was circling around, so again I let the silence talk.

  ‘If we picked the right targets.’

  ‘We?’

  Pierce rubbed the bristles on his chin. ‘We’ve been going about this all wrong. I’ve been trying to create this authentic experience – look, you can roll your eyes all you want, but that’s what I’ve been saying all along, that’s what I’m looking for, something real – but the city hasn’t been cooperating. Because it’s an experience with an active side and a passive side. And you can’t actively be the passive side, the side it happens to. But you can be the active side, the one that makes it happen. That would be no less authentic, no less contrived, right?’

  My voice dropped to a hiss. ‘You want to go out and mug someone?’

  Pierce nodded. ‘Sure. Why not. We can see it from the inside, that way. And put a bit of fear back on the streets. Hey – it might even be therapeutic for you. Work out some of those demons, yeah? Getting mugged is one of the reasons you drink, right?’

  On a very superficial, limited level that was true, but it was also untrue, a crass simplification. But I did not want to get into that.

  ‘What about atonement?’ I asked. ‘What about making amends for Night Traffic?’

  ‘I’m starting to think that atonement might, in fact, not be the right approach,’ Pierce said. ‘I’m entertaining alternatives. If the mob can’t be appeased, perhaps it can be baffled.’ He brightened, and tapped the barrel-top in front of me with his index finger. ‘It’ll make a great piece for you. I only wish I was the one writing it.’

  I felt a scabbed scratch reopen with a jab of pain as my face contorted in response. ‘I’m not taking part in this!’

  ‘You’re an observer, you’re golden, blameless,’ Pierce said. ‘You’ve been manipulated by the devious Oliver Pierce, I don’t know. If I could guarantee to you that the person we chose absolutely, undisputedly deserved to have the fear put into them …’

  ‘Oliver, no.’

  He jumped in, not letting me elaborate on my refusal. ‘One attempt. Tomorrow night. And in exchange … A signed confession. For your editor, right? To put in the vault. I’ll bring it with me tomorrow. Full cooperation. You can ask what you want, on the record, you’ll get the exclusive. Signed and sealed.’

  Tomorrow was Thursday. If I had a signed confession and a guarantee of cooperation in my bag on Thursday evening, I could take it to the meeting on Friday morning. It would be enough to appease the mob at work, for sure. And what would I have to do to get this guarantee? Spend another evening blundering about the streets with Pierce, observer to his increasing mania. Eyewitness to the unravelling. He was right, it did make for a great story. A real escapade. I was certain that no actual crime would take place. Tonight had been a fiasco. Did I have confidence that the stocky cult novelist before me could confront a stranger in the street and demand his wallet and phone? How, exactly? Nothing would happen.

  Especially if I could make the pool of potential victims as small as possible.

  ‘We need to lay down some rules first,’ I said. ‘Get the right target, yes?’

  ‘Rules, yes,’ Pierce said. ‘Good.’

  ‘No women,’ I said. ‘Men only. Healthy, able-bodied, adult men.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Pierce said. ‘Wouldn’t dream of anything else.’

  I fixed him with a stare. ‘White men. You don’t want a racial component.’

  ‘I agree. Simple mugging. No hate angle.’

  ‘On the same score, heterosexual.’

  Pierce frowned. ‘Well, that’s hard to guarantee.’

  ‘But if there’s any doubt or possibility—’

  ‘Well, now you’re being prejudiced. There is no way of tellin
g.’

  ‘Fine. We’ll put a pin in that. And they have to deserve it. They have to be the right sort.’

  ‘This sort?’ Pierce said as Winterzone’s guests streamed past us towards the exit. The Renewosaurs had quieted for the night. ‘The streets around here must have potential right now …’

  I winced, feeling once more a shard of pain in the circuit of my right eye as the damaged skin around it stretched and wrinkled. It was a complicated crowd. As a group, I might detest it – there was the abstract entity causing the harm, cheering the purgation of the city – but as individuals it was less obviously malign. The two men sitting nearest us, for instance, one wearing a shiny Moncler jacket, the other in a conspicuously moth-eaten Fruit of the Loom sweatshirt bearing the 1990s logo for Electronic Arts. What about them? Struggling artists or advertising executives? Private renters or owner-occupiers? And what if that mirror was held up to us? At least I didn’t look the part, I thought, with my injured face and court-appearance suit, my underlying pallor and shakes and emaciation. I had a 200-hours community-service look to me. Unless that could all be read as ironic, a carefully constructed pose – the guardians of Winterzone had let me through with barely a twitch, after all, apparently satisfied on sight that I wasn’t an ASBO graduate.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You can’t just charge off and try to get someone. You should have a clear idea of who merits the crime.’

  ‘How do we do that?’ Pierce asked, visibly impatient.

  You don’t, I thought. I didn’t want to facilitate an assault, I wanted to put so many ethical hurdles in the way that it was impossible. But I did want to appear helpful.

  ‘We could mood-board it,’ I said. ‘It can be a useful creative tool – make a wishlist of the best possible victims.’ I opened my bag, took out my reporter’s pad and laid it between us. ‘Who would be ideal?’

  Pierce frowned. ‘I don’t know. City types. Property developers. Estate agents, the big ones.’

  ‘Alexander De Chauncey, for instance,’ I said. ‘He would be perfect.’ I jotted his name at the top of the list.