by Paul Carr
Unable to interview me while I was still drunk, they’d thrown me into a cell until morning.
The first time I was arrested, I was terrified – worried what it would mean for the company I was then in the middle of starting, worried about what the consequences generally would be for me getting a criminal record, and just generally terrified at being locked in a police cell for the first time in my sheltered life. This time, though, I just felt bored. I knew that I would be interviewed in a few hours by two policemen who would probably be about nineteen years old and who would either slap me on the wrist in a ‘we’ve all had a drink, you idiot, don’t do it again’ way, or would take a dislike to me on the basis that I’m a smart-arse middle-class twat with a law degree, and would decide to charge me.
That second possibility is what had transpired the previous time. I’d avoided court, and a criminal record, only by calling the Crown Prosecution Service and convincing them to drop the charges, which I’d managed to do because – after all – I’m a smart-arse middle-class twat with a law degree.
Whichever route the police decided to take this time, I knew nothing terrible would happen to me and that I wouldn’t end up in jail. More importantly, I knew that I’d have an amusing story for my blog – or maybe even a freelance article – which would in turn help promote my book. I had turned into an accidental career criminal, in so far as accidentally committing crimes now directly benefit my career.
Another hour passed and finally, as expected, came the clanking before the door swung open. The custody sergeant marched me down to the interview room where, as expected, sat two policemen and a tape recorder. They explained my rights, I explained that I didn’t want a lawyer, and then I began to tell them the whole story. They laughed a couple of times, and I made a mental note to include those parts of the story in the blog post. And then came the moment of truth.
‘As this is your second offence,’ said one of the policemen, ‘but the last time the charges were dropped, we’re happy to let you go with a caution.’
‘Hmm,’ I said. A caution is one of the more misunderstood punishments in the English justice system. Although people often talk of ‘getting off with a caution’, accepting one does actually have some consequences. For a start, to be eligible for a caution, you have to admit that you’re guilty of a crime. Even though a caution isn’t technically a conviction, this admission forms part of your criminal record, which means it will appear if you’re ever subject to a background check. Also, you’re generally only allowed one caution – next time it’s straight to court.
Knowing all of this, I knew that the smartest thing for me to do would be to do what I’d done the previous time: refuse to admit any guilt, agree to be bailed to appear in court in a month’s time and then try to sweet-talk the CPS into dropping the charges in the meantime. It would probably mean having to go to court for an hour or two to set a trial date, but hopefully things would go no further. Yes, that was the smartest thing to do.
‘Would you like to accept the caution …’
Had I been sober then the problem would have hit me far sooner. Instead, it was only when the interviewing officer asked me the question for the second time that I finally sobered up enough to realise the jam I was in.
If I accepted the caution, and the accompanying criminal record, then I would almost certainly experience problems if I tried to apply for a visa to travel or live anywhere outside Europe. Given how much travelling I was doing, I really, really didn’t want a criminal record.
But if I didn’t accept the caution then I’d be given a court date that could be anything up to two months away. And given how much work I’d have to do – dealing with the CPS, writing letters, making phone calls and all that crap – I’d be basically stuck in London all that time. Then if things went badly with the CPS, I’d have to wait for a second court date, during which I’d actually be fined, or – Jesus – given community service. If I didn’t accept the caution then my nomadic experiment was over, in the short term at least. If I did accept it, the experiment was very likely over in the long term.
Suddenly having an amusing story to tell about being arrested again didn’t seem like such an upside.
I took a deep breath, which still tasted of rum.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’d like to accept the caution.’ I had no real choice: I could hardly bear to stay in London for two more weeks, let alone two months.
The custody sergeant slid the piece of paper across his desk for me to sign. I was being given a ‘conditional caution’, which is like a normal caution but with the added demand that I pay the cab driver the fare I owed him; the total on the meter by the time he eventually drove off was £135. He also handed me a sealed plastic bag containing my phone, my belt and Anna’s keys. ‘Probably not much use now,’ he said, ‘they’ll have boarded up the door after you were arrested, but it’ll definitely need to be replaced.’
Of course: the bloody door. Anna was due back in less than twenty-four hours and I had to get it fixed before then. I’d probably have to pay an obscene call-out fee for an emergency door replacement company but at least that was better than having her arrive back to a missing door.
Truth is, it wasn’t Anna’s reaction that scared me – we’re old friends and, as a fellow writer, she would probably see the funny side of it. Hell, I should probably give her first dibs on pitching the piece to her editor: ‘the night my friend got my door kicked in by the police’. No, the person who scared me was Anna’s boyfriend, Drew, who worked for a ‘private security company’ in Iraq. I’d only met him a couple of times and he seemed like a thoroughly nice guy but – let’s be honest – he was basically a hired mercenary; God only knows how he’d react to the drunken idiot who’d got his door kicked in. I really had to get back and fix that door.
Finally the custody sergeant was ready to let me go. He gave me my copy of the caution and reminded me that if I didn’t pay the cab driver within ten days, I’d be arrested again and sent to court. Likewise, if I got arrested again in the next six months, I’ddefinitely be sent to court. He swung open the big metal door that led out to the main reception. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘and your friend is waiting for you in the car outside. She couldn’t find anywhere to park.’
‘My friend?’
‘Yeah, I have to say, the bloke she was with didn’t look happy at all.’
‘My … what friend?’ I murmured.
‘The girl who owns the house, I think. She called earlier to say she’d come back and found the door boarded up. We usually leave a number on the door for the homeowner to call.’
Oh. Fuuuuuck.
‘And you said she’s with her boyfriend?’
‘Looked like it. I wouldn’t like to be the one who got that bloke’s door kicked in. Good luck, mate.’
1007
To Anna’s, and particularly Drew’s, credit neither of them killed me. In fact, they both thought my night in the cells, and my grovelling apology were hilarious. ‘It was kind of a shitty door anyway,’ said Drew, ‘we were going to get it replaced. And now we have an excuse.’
‘And I’m paying for it,’ I said.
‘Exactly. Win-win.’
I looked down at my caution and the £135 underlined on it; I made a stab at guessing how much the door would cost – a couple of hundred quid at least – and then added on the price of the wine and flowers I should probably buy Anna and Drew to say sorry. My one night free stay was going to cost me at least £500, plus my new criminal record.
Yeah, win bloody win.
1008
After replacing Anna and Drew’s door, I decided that I should probably avoid friends’ houses in future. At least in a hotel, the police don’t need to kick down doors – they can just ask reception for a key.
I headed a mile or so up the road to the Raglan Hotel in Muswell Hill. The Raglan is a really nice place – the rooms are modern, the service is good and I was able to blag a rate of £75 a night, which was an absolute bargain for
London. All of which could only mean that there was a huge catch. And there was: Muswell Hill is several miles from the centre of town, almost an hour, in fact, by a variety of trains and busses. Realistically that meant adding £50 a day just for cabs, putting the total per night at almost three times my budget. In London that still constitutes a bargain.
Still, at least money would soon be no object. The closer my book publication date came, the more keenly I could taste my impending fame and success. Thanks to some advance press, and my drunken travelogues from Spain, people had actually started to pre-order the book on Amazon.
I’ve never understood why someone would want to order a book before it’s out, any more than I’ve understood people who queue outside shops the night before things go on sale. But just because these people were obviously mentally ill didn’t mean I didn’t want them as readers. Even if, as Robert said, ‘it’s probably just all the people who hate you ordering copies for their lawyers’.
Still, whatever the reason, a week before publication, mine was officially the 97,000th most popular book on the site. When you take out all the books about wizards and vampires that was almost certainly the top ten.
Rebecca had been working hard too. She’d lined me up an appearance on Sky News to review ‘this week’s big stories on the Internet’. The fact that I had no idea – or interest in – what people on the Internet were talking about (unless they were talking about me) was irrelevant. On the day of the programme, the producer emailed me a list of stories about which I’d be expected to opine. My favourite story concerned a new company that rented dogs to rich people in New York. I made a joke about them being just ‘for Christmas, not for life’. The host and I shared a fake laugh and then it was back to proper news for Sky and back to my hotel for me.
On the way ‘home’, I checked my Amazon pre-sales rank and discovered, to my delight that, on the basis of my performance, the popularity of Bringing Nothing to the Party had dropped by about 10,000 places. Had people actually cancelled their pre-orders after seeing me on television?
Rebecca was also doing a sterling job in drumming up well-known names to provide positive quotes about the book that could then be used on the cover and in marketing materials. She’d asked if I knew any successful authors and, as well as Zoe, I suggested that she should try Mil Millington, the comic novelist who wrote Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About.
I suggested Mil for two reasons: one, I’ve always enjoyed his writing and, two, we’d met a couple of times, including once at the launch party for a company I co-founded. Mil had taken great pleasure in mentioning my drunken behaviour at the party in his column for the Guardian’s weekend magazine. In fact, he wrote the episode in such a hideously libellous way that his editor had actually emailed me to check that I wouldn’t sue. I’d assured the editor that I’d be on thin ice suing anyone over my drunken behaviour and the thing went to press unedited. Mil owed me a favour, and I sent him an email telling him that I was calling it in, in the form of a quote.
From: Paul Carr
To: Mil Millington
Hi Mil,
You know how ages ago you wrote that column in the Guardian about me being a flirtatious drunk? And you know how I was *outrageously* decent about it?
You’ve probably been feeling for these past years that you probably should do me some kind of enormous favour to make up for how *outrageously* decent I was that one time.
Well, good news! I’ve written this book about my failed attempt to become a web billionaire and it’s going to be published by W&N in July and my publicist has asked me if I know any *A-list authors* who might flick through it with the view to possibly giving me a quote if it’s any good. It’s called Bringing Nothing to the Party and I’m quite proud of it.
What do you think? Can I get W&N to send you one? You can always burn the damn thing. No pressure.
Paul
Mil’s reply was grudgingly accommodating …
From: Mil Millington
To: Paul Carr
My next book is also out in July. Way to dissipate their energy, Carr. You wanker.
My absolutely unshakeable, long-standing policy about quoting is that ‘I don’t quote on fiction.’ Which you appear to have cynically avoided by doing something that’s non-fiction. So, I suppose I have no choice but to read the damn thing, have I? Oh well, at least that’ll give me the chance to rubbish it more authoritatively.
Mil
I later learned that I’d wasted a perfectly good favour: Mil is published by W&N and Rebecca is his publicity manager too. She could have ordered him to write the review. Still, a few weeks had passed since he’d received the manuscript and I was starting to wonder if he had indeed burnt it. For all my levity, Mil was someone whose opinion mattered to me. Various copies of the book had been floating around W&N and the majority of the feedback had been positive, but like most people who get paid for writing words I’d always suffered from hideous imposter anxiety; why on earth would anyone pay to publish my words?
Mil is a proper writer; if he liked the book and agreed to provide a quote for it then I could feel like I’d earned my place on the bookshelves next to him. If he hated it, then all my anxieties would be justified.
Finally, an email arrived from him. I could hardly bear to open it …
From: Mil Millington
To: Paul Carr
Well, Carr, I’ve finished reading your manuscript now. I have to admit that I was surprised and quite impressed at your partial success in faking a sensitive side – though this accomplishment will, of course, be lost on those who’ve never met you. Anyway: a quote.
Off the top of my head, I’m inclined towards: ‘Carr’s book astonishes with its seemingly pathological delight in defaming Islam.’ The trouble with that is, I suspect you’d bury it somewhere inside rather than using it for the cover/posters/promotional button badges.
Alternatively, then, there’s this: ‘Made me want to vomit for all the right reasons.’
Now, I think that’s great. I’d fellate someone through a hole in the wall of a public lavatory for a quote like that. It’s arresting, usefully unlike the majority of the other quotes on the other books that will be all around it, and – best of all – is just unclear enough to be intriguing; one might be tempted to pick up and glance through a book with that on it simply to try to see what it might mean, exactly. But, I fear Weidenfeld & Nicolson – with its history and its book publishing mentality and its offices opposite the world’s least prestigious nightclub – might find it ‘too Internet’. I mean, if the book were a webpage it’d be ‘Paul Carr: He’s a Cunt’ and everyone would snicker with approval. Paper publishing isn’t like that, yet. Perhaps W&N wants a quote that’s more straightforward, and less likely to get the book misfiled in Waterstone’s under ‘bulimia’.
So … um. Maybe:
‘Like Dragons’ Den in a threesome with a society gossip page and the IT Crowd.’
Publishing loves things from off of the telly, and that mentions *two* things from off of the telly. Plus the word ‘gossip’. It might be more to Orion’s liking, therefore.
There you go, then. Except, it does occur to me that none of those quotes explicitly says it’s amusing. If you wanted to go that way, there’s:
‘Carr is funny enough that you can almost forgive him.’
This also hits the ‘intriguing’ target mentioned above, but might be thought unsatisfactory for exactly the same reasons I mentioned, above.
Hell, just use them all; three attributed to made-up names deceptively close to actual ones – ‘Steue Jobs’, ‘Marti N Amis’ and ‘Ricky Gervias’, say. Whatever you fancy – I’ve got to mow the lawn. If I gave you more quotes would you come round and mow my lawn? No, you bleeding wouldn’t, you indolent, garrulous fop: so – that’s your lot.
Mil
Allahu Akba!
1009
As the book launch got closer, I decided to check out of the Raglan and move into somewhere more
central. Having exhausted every option on Trip Advisor, I knew if I wanted to find a decent place in zone one, without paying more than £200 a night, there was only one possible trick left. Secret hotels.
Even the most popular upscale hotels have nights where they can’t sell all of their rooms, but for obvious reasons they don’t want to advertise that fact to the world. Instead, they offer the rooms for sale through ‘secret hotel’ sites, like Hotwire.com. Potential guests can search for hotels by general area (‘central London, near Oxford Street’) and by feature (‘five-star quality, with gym’) but until you confirm your booking, and pay for it up front, you don’t find out the name of the place you’re staying.
The nature of the secret sites, though – hotels use them only as a last resort – means that you can usually only book a room for one or two nights at a time. As a result, I found myself hotel-hopping like a madman for the next couple of weeks, moving to a new place every day – the Holiday Inn Bloomsbury one night, the Copthorne Tara Kensington the next; anything to avoid returning to the Easy Hotel.
One night I lucked out and ended up staying at the five-star Park Lane Hotel for £85. My average nightly rate over the fortnight was just north of £100, still way off budget. But at least I was staying in nice places – every day was an adventure, not knowing where I was going to end up.
Which is how I came to end up staying across the road from Karen’s house.
1010
Karen was one of my reasons for leaving London.
She was the girl who, after the incident where she became BFFs with my other ex-girlfriend, had created an entire hate blog about me. More than that, to help with her plan to destroy my life, she was the girl who had spent weeks recruiting as many more of my ex-girfriends as she could find, as well as disgruntled former employees, people who I’d accidentally spilt drinks on in bars, people who thought I’d looked at them funny back in kindergarten; basically anyone who might still be holding a grudge against me and who might want to contribute to the blog.*