Is This the Way You Said?

by Adam Thorpe

  ‘Really. A very big effect.’

  ‘Well, what can I say? Glad you liked it.’

  A slight frown.

  ‘Liked it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Jonathan.

  Eddie Thwing, the renowned editor, leant forward slightly, his hands folded on the starched cloth.

  ‘How can I have liked it, when I haven’t even read it?’

  Eddie came to a gorge that ran straight down to the sea. Everywhere was dry and brown except for here, where a stream was still running and the sides of the gorge were green with bushes and trees. Those trees looked like poplars and there were tall rushes growing. He could smell the freshness, there was a magic about it: this is where the gods come, he thought.

  He scrambled down to the stream, where someone had placed two planks as a simple bridge. A goat, hobbled like the others, limped away. A solitary goat. The scapegoat. He wouldn’t mind being that goat, able to get away like that, from the others. No responsibilities. No typescripts. How many titles published a year? Three hundred thousand. A disease. They ought to have a moratorium, a ceasefire. No books for ten years. No authors.

  The goat was looking at him. That same strange stare. Goat-god. Pan. Trouble, maybe. A gust swept up the gorge from the sea and stirred the leaves and swayed the rushes and Eddie thought of that wicked wind in, what was it, Where Angels Fear to Tread? That alien, southern wind of excitement and danger.

  He shivered. The sun was no longer high enough to reach the gorge, it was lighting the rocks overhead but not the gorge. The sound of the stream was pleasant but seemed to mask a perpetual tumult of screams and tiny cries. This was the moment, sitting there on a patch of green by the stream in the shadows of the little gorge, that he’d look back on as premonitory or even worse – as the moment Ed was lost. Something telepathic, some intensity thrilling the air. Maybe the goat had felt it, because Eddie remembered it pricking its little ears and looking up, scenting something he couldn’t. But right now he didn’t know that, of course. He was enjoying the solitude by the lonely stream on the wild headland of Andros. Savouring it, despite the anxiety sounding underneath the music of leaves and water. That distant booming that must be the sea striking the rocks out there.

  ‘You haven’t read it?’

  ‘No. But my wife did.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  ‘You see, do you? That’s good.’

  Jonathan was out of his depth. He knew it. He didn’t know any of the rules. He knew the rules of his job, he even knew the rules of the proper theatre world – that, like film, it was mostly a family affair, an affair of blood and then an affair of sex, or luck, or class, or charm, or sheer brutal selfishness and self-belief to the point of sickness and maybe, somewhere in there, talent – but here in this book world, he was out of his depth. The waiter had laid two pairs of wooden chopsticks. Jonathan was OK at chopsticks.

  ‘I know you must be really busy,’ he said. ‘I mean, I wasn’t expecting you to have read it. You probably have people to read things for you. I dunno, I just sat down and wrote it.’

  ‘Ten years.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’ Jonathan grinned, acting sheepish.

  ‘You brought it along with you. That’s good. Because I haven’t got a copy.’

  Jonathan blinked, like a clown who’s been hit on the head.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘The copy you sent me, it was thrown into the sea. Into the deep blue Mediterranean sea. Off Andros. Do you know Andros?’

  ‘Er, no.’

  At that moment the waiter arrived from the kitchen beyond the swing door with small plates on which raw flesh was curled or spread in thin fillets soaked in oil. Fish flesh. Fresh fish from the sea. You could smell the sea. Jonathan felt dizzy.

  ‘Who did that? Threw it into the sea?’

  ‘Take what you want. This is good. This is carved up while it’s still living. In Tokyo, they carve it up in front of you. Alive.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘No, it’s very good. Have you never had it? They slice up the belly without touching the major organs. Technically the fish is still alive, just lying there with its belly sliced up ready to be eaten. This isn’t the fugu, by the way. This is tuna and this one is halibut. This is just for starters. A sushi meal takes a long time. This is the best place in London. In fact, it’s the only place that does puffer fish under the counter. I have contacts, I checked it out, I checked out the age of the chef, because it’s like surgery: a young chef might not have the experience to slice up the puffer fish and he might make a mistake, despite his two years’ training. A mistake would be fatal. The amount of toxin sufficient to kill you can be fitted on a pinhead. The toxin is called tetrodotoxin. I thought you might want to know that. Certain books can be fatal, too. The chef is an itamae. That’s what they’re called. The samurai of the kitchen. Actually, he’s not the usual chef. An itamae has to be called in especially, when there’s an order. He’s the only itamae in London, as far as I know. But today, he’s the chef.’

  Thwing was looking at him, calculating the effect.

  ‘Great,’ said Jonathan. ‘I’ll try anything once.’

  Thwing smiled. ‘Once and for ever, maybe, in the case of puffer fish, if the itamae is inexperienced. But I checked him out. He’s over forty. Here he is. Hello, Kaze.’

  The chef, a small man with a smooth skin and greying eyebrows, gave them a little bow. He was grinning from ear to ear. He was eerily like the Kabuki actor who had taught Jonathan the gruelling exercises all those years ago, that you were supposed to do on dry sand.

  ‘The fugu costs nearly £200,’ said Thwing. ‘That’s one reason he’s come out of the kitchen to see us. The other is to check that we’re not the police or a hitman hired by some crazed smack addict of a Yakuza boss who thinks he’s been cheated. Or maybe it’s to see what we look like alive.’

  Jonathan laughed, a little falsely. The chef laughed too, out of politeness. He had hairs coming out of his nose. Thwing offered him some sake. The waiter was hovering and the chef barked at him and the waiter came back almost immediately with a third sake glass. Thwing filled it to the brim.

  ‘Kampai!’

  ‘To fugu!’

  ‘Kampai!’

  ‘Very good sake,’ said the chef, nodding. He had another.

  ‘Kampai!’

  ‘To life!’

  ‘Kampai!’

  ‘He’d better not have many more, if he’s operating,’ Jonathan suggested, the sake oiling his mind and converting his anxiety – for he realised the puffer fish was for real, now – to excitement.

  ‘You once told me,’ said Thwing, addressing the chef with a hand on his arm, ‘that the fugu closes its eyes. Eyes close? The only fish in the world to do so. To close its eyes.’

  The chef nodded. ‘Cry,’ he said. ‘Make a noise – cry! Oh, sad. I sad when fugu kill cos cry. Fugu make sound like cry.’

  ‘Here’s to the end of sorrow,’ said Thwing, filling the chef’s sake glass to the brim.

  The chef threw his hands up in protest; but Thwing declared, with an assured authority that Jonathan admired: ‘Kaze, in this country, as you know, it is dishonourable to refuse a drink, once you are offered a drink. Dishonourable.’

  Kaze gave a high little giggle and picked up the glass and called out, even more enthusiastically, ‘Kampai!’ Then he downed it in one go.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Thwing, once the chef had left them, knocking a chair as he went: ‘Kaze Iwamoto is a master, a great sashimi chef. We’re lucky he was available. They do it in front of you, if you ask. I didn’t think you’d want to, being the guy you are.’

  Jonathan almost found himself protesting.

  ‘They use very sharp knives,’ Thwing continued, ‘and the tail flicks up and the mouth gulps, as fish do when they’re out of their element, even as the belly is being sliced. It’s impressive to watch. It indicates, obviously, that they haven’t just defrosted the fish. I don’t think they’ve defrosted it here, but you never know
. As long as something’s expensive enough, they can do whatever they like. I think they keep the puffer fish in an underwater cage that is hidden somewhere from officials, from the police. They sew its lips together: it has very sharp teeth. Or maybe it’s frozen. Either way, you’ll still get the effect.’

  ‘The effect?’

  ‘I call it the kiss. Your lips’ll tingle and your tongue’ll feel a little numb. That’s the minuscule traces of the toxin from the liver, which they cut out, along with the testicles. You remember sherbet crystals, as a kid? Well, this is infinitely better, because it’s dangerous. It’s adventure. It’s a thrill. It’s even better than the first time you snogged. If you can’t actually feel your tongue, you call the ambulance. Although by then it’ll be too late.’

  Jonathan nodded, a little anxious again. Eddie Thwing was behaving like a villain out of a James Bond movie. It was pure ham, pure drama queen – the slow delivery, the words rolling precisely off his tongue.

  He clearly loved words. This editor.

  This is some kind of test, Jonathan realised. An initiation rite. And at the end of it, you finished up like Anita Barry.

  ‘But don’t tell anyone that you’ve eaten fugu here. Or the place will get into big trouble, and it doesn’t want trouble. It doesn’t want to be noticed, even. In New York, of course, fugu’s legal as long as the chef’s a proper itamae. I ate it a few times when I was in Tokyo. In London, it’s banned. Because no one notices,’ Eddie Thwing went on. He hadn’t once smiled, Jonathan realised, until now. Now Eddie Thwing was smiling. ‘No one notices if food’s crap, as long as they pay enough. It’s the same with books. Except it’s not to do with how much you pay, it’s to do with how much the publisher pays.’

  ‘The author?’

  Jonathan was finding the sushi’s rawness a little conspicuous, if that was the right word. It filled his mouth with the sea, with harbours and sea winds, but he was used to that from Brighton. His favourite dish was a heap of tiny, fried sprats. The chopsticks were fine, he could handle chopsticks, although the effect of the sake made him want to giggle when the raw flesh slipped off before it got to his mouth. His knees were aching from the lotus position. His body used to be able to hold it for ages, no problem, but age was stealing in, and the tiny injuries from thirty years of mime were showing up. He didn’t want to sort himself out, though, while Thwing was talking.

  ‘The bookseller. The chains. What I call protection money. The publisher pays for the price to be slashed, for special offers like three-for-two, for posters and window space and all that crap. But it’s decided on potential profit, not quality. And the punters are stupid, undiscriminating, so they follow the signs, follow the herd. Sheep, not goats. I prefer goats. They can be solitary. But the goats are hobbled. The stupid sheep read the same four or five books. The big booksellers lick their lips and are happy, because they’re false. They’re not selling books at all. They’re selling product. They take your ground-breaking, amazing book to sell only after they’ve looked at the fucking EPOS figures and what that says about your previous sales. I call it the intelligence-saving device. It saves them having to think, to consider.’

  Thwing helped himself to sake without giving a toast.

  ‘Welcome to the glorious world of books,’ he said. ‘Where are you from, originally?’

  And drank.

  ‘Daventry, near Northampton,’ Jonathan replied. ‘And you?’

  ‘Cornwall.’

  ‘Right. Great. You know, you sound like my friend Dave. He runs a second-hand bookshop in Brighton. Typical second-hand place, you know? Chaos, you can hardly move. But he says what you’re saying. The trouble is, he doesn’t sell a thing. In fact, I think you know it. The bookshop. Fastidium.’

  Eddie Thwing stared down at his food. The coil of fish on his plate lay untouched.

  ‘So you ask yourself,’ he said, almost murmuring it, ‘what am I in it for? Why have I let this disease enter my life?’

  He looked up again. It seemed that he was actually in tears. At least, his eyes were filmed over.

  ‘I think that about every five minutes when I’ve got a class of thirteen-year-old yobbos,’ said Jonathan. ‘But you still persevere. Pays the bills.’

  Eddie Thwing stayed staring at him until Jonathan had to concentrate on his food, serving himself to the final slip of rawness. He was talking in clichés, he was spewing offal. His mind had gone thin. This guy hadn’t even read the book. So? Why should he have done? A busy man—

  ‘She called the gods prats.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘That was a mistake. It attracted their attention. The second mistake was yours.’

  ‘Mine?’

  ‘Yours.’

  ‘Right.’

  Jonathan shook his head slowly from side to side. ‘Hey, I’m really lost. Sorry.’

  He dabbed his mouth automatically with his starched white over-large napkin. This guy was looking at him with such malevolence. Maybe Thwing was having a nervous breakdown. Jonathan’s father had got like that, with his war wound and his war memories from El Alamein and a bottle of gin a day.

  ‘Sorry,’ he repeated, feeling suddenly able to handle it, as he’d handled his father. (Don’t search for logic in this. Go with it. Don’t let it block itself, keep the flow going, we’re not here to watch two dumb guys staring at each other, you lot.) ‘As the Sufis say, “Lose cleverness, buy bewilderment”. I’m bewildered. I’m bewildered most of the time, actually. But I thought you’d taken me to lunch to discuss the book, which in your letter you said you’d liked.’

  Eddie Thwing’s eyes had drifted onto a point roughly where Jonathan’s heart was.

  ‘I hadn’t read it.’

  ‘No, but—’

  ‘If I had . . .’

  Pause.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have taken it.’

  ‘Taken it? You mean for publication?’

  ‘To fucking Andros.’

  ‘Oh, right. The holiday didn’t go well, then?’

  Eddie Thwing burst into laughter – if such a harsh, savage sound could be called laughter.

  He didn’t stay long in the gorge.

  He checked his watch: five minutes, maybe. He scrambled out of the gorge and back up to the track. He’d been away fifteen minutes already: the next stretch of track climbed steeply to disappear over the brow of the nearest ridge. The church was hidden again. He felt like climbing up to the brow of the ridge to see what lay beyond, it was as inviting as any near horizon – although when you got there it was always the same old thing rolling away. And the image of Ed through the blinding glitter a few minutes back was nagging at him.

  This was always happening, he thought, as he strode back: he was always thinking the worst because he read fiction all the time and even intelligent fiction of whatever genre relied on things going wrong, on tragedy and disaster. It was screwing him up.

  He came to the bend that bordered the slope beetling over the unseen sea canyon below, way under his feet. The glitter on the water had shifted slightly, it was easier to see Holly.

  No Ed.

  He shielded his eyes with his hands and screwed them up, shuttering down the little twinkly stars of glare until the edge of the big slab loomed a bit clearer. Holly was reading, he could see that. He could see her in exactly the same position as five minutes back. But there was no Ed. This couldn’t be true. His heart had hammered like this before, when Ed had run out into the road in Camden and a bus had passed between them and then there was Ed, on the other side, a mere toddler whom the bus would hardly have felt. And times before, before Ed. Was there a time before Ed? He supposed so.

  This couldn’t be true. He stayed looking, screwing his eyes up, waiting for his son to appear from behind the slab, or from behind Holly. He’s probably lying down beside Holly, Eddie thought, but it was too far away to see and he was the wrong angle. He’s probably just there. Christ. You can’t even go for a little stroll on a nice Greek isla
nd without putting your arse in the highest gear. Insecurity, that’s what it is. You’re so intrinsically insecure, thanks to your mother faffing about over you in Hemel, in that little over-stuffed semi in Hemel. Eddie was talking to himself in a stage whisper, now. Where is he?

  Ed! he shouted, waving his arm. Ed! Ed!

  His voice got nowhere, flattened somehow by the open air, as if it wasn’t in inverted commas.

  He was breathing hard, now. He could see the sea whitening abruptly around the rock. Then he saw Holly move, get to her feet. Ah, she was getting Ed. He must have made his way behind, into the scree and scrub. Eddie wanted to laugh with relief. But Holly was shouting. He could just hear it above the sigh and sough of the water, a weeny little cry. She was echoing his shout. He was pretty certain she was shouting for Ed, too.

  He started running down the track, feeling sick, feeling his whole body turning into a circuit board with the cover off. He was shouting fuck fuck fuck as he ran down, and then Jesus Christ oh Jesus. The details of the stones he was slapping through were very clear. He wished he was a stone. Or a goat. Then his right sandal strap broke and he found himself losing it and sliding his bare foot on the roughness of the track, dust clouds piling up like he was a motorbike, and limping back and cursing and then using his sandal like a flip-flop by trapping the thong between his toes, but this slowed him down and he had to hop and run at the same time and the sun was in his face.

  But it wouldn’t have mattered if he’d been able magically to leap from the bend in the track and swoop straight down onto the black slab where the water heaved and subsided and now and again thrashed into foam, because Ed was already four-and-a-half minutes under, already a pale underwater form among the beautiful swarms of fishes, his hair floating out like the frill of a sea anemone or the fronds of weed, already taken by the curious currents to the anonymous depths a hundred yards out from the slab on which loose pages were fluttering and Holly was screaming and screaming his name.

  Something very dark was happening. He could feel it. He could feel it pulsing from this man the other side of the low, wooden table. He wished Marion were here. He felt oddly alone in this swirl of dark energy. Maybe this is what all authors feel. Real authors, not the fake ones. Very alone.