Plume

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‘Blocked,’ Pierce said, pronouncing the word with complete neutrality. ‘That’s an interesting way of looking at it. A block. You’re a writer, you must know this: when you’re blocked, it’s never a problem with whatever you’re doing at that moment, it’s a problem with what you’ve already done. It’s a problem in the past, not in the present. You have to go back in order to fix it.’

Fascinating. He could sell that to the writing magazines, maybe, but I couldn’t sell it to Eddie. Was the coffee hotter than I thought? A wisp of steam flexed over my cup. I blew on it and it fled, but I didn’t know if it had been steam, or smoke, coming from elsewhere, but it must have been steam. Rings formed and shunted in the black surface of the coffee. I put the cup on the coffee table with a bump and shut my eyes.

No. Not here. Not now.

‘I don’t understand,’ I said, keeping my eyes shut. Perhaps I sounded upset, or weary, or irate, but I didn’t care. ‘You sounded very eager to talk to me when we got in touch, but now it sounds as if there’s not much you want to say.’

I opened my eyes. The smoke was close to the floor, not yet reaching for my throat. Pierce was staring at me.

‘How long has that been going on?’ he asked, with a downward gesture of the eyes.

‘The … What?’ It took superhuman effort that I was able to even find those two unconnected words. ‘The smoke?’

‘Smoke?’ Pierce said, frowning. ‘That!’ he repeated, pointing at my right hand.

My hand was shaking quite badly, a rapid, rocking action that started at the wrist and magnified through the fingers, causing them to quiver and quake in a very noticeable way. I stilled it with my left hand in what I hoped looked like a calm and natural action; in reality I was clamping down on it like a farm dog on a rat.

‘I had an uncle who got the shakes,’ Pierce said. ‘He used to stay with us at Christmas. Divorced, and my cousins had their own families by then and didn’t want to know. I don’t have any colourful stories about him. He didn’t get shitfaced and fall about or anything like that. It was painfully clear that he was on his best behaviour, for us, for his brother. By the middle of the afternoon his hands would be shaking so badly he was barely able to roll a cigarette. He died when I was a teenager – when he was only in his fifties.’

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to associate myself with Pierce’s tragic uncle, and I didn’t know what else I could say. What I wanted to do was to come up with a story that would pass off the shaking as something other than what it was, but my mind was blank, nothing came. I could not construct an alternative universe in which the comparison was unfair. It was fair. All I could do was stay quiet.

‘I must admit, I don’t often think about that uncle,’ Pierce continued. ‘Remembering him now, what comes to mind is … He was my father’s older brother but you would never have guessed that from looking at them. Sure, he looked older, more beaten-up, but he completely deferred to my father, let himself be ordered about, nagged, all very meekly. Almost like a child.’

‘Maybe he wanted that,’ I said, and I was surprised to find myself talking at all, and interested to know what I was going to say next. ‘Someone taking charge. A voice outside the head.’

Pierce stared hard at me, not with and not without kindness, as if slightly refracted by a thick layer of invisibly transparent material between us.

‘Quin told me you were a drunk,’ Pierce said.

I had never been called that before. The word was there, always at the periphery of my thoughts about myself, but I put great effort into excluding it.

‘He said you were steaming drunk when you met him, and that you smelled of old booze,’ Pierce went on. ‘He wasn’t impressed. You know him – a monk. Fresh pomegranate and plain yoghurt for breakfast, cycling everywhere. Determined to see in the singularity. Your thingie, your Dictaphone, was out of batteries and you tried to make notes. The interview was full of mistakes and quotes lifted from other places.’

Some sort of noise was made in response to this – a cough, an ‘mm-hm’ – but the organism making that noise was very far away now. If I had not been sitting down, I knew I would have fallen by now. I knew that as a fact. As it was, I wanted to close my eyes again and slump sideways onto Pierce’s ancient sofa, to feel the cracked brown leather cool on my cheek, to let sleep come. The grey was closing in around my vision.

‘Not the first time, right?’

I shook my head. ‘I’ve been sloppy,’ I said, the words slipping.

‘Jesus,’ Pierce said. ‘Are you OK? You look like you’re going to be sick.’

‘Could I have a glass of water?’

‘Sure.’ He rose at once and disappeared into the kitchen. A cupboard opened, a tap ran. ‘I’m not trying to get you into trouble. You can relax.’

He was wrong about that – I could in no way relax. Just try to relax, when the gathering shadow that’s been chasing you for months appears in front of you, its terrible face bared, and you know that all this time you have been running straight to it. And ‘relaxing’ suggested tension, tightly wound muscles, stiff sinews. That was not how I felt. I felt undone, as if I were unravelling, unspooling. Pierce returned with a tall glass of tap water, which he placed in front of me, but he did not sit. Instead he went back to the kitchen.

There was a single ice cube in the water, a tiny kindness that I found almost overwhelming, and which did more to convince me that Pierce meant me no harm than anything he said. In putting these truths to me, he had spoken without condemnation or judgement but in the tone of a professional, a counsellor or doctor – or a sympathetic interviewer.

‘Thank you,’ I said, late. I took a sip of the water. Putting the glass back on the table, I saw that the DVR was still running, its red light still lit, counter still counting. This would all make uncomfortable listening, if I ever got around to that stage.

When Pierce came back, he was holding two small cut-glass tumblers and a bottle of whisky – Maker’s Mark, with the melted plastic around the neck of the bottle to look like a wax seal. Though I dearly wanted a drink, the sight of the bourbon filled me with fear. There was the usual reflexive secrecy of the addict – the fear of being seen indulging in addictive behaviour, a fear married to shame. But there was more. I tend to avoid spirits, even wine. Deep in me, I knew that it was too easy to overdo it that way. And by ‘overdo it’, I don’t mean getting incapably drunk – that was the work of every evening. I meant killing myself.

‘I don’t usually drink whisky,’ I said.

‘What do you usually drink?’

‘Stella.’

‘Stella. Huh. Wouldn’t have guessed. Wait.’ Pierce was off again, another trip to the kitchen. A fridge door rattled open, bottles clinked, a bottle top clattered against a hard surface.

‘Not Stella, but.’ It was a bottle of Czech lager.

‘Thank you.’ Still, the reflex reflexed – don’t let him see you drink – though it was clearly far past the point of being important, and that bottle, condensation making a stripe of light down its side, was the most welcome sight in the world. The mists receded, the world sharpened again, just from the sight of that hard green glass.

‘How many people know?’

I didn’t know what he meant; the question interrupted my thrill at having that cold bottle in my hand. ‘About the, er, problems with the articles, or about the drinking?’

‘Both. Either. I assume they are related phenomena.’

Pierce’s attitude, I realised, his demeanour, was entirely journalistic. Pleasant enough, but that pleasantry was like the soft toy dangling in the dentist’s office to distract child patients from what else was there. The equipment. I had been right about his professional mien, I recognised it – I was being interviewed.

‘No one,’ I said.

‘Really?’ Pierce’s eyebrows rose.

‘Maybe one or two people in the office have suspicions,’ I said, thinking of Polly. And Kay.

‘Quin likes data,’ Pierce said. ‘He was raised by spreadsheets, I don’t know. When he is confronted with a problem, he digs out all the data he can find, digs and digs and digs, and eventually the problem just isn’t there any more. When you have enough computing power, and enough eager employees and interns, you can do amazing things. When you have enough data.’

In a ball of numbness, I was hyper-aware of the cool weight of the bottle in my hand, the tiny interactions of the pads of my fingers against glass and condensation. I took a deep drink from it, realising as I did so that I had been deliberately delaying that moment – the usual ostentatious show of restraint, the one I used in pubs, drinking in company, to show that I didn’t have a problem. It was entirely surplus to requirements here. All the rules had changed; they had been changed by strangers, indeed, when I had always assumed that the confrontation would come from someone close to me. I knew how that felt, from the ending with Elise: the walls folding in, the ceiling coming down, crushed, trapped, suffocated. That was how I had imagined it, when I had dared to imagine it, or found the thought inescapable: with Eddie and Polly in the aquarium, with Eddie in the publisher’s office upstairs, with Kay.

But this was different. I wasn’t crushed and I wasn’t trapped. Which is not to say that I wasn’t afraid: on the contrary, the thought of a vengeful Quin in possession of this kind of information and talking about it with others as he had plainly talked about it with Pierce – that was chilling.

‘So Quin guessed?’ I asked. ‘About me?’ What I wanted to ask was: what kind of proof does he have? Anything I can’t lie my way around?

Pierce grunted, a bitter dreg of a chuckle. ‘Guessed. Yeah, Quin is great at “guessing”. Gifted really. Quin “guessed”.’

‘I don’t understand what this has to do with me. Or … I mean, I see what it has to do with me, but I don’t know what … why Quin said all this to you.’

‘He was angry,’ Pierce said. ‘With you, and with me. Are you still recording this?’

‘Yes.’

‘Switch that off for a minute, would you?’

‘Sure.’ I picked the DVR off the coffee table and pressed the off button.

‘Inaccuracy makes Quin angry,’ Pierce said. ‘Deliberate inaccuracy especially so. He says one of the biggest challenges Bunk faces is filtering out the lies from social media. Like when someone tells Tamesis that they’re in the office when really they’re in the pub.’

Acid bubbled up within me. Pierce’s sarcastic tone earlier could be understood – Quin hadn’t guessed at all.

‘He doesn’t care about the social reasons for that sort of thing, the niceties,’ Pierce continued. ‘It’s just bad data, it corrupts his models. I asked him why he wanted anything to do with my map, with the kind of research I did for Murder Boards. He said that he was trying to run a stochastic analysis of apocrypha and myth. But he … I had a lot of research material for Night Traffic around in the flat, and he looked at all that too. Without asking.’

Pierce had been taking very small sips from his whisky before this, as if unfamiliar with its taste, or at least unfamiliar with its taste at this hour. Now, however, he took a deep draught, draining his glass.

‘The thing about Night Traffic,’ he said, with a little lick of his lips, ‘is that I made it up. None of it happened. None of it is true.’

I swallowed. Pierce was glaring at me, full eye contact, judging my reaction, as if he were trying to read my thoughts about what he had said.

He wouldn’t be able to. My thoughts were: He doesn’t know about the second DVR. The one that was in my shirt pocket. The one that was still recording.

FOUR (#u12ebdc24-7568-5f1f-957f-b8f9476145db)

‘Have you ever been mugged, Jack?’

I had to take a moment to think about the answer. It was a simple question, with a simple, truthful answer. But in this room, at this time, all certainty felt suspect. The man sitting opposite me had taken an event I had experienced twice and described it nearly perfectly. That his version was a giant lie – with an orbiting debris field of lesser lies – was deeply disturbing. My own experiences felt counterfeit. It was a violation, akin to an attack. I should have been angry, but Pierce’s authority and my respect for him were – curiously – unchanged. In a way, a very conditional and twisted way, I admired him: that he could invent an account so detailed, sympathetic and convincing – utterly, utterly convincing – was impressive.

‘Yes, I have,’ I said. ‘Twice, actually.’

‘Actually.’ Pierce un-crossed and re-crossed his legs. ‘Well, I have never been mugged.’

‘You describe it so well.’

‘Yes, so I’m told. What is it like? Being mugged.’

‘Don’t you know? I mean, even if it hasn’t happened to you, you must have spoken with plenty of people, and your research—’

‘Yes, yes.’ He waved this away. ‘I got emails, letters. People feeling as if they had to share what had happened to them with someone they thought would understand. Some horrible stories. I spoke at the annual conference of the National Association for the Victims of Crime. I tried to get out of it, but they were so persistent and nice. Afterwards people wanted to talk to me … That was towards the end, by the way, right before I decided I’d had enough, couldn’t stand lying to these people any more. But what you learn from all these stories – well, no, listen, this is important. Being a writer is to realise that all experience is unique but analogous. People are good at thinking their way into other people’s heads, much better than most of them realise. Anyway, tell me.’

Again, I had to think about the answer. Though they were technically very similar events – alone, vulnerable, a threat, a theft – the two experiences were very different, and it was hard to establish the common emotional ground between them.

‘Confusing,’ I said.

‘Confusing. Very good answer,’ Pierce said. He sat back in his chair and smiled. ‘Can you expand?’

I shrugged. Once again Pierce had turned my interview into an interrogation of me. I was still trying to mentally accommodate his admission about Night Traffic. A fraud. It was a fraud. And I did not yet know my response to that. There are journalistic clichés: ‘stunned’, ‘shocked’, ‘reeling’, ‘taken aback’. Those would work, but not well. It was more a troubling in-between state, waiting for feedback that isn’t coming, and feeling nothing in the meantime. Being lost, and getting out your phone to check the map – but it doesn’t load. You see the little dot marking your location, but on a field of grey. And here he was drilling information out of me. I was pitted with the sense of having shared too much from my own darkness. Pierce was impressive, for sure. The unembarrassed way he questioned, the way he handled the answers – that ‘very good answer’ there, a bit of positive reinforcement to help the subject, me, along, making me want to share more. A natural journalist, whereas I had spent a decade scraping by and pretending.

‘The first time was very much what you’d imagine, you know,’ I said. ‘I was frightened …’

‘How was it confusing?’

I drank from my beer. ‘There’s a moment, a time when you don’t know what’s happening – you’re being mugged but you don’t know it for sure just yet, you haven’t figured it out, you don’t know what this guy, this stranger, wants – you don’t realise that the rules have been … that they don’t apply any more, that different rules apply, different roles. It’s confusing. You’re moved very quickly from one situation, a normal situation, to an abnormal situation, and it takes some time to catch up. And the second time – the very fact it was the second time, it had happened before, made it different. I knew what was going on, but … it was still a very confusing experience.’

In truth, the second time had not been confusing at all. My emotions, at the time, had been very clear – more than clear, blinding, revelatory. Only in retrospect did I feel conflicted about what had happened and began to see that my reaction had been … perverse. ‘Confusing’ was a handy word to slap on that mess. Pierce was, once more, looking at me to expand, and I didn’t feel inclined to.

‘Let’s talk about you,’ I said. ‘I’m supposed to be the interviewer.’

‘Why?’ Pierce said. ‘You’re not recording.’

Not as far as he knew. ‘I assume you’ll want to go on the record at some point.’

‘To “set the record straight”?’ Pierce said. ‘That was the expression Quin used. More than once. I had to “set the record straight”. As if everything is disordered now, crooked, and when I … If I go on the record it’ll all be properly arranged and neat and tidy. “The Record”! As if there’s a single, agreed text of the past somewhere, in a big ledger with metal clasps … Or in one of Quin’s servers, now, I suppose.’

He stopped, and stared out of the window, biting his lip, frowning, those hard eyes points of radiant darkness. ‘That’s shit. That’s a big pile of shit. You must see that. Everything would be blown to shit. There’ll be a big storm of shit. Newspapers. I’ll be ripped apart.’

The eyes were avoiding me now, and they swam. For the first time in our discussion, he looked vulnerable. Might he cry? Profile gold …

‘The worst part,’ Pierce continued, ‘is that it won’t even be that big a scandal. Not the front page of the newspaper, it won’t touch the TV. Enough to destroy me, of course. A couple of days of it online, before people move on. I’ll be ruined. But it won’t be that important a story. Just enough to ensure I never come back.’

He was right I had not fully calculated the implications of what Pierce had said about Night Traffic – I had been thinking purely in personal terms, not about the wider world. I had thought, This is a huge story, but not put any real imagination into what that meant. This would bump Eddie’s estate agent friend for sure. Eddie might want it on the cover. Pierce was right, national newspapers would pick it up. The magazine’s name would be everywhere, we’d be at our highest profile for years, maybe since the Errol days. Money would flow: extra news-stand sales, new subscribers, extra ads sold against my piece, syndication rights. In narrow professional terms, I would be a hero. My dismissal would be off the table for a while, six months maybe, enough time for me to get my act together. And the incredible fact was that the story had just dropped from the sky. Quin volunteered Pierce, and Pierce had served up the story.

A wisp of doubt. I hadn’t actually done anything, not yet. I could imagine the finished product: long, New Yorker-ish, bringing in a lot of voices, well-researched, prize-winning. But it had been months since I put words on paper, and that had been the Quin train-wreck. Could I produce 5,000 words of empathy, careful questioning, supporting quotes, legal niceties and meticulous fact-checking? Lawyers would read it, tens of thousands of people would read it, awards judges would read it. I could imagine having written it – stepping onto the stage to accept my award – but I couldn’t imagine actually writing a single line.

And I would need Pierce to cooperate, on the record. I might secretly have his confession on tape, but using that alone, without a corroborating, sympathetic interview from him, would turn my piece into a ham-fisted assassination. Pierce would be denied the stage-managed interview he must want; instead he would get an exposé by a hostile and unscrupulous journalist.

With a tidal surge of nausea, I realised that I couldn’t get away with that. Pierce was not powerless. He could strike back, with Quin, with the information they had accumulated on my drinking and inaccuracies and lifted quotes. Who knew how much data Quin really had? They could respond with so much muck of their own that I’d be destroyed – and, in the ensuing shitstorm, Pierce might be able to absolve himself. I began to appreciate why I, in particular, had been chosen for this job: mutually assured destruction.

Involve Pierce. Get him on board. ‘If you go on the record,’ I said, ‘I’m prepared to craft the story with you, make sure you get your side across clearly and sympathetically. We can make your, ah, coming-out as gentle as possible.’

‘Well, thanks,’ said Pierce. He pinched the bridge of his nose, and shut his eyes hard, seemingly tired. ‘But let’s not delude ourselves. No way it’ll be gentle. It’ll be brutal. I’m going to get killed.’

I could not deny this, so I didn’t say anything. Instead, I thought about the DVR in my shirt pocket. If I glanced downwards, I could just see the top of it. Pierce could probably see it too, if he knew to look, but that shape against my breast could be anything – phone, vape stick, pen drive. I became very conscious that my body language might betray me, might reveal that I was wearing a wire. I rolled my shoulders, pretending to rid them of stiffness, in fact trying to get the DVR to be less conspicuous, and peered into the neck of the beer bottle, inspecting its foaming dregs. To my surprise, the bottle was already almost empty, though I hardly remembered drinking from it at all.

But Pierce wasn’t even looking. He was preoccupied with telling his story. ‘Quin threatened to go public without me,’ he said. ‘He insisted that I confess and make amends. He said that it reflected badly on him.’ He barked a laugh, eyes wide. ‘On him! How fucking vain can you get? Such concern for his own reputation! He’s completely naive. He thinks that if I say I’m sorry then I’ll be OK. He’s wrong. I made up … I’d say “I made up a story” but that sounds so fucking innocent, so pre-school. I invented people. I invented events. I defrauded my agent, my publisher and the public. I told lie after lie after lie and said to people every time, “this is the sworn truth”. I was praised for my honesty. I’m a monster.’

I wanted, more than ever, to check the DVR in my pocket, to confirm that it was still running, recording these words. But I did not dare. I kept my eyes on Pierce, draining the last of my beer and letting him speak, but hardly listening, thinking only of the recording.

‘All those people who praised it, who praised my courage and candour,’ Pierce continued. ‘The people who wrote to me, the people who invited me to speak … All those people are going to feel like I made fools of them. And I did. Helen Mirren said that it made her cry. In a newspaper. Dame Helen Mirren. What are they going to do? How do I atone for something like that?’

‘Is that what you want?’ I asked. ‘To atone?’

It was Pierce’s turn to be silent. He scowled, giving the question deep, zealous thought.

‘If I’m being honest,’ he began – and I thought, Yes, please be honest – ‘I’d rather die before the truth comes out. But I’ll settle for atonement.’

‘Why did you do it?’ I asked. If I did decide to betray Pierce, the more information I could get out of him while he believed himself to be off the record, the better.

But he was no longer cooperating.

‘I envy you, you know. You’ve done it. You’ve been there – twice. I tried to think of the most primal urban experience possible: being mugged in the street, that was it.’

‘The way to avoid being mugged,’ my dad said, ‘is to look as if you’re going to mug someone.’ Memorable advice – well, I’ve remembered it, which is more than I can say about most of what he told me before I went to London. What made it stick was the thought it immediately prompted in me: that I could never, ever imagine my dad looking as if he were going to mug someone. This gem of street-smarts was dispensed by a diminutive, paunchy tax accountant wearing an incredibly aged blue blazer with loose brass buttons that dangled like charms on a bracelet. When my dad started losing his hair, it went at the temples first, as is quite common. But then it kept going back in two temple-width swaths, never expanding its path to take in anything from the sides or the top of the head. This left a mohican-like strip of hair in the middle of his scalp. He never did anything to adapt his hairstyle to the diminishing resources at its disposal, to try to disguise or balance the creeping baldness – a failure I saw then as a hopeless inability to face facts but in retrospect looked more like splendid unconcern. He simply did not mind.