‘Sarah,’ I said, ‘please, you have to believe me.’
It took two weeks from Craig Bennett’s death for the funeral to be rearranged, but in the meeting in which I had agreed to resign in exchange for six months’ salary, my CEO Belinda Wardour made it a condition of the deal that I would not come to the funeral.
The distraction of Bennett’s editor having mysteriously fallen from a window the night before delayed journalists from seizing on my involvement. James Cockburn, the flamboyant publishing director for fiction at Eliot, Quinn, was a minor media celebrity in his own right, and the rumours suggested his broken legs were a result of Bennett having pushed him. The hypotheses were irresistible.
None of the few people who knew about my role in Bennett’s death spoke out. I was to disappear. So, ‘resigning to focus on my writing’, I received my pay-off with a contract that prohibited me from speaking to the media or publishing anything about Craig Bennett. Belinda, in the Bookseller’s ‘Moves’ section, delivered the quote-de-grâce: ‘It’s disappointing to have Liam leave so soon after he arrived, but he’s decided his career is not in publishing and we wish him all the best.’
It looked then like we had got away with it.
Cockburn was still in hospital. The man who gave me my job, my mentor, a role model. (He’s a whole other chapter, a bloody novella.) He sent his own quote for the papers from his bed.
I deeply grieve the loss of our friend Craig Bennett. He was one of the most charming, generous men we will ever know, and the fact that hundreds of thousands if not millions of us feel like we did know him is a testimony to his extraordinary writing. I can’t accept that I will never read a new book by him again, although many of his millions of readers who have not yet read his frank, acerbic and incredibly moving memoir Juice will be able to when it is published in mass market paperback in June this year. A fearsomely honest, original writer, we may never see his like again.
Rumours in the press make it important to clarify something: when I last saw him, the night before he died, before I drunkenly defenestrated myself at a party, we were the best of friends. It is rare in what has become sometimes a sterile publishing industry that writers’ lives are as fascinating as Craig’s, or their personalities as dramatic or exaggerated, and so we shouldn’t be surprised that such a born storyteller should spawn some shaggy-dog tales about his final hours. If Craig can see us now – I won’t say he’s exactly laughing – he’d be too annoyed about not being alive, but I know –
* * *
I couldn’t read any more of it, and avoided the papers for the rest of the month. It wasn’t the only subject I was avoiding; it became much harder for Sarah and me to pretend we were happy as our last month together wore on. Our smiles stuck as we tried to think of something to say to each other that wasn’t the thing we needed and refused to speak of. But as my flight approached, the panic overwhelmed me and I began to break the terms of our truce.
Sarah had finished eating and was staring out of the window again, watching the children play. Yes, we had imagined that too. She turned and looked at me.
‘Please stop, Liam. I’ve listened. We did this at the time. We’ve done it since. There’s nothing you can say to make things better. Perhaps being apart will work, I don’t know. Just please, for now, stop talking.’
The worst thing about those words was how calm and placatory she was when she said them. Everything was not going to be all right, but she stood and came towards me and we kissed like love was simple, and then, for what I hope was not the last time, she led me upstairs back to bed.
If I never get Sarah back, if I ever stop trying to, I wonder how long it will take me before I am unable to recall the exact detail of her face, the sound of her voice, the way she moves. It would be romantic to say that she will never leave me, that I will see her looking back at me whenever I close my eyes. Oh, don’t worry: I have said this to her.
Sarah is beautiful, though she’s not so pretty you would fall in love with her from a photo. She’s not the type of girl to practise how to come across best in 2D, and this was one of the things I liked least about her, her carelessness, her lack of artifice; it was not natural. Perhaps this is what love consists of: simultaneous repulsion and attraction to a feature of the beloved. I loved and hated that she was different to me, and because I didn’t realise this I spent my time trying to correct the things I liked least about her that were in fact the things I liked the most.
There are physical similarities between us. Her eyes are brown, mine blue, though we have the same brown hair, hers falling in curls to her shoulders, her superb shoulders, two of the only things that can distract me from her legs. It is not that her legs are the type you see on the front of tights-packets or on teenage models in Sunday supplements, they’re not as long as these, less exercised or less starved, no less the better for it, the legs I wrote poetry and cooked dinner for and lay between, the legs I watched to the detriment of road safety when we rode bikes together. They were her legs. I don’t care if they make me objectify her: she was here! She was once here! So close I could touch her.
I had been best friends with Sarah for many years before we got together, though from the very first day I met her it had been an ambitious friendship. I had wanted her, and I had always wished she would split up with whichever boyfriend she had at the time. If it was not an innocent friendship I began with Sarah, when I sat next to her and listened to her voice rise and fall, when I laughed involuntarily at her stories and character assessments, when I plotted our adventures together, our happy ending, then there was nothing corrupt in it either. It was never the right time for us: I was not as forceful then as I have been since, and she either had an unsuitable boyfriend or I had an unsuitable girlfriend and we were never in the same place long enough to make the unsuitability incontestable. Sarah couldn’t hold a job then (and perhaps now) for more than a year before she was bored and off somewhere – Korea, Brazil, India – to do another job and learn another language from another exotic boyfriend. These were years in which I could forget her except as a wistfulness, the warm promise of a distant reunion; make me happy, but not yet. I began to enjoy myself.
It was in the gap between one of Sarah’s disappearances that I finally confessed how I felt to her. I had been single for a year, but she had a boyfriend back in Brazil, an artisan potter (they were always people with extraordinary occupations), and in her laidback way she assumed they’d stay together without being able to articulate how. In the meantime she had moved to Edinburgh for a job at the National Museum of Scotland, and invited me up to stay for a long weekend. It began on Thursday in a pub near her flat in Leith, one you reached by walking down a narrow street lined with prostitutes. We played a game – I can’t remember who started it – categorising all our mutual friends by whether or not we wanted to sleep with them. I was delighted at how many people she didn’t want to sleep with. Perhaps I lied a bit to suggest my tastes were less catholic than they are. And then we could no longer avoid it.
Yes, she admitted, with almost entirely disguised shyness, she would.
Yes, I admitted, rapturously, I would, I would, I would.
The next day we climbed to the top of Arthur’s Seat and stood braced against each other as the wind tried to tear us off. On the way down her feet slipped and I caught her under the arms. She turned and looked at me incredulously, as if she hadn’t noticed I had been with her until that moment. I had to say something but I couldn’t.
She never had the right clothes for the country she was living in. That day she was wearing a summer dress with shiny black tights and flimsy canvas shoes – a thick blanket of a woollen overcoat on the top donated by one of her new colleagues after she had arrived to work two days in a row in a soggy denim jacket. The cold rain began to hammer down as we reached the bottom and she was soon sodden. We took refuge in a pub. She had stolen a lipstick that morning from Superdrug and came back with cherry-pink lips and soaking hair. Her lips were so bright they seemed to belong to another dimension. She was wonderfully disorganised in the way she assembled herself