‘No, she’s . . . she’s got a lot of work on at the moment. I’m here for a while. She’ll come later.’
‘Are you missing her yet?’
‘Lots,’ I said truthfully, and we arranged to meet at her flat in Recoleta.
I walked to her apartment at nine that evening. The sky was a darkening regal blue at that time and the city felt poised, waiting to do something. Young men and women walked past me with groceries, old ladies walked dogs, couples sat on walls and benches tonguing each other unashamedly – it was still early, there was much to do.
I found Lizzie’s apartment and rang the buzzer, and the most beautiful man I have ever seen answered the door. He was clearly Argentine, and I can only describe him, as I apprehended him then, like something from a brochure: his long dark glossy hair, honey-coloured skin, perfect brown pools for eyes where one could drop one’s soul and never hear a splash. He was smoking ‘a fragrant joint’.
‘You must be Liam,’ he said, reaching out a hand and leaning forward when I took it to kiss me on the cheek. I’d read in the guidebook that this was how they did hellos and, though I liked it, it surprised me. I didn’t know whether to return it, but he left his cheek there for me so I kissed him back. Behind him, the woman who must have been Lizzie was lying on her front, her feet raised up and casually wiggling behind her while she laughed on the phone and waved at me. His stubble scratched against mine as we separated and made me want to light a cigarette. Her legs made my initial. Behind her was an open balcony, with a view of many more balconies in the warm dark where the streetlights seemed to shine brighter than English streetlights, simply because they weren’t English streetlights. Lizzie, folded up, looked like she’d be tall when she straightened.
He was introducing himself. ‘My name is Arturo,’ he said. ‘You have just come to Buenos Aires?’
I nodded. It was calming to be in a real living room, without any calming electronic tango music playing. Arturo had a really good haircut. It shone. He shone. I asked him the question I already knew the answer to ‘How do you know Lizzie?’ and he just smiled and turned around to look at her. I remember the phone she was talking into was an old-fashioned one with a rotary dial. Her legs were tanned and the soles of her feet looked like they would always be dirty. Some men wouldn’t have liked that. But not me and Arturo. In fact, I just didn’t know which of them to look at.
He offered me his spliff and, still stunned, though I hated dope, I took it and inhaled. Twice. Again. And then we were grinning at each other and embracing, as if enacting the second stage of the unusual hello we had begun before. ‘You want a beer,’ he told me.
While he was getting it, Lizzie hung up and tipped herself from the sofa like a slinky springing over a step. ‘Liam!’ In the same motion, she fell forward into me and hugged me doggily, pushing her chest into me, all coconut smelling, tall and limber, freckled brown skin still radiating the afternoon’s sun. ‘What fun.’ It was a hug I was in no hurry to leave but we pulled apart as Arturo came back into the room with my beer.
He handed it to me and studied me more carefully. This alone should have been reason for him to relax if he was assessing me as a threat. He looked hard at Lizzie before turning back to me. ‘But you are not here with your girlfriend, Liam.’
‘She’s had some work come up that was too good an opportunity to miss. She can’t leave right now. Hopefully –’
‘Oh, yes, let’s talk about Sarah,’ interrupted Lizzie. ‘I want to hear all about what she’s been up to – and how you met, what you do.’
And so, like the dutiful proud boyfriend I wanted to remain, I began to describe Sarah’s blossoming career as a curator, her invitations to New York and Sao Paulo, how she had nearly finished her PhD, about the offers she had to teach short courses that summer at universities around the world. After years of having no money and having to admit at parties to being a student, she was suddenly in possession of a glamorous success story. I knew what that felt like, how useful it was, how heady the opportunities, how excited and self-absorbed it had made me. She would survive it better. It was perfect poetic symmetry that I had fallen just as she had reached her peak. She could do whatever she liked with her success now.
‘And what do you do?’ asked Arturo. ‘Why are you here?’
‘That’s a good question,’ I admitted.
I had tried to think of something plausible on the walk over. But if you are hiding some details of a story, it is always best to reveal others truthfully.
And so I started to tell them about my shame.
Chapter 3
I was sent to meet Craig Bennett on the opening Monday of the London Book Fair. I don’t need to mention in which year. That morning Sarah had left me. After an entire night begging her not to I was almost grateful when she slammed the front door behind her, leaving me with one fewer of the bags of clothes she had thrown all over our bedroom.
In the shower I let myself collapse, sob and pray to my childhood God who only existed now during aeroplane take-offs and girlfriend emergencies. I turned all that off with the water and put on my best new suit. I had work to do.
Within minutes of leaving the house for Earls Court I became terrified of the conclusions Sarah would reach without my constant interruptions. I called her whenever I had a moment between meetings but she never answered. Each minute was madness. I started drinking at lunch, quickly working out which of my appointments wouldn’t mind moving to the bar. I still have my tattered schedule for that day: apparently I met with fifteen different people. I can’t remember who most of them are, let alone the books they talked to me about. There were many tall, wonderful-looking women from the Netherlands and Germany, from France and Italy. There always are. I must have nodded in the right places and delivered my lines correctly; somewhere in the middle of that afternoon Belinda materialised in a cloud of exquisite perfume to tell me what a good job I was doing, and could I meet Craig Bennett in a restaurant in Notting Hill and look after him for a couple of hours before delivering him safely to our party?
James Cockburn would have normally been the one to look after Bennett but he was in hospital with the broken legs he’d acquired when falling from the first-floor window of a flat in Soho. I would have been at the party and witnessed this for myself if I hadn’t been pleading with Sarah not to leave me.
Cockburn’s fall was the talk of the Fair that day. People flocked to our stand to find out what had happened. I heard six or seven different versions, including the most lurid: that Craig Bennett, gripping Cockburn’s shirt, had leaned him out of the window, demanding his advance be increased, and when Cockburn only laughed, Bennett had shoved him, perhaps half in jest, straight out the window onto the street below. It was a good story, but I heard another that was far more in character for my hedonistic mentor, that Cockburn decided to climb out the window and scale the narrow ledge around the edge of the building – why? – to surprise two actresses known for their roles in BBC costume drama who were sitting on an adjacent windowsill. This was just the kind of idea Cockburn would have found attractive, particularly as he had been drinking since the Sunday lunchtime kick-off of the QPR home game he’d taken some New York publishers and agents to.
There were other stories too.
Eighteen months earlier, when I had come to London to start my brilliant new job and move in with Sarah, I had done my best to correct my hedonism. I had been using my father’s disappearance at sixteen for far too long to justify my excesses; I was no longer that damaged teenager. Sharing a flat with Sarah seemed to be the perfect point to give up the long boozy stimulant-filled weekends of the previous five years of our lives – and earlier too, when we had been best friends attached to the wrong people. Now we had our own living room in which to watch films and DVD box-sets on our own sofa. We