We moved into a flat in Hackney in an old council block. It didn’t look much but I loved it. The sun came through our thin curtains and woke me up at five in the morning in the summer. I’ve never been much good at sleeping, never a member of what Nabokov calls ‘the most moronic fraternity in the world’. (I had my own moronic fraternity united by the refusal of sleep, with Cockburn our founder and spiritual leader.) I would quietly watch Sarah sleeping until I got bored, and then sneak into the living room to read a manuscript for an hour or two before she woke up. I was good at my job then. Insomniacs make diligent readers as well as talented hedonists.
But Sarah liked the drugs too, and a couple of weeks into my well-intentioned abstinence, she began to wonder where they were. ‘Have you not got – literally, not got anything? Oh. Oh . . . good.’ It was my fault. I’d always had something squirrelled away; I’d created expectations. (That euphemism: we were expected to drugs.) There was a point in every party when we realised how easy it would be to have more fun. How boring it would be not to.
We decided the sometime in the non-urgent future when Sarah got pregnant would be the new deadline for renouncing our lifestyle (or we’ll regret it then, said Sarah) and we went back to normal. It was not hard to find new drug dealers. I asked a literary agent over lunch, and she pitched her entire list to me, central, south, west, east, north . . . I bought them all. And suddenly drugs were almost legal as mephe-drone appeared, combining the effects of cocaine and MDMA and speed, great pillows of which were available over the internet for almost nothing. Everyone was taking it. Everyone stupid was.
What I love (I am trying to say loved) about drugs is the way they engender the temporary suspension of disbelief, poetic faith, negative capability, whatever you want to call it. You can invent magical new characters for yourself when you’re on them, and if you start to believe in them others will too. Perhaps an aspiring writer’s instincts are riskier, more hospitable to the reader’s desire for titillation, for secrets and extra-marital intrigue. Perhaps. This type of grand disingenuousness annoyed Sarah more than anything. So it should have. I just liked getting high. It isn’t only writers who make themselves into characters: it’s one of the commonest failings, one of the purest joys. And you don’t have to be a liar to be a writer: that’s a book festival cliché you hear from midlisters aspiring to midlife crises. Becoming a vainglorious prick has never been fundamental to creating literary art. No. I did that because it was fun, because I was morally exhausted and it was easy to pretend my behaviour was separate from my essence. But if the man careering around town in my clothes wasn’t me, then why did I feel so bad, and so proud, about the way he talked to women?
It hadn’t always been this bad or good. I’d arrived in London from a small press in Birmingham with a reputation for frugality, integrity and luck. Everyone loves a plucky indie. It made people at the conglomerates trying to poach our successful authors feel good about themselves to know we existed, that there was room for us. I was embraced at book parties. Have you met my mate Liam? People thought I was a nice guy. I cared about writers. Well, I always had a lot of compassion but outside of work it mostly overflowed in the wrong directions, to the people who least needed it. To the people who exhibited moral failings, by which I mean the people with the option to. The carnal people, the libertines, the charmers. The lookers, the liars, the reckless. The success went to my head. That’s the point of success. I was drawn to the promiscuous and the criminal, like my mentor and the other JC, and who knew London publishing would be such a fine place to find these two qualities? It was with my reputation in mind, and with Cockburn lying in an expensive private hospital – not his first trip to an expensive private medical facility paid for by the company – that they sent the ingénue out to look after Booker-winning Craig Bennett. We had never met but by coincidence we shared the same literary agent, Suzy Carling – I had written one bad novel no one wanted to publish but she had managed to place a story of mine in Granta, and this had blown a gale into my inflating ego. I must have seemed just the man for the job. My task was to talk books, flatter, reassure him that in spite of the rumours, we knew he and Cockburn were the best of friends. I was to order the drinks as slowly as possible and on no account allow him to take me with him to score drugs of any kind. His publicist Amanda Jones briefed me. He was due at a party at ten; all I had to do was get him there, and then she and Suzy and the rest of the cavalry would take over. If there were any problems I was to call. Belinda hoped we would hit it off in a purely professional way, that I would be an option to take over the editing of his books if, despite our assurances, Cockburn’s mysterious fall proved fatal to their working relationship. There was a lot riding on it: his last novel had sold nearly half a million copies.
I understood why they trusted me: I was polite, I was unpretentious (unpretentious for publishing, very pretentious for elsewhere) and I got on with people. They couldn’t have known about the damage I successfully concealed. When Craig Bennett is written about in the press, his name is usually prefaced by phrases such as ‘combustible’, ‘iconoclastic’, ‘self-destructive’, even ‘Bacchanalian’, which tells you more about journalists than about Bennett. (I once heard a literary editor describe James Cockburn as a real-life ‘Dionysius’, by which they meant he wore his shirt unbuttoned and took cocaine at parties.) Such tags were relative. Most novelists don’t make good copy for the news pages. If Bennett wanted to turn up on stage in the middle of a seventy-two-hour bender and abuse crowd members for their ‘intellectual cowardice’ then I was all for it. If he wanted to grip Julian Barnes in a tight bear-hug whenever he saw him in a green room and repeatedly lick his face until prised away, then what of it? (Bennett was ‘not welcome again’ at the Hay, Edinburgh and Cheltenham festivals.) He was a little old for such behaviour, but so are many people who behave this way. I am not in the first generation of men who refused to grow up. That evening I was expecting to meet someone completely normal. I wasn’t at all worried about Bennett’s reputation.
I arrived twenty minutes late at the glass-fronted French restaurant in Notting Hill. Or rather, I was on time, watching him through the window as he poured himself three consecutive glasses of wine. Sarah had finally answered her phone and was telling me it was over and to stop calling her so much. I pleaded with her to see sense and she objected to my definition of sense. Over the last twenty-four hours I had maintained a firm faith in the power of reason to defeat chaos. If I could just keep talking, if I could talk all day and all night, she would have to realise what I had done was not so bad, that it was not in fact me who had done it. I would have gone on for ever, listening to my voice grow more impassioned and articulate, wavering on the edge of real tears, if she had not begun to cry herself, something she hardly ever did, and in doing so remind me that she was something more than an obstacle to my will, an exercise in persuasion. She was Sarah and she was miserable. I would never have the right or the power to convince her otherwise.
I looked at my reflection in the restaurant window and listened to her cry. She was not a crier; I’d made her take on a role that wasn’t hers. We criers are the moral infants of the world, the sensualists. We like the way it feels; though we don’t admit it, we’re yearning to be miserable. We want a fix. Behind my reflection Craig Bennett was looking at me curiously. I waved at him and something in the friendly childishness of my gesture stabbed me: how far away I was from that pleasant boy I’d taken for granted and forgotten to stay in touch with. I wheeled around and after two minutes of desperate, abruptly terminated pleas to Sarah, I wiped my eyes on the sleeve of my shirt and entered the restaurant.
‘You look fucking awful,’ he said, after I introduced myself and sat down. Some people may have thought the same of him. You will have seen the photos: the rich craggy drinker’s face; its pink tributaries crawling through reddish stubble, sunken blue eyes, bleached of emotion by hot weather and late nights. A surly face. Well, that was the photos, or the photos the papers took, or the photos the papers used. He might have been trying to look surly but it didn’t convince me, and I was glad to take his comment as friendly. I have a lot of friends who, if they don’t have faces like his already, are working on getting them.
‘Yes, I do,’ I said, nodding.
‘And