‘I’ve never had a brother,’ I said to him. ‘I loved him like a friend. Or like a father.’
Perhaps I looked sad then because Lizzie reached over and put her hand on my shoulder. ‘What happened next?’ she asked.
Craig and I were in a cab, heading to Soho, up some stairs to be greeted by a golden-haired actor. He looked shocked then surrendered to an open-mouthed grin. ‘Craig – you came back! What a delight! What chutzpah!’
I hadn’t seen Bennett abashed before. He was staring past the actor at the two windows on the other side of the room.
He hadn’t explained where we were going in the taxi, just that he’d made a new friend who’d be able to sort us out before we went to the party where we were due. ‘Now we’ve started, we’ll need it or it will seem like a dreadful evening,’ he’d insisted, though he didn’t have too much insisting to do. ‘And he’s a good man: Fergus, an actor, a pleasant host.’
As Bennett fixated on the window I realised where we were. The cardboard crates full of empties confirmed it. We were all suddenly surprised at the situation. We probably needed more drugs. I had a sachet of mephedrone in my wallet, but it was a bit more engulfing and lasting than cocaine; not as socially acceptable. I bit my tongue and introduced myself to Fergus. ‘As you can see,’ he said, ‘the last party feels like it finished about three minutes ago.’ He pulled a mostly-full bottle of Prosecco from a cardboard box on the floor: ‘Sorry it’s not cold, fellas.’ He rinsed out three mugs – ‘God knows what became of all our glasses last night’ – and Bennett discreetly recovered himself and drew Fergus aside.
As they conferred, I wandered over to the window and looked down to the pavement below. I don’t know what I thought I might see: a cartoon James Cockburn-sized imprint, perhaps. On the other side of the road Eros Videos and Soho Video Club seemed wildly anachronistic, as if they were funded by the council as tourist attractions. A thin ledge ran under the window and around the side of the building. Fergus was speaking into the phone now and Bennett came over to stand with me at the window. We both peered down. ‘Is this where . . . ?’ I asked. He didn’t answer. ‘Fifteen minutes,’ said Fergus, putting the phone down.
Some people, some writers, like to lyrically describe the reveries they’ve experienced on drugs. It’s an even more boring and shameful habit than taking them. Cocaine was done and did what was expected of it. In the course of consumption we acquired two actresses and four missed calls from Bennett’s publicist, two from our mutual agent and one, worryingly, from my CEO. We had moved to an upstairs members’ club round the corner where the barmaid had greeted Bennett enthusiastically. I’d still made no contact with James Cockburn, suspecting, correctly, that I had been sent on a mission to betray him. It was midnight. We were two hours late to the party, but the party would go on late, and so I told myself that the situation wasn’t irretrievable. Bennett was perfectly happy where he was and didn’t share my CEO’s sense of the importance of meeting export buyers, foreign editors and the producers of TV book clubs. The actresses’ names were Lucy and Charlotte and they were the costume drama stars who had been at the party the night before. They were the kind of intelligent bohemian young women that a Cockburn would go to dangerous lengths to impress. My work credit card was behind the bar and we were drinking champagne. Bennett had stumped up the cash for an eighth of good coke and no one was being shy about taking it.
Eventually, I got all five of us into a taxi. We would arrive with an hour left of the party. I texted Amanda to say we were on our way. The response was immediate: that would be very fucking wise of you.
Leaving the taxi, we faced the usual gastro-enormo-bar in Kensal Green. In large part because of James Cockburn’s copy-friendliness and connections with film directors, conceptual artists and indie rock stars, our publisher’s yearly party was officially the place to be at the book fair. Part of the fun was guessing which rock and rollers would turn up to be drunk under the table by the real hedonists. A voluble chunk of the international publishing industry would be in there.
A bouncer checked my name off and waved us all through. Inside, the cavernous first-room was decked out in what passes for classiness in posh pubs: wine-dark walls interspersed with flock wallpaper, oak tables and Chesterfield sofas. It was heaving; I immediately lost Bennett and the actors as I pinballed between double- and triple-kisses. The crowd was perhaps seventy per cent female and around a third of the remaining men were gay: to a man of imagination this was publishing’s great perk and peril. I grabbed a drink and fought my way outside onto the teeming smoking terrace. Here I found myself next to Olivia Klein, a literary reviewer I would rather have avoided. I had been trapped in a disconcerting conversation with her at a Christmas party. She had said the rudest things to me about the books I published, all the time smiling winningly and moving me closer against the wall. She was young, in her mid-twenties, one of those eerily tall Oxbridge girls with skin so pale as to be translucent. She would have grown up in the country, miles from her friends, with only her horse, her mother’s neuroses and her father the doctor’s well-stocked library of Russian novels for company. As a result of which, she was far cleverer than me.
‘Now when are you going to publish something a bit more avant-garde?’ she was asking. ‘Where’s the new Calvino? Where’s the new Borges?’
‘I’m trying to publish books that large numbers of people will buy,’ I explained. ‘It’s my job.’
‘So you’re happy to be complicit in the dumbing down of our culture?’
‘Where is this new Borges, anyway? He wasn’t in Birmingham.’
‘You probably wouldn’t recognise them if you saw them,’ she said dismissively.
‘You don’t have any recommendations? Nothing you’ve read recently in the original Catalan?’
‘Don’t be facetious.’
I tried to change the subject. ‘I hear you’ve written a novel, Olivia.’
(I had chatted to some literary scouts that day. Literary scouts are book spies employed by foreign editors: they always know everything that everyone is reading.)
‘Who’s your agent again? I could ask them to send it to me.’
Her body tensed, so much that I prepared to jump out of the way. She breathed deeply. ‘Your broken-legged buddy has already anatomised what he perceives as its failures to my agent. Not enough tits, or something like that.’
‘Well, James does have quite an instinct for that kind of thing. Have you considered putting some more tits in?’
‘Oh, grow up. I’m looking forward to reviewing the next masterpiece you publish.’
She walked away then and I wondered if I might be able to damage her career before she did any damage to mine. I didn’t know that I had only a few hours left of my career and at the time I quite relished the fight. An enemy can be more fun than a friend, more enlivening, more intimate. I didn’t have as many as I would have liked. People liked me, or at least the people I liked liked me, or at least I thought they did. Then I thought of Sarah crying on the phone and realised things might be about to change.
‘Liam Wilson!’ My agent was walking towards me. Suzy Carling is only a few years older than me but seems at least two generations more advanced. She is striking in appearance and exhausting in conversation. She refuses to answer any questions or remarks that don’t interest her, regardless of how useful they are to me. Tonight she was glamorous in a sleek black dress and blue suede boots with frightening long heels. Behind her, I caught a glimpse of Bennett through a window, striding somewhere with Jay McInerney in tow. Suzy pulled a Gauloise out of her handbag and leaned over to me. I lit it for her and she straightened up.
‘How are you, Suzy?’
She blew smoke at me. ‘Yes. So, what is the news with James? I can’t get through to him. Have you spoken to him yet?’
‘No, I haven’t but I spoke to Belinda this