Theft E-Book

Luke Brown

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 423

Beschreibung

What I did to them was terrible, but you have to understand the context. This was London, 2016 . . . Bohemia is history. Paul has awoken to the fact that he will always be better known for reviewing haircuts than for his literary journalism. He is about to be kicked out of his cheap flat in east London and his sister has gone missing after an argument about what to do with the house where they grew up. Now that their mother is dead this is the last link they have to the declining town on the north-west coast where they grew up. Enter Emily Nardini, a cult author, who – after granting Paul a rare interview – receives him into her surprisingly grand home. Paul is immediately intrigued: by Emily and her fictions, by her vexingly famous and successful partner Andrew (too old for her by half), and later by Andrew's daughter Sophie, a journalist whose sexed-up vision of the revolution has gone viral. Increasingly obsessed, relationships under strain, Paul travels up and down, north and south, torn between the town he thought he had escaped and the city that threatens to chew him up. With heart, bite and humour, Luke Brown leads the reader beyond easy partisanship and into much trickier terrain. Straddling the fissures within a man and his country, riven by envy, wealth, ownership, entitlement, and loss, Theft is an exhilarating howl of a novel.

Leseprobe

PRAISE FOR My Biggest Lie by Luke Brown

‘A real page-turner. Deeply sensual.’

Gary Shteyngart

‘I grabbed this for its mad adventure but came away with a gift for the heart.’

DBC Pierre

‘Smart, zingy and extremely funny, this is a real treat.’

Paul Murray

‘Its warmth and tenderness are hard to resist.’

Catherine O’Flynn

‘Brown’s deliciously tricksy novel encourages its reader to pay attention to correspondences between art and life… It captures the sun-soaked sexiness of the city… and the hazy drug that is desire better than anything I have read in years.’

The Guardian

‘Rewarding and ambitious.’

Times Literary Supplement

‘An unashamedly literary novel that nonetheless wears its learning lightly and is totally unpretentious: a ludic, drunk, dizzying jaunt.’

Dazed & Confused

‘A scintillating, intelligent and uproariously funny trip into the excesses of storytelling.’

Big Issue

First published in the UK by And Other Stories Sheffield – London – New York www.andotherstories.org

Copyright © 2020 Luke Brown

All rights reserved. The right of Luke Brown to be identified as author of this work has been asserted.

ISBN 9781911508588 eBook ISBN 9781911508595

Editor: Stefan Tobler; Copy-editor: Gesche Ipsen; Proofreader: Sarah Terry; Typesetting and eBook: Tetragon, London; Cover Design: Luke Bird.

And Other Stories gratefully acknowledge that our work is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

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Contents

Part OneOneTwoThreeFourFiveSixSevenEightNineTenElevenPart TwoTwelveThirteenFourteenFifteenSixteenSeventeenEighteenNineteenTwentyTwenty-OneTwenty-TwoAcknowledgements

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For Jacquie, Naomi and Rachel

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‘I never cared one bit about the property. I cared about herself – and always shall do.’

Branwell Brontë to J. B. Leyland, 1846

‘… theft’

What Is Property?, 1840

‘Verily, what with tainting, plundering and spoiling, Tom has his revenge.’

Bleak House, 1853

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‌Part One

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‌One

What I did to them was terrible, but you have to understand the context. This was London, 2016. My friends and I had lived our adult lives in flats with living rooms made into bedrooms, kitchens into pop-up cocktail bars and gallery spaces; we worked in pubs and shops and schools and clung on to our other lives as artists and musicians and professional skateboarders. For too long I’d suspected that I would have been more successful if I’d spent less time talking to my friends, if I had been more discerning about who they were, if I had put to another use the ten thousand hours in which I had discussed the meaning of love with the lunatics who wouldn’t leave my sofa. How much more organised and efficient I thought my mind might be if it had not had so much company. I worried that I had sabotaged myself, ruined myself for both distinction and the humdrum, and I wished I had become another man, a better man, a man who I suppose would feel no sympathy for me, a superior bastard, a loathsome know-it-all, who would replace me, and get away with it, and no one would mourn me. There is little point thinking about what might have been. Character means character.

My name is Paul. I work three days a week in a bookshop and write for a magazine. I am here in my predicament, and it is not so bad. Amy disagrees with me about that. But then we disagree about nearly everything. Or we did until she disappeared.

*

‘Do you like the word property?’ I asked Amy.

My sister, two years younger than me, considers herself the senior.

‘Property?’ she said.

‘You say it a lot. I’ve seen this great property.’

‘What word should I use? What word would you like me to use?’

‘I don’t know, something less abstract: house, flat, maisonette, or we could change the subject, talk about, I don’t know, music, philosophy, art, love.’

‘Something less abstract?’

‘Property, property, property – do you know what I hear?’

‘What?’

‘Mine, mine, mine.’

‘Do you know what I hear when you talk about property?’

‘What?’

‘Whine, whine, whine.’

*

Recently Amy and I have come into some property together, this little terraced house, only three minutes’ walk from the sea. Open your mouth and breathe that air in, the freshest air in all of the country. Listen to the seagulls’ shrieks. Inside the house you’ll see it’s very tastefully decorated, with wooden flooring, painted walls, a modern kitchen with a door that leads out to the little garden that catches the sun in the morning. Yes, sun. Such glorious summers you could have here, by the waves. It could make an imaginative person a lovely holiday home. Is ‘imaginative’ the word? Self-reliant. You wouldn’t believe how cheaply things go up here. Mortgage payments would be nothing for someone used to the price of life in London. We’ll probably drop the price again soon. It’s slow at the moment. Not much movement. Open the door and the freshest air just fills your lungs. The streets, seen from above, ripple out in concentric circles around a man-made hill: a pebble dropped in a pool, a feat of ambitious town planning from Decimus Burton, the Victorian architect who also designed Hyde Park, Green Park, St James’s Park. People used to come on the train from miles around for their holidays. The line closed a long time ago, but even though we’re surrounded on three sides by the sea we’re hardly isolated. It’s only forty minutes by tram to the nearest train station, and that’s only three hours from London. New trams too, very comfortable. We’d live here ourselves if we could. If it were possible.

*

The magazine I write for is called White Jesus– who knows exactly why? The title is composed of words of equal length convenient for cover design, allows for occasional crucifixion photo shoots, appeals to the editor’s messiah complex and offends ‘civilians’, by whom the editor might mean ‘Christians’, who aren’t offended at all, who remain unaware of the magazine, not working in fashion or hairdressing, or living in Dalston.

I write two pages for the magazine, for little more than beer money. I pitched them to the editor, Stev’n – ‘rhymes with seven’, he insists – when he was going on dates with my sister and briefly listened to what I had to say. Amy, who has been missing ever since our last argument, is sometimes attracted to awful men. (Is there another kind? she says whenever I mention this.)

In one of my pages I write about books. In the other I write about haircuts. I am paid twice the amount to write the haircut page as the books page, though it takes me less than a tenth of the time. I set forth in Hackney and Peckham, approach strangers, and ask if I can snap a picture to feature in the London Review of Haircuts. Alongside their picture in the magazine and online I award their hairstyle between one and five pairs of scissors – a system I developed personally and which as far as I know is unique. Hair criticism is not a hard science – it is more akin to the interpretation of dreams. Using the imaginative empathy you might find in an analyst or old-fashioned literary realist, I type a witty summary of what the person attached to the haircut is like, a précis of their secrets and longings, in fifteen to twenty words.

Increasingly, I am under pressure from Stev’n to be cruel. I understand the appeal snark holds to our readers, to our souls. I do my best to resist it. Before I approach the haircut, I have usually decided how many pairs of scissors I am to award; if it’s four or above, I will reveal my rating then and there. I have to consciously fight my attraction to women with fringes, whom I usually award four and a half scissors out of five. Technically, of course, that is nine scissors, but this is not a pedantic era, not in the basement discos of Kingsland Road. I never award five pairs of scissors. Perfect hair is impossible, but the quest for perfect hair provides the page with a sense of telos, something the readers of White Jesus crave, even if they don’t know they do. Hi, my name’s Paul and I write for White Jesus magazine. I love your hair, it’s totally four and a half scissors out of five – would you mind if I put you in the next issue? Sometimes the people I approach giggle and think I am joking. They are known to sneer and ask me if that is my best chat-up line. But that doesn’t happen often. I choose the ones who look friendly.

*

The constant carnivalesque of the night buses, the queues for jerk chicken, the roped-off smoking sections. Contrary to popular stereotype, this is a friendly city we live in, often heartbreakingly so. Lack of friends is the least of our worries. There are lots of us out there, looking for each other, who think a new person is the most exciting thing. Not thing: don’t purposely misconstrue me. Sentient being. Equal. Superior.

‘I wish you could be a woman for a year,’ said Amy. ‘No, like a decade. Three decades. Then you’d see if you like to be constantly harassed and degraded.’

Amy is a serial dater in the American style that Tinder has made standard here too. She sees nothing strange about interviewing three different men a week, for a date to last forty-five minutes and consist of drinking a coffee. It is her experience, she says, that has confirmed her hypothesis that young men in London are the worst men in the world.

She gets no significant argument there from me. I know when I am beaten.

Nevertheless, I don’t think it is helpful for Amy to believe in the absolute awfulness of men in this city. ‘Don’t you think it’s dangerous for you to assume the monsters are all on the outside?’ I said once to her, only once.

She took her time thinking about which way I had annoyed her most. Neither of us likes the suggestion that we know each other better than ourselves; we worry it is true.

‘Is it somehow my fault these men have got wind of the imbalance in our ability to have children? My fault that they’re using my greater urgency as leverage to make suggestions about my pubic hair and its removal, or to bring up the subject of my ideal weight, or to refuse to make an arrangement for next Saturday, or to answer a text message? I’m talking about men, right, who place wooden shoe trees into their shoes when they take them off at night, men with separate combs and shampoos for their beards, men with Nespresso machines. For these men to want to take every day as it comes? For these men to talk about freedom?’

‘The thing is, Amy,’ I said, ‘I don’t like men much either.’

But this is even more unfair.

‘You,’ she said, ‘don’t need to.’

*

Every member of the older generation who owns property has the potential to purchase part of the younger who doesn’t. Perhaps it has always been this way. The young people dream of collaboration or revenge. Legal documents set out the niceties of the tension. Until recently I owned nothing, and my half-share of an inherited and what appears to be unsellable terrace in a half-alive northern town has not shaken my allegiance with the squatters in this city. These are the people who still talk to me, the ones who live in dilapidated hospitals and office blocks awaiting destruction. I have walked to their bedrooms through dark corridors in decaying horrorscapes like the scariest levels of Resident Evil. It’s true, perhaps, that except for my sweet nature I don’t have much to offer my younger friends. That one day they will decide I have been irresponsible with my opportunities, and judge me for this.

*

The last time I saw Amy before she disappeared was at Christmas, which we spent alone together at Mum’s house, ours now, on the Lancashire coast where we grew up, this town from where trawlers used to set out into the North Atlantic, until we were banned from fishing there by the European Economic Community after the Cod Wars in the 1970s. Hard to mourn the end of overfishing. But someone had to.

At the very end of 2015, my sister and I managed three days of peace together before the Argument, and the Argument didn’t feel so different from the arguments we had had before, maybe different in scale but not in kind, but then… how many more can we have until our desire to avoid them leads us to avoid each other completely? The situation was difficult for both of us. We wandered around, double-jumpered, being as stingy with the heating as Mum had always been, picking up ornaments and putting them back down, finding a quiddity in them that they had never had before. They were ours now. We looked out of the window at the spot where her car wasn’t parked.

One evening we started to discuss what we would do with her furniture if we ever managed to sell the house. Amy owns two flats of her own and is always looking for new places to buy, renovate and sell on. This gives her a certain brusqueness when such matters are discussed. I was reluctant to follow her instructions and begin to list things on eBay.

‘Don’t tell me I’m insensitive,’ she said. ‘I’m being practical. You’re being sentimental. And lazy. When did you even speak to Mum anyway?’

‘On Sundays.’

‘Sundays? I spoke to her all the time.’

‘Does that make you better than me, because you rang her up all the time to moan about your life?’

It was not long after this that she threw a wine glass. It wasn’t at me, just at the wall that was next to me. But even the little bit of the wine in the glass made quite a mess of that wall, and while I ran off to the pub Amy stayed to scrub the stains off, so that the value of the property wouldn’t be diminished. In the morning I heard the front door slam and found she had left for London without me.

*

Mum was never fond of driving, or of teaching, but she drove each day to a secondary school to teach modern languages to depressed children, many of whom would never leave the peninsula where they and their parents had been born.

When the panic attack hit her in the middle of a stretch of dual carriageway, she was two years away from retirement, but at that moment it must have seemed a long way away. Amy and I can only speculate. We both take it as certain that the fact that there was nowhere for her to pull over was a cause of the crash, as well as the reason it was fatal. She had had panic attacks on this same stretch of road before, and usually took a long detour to avoid it. Her head teacher had made her late that night, calling her in to discuss a complaint made by a parent, and she was hurrying to get to a church hall where she had set up a ballroom dancing class, her plan to earn a little bit of money doing something she liked.

Three couples turned up that night, and her dancing partner, Alan. They chatted to each other for a few minutes outside the locked hall, before they decided it was too cold to wait any longer. Alan drove to her house, and then her school, to see if he could find her. The main road out of town was blocked off by the police.

Mum is a cautious driver, she always wears her seat belt. She waits a long time to pull out at junctions. People beeped their horns behind her sometimes, and if I was beside her when they did I would fantasise about smashing their windows.

Because this is what I think happened.

With the steel barrier to her left and the long lorry to her right, the car coming too close from behind and forcing her too close to the car in front, she felt the pressure building and knew it would not subside. The strap seemed to be pulling tighter around her every second, choking off the deep breaths she tried to take. Pushed in on every side, she scrabbled for the button to wind down the window, but she couldn’t find it, and the car smelled of hot carpet, the crackle of kindling, bunched newspaper and firelighters, and then her hand alighted on her belt buckle, on the one restraint she could undo, unclipping it just before she blacked out and hit the car in front.

Wherever Amy has gone to, this is one of the few things that she and I can agree upon.

*

The party is about to end but it used to be such fun. We all loved each other. We were all interchangeable, in the best way. We woke up in each other’s arms and stumbled out to buy breakfast, past groups of people looking just like us, right down to the same sunglasses and unisex jeans. Someone would always know someone else intimately and we would all embrace each other, breathing in the sweet smell on our necks, something sharp and carnal.

Now I wonder if this city’s friendliness is the most dangerous thing about it. There is always someone to inspire new hope in you. There is always a saviour to find.

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‌Two

When I am not working in the bookshop or reporting on hairstyles I do the work I like the most. This is how I met Emily Nardini. It was quite a coup for me and White Jesus: Nardini had not consented to an interview in over ten years, or to a photograph in over twelve, and when I wrote to request my interview I had to insist on a photograph: most of our readers only look at the pictures. I had never seen Nardini in the flesh before, surprising really, as most of the writers who live in London pass through the shop at one point or other. I don’t think I would have missed her, despite there being only the one publicity photo in existence, taken when she was twenty-one and her first novel had just been published. It was the kind of photo that made publishers use the words ‘highly promotable’ in press releases. Dark Italian features bleached into high contrast by the rain and scour of a Scottish shipbuilding city. A formally beautiful face, with pale skin and bright eyes like a starlet in monochrome. Writers don’t look like that. They get enough attention for being averagely attractive, competently stylish; her looks are distracting. More distracting for a woman; men don’t suffer the same if we are put up on posters. The photo of her shows someone who senses exactly what the camera is taking from her. She looks straight at it, resentful, about to become furious. She is sick of being looked at like this, sick of what we are trying to claim from her. Her seriousness. Her language. So she scowls and becomes someone whom sensitive men want to patronise and cheer up. Someone whom gallants want to rescue.

When she agreed to the interview and photo request it was clear to me there had been a terrible mistake. While White Jesus does feature cultural articles, they are often next to photos of girls in their underwear, often just one piece of their underwear. I was concerned about her meeting with our house photographer, due round after my interview, who considered himself to be a boundary-pushing conceptual artist. I hoped he would remember it was a book interview and not try to persuade her to take her clothes off, or pose provocatively on a merry-go-round, or underneath a live swan, or wearing a unicorn horn, or with ice cream on her face, holding an antique pistol, or a serrated blade to a child’s throat, or doing a handstand in a loose dress, on rollerblades, or smoking a Cuban cigar in a wheelbarrow, in a short plaid skirt, wrapped in a butcher’s apron covered in gore, or attached to a radiator with cable ties, or joke-shop nails, or actual nails, or any other of his signature moves, but I didn’t put it past him. I wished I could hang around to keep an eye on him but I had to work in the shop that afternoon.

*

I had not prepared well for the interview with Emily Nardini. On the night before, the magazine had held their January awards ceremony in a warehouse in Bethnal Green. The magazine likes to position itself in strict opposition to the penitent mood of January, the temporary veganism and abstinence. It is catered by the owner’s mate who runs a series of Satanic burger joints done out in apocalyptic Gilbert & George-style stained glass. There are mounds of ‘murdered yogi’ burgers, pitchers of rum cocktails, envelopes full of chisel and big thick Es the size of Scrabble tiles being passed around. Such things once had appeal, but these days I would rather have skipped it – except it was politic to make an appearance. Jonathan, the advertising director, is a man I met in the previous millennium at what was then called the London College of Printing. I would only cautiously describe Jonathan as a friend, for reasons you will come to understand, and last week he had casually mentioned to me that Stev’n was talking about cutting my books page, in favour of a legal highs column. I had not been reassured by Jonathan’s reassurance that if this did happen I would be the first choice to write the legal highs column, that Stev’n had a great respect for my ability to enjoy narcotics, and I would probably be paid more money for it. At the party I intended to catch Stev’n when he was flying on a cocktail of empathogens and subtly implant within him an association between my books page and euphoria. But in the end I spent most of the night talking to a woman a few years older than me, the managing director of a clothing company who advertised with us, about who our favourite character in Middlemarch was – Dorothea, obviously, not the feckless millennial she ends up with – in between accepting bumps of cocaine from the corner of her credit card and downing martinis from the free bar. You wouldn’t know from looking at me, but I’ve got a real thing about the nineteenth-century novel. I know my freedoms dwarf those of its heroines, but that doesn’t stop me identifying with women anxious to see if their saviour will arrive.

The managing director and I were surprised to be having a conversation about Victorian novels in a crowd of 25-year-olds dancing to grime, spilling cocktails and taking dabs of MDMA; and I wondered if she might be interested in me, if she had space in her flat, if she wanted a child, if we could come to a civilised arrangement we could reasonably name ‘love’.

I woke up fully clothed, with oily hands. The more vivid details of my journey home struggled to arrange themselves into sequence: falling off my bike repeatedly, making emergency repairs, giving all my money to a homeless man after a bin jumped out at me and I rode up a lamp post. I was due at Emily Nardini’s in forty-five minutes. I did not have time to remove the oil from my hands, have a shower or charge my phone – just to pull up the address on my laptop and draw a map on my arm of how to get to her house from the Tube stop. I grabbed my voice recorder, splashed some water on my face and ran out of the house, forgetting to take with me the list of questions I had prepared to ask her.

*

I had been giddy and happy on the Overground; one or two of the many martinis I had poured into myself must have remained active. When I changed to the Tube, however, and started to think about the photographer, I began to feel hot and panicky. I could not work out whether the way the light was flickering in the carriage was a malfunction inside or outside me. I am not a man who drinks in the mornings, but it was clear to me that in this case not drinking was more irresponsible. The only pubs open at this time are Wetherspoons and I didn’t like my chances of finding one in Holland Park, so when I rose into daylight I quickly nipped into an off-licence.

Holland Park: that address had thrown me. The protagonists of her novels are always impoverished runaways, cleaners, waitresses, hotel staff, hairdressers, writers or even less employable artists, all roughly the same age as Nardini, living in a room of their own, bed, upright chair, no room for books or bag.

The street I was led to by the map on my arm was a quiet, tree-lined curve of tall white buildings. Outside her door I opened a can of Coke, took a swig and replaced it with an inch of whisky from the little bottle I had just bought. Then I rang the door and waited.

*

I was surprised by how friendly she looked, how cheerfully she held out her hand. More than the intervening years, it was the unexpected range of expression that made her look so different from her photograph. Her beauty was still there, but it was warmer and less intimidating when she smiled. She was only very pretty, terrestrial, made up with eyeliner and mascara.

I held out my hand and she withdrew hers.

‘Oh, shit, yes,’ I said.

‘Have you been fixing cars?’ she asked.

‘Tinkering with my ute,’ I said, in an Australian accent. I make bad jokes when I’m nervous. She didn’t smile so I reverted to British English. ‘A bike, actually.’ I looked at my hands. ‘It’s very hard to get off.’

‘The bike?’ she asked.

‘It was very hard to stay on the bike last night.’

‘You are the journalist, aren’t you?’

‘Um. I am here to do the interview.’

She weighed me up for a few seconds. ‘Aha,’ she said. ‘Well, we’re up here.’ Her Glaswegian accent was carefully enunciated, like a regional Radio 4 presenter’s; I imagined her planing the edges off it, like I had done with mine, sliver by sliver, to wedge between where we had been and where we now wanted admittance. In a dark blue skirt or dress, a grey jumper and black winter tights, Emily was wearing no shoes, and on the balls of her feet she led me to a set of stairs.

‘We’re right at the top,’ she said, turning back to scrutinise me again. Then she headed up and I followed her.

*

On the way up the stairs I tripped on a step and had to grab her arm so I didn’t fall over.

‘I’m really sorry,’ I said, righting myself.

‘It’s OK,’ she said, but she justifiably sounded wary. ‘Perhaps you need a cup of tea to go with your Coca-Cola?’

‘I just tripped. Yes, a cup of tea would be nice.’

I followed her through the door, which opened into a wide hallway of polished wood with long corridors at right angles to each other. On one side of each corridor fitted mahogany bookshelves stretched to the end.

‘There’s a camera attached to the front door,’ she said. ‘What was that I saw you pouring into your Coke? Rum?’

‘Oh, shit.’ I put the can down on the side. ‘Whisky, actually.’

‘Are you an alcoholic?’ She asked this in the tone she might have used to ask if I came from London. I followed her down the length of a corridor and into a kitchen, shiny, clean, light: a piece with the flat.

‘No. That was an emergency drink.’

‘That sounds like the sort of thing an alcoholic would say.’

‘A minor alcoholic, though. A major alcoholic would accuse you of being a witch and burst into tears before he asked you to pray with him.’

She pressed her lips together to suppress what could have been amusement or irritation. ‘Are you drunk now?’

‘Not at all. Sorry – I just had to defer a hangover for a couple more hours.’

‘Did you consider not getting drunk last night?’ she asked calmly, filling the kettle. ‘Considering this engagement of ours?’

‘It was our awards party, I had to go. They’re planning to cut my books page, you see. I’d planned to buttonhole the editor and convince him of the value of it before he replaces it with… I don’t know… a page of weird genitals that look like vegetables, or weird vegetables that look like genitals, I don’t know, I can’t think like he does.’

I was speaking too quickly. I was pacing back and forth in the kitchen, forcing myself not to pick up the can of Coke.

She watched me walk from one side of the room to the other. ‘So, if I understand correctly, you’re saying your getting smashed last night was… in service of literary journalism?’

‘Exactly. I’m very sorry not to turn up completely sober.’

She took two mugs from a cupboard. ‘I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt. There have been times too when I haven’t turned up completely sober.’

‘You’re welcome to some whisky, if you’d like.’

‘No thanks. Not a whisky girl. Any Italian genes overrode the Scottish ones there. And I’m not an anything girl at the moment.’

‘I’m sorry if I seem glib about the booze,’ I said. ‘I suppose I charged in here like a bull in a china shop.’

‘You charged in here sheepishly. And then you fell over.’

I laughed, and then she smiled with a little less froideur than before, and for the first time I felt like the interview might be something other than a disaster.

‘How come you’ve invited me over, anyway?’ I asked. ‘I thought you avoided this stuff.’

*

Desperate times. She’d been too aloof, needed to be more realistic. Said her agent. Said her editor. Said her new agent. Said her new editor. She had to show willing this time. Even though no one cared about novels any more, especially her novels.

I disagreed. She shrugged. The kettle clicked off and she turned to make two mugs of tea. I stepped out of the kitchen back into the hallway.

‘Mind if I look at your books?’

‘They’re mostly my boyfriend’s, but yes, feel free. It’s mostly art books on this side. All the fiction is round the corner. There’s a little room I use to write in which holds the few books that have stuck to me.’

I walked out into the corridor. The art books had been arranged alphabetically, and I noticed the classical taste of the contemporary choices. I looked for Emin, Lucas, the Chapmans – no. Round the corner the fiction began. Whoever she lived with was a big reader with excellent taste. I carried on down the corridor, attracted by the light I could see from the room at the end. It was a long room with two enormous sets of windows that filled it with light and showed the top branches of the tree outside. The walls were covered in paintings, there was a dining table at one side of it, and a living-room area formed by two dark red sofas in an L-shape. Hardbacks were piled in a stack in one corner of the room with spines I recognised as recent arrivals to the shop. There was a photo of a middle-aged woman on the mantelpiece, the sort of woman who belonged in this room. Six of our living room could have fitted inside this one, and I wondered how much the flat had cost when it was bought. I wondered how much it cost now. I observed myself wondering and hated myself for being so dull. A pair of black Chelsea boots faced the corner like a dunce.

‘Sugar?’ shouted Emily from the kitchen.

I walked back and said no thanks. I watched her remove a teabag from one mug and dunk it in the other. ‘Your boyfriend’s a big reader too.’

‘Oh, yeah. A lot of the books are actually his ex’s. She was in the business until – well, that’s his business. I’ve always been too peripatetic until recently to keep hold of my books. I end up buying the same favourites four or five times.’ She handed me a tea. ‘Probably easiest to do this in my room. The living room’s too distracting. You just want to appreciate it. I don’t allow myself in there when I have work to do.’

She led me back down the corridor and opened a door. The first thing I saw was a double bed and I thought hopefully that perhaps I had misheard her about the boyfriend, and she was only a lodger.

‘It was the guest bedroom before I took it over,’ she explained. ‘Supposed to be for his daughter but she never stays over, not now I’m here.’

She turned sharply away from me as she said that, and I didn’t ask any further.

It was a big enough room for the bed, a wardrobe, a neat desk in one corner and a sofa facing it. A white Ikea Billy bookcase like the three I had crammed into my room was out of keeping with the display furniture of the corridors, and stuffed full of paperbacks, unalphabetised. Two piles of books were stacked next to it, Jenga towers a couple of moves away from collapsing. There was a plastic crate of CDs on the floor next to an integrated stereo of nineties vintage, the type of thing you bought in Argos, and which proudly advertised its Megabass. The contrast between the room and the style of the rest of the flat made it seem like an installation: a young person’s room in a shared house, inside the grand surroundings of a public gallery. Outside the window were neat strips of neighbours’ gardens, a small and ancient-looking church, a little plot of gravestones. She turned the desk chair around to the sofa and gestured to it.

‘Thanks for agreeing to do the interview,’ I said, sitting down. ‘You may have been surprised to find out we even had a books page.’

‘I’m not sure I’ve seen the magazine.’

‘Well, there’s no reason why you should have. Perhaps you’d have browsed through a copy waiting in a hairdresser’s. There are approximately seventy pages of adverts before you reach the contents page.’

Emily flopped back onto the sofa as if the news had exhausted her. ‘My publicist was keen to emphasise the quality of the books coverage. That did make me suspicious.’

‘That’s nice of her. She might have been stressing the contrast. There’s a toxic level of irony in much of the content. Though I don’t know if that’s the word, actually. I don’t know if the photos of the models on the toilet are ironic. Or the high-school-massacre fashion shoots. I think they’re just corrupt.’

‘Why do you write for such awful-sounding people?’

‘I haven’t had much success offering myself elsewhere.’

‘I begin to worry where I fit in here.’

‘You’re my choice. I’m the magazine’s gravitas. Stop raising your eyebrows.’

‘I was looking at your wrist. Is that a map?’

‘It is, yes.’ I pulled my sleeve up further and showed her how to get to her house from the Tube stop. ‘If we end up becoming mates, I could have it done as a tattoo as a souvenir of today.’

‘That would be original. You probably have a “bad tatts” section in the magazine.’

‘Let’s not talk about that. It’s three times the length of my book section.’

I put the recorder on the table.

‘So, shall we begin? Emily, tell me about your body art.’

*

We spoke for about an hour and a half. Her careful vowels serrated at the edges when she became disdainful. There was no getting away from it: she was bitter about the world’s indifference to her and the trouble it took to write a book. She knew no one asked her to; she knew she was angry and had no right to be: ‘How do we redeem this interview from me moaning on about how crap the world is?’

So I asked her the question I was most interested in, the one I knew to be the most vulgar. ‘How much of what has happened to your characters is based on what has happened to you?’

‘Perhaps you could be specific,’ she said quietly.

*

Emily, are you on the edge? Emily, are your parents dead too? Emily, do you believe love is impossible? Do you believe love is the only hope? Were you married once, for only two weeks? What is it like to live for so long in poverty? What is it about Paris, why do you keep running there? Couldn’t you ever have decided to be happier? Is that what you have done now? Or have you always been happy? Have you tricked us? Why did you never mention this flat? Who is this man you live with? Are you writing about him now? Have you chosen comfort over love? Do you think I am an idiot? Am I like the rest of the men in your novels? Are we all so transparently hungry? Are we all so gauche? So vain and inconsequential? Are we the problem? Are we your problem? Are you laughing at me? Could you ever love someone like me? What has he got that I haven’t? Is it money? Or something else?

*

The London Review of Haircuts

An outgrown fringe, half-tied behind, is slipping back across her face. She pushes it back, like the childish thoughts of smoky rooms and loud music we hope lie behind those dark eyes, the same brown as her hair. She doesn’t look the way she does entirely by accident, and she would like to test the power and reach of those looks again while they still belong to a young woman.

*

She was laughing by the time she saw me to the door. ‘You didn’t drink your Coke,’ she said, handing it back to me. ‘It’s full to the top.’

‘This should be some kind of epiphany for me. A spur to throw down my crutches and walk unaided.’

I took a swig.

‘Stagger unaided,’ she said.

‘Remember what I said: if the photographer suggests anything unusual, remind him this is for a book interview, lock yourself in the bathroom and ring me on my mobile.’

‘I’ll handle him. Don’t worry.’

I leaned over and kissed her on both cheeks. ‘Thanks again. I hope I see you around. If you were serious before about inviting me round for dinner sometime, I’d love to come.’

She looked at me curiously, as if I had nearly tricked her into something unpleasant. She frowned. ‘Andrew is always encouraging me to invite friends round. I suppose he might like you once he’d got over his disappointment that I’d invited a man and not a woman.’

‘I could bring a woman, if you liked.’

‘You bragger. No, thanks.’

‘Just a bottle of wine, then.’

‘And a half-bottle of whisky for the doorstep.’

‘I’d turn up sober, I promise.’

‘Best not promise. You never know when literature will need you again. Goodbye, Paul.’

‘Bye, Emily.’

She shut the door. I stood there for a few seconds and listened for her footsteps on the other side. After about ten seconds I heard her going back up the stairs and I turned away too.

‌

‌Three

The bookshop where I work is in Bloomsbury, surrounded by universities and libraries and the British Museum. My colleagues here come from a separate planet from my colleagues at White Jesus, being, in the main, graceful, thoughtful people, well read in political philosophy, current affairs, poetry and literary fiction.

‘Have you heard about Leo?’ asked Helen, as soon as I walked through the door. Helen is the shop’s manager, a woman my age from Hull. ‘A hundred K,’ she said, which is not the kind of thing she usually said, and I wished I were not aware of the context, that my least favourite colleague Leo had been talking to publishers about the novel he had written.

‘K?’ I said.

‘A hundred thousand pounds.’

‘That’s a lot of M,’ I said.

‘I know.’

‘Is he going to resign?’

‘I didn’t think of that. Would you resign?’

‘No. Or I’d spend half of it in six months and half of it on subsequent rehab.’

‘Thank God for you, Paul. I can rely on you not to go anywhere.’

‘Particularly if you give me a pay rise.’

‘Ah, Paul.’

‘Have you spoken to him?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Is he unbearable?’

‘A little bit.’

‘You’re less bitter than me. That means he’s totally unbearable.’

‘I’ll leave you to judge it. How was Emily Nardini?’

I breathed out. ‘If you say something stupid to her—’

‘Which you did.’

‘Which I did – she looks just like her photo. But on perhaps as many as two separate occasions I actually made her laugh. Then she looks different.’

‘You haven’t fallen for her, have you? You look like you have.’

‘I fall in love with everyone I meet. For a little bit.’

‘You’re like George Eliot. She used to fall in love with everyone she met.’

‘I’m glad someone’s finally noticed. That’s why I hit it off so well with Emily Nardini.’

Helen bent to look something up on the computer. ‘That must be why. Where did this meeting take place?’

‘Her flat, in Holland Park. It’s huge. She lives with what appears to be a rich man. I thought I’d be meeting her in a rented room somewhere but she has the run of the place.’

‘You know who she lives with, don’t you?’

‘No. Who?’

‘Andrew Lancaster.’

Andrew Lancaster. I recognised the name, but it was one of those sturdy names anyone could have. There were probably three famous Andrew Lancasters.

‘The popular historian. Left-wing, at least to start with. Professor at UCL. Pally for a while with the Blair government. Increasingly right-wing, say his enemies. No fan of the Tories.’

‘Oh, yeah. Of course, I’ve sold hundreds of his books without giving him any thought. He sounds…’

‘Clever? Accomplished?’

‘I was going to use the word “distinguished”.’

‘Distinguished, yes.’

‘And to be called “distinguished”, you have to be how old?’

‘In general or particular?’

‘Of course, in general.’

‘I think he’s in his late fifties.’

*

My own accommodation was a little different from Emily’s. I lived with a young woman who was not my girlfriend on the Kingsland Road in Dalston, in a place my friends and I named ‘the château’ when we moved in eleven years ago. It’s a two-bedroom flat that during our tenancy has regularly been a three-bedroom and six-person flat. We didn’t need to have so many people living here to afford the place but it always felt selfish to have a living room and kitchen when a friend needed somewhere cheap to live. The happiest times I remember here were those times when we spoke always about how much we hated living here, when I lived with my friends Stuart and Lenny and our girlfriends, Monica, Kate and Anya, queuing in the winter mornings for a shower, the ceiling paint flaking down like snow, or when we crammed into the kitchen to try to make dinner, to find space in the fridge, to locate the milk, Hoover or ironing board, our keys, our hash, a stash of cocaine lost three years ago during a party which we still remained optimistic would one day show up, and one day did, in a secret compartment not one of us remembered hacking out of The Line of Beauty with a razor blade. Monica was the first to leave, when she took what was going to be a two-year job in Melbourne. Stuart and Kate left a year ago to buy a house in Margate; and for a while Lenny and I had rooms to ourselves and the rare luxury of a living room (Anya was staying mostly at her parents’ by then). We had lived together for nearly ten years, earning what money we needed in ways we found convenient; Lenny made it that long as a musician and professional skateboarder before he was eventually defeated by the idea of a ‘career’ when the fear of not having one became magnified out of all proportion by marijuana-smoking. He is back in Coventry at his parents’ now, working as a teaching assistant. When I speak to him on the phone he is happier than he was during those last years in London, those anticlimactic months when we had what we had always thought we wanted: a TV and a sofa in a room designed for TV-watching. It was not enough. ‘For years I was convinced something awful was going to happen to me,’ he said. ‘Well, it’s happened now. It’s much better now I know what it is.’ I hadn’t wanted to replace Lenny in a hurry; it was not urgent on such low rent, and it might have seemed indecent, like marrying again weeks after being widowed; but then I met Mary.

The château is located on the two floors above a branch of inexpensive British patisseries, and though the rent is cheap beyond all proportion for London, there are reasons why it would be offered cheap in a saner world. Waking up in the top bedrooms, the smell of the steak bakes that drifts up through the floorboards is not so pungent, but Stuart and particularly Kate (a vegan), who had what is now the living room downstairs, never quite got used to their closer proximity to the ovens in the shop. It is a mixed blessing to be upstairs: our central heating system is erratic, and our roof porous. In the middle of one memorable dream I woke up choking on dust, looking up at Monica’s face as it slowly revealed itself to be the moon seen through a new hole in the roof. I have lived here for over a decade now, moving rooms only once after Monica left me and I switched to the room next door where she wouldn’t be quite as absent. While the rest of the area’s real-estate value has risen to the extent that it may even rival Emily’s W11, I have never had to pay more than the £100 a month I first agreed to in the year after I finished my undergraduate degree. Paying, by this mixture of good fortune and tenaciousness, what might be the cheapest rent in London, I do as little as possible to remind our landlord that we exist – the place has not been decorated or refurbished for at least a decade, and I suspect four. The last time we called him was when the hole appeared in my bedroom’s ceiling; mostly, I carry out my own repairs, unskilfully, using a collection of cheap tools and screws we keep in a child’s Superman lunch box. Another peculiarity of our château – it has no address. It does not exist, and nor do we – we receive no polling cards, we pay no council tax. Our gas and electricity operate with tokens, and Harpreet, one of the chefs pâtissiers downstairs, has been kind enough to let us share their wi-fi. Arriving chez nous, vous allez down the alley and into the backyard before climbing a rickety fire escape into the kitchen, I feel constantly on the verge of being found out. We have our post sent to our places of work, those of us who have places of work, and at the moment that happens to be all of us, including the temporary guest downstairs who I am hoping will sort things out soon with his wife.

*

He was in when I got back, lying on the sofa under a single Postman Pat duvet cover that had belonged to a previous resident. There were childhood remnants in all of our flats which someone had been too sentimental to throw away. Jonathan’s boots were peeping out, and he was watching EastEnders. ‘How do you make Netflix come on?’ he asked.

‘Our TV isn’t well educated enough,’ I told him.

He turned it off. ‘Fuck it, then. Normal TV is bollocks now.’

‘Any news on Julia?’

‘Oh, don’t mention her. I’ve had a bad enough day.’

I have known Jonathan since we met on our magazine journalism degree at the London College of Printing, which wasn’t such a comic idea in the last year of the last millennium, before they changed its name to sound less archaic. Jonathan has always been an entrepreneurial spirit. He sold Spanish cigarettes and Dutch ecstasy on campus, and by our final year he was wearing Paul Smith suits to seminars and the pub. He had started working for White Jesus in the summer of our second year, which was where he met his wife Julia, two years his senior and the only daughter of a surgeon and a psychiatrist. It was at this time he began to insist on being called Jonathan rather than Jonny. She had thrown him out a month ago and he had been living in our living room since. I still hadn’t got to the bottom of what he had done that was bad enough to be thrown out by Julia. They’d always been proud of being sexually adventurous; so I didn’t think it was infidelity, unless there was some line of etiquette he’d overstepped. According to him, they were just ‘working some stuff through’.

He turned up one night with a bottle of Jameson’s and a bag of ice. I was touched at the time that he’d chosen me to come to, though I wonder if he had anyone else, or if I was just the softest touch he knew. We barely saw each other outside of work functions these days: Jonathan, the advertising director, is also de facto publisher of White Jesus