Читать книгу My Biggest Lie - Luke Brown - Страница 9

Chapter 2

I had never been on a flight like the one I took to Buenos Aires. There was a stop-over in Madrid for eight hours and I used it to leave the airport, go to a bar in the city, drink ten small but powerful beers and compose a frantic letter to Sarah that during the time I was writing it convinced me I could make everything all right again. I posted the letter, got on the wrong Metro line back to the airport and nearly missed the plane. When I made it just in time I was drunk, but I was not alone. For the duration of the twelve-hour flight it seemed that nearly every passenger remained standing with a beer in their hand, wandering between other groups of upright and talkative Argentines. It was like a giant pub in the sky. I can’t remember if we sat down even for take-off; it wouldn’t surprise me if we hadn’t, or if there had been barbecues sizzling in the aisles. The first half of the trip was a blur. I woke up, four hours in, sprawled across three seats, and immediately had to be sick. No one seemed surprised as I ran to the toilet with my hand over my mouth. Afterwards, I lay back down and hugged myself, crying freely but quietly, until an air hostess from the 1970s shook me and encouraged me into an upright position. We were about to land.

The taxi driver didn’t understand my painstakingly prepared phrase-book instructions. I was asking for the Avenida de Mayo, which I pronounced like –ayonnaise.

‘Que? Que?’

‘De Mayo!’

‘Que? Que?’

I pulled my piece of paper out and showed it to him. He read it and slapped me on the shoulder, spraying spit across the windscreen: ‘Avenida de Mazcho!’ And then he was off.

It was a bright sunny morning I did not belong in. The driver carried on a conversation with the radio as we sped through wide cracked roads lined with grand municipal buildings. It looked like Paris then Madrid then Milan; I couldn’t keep track but I felt like I had been here before. I began to cheer up but when I arrived at my hostel at 7 a.m. they had no idea who I was and explained to me, thankfully in English, that they were full up. That was that, then. I had done my best. I asked them to order me a taxi to the airport because I was going back to England. On hearing this, they rang around and found me a place at a sister hostel and so, another taxi ride later, I arrived at the Tango backpackers hostel in Palermo. I’m not sure how the driver knew it was the right one because I learned later that every hostel in Buenos Aires is called the Tango backpackers hostel. In the foyer was a small young man behind a reception desk. He looked up eagerly as I came through the door then looked disappointed, a look I thought was caused by my not being a woman. I felt sad for him too. Behind him was a wide bar, with fridges full of enormous bottles of lager labelled in the national blue and white. There was a music playing I had never heard before: chilled-out ambient beats and accordion solos. Electronic tango. At the time I found it quite beautiful, but I had been travelling for thirty hours and was delirious with strange emotions. I was to learn that no music but electronic tango played in the bar, for twenty-four hours, every single day of the week.

There was one private room left, a small white box just off the building’s roof terrace. It had a single bed, a clothes rail and a window almost completely obscured by an air-conditioning unit which didn’t work – a perfect monk’s cell for me to begin my penance.

I had half of my redundancy money left and had applied for an Arts Council writing grant. If that came through, I could live like this for months. I would redeem myself through hard work, honesty and self-control. Honestly.

For the first few days I kept myself to myself and didn’t explore far from the hostel. Without Sarah, I was in a state of shock, left to face head-on the reality of having lost my job and way of life. I suffered moments of vertiginous panic, but I can’t claim I spent all my time realising hard truths. It was confusing. The hard truths seemed to have nothing to do with my being here in this airy hostel lounge, sitting at a table listening to endless accordion over crisp backbeats and earnest conversations between Americans. Not that all the voices were American, nor even the loudest. There were Scandinavians, Israelis, Aussies, English, Europeans, all sorts. There were even some Latins, though they were mostly staff. Over those first few days I divided all the guests into two categories: the Kids and the Broken. Well, I had nothing in common with the Kids, with their tattoos and gym-muscles, their slender limbs and colourful clothes. They talked about mountains and beaches and marijuana. They were gap-year students, recently graduated and other idiots. I begrudged them their innocence, especially when they started to philosophise, which they did with a forthrightness that was difficult to ignore. But my greatest disdain was reserved for the inevitable moment when one of the Broken would take them seriously and offer his own opinion on the happy peasants of India. It was a point of faith for many of the Broken that there was nothing separating them from the Kids. The poor broken men (they were nearly all men). I refused to accept I was one of them in spite of the evidence. It helped that they were mostly slightly older than me, men in their mid to late thirties, fleeing lucrative careers in IT, accounting or management consultancy: lonely, dog-eyed men in checked shirts and baleful smiles looking all day for good news from Apple laptops, the very latest models, peering over the top for anyone to talk to. Looking at them, I realised that I had left a job and a life that I had loved. And so after two days of shock I could no longer bear to be around them.

I was staying in Palermo Viejo, an aggressively cool neigh-bourhood full of hipster boutiques, leafy streets and bar-lined squares where the late autumn sun dappled onto outside tables . . . all of that gloss. It would have been a wonderful place to be with Sarah. If she had been speaking to me. She had made me promise not to call her for the first two weeks and while there was still a chance she would forgive me I was determined to do whatever she told me. The nearest square to my hostel was Plaza Cortázar and I took this at first as a good omen, a perfect place to sit and read and write, to plant myself in the city’s literary soil and try to grow something. Unfortunately the right books I’d packed were completely the wrong books: translations of the Argentine masterworks I had naively assumed would help me feel at home on arrival. Borges’ gnomic, deeply un-reassuring stories made me want to weep every time I attempted them; there were times when I could not even get to the end of a story’s title. Cortázar’s supposedly read-in-any-order novel Hopscotch made me feel scared I did not know my way back to my bedroom, even when I was in my bedroom. I was too fragile and unplotted for either of them. I craved English realism to anchor me, but the books on the hostel’s shelves had been left by children and hippies and the only readable novel I could find was Bleak House by Charles Dickens, an enormous over-corrective to the Argentine canon and the worst book in the world to read while watching the sensuality of Buenos Aires streetlife pass by. Fog, soot, grotesque characters and a saintly narrator. I recognised none of this around me. The guidebook mentioned an English-language bookshop, but when I went to find it one day it had moved. Borges loves this about Buenos Aires, his imaginary city, the image of which he says is always anachronistic. I gleefully hated him and resigned myself to Bleak House.

Though I had yet to start my novel, I was nevertheless writing something: daily emails to Sarah. I should have taken more care with these. I can’t remember exactly what they said and I will never have the courage to look back at them in my sent items folder. But, hell, I know what they will have said, they will have said, don’t leave me, don’t leave me, don’t leave me, and though I will have tried to be clever and present a compelling case for why it would have been better for her and not just me if she’d stayed, she would have seen straight through my manipulations to the real message: that I was selfish, that I was needy, that I was work. Whatever I was, I wasn’t what I had suggested I was to begin with. And so it was that after a week I received a devastating response.

Before Sarah told me that it was over between us, for ever, completely, she told me how ‘tired’ she was of my ‘silly romantic language’ that didn’t ‘begin to redeem’ my ‘excuses and lies’. I was ‘addicted’ to trying to make people ‘feel the way you want them to feel’, ‘like a politician rather than a boyfriend’ who couldn’t understand ‘making someone happy is not pushing the right buttons in the right order’ but being ‘true and strong and open’. ‘I don’t know who you are.’ It was over. ‘I want you to have no hope.’

Amid the agony of accepting and refusing to accept what I had always known was going to happen, I suspect I quite liked the portrayal of me here, the compartmentalised, enigmatic multi-man. It is a sort of fun being a dick-head, that’s why there are so many of us. It wasn’t unique to me – did other people really reveal themselves truly to others? Were they better than me or did they just make a better job of pretending to be? I didn’t believe it was only me who was so hungry, so weak.

What mattered actually was that Sarah thought there were truthful people around and that she was one of them, even if she was in a minority. There were better people than me for her to risk spending her life with.

I was desperate to go home, to make a dramatic gesture; I had to talk to her face to face, convince her she could believe in me.

I quickly saw how much worse this would make things. It was my constant presence in daily emails that had driven her to such a quick conclusion. She wouldn’t want to see me; she would be disgusted at my additional cowardice, at my throwing away the chance to write the novel I had been talking about for so long. Perhaps if I gave her time to forget the vivid recent pain and remember the pleasure, my devotion . . . if I stayed here and learned something, wrote something to show her who I was. It was my only chance.

It was then that I decided to write the love letter, the love letter to end all love letters. I would take notes for months, write it all by hand – the pornography of the internet found its correlation in the email, instantaneous, generic, regretted. This time I would write slowly to Sarah, I would think and revise, I would find out how I felt about her and surprise us both with its truth.

This was my new faith.

But life was unbearable. I needed distraction, I needed a friend.

So I emailed Amy Casares. I had met Amy when I published her first novel, five years ago. She was half Argentine, half English, Argentine on her father’s side, and had spent her late twenties in Buenos Aires producing a film at the same time as Bennett lived there (this was at the end of her brief first career working as the gorgeous daughter in the Oil of Ulay TV adverts). I had mentioned her to Bennett on the night I met him to see if he knew her, and he told me he had fallen in love with her and never forgotten her. I was not surprised about that, for I had been in love with her myself since we published her. She was ten years older than me and painfully beautiful. I didn’t need to imagine her in her twenties or even thirties for I loved her as she was now, chastely, immaculately. The novel had done well, as these things go, but it had not made Amy a star, and Bennett had no idea it had been published until I told him.

It took some courage to email her. I knew that she would know some people out in Buenos Aires, but I did not know what she had been told about me, what she thought about Bennett’s death. I didn’t know whether she had gone to the funeral and, if she had, what stories people would have told her afterwards. Three days after I had sent the email, when I had had no reply from Amy, I decided she had made her decision about me. And so, despite my misgivings, I contacted Sarah’s friend Lizzie on Facebook, the friend who had provided the initial reason for the trip. Lizzie sent me her number and I gave her a call that evening. She had a light, springy voice when she answered the phone, an accent that reminded me of Sarah’s. ‘So how is Sarah?’ was almost the first thing she said. ‘She’s not here?’

‘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.