My gammon lunch repeats on me. “Nick’s novel,” Suze Brittan tells me, “is set in the Afghanistani war. Richard Cheeseman raved about it, and he’s interviewing Nick on my program next week.”
“Oh? I’ll be glued to the set. I heard about it, actually. What’s it called? Highway 66?”
“Route 605.” Nick Greek’s fingertips dance on the screen. “Named after the highway in Helmand Province.”
“Were your sources any more firsthand than Stephen Crane’s?” Obviously not: The closest this pallid boy ever came to armed combat was group feedback on his creative writing MA. “Unless, of course, you were a literate marine in an ex-life?”
“No, but that’s a fair description of my brother. Route 605 wouldn’t exist without Kyle.”
A small crowd, I notice, is now watching us, like tennis spectators. “I hope you don’t feel overly indebted to your brother, or that he doesn’t feel you’ve exploited his hard-won experiences.”
“Kyle died two years ago.” Nick Greek stays calm. “On Route 605, defusing a mine. My novel’s his memorial, of sorts.”
Oh, great. Why didn’t Publicity Girl warn me that Nick Greek’s a sodding saint? Lady Suze is looking like a Corgi just shat me out, while Lord Roger gives Nick Greek a fatherly squeeze on the biceps: “Nick, son, I don’t know yer, and Afghanistan’s a total bloody cock-up. But your brother’d be proud of yer — and I know what I’m on about, ’cause I lost my brother when I was ten. Drowned at sea. Suze was saying — weren’t you Suze? — that Route 605 is my sort of book. So yer know what? I’ll read it over the weekend”—he clicks his fingers at an aide, who taps a smartphone—“and when Roger Brittan gives his word, he bloody well keeps it.” Bodies come between me and the haloed ones — it’s as if I’m being towed away on casters. The last familiar face is that of Editor Oliver, cheered by the future angle of Route 605’s sales graph. I need a drink.
HERSHEY IS not going to vomit. Did Hershey not pass this broken gate earlier? A hunchback tree, a brook that won’t shut up, the puddle reflecting the BritFone holo-logo, the acid reek of cowshit. Hershey is not drunk. Just well oiled. Why am I here? “So far up his own arse he can see daylight.” Gulp it down. The pavilion was a bottomless pit. The mascarpone trifle was ill-advised. “That wasn’t Crispin Hershey, was it?” My shortcut across the car park back to my comfy room at the Coach and Horses has trapped me in a Möbius loop of Land Rovers, Touaregs, and slurping hoofed-up mud. I thought I saw Archbishop Desmond Tutu and I followed him to ask about something that seemed important at the time but it turned out not to be him anyway. So why am I here, dear reader? Because I need to keep my author profile high. Because the £500,000 advance that Hyena Hal extracted for Echo Must Die is gone — half to the Inland Revenue, a quarter to the mortgage, a quarter to negative equity. Because if I’m not a writer, what am I? “Anything new in the pipeline, Mr. Hershey? My wife and I adored Desiccated Embryos.” Because of Nick sodding Greek and the Young Ones, eyeing my place in the throne room of English Literature. Oh, rum, sodomy, and the lash: Mount Vomit is ready to erupt; let us now kneel before the Lord of the Gastric Spasm and all pay homage …
March 11, 2016
PLAZA DE LA ADUANA IS THROBBING with Cartagenans holding their iPhones aloft. Plaza de la Aduana is roofed by a tropical twilight of Fanta Orange and oily amethyst. Plaza de la Aduana is oscillating to the cod-ska chorus of “Exocets for Breakfast” by Damon MacNish and the Sinking Ship. Up on his balcony, Crispin Hershey taps ash into his champagne glass and remembers a sexual encounter to the music of She Blew Out the Candle—the Sinking Ship’s debut album — around the time of his twenty-first birthday, when the images of Morrissey, Che Guevara, and Damon MacNish surveyed a million student bedrooms. The second album was less well received — bagpipes and electric guitars usually end in tears — and the follow-up’s follow-up bombed. MacNish would have returned to his career in pizza delivery had he not resurrected himself as a celebrity campaigner for AIDS, for Sarajevo, for the Nepalese minority in the Kingdom of Bhutan, for any cause at all, as far as I could see. World leaders eagerly submitted themselves to two minutes of MacNish while the cameras rolled. Winner of Sexiest Scot of the Year for three years running, tabloid interest in his regularly rotating girlfriends, a steady trickle of okay but mojoless albums, an ethical clothing brand, and two BBC seasons of Damon MacNish’s Five Continents kept the Glaswegian’s star well lit until the last decade, and even today “Saint Nish” remains in demand at festivals, where he delivers a polished Q&A by day and a tour through his old hits by night — for a mere $25,000 plus business-class travel and five-star accommodation, I understand.
I slap a mosquito against my cheek. The little bastards are the price for this delicious warmth. Zoë and the girls were due to join me here — I’d even bought the (nonrefundable) tickets — but then the shitstorm blew up about Zoë’s earth-mother marriage counselor. £250+VAT for an hour of platitudes about mutual respect? “No,” I told Zoë, “and, as we all know, no means no.”
Zoë opened fire with every weapon known to woman.
Yes, the porcelain mermaid was launched from my hand. But had it been aimed at her, it would not have missed. Therefore I didn’t mean to hurt her. Zoë, by now too hysterical to follow this simple logic, packed her Louis Vuitton bags and left with Lori the hairy au pair to pick up Anaïs and Juno from school, thence to her old friend’s pad in Putney. Which was mysteriously available at zero notice. Crispin was supposed to proffer promises to mend his ways, but he preferred to watch No Country for Old Men with the volume up really loud. The following day, I wrote a story about a gang of feral youths who roam the near future, siphoning oil tanks of lardy earth mothers. It’s one of my best. Zoë phoned that evening and told me she “needed space — perhaps a fortnight”; the subtext being, dear reader, If you apologize grovelingly enough, I may come back. I suggested that she take a month and hung up. Lori brought Juno and Anaïs to visit last Sunday. I was expecting tears and emotional blackmail, but Juno told me her mother had described me as impossible to live with, and Anaïs asked if she could have a pony if we got divorced, because when Germaine Bigham’s parents got divorced she got a pony. It rained all day, so I ordered in pizza. We played Mario Carts. John Cheever has a short story called “The Season of Divorce.” It’s one of his best.
“STILL PUTS ON a decent show, don’t he, f’ra fella his age?” Kenny Bloke offers me a smoke as Damon MacNish windmills through “Corduroy Skirts Are a Crime Against Humanity.” “I saw the lads in Fremantle, back in … eighty-six? Fackin’ A.” Kenny Bloke’s in his late fifties, sports ironmongery in his ear, and is a Noongar elder, according to the festival bumf. I observe how Damon MacNish and many of his contemporaries have turned into their own tribute bands, which must be a peculiar and postmodern fate. Kenny Bloke taps ash into the geraniums. “MacNish’s sitting pretty compared to a lot of them, I reckon. Guess who was playing at Busselton Park not so long ago? Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. Remember them? Not a massive turnout, I’m afraid, but they’ve got pensions and kids to put through college, same as everyone. Us writers get spared that, at least, eh? Farewell tours on the nostalgia circuit.”