I note, “You’re acting as if this has happened before.”
“A few times,” replies Aoife, with understatement. “You haven’t read The Radio People, have you?”
Before I can answer Holly Sykes blinks, and finds us. “Oh, f’Chrissakes, it just happened, didn’t it?”
Aoife’s worried and motherly. “Welcome back.”
She’s still pasty as pasta. “What did I do to my head?”
“Tried to dent the lighthouse with it, Crispin says.”
Holly Sykes flinches at me. “Did you listen to me?”
“It was hard not to. At first. Then it … wasn’t exactly English. Look, I’m no first-aid expert, but I’m worried about concussion. Cycling down a hilly, bendy road would not be clever, not right now. I’ve got a number from the bike-hire place. I’ll ask for a medic to drive out and pick you up. I strongly advise this.”
Holly looks at Aoife, who says, “It’s sensible, Mum,” and gives her mother’s arm a squeeze.
Holly props herself upright. “God alone knows what you must think of all this, Crispin.”
It hardly matters. I tap in the number, distracted by a tiny bird calling Crikey, crikey, crikey …
FOR THE FIFTIETH time Holly groans. “I just feel so embarrassed.”
The ferry’s pulling into Fremantle. “Please stop saying that.”
“But I feel awful, Crispin, cutting short your trip to Rottnest.”
“I’d have come back on this ferry, anyway. If ever a place had a karma of damnation, it’s Rottnest. And all those slick galleries selling Aborigine art were eroding away my will to live. It’s as if Germans built a Jewish food hall over Buchenwald.”
“Spot the writer.” Aoife finishes her ice pop. “Again.”
“Writing’s a pathology,” I say. “I’d pack it in tomorrow, if I could.”
The ferry’s engines growl, and cut out. Passengers gather their belongings, unplug earphones, and look for children. Holly’s phone goes and she checks it: “It’s my friend, the one who’s picking us up. Just a mo.” While she takes the call, I check my own phone for messages. Nothing since the picture of Juno’s birthday party earlier. Our international marriage was once a walk-in closet of discoveries and curiosities, but international divorce is not for the fainthearted. Through the spray-dashed window I watch lithe young Aussies leap from prow to quayside, tying ropes around painted steel cleats.
“Our friend’s picking us up from the terminal building.” Holly puts her phone away. “She’s got space for you too, Crispin, if you’d like a lift back to the hotel.”
I’ve got no energy to go exploring Perth. “Please.”
We walk down the gangway onto the concrete pier, where my legs struggle to adjust to terra firma. Aoife waves to a woman waving back, but I don’t zone in on Holly’s friend until I’m a few feet away.
“Hello, Crispin,” the woman says, as if she knows me.
“Of course,” remembers Holly. “You two met in Colombia!”
“I may,” the woman smiles, “have slipped Crispin’s mind.”
“Not at all, Carmen Salvat,” I tell her. “How are you?”
August 20, 2018
LEAVING THE AIR-CONDITIONED FOYER of the Shanghai Mandarin we plunge into a wall of stewy heat and adoration from a flash mob — I’ve never seen anything like this level of fandom for a literary writer. More’s the pity that writer isn’t me — as they recognize him, the cry goes up, “Neeeeeck!” Nick Greek, at the vanguard of our two-writer convoy, has been living in Shanghai since March, learning Cantonese and researching a novel about the Opium Wars. Hal the Hyena has liaised closely with his local agent and now a quarter of a million Chinese readers follow Nick Greek on Weibo. Over lunch he mentioned he’s been turning down modeling contracts, for sod’s sake. “It’s so embarrassing,” he said modestly. “I mean, what would Steinbeck have made of this?” I managed to smile, thinking how Modesty is Vanity’s craftier stepbrother. Some heavyweight minders from the book fair are having to widen a path through the throng of nubile, raven-haired, book-toting Chinese fans: “Neeck! Sign, please, please sign!” Some are even waving A4 color photos of the young American for him to deface, for buggery’s sake. “He’s a U.S. imperialist!” I want to shout. “What about the Dalai Lama on the White House lawn?” Miss Li, my British Council elf, and I follow in the wake of his entourage, blissfully unhassled. If I appear in any of the footage, they’ll assume I’m his father. And guess what, dear reader? It doesn’t matter. Let him enjoy the acclaim while it lasts. In six weeks Carmen and I will be living in our dream apartment overlooking the Plaza de la Villa in Madrid. When my old mucker Ewan Rice sees it he’ll be so sodding jealous he’ll explode in a green cloud of spores, even if he has won the Brittan Prize twice. Once we’re in, I can divide my time more equally between London and Madrid. Spanish cuisine, cheap wine, reliable sunshine, and love. Love. During all those wasted years of my prime with Zoë, I’d forgotten how wonderful it is to love and to be loved. After all, what is the Bubble Reputation compared to the love of a good woman?
Well? I’m asking you a question.
MISS LI LEADS me into the heart of the Shanghai Book Fair complex, where a large auditorium awaits keynote speakers — the true Big Beasts of International Publishing. I can imagine Chairman Mao issuing his jolly-well-thought-out economic diktats in this very space in the 1950s; for all I know, he did. This afternoon the stage is dominated by a jungle of orchids and a ten-meter-high blowup of Nick Greek’s blond American head and torso. Miss Li leads me out through the other side of the large auditorium and on to my own venue, although she has to ask several people for directions. Eventually she locates it on the basement level. It appears to be a row of knocked-through broom cupboards. There are thirty chairs in the venue, though only seven are occupied, not counting myself. To wit: my smiling interviewer, an unsmiling female translator, a nervous Miss Li, my friendly Editor Fang, in his Black Sabbath T-shirt, two youths with Shanghai Book Fair ID tags still round their necks, and a girl of what used to be known as Eurasian extraction. She’s short, boyish, and sports a nerdy pair of glasses and a shaven head: electrotherapy chic. A droning fan stirs the heat above us, a striplight flickers a little, and the walls are blotched and streaked, like the inside of a never-cleaned oven. I am tempted to walk out — I really am — but handling the fallout would be worse than putting a brave face on the afternoon. I’m sure the British Council keeps a blacklist of badly behaved authors.
My interviewer thanks everyone for coming in Chinese, and gives what I gather is a short introduction. Then I do a reading from Echo Must Die while a Mandarin translation is projected onto a screen behind me. It’s the same section I read at Hay-on-Wye, three years ago. Sodding hell, is it already three years since I last published? Trevor Upward’s hilarious escapades on the roof of the Eurostar do not appear to amuse the select gathering. Was my satire translated as a straight tragedy? Or was the Hershey wit taken into custody at the language barrier? After my reading I endure the sound of fourteen hands clapping, take my seat, and help myself to a glass of sparkling water — I’m thirsty as hell. The water is flat and tastes of yeast. I hope it didn’t come out of a Shanghai tap. My interviewer smiles, thanks me in English, and asks me the same questions I’ve been asked since I arrived in Beijing a few days ago: “How does your famous father’s work influence your novels?”; “Why does Desiccated Embryos have a symmetrical structure?”; “What truths should the Chinese reader find in your novels?” I give the same answers I’ve been giving since I arrived in Beijing a few days ago, and my spidery, unsmiling translator, who also translated my answers several times yesterday, renders my sentences into Chinese without any difficulty. Electrotherapy Girl, I notice, is actually taking notes. Then the interviewer asks, “And do you read your reviews?” which redirects my train of thought towards Richard Cheeseman where it smashes into last week’s miserable visit to Bogotá and comes off the tracks altogether …