“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.”
I probe this not-necessarily-true remark. Echo Must Diecleared twenty thousand in the U.K. and the same in the States. Respectable …
… -ish, but for the new Crispin Hershey novel, disappointing. Time was I’d shift a hundred thousand units in both territories, no questions asked. Hyena Hal talks about eBook downloads reconfiguring the old paradigm, but I know exactly why my “return to form” novel failed to sell—Richard Cheeseman’s Rottweilering. That one sodding review declared open season on the Wild Child of British Letters, and by the time the Brittan Prize longlist was announced, Echo Must Diewas better known as The One Richard Cheeseman Hilariously Shafted. I scan the spacious ballroom behind us. Still no sign of him, but he won’t resist the tug of coffee-skinned Latino butlers for long.
“Did you look around the old quarter today?” asks Kenny Bloke.
“Yes, it’s pretty in a UNESCO way. If a touch unreal.”
The Australian grunts. “My taxi driver told me how the FARC people and the intelligence services needed a place for a holiday, so Cartagena’s their de facto demilitarized zone.” He accepts one of my cigarettes. “Don’t tell the missus—she thinks I’ve given up.”
“Your secret’s safe. I doubt I’ll be coming to …?”
“Katanning. Western Australia. Bottom-left corner. Compared to this”—Kenny Bloke gestures at the Latin Baroque glory—“it’s a dingo’s arse. But my people are buried there, from way, way back, and I wouldn’t want to leave my roots.”
“Rootlessness,” I opine, “is the twenty-first-century norm.”
“You’re not wrong and that’s why we’re in the shit we’re in, mate. If you belong nowhere, why give a tinker’s toss about anywhere?”
Damon MacNish’s drummer whacks out a solo and the sea of Latino youth below makes me feel WASPish and old. Friday, ten P.M. in London, no school tomorrow. Juno and Anaпs are handling my and Zoл’s trial separation with suspicious maturity. Surely I deserve a few teary episodes. Has Zoл been readying them for a bust-up? My old mucker Ewan Rice told me hisfirst wife had sought legal advice six months before the D-word, hence her cool million-quid settlement. When had the rot set in for me and Zoл? Was it there at the very beginning, hiding like a cancer cell, on Zoл’s father’s yacht, Aegean sea light playing on the cabin ceiling, an empty wine bottle rolling oh-ever-so-gently on the cabin floor, this way and that, this way and that? We’d been celebrating Hal the Hyena’s text to say the auction for Desiccated Embryoshad reached Ј750,000 and was stillclimbing. Zoл said, “Don’t panic, Crisp, but I’d like to spend my life with you.” This way and that … This way and that …
“Swim for it!” I want to shout at that moronic Romeo. Before you know it, she’ll “study” for an online PhD in crystal healing and call you narrow-minded if you dare wonder aloud where the science is. She’ll stop greeting you in the hallway when you get home. Her powers of accusation will stupefyyou, young Romeo. If the au pair’s lazy, it’s your fault for vetoing the Polish troglodyte. If the piano teacher’s too strict, you should have found a huggier one. If Zoл is unfulfilled, it’s your fault for depriving her of the imperative to earn a living. Sex? Ha. “Stop pressuring me, Crispin.” “I’m not pressuring you, Zoл, I’m just asking when?” “Sometime.” “When is‘Sometime’?” “Stop pressuringme, Crispin!” Men marry women hoping they’ll never change. Women marry men hoping they will. Both parties are disappointed, and meanwhile Romeo on the yacht kisses his soon-to-be-fiancйe and murmurs, “Let’s get hitched, Miss Legrange.”
The drum solo ends and Damon MacNish bounds up to the mike, does a “One-two-three-five” and the Sinking Ship strike up “Disco in a Minefield.” I let my cigarette drop into an imaginary lake of gasoline and turn the plaza into a Doomsday whooosh, k’bammm! Ommmmmm …
I recognize a very familiar voice, mere feet away.
“So I told him,” Richard Cheeseman is saying, “ ‘Uh, no, Hillary—I don’t have a libretto of my own to show you, because I flush myshit down the toilet!’ ” Balding, midforties, round, and bearded. Hershey squeezes through the bodies and brings his hand down on the critic’s shoulder, like a wheel clamp. “Richard Cheeseman, as I live and breathe, you hairy old sodomite! Howare you?”
Cheeseman recognizes me and spills his cocktail.
“Oh dear,” I emote, “all over your purple espadrilles, too.”
Cheeseman smiles, like a man about to have his jaw ripped from his skull, which is what I’ve long dreamt of doing. “Crisp!”
Don’t “Crisp” me, you wormfuck. “The stiletto I brought to skewer your cerebellum got seized at Heathrow, so you’re in the clear.” Those in the literary know are gravitating our way like sharks to a sinking cruise ship. “But my, oh, my,” I dab Cheeseman’s arm with a handy napkin, “you gave my last book a shitty review. Didn’tyou?”
Cheeseman hisses through his rictus grin. “Did I?” Up go his hands in a jokey surrender. “Candidly? WhatI wrote, or howsome intern slapped it about, I no longer recall—but if it caused you any offense—any offense at all!—I apologize.”
I could stop here, but Destiny demands a vengeance more epic, and who am I to deny Destiny? I address the onlookers. “Let’s get this out in the open. When Richard’s review of Echo Must Dieappeared, many people asked, ‘How did it feel, to read that?’ For a while, my answer was ‘How does it feel to have acid flung in your face?’ Then, however, I began to think about Richard’s motives. To a lesser writer, one could attribute the motive of envy, but Richard is himself a novelist of growing stature and a motive of petty malice didn’t wash. No. Ibelieve that Richard Cheeseman cares deeply about literature, and feels duty-bound to tell the truth as he sees it. So you know what? Bravo for Richard. He misappraised my last novel, but this man”—again, I clasp his shoulder in its ruffled shirt—“is a bulwark against the rising tide of arselickery that passes for lit crit. Let the record show I harbor not a gram of animus towards him—provided he brings us both a hugemojito and pronto, you scurrilous, scabby hack.”
Smiles! Applause! Cheeseman and I do a mongrel mix of a handshake and a high-five. “You got me back, though, Crisp,” his sweaty forehead shines, “with your jealous-fairy line at Hay-on-Wye—look, I’ll go and get those mojitos.”
“I’ll be on the balcony,” I tell him, “where the air’s a little cooler.” Then I’m mobbed by a dollop of nobodies who seriously suppose I’d bother to remember their names and faces. They praise my noble fair-mindedness. I respond nobly and fair-mindedly. Crispin Hershey’s magnanimity will be reported and retweeted and so it will become the truth. From across the plaza, through the balcony doors, we hear Damon MacNish bellowing: “Te amo, Cartagena!”