Plume. Will Wiles

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СКАЧАТЬ drinking in company, to show that I didn’t have a problem. It was entirely surplus to requirements here. All the rules had changed; they had been changed by strangers, indeed, when I had always assumed that the confrontation would come from someone close to me. I knew how that felt, from the ending with Elise: the walls folding in, the ceiling coming down, crushed, trapped, suffocated. That was how I had imagined it, when I had dared to imagine it, or found the thought inescapable: with Eddie and Polly in the aquarium, with Eddie in the publisher’s office upstairs, with Kay.

      But this was different. I wasn’t crushed and I wasn’t trapped. Which is not to say that I wasn’t afraid: on the contrary, the thought of a vengeful Quin in possession of this kind of information and talking about it with others as he had plainly talked about it with Pierce – that was chilling.

      ‘So Quin guessed?’ I asked. ‘About me?’ What I wanted to ask was: what kind of proof does he have? Anything I can’t lie my way around?

      Pierce grunted, a bitter dreg of a chuckle. ‘Guessed. Yeah, Quin is great at “guessing”. Gifted really. Quin “guessed”.’

      ‘I don’t understand what this has to do with me. Or … I mean, I see what it has to do with me, but I don’t know what … why Quin said all this to you.’

      ‘He was angry,’ Pierce said. ‘With you, and with me. Are you still recording this?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Switch that off for a minute, would you?’

      ‘Sure.’ I picked the DVR off the coffee table and pressed the off button.

      ‘Inaccuracy makes Quin angry,’ Pierce said. ‘Deliberate inaccuracy especially so. He says one of the biggest challenges Bunk faces is filtering out the lies from social media. Like when someone tells Tamesis that they’re in the office when really they’re in the pub.’

      Acid bubbled up within me. Pierce’s sarcastic tone earlier could be understood – Quin hadn’t guessed at all.

      ‘He doesn’t care about the social reasons for that sort of thing, the niceties,’ Pierce continued. ‘It’s just bad data, it corrupts his models. I asked him why he wanted anything to do with my map, with the kind of research I did for Murder Boards. He said that he was trying to run a stochastic analysis of apocrypha and myth. But he … I had a lot of research material for Night Traffic around in the flat, and he looked at all that too. Without asking.’

      Pierce had been taking very small sips from his whisky before this, as if unfamiliar with its taste, or at least unfamiliar with its taste at this hour. Now, however, he took a deep draught, draining his glass.

      ‘The thing about Night Traffic,’ he said, with a little lick of his lips, ‘is that I made it up. None of it happened. None of it is true.’

      I swallowed. Pierce was glaring at me, full eye contact, judging my reaction, as if he were trying to read my thoughts about what he had said.

      He wouldn’t be able to. My thoughts were: He doesn’t know about the second DVR. The one that was in my shirt pocket. The one that was still recording.

       FOUR

      ‘Have you ever been mugged, Jack?’

      I had to take a moment to think about the answer. It was a simple question, with a simple, truthful answer. But in this room, at this time, all certainty felt suspect. The man sitting opposite me had taken an event I had experienced twice and described it nearly perfectly. That his version was a giant lie – with an orbiting debris field of lesser lies – was deeply disturbing. My own experiences felt counterfeit. It was a violation, akin to an attack. I should have been angry, but Pierce’s authority and my respect for him were – curiously – unchanged. In a way, a very conditional and twisted way, I admired him: that he could invent an account so detailed, sympathetic and convincing – utterly, utterly convincing – was impressive.

      ‘Yes, I have,’ I said. ‘Twice, actually.’

      ‘Actually.’ Pierce un-crossed and re-crossed his legs. ‘Well, I have never been mugged.’

      ‘You describe it so well.’

      ‘Yes, so I’m told. What is it like? Being mugged.’

      ‘Don’t you know? I mean, even if it hasn’t happened to you, you must have spoken with plenty of people, and your research—’

      ‘Yes, yes.’ He waved this away. ‘I got emails, letters. People feeling as if they had to share what had happened to them with someone they thought would understand. Some horrible stories. I spoke at the annual conference of the National Association for the Victims of Crime. I tried to get out of it, but they were so persistent and nice. Afterwards people wanted to talk to me … That was towards the end, by the way, right before I decided I’d had enough, couldn’t stand lying to these people any more. But what you learn from all these stories – well, no, listen, this is important. Being a writer is to realise that all experience is unique but analogous. People are good at thinking their way into other people’s heads, much better than most of them realise. Anyway, tell me.’

      Again, I had to think about the answer. Though they were technically very similar events – alone, vulnerable, a threat, a theft – the two experiences were very different, and it was hard to establish the common emotional ground between them.

      ‘Confusing,’ I said.

      ‘Confusing. Very good answer,’ Pierce said. He sat back in his chair and smiled. ‘Can you expand?’

      I shrugged. Once again Pierce had turned my interview into an interrogation of me. I was still trying to mentally accommodate his admission about Night Traffic. A fraud. It was a fraud. And I did not yet know my response to that. There are journalistic clichés: ‘stunned’, ‘shocked’, ‘reeling’, ‘taken aback’. Those would work, but not well. It was more a troubling in-between state, waiting for feedback that isn’t coming, and feeling nothing in the meantime. Being lost, and getting out your phone to check the map – but it doesn’t load. You see the little dot marking your location, but on a field of grey. And here he was drilling information out of me. I was pitted with the sense of having shared too much from my own darkness. Pierce was impressive, for sure. The unembarrassed way he questioned, the way he handled the answers – that ‘very good answer’ there, a bit of positive reinforcement to help the subject, me, along, making me want to share more. A natural journalist, whereas I had spent a decade scraping by and pretending.

      ‘The first time was very much what you’d imagine, you know,’ I said. ‘I was frightened …’

      ‘How was it confusing?’

      I drank from my beer. ‘There’s a moment, a time when you don’t know what’s happening – you’re being mugged but you don’t know it for sure just yet, you haven’t figured it out, you don’t know what this guy, this stranger, wants – you don’t realise that the rules have been … that they don’t apply any more, that different rules apply, different roles. It’s confusing. You’re moved very quickly from one situation, a normal situation, to an abnormal situation, and it takes some time to catch up. And the second time – the very fact it was the second time, it had happened before, made it different. I knew what was going on, but … it was still a very confusing experience.’

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