Plume

‘Blocked,’ Pierce said, pronouncing the word with complete neutrality. ‘That’s an interesting way of looking at it. A block. You’re a writer, you must know this: when you’re blocked, it’s never a problem with whatever you’re doing at that moment, it’s a problem with what you’ve already done. It’s a problem in the past, not in the present. You have to go back in order to fix it.’

Fascinating. He could sell that to the writing magazines, maybe, but I couldn’t sell it to Eddie. Was the coffee hotter than I thought? A wisp of steam flexed over my cup. I blew on it and it fled, but I didn’t know if it had been steam, or smoke, coming from elsewhere, but it must have been steam. Rings formed and shunted in the black surface of the coffee. I put the cup on the coffee table with a bump and shut my eyes.

No. Not here. Not now.

‘I don’t understand,’ I said, keeping my eyes shut. Perhaps I sounded upset, or weary, or irate, but I didn’t care. ‘You sounded very eager to talk to me when we got in touch, but now it sounds as if there’s not much you want to say.’

I opened my eyes. The smoke was close to the floor, not yet reaching for my throat. Pierce was staring at me.

‘How long has that been going on?’ he asked, with a downward gesture of the eyes.

‘The … What?’ It took superhuman effort that I was able to even find those two unconnected words. ‘The smoke?’

‘Smoke?’ Pierce said, frowning. ‘That!’ he repeated, pointing at my right hand.

My hand was shaking quite badly, a rapid, rocking action that started at the wrist and magnified through the fingers, causing them to quiver and quake in a very noticeable way. I stilled it with my left hand in what I hoped looked like a calm and natural action; in reality I was clamping down on it like a farm dog on a rat.

‘I had an uncle who got the shakes,’ Pierce said. ‘He used to stay with us at Christmas. Divorced, and my cousins had their own families by then and didn’t want to know. I don’t have any colourful stories about him. He didn’t get shitfaced and fall about or anything like that. It was painfully clear that he was on his best behaviour, for us, for his brother. By the middle of the afternoon his hands would be shaking so badly he was barely able to roll a cigarette. He died when I was a teenager – when he was only in his fifties.’

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to associate myself with Pierce’s tragic uncle, and I didn’t know what else I could say. What I wanted to do was to come up with a story that would pass off the shaking as something other than what it was, but my mind was blank, nothing came. I could not construct an alternative universe in which the comparison was unfair. It was fair. All I could do was stay quiet.

‘I must admit, I don’t often think about that uncle,’ Pierce continued. ‘Remembering him now, what comes to mind is … He was my father’s older brother but you would never have guessed that from looking at them. Sure, he looked older, more beaten-up, but he completely deferred to my father, let himself be ordered about, nagged, all very meekly. Almost like a child.’

‘Maybe he wanted that,’ I said, and I was surprised to find myself talking at all, and interested to know what I was going to say next. ‘Someone taking charge. A voice outside the head.’

Pierce stared hard at me, not with and not without kindness, as if slightly refracted by a thick layer of invisibly transparent material between us.

‘Quin told me you were a drunk,’ Pierce said.

I had never been called that before. The word was there, always at the periphery of my thoughts about myself, but I put great effort into excluding it.

‘He said you were steaming drunk when you met him, and that you smelled of old booze,’ Pierce went on. ‘He wasn’t impressed. You know him – a monk. Fresh pomegranate and plain yoghurt for breakfast, cycling everywhere. Determined to see in the singularity. Your thingie, your Dictaphone, was out of batteries and you tried to make notes. The interview was full of mistakes and quotes lifted from other places.’

Some sort of noise was made in response to this – a cough, an ‘mm-hm’ – but the organism making that noise was very far away now. If I had not been sitting down, I knew I would have fallen by now. I knew that as a fact. As it was, I wanted to close my eyes again and slump sideways onto Pierce’s ancient sofa, to feel the cracked brown leather cool on my cheek, to let sleep come. The grey was closing in around my vision.

‘Not the first time, right?’

I shook my head. ‘I’ve been sloppy,’ I said, the words slipping.

‘Jesus,’ Pierce said. ‘Are you OK? You look like you’re going to be sick.’

‘Could I have a glass of water?’

‘Sure.’ He rose at once and disappeared into the kitchen. A cupboard opened, a tap ran. ‘I’m not trying to get you into trouble. You can relax.’

He was wrong about that – I could in no way relax. Just try to relax, when the gathering shadow that’s been chasing you for months appears in front of you, its terrible face bared, and you know that all this time you have been running straight to it. And ‘relaxing’ suggested tension, tightly wound muscles, stiff sinews. That was not how I felt. I felt undone, as if I were unravelling, unspooling. Pierce returned with a tall glass of tap water, which he placed in front of me, but he did not sit. Instead he went back to the kitchen.

There was a single ice cube in the water, a tiny kindness that I found almost overwhelming, and which did more to convince me that Pierce meant me no harm than anything he said. In putting these truths to me, he had spoken without condemnation or judgement but in the tone of a professional, a counsellor or doctor – or a sympathetic interviewer.

‘Thank you,’ I said, late. I took a sip of the water. Putting the glass back on the table, I saw that the DVR was still running, its red light still lit, counter still counting. This would all make uncomfortable listening, if I ever got around to that stage.

When Pierce came back, he was holding two small cut-glass tumblers and a bottle of whisky – Maker’s Mark, with the melted plastic around the neck of the bottle to look like a wax seal. Though I dearly wanted a drink, the sight of the bourbon filled me with fear. There was the usual reflexive secrecy of the addict – the fear of being seen indulging in addictive behaviour, a fear married to shame. But there was more. I tend to avoid spirits, even wine. Deep in me, I knew that it was too easy to overdo it that way. And by ‘overdo it’, I don’t mean getting incapably drunk – that was the work of every evening. I meant killing myself.

‘I don’t usually drink whisky,’ I said.

‘What do you usually drink?’

‘Stella.’

‘Stella. Huh. Wouldn’t have guessed. Wait.’ Pierce was off again, another trip to the kitchen. A fridge door rattled open, bottles clinked, a bottle top clattered against a hard surface.

‘Not Stella, but.’ It was a bottle of Czech lager.

‘Thank you.’ Still, the reflex reflexed – don’t let him see you drink – though it was clearly far past the point of being important, and that bottle, condensation making a stripe of light down its side, was the most welcome sight in the world. The mists receded, the world sharpened again, just from the sight of that hard green glass.

‘How many people know?’

I didn’t know what he meant; the question interrupted my thrill at having that cold bottle in my hand. ‘About the, er, problems with the articles, or about the drinking?’

‘Both. Either. I assume they are related phenomena.’

Pierce’s attitude, I realised, his demeanour, was entirely journalistic. Pleasant enough, but that pleasantry was like the soft toy dangling in the dentist’s office to distract child patients from what else was there. The equipment. I had been right about his professional mien, I recognised it – I was being interviewed.

‘No one,’ I said.

‘Really?’ Pierce’s eyebrows rose.

‘Maybe one or two people in the office have suspicions,’ I said, thinking of Polly. And Kay.

‘Quin likes data,’ Pierce said. ‘He was raised by spreadsheets, I don’t know. When he is confronted with a problem, he digs out all the data he can find, digs and digs and digs, and eventually the problem just isn’t there any more. When you have enough computing power, and enough eager employees and interns, you can do amazing things. When you have enough data.’

In a ball of numbness, I was hyper-aware of the cool weight of the bottle in my hand, the tiny interactions of the pads of my fingers against glass and condensation. I took a deep drink from it, realising as I did so that I had been deliberately delaying that moment – the usual ostentatious show of restraint, the one I used in pubs, 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.