Plume

‘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 (#u12ebdc24-7568-5f1f-957f-b8f9476145db)

‘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.’

In truth, the second time had not been confusing at all. My emotions, at the time, had been very clear – more than clear, blinding, revelatory. Only in retrospect did I feel conflicted about what had happened and began to see that my reaction had been … perverse. ‘Confusing’ was a handy word to slap on that mess. Pierce was, once more, looking at me to expand, and I didn’t feel inclined to.

‘Let’s talk about you,’ I said. ‘I’m supposed to be the interviewer.’

‘Why?’ Pierce said. ‘You’re not recording.’

Not as far as he knew. ‘I assume you’ll want to go on the record at some point.’

‘To “set the record straight”?’ Pierce said. ‘That was the expression Quin used. More than once. I had to “set the record straight”. As if everything is disordered now, crooked, and when I … If I go on the record it’ll all be properly arranged and neat and tidy. “The Record”! As if there’s a single, agreed text of the past somewhere, in a big ledger with metal clasps … Or in one of Quin’s servers, now, I suppose.’

He stopped, and stared out of the window, biting his lip, frowning, those hard eyes points of radiant darkness. ‘That’s shit. That’s a big pile of shit. You must see that. Everything would be blown to shit. There’ll be a big storm of shit. Newspapers. I’ll be ripped apart.’

The eyes were avoiding me now, and they swam. For the first time in our discussion, he looked vulnerable. Might he cry? Profile gold …

‘The worst part,’ Pierce continued, ‘is that it won’t even be that big a scandal. Not the front page of the newspaper, it won’t touch the TV. Enough to destroy me, of course. A couple of days of it online, before people move on. I’ll be ruined. But it won’t be that important a story. Just enough to ensure I never come back.’

He was right I had not fully calculated the implications of what Pierce had said about Night Traffic – I had been thinking purely in personal terms, not about the wider world. I had thought, This is a huge story, but not put any real imagination into what that meant. This would bump Eddie’s estate agent friend for sure. Eddie might want it on the cover. Pierce was right, national newspapers would pick it up. The magazine’s name would be everywhere, we’d be at our highest profile for years, maybe since the Errol days. Money would flow: extra news-stand sales, new subscribers, extra ads sold against my piece, syndication rights. In narrow professional terms, I would be a hero. My dismissal would be off the table for a while, six months maybe, enough time for me to get my act together. And the incredible fact was that the story had just dropped from the sky. Quin volunteered Pierce, and Pierce had served up the story.

A wisp of doubt. I hadn’t actually done anything, not yet. I could imagine the finished product: long, New Yorker-ish, bringing in a lot of voices, well-researched, prize-winning. But it had been months since I put words on paper, and that had been the Quin train-wreck. Could I produce 5,000 words of empathy, careful questioning, supporting quotes, legal niceties and meticulous fact-checking? Lawyers would read it, tens of thousands of people would read it, awards judges would read it. I could imagine having written it – stepping onto the stage to accept my award – but I couldn’t imagine actually writing a single line.

And I would need Pierce to cooperate, on the record. I might secretly have his confession on tape, but using that alone, without a corroborating, sympathetic interview from him, would turn my piece into a ham-fisted assassination. Pierce would be denied the stage-managed interview he must want; instead he would get an exposé by a hostile and unscrupulous journalist.

With a tidal surge of nausea, I realised that I couldn’t get away with that. Pierce was not powerless. He could strike back, with Quin, with the information they had accumulated on my drinking and inaccuracies and lifted quotes. Who knew how much data Quin really had? They could respond with so much muck of their own that I’d be destroyed – and, in the ensuing shitstorm, Pierce might be able to absolve himself. I began to appreciate why I, in particular, had been chosen for this job: mutually assured destruction.

Involve Pierce. Get him on board. ‘If you go on the record,’ I said, ‘I’m prepared to craft the story with you, make sure you get your side across clearly and sympathetically. We can make your, ah, coming-out as gentle as possible.’

‘Well, thanks,’ said Pierce. He pinched the bridge of his nose, and shut his eyes hard, seemingly tired. ‘But let’s not delude ourselves. No way it’ll be gentle. It’ll be brutal. I’m going to get killed.’

I could not deny this, so I didn’t say anything. Instead, I thought about the DVR in my shirt pocket. If I glanced downwards, I could just see the top of it. Pierce could probably see it too, if he knew to look, but that shape against my breast could be anything – phone, vape stick, pen drive. I became very conscious that my body language might betray me, might reveal that I was wearing a wire. I rolled my shoulders, pretending to rid them of stiffness, in fact trying to get the DVR to be less conspicuous, and peered into the neck of the beer bottle, inspecting its foaming dregs. To my surprise, the bottle was already almost empty, though I hardly remembered drinking from it at all.

But Pierce wasn’t even looking. He was preoccupied with telling his story. ‘Quin threatened to go public without me,’ he said. ‘He insisted that I confess and make amends. He said that it reflected badly on him.’ He barked a laugh, eyes wide. ‘On him! How fucking vain can you get? Such concern for his own reputation! He’s completely naive. He thinks that if I say I’m sorry then I’ll be OK. He’s wrong. I made up … I’d say “I made up a story” but that sounds so fucking innocent, so pre-school. I invented people. I invented events. I defrauded my agent, my publisher and the public. I told lie after lie after lie and said to people every time, “this is the sworn truth”. I was praised for my honesty. I’m a monster.’

I wanted, more than ever, to check the DVR in my pocket, to confirm that it was still running, recording these words. But I did not dare. I kept my eyes on Pierce, draining the last of my beer and letting him speak, but hardly listening, thinking only of the recording.

‘All those people who praised it, who praised my courage and candour,’ Pierce continued. ‘The people who wrote to me, the people who invited me to speak … All those people are going to feel like I made fools of them. And I did. Helen Mirren said that it made her cry. In a newspaper. Dame Helen Mirren. What are they going to do? How do I atone for something like that?’

‘Is that what you want?’ I asked. ‘To atone?’

It was Pierce’s turn to be silent. He scowled, giving the question deep, zealous thought.

‘If I’m being honest,’ he began – and I thought, Yes, please be honest – ‘I’d rather die before the truth comes out. But I’ll settle for atonement.’

‘Why did you do it?’ I asked. If I did decide to betray Pierce, the more information I could get out of him while he believed himself to be off the record, the better.

But he was no longer cooperating.

‘I envy you, you know. You’ve done it. You’ve been there – twice. I tried to think of the most primal urban experience possible: being mugged in the street, that was it.’

‘The way to avoid being mugged,’ my dad said, ‘is to look as if you’re going to mug someone.’ Memorable advice – well, I’ve remembered it, which is more than I can say about most of what he told me before I went to London. What made it stick was the thought it immediately prompted in me: that I could never, ever imagine my dad looking as if he were going to mug someone. This gem of street-smarts was dispensed by a diminutive, paunchy tax accountant wearing an incredibly aged blue blazer with loose brass buttons that dangled like charms on a bracelet. When my dad started losing his hair, it went at the temples first, as is quite common. But then it kept going back in two temple-width swaths, never expanding its path to take in anything from the sides or the top of the head. This left a mohican-like strip of hair in the middle of his scalp. He never did anything to adapt his hairstyle to the diminishing resources at its disposal, to try to disguise or balance the creeping baldness – a failure I saw then as a hopeless inability to face facts but in retrospect looked more like splendid unconcern. He simply did not mind.