Plume

In the first year after their retirement, they argued: long, flamboyant arguments with epic scope, stirring chiaroscuro and elaborate, intertwined plots and subplots. Late in life, they found that they shared a gift for holding a really poisonous row.

They supplied their own reviews of these arguments. Ever since I turned eighteen, Dad had routinely taken me out for ‘a pint’ at the local pub. A pint, precisely: two half-pints of bitter, followed by a further two ordered with hints of wicked indulgence and declamations that that had never been the plan. After his retirement, those drinks turned into discussions of the arguments. ‘Your mum and I have been arguing a lot,’ he would say, every time, as if he didn’t say the same thing every time. He never criticised her, and I truly believe that it would never even occur to him to do so. But he would sadly acknowledge the fact of the arguments, without giving the slightest detail as to what might be causing them, and expect me to be sympathetic.

(My sister reported that she was getting the exact same from Mum, often at precisely the same moment. Mum did criticise Dad, but only in the vaguest, most all-encompassing terms: ‘Your Father!’, uttered as if his very existence was an affront we had all quietly tolerated for too long.)

Then, a transformation. After about a year of arguments, including the hellish Christmas of 2012, my parents decided they needed a holiday. For twenty-five years, French beaches had known their presence in the summer. Their knowledge of the French coast was probably rival to that of Allied high command, June 1944. But this time, in the spring of 2013, they went on a city break, to Brussels on the Eurostar.

They stayed four nights and I received three postcards. Dad ate a horse steak. Mum ate a waffle sold from a van. They were photographed in front of the Atomium, the Palais de Justice, the Tintin Museum, the restaurant where Dad ate the steak, the van from which Mum purchased the waffle, and the headquarters of the European Commission.

A mania took hold. An addiction, maybe. No city in Europe was safe. It didn’t really matter where this postcard came from, and I already knew the gist of what was written on the back. It would join a small pile of very similar postcards on the kitchen counter, next to a cork board thoroughly covered with a bright collage of classical columns, Gothic spires, Moorish palaces, Dutch gables and high pitched Nordic roofs.

The era of arguments came to an end. So began the era of city breaks.

Standing in the icy doorway for so long had completely thrown me off my stride. I opened another can of Stella, forgetting that I already had one on the go.

All the cans in the fridge were empty by the time I left the house, and so were the half-empty cans I had found. I would have to pick up more, but then I would have needed to make a run in any case. Three cans or fewer was completely insufficient, dangerous. The horrible thought that there was no alcohol in the flat would be at or near the front of my mind all day.

In other regards the morning was going well. I had showered, put on (mostly) clean clothes, and set out at a reasonable time. My bag was double-checked for all the things I needed: two digital voice recorders, my old one and my new one, and spare batteries for them. After the recent disaster with F.A.Q., I was taking no chances.

Also in the bag were Pierce’s books: two novels, the mugging book, and the cash-in collection of non-fiction that his publisher had put out the Christmas that the mugging book was at the top of every broadsheet ‘books of the year’ list. Actors, MPs, television historians, baking competition hosts, they all exerted themselves to overstate how luminous, powerful, searing, important, draining, life-affirming, etcetera, etcetera they had found Night Traffic. I felt quite resentful about all this, because I had been reading Pierce for years. My copy of Night Traffic was the softback Panhandler Press edition with the cheap cover art, not the classy Faber edition that appeared when the award shortlists and reviews started to pile up, and which is still inescapable on the Tube.

I had been reading Pierce since his first novel, Mile End Road, came out in 2009. This was a fairly conventional story of twenty-somethings finding love, losing it, finding it again and then losing it for a second and final time. But the few reviews it received praised its rendering of twenty-first-century London life and its (at the time) unusually realistic depiction of the mobile phone and social media habits of young Londoners. It was longlisted for a couple of prizes and did not trouble any bestseller charts.

Pierce’s second novel, Murder Boards, had the good fortune to appear just before the 2011 riots. To capitalise, the post-riot paperback was given a sensational cover, with a movie-like strapline: THE CITY IS ABOUT TO EXPLODE. This bore little relation to its contents, 500 pages of non-linear narrative and cut-up technique told from the multiple viewpoints of its spectral cast of characters. It was concerned – obsessed, really – with missing persons and unresolved crimes, and steeped in police jargon and the imagery and phrasing of TV news. At times, it appeared to be deliberately opaque and confusing, as if the reader were an investigator confronted with contradictory accounts of events and inscrutable enmity between characters, between reader and author, between author and reality, with the objective truth of the past unknowable. To give up on Murder Boards was to play Pierce’s game, to take on the role of the indifferent bystander, the grazing TV viewer, the desensitised inquisitor, the impatient and unsympathetic bureaucracy. The reader’s natural frustration with a long and frankly exhausting experimental novel was thus subverted. Read to the end or put the book down unfinished – either way, Pierce won. Reviewers were divided. One-third of them hailed Pierce as a genius, another third called him a charlatan. The remainder made it obvious they did not understand the book, and maybe had not even finished it, by playing it safe with cautious praise.

After the modest success of Mile End Road, Faber had poached Pierce from Panhandler and put out Murder Boards with much ballyhoo, but despite a brief life as an edgy fashion accessory and social media prop, it was a resounding commercial failure. Whatever happened, Pierce was back at Panhandler for his third book, Night Traffic. Maybe the big house took fright at the thought of releasing a long essay covering many of the same themes as the chunky, expensive literary novel that was stinking up its balance sheets.

But since the appearance of Murder Boards, Pierce had acquired a small and eager following, myself included. His post-riots essay for 3AM Magazine, ‘Beneath the Paving Stones, the Fire’, had circulated on Twitter and Tumblr for more than a month, and was republished by the New York Times. Pierce had been writing essays about London for years, but now his writing became more adventurous, more scandalous, and funnier. He was able to arrange gonzo escapades that other journalists – again, myself included – could only dream about. A night spent with criminal fly-tippers, dumping trash on street corners and narrowly evading the police. Searching for forgotten IRA arms caches in north London back gardens. A memorably hilarious excursion with three Russian heiresses, the daughters of Knightsbridge-resident oligarchs, to find and consume authentic East End jellied eels.

In the summer of 2012 – the ‘Olympic summer’, we journalists are now apparently bound by law to call it, although for me personally it has darker connotations – Night Traffic appeared. Short, extraordinary, explosive. Night Traffic was an account of an incident the previous year in which Pierce had been mugged by a group of youths, no more than teenagers, in a quiet part of his native east London. Finding Pierce’s mobile phone and about £20 in cash to be insufficient reward for their effort, the youths had shown the author a blade, marched him to a cashpoint and forced him to withdraw £300. He spent more than half an hour in their company, crashing through an immense range of emotions from outright terror to perverse bonhomie and back to terror. Afterwards he had been too traumatised to appreciate that he should report what had happened to the police. A dark week was spent shut up in his flat, turning the events of that night over and over in his head, before he realised that he did not want to report it after all. Instead he would compose his own report, tackle the matter as a writer, as a journalist. He returned to the scene during the day and at night, and retraced his steps. He tried to find witnesses. He searched for the youths, sitting out through the small hours. He tried to get CCTV footage of the incident, without success. And he found himself coming to a transgressive acceptance of what had happened: that his ordeal had been a natural part of the ecology of the city and the economy of the night, that it was all preordained and the product of order, not disorder – and, most controversially, that violence might be a salutary urban force, ‘the street seeking balance’.

Night Traffic was not quite an ‘Overnight Success’, as the headline of Pierce’s Guardian interview put it. Panhandler was a small operation, based in Ipswich, and only managed to get it into a few larger bookshops. But Pierce’s cult reputation got it under all the right noses, and even before its official publication there were rumours and previews promising that it was special. Then came a month-long bombardment of long, shining pieces by heavy-hitters: Will Self in the Guardian, Geoff Dyer in the Telegraph, Michael Moorcock in the Independent, Rebecca Solnit in the TLS, Iain Sinclair in the LRB. Panhandler’s first printing sold out immediately and it rushed a deal with Faber for a mass-market paperback, which hit every bookshop in the UK and Ireland just as the award shortlists started to roll in. Knopf bought US rights for six figures. By early 2013, Pierce was a rare creature: a literary celebrity. He even made a brief, ill-at-ease appearance on The One Show, during which, in a first for that programme, he used the word ‘epiphenomenal’.

Then he disappeared, or as close to ‘disappeared’ as you can get while still living in London and being verifiably alive. The last post he made on Twitter was to announce the cancellation of two forthcoming events; the account shut down a couple of weeks later. Emails bounced back to their senders. The slim hardback of collected essays came out in late 2013 and Pierce did nothing to promote it – no interviews, no readings, no appearances.

Night Traffic had attracted some controversy. The police had helped sales by criticising Pierce’s decision not to report the crime, and his freelance investigations. A Daily Mail columnist had attacked Pierce for ‘celebrating’ urban violence. One or two bloggers had taken against the book, claiming that it perpetuated stereotypes about the inner cities and deprived young people, although there was never much wind in the sails of this accusation; some corners of Twitter griped about ‘poverty tourism’. But the reasons for Pierce’s withdrawal from view remained stubbornly enigmatic. One theory was that he had taken fright at the sudden attention; another held that it was all a ploy, a stunt, an over-exposed author’s effort to recharge mystique. There were rumours of grand secret projects, but nothing more than rumours. I had been astonished when F.A.Q. said Pierce had been consulting with them on the mapping software that underpinned Tamesis. Consulting how? Doing what? Tamesis’s workings were obscure, purposefully so – Quin had this whole spiel about concealing some aspects of how the application worked. ‘Open but dark systems’, ‘benevolent spookiness’, ‘network chiaroscuro’. You can see all that on Quin’s TED Talk, or his presentation to the RSA. I forget which.

But I digress.

Writing profiles isn’t hard – there are rules to remember, but anyone can learn those rules. For instance, don’t slam your readers with great slabs of biography. Don’t regurgitate the subject’s CV all over the page. That information needs to be broken into digestible morsels and stirred into the writing. I learned that in my first job in journalism, shortly after I graduated in 2004. See?

Another rule is: don’t keep the reader hanging around. Like Eddie said, listen out for that strong opening. You have to start with a bang. The beauty of this is that even a disastrous interview with an obstructive subject can be turned to your advantage. If Pierce was rude and unhelpful, if he refused to answer questions and insulted my parents, I could still write the piece to my advantage – as a gonzo exercise, to use Pierce’s own tactics against him, or as self-deprecating humour. It took a bit of skill, but it was possible. I had started the calamitous Quin interview with his reaction to my late arrival. Indeed, it was a gambit I had worked hard in recent months as my preparation had grown more and more threadbare, and anyway it was so heavily used in the Sundays it has become cliché.

Yet another rule – and this applies to all feature writing, not just profiles – is that you need what’s called a ‘nut graf’. This is a paragraph or a line, near the start of the piece, that tells the reader what the article is about. It poses the question that the feature sets out to answer. So for Pierce, I’d like the nut graf to be along these lines: What made this acclaimed author suddenly shut himself off from the world – and why is he opening up now?

To ask that, of course, I’d need to get a good answer to that question. Because I have a nut graf of my own: Am I going to be fired this week?

At Victoria Station, there were unusually large numbers of people standing on the forecourt, not rushing about, and for a horrible second I thought the Underground entrances might be closed. This often happens in the mornings, as Victoria is always overcrowded and they have to shut the gates to stop a dangerous crush developing on the platforms. But it was well past the peak of rush hour and people were freely coming and going. Those commuters who were standing around outside were all facing in the same direction, towards Victoria Street, and they were all looking up at the sky.

I had been walking with my head down and my earphones in, thinking about Pierce, about what I was going to ask him. Little else had registered, apart from the coldness of the morning and the weakness of the light. I raised my eyes to see what the others were seeing.

The sky to the east – that is, towards the greater part of London – was poisoned. There are winter days when snow-filled clouds trap the land in unshifting twilight and the location of the sun is a mystery. But this occultation was deeper and darker than that, and lower and more sinister. Not storm-grey but the grey of truck tyres and industrial soot, intensifying to near-black at its thickest point. The plume. It had scented the air with a petrochemical tang that brought a solvent sting to the sinuses. I suppose I should be grateful to my neighbours for coating my sensory organs with a fine layer of pulverised brick and plaster, protecting me from the great fire’s morning bouquet.

I picked up a Metro from an untidy heap by the top of the Tube stairs. ‘Two Hurt in Inferno’ said the front page headline; a subheading added ‘Fuel Plant Blaze Rages Through Night’. On a normal morning I wouldn’t read Metro but I wanted to see more pictures of the fire, in particular more pictures from above. I can’t say what prompted this desire, but it was ardent and sudden.

‘I don’t like it,’ a young woman standing nearby said to her colleague. ‘I don’t like it. I just don’t like it.’ They were looking at the plume, but I didn’t know if they were talking about it.

A short hop on the Victoria Line, a transfer through the labyrinth of Oxford Circus, then a longer stretch on the Central Line. Rush hour had eased enough for me to get a seat and examine the paper.

As well as the cover, the fire had been given two inside spreads. The editors had clearly intuited that it would be a major topic of conversation on the morning commute and in the city’s workplaces, and had done their best to cater for that curiosity. Pages four and five were straight reporting: pictures of the fire crews, details of the evacuation, hasty facts about the toxicity of the smoke, and – best of all – a top-down Google Earth view of the fuel facility with numbered spots: ‘Minute by Minute: How Blaze Spread Beyond Control’.

Better yet were pages six and seven: ‘Your Pictures of Barking Inferno’. What an age this was for the gawper and the rubbernecker – at last, satiety. Sam from Leyton had captured an apocalyptic black pillar dwarfing a twilit terrace of houses. Ann from Maida Vale contributed a picture from Hampstead Heath, probably taken around lunchtime: London as Mordor, an inverted black pyramid spewing darkness at its eastern edge. In the foreground of this image, other people could be seen on the Heath, also taking photos with their phones. Lee from Southend had another angle, the smoke cloud from the east, the western horizon kohled, sunset cancelled. My favourite image was by James from Crystal Palace: the view from a passenger seat of a plane approaching City Airport. The horrifying size of the plume was made clear: the leg of an elephant with a foot of fire stamping down on the estuary; London a grimy circuit board experiencing a fatal short. It’s not a long journey from Oxford Circus to Liverpool Street and I made it no further into the newspaper.

At Liverpool Street I had arranged to meet the photographer, Alan, who was coming in by train from Essex. But when I got to the Kindertransport memorial by the tube entrance, Alan wasn’t there. Last time we met – the Quin interview – I had had a heavy morning and had kept him waiting for half an hour. He had not been pleased. Was he taking revenge? But, no – or at least, not yet. To my surprise, I was three minutes early.

The memorial was a handy place to meet, but an uncomfortable object to spend too much time around. It’s very small, almost too small, as if it is somehow embarrassed, which is a bad vibe for a memorial. Its size also makes it look a little kitsch, and I can never see the two bronze children without thinking of the charity collection boxes for the blind that used to be found in every pub. And then, having been struck by those thoughts – every time – I am embarrassed to have felt that way about a reminder of the Holocaust, and the little bronze children are full of reproach.

The equilibrium I had briefly experienced on the train was gone, and I began to choke up again. My options were limited. The pubs were just now opening, and in any case there was no time. On the station concourse there was a little food and wine shop, but where could I discreetly drink a can?

‘Jack.’

I had drifted away from the memorial, into the middle of the concourse; Alan had come up behind me, packhorse-heavy with bags, tripods, reflectors and other equipment.

‘Alan. Hi.’

‘You look a bit lost, mate,’ Alan said, full of cheer and heartiness. He was a short, muscly man somehow well-served by his receding hairline, which gave him an aura of toughness and experience. He combined this with a plain-speaking, no-airs, working-man demeanour – all ‘mate’ and ‘pal’ – that I suspected was a carefully cultivated pretence. Nevertheless, it was enough to set me – provincial bourgeois – ill-at-ease, eager to demonstrate my own (entirely affected) rough-diamond nonchalance. I had the same ridiculous problem with plumbers.

‘Yeah, no worries,’ I said, regretting every word as I spoke it. Was I supposed to be Australian? ‘I was just thinking about getting a coffee.’

‘Now you’re talking,’ Alan said. He checked his watch with a flourish. Chunky metal strap, hanging loose. ‘Yeah, plenty time, plenty time.’

We crossed to a little coffee booth, Alan’s many bags clanking against my nerves. I ordered two black coffees. Coffee might help, for a time.

‘Jack, mate, this Q&A guy …’

This took me a moment to parse. ‘You mean F.A.Q.?’

‘Yeah.’

I didn’t like this direction. Alan had had real trouble getting Quin’s portrait. He had wanted to shoot the designer in the Tamesis nerve centre, where a giant screen streamed live data from the app. But Quin had refused, and was steadfast in his refusal, fretting about client confidentiality and industrial espionage. The alternative offered was his characterless office, which Alan hated. Eventually, using the combination of charm and un-embarrassable persistence that is a standard part of the photographer’s kit, Alan got Quin up on the roof of Bunk’s Shoreditch building. The London skyline made a good backdrop for the creator of Tamesis. But the very next day I got an agitated phone call from Quin – the first of many – insisting on picture approval. Compounding all this was the rush caused by our – by my – lateness. I would prefer never to hear the name Quin again, but it continued to dog me.

‘Can you nudge your people?’ Alan said. ‘I haven’t been paid.’

‘Shit. Alan, I’m sorry, I’ll give them hell.’

‘I knew I could count on you,’ Alan said.

The coffee was too hot to hold for long and I had to continually switch it between hands as the pain became unbearable. Alan did not appear to be affected. He even sipped his.