Plume

‘What did you fall out about?’ I asked.

Pierce shifted in his seat uncomfortably. ‘Various things. I found out he was writing navigation software for the Met.’

‘For the Met? The police?’

‘Yeah. They’ve got this drone – unmanned aerial vehicle – kind of a prototype. Except it doesn’t work. It’s junk. They – the Met – thought part of the problem might be the onboard software. And since mapping is Bunk’s big thing, Quin’s big thing – Roamero, Tamesis, all that – they asked him to take a look. All hush-hush. The trouble with Quin is curiosity. For all his radical pose, he’d agree to anything if it meant being able to poke around inside the hot brain of a police vehicle. He was embarrassed about it and he told me – partly because he wanted to excuse himself for having agreed to take a look, I think – that it was a total turkey. A dodo. Classic bureaucratic fuck-up. Barely up to the job of finding a lone pick-up in the desert, let alone spotting who’s carrying the knife outside a Camden pub. “It’ll never do what they want it to do,” he said. And’ – Pierce gestured towards the TV, which was turned off – ‘it turns out he was right.’

I didn’t know what this last part meant, but I was too preoccupied with the rest of what Pierce had said to pick up on it. Quin, working with the police? His image had a wide stripe of anti-establishment idealism, coloured by tech-industry optimism: giving people the tools to get around the Man, direct democracy, that sort of thing. During one of the surveillance scandals he had been on Channel 4 News to say that he would never give user data from Roamero or Tamesis to the police or GCHQ. They hadn’t asked, but Quin had seen a public relations opportunity and seized it with both hands. He was on form – articulate, scornful, glowing with righteousness. The only time Cathy Newman managed to wrongfoot him was when she asked how he would feel if criminals exploited Tamesis. The strangest expression appeared on his smooth, innocent face, certainly not an expression one tends to see on these TV interviews: distraction, deep focus, as if he were repeating the question to a deeper part of himself. ‘I can’t imagine how criminals would use something like Tamesis,’ he said at last.

The thought that he could go from that idealistic naïf to being a man designing software for a police drone was staggering. But I was here to interview Pierce.

‘Let’s get back to you,’ I said. ‘What are you working on at the moment?’

‘Not very much, to be frank.’

‘Nothing, really?’

Pierce sighed. ‘Well, there was the grand psycho-concordance of London that ate up so much time and energy. Ever since I abandoned it I have been a bit stuck.’

‘No plans? Ambitions?’ I must sound like Polly, I thought, and that reminded me of her neat list of times and her, if you get a moment, mandatory tasks.

Pierce sighed again, bringing his whole upper body into the action, shoulders slumping – as if the will to go on was visibly deserting him. It was bizarre that the voluble, gossipy creature of a couple of minutes ago should yield to this exhausted, taciturn presence.

‘The encyclopedia was part of a broader project – if you can call it a project, more of an ambition,’ he said. ‘The same project, in fact, as Night Traffic. An attempt to discover something about the city. I don’t know where that project is going now.’

I checked the DVR, but only out of instinct, and watched the seconds climb, recording useless, dud material.

‘So this larger project …’ I began.

Pierce rolled his eyes. ‘You know that stuff they used to put in shower gel? I think they’ve banned it. These little particles, little grains of plastic. It was always called, I don’t know, “dermabrasion microbeads” and I guess most people thought it was pumice or pulverised seashells or something, but it wasn’t, it was plastic, tiny specks of plastic. All this plastic going straight down the plughole, into rivers, into the ocean. Fish eating it. Seabirds eating it. It was poisoning everything. Those big swirling garbage patches in the oceans, they’re not all Lucozade bottles and Ninja Turtles, most of it is this plastic dust that is almost too small to see. But it’s choking up everything. Anyway, that’s what I think of when I read a lot of writing about London: synthetic grit. Plastic that makes you feel a little better for a moment or two, a little invigorated, and then it poisons the world.’

This reminded me of a few passages from Night Traffic – Pierce had written about sitting in his flat after the attack, surrounded by novels and non-fiction about the gritty, grimy, real city having just encountered genuine crime, and feeling that he was surrounded by fraud, including his own work – especially his own work.

‘You talk about that in Night Traffic, don’t you? About craving an authentic experience in the city, something not commercial and not nostalgic, not packaged, but real …’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Pierce said, although there wasn’t much in his reply that was affirmative. Instead he appeared embarrassed, with those broad shoulders still hunched forward, staring into his coffee as if he expected the cadaver of a family member to come bobbing to its surface. ‘That, that’s what I wanted to do.’

I tried not saying anything – that old trick of barristers and psychotherapists – to see if he volunteered more information, but nothing came. The DVR recorded the silence of the room, the small sounds of the leather seats, a muted police siren from the direction of the main road. This was going exactly the way that Freya had predicted: he simply did not have anything new to say, and was unwilling to return to subjects he had talked about in the past. A few quotes about a years-old book and abandoned projects weren’t going to be enough, and not enough time had elapsed for this to be a Whatever-Happened-To piece, all melancholy thoughts about the fleeting nature of fame and the callous muse. Those weren’t the magazine’s style, anyway: Eddie wanted fresh, up-and-coming, ahead of the curve, stylish. Not worn-out artists and their sadsack regrets. It’d be ten pages on De Chauncey, then, about his suits and his cars and the secrets of his success.

The coffee Pierce had made was good, but I wondered if he had left it too long on the stove. As I drank it, I was becoming more and more aware of a burned taste accumulating in my mouth.

‘The reaction to Night Traffic was extraordinary,’ I said. ‘Did you feel overwhelmed? Is that why you …’ I realised that I did not have a good way to describe exactly what it was that Pierce had done. Withdrawn from view? Become a hermit? Fucked up his career, just as he was now fucking up mine? ‘Why you stopped writing?’

At last, a strong reaction: Pierce looked up sharply and the eyes got me again. ‘Stopped writing? What makes you say that?’

‘Everything you’ve been saying,’ I said. ‘No new books, no journalism, not even working with F.A.Q. – you sound completely blocked.’

‘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.

‘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.’

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.’