I left the flat early. Just past seven in the morning.
I knew I’d be out all day and was dressed for all weather – trainers, jeans, T-shirt and my new favourite hoodie. Something I usually wore around the flat. It was too big for me and was really baggy but it had fleece on the inside and was comforting.
Before I left I pulled my hair back in a ponytail and popped my cap on. I checked myself in the mirror. My face looked puffy, and there were dark patches around the eyes. Fuck it. After the night I’d had, the point was to look sexless. Completely and utterly sexless. With my sunglasses on, I was anonymous, too. Perfect attire for meeting Max.
As an afterthought, I grabbed my gym bag, emptied it and threw in my laptop, purse, phone, some changes of underwear, my makeup bag, sandals and a fresh tee. Then I added a dress. Anything could happen. I might never return.
Helen and Malcolm were already awake; I could hear faint noises in the kitchen upstairs. Helen would be waiting for me to come up and talk to her. It wasn’t going to happen. I had to buy some time. Liam would get back to me, eventually. Even if he only read a few sample chapters while taking his morning shit. He was usually quick with his assessments. They weren’t always right but they generally pointed in the right direction, which was helpful.
And then I was on the street moving quickly. I felt hounded. No one was following me, but I could feel the weight of Helen’s reproaches. I could feel Daniel’s idiotic hopes. I could feel Malcolm’s censure. I could also feel the truth bearing down on me. The one I would not allow or admit.
I slowed my pace once I was out of view of Helen and Malcolm’s place and was nearing the tube station. I was meeting Max at the V&A at eleven. It was his favourite meeting place, being a short walk from his office. But I had hours to kill before then. My default time killer was the National Gallery, but it was too early.
The tube took me to Sloane Square where I had breakfast at Côte Brasserie. It wasn’t busy so I opened my laptop and did some work for Liam. I ordered another coffee to make it last, but the waitress eventually grew tired of my presence. I felt uncomfortable under her gaze and moved on.
I had never strolled down the King’s Road so early. None of the shops were open. It was depressing. I crossed the street to look at the books in Waterstones’ windows. There were our books: a neat little pile of the older titles in paperback beside a larger display of the latest hardcover, No Going Back Now. They were stickered with ‘No. 1 Bestseller’.
And in the next window were all of the Man Booker longlisters. Malcolm’s book was there. Each book was accompanied by a photo of the author and a quote. The standard author photo of Malcolm – taken about twenty years ago – was accompanied by a quote from the radio interview: ‘A Hundred Ways isn’t about anything. That’s why no one wanted to publish it. It’s just a tiny blood clot. That’s all it is. And it’s travelling along an artery towards our collective brain – culture. Now I just want to live long enough to see the surprise in the eye of mankind as the aneurysm strikes.’
I was about to keep walking when Waterstones opened. I went in.
I stupidly decided to buy the other longlisters. Thirteen books. And then made another poor decision, which was to walk. By the time I reached the V&A my arms were about to break. It wasn’t far, but I took a couple of wrong turns and the bags were heavy.
I arrived at the V&A early. I left the books in the cloakroom and walked through to the inner courtyard. This was my favourite spot in the V&A. Years ago, when Max would drag me here to exhibitions, if it was sunny, I would let him go around without me and I’d wait for him, lying in the sun with my feet in the paddling pool. Now, there were people already doing what I had once done. I stood looking for a spot when I heard my name.
Max was seated behind me, near the south wall at a small white table half in and half out of the sun. He was in the shade and the Penguin Modern Classic he’d been reading was resting open face down on his knee. I don’t know how he knew it was me. I had passed my reflection in a shop window and had stared at it. I thought I looked completely anonymous.
I’d forgotten his ways. He was always early. It caused him great anxiety to be late; to counter that he habitually arrived at least half an hour early for things. It used to drive me nuts and was the cause of many arguments. We’d often end up arriving separately.
There are moments in your life when you know you’ve taken the wrong path. Meeting Helen had been a wrong step. Seeing Max seated at a table with a coffee and a bottle of mineral water in the V&A garden was confirmation of my error. I felt convinced that we were meeting because of that choice. The life I was living now with Helen and Malcolm was a shadow of the life I had lived with Max. The same centre of gravity. The same ambitions. I had re-entered his world by stepping through Helen’s front door.
But I thought I’d left all that behind. I’d put years, millions of words and many men between me and the Amy who hung on every word that left his lips.
I didn’t go to him now. I stood firm and stared.
I’d forgotten how petite he was. He’d grown in my memory. He wasn’t exactly short – he was taller than me – but he was small: slight hands, thin wrists, narrow shoulders, no hips. Not an ounce of fat on him. He was wearing dark suit trousers, brown leather belt, matching brogues and a pink shirt. His suit jacket was hanging on the back of his seat. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, and his top button was undone, which was his concession to the sunny day.
There was a moment when I thought I would just walk off. He was suddenly alien. I looked at his face. His lips. His eyes. The slight stubble. He wasn’t the same. It wasn’t the Max I’d known. The Max I knew didn’t need to shave. The Max I knew had a light in his eyes, an eternal optimism. A hint of laughter on his lips.
He must have sensed I was edging towards flight. ‘Amy,’ he said again, and stood.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. It was a mistake. I saw him naked. I saw that slight figure standing at the end of the bed. The pale skin. The patches of dark hair on his chest and the thick pubic hair. I remembered his cock and the weight of his body on mine. I remembered his hand on my hip as he slept, the nights in his arms while we read. I remembered how he held my hand on the street. I remembered how I had wanted him.
I opened my eyes. There were tears in them, but I brushed them aside. He wasn’t the Max I had known. He was older. He was more reserved. He was a stranger.
I placed my sunglasses on the table, read the title of the book, Extinction by Thomas Bernhard, then I sat opposite him in the sun.
‘There is no us, so don’t even mention the past,’ he said straight off. He might have slapped me. That was the effect. My cheeks reddened. I stared at him in disbelief.
‘Would you like a coffee?’ he added. I shook my head. Still smarting.
The hoodie was too warm now. But I couldn’t take it off. I really didn’t want to be me in front of him.
‘You’re different,’ I said.
‘Of course I’m fucking different,’ he said. He looked at me very directly. ‘And you know why.’
There was no denying anything he said.
‘You owe me,’ he added.
I knew what it was for him to say this. He didn’t want anything from me back then or since. Something had changed.
I nodded.
‘The magazine is in trouble. I need something big. Something that will sell physical copies and something that will get people to beyond the paywall online. An article that might get syndicated in the US.’
‘Surely one article won’t save you if you’re in financial trouble.’
‘The backers are getting anxious. A small uptick in sales would settle them down and give me another six months. It’ll also raise my profile and give me a platform to leap from if it came to that.’
‘So you want access to Liam?’
‘I can get access to Liam, for Christ’s sake. Anyone could. He’s on tour most of the year. He’s overexposed. No, I don’t want access to Liam.’
‘What do you want then?’
‘I want the black man.’
At first I didn’t catch his meaning. Then I remembered Val McDermid’s book launch.
‘Liam doesn’t see things like that.’
‘Bullshit.’
It was bullshit. ‘Why would he talk to you about it?’
‘Why not? Especially if you introduced the idea to him. You know, while sucking his cock.’
‘Hard to talk with cock in your mouth.’
‘You know what I mean.’
I turned around to look over at the children playing in the fountain. This wasn’t going the way I imagined. He was being brutal, something he didn’t know how to be when I had known him.
My face still turned away, I said, ‘Liam despises guys like you. He says you’re the cock-blockers of literature.’
‘Is that what he says?’
‘No, I was paraphrasing.’
‘What does it mean – cock-blockers of literature?’
‘What it says. There’s a ton of great new writing out there, and Liam thinks writers like you denigrate it without reading a page.’
‘There isn’t much truth to that accusation. Besides, he probably reads as much of my writing as I read of his.’
‘You’re wrong there. Liam reads everything. He’ll eat you alive if you give him a hint of that shit. Really, it won’t take much, a drop of elitist blood in the water and you’ll be dinner.’
‘Still, he can’t be that bright, if writing what he writes satisfies him.’
‘Fuck you, Max.’
He was being awful. There was so much anger in him. I hadn’t expected it. I thought he would have moved on. He seemed to have moved on. There had been no contact.
‘Do you still write this shit down?’ asked Max.
‘If you mean my diary, yes.’
‘Do you ever re-read the bits about us?’
‘No. I don’t look back.’
‘You got it all wrong, you know. You’re going to get this wrong, too, if you think it worthy of recording,’ he said, pressing the tip of his index finger against the tabletop. ‘I read it, you know. All of it. That’s how I found out how corrupt you really are. You aren’t honest enough to record the truth. Aren’t smart enough, either. All the great diarists have an unworldly capacity for revelation. They hit on universal truths almost by accident. You write fiction. You rely on tropes and clichés. Your psychological assessments were way off. Your worries and concerns. Your childish hopes and dreams. Fantasies. And you wrote terrible things about me. But at least that was interesting. Reading a fictional Max, with fictional motives and anxieties.’
‘I thought we weren’t going to talk about the past.’
‘And then you also wrote in detail about fucking Liam. Like it was an erotic novel. So much detail. Why would you do that?’
‘I got off on it,’ I said, wanting to land something on him.
‘The sex scenes in the Jack Cade books are just as banal; I bet you write them, too.’
I said nothing.
‘I tormented myself for a week before I got the courage to confront you and throw you out. I got to observe you that whole week knowing what I’d learnt. It changed you in my eyes. I knew where you’d been, could see what you were seeing. You behaved atrociously towards me. You revelled in the deception. Got off on it. Lied to my face. Day in, day out. Not only to me, to Liam, to your work, to your friends, to yourself in the diary.’
Even though I was angry at the way he was treating me, I deserved every word of it. The tears started to fall so I put my sunglasses back on and pulled my hoodie over my cap.
It was a beautiful setting for a horrible fucking conversation. All around us people were chatting; the kids paddling in the fountain were shrieking with delight.
‘And I fucked you after I knew. That was the worst bit. That’s the bit I regret. I shouldn’t have. But I loved you so much and it was ending. Everything we’d shared up until that moment had been intact till then. As soon as I fucked you knowing that Liam had probably fucked you that morning, or afternoon, or both, all of our past years crumbled to dust.’
My shoulders were shaking. I raised my hand to my mouth in order to smother any noises I might make.
‘I read some this morning, to remind myself.’
‘You made a copy of my diary?’
‘Yes, and I read it to remind me what you’re really like.’ He handed me his handkerchief. ‘Because try as I might, even after all this time, and after all I know of you, I can’t stop loving you.’
I looked at his face hopefully, but found only animosity in his eyes. His jaw was clenched and he spoke the next words as though spitting out poison.
‘I hate you and love you in the same breath. Reading it reminds me to hate the more.’
I had done all of this to a man who loved me. If he were a changed man, I had changed him.
But the diary wasn’t the whole story. Diaries never are.
We sat in silence for a long time. I wiped my eyes and eventually stopped crying. I couldn’t look at him, so behind my sunglasses I closed my eyes.
I was the first to speak. ‘How much does the magazine need?’
‘Are you going to invest? Is that what you’re suggesting?’
‘Yes, why not?’
‘Because I’d rather close it than take money you’ve made writing that shit with him.’
‘How much do you need?’
‘I know you can fix it. I know that. But I don’t want you to fix it like that. Do you understand? All I need is for you to get Liam to agree to talk about race and racism in Britain.’
‘He won’t do it. It’s too risky. Popular writers stay out of politics.’
‘I’ve been researching black writing in Britain and I’ve interviewed a number of literary authors, most of whom struggle to make ends meet. I really need to get the perspective of a successful black writer.’
‘Perhaps part of his success is due to not discussing his race.’
‘His hero, Mark Harden, is black!’
‘Don’t you think that’s awesome enough? He’s got white readers all around the world invested in and cheering for a black man. That’s political, don’t you think? That’s a bloody achievement.’
‘But I want him to say as much.’
My phone rang. I searched in my gym bag and dug it out. It was Liam.
‘Sorry, I have to take this.’
I walked quickly away from the table to the far corner. I took a very deep breath and answered, hoping to mask all that I was feeling. ‘Hi, what do you think?’
‘Whatever you said to her last night worked. She’s not going to leave me.’
‘Oh, Gail, right. Good. I meant the manuscript.’
I turned and looked back across at Max. He was reading again.
‘I emailed a response ages ago. What have you been doing?’
‘I’m having coffee with Max.’
‘Oh, fuck. How did that come about?’
‘Long story. So is the manuscript money?’
‘Yep, it’s money. I’m going to finish it tomorrow. But it’s money. No doubt. Whose is it?’
‘One of Julia’s finds.’
‘Really?’
‘Yep. She’ll be happy to hear you think it’s good.’
‘I’m meeting her later. I’ll let her know,’ said Liam.
‘You’re meeting her?’
‘Yeah, we’re having dinner. Her suggestion.’
‘Without me?’
‘Yep, she wanted it that way. Says you hate her. Do you?’
‘Of course I hate her – she’s inhuman.’
‘I’ll say you said, hi, then.’
‘Don’t you fucking dare. And don’t mention the manuscript. I want the cred on this one. She’s still my boss.’
‘Why the fuck do you bother with all that? You don’t need to be on the payroll there.’
‘I like causing trouble. Delete the manuscript when you’re done. I wasn’t meant to show anyone. I have to go.’
‘Hey, do you know it’s been at least three weeks since we last fucked? I miss you.’
‘It can’t be that long.’
‘It is. I’m counting. What happened to every Thursday? You need to find time for me. I miss you. I want you.’
‘We need to talk, Liam.’
‘That sounds ominous.’
‘It is. But we need to discuss this face to face.’
‘Shit, Amy, tell me now.’
‘No. Goodbye. I have to get back to Max.’
I pressed end.
When I looked towards the table, Max was gone. My backpack was slung over the chair. I hurried over to it before the bomb squad arrived to blow it up.