March 11, 2016
PLAZA DE LA ADUANA IS THROBBING with Cartagenans holding their iPhones aloft. Plaza de la Aduana is roofed by a tropical twilight of Fanta Orange and oily amethyst. Plaza de la Aduana is oscillating to the cod-ska chorus of “Exocets for Breakfast” by Damon MacNish and the Sinking Ship. Up on his balcony, Crispin Hershey taps ash into his champagne glass and remembers a sexual encounter to the music of She Blew Out the Candle—the Sinking Ship’s debut album—around the time of his twenty-first birthday, when the images of Morrissey, Che Guevara, and Damon MacNish surveyed a million student bedrooms. The second album was less well received—bagpipes and electric guitars usually end in tears—and the follow-up’s follow-up bombed. MacNish would have returned to his career in pizza delivery had he not resurrected himself as a celebrity campaigner for AIDS, for Sarajevo, for the Nepalese minority in the Kingdom of Bhutan, for any cause at all, as far as I could see. World leaders eagerly submitted themselves to two minutes of MacNish while the cameras rolled. Winner of Sexiest Scot of the Year for three years running, tabloid interest in his regularly rotating girlfriends, a steady trickle of okay but mojoless albums, an ethical clothing brand, and two BBC seasons of Damon MacNish’s Five Continents kept the Glaswegian’s star well lit until the last decade, and even today “Saint Nish” remains in demand at festivals, where he delivers a polished Q&A by day and a tour through his old hits by night—for a mere $25,000 plus business-class travel and five-star accommodation, I understand.
I slap a mosquito against my cheek. The little bastards are the price for this delicious warmth. Zo? and the girls were due to join me here—I’d even bought the (nonrefundable) tickets—but then the shitstorm blew up about Zo?’s earth-mother marriage counselor. ￡250+VAT for an hour of platitudes about mutual respect? “No,” I told Zo?, “and, as we all know, no means no.”
Zo? opened fire with every weapon known to woman.
Yes, the porcelain mermaid was launched from my hand. But had it been aimed at her, it would not have missed. Therefore I didn’t mean to hurt her. Zo?, by now too hysterical to follow this simple logic, packed her Louis Vuitton bags and left with Lori the hairy au pair to pick up Ana?s and Juno from school, thence to her old friend’s pad in Putney. Which was mysteriously available at zero notice. Crispin was supposed to proffer promises to mend his ways, but he preferred to watch No Country for Old Men with the volume up really loud. The following day, I wrote a story about a gang of feral youths who roam the near future, siphoning oil tanks of lardy earth mothers. It’s one of my best. Zo? phoned that evening and told me she “needed space—perhaps a fortnight”; the subtext being, dear reader, If you apologize grovelingly enough, I may come back. I suggested that she take a month and hung up. Lori brought Juno and Ana?s to visit last Sunday. I was expecting tears and emotional blackmail, but Juno told me her mother had described me as impossible to live with, and Ana?s asked if she could have a pony if we got divorced, because when Germaine Bigham’s parents got divorced she got a pony. It rained all day, so I ordered in pizza. We played Mario Carts. John Cheever has a short story called “The Season of Divorce.” It’s one of his best.
“STILL PUTS ON a decent show, don’t he, f’ra fella his age?” Kenny Bloke offers me a smoke as Damon MacNish windmills through “Corduroy Skirts Are a Crime Against Humanity.” “I saw the lads in Fremantle, back in … eighty-six? Fackin’ A.” Kenny Bloke’s in his late fifties, sports ironmongery in his ear, and is a Noongar elder, according to the festival bumf. I observe how Damon MacNish and many of his contemporaries have turned into their own tribute bands, which must be a peculiar and postmodern fate. Kenny Bloke taps ash into the geraniums. “MacNish’s sitting pretty compared to a lot of them, I reckon. Guess who was playing at Busselton Park not so long ago? Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. Remember them? Not a massive turnout, I’m afraid, but they’ve got pensions and kids to put through college, same as everyone. Us writers get spared that, at least, eh? Farewell tours on the nostalgia circuit.”
I probe this not-necessarily-true remark. Echo Must Die cleared twenty thousand in the U.K. and the same in the States. Respectable …
… -ish, but for the new Crispin Hershey novel, disappointing. Time was I’d shift a hundred thousand units in both territories, no questions asked. Hyena Hal talks about eBook downloads reconfiguring the old paradigm, but I know exactly why my “return to form” novel failed to sell—Richard Cheeseman’s Rottweilering. That one sodding review declared open season on the Wild Child of British Letters, and by the time the Brittan Prize longlist was announced, Echo Must Die was better known as The One Richard Cheeseman Hilariously Shafted. I scan the spacious ballroom behind us. Still no sign of him, but he won’t resist the tug of coffee-skinned Latino butlers for long.
“Did you look around the old quarter today?” asks Kenny Bloke.
“Yes, it’s pretty in a UNESCO way. If a touch unreal.”
The Australian grunts. “My taxi driver told me how the FARC people and the intelligence services needed a place for a holiday, so Cartagena’s their de facto demilitarized zone.” He accepts one of my cigarettes. “Don’t tell the missus—she thinks I’ve given up.”
“Your secret’s safe. I doubt I’ll be coming to …?”
“Katanning. Western Australia. Bottom-left corner. Compared to this”—Kenny Bloke gestures at the Latin Baroque glory—“it’s a dingo’s arse. But my people are buried there, from way, way back, and I wouldn’t want to leave my roots.”
“Rootlessness,” I opine, “is the twenty-first-century norm.”
“You’re not wrong and that’s why we’re in the shit we’re in, mate. If you belong nowhere, why give a tinker’s toss about anywhere?”
Damon MacNish’s drummer whacks out a solo and the sea of Latino youth below makes me feel WASPish and old. Friday, ten P.M. in London, no school tomorrow. Juno and Ana?s are handling my and Zo?’s trial separation with suspicious maturity. Surely I deserve a few teary episodes. Has Zo? been readying them for a bust-up? My old mucker Ewan Rice told me his first wife had sought legal advice six months before the D-word, hence her cool million-quid settlement. When had the rot set in for me and Zo?? Was it there at the very beginning, hiding like a cancer cell, on Zo?’s father’s yacht, Aegean sea light playing on the cabin ceiling, an empty wine bottle rolling oh-ever-so-gently on the cabin floor, this way and that, this way and that? We’d been celebrating Hal the Hyena’s text to say the auction for Desiccated Embryos had reached ￡750,000 and was still climbing. Zo? said, “Don’t panic, Crisp, but I’d like to spend my life with you.” This way and that … This way and that …
“Swim for it!” I want to shout at that moronic Romeo. Before you know it, she’ll “study” for an online PhD in crystal healing and call you narrow-minded if you dare wonder aloud where the science is. She’ll stop greeting you in the hallway when you get home. Her powers of accusation will stupefy you, young Romeo. If the au pair’s lazy, it’s your fault for vetoing the Polish troglodyte. If the piano teacher’s too strict, you should have found a huggier one. If Zo? is unfulfilled, it’s your fault for depriving her of the imperative to earn a living. Sex? Ha. “Stop pressuring me, Crispin.” “I’m not pressuring you, Zo?, I’m just asking when?” “Sometime.” “When is ‘Sometime’?” “Stop pressuring me, Crispin!” Men marry women hoping they’ll never change. Women marry men hoping they will. Both parties are disappointed, and meanwhile Romeo on the yacht kisses his soon-to-be-fiancée and murmurs, “Let’s get hitched, Miss Legrange.”
The drum solo ends and Damon MacNish bounds up to the mike, does a “One-two-three-five” and the Sinking Ship strike up “Disco in a Minefield.” I let my cigarette drop into an imaginary lake of gasoline and turn the plaza into a Doomsday whooosh, k’bammm! Ommmmmm …
I recognize a very familiar voice, mere feet away.
“So I told him,” Richard Cheeseman is saying, “ ‘Uh, no, Hillary—I don’t have a libretto of my own to show you, because I flush my shit down the toilet!’ ” Balding, midforties, round, and bearded. Hershey squeezes through the bodies and brings his hand down on the critic’s shoulder, like a wheel clamp. “Richard Cheeseman, as I live and breathe, you hairy old sodomite! How are you?”
Cheeseman recognizes me and spills his cocktail.
“Oh dear,” I emote, “all over your purple espadrilles, too.”
Cheeseman smiles, like a man about to have his jaw ripped from his skull, which is what I’ve long dreamt of doing. “Crisp!”
Don’t “Crisp” me, you wormfuck. “The stiletto I brought to skewer your cerebellum got seized at Heathrow, so you’re in the clear.” Those in the literary know are gravitating our way like sharks to a sinking cruise ship. “But my, oh, my,” I dab Cheeseman’s arm with a handy napkin, “you gave my last book a shitty review. Didn’t you?”
Cheeseman hisses through his rictus grin. “Did I?” Up go his hands in a jokey surrender. “Candidly? What I wrote, or how some intern slapped it about, I no longer recall—but if it caused you any offense—any offense at all!—I apologize.”
I could stop here, but Destiny demands a vengeance more epic, and who am I to deny Destiny? I address the onlookers. “Let’s get this out in the open. When Richard’s review of Echo Must Die appeared, many people asked, ‘How did it feel, to read that?’ For a while, my answer was ‘How does it feel to have acid flung in your face?’ Then, however, I began to think about Richard’s motives. To a lesser writer, one could attribute the motive of envy, but Richard is himself a novelist of growing stature and a motive of petty malice didn’t wash. No. I believe that Richard Cheeseman cares deeply about literature, and feels duty-bound to tell the truth as he sees it. So you know what? Bravo for Richard. He misappraised my last novel, but this man”—again, I clasp his shoulder in its ruffled shirt—“is a bulwark against the rising tide of arselickery that passes for lit crit. Let the record show I harbor not a gram of animus towards him—provided he brings us both a huge mojito and pronto, you scurrilous, scabby hack.”
Smiles! Applause! Cheeseman and I do a mongrel mix of a handshake and a high-five. “You got me back, though, Crisp,” his sweaty forehead shines, “with your jealous-fairy line at Hay-on-Wye—look, I’ll go and get those mojitos.”
“I’ll be on the balcony,” I tell him, “where the air’s a little cooler.” Then I’m mobbed by a dollop of nobodies who seriously suppose I’d bother to remember their names and faces. They praise my noble fair-mindedness. I respond nobly and fair-mindedly. Crispin Hershey’s magnanimity will be reported and retweeted and so it will become the truth. From across the plaza, through the balcony doors, we hear Damon MacNish bellowing: “Te amo, Cartagena!”
AFTER THE FINAL encore, the VIPs and writers are driven to the president’s villa in a convoy of about twenty bombproof 4×4 limousines. Police sirens brush aside the riffraff and traffic lights are ignored as we levitate through nocturnal Cartagena. My traveling companions are a Bhutanese playwright, who speaks no English, and two Bulgarian filmmakers, who appear to be swapping a string of disgusting but funny limericks in their own language. Through the smoked-glass window of the limousine I watch a nighttime market, an anarchic bus station, sweat-stained apartment blocks, street cafés, hawkers selling cigarettes from trays strapped to their lean torsos. Global capitalism does not appear to have been kind to the owners of these impassive faces. I wonder what these working-class Colombians make of us? Where do they sleep, what do they eat, of what do they dream? Each of the American-built armored limousines surely costs more than a lifetime’s earnings for these street vendors. I don’t know. If a short, unfit British novelist in his late forties were ejected onto the roadside in one of these neighborhoods, I would not fancy his chances.
The presidential villa lies beyond a military training school, and security is rigorous. The party is al fresco in the villa’s tasteful and floodlit gardens, where drinks are served and vol-au-vents circulated by crisply ironed staff, and a jazz combo is doing a Stan Getz thing. The swimming pool is lined with candles, and I cannot see it without imagining an assassinated politician floating facedown in it. Several ambassadors are holding court in huddles, reminding me of circles of boys in a playground. The British one’s about somewhere. He’s younger than me. Now the Foreign Office has gone all meritocratic our diplomats have lost their larger-than-life Graham Greeneness, and are of less novelistic use. The view across the bay is impressive, with its slapdash South American shorefronts erased by the night, and a baroque moon floats aloft a fecund, one might say spermy, Milky Way. The president himself is in Washington drawing down more U.S. tax dollars for the “War on Drugs”—one more push!—but his Harvard-educated wife and orthodontically majestic sons are busy winning hearts and minds for the family business. Piggishly, he admits, Crispin Hershey wonders whether there’s an offshore prison where ugly Colombian women are incarcerated, because I don’t recall seeing one since I arrived. Would I, dear reader, should I, were the opportunity to present itself? My wedding ring is six thousand miles away in the drawer where my rarely opened box of marital condoms is hurtling past its use-by date. If I am less married than at any point since my wedding day it is Zo?’s doing, not mine—as is abundantly clear to any halfway-objective witness. In fact, if she were an employer and I her employee, I would have strong grounds for suing her for constructive dismissal. Look at how atrociously she and her family ostracized me during the Christmas holidays. Even three months later, on my third glass of champers, gazing at the Southern Cross and warmed by a balmy 20 degrees Celsius, I shudder …
? ? ?
… Zo? and the girls had flown out to Montreal as soon as school broke up, giving me a week to get stuck into my new book, a black comedy about a fake mystic who pretends to see the Virgin Mary during the Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival. It’s one of my best three or four. Unfortunately that week without me also allowed Zo?’s family to get to work on Juno and Ana?s, inculcating in my daughters the cultural superiority of the French-speaking world. By the time I arrived at our little pad in Outremont on December 23, the girls would only speak to me in English when I explicitly ordered them to. Zo? allowed them a treble budget of online games as long as they played en fran?ais, and Zo?’s sister took them and their cousins out to a Christmas fashion show, in French, followed by some sort of teenybop boy-band concert, in French. Cultural bribery of the first degree—and when I objected, Zo? was all, “Well, Crispin, I believe in broadening the girls’ horizons and giving them access to their family roots—and I’m astonished and depressed that you want them locked inside Anglo-American monoculture.” Then, on Boxing Day, we all went bowling. The eugenically favored Legranges were astonished beyond words by my score: twenty. Not on one ball, but for the whole sodding game. I’m just not built for bowling; I’m built for writing. Juno flicked back her hair and said, “Papa, I don’t know where to look.”
“Creespin!” Here comes Miguel Alvarez, my Spanish-language editor, smiling as if he has a present for me. “Creespin, I have a small present for you. Follow me a little, to a place a little more discreet.” Feeling like an Irvine Welsh character, I follow Miguel away from the hubbub of the main party to a bench in the shadow of a tall wall behind, indeed, a tangle of cacti. “So, I have items you ask for, Creespin.”
“That’s most obliging of you.” I light a cigarette.
Miguel slips a small envelope the size of a credit card into my jacket pocket. “Enjoy, is shame to leave Colombia without tasting. Is very very pure. But a thing, Creespin. To use here, here in Cartagena, in private, is not big deal. But to transport, to carry to airport”—grimacing, Miguel slices his throat. “You understand?”
“Miguel, only a deadhead would consider taking drugs anywhere near an airport. Don’t worry. What I don’t use, I’ll flush away.”
“A good plan. Play safe. Enjoy. Is best in world.”
“And were you able to find a Colombian phone?”
“Yes, yes.” My editor hands me another envelope.
It, too, goes into my jacket pocket. “Thank you. Smartphones are great when they work, but if the coverage is dodgy you can’t beat the little old phones for sending texts, I find.”
Miguel tilts his head, not really agreeing, but thirty dollars, or however much the thing cost him, is a cheap price to keep the Wild Child of British Letters onside. “So, now you have all, and all is good?”
“Very good indeed, Miguel, thank you.”
Like my best plots, this one is writing itself.
“Eh, Crispin,” beckons Kenny Bloke, the Australian poet, as we pass a huddle of celebrants on the far gate of the cactus garden. “Some people here to meet.” Miguel and I join the small group of writers, apparently, under a canopy of tree ferns. The foreign names don’t really sink in—none has had a story in The New Yorker, so far as I’m aware, but when Kenny Bloke’s introducing me to the pale, dark-haired, angular woman, I suffer a throb of recognition even before he names her: “Holly Sykes, a fellow Pom.”
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Hershey,” she says.
“You’re vaguely familiar,” I tell her, “if I’m not mistaken?”
“We were both at the Hay Festival on the same day, last year.”
“Not that sodding awful party in that ghastly tent?”
“We were both in the signing tent, actually, Mr. Hershey.”
“Hang on! Yes. You’re that angel author. Holly Sykes.”
“Not angels in the harps-’n’-haloes sense, though,” interjects Kenny Bloke. “Holly writes about inner voices—and as I was just saying, there’s a strong affinity with the spirit guides my people believe in.”
“Miss Sykes,” says Miguel, oleaginously. “I am Miguel Alvarez, editor of Ottopusso, editor of Creespin. Is great honor.”
The Sykes woman shakes his hand. “Mr. Alvarez.”
“Is true you sell over half-million books in Spain?”
“My book seemed to strike a chord there,” she says.
“Uri Geller struck a chord everywhere.” I’m drunker than I thought. “Remember him? Michael Jackson’s best mate? Big in Japan? Huge.” My cocktail tastes of mango and seawater.
Miguel smiles at me but swivels his eyes back to the Sykes woman like an Action Man figure I once owned. “You happy with your Spanish publishers, Miss Sykes?”
“As you pointed out, they sold half a million copies.”
“Is fantastic. But in case of problem, here, my card …”
As Miguel hovers, another woman materializes by the tree fern’s trunk like a Star Trek character. She’s dark, golden, mid-to-late thirties, and impalingly attractive. Miguel says, “Carmen!” as if he’s delighted to see her.
Carmen stares at Miguel’s business card until it vanishes into his jacket pocket, then turns to Holly Sykes. I’m expecting a Latina accent full of thunder, but she speaks like a Home Counties domestic-science teacher. “I hope Miguel hasn’t been making a nuisance of himself, Holly—the man is a shameless poacher. Yes, you are, Miguel—I know you haven’t forgotten the Stephen Hawking episode.” Miguel tries to look jokey-penitent, but misses and looks like a man in white jeans who underestimates a spot of flatulence. “Mr. Hershey,” the woman turns my way, “we’ve never met. I’m Carmen Salvat, and I have the singular privilege”—a dart aimed at Miguel—“of being Holly’s Spanish-language publisher. Welcome to Colombia.”
Carmen Salvat’s handshake is no-nonsense. She radiates. With her free hand she toys with her necklace of lapis lazuli.
Kenny Bloke pipes up: “Holly mentioned that you also publish Nick Greek in Spanish, Carmen?”
“Yes, I bought the rights to Route 605 before Nick had finished the manuscript. I just had a good feeling about it.”
“Bloody blew me away, that book did,” says Kenny Bloke. “Totally deserved last year’s Brittan Prize, I reckon.”
“Nick has a lovely soul,” says a Newfoundland poetess, whose name I’ve already forgotten but who has the eyes of a seal gazing out of a Greenpeace poster. “Truly lovely.”
“Carmen knows how to pick a winner,” says Miguel. “But I think, in sales, Holly is still streets ahead, no, Carmen?”
“Which reminds me,” says Carmen Salvat. “Holly, the minister of culture’s wife would love to meet you—could I be a pest?”
As the Sykes woman is led away, I watch Carmen Salvat’s appetizing haunches and get to work on a fantasy in which my phone rings—right now: a doctor in London with the catastrophic news that Zo?’s Saab was knocked off the Hammersmith flyover by a drunk driver. She and the girls were killed instantly. I fly home tomorrow for the funeral. My grief is ennobling, but crushing, and I withdraw from life. I’m glimpsed occasionally riding the obscurer London Tube lines, out in zones four and five. Spring adds, summer multiplies, autumn subtracts, winter divides. One day next year, Hershey finds himself at the end of the Piccadilly Line at Heathrow airport. He exits the Tube, wanders into Departures, and glances up at the board to see the name “Cartagena”—the last place on earth where he was still a husband and father. On an impulse he cannot explain, he buys himself a one-way ticket—for some reason he has his passport with him—and the evening of that very same day finds him wandering the streets of the old colonial quarter of the Colombian town. Girls in love with boys on scooters, screeching birds, tropical flowers on winding vines, saudade, and solitude, One Hundred Years of it; and then, as the tropical dusk darkens the corners of the Plaza de la Aduana, Hershey sees a woman, her fingers toying with a necklace of lapis lazuli, and they stand still as the world eddies about them. Surprisingly, neither is surprised.
MANY COCKTAILS LATER, I’m helping a royally bladdered Richard Cheeseman into the lift and back to his room. “I’m fine, Crisp, I look drunkier than I am, really.” The lift doors open and we step inside. He staggers like a drugged camel in storm-force winds. “Jussamo, I f’got m’room number, I’ll just”—Cheeseman takes out his wallet and drops it—“oh, bumplops’n’pissflaps.”
“Allow me.” I pick up Cheeseman’s wallet and take out the swipe-card in its sleeve—405—before returning it. “There you go, squire.”
Cheeseman nods his thanks and mumbles, “If th’numbers in y’room number add up to nine, Hersh, you’ll never die in it.”
I press 4. “First stop, your room.”
“I’m fine. Icanfindmy—my—my way home.”
“But I’m duty-bound to see you safe to your door, Richard. Don’t worry, my intentions are entirely honorable.”
Cheeseman snonks: “Y’not my type, y’too white’n’too saggy.”
I see my reflection in the mirrored wall, and recall a wise man telling me that the secret of happiness is to ignore your reflection in mirrors once you’re over forty. This year I’ll be fifty. The door goes ping and we step out, passing a lean and tanned white-haired couple. “This place usedt’be a nunnery,” Cheeseman tells them, “fullo’virgins,” and croons an early hit by Madonna. We shuffle along a corridor half open to the Caribbean night. A crooked corner, then 405. I swipe Cheeseman’s card through the lock and the handle yields. “ ’Snottalot,” says Cheeseman, “burra callit home.”
Cheeseman’s room’s lit by the bedside lamp, and the destroyer of my comeback novel staggers over to his bed, trips over his suitcase, and belly-flops onto the mattress. “Notteverynight,” flobbers monsieur le critique, as he succumbs to an onslaught of giggles, “I get escorted home by the Wild Child of British Letters.”
I tell him, Yes, that’s hilarious, and sweet dreams, and if he’s not up by eleven, I’ll call up from Reception. “Ammabs’lutely fine,” he drawls, “I truly, madly, deeply, truly, really am. Really.”
Arms outspread, the critic Richard Cheeseman passes out.