The Pier Falls: And Other Stories

  Nor does he sleep the following night at the hotel, despite Hellboy on the Mac, two Paracodol and three whiskies from the minibar. He stares into the grainy, monochrome dark, listening to the low, irregular timpani of the heating pipes, unable to let go of the world. He knows that if he falls asleep the stranger will enter the room and slaughter him. It is more than simple fear, however. He has never really thought of himself as possessing an unconscious. He has seldom looked inwards and has seen little on those rare occasions. He loves busyness, company, tasks, exercise. Belatedly he is realising that there is a vital part of the mind which can go badly wrong but which cannot be easily accessed. He is forty-one years old and only now becoming aware of a problem his less confident contemporaries were grappling with on the windswept edge of the playground at St. Aloysius Primary School.

  The following afternoon Veronique, the executive producer from Palomar, pitches up and makes polite enquiries into Gavin’s health. He forgets to count to three and uses the phrase “the fucking matriarchy.” He is told to take four days off while the crew shoot background footage in Manchester and Edinburgh. “Yoga, sex, pills, whatever. Get some rest. You look like the walking dead.”

  Tony’s advice was intended to apply only to work situations, but when Emmy tells him to go to the doctor Gavin yet again fails to count to three, the upside being that Emmy moves into Pastor Manders’s guest room in Chiswick for a week “to make sure two careers don’t go down the tube,” and he is able to jam chairs under the handle of the bedroom door, sleep with the light on and leave Radio 4 chattering through the small hours.

  After four days he returns to Huddersfield and maybe he isn’t as sharp or as energetic as he was before but Annie says nothing and he makes it through the rest of the filming without medical assistance, which seems to him to be the most important thing of all, to have been his own saviour.

  But the week Emmy intends to spend sleeping elsewhere so that she arrives fresh onstage every night becomes two, then four. In week number six the much-delayed Fog finally opens. It is a low-budget Mike Singer film, shot the previous spring on the north Norfolk coast, in which Emmy plays the mother of a profoundly handicapped boy who might or might not be possessed by the Devil. Technically horror, it is hugely affecting and very beautiful and the reviews for Emmy’s performance in particular are ecstatic. In week number ten she is offered one of the female co-leads in Lockdown, a new crime seven-parter for ITV alongside Gemma Arterton and Matt Smith.

  When she meets Gavin for lunch at Honey & Co. on Warren Street the following day he seems unimpressed by her news which, in other circumstances, might offend her except that it is clearly part of some deeper problem with which he is wrestling. If only he were to ask for help, in however coded a fashion, she would find it impossible to refuse. But he doesn’t reach out, and if she has learnt one thing in their three years not-quite-together it is to say nothing which presupposes weakness on his part. So she leaves the last few forkfuls of her chestnut and rum cake, kisses him on the cheek and walks out knowing, even as she does so, that this is the unexpected minor cadence of their marriage ending.

  He gets an email from Sarah. She writes, “I would have preferred not to be in contact at all,” and it is this phrase which strikes Gavin with more force than the news that their father has slipped on an icy kerb en route to the newsagent and broken the top of his right femur. He should drive up to Leicester but he cannot bring himself to obey a summons, least of all from his sister. So he rings his mother, says that he’s filming, and asks her to send his father good wishes for a speedy recovery.

  Tony is having trouble finding a broadcaster for the Silk Road series. There are rumours about Gavin’s temperament but that shouldn’t matter. Viewing figures for Isambard’s Kingdom were consistently high and commissioners rarely care about interpersonal friction on set if it stays out of the papers. Two of the commissioners are new, however, and eager to personalise their fiefdoms and consequently disinclined to favour projects with which their predecessors had been toying.

  “It’s the wrong part of the cycle,” says Tony. “We hunker down, stay busy, give it twelve months, repackage…”

  “And that’s it?” says Gavin. “That’s your answer?”

  Tony pauses and says, “Gavin. You can fuck other people off, up to a point, but you do it to me and it’s curtains.”

  At which point the process of decline might still be reversible so long as Gavin tightens his belt, accepts all the public speaking engagements he’s offered, writes the text for The World’s Most Amazing Buildings, a children’s book Walker have commissioned, and does a few of the less-than-appealing adverts his agent is putting his way. Instead he does something so stupid that he will never be able fully to explain it either to himself or to anyone else.

  He is in the Hospital Club in Covent Garden, the membership of which is one of the expenses he might be wise to forgo until he has a steady income again. He is sitting in the bar writing the book for Walker because he dislikes being alone for long periods, which is one of the reasons he is unwilling to forgo the membership. He is drinking, just enough to take the edge off. It is shortly before three in the afternoon.

  “Gavin?”

  He looks up to find Edward Cole smiling down at him. Pastor Manders, the owner of the house to which his wife fled when she left him. The man makes him uneasy. Gay men in general make him uneasy. It’s the physical aspect, of course, but it’s also a sense that he is being mocked in a language that sounds superficially like English but which he doesn’t quite understand.

  “How are you doing?”

  “Yeh. I’m doing fine, Edward. Cheers.”

  “Emmy says she’s worried about you.”

  The following day Tony will say, “You’re a public figure, for Christ’s sake,” though the more pertinent fact is that Emmy is a public figure and Gavin is particularly galled to see that every article describing the incident describes him as “the estranged husband of…”

  He says, “Fuck you, Edward.”

  “Goodness.” Edward raises an eyebrow. “I see what she means.”

  “You have no fucking idea what she means.”

  “If you want my advice,” says Edward, because if someone snaps your olive branch then you are surely allowed to poke them with the broken end, “I’d stick to Earl Grey before the sun’s over the yardarm.”

  In the photo you can’t see the punch landing, which is one of the reasons why Gavin doesn’t end up being prosecuted for GBH, though there will be times, later in the year, when he thinks prison might have been the preferable option.

  He spends the night in the cells at the West End Central police station and is granted bail the following afternoon. He calls Tony but doesn’t realise the depth and nature of the shit he is in till Tony throws a copy of the Daily Mail into his lap. Their relationship, personal and business, ends before they reach Richmond. Walking the last two miles home Gavin is stopped by a boy of nine or ten who wants a joint selfie. Gavin tells him to go fuck himself and the boy starts to cry. He realises that the boy knows nothing of what happened the day before. The boy’s father says to Gavin, “What is wrong with you?”

  His financial adviser is “tied up with other clients” so he sits in one of the smaller meeting rooms at Crace & Lawner being talked at by a pustular underling who advises him to draw up a budget, liquidate some of his investments, rent out the house and move into a flat, and whose tone says, unmistakably, “We are no longer flattered by your custom.”

  Martin comes out of hospital with his femur pinned. He walks slowly and will use a frame for the first few weeks. Madeleine assumes that it is the pain and the drugs he is taking to dull it which are making him blurred and unmotivated, but when the dosage comes down and he begins walking unaided she can see that the fall has shattered something which is not physical, and that his redoubtable grip, on himself, on his family and on the world, had been a prolonged act of will he no longer has the energy to repeat.

&nbs
p; In Durham David puts a plastic bag over his head, pulling it tight by holding the loose material at the base of his skull like a ponytail. If he rides out the automatic reflex to uncover his mouth and nose he enters a place of great calm. He begins to feel woozy, his fist uncurls, the bag comes loose and he starts to breathe again. He does this often. He imagines his parents finding his body on the bedroom floor. He imagines a dog walker finding his body on nearby waste ground, decayed and bloated after a week’s search. He imagines being in a persistent vegetative state. All these things comfort him in different ways.

  Gavin remains drunk for most of the next three months, never blind, never stumbling, but starting with a whisky at breakfast and maintaining a modest but steady intake during the day so as to keep the world at two or three removes.

  When the Hospital Club withdraws his membership he transfers his custom to a string of less salubrious establishments in Covent Garden and Soho, moving on each time friendly advice is offered concerning his health and welfare.

  He does not open his post. He does not answer the phone. He does, however, open an email from Kirstin in Sydney. It says, “You forgot Thom’s birthday. I reminded you and you still forgot. If I write any more I will just get angry and I’m tired of being angry. Please don’t contact us again. Thom has a new father now. He is kind and generous and reliable. There is nothing good you can add to his life.”

  Every night for the next week when the stranger appears he is holding Thom by the scruff of the neck, pressing the barrel of the shotgun to the side of the boy’s head. Gavin tries to reach them but the intervening air is viscous and obstructive, the way it is in dreams, and the stranger pulls the trigger before he is halfway across the room so that Thom’s head becomes a spray of wet, red vapour.

  He is sitting in the Mem-Saab on Stukeley Street pretending to eat chicken tikka shashlik. It is the price of spending several hours in the warm human buzz, drinking his way through four bottles of Cobra. He has a ring-bound notebook with him and a big Phaidon volume on the architecture of Alvar Aalto so as to look and feel purposeful.

  Amber, whose name is very possibly not Amber, would have rung alarm bells three months ago: the confidence which doesn’t quite hide the damage, the blowsy, dog-eared glamour, a blurry tattoo swallow just below her left ear. What catches him off guard, however, is the way she sits herself down across the table and says, “I’m more of a Mies van der Rohe fan myself. Clean lines, white space. You want to be modern? Be modern. Don’t go off half-cocked.”

  She doesn’t pry or criticise. She says, “Life’s a bitch,” and while she’s referring explicitly to her father, who died when she was five years old, her eyes hold his long enough to let him know that she understands that he has been through a hard time himself recently. It should worry him, the speed and ease of this seeming rapport, but he is lonelier than he dares admit.

  She’s been an art student and an architecture student, though she finished neither course. She’s lived in Barcelona, Dublin, Norwich and Copenhagen. She has a pilot’s licence and knows how to build a drystone wall and the Swedish poem she recites sounds convincing to his untutored ear. The swift hop from story to story suggests that she wants none of them examined too closely but she has genuine charm, and when she disappears to the toilet and returns wiping her nose and talking too fast he is not dismissive and superior as he might previously have been.

  They take a taxi to Richmond where she slips off her shoes and socks and unbuttons her jeans and says, “I suppose you’ll want to fuck me now.” She seems ten years younger suddenly, her earlier confidence gone entirely. He doesn’t know if it is a piece of play-acting, or whether she is wearily bowing to the inevitable, offering him the use of her body in return for something she hasn’t yet spelled out. He’s several drinks beyond all but the most rudimentary moral judgement and she’s naked now, scrawny with big breasts, not a million miles from Emmy, or indeed Kirstin, if the clock were wound back and they’d led rougher lives. There is a big bruise on her left thigh.

  He takes the path of least resistance and they fuck on the sofa. He is inside her for a minute at most, no condom, no thought for her pleasure. Afterwards she wraps herself in the baby-blue cashmere rug he bought for Emmy’s birthday and smokes a cigarette. No one has ever smoked in the house but he says nothing and of all the day’s events it is this which most clearly marks the point past which he gives in to the momentum of the fall.

  He opens a bottle of Château Puy-Blanquet. They watch Shutter Island and say very little to one another, though whether this is because of a shared shame or a wordless bond he doesn’t know. They are conspirators now and don’t need to ask or answer such questions.

  In the middle of the night she takes hold of his hand, puts it between her legs and rubs herself with his fingers until she comes. She is crying as she does this. He pretends to be only half awake so that he does not have to ask what’s wrong. He falls back to sleep and dreams vividly about his son: playing chicken-in-the-waves in Half Moon Bay, the velociraptor cake Kirstin baked for his seventh birthday, reading Zagazoo together, reading Bear Hunt together. He hasn’t thought about his son this much in years. He dreams about the shouting competition the two of them had in the Malvern Hills and how neither of them could speak for two days afterwards. He knows, somehow, that he is asleep, and that when he wakes he will enter a day of harrowing loneliness. But how does one remain inside a dream?

  Then suddenly his eyes are open and he can smell cigarette smoke and hear loud music coming from downstairs.

  When Leo reads about his brother in the paper what he feels is schadenfreude mostly. He still blames Gavin for the problems which have plagued Anya and interrupted her schooling since Christmas—the headaches, the fatigue, the stomach pains—and for the arguments he and Sofie have about how to deal with them. Nevertheless he tries to contact Gavin in order to put his mother’s mind at rest, and it is only when he gets no response to his emails and phone calls that he becomes genuinely worried.

  He contacts Kirstin and Emmy and Tony but the last reliable sighting is seven weeks old and he is haunted by the image of his brother twisting on a makeshift noose while the rest of them feel smug about his comeuppance. He should ask Sarah to go to London—she is nearer and richer—but he is not immune to the sibling rivalry he usually pretends to rise above, so he pays a king’s ransom and takes a five-hour train journey to London at the crack of dawn one Saturday in early May.

  There is no answer to his knock at the door so he reads four chapters of God’s Traitors by Jessie Childs over a panini in Costa. An hour later there still is no answer and he is angry with himself for having conceived such a simplistic plan when his brother could be in Bali for all they know. He walks to Kew Gardens and back brooding on the string of insults, spoken and unspoken, which peppered his childhood in the shadow of the golden boy—the second-hand duffel coat, the afternoon he was pushed out of the tree house, the shelves his father hand-built for Gavin’s bedroom whose true purpose had nothing to do with the books and toys they were too weak to support. He receives no answer to his third and final knocking but leans over the thorny anti-burglar hedge before leaving so that he can look through the side window, half hoping now to discover, if not a body, then some demeaning squalor at the very least. What he sees instead is a woman staring back at him, wearing a Clash T-shirt which is too big for her, drinking from a racing-green mug and smoking a cigarette. She must be in her late twenties, greasy blonde hair, a sleazy, car-crash aura, the kind of person he has only ever encountered in films or TV documentaries. She does not react and he realises that she is looking at her own reflection. He backs away slowly, telling himself as he walks to the station that his brother’s life is falling apart but unable to suppress the thought that he is living out a sexual fantasy of a kind that was never available, and will never be available, to his younger, less adventurous brother.

  Gavin gets out of bed and heads down to the living room intending to tell Amber that she must lea
ve, but he can’t bring himself to do it. In spite of the music and the smoking and the knowledge that she is accelerating his descent towards some as yet undefined crash, there is sufficient consolation in Amber’s presence to make it preferable to the empty house with the menacing pile of unopened mail and the phone that rings and stops and rings and stops and the framed photographs which he has hidden in drawers.

  The two of them come and go and after a couple of days Gavin realises that she has got her own key cut. He can’t remember her asking if she could do this but his memory of the recent past is increasingly fogged by alcohol and the hangovers he keeps failing to alleviate with painkillers and willpower despite the repeated promises he makes to himself.

  Amber has been in residence for nearly a week when he returns from Tesco one lunchtime to find her arguing with a tracksuited man in the kitchen. He has a sinewy, underfed air and Gavin can smell both his deodorant and the sweat it is failing to disguise.

  “What are you doing in my house?”

  “Amber and I are talking.” The man doesn’t even turn his head.

  “Amber…?”

  She says, “I’m so sorry, Gavin.”

  The man laughs. “She’s not fucking sorry. You’re never fucking sorry, are you, babe?”