Plume. Will Wiles

Pierce would be denied the stage-managed interview he must want; instead he would get an exposé by a hostile and unscrupulous journalist.

      With a tidal surge of nausea, I realised that I couldn’t get away with that. Pierce was not powerless. He could strike back, with Quin, with the information they had accumulated on my drinking and inaccuracies and lifted quotes. Who knew how much data Quin really had? They could respond with so much muck of their own that I’d be destroyed – and, in the ensuing shitstorm, Pierce might be able to absolve himself. I began to appreciate why I, in particular, had been chosen for this job: mutually assured destruction.

      Involve Pierce. Get him on board. ‘If you go on the record,’ I said, ‘I’m prepared to craft the story with you, make sure you get your side across clearly and sympathetically. We can make your, ah, coming-out as gentle as possible.’

      ‘Well, thanks,’ said Pierce. He pinched the bridge of his nose, and shut his eyes hard, seemingly tired. ‘But let’s not delude ourselves. No way it’ll be gentle. It’ll be brutal. I’m going to get killed.’

      I could not deny this, so I didn’t say anything. Instead, I thought about the DVR in my shirt pocket. If I glanced downwards, I could just see the top of it. Pierce could probably see it too, if he knew to look, but that shape against my breast could be anything – phone, vape stick, pen drive. I became very conscious that my body language might betray me, might reveal that I was wearing a wire. I rolled my shoulders, pretending to rid them of stiffness, in fact trying to get the DVR to be less conspicuous, and peered into the neck of the beer bottle, inspecting its foaming dregs. To my surprise, the bottle was already almost empty, though I hardly remembered drinking from it at all.

      But Pierce wasn’t even looking. He was preoccupied with telling his story. ‘Quin threatened to go public without me,’ he said. ‘He insisted that I confess and make amends. He said that it reflected badly on him.’ He barked a laugh, eyes wide. ‘On him! How fucking vain can you get? Such concern for his own reputation! He’s completely naive. He thinks that if I say I’m sorry then I’ll be OK. He’s wrong. I made up … I’d say “I made up a story” but that sounds so fucking innocent, so pre-school. I invented people. I invented events. I defrauded my agent, my publisher and the public. I told lie after lie after lie and said to people every time, “this is the sworn truth”. I was praised for my honesty. I’m a monster.’

      I wanted, more than ever, to check the DVR in my pocket, to confirm that it was still running, recording these words. But I did not dare. I kept my eyes on Pierce, draining the last of my beer and letting him speak, but hardly listening, thinking only of the recording.

      ‘All those people who praised it, who praised my courage and candour,’ Pierce continued. ‘The people who wrote to me, the people who invited me to speak … All those people are going to feel like I made fools of them. And I did. Helen Mirren said that it made her cry. In a newspaper. Dame Helen Mirren. What are they going to do? How do I atone for something like that?’

      ‘Is that what you want?’ I asked. ‘To atone?’

      It was Pierce’s turn to be silent. He scowled, giving the question deep, zealous thought.

      ‘If I’m being honest,’ he began – and I thought, Yes, please be honest – ‘I’d rather die before the truth comes out. But I’ll settle for atonement.’

      ‘Why did you do it?’ I asked. If I did decide to betray Pierce, the more information I could get out of him while he believed himself to be off the record, the better.

      But he was no longer cooperating.

      ‘I envy you, you know. You’ve done it. You’ve been there – twice. I tried to think of the most primal urban experience possible: being mugged in the street, that was it.’

      ‘The way to avoid being mugged,’ my dad said, ‘is to look as if you’re going to mug someone.’ Memorable advice – well, I’ve remembered it, which is more than I can say about most of what he told me before I went to London. What made it stick was the thought it immediately prompted in me: that I could never, ever imagine my dad looking as if he were going to mug someone. This gem of street-smarts was dispensed by a diminutive, paunchy tax accountant wearing an incredibly aged blue blazer with loose brass buttons that dangled like charms on a bracelet. When my dad started losing his hair, it went at the temples first, as is quite common. But then it kept going back in two temple-width swaths, never expanding its path to take in anything from the sides or the top of the head. This left a mohican-like strip of hair in the middle of his scalp. He never did anything to adapt his hairstyle to the diminishing resources at its disposal, to try to disguise or balance the creeping baldness – a failure I saw then as a hopeless inability to face facts but in retrospect looked more like splendid unconcern. He simply did not mind.