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,