Nobody Pays for It
Two days after his car was found burnt-out near a cliff’s edge her PA handed her a padded envelope. She recognized the handwriting, its unruly loops and truncated stems. There were meetings scheduled that day. Her clients had travelled distances, one from as far as Cologne. She cancelled them all and left Populus, the recruitment consultancy she’d built from a desk in a spare room to a suite of offices on London Wall. She drifted around the City, not looking up or down until she found the restaurant. She insisted on a table not facing the street. At first it seemed he’d sent her nothing personal, no letter or explanation, only J, a manuscript an inch thick. His agent’s statement had said that James Jay’s last masterpiece was either ashes or he’d taken it to the sea.
She had known James Jay for over thirty years, though since they were teenagers she’d met him only once, in Bennetts three summers ago. The first she remembered of him was out in the park where they all used to play, the timid, scrutinizing boy who involved himself only if someone wandered offside or overstepped the crease. It was known that every night no one in his house ate dinner unless a previously agreed-upon dead language was spoken throughout. It was said that from an early age his parents had gifted him the role of little Solomon in their frequent and vicious disputes. Nothing was so complicated that an eight-year old couldn’t adjudicate. He grew tall and athletic, but stooped and leant away when you talked up to him. He jumped a year at school, took exams early and additional subjects for fun: Philosophy, Ancient Greek, Further and Furthest Maths. He was the first-choice captain of the school water polo team but never found a way of leading the others. Eventually they handed the role to someone who could.
When she was sixteen she used to watch him play. When she watched him she knew. Her mother said – and said it more than once so must have been cool about it – that hopefully something of his brains and prospects might rub off on her.
After the game where he scored five second-half goals in front of the England selector, she counted all the Alistairs and Tobys out of the changing rooms. She’d dressed less tomboyishly than usual. He was sat on a bench, still wet, still dripping. A vein stood out on his bicep. It was awkward afterwards. She promised herself that she would never expose herself like that again. It would not be the first time that she made this promise. It would be written out in journals and diaries and confessed to expert strangers in book-lined rooms, after work, after the end, for £125 an hour.
The first page of J was dense. She’d had trouble reading his work before. The Thresher, his only novel, had stumped her. His other books, all non-fiction, were called Reason’s Inward Pulse, Doctor Neuroscience Takes a Train and The Splendour of Fear. The only thing she had liked was Fin, a memoir about swimming. In fact, it was Fin that alerted her to him again. When she’d read an interview, accompanied by a moody photo (he was an interviewer’s nightmare: evasive, ogreish, bored), the wires connected. She’d written to him via his publisher, old-style.
In Bennetts he didn’t take his beanie hat off and clearly hadn’t shaved for some weeks. He ordered the same meal as she did, and the same wine, but touched neither. It took her a while but she was a people person, talked for a living, made others feel at ease. He was interested in the rise of Populus. He wasn’t married to woman called Katinka, as one post on a web forum had stated. He listened when she explained that she was seeing a man called Bart from Seattle who seemed to be bringing to the forefront of her thoughts some old, sapping confusion. It was better talking to James. He told her what to do. He said he made sense out of senselessness. His new book was called J. She asked him about his favourite TV programme, a parting-shot question she used in interviews if she’d made up her mind. He told her that when he was a child he used to creep downstairs and turn on the TV to relish the shrill pitch at closedown. Then he said, ‘that or the space programme.’
In the street she had tugged his sleeve and asked him to come back to her flat. There was a terrace, river views and champagne in the fridge. He looked scared, like there was something desperate, life-or-death to do instead. He said he’d call, invite her to visit him. He lived on the coast, up there. He never phoned.
J was disorganized. She found herself skimming notes for a biography of a sixteenth-century astronomer called Jirkwald, a made-up man, she suspected. After about ninety pages the writing began to settle, compose itself. He came down from the skies. An account of a water polo game, five goals in the second half and a conversation with the selector and: the girl slinks into the changing room after the others leave and the girl is beauty, the fork in the lightning, and in her eyes you see something in you that you don’t believe, and even then you know how these things end, what they get like. And you make a mistake, fail to give yourself. You end up here, the air, and end. Maybe?
She made a call and tersely dumped Arturo Quick, a trader she’d been sleeping with for five months.
No body was found. Meanwhile she would find herself opening and closing the book at this point, over and over with each new hope and their parting. Here, yes, here, she would later explain, it was here that the trouble between them really began.
*Ashley Stokes's first novel, Touching the Starfish was published in 2010, and his latest story, 'A Short Story about a Short Film' appears in Unthology No.1 (both Unthank Books). He's also writes a blog-novel: subgrubstreet.blogspot.com.