Free My Biggest Lie by Luke Brown

the Irish booksellers staggering through the door, looking for somewhere to take cocaine. ‘You’ll join us for a line, won’t you, Craig?’ they asked. He looked at me sadly. ‘Do you see what I mean?’ he said. ‘Please don’t,’ I said. ‘Don’t what?’ he said, shaping his face to inflame to an insult like a Glaswegian on holiday in Blackpool. I decided it would only provoke him into taking more if I made an issue of discouraging him. ‘I’m going to look for a drink,’ I told him. ‘A rum and coke, please,’ he said. ‘With just a very tiny bit of coke?’ I asked. ‘Just a tiny bit,’ he sighed, in a calmer voice.
    More people had arrived in the lounge since I had left and I became caught up saying hello to friends and strangers. I found myself repeating the speech Craig had just delivered to me. After a while I began to feel guilty that I was making fun of him, that people thought I was being ironic. I was not laughing at him. I was laughing in delight because of him, because I’d come to know him. I went tofind him. Bennett and the booksellers had been joined on the bed by the two actresses. A steady stream of people moved in and out to hear Bennett hold forth on various topics: the nature of love, the derangement of the senses, advances in vineyard machinery, the Australian literary scene, the importance of courage and its illusionary nature, where to buy cocaine in Palermo Viejo, house prices in the Gower Peninsula, etc., etc. I had lost him to the crowd. I couldn’t get near him.
    I told myself not to panic and rejoined the gathering in the living room. Time passed in a flurry of quick conversation. When I looked at my phone, it was late , 4.30 a.m. The party was thinning out. I went to use the toilet and bumped into Bennett at the door.
    â€˜Come in here with me,’ he said. ‘I need a sensible fucking conversation.’ I went back in and sat on the bath. He pulled the toilet cover down and sat on that. ‘I don’t even need the toilet. I just wanted a fucking breather. Don’t these people on cocaine talk?’
    I couldn’t help laughing at this.
    â€˜Hey, fuck you . There is less hypocrisy in that statement than you assume. At least I have given what I say some thought in advance. That’s the way to take cocaine – you need to have prepared some interesting conversation earlier. They have not. And they keep trying to nudge me onto the subject of Cockburn without just asking me straight out what happened.’
    There was an awkward silence. ‘So, what did happen?’ I asked.
    â€˜They’re half right, some of them out there, you know? I was arguing with James about his wife. It was because we were arguing he ran off and tried to show off. But we weren’t arguing about her for the reasons I’ve heard. I dolove her but I’m not in love with her. I think she’s wonderful. Do you know her?’
    I had met Ella a few times. She’s a quiet, satirical woman, a psychologist Cockburn has been with since they met at university, and I like her for the economy with which she ridicules James whenever he switches into his performance role. Just a word or a look to put his feet back on the ground. She’s from Manchester and has kept her accent, and it has enormous power as a corrective to his bullshit. I’ve neutralised my Northern accent, softening it while keeping my flat vowel-sounds. James picks and chooses his depending on his mood. When he plays James, laddish, down-to-earth football fan, who happens to be able to recite lines of poetry by Ezra Pound, he comes on like a Renaissance Gallagher brother. But in his publishing speeches, he elongates his vowels, becoming almost mid-Atlantic (apart from the rare occasions when he introduces a Northern writer, when he comes over like the manager of a cocky indie band from Salford). The difference between James and