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I left my flat at six that morning to catch a train to Wales to interview Augustus Fate. It was the first interview he’d given in nine years. When I boarded at London Paddington, I threw my rucksack into the overhead rack, slumped into my window seat and shuffled through my Spotify, from Sufjan Stevens to Bowie to Beethoven’s fifth. None of them helped me forget my troubles: the patronising, enigmatic comments – supposedly worth nine thousand pounds a year – that my tutor made while ‘supervising’ my thesis; the drudgery of my weekend job in the local pizzeria, where every one of my tips, mostly earnt by flirting, were nicked by my plump French boss; the sapiosexual physicist I shared a flat with, whose trysts stole much of my sleep; Rachel.
I attempted to quieten this white noise by reminding myself that I was about to interview one of the most famous and celebrated authors alive today. That millions of readers and writers and journalists would sacrifice body parts to be in my place. That I had to produce four thousand words, which would be published in The Times and syndicated across the world. I flipped open my iPad, where I had typed the heading ‘Interview Questions’. The rest of the page was blank.
I gazed out at the suburbs greying past. The stranger oppos- ite me was giving my foot an irritated glance, for it had been tapping out a nervous piece of jazz. Blushing, I crossed my legs and locked my hands in my pockets. How I missed the body of my teenage years, which had been such a graceful, languid thing, slumped in T-shirts, stretched out over a bed or a lawn, catlike in the sunshine. The divide between those two eras, between my sixteen-year-old self and the present day, had created two Jaimes who existed in entirely different worlds. The first Jaime lived in a society aswirl with money, happily borrowing to study for a BA, since the reward of a good job felt like a certainty. The second Jaime was a man who went to the cafe in Waterstones Piccadilly each week to sip espressos and fill in form after form, only to find out – over 540 job applications later – that he wasn’t good for cleaning (overqualified), flipping burgers in McDonald’s (doubly so) or publishing (I attempted five internships but it was clear that I just didn’t have the right connections).
We were all in the same flimsy, leaking, waterlogged boat. My friends who ought to have been physicists were working in call centres; friends who were qualified engineers were banging on doors, selling tea towels and oven gloves. We bought food from supermarkets laid out on pallets, lacking any slogans or fancy packaging; we shunned the expense of TV licences by borrowing a Netflix login; we rented small rooms with rashes of mould growing across the ceiling for extortionate sums and when we couldn’t afford those anymore, we moved back in with our parents, extending our childhoods like our overdrafts. We surfed the internet for hours with zombie eyes and latched on to causes that were miniature – an offensive advert, the actions of a particular landlord – because to attempt to address the bigger issues was to feel helpless and hopeless, to sense that the world had been reshaped for those who lived in grand houses and played golf at weekends.
My interview with Fate had the potential to change my limp destiny and achieve that near-impossibility: a journalism job that paid. The pressure was worse than anything I had endured; no wonder my nails were non-existent.
The scenery softened: London brickshit was replaced by countryside, hawthorn and birdsong. I changed trains at Newport, then picked up a local service from Craven Arms. As the train rattled across Llandrindod Wells, the sun became a red glow on the horizon and snow began to fall. The austere landscape took on an eerie beauty; churches became poetic, trees silhouetted with white. Occasionally I was pierced with an ache in my stomach, a wish that Rachel was with me, that we could wander into those dark snowy woods together; but there was a kind of pleasure in my wistfulness. By the time the train pulled into Pen-y-Bont, twilight was smoking the sky. I liked the small, quaint feel of the station: the stone walls and the murmurs of people chatting in Welsh; the sheep beyond the car park.
The taxi the paper had booked was waiting for me. The driver was a stout man with a pointed beard. When I passed over my rucksack, he looked me up and down. Should I have worn a suit and tie? I had opted for my usual jeans and red checked shirt with the thick black trench coat I had picked up in the local Oxfam, but now I was back to fretting that Fate might be a proponent of the industry’s formalities. In the back of the taxi, I fingered the dark prickle of my stubble, pushing back my uneven fringe from my forehead. We were mute for five minutes before I asked him what it was like to have Fate as a neighbour.
So much had been written about Fate that he had become more myth than man. He’d once been a fixture on the London literary circuit, after winning the 1993 Whitbread and receiving his first of many Booker nominations, but for the past dec- ade he had eschewed all company and shut himself away in a remote Welsh village. In the latest photo of him – from five years ago – he looked as though he belonged in the title role of King Lear, hurling obscenities into the wind.
I was hoping the driver might tell me all sorts of exotic stories about how Fate sacrificed local sheep, or sewed pansies into his beard. Instead, he shrugged and said that the only book he enjoyed reading was his Bible. The press sometimes sent helicopters flying overhead to spy on Fate’s cottage, he added, which spoilt the silence for everyone.
He parked his taxi on the curve of a country road.
‘I can’t take you any further.’ He pointed to the fence, a jagged gap cut into it. ‘Just go through there and carry on up for two hundred metres.’
I followed a trampled depression through the snow-strewn grass and bracken. I was already translating my experiences into Times New Roman; I noted the detail of some rabbit fur and blood caught on the fence. The sound of a Welsh ‘Silent Night’ echoing out from the village church down the lane. The icy purity in the air that made my eyes water and my skin feel raw. The trees here were different from the ones I saw every day in London parks, where they were pruned to meek prettiness. These trees seemed to jostle me, like locals who find a stranger invading their town. My body began to defy the cold; sweat burnt under my armpits. I couldn’t help picturing a simple lane and neat gate on the opposite side of the thicket, which I had somehow missed. If it did exist, I’d have to pretend I never saw it.
*
Death in fiction: that’s my speciality. My favourite fictional death has to be that of Mr Krook, the shopkeeper in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. The death itself is a crazy, wonderful thing – Mr Krook’s lodger enters his room to find a smoulder- ing, suffocating vapour in the room and a dark, greasy coating on the walls and ceiling. Even better is the pompous preface that Dickens wrote a few years on, in which he asserted that there were over thirty well-documented cases of spontaneous human combustion, including the famous death of Countess Cornelia de Baudi Cesenate.
Fate also had a penchant for the dramatic, quirky death. He even included his own death by spontaneous combustion in The Beetle Fossil, one of his early novels. In another, charac- ters were infamously killed off at random intervals with casual, throwaway sentences: ‘Kay was playing tennis when a ball smashed into her skull’; ‘Gerard was walking down the street when he fell under a bus’.
My sapiosexual physicist flatmate was there when I got the call to say that I’d won, sitting at the kitchen table in her neg- ligee, smoking a Sobranie and eating a bowl of cornflakes. She declared that someone had to be playing a joke on me. When I informed my supervisor, Professor Millhauser, he congratulated me in a tone of astonishment. He added that they’d probably received very few entries for the competition, and though I had broken a certain ancient college rule by using part of my thesis, he would kindly abstain from reporting me. My fingers were shaking when I emailed Rachel the news, but she never replied; I emailed her seven times more, but still didn’t hear back.
The last email I ever received from her sits on my computer, dated six weeks ago: ‘I have forgotten my umbrella.’
My interest in her ought to have faded by now, really. Instead, it had intensified into a pathetic obsession: she was the backdrop to my days; she laced my dreams at night.
I had reached the door of Augustus Fate’s cottage. I could no longer hear ‘Silent Night’, just the sound of my teeth chattering and the harsh uncertainty of my breath. I raised my fist, slowly. Above me, the light was already dying, stars lonely in the pale blue twilight.
*
Augustus Fate’s author photos depicted him as a giant in a black cape. In real life, he was a few inches shorter than me. He was wearing a navy jumper with holes in it, a pair of brown cordu- roys and sandals, displaying a row of large, gnarled toes.
‘Mr Lancia!’ His voice possessed the maturity of the snow-soaked oaks that curled over his cottage. ‘Do come in.’
The cottage was delightfully strange: perfect article fodder. There were little tables carved from wood stumps. Tree branches framed a window, forming a curtain rail, from which hung two orange sheets patterned with sequins. There were so many can- dles; it was surely a hazard, what with so much wood and paper teasing flame, but I liked the atmosphere of eerie romance they created.
Clapping his hands, Fate declared that he would fetch some tea for us. I listened to him clattering in the kitchen and smiled, warming myself by the open fire. I felt at ease, as though I was in the home of a kindly uncle I had known for years. I can do this, I thought, I can actually do this.
