‘Do whatever you like,’ I told him, thinking this was a disappointing way for him to say goodbye to his oldest friend. ‘I don’t care.’
We seemed to lose track of each other after that and when I eventually dug out his email address and wrote to tell him that my mother had died, he wrote back almost immediately, offering condolences while inviting me to a reading he was giving at a city-centre bookshop the following day, to be followed, he said, by an evening of alcohol-fuelled reminiscing.
I had no great desire to see him in front of an audience but nevertheless I went along and was surprised to see that he’d become a little bit famous, or as famous as a novelist can get anyway, for a sizeable crowd had gathered to hear him tell us all how wonderful he was.
‘Before writing this novel,’ he said, putting both hands to his face and dragging them slowly across the skin, as if his fingers might offer an early-evening exfoliant, ‘I had a serious case of what our German friends call …’ He paused for a moment and looked around the room. ‘Are there any Germans here?’ he asked, and if there were, no one spoke up. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I had a serious case of what our German friends call kästellfrügenschänge, which literally means the sensation a man feels when he is standing on a precipice, usually but not necessarily naked, preparing to jump to his death but being held back by a feeling that he might yet be of some use to the world.’ He smiled gently and shook his head as if he could not quite believe that he had ever doubted his own genius. ‘But when the words came?’ He wagged his finger at us as if we were unruly children. ‘No more kästellfrügenschänge.’
The audience, morons all, lapped it up. I could see two university-aged girls, pretty if you like that sort of thing, doing everything they could to make eye contact with him. And I’m sure the boy next to me emitted a faintly erotic sigh at my old friend’s supposed bilingualism. For my part, I found it hard not to laugh out loud, for I had spent most of the last few years living in a town called Tittmoning on the German-Austrian border and had become fluent in the language. (I work on a large dairy farm where, in fact, I have my own brand of local celebrity as the kuhliebhabermann – which literally means a man who has a suspiciously close emotional relationship to cattle – a nickname I acquired for no other reason than the fact that I try to treat all my cows, especially the good-looking ones, with atypical kindness before sending them off to the slaughterhouse in Burghausen to be stunned by electrical currents and have their throats slit.) And I can promise you that kästellfrügenschänge is not a real word. It’s just a jumble of sounds placed next to each other that have a faintly Germanic ring to them.
My sighing neighbour, trembling before greatness, raised his hand.
‘A question,’ said Arthur, pointing towards the boy, whose face immediately turned fire-engine red.
‘Please, sir,’ he whispered, like an older, ganglier, gayer version of Oliver Twist. ‘Please, sir, what advice would you give to young writers?’
Arthur tapped his upper lip with his index finger as he considered this. I rolled my eyes; this could hardly be the first time he’d been asked such an obvious question. Surely he had a stock answer tucked away somewhere.
‘Have you ever visited the southern of the two Brelitzen Islands?’ he said finally, after much thought.
‘No,’ said the boy, shaking his head.
‘The northern one perhaps?’
‘No.’
‘What about the Cassandra Strait, that spiteful stimulant of cerulean that separates the two?’
‘I’ve never been anywhere,’ said the boy, becoming noticeably aroused now by such close attention. ‘Except to EuroDisney once with my uncle Mark when I was twelve.’
‘The Brelitzen Islands,’ said Arthur, smiling. ‘Go to the Brelitzen Islands. You’ll know why when you get there.’
I felt myself beginning to grow angry. I’m not an expert on world geography by any means but I had never heard of the Brelitzen Islands and doubted their existence. Still, I said nothing. God forbid that I should piss all over the magic.
‘Creating art,’ declared Arthur a moment later, apropos of nothing, while holding his wretched novel in the air, ‘reminds me of why I look forward to death so much. At the heart of our mortality lies what the Shīn-du monks on Mount Hejiji call shrān-kao.’ He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m pronouncing that wrong, amn’t I? It’s shrān-kaoj, I think. With a silent “j” at the end?’
He looked around but no one said anything. They were staring at him like he was the love child of the Dalai Lama and Oprah Winfrey. An old lady, close to tears at such life-changing wisdom, blew her nose loudly, sounding like a steam engine about to depart a platform in The Railway Children.
‘Yes, I think that’s it. Shrān-kaoj. Forgive me, Gampopo!’
Both pronunciations had sounded exactly the same to me and they were, I’m sure, equally meaningless. I also doubted the existence of Shīn-du monks or of Mount Hejiji itself, which, for what it’s worth, he pronounced He-ki-ki.
‘But life,’ he added, banging his index finger sharply against the dust jacket, which showed a young boy walking with his back to the reader along a road towards a moonlit horizon. ‘Life is art and art is pain and pain is what makes us know that we are alive.’ He held the book aloft now and waved it at us with all the zeal of John Knox brandishing the Book of Common Prayer in the face of Mary, Queen of Scots. ‘And I am alive,’ he roared then, a blue vein beginning to assert its presence on his forehead. ‘I’m alive!’
Really, considering that we were only meeting again because I was preparing to bury my mother, I thought the whole performance was a little over the top.
Later, in the pub, Arthur told me that he didn’t want to know anything about what had happened to me during my years abroad. He asked me not to speak about the friends I had made, the experiences that had changed me or any love affairs that I might have enjoyed. He didn’t even want to hear about my cows and I have many interesting stories to tell about them if people are only prepared to listen.
‘As an artist,’ he explained, ‘as a creative person, I prefer to rely on my imagination. I have memories of the boy you once were, Mulligan, and ideas about the man you might have become. Let’s not spoil the narrative by drizzling reality over it.’
‘Why do you keep calling me by my surname?’ I asked. ‘Why don’t you call me Pierce?’
‘I’ve always hated that name,’ said Arthur. ‘Even when we were children, foraging for adventure like truffling pigs in the woods, comparing penis sizes in darkened glades—’
‘That never happened,’ I said.
‘Even then I didn’t like the name Pierce,’ he continued, ignoring me. ‘There’s something so unbearably common about it. No, I think Mulligan is a far better name. You don’t meet many Mulligans any more.’
‘Well, I don’t want you calling me that,’ I said.
‘Fine, then I shall call you Darling.’
‘No, that won’t work either.’
‘It’s either Mulligan or Darling, darling. You decide. Now would you mind if I swapped seats with you? I prefer to keep my back to the room.’