Monica picked up her glass of wine and walked around the café turning off all the lights and straightening any errant chairs or tables. She went out onto the street—keys in one hand, glass in the other, locked the café door, and turned to unlock the door to her apartment above.
Then, out of nowhere, a large bloke, towing a blonde like a motorbike’s sidecar, careened into her so hard that she was momentarily winded, and the glass of wine she was holding erupted, all over her face and his shirt. She could feel rivulets of Rioja coursing down her nose and dripping off her chin. She waited for his abject apology.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” he said. Monica felt a heat rising from her chest, making her face flush and her jaw clench.
“Hey, you walked into me!” she protested.
“Well, what on earth do you think you were doing just standing in the middle of a pavement with a glass of wine?” he said. “Can’t you drink in a bar like a normal person?” His face, with its perfectly symmetrical planes, would have been classically handsome, but it was split by the ugly gash of a sneer. The blonde pulled him away, giggling inanely.
“Stupid bitch,” she heard him say, deliberately pitching his voice just loud enough for her to hear.
Monica let herself into her apartment. Honey, I’m home, she said, as she always did, silently and to no one, and thought for a minute she was going to cry. She put the empty glass down on the draining board in her kitchenette and wiped the wine off her face with a tea towel. She was desperate to speak to someone, but she couldn’t think who to call. Her friends were all caught up in their own busy lives and wouldn’t want her inflicting her misery on their evenings. There was no point calling her dad, since Bernadette, her stepmother, who saw her as an inconvenient backstory to her new husband’s life, acted as gatekeeper, and would no doubt announce that her father was busy writing and couldn’t be disturbed.
Then Monica saw, sitting on the coffee table where she’d left it a few days ago, the pale-green notebook, labeled The Authenticity Project. She picked it up and turned again to the first page. Everyone lies about their lives. What would happen if you shared the truth instead? The one thing that defines you, that makes everything else about you fall into place?
Why not? she thought, feeling the thrill of being uncharacteristically reckless. It took her a while to find a decent pen. It seemed a bit disrespectful to follow Julian’s careful calligraphy with a scrawl in manky old Biro. She turned to the next clean page and began to write.
SIX
Hazard
Hazard wondered how much of his life he’d spent bent over toilet cisterns. Probably whole days, if you added it all up. How many potentially lethal bacteria was he hoovering up along with a roughly chopped line of Colombia’s finest nose candy? And how much of it was actually cocaine and not talcum powder, rat poison, or laxative? These were all questions that wouldn’t be bothering him for very much longer as this was the last line in the last gram of coke that he was ever going to buy.
Hazard searched in his pockets for a banknote, before remembering that he’d used his only twenty on the bottle of wine that he was halfway through drinking. In this fancy, overpriced wine bar, a twenty bought a bottle that was closer on the spectrum to methylated spirits than fine wine. But it did the job. He checked all his pockets, pulling out a folded-up sheet of paper from inside his jacket. A copy of his resignation letter. Well, that had a nice symbolism to it, he thought, as he ripped off a corner and rolled it into a tight tube.
After a hefty sniff, the familiar chemical taste hit the back of Hazard’s throat and, within minutes, the edginess he’d been feeling was replaced by a sense of, if not euphoria (the days of that were long gone), then at least well-being. He crumpled the rolled paper, along with the tiny plastic bag that the powder had been in, and threw them into the toilet bowl, watching as they were sucked into the depths of London’s sewers.
Carefully, Hazard lifted up the heavy, porcelain lid of the toilet cistern and leaned it against the wall. He took his iPhone—the latest model, obviously—out of his pocket and dropped it into the water filling the cistern. It made a satisfying plop as it sunk to the bottom. Hazard replaced the lid, trapping the phone inside, alone in the dark. Now he couldn’t call his dealer. Or anyone who knew his dealer. The only number on that phone he knew by heart was his parents’, and that was the only number he needed, although he’d have a fair bit of making up to do when he next called it.
Hazard checked his reflection in the mirror, wiping away any telltale signs of white powder from under his inflamed nostrils, then walked back to his table, with more of a strut in his step than he’d had when he left. His positivity was partly chemical, but he also felt a tinge of something he hadn’t felt for a long while—pride.
He looked quizzically at the table. Something was different. The bottle of wine was still there, along with two glasses (so it looked like he was waiting for someone, rather than drinking alone) and the dog-eared copy of the Evening Standard he’d been pretending to read. But there was something else too. A notebook. He’d had one like it when he was a rookie trader, filled with snippets of information he’d gleaned from the FT and hot tips thrown at him, like treats to an enthusiastic puppy, by the veterans on the trading floor. But this one had The Authenticity Project written on the cover. It sounded like a load of new age nonsense. He looked around for anyone suitably “spiritual” who might have mislaid it, but there was just the usual crowd of midweek drinkers, busily shrugging off the stresses of the working day.
Hazard pushed the book to the edge of his table, so that its owner might spot it, while he got down to the important business of finishing the wine in front of him. His last bottle of wine. Because cocaine and wine went together, like fish and chips, eggs and bacon, MDMA and sex. If he was going to give up one, he had to give up the other. Along with his job, because after years of surfing the markets on a wave of chemical high, he didn’t think he could do it, or wanted to do it, sober.
Sober. What a horrible word. Serious, sensible, solemn, staid, steady—nothing like Hazard himself, who was a case of nominative determinism in action. Hazard put his hand firmly on his right thigh, which was jiggling up and down under the table. He realized that he was also grinding his teeth. He hadn’t slept properly for thirty-six hours, since the night he’d spent with Blanche. His head was wired and desperate for more stimulation, fighting against his body, which was bone-deep tired and yearning for oblivion. Hazard was, he realized, finally exhausted with it all, with his life and the constant merry-go-round of uppers and downers, the sleaziness of the desperate calls to his dealer, the constant sniffing and the increasingly dramatic nosebleeds. How had the occasional line at a party that made him feel like he could fly turned into something he had to do just to get out of bed in the morning?
Since nobody seemed to be interested in the abandoned notebook, Hazard opened it. Densely packed handwriting covered the page. He tried to read it, but the letters danced around on the page. Hazard closed one eye and looked again. The words settled down into more orderly lines. He flicked forward a few pages and found that there were two different types of handwriting—the first a delicate calligraphy, the second a simpler, rounder, more ordinary hand. Hazard was intrigued, but reading through one eye was tiring and made him look like a nutter, so he closed the book and pushed it into his jacket pocket.