Hawthorn and Child (32 page)

People are allowed to visit me. The first thing I say to someone when they visit is something like this – ‘Thank you for visiting. The flat is bugged. Every room is bugged. People are listening in. You can talk freely about me and my situation, I have nothing to hide, but please be conscious that if you talk about yourself, I am not the only one who is listening.’ This puts people on edge. I can see them rethinking the level of support they are prepared to give me. I can see them choosing different words to the ones they had ready. The speeches of indignation they had rehearsed on their journeys are replaced by lukewarm expressions of empathy, understanding, pity. I realize that my situation has made me depressed and paranoid.

The people who visit me the most are Simon Forrester and his team, my old friend Rupert from Cambridge, and my sister. Other people have visited once or twice. My father, once. My brother, twice, once with his two sons, who found a tiny microphone in a window frame and made farting noises into it until somebody called on the telephone to tell them to stop. A journalist came once. She talked to me for hours. But the article she wrote could be read in five minutes. I didn’t understand. It upset me. A few writers have come. To show their solidarity, they say. They tell me that they are with me all the way. Then they leave, and I go and sit in the kitchen for a while and look at the cooker.

Lately, I have been telling all my visitors about my symptoms. I show them the skin on my arms.
Look
, I say to them,
look how allergic I am to the flat, the building, to what has been placed on my shoulders. Look at my feet, at the skin, my feet are disintegrating. Look at the dandruff on my T-shirt – not on the shoulders, but on the chest. Look at me. I am crumbling
. I am not sure how this helps anyone.

I am to be charged, Simon Forrester tells me. They are
formulating
the charges now. Building their case. At some point in the next few weeks I will be rearrested and charged. And the interviews will start again.

I will be accused of deliberately and maliciously drawing the attention of the police and security services to an elaborate but entirely fictitious conspiracy to attack the 2012 Olympics; of knowingly diverting police resources towards what I knew to be a hoax; of deliberately focussing the suspicions of the security services on to innocent third parties and thereby subjecting them to interference and disruption and distress; of deliberately abusing the good offices of literary agent Stanley Whitmarsh to provide a cover story regarding the writing of a novel; of writing scenes and dialogues for such a novel, so lacking in literary merit as to be patently absurd as a defence; of collating notes and information about a
radioactive
bomb attack on the London Olympics detailed enough to cause serious alarm to the security forces; of deliberately collating such notes and information in such an incompetent way as to guarantee the attention of the police and the security services to the hoax; of deliberately engineering a massive drain on the resources of anti-terrorist teams, in terms of both manpower and finance; of placing strain on the security services of allies such as the United States, Pakistan, Germany and other nations, to such an extent that other genuine inquiries were hampered and in one case derailed; of organising a convoluted and self aggrandising version of the old fashioned hoax bomb warning; of causing a spectacular waste of police time. The Crown Prosecution Service will be pressing for a lengthy custodial sentence.

I can imagine anything. I can imagine crumbling to powder. I can imagine them breaking down my door and finding nothing left but a small hill of dust. Where I have been. I can imagine no one believing me. I can imagine everyone believing me. I can imagine you. People are right to distrust writers. We are not trustworthy people. We make things up.

I can imagine Detective Hawthorn. I can imagine him looking for a story and looking to get it straight and trying to write it.
Oh you should write a book about me
, people say to him. All the time. They all say it.
My life, they say, that would be some story that would.
And I can imagine Detective Hawthorn trying. I see him across the road sometimes, sitting in the passenger seat. With Detective Child, I assume. All day long sometimes, they sit there. All day long. Sometimes I fall asleep with them sitting there, and when I wake up they are still there. As if they are waiting for me to tell them what happens next.

I think I will plead guilty.