My Life as a Fake Read Online Free PDF Page A

plainly confess to ‘interests.’
    He cast down his eyes, which produced an odd effect suggesting not whimsy or modesty but a sudden, secret arrogance. I don’t want you dashing off, he said. I need to speak to you.
    He set down the second envelope. It was larger than the first and its flap had been closed with coarse black tape, clearly from the bicycle shop, and this he now fussily rolledaway. From the envelope he extracted a single sheet of paper wrapped in thin clear polythene.
    God knows why, but I was suddenly certain that he wished to sell me an autograph, and I did feel a twinge of compassion for this literary exile waiting for the chance to sell his little treasures. In this, I imagined, he was not unlike the boys who loitered in front of the Merlin with their rolls of batik, waiting for the Americans to come outside.
    Very delicately, he removed the plastic sheath, folding it so particularly that my eyes were held and I really paid no attention to the treasure it had protected, not until the owner brought it to my attention.
    It was a poem, or a part of a poem, composed in those thick rhythmic down-strokes which would later become, if only briefly, so familiar.
    May I pick it up?
    The tropics are not kind to paper.
    And indeed the page showed the signs of both mould and water damage, having become so very fragile that it seemed likely to break in half or even shatter. It looked to have been sliced from a bound journal.
    Read, Mem, read.
    I did so, and I doubt it needs saying that I read with a full consciousness of the old man’s history. I approached these twenty lines with both suspicion and hostility, and for a moment I thought I had him. It was a sort of Oriental Tristan Tzara, but that was too glib a response to something with very complicated internal rhymes and, unlike Tzara, nothing felt the slightest bit false or old-fashioned. It slashed and stabbed its way across the page, at once familiar and alien. I wondered if the patois—Malay, Urdu—was disguising something as common as cod Eliot. But that did not fit either, for you really cannot counterfeit a voice. All I knew now, in mymoment of greatest confusion and suspicion, was that my heart was beating very fast indeed. Rereading the fragment, I felt that excitement in my blood which is the only thing an editor should ever trust.
    Who wrote this, I asked. I must have looked frightfully stern but in fact I was all atwitter. Where is the rest of it?
    He removed his spectacles, rubbed his eyes, and sighed.
    Oh shit, I thought, of course! It’s him. It must be him. You wrote this?
    No, no, not me.
    Is the author a secret?
    You will not believe me.
    I should like to know, I said.
    It is a man named McCorkle.
    I do have a temper. My family knows I have a temper. It is probably true that I will die in a room by myself because I have savaged someone who was trying to help me, and I have seen good cause to write those notes of apology one of which—my grovelling little letter to Cyril Connolly—is apparently amongst his papers in the British Museum. But in this case it should not seem peculiar that I was angry, having been titillated by the prospect of a find only to be told that its author was the man upon the stair.
    I am afraid, I said, that Mr McCorkle’s notoriety precedes him.
    Yes, he said, you know who he is. His manner was not as one might expect it to be—was oddly insistent, in fact. Oh, you know him certainly.
    But not exactly?
    He did not answer but returned the fragment to the safety of its plastic sleeve.
    I doubt it has much commercial value, I said.
    You think I come to hawk to you, he said brusquely.
    Of course that was precisely so, but I shook my head.
    Then what
do
you think-
lah
? He looked up at me with eyes still watery but also belligerent.
    Oh no, I said, you are the one who sought the meeting.
    He blinked. Perhaps a cup of tea, he said, and I saw what a strange and fragile creature he was, powerless, pathetic, filled with pride