Dinner, 4 A.M.

‘I have long maintained that while my breakdown may have been bleak in its moment, it has more than paid for itself by the generous supply of anecdotes that would otherwise have been unimaginable had I spent my twenties without that particular mix of absurd melodrama and frankly remarkable lapses in judgement.’

Mark pauses, raising his head from the book and csating his eyes to the crowd for a moment. It is a subtle bit of punctuation, calculated to give the following line precisely the impact he intends. From the rear of the room, I trace his line of sight; watch, as his eyes linger on the first few rows before shfting, his gaze travelling slowly to the vague vicinity of where I’m sat.

I find myself looking down at my lap, then, shrinking into myself. It is an instinct. Nothing more. I do not imagine I will be seen. There are a hundred people here, at least, and I have learned to hide myself behind the sea of adoring faces. Even still, it is an instinct. 

When he speaks again, his voice has slowed, taken on a satisfied lilt.

‘Which is to say, I firmly believe that I am able to speak to you now not in spite of my past, but precisely because of it.’

Another pause, and this time it is for the round of applause we have both come to expect. 

To his relief, I am sure, this evening is no different. I am less surprised. Audiences seem to relish this idea, after all. It is what they’re here for; the message that Mark has come to represent. 

Your suffering is far from pointless, he tells them, it is the stepping stone for great things to come.

The applauds begin to subside: his next cue. ‘Although, I should stress that there are considerably easier ways of becoming a Sunday Times bestseller.’

A laugh, perhaps the biggest the joke has received all week. I laugh too, though I have heard the joke too many times to find it funny anymore. 

The interviewer – Sarah, or Sasha, or something like that – smiles appreciatively. Mark likes Sarah, I can tell. She’s asked all the right questions; laughed at all of his jokes. Which is to say, she’s Mark’s type.

‘You know, that's something about you that really does come across in the book,’ she says. ‘This remarkable ability to find humour in even your darkest moments.’

‘Well, it's either that or cry, isn't it?’

The audience laughs again. Sarah, too. Mark certainly makes the sound of laughter; certainly opens his mouth, makes sure to flash the teeth he paid so much for. He certainly does not follow it up with ‘although, I did use to cry. A lot, in fact.’ He made that mistake on the first night of the tour. He knows his audience now.

‘If you don’t mind, there’s another story early on the book that I hoped you wouldn’t mind telling us about.’ Sarah looks down to her copy: hardback; Mark’s face, front and centre; little strips of coloured paper poking out of what looks to be every other page. ‘I have to say, I actually read it on the train over this evening and I got more than a couple of stares from laughing so much.’

‘That’s too kind, thank you,’ he says. It’s a reflex, at this point. I wonder if he means it nonetheless.

She turns to the crowd - ’it appears in Chapter 1, so don’t worry, people, no spoilers’ - and gets a polite chuckle.

Mark continues to play his part, acts intrigued, as if he does not know precisely which anecdote he is being asked to recount. He does, of course. It is the same anecdote he has recounted every night this week, after all. The same one he told on breakfast television during his appearance a fortnight ago, too. 

Sarah hands the book to him, open on an early page. He glances at it, then chuckles; raises a hand to his brow, careful not to obscure his smile. It is important, I suppose, that the audience know he is in on the joke.

‘Ah, okay, yes,’ Mark says. He shakes his head in mock embarrassment, then clears his throat, and begins to read. 

‘It was the Wednesday after after that rather spectacular combustion of my relationship with Jenna that I hit upon a realisation. Suddenly, it seemed to me that the answer to all of my myriad problems was really quite simple. What I needed – what would undoubtedly, undeniably improve my lot – was to throw a dinner party.

‘Everyone had, after all, been telling me that I needed to get out more; that I needed to make plans, be social. All very sensible advice, I'm sure, for someone who feels capable of leaving the house. Unfortunately, and I’m sure many of my readers have experiences this at some point, even the small act of stepping outside can be debilitatingly overwhelming.’ 

‘So to have struck upon such a simple idea as a dinner party was something of a revelation. I don’t have to go to all the trouble of visiting people, I realised, or of leaving the house for the first time in days. I could simply gather all of my friends in one room, all at the same time. Kill several birds with one stone, as it were.’

‘There were, admittedly, three problems. Firstly, I had no money…’

The crowd laughs, and Mark has a rare moment of going briefly off-script. ‘I know, not a good start. It gets worse, trust me,’ and then returns to his reading voice. ‘I had no money, no food, and…’

I look about the auditorium; to the enraptured woman to my left, lent forward on the edge of her seat. The whole room is still, hanging on his every word. It’s as if they haven’t read this story already; as if they aren’t waiting to get their copies of this exact story signed by the man responsible for telling it. 

I am at the edge of my seat too, though for an entirely different, entirely more pathetic reason. I am on the edge of my seat because I wonder if this is the night he tells the truth.

Mark continues. ‘It was half past three in the morning.’

A ripple of laughter erupts from the crowd. I am disappointed. It appears the story will continue as it has been told every other time. I do not blame Mark for this, of course. I understand his reasons. It is a white lie after all - off by a few hours - a detail hardly worth getting in the way of a good anecdote. 

I tune back in to find Mark some way further down the page.

‘So, I set about preparing this elaborate three-course meal from whatever scraps I could find, and I called all of my friends to see if they fancied a spot of very early breakfast.’

I’ve never actually known if that part was true. Did he call other people? Certainly, no one I've asked remembers receiving a call.

‘As you can imagine, I had more than a few phones hung up on me. Poor Kelly, I think she thought I was trying a booty call.’

I don't know anyone called Kelly. Perhaps Mark did.

‘Well, no matter, I thought.’ Then, in a theatrical voice: ‘“Build it and they will come,” I figured,’ and he gives a self-conscious laugh.

‘Really, I was not in my right mind. But I set about making this elaborate menu with what I had lying around the house. I found a few carrot sticks that I thought would do for starters, and whipped up what I had the audacity at the time to call aioli though in truth it was the last of an old bottle of mayonnaise that I’d dropped a few dashes of bottled lemon juice into. Still, better than the main: spaghetti, cooked in a sauce truly of my own invention. To this day I don’t know what I put in it, but I can assure you, it’s a good thing nobody was in the mood for pasta, because it would almost certainly have put anyone in hospital for eating it.’

‘And dessert?’ Sarah asks. 

‘Oh, simple. Dessert was one digestive biscuit. Not one per person, mind you. Just one old digestive biscuit that I’d discovered at the back of the cupboard, years out of date I’m sure. I was going to cut it into as many pieces as there were people, so we’d all get a bit.’

I watch Mark lift his eyes from the page, giving Sarah and the audience their cue to laugh. Everyone does, of course. To be fair to them, it truly is a spectacle of a story, to hear Mark tell it. 

‘Only the weirdest thing happened. I was sitting in front of this banquet of mine, certain that no one would come, when the doorbell rang. And it was my friend, Daniel. A friend of a friend, really. I'd only met him a small handful of times - I can’t say I even remember calling him, actually. Not to say he wasn’t a lovely bloke; he was. And now there he was, on my doorstep at four in the morning, coat thrown over an old pair of trackies and a hole-ridden t-shirt, looking half asleep.’

Another laugh. Mark is enjoying himself.

This bit of the story always stings. Still, I wonder if “a small handful of times” is at least an improvement from last night’s telling. “A couple of times”, that’s how he’d described it then.

Either way, I wonder why he has decided on this particular altering of history. Does admitting our past make it a less interesting story, somehow? Perhaps. Perhaps it adds an air of tragedy to the anecdote that he’d rather avoid. 

And there was a sliver of truth to it: we had indeed met through a mutual friend. Paul, a childhood friend, he’d introduced the two of us at a house party. We’d been fifteen at the time. By the night of the so-called dinner party, Mark had known me for more than a decade.

There is another chuckle, and I’m brought back into the room, to the familiar, still strange sound of Mark’s reading voice. 

‘But the thing I remember most fondly is how we laughed that night. And we really did laugh. Neither of us ate the food, of course. I remember at some point we were chatting away and something he said just cracked me up. I ended up literally curled up on the kitchen floor, unable to catch my breath for laughing. And there was Daniel, bless him. I don’t think he found it half as funny as I did, but he sat there with me all the same, no doubt wondering what on earth was wrong with me.’ 

Mark pauses, and smiles gently. 

‘Bizarre as it was, I still think about that disastrous, four A.M. dinner party. I think, ultimately, it’s a moment that entirely encapsulates, for me, what life is truly about. That it is about those little moments - moments of joy, even when everything else seems utterly hopeless.’

I say the next line under my breath, in time with Mark. A slight moment of mockery. I cannot help myself. ’Although I have since discovered that joy is considerably easier to find when you can afford a decent meal.’

There is a round of applause. Looking at Mark, I wonder if I can just about make out the muscles twitching in his jaw as he counts the seconds, measuring how long it lasts compared with the other ovations he has received this week.

‘I think we have time for questions,’ Sarah says, the lights raising slightly to give the guest speaker a view of the crowd.

I shrink lower in my seat, make sure to not be spotted, though I am sure I am invisible to him in my current position. At the same time, I find myself having to fight against the urge to raise my hand. It is the same every night. 

Because I do have questions about that night; answers I’m desperate to know. 

I want to ask, does he remember why I came that night? Does he remember the sound he made down the phone when he called? The wailing. Guttural, like an animal caught in a trap. It has certainly stayed with me. Has it stayed with him?

Does he remember texting me after he put down the phone? ‘Sorry about that,’ sent with a smiley face. ‘Don’t know what came over me.’ Then, moments later, ‘Do you fancy popping over for a couple of beers? I’ve made some food.’

I want to know if he remembers how he cried that night, how he lay on the kitchen floor and cried until he could hardly breathe; if he remembers me beside him, sitting and rubbing his back until he fell asleep. If he remembers me guiding him to his bed, his arm flung over my shoulder as I helped him up the stairs. If he remembers me pulling the covers up around him.

A woman two rows ahead raises her hand. Then a man to my left. Sarah points to the woman, who asks Mark how he found the courage to begin writing about his experiences. He gives an answer I've heard before, about the importance of honesty and vulnerability.

I look down at my own hands.

It wouldn't take much. An arm raised, a few words into a microphone. I could ask whether he remembers what really happened. I could tell him what it was like to hear that noise on the other end of the telephone, to sit on his kitchen floor and wonder whether there was anything I could possibly say that would help.

But what then?

Would he become angry? Being outed, in front of his adoring friends? No doubt, he would have some right to be. It wouldn’t be fair to him or to them. 

Perhaps he’d look at me quizically, deny he knows me at all. 

Or he would apologise. He would see me, eye-to-eye, and in that moment remember that night as it truly was. He would thank me, tears forming in his eyes; address the audience, red-faced and ashamed, admit to them that I was indeed right, that he hadn't quite remembered things as they happened. That he had lied.

Is that even what I want?

Perhaps. After all, do I not deserve some recognition for what I did? Some acknowledgement, at the very least, that I mattered - if not now, at least then? Was it not worth a thank you, that I, and no one else, was there for him in that moment?

I shudder at the thought that I might care for that. Because whether he does or does not, I remember that night with clarity. I remember how frightened I was for him. How I would have given almost anything to see him happy again. 

And here he is. Happy. More successful than either of us could have imagined.

So why can't I leave it alone? Why must I appear each night, and hide, and pray he will not see me? 

Why must I fight to keep my hand lowered? 

It is not these questions; not the catharsis I wonder, and doubt, the answers may provide. 

Truthfully, given the chance, I don’t believe these are even the questions I would ask.

Given the chance, I would want him to know only this:

I am glad you are doing well. I am proud. I do not mind that you have become too busy to speak. That we have not talked for so long. I am happy for you. I would do it all again, if I had to.

And those are the things I cannot say, not for him, but for me.