Lurid & Cute by Adam Thirlwell Page A

create a perfect lie, the kind that opens out new possibilities of other lives and other worlds, as if you’d made a voyage to the moon in your own home-made jetpack. You just do something with panache and anyone who loves you will believe you, if they have no other reason not to – and most of the time they do not. Although the problem with lying is that if what I wanted to do was consign just one aspect of my life to unreality then I think I was mistaken. Unfortunately, it leaks all over the picture. Sure, terrible things may well be often said in conversation but much more terrible can be the way that nothing is said at all. In either case there will be consequences, so that what looked like nothing but silence and absence may well turn out to be a grand event. For on reflection I do have to also admit that it was the particular way that Candy and I constructed this nothing that was in fact important for the future story I have to tell. That there were no consequences in the immediate future turned out to be the darkest consequence of all for the genuine, more long-distance future. It was the way we silenced each other that had the explosive possibilities inside it. And I do say silence. Because let’s say that however cool a person is, very few are the people who definitely enjoy the row and the argument. I am certainly not one of them. If what you want to film is sharpshooting in the bars of silent towns, with shotguns and other props, I am not necessarily the ideal star. Nor can I do the shouting in restaurants thing so very well – those scenes with women who upturn tables and scrawl lipstick on their faces like bloodstains or bad clowns. Such scenes make me scared. In fact, brawls scare me in every form they take. The only other person in the world who dislikes conflict like I dislike it is Candy and maybe this is one reason why we will love each other for ever. We prefer there to be silence between people, even though of course there is no such thing as silence, for even as you move your head or hand in a certain way you are offering communication – which is maybe why there are so many possible art forms, because while film is possibly the greatest if what you want to do is silence and the many truths of gesture, then also you need an art form made of words for all the elaboration of the inside thinking. Just one of the art forms is not enough to do the entire cosmology, the vast interior and the small exterior. And in this case the cosmology was how much truth a man must tell his wife, in the early and suburban morning of a giant city. I would not say I totally yet knew.
    ME
    You go to work all day and it’s difficult –
    Yes, the only problem is that lying has to be managed with care, and for a moment we were careless.
    CANDY
    I only do it for us – I mean – I just want you to have your space –
    Suddenly this was a more difficult place for me to argue from and so I paused there. But also I did try to make the right sort of noise because I totally agreed with her. She was in no way being cruel and in fact the opposite, which often happens. It was like my mother long ago berating me in some Chinese restaurant for not wanting the salt-and-pepper chicken feet when I had ordered them myself. But there I suppose I can be excused by my youth and inexperience. Almost definitely it was catastrophic harm that I was causing but I don’t know if harm should be the only or even main criterion for judging any of one’s actions: what about for instance glee or marvelling or simply the grotesque? For there it is. Lying is lovely. True, to make that discovery is also very troubling. If you have a desire for moral outcomes, if your aim is the most ideal society possible – and that is always what I try to achieve – then lying has its fearsome aspects. But it just happens very softly and fast, like I’d just discovered that all the leather-bound volumes along one wall of