The Upgrade: A Cautionary Tale of a Life Without Reservations (24 page)

I suggested Mil for two reasons: one, I’ve always enjoyed his writing and, two, we’d met a couple of times, including once at the launch party for a company I co-founded. Mil had taken great pleasure in mentioning my drunken behavior at the party in his column for the
Guardian
’s weekend magazine. In fact, he wrote the episode in such a hideously libelous way that his editor had actually emailed me to check that I wouldn’t sue.

I’d assured the editor that I’d be on thin ice suing anyone over my drunken behavior and the thing went to press unedited. Mil owed me a favor, and I sent him an email telling him that I was calling it in, in the form of a quote.

Mil’s reply was grudgingly accommodating …

I later learned that I’d wasted a perfectly good favor: Mil is published by W&N and Rebecca is his publicity manager too. She could have ordered him to write the review.

Still, a few weeks had passed since he’d received the manuscript and I was starting to wonder if he had indeed burnt it. For all my levity, Mil was someone whose opinion mattered to me.

Various copies of the book had been floating around W&N and the majority of the feedback had been positive, but like most people who get paid for writing words I’d always suffered from hideous imposter anxiety; why on earth would anyone pay to publish my words?

Mil is a real writer; if he liked the book and agreed to provide a quote for it then I could feel like I’d earned my place on the bookshelves next to him. If he hated it, then all my anxieties would be justified.

Finally, an email arrived from him. I could hardly bear to open it …

Allahu Akba!

As the book launch got closer, I decided to check out of the Raglan and move into somewhere more central. Having exhausted every option on TripAdvisor, I knew if I wanted to find a decent place in the center of town, without paying more than $400 a night, there was only one possible trick left. Secret hotels.

Even the most popular upscale hotels have nights where they can’t sell all of their rooms, but for obvious reasons they don’t want to advertise that fact to the world. Instead, they offer the rooms for sale through “secret hotel” sites, like
Hotwire.com
. Potential guests can search for hotels by general area (“central London, near Oxford Street”) and by feature (“five-star quality, with gym”) but until you confirm your booking, and pay for it up front, you don’t find out the name of the place you’re staying.

The nature of the secret sites, though—hotels use them only as a last resort—means that you can usually only book a room for one or two nights at a time. As a result, I found myself hotel-hopping like a madman for the next couple of weeks, moving to a new place every
day—the Holiday Inn Bloomsbury one night, the Copthorne Tara Kensington the next; anything to avoid returning to the Easy Hotel.

One night I lucked out and ended up staying at the five-star Park Lane Hotel for $170. My average nightly rate over the fortnight was just north of $200, still way off budget. But at least I was staying in nice places—every day was an adventure, not knowing where I was going to end up.

Which is how I came to end up staying across the road from Karen’s house.

Karen was one of my reasons for leaving London. She was the girl who, after the incident where she became BFFs with my other ex-girlfriend, had created an entire hate blog about me.

More than that, to help with her plan to destroy my life, she was the girl who had spent weeks recruiting as many more of my ex-girlfriends as she could find, as well as disgruntled former employees, people who I’d accidentally spilt drinks on in bars, people who thought I’d looked at them funny back in kindergarten; basically anyone who might still be holding a grudge against me and who might want to contribute to the blog.
⁴⁰

Let me be absolutely clear: I was a complete shit to Karen and I deserved every bad thing that she tried to do to me. In fact, over time, after I came out of witness protection, I had come to grudgingly admire her for taking such perfect revenge: going straight for where I would hurt the most—my ego.

But for all that admiration, I still had no desire ever to see her again. When I lived in London, even with eight million people in the
city, I remained in constant terror any time I walked into a pub, or a shop, or a restaurant, fearing she’d be there. The girl had eviscerated me online; God only knows what she’d do in person.

Returning to London for a visit, though, I’d started to think differently. For a start, it was ridiculous that I was walking around the city in fear. Karen was a pissed-off ex-girlfriend, not a ninja assassin. Second of all, any anger she had towards me would probably have dissipated now; she’d stopped blogging abruptly a few months earlier, leading me to suppose that she’d found a new boyfriend and decided to give up her campaign against me.

And thirdly, the whole thing was my fault. I’d hurt her. Hell, maybe it would be good if I did run into her; maybe it would give me a chance to apologize properly, to her face, like a man. To say “Karen, I acted like a dick and I got the comeuppance I deserved. I’m truly sorry for the hurt I caused you.” So, when
lastminute.com
’s secret hotel booking system sent me the email confirming the name of my next secret hotel, and it turned out to be right across the street from Karen’s house, my initial horror quickly turned to resolution.

Clearly fate, and
lastminute.com
, had sent me some kind of sign. It was time to face my demons. Unlike most of my ideas, the more I thought about this one the more certain I became. Rather than waiting for the inevitable accidental meeting, I should send Karen an email, telling her that I’d accidentally ended up staying nearby—not across the street, that would just look mental—and suggesting a coffee.

No, not an email—that was cowardly. I’d call her: I’d deleted her number from my phone but had kept it written down, just in case.

Yes, I concluded, calling Karen is the right thing to do. And had I been stone cold sober when I’d concluded it—and had it been, say, the middle of the afternoon, then I would probably have been right.

But it wasn’t the middle of the afternoon: it was midnight and I’d just got back to the hotel having spent the evening drinking with Robert.

She answered on the second ring.

“Hello?”

The voice was instantly familiar. I was worried that she’d see my number and not pick up, but judging by her tone—curiosity, rather than concern—I wasn’t the only one who had purged our relationship from their phone.

“Hi, Karen, it’s Paul Carr,” I said, with possibly a little too much formality.

“Oh, hello,” she said. This was a good sign. Anything less than “go fuck yourself” was a good sign. The conversation started out slow and stilted, as befitted a girl who had created a hate blog having just answered the phone to the object of her hate, at midnight. Oddly, though, once I explained that I was calling to apologize, she became surprisingly civil—chatty, almost.

“Are you drunk?” she asked.

“No,” I almost lied. The truth is, I’d sobered up the moment she answered. We talked about her blog, and how it had succeeded in embarrassing me and making me feel ashamed of how I’d behaved. She seemed pleased by that, but not in the gloaty way I’d expected. If anything she sounded grateful.

Grateful that I’d learned my lesson and that I’d been forced to think hard about the hurt I’d caused.

“Thank you for the apology,” she said, “I appreciate it.” I paused, knowing I should end the conversation there. I’d said what I needed to say and now she could go back to her life with—presumably—her new boyfriend and all would be slightly more right with the world than it had been a few hours earlier.

And had I been thinking about it stone cold sober in the morning, then that’s probably what I’d have done.

But I wasn’t sober—not really—and it wasn’t the morning.

“I’d really like to see you,” I said, “I’ve missed you.” I really had.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said.

She was right. I pressed on. “How about if I came round tomorrow and we had breakfast? I’d really like to apologize properly, to your face.”

“I really …” then a pause. “OK, if you’re really not drunk and you’re not going to wake up at noon and forget this. Which is to say if any of what you’ve just said is true, then come over at ten. Bring bagels. And I’ll listen to your apology.”

I could have cried.

“OK,” I said, “I’ll be there, I promise.” I hung up.

And then I cried; tears poured down my cheeks and I slumped to the floor in a mixture of relief, panic and a weird sense of joy at the possibility of making things better. I walked over to the minibar and poured myself a whiskey out of one of the tiny bottles.

My hands were shaking. It hadn’t occurred to me that I’d ever be able to make things better with Karen, and now I had a second chance. All I had to do was make it to her house by 10 a.m.

I drank the entire mini bottle of whiskey in one gulp.

I woke up to the sound of my phone ringing. I squinted at the screen. It was Robert.

“Hey, mate,” I said, “how you doing? You’ll never guess what I did last night?”

“Tell me over lunch,” he said. “Ten minutes, at your hotel?”

“What?” I sat bolt upright in bed. “What time is it?”

“About half twelve, why?”

Fuck.

“FUCK.”

“You’re unbelievable,” said Robert as we sat down to lunch at a French place a safe enough distance from my hotel.

I’d tried to call Karen twice but, unsurprisingly, the calls had gone to voicemail after a couple of rings. How could I have been so stupid? I had drunk half the contents of the minibar to “steady my nerves” before finally stumbling into bed and forgetting even to set an alarm.

“This is it,” I said, “the final straw. I have to stop drinking.”

“After this bottle,” said Robert, filling my glass.

“After this bottle.”

“OK, gentlemen, time to make your way outside, please.”

The bartender of the Albert pub in Victoria had already stacked the barstools on the tables and was now getting twitchy.