Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer

piled with ice, each topped by a slice of lemon. The ice creaked and cracked as she filled the glasses. The whole thing was like an advertisement for the word ‘refreshing.’ He took a gulp.
    ‘Very refreshing,’ he said, stupidly, before hunting for his Dictaphone in the collection of bags he'd amassed at the Giardini. ‘Have you been to the Biennale yet?’
    ‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow.’ He told her about the things he'd seen so far, the dartboards, the Finnish boat slowly filling up with water on its journey across the sea of coloured glass. He found the Dictaphone.
    ‘Would you mind if I recorded our talk?’
    ‘That's fine.’ He placed the machine on the table between them, pressed
Record.
    ‘It's, um, voice-activated,’ he said. ‘How cool is that?’ It was another stupid remark and, as such, he was happy to have made it. Years ago he had tried to impress his subjects with how astute, on the ball, up to speed and generally smart he was. This, he had learnt, was a mistake. Interviews worked much better if the subject thought you were a complete numbskull. They let their guard down, became more expansive, actually tried to compensate for your manifest failings. Not, he began to suspect, that that was going to make much difference here. She was not unfriendly, but she was entirely business-like. Interviewees generally tried to charm you; she did not bother. But she did pour more water into his glass. She wasn't interested in him – interviewees never were, they were only interested in how they would appear in print – but she seemed equally uninterested in herself.
    ‘Perhaps I could start by asking you about Niki's record.’ He found himself squirming as he spoke. ‘What do you think about it?’
    ‘I like it,’ she said. He waited for her to continue. She didn't.
    ‘Would you like to expand on that a bit?’
    ‘I like it a lot. They're nice tunes. I like the lyrics too, some of them.’
    ‘Any ones in particular?’
    ‘I can't remember them off-hand, but I think she has a nice turn of phrase.’
    ‘What about the recording? I see that you actually sing backing vocals on one of the tracks.’
    ‘That was sweet of her to ask me. Obviously I can't sing for toffee, but it doesn't matter because there's so much else going on you can't really hear me.’
For toffee.
It was years since he'd heard that expression.
    ‘Well, I like it,’ he said, even though he had not yet bothered listening to the presumably crap CD that the PR had biked over to his flat with an urgency appropriate to desperately-needed blood. ‘Um, is it the kind of thing you listen to normally? I mean, what kind of music do you like to listen to?’
    ‘I like older music. I'm showing my age, but I like Bob Dylan. I like The Doors.’
    ‘Did you ever meet Dylan?’
    ‘No. I saw him at Blackbushe in nineteen seventy whenever.’
    ‘Eight. Me too. Great, wasn't it?’ This was it, the breakthrough, the moment they discovered they had something in common even though it was the thing that everyone from twenty to seventy had in common: an interest in Bob Dylan. With a bit of conniving on Jeff's part, the interview could now genuinely become what it always tried to masquerade as: a chat. ‘I was at Earl's Court too.’
    ‘I didn't make that.’
    ‘Who else do you like?’ he asked, resisting the temptation to go completely Dylanological.
    ‘Tangerine Dream,’ she said. ‘Van der Graaf Generator.’ He couldn't tell if she was joking.
    ‘Did you ever see Van der Graaf?’ he asked, responding in kind.
    ‘I knew Pete Hammill slightly’
    ‘Did
you? What was he like?’
    ‘He was nice. A nice, well-read, well-mannered English boy.’
    Jeff said,
‘H to He Who Am the Only One.’
    ‘Pawn Hearts,’
she said back. He thought she was about to laugh, but she didn't quite.
    ‘There's another one, but I can't quite remember it.’
    ‘The Least We Can Do Is Wave to Each Other,’
she said.
    ‘Of course.’
    ‘Aerosol