I knew it. I had told him that Pussy McWilliam was a psycho. He thought he knew better. He could handle it. Just because he wrote stories, he seemed to believe he could control things in real life. Different rules applied to him.
Later, I heard that some of the other guests had commented that he seemed to be unusually hyper during the evening, like maybe he was on something. They said he had been chatting away in that corner when he noticed someone across the room. He became agitated because this bloke – a small, wiry type in dark glasses – kept glancing at him and started moving closer. They say that Dad looked confused. Then, when the guy in the shades walked quickly towards him, it was if he knew what was about to happen. He turned to face the man but didn’t say anything, just gave a sort of weird smile. The guy pulled a piece out of his pocket, raised it to chest height and shot him through the heart. As Dad fell back against the wall, the man turned, pocketed his gun and, cool as you like, made his way out of the club before anyone could do anything.
Poor Dad. No wonder he was freaked. It was only Jimmy Rose, the man he had once seen round at McWilliam’s place, one of Pussy’s most experienced removal men. Rose was not exactly part of the book set. He could only be there for one reason. Only, instead of going down to the basement, he went up where he was. Then he made his move.
He was never stupid, my Dad – innocent, yes, stupid, no. I guess that, in those few moments, he realized that I was not the only one in possession of a dangerous secret. He knew about Pussy’s past. He knew that his media career was built on a scam.
No reason to kill someone, you might think. But Dad had gone too far. He had taken a liberty. When he had suggested to Pussy that the debt owed to him might be repaid with a bullet, Dad did something which few people have ever managed to do. He shocked Pussy McWilliam.
In many ways, Pussy is a just traditional geezer. As bent as you like, he has his own warped sense of right and wrong. He was always a great believer in family. So what Dad proposed was just the worst thing he had ever heard. Who did this author bloke think he was? What kind of scumbag did he take him for to think that Pussy McWilliam would stoop to such a thing? No, when Dad asked Pussy to arrange the assassination of his only son, he signed his own death warrant.
Yes, it’s true. Dad had got his precious success at last. The way he saw it, the only person who could take it away from him was me. I had told him that no way would I blab his big secret around the place but somewhere along the line he had forgotten how to trust people.
The morning after he was murdered, the police came round to the house. They took his diaries and files and were interested to find a manuscript of Brian McWilliam’s Nymph, In Thy Orisons on a shelf beside his desk. But they ignored the contents of his work-in-progress drawer, including a box-file marked Kill Your Darlings. What good was that to anyone? It was just one of his stories, wasn’t it?
I read it. To tell the truth, I’m not too into books and Dad’s stuff has never been much to my taste (although I quite liked The Lonely Giant, right enough, when I was a kid). But there it all was, in back and white, the truth at last. Possibly the first completely honest thing he has ever written.
Not that he could quite bring himself to admit, even to himself, what he was going to do. When I showed Mum the last pages of the manuscript, she seemed to think that it could have been the prostitute he had been seeing who was the target, or even that Martin bloke he was always so obsessed by.
Yeah, right, definitely. That really made sense, didn’t it?
It was me. It was always going to be me. I put in a call to the police and told them everything I found in his book.
They fingered Jimmy Rose within hours. They knew that he had done work with Pussy in the past. His face and method of operation fitted the description of witnesses. But old Pussy was already one step ahead. One of his contacts in the force tipped him off and, by the time the squad cars had rolled up at his gaff, he was on his way to the airport. They say he’s in Rio with all the other old lags.
Word got out. Suddenly poor old Peter Gibson’s novel was tainted goods. Booksellers took it off display. The publishers quietly let it go out of print. Mum agreed to pass over a whole stack of money to Mr and Mrs Gibson. The porny thriller that Dad wrote for Pussy came out in paperback and hit the book charts, no problem. All the cash it’s making is going to the Barnardo’s Homes. And they say that publishers have no sense of humour.
As for Dad’s very last work, I read it again shortly after Jimmy Rose had been tried and sent down for ten years, then gave it to Mum. Between us, we decided that, for all his faults, Gregory Keays deserved to have his side of the story told. The publishers were a bit iffy but, when they heard that all proceeds of the book would go to the dead author’s poor little son, they agreed to take it on. It was Mum’s suggestion that I should bring the story up to date.
Sometimes I sit in his little office and look through the work that had become my father’s life: his unfinished novels, his articles for the Professional Writer, his little ra-ra affirmations, his precious quotations, his half-completed lists, ‘Ten Great Red-headed Authors’, ‘Top Five Literary Hermits’, ‘Five Worst Cases of Writer’s Block’, ‘The Flying Fist: great writers and self-abuse’. It makes me sad, the way he was sucked under by all those words written by other people, by the way he needed to compete with Gustave, Leo, Martin and whatever, his obsession with that good old infallible worm.
Once he had been all right. I remember how, years ago, he told Mum and me that sometimes, for an hour or so, he would copy out a few pages from his favourite books and pretend that he had written them himself, just to ease the log-jam in his brain. Now, in an unmarked folder, I found page after page after page of his work. The Good Soldier by Gregory Keays. The End of the Affair by Gregory Keays. Something Happened by Gregory Keays. The Counterlife by Gregory Keays. Money by Gregory Keays.
For a short while, I thought about getting something down myself, my memories and thoughts of a man who lost it for literature, my poor dead dad. The kid bites back. Then I glanced through the pages of his little creative primer and decided that there was a world out there, a life to live, and that it was best to leave the last word to Gregory Keays.
About the Author
Terence Blacker wanted to be a jockey when he grew and up. In fact, he could ride before he could walk, and his childhood hero was the great steeplechaser Mill House (a horse). He lives in Norfolk, England. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
A Note to the Reader
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
&nbs
p; Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
About the Author
Copyright
KILL YOUR DARLINGS. Copyright © 2000 by Terence Blacker. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
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ISBN 0-312-28329-6
First published in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
First U.S. Edition: December 2001
eISBN 9781250095589
First eBook edition: July 2015
* Indeed, I might well have done so. Before my recent success, a proposal for an open-ended series of anthologies – The Cat in Literature, The Dog in Literature, The Pig in Literature and s on – was in my pending tray.
* The story was later incorporated, with relatively minor shifting of narrative furniture, into the final section of terpsichore 4:2.
* ‘One of the most outrageous sex scenes in contemporary English fiction.’ Books and Bookmen.
* ‘A sure-fire winner for the reluctant reader.’ School Librarian.
* A fuller version of this argument can be found in Elizabeth Smart’s ‘On the Side of the Angels’, Journals, Volume II, 1994.
* ‘BE-IN AND NOTHINGNESS’ was the headline in the New Statesman.
* A legitimate borrowing from Immortality (1991) by my fellow novelist Milan Kundera.
* ‘The surprising return of the Forever Young generation’ was the headline in Prospect magazine.
Kill Your Darlings Page 31