Get Poor Slow

by David Free

  ‘Who for?’ she asked with horror. ‘Not for Jeremy?’

  ‘Yes, for Jeremy. You didn’t know?’

  I watched the cogs churn behind her eyes. She’d been bargaining on Barrett Lodge. No doubt she’d already pictured his limp garland on the paperback: humane, monumental, coruscating . . . a masterpiece. And instead she’d landed me. What had she done to deserve that? She stole a tiny but telling glance at her phone. It wasn’t hard to read her mind. She thought she could ring Skeats later and get me booted off the job. Let her try it. She’d be in for a shock.

  For the moment she picked up an apple and looked hard at its grainy surface, so she wouldn’t have to look at me. ‘Have you read it yet?’ she said.

  ‘It would be improper of me to say.’

  Tweedy kept looking at the fruit. At a similar moment Jade had given me her full gaze, not too long before giving me everything else. Tweedy, to her credit, was not about to give me either. Instead she said, ‘Look. Tell you what. Shoot me a synopsis of that novel of yours. Two pages. Can’t promise anything. But if I feel like it’s got . . .’ She fell silent and snapped her fingers a few times to suggest some elusive thing that could not be verbalised, something like pizzazz, or marketability, or proximity to the blazing virtues of Dallas Fingle. Whatever she was thinking of, she wouldn’t find it in anything written by me. ‘If I feel like it’s got something,’ she elaborated, ‘we can take it from there.’

  It was a tepid effort, as bribes went. I’d had better. But you had to remember she thought Fingle’s book was good. She didn’t see how anyone, even me, could think otherwise. How nice it would have been to inform her, right now, that her boy, her baby, was a raging illiterate. But why ruin her surprise?

  ‘So what am I doing here?’ I asked her.

  ‘Well,’ she said, swerving away from the other stuff with relief. ‘I saw you on the telly last night, with Missy. And I loved the way you reframed the narrative. I certainly think there’s a book in that, if you’re interested. The crime, the investigation, the whole “person of interest” thing. Have you thought about it? We’d be interested, if you are.’

  ‘A celebrity memoir?’

  ‘More than that, I’d hope. Much more than that. The trial by media. The headlines. The struggle with alcohol. Depression, if you have it. This is the kind of stuff I can sell, Ray. Reality stuff. Life writing. You know what the climate’s like. Let’s operate within the parameters of the real here. And look, maybe you’ve had other approaches already, I don’t know. If you haven’t yet, you will. That’s your business. What I can tell you is what we can offer you. The brand, for starters. That logo on the spine. Lot of history there, Ray. Generally I’ll sit here with a writer and I’ll reel off some of the names we’ve published over the years. You of all people I don’t need to do that with.’

  ‘Of course not.’ Sample names: Vagg, Fingle, the guy in the chef’s hat. But her central point was sound. I was, after all, still sitting there, still listening, still lashed to the chair by reality’s parameters.

  ‘And the beauty of this is that you’re a writer already – in the sense that you’ve written a lot of short stuff, a lot of newspaper stuff. So the writing element shouldn’t be much of a problem. I think we could persuade the board of that.’

  My eyes were fixed on the cloche of the celebrity chef. My mind was fixed on the stark facts of my penury.

  ‘In terms of money,’ she pertinently said, ‘the days of the swinging-dick advance have been and gone. We both know that. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you. That being said, I think we could put something together.’ Her tone said I was lucky not to be paying her. ‘And there’s – there’s your novel too. Maybe. I don’t know. We’ll see. All this is contingent, of course, on what happens to you in terms of your legal position.’

  ‘I’m innocent, if that’s what you’re asking.’

  ‘Good. Good.’

  ‘Although you’ve published the odd felon in the past.’

  Tweedy thought about that. ‘Maybe, but no one who’s killed an innocent girl in cold blood. There are limits, even in this landscape. But look: let’s not get morbid. Let’s assume this thing’ll have a happy ending.’

  ‘I’m working on it.’

  ‘Good,’ Tweedy said. ‘Think it over. I’m not asking for an answer here and now. Take a day or two. But bear in mind that there is an element of urgency, with any project like this. Your viability’s at a peak right now, today. It won’t stay there forever. We’ll want to leverage it while we can.’

  ‘Before people forget who I am?’

  ‘Yes, to be frank. It happens. What people are interested in is current affairs, with the emphasis on current.’

  ‘Who wants to be read by people like that?’ She was making it damned hard to maintain my dough-focus.

  ‘I keep forgetting you’re a critic,’ Tweedy said.

  ‘This is what things have come to? Books for people who don’t like books?’

  ‘We’ve got our prestige books too.’

  ‘Like Fingle’s?’

  ‘Exactly. But they can’t all be books like that.’

  ‘Some of them have to be books like mine.’

  ‘Assuming you want there to be a bloody book, yes.’

  ‘To make back the money Fingle loses by being so searing.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Ray. I was sort of under the impression I was doing you a favour here. Do you have any idea what people in this industry think of you?’

  ‘I assume they think I’m utterly beyond the pale.’

  ‘Okay. So you do have some idea. Anyway,’ she said with an air of finality. ‘I’ve told you what I can offer you. If you’re not interested, you’re not interested.’

  I looked at the hall-of-famers stacked against the wall behind her. I looked at the game-show host with his raised thumb. Money, Jade had told me, is good. I still thought that was untrue. I thought it now more than ever. But there was no denying the other thing. Lack of money is a nightmare. It makes you stop being you. When you don’t have any, money starts thinking your thoughts for you. It makes all your decisions. And finally the worst happens: it writes your words.

  ‘Now, Jill.’ I looked her in the eye again. I’d made enough futile gestures for one day, if not for a lifetime. ‘I don’t recall saying that.’

  There are things you finally learn, if you live long enough. When a stranger stops her car and opens the door for you, get in. When a man sticks out his hand at you, shake it. Think about the consequences later, if at all. Take what you get offered, not what you deserve. If you wait for that, you might be waiting forever. The future never comes. It’s a myth, like the afterlife. Don’t subtract yourself from the world and hope that a different and better world will spring up in its place. It won’t. No matter how fucked you are, someone else is always worse off. In a day or two it will probably be you. Try not to drink too much. You still will, but you won’t drink as much as you would have if you hadn’t tried. Never turn down a shot at sex or money. Don’t look too hard for the hidden catch. There will always be one. You’ll find out what it is soon enough. Waste no time trying to please other people. Not even they know what they really want. Pursue the truth if you like, but don’t imagine that it matters all that much to anyone else. Make a big noise, or the world will forget you’re there. Do all these things and hope they add up to a life.

  This is what it’s like to be a writer.

  Maybe it’s what it’s like to be anyone.

  Maybe that was the night I turned up at Liam Vagg’s. Or maybe it was some other night. The encounter seemed blurred even while I was having it. I don’t believe he asked me in. At any rate I never made it past the front door. I don’t remember driving there, and I don’t remember driving home. I will never be sure I didn’t dream the whole thing. But if I dreamt it, why didn’t I dream myself some better lines?
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  ‘I told you never to come back,’ Vagg said.

  ‘I came here to apologise,’ I told him.

  He started closing the door. I stopped it with my foot.

  ‘I was wrong to think you killed her,’ I said. ‘That showed a sorry lack of imagination. I thought you were the nastiest guy she knew. I was wrong, by a long way. She had somebody worse. I’ve heard his voice on the phone. I’ve tasted his skull. It won’t be long till I find him. I’m closing in. Things are swinging my way, Vagg. Guess what? Your pal Jill Tweedy offered me a book deal. A true-crime quickie. A ruffian’s memoir. I’m coming after your title, champ. This hasn’t all been a waste. I’m finally getting my payoff after all.’

  ‘I wouldn’t bet on it.’ Vagg looked bored. ‘What’s the advance?’

  I quadrupled the true sum and named the result. It still wasn’t enough to wound him.

  ‘I’ll believe it,’ he said, ‘when she sends you the cheque.’ Even at midnight the Brylcreem, the designer sweats.

  ‘Believe it now,’ I said, ‘and save yourself some time. She’s hot for me. She wants my infamy. I’m a marketable scumbag, like you. Mind you, I’m not really a criminal. You’re one up on me there. But you know something? Suddenly I don’t mind looking like one. Yeah, I sort of like the spotlight now, Vagg. I’m starting to see the point of it. Maybe I want to stay in it a while longer. Maybe I don’t want them to catch the guy who really did it. Not just yet. Why kill the goose now?’

  ‘Try that and you’ll end up in prison, mate, very fucking fast. You think Tweedy’ll want to touch you then? Don’t bet on it. She’ll be wanting that advance back, too.’

  ‘All publicity’s good publicity, Vagg. I hardly need to tell you that. And my publicity’s even worse than yours. I’m coming for your mansion, pal. I’m coming for your readers. I’m younger, I’m more desperate, and I write better.’

  ‘Well, you’d better write fast. You’re already starting to smell like yesterday’s news.’

  ‘You don’t smell so fresh yourself. You know how many copies of your book I saw in Tweedy’s office? Try none. They’ve got a new blue-eyed boy over there. His name’s Dallas Fingle. They’re about to throw everything they’ve got left at him, so don’t be surprised when they stop throwing it at you.’

  ‘I’ve heard all about him,’ Vagg said. ‘He sounds like a cunt.’

  ‘He is. That’s another apology I owe you. I didn’t know what a bad book was, until I opened his. At least your stuff’s honest. I should have said that when I reviewed it.’

  He was about ready to shut the door now, whether my foot was in the way or not.

  ‘Wait,’ I told him. ‘I’ve got one more thing to say. Ready? I wish I could write the way you do, Vagg. I mean it. I wish I had the common touch. I wish I could treat it as a day job, like baking bread. I say that without malice, or without much. I wish I could write a page of prose without worrying about how good or bad it is. Maybe I’ll start now, with the junk memoir.’

  ‘Go for it. Here’s my blurb. You’re a drunk, you seem to take a lot of pills, I’ll be surprised if you survive the drive home, nobody cares about your reputation except you, and you were ready to throw it all away for one night of phoney sex.’

  ‘Actually it was two,’ I told him, ‘plus some cash that never turned up.’

  ‘Also,’ he said, as the big expensive door closed on me, ‘I still reckon you killed her.’

  9

  Something dull and heavy was on my chest. I thought a man was kneeling there. My eyes were shut. I tried forcing them open. It didn’t work. My brain had risen from sleep but my body was locked below the surface still, paralysed. It happens to me sometimes. I fear it says bad things about my lifestyle. It’s like waking up in your own corpse. I don’t recommend it. You can think but you can’t move. This time I started to fear it would never end. It had never gone on for so long. There was panic in me but it had no way to get out. The thing on my chest felt like the dead body of a big soft animal. It was crushing my maimed lung. I heard birds singing. They sounded way too loud. Was I outside – in the scrub, on the lawn? Had things come to that? A strangely fresh wind was fingering my hair.

  My eyes came open, but the rest of me stayed entombed. I was on the couch, on my back. I looked down the length of my body, racked out in its coffin of air. I was fully dressed, boots included. It was the middle of the day at least. I lost patience and tried thrashing life back into my limbs. This is exactly the wrong thing to do. It’s like trying to lift a fridge with your mind. The thing on my chest was Fingle’s manuscript, flopped open like a fat dead albatross. It was crushing the breath out of me, and I couldn’t get it off. I was dying the way I’d lived, under a suffocating mudslide of talentless prose.

  Not before time, my concrete body surged up out of its shackles. It jerked sideways and flung Fingle’s schlockbuster to the floor. Then I lay there shaking on my flank for a while, sucking air like a beached fish, taking things in. The door behind my head was standing wide open. That was where the wind was coming from. I didn’t remember leaving it open, but that didn’t mean much. Those singing birds were not outside. They were with me in the room. There were two of them. They were perched on a curtain rod above the sink, painting the wall below them with liquid shit. They were strangely small, considering their output of noise and waste. Somehow I’d have to get them out. That had to be done soon, but by no means yet.

  The clock said it was two in the afternoon. On the coffee table beside my head was a kit of morning essentials: pills, water, a modest amount of liquor, a pen. I must have prepped them the night before, when I was thinking straight. The only thing missing was a bucket, or preferably two. I hauled myself away to the can and made it happen. A lot of bad things had happened to me lately, but vomiting through broken ribs was a hot new contender for the worst. When I was all wrung out I came back and redumped myself on the couch. My bed was softer but it was farther away. Also I was in no shape to lie down. I had to sit up straight and cradle my howling pink newborn brain for a while. The song of the birds ripped into it like an endless downpour of barbed silver arrows.

  I shut my eyes and tried to reassemble the shards of the preceding night. Vaguely I recalled having dropped in on Vagg. Apparently I had then made it home, lurched inside, failed to shut the door, and fallen asleep reading Fingle’s book. What a waste of time that last part had been. Whatever I’d read, I couldn’t remember a word of it. And now the proofs were splayed on the floor like the head of a mop, and my place was lost forever. But wait. One thing I did remember. At a certain point in the evening, just before I went under, something in Fingle’s book had stirred me. Some tin-eared phrase or scene in there, some stray stroke of hackery, had lit a fuse in my mind. I recalled a period of mental smouldering, as if I could smell a distant burning but couldn’t find the source. And then, when I was on the point of sleep, a lightshow of revelation had burst behind my eyes. Something profound had come to me. Was it something about Fingle, or had I landed on some wider answer? Whatever it was, I’d written it down. Yes. Now I remembered that too. I had hauled myself up off the couch, found a pen and a pad, and written it down. It had to have been something pretty vital, if I’d forced myself to do all that. Maybe it was the answer to the whole thing.

  For some reason I hadn’t left the pad within reach. It was down at the far end of the table, still flipped open. I didn’t bother wondering how it had got there. I felt a general optimism that trumped such questions. The future was on my side for once. The answer was right in front of me, in plain sight, even if I had to get off the couch to reach it. For a while I didn’t. I just stayed where I was, looking at the pad but making no move. Time had slowed. I thought I could afford to savour the moment. Finally I got up and went over and looked down at the pad’s top page. It was empty. There was nothing on it. I pawed through the pages under it. There was nothing on them either. I flipped back to the firs
t page. Running down its left edge, jammed in the pad’s metal spiral, was the ragged remnant of a missing sheet, with a few severed loops of my handwriting still clinging to it. I’d written something down all right, but some fuckstick had ripped it out. I had a strong feeling it hadn’t been me.

  I was already headed for the kitchen bin. The birds saw me coming and freaked out, exploding off the curtain rod and flapping around my head in black ragged circles, screeching like rusted hinges. I threw my hands at them. They didn’t seem to care. I removed the bin’s lid. What I wanted to see right under it, crowning the rest of the trash, was a balled-up sheet of fresh white paper. Instead I saw the typescript of my dead novel. What was that doing there? I pulled it out and plunged my hands into the deeper garbage. They delved and rummaged. They got wet. They found nothing.

  The birds were back on the curtain rod but they hadn’t shut up and they hadn’t stopped shitting. It was starting to feel like a bad day. I glanced over at my bedroom door. The day got worse. The door was closed, and I never closed it except when I was in there, and I wasn’t in there. I wanted to believe it had blown shut in the wind, but the wind was blowing the other way. I found myself moving towards the door. Why was I doing that? Why wasn’t I walking away from it, fast? There was something inevitable about the whole scene. Somebody somewhere had written all my moves for me. I had walked towards a door like this before. I had a bad feeling about this one too. Somehow I knew what was behind it. If I was right, I’d better know it now. If I was wrong, whatever else was in there couldn’t be worse.

  I opened the door – not all the way, but far enough. I wasn’t wrong. Missy Wilde was lying on my bed again, exactly where she had lain the other day, wearing a similar outfit, striking an identical pose. Her knees were up. Her legs were parted. Her skirt was pooled around her waist. This time, on the other hand, she was dead. There was something drastically wrong with her face. Her shins were purple and waxy. On one of them a fat fly was moving.