Get Poor Slow

by David Free

  ‘Funny you should mention Fingle,’ I said.

  ‘Why’s that?’ He reached for a pencil and started tapping it against his side of the desk. Looking at it gave him a half-plausible excuse not to look at me. This thing was getting off to a bad, bad start.

  ‘I swung by Barrett Lodge’s desk on the way in,’ I said.

  Skeats said nothing.

  ‘Guess what I saw on it?’

  ‘A rat?’ Skeats tried to grin, but his face wasn’t buying it. He’d stopped tapping the pencil.

  ‘Close. I saw Fingle’s book.’

  Skeats lost the smile and tried on a frown instead. He couldn’t make that work either.

  ‘Lodge seems to think he’s reviewing it,’ I said.

  Skeats looked over at the closed door, as if to confirm that there was wood between us and Lodge. Either that or he was checking escape routes.

  ‘Okay,’ he said in a low voice. ‘I won’t bullshit you.’

  ‘There’s a first time for everything.’

  ‘Keep your cool, Ray. I’m not fucking you here. I’m fucking Lodge. You’re still my Plan A. I threw him a copy for backup. I had to. This book’s a big deal. I can’t afford to take any chances on it. I needed a safety net in case you get a last-minute attack of the . . . of the Gore Vidals. But as far as I’m concerned, you and I still have an agreement.’

  ‘Which is? Remind me of it.’

  ‘As long as you come up with something usable,’ he said, ‘I’ll use it.’

  ‘I don’t remember agreeing to that. I remember sitting there while you said it.’

  ‘In that case you can hardly blame me for taking an each-way bet.’

  ‘Define “usable”.’

  ‘Christ, Ray. We’ve been through that.’

  ‘Let’s go through it again.’

  Skeats made a big mistake now. He heaved an extravagant sigh and went into Polonius mode: as if the fool in the room was me. ‘This book,’ he said patiently, ‘is going to be the biggest Arts story of the year. They’re holding a junket for it, for Christ’s sake. Take it from me, this is not normal. Fifteen minutes I get with him. Timed by some flunky with a stopwatch, if you please. When there’s a minute to go, they’re going to ring a little bell. You think this is normal? This is a first-time novelist we’re talking about. Normally they’ll sit down with you for as long as you like. Longer. You can’t get rid of the fuckers. Not Fingle. This guy’s special. No one even knows what he looks like yet. They’re keeping him under wraps, like he’s the phantom of the fucking opera.’

  ‘I know what he looks like.’

  ‘No shit?’

  ‘I saw the book in Tweedy’s office.’

  ‘What does he look like?’

  ‘I won’t spoil your surprise.’

  Skeats shrugged, as if he’d be seeing him soon enough. ‘You get what I’m saying, though? Tomorrow I interview him. Saturday week the interview goes on the front page. And I don’t mean the front page of Arts. I mean the front page, as in page one. Two weeks after that we run an extract from the book. And two weeks after that it’s our lead review. By which time a certain momentum will have built up. Are you with me, Ray? You still want me to define “usable”? Usable is something that’ll be consistent with that momentum. Something that won’t confuse people. Something that won’t make them wonder, are we talking about two different books here, or what? Something that won’t make the industry wonder if I’ve got a madman working for me.’

  ‘As opposed to a toothless stooge.’

  ‘If you force me to run Lodge’s, I’ll run Lodge’s. I might as well be frank about that.’

  ‘Last time we talked, you told me he was on his way out.’

  ‘Barrett’s a safe pair of hands, Ray. Don’t underestimate what that means to me, being a safe pair of hands.’

  Out on the floor, those guys with the nail guns were still going at it. Otherwise there was the sound made by a modern newspaper: the sound of not many people doing nothing much, on equipment that made no noise.

  ‘So who’re you sleeping with now?’ I said. ‘Jill Tweedy?’

  ‘Ray. That is way beneath you.’

  ‘What’s the payoff then?’

  ‘Grow up, Ray. You know this isn’t about money.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘It’s about knowing which way the wind is blowing.’

  ‘And which way,’ I asked him, ‘is the wind blowing?’

  ‘Not your way, mate. Not the way you’re going.’

  Now he’d upshifted from confidence to aggression. Another bad play, at this delicate stage of proceedings. Another bad life choice. No, this was not going well. My resolve was taking dents all over the place.

  ‘Lodge called him a stylist,’ I said. ‘Is that the sort of thing you want me to say?’

  ‘I’m not telling you what to say.’

  ‘You’re just telling me what not to say.’

  ‘No, I’m telling you I have an editorial policy, like every other editor in the history of the business. It’d be nice if you remembered that’s what I am, mate, in the end. The editor. Your editor. It’d be nice if you at least pretended to respect me.’

  ‘I thought I always had.’ We were finally getting to the nub of things – now, at this faltering hour, a bit too late in the day to help either of us, especially him. This wasn’t about Lodge, or Fingle, or Jade. It wasn’t even about me, or just me. It was about rank. It was about Skeats’s thirst for deference. If you didn’t give him that, he felt like a man who looks in the mirror and sees nothing there.

  ‘Does Lodge have any idea,’ I asked him, ‘what a stylist is?’

  ‘Do you? A stylist is somebody that Lodge says is a stylist. End of story. They put it on the back of the book and it becomes a fact. This is the way the real world works.’

  I half-wanted to tell him he was making a big mistake, talking to me in this tone. But I also wanted him to keep making it. I’d reached the point where it made things easier for me, not harder. I said, ‘Have you read the book?’

  ‘Ray, you’re becoming a bit of a bore on this.’

  ‘Have you read this book?’

  ‘You know I haven’t.’

  ‘Well, I have. And there’s something wrong with it. It reeks. It’s like Fingle’s daring you to call his bluff. It’s like he’s doing an Ern Malley.’

  ‘Ray, do you ever wonder if you’re in the wrong game?’

  ‘No,’ I lied. ‘Do you?’

  ‘A critic is meant to articulate what people are thinking. And who else thinks what you think, at this point? Does anyone? The trouble,’ he said, ‘is that you don’t really seem to like books.’

  I was still thinking about Ern Malley. It sounded like something I’d said before. Long ago, in a different life. I wanted to nail this impression down, but Skeats kept talking over my thoughts.

  ‘And I happen to rub shoulders,’ he was saying, ‘with a lot of people who do like books. And I’ll tell you something. All of them, to a fucking man, are raving about The Tainted Land.’

  ‘Who are these fools? Name one person who’s read it and says it’s any good. And don’t say Lodge.’

  For a moment he hesitated: he seemed to be on the brink of saying something I really wouldn’t like. Then he changed his mind and said: ‘Ray, let’s broaden the scope of this chat.’

  ‘Yeah. Let’s do that.’

  ‘I feel we’re at a crossroads here. A watershed.’

  ‘So do I.’

  ‘We may even be reaching the end of the line.’

  ‘I feel that too.’ I was drifting out of the scene now. I pictured myself back out on the road, driving into a future from which Skeats was already fading.

  ‘I mean, I don’t know what more I can do here.’ He heaved a big terminal sigh. ‘I’ve offered
you the chance to play ball. And I don’t just mean on this book. I mean in general, in the future, for good. And you don’t seem all that interested. Which is fine, fair enough, okay. It’s your choice. As long as you understand it’s a permanent one.’

  ‘If you’ve got no further use for me,’ I said, ‘then I’ve got no further use for you. Think that through.’

  ‘That a reference to me and Jade?’

  ‘Among other things.’

  ‘I have thought it through, as it happens.’ He looked over at the door again. It was still shut. It hadn’t turned its own knob and freed its own latch since the last time he’d looked at it. He lowered his voice and said: ‘You’re a smart guy, Ray. Too smart, in some ways. But you play the percentages. And her and me, there’s no percentage in it. You must be able to see that. I didn’t kill her and I’ve got no idea who did. I knew her a bit, I fucked her a bit, we fixed a few reviews. End of story. You want to tell the world that, go ahead. But I don’t see you being that stupid. That cheap. I can’t see you smearing a dead girl for no good reason. A girl who’s no longer around to defend herself. I can’t see you telling the world she was a . . . Well. We know what she was really like. But nobody else does, not yet. And I don’t see why you, of all people, would want to ruin their fantasy about her. It wouldn’t be your style. After all, you’re better than all the rest of us, aren’t you? Isn’t that your shtick?’

  ‘I wouldn’t bet on it.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what I will bet on,’ he said. ‘You liked her. You liked her a lot. And I don’t think you want the tabloids to turn on her. I know you don’t give a shit about me. You probably don’t give a shit about my wife and kids either. Fine. But Jade’s another story, isn’t she? At least to you.’ Here it came: one last clean wide revolting grin, one last drastic over-rating of his own wit. ‘I’m calling your bluff, Ray. I just don’t see you pissing on her memory in public. If you don’t keep it sacred, who will?’

  ‘Speaking of your wife,’ I said, ‘I hear she’s out of town.’

  ‘What the fuck,’ he said with some surprise, ‘has that got to do with it?’

  I waved a careless hand. Nothing. Pure hatred is like pure love. It makes your decisions for you. What man could look at Skeats’s vain and vacant face and not want it gone forever? Not me. That much was now clear. Somebody better than me, maybe. Somebody who knew him less well. But not me.

  ‘Otherwise,’ that face was saying, ‘I don’t think we’ve got much left to say to each other. I tried offering you more work, and look where that got us. There is no more work for an inflexible cunt like you. You refuse to see the big picture. Look around yourself, mate. The whole business is dying. And you want to argue the toss on whether some guy’s a stylist, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘And you want to save it by giving good reviews to bad books.’

  ‘Pretty soon there won’t be any books at all, Ray, good or bad. Is that what you want? What do you plan to review then? Don’t you get it? If the ship goes down, so do we.’

  ‘Maybe it deserves to go down. The industry fucked itself, Skeats. You can’t keep selling people shit and telling them it’s gold. Sooner or later you run out of customers.’

  ‘I tried, Ray. I did my best with you. I cut you way more slack than anyone else would have. I’m starting to forget why I bothered. You just never got it.’ He said that a bit sadly. A bit sadly, but not a lot. He thought the grave he’d just finished digging was mine.

  ‘So we fend for ourselves now.’ I was about ready to leave. ‘Both of us are on our own.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll do all right,’ Skeats said.

  ‘Goodbye, Jeremy.’ I stood up. ‘It’s been pointless knowing you. I never really worked out what it is you do, except fuck up people more talented than yourself.’

  I was a step shy of the door when Skeats said to my back: ‘Who did you think you were, Ray? Kenneth Tynan? Cyril Connolly? You were just a newspaper reviewer. That’s all you ever were.’

  I looked back at him. ‘That’s all they were too, you fool.’

  ‘Once upon a time, maybe. Those days are dead. They’re never coming back.’

  Again I turned to go. I was out of memorable comebacks, and anyway Skeats wouldn’t get to remember them for long. He looked half-embalmed already. The lofted hair, the plasticky witless face, the pale lipless smile. I was talking to Yorick’s skull. Gel your flaxen locks an inch thick, pal. Gravity’s coming for them.

  I was touching the doorknob when Skeats said, ‘You want to know who liked Fingle’s book?’

  He had one more knife to fling at my spine. Like a fool I turned around and let him fling it into my heart.

  ‘Jade,’ he said.

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘It’s a fact. Take it from me.’

  ‘No. She was much better than that.’

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong. She was the first person I ever heard talk him up. She used to lie there and rave about the prick, well before anyone else had ever heard of him. She told me he was the real deal. Oh yeah, and she called him a stylist too.’

  ‘Then she was lying.’

  ‘She wasn’t. She liked the book. She liked him. You think you knew everything about her? You only ever fucked her twice, by your own admission. No, Ray. There’s a few things about her you never found out. Let’s add this to the list. Matter of fact, she didn’t just like him. She discovered him. This book was her baby.’

  ‘Now that I know is bullshit. Jill Tweedy discovered him.’

  ‘And who told you that?’ Skeats demanded with a leer. ‘Don’t tell me. Let me guess. Jill Tweedy, right?’

  That one caught me flat-footed. It was an arid feeling: standing there at the net and watching Skeats pass me with a cold winner. It made me feel old, clueless, dead on my feet.

  ‘Sometimes it stuns me,’ he was saying, ‘how little you really know about this business. Jade’s dead. She’s gone. You think a leathery old warrior like Jill Tweedy is going to sit back and let a corpse take credit for the biggest book of the year? You think a senior editor’s going to admit that Fingle got discovered by a publicist, and a dead one at that?’

  Still that foul feeling of having nothing to say. After all those years of hacking away at my words, he’d reduced me to silence at last. Not that it mattered any more. Anything I said was headed straight for the abyss, unless I remembered it myself. But that had been the story of my career.

  ‘She was his biggest fan, Ray.’ He was talking to my back now. ‘If you don’t like it, go home and take it up with her ghost.’

  I didn’t wait that long. I got the inquest started in the car, where there were no other ghosts in the way. My memory of her was in the last stage of collapse. The gutted edifice of her lies was finally coming down. If she had really liked Fingle’s book, I had no more shreds of her to cling to, and not much of a self left to do the clinging with. I was unravelling as fast as she was. Soon one of us would be a shapeless heap of rags on the floor. It was a race towards non-existence, and I didn’t care who won it. I looked at the hard grey road in front of me, bone-pale in the headlights, and wondered what was keeping it there. Everything else had been snatched from under me. Why not that too? I drove fast, so I would make it home while the earth still held.

  She couldn’t have liked Fingle’s book. If I knew one real thing about her, that was it. I was ready to concede almost anything else. For all I cared she’d fucked the guy. If she’d met him, she probably had. The fucking I could take. I’d grown numb to that. But the idea that she’d liked his stuff – that stuff. If that was true I was ready to die. The world was a meaningless place, and I wanted no part of it. If The Tainted Land was her kind of book, I hadn’t known her at all.

  The road ahead, in the ashen wash of my lights, was starting to look like the same scarred stretch of tarmac all the time, endlessly cycling on a cheap loop. The landscap
e was in re-runs, like my brain. A half-hour shy of home, when I could wait no more, I dropped a couple of red-and-whites. They would take about an hour to bite, and when they did I would be down for the day. Thirty more minutes on the road, thirty on the couch: that was about as much consciousness as I was up for. After that, the fog would come down.

  Maybe I hadn’t known her. The prospect had to be entertained. I almost wanted it to be true. It would mean I could let her go. It would also mean I was a madman, but who said I wasn’t? Nobody except me. Maybe Skeats was right: maybe my standards were so out of whack that I was effectively insane. If I wasn’t, a lot of other people were. Maybe Fingle was a genius. Maybe I did kill Jade, and Missy too. Maybe the voice on the phone was a voice in my head. Maybe the man who would visit Skeats tonight would be me.

  All that horseshit had to be considered – for about thirty seconds. And then it had to be shovelled aside for good, because time was running out. Fingle’s book was trash. It didn’t matter how few people could see it. It remained a fact. It was an epic for fools, and the girl I knew had not been a fool. Yes, she had used me. Yes, she’d told me a few lies. Yes, she had fucked Skeats and Vagg and probably Fingle. But I still thought I’d known her in a way that they had not. If I was wrong, I didn’t know myself either. But I wasn’t wrong. Not all of it had been lies. She’d given me wit, and nothing is less fakeable than that. She was the opposite of a fool. She knew what bullshit smelt like, and Fingle’s book smelt of nothing else. Of course she hadn’t liked it. That meant she’d been lying to Skeats when she said she had. More than that: it meant she’d gone out of her way to lie about it. Now why would she have done that?

  By now I was at home. I drove through the front gate without slowing, without taking questions. I had about ten minutes left to think straight in. I needed to lie down. I’d have liked to do it on my bed, but I was ready to assume that Missy was still there. I wasn’t about to go and check. The bedroom door was still shut. The undergap was still plugged by a towel. I lay on the couch instead. Jesus: she was still in there all right. Her stench had ramified while I was gone. Was it a metaphor for something? My rotting life? My dead career? I heard a muted sound in there that might have been the buzzing of flies. I wanted to stop hearing it. I got up and dragged the couch as far away from the bedroom as it would go. It knocked something over that smashed. I didn’t bother checking what. I stepped on a shard of it and the shard went in deep. I left it in there and let the blood spill. Why not, since there was blood everywhere else? I lay down again, feeling the first billows of the descending haze: the dope mingling with my pain like blood in bathwater. She’d lied to Skeats. She’d told him Fingle had talent. She’d laid claim to discovering him. Why this rush to claim credit for a cretin? The answer was close. I almost had it. It was like a balloon that kept drifting down from the ceiling to my fingertips. I kept trying to seize it, and it kept squeaking back up out of reach. And I was falling away from it now, sinking away from lucidity. I wasn’t going to get it, not tonight, not in time to save Skeats. I had dropped those pills a fatal ten minutes too early. He came into my head now – softly, a ghost already. I was falling away from him too. I had done my best. I’d driven there to warn him. But before I could save his life he had tried to take mine, by telling me I would never write again. To a writer that is a death threat. If Skeats knew anything he’d have known that. One man in that room was going home to face oblivion. Why should I have let it be me? I’ve got integrity, but not that much.