Get Poor Slow

by David Free

  Just before I went under I had one last thought. It went something like: You didn’t do enough. It’s not too late to do more. If you don’t, you’ll regret it forever.

  But that was it. My flesh was weak. It always has been. I was out.

  I woke in the dark and knew he was dead already. I knew it because I knew everything. Four or five hours of sleep and my brain had tightened around the truth like a fist. I knew who’d killed her and I knew why. I knew there was no hurry any more. I knew Skeats wouldn’t answer the phone if I rang him, now or ever again. I dialled him to prove it, and stood there in the dark while his phone rang out. The old ritual, one last time: me calling, him not picking up. Finally he had a solid excuse. I tried to picture the scene at the other end, him in his empty house, splayed there in his share of the dark. Strangled? I doubted it. The man who had killed him was small in every way. Even when killing women he liked to skew the odds. He’d have taken a blade there at the least. He had killed Skeats for his own benefit, not for mine. For his own reasons he needed him gone by tomorrow. I pictured a dark room with darker splashes on its walls. I saw defensive wounds on Skeats’s palms, like pursed lips. Had he died with his eyes open or shut? Either way, they were closed to the big picture. His killer’s face would have meant nothing to him. He had gone out as he’d lived, understanding nothing.

  I put the phone down. I had another job to do. I hadn’t hit bottom yet. I opened my laptop and stuck the flash drive in its socket. The password box came up. I put the word Fingle in it. It didn’t work. She was craftier than that. I tried The Tainted Land. That failed too but I kept going, like a crazed marathon man in sight of the finish line. Each defeat was one more necessary stride towards the tape. Ern Malley, I typed. No result. Punchinello. That’s what Fingle had been, and still was even now: her puppet, her clown. Still no result. Stewart. Nothing. McAuley. No. Frankenstein. Prospero. Oz. Then I typed the word Caliban.

  It worked.

  A square window came up, showing the drive’s decrypted contents: her insurance policy, her rainy-day Fingle file. The window had two icons in it. One was a folder called The Tainted Land. The other was a video file with no name. Rashly, I opened that one first.

  With computers there is no time for second thoughts. The video started at once, and suddenly there was no prospect of looking away. The image was subdued and barren-looking: a moving picture, although nothing was moving in it yet. I saw a double bed in a dark room. A venetian blind threw fillets of streetlight across it. I knew the mise-en-scène: her bedroom, pre-blood stains, pre-murder, pre-me. The camera, I guessed, sat on the dresser I had raided on the night Fingle tried to kill me. The scene waited darkly for someone to enter it. I wanted to rip the drive from its socket before the action started. But my body wouldn’t do it. I had to watch what was about to happen, even though I knew it would never leave my head. It was going to be a snuff film, and the victim was going to be me.

  Here they came, first her, then Fingle. She was leading him by the hand. They were both naked. His cock, inevitably, was larger and nastier than mine. It was horribly half-aroused, a windsock on a blustery day. When his back was to the lens she looked past him and broke the fourth wall – just for a moment, but pointedly. She knew about the camera and he didn’t. Then she sat on the bed’s near edge and lay back and opened her thighs. And the worst novelist in the world knelt before her, and the gates to heaven were eclipsed by the moronic rear of his head. He gorged himself there in vicious silence, like a mole burrowing its way to the earth’s core. The James Dean hairdo dipped and bobbed. I watched now because I knew I would never watch again, once the horror show was done. This would be my last look at her living body. Those bites were not on her thigh yet. Before Fingle’s head got in the way I’d made a point of looking, and the site was clean. I had a feeling it wouldn’t be for long. Yes: watch now. His unlettered primeval face was getting bored. It roved back down towards her knee, or back up to it – the geography was inverted. Then he roved back the other way, seeking paler flesh, like a starving man who’d finished the fruit and still wanted the rind. Soon he reached a soft place that would have been her buttock if she was standing up. His neck went tense and she uttered a ragged yelp: one-eighth pleasure, seventh-eighths pain. I knew how deep his teeth went because I had seen the wound myself, days later, maybe weeks, when it looked like a wine stain fringed by rusty staples. And I had thought, while looking at it: one day, when I know her better, I will ask her about the degenerate who did that. And here she was, telling me. I watched her seize a fistful of his hair – not to pull his head away, but to force it deeper in. Whether or not she liked Fingle, she liked what he was doing. I couldn’t fool myself about that. But how could she have believed that it would have no price tag? It always does. She had been so young, and I had never felt so old.

  I reached for the drive’s plastic hilt. I was ready to shut the show down now. I believed I had caught its drift. But before I could yank the plug she broke the fourth wall again. She raised her gaze from the top of his skull and looked straight down the barrel of the lens, at me. And our eyes met, and I knew they would never meet again, and I didn’t have the heart to break the clinch before she did. She had thought she was bulletproof. She had thought Fingle was the clueless one, the one in over his head. She was smarter than he was, but not smart enough to know that smartness doesn’t matter. The sword is mightier than the pen. The barbarians always win. But even I had been too young to really get that, until about yesterday.

  Finally she looked away from me, forever this time, and in one fast slithery move she pushed him to his feet and slid off the bed and knelt on the carpet and dipped her face to send him to paradise and me the rest of the way to hell. Before either of us could get there I yanked the drive like a rotten tooth. The screen froze and went grey, then black. And then it was just me in the dark again, with the laptop’s speakers uttering a barren howl of protest. I’d have uttered one too, if I’d thought there was any point.

  When I felt like moving again I restarted the machine and was rebathed in its light. The worst was over now. The rest could be safely predicted. Redocking the drive, I re-entered the password and opened the folder labelled The Tainted Land. Inside it were two documents. I clicked the first one and scanned a few pages. It was Fingle’s transom draft of the novel. It made the published version look like something by Rilke. Here was how the tackler of the big themes thought you wrote sentences and spelled words. If the final text had looked like this I’d have been quicker to suspect him of derangement. Not of multiple murder, though: it stunned me that he’d had the wherewithal to pull that off. It stunned me that a man who wrote like this could pull off anything, including tying his own shoes. But Jade had made the same wrong guess. Fingle wasn’t a straw man. He just wrote like one.

  The second document was the work as I’d read it in proof. It was Fingle’s abysmal manuscript touched up by a literate hand – that of Jade. Literate, but not literary. She hadn’t turned it into anything worthwhile. There had never been any chance of that, and anyway it hadn’t been her aim. No, she had preserved his essential worthlessness. All she’d done was put a little makeup on the turkey, knowing that a little would be more than enough to fool the likes of Tweedy, and Skeats, and Lodge. Plausibility, and then hype. In literary circles, what else is there?

  I hadn’t been blind, I’d been deaf. She’d told me about the whole scam. Fingle was her long con, her retirement plan. Fifty per cent for life, in exchange for never blowing his secret. She had pulled him from obscurity: not because she thought he had talent, but because she knew he had absolutely none. She was sick of the usual drill: ho-hum books by so-so writers, ingeniously marketed by her. She’d wanted to prove it could be all her: a bubble of pure promotion, spun around a product that had no property except bulk. So she’d raided the slush pile for something even worse than usual. And she’d found Fingle – a selection that confirmed her genius. His book wasn’t me
rely no good; it also thought itself a searing masterpiece. It had size, scope, ambition – all the things a marketer could really sink her teeth into. Sell them hard enough, get a big enough ball rolling, and people would forget that the concept of quality had ever existed. Jade wasn’t ahead of her time, and she hadn’t wanted to be. She was of it, fully and audaciously: she was deeply in tune with its resonances. She’d pulled off the perfect post-modern swindle.

  It was her masterpiece, and she’d told me all about it. All she’d lied about was the tense. It wasn’t something she was saving for the future. She was pulling the scam already, even as we lay there. All along it had been happening right in front of me, with Fingle as her wretched Pinocchio. She had knocked off his edges and slipped him into the machine. And she couldn’t resist telling someone, and the someone had been me. Here was my consolation at last. She hadn’t told Skeats, or Vagg, or Jill Tweedy. She’d told me. Had she seen the same fire in my eyes that I saw in hers? Did she feel we had a future?

  She was magnificent. You had to hand it to her. The Tainted Land was an enormous piss-take, a vast fraudulent happening, an act of glorious and wicked subversion. And it had all worked perfectly – until the bodies started to fall, starting with hers. She hadn’t guessed that Fingle would be a psychopath. Maybe she should have. A semi-literate who thought he was Tolstoy: that reality-gulf should have given her pause. More than that: it should have scared her. Delusion on that scale is not harmless. Instead of a stooge she’d got a monster, with a few ideas of his own. If only I’d been on hand to tell her about writers and madness. Even good writers have their pride, their fears, their insecurities. We all think we’re better than we really are. We’re all a bit nuts. Those of us who are a lot nuts should not be toyed with. She’d been playing with fire.

  Well, so was Fingle now. I yearned for daybreak, even if it turned out to be my last. There was just one body left to fall. No more thinking, no more ceaseless arguments about merit or subjectivity or taste. Just two deluded scriveners going at it, mano a mano, one last time. The way I felt, that didn’t sound like the end of the world. The way I felt, the end of the world didn’t sound like the end of the world either.

  12

  In a spirit of closure I swung by Skeats’s house en route to the junket. His blood wasn’t on my hands but it was in my head. Seeing it for real would be my punishment, my penance.

  But when I found him I felt something dangerously close to nothing. I was punch-drunk on dead bodies. His front door was wide open. In a big central room he sat posed half-upright in the angle of the floor and wall. I hung back beyond the reach of his stains. I didn’t want him on my boots. He looked the way my prose looked after he’d improved it. His eyes were open. His face wore a look of mild bafflement, as it pretty much always had. It asked the same question in death that it had asked in life: how did a man like me end up in a position like this? His hair was a riot of golden loops still, moussey to the last, a live pooch sitting vigil over its dead master. It had been a mistake, I already saw, to grant him the seriousness of death. From now on he would no longer be around to remind everyone what he was really like. They would talk about his services to literature. Not existing would be a clear plus for him. I looked at him and thought: You finally beat me. You’re out of it and I’m still here, looking at the worst thing I have ever done. Maybe I owed him an apology. I could subtract it from the many he had died owing me.

  I went to his bedroom and found his press pass, and a white envelope containing three polaroids of Jade. Only a very bad man would have wanted to keep them. I kept them.

  In the big old hotel, at the entrance to the function room, I flashed Skeats’s ID. The skinny blonde on the door gave a mild shrug and let me go by. From my angle she didn’t look that young. From hers I looked so generally middle-aged that she saw no difference between me and the mugshot of Skeats. That hurt, even through the haze of everything else. My craving for apocalypse went up a notch.

  The function room was a big glossy sanctum with a parquet floor and panelled walls the colour of burnt toffee. Its function, on any normal day, would have been to keep a man like Fingle out. Today he was the guest of honour. The walls were draped with big silk sails or banners stamped with the cover art of his book. They looked as classy and restrained as ten-foot-high advertising materials can. I half-recalled a line from Ern Malley: something about the hoisted banners of praise. There were about fifty people in the room and all I saw was their backs. Their faces were all aimed at a vividly lit clearing at the room’s far end. I drifted towards it as if in a dream. And I was in a dream. I was in Jade’s dream. In her version she had been here too, and I probably hadn’t. In her version she hadn’t been dispensable. Beyond the crowd, on the near shore of all the fake white light, two big guys in semi-sufficient T-shirts were tensed over a pair of TV cameras. Out in the core of the light’s glow were two swivel chairs. In one of these sat the current doyenne of TV news entertainment. In the other chair was Fingle.

  I already knew what he looked like, so I’d thought I was in for no more surprises. But I hadn’t guessed what he would wear on his big day out. Who could have? Nobody was that good at guessing. He wore black pointed boots, tight purple jeans, a collarless white shirt and a chocolate waistcoat. Above all he wore a black broad-brimmed hat with a white feather stuck in its band. I recognised him after a second or two, but only because Jimi Hendrix was dead. Fingle was talking, and the doyenne was listening gravely, nodding her head. Who could listen gravely to a man wearing those threads? They reeked of clinical madness. Couldn’t she smell it?

  I drifted towards the action, unperceived by Fingle or anyone else. So this was what he looked like out of the shadows, the man who had destroyed my life. The shadows had a lot to be said for them, clearly. I thought I deserved a less laughable nemesis. One has a right to demand that one’s executioner shall not be a clown. But this was how fragile my happiness had been. It had been shattered by a buffoon. I kept drifting towards him, still unseen. I had a weird sense that I no longer existed. All these lights and cameras and people, and none of them pointing at me. My star was fading. All I saw was backs. One of them belonged to Jill Tweedy. She was standing up at ringside, watching her adopted boy shine. Was the world really this desperate for cultural icons?

  When I got to the outer ring of the white light I propped. I didn’t want Fingle spotting me just yet. But Jill Tweedy had a sixth sense for the uninvited guest. She turned and saw me, and her face crumpled with vexation before she could stop it. She strode over and whispered, ‘Ray.’

  ‘Jill.’

  ‘I was expecting Jeremy.’

  ‘He had a rough night.’

  ‘Or even Barrett.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’re stuck with me.’

  She didn’t bother to hide what she thought of that. I had lowered the junket’s tone. I was fucking up Finglefest. It didn’t matter that I was one of her authors too, sort of. Right now she was wearing her Fingle hat: she was repping the prestige end of the slate, the prize-wrangling end. And I belonged with the crooks and the dieters and the celebs. I watched her ponder, briefly, the scorching phone call she thought she’d be making to Skeats later on. And then she looked at her watch with resignation. She had a pep rally to run, and I was the next cheerleader whether she liked it or not. Briskly she talked me through the basics of Fingle etiquette. No personal questions, or Fingle would walk. No soul-sucking photography. (‘He’s got a black eye anyway,’ Tweedy said.) Fifteen minutes of face-time all up, with a warning bell at ten minutes and a final bell at fourteen. What would happen if I was still there a minute later she didn’t say. I found it a moot question myself.

  Fingle still hadn’t seen me. The TV people were done with him now. They were killing their lights, collapsing their tripods. He sat there in the sudden gloom and inspected his shirt front. He didn’t bother scoping the room. Why would he? He knew Skeats wasn’t showing up. He thought he h
ad the next fifteen minutes to himself. His fan club splintered and drifted to the side wall, where a row of trestle tables was decked with the kind of food you get at book launches or when someone has died. With Fingle you had both things at once, although his fan club didn’t know it yet. They were a complacent-looking bunch, Fingle’s crowd. They didn’t look much like people who read books. They were dressed too well, for one thing. Whoever they were, they seemed to think the main event was now over. The moving pictures and sound bites had been snared. All that remained was for the loners like me, the revenants of print, to slink up there like Oliver Twist and receive Fingle’s dregs. This part didn’t qualify as a spectator event. The cognoscenti could half-watch it from a distance while talking about other things. That suited me fine. I needed a crowd, but I didn’t want an audience. I strolled towards him. He had removed his hat to confirm that the feather was still present and upright. It was. This pleased him. I had time to see, while the hat was off, the mangy bald spot I had conferred on him with my teeth, that night in Jade’s house. The wound was leathery and textured and brownish-red, like an old six-stitcher. With a smirk of lowbrow satisfaction Fingle put hat and feather back on his head. When he looked up and saw me filling the empty chair beside him, he stopped having a good time.