by David Free
I said nothing for a while. I let him think about what was happening. His face had gone slack, with a makeshift smile draped across it for show. Behind it his vestigial brain was in overdrive, pedalling for traction like a cartoon dog stuck between cliffs. I watched him weigh the permutations. I found them a bit confusing myself. He knew who I was, but he didn’t know if I knew who he was. We had talked on the phone. Two nights ago he had dragged a corpse past me while I slept on the couch. Once in a dark house he had tried to kill me hand to hand, and I had done my best to kill him back. What he didn’t know was if I’d joined the dots yet. On that question he was still in suspense.
For the moment I let him stay there. A PR girl had swept into earshot and was buzzing around us like a fly. It was the blonde who’d looked right through me at the door. Looking right through me again, she put a fresh glass of water on the knee-high table between me and Fingle. She put a big fat copy of his book there too, in case I’d missed its name on my way past all those ten-foot banners. She wanted to be noticed, but not by me. She had eyes only for Fingle: Fingle in his Hendrix hat and Civil War waistcoat. If worn by anyone else, these threads would have made her laugh out loud. But Fingle was a celebrity. He had the gravity of fame, and that changed everything. I wanted to tell her what he did to literature-loving publicity girls, but maybe that wouldn’t bother her either. I waited, wanting her gone. I was desolate and sick of an old passion. I yearned to be alone with him. Her lust for him was trivial next to mine.
But still she loitered, still she fussed. She was starting to throw me nonplussed looks, as if she thought I was squandering my face-time with the master. It hadn’t occurred to me that the clock was running. I threw him a softball question for show. Tell me about the title, I said. Tell me about the taint. You seem to know an awful lot about history. Fill me in on the big picture.
Through a tight smile he did his best, but his best was even worse than usual. His voice was the voice from the phone, but it had lost a lot of its sass. He kept looking queasily down at my notepad. It was open, but I wasn’t writing down what he said. I was ready to put on a show, but not that much of a show. Being this close to his body sickened me. All those things it had done. Nor was I feeling that crazy about myself. No matter how civilised you are, you feel somehow shamed and inferior when faced with the man who has ruined you with violence. Or maybe I was just less civilised than I thought. The quadrant of his face that I’d headbutted in her room was still discoloured by a rich saffron bruise. Here at least was one thing to be proud of: my last act of literary criticism, and possibly my finest.
The PR girl was running out of reasons to stick around. Maybe Fingle had thrown her a crumb or two of encouragement earlier in the day, but he was in no mood to throw her another one now. Finally she got the message and went away. So now it was just us, me and Fingle in the wash of the room’s noise. A few faces were pointed our way from the buffet table. They could see us but they couldn’t hear us. I took my chance while I had it. I leant towards him, put an intrigued book-chatter’s frown on my face, and said: ‘If I’d known who you were, I’d have hit you harder.’
Panic washed over his face like a wave full of sand.
‘Don’t get out of that chair,’ I told him. ‘If you do, it’s over. Stay put. Stay calm. Nothing’s going to happen. Not here, not now. If I was going to raise a stink I’d have raised it by now. Do you understand? We’re going to talk. That’s all that’s going to happen. Nod your head, Fingle. Smile. Look like you’re being interviewed.’
He nodded. That ailing smile twitched on his lips like a dying moth.
I said, ‘I know everything. Don’t bother hoping I don’t.’
He said nothing.
‘Nobody else knows, not yet. Maybe they don’t have to.’
His crippled smile writhed and squirmed, flicking its dying limbs in the air. There was an alarming heat in his eyes. I wondered if I’d miscalculated. Maybe I had made Jade’s mistake, and revved the little engine of his brain a needle-notch too far. For a bad few seconds it seemed possible that he would blow his foul wad here and now, and do his thing in the middle of his own coronation. And I didn’t want that. This wasn’t the time or place for Armageddon. I wanted the earned climax, the crafted denouement.
‘For Christ’s sake, relax,’ I told him. ‘People are watching. Smile. Nod. Say something.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said.
‘The story of your life,’ I said, ‘and for once it’s not true. Tell me: does part of you wish she was still around?’ For the sake of the spectators I had uncapped my pen. Its tip quivered in the churning air between us. ‘You must, at times like this. You must wish she was here to pull a string and make you talk. Make you sound like a real person. But you made your choice. You got what you wanted. It’s all you now, Fingle. You’re a literary man, thanks to her. So come on. Let’s hear you. Wow me. Hit me with an aperçu.’
Silence again. He looked like an enraged child. I wanted to tear that look off his face with my bare trembling hands. Lust wasn’t the right word for it. When you want a woman you can wait, and savour the waiting. With Fingle I was having a hard time not lunging right now. So, from the look of it, was he.
‘Did Skeats,’ I went on, ‘have any last words?’
No answer.
‘I’m guessing he didn’t.’ I tried a smile myself, but it felt no more plausible than Fingle’s. ‘He wasn’t the lapidary type. You didn’t need to kill him, by the way. He knew nothing. Jade didn’t tell him the important stuff. You probably thought he’d turn up today and spoil your party. Well, he wouldn’t have. Were you worried about that night on her driveway? Did you think he saw your face? He didn’t. Of course he didn’t. He looked but he didn’t perceive. That was the story of his life. Tell me: were you wearing this get-up when he saw you – the Rick Danko threads? It wouldn’t have mattered, even if you were. He still wouldn’t have clocked you. He wasn’t an observant man. He was probably looking at his phone. He was probably taking a selfie. You killed him for nothing.’
The twitching mania in his eyes had cooled to fury now. He could see that the end was not going to happen here. He had worked out that I didn’t want that any more than he did.
‘Say something, Fingle. Be deep. There’s a girl over there looking right at us.’
‘You’re a dead man,’ he said.
‘Nice. Is that one of Dostoyevsky’s, or did you come up with it yourself? Anyway, you might be right. One of us is a dead man. I’ll give you that much. But we’ll get to that. First let’s talk about Jade. I know I’m not meant to ask about your private life, but let’s live dangerously. She kept your draft, Fingle. She saved it for a rainy day. I’ve seen it. Sweet Jesus. I thought the published version was scary. That thing should have been strangled at birth. And yet look at what she did with it.’ I spread my hand at the waning junket – the silk banners, the literati flitting around the finger food like koi. ‘All this is her, Fingle. Don’t think any of it is you. This is as high as a marketer can fly. If only she’d lived to see it. A bubble of pure hype, and you’re the puff of air inside. That was your job – to be nothing. To be a vacuum. To be no good. How did that conversation go – the one where she told you what she was up to? The one where you found out what you really were to her? A jumped-up, repulsive little Oswald. A lab rat who thought he was a PhD. It must have been a bad scene. Was that when you decided she had to go? Was the rest just being patient, waiting till she’d served her purpose? Waiting till the lie had its own momentum, so you could safely chuck her over the side?’
I watched his infinitely nasty face darken again with boiling blood. It struck me that this look, or something like it, must have been the last thing she’d seen on earth. I could think of no worse sight to go out on.
‘What did she think she was doing,’ I asked him, or myself, or her, or nobody, ‘messing around inside a head lik
e yours? She forgot you were real. Her imagination wasn’t that vivid. She thought you’d be all hollow inside, like your book. She forgot you might have a few ideas of your own. Woeful ideas, like that feather in your hat. Like the hat itself. Poor things, but your own. She thought you’d be grateful for anything. She thought fifty per cent would do you. And why not? It was a hundred per cent more than you deserved. How did it feel, when you found out she was laughing behind your back? Or did she make the mistake of laughing into your face as well?’
Jill Tweedy rang her first chime. Five minutes left.
‘I want you to come for me, Fingle. That’s how this is going to end. You want me dead? Fine. Come and make it happen, tonight. You know where I live. The doors will be unlocked. I’ll be waiting. Everyone else is dead already. I’m the last one left who knows anything. Do it, Fingle. Come for me. Let’s close the circle tonight.’
He smiled. He said nothing.
‘This is a one-time offer,’ I told him. ‘If I wake up tomorrow and one of us isn’t dead, it’s over. I walk down my drive and I hold my final press conference. But today – today is your lucky day. Today I have immortal longings in me. I want death. Preferably yours, but mine’ll do. I’m tired. I’ve had it. Maybe it’s time I made a half-graceful exit. This is your world, not mine. If books like yours are what people want, they can have them. If that’s what they want to call literature, they can do that too. I’m sick of trying to stop them. I’m done. The one thing I still want out of life is a final chance to fuck you up. You scared it’s a trap? I’m telling you exactly what it will be. You and me in a room. Just us two animals. The thumb drive will be in my pocket. Everything’s on it. I’m the last one who knows. Kill me, take the drive, and all this will be yours.’ I spread my hand again: the banners, the cameras, the lights, the women. ‘You’re close, Fingle. You’re so close. You’re like Gatsby. Know who he is? Your dream’s right in front of your face. Don’t let me snatch it away. Right now, as we speak, while you sit there like an op-shop dummy, Barrett Lodge is reviewing your book. And it’s glowing, even by his standards. I’ve had a sneak peek. He will call you a stylist. He will call you the saviour of modern literature. Skeats won’t be around to print it, thanks to you, but somebody like him will be. Maybe it’ll be Lodge himself. You want to throw all that away? I doubt you do. Tonight, Fingle. Come for me. Do it. You’ve run out of other people to kill.’
Somewhere beyond the reach of the light, Jill Tweedy rang her final bell. We had a minute left. It hit me that I was probably having the last conversation of my life. And look at the man I was having it with. The destroyer of love, the wrecker of literature. If this was the way the world ended, I wouldn’t miss it.
‘We’re talking now because we won’t be talking then,’ I told him. ‘There will be no more dialogue. Understand? This is it. If you’ve got any final words, say them now. I’ve said mine.’
‘You could have saved him,’ Fingle said. ‘You could have warned him. I knew you wouldn’t. You’re no better than I am.’
I shook my head. ‘No, Fingle. No. Leave the philosophical stuff to me. You just turn up tonight, and do what you’re good at.’
What Jill Tweedy did at the fifteen-minute mark I will never know, because I was already gone.
13
It was dark before I got home. On the last part of the steep twisting road my headlights raked up through the bush and ignited the big grey gums. Shreds of fog hung over the bitumen like dental nerves on an X-ray. Frogs and rats skittered out of my light and got reswallowed by the scrub. A feral dog bounded up out of the long grass and ran beside me for a while, this big pale freak of a hellhound loping along in the fog. There was something gimpy about his stride. His fur was a mess. He had just enough sense to avoid my wheels, but not enough to get out of my lights. He kept pace with me for a long time, lolloping along strangely like a bad old cartoon. His eyes looked shiny but dead. Finally he peeled away and faded back into the trees.
At the foot of my driveway I met a stranger omen. There was nobody there. No trucks, no vans. The whole carnival had packed up and moved on. All that waiting and they would miss the end. It spooked me, for half a minute. Then it shrivelled away and joined the list of things that no longer mattered: the fading things of the world. I was a ghost already. History had started to happen without me.
Inside I turned on no lights. I’m good at moving around the place in the dark. That much edge I would have on him. The air hadn’t stopped reeking of sweet bad meat. I went to the sink and opened the little door under it. Somewhere in there was a claw hammer, standing inverted on its richly solid head. I felt around till I found it. I found a bottle too. It wasn’t empty yet. That was one personal affair I could straighten out while I waited.
I shoved the armchair to the middle of the room and sat there in the dark with the hammer at one foot and the bottle at the other. Out in the sterile wind, the fronds of the big palm trees cracked like flags at a car yard. The big side window shuddered, as if a condemned man was shaking the bars of its uprights. One last animal act in the dark, then. That was how it had started: me and Jade, here in this room. A month ago, in calendar time. A bad month. Thinking about it would be a waste of my last few hours. But they were going to feel wasted anyway, whatever I did with them. I swigged from the bottle and put it back on the floor. How do you fill up your last night on the planet? There is no good answer. Nothing is quite up to the job. So you feel paralysed. Time curdles and goes sour on you. After a while I stopped returning the bottle to the floor between swigs. I wanted a thick bath of nectar between me and what was about to happen. Hammer on bone, the horror of terminal violence. Who wants to be fully there for that? Fingle, maybe. Not me.
Out in the wind, something plastic and hollow skittered across the dirt of the drive. That didn’t bother me. Noises were okay. Silence was the thing to worry about. When he came, silence was the sound he would make. Stealth he could do. Suddenly he would just be here. But he would have a lot of floor to cross before he got to me. I weighed the hammer and I weighed the bottle. For the moment the bottle was heavier, and would make the bigger dent in his skull. But only for the moment. If the moment lasted much longer I would have to reassess.
The darkness was good. It was working for me. It was getting me back to my roots as an organism. With the lights on, in a room packed with fools, it’s easy to be half in love with death. In the dark you feel less Keatsian. You rediscover your will to stick around. If it’s either you or the other guy it might as well be you, especially if the other guy is Dallas Fingle. Also the booze was doing its work. It was starting to lubricate my limbs. They felt violence-primed, ripe for affray. The readiness hummed in them like static.
I got up and put on a record. Maybe the booze was working too well. I remember worrying about that, as I stood there in the glow of the amp’s tubes. I looked for something quiet, something I would hear him coming over. I picked the Goldberg Variations: the preferred vinyl of the Hollywood psycho. I returned to the armchair and sat in the dark. Piano trills rippled frailly in the wind. They sounded better than I’d remembered, either because I was drunk or because I was about to die. You should have listened to things like this more often, I thought. You should have had that sort of life. You should have gone out to halls and listened to people play instruments. You shouldn’t have shut yourself off from human contact. You should have tried harder to be somebody else. You had one life and you fucked it up. You should never have smashed your skull on that slab. Doing that was a bad move all round. When it happened, you should never have resurfaced. You should have taken the world’s hint and stayed down there for good. From that day on, it was always going to be half a life. You should have chucked in writing when you were twenty, the way everybody else does. You should have been someone people needed. You should have been a fisherman, a shopkeeper. You should have spent less time alone. You should have fucked more and read less. There were people around you,
once. You let them fall away. You put your head down and wrote things for people you didn’t know. And when you came back up for air you were old, and everyone was gone. You put the world on hold, and it hung up on you. And the other people never read your stuff anyway. You should have fucked more, read less, and written nothing. You should have money, like everybody else. You should have stuff, like everybody else. You should have a wife and kids and a house and a dog like everybody else. There should be someone here with you now. It should be her. You should never have let her leave. What did you think it was all for, all those hours and months and years of pushing words around pages? It was for her. It was to get a girl like that to your door. She was the point of it all, the payoff. You should have seen that before it was too late. Her on the doorstep: that was the big moment. Everybody gets one. That was yours. How did you not see it? You should have dropped to your knees and hooped your arms around her and buried your face in the warm cove of her body and never let her go. You should have renounced everything else on the spot. You should have known you’d love her eventually and you should have started straight away, when it still might have made a difference.