Get Poor Slow

by David Free

  She didn’t have to think about it very hard.

  So the rest is silence, paid for by Bennett and Bennett. I have moved up in the world. I have stopped being broke, for the moment. I am back to merely going broke. I am back to getting poor slow. Somehow that fall or leap I took all those years ago continues. I still haven’t hit the ground. I have time on my hands. I am free to read Thucydides, Cicero, all those books that lie in ashes in the black and buckled frame of my home. I have time to think about Jade, which might not be the best thing for my health. Maybe I’d have been better off writing Tweedy’s book. But if it’s a choice between writing lies and writing nothing, I’m enough of a writer to write nothing. I have learned that much from all this, if no more.

  I saw Ted Lewin last week. We met in a pub. I thought I was getting him drunk. Probably he thought the same about me. There were things we still wanted from each other. He already had the flash drive, and some idea of what it meant. He had Fingle’s flambéed DNA. He had motive, if you wanted to call it that, for Jade, and Missy, and Skeats. But he wanted more. He was a completist. We talked way, way off the record. He told me some things he had known all along. On the night she died, my phone was with me in the car, spewing data as I drove. That whole sorry night, as I blundered towards her through the dark, I laid down digital spoor like a leaking sack of rice. Lewin showed me the printouts: the constellation of my missing hours, the spreadsheet of my innocence. Just before eleven I found her phone number online, and called her. The conversation went for six minutes. Then I got in the car. For about ninety minutes I laid down a trail going east, towards her house. I pinged towers. I triggered toll sensors. I tripped a speed camera or two. I took a few wrong turns. All of this meshed with my ragged memories. At twelve-twenty my phone hit one last tower and stopped moving. That meant I was at her house. And there the record went dark, in my skull and in Lewin’s files. For nearly five hours I was off the grid. Whatever happened in that nook of time left no trace, except for a fading bite on my skin. And then at five-fifteen I existed again, according to the files. I was back out on the road, spilling data the other way. Just before six, when I was almost home, she rang me. Or somebody did, using her phone. The call lasted twelve seconds. Whatever got said made me turn round and go back, fast. I made it there in forty minutes. The rest I remembered, more or less. The sun rising before I got there. Her front door wide open. Walking inside and seeing what I saw.

  So my ramshackle alibi (I wasn’t there, except when I was; I did plenty, but I didn’t do that) had been true all along, or at least not false. Lewin had always known that, but had never been able to believe it. And I had always believed it, but had never been able to know it. All along, Lewin had held his unbeatable cards: the irrefutable pings of the towers and tollgates. And all he was ever waiting for, in that slow-motion room of his, was the moment when I would outrage this data in some irreversible and fully damning way: the moment when I would commit myself, at last, to a coherent body of hard lies. And then he would have played his mighty hand, his lay down misère, and dared me to reply. (Lay Down Misère: a good title for the autobiography I will never write.) And no comeback would have been good enough, at that point, to prevent the sequel: the handcuffs, the cell, the confiscation of the belt and laces. Even the truth, or my tattered version of it, would not have worked. I would have been shovelling my words into a void. (My autobiography again.) So all along I had been one rash answer away from doom. Each week Lewin had waited, with his printouts posed. And each week I kept disappointing him, in more ways than I knew. I had such a hazy hold on the truth that I didn’t even know when I was lying, or if I needed to. I had done my best, but my claims had lacked theme, pattern, structure. Whenever Lewin tried to close his hands around my story, he came up with nothing but air. I couldn’t even get my lies straight, and that had saved me – if you wanted to call me saved.

  And now Lewin needed saving too. He wanted closure. He didn’t use the word. He was too grown-up for that. But he seemed to believe in the concept, which surprised me. You’d think he’d know better, even with a few beers in him. The case was closed. He knew enough, more than enough. But he couldn’t stand not knowing the rest, and he was desperate enough to think he could get it from me. What happened in those uncharted five hours? What did we talk about? What made me leave? What made me go back? What got said in that twelve-second call? The satellites can’t answer questions like that. Lewin thought I still could. He had never believed I could forget such things. He theorised that Fingle had been outside the house that night, watching us, waiting for me to leave. He wanted that theory verified by me. He thought I could remember by an act of will. He still didn’t get it. Hunched over his readout of her final hours, he begged me to repair its blind spots, its voids, its grey areas. This is all he’s ever wanted from me – a story that is all light. And this is the last thing I am equipped to provide. Scan my brain and you will see shadows where the light will never go, smudges of dark matter as scrambled as Lewin’s bad eye. The skull doctors can’t fix me. They can only plot and image my failures, with white machines that look like streamlined coffins. And now Lewin thought he could restore me to health by waving a few scraps of data at me. This was touching but misguided. All he was giving me was more incompleteness, more fragments to shore against my ruins.

  ‘You want to jog my memory?’ I asked him. ‘Jog it all the way. Where did you find my sample?’

  He looked away from me, pretending not to know what that meant.

  ‘You know what I’m asking,’ I said. ‘Tell me where it was. Exactly.’

  He was disgusted, but this is what you get when you do these things in a pub.

  ‘On her?’ I said. ‘In her? Where? On what? It’s my sample. Tell me where I left it.’

  It was not my finest moment. It got less fine. I started begging. ‘Help me remember,’ I said. ‘Not just for you. For me.’

  He knew the answer, but he wouldn’t tell me. There was pity in his eyes, but not mercy. I sickened him. He sat there and watched me drown. I have never seen him again.

  They have boarded up her little house, with its tangled gardens and its out-of-hand lawn. I am getting evicted from my past, one person and one venue at a time. They’re winking out on me like lights: Jade, Skeats, Lewin, Lewin’s room, the newspaper, my place, hers. I see now that I blew my best and only shot at salvation, that night I went back to toss her house. Raiding her panty drawer was a cheap short-term play. I should have pillaged her bookshelves instead. There, if anywhere, I would have found the real her. Did she own, for example, a copy of Ern Malley’s Complete Poems? Did she fill its margins with notes? I have convinced myself that she studied his case: the bad poet invented by two good ones. This is Malley:

  It is necessary to understand

  That a poet may not exist, that his writings

  Are the incomplete circle and straight drop

  Of a question mark

  And yet I know I shall be raised up

  On the vertical banners of praise.

  Not bad, for a man who never existed. Better than Fingle, who did. They don’t make frauds like Ern Malley any more. I have convinced myself that his spirit hung over us as we lay twined on my bed. On good days I feel that her spirit was there too: not hovering or half-absent, but fully down there in her body, with me. But I will never know for sure. That case can never be closed. The question will have to hang forever: the incomplete circle, the straight drop.

  If I had her back on the planet for just an hour, I would devote every minute of it to cross-examination. Sex is fleeting, and I have begun to hate fleeting things. Sex lasts for as long as it lasts for, and then it’s gone. Unanswered questions never leave. They bloom and spread like tumours, and they kill you a lot more than once. I would have my questions ready for her, like a stalker. I would ask her the things Lewin asked me, and more. What made me leave her house that morning? Did she know Fingle was coming,
or did he swing by uninvited, like me? Did she tell me again that Vagg was on the way? Was that how she got rid of me? Or did I break and tell her the truth and get kicked out because I had cost her fifteen grand? How many lies were there in the bed with us, that second time? As many as the first time, or even more? Or did we purify the air between us and go at it lie-free, like proper lovers? I would ask her about the distance I heard in her voice, that night on the phone. Was she falling away from me even then? Had I already served my purpose? I would ask these questions with shame, knowing she deserved better than to be pawed at by a Proustian maniac like me. But I would ask them anyway. I would ask her what her plans had been, post-Fingle. I would ask her point-blank if I was in them. I would ask her if I was ever inside her head, just a little bit. I would ask her if she had seen the same light in my eyes that I saw in hers. Recall that this is a fantasy, in which I would get the truth from her just by asking for it.

  There are days when I half-forget that she is dead, or somehow manage to point my mind at other things. And then the huge fact of it just rears up out of nowhere and stuns me, like those big raw winds that sweep off the ocean and rattle your car on a coastal road. I blink and I sway on my feet, but I have to want the pain as much as it wants me. It means she still matters. The day it stops sideswiping me that hard will be the day she starts dying a second time.

  There are days when I try to make that happen. I tell myself she used me and half-destroyed me. I tell myself she isn’t yet done. I tell myself that one day soon the dead weight of her will drag the rest of me the rest of the way down, unless I cut the wire and let her drop. But I have never managed to believe these things yet, and probably never will. There are days when I tell myself I hardly knew her. I burnt my life down for a girl I met twice. It can’t have been much of a life, if I was ready to do that. And maybe it wasn’t. But maybe I’d have torched it for her anyway, even if I knew her better, and even if there had been more of it to burn. Maybe she was that much of a girl. If I could convince myself that she wasn’t, would that make things better or worse? It doesn’t matter. I am in no serious danger of believing it, or even of wanting to. She was worthy of the flame, and can still be saved from it. There are things about her that only I remember. Phrases, movements of the eyes, little gestures she threw out into the hurricane of passing time. If I don’t hang on to those scraps of her, who will? I didn’t kill her the first time, but if I let these last things fade she will die again, and this time it will be for good, and the culprit will finally be me.

  I still think about her there on my doorstep, pressing her face against the flyscreen, shielding her little scrunched-up eyes against the afternoon sun. The moment slows, then freezes. The rolling film becomes a still photograph. Her body hangs there like fruit in the frame of the wire door. I feel I could reach back through the frame and seize her, and never let her go. Quick, now, before the lamp burns through the celluloid. But always I stay frozen there at the keyboard, stranded, clueless, paralysed in the act of writing something that no one will ever read. And then the film yaws back up to speed, and I have lost my shot again, and the scene plays out the way it always has and always will. There is no way of being ready for these moments. The bigness of the big half-hours is never clear until they’re falling away from you, tumbling away in the rear-view: the lopped story that could have gone any way, the phantom limb that will never stop itching. The best luck you ever had, or the worst, or both. If I could have that moment back a hundred times, I would gladly live my way through every last one of its branching universes. I know I’ve lived the worst one already.

  But she won’t come back to me that way. The memory of that moment gets smaller all the time. It grows blurred and smudged with overuse. What I live for is the memory that will feel brand new, because I have never had it. The untouched memory of that lost final night: it’s in there somewhere, in some walled-off cellar of my dusty head, unbreached, patiently waiting, pristine in its wrapper, like a gift I never opened and weirdly left behind. Lewin was wrong to think I can liberate those missing hours by force. I can’t. I have tried. But maybe, if I stick around for long enough, they will return to me by accident. One day the frayed ends of my severed, wandering neurons might brush up against each other, and spark into service, and the dead memory will explode back into the light. And she will be here again, and I will meet her as if for the first time. She will be back, and her little eyes will be laughing again, and she will have no idea she is dead. Because she won’t be, not yet, not then. It’s a laughable little hope, but so are most hopes. I don’t see why I shouldn’t stick around and cling to it, for a while. There will be plenty of time for oblivion.

  David Free is a critic and novelist based in Northern NSW.

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, institutions and organisations mentioned

  in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real,

  used fictitiously without any intent to describe actual conduct.

  First published 2017 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd

  1 Market Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2000

  Copyright © David Free 2017

  The moral right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Extract from SIBYLLINE (Collected Poems, Angus & Robertson, 1993) (6

  lines). By Arrangement with the Licensor, The Ern Malley Estate, c/- Curtis

  Brown (Aust) Pty Ltd/Ern Malley: extract from ‘Sibylline’ from

  The Darkening Ecliptic (ETT imprint, Exile Bay 2017)

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available

  from the National Library of Australia

  http://catalogue.nla.gov.au

  EPUB format: 9781760554392

  Typeset by Post Pre-Press

  Cover images: Shutterstock and Superstock

  Cover design: kid-ethic.com

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