by Marco Ocram
“It wasn’t a mistake, Bow, it was just bad luck. Bad luck for you that Herbert had a loyal friend who would move heaven and earth to prove his innocence.”
“And what do you plan to do now, young man?” This time it was Professor Sushing who asked the question.
“What do you think? We are going to call for back-up, then have you all taken back to Clarkesville. Herbert Quarry will be freed on the basis of your confession, and you will take his place in the Clarkesville County Penitentiary.”
Just as I finished speaking, all the lights went out.
LESSON FORTY-SEVEN
‘Herbert.’
‘Yes, Marco’?
‘What was it you said about credulity?’
‘Never mind, Marco. It’s too late to be worrying about that now.’
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
In which we wave goodbye to the last traces of realism.
There were sounds of a scuffle.
“Don’t nobody move.”
It was Chief McGee’s voice. Scoobie McGee thumbed a lighter—its feeble glow revealed Como unconscious on the floor. Each McGee held a gun, one of which was pointed at me.
“You, Writer, sit down next to your friend, and no tricky moves or you’ll both get it.”
I wasn’t sure what tricky moves he expected me to write, but I sat on the floor, hoping not to poop in my hired tuxedo. I’d never been so scared. I’d invented Como as a tough giant to keep me out of trouble, and here he was, felled by a cowardly blow from a minor character. I had no idea what to type—the next sentence could be my last. I stared at the proudly defiant stag in the Pollock over the granite mantlepiece of the vast fireplace, a metaphor for my own predicament. I could scarcely believe paint hurled from a tin could have created such a vivid and moving scene. If Pollock could achieve that, surely I could invent some amazing plot twist to save the respective bacons of Como and his young Writer.
Inspired, I let the action flow.
Como stirred beside me. I helped him sit against the wall. About us an argument raged.
“You shouldn’t have let him snoop around,” said Scoobie.
“Don’t look at me,” said his uncle, “he said he was investigating Quarry.”
“Well you fell for that alright, just as you let that slut Kellogg wind you round her finger.” Marcia pointed her own finger in accusation as she spoke.
Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap. As I had done a chapter ago, Sushing called for the attention of the room, hammering the butt of a wine bottle on the polished oak of the dining table.
“Leave the arguments for later. You,” he nodded at Scoobie “light the candles, then find some lamps. Keep them covered,” he added to Chief McGee, meaning me and Como, obviously, not the lamps.
Sushing and Bow conferred in private murmurs until Bow nodded his agreement to a conclusion Sushing subsequently announced.
“This is what we will do, ladies and gentlemen. We will return to Clarkesville in two boats, one large, one small. We will put our friends here in the smaller boat. They will have an accident and their boat will capsize. A search will find the overturned boat, and they will be presumed lost at sea. When we are asked, we will be shocked—we did not see or hear anything amiss. Ocram and the Lieutenant had drunk much during the celebration. They were unsteady on their feet. Perhaps their intoxicated state contributed to the accident. We should blame ourselves, ladies and gentlemen, for not having insisted they share our safer craft.”
“An accident? What kind of accident?” asked McGee, the question being one of interest to all of us, especially me.
“That’s your specialty, not mine. Just make sure the bodies are never found.”
“Okay, everyone. Down to the boats.” Chief McGee waved his gun at me. “You first, Writer.”
We filed outside. The complete absence of electrical light showed the island had suffered a power cut, no doubt due to poor maintenance of its diesel generator in the off season, I thought, draping the flimsiest veil of plausibility over the previous scene.
There was a waxing moon, its light sufficient to guide us to the jetty. As we walked—Como and I at gunpoint—Sushing coached the other conspirators: what to say to the police, what not to say, how to act, the importance of sticking to the story, the paramount need for secrecy. He talked with utter confidence in his plan, and utter disregard for its intended victims, as if Como and I were already dead. How could I, a naïve and inexperienced writer, hope to outwit such a cunning and ruthless character?
As we approached the moorings, a tide of panic engulfed me. I cursed Herbert. I was about to die, and it was all his fault. Break the mold of literature, he said. Write as Pollock painted. Don’t think ahead. Type the first words that come into your head. Well I’d tried and look where it had got me—about a page away from an awful death. Why hadn’t I written that the Clarkesville Bay Island Hotel was renowned for the reliability of its electricity supply, or even set the dinner in a downtown hotel? Better still, why hadn’t I avoided this whole farcical charade by writing a book about being stranded on a luxurious island with a sect of author-worshippers? A tender lump of sadness swelled in my throat as I contemplated my fate. After all I had written, this was how it would end. I thought of my poor Bronx mom, and how sad she would be. I thought of Como’s sainted mother, and how sad she would be. I thought of the loss of my huge advance. But most of all, I thought about the millions and millions of bereft readers, denied the pleasure of reading my mold-breaking book. How could I evade that tragic fate?
I was now almost pooping myself with fear. I needed an incredible twist in the next paragraph, or I was a dead man. Trying to walk and cross my legs at the same time, I desperately scanned the skies for some source of salvation—an alien tripod to zap the baddies, a meteorite to squash them, a twister to suck them to Oz, an enraged dragon to blast them with its fiery breath, malevolent birds to peck out their…
Bow’s perplexed voice interrupted my frantic speculations.
“Tide’s out! It’s not meant to be low tide until two oh eight.”
Bow had a huge yacht at the Clarkesville marina, I recalled, thus explaining his familiarity with the local tide tables.
I looked for myself. The tide was astonishingly low. The waters had retreated beyond sight, exposing acres of virgin seabed—even the dredged channel for the launches was dry. The boats themselves lay almost on their sides on a slick bank of mud.
The Professor caught my eye. As the two men of science in the party, we were reaching the same conclusion at the same time. There was only one explanation for the extreme tidal phenomenon, an explanation we voiced together in awed, disbelieving tones…
“A tsunami.”
Whether I said it first, or Sushing did, doesn’t matter, because soon we were all saying it, some of us several times, with varying shades of expression, thus:
“A tsunami?”
“A tsunami.”
“A tsunami!”
“A tsunami??”
“A tsuna…”
“A tsunami!!!”
“A tsunami???”
Even Como had a go.
“A tsunami? Are you shitting me? You don’t get friggin’ tsunamis in Clarkesville.”
It was a fair point, but before I could ask him in sarcastic tones whether he preferred death over seismological realism, the tsunami hit. One moment we were standing on the jetty, looking at the vast expanse of seabed eerie in the moonlight; seemingly the next, the waters returned, flooding the jetty, our feet, our knees, our thighs.
Someone screamed. A huge cliff of water loomed out of the night, thundering towards the mainland with the speed of a train.
I will never forget the minute that followed, the mad minute in which I was swept by the irresistible waters in deadly soup of flotsam—baulks of timber, shards of glass, the bodies of countless creatures, small boats, beach balls, airbeds, buckets and spades, sunshades, fishing tackle, lobster pots, sailb
oards, unexploded WW2 mines, submarine nets, oil rigs; I was buffeted by them all until I was hurled onto the mainland shore, where everything went blank.
I came to in surroundings that became familiar as my mind cleared. I was lying at the top of the high grassy bank that separated Herbert’s house from the beach. The spent waters of the tsunami had retreated, leaving mile upon mile of debris all along the coastline around Clarkesville. There was another shape on the bank a few yards away. Could it be? Yes. It was Como. I limped to where he lay. He was breathing but unconscious, no doubt concussed by debris as I had been.
Then I remembered something which seemed more valuable than my own life. I patted my pockets. It was still there—the small portable recorder upon which I had preserved the conversation around the dinner table at the hotel. Its glass display panel was smashed, and, like me, it was completely waterlogged, but would its electronic memory be intact?
I squelched up the path to Herbert’s house. I turned on the blessed lights and slopped into the study, a trail of seawater marking my passage. At Herbert’s desk, I coaxed the small memory card out of the ruined recorder. I prayed as I inserted it in the slot on Herbert’s PC. Yes! The files were there, the files that would free Herbert and earn me the world’s largest royalty payments. Taking no chances, I logged in to my account and uploaded the files onto the cloud. There. At last I could relax. I leaned back in Herbert’s chair.
Something hit me hard on the back of the head.
LESSON FORTY-EIGHT
‘Tell me, Herbert.’
‘Yes, Marco?’
‘Is there anything that is not like a boxing match?’
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
In which Marco imagines more melodramatic mayhem.
I came-to, this time with a hyphen, lying on my side on the floor. My wrists and ankles were bound, my arms behind my back. I heard typing and looked up. There was a bedraggled shape in Herbert’s chair. Marcia Delgado. She heard me move. Her face was terrifying. A mask of pure malevolence. She held a knife.
“You snooping bastard. We had it all sorted, but no, the snooping bastard has to come along and interfere where he’s not wanted. Well your snooping days are over.”
She got behind me and yanked back my head with a handful of hair. I could feel the knife on my throat.
“You’re gonna tell me what you’ve done with those files. Now!”
The now was screeched as if by Satan himself. I summoned an unassailable resolution. I was not going to tell Delgado where I put the files. She could kill me if she liked, but the story would survive. Como would investigate. The truth about the Herbert Quarry affair would come out whether I lived or not.
Something of my resolve must have shown on my face, for she threw me back on the floor.
“Right then,” she hissed. “If you won’t show me, the computer’s going to burn in the fires of hell. And you with it.”
I heard her go outside. Lugging a jerrycan from Herbert’s garage, she shook diesel over Herbert’s desk and computer. Without a word, she doused more over me, then left a trail of fuel into the hall. I heard matches struck.
I was seized with a blind panic. I screeched for help. I couldn’t stand but I somehow squirmed to the door. Too late. The hallway was full of flame—the heat seemed to burn my face even at a distance. I squirmed back into the room and tried to shut the door. It was held open by a hook, too high to reach. I tried to get an arm behind the door to wrench off the hook—I didn’t have the strength. The flames were moving along the corridor. They would soon be feeding greedily on the diesel-soaked carpet in front of Herbert’s desk. I kicked the carpet into folds and pushed it into the hallway. I was only delaying the arrival of the flames, but there was nothing else to do but try to survive.
In desperation I managed to stand and headbutt one of the windows. I almost knocked myself out, falling back on the floor in a daze. The panes were toughened glass, a result of Chief McGee’s fake security appraisal of Herbert’s property.
The fire was raging in the doorway. Herbert’s desk and computer were ablaze. The acrid fumes were choking me. My exposed skin felt on fire. My wet clothes were steaming. I was going to asphyxiate or be burned to death. I wormed across the floor to the corner furthest from the fire and stared at the flames that would soon envelop my body. I felt detached and philosophical. I had written my book without thinking, and this was its end. Was it self-inflicted—a subconscious urge for heroic self-sacrifice—or had the gods of literature wreaked swift revenge for my irreverence? I thought of the characters I had created, good and bad—my Bronx mom and Sushing, to mention just the bad—and especially of the true hero of the book, Lieutenant Como Galahad. My eyes welled with tears as I thought of the companionable times we had spent in the fearless pursuit of Truth. He had been unquestioningly loyal to his Writer—well maybe unquestioningly is going a bit far, but this is the big dramatic scene, don’t forget—and now I was to betray him by dying, never more to type a single…
My tragic monologue was cut short as a huge rock crashed through a window in an explosion of glass. The roar of the fire redoubled with the inrush of air. A burly figure stepped over the window ledge, the tail of his damp shirt clamped across his face.
“Hold on, Writer.”
Como slung me over his shoulder and dumped me out onto the cool grass.
LESSON FORTY-NINE
‘I was thinking, Herbert.’
‘Really, Marco?’
‘I think the last chapter might be the most important.’
‘Why do you say that, Marco?’
‘Because it is the one my readers will read last, Herbert.’
‘Are you sure, Marco? They might not get that far.’
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
In which the writing of the book proves to be the easy part.
I was the hero of the hour, the face on every front-page and TV channel, the toast of the publishing world. A plague of reporters had descended on Clarkesville. I couldn’t move without being mobbed. I had written a book unlike any other. No one could decide which was the biggest story—the tsunami, Herbert’s innocence, or my breaking the mold of literature. The combination of the three was a publicist’s dream. Barney had been ecstatic on the line from New York.
“Markie baby, this is gonna be the biggest thing ever. And I mean e-verr. There’s a bidding war for the movie rights. Cruise is begging for your part, begging for it. Elton’s on the phone every five minutes about a musical. Como go Bro’s number one on YouTube. I got the contract from Microsoft for the Xbox game. Every talk-show wants our Markie, and the book’s not even published yet. So, get yourself up here. We’ve got a book to finish.”
I got myself up to New York. Actually, Barney sent a stretch limo. On the drive I reflected on what had happened since the waters of the tsunami retreated.
Herbert had been released, with all charges dropped; psychologists working for the DA decided Lola had a mental age of 37, so a prosecution wasn’t in the public interest.
Como and I spent a weekend making a razz video, he winning a toss to call it Como go Bro rather than Rock’em Ocram. I promoted him to Police Chief for helping me solve the sensational case—and for saving my life.
Chief McGee had drowned in the tidal wave—a better fate than frying in the chair. The other conspirators drowned too, except for Professor Sushing and Marcia Delgado. Marcia fled from the burning house and disappeared, providing the possibility of a last-minute plot-twist if she came after me with the knife. The Professor escaped to Panama, so I could recycle him as a character in my next book.
Jenny McGee, the innocent object of the conspiracy, had lost her father, but was due to gain all of Elijah Bow’s estate, or what was left of it when the lawyers had finished.
My Bronx mom was overjoyed to have her little Markie safe and sound—she threw a party for me with all her friends from the hairdresser’s and tried to get me dating their daughters. However, I had no time for th
at—I had a book to publish.
It was then the real work started. Having written seventy-five thousand mold-breaking words completely off the top of my head, having eschewed all editing—in true Jackson Pollock fashion—and having handed the raw manuscript to my publishers with instructions to change not a single word, I was faced with crafting the blurb for the back cover.
“That stream of consciousness stuff might be OK for the book,” said Barney, “but we’re not gonna have any of that crap on the cover. We gotta get the backmatter right or we’ll kiss goodbye to sales.”
It was purgatory. I spent more time on those two-hundred words than I did on the rest of the book. Version after version I sent to the publishers. Never was one right. This was too long. This was too short. That sentence doesn’t flow. That phrase will be offensive in Balinese. There was no end to it.
From time to time Barney called with updates. The print run for the first edition had been set to five million—a world record. Everyone wanted to read how Marco Ocram had survived a tsunami to bring the world the truth about the Herbert Quarry affair. According to Barney, hot actresses were queueing round the block to have my babies.
Babies…
I thought of my book. It was going to be my baby. A joyous birth after hours of labor. I thought of all the trauma and grief Frances Kellogg and Elijah Bow had caused by their own desperate plans for parenthood. Parenthood, I thought—it was like a boxing match…
EPILOGUE
In which a promise is not fully honored.
I was reading a review of my book in The New York Times, and wondering what a ‘fatuous farrago’ was, when my iPad beeped with an email from Barney. An astonished “Wow” burst from my lips as I scanned it. I danced into the kitchen.
“Mom, listen.”