First Person

by Richard Flanagan

  It was just on nightfall when a fishing boat finally found and rescued me. Later that night I was transferred onto a police boat which had rescued Ray shortly before I had been found, miles away from where the fishing boat had discovered me. Ray came up to me, his eyes murderous, his tone demented, demanding.

  Where’s Kif? he said. We’ve got to find him. We can’t give up.

  He didn’t know who I was. I heard him say that Kif was dead, that Kif was not dead, that Kif was. The truth was we both thought by not holding together we were somehow responsible for the other’s fate, that we had each killed the other.

  Years later I met one of the policemen who had been on that boat. He said that Ray had been in the final stages of hypothermia. They had expected him to die and had the body bag out ready for him.

  A lot of people found it funny, but I didn’t laugh for a year or more after it happened. When I thought no one was looking I’d cling to the earth like a lunatic, ear pressed to the ground, and I knew the earth was turning and me with it. I would clutch it harder so that I might not be spun off. I would hold it until I could hear it breathe beneath me, and only then relax, and only then a little. It was in that time I met Suzy and conflated her and the planet in my affections. I clung to her for as long as I could.

  4

  1

  THE MORNING AFTER Ray’s call I had four hours’ work as a doorman at the city council’s civic square exhibition. It was my one regular job, four mornings a week in an otherwise empty building that had once been a public library. I sat at the top of a long flight of stairs at the entrance of the old reading room in which a few desultory models, plans, and interpretation panels formed an exhibition which purported to encourage informed civic debate. I had two tasks: to keep count of the visitors with a click-counter and to make sure no one walked out with one of the models.

  No one came to be counted. Most of the time I was able to work away in an exercise book hidden on my lap beneath the table, writing what I hoped would be my novel. But as I sat there that day all I could think of was Heidl’s tormenting offer. On the one hand, it would be money—and a published book. A book I would write. It was astonishing. Unbelievable. I would finally become what I had always said I was going to be—a writer. Admittedly, a ghost writer, but that was a small thing. After years of poverty and increasing frustration, if not outright depression, at my failure to write a novel, it seemed the fast track to authorial integrity. And with the money I could pay bills, buy time, and finish my novel.

  But fears flew around that dusty, forsaken foyer and muddied my mind. I worried that I would somehow be tainted, not simply publicly, but in my heart, having abandoned some sacred trust for a Faustian deal involving money. Because money was the only reason I would ever do such a thing. Fuck the money, I thought. Damn the money! I scribbled in my exercise book, a typically false transposition of my own feelings. If it was money I wanted I’d be anywhere else in the world, I told myself, not sitting as a doorman at the Hobart City Council exhibition.

  I worried once more about my literary reputation. After a time, I realised I had no literary reputation to worry about. For that matter, I had no novel. Some years earlier there had been my art history honours thesis, which had been published to a screaming silence by a Brisbane publishing co-operative, Hoppy Head Press—not so much a publishing house as a share house got lucky, first through a commercial connection with Ronnie McNeep, and later by making a great deal of money out of a Pritikin diet cookbook. A little of this it then lost on a far less lucrative McNeep suggestion: my Quiet Currents: A History of Tasmanian Modernism, 1922–1939.

  There had, in addition, been two short stories, one of which won the Wangaratta City Council Edith Langley Award, the citation for which had meant even more than the five-hundred-dollar cheque, extolling me as “possibly a new voice in Australian literature.” The adverb was, as I felt adverbs were, hopefully redundant.

  I resolved to stay with literature. I would stick with the novel and I wouldn’t take the ghost-writing job. It was an insult and worse to a real writer, even a real writer like me who had not really written anything real.

  I returned to writing in the exercise book balanced on my knees. The few who had seen gobbets of my work found it hard to say anything. It wasn’t that praise was beyond them. It was that even contempt was difficult. Ray, to whom I showed a dozen pages, and who had been excited to read it—honoured, he said—came back into our kitchen, put the pages down on the table, and looked up.

  Lot of words, mate. Thousands?

  The drowning…I said. Is it—

  Amazing, Ray said. His voice was without enthusiasm.

  You think—

  There’d be thousands there, right?

  I don’t really know what I wanted Ray to say. Nor did Ray. Genius? Masterpiece?

  Words, Ray said after some time. I mean. Like. How many are there in what I just read? Thirty thousand? Forty?

  Three, I said. Three thousand. Or so.

  Well, mate, that’s fuckn amazing. I thought it was a lot longer. They all seem to work too, Ray said. The words, I mean.

  And that was that. Like a piece of PVC pipe or a tap, a fork, a sewer or serviette, the words seemed to work. The only thing left was to go on writing, yet writing had become an agony. Simple words grew impossibly complex. I spent one morning listening to myself sounding out the ever stranger, more mysterious word “and.” It assumed a connection could be made and should be made. But in my mind no connection was. Every sentence seemed false, and my suspicion about language crept into conversation: everything disintegrated into meaninglessness the moment I said even the most obvious thing to Suzy or Bo.

  Hang in, I told myself. You’re not the first to despair. It will get better. I tried to persuade myself that one word follows another, and in that way sentences, paragraphs, love affairs, wars, nations, and novels come into being.

  Or so I had imagined.

  But the words didn’t come, and they wouldn’t. And so to gee them along I had tried, to name but a few muses, dissipation, industry, asceticism, marathons, masturbation, meditation, tantric denial, cheap beer, home-made slivovitz, hashish, and speed. For a time, I deliberately avoided writing, to let ideas ferment and arise through some organic mystery. No ideas rose, writing wasn’t dough or yoghurt, all things and every sentence kept sinking. My mind was as empty as the exhibition room. Yet for me, the only thing worse than writing was not writing.

  2

  Lost behind my table in the council foyer I thought of Suzy, the impending birth, this matter of twins that suddenly seemed to me far more extraordinary and far more pressing than the exercise book that lay on my lap full of forced sentiments and stolen ideas, words that had once seemed profound, even brilliant, but which now struck me as trivial and embarrassing.

  I tried to console myself that it was okay to write rubbish, a necessary prelude, an inevitable bad patch. All of which suggested I was capable of a subsequent good patch. For that, though, there was no evidence whatsoever. I was caught between the fear of not finishing my novel and looking a fool, or finishing a rubbish book and looking an even greater fool—worse, a deluded fool, a mediocre and vain pretender. The art, I read, was to find your centre and write from that. It wasn’t that I worried I couldn’t reach my centre. It was that I feared I had. And there was nothing there.

  In all this Suzy was an enigma. She neither believed nor disbelieved in my talent. That’s you, she would simply say. As the evidence of my failings as a writer mounted I resented this more and more. Surely she should love me, I thought, for my talent. But what was everything to me—whether I had this kernel, this essence, this thing that might mean something beyond me—was irrelevant to Suzy. The problem was this, I realised: Suzy loved me whether I had talent or not. Suzy loved me right or wrong, good or bad, thing or no thing; she loved something beyond and separate of whatever I might or might not be. Such a love made no sense to me. At times, I perhaps even hated her for it, because i
t did not admit to its logic the one thing I hoped was not mediocre in me: my talent.

  For my fear was greater than any gratitude, my growing failure was more important than her unconditional love, and, try as I might to hide from Suzy my growing terror, my anger, its surest messenger, I couldn’t. So when Suzy had that morning told me she knew I would write the novel and that the novel would be a success, I told her she was a fool for believing such nonsense. When she started crying, saying she only believed in me, I grew so angry I threw a chair across our kitchen where it hit the wall and snapped a leg, because I felt she wasn’t listening when I said I had nothing to write.

  Don’t you see, I yelled, there’s nothing to believe in?

  Great loves are worth destroying in order to remind us how ordinary we really are. Or so Tebbe says. I don’t know whether our love was great, but it took some wrecking. We had begun to fight more during the pregnancy. Our poverty didn’t feel oppressive, or rather we didn’t see it for the oppression it was. Yet every day it was leaving us a little less.

  We couldn’t see what it added up to: the food we couldn’t afford, the home we couldn’t heat, the car that kept breaking down, the petrol we couldn’t pay for, the time expended on making good the innumerable small things that were bad—the dilapidated junk-shop furniture, an electric toaster that needed rewiring, the external door that had to be rehung, the car brakes. To which may be added the refrigerator that no longer worked, the stove with only one hotplate, the ever-tormenting washing machine, the second-hand clothes, the steady erosion of joys and the creeping glacier of worry. And though we lived it every day, what was hidden behind it all, even from us, was our mounting, unspoken despair.

  Suzy grew dreamy and seemed ever more focused on her enormous belly. While walking she would rest her hand on the top of it, as if escorting strangers into the new world. It reminded me of the way people on horses in the movies rested their hand on the horse’s neck as they chatted before they rode away. There was something about the gesture that drove me crazy, and that was because there was something about the pregnancy that felt exclusive and excluding. It was taking Suzy somewhere new and leaving me behind, marooned, condemned to playing a part for which I could find no real feeling. Much as I strived to discover it, other than a biological fact I felt no connection. It wasn’t my belly. What I had was more poverty, growing worries, a new fear—all of it congealing into a fetid desperation.

  I was ashamed that I felt such things.

  But I felt them.

  And when my anger came on me now it was as something new, as a rage and as a madness. I felt powerless against its sudden eruptions. But I felt powerless generally and perhaps that was the problem. I kicked a side panel of our car in when the reconditioned gearbox seized; I put my fist through a glass sliding door when the washing machine broke down irretrievably and there was no money for that as our total savings had been spent on the gearbox. Suzy, I felt, ignored our true situation by seeking to reassure me we would cope just fine when the twins arrived. But it wasn’t that. It was that she rested her hand on her belly when she said it, as though even while saying it she was riding ever further away from me, and I had yelled, How? How can we look after them, Suzy? Because I could no longer see a way, and though I had to have forty stitches in consequence, the wound inside only grew worse.

  At such times I frightened Suzy. I frightened myself. The night after the sliding-door incident we again fought. She called me a monster; she said she didn’t recognise who I was becoming. In truth, I didn’t either. She railed against the book as if it were a person, a thing, a force that had come to destroy us.

  And perhaps it had.

  Suzy said a word I had never heard her use, in a way she didn’t normally speak but used with such force and clarity that I had to believe her.

  I am aggrieved, she said slowly, growling the word as if it were made of moving metal parts. And I have cause to be aggrieved.

  She said nothing more but had somehow said everything. And like a fool I began to try to justify the way everything had to be sacrificed for the book, why I worked on the book seemingly every waking hour, why I had no time to get a real job, why the book mattered more than anything else. I filled the air with empty words in the same way I filled the screen with empty words, and I suddenly realised not one word meant anything.

  I stopped talking.

  In that terrifying void I heard Suzy ask if I loved her.

  I didn’t say anything and I couldn’t think what I should say. Instead, I wearily waved my arm and mumbled something about it not mattering. And with that Suzy ran her hand along our only bookcase, pushing several shelves of books to the floor, the falling books smashing a coffee mug and breaking a record player’s perspex cover. She was yelling that I’d changed, that something had got into me, that she hated the book, that she didn’t understand me any more. And with that she collapsed onto the mess of scattered paper on the floor, where I could hear her sobbing over and over:

  The fucking book is killing us.

  At other times the whole wonder of the pregnancy would seize me with an almost violent force; I would grab Suzy and push my face to her weather-balloon belly and feel both panic and wonder. That taut hemisphere was a miracle, and whether I wanted it or not, whether it seemed to exclude me or include me, I felt as I heard distant heartbeats from within that this was also me, no matter how much it wasn’t; this was me, or it was allowing me in, that there was a place where you could be nothing and something at the same time. But I didn’t know how to reach that place. As she cradled my head, all I could do was reassure her that the book would soon end.

  It will never end, Kif, Suzy said in a distant voice. Never.

  3

  Still, as every other morning I worked at the council, I kept furtively writing, exercise book hidden below the table on my lap. It was my last, my only, my remaining and irreducible belief—that somehow in the writing the writing would emerge. If the con man’s publisher ever rang, I resolved I would take the call. It was, after all, flattering for someone who in the deepest part of their being feared he could not write to be rung by a real publisher and asked if he would write a real book for a real publishing company. That would be something that the world owed me, paid up.

  And I would say no.

  Though I did not dare think it, I understood I would later retail the story around those few friends I had left, how I, Kif Kehlmann, had been asked to ghost write a book and turned it and the money down, in order to concentrate on my real work as a writer, the finishing of my first novel.

  In this spirit, I readied myself to be an immortal writer in the manner of de Maupassant, who put a pistol to his head, spun the barrel, and when he failed to kill himself saw it as proof of his own immortality. My pistol would be the call from the publisher—I needed the money, I needed the sense of purpose it might give me, I needed to publish a book, any book; I needed—for fuck’s sake—the chance. I would talk to the publisher as an equal, I would talk as a man who could pull the pistol’s trigger. And that was why when he called I would prove I was willing to risk death by saying, No!

  Kif?

  I looked up from my exercise book. It was council’s Corporate Services and Equal Opportunities Manager, Jen Birmingham, a large woman by turns bullying, pitiful and drunk. But mostly drunk. It was said of Jen Birmingham that she had been a great beauty. Her grand face bespoke the ruin of ravaged empires. She wore ruby red lipstick applied in only an approximate relation to her lips. It was also said of her that she either wanted to lick you or kick you. The last time she had come by she had talked at length about a daughter who no longer spoke to her. But I could tell from her voice—slightly brittle, sharp—that today was not a day for a licking.

  Are you?

  It was unclear as to what was the right answer. I was on my last warning about wasting council time by using it to write a novel. How I might use my pointless hours in an empty foyer standing guard over an empty exhibition in a manner
that profited council had never been explained.

  Are you working on—here Jen Birmingham paused—that book?

  It was even unclear to me if it was a book or a grave error.

  Again? Kif? After our warning?

  I was staring at my knees, at an exercise book of twenty-six symbols chaotically arrayed into many patterns. Was that what a book was?

  No, I said.

  I am sorry, Kif. You’ve been warned again and again about—

  Mrs.—, I pleaded.

  But I was stopped by the sight of Jen Birmingham’s real lips and perhaps 60 percent of her trompe l’oeil lips seeking a word that might give adequate expression to her disgust. It was possible to sense in her cruelty a comparable wound, but it didn’t make her cruelty any less cruel nor my situation any better. And when Jen Birmingham’s lips finally found the word, they opened, and she cried—

  WRITING!

  I clutched my exercise book tight.

  See out your shift today, Kif. There’s no need to return tomorrow. We are letting you go.

  After Jen Birmingham left the foyer, I was alone once more in front of the empty exhibition room. I reopened the exercise book and began another sentence. But it was no good. There was neither flow nor dance; neither pause nor movement. Filled with dread at the thought of even getting a character to stand up and leave a room, I instead stood up and left the building.

  That afternoon I spent labouring for a builder was welcome in its mindlessness. I could forget that our last regular income was gone and all we had left to live on was this casual work. My first hour was taken up digging and barrowing out clay from the side of a house in preparation for a foundation; the next, exhausted, carrying steel up a steep drive; the final two hours mixing concrete for footings in a wheelbarrow. It was a clear winter’s day, my body hot until I stopped, and then it chilled rapidly.