First Person

by Richard Flanagan

  All-in-all—explanatory notes and numerous caveats included—there was close to 27,000 words—less than half what was expected as a final manuscript—and these I had to abandon to Gene Paley in the hope that there was enough in them to satisfy him for now. He had, admittedly, made it clear he did not expect a final completed manuscript. But whether Gene Paley would find in my draft evidence of a book he thought worth publishing was a different matter.

  Gene Paley had sent me a message saying that he would stay at his desk waiting for me to deliver. When—a little after seven that evening—I handed my typescript over to him he seemed pleased to receive it, though not as surprised as I was that I had actually managed to finish the draft. I felt intensely depressed and I had the shakes so bad I thought I might fall over in his office. He told me he would have it read by the morning and give me his thoughts then.

  Although I was washed out and coming down badly from the speed and lack of sleep, I was too exhausted to say no when Ray, who was waiting for me outside, suggested we grab a counter tea at a St. Kilda pub.

  3

  Over steak and chips we talked about old times, which are mostly free of rough edges, and we avoided the thing that had brought us together to drink in that city far from our island home. A band was playing, and the noise made for an odd intimacy. Maybe because I was feeling depressed, I confessed that I didn’t like what I was doing, but when Ray asked me why, pointing out that it was money, I was hard pressed to answer.

  I’m working hard to make him look good, I said finally. Maybe that’s it.

  So? Ray said.

  A man robs, maybe kills—

  Maybe, Ray said. He seemed unusually equivocal. But has he told you that?

  Not exactly.

  How do you know then?

  Well…I don’t, I said. He’s a liar.

  Ray snorted. So? Maybe he is, maybe he’s not, maybe he’s something else.

  What does that mean?

  Something worse.

  Like what?

  Fuck him. That’s all.

  I was irritable from the speed and exhaustion, and not really listening. I said I didn’t know if I could do it any more, and even if I did somehow manage it, even if it were a good job, all I would have done is managed to make Heidl look a hero.

  I dunno, Kif. I’d have to read it. You’d have to be pretty good to polish that turd.

  I talked about how it would be impossible to get published if I failed with this book, though I had no idea if that was the case or not. Ray didn’t agree, but as he admitted he’d be the last to know. He tried to be his normal cheery self, but he wasn’t really cheerful at all, and when I asked him why, he looked around the bar room before fixing me with his eyes. He made me promise if he told me something that I’d tell no one, and, above all, never tell Heidl.

  I asked why.

  Because…, Ray said but his voice grew uncertain as he said it, as though he was repeating something he had learnt but never believed, because it’s a secret.

  And he told me.

  4

  Heidl had made Ray stop outside a sports goods store. They had gone in and Heidl had bought a Glock pistol, along with some boxes of bullets.

  Why? I asked.

  That’s what I asked him. Why? I said, what do you want that fuckn thing for? Ziggy raves on for a while with that shit about the banks trying to do him in, how we needed protection now, but it was nothing to do with that.

  Ray was oddly upset about something I felt wasn’t so far out of character with someone as self-dramatising as Heidl. I asked when it had happened.

  The day before yesterday, Ray said. When Heidl said he had to quickly meet with his lawyers and then we didn’t come back for the best part of the day. We didn’t meet any lawyers.

  I’d worked that out before you left.

  Ziggy was on a mission. First, he gets me to stop to buy the Glock. Next, he wants me to drive him to Bendigo. But an hour out of Melbourne, he gets me to drive us down some side roads until we end up in this patch of thick scrub. He tells me to pull over. He gets me to follow him into the scrub. We walk about ten minutes, and then he says, I need you to kill me, Ray.

  I laughed, but quickly stopped. Ray didn’t smile, and just kept staring at me.

  I’m serious, Ziggy says. I’d rather you kill me, he says. I need a friend, Ray. You’re my mate, he says. I hate how he says it. Like it’s a leash. My best mate, he says. And he went on like that, that sort of shit—a real mate would do it; that’s what real mates are for, the tough thing, the hard shit.

  Ray was pouring Jack Daniel’s shots into our beer, making the beer taste flat and sickly. We skolled them and ordered more, skolled them and drank some more. I didn’t know what to say. We started talking about other things.

  Then Ray said: he made me practise.

  What?

  Killing him. With the gun. Showed me how it had to sit in the mouth, what angle. That sort of shit. You fuck it, you blow half your brains out but you live.

  Ray thrust an index finger into the front of his mouth in a vertical position. With a garbled voice he said, this way, you lobotomise yourself.

  He slowly moved his finger down until—still in his mouth—it angled in a diagonal line up past the top of his ears.

  Like this, Ray said. That’s what Heidl said. Like fuckn this.

  He pulled out his glistening finger and wiped it on his jeans.

  For the first time I realised that beneath all the talk of adventures, of choppers, of the wild lands of Cape York, of hunting dugong with the Aboriginals, Ray was unhappy and his unhappiness had about it the nature of something tormenting and inescapable. I also realised that we had both ended up somewhere we should not be.

  Why don’t you just leave, I said. He can find someone else. You don’t owe him anything.

  It’s not that. It’s him. You don’t get it, mate. You just don’t get it.

  Get what? I asked.

  He dropped his hand from his face.

  Him.

  What?

  Him! He doesn’t, like—you can’t.

  Can’t what?

  Leave.

  The band was noisier than ever, and I had to lean in.

  Can’t leave. He won’t allow it. He says if you’re really my friend, you wouldn’t. If mateship means anything to you. If you’re a mate.

  Mate?

  And Ray yelled—

  You fuckn can’t.

  He leant back, his elbow on the bar.

  Yeah, that’s what he says. I know. It’s weird. But if you leave him you wouldn’t know what he might do to you. Come after you…

  His voice trailed off. He ran his finger around the rim of his glass and when he looked up from his drink I caught his eyes.

  Kill you? I said.

  Ray looked back down, tapped the glass rim with a finger, but what he meant by this gesture I had no idea. I thought of the odd way Heidl said mate, with his strange half-American, part-German voice with its Strine overlay.

  Mate? I said. He’s no fucking mate.

  Well. He thinks I am. I can’t explain it.

  You should fucking kill him.

  Yeah. Don’t think I don’t think it.

  And once more he put his finger in his mouth, angled it back, closed his lips around his finger as if it were a lollipop, and said, Boom! His face went into his maniacal, slightly cracked smile that he seemed to reserve for when he wanted to have his way, when he was drunk or stoned, and wanted to steal a car, or steal someone’s girlfriend; only this time it vanished almost as quickly as it appeared.

  Yeah. Don’t think I don’t think it, Kif. Don’t think I don’t think it all the time.

  5

  At 11 a.m. on Friday I was in the office, Heidl-less, when the phone rang. With the hours I’d been keeping, the work, the speed, Heidl, the tension of not knowing if I was going to get the book written, I was fried. My head was mud. I had passed the morning seeking to make a chapter work but nothing worked, noth
ing connected, and I was lost again in the story of Heidl, defeated by his strange refusal to have a life, even on the page. I picked the receiver up. It was Gene Paley’s secretary.

  In his office, TransPac’s CEO apologised for having troubled me to produce a draft manuscript under such extreme pressure. His manner felt ever more an unsettling combination of simpering deference and casual brutality.

  But you see I have to know, Gene Paley said.

  He lifted my manuscript off a side table, placing it on his desk and pushing it towards me as if he were returning a defective toaster to the shop.

  What you and Heidl have been up to. To see if you can deliver us a book.

  I may have flinched but it might have looked like a smile.

  There’s some fine writing here, Gene Paley said.

  I may have smiled but it might have looked like a flinch.

  Kif. A book is a mirror. If a capuchin monkey stares at its pages, Albert Camus isn’t going to stare back.

  I mumbled something.

  You need to reveal the story to the reader.

  I have, I said.

  You haven’t yet.

  I will.

  Kif, for the moment I think you’ve gone as far as you can with Siegfried. You’re flying back to Tasmania tomorrow?

  Tonight.

  Don’t come back till next Thursday, Kif. Stay at home, flesh this draft out. As much as you can. And then use next Thursday to check it over with Siegfried. That gives us a bit over a week after that for you to rewrite and edit. Okay?

  Having run what felt the equivalent of the three-minute mile, I was now being ordered to run a sub-two-hour marathon. I may have nodded in despair.

  One question.

  Yes, I said.

  What is the story?

  It’s straightforward, I said.

  He slowly tapped his marsupial-like fingers on my manuscript.

  What is it though? Gene Paley asked, tiny pale digits drumming.

  A story of the future lost? I ventured.

  The way you tell it, Gene Paley said, he’s the coming dawn. The new tomorrow.

  He’s a parable, I said, or perhaps just hoped.

  There are no numbers in parables, Kif. They don’t sell. Unless it’s America. And there they package it as self-help.

  And here?

  Well, here in Australia we like hanging calendars—you know, defiant confessions of crimes. Given from the gibbet. Yo ho and sorry lads, but fuck the power and then the power fucks you. We want them punished, but we like them proud.

  The dying game.

  Exactly.

  So what do you want? I asked, because I really had no idea what he was on about.

  How he was CIA. How he ripped the banks off. How he’s not repentant.

  No?

  No. Australians like their heroes bad. Unrepentant. That’s the point.

  He’s German, I said.

  He told you?

  No. He said he was Australian.

  Mmm.

  My eyes dropped a little. I noticed the starched ghost image of an underarm sweat stain on Gene Paley’s white shirt.

  Kif, there’s interesting things here. But you need something to happen.

  Something does, I said.

  Not yet.

  But it will, I said. I am sure of it.

  13

  1

  A FEW HOURS after speaking with Gene Paley, I flew home to Tasmania. Disembarking at the airport in the winter dusk, the undertow of weary passengers washed past me, walking through the rain towards the terminal. I stopped on the wet tarmac and stood alone. Inside the terminal, Suzy was waiting for me. She too would be standing alone, ready to meet, and not meeting.

  And I wondered: who was she? For that matter, after three weeks with Heidl, who was I? And the hardest question: why were we we?

  I had no idea.

  We just were.

  For our island and our time, all of it now too far away, we had been old for marriage. Suzy was twenty and I was twenty-three, and we knew with the fatalism of our world that now was the time when we must go on, and go on we did, ready to meet, and not meeting.

  Our marriage consequently was a mystery to us both. It was what you did, and, having done it, we went on doing it. We did it and we did it and we didn’t question it. There was a great determination tempered by a great pity that bound us together. There still prevailed on our remote island the custom of the unarranged marriage, as arbitrary and doomed, as hopeful, as absurd and oppressive and liberating as its corollary, the custom of the arranged marriage. The belief was it ended well when it did not end badly—at which point there had to be a villain, the bad man or bad woman. But of the custom itself there was no questioning or criticism.

  I made my way inside to find, in defiance of even my imagination, Suzy was bigger than a week earlier. As the airport’s sole luggage carousel groaned into life and began its elliptical labour, we both had to bow awkwardly to reach over her huge stomach to hug. Suzy seemed more than ever a stranger, a country I had once known now changed out of all recognition—her body, her smell, her softer voice, a slight blurred emotion in her responses, a vague smile in speaking—about what? whom? why? Did we feel something less? Or something more? I don’t know. Sensing the danger of unravelling, I said the book was coming together.

  The book and the twins—triplets! Suzy said.

  Yes! I replied. A trifecta!

  That’s how we talked, or how we tried to talk. Going on, getting on. Cheerfully. I wasn’t always so cheery, but I accepted my lot, or, at least, accepted that I should accept it. And Suzy never ceased trying, and I admired her for that. Our world was one of labour, and marriage was understood as another aspect of work. Suzy was a hard worker in all things.

  Suzy was thirty-eight weeks gone, and we had had drummed into us by doctors and midwives and a murder of birth professionals—knowing, slightly irritating people who smiled too much when making their points—the many reasons twins always came early and the often distressing consequences of premature birth. But the doctor’s warning about the possibility of pre-eclampsia hadn’t seemed to come to anything and our twins continued happily ensconced within, by all measurements still healthy and growing.

  Other than lethargy and the difficulties of manoeuvring her improbable body through doorways, in and out of the EH’s front seat, between furniture and people on the street (Homemaker? More like an icebreaker, she said, after knocking over a vase and two chairs with her belly), Suzy seemed to be having no physical problems—no bad back, no varicose veins, no wild emotional rides and, other than occasional heartburn of a morning, no discomfort. And so, after reading Bo her favourite fairytale of wolves and woodcutters, I returned that evening to my tiny writing room and Suzy to the sofa in the lounge room.

  At my desk I stared dully at paper, empty screen, blinking cursor. From downstairs I heard a record playing softly, songs of innocence from the ’70s. I went back down to the lounge room, lit now by only one low side lamp. For a song or two Suzy and I danced, the four of us making of our awkwardly aligned bodies a slow shuffle.

  I’m sorry about the money, I whispered into Suzy’s ear. I didn’t know when I took the job that I’d get nothing upfront. I’ll find us a second cot.

  We still only had the one cot I’d scrounged from the tip and fixed up myself when Bo was born.

  It’ll work out, Suzy said. We’ll be fine.

  Writing this now, trying to recapture the mood of that night as we gently held each other, it is not the softness, the sweetness that I am astonished by. No. It is our lack of doubt. Our terrifying lack of doubt that tomorrow could be better than today, that things would turn out well. Knowing me, knowing you, as the song went. Round and round we went, knowing we were safe, knowing we had each other, knowing—knowing—knowing—knowing nothing at all.

  2

  The screen froze.

  I swore at the computer, unbent a paperclip and with it forced the ejection of the floppy disk, swi
tched the Mac Plus off and on, reinserted the disk, and then waited for an interminable time as the machine chugged away, making a harsh noise not unlike a choked coffee grinder as it booted back up. I looked around my writing room—more a wardrobe than a room, with its narrow walls that each night seemed to press in a little tighter—stretched my arms, and yawned. It was past midnight, but I had made unexpected progress since arriving home that evening. Finally, the machine once more running, I opened the file in which I had been writing the latest chapter.

  None of my changes was there. That long evening’s work was gone, all wiped by the screen freeze. I sat there feeling not so much angry as nauseated. I had so little time left and was now half a day further behind. The calamity only reinforced my growing sense that the book was an empty farce—that there was no book, and, worse, that there was never meant to be one.

  And that, in turn, brought a painful question to my mind—had this always been Heidl’s plan? After all, he had too many lies to cover, too many untruths to square to want a writer who might make sense of his ludicrous life. And coupled with that he had a criminal’s disinclination to leave any record, no matter how devious and untrue. It all amounted to evidence. Was his growing confidence in me not as someone who would write his story, but as someone who never would? A front, a fool he could use to con the last of his advance out of Gene Paley? Was that why he chose me?

  The mist outside my window left night-time Hobart wet smears of yellow on black. My hopes for myself as a writer were a joke, my failure as a family man unable to bring any money home a joke. And the most bitter joke of all was that Heidl had picked me out of obscurity because he knew I was incapable of writing the book.