First Person

by Richard Flanagan

  Suzy’s hand fell away from mine as portentous faces crowded somewhat comically in between her spread thighs and then parted for the midwife. In spite of all the expertise massed in the room, she seemed the only one helping Suzy give birth, while the others contented themselves with occasional stares and the stern murmuring of expert opinion.

  I rushed around. Between Suzy’s bloody thighs an orb of greasy hair was appearing and receding in powerful pulses. There was blood and fluid everywhere. Each time, the greasy hair would emerge a little more, then vanish within, as if taunting the world, as if unsure whether to arrive or to depart. A hush came over the room.

  Get ready, a voice said.

  And in that hush, as the moment of birth grew close, I heard Heidl.

  The evidence is with me!

  A head that seemed vastly oversized had begun to form out of Suzy—so much bigger than anything I had ever imagined possible. It was in its blood-slubbed state far more reptilian, even amphibious, than human.

  And again, that wretched voice.

  Take what you can! Before it destroys you!

  The midwife grew serious. The doctors all deferred to her now as she talked Suzy through the final stages. As she softly spoke, telling Suzy to slow down or speed up her movements, to push this way or that, to relax or to strain, a dance between the two women began.

  Suzy travelled further into her agony, screaming, writhing, begging God. The blue hospital smock fell away, leaving a nipple exposed; she didn’t care, no one did, we were all beyond such things, and yet I covered her and watched it fall away once more. Suzy looked up, wet-flecked hair stuck to her sweaty flesh, lost eyes searching me for some answer I didn’t have or direction I couldn’t give.

  All we understood was that in that crowded room so full of expertise Suzy was alone with her body. So terrifyingly alone. She was on the gas now, I don’t know for how long she had been on it, she had a thing against the gas as she had against the pethidine, but now she sucked on it greedily. I couldn’t get Heidl out of my head. Suzy stared at me from some great distance, as if I were a stranger, a monster, and her face began to contort and then broke into a scream as another contraction took hold.

  Good girl, the midwife said as the head began to protrude, good girl, push harder.

  I am pushing hard, Suzy pleaded and then she cried out from the bowels of her being as slimy shoulders appeared, followed in a tumble by arms and froglegged torso, bloodied, bunched up and buttered in vernix; and in a final shuddering convulsion legs and feet suddenly slid out.

  The baby was taken off to be weighed and measured before I even saw it properly. From a far corner there came a cry, almost a quack, hot dry air rasping still-wet lungs. Through a wall of white coats I saw the baby, stick-like legs kicking as if erratically pedalling a partly seized crank, penis wobbling below a pear torso. And I felt such a tumult of so many things: gratitude, fear, wonder, emptiness, and a confusion as to why I was allowed to be part of such a thing.

  I heard Suzy groan. Turning back to her, I saw her now partially deflated belly was convulsing.

  Slow her down, a white coat barked. It’s too soon.

  But it was too late. Something was wrong. I had forgotten that there was another child still inside.

  9

  Once more, the mood in the room abruptly changed. The midwife urged Suzy to try to ease up on her contractions, but her contractions were all that Suzy now was.

  My God! It’s crowning already, the now red-faced midwife said. It’s coming so quickly—

  And she had just got into position when I saw Suzy open once more. Out of her there flowed a translucent egg, which the midwife accepted in her cupped hands as if it were a gift.

  And inside the egg there floated a tiny being.

  There were cries of astonished delight at the pink- and blue-hued globe as the midwife held it up. We all gazed in wonder as a ginseng root-like creature, serene in its perfect world, rolled within the amniotic sac’s limpid clutch. I gasped as the midwife pushed her thumb into the caul to rip it apart. As if it were a magician’s sleight-of-hand trick, the miraculous bubble vanished in a flood of water, leaving revealed in the midwife’s cupped hands a baby boy.

  He had blue eyes, an unearthly china blue, large and open as a summer sky. For no more than a moment or two, in the dimly lit ward, those eyes gazed steadily and calmly at me. The enormity of it, the insignificance of me, everything at that moment suddenly made sense and was as it should always be.

  And then, once more, I heard Heidl. Something had happened, and yet what was it? All I could see was my family yet all I could hear was Heidl, Heidl, Heidl. I wanted them safe, but were they? I feared Heidl coming for them, for me, for us. Everything was as it should be, everything was good, and I knew it would not get better. I had thought I would finally know some truth of life and that it would be liberating, and for a few moments it had been so.

  But almost immediately it all vanished as the miracle of the amniotic sac had, dissolved into a bloody puddle, and my euphoria was overtaken once more by Heidl’s talking. Everything that had been liberating was revealed to me as imprisoning, and all that had been joyful suddenly grew desolate.

  I saw before me two strange animals, wobbly limbed and puce-faced, grimacing creatures with spastic movements, almost aliens. I felt worthless on this earth unless I was capable of doing something that was equivalent to their birth. Yet other than death what was equivalent to what I had just witnessed?

  I desperately wanted to feel something, to feel anything, yet my mind was filling with Heidl’s words, the madness of Heidl’s thoughts, a terror was on me, and much as I fought the sensation I couldn’t escape the sense that what he said was true.

  The world is evil.

  I traced a finger on our firstborn twin’s cheek.

  You will lose.

  I cupped the secondborn twin’s tiny warm head with my hand.

  Be punished. Be destroyed.

  I suddenly felt so many things. Yet Heidl had all the words.

  Look around you, Kif. The evidence of the world is with me.

  You’re lost for words, the midwife said.

  There is no right thing.

  No, I said, unsure, Heidl’s voice like a tinnitus of derangement in my ears. It’s…it’s just not what I expected.

  There was fluid everywhere and still it poured out of Suzy.

  It never is, she said.

  And there came the placenta, a huge liver-like organ, which half-fell and half-flopped out into a stainless-steel kidney dish, and after it more blood and fluid.

  And, with that, finally, it was done.

  14

  1

  ENCRUSTED IN the shaggy seat covers of the Melbourne taxi was the Melbourne taxi smell of burnt plastic and stale Melbourne vomit. I opened the grubby Melbourne street atlas to show the Melbourne taxi driver what route to take through his city of Melbourne to get to Port Melbourne. It was that sort of city. Maybe it still is.

  What did you say you were again? the cab driver asked.

  A writer, I said with little conviction.

  Would you be a Jez Dempster man by any chance?

  I wound down the window to get a mouth of fresh exhaust and tried to think through how I might deal with Heidl on this, my last day working with him. I had just nine hours to surmount the insurmountable.

  I was astonished to have got this far. When, after the twins’ birth, I was on the verge of ringing Gene Paley and tossing the whole thing in, it had been Suzy who had urged me to go on, saying I couldn’t give up, that we needed the money. How else were we to pay for the firewood? The bassinet? The baby seats?

  Not that she liked it either. She had come home the previous day with the twins, was exhausted beyond measure and needed me, and I was in my writing room. But as she said, what choice did we have? We were in too deep. We both understood that it was no longer about my literary ambitions, or any ambitions, that it wasn’t about vanity or art but only cash, the cash we
didn’t have, the cash we so desperately needed to keep our mortgage payments going and our heads above water.

  And so, following the twins’ birth, Suzy still in hospital, Bo at Suzy’s parents, I went straight back to work on the second draft, preparing a special manuscript with my concerns tagged and highlighted. I drew up a list of highly specific questions to deal with the major confusions in Heidl’s story that I had never been able to reconcile, and which Pia Carnevale was now insisting had to be resolved one way or another. I even had printed out a schedule to show him. It broke down the scant few hours we had together that day into the pressing matters of the manuscript, showing—if we were to get the job done—how many minutes we could spend on each concern before moving on to the next. It was ludicrous. But it was also the only hope I had of ensuring Heidl might do what had to be done.

  In addition to this not inconsiderable task was something simpler. Having grown nervous with Heidl’s ever more apparent lack of interest in his own biography, Gene Paley now wanted me to get Heidl’s signature on a document drawn up by TransPac’s lawyers that said my manuscript was a true and accurate record of his life.

  As my taxi pulled up at TransPac’s offices, I saw Ray in his now familiar sentry position outside the main entrance, leaning on the concrete planter box. It was a heavily overcast day, with a storm constantly threatening but never arriving, and Ray seemed similarly lost in some interminable waiting. He was so absorbed in thought or memory that he didn’t notice me arrive, and never saw me until I was standing next to him, calling his name.

  He raised his head slowly, still looking at the ground where a few rain spots would fall and vanish, as if he had spilt his thoughts on the ground and couldn’t see where they had fallen.

  Ziggy’s lost it, he said.

  What?

  Completely fuckn lost it. Someone tried to kill him last night.

  Who’d be bothered?

  That’s what he reckons. He thinks—

  Ray shook his head.

  I dunno what he thinks. He’s got choke marks around his neck, that’s all I know.

  He looked at me.

  But who knows? You? Me? Ziggy?

  You’ve seen him, I said.

  Me? Ray asked, genuinely bewildered by where his talk was leading him. You’ve talked to him. You know his whole shitty story so you tell me—what does he fuckn think?

  Let’s go up.

  He says I should have been there. That I let him down.

  Come on, Ray.

  But he gave me the night off. Said he didn’t need me.

  Let’s go.

  I can’t, mate.

  Cmon.

  He’s ordered me to stay here.

  For what?

  To keep a lookout.

  For fuck’s—

  For whoever tried to kill him. In case they come back. I dunno.

  Well they can enter over there, I said, pointing to a distant entrance. Or over there—there’s access from the rear at the end of that drive.

  Tell him! Ray suddenly shouted. Fuckn tell him! I can’t protect him down here! I’m better up there with him.

  I’m going up, I said, and left Ray to his strange, pointless post, a job that for some reason troubled him so much he hadn’t even bothered to notice me. I caught his reflection in the glass as I entered TransPac, standing there almost as if he were the assassin waiting to strike, while all the time posing as the bodyguard who was meant to take the bullet.

  2

  In the executive’s office Heidl was for once not behind the executive’s desk but pacing the room.

  Siegfried, I said.

  He glanced at me, shook his head, and kept walking back and forth. But this day of all days I had resolved that I would keep my cool and not be drawn into his games of evasion. Not be provoked, not be diverted, not be misled. Nor would I lose my temper, nor my interest, but keep to my schedule of tasks. One way or another I would by the end of the day have made coherent, if not accurate, all that I had written, and—above all other things—have the release signed. I sat down, arranged my manuscript and notes on the table. Heidl took no notice.

  Ziggy, I said. I realised it was the first time I had ever used the familiar form of his name, though whether it was out of contempt or a growing intimacy, or both, I have no idea. Fuck you, I thought. Fuck you.

  You see anyone out there? Heidl said. He was pointing out of the window at the city. Sitting in a car?

  He seemed different than I had ever seen him: agitated, flushed, almost deranged.

  Ziggy, we need to get through a lot today—

  As you drove in? Maybe half a block back? Maybe a whole block?

  He waved his hand towards Europe, towards Mecca, towards Houston and Langley and Laos, towards the South Pole and the North Pole and the past and the future and everything that spun in between.

  There, he said. Did you?

  I hated the shape of his mouth at that moment, his gap teeth, his whole aftershaved and lolly-striped shirt look. I wanted to ask him: are you a mid-level accounts manager presenting half-yearly results or a con man with some fucking criminal pride?

  Instead, though, I patted the pile of paper that was my manuscript in the splayed hand, flat-palmed manner I had observed of Gene Paley, hoping, perhaps, to project a certain executive élan and suggest a good job nearly done.

  We just have to get these last queries sorted, I said with a fixed smile of a type the word determined is sometimes used. And then the book’s done.

  Well, you wouldn’t see anything, Heidl said. Would you, Kif? What do you know? There it is—that’s the thing.

  But what was the thing? That was perhaps my fundamental problem. I had no idea what the thing was. Nor did Ray. Heidl, on the other hand, had too many ideas about the thing and not one of them was useable. All I could do was offer up the illusion to which I had devoted my life.

  The book, Ziggy.

  The book wasn’t the thing either though. The book, as I’d come to realise, wasn’t anything.

  Heidl went back to the windows that faced the street, and drawing his back tightly up against a rough-rendered concrete pillar that separated two of the windows, he twisted his head and scanned the street, as if a sniper might be out there. His gesture struck me as absurd and melodramatic, and it only infuriated me more.

  The book? Heidl said. You really think I want to talk about that?

  I said I did.

  The book? Heidl hissed, half-question, half-astonishment, as if it were a trick or a curse or some inescapable destiny, or a fatal trap combining all three. He shook his head. Today’s emotion, I guessed—it always felt a little like bad charades—was despair.

  I told him, yes, that was right, that it was the book, that it was his book, and because of his book we were there.

  How do you think this happened? Heidl said, turning to me and pointing at his collar. Tell me!

  With a sudden jerk he pulled his collar down to reveal two shocking bruises that ran around half his neck, disturbingly large blue-black welts.

  3

  Obscene and inexplicable, I avoided looking at the bruises any further by returning my gaze to the monitor and clicking a few keys.

  Look! he hissed.

  I said it was time to work.

  Heidl leaned in, adopting a posture and tone at once angry and conspiratorial.

  I’ll give you an idea, he said.

  I agreed an idea would help. I said it might even amount to a novelty.

  The banks! he stage-whispered.

  I asked if he had got hit by a bouncing cheque, as a test to see if he was listening.

  The banks, he yelled, the fucking banks, Kif, want me dead!

  He wasn’t listening. I felt this wasn’t a bad approach for me either. I walked over and passed him his copy of the typescript and schedule and explained our timetable for the day.

  Two men tried to garrotte me, Heidl said.

  I said I wouldn’t blame them, but we had other things to th
ink about.

  He thrust himself off the pillar and, coming in close to me, started yelling, brandishing the typescript and schedule as if they were damning documents for his case.

  Kif—someone tried to kill me last night! I was walking back to my hotel from a restaurant when two men grabbed me and pulled me into an alleyway. One began strangling me, then—

  I asked the obvious question: Why?

  Why? You ask me why? Maybe for the same reason they killed Frank Nugan.

  I was falling: Who? I asked.

  Frank Nugan. He knew too much. I know too much. I showed the world how stupid they looked. They don’t like looking stupid. Seven hundred mill! If I tell you all the things I know about them, about how they work, naming names, you know, if I tell you all those things then they’ll want to kill me. I’d want to kill myself, because it’d be easier.

  And still I continued to fall and still I couldn’t help myself, and Heidl had me as he always had me: falling and falling.

  Kill yourself, I said, or tell the truth?

  Both. That’s why they’re out there. They probably think I have written it all up, everything, and that’s why they want to kill me.

  You’re saying the banks paid these men to kill you?

  My God! Heidl cried. They tried to strangle me, Kif. I am no hero, but I knew it was the end if I didn’t do something. I managed to trip one over, slip out of the wire they had around my neck, and run like hell.

  The bruises were real, but who could say what had happened? If it was a wire, I wondered, why then were the bruises wide rather than narrow? Was it a mugging gone bad? Some rough trade turned too rough? But I didn’t bother saying any of this.

  Why would the banks want to kill you when they can get you locked up for years? I asked. They’ll win in the court, that’s all they care about.

  What if I tell the truth in the dock about them?

  For God’s sake, Ziggy—can we just work?

  I’ll tell the truth, he said.

  It’d be a first, I sneered. You’ve given me nothing, not truth, not even half-decent lies. I’ve written my book in spite of you, and now all I’m asking is one thing; just one. Just help me correct any obvious errors in the lies I’ve made up on your behalf.