First Person

by Richard Flanagan

  I was finished.

  8

  I stood up. I just wanted to leave. But first I resolved I had to see Gene Paley to tell him there was no book. Grim as that would be, I also knew it would be for me a relief and a release. I wanted to go home to Suzy, to Bo, to the twins, to a new beginning, as soon as possible.

  Making my way along that walk of shame that was the corridor leading to Gene Paley’s office I could think only one thing: it was over.

  Gene Paley’s secretary greeted me with a bright smile.

  Kif, she said, I was just about to call. Your flight’s been cancelled because of the bad weather.

  It seemed a cruel final blow, albeit of a piece with the slow ritual death the whole day had been.

  That’s the last tonight to Tassie, I said.

  I know, Kif! the secretary said as if it were a source of wonder. I tried, but the earliest flight I could get you on is tomorrow evening at seven-thirty. I’m sorry! She winced a smile. Do you want to see Mr. Paley? I am afraid he’s in conference at the moment, but if you come back in, say, an hour, he could—

  No, I said. It’s not important.

  I went back to the office. I gathered up my papers and disks and left. Outside was a deluge. I drove to a pub, bought a beer. And as time passed, I bought another beer.

  And another and another.

  The same bleak thoughts went back and forth in my brain. There was no agreement signed by Heidl so there was no book that could be published. There wasn’t even a book to publish if an agreement was signed as I didn’t have anything like the material I needed. I didn’t wish to admit defeat to Gene Paley, take my five-hundred-dollar quit fee and go home. But what choice was there?

  That night I found myself alone at Sully’s home watching the TV. Sully was away visiting old friends. In a bookshelf, on top of a yellowing volume of Michael Dransfield’s poetry, I found an opened bottle of cheap gin, but there was nothing to cut it with other than orange cordial. It tasted like hand cleanser mixed with sugar snakes. It tasted like my life, and it did the job. A late-night news item came on about a bad car accident in which a vehicle had plunged off the Great Ocean Road near Lorne earlier in the day. Its sole occupant, the reporter continued, was well-known Melbourne businessman Eric Knowles. He had been rushed to hospital but died shortly afterwards. I poured myself another glass of gin and orange. So that was that, I thought, or tried not to think. The same stubborn thoughts made their sluggish circles in my defeated, befuddled brain. The phone rang. I ignored it. I resolved to get further drunk, sleep in, and see Gene Paley on my way to the airport with the bad news and to collect my five hundred dollars. I’d plead for five thousand, on the basis of work done in good faith, and I knew Paley would simply press his flat palm on the contract and remind me of what I had signed.

  And then it would be done.

  The phone rang again, I poured another gin and topped it with gin, drank it and pondered my future life. There was nothing to ponder. I emptied the glass and was pouring another gin and gin when the phone rang yet again. I went to the hall table to answer it.

  It was Ziggy Heidl.

  9

  Ray gave me your number, he said.

  I took a long slug of the gin.

  Told me that storm shut down the airport.

  I refilled my glass.

  Can you come tomorrow?

  I felt no need to say anything, preferring to fill my mouth with gin.

  I’m at the homestead, Heidl said. I think working here would be so much better than that office. We’ll get some things done and your questions properly sorted.

  He went on, but only a little. It was all uncharacteristically direct. Almost helpful. He even gave detailed directions, in that way, I felt, that he always used the truth of detail as a cover for some larger lie. But I was beyond such games and just wanted to put myself out of my own misery.

  I told him I wasn’t coming.

  We argued.

  He: money, obligation, promises made.

  Me: indolence, impossibility, pointlessness.

  No, I said, finally.

  As a friend.

  No.

  I need your help as a friend to finish the book.

  What about the auditors’ conference? I thought you were speaking at it tomorrow.

  Oh—that! Forget it. I have. But this matters, Kif. It’s been very hard for me, you know—coming to terms with what my life was, what it is.

  So you’re not going?

  Going? Where? No. The thing is, Kif, I think you, of all people, you understand my situation. I know I’ve not been easy, but it’s not been easy for me. Please come here, and let’s finish the damn thing.

  I’m sorry, I said, and hung up.

  All about the book were confusions, dog-ears, missing pages. Nothing felt clean and straightforward any more. Out of habit, though it was forlorn and dead, I went back to the dining-room table that I had worked on of a night these past crowded weeks. I looked at my notes, returned to the pages of the latest manuscript, and, though a little under the weather, I began cutting here and adding clauses there, writing one or two new sentences and then runs of a few paragraphs. Some dreamlike mood took hold of me. The more I invented Heidl on the page, the more the page became Heidl and the more Heidl me—and me the page and the book me and me Heidl. For the first time in my life I sensed the terrifying unity I had always craved as a writer but had never known. Everything was growing ever more ambiguous—his life, the book, my sense of who I was and what I was doing. My first novel, I was aware, had suffered from being autobiographical, but now I feared my first autobiography was becoming a novel. Everything blurred and then dissolved, and when it finally came back together it was to discover myself in the Nissan Skyline, driving through the dawn to Bendigo.

  15

  1

  SOME EARLY MORNINGS are mesmerising with their light and their clouds and, above all, their odd sense of departure. On Port Phillip Bay a few tinnies trickled like black ink drops over a brilliance of broken glass. What a book should be. Looking at that light, those clouds—if only for a few moments—I felt free. I felt I could write a hundred books and still not have caught a fraction of the feeling that overwhelmed me in those few seconds.

  And for once, as I travelled through the long urban villages with their falafel shops and cafés and Vietnamese restaurants, their bakeries and groceries blossoming on the street with plastic buckets of floral bouquets, nothing mattered. I made my way past beaches and palm trees and entered a less colourful nether world of industrial parks, peopleless and quiet, that gave way to the silent farms and broken bush, the rising sun leading me off the highway, along a country road and finally, after some hours, up a long gravel drive past a neglected native bush garden poking out of an eroded paddock like springs and horsehair out of a broken sofa.

  I didn’t recognise myself in the man now getting out of the car to greet Heidl in front of a sprawling ’70s white concrete brick house, low slung as slander, with its mission-brown windows and burnt-orange tile roof, smiling, saying how I was looking forward to working with him at his home.

  I felt something running along my calf and glanced down to see a blue Siamese cat, back arched, pushing into my leg and purring. Heidl, who rarely seemed to touch other humans, put his hand on my back and held it there for some time. Smiling, he told me how much we were alike.

  And as it was good to agree, I agreed with him. Hadn’t we, after all, little by little, in our clashes, our fights, and our necessary communion of work, both begun to change? Weren’t we slowly coming to resemble each other, as the coloniser does the colonised? It was as if a door I had been pushing on forever had unexpectedly opened and I was falling through it into a void on the other side. Perhaps I was trading some part of myself as a human being for another part as a writer; some dignity or pride, or something even more fundamental. Whatever it was—whoever I now was becoming—that morning in Bendigo the trade felt as if it might just be successful.
r />   Now that we are mates, Heidl said.

  His German accent, however acquired, meant that rather than emphasise the beginning of words in the Australian manner, he always accentuated their end. Mates-ss, out of his mouth, was serpent-ribboned. Something went wrong with the word mate in the 1980s, as with so many things. Some criminal complicity, some implied threat, some shared guilt. I am not sure what, but it wasn’t good. Yet his sibilant “s”s no longer unnerved me. For the first time I felt an ease, almost a serenity about Siegfried Heidl.

  And this, in turn, calmed me.

  2

  I want you to help me, Kif, Ziggy Heidl said as he led me into a cathedral-ceilinged pine kitchen, all cheap knotted timbers slimed with polyester gloss as glistening as cling wrap. Wherever the seven hundred million had gone it hadn’t been lost to interior decoration. Maybe that was why that unremarkable house felt to me one more disguise. Heidl pushed a small ginger cat off a pine kitchen table, inviting me to sit down.

  As a friend, Heidl said.

  Sure.

  It’s a very large thing, he said. Not difficult. Just, well, it may seem…unusual.

  We talked a little while about nothing; me, a few pieces of meaningless personal trivia I felt safe in sharing about how Sully had gone away for a few days to the Blue Mountains to see old friends; he, about taking the kids to school and how Dolly was gone for the day seeing an aunt in Castlemaine. He was bubbly in the way of a bottle of spumante left undrunk, something not to be entirely trusted.

  I waited for him to take the conversation to where he always did: toxo, Tebbe, Laos, the company. But that’s not what happened. He was attentive that day and silent on many things. He poured coffee from a drip filter machine. Morning light fell through the back windows beneath which lay several more cats. He seemed, in a way I had never seen him to be, happy. Almost peaceful. And that’s when he fixed me with his dog eyes and asked me if I might do him a favour.

  As a friend, he said. As a mate.

  Of course, I said, passing on the coffee he offered me in a mug marked DOLLY.

  Kif, he said as he poured the coffee down the sink and put the mug in the dishwasher. I want you to kill me.

  When, after some time, it was clear I wouldn’t reply, he sat back down and spoke again.

  I haven’t much time left, Kif, he said. They’re coming for me. And they will get me, Kif. That’s the thing. I can’t escape them. You know what they can do. The other night I was lucky. I might be lucky again. Maybe I’ll be lucky two or three times. But I have to succeed every time. They only have to succeed once.

  I remained silent.

  So will you do it? he asked, as if he meant would I go to the corner shop to buy some milk.

  Do what? I replied, as if I just wanted to check the order.

  He reached inside his red baseball jacket and pulled out the pistol I had glimpsed the day before. With its stippled black plastic grip it looked almost a toy.

  A Glock, I said, as if it was of no concern, as though it were an everyday thing to work with people who drew revolvers over morning coffee.

  Roger that, Heidl said. I didn’t know you were a gun man. But I knew nothing of pistols and I was only guessing it was the same gun with which he had made Ray practise killing him.

  I guess you know all this then, he said, taking a clip of bullets out of the grip. He held the gun up to me in the theatrical way of a magician about to perform a trick, and slid the barrel back to show me the chamber was clear of bullets. Pointing the gun at the ceiling he pulled the trigger to show it was safe. These dramatic gestures seemed to please him.

  Now, he said. Let me show you how.

  With his dreadful dog eyes fixed on mine and mine with nowhere else to go, Heidl turned the gun away from me and onto himself.

  3

  He slowly slid the ugly square barrel into his mouth, angling it up towards the back of his head. Obscenely posed he sat before me, his face a vertiginous emptiness greater than that any desert or any ocean ever presented.

  After what was probably no more than a few seconds but felt so much longer—minutes, years, decades—he took the Glock out of his mouth in an easy movement, black metal barrel glossed with spittle spume.

  Don’t worry, Kif, Heidl said softly.

  As he wiped the gun with a tissue, he began laughing. At whom or what, at me or him or the world, I still to this day couldn’t say.

  No, I said.

  A simple refusal seemed inadequate, and felt almost acquiescence.

  No way, I said.

  But he could hear that my voice was unsure, that my voice was betraying me; I could feel myself giving in to what Ray had tried to warn me against, the danger of letting him in.

  No fucking way, I said as Heidl continued laughing.

  But that only sounded worse.

  Are we friends, Kif? he said. We are friends.

  I nodded in a way I hoped was evasive and non-committal, but felt, as my head tottered, passive, even accepting.

  We need to get to work, he said, his smile one of enormous good cheer, eyebrows arching, mouth ballooning wide as a fun park entrance, his newly found good humour intolerable.

  Kif?

  Yeah?

  Friends.

  Sure, I said, opening up the box folder that held the manuscript and the unsigned release form.

  Mates?

  Mates?

  Mates, Heidl repeated.

  Sure, I said. Sure, we’re mates, Ziggy.

  Why did I say that? I wondered. And yet having said it, each further agreement seemed to make me weaker and him stronger.

  Help me, then, Heidl said.

  If you want to kill yourself, I said, almost stammering, kill yourself.

  Please, Kif.

  Why involve me?

  Because I’m afraid I’ll botch it, Kif, Heidl said. Simple as that. I’m afraid at the last minute I’ll point it the wrong way and just wound myself terribly, end up with a mess, die slowly, or not at all. Maybe live as a vegetable. I’m a coward, Kif. I’m terrified. Here, he said.

  He held the Glock out to me, lying flat in the palm of his hand.

  It’s okay—look.

  He pushed the awful thing right under my face. He showed me the safety built into the trigger’s centre as a separate lever that had to be simultaneously pulled to fire the gun.

  Like this, he said.

  With his repellent puffy index finger, he pulled the trigger.

  Off, he said.

  Squeeze, he said.

  The trigger clicked.

  He repeated the action, showing me how to pull the trigger and safety together, slow, constant in the pull.

  Again, he said, off.

  Squeeze.

  Click.

  And when he proffered the gun the second time, a tissue over its incriminating stippled grip and trigger, I slid the release contract over to him.

  Sign the release, I said.

  4

  Thank you, he said, his voice now quiet. Thank you, Kif.

  If I hadn’t known him as I did I could have almost thought him genuine. And he looked at me with such gratitude that it was pathetic, as if I had already killed him.

  Let’s practise, he said.

  No, I said, but somehow it was as if he had managed to make me agree, and though I’d agreed with nothing I was now holding a gun in my right hand.

  Now, he said, taking my hand and threading my finger through the trigger. Like this.

  It was mad beyond words and even madder that he would want to be killed. Maddest of all was that Heidl thought I would be his murderer. And yet everything I said seemed to somehow more deeply implicate and involve me with his insanity.

  Not today, Ziggy, I said, opting for diversion, passing him the gun back. He seemed to take it well enough, placing the gun on the table between us.

  Oh no, he said softly, it has to be today. Dolly and the kids are away; I’ve given Ray the day off; you said your friend is away, and so no one knows yo
u’re here—right? So what could be better? And if you don’t do it who will?

  Ray, I said and immediately regretted saying such a monstrous thing.

  It can’t be Ray, Heidl said. He would be their number one suspect. The prime suspect. And then Ray would suffer, he would go to jail for murder. I don’t want that. You don’t want that either. But you? No one knows you’re here, no one will ever suspect you. The ghost writer of ghosts, he said, and laughed. The book will be a great success now, you know.

  The whole thing seemed to make him rather jolly.

  Well, of course you know, he said. You told me!

  He reached across to where a box of brightly coloured latex gloves sat, and passed to me a translucent blue pair. Here, he said brightly, let’s practise with these.

  I looked at the blue gloves.

  Please, Heidl said. It’s the next stage.

  The release, I said. Do you need a pen?

  Let’s just practise this first, he insisted as I pulled the blue gloves on, and he went on about how once I had shot him, in a detail that seemed to be lifted from a bad movie, I was to put the Glock in his hand and place the shell at a point Heidl would show me before his death. After, he explained, I was to immediately drive back to Melbourne, leave the car that evening at the publishers as I had arranged, and fly home to Tasmania. No one would ever know I had been with him.

  So you’re sure no one knows you’re here? he asked.

  I’ve already told you—

  The publishers? Gene Paley?

  I told no one at the publishers.