Get Poor Slow Read online

‘I would,’ Vagg said. ‘Because I can. Look out the window, mate. Look out the window.’

  ‘I know what water looks like, Vagg. I saw some on the way in. Then I saw you, in your natty tracksuit.’ The low yellow sun speared in through the glass and impaled my aching eyes. Keith Moon played drum fills in my skull. ‘You’ve come a long way, Vagg, but you’re still you.’

  Vagg said, ‘I’m trying to tell you the truth, you ungracious shit.’ His lizard tongue moistened his cracked grey-whiskered lip. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘I see now that twenty-five was a long way over the odds, for a pat on the back from a cunt like you. But what can I say, Saint?’ He leered, relishing what he was going to say next. ‘She had ways of bringing a man around. Am I right?’

  He sat back and let me enjoy that one for a while. I managed a smile, but only because I was thinking about the knife. It was a miracle I hadn’t whipped it out yet, but the evening was still young. Which one of us would die, if I pulled the shank and lunged at him right now? Vagg was an old man, but he radiated homicidal know-how. Then again, he was a celebrity these days, and celebrities have things to lose. He had riches to protect, and maps made out of hide: he was a brand. Whereas what I had was obscurity, pain, lack of money, lack of readers, lack of her. If the blade wound up in me instead of him, I wouldn’t wholly care. That made me dangerous, to at least one of us.

  ‘Did prison do this to your personality,’ I asked him, ‘or were you like this when you went in?’

  He sighed. ‘Shall we wrap this up, Saint?’

  ‘No. Let’s not do that. I’m just starting to enjoy myself. I’m starting to feel a connection here. Aren’t you? I mean, I thought I was a charmless fucker . . .’

  ‘Yeah,’ Vagg said. ‘Let’s drag this out a bit. A bit, but not a lot. Let’s get all your questions answered, so I never have to see you again.’

  He swirled his drink. Was that all he planned to do with it? My own glass was empty, although I had no special memory of making that happen. I got up and helped myself to a refill. I made it a big one so I wouldn’t have to get up again soon, or very soon. Vagg watched me do it. He said nothing, and I didn’t like the way he said it. Until ten minutes ago, the worst man I’d ever sat down with in the flesh had been Jeremy Skeats. Clearly I’d led a sheltered life. I needed to get out more. Either that or I needed to get out less. But I had come here to find things out, and I was finding things out. I could hardly expect to like them. That had never been on the cards in a place like this.

  ‘Whether it was fifteen or twenty-five,’ I said, when I was back in the second-best chair, ‘it was gone the next morning. I couldn’t help noticing that.’

  Vagg smiled his refurbished smile, and shook his head, and looked at me the way you look at a man who just doesn’t get it. ‘Gone? Wake up, Saint. It was never there. This shit about – what was it? She was expecting me to lob over with the cash that night? In what – a leather briefcase? Come on. You can’t honestly believe I’d give her money up front. She was persuasive, but she wasn’t that persuasive. The deal,’ he said, ‘was I’d pay her if and when you two did your bit.’

  ‘Again, it moves me that you think I’ll believe a man like you.’

  ‘But you do. Yeah, I can see that you do. Because you know what she was like, don’t you. You know how she operated.’

  ‘And what she was like, Vagg?’

  ‘She was a disgrace,’ Vagg said. ‘Everything she told you was a lie.’

  I’d thought I could get through this without pills. I was wrong. I reached into my pocket now. Vagg had the good sense to watch this move with full vigilance. I brought out a blister pack and cracked capsules from its fat foil welts.

  ‘It pains me to have to say that about a dead girl, Saint.’ He watched with vague contempt as I popped my pills. ‘It really does. But what choice have I got? Cash up front my arse. She was keeping you on your toes, mate. She must have had a sixth sense that you wouldn’t come through.’

  ‘Does it worry you, Vagg, that not even ten grand could induce me to say you were any good? Believe me, I don’t draw the line at much. But I drew it at that.’ Actually I hadn’t, but I wasn’t about to tell Vagg that. ‘What did you want me to call you again? The people’s Plutarch? The convict Carlyle? No. Words have to mean something.’

  Vagg clamped a fresh cigarette in his lips and spoke through it. ‘You poor bastard,’ he said. ‘You still don’t get it.’ He applied himself to the antique lighter again, letting me dangle for a while before he went on. ‘You keep talking like this was my idea. This was all her, my friend. All I told her was I was sick of getting bad reviews. That was it. That was the sum total of my input. It was her that come up with the notion of buying you off. Me, I wasn’t that sold on the idea at first. Let’s say I had to be talked around to it.’ He smiled in a way that made me never want to see anyone smile again, particularly him. ‘Wake up to yourself, champ. This wasn’t about me, you, my book, my reputation, yours. This was about her getting her hands on a very fuckin’ large sum of money. Larger than either you or me thought, apparently.’ Smoke wreathed his silvered skull. His nostrils pushed out tusks of smog. ‘My idea? How could it’ve been? Until she threw your name out, I’d never even heard of you, had I? Think about it for a minute. Until a couple of weeks ago, it’s not like you were a household name.’

  ‘In a household like this, probably not.’

  ‘Nobody I know had ever heard of you.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it.’ I had started to feel removed from the action now, a spectator of my own demise. The scene felt muffled and skewed, like a bad dream. The world had got things backwards. I was the artist and Vagg was the savage. So why was I the one over here, and why was he the one over there? Why was he the one with Metternich’s desk, and Noël Coward’s cigarette lighter, and some flunkey out in his infinite garden raking the leaves? Why was I the one in the week-old clothes, slouching towards arrest, sagging under the weight of the dead girl, while he shook her off like a dog shaking off water?

  ‘So it beats me,’ he was saying, ‘why you have this high opinion of yourself. Have you asked yourself why she happened to pick on you – you of all people? Maybe you should. Maybe it’s because she knew you could be bought. And she guessed right on that, didn’t she? Or she almost did, unless you want to claim you were never on the hook at all. But we both know that you were. Yeah. You still look haunted by it. Don’t be. There’s no shame in it, or not much. She hooked me too. She had her charms. But Christ. The way she treated people . . . You know what I thought to myself, when the devious little bitch turned up dead? I thought: no surprises there. Some bloke’s got jack of it and he’s knocked her off. Don’t get me wrong, I hope they catch the cunt that did it. But like I say, it wasn’t me.’ The grey eyes narrowed in the scaly reptile face. ‘Was it you?’

  ‘You’ve cracked it, Vagg. It was me. I came here strictly for the repartee. I wanted to soak up a bit of culture.’

  He contemplated my glass, which was empty again. Standing, he uncorked the Blue Label and tilted it at me in a valedictory sort of way. I put my glass out. Accepting his booze felt like a kind of surrender, as if it meant accepting everything else too – his gibes and his slurs, his desecration of my past. That was a lot to give up for the joke measure of Scotch he poured me. I’d have thrown it back in his face, but it would have evaporated on the way.

  ‘That’s your last one,’ he said. ‘I don’t want you getting too blind to leave, and I reckon it’s about time you did. I’ve told you everything I know. Whoever she was waiting for that night, it wasn’t me. I didn’t go there, and I sure as shit didn’t kill her. I had no reason to. Frankly, I’ve come out of this pretty sweet. She’s dead, but I’m pretty sure she’d stopped fucking me anyway. Plus I got to keep all my coin. All I copped was one bad review from a deadbeat critic that nobody reads.’

  He resank into the creaking mitt of his chair. He trained his
dishwater-grey eyes on me. ‘Why didn’t you come through for her, by the way? As long as we’re satisfying each other’s curiosity.’ From the drawer at his right hand he took a wrapped cigar. He unsheathed it languidly, as if I’d had my fun and now it was his turn. That was ominous, considering how much fun I hadn’t had so far. ‘You could’ve had yourself a nice little payday there. Not as much as I was actually paying. We’ve established that. But big enough, by your standards. So why’d you pull the pin? And don’t say you couldn’t bring yourself to tell a lie. We’re big boys, Saint. We don’t believe in fairy tales. What happened? She stop fucking you a day too early?’

  And still I wasn’t killing him. That said a lot for my character, I thought. If I had it in me to hack someone to death, I’d be doing it right now. Instead I stayed monk-still in my chair, butchering nobody. If only Ted Lewin had been there to see it.

  ‘Somebody was with her the night she died,’ I said. Here came my last play. ‘You’re telling me it wasn’t you.’

  ‘That’s what I’m telling you.’

  ‘You’re out of luck if it was. They’ve got his DNA.’

  A sadistic smile took root on his face. If he was acting, he was a leathery master of technique, a sun-dried Lee Van Cleef. ‘Oh dear, Saint. Oh dear. I think I get it now. I think I see why your back’s up. Some other big-dicked bastard was with her that night instead of you. Or as well as you, is that it? And maybe he killed her, too – assuming you didn’t. That is nasty, I’ll give you that. But I’ll tell you one last time. Whoever it was, it wasn’t me.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll throw them your name anyway.’

  ‘Do that, mate. Do it. They’ll swab me, they’ll clear me, and you’ll be back where you are now, except the truth’ll be out about our little deal. And your reputation’ll be rooted, and that’s about the only thing you’ve got left, isn’t it?’

  ‘The rest is bestial.’ I looked around his study. It was bestial, all right. There were bits of cured dead animal everywhere: on the desk, the chairs, the books, on that map on the wall, on him.

  Vagg sighed. ‘You’re a hard guy to like, Saint. You walk into my house, you accuse me of murder. You tell me my work is shit. You talk to me like I’m a fool. But brother, I feel for you. Maybe I’d have gone the way you’ve gone, if nobody gave a fuck about what I wrote.’

  I looked at the shelf that bowed under the weight of his oeuvre, all those books of his with their one-word titles. Somewhere in my dusty throbbing head a quotation stirred. When no other part of me works, the literary part still does. ‘I’d rather write for myself and have no public,’ I said, ‘than write for the public and have no self.’ It sounded good, but I didn’t believe it. From where I sat, having no self looked a lot better than having one.

  ‘I feel like I’ve disappointed you, Saint.’

  ‘That’s hardly the word.’

  ‘No,’ Vagg said, ‘let’s explore this.’ He sent a lungload of weed reek across the desk. ‘You’re acting like you wanted it to be me. I don’t get that. If I offed her because of that review, it would have been your fault as well as mine. You’d have been implicated up to your throat. And I’m telling you you’re off the hook.’ He pointed his cigar at me, trailing foul smoke. ‘So why do I feel like you wanted a different answer? Okay, you want the coppers to lay off you and focus on some other cunt. I can see that. I get that. That’s only natural. I’ve been there meself, back in the day. But I’m sensing there’s more to it than that. I’m sensing you’re unusually desperate. And I’m watching you go to town on my Blue Label. And I’m thinking, Jesus Christ, I thought I could drink.’

  ‘You can’t, but go on.’

  ‘And I’m thinking . . . you want to know what I’m thinking, since we’re being frank with each other?’

  ‘Go ahead. Say it out loud. Embarrass yourself.’

  ‘I’m thinking to myself, maybe this isn’t about the coppers at all. Maybe you need to prove to yourself you didn’t do it.’

  ‘Pulp fiction,’ I said. ‘A hack’s fantasy.’

  ‘Is it? The papers say you’ve got a few problems with your head. Are they right? Think hard, Saint. Think fuckin’ hard. Did you do it? How can you be sure you didn’t? I think you liked her a bit too much, pal. There’s your motive, in case you think you didn’t have one.’

  ‘In polite society, Vagg, we don’t kill women because we like them.’

  ‘Was it you, Saint? Only you know that – if you know it. But I’ll tell you something, mate. A little trick of the trade. If it wasn’t you – if it really wasn’t you – you’d better find the cunt who did it yourself. Because the coppers, they won’t be looking for him all that hard. Not now. Not any more. They’re way past looking for other blokes at this point. You’re the only guy they want it to be. So you’d better find yourself a few other trees to bark up, and you’d better bark up them fast, before your luck runs out. Maybe it was the guy who fucked her. Or maybe it wasn’t: maybe that bloke took off and then some other bloke turned up. With her, nothing would surprise me. I’ll tell you what, though. You’d better hope it was the guy that fucked her. Yeah, you’d better hope that. Because if it wasn’t – if they find him and type him and clear him – then you are gone, mate.’

  He came with me to the front door. Either he was showing me out or he was making sure I was really going. He didn’t have to worry about that. I was more than ready to be elsewhere. The walls of his hall were lined with framed photographs: Vagg posing with various other pillars of the culture. I saw Skeats in one snap – not featured, but doggedly self-inserted in the background, slightly out of focus, out there on the rim of Vagg’s aura.

  On the doorstep I managed a speech, of a kind. ‘You want to know why I didn’t come through? Why I didn’t throw the review? Because you’re no good. Even you must know that. You’re not even close. You don’t even know what good is. And that has to be said, before everyone else stops knowing it too.’

  It was true, except for the parts that weren’t. But Vagg didn’t have to know how hard I’d tried to call him a master craftsman. I could still cling to that secret. Anyway, that was a mere detail. I was talking about higher truths.

  ‘Fuck off, mate,’ Vagg said, ‘and never come back here again.’

  I’d gone there thinking I had nothing left to lose. I would never make the mistake of thinking that again. You always have things to lose, as long as you’re alive. She was still losing things and she was dead. Back on the bridge, in a stagnant river of tail-lights, I tried to think of one thing she’d told me that was unimpeachably a fact. Had any of it been real? I had a sick feeling I’d never know. One night was all I had of her, and Vagg had vandalised it beyond repair.

  Down on the road they used to call a freeway, until they started making you pay for it, the traffic was even worse. I had a long way to go before I could stop being alone with my thoughts. It need scarcely be said that I wanted a drink. I also wanted to put my fist through something, possibly the side window. Her past was a torture chamber. I had been a fool to open it up. Now that I had, there was nowhere to go but deeper in. I could hardly close the case now, feeling the way I felt. Her past was the only place I would ever find her. It was all she was ever going to be. This is an excellent reason not to die. All those things you thought you were going to put right one day will stay wrong forever. You’re not a work in progress any more. Suddenly you’re under glass, and that’s it: that’s all you ever were. The wind changed when she was making a face, and she would never get to make another one. She would never be around again to sweeten the record, to ease my mind with a fresh round of sex and lies. Say what you like about lies. At least they prove a girl’s alive, and making an effort.

  I was halfway home now, but my mind still hadn’t left Vagg’s. What had she been thinking, when she put her body under his? I knew about female sexuality, thanks. I knew that girls liked fucking too. And I knew that she liked it
more than most girls did, and probably most men. But Vagg? Nobody liked sex that much. And nobody could like money that much, either. Fifteen grand was a lot, but surely not enough. Or had she planned to take my ten as well? All these answers she would never give me . . .

  I had decided, back at Vagg’s, to call it a night before any more harm could come to me. I had resolved to drive home, ingest things, shower the Vagg off me, and recline into oblivion. But the further I got up the road, the more cowardly that plan seemed. It was just a recipe for more hell. Passing out on the couch no longer really cut it, as a response to the gathering storm. Unconsciousness had started to yield diminishing returns. I kept thinking about Vagg’s parting shot – his final lowlife pensée. He’d told me I was close to finished. He’d told me I’d better bark up another tree, and bark up it fast. Out on the motorway, as the last sweet wave of his liquor lapped in, I suddenly saw that this was very good advice. Drunkenness has its critics, but I love those moments when it delivers the third eye, to say nothing of the third ball. There in my dark rolling coffin, at the still point of the turning world, I saw things with a wicked new clarity, in ultra-sharp HD. I saw the fly’s-eye cells in people’s tail-lights. I saw the texture of the road: the black varicose veins in the concrete, the glossy white paint of the lines. And I knew that I was utterly finished, unless I did all the detective work myself.

  Suddenly I no longer wanted to call it a night. A night was the last thing I wanted to call it. I wanted to call it half a night: half a night so bad that it had to be redeemed, straight away. It didn’t really matter how. Whatever I did, it couldn’t make me feel worse than I already felt. Bark up another tree, then. But what tree? I knew the answer before I asked the question. Her empty house, back there in the city, back in the heart of darkness. Her body was lost to me but her house wasn’t, even if it turned out to be locked. Some locks can be busted down. The pilgrimage had to be made. And I was awake and at large and already halfway there, even if I was driving in the wrong direction.