Get Poor Slow Read online

  That part could soon be seen to. I veered into the fast lane. Behind me an idiot truck blared its horn. That made me speed up, at exactly the moment I should have been slowing down. To my right, beyond the rushing Armco, the median was a deep unlit void. A dark breach in the barrier was coming at me fast, hysterically fast. A sane man would have waited for the next one. No: a sane man wouldn’t have been looking for one at all. I, on the other hand, hit the brakes, and slid dementedly into the abyss. The truck bellowed behind me. There was a long blind freefalling moment when I didn’t know what, if anything, I was about to hit. I had time to reflect that this would be a pretty stupid way to die. How many people have that as their last thought? And then I was deep in the carwash of the median, scything through native shrubs, juddering on a minefield of fist-sized rocks, hearing things snap off my sled, and generally finding out that I had been wrong to think the evening could get no worse.

  5

  Her neighbourhood was all ghostly concrete and cheap new brick. The same townhouse, endlessly cloned, ran endlessly up both sides of the street. I’d found my way there with an eerie lack of friction, on autopilot, taking no wrong turns. I knew each piece of landscape before I got to it: the wan lanky streetlights that strode up the slope of the road, the bone-pale kerbing that snaked along in their underglow. If I’d been tempted to doubt the DNA, it was vindicated now. I had come here in the dark before. That first night my dick had done the driving. This time my memory was at the wheel – an even shadier operator. Still, it had got me to the right place, even if it couldn’t make me remember things. Maybe there was hope for it yet.

  I knew her house from the foul shiver that washed over my body when I drew level with it. Her little car was still sitting there in its port, waiting for her like a faithful dog. I drove past, a long way past, and left my car on the street. I came back on foot, not eagerly. My body was clear on the point: it didn’t want to be anywhere near that house. The closer I got, the sicker I felt. Meanwhile the cold air was rendering me sober, which didn’t help. I hated what I was about to do. I scanned the sepia street for some solid excuse to bail out and go home. A marked police car would have done nicely. A sedan that looked like an unmarked one would have worked too. But I kept seeing nothing. There was no cop standing guard at the mouth of her driveway, or in her carport, or up at her front door. I was in luck, if you wanted to call it that.

  The house was an infiltrator’s nightmare. The moonlight bathing it was ominously lucid – good enough to see by, and good enough to get seen by too. Her carport and her front door were outrageously legible from the street. The windows of her neighbours, at the back and on the right-hand side, peered in lewdly over her fence. Lights were on in both places. Along the remaining flank of her house ran a narrow lane for pedestrians. The lane was my best bet, although it was partly lit by a deplorably unvandalised streetlight. I went up the lane and moved beyond the pool of the lamp’s glow. There was still nobody around. I gripped the top of her fence, vaulted it, and came down in a fiendishly sonorous gravel garden. The noise I made hitting it got me out of it fast, and sent me deep under the skirt of moon shadow that ran along the house’s near side.

  I sat there for a while with my back against the bricks, waiting for midnight to get closer. There could be no harm in doing that. I looked at her forsaken yard, full of drooping unmowed grass. In life she’d been so wickedly on top of things: her job, her schemes, me. Since dying she’d really let herself go. Her garden had gone rogue. Why hadn’t somebody close to her done something about it? Maybe there was nobody close to her. Maybe I was it.

  When I could no longer take not moving, I got up and did a furtive lap of the house. The high grass whispered against my shins. I tried all the windows, half-hoping one of them would just slide open when I pushed it. None did. That exhausted my window-cracking expertise. There were two doors, a front one and a back one, both deadlocked, both gift-wrapped in big sagging crosses of police tape.

  I sat against the side wall again, trying not to let my momentum flag. I had to ride the logic of the night. I’d ridden it this far, to the outside of her wall. All I needed to do now was get on the other side. It was good to have a problem so base, so material. I was sick of the enigmas of metaphysics. If a woman doesn’t want you inside her life, there’s nothing you can do about it. The same goes for her body. Her house is a different matter, especially when she’s dead. If you want to get in there badly enough, you will. And I wanted to a lot. Only a few bits of wood and glass were keeping me out. At the worst I could just find a rock and put it through a window.

  But there was no call to bring on Kristallnacht just yet. I hadn’t fully applied myself to the doors. I started with the back one, because the front one was more exposed. The back one felt pretty exposed too, once I was out there standing at it. When I pulled at its truss of police tape, it drifted limply away from the frame. Somebody had slit it neatly down the right-hand side. I would have paused to wonder who, if I wasn’t standing in flagrante at a moonlit crime scene. Since I was, I dropped the tape, stopped thinking about it, turned the knob, and bumped the door hard with my shoulder. I got a promising result. There was give in the lock. The tongue rode through a useful slice of air before hitting the hasp. The jamb shook against my shoulder in an interesting way. I dug a thumbnail into its timber and pried off a damp clump of splinters. The wood was rotten. I’d never kicked down a door in my life, but this wasn’t a bad one to start with.

  A car was passing on the road. When the sound of its engine peaked I stepped back and gave the door a wild clout with the sole of my right boot. It hurt me more than it hurt the door. The slap of it echoed in the metallic night. The darkness raised an eyebrow. My knee hummed like a tuning fork. I threw in a second kick fast, before the neighbours could start wondering about the first one. This time I regretted the impact less. I heard wood yield with an inner crunch, like a bad tooth meeting a chop bone.

  More cars passed. Each time one did, I put in more leather. I was too deep into the bacchanal to stop now. Fuck the neighbours. These were the same feckless fools who’d stayed inside and heard nothing while somebody stabbed her thirty times. Would the sound of splintering timber rouse them from their couches now? And what if it did? All I was doing was kicking down a door. What was so incriminating about that? Who else but an innocent man would be desperate enough to be out here now, in the middle of the night, doing this?

  When the frame was one good shot shy of going down, I stepped back and went at it shoulder-first. Wood blew like the spray of a wave and launched me into the dark interior. Something metallic boomed like a gong. The door, flying in ahead, had spanked a hollow sink or washtub. I silenced the steel with my palm, then pushed the door back against its blasted frame. The house tasted of trapped stale air. I was standing in a small tiled laundry. I vaguely recalled having stood in it before. My memory is good for that much: for confirming, too late, things I’ve already worked out the hard way. I found a light switch by feel and snapped it. Nothing happened. I went to the threshold of the next room and found another switch and got the same result. Her electricity had been shut off. Maybe this was standard practice in the houses of the dead. Anyway, it settled the question of whether I’d be doing things in the dark.

  The next room was the kitchen. It too made my memory twitch a bit. I stood in there and waited for a while, getting used to the dark. It wasn’t total. The window was uncurtained, and enough light washed in to give you the essentials: the white of the ceiling, the frames of the doors. One of them opened onto a hallway. I stepped into it. Doors came off it to the left and right. I was already looking, however, at the shut and weakly glowing white door at the hall’s far end. That door I knew. It was the door of the room she’d died in. I’d have to go through it eventually. Why put it off? It wasn’t as if she was still in there. It just smelled as if she was. The odour came down the hall and sort of wreathed me as I approached. It had a familiarity I didn’t wan
t to explore. It was sharp and eggy and had something to do with heat. Before touching the door’s handle I paused. I wore no gloves. I had no torch. This was madness. I went in.

  The room was weirdly lit up. That streetlight out in the lane stood indecently close to the window, leering straight in. A venetian blind carved its sickly light into fillets and threw them diagonally across the carpet. I had a feeling I’d seen these rungs of light before, back when there was still a bed there for them to fall across. The bed was gone now, along with her fouled mattress. But nobody had scrubbed her blood off the walls. That big frank central smear was still there, with its dry flaky tentacles of run-off. It was the baked-on blood that stank. It beat the smell of a dead body, but not by much. The blood looked monochrome in the muffled light: black on grey. That was graphic enough for me. I had no urge to re-see it in colour. But even in black and white it helped me get a few things clear. Somebody had done this to her, in this room, during a hellish animal fragment of a night like this. Whoever he was, he’d hated her with an energy I just don’t have. I’m too old for it, for one thing. And anyway I’ve never hated anyone that much – not even Skeats, not even Vagg, let alone her. It was good to get some moral clarity on this point. I’d heard enough drivel about the thin or non-existent line between me and the man who did this. I’d heard enough pseudo-philosophy about the blur or overlap between love and hate. No. The man who put these smears on the wall had something wrong with him that went well beyond the things that were wrong with me. The line between us wasn’t thin. It wasn’t even a line. It was a canyon. It was a phylum. There were species between us. I had many a circle of hell to plunge through if I ever wanted to meet him.

  I got to work. I drifted around the room, lusting for data. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to find, but I knew I would have to find it now. I was never coming back. That much I knew. If the sodden wick of my memory was ever going to get relumed, this was its final chance. And maybe I got a little spark from it now, as I moved through the wedges of carved-up streetlight. I thought I remembered her naked and alive, stretched out on the bed that was no longer there, with this same ladder of light flung over her like a zebra skin. She was saying something. I closed my eyes and tried to hear it. It’s like trying to get an old song back. Soon I was just standing there wasting time.

  I went back to whatever I thought I was doing. There was a rib-high dresser against one wall. My hungry silhouette arrived in the big wooden mirror above it: this shadowy fool in the house of a dead girl, tossing the place for fresh sources of pain. I opened her top drawer and sank my palm into a tangle of cold underwear. I pulled out a pair and held them to my face. I wanted a living scent, but all I got was the smell of detergent. I tried another pair, but again the cloth was cold and gave me nothing. I pocketed both pairs anyway. I hated myself for doing it, but I’d hate myself more later if I didn’t. I dipped into the drawer again, deeper this time, and my fingers hit something cool and smooth and tapered and plastic on the sea floor. I pulled it out. It had decorum, as dildos went. Its girth was modest, its surface unveined. I liked the fact that she’d needed one. I applauded the implication that she’d spent the odd night alone. In the dark mirror I watched myself sniff the thing and then taste it. These acts did not fill me with pride. Then I watched myself pocket it. There was no way I wasn’t doing that. But my sense of moral clarity was slipping, and my pockets were filling up with fool’s gold. It was time I quit the muff drawer and found something that might do me some good. I’d come here to reverse my decline, not steepen it. So I took one last undergarment for the road, and I pressed it to my thirsty face.

  It turned out to be a good move. My lips felt something trapped or hidden in the weave: something small and square and solid, like a tooth. I pinched the cloth till I had the object cornered. It was lodged in the soft cocoon of the crotch, where the fabric was doubled up. Running a nail around the seam, I found a tiny breach in the stitching. I slipped a pinkie through and touched what was inside. It was a flash drive.

  How had Lewin missed it? He must have tossed the drawer too piously, with too much queasy respect for the underwear of the dead. I pictured him gloved and sombre, bent on getting the grim rite behind him. He had lacked the genius to linger over the sifting, to probe each pair with the proper lust, to gorge himself on the evidence.

  I slipped the garment into my coat pocket, leaving the drive in the haven of the crotch. It was almost certainly time to split now. I hadn’t really known what I was there for, but I had ample reason to think I’d found it. A crotch-stashed flash drive: I could hardly hope for better than that. Considering where she’d hidden it, I expected big things from its contents. Yes, I had pushed my luck far enough for one night. For once I could go home a winner. For once I would have a laurel to rest on. I was still thinking that when I heard a key turn in her front door.

  My balls tightened like fists. The door opened and then was quietly closed. Then, on the carpeted floor just inside it, there was a terrible lone creak. Then nothing. Nothing at all. I waited. I’d forgotten how to breathe. My heart kicked at my ribs like a drunk in a paddy wagon. It wanted out. So did I, but I was a long way from both doors, and someone was in the way of at least one of them, and anyway I couldn’t move. My soles had sent down roots through the carpet. Whatever happened next, it wasn’t going to get done by me. I was out of ideas, and my body was out of juice. All I could do was look down the empty hall and hope nobody appeared at the other end of it.

  For a long time nobody did. Then things happened fast. A shape bled darkly into view. It was short and solid and seemed to be wearing a hat. The hat was on a strange tilt. It seemed to be pointing my way. Then the shape raged into life and hurtled up the hall at me. The carpet boomed. The shape hit me low and scooped me off the floor and drove me hard into the back wall, where her blood was. Something behind me split with a rich crunch. It sounded like Gyprock but felt like my spine. I heaved out air with a sound I had never heard myself make. My feet scrabbled but got no floor. The guy’s arms were locked hard around my elbows and chest. He was small but viciously strong. His hat had come off. He wasn’t Vagg. For one thing he was too short. If Vagg was Dick, this was Perry. I heard gurgling. It was coming from me. Perry went back a few steps then slammed me into the wall again. He was utterly insane. There was an anarchic voltage in his body that made this vividly clear. I felt a kind of fear I had never felt before and do not recommend: the fear or knowledge that I was about to die. This guy wasn’t going to stop. There was madness in his limbs. And he had killed her too. There couldn’t be two guys around like this. He had smeared the walls with her. And now he was going to smear them with me, and there wasn’t much I could do about it. He had way too much violence in him. On top of the fear I felt shame, this strange primal shame, as if I was letting him do it somehow, as if I was failing to try my best. Was this why my ancestors had done all that evolving? Was this why I’d read all those books? So I would die in the dark in this airless room, just because I was the lesser animal? I pumped my feet but only one of them grazed the carpet. I had no leverage. I couldn’t breathe. His hair was in my mouth. I couldn’t see his face. The room was too dark. He had killed her, and I would die without knowing who he was. To take a piece of him with me I opened my jaw around the bitter peach of his scalp and bit into it as hard as I could. I tasted hair and sweat and a hot backwash of salty blood. He reefed his head away, and a rank wad of flesh and hair tore off in my mouth. I spat the flap out and kept spitting. Perry was reeling backwards, squeezing me hard, bearing me grotesquely up off the floor, making room for one more charge at the wall. But he ran out of carpet and hit the dresser behind him. Something huge and heavy came down on our heads, mainly on his. It felt like the ceiling but it was made of glass. It was her mirror. Chunks of it were in my hair. He threw his head back to shake off shards. That put a foot of clear air between our faces. I cocked my skull and lashed it through the gap. There was a flash of white light and a phenom
enal crack of bone on bone. It hurt me unbelievably, but it hurt him more. It must have, because it made him let me go. Through the starburst I saw him sag silently to his knees. On his way down he flung out a sick paw and seemed to rip away a fistful of my coat. I stood over him for a dazed second before my humming skull worked out what he’d done. He’d snagged the hanging panties from my front pocket. The crotch drive, her trove. He had my richest pearl in his fist without knowing it.

  I could have gone then. I was closer to the front door than he was, and I was on my feet and he wasn’t. But I was damned if I was leaving without that flash drive. Also I had a deep animal need to hurt the cocksucker while he was down. When a man tries to kill you, you acquire a distinct urge to kill him back. He’d flipped a switch in me. He’d attacked the wrong man on the wrong day. Never fuck with a writer. We’re dangerous, now that the world has no more use for us. We spend half our lives on our knees, begging for next month’s job or last month’s pay. The hatred builds. It’s not every day you get to kick some kneeling philistine back.

  I threw my right boot at him with lust, and it hit what I hoped was his face. I heard him moistly grunt and slump. Maybe I was as crazy as him. I danced back and threw the boot in again, aiming for his ribs. This time it got jammed in him like a chisel in wood. He’d caught it in his hands. And then somehow, with stunning abruptness, I was off my feet and thumping down hard on the glass-strewn carpet beside him, and he was coming at me sideways through the shards. I clawed back at him. He still had hold of the panties but he didn’t know they mattered. I seized and yanked them. His grip tightened reflexively but a beat too late. The cloth stretched, went taut, then twanged free in my grasp. I rolled away from him and balled the prize up tight and crammed it deep into my hip pocket. That gave him time to stand and blast my ribs with a ruinous boot or knee. The pain was pure and astounding. It saturated the nerves like bliss. I rolled away from him and gagged for air. He kicked me again. That one caught me on the hip. I breathed in blood. I’d had enough now. I was ready for a truce. I was ready to go home. I rolled away again, or tried to, but the floor turned into a wall. I looked up at it. It was the wall with her all over it, all those Rorschach blots of her flung blood. Looking at them made me remember what was stashed in my sock.