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  When he stepped back to aim his next shot I rolled sideways and pulled the knife and when his boot came surging back at me I drove the blade tip-first into the flying arc of his flying shin. I felt the steel skid off bone and lodge in meat. He made a bovine noise and staggered backwards. I lurched after him on my knees to keep hold of the handle, glass crunching under me, blood lubing my knuckles like crude oil, the sodden fabric around his shin wrenching the knife sideways. Then he kicked berserkly forward, like a spooked stallion, right into the angle of the blade, and I felt the steel slice clean through a steak’s worth of calf-meat before the force of his swing torqued the knife out of his flesh and out of my slippery fist and sent it flipping away with a clatter against some distant part of the wall.

  I scrambled after it on my hands and knees, frisking the floor in a wide blind arc, blundering into the thick of the broken glass. The carpet was alive with savage teeth. Chunks got stuck in my hands and bit me to the bone when I put weight on them. My skull smacked into her dresser. For some reason Perry wasn’t raining leather on me from behind. I looked around. He wasn’t there. Then I heard him in the kitchen. I heard a drawer open. I heard bits of metal slide and clatter. Stabbing him had been a bad idea all round. It hadn’t worked, and now he wanted some cutlery of his own, and somehow he’d known where to find it. And he was being pretty choosy in there, from the sound of it. He was taking his time. He seemed to have some particular blade in mind.

  I decided not to hang around and find out what. I could live with the ambiguity. I went to the window and plunged my bleeding hands through the venetian. I held the latch and yanked at the glass. It didn’t move. It was locked. I felt around for the bolt. The blind swished and clattered like a wind-lashed palm tree. Maybe he was still in the kitchen or maybe he was on his way back with the silverware. I was too busy fist-fucking the jangling blind to hear. I found the bolt. She’d left the key in its lock and I loved her for it. My spine felt exposed and tender, like a snail stripped of its shell. I didn’t look around. If he was behind me now, it wouldn’t do me much good to know it. I flipped the key and yanked the bolt and wrenched the window all the way open. Cold air washed over me but the big steel cobweb of the venetian still hung between me and the night. There wasn’t time to roll it up or rip it down. I just hurled myself over the thigh-high sill and tore out into the sky through a mangled blend of bent slats and busted flyscreen. I hit her sorry lawn and rolled and staggered and ran.

  I didn’t look back till I was over the side fence. When I did, he was back there in the frame of the open window, just standing, just watching, not coming, a dark still shape against the darker room, a nightmare out of Thomas Hobbes: solitary, nasty, brutish and short.

  For about two seconds I looked back at him and thought I’d scored some kind of victory. Then I looked at myself and got the point. The pale wash of the streetlight was all over me. I was lit up like a man on a stage. If he hadn’t guessed who I was already, he knew now. This was why he had stayed back there in the dark. Unlike me, he could afford to wait. He knows where I live. Everybody does. He can come for me whenever he likes.

  All that got clearer to me in the car, as I put miles of churning blacktop between me and him, as my flopping heart slid back down my throat like a clubbed seal. He didn’t let me go. I let him go. I had one shot at him and I blew it. This is getting to be my life: perceiving things clearly but too late, never seeing my shot until the shot is gone. By a freak of chance I had found the man I was looking for. And what good did it do me? All I can say is he’s on the short side. He wears a hat at night. He knows his way around her place in the dark. He knows where she keeps her knives. For the next few weeks he will walk with a limp. And he has a key to her front door. I have decided not to believe that she knew him, and liked him, and gave him the key because she wanted a guy like that in her life. If she did, it’s more than she ever gave me.

  Back at home I assembled the ingredients for the next bit: laptop, memory stick, bottle. The adrenaline had ebbed out of me in the car. The agony in my ribs had hardened like concrete. Something was seriously wrong inside me. Raising the bottle to my lips hurt. So did swallowing. When I coughed, a mist of blood appeared on the laptop’s glowing screen. I didn’t wipe it off. Its presence seemed fitting. Moving like an even older man than I was, I uncapped the memory stick’s metal tongue. It would be a small miracle if the contents were not nasty. Just touching the thing made my heart panic and kick in its stall, like a bullock getting its first glimpse of the slaughterer’s blade. I slid the tongue into the laptop’s jack. An icon appeared on the screen. When I clicked it, a dialogue box opened. It asked me to enter a password.

  Why hadn’t I seen that coming? Of course she had sequestered the truth behind one last veil. The cursor blinked, counting off time I didn’t have. I breathed out and drank in. I tried passwords. I tried her name. Full name, first name only, last name only. I tried Vagg’s name. I tried the name of his book. I tried her employer’s name. I tried the name of her street. I tried the make and model of her car. I was running out of stuff I knew about her. I was running out of words. Soon the world would have no words left in it that I hadn’t tried. Bottoming out, riding despair to its absurd terminus, I tried my own name – as if I’d been more than a stranger to her, as if I’d made a password-sized dent in her world.

  It didn’t work.

  I took the bottle to bed then, and waited for its nectar to slosh in and drown the fires that burned all over my body. One or two of my ribs were broken. They had to be. I was no authority on broken ribs, but I knew what unbroken ribs felt like and they didn’t feel like this. Biting the guy’s skull had loosened some of my upper teeth. There was a vicious lump on my forehead. Not all of it was made of swollen flesh. Part of it turned out to be a plectrum-sized chunk of glass, buried in there like a tuber. When I pulled it out, I felt hot fresh blood wash down over my face. I lay there and let it flow.

  Well, I had made it back alive. You could say that much for my big night out. Apart from that I didn’t have much to show. A dildo and three pairs of panties weren’t going to stop my slide into hell. And without a password the thumb drive was as useful to me as the dildo was to her. And that was my whole score. I hadn’t even looked for money in there, which I certainly should have. I was going broke fast now. If Lewin didn’t lock me up soon, I would finally get to find out what it was like to have no money at all. And if anyone owed me a contribution, it was surely her. I was getting poor much slower, before she came along.

  A dildo, some panties, and one more locked chamber of her past that I wished I’d never found. These fragments were all the reward I’d scored for kicking down her door.

  No, there was one more thing. I’d met the enemy, and he wasn’t me.

  6

  Something is in the middle of happening. Maybe it’s my largest mistake yet. There is a TV crew in the house. I don’t really remember how they got here. There is a ludicrously attractive blonde girl on my couch, asking me things. I am saying things back. There is a pool of white light around us. Either I’m triumphantly remaking my public image in its glow or I’m drowning in it. When the show goes to air we’ll know which. There are black cables taped to my floorboards. There’s a big guy on the girl’s far side, hunkered behind a camera, training the dark funnel of its lens on me. The girl is blonde but tanned: her skin is darker than her hair, as in a negative. Her skirt is so short that looking at it is the same thing as looking up it. I know her name, in theory. Everybody does. It’s on the tip of my tongue. I’m nodding at something she has just said, trying to look like a man who remembers roughly how he came to be in his chair.

  Things are coming back to me. I’m piecing them together. I’m getting a lot of money for this thing. Why else would I be doing it? They threw me a bonus to do it in my house. Not taking drugs before they came was not an option. Getting kicked half to death in Jade’s house has left me ancient, hunched, semi-mobile. But I
seem to have taken way too many. I appear to be dangerously high. I must have mistimed the dose somehow. The TV people must have turned up late. Yes, they made me wait. I remember hating them for it. Conceivably, more than conceivably, I killed the time by drinking too. I should be more worried about all this than I am. I’m worried that I’m not, but I’m not worried much. This must be what dying finally feels like – just gently letting go of past and future, just casting yourself on the soft tide . . .

  The girl’s name is Missy Wilde. That’s coming back to me too. She’s said to be sharp, but the people who say it are people like Skeats. She is a feminist of the new school. That means she shows you a lot of flesh but you’re not allowed to look at it. I’m looking at it anyway, since I’m the nation’s biggest scumbag whether I do or not. Why be the nation’s biggest fool too? I wish I had the integrity to look away. In principle she is not my type. In principle I abhor everything she says and writes and does. She doesn’t just do TV. She is a queen of new media. She blogs. She tweets. She goes on panels and talks about the politics of body image – while looking like that. She writes columns about how bad her boyfriends are at making her come.

  And now she’s on my couch, asking me how this giant contusion got on my forehead. She’s saying the viewers will want to know. Her lipstick is sort of mauve. I tell her a pissed-off member of the public jumped me a few nights back. This strikes me as inspired, and has the further merit of being half-true. She’s wearing stockings with black suspenders. No doubt there is irony involved. And now she’s asking if Jade Howe ever came to my house, back when Jade Howe was still alive. The suspenders yank up the rims of her stockings in tight arcs, like the cables of a bridge. Have I used that metaphor already, somewhere? My imagination has stalled. I’m pausing, trying hard to remember what lies, if any, I have told Lewin about Jade coming to the house – and whether I’ve told different or bigger lies to the people at my gate. My mind feels like a wiped windscreen, when you wait for the crescent of wet grime to vanish so you can see. There is a small currant of a mole in the fluting of Missy’s tanned throat. The gears inside my skull are turning but not catching. The cogs have gone all smooth. My memory isn’t working well enough for lies. All I’m fit for is the bald truth. So I tell her yes, Jade came to the house. Apparently I’ll be going down in a fireball of candour.

  I’m wondering how it came to this. I don’t have to wonder very hard. It came to this because of Skeats. When he fired me, I had to start thinking about money. And I hate thinking about money, which must be why I don’t have any. Hemingway said you go broke in two ways: gradually, then suddenly. For a long time Skeats made me go broke the first way. That was okay, because I could get away with pretending it wasn’t happening. And then he sacked me, and the thought of money slipped off its leash and got right up in my face.

  And here is the upshot: me neck-deep in this pool of fake white light, with Missy Wilde asking me straight up, in my own home, if I killed Jade Howe. This is what the world wants. It won’t pay me to write. But to hear me utter the word ‘no’ for the eightieth time, it will pay me more than I ever got for a year of reviews. To look at it another way, the payoff that Vagg never delivered has finally come my way, from an even more contemptible source. For an hour of this tripe I’ll get more than Vagg would have paid me for my soul. Plus an extra five thou for letting them in the house. What did they expect to see in here? The gore-caked murder weapon in the washing up? A signed confession on the coffee table?

  There’s a floating scar on my vision shaped like the light rig. I have this odd feeling I’m in a bubble, looking out. My drunkenness has depth. It has body. I can hear Missy out there at its rim, but there’s a distance between us, like a satellite lag. Now she’s asking if I’m an alcoholic. She asks the tough questions, all right. She declines to be thought of as lightweight. She wants to know if I have blackouts. I take a furtive glance at my right hand, just to make sure there’s no drink in it. There isn’t. In a way this strikes me as a shame, but on the plus side it lets me deny her charge with a bit of heat, a bit of eloquence. And why shouldn’t I? I’m an innocent man, after all. We know this now. What have I got to fear? There is something about Missy that makes me want to trust my tongue.

  She’s done her homework, give her credit for that. No clipboard, no notes. She’s doing rigour, as if I don’t get enough of that from Ted Lewin. Now she wants to know if my relations with Jade were carnal. I confirm that they were. She asks if I was in love with her. I reply with my standard lie, although by now I almost forget what the lie is for. Still that feeling of floating in a bubble. In a sense we both are. We’re adrift in the twilight zone between taping and airing, so what we say is not really going beyond this room, not yet, and won’t for a while, and might get cut out anyway, and therefore hardly feels like it’s being said at all. Maybe that feeling is dangerous. Or maybe it’s useful, since caution has done me fuck-all good in the past. One of us seems to have raised the topic of DNA – my DNA. I can’t rule out the possibility that I raised it myself. Either way, I now hear myself making free reference to the other sample – the mystery load, the blast of the second shooter. This is bold. I allege that the guy who left that load was the guy who killed her. This is even bolder. Lewin will hate me for it, when the show goes to air. But I’ve never got much mileage out of him not hating me. From Missy, on the other hand, I get a welcome recalibration of vibe. Suddenly she’s looking at me as if I might not, after all, be a murderer. This is progress.

  I’m feeling rumours of agony, now, from the big red beetroot that’s planted under my ribs. There is a distant glow in my backbone, like a cane fire on a horizon. The chemicals are retreating from me like a tide. I want these people to pack up and leave so I can top myself up. But we’re still rolling. Missy has ditched the homicide theme and is working the human interest angle. She wants to talk, in a friendly sort of way, about my well-documented failure to be a normal respectable non-suspect nine-to-five guy. Is it true that I have no job now? Also, what made me think that being a book critic was a job to start with? Why do I live alone? Why do I have no wife, no children, no real estate? Do I get lonely? Why have I opted out of the mainstream dream? What, in general, is wrong with me?

  Some things only women ask, because men know they might get hit in the face if they try. Not that these aren’t damn good questions. I think about them myself at night, when I can’t sleep. Thinking about them is why I can’t sleep. But the answers are a bit knotty for prime time. I draw breath to tell her that. And then I think what the hell, and I give her a blast of what she’s asking for. It isn’t just because she’s paying, although there is that. It isn’t just because I’m intoxicated, although there is that too. It’s more this: I’m in the dock, and somebody is inviting me to say my piece. So why not say it, since every other fool and knave has said his? Clearly, the world will never want my autobiography. I will never get my shot at a De Profundis, unless this sleazy televised transaction is it. Yes: I have the floor, and for once people will be listening. This is my shot at the big speech.

  So I give it, or a version of it. I tell her I gambled all I had on the life of the mind. If the accountants and middle managers and investment brokers of the world want to call that a wasted life, I am not obliged to agree with them. I tell her I have set my life upon a cast, and I will stand the hazard of the die. I tell her I wanted to purify the dialect of the tribe, but the tribe didn’t turn out to be interested. I tell her I live alone because I like everyone else even less than I like myself. Let people who can stand other people live with them. By now I am on a roll that impresses even me. I sound like Richard Burton as Hamlet. O vengeance! I am spraying revelation like an unmanned hose. I tell her about my rejected novel, my filthiest secret. I tell her how long it took me to write it. I tell her that literature double-crossed me, by promising me a future and then ceasing to exist. Now I sound like Othello. My occupation is gone. I am a hunger artist, a rag-and-bone man. I don’t
ask for pity, but I’ll be damned if I’ll be an object of contempt.

  Lewin won’t be the only one in for a shock, when this thing goes to air. I’ll be in for one too. I’m forgetting what I say even as I say it. The tide of painkillers has gone out and the tide of agony is coming in. And pain cripples the mind worse than drugs do. I seem to have finished my speech, because Missy is giving a counter-speech of her own, about the power of new media. She is roused. I seem to have pissed her off. She’s defending the internet as if she invented it. It strikes me that we may no longer even be rolling. She seems to be sitting on the couch side-saddle, with her feet tucked up under her skirt, and her shoes kicked off on the floor. Are the lights still on us? Am I even still in my chair? Maybe I knew then, but I don’t know now. My tenses are starting to blur. At a certain point I found or find myself standing at the sink. I seem to have decided fuck it, I have to get out of that chair. This must mean we’re done, or having a break. At the sink, I find myself in a quandary. If I pour myself a drink I’ll have to pour one for everyone else, and that will make them stay longer than I want them to. Then again, if I don’t pour myself one I won’t get to drink it. It’s a tricky call. To help myself make it I have a drink. When I turn around, there is nobody in the room except Missy. Everyone else is gone. Their stuff is gone too, the cameras, the lights, the cables. The room is back to normal, except Missy is still in it, curled on the couch with her shoes off, smoking a cigarette, hunched over her phone, thumbing in text. I step or wade over to the front window. The small things seem to be happening in slow motion, the big things in weird leaps. I pull back the curtain and look out at the drive. What I want to see out there is the camera guys, loading gear into the big white van they came in. What I see instead is an empty drive. The camera guys are gone. So is the van.