Get Poor Slow Read online

  ‘I’m telling my followers,’ Missy said from the couch, ‘that you knocked it out of the park.’ She blew out smoke, chuckling at something she saw on the phone. I dropped the curtain. The scene had thumped down to earth now: it had shaken off the creamy haze of the present tense. My buzz was definitively gone. I had lost the last shimmers of it at the window, looking out at that patch of vanless dirt.

  ‘The DNA thing,’ Missy went on, her face slack and inane over the phone’s glow, ‘is going to be a game changer.’ How long had we been alone, just the two of us? She was acting as if we knew each other pretty well. Was it possible I’d asked her to stay? That didn’t sound like me. I turned my back on her and filled a coffee mug with bourbon. I didn’t mind her knowing what was in there, but I minded her knowing how much. Not that she seemed to be in any danger, just yet, of looking up from her phone. T. S. Eliot knew her type: distracted from distraction by distraction. I took the mug back over to the armchair and sat, still waking up in the afternoon’s dregs.

  ‘That stuff you said about your novel?’ She let her big green eyes drift up at me for just a second. I felt their cursory transit graze me like a breeze. ‘People are going to lap that up.’ But already her head had dipped back to the phone. ‘You can be quite charming when you want to be.’

  Her tone said I could expect to have her full attention soon, but not all that soon. This wasn’t bad manners. It was the new manners. Everyone did it, so there was no one left to care. I sat there and drank and watched her be bad news. Whatever was happening here, my body wasn’t up for it. It was hardly even up for existing. When I breathed, which I had to once in a while, my ragged right lung got dragged over a field of oyster shells. Like a sick old dog I had an instinct to go somewhere private and die. But first I had one more bad scene that had to be lived through, one more pit stop on my road to damnation. Probably, while she frowned and chuckled at her phone, I was meant to be taking a long unmonitored look at her body. I had no great urge to. It had its merits, but it wasn’t Jade’s. That meant it was wasted on me: the lean glossy torso, the superb teeth, the heaped hair, the fist-sized breasts half-bared by the tight starched top. She was the wrong kind of vamp, and I wanted her out, I wanted her gone, and this was not the urge she was used to arousing. I felt we were both in for a rough half-hour.

  For some reason she was smiling now: at the phone, not at me. ‘Some woman’s asking if you look as good in the flesh as you do on TV.’

  ‘Let me know,’ I said, ‘when you’re talking to me.’ Something was coming back to me. I had slagged Missy off in print once, with extreme prejudice. And plainly she didn’t remember, if she’d ever known in the first place. Even my victims didn’t remember me. Maybe I had wasted my life.

  Missy smiled again but still didn’t look up. ‘Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it,’ she said. Meaning tweeting, networking, the whole glorious war on nuance. ‘Seriously,’ she went on, ‘you’re mad not to be part of this. Get a profile. Leverage your situation while you can.’

  ‘Leverage it for what?’ Those teeth of mine were still loose where I’d bitten the killer’s skull. Speaking still didn’t feel right.

  ‘For connections. For followers.’ She shifted around on her tucked-up stockinged feet to get more comfortable. She’d squirmed halfway out of her skirt now, and it had only been halfway on to start with. At its rim, her toes wiggled in a way that would have struck a healthy man as very good news. But I was not a healthy man. The evidence for that was mounting. The extent to which she wasn’t Jade was starting to make me feel ill. I do not speak existentially. Looking at her was starting to turn my stomach.

  ‘I don’t want followers,’ I told her. ‘I want readers. Or I did.’

  ‘Well, start a blog then.’ Still looking at the phone. ‘Why do you take the march of progress so personally?’

  ‘Because it’s happening on my throat.’

  And all over my ribcage, from the feel of it. The pain was ludicrous. It made me want to cry or bark with laughter, but I was capable of neither. I was getting flashbacks to the primal scene: Jade on the same couch, at exactly this time of day. Unfortunately they kept ending. I kept coming back to the present: Missy’s body there instead, all sharp angles and painted nails, my disease hanging between us like a miasma. Was I ever going to get better? I could think about that when she was gone. But a lot still had to happen between now and then.

  ‘There,’ she said, putting the phone aside with a joke flourish. ‘Now you can be charming.’

  ‘You know something?’ I said. ‘Until I was a murder suspect, people who found me charming and good-looking and interesting were pretty thin on the fucking ground.’

  ‘But fame’s a turn-on,’ Missy said. ‘Surely you know that?’

  She aimed her big green eyes at me and waited. You could see she wasn’t used to waiting long. By now the average heterosexual would have been over there on his knees, drooling on the floorboards, reciting a sonnet while removing her garters with his teeth. But I was still in my armchair, riding out another one of those flashbacks. I was starting to regret all those candid looks I’d taken up her skirt. I’d meant nothing by them. But I had sent her the wrong message. Things were expected of me. I half-pitied her for expecting them, but maybe it was time I pitied myself instead. Girls like Missy Wilde don’t flop themselves down on your couch all that often. When one does and you want her gone so you can think about a dead girl instead, you have a problem.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘Jade Howe did.’

  ‘She what?’

  ‘Found you charming, apparently.’ She tilted her head a bit. With a restless finger she caught a loose hanging corkscrew of her hair and started twisting it, as if to remind me she wasn’t bald.

  ‘Let’s talk about something else.’

  ‘I see. That topic’s closed, is it?’

  ‘Yes it is. Well spotted.’

  She waited. I saw the assurance in her wide eyes falter for a moment, like a candle flame bent by a breeze. For the duration of that moment she looked lost. Maybe it was dawning on her that she’d picked the wrong dissolute semi-celebrity to slum with. She’d never had to work this hard. Again I almost felt sorry for her. But she was a big girl. She could look after herself, probably better than I could. She flexed her stockinged feet again, tucked up under her like the paws of a black cat. I watched them wiggle. Through several layers and types of ruination I felt the rumour but not the reality of a hard-on, like a shadow in Plato’s cave, or the glow of a crushed ember in a burnt-down house.

  ‘I must say it’s brave of you to stick around,’ I told her, ‘considering what I’m meant to have done.’

  ‘People know where I am.’ She flashed me a scurrilous smile. ‘Anyway, you won me over with that speech. Like I said, you can be quite charming when you want to be.’ She waited a bit. ‘Why don’t you want to be more often?’

  An astute question. I thought she almost sounded like Jade then, but maybe the booze was kicking back in.

  ‘Why don’t you come and sit here?’ she said.

  Another valid question. There was no good answer to it. Bad answers were all I had. I said, ‘Let me drink this first.’

  The flame in her eyes flickered and bent again while she took that in. But the rest of her didn’t flag. Her bawdy toes kept wiggling. Her straightened index finger kept playing with her hair. ‘I’d love to read this novel of yours,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Let’s not do that.’

  She tensed. This time her playful toes froze. ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’m doing you a favour. You wouldn’t like it.’

  ‘You think I’m not up to it?’

  ‘Christ. It’s not that. Nobody likes it. Not everything has to do with you.’

  We sat there for a while.

  Finally she said, ‘What’s happening here exactly? Do you want me to leave?’


  ‘Why? So you can go home and blog about how hopeless I am at foreplay?’

  She smiled. ‘So you’ve read my stuff?’

  ‘Enough to get the gist of it, yeah.’

  She liked that more than she was meant to. ‘It’s okay, Ray. You’re not exactly my target reader. And I’m not exactly yours, let’s face it.’ She picked up a parched black hardback from the stack of classics beside her: Catullus, Caesar, the guys I was still getting around to. Her milky painted nails were nebulae against the cover’s night sky. ‘Are any of these fuckers still alive?’

  ‘Not by a long shot.’

  ‘This is the dead white male section?’ Her toes had thawed, and gone back to wiggling.

  ‘Why not? I’m two-and-a-half out of three myself.’

  ‘Half a male?’

  ‘Half-dead.’

  ‘You sure about the other part? I’m starting to wonder.’

  ‘Oh, I get it. Most days you don’t have to ask twice.’

  ‘Most days I don’t have to ask once.’

  ‘Does anyone in your generation know how to sit still for five minutes?’

  ‘It depends what’s going to happen next.’

  ‘I haven’t killed you yet. Give me that much credit.’

  ‘If you want me to stay, you’d better say something nice, fast.’

  ‘Who said I want you to stay?’

  ‘Do you? Most men do.’

  ‘Calm down. Can’t we just sit here for a while?’

  ‘What’s your problem? Are you scared?’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of women. Of me.’

  ‘No, but I can take people or leave people. That includes even you. Also you’ve caught me at a bad time. In general, and not just in general. Look.’ I lifted my shirt. I let her see the damage – the glorious sunset over my sternum. I let the shirt drop. ‘That’s my problem, or one of them. Somebody beat me half to death the other day. And I felt bad before that happened.’

  ‘So do you want me to go home,’ she said, ‘so you can get on with dying?’ Mischief had come back into the big green eyes. Something about the novelty of my pitch had appealed to her.

  ‘No. I’m just saying there will be no hard feelings if you do. I’d walk out on me too, if I could. Admit it. I’m a disappointment. I’m a disgrace to fame. You’ve changed your mind. You want to leave. So leave. I honestly won’t mind.’

  ‘Oh but you would. You should. You’d be mad not to. May I make an observation?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘You seem to be a bit obsessed with death. With being half-dead. Maybe you should think of it as being half-alive. Or actually: just alive. Still here. Not dead at all. Capable of doing things that dead people can’t do.’

  ‘That’s not bad. Maybe I should read your stuff.’

  ‘Is that what your novel’s about? Being half-dead?’

  ‘Let’s not talk about that. If we’re choosing life here, let’s not talk about that.’

  ‘So . . . Can I read it?’

  ‘Jesus. You don’t give up.’

  ‘Well, if we’re just going to be sitting here . . .’

  ‘You want to read it now?’

  ‘Why not? Where is it?’

  It was in the bedroom, but she’d guessed that. Where else could it be? In the fridge? Under the sink? She was smiling again. A woman like her does not stay thwarted for long. I picked up my drink and went for the bedroom door. When I was halfway there I heard her get up and come after me. I was surprised she left it that long. These days my life obeys the rules of pulp fiction. When I walk into bedrooms, women wearing suspenders follow me. But my body remains stuck in a bleaker genre. It is a slave to the laws of realism. It’s jammed in them neck-deep. It’s so real it doesn’t work any more. All it can do is feel pain. It can do dialogue, but she wasn’t after much more of that. I drifted into the room ahead of her, already wishing I had a fuller mug.

  My novel was deep-sixed under the bed somewhere, like a corpse thrown face-down into a river. I checked under my side first. You still have a side, even when you sleep alone. I put my drink on the bedside chest and knelt down into a thunderbolt of agony. I felt around in the dust and found the stiff. When I resurfaced Missy was standing over at my big bookcase with her back turned, scanning its contents or pretending to. Again I got a potent flashback of Jade, standing in exactly that spot, shorter, naked, her dark head tilted in contemplation, those grape-hued marks on her thigh. That was all I needed: her plump little naked ghost in here with us. The scene did not require further fucking up.

  I picked up my drink again and dumped the fat typescript on the bed. Missy flopped down beside it and got cosy. She propped her back against a heap of pillows. Hair of that quality did not belong on my weathered bedding. She put the typescript on her thighs. She brought her knees up. Gravity sucked her skirt towards her waist. It didn’t have far to go. The manuscript pinned it in place, sort of. Missy didn’t seem fussed either way. I got a flash of her satin panties. They were white and plump. They had sheen. She rearranged herself. I saw a black scorpion tattooed high on her left thigh, pointing its pincers the rest of the way up. She made a big show of keeping her eyes on the typescript so I could gorge myself on the view. I tried, but my appetite was stuck in reverse. The better her body looked, the less it belonged on my bed. I had those genre issues still. One of us was in the wrong book. She came from a world where women had thighs that the light bounced off and black suspenders running up them and mother-of-pearl panties and a scorpion up there to wave you the rest of the way in, on the off chance that you were still weighing your options. And I was Jake Barnes home from the war, and my dick was the dick of a dead man.

  She riffled my typescript for long enough to confirm it had words in it. Her interest in it petered out at that point. That still put her ahead of the rest of the world. ‘You should try shopping this around again,’ she said, tapping a luminous nail on the work’s top page. ‘The night this interview goes to air, you’re going to be the most famous writer in the country.’

  ‘For one night.’

  ‘Exactly. It won’t last forever. You’ll want to milk it while you can. Why don’t I hook you up with Jill Tweedy at Bennett and Bennett? Jill does my stuff. You know,’ she provocatively said. ‘The stuff about how useless men are at foreplay.’

  ‘Bennett. That’s where Jade worked.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t want to talk about her.’

  She put the typescript aside. That made her skirt drop and pool around her waist. She let it stay there. Idly she let her legs fall open, then pushed them shut again, then let them fall back open. I watched them sway. I looked at the place where the brown flesh went chubby and pale before hitting the bunched-up rim of her panties. There was the faintest sprinkling of glossy hairs there, pale in the late light, like fur on a fruit. She kept the rhythm going. The satin of her panties went taut and then slack, taut and then slack. When it was taut, the cleft behind it looked like two segments of a peeled mandarin, or a mouth suppressed by a white gag. It gapped and closed, gapped and closed, pinching silk. I approved of this as a spectacle and wanted her to keep doing it but I had no ideas beyond that. I had always known the pills were a problem and I had always thought I would deal with the problem when it arrived. Well, it seemed to have arrived. A spot of moisture had appeared on the satin between her legs, like the first drop of rain on a swollen white sail. She watched me watching it. Her face was flushed. The heat in her eyes looked a bit like anger. Soon it looked exactly like anger.

  ‘Well?’ she said. ‘You plan on standing there forever?’

  Without looking at her face I said, ‘I’m waiting for you to send me some sort of sign.’

  She clapped her legs shut. This was her version of playing hard to get. ‘Seriously,’ she said. ‘Are you a faggot, or what?’

  I ste
pped over the event horizon and joined her in the scene. I had to now. The moment could be deferred no longer. And maybe I would turn into someone else when I touched her. It was worth a try. I sat on the mattress, dumping the mug on the bedside chest as a show of good faith. I put a hand on each of her knees. Her skin felt hotter than it looked. I pushed the knees apart again. She let me do it, but she hadn’t stopped looking ornery. Maybe I shouldn’t have drained the mug before dumping it. Maybe that had been a mistake. Or maybe she was so generally pissed off that she was going to say the next thing anyway, no matter how fast I came to heel. Anyway, she said it.

  ‘I take it you know about Jade and Jeremy Skeats?’

  My hands froze on her hot skin. The world narrowed to one humming moment, and I knew I would remember that phrase, and the sound of her saying it, for as long as I lived.

  ‘What about them?’ I said.

  ‘You didn’t know?’ She was enjoying this. ‘They had a thing.’

  ‘What kind of thing?’ The room wasn’t a room any more. I was out on some wind-whipped heath, naked to the howling sky.

  ‘What kind of thing do you think? The kind of thing where they were fucking each other.’ She lay there smiling beyond her open legs, watching me die. ‘And here I was thinking you knew everything.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Everyone does. It’s common knowledge.’

  ‘So it’s a rumour? You don’t know for sure?’

  ‘Jesus, you were in love with her. You still are.’

  ‘Make up your mind. Am I a fag, or am I in love with a dead girl?’ Why do people keep saying it? Do I carry the evidence on my sleeve, on my face?