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Page 16

‘Okay, they do. But this time they really mean it. Trust me on that. I’m giving you a bit of context here. I’m not telling you what to write. Obviously I’d never do that. I’m just giving you the background. I’m saying, in six weeks’ time, this is the book that everyone’s going to be talking about. And I’m saying: What do I look for in a chief reviewer? I look for someone I can rely on to be at the centre of that conversation. Think about this, Ray. You’re a smart guy. Think about the game you’re in, and play it.’

  I eyed the proofs. He eyed me eyeing them. We both knew he wasn’t going to give me Lodge’s chair. He didn’t want someone who would speak for the paper. He wanted someone who’d speak for him. He wanted me to stand on the throat of my song. I’d done that once before, for Jade, and it hadn’t worked out that well. It had stopped being rewarding pretty fast. If I did it for Skeats, it would be unrewarding all the way.

  But when I stood up, Fingle’s breeze-block galley was tucked under my arm. A job was still a job. Ten minutes of fun and the old order had reasserted itself. We were back in the real world, in which I needed Skeats more than he needed me. I hated myself for that. I hated the world for it. But when I am not getting paid to write, I am nothing. I’m just a man who spends half the day drinking and the rest of it sleeping. I knew what unemployment tasted like now. It tasted like death.

  ‘That other thing,’ said Skeats. ‘We’ve buried the hatchet on that? You won’t say anything to the cops?’

  ‘Not unless I have to.’

  ‘And you don’t,’ he said. ‘This other bloke, he’s a clown. They’ll find him soon enough. Until they do, you stay smart. You’ve got a future after this thing’s over, Ray. Part of that future’s with me – if that’s what you want. I do, if you do.’

  I didn’t like his tone, but then again I never do.

  8

  Be careful what you wish for. I was getting paid to write again, but before I could write I had to read: 1259 pages of this Fingle character. I never piss on a book without reading the whole thing first. I do have a few principles, and that’s one of them. At home I hit the couch and assembled a lie-down workstation: notebook, pen, the fullest bottle I could quickly find. I propped the proofs on my one good lung and got instant emphysema. I flipped to the first page of text. It was an Author’s Note. The note was ominously long. In it, Fingle explained that his novel, although set in the past, was a work of fiction and not of history. This meant that only a fool would read it in quest of historical ‘truth’. The quote marks around the word truth were Fingle’s. Having cleared that one up, he laid out his general vision of what novels were meant to do. They were meant to meditate on something he called symbolic truth. Suddenly the quote marks were gone. After that he went on, for a bit, about the power of mythology. I got his drift. It wasn’t complicated. Saying false things about the past was how you exposed its real nature. As long as your heart’s in the right place, you can be as free with the facts as you like. Fingle was a trailblazer, all right. Never before had I hated a writer so much so early. His book hadn’t technically even started, and I was sick of it already. At this rate my career as the new Lodge was going to last about two minutes.

  I turned the page. I saw half-a-dozen hefty swinging epigraphs: from Dostoyevsky, Céline, Genet, Camus. No doubt about it: Fingle knew how to read a dictionary of Euro-quotes. I turned to the next page. Chapter One. A few more epigraphs. And then, under a sky leaden with the zingers of better writers, the action started. In an unnamed harbour, a creaking wooden ship was dropping its anchor. We seemed to be somewhere in the eighteenth century. A longboat full of white marines in red coats peeled off from the ship and rowed for shore. They were drunk. This, you were apparently meant to think, was a pretty unforgivable thing for them to be. But wait: now one of them was standing up in the boat, in order to urinate into the bay. Again Fingle seemed to think this a self-evident outrage, as if the guy should have held out for the nearest mulch toilet. While that baddie defiled the ecosystem, the redcoat beside him was ominously shouldering a rifle. He pointed it towards the beach, cocked it, and shot a strolling Aborigine.

  End of page one. 1258 pages to go.

  I got the remote and switched on the TV. I was going to be on it in half an hour: me and Missy Wilde, back when we still had chemistry, back before our relationship went to hell. Watching it wouldn’t be much fun, but it would beat reading more of Fingle’s prose. Waiting for showtime, I skimmed the rest of his polystyrene opus with as much energy as I could muster. It had sweep – I was ready to give him that. The action stretched, like a flimsy old pair of pantyhose, over the fat white expanse of the last two hundred-odd years. The central characters were all descended from the genocidal honky on the longboat, or maybe from the guy who pissed in the water. To work out which, I’d have to read the whole horrible book. Apparently the bad guy’s son grew up to be a grazier who made his fortune by raping the virgin land. The son of that guy, or maybe his grandson, was a top-hatted goldminer who got his kicks from being racist to immigrant labourers. Later on you had a corrupt media mogul, a warmongering politician, a timber tsar with a thing for the unsustainable razing of old-growth forests. Fingle’s prose was as perfunctory as his ideas. He wasn’t just bad, or even unbelievably bad. He was suspiciously bad. I felt like the victim of some weird post-modern scam. Maybe Skeats had slipped me a dummy text written by a child, to check just how compliant I could be. If I could be induced to praise this slab of styrofoam, I would never have to be worried about again. Yes, I had a paranoid sense that someone was testing me. But surely such things didn’t really happen, even to me. I put the proof aside, resolving to revisit the question some other day, in that ideal future when my head won’t be too smudged by pain or other things. For now I was left with the feeling that someone, somewhere, was taking the piss.

  Then it started, the Missy and me show. I lay there watching myself say things I’d forgotten I’d ever even thought. Some of them weren’t bad. Tightened, rejigged, the broadcast had a coherence that my memories lacked. Missy looked better on my TV than she’d looked on my bed. I found myself wondering why on earth I’d wanted her off it. What had I been thinking? I watched her body on the screen and forgot the personality that went with it. I tried to look up her image’s skirt, as if I’d see something up there that I hadn’t seen before. Maybe this time there would be no teeth marks, no complications.

  At the bottom of the screen there was a scrolling ticker for live social media feedback. The world was reviewing me, in real time. To start with, it was a rolling slurry of bad news. But as Missy peeled her way towards the inner me, the odd chunk of pro-Saint sentiment started bobbing up in the stew. Some spirited cyber-thinker ventured the word ‘injustice’ – with a question mark, but it was better than nothing. When my image told Missy’s about the mystery DNA, the tide really turned. Somebody floated the word ‘innocent’. Someone else said something about a cover-up. By the show’s end something unprecedented was going on. I had fans.

  About an hour after the credits rolled I got an email from Jill Tweedy – senior editor at Bennett and Bennett, mentor and publisher of Missy Wilde. She wanted to meet. How would tomorrow be, at her office?

  I looked at the excruciating bulk of Fingle’s book.

  I wrote back and told Tweedy I was free.

  In the offices of Bennett and Bennett, the walls have no corners. They have curves instead of angles, and they’re covered with salmon-pink carpet. The lobby is like the waiting room of an upmarket brain doctor. There’s a big white horseshoe desk personned by multiple receptionists. The firm’s name is bolted to the wall in heavy but sleek chrome letters. I’d never been on this side of the ramparts before. It looked a lot better than my side. The chairs for waiting in are padded and plush. I sat in one and thought about money. Never before had I been so close to having none of it. The TV cheque hadn’t turned up yet. Christ knew when it was going to. When it did, it would take two or three days to clea
r. Ruin was so close now that days were starting to matter. The Fingle money was of course irrelevant: it was eight weeks away even if I could bring myself to review the book, and a cheque of that size would make no difference anyway. The haemorrhage would blast it straight into history. Conceivably, Tweedy was my last shot. If I didn’t walk out of this place with a cheque, or better still some cash, the shuddering little stunt plane of my finances might finally hit the ground instead of looping back into the sky. Of course Ted Lewin could always fix things at any time by locking me in jail. That would put me back on my feet straight away. But for the moment I was stuck with being an unarrested writer. Sitting in the Bennett lobby, I thought I might finally be in some kind of luck. The place stank of lucre.

  It stopped doing that, once you got past reception. It started looking like my place instead. Stepping into Tweedy’s office was like going backstage at a sausage factory. I saw things in there that no civilian was meant to see: the offal and filler of the book trade, the waste products of the industry in its terminal phase. Life-sized cardboard photographs of Bennett’s star writers were heaped randomly around her walls. I saw Liam Vagg in his best threads, flanked by his pit bull. I saw a game-show host whose trademark was to hold up his thumb while smiling. I saw a celebrity chef lifting a silver lid off a white plate. Between the lid and the plate there was an oblong hole in the cardboard, where a book would be displayed when the effigy hit the stores. I doubted it would be the Critique of Pure Reason.

  Jill Tweedy had the air of a canteen lady who took no shit. I sat on the other side of her desk and watched her eat a leafy lunch out of a square plastic tub. She was my age and looked it. I was my age and looked like me, so I could hardly point the finger – the finger that was bent and scarred at the best of times, and now full of bone-deep shards from a dead girl’s mirror. Tweedy glanced at the fading pink bruise on my forehead but didn’t ask about it. Not caring about things like that was part of her hard-bitten style. We were on the same page, Tweedy and I: we were old enough to know that time blows by you like a typhoon. Our days of squandering it on fake pleasantries were behind us. You weren’t meant to like her, and I liked her for it.

  Even so, it had to be recalled that I was on enemy turf. The desk between us was chaotically duned with Bennett product: bound and unbound proofs, mocked-up dustjackets, paperbacks garnished with the flaccid praise of Barrett Lodge. Christ knew how many of Tweedy’s books I’d taken down over the years. It had to be a lot, although I couldn’t remember their names. She would, though. I knew that much about the trade. I saw a bloated hardback on my side of the desk, half-hidden by all the other slabs of wasted forest. I angled my head to read the spine. The Tainted Land, it inevitably said. I’d thought I was here to get away from it. Apparently that was not going to be feasible.

  I picked it up.

  ‘Careful, now.’ Tweedy stopped chewing. She went all tense and headmistressy. ‘That one’s embargoed. Hot off the presses.’

  It was less heavy than the proof copy, but not by much. There was nothing on the jacket’s front except the title and the author’s name, in stark white text against an ochre background. The font was austere: it spoke, grimly, of Fingle’s deep seriousness as a writer and man. You could take the font’s word for this. You didn’t even have to read the book. You could just buy it, stick it on the shelf, and wait for the prize committees to endorse your good taste. I checked out the back-flap photo. Fingle looked like James Dean, only dumber. No wonder he was no good. He hadn’t suffered. Never trust a non-ugly writer.

  I opened the text to a random page. Tweedy stiffened some more.

  ‘You know the rules,’ she said. ‘No peeking.’ She tried to sound mock-stern instead of real-stern, but it didn’t work. Some people like their humour dry. Tweedy seemed to like hers non-existent. Conceivably she had tried laughing once, in her youth, the way another person might try mescaline. And it hadn’t been her thing. Creases of underuse ringed her slot of a mouth, like cracks around a scorched billabong. Again this was okay by me. I was pretty much out of gags myself.

  I let the book drop shut. Apparently she had no idea I was reviewing it. That interested me.

  ‘You’ve heard about him, of course,’ she asked me, or told me.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Guess who plucked him from obscurity? I found it in the slush pile, believe it or not. Over the transom, totally cold. Which never happens. The dream novel. The one that reminds you why we got into the business in the first place.’

  So it was her fault. I considered telling her that obscurity existed in order to keep people like Fingle buried, forever. That was the whole point of it. Instead I said, ‘What’s he like?’

  ‘As a person? Ooh. Interesting. Reclusive. Moody. A bit of a mystery. Tough life. In and out of institutions as a kid.’

  Not educational ones, to judge from his prose. I put the book back on the desk and said, ‘My commiserations about Jade.’

  Little as I liked throwing around her name, I liked throwing around Fingle’s even less. Also I thought she had to be mentioned early, for form’s sake. I shouldn’t have bothered. Tweedy had gone all rigid again, as if I’d raised the name of her least favourite dead person.

  ‘She’ll be missed,’ she stingily said. She left it to me to sketch in the rest of the sentence: She’ll be missed, but not by me. Apparently Jade, in life, had done something that rubbed Tweedy up the wrong way. Whatever it was, getting murdered had not been nearly enough to make up for it.

  ‘I got the feeling,’ I said, ‘that she was a workaholic.’ Since Tweedy didn’t want to talk about her, I suddenly did.

  ‘She certainly got results,’ Tweedy grimly conceded.

  ‘She went the extra mile.’

  ‘She did.’

  ‘She ever talk about her boyfriends?’

  ‘Not to my knowledge.’

  That was a strange way of putting it. I wasn’t here to add Tweedy to my list of suspects, but this was a chart-busting performance.

  ‘Ex-boyfriends?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Some young guy?’ I said.

  ‘I knew nothing about her personal life. She played all that stuff pretty close to her chest.’

  She sealed her lunchbox with a resonant little click, as if dropping the lid on the whole topic. ‘We should talk about you,’ she said.

  I sat back. ‘So Missy told you about my novel?’

  Tweedy gave me a blank look. ‘You’re writing a novel?’

  ‘I’ve written one already. I assumed that’s why I was here.’

  Apparently I’d assumed wrong. Well, that solved one little mystery. I’d been wondering why Missy had done me that favour, or any favour. Here was my answer. She hadn’t. I should have seen that coming. I had thought my head was at its best this morning, more or less. I hadn’t even brought a flask. But maybe my best was worse than I’d thought.

  ‘First novels are a tough sell, Ray,’ said Tweedy with a pro’s savvy. Yes, I should have seen that she’d called me here with implausible urgency, if my novel was what she’d wanted to talk about. For my novel, any amount of urgency was implausible.

  ‘So tell people it’s my second.’

  ‘What’s it about?’ Tweedy said briskly. ‘Sell it to me in one sentence.’ She meant that the sentence might as well be a short one, since it would be a waste of breath at any length. She wanted to move on. The topic inconvenienced her. You don’t mention an unsolicited book in a publishing house. I had broken the laws of good taste and commerce in one gauche stroke, like a man offering a dead pig to a kosher butcher.

  ‘I don’t think I can do that.’

  ‘Well if you can’t do it, Ray, what makes you think I could do better?’ She was back in her element now, setting me straight with her blokey little maxims about the bottom line.

  ‘Maybe you could read it,’ I proposed – since I was
here, and since I never would be again. No doubt I was wasting my time, but what was another five minutes on top of the life I’d wasted writing the thing in the first place? ‘Let’s think outside the box. Read it, and see if you think it’s any good. And if you think it is, let your sales people worry about selling it. Isn’t that their job?’

  Tweedy, in an effort to hurry things along, had started shaking her head long before my little speech was done. ‘Come on, Ray. You know the score. Fiction’s dead in this country. It’s just the way things are.’

  ‘Fingle’s book,’ I pointed out, ‘is a first novel.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Well. Not everybody can write like that.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Tainted is a once-in-a-decade kind of book.’

  ‘And what’s it about, in just one sentence?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what it’s about in one word. It’s about Australia. It is Australia.’

  If that was true I was swimming out on the next tide. I left a moment’s silence to mark the passing of my novel, the official death of my one big shot. But really it had died a long time ago, the way we all do, a day at a time. No wonder I was a failure. I’d got hung up on this idea that books had to be good, when all they had to be was fat and full of big ideas. Yes, writing was like long-haul trucking. If you could load a book with heavy issues and get it from page one to page 1259, that made you an important writer. End of argument. Give the guy a prize. Quality? What had I been thinking? I’d spent my life worshipping a dead god. Maybe it was time I lowered my sights, devoted my remaining years to humbler ideals. Paying the rent. Eating. Maybe it was time I took the hint and knelt down in front of money.

  I hefted Fingle’s barbell of a book again. This time I opened it and kept it open.

  ‘No peeking,’ Tweedy said again.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said, ‘I’ve got the proofs at home. I’m reviewing it.’ Perhaps it was the wrong move, but there was a look on her face I was dying to wipe off. I got that result, instantly.