Get Poor Slow Read online

  Lewin said, ‘I’ve got blokes who think we’ve got enough to charge you now. Today.’

  ‘The same blokes who keep leaking things to the press?’

  ‘Things like what?’

  ‘This morning I got told you found my prints in her bedroom.’

  Lewin did a thing with his tongue that caused his cheek to bulge with displeasure. This is as upset as he ever gets.

  ‘Who told you that?’ he asked me.

  ‘One of the people at my gate.’

  His cheek whitened like a flexed knuckle.

  ‘It’s true?’ I asked him.

  ‘Would it surprise you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I was in there. Once. When she was alive.’

  Here was one of those times when I found it crucial to look him in the eye. His ravaged iris looked back at me, or seemed to. It didn’t look happy, but it never does. His other eye, his good eye, gave nothing away.

  ‘You never said this before,’ he said.

  ‘I’m saying it now.’

  ‘Why were you in there?’

  ‘It was her bedroom. Do I have to say it?’

  Lewin waited for me to say something more, something better. He speaks only when necessary, and sometimes not even then. He prefers to listen, and watch, and let you blow your jittery load into the endless brutal silence. He is especially mute about the personal stuff, the dirty stuff. Boy did he land the wrong case.

  ‘We were intimate,’ I clarified.

  ‘Okay. And when was this?’

  ‘A couple – a few days before she died. I’d have to check the date.’

  ‘I’ll get you to do that, Ray. I’ll get you to do that.’

  The disapproving tongue rolled from the inside of his cheek to the inside of his lower lip. Sartorially Lewin does not occupy the cutting edge. He dresses like a maths teacher. A stick of white chalk would not look out of place in his hairy right hand. He wears old grey slacks with a crease down each leg. He wears abraded short-sleeved shirts and badly knotted RSL ties. Did he resolve, back in the mid-1980s, never to buy another shirt before retirement? Is he deliberately pushing them to the point of disintegration? His hips are narrow but he has a big old medicine ball of a gut. He has a formidable quiff of silver hair. His eyebrows have gone rogue: each bristle is as thick and stiff as a quill. There are further bushels of silvery growth on his forearms, in his nostrils, in the gulches of his ears. He wears white singlets under his shirts: their bulging rims swerve poignantly beneath his armpits, like the cables of a suspension bridge. I feel he has a stay-at-home wife who irons the trousers and shirts and mandates the wearing of the singlets. On his end of the desk, near his stack of folders, he keeps a grey felt hat, a fedora. It looks like Jack Ruby’s. Unlike Ruby, Lewin does not commit the gaffe of wearing his indoors. I have never seen it on his head, because I have never seen him outside this room. To start with, but not for long, I let Lewin’s bus-driver act lull and deceive me. I let his clueless threads give me a false sense of security. But what other sense of security is there, in the end, except the false one? I know now that I have to be on my toes for him. I went for years without needing to do that for anybody. My toes were badly out of practice. And then she came along. And now Lewin.

  ‘It’s time you started taking this seriously, Ray,’ he said.

  ‘I do. I will. I’m learning as we go, Ted. I used to think a few things were still my business.’

  ‘Nothing’s your business, mate. Not any more.’

  ‘I’m starting to get that.’

  ‘Got any more surprises for me?’

  ‘No. And by the way, I wasn’t just thinking about me. I was thinking about her too. I was thinking even a dead girl’s entitled to her privacy.’

  ‘Not a murdered one. Not in this room.’

  ‘“This room”? The things I say in this room, Ted, have an eerie way of leaking out of it.’ I seized this scrap of moral credit while it was handy, and threw it on my parched side of the scales. Who knew when the next crumb would fall my way?

  ‘Let me worry about that.’

  ‘Please do. So far it doesn’t seem to be working. Who else listens to these tapes, Ted? Who’s listening to us right now?’

  ‘A lot of people who think they should be in here instead of me. A lot of people who think I’m not riding you hard enough. You’re a hard man to stick up for, Ray. You keep lying to me about the small things. When that happens, people start wondering if you’re lying about the big things too.’

  He is good at making me feel I have let him down. And he seems to think I let her down too, when I do that. I feel I can decide that bit for myself, since I knew her and he didn’t. Otherwise, I keep discovering in myself a dangerous urge to please him. Sometimes – this is an odd but recurrent thought – sometimes I suspect he knows everything that I know anyway, and more besides. Sometimes I think there’s no point keeping the rest of my secrets from him. He knows most of the worst stuff already, and he still looks at me as if I’m human. Let’s give him credit for that. Remember, he has raided and tossed my home. He knows about the booze and the prescriptions. His tech guys seized my laptop, and pulled a copy of its hard drive. There’s stuff on there so bad that I choose not to remember it, but Lewin knows about it all. The images I look at late at night, all my aborted drafts: he has perused those maps of hell. After such knowledge, what forgiveness? He has sniffed the cadaver of my unpublished novel. Did he read it? Did he like it? One day he just handed the typescript back to me, silently. He knows nearly everything, and none of it perturbs him. No crime short of murder – her murder – vexes his great senatorial head.

  ‘Let’s go back to the start.’ Lewin sighed through his nose. The silver hairs in there stirred. ‘You first met her when?’

  ‘At her place, a few nights before she died.’

  ‘And then at your place, one night before she died?’

  ‘One night before the night of her death, yes.’

  ‘So you were intimate twice?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Be exact,’ he said without relish.

  ‘On two separate nights – on two discrete occasions – we were intimate. Once at her place, once at mine. Not – or not necessarily – limited to once each time.’

  ‘And before that first time you’d never met her?’

  ‘Face to face, no. I knew her, because she sent me a letter once. As you know.’

  ‘And you threw this letter out.’

  ‘Yes. Eventually. Which at the time didn’t strike me as an act I would subsequently have to explain, defend, read about in a newspaper, or think about ever again.’

  ‘And she never sent you any emails?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Never texted you?’

  ‘No. We corresponded, the old-fashioned way. The way that doesn’t leave a trace on a server. Which I know you don’t like. But that’s how it happened.’

  ‘Do book reviewers normally get fan letters?’ Lewin was not a literary man, but even he smelt the stink on this whopper. He kept coming back to it. Each week he made me say it again – to see if I could still pull it off with a straight face.

  ‘Sometimes. Not often. But it happens.’

  ‘The night you were at her place. How long did you stay?’

  ‘All night.’ Another lie, in theory. But when I said it, a strange thing happened in my head. I saw her bedroom at night: me on a bed and her on me. For a galvanic second she was alive in my skull again, as alive as any dead person can get, and more alive than many a living one, not excluding myself. It felt like an authentic flashback – as if my torn memory was now ready to convert fiction into fact. Or maybe it was a fact. I was in no position to rule that out.

  ‘Other than that, you’ve never been inside her house?’

&n
bsp; ‘No.’ Something metallic ticked in the silence. A clock? Do clocks still tick? ‘If you found my prints, that’s when they got there.’

  ‘So the night she died,’ Lewin said. ‘You never went inside then?’

  ‘I’ve told you. I wasn’t there.’

  ‘But you were there the next morning.’

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t go inside.’

  ‘I was wondering if your story had changed on that too.’

  ‘It hasn’t. It’s not a story.’

  He waited.

  ‘The sun was up when I got there,’ I said, not for the first time. ‘I parked in her driveway. I knocked on her door. She didn’t answer. I went home.’

  ‘You didn’t try the door?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You gave up that easy?’

  ‘If I’d known she was in there dead,’ I said, ‘I’d have kicked up more of a stink. I thought there’d be other chances.’

  He waited. I considered letting him wait forever. Then I said, ‘I know what your witness says. But your witness is wrong.’

  He waited some more.

  ‘What this person must have seen,’ I said, ‘was me leaving the doorstep. Not me walking out of the house. Me leaving the doorstep.’

  ‘This is a large mistake to make, Ray.’

  ‘I agree. Take it up with your witness. He’s either blind or he’s a fucking fool, and that’s why we’re sitting here. I knocked on the door and I left. That’s all.’

  ‘Looking agitated.’

  ‘That part’s possible.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’d driven a long way to see her.’

  ‘Why?’

  That deserved either a flippant answer or no answer at all. I settled for silence. What we were talking about was not all that funny. Some things remain sacred, at least to me. Some things are too hallowed to be talked about in Lewin’s room: her heat, the way her tongue fluttered, the blue veins on her chest. Her secrets are my secrets now. If I don’t keep them, who will?

  ‘Let’s talk about the night she died.’ Lewin pulled a folder from his stack.

  ‘Didn’t we just do that?’

  ‘I mean you. Your movements.’ The folder was fat with data. He kept it closed, for the moment. He tapped its edge against the desk.

  ‘I had no movements.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t remember.’

  ‘I remember that much.’

  ‘You called her.’ He put the folder on the desk. The cover fell open. I saw spreadsheets, columns of raw output, dates, times, colons, slashes, dashes, alphanumeric strings. A spew of ugly type, all of it bad for me, even the punctuation. It is not Lewin’s style to produce documents that make me look good. He selected a stapled printout and started leafing through it. All this was taking a long time. Silence kept closing back in on us, lapping around the little islands of our words. Machinery vaguely hummed. His printout rustled. ‘You talked to her for five minutes.’

  ‘So you’ve told me. It sounds plausible.’

  ‘Or rather six,’ he said, when he’d found the page he wanted, the relevant column, the germane cell. ‘Ten fifty-one to ten fifty-seven.’

  ‘If you say so. Who am I to dispute the metadata?’

  ‘You still don’t remember?’

  ‘No. Which happens, at least to me. I’d had a bad day. I’d had a drink. I’d dropped a few pills. You’ve seen my medicine cabinet.’

  ‘But you remember some things.’

  Here we went again.

  ‘You remember you weren’t at her house,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t forget things that big.’

  ‘You say that, but I don’t see how you can know it.’

  I requested a break. In the toilets, in the stink left by some depraved colleague of Lewin’s, I necked another red-and-white pill before I could think twice about it, or even once. You can’t have thoughts when your head feels like that. Two red-and-whites in one day. I wouldn’t be getting a hard-on for a while, but then again why would I be needing one? I took a small but not unwarranted swig from my flask. I made scrupulous use of the mouthwash. When I got back to Lewin’s room I had a speech ready.

  ‘The blackout angle is bullshit, Ted,’ I told him. ‘It’s pulp fiction. You must know that. I remember what happened. I just don’t remember it all that well. I took a few pills, I drank a bit, and I had a conversation I don’t recall the finer points of. That’s it. I didn’t turn into Mr Hyde. I didn’t go out for a midnight drive and cut up a girl I hardly knew. I fell asleep on the couch. Or I passed out, if you prefer. I was in no shape to get behind the wheel, I assure you.’

  ‘But the morning after, you were in good enough shape to take a drive then?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that. But I made it, apparently.’

  ‘At six in the morning?’

  He had a way of making it sound deeply implausible – getting up that early for her, driving all that way.

  ‘To visit a girl you hardly knew,’ he said.

  ‘So I wanted to know her better. Why not? I haven’t entirely retired from the human race.’

  He laid down another one of his epic pauses. One day I’ll just say nothing back, and see what he does about it. From the corridor outside, as if from a long way off, the buzz of workplace interplay washed in – banter, laughter. I remembered the feeling, but I remembered it less well all the time.

  ‘Unless you want me to lie,’ I told him, ‘my story is never going to get any better. I’ve told you what happened. All I can do is sit here and keep saying it. I was at home, I was asleep, and there was nobody there to verify it. I know you don’t like that. I don’t either, much. But this is what every night of my life is like, barring the odd miracle.’

  Lewin sighed. ‘Would you call yourself an alcoholic?’

  ‘No.’ We were back at the usual dead ends.

  ‘How much money did you make last year?’

  I told him. But he already knew – I could tell from the way he didn’t yodel in disbelief.

  ‘You live on that?’

  ‘I’m not sure how, but yeah.’

  ‘And that’s from reviewing books?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And that’s the way you like it?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  He closed the file, and went back to tapping its spine on the table. His bad eye bulged. ‘Anything you want to add, Ray?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If there is, now’s the time.’

  The pills, if they’re working too well, can make you lose your fear of reality’s edge. Danger can sneak up on you. Suddenly Lewin was talking in a tone he’d never used before. His patience was starting to sound the way his shirts looked: eroded, frayed. For a bad moment I thought I had finally found the limits of his cool. I thought: today’s the day. Then he tossed the folder back on the stack and said:

  ‘You’re still not in this too deep, Ray. But you’re getting there. You’re getting there. We’re going round in circles. We can’t do that forever. One day soon we might have to arrest you. Don’t make me do that. If you do, I won’t be able to help you any more.’

  ‘That’s what you’re doing now, is it? Helping me?’

  ‘Believe it or not, mate, yes. I’m trying to eliminate you from inquiries. I’m helping you and you’re helping me. That’s the theory. But you’re making it harder than it has to be. Sometimes I think you’re doing it on purpose.’

  Still that tone. This was not ending well. He was letting me walk out again, but again I’d be walking out in worse shape than I’d turned up in. This couldn’t keep happening. Pretty soon it would stop being logically possible. I had to throw him something more now, something fresh.

  ‘I liked her, Ted.’ I looked him in the eye again. I gave each eye equal time, just to be
sure. ‘Maybe I haven’t made that clear. I liked her a lot. There’s your answer, if you want to know why I got up at six in the morning to see her. You know what she looked like. You’ve seen the pictures. The whole country’s in love with her now. Well, I knew her when she looked like that and there was still something you could do about it. Back before she was everyone’s favourite dead person.’

  ‘Are you saying you were in love with her?’

  ‘No.’ I’d walked straight into that one.

  ‘So you’re saying . . . What?’

  ‘I’m saying put yourself in my shoes. I’m saying bear this in mind when you’re wondering why I behaved a bit oddly. Not homicidally. Oddly.’

  ‘I’m trying, Ray. But put yourself in mine. Let’s say you were me. Wouldn’t you be looking at you?’

  ‘Probably. But I’d be wasting my time.’

  ‘So where’d you be looking instead?’

  ‘The guy stabbed her thirty times, right?’

  ‘That’s what they say in the papers,’ Lewin said.

  ‘I’d be looking for someone who knew her for more than a few days. Someone who either loved her or hated her.’