Get Poor Slow Page 3

  ‘Right. And you didn’t love her, like you say.’

  ‘I hardly knew her,’ I said, as if that made a difference.

  ‘And you didn’t hate her.’

  ‘I didn’t know her long enough for that, either.’

  I left the car in the basement of the justice precinct. The parking there is free. That much can be said for being a person of interest. A big salty wind boomed up from the harbour, funnelled by the cold stone buildings. I plunged into it with my face pointed at the pavement. Junk-food wrappers rattled along the gutters. Garments flapped around passing bodies like washing on a line. I hate the city at the best of times. Now that I’m an enemy of the people, I like it even less. Walking down a city street, I feel like a doomed man in a motorcade. My skull feels eggshell thin. Some people don’t recognise me, which is good of them. Some half-do, but don’t quite make the connection in time. But there are always the ones who know me right away, and want to tell me what they think of me – as if I don’t know already. As if I can’t have a rough guess.

  Today I made it two blocks towards the water, head down, before I felt some hag on a crowded corner come at me from behind, craning her face into mine. Before she could get started I crossed against the light. Dodging angry cars, I heard her rain angrier slander on my spine. It was nothing new, but it was noisy enough to make people look my way. I made the mistake of looking up to see how many had. A guy coming past got a jolt of instant recognition and swerved back at me, getting ready to speak his mind. He changed it when he got close enough to see how tasty I look in the flesh: the bent nose, the network of white scars around it, the curl my mouth makes when I’m not on TV, putting on a show. Something about all that made him decide to shut his mouth and move on. I try to look as if I still care, when I’m on TV. I turn on the remnants of my charm. I play to the swinging voters. I act as if I still have a few things left to lose. On the street I feel freer to be myself.

  I shouldn’t have been out there at all. I should have been back in the car, halfway home to my intoxicants and my couch. That hour in Lewin’s hard chair had ignited the ruined nerves along my spine. But my afternoon was only half-done. Now I had to sit down some more: with Jeremy Skeats, my boss, the literary editor who knows nothing about literature. It sounds like a good joke if you’re not on the end of it. I looked at my watch and made my usual Skeats resolution. Whatever he wanted to say, I would sit there and behave myself while he said it. Whatever books he offered me I would take, because I was in no position to turn anything down. I never was, and he knew it. I hated him for that, but I hated him for a lot of other reasons too. Nevertheless, I would behave. And when I was done behaving I would drive home, get horizontal, and not get up again for a very long time.

  He wanted to meet at a place called Diana’s. It sounded like a funny name for a bar, and when I got there I saw why. It wasn’t a bar. It was a coffee shop. Skeats was established at one of the outdoor tables. You couldn’t miss him, and you weren’t meant to. He wears suits but he doesn’t wear ties. The suits look expensive and no doubt are. He wears white tailored shirts that hang open almost to his navel. The exposed area of his chest is tanned, ludicrously. No man worth knowing looks so healthy. No man even vaguely devoted to the life of the mind spends so much time in the sun. His head has a tangle of gelled golden curls on it, like the pelt of some pampered spoodle or six-year-old French king. His cheeks are darkened by a pointillist stubble that would make me want to hit him even if I didn’t know him. He goes to the gym. He lifts weights. He looks like an off-duty musketeer. People call him a public intellectual. I agree with the public part.

  I sat across from him. Inevitably, he was dicking around with his phone. Less inevitably, he stopped doing that as soon as he saw me. He put it on the table and stopped looking at it. This was ominously courteous of him.

  ‘Raymondo,’ he said, giving me the full radiance of his facial tan.

  ‘Can’t we sit inside?’ I asked him.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because people keep looking at me like I stabbed a girl to death.’

  He frowned a bit, trying to work out what that had to do with him. ‘I won’t keep you long,’ he said. I noticed now that the wreckage of a prior meeting was sprawled between us on the table: two drained mugs, two saucers, a half-demolished muffin. Someone had been sitting in my chair before me. Someone he assigned better books to, and paid more money. I was the footnote, the afterthought. There was a newspaper on the table too – our newspaper, our emaciated broadsheet, stirring in the restless air, pinned to the wood by the puerile weight of Skeats’s phone.

  Hooking an arm over the frame of his chair, he lolled casually back and said, ‘So how’s it all going?’

  ‘Not well,’ I said. But he hadn’t got me here to ask that. A surge of wind came up the steep street and throttled the shaft of the big umbrella that stood in the table’s core. Golden Boy’s gelled curls stirred at the fringes but not the roots. Our newspaper flapped and shifted. The phone shifted with it, caught in its undertow.

  ‘It can’t be easy,’ Skeats said, trying hard not to look as if he was thinking about his phone. His spare hand – the one he wasn’t lolling casually back with – reached down and covered it, tenderly, until the wind eased.

  ‘It isn’t.’

  ‘The girl . . . Shit. She looked like a hell of a nice girl.’

  ‘She was.’ I had an odd sense that he was pretending not to know her name. How could anybody, even him, not know it by now? The TV repeats it every night like an incantation, like a byword for ravaged innocence.

  ‘You want coffee?’ He looked around for a waiter, but not all that hard. Often I get the feeling that Skeats is not a real person. He lives between air quotes, somehow. His whole existence seems to be pitched at some unseen camera or crowd.

  ‘No.’ My head pulsed. I pulled out my flask and took a jolt.

  Skeats looked at me as if I’d tied off a vein and jammed a rusty spike into it. When the flask was back in my pocket he said, ‘So how long’d you know her for? Before she . . .’

  ‘Not long.’

  On the table his phone gave its little bird call. I waited for him to attend to it. He didn’t. ‘You know her all that well, or . . . ?’

  ‘Is this an interrogation? You sound like Ted Lewin.’

  ‘I’m just wondering how deep in this you are,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll get out of it.’

  Off behind my left shoulder, in the indoor part of the café, something was going on. I had a bad feeling it was about me. I heard a woman’s voice half-raised in admonition. I heard a man’s voice raised a bit louder. Skeats glanced back there but saw nothing that troubled him. Maybe he wasn’t looking hard enough.

  I said, ‘They still haven’t sent me that money, by the way.’

  ‘What money?’

  ‘The money for the Vagg review.’ I watched him hard to see if he’d made the connection yet – to see if he knew that she’d still be alive, if it wasn’t for his towering mediocrity. But he hadn’t. You could tell by the way his face displayed no shame. If it was ever going to, this was the time. ‘The least you can do,’ I said, ‘is pay me for it. Considering.’

  ‘It’s on its way,’ he said smoothly. You had to salute the man’s lack of wit. He had all the pieces. He was just too stupid and vain and lazy to put them together, and work out what he had done. If I got through the next ten minutes without lunging across the table for his tanned throat it would be even more of a miracle than usual.

  ‘How can it still be on its way? They tie it to a carrier pigeon?’

  His phone cheeped again. Again he didn’t answer it. He didn’t even look at it. That scene behind my shoulder, whatever it was, was still percolating.

  ‘Speaking of money,’ I said, ‘how about slinging me a book or two?’

  ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘that’s what I wanted to
talk about.’

  That didn’t sound good. And why was he looking at me and not his phone? This was an eerie reversal of form. Suddenly it occurred to me to worry a lot about what we were there for. My dazed head had let me down again. Once more it had failed to sniff out the dangers of the present. It was stuck on Jade, spinning its wheels in the past again, as if all the bad stuff had happened to me already. And meanwhile here Skeats was right now, in plain view, lubing up to fuck me again. I was about to get fired. Why else would he have wanted to meet me here, now, in public, in daylight, face to face? Who, these days, wanted that?

  ‘As you know,’ he said, ‘I don’t believe in keeping my writers in suspense.’

  I should have left then. When Skeats hits you with one of his moronic homilies, it’s not because something good is about to happen to you. But before he could follow through, something else happened. A chair hit the floor behind me. Skeats looked back there. Now he was troubled: the static had grown so flagrant that even he could feel it. I turned and saw it too, through the gauze of my aching eyes. This big puce-faced yokel in a business shirt was bowling towards us, pinballing off tables and chairs. He only had eyes for me. He looked as if he’d played rugby once, but not for a while. At a minimum he was about to denounce me. If he had something non-verbal in mind, he would find I was at least as up for it as he was. The afternoon could end in worse ways. It would be nice to get blood on Skeats’s shirt, even if some of it turned out to be mine.

  The guy arrived and slapped his meaty palms on the table. He leaned over me hard, till his fat red carbuncle of a face was about all I could see.

  ‘You’re not fooling anyone,’ he said. ‘Mate.’

  I waited. His breath stank of dead fish. His features boiled and quivered, like raw offal on a hot grill. But his heat had already peaked. I had come to know his type. He’d wanted to say his piece, and he’d pretty much said it. There would be no violence.

  ‘I promise to try harder,’ I told him.

  His wife was beside him now, trying to yank him away by the elbow. The guy shook off her grip with a sulky lash of his arm. Yes, he was all spent now. He had struck his blow for justice, and in the aftermath of his big moment he looked clueless, even senile. The event had let him down somehow. He’d been expecting so much more from it. Improvising, he decided to sweep something off the table with the ruddy T-bone of his hand. A mug? No. He was too law-abiding for that. He went for the newspaper instead. Skeats, reacting in record time, intervened: to rescue his phone. His craven hand scuttled in and nabbed it to safety as the yokel’s came down, yanking up the broadsheet and flinging it out to the wind. Then the yokel was out in the wind with it, the wife hustling him away. The paper flapped down to the stained pavement and lay there twitching.

  Skeats watched it convulse for a while. It gave him a good excuse not to look at me while he said what he said next. ‘I’ve been thinking it might be wise, Ray, if we dialled down your profile a bit.’

  Out in the gutter the wind tugged at the fallen broadsheet. A big double page went surfing up the street. Nobody bothered dodging it. It was just a newspaper.

  ‘Define “dial down”,’ I said. I wasn’t about to make this easy for him. I wanted to watch him writhe.

  ‘In the short term, I reckon it might be wise if we cooled it on your stuff altogether.’

  ‘That’s not dialling me down. That’s switching me off.’

  ‘Not permanently,’ he said. ‘Just for a while.’

  ‘Define a while.’

  ‘Until this thing blows over.’

  ‘Who says it will blow over?’

  ‘Well, Christ, it can’t go on like this forever. Either they’ll clear you or . . .’

  ‘Or what? Arrest me? It won’t come to that. It’s under control. I’m handling it.’

  ‘Ray, this isn’t just me. This is coming from the men upstairs.’

  ‘The wise men of the newspaper trade?’ My eyes were still aimed at the gutter, at that flapping and twitching broadsheet. ‘I like that. The whole place is giving out the death gargle, thanks to them. They think they can restore it to glory by sacking me?’

  ‘I’m not sacking you, for Christ’s sake. Take a month or two off. Clear your name. Let the stink of all this dissipate. Come back when you can just be a critic again, as opposed to public enemy number one.’

  He thought he could afford to smile again. He thought we were pretty much done. He thought he could walk away from the whole thing in a minute or two, just by walking away from me. I’d be a fool to set him straight about that now. Then again, I’d be an even bigger fool if I didn’t do it soon, very soon. I couldn’t wait to see his lipless fake grin just freeze and hang there, like a bird shot in flight, while the rest of him soaked up the news.

  ‘This thing’s my problem,’ I said again. ‘Let me deal with it.’

  ‘I’ll tell you something, Ray. From the outside, you don’t seem to be dealing with it all that well.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Yes. It’s right. From where I sit, it looks like it’s getting worse all the time. Why don’t you get yourself a lawyer, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘They cost money, for a start. Also people with lawyers have a way of looking guilty.’

  ‘People without them can look pretty guilty too.’

  ‘You think I’m guilty?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘You think firing me will make me look less guilty?’

  ‘I’ll say it again. I’m not firing you.’

  ‘Right. I just won’t be working or getting paid.’

  ‘Temporarily, mate. Temporarily.’

  Maybe it was true, or maybe he just wanted to get through the next five minutes without hearing the speech where I told him what I really thought of him. We both knew I had that speech in me. He was right to fear it. Even I did, in a way.

  ‘I think this is the right move for you, Ray.’ He was lolling back in his chair again.

  ‘Yeah. Having no money will be ideal, on top of everything else.’

  ‘I’d appreciate it if you didn’t fight me on this.’

  ‘And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t talk in clichés, but you can’t have everything.’

  He didn’t like that. ‘While you’re away’ – he unyoked his arm from the chair’s back and leaned testily forward – ‘while you’re clearing your name of murder, Ray, maybe you should think about a few other things too.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Such as the big picture. Such as the way you approach things.’

  ‘And what conclusions would you like me to reach, Jeremy?’

  The afternoon was failing. Light was draining from the street like a beaten army. People were on their way home. The people on foot were moving faster than the people in cars.

  ‘You know what I’m talking about,’ he said.

  ‘Remind me.’

  Skeats sighed indulgently. He has this radically misguided view of our relations. He’s so dumb he doesn’t even know he’s the dumb one. ‘I’ve said it before, Ray. Maybe this time you’ll take it in. You need to rethink the Dirty Harry routine. Times have changed. Books are in deep shit. They need all the help they can get. The way things are going, I don’t have that much use for a hanging judge any more. I spend half my Monday mornings getting an earful from whoever the poor bastard is that published the book you kicked the shit out of the day before.’

  ‘You want me to be an industry lapdog, like Barrett Lodge.’

  ‘I prefer to think of him as an accentuator of the positive.’

  ‘I believe I recently tried that. Accentuating the positive. It didn’t work out that well, from memory.’

  ‘You really want to talk about that episode, Ray?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I?’

  ‘Because it involved some odd behaviour.’ />
  ‘From me or from you?’

  I threw that out mainly for my own amusement. But I got an interesting result. Skeats’s face made a comically bad attempt to look like the face of a man who had no idea, no idea at all, what I was talking about. I could see he was bluffing, but I was in no condition to sift the connotations. Maybe the lie had serious weight or maybe it was just recreational. With him it was always hard to tell. But it was strange that he was still so bad at dissembling, after all the practice.

  ‘I’m not saying I don’t value your stuff, Ray,’ he said. ‘You know I do. If I didn’t I wouldn’t print it. And I’m not saying you don’t have a future. I’m just saying . . .’

  ‘I know what you’re saying,’ I said, so he would stop saying it.

  ‘Good. Excellent.’ He slapped the table as if the ordeal was over. For him it was. I felt one last urge to drag him down neck-deep into her blood with me, where he belonged. But I rode it out and let him go. I watched him weave his way back up the hill through the crowd. He moved urgently and with purpose, outstriding the swarm of the less important. All those people, and none of them read books any more, or papers. Just screens, the smaller the better. Skeats’s was clamped to his ear already, like everyone else’s. Maybe he was telling the men upstairs that the deed was done. I watched his bobbing curls vanish like froth into the human tide and I thought: You poor fool. Do you think I will ever forget this moment? When my memory works, it works forever.

  A shadow fell over the table. I winced and looked up. What now? Just a waitress. She had red hair and a ring through her nose. She was around Jade’s age, if not younger. She had a pleasant look on her face, which meant she had no idea who I was. Don’t young people watch the news any more? Doesn’t my infamy make the grade in their celeb feeds or selfie streams? She blushed a bit and looked down at her own fingers. They were pinching a folded piece of paper. I got the picture now. Skeats hadn’t paid his bill. The girl could see that giving it to me was a bit rough, but she didn’t know what else to do. Her hands were sort of stuck in the middle of the act. She was young and self-conscious and her movements of body and face had an exaggerated quality.