Get Poor Slow Page 4

  ‘What happened to the fancy guy?’ she said.

  I held my hand out. She blushed a bit more and slipped me the bad news: seventeen bucks for two coffees and a muffin. I pulled my wallet out, hoping there’d be something in it. There was a twenty and nothing else. I told her to keep the change. She wouldn’t take it. She dug in her apron for coins. I decided I’d better wait for them, since she had a job and I didn’t. I wondered who else I was paying for, apart from Skeats. Barrett Lodge?

  ‘I hope he’s going to pay you back,’ the girl said, rummaging. I liked her tone. It dripped with Skeats-hatred. He must have done or said something, before I came, that gave her a correct impression of his personality. Or maybe she just hadn’t liked the look of him, which would have been fair enough too. Either way I liked her more and more all the time. In my former life I might have had a crack at taking her home. In my current life there was a three-ring circus camped at my front gate. So even if I got her past the question of my face, we’d have that question to get past too. And there was no good answer to it, and if I told her even half the truth the evening might never recover. At a minimum she would stop looking happy and innocent for a while, and I didn’t want to be responsible for that. Anyway, she wasn’t Jade. All the women in the world have that defect now. Whoever they are, they’re not her.

  ‘Don’t worry about the fancy guy,’ I told her. ‘The fancy guy’s going to pay.’

  2

  I know a lot about the big half-hours that can make or break a life. When I was a kid, I took a swan dive off a garage roof and cracked my skull on a concrete slab. This is not a metaphor. Or maybe it is, but it happened. I got my hands down first. If I hadn’t, I’d have died then and there. At the time I must have thought that would be a bad thing. A few of my fingers broke. Then the rest of me came down. I was spinning forwards, flipping over. My face bit the slab and skidded and my body went on over it and my neck arced to breaking point like a vaulter’s pole. Bits of my face got left on the slab. Bits of the slab got left in my face. My bottom teeth bit clean through my lower lip. My nose got smeared across my face like a lump of butter chucked into a hot pan. My spine didn’t break. It just felt as if it did. I still wonder what breaking your back must feel like, if not breaking it felt like that.

  The only good thing about smacking your head that hard is that your stunned skull will never let you remember it. The impact ripped a ragged permanent hole in my memory. Don’t ask me what I was doing on that roof. Don’t ask me why I went near the edge. According to my insulted brain, I was never even up there. The data never got laid down. There’s just this messy jump-cut or splice and I’m waking up on my back, with a ring of blurred faces a long way above me. An ambulance was already present. For ten minutes my body had been lying there on the planet but the rest of me had been somewhere else. It had been down there under the slab, seeing what death felt like. It felt like nothing. I had no complaints. On bad days I wish I’d stayed down there for good. Instead I resurfaced. At the time it felt kind of pleasant. For the last time in my life, I felt no pain. I was just tired. I wanted to slip back under the slab and sleep. But this hunkered paramedic kept wanting to know if I could move my foot. I tried. I looked down to see if it was working. That was a mistake. I saw what had happened to my hand. I lurched onto my side and vomited a gutload of dirt and black blood.

  I have learned not to think, much, about what my life would have been like if that afternoon had never happened. It would have been different. I know that much. Possibilities narrowed for me that day. Potential was belted out of me. I was never going to be a leading man after that. I would be a critic at best, but never a player. When you’re in pain most of the day, there is only so much work you can get done. I would write better books than most of the books I review, if I had a different body. And I would look better than most of their authors, if I still had my old face. But I don’t, and I have grown to like my new one. I no longer pine for a mint-condition look. My fake teeth are more plausible than some people’s real ones. My fingers are gnarled but functional. My nose has been straightened out, sort of. A cobweb of fine white scars radiates from the big central gouge on its bridge. I don’t get all the women I want, but who does? I get a few. Some of them dig the scars. They like touching them. I don’t mind that, as long as they touch the rest of me too. When my skin gets tanned the scars don’t. In the mornings, when I shave, the mirror looks as if it’s been cracked by a pebble in the night. By forty you’re meant to have the face you deserve. I got the face early. It took me a while to earn it. I believe I am finally there.

  You get a short cut to the truth, when something like that happens to you early. It’s not enough to say life is a lottery. Losing a lottery can’t hurt or kill you. I made one mistake and I got half a life, or on a good day three-quarters of one. Then again I might have died that day, and had no life at all. Alternatively, I could have just stayed away from the edge and skipped the maiming altogether. That would have been nice. If things had gone that way I would be somebody else now. I wouldn’t be me. I would be a nicer guy all round. It’s hard to believe in an unchanging self or soul when your body has turned on you. Also it’s hard to believe in free will, when you can’t remember being present for the hinge moment of your life. The outer evidence says I was there: up on that roof, and conscious, and moving for some reason towards the edge. But since I don’t remember doing it, it’s hard to feel I had much choice in the matter. Things happen to you and you can’t stop them. If you try to, other things will happen to you instead. Maybe they will be worse. There was a woman across the street who saw me drop. She had a hard time describing what she saw. She said it looked like a dive, but it looked like a fall too. It looked like both things at once. I have learned to live with that ambiguity. Maybe it was both things. Maybe it was a leap gone wrong. Maybe I caught a toe in the gutter. Maybe I thought I’d land on my feet.

  The difference hardly matters now. It stopped mattering the moment I hit the earth. All that matters now is the damage, which has never stopped happening to me. Thirty years later, the thumped gong of my body is still shivering. The nerves along my spine still scream as if they got crushed yesterday. You’d think they’d chuck it in, you’d think they’d leave me alone, now that all my other nerves are dying – the nerves in my fingertips, the nerves in my dick. But they maintain the rage. They spit and arc like severed powerlines. If I sit in a chair for more than ten minutes my spine lights up like a vein of lava, and then my skull explodes like the Hindenburg. So I write standing up – like Hemingway, like Nabokov, like Philip Roth. Unlike them I do it on a computer. I stand a beer case on my desk and put an open laptop on the summit. I type on a plug-in keyboard positioned at cock height. It’s a strange set-up to look at, but usually there’s no one to look at it except me.

  Thirteen days ago, at about four in the afternoon, I was standing at my prose rig doing my thing. I must have been having a good day, if I was still on my feet at that hour. Either I was writing something serious or I was emailing Skeats about money. But what’s more serious than that? Beyond the laptop my front window showed me a slab of overcast sky. Back then I didn’t close the curtains. I had no reason to. A storm was coming in. Under it, a small red car appeared at my gate, then swept its slow way up the steep dirty ribbon of the drive, throwing up dust like a magician’s fistful of smoke. What was vanishing in that plume was my old life, although I didn’t know it yet. I stood there behind my rig and watched the little car get bigger. Naturally I hoped it had come to the wrong place.

  I stopped hoping that when the driver got out. Her hair was dark and she wore it long. Her body was little and ripe and packed with the promise of obscenity. I’m bad at ages but I put her somewhere between twenty-five and thirty. She wore jeans and a V-neck jumper the colour of charcoal. A lot went on inside it when she moved. She came up my front steps, squinting into the dropping sun. She hadn’t seen me through the window yet. She moved without scruple, as
if things generally went her way. When you looked like that they probably did. She stopped at the screen door and cupped a hand over the mesh to look in. When she saw me standing there, right on the other side of it, she jumped.

  She said, ‘Are you Raymond Saint?’

  I told her I was.

  She told me her name was Jade Howe. I looked at her and couldn’t believe my luck. I was right not to, although I was wrong to think the luck was good.

  ‘It isn’t an easy place to find, this little shack of yours.’

  Why she’d wanted to find it I didn’t ask her, yet. I let her think I wasn’t curious, as if girls like her dropped in on me every day. She was sitting on the couch that ran along my back wall. I stood with my spine against the cold side window and took my second good look at her. Her eyes were dark, maybe even black. A spray of little freckles dusted her nose like a flung pinch of sand.

  ‘Was it worth finding?’ I asked her.

  She took a look around the little room. I could see that she’d been dying to. Things get squalid when I’m in the middle of writing something, and I’m always in the middle of writing something. The sink was stacked with unwashed plates. Books I had no room for on my shelves were heaped around the walls in random drifts. On my desk, and on the floor around it, were the magpie’s scraps of paper I wrote my notes on: envelopes, torn bits of magazine. Some of them had been lying around for months, although she had no way of knowing that. Likewise, she had no way of knowing that the half-full bottle of booze beside the keyboard had not been half-full for very long.

  Anyway, she didn’t seem to care. She took in the scene, then she just looked at me and smiled. It had been a while since any girl had done that to me, except as a matter of store policy. But maybe she was selling something too. I had a feeling I’d like her anyway, even if she was. Outside, that storm was sliding in. Trees were limbering up for it in the high grey wind. The air had gone all staticky and cold.

  ‘What’s that you’re drinking?’ she asked.

  I told her. I offered her some. She surprised me by saying yes. Not many women do. I put a glass of it on the low table near her knees, then went back to my place at the window.

  ‘So what is that?’ She was looking at the prose rig.

  ‘I write on my feet.’

  ‘Like Hemingway?’

  ‘My God. You’re a reader.’

  ‘I’m in the business.’

  ‘You don’t say.’

  ‘I love your stuff, by the way.’

  ‘My stuff?’ I pondered that claim. I turned it over in my head, like an archaeologist inspecting an implausibly large chunk of Troy. ‘You mean my reviews?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I wish I could write like that.’

  ‘You’d be amazed by how often I don’t hear that.’

  ‘Somehow I thought you’d look scarier.’

  I thought about telling her how she looked, but I had a feeling she already knew.

  ‘You reviewing something now?’ She turned her head, when she said that, to look out at the thrashing trees. There was something off about the way she did this. It seemed coy, and I had already worked out that coyness wasn’t her thing.

  ‘I’m always reviewing something,’ I said. Did I sense even then what she was up to? I waited till she showed me her dark eyes again. ‘So what part of the business,’ I asked them, ‘are you in?’

  ‘I do publicity for Bennett and Bennett.’

  Ah. That brought us a notch closer to business. Bennett and Bennett published bad books. They’d published good books once, back when publishers could still afford to do that. These days what they mainly printed were gimmick books: non-literature by non-writers. Novels by supermodels. Cookbooks by wicketkeepers. Memoirs about crossing the Sahara by unicycle. I didn’t hold this against them, much. Every publisher did it.

  ‘And yet you like my reviews.’ The light outside was dropping fast. Gumnuts rattled down on the tin roof. ‘You must be the only marketing girl in the country who does.’

  ‘I’m not,’ she said with mock horror, ‘a marketing girl.’ There was an ironic spark in her eyes I was starting to like.

  ‘So what are you?’

  ‘I handle writers.’

  ‘Have you come here to handle me?’

  It was poor stuff, but there was something about her that encouraged bold speech. Plus I was fairly loaded. Let us bear in mind that it was four in the afternoon. Anyway she took it with a smile. She was used to hearing men say stupid things. She knew we were all fools. Her legs were crossed and her torso was tipped towards me, as if she wanted to talk in whispers. Yes, her body set a tone of conspiracy from the start. But who was going to overhear us? A gap had opened between her jumper and her torso. I didn’t look into it yet.

  ‘I don’t do critics,’ she said.

  ‘What a pity. Who do you do?’

  ‘Novelists, mainly.’

  ‘I happen to be a novelist too.’

  That one caught her out.

  ‘You’re writing a novel?’

  ‘No, I wrote one.’

  ‘Called what?’

  ‘Called nothing. It never got published.’

  ‘That sucks,’ she said.

  Yes. It did suck. She leant forward some more. It was dark enough to turn on a light now, so I didn’t turn one on. A mood was building and I’d have been a fool to mess with it. Any minute now the sky was going to crack and spill its heavy load on us. It looked as if a filthy paintbrush had been soaking in it. We both knew she couldn’t leave under a sky like that. Whatever was happening, we could afford to let it happen slowly.

  ‘I was the wrong kind of novelist,’ I said. ‘I made the mistake of not getting famous for something else first.’

  ‘Like hosting a game show,’ she offered.

  ‘Right. Or losing my limbs halfway up Everest.’

  If she knew the business was a joke, why did she work in it? For that matter, why did I?

  ‘Did you ever submit it to us? To Bennett and Bennett?’

  ‘You turned it down, but so did everybody else. I hold no grudge.’

  ‘Maybe you should try us again.’

  ‘I don’t think so. The world’s had it with novels, don’t you think?’

  ‘Maybe it has. I don’t know.’ Again she felt a sudden need to avert her gaze. This time what she looked at instead of me was one of her own subtly chewed fingernails. ‘The thing I’m working on now, it’s a non-fiction thing. Kind of history for the common man.’

  ‘And who wrote it?’ I mechanically asked, although I had known the answer for a while.

  ‘Liam Vagg,’ she said. Then she defiantly looked back up at me: plump, sly little Jade, with her sleeves rolled halfway up to her elbows.

  ‘You’re handling Liam Vagg? I hope you’ve been wearing rubber gloves.’

  ‘You know his stuff then?’

  ‘As it happens, I’m reviewing that very book.’ I gave her a moment, just in case she wanted to rig up a look of puzzlement or surprise. She didn’t bother. ‘But I have this strange feeling you already know that.’

  She didn’t stop looking at me, but this huge wave of guilty blood broke over her face, and washed down over the beach of flesh that ended at the V of her jumper.

  ‘Who told you?’ I asked her.

  ‘Your editor.’

  ‘Skeats?’

  She nodded.

  A rancid thought hit me. ‘Christ, you’re not a friend of his?’

  ‘Jeremy Skeats? No. I’ve never met him. We’ve only talked on the phone . . .’

  Outside, the treetops heaved in the wind, all rubbery and drunken. A frenzied palm lashed the sky like a switch. And now the loathed spectre of Skeats was in the room with us, dangerously messing with my mood.

  ‘So you rang him up,’ I said, ‘and you asked
him who he’d assigned Vagg’s book to?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And he just told you?’

  ‘Well, not straight away. First he asked me out to lunch.’

  ‘What the fuck for?’

  ‘He said he wanted to talk about books.’

  ‘Horseshit. He’s never read one.’

  ‘I’m just telling you what he said.’

  ‘And what did you say?’

  ‘I said maybe.’

  Here came the rain, and not subtly. It crashed down on the roof like applause on an old record. I thought about telling her Skeats was married, and had children, but the whole theme had to be ditched. It was warping my performance.

  She tilted her empty glass at me. ‘Do I get a refill?’

  While I was pouring her one I turned on the light. It was so dark now that I had to, if I wanted to see her at all. Our reflection appeared in the rippling side window. Wind shook the glass and made the scene wobble. I sat down in the armchair across from her. It wouldn’t do much for my back, but the rest of me wanted to close the gap between us.

  ‘So you’re doing the publicity for Vagg’s new novel,’ I summarised, lifting my voice over the rain. ‘You call Skeats and ask him who’s reviewing it. He tells you it’s me. And now here you are.’ It couldn’t hurt to let her know that I smelt the vice in the room.

  ‘Should I go?’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘Should we forget it? Should we talk about something else?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m enjoying this.’ If she was losing her nerve, I wanted her to get it back. ‘Interesting things don’t normally happen to literary critics. This thing’s getting more interesting all the time.’

  She said nothing. She was letting me run the show for a while, or letting me think I was.

  ‘So what do you want to know?’ Raising my voice some more, the foliage beyond the rain-blurred windows rolling and boiling like a crazy sea. ‘You want to know if I’ve read the book yet?’