Get Poor Slow Read online

  ‘Have you?’

  ‘I have. What else? You want to know if I liked it?’

  ‘I get the feeling you didn’t.’

  ‘Well, did you?’

  ‘No.’ A bit sadly. ‘Not really.’

  ‘So what made you think I would?’ Me of all people, I nearly said.

  ‘I guess I didn’t.’

  ‘And what made Skeats think I would, for that matter?’ Here was something I might have asked myself before, in private, if my head worked properly. I looked away from her for a moment. I had to. It was hard to have abstract thoughts while looking at her. ‘This isn’t the sort of book he normally throws me,’ I said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it’s local product, and it’s no good.’

  ‘And when something’s no good, you piss on it.’

  ‘Exactly, and pissing on the local stuff isn’t Skeats’s style. He likes going to the festivals. He likes getting photographed with his arm around the stars. Books like this he normally throws to Barrett Lodge.’

  ‘Because Barrett Lodge likes everything?’

  ‘Or says he likes everything, because he’s too slothful to say anything else.’

  No doubt there was more to be said on this theme. But a burst of lightning chose that moment to strobe the scene outside, all those treetops jiving in the rain, and then a startling crack of thunder shook the flimsy boards under our feet. ‘Fuck,’ she said. I liked the way she said it. I’d have liked it any way she said it. Then she said something else that got half-lost in the antics of the big sky. I thought I heard it, but asked her to say it again.

  ‘Come here,’ she said, flattening a hand on the couch’s other cushion.

  It was what I thought she’d said, but it hadn’t hurt to hear it twice. I took my drink over there and I sat. If I’d ever had the edge on her, I lost it then. The couch was not large, and she was making no big effort to stay on her side of it. Suddenly it wasn’t all that easy to breathe.

  She leaned in close and half-shouted: ‘That’s what I like about your stuff.’ Her breath was all hot and nectary with booze. The look in her eyes had moved well beyond mischief now. They flashed with a heat so indecent that I almost had to look away from them. Almost, but not quite. ‘You always say what you think.’

  Outside the loaded gutter spilled ropes of water on the sizzling deck. Her nearest breast was all over my elbow. She wasn’t taking it away.

  ‘Want to know what I’m thinking now?’ I said.

  Maybe she heard that or maybe she didn’t. Anyway what she said back was: ‘It hasn’t got you all that far, has it?’

  ‘What hasn’t?’

  ‘Saying what you think of things.’

  ‘Jesus. What does that mean?’

  ‘I mean . . .’

  She let her eyes do a lap of the room. It didn’t take them long. You had to admire her style. She’d known me twenty minutes, and already she was telling me I’d squandered my life.

  ‘I’ve got a hunch about you,’ she said then.

  ‘What hunch is that?’

  ‘It’s a weird feeling. I’ve read so much of your stuff, I feel like I know you.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I feel like I could say anything to you and you wouldn’t mind.’

  ‘You may be right.’

  ‘And I mean, if I say something you don’t like, I feel like you’ll just tell me to fuck off and that will be that.’

  ‘Try it. Chance your arm.’

  If we were still sitting there in five minutes my spine would be molten. But I had the feeling we wouldn’t be. I looked at her brown or black eyes and tried to work out where the pupils stopped and the irises began. My breath gusted hard, as if driven by an iron lung. The storm drowned out the sound of it, but only just. A sharp animal scent drifted in from the drenched earth. If I was Norman Mailer I’d say that it drifted from her. For all I knew it did. My ruptured nose is not my keenest organ.

  ‘Do you want me to say it for you?’ I said.

  She didn’t tell me not to.

  ‘You want me to whitewash the Vagg review. That part’s not hard to work out. You want me to write a thousand words about that piece of shit without mentioning it’s a piece of shit. Stop me when I start going wrong.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘There’s more? What more can there be? You want me to tell people – what? That he has talent? Style? Wit?’

  ‘You’re the writer.’

  ‘This would be in return for what?’

  ‘Money.’

  ‘That’s all?’ I tried looking playfully disappointed, but I’m rusty at stuff like that.

  ‘A lot of money.’

  ‘From who?’

  ‘From Vagg.’

  ‘And how much is a lot?’

  Her breast rose and fell against me. My elbow was taking its full weight now. My other hand was on her thigh. We were past being polite about the small stuff. It was open season on the lesser crimes. I felt a radiant heat through her jeans. I had a hard-on of once-in-a-decade savagery. ‘How much,’ I asked her again, ‘is a lot?’

  ‘If you don’t want to do it, I don’t think I should tell you.’

  ‘Who said I don’t want to do it?’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Tell me how much money a lot is, and we’ll see.’

  ‘It’s a lot. Take my word for it. Or don’t you trust me?’

  It was my move. She smiled, daring me to make it. We’d reached the point where more talking could only fuck things up. Even I could see that. I’m a word man, but silence has its place. I reached up and pushed the hair off her forehead. I flattened my palm against her face and moved it slowly down. When it got to her mouth she parted her lips and took in my thumb and bit into its first joint – not all that hard, but not all that softly either. She watched me over the top of it. Then she opened her teeth and took the whole thumb into her mouth and let me sample the wet heat of her tongue. The whole thing felt too easy, but good things always do. Her eyes blazed at me like two lights saying Go. Don’t stop. Go. So I went.

  Only a fool would write about the rest. After it we lay beached on the bed, stunned and speechless. Her curled body was half on top of mine and half not. The flesh between her ribcage and hip gathered in soft folds, piling up on itself like freshly cranked pasta. While I toyed with it, she plucked at the crimson scars on the back of my hand. My other hand wielded my uncapped bedside flask. The rain had stopped. The afternoon light had come back again, briefly, so it could fade back out in the proper way. Now and then we sipped lazily from the flask. We were in no rush to let reality back in the room. We were doing so well without it. But sooner or later the world had to be rejoined.

  ‘How much money,’ I finally asked her, ‘is a lot?’

  ‘Ten thousand dollars,’ she said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘This is out of Vagg’s own pocket?’

  ‘To him, that’s not that much money.’

  ‘What’s he want me to say? That he’s Thucydides?’

  ‘Call him a master craftsman. He’d settle for that.’

  ‘Why do all lousy writers want to be called master craftsmen? What do they think it means?’

  ‘He just wants people to think he’s a proper writer.’

  Even that was asking too much, but I didn’t want to spoil our party just yet. Liam Vagg was no good, as either a writer or a man. Until Skeats had sent me his new book, I’d done my best to stay hazy about the details of the Vagg career. For some reason I get no joy from reading up on the vast fiscal triumphs of my inferiors. I knew that he’d robbed banks once, in his mad-dog youth. Everybody knew that about him. Being an ex-con was his gimmick. In prison he got literate and wrote a
crime memoir. It got published. It was a monster hit. They turned it into a movie. Maybe there was a sequel, and maybe they made a movie out of that too. Somewhere around then he had reinvented himself – as a pop historian. Who had given him permission to do this I didn’t know. Judging from the one book of his I’d read – and I was fucked if I was ever going to read another one – Vagg was an historian the way I’m an opera singer when I whistle Puccini on the can. Reading him was like hearing a proper book get recounted from memory by a drunk.

  These days Vagg played the ex-con stuff down, except when the publicity people got him to play it up. He was a reformed character now. He could afford to be. He dressed in designer clothes; he wore his long proletarian hair in a silver ponytail. But he still looked lean and pale and ugly, like a retired greyhound. He still had blurred tattoos hailing from the era when skin art was strictly for scum. On the jackets of his books he posed with a leashed pit bull, as if to let you know he could kill you twice if you gave him a bad review. Yet somehow the ageing villain had attained respectability, except in the eyes of people who still read proper books. Since nobody did, he was in the clear. He was foully rich. He lived on the harbour. He went on TV and gave his views about the national character, and world politics, and law reform. He was a hooligan seer, a hack tycoon. He had it all, except for merit. What the hell did he want with a good review from me?

  ‘Ten grand?’ I said. ‘Is he insane? Does he know how many people read what I say? I could call him Jesus and he’d sell maybe fifty extra copies.’

  Even that was putting it a bit high. The truth, as far as I had ever been able to tell, was that nobody, nobody at all, nobody except me, ever read a word I wrote. But I wasn’t about to share that with her. I felt close to her, but not that close.

  ‘The sales aren’t the point,’ she said. ‘He’s got the sales already.’

  ‘And that’s not enough for him.’

  ‘Not any more. He wants people to take him seriously.’

  ‘Is he looking to bribe everyone who’s reviewing it, or just me?’

  ‘Just you.’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘Because you’re the hard man, and everybody knows it. If you say you like it . . .’

  ‘If I say I like Vagg, my reputation as the hard man will vanish overnight.’

  ‘And?’ she said starkly. ‘I mean, so what?’

  That stumped me. Her fingers plucked idly at the scars on my hand. I watched them but couldn’t feel them. The tissue there is like bark.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ she said. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t.’

  ‘I’m not sure I do.’

  ‘I mean, people respect you. They know you’re a brilliant critic. But what good does that do you?’

  ‘If having a reputation’s so pointless, why’s Vagg ready to pay ten thousand bucks to get one?’

  ‘Because he’s got everything else already.’

  I tried not to believe she had a point.

  ‘You must have thought about it.’ Her persuasive little fingertips nipped at my dead skin. ‘You’ve been writing for how many years? Shouldn’t you have something to show for it?’

  ‘Something like what?’

  ‘I don’t know. A house. A wife. Kids.’

  ‘I believe I have a house. What do you call this structure I just fucked you in?’

  ‘I’d call it a shack. A hut. And do you even own it?’

  ‘Why? So I can sell it when I’m dead?’

  ‘You live like the Unabomber.’

  ‘Ten thousand dollars won’t change that.’

  ‘Forget that. I’m saying beyond that, in general. I’m saying, why is Barrett Lodge the chief reviewer and not you?’

  ‘Because this is the way the world works. I wish I could remember being so young that I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Money is good,’ she said. ‘It’s good. You must have thought about these things.’

  ‘Do you often bribe book reviewers?’

  ‘No. This is a first.’

  ‘And it was Vagg’s idea?’

  ‘This is his version of how the world works. You want a result, you pay for it.’

  ‘And what’s your cut?’ I said.

  She stopped plucking at my hand. ‘Who says I’m getting one?’

  ‘I sense it.’

  She hesitated. That wasn’t like her. Yeah, she was getting a cut all right. Her whole body was tense with the information. I hoped her mouth wasn’t about to deny it. That would put a regrettable dent in our relationship.

  ‘Five grand,’ she finally said, and her eyes lit up again.

  ‘Out of my ten?’

  ‘No, on top of your ten.’

  ‘Fifteen all up? Jesus. He is mad.’

  ‘So what are you thinking? You’re thinking about it, aren’t you?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  She rolled off me and slid off the bed. She went over to the big bookcase against the wall. Keeping her back to me, she tilted her head and checked out my library. She hadn’t got up for good, but she was letting me know how I would like it when she did. Also she was letting me take a long leisurely look at her body. I did so. What else was I going to look at? Her flesh was ample but not loose. High on the back of her right thigh was a pair of grape-coloured bruises. Somehow I hadn’t seen them until now. That was remiss of me. You could call them lovebites, but you’d be stretching a point. They looked more like gunshot wounds. They were fresh. There were black tracks around the fringes that had to be teeth marks. I wondered about the freak who’d put them there. It certainly hadn’t been me. Did he own her, or had he just been passing through? I wanted to tell her he was a fool and a scumbag either way. But I thought we’d have other chances to discuss him. I thought there would be other days.

  ‘Be honest,’ she said, without turning round. ‘How long would it take you to make ten thousand dollars? Normally?’

  ‘A while.’

  ‘How much of a while?’

  ‘A fucking while.’

  Finally she came back. She lay down on top of me and sighed. The sigh entered my body and ran all the way up and down it like an electric charge.

  ‘Didn’t you expect more, Ray?’

  ‘More what?’ It was the first time she’d used my name.

  ‘Out of your life. You must have expected more.’

  ‘Jesus. I’m not dead yet.’

  ‘What was the plan, though? You must have had one. Was it that novel of yours? Was that the big gamble? You put all your eggs in that basket?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘You thought it’d make you rich?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

  ‘And now what?’

  ‘And now I’m not.’

  ‘So what now? You plan to live like this forever?’

  ‘We’re getting a bit close to the bone here.’

  ‘Should I shut up?’

  ‘My life’s simple and I like it like that.’

  ‘You don’t ever get the urge to complicate it?’

  ‘Sometimes. I always end up regretting it.’

  She pouted. ‘Always?’

  ‘Maybe I should apply for your job,’ I said. ‘Publicising people who are famous already. It doesn’t sound all that hard.’

  ‘It isn’t.’

  ‘That can’t have been your dream. Dishing out bribes on behalf of lowlifes like Vagg. You’re way too good for that.’

  She propped herself up on both elbows, as if about to favour me with something significant – a secret, a confession. Then she thought better of it, or seemed to.

  ‘Say it,’ I urged her. I got the feeling I was meant to. Do women pick up these tricks along the way, or are they born knowing them?

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘Bullshit.
’ I gave her rump a playful slap. I’d been waiting for a good excuse to do that, or even a bad one. ‘Spit it out.’

  ‘Okay. You want to hear my retirement plan? One day I’m going to go through the slush pile, and I’m going to pull out the shittiest manuscript I can find.’

  ‘Isn’t that how they found Vagg?’

  ‘Shut up and listen.’ She dug the blade of her chin into my chest and looked up at me. ‘People like Vagg – you’re right, they’re famous already. There’s no skill in it, selling guys like him. It’s just setting up meetings. That’s all it is. But what if I found someone in the pile who was just a puppet? A complete nobody. What if I started the selling then, when nobody knows him from Adam? What if I slipped him past the editors and –’

  ‘Hang on. How exactly do you “slip” something past an editor? I’ve been trying it all my life. It doesn’t work.’

  ‘This is what I’m saying. Shut up and listen. Your book had no heat on it. I’m saying you need heat on it from the start. Before it gets to them.’

  ‘You want to market some patsy all the way to the top?’

  ‘I want to try.’

  ‘Of course, he’d have to be no good at all.’

  ‘Exactly. Because that way it’d all be me.’

  ‘An Ern Malley for the age of spin.’

  ‘You think it’d work?’ Her eyes flashed wickedly.

  ‘I know it would. They’re doing it already. The industry thrives on overhyped shit. But what’s the payoff?’

  ‘Fifty per cent of everything he makes, forever.’

  ‘In exchange for what? Not blowing the whistle on him?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Where’s the fun in that, though?’ We were just talking. None of it had weight. But I wanted to make the scene last. ‘You need to think bigger. Hype him all the way to the Nobel, then blow the lid off the whole thing. Step out from the wings and end the pageant, like Prospero. Rain down shame on the whole industry. That’s a payoff.’

  ‘I prefer the payoff where I get paid,’ she said, ‘and it’s my plan.’

  ‘Of course, you’ll need a critic to whip the top for you. An inside man.’

  ‘Oh will I?’

  ‘Absolutely. A known hard man who’s willing to call your Oswald a genius.’