Get Poor Slow Page 6

  ‘Someone like Barrett Lodge?’ she impudently said.

  ‘Think about it. It’d be you and me against the literary world. Until now it’s been just me. That was much less fun.’

  ‘Well you’re not getting your hands on my fifty per cent,’ she said.

  ‘Jade, I feel like I made you up.’ I cradled her diabolical skull in my fingers. ‘At long last, a girl with a mind as nasty as mine. You think like me but you look like you.’

  ‘If you made me up,’ she said, ‘would I do this?’

  She dipped her face but preserved eye contact. Her mouth moved down my body. When it came to my lowest rib, she bit me harder than I have ever been bitten in my life. Her teeth went in and stayed in. The pain was stunning. Instinctively I raised a hand to hit her. I didn’t go through with it, but I came close. That startled me more than the pain. She saw me do it, but was laughing too hard to care. It fleetingly crossed my mind that she was nuts. Then I went back to thinking she was the sanest person I’d ever met. A ring of blood-beads seeped up from under my skin, then sat on its surface like crimson dew. No, I didn’t make her up. Thirteen days later, the fading proof of her is still there on my belly. When I press on the welt I get a jolt of pain that sends a blast of white light across my vision. I have had plenty of time to wonder, since her death, if the man who put those bites on her thigh gave her the taste for doing it herself. Or maybe he got the habit from her. For some reason I like that idea less.

  ‘Did you do that to change the subject?’ I asked her.

  ‘You’re the one who keeps changing the subject.’

  ‘So we’ve stopped talking about your thing.’

  ‘That’s not real. Forget about it.’

  ‘I don’t think you should. I wouldn’t want the Vagg thing to be our swan song.’

  ‘So you’re going to do it?’

  ‘I was until you bit me.’

  She smiled. She dipped her head again and licked the blood off me. Her feathery hair fanned out over my chest. She looked like drowned Ophelia, spread wide on the water.

  I said, ‘Nobody else knows about it?’

  ‘Just you, me, and him.’ She brought her face back up.

  ‘Has he given you the money yet?’

  ‘Of course not. But he’s ready to, if you say yes. In cash.’

  ‘Has he gone back to robbing banks?’

  ‘These days he doesn’t need to.’

  ‘Up front?’

  ‘If you say yes.’

  ‘And if I say no?’

  ‘I guess our lives will just keep going the way they’re going.’

  Her tone made it clear who would be the loser out of that. Also she made it sound as if my life and hers were still separate things. Even then I’d started thinking they shouldn’t be. I’d known her for about two hours, and already she had the power to scare me.

  ‘It won’t be easy,’ I said. ‘The people who read me have an ear. There aren’t many of them, but they have an ear. They’ll know something’s up.’

  ‘Maybe they’ll suspect it, but they’ll never actually know. Not if you do it cleverly enough.’

  ‘What if we ask him for more?’

  That she wasn’t ready for. ‘How much more?’

  ‘What if we ask him to double it?’

  ‘You just said he was nuts to pay fifteen.’

  ‘He is. But if he’s nuts enough to pay fifteen, maybe he’s nuts enough to pay thirty.’

  ‘I could try. But if he says no, you’ll still do it?’

  ‘Relax. I’ll do it either way. I’m just saying, let’s squeeze him first. Let’s shake the old spiv down and see what happens.’

  ‘So you’re not a saint after all?’

  I’ve heard all the bad jokes about my name. There are no good ones. But on her lips, many an old thing seemed new again.

  ‘Not by a long chalk,’ I said.

  She put her mouth on my chest again, and licked at that ring of blood. We were getting back to the part where speech no longer mattered.

  ‘And remember,’ I said, before we left the world of words altogether. ‘If you ever do that other thing, I want you to count me in.’

  *

  There was a hitch. Maybe it was a small hitch or maybe it was a very large one. Either way, I didn’t think she had to know about it. The hitch was this. I had reviewed Vagg’s book already. Two nights earlier, two nights pre-Jade, I had fired off my thousand words to Skeats. And they weren’t pretty. I’d forgotten most of the details, but I retained a vivid sense of the gist. It had been a massacre, an orgy of candour. Why not? Back then, I’d had no reason to lie. Vagg’s book was shit and I had said so. I had called his fame a literate person’s nightmare, or something like that. I had spoken of the decline and fall of Western culture, hinting that Vagg was largely to blame for it. Perhaps I had ventured a gibe or two about his criminal past. When a man’s book gives me that much of a headache, I feel professionally bound to give him a larger headache back. And now the headache looked like being mine again. If Vagg paid fifteen grand in advance and got that review in return, he’d come looking for a refund at the very least. If he laid down thirty he might bring along his pit bull.

  That lie cast its cold shadow over us, then, as we lay there twined on the bed. While she nibbled at my body, the truth kept nibbling at my mind. Thinking about it made it difficult, although not impossible, to savour what we were up to. I doubted the problem was fatal. To fix it, all I had to do was move faster than Skeats. History did not indicate that this would be hard. My stuff had never taken less than two weeks to limp from submission into print. Sometimes it took two months. Skeats was a slow-burn man. He liked to maim my prose at his leisure, like a torturer pulling teeth – yanking a comma here, crippling a joke there. It took him time to think of all the ways he could make each sentence worse. So there was, I felt, no call to panic. Probably he hadn’t opened the document yet. I was pretty sure, come to think of it, that he hadn’t even acknowledged receipt. All the signs said I was safe.

  Still, the fuse to disaster had been lit, and I itched to hit the laptop and hose it down. So when I asked her to stay the night I didn’t mean it, and she could tell I didn’t mean it, and she was meant to. I regretted it even then, but I thought I could fix it later on, like everything else. I repeat: I thought there would be other days. For the moment, what I craved was an hour or two alone to put things right. After that we could reunite and enjoy a long unvexed future together, beneath a sky unclouded by secrets. So I let her go. I didn’t drop to my knees and sink all ten fingernails into her rump and bury my face in the front of her and beg her in a flesh-muffled voice to stay. I let her go. I wanted her to go. I watched her tail-lights swing out of my driveway and I was glad. Was I mad then or am I mad now?

  Immediately I emailed Skeats. I told him I’d reread Vagg’s book and acquired some second thoughts. I told him to spike my first review without reading it. I told him to expect a replacement soon, very soon. I uncapped the bottle beside the laptop and didn’t bother with a glass. And I got to work. I began by calling Vagg a stylist. Once I’d said that without dying of shame, anything seemed possible. I upped the ante: I called him an innovator. Again I waited for the outraged God of Letters to strike me down. Again it didn’t happen. (Had Skeats replied to my email yet? No, he had not.) On a roll, I called Vagg a good old-fashioned storyteller. If he wasn’t one, let somebody else prove it. And who was going to try? Vagg himself? The people who sold his books? The people who bought them? After a while the grog splashed into action, and I really went to town. Surfing a huge foaming wave of booze and bullshit, I gave the old hack his money shot. I called him a master craftsman. I called his stuff history as literature. Or maybe I called it literature as history. Or maybe I called it both. Again, who was going to object? People like me? I’m the only person like me left, and even I don’t give a shit
any more.

  It must have been about two in the morning when I dispatched the finished product to Skeats. Even at the time I could hardly remember what it said. All I knew was that it was a masterpiece of venality. When you don’t mean a word you say, writing becomes the easiest thing in the world. Maybe I should have done it that way all along. No wonder Barrett Lodge was so prolific. I pictured a lucrative new future: perjuring my way to fame and fortune. I drank to it copiously. I wondered if I’d taken my nightly dose of pills. I thought I had, but couldn’t remember for sure. That meant I’d better dose myself again just in case. A double dose can put you on the canvas for a long time, but no dose at all will bring on the apocalypse. Anyway, maybe I wanted to be on the canvas for a while. I already had a sense of what I’d feel like when I woke up, and I was in no hurry to feel like it. A triple dose then? Why not? Why not? So I abused a final pill, then resolved to hit the sack for my own safety. Had Golden Boy replied to that email yet – to any of my emails? No. Did that mean he hadn’t seen them? Not necessarily. It was three in the morning, but mediocrity never sleeps. I shut the laptop down. On the floor beside the bed I found her black panties. I was drunk enough to assume she’d left them behind by accident. I still thought she was the kind of girl who made mistakes. I took them to bed and considered disgracing myself with them. It would be a fine note for the evening to end on. But it wasn’t going to happen. I was sinking away from consciousness too fast. At least I had them in my hand, though. I had clutched that much of her before she melted away.

  One night I’ll take so many pills that I will stay down on the canvas for good, and people – a few people – will have to wonder if I did it on purpose or by accident. What they won’t understand is that the distinction no longer applies, once pain’s claws are in you deep enough. You just want it gone. If you happen to blow yourself out of the water too, so what? I’ve had nights when the risk seemed more than acceptable. So far I’ve always woken up the next day. But never waking up again has something to be said for it, when waking up feels the way it does to me.

  I came around on what I thought was the next morning. The clock beside the bed said five-fifteen. By the time it said five-thirty I’d worked out that the sun was going down, not coming up. I had slept through the lion’s share of her last day on the planet. I’d been dreaming there was an axe buried so deep in the core of my skull that nobody could get it out. Some fat bearded lumberjack kept trying. For leverage he’d planted the sole of a hefty boot on my face. I kept telling him to go away and let me die.

  I staggered out into the yard and howled at the grass for a while. When that was done I went back inside and tried lying on the couch. I gave up on that fast. There was nothing I could put my head on that didn’t feel like a sack of razors. So I got myself roughly upright and didn’t move and just sat there like someone’s dumped outfit for a while. I was still slumped there when the details of the Vagg mess came back to me. I groaned. There was nothing I wanted to think about less. I looked across at my open laptop. If Skeats had emailed me while I slept, I needed to know about it. If he hadn’t, I needed to know that even more. I looked at the acre of floor between me and the keyboard. I resolved to make the crossing soon, if necessary on my hands and knees. In the end I got there on foot. I woke the laptop up. Its buzzings and machine noises jackhammered my tender skull. When it had settled itself down I pulled up my emails. They looked all blurred, as if submerged in seawater. I knew from long experience that there was no point trying to focus my eyes. It wouldn’t work, and it would hurt a lot. I saw through the haze that there was something from Skeats, sent at ten-thirteen this morning. It was entitled RE: Revised Vagg. So he had replied, and in reasonable time too. I thought: I will take two seconds to confirm that the problem is solved, then I will celebrate by getting back to dying.

  But when I opened his message, all I saw was a white blur. Was I really that blind? I squinted. Still nothing. I scrolled down: there was my original message, with the revised Vagg file properly attached. I scrolled back up. Skeats’s half of the window was empty. The raging imbecile had outdone himself. He’d sent me a blank reply.

  For a long while I just stared at it, the way the owner of a stolen car will stare at his empty garage. Finally I rallied and sent him a new message. It said: So you got my Vagg rewrite? You’ll scrap the first one and run the second one?

  Back on the couch, I tried to convince myself that not even Skeats could evade or misunderstand that. I have spent a third of my life repeating myself for the benefit of fools. While waiting on his reply I took a jolt from last night’s bottle. I felt more than entitled to one. Hadn’t I earned my cut already, for Christ’s sake? Hadn’t I done enough? I had sold my soul, which should have been the hardest part. I had reviewed Vagg’s dismal book twice. I had told the most fantastic lies about it. I had let go of the idea that anything I said mattered. And here I was doing it all again, or still, or even more. I was on bribe-and-a-half time now, the way I saw it. I had a good mind to charge Vagg a vig.

  My email chime went off.

  I told myself it couldn’t possibly be Skeats yet.

  I went over and checked anyway.

  It wasn’t him. It was a piece of junk mail.

  I went back to the couch. Maybe a bit of time passed here. Maybe I drank a bit more. I kept thinking about that blank email. Could anyone, even Skeats, send a wordless email by accident? Then again, why would he do it on purpose? To buy time? Time for what? Either he’d slipped up or he was fucking with me. It was hard to say which thing was more likely. He was a master of both forms.

  My mail chime sounded again. I went weakly to the machine. This time it was him. He had replied to my latest email. His reply consisted of one word. The word was Yep.

  Why did that fail to reassure me? Because I knew who I was dealing with. Christ, my head ached too much for this. I scrolled back to my own message, reread it, and hated myself for writing it. I had asked him two questions in one email – a cardinal error. If Skeats was anybody else, you could safely assume he was saying yes to both of them. But he wasn’t, so you couldn’t. Maybe he had read no further than the first question, and was answering only that. Maybe he was answering just the second one, because the first one had already slipped his mind. Skeats was an incredibly busy and important man. His one-word replies were meant to remind you of that. They were meant to save time. Instead they wasted it. Mainly they wasted yours. But you could make them waste his as well, if you felt like pressing the point.

  This time I had to. I had to pin the slapdash fucker down. I was starting to feel distinctly messed with. I looked around for my mobile phone. Finding it through the saline haze took time. Finding his number on it took more. I called it. He didn’t answer. That was a worry. His phone was never far away from him. I got his voicemail. I told him to ring me back.

  Five minutes later he still hadn’t. I tried him again and got the same result. I felt a pang of fear or prescience. I was starting to comprehend how much I wanted Vagg’s money. I wanted it a lot. I sent Skeats a text. Call me. I waited, but not for long. I called him again. Again he didn’t answer. That clinched it. Either he was dead or he was avoiding me. I was beyond uneasy now. I ditched the mobile and went over to the landline, wondering why I hadn’t tried it in the first place. The landline was clean, as far as I knew. It wasn’t lumbered with the stink of my ID. I waited three long minutes so he wouldn’t guess it was me. Then I dialled his number. He picked up straight away.

  ‘Raymond!’ he said heartily, when I told him who it was. If this was his impression of a man who was happy to hear my voice, it needed work.

  ‘You got my email?’ I said.

  ‘Mate,’ he said, ‘can I call you back?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Frankly, this isn’t a great time.’

  When a man like Skeats uses the word frankly, brace yourself for a deluge of lies. ‘This won’t take long,’ I said. ‘
I want you to confirm that you got my Vagg rewrite.’

  ‘Ye-aah.’ He hesitated so long in the middle of that word that he almost stopped saying it. You could hear him wishing he’d started saying something else instead, like ‘no’. We were five seconds into the call and already we were chest-deep in bullshit. Something was going on, all right.

  ‘You sound unsure,’ I said.

  ‘No, I got it. The second one, you mean?’

  ‘Yes, I do mean that. That’s why I said rewrite. Is there a problem?’

  ‘Not really. It’s just that it came a bit late.’

  ‘A bit late for what?’

  ‘A bit late to do any tinkering.’

  ‘Tinkering? I’m not asking you to tinker. I want you to scrap the first piece and use the second one.’

  ‘Ah. Well that is a problem.’

  ‘In what sense?’

  ‘The deadline’s been and gone, mate.’

  Deadline. Is there a nastier word in the language? The cold steel of it touched the base of my balls like the blade of a scalpel.

  ‘What deadline?’

  ‘Tomorrow’s deadline.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’ I gave myself a moment. How drunk was I? ‘Hang on. I’m talking about something I sent you three days ago. You can’t tell me that’s running tomorrow.’

  ‘Why not? It is.’

  ‘Pull it. I’ve changed my mind.’

  ‘It’s a bit late for that, Ray. You’ve missed the boat.’

  ‘Three days? You never turn things around that fast.’

  ‘Not normally, true. But a couple of people fucked me on their deadlines, including Barrett. Luckily I had your Vagg thing to throw into the breach.’

  ‘When the fuck,’ I asked him, ‘were you planning to tell me this?’

  ‘Check your email,’ Skeats said. ‘I sent you something this morning.’

  ‘That was blank, and I think you know it.’

  ‘Blank? No shit?’