Get Poor Slow Page 8

  I remember walking up her driveway with the sun still rising. Her red car was there. And a rolled-up newspaper on the cement, with my Vagg review curled inside like an evil fetus. And her front door standing wide open. I remember walking up her carpeted hallway. I remember seeing the corner post of her bed, and then her bare foot. I remember thinking she was asleep. I remember bracing myself to see somebody next to her, maybe even Vagg. At the time, that was the worst thing I could imagine. And then the blood, that supernova of drying slime on the bed and the walls and her. The smell of it in my mouth. And then the irreversible error of looking at her face. Her eyes both open, the look in them like a scream you couldn’t hear. There was nothing fake about that look. She had died looking at a man from hell.

  I was shaking and almost out the door when I remembered the cash. I made myself go back and look for it. Let’s assume I was in shock. I waded back in against the tide, back up the hall, back into her room. I looked everywhere, within reason. I went as close to her torn body as I dared. The money was gone, if it had ever been there.

  I remember the drive home. I remember saying aloud: what did you touch in there? Did you touch the doorknob? Did you leave prints? I looked at my hands and there was no blood on them. I remember getting home and heading straight for the shower. I remember flinching when the water hit my ribs. It wasn’t just the pain. It was what the pain meant. I looked down. There were two bites on my chest now, not one. The second bite was savagely fresh. Blood still drooled from its deeper notches. I had no memory of how it had got there: only fear.

  I remember thinking: Your life is about to change.

  3

  Flashback over. We are back in the present tense. My curtains are shut. The couch she sat on for an hour has never been sat on since, except by me. My ribcage still has those bites on it. You’d think they’d be gone by now, but I heal slowly these days. Also they were not trivial wounds. One of them still looks a day fresher than the other, and makes me flinch harder when I touch it. And the teeth marks look similar, flagrantly similar. No, not similar: the same. I am no dentist, but I have eyes. Ted Lewin, for all his rigour, has never asked me to remove my shirt. If he ever does, I’ll have yet another thing to explain, and even I won’t really know if I’m lying about it. Somebody bit me in the middle of that final night. If it wasn’t her, we are dealing with a large coincidence. If it was, we are dealing with a tragedy. It would mean I was with her one last time and have lost the whole memory. And if I can forget that, I can forget anything.

  There are things on my floor that have been there since she was alive. The glass she drank from is right where she left it on the table. It’s not that I want to preserve the scene. It’s that I can’t muster the will or energy to clean it up. I can no longer see the point of doing things like that. I only knew her for two days, but her death tore something vital from me. The hook of her went deep into my gut, and it came out festooned with my organs. I hate the world because she’s not in it. If it wasn’t for the people down at my gate, I would no longer shave or shower. I would let myself look the way I feel. But that might give them the right idea, and we can’t have that. I have stopped hoping that they will all just leave one day out of boredom. They will stay until something drastic occurs, something terminal. They’re dug in now. They’re in this too deep. We all are.

  When Lewin called me in for my first interview, I thought we were doing something routine. I assumed I was in minor trouble, and believed I could ride it out. I thought he’d lose interest in me pretty fast. After all, I didn’t kill her. Why would I? It was Vagg. It must have been. I thought Lewin would work that out by himself, given time. So I sat through the early turbulence and waited for him to do his job. I waited for the Detective Inspector to detect and inspect. I waited for Vagg’s name to bob up in the news, like a corpse riding its gases to the top of a lake. Two weeks later, I’m still waiting. The only corpse floating in the newspapers is mine.

  Of course I can always throw Vagg to Lewin myself, if I have to. But I don’t see how it can be done without sketching in the context: her and me, the rigged review, the ten grand. I’ll need to be in a very tight corner before I give up all that. My literary reputation is all I have left. It’s a small thing, but my own. But it will go on the bonfire with the rest of me, if the stuff about Vagg ever gets out. I was ready to risk my literary honour when I could get her in return – her and Vagg’s fat ransom. But she’s off the table forever now, and I never did get that fucking cash. I’m back to having nothing but a name, and I’d like to keep what’s left of it. If I give up Vagg so I can get on with the rest of my life, I’ll have no rest of my life to get on with.

  So every day I throw one more chip on the original gamble. I bet that I’ll get out of this unarrested, with my professional name unsmeared. I wait for Lewin to find his own way to Vagg. But he keeps not doing that. And the longer he takes, the guiltier I look; and the guiltier I look, the less reason he has to look anywhere else. Each time I re-enter his room, I am forced to bury myself deeper in lies. The lies started small, and some of them had a bit of dignity; but there was only one way they could go from there. Why was my address in her notebook? Because she wrote me a letter once. What kind of letter? A fan letter, saluting my criticism. (Two lies in, and already we had veered grievously off the fairway of plausibility.) What became of this letter? You improvise, and you get stuck with your improvisations for good. Did she ever come to your house? You have to say yes, in case somebody saw her car. When? Again you can’t lie, as much as you want to. So you tell the truth, even though it puts you with her, alone, in blazing proximity to her death. What brought her to your place? Why did she drive all that way? Here the truth must be shunned, spurned, strenuously not told. But what is the alternative to the truth? Only everything else. You can say anything you want, when your only aim is to erase what actually happened. That sounds a bit like freedom. But when you are not free to tell the truth, you are not free at all. You are a man who may breathe anything he likes except oxygen, a man with an all-you-can-eat pass to a smorgasbord of rotten meat. Out in the land of the lie, the only alternative to the bad option is the worse one. There are lies so atrocious that they will finish you on the spot. There are lies you will have to repeat and defend forever, even though you know, right from the start, that they do not rank with your finest work. There are lies whose leaking hulls will have to be plugged and patched, every time you retell them, with increasingly slapdash sub-lies. But you get no time to think ahead, when Ted Lewin is watching you. You get no time to think about quality. You have to pick your lies fast. And the machines will be watching you too, with their flawless memories, the fact-checkers you can’t argue with: the networks and the servers, the unsleeping narcs and snitches who hide out in the circuitry of your phone. Lewin troubles me, but he doesn’t scare me. Not much does. But the computers do. They have every power of God – plus they exist. And they are everywhere. In the whole of human history, the liar has never had it so bad. If you knew her for innocent reasons, why do the records not show it? Why did you send each other no emails? How come she never called or texted you? Why is your hard drive so mute about the matter? Why did your lone call to her happen in the dead of night? You get fuck-all wriggle room, in the age of the machine. You are strapped into an eternal polygraph. Even when you die, you won’t be free of it. You see why people finally give up and call for the biro, in rooms like Lewin’s. And you see why they look so happy when they do – why their bodies sag with relief as if freed from the jaws of a vice. Truth has an awesome gravity. Resisting its pull is savage work. Even I must submit to its tug now and then, and feed Lewin a tactical nugget of non-fiction. If I hadn’t done that pretty regularly, I’d have been finished long ago. But my fund of non-incriminating facts wasn’t all that bounteous to start with, and I am running out of scraps to throw him. Each week I get closer to bedrock – closer to the point where there’s nothing left that I know that he doesn’t, except for
the things about Vagg. Soon the moment will come when I have nothing left to say except everything: the whole truth. Will I know that moment when I see it? If Lewin arrests me, if he puts me in a cell I can’t leave, will that be the moment to bite down on the cyanide? Probably, but I won’t know for sure until it happens.

  And what if Vagg didn’t do it? That doesn’t bear thinking about. He did it. He must have. And each night he sits there in that big old house of his on the harbour, watching me burn. I’m starting to think it’s time he got some of the heat. If Lewin won’t turn it on him, maybe I’ll have to do it myself. Sometimes I think about paying him a visit. Not straight away, but soon. And what will I do there? Kill him? Squeeze him for cash? I don’t know yet. I have a hard time, these days, telling a good idea from a bad one. I have a hard time forming intentions. I have a bad tendency to let things drift, and they always seem to drift the wrong way. Last night I looked up Vagg’s address. There’s a website that tells you the way to the homes of the stars, and Vagg made the cut. I planned a route. While I was at it, I checked how easy it is to buy a gun. It’s not as easy as you’d think. I don’t know how seriously I take these notions. All I know is that something has to change. Not straight away, but soon.

  Tomorrow I’m due back in Lewin’s little room.

  *

  It didn’t go well. Or maybe it did, in that he let me leave at the end of it. Maybe that’s the best I can hope for now: not getting locked up, one day at a time. I am never at my best in Lewin’s room, either morally or verbally. But the tapes are always rolling to preserve my words. My output is in demand, for once. The things I say in there are more keenly awaited, more eagerly perused and reread, than any sentence I have ever vainly aimed at posterity. Do digital tapes roll? Are they even tapes? My metaphors are behind the times. I no longer know how the world around me works. When did I get so old? One day I was twenty, and the next I was halfway to death.

  ‘There’s one thing I haven’t told you,’ I informed him this morning, straight off the bat. I wanted to seem transparent from the outset today. I wanted to start on the front foot and stay there. ‘Your witness is right. I did go in the house that morning. When I got there, the door was wide open. I went in. I saw her body.’

  ‘And?’ said Lewin. And? The man always wants more. There’s nothing about his room I don’t hate now: the cold artificial light, the clean edgeless surfaces, the toneless conditioned air. Bad things happen to you in rooms like this. You get told you have cancer. You arrange to bury your dead. Other people arrange to bury you.

  ‘And she was dead. She was naked. There was a lot of blood. I didn’t stick around to see anything else. I was in and out in thirty seconds.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say this before?’

  ‘Because I knew how it’d look.’

  ‘And how do you think it looks now?’

  ‘Worse, but that was the gamble.’

  Yet again I’d let him down. His tactic at such moments is just to sit there, and let silence italicise your blunder. Arthritis has warped his fingers into tortured shapes. They look like bits of driftwood. He smells of cigarettes. I looked at his grey chest hair, curling from the throat of his short-sleeved saffron shirt. I looked at his one bad eye and his one good one. Lewin is a decent man, and he deserves a more respectable foe than me. He deserves an old-school meat-and-potatoes villain. Instead he’s got me: a lone-wolf writer, steeped in iffiness and private murk. It isn’t just self-interest that makes me withhold the Vagg stuff from him. I also have a tender urge not to expose him to the depravities of the literary world. I don’t want to drag him into that swamp, with its grifters and grafters, its hucksters and hustlers, its Falstaffian liars and frauds, the people who buy your soul and never even pay you for it. In that milieu I qualify as one of the good guys.

  ‘Did you touch the body?’ he asked me.

  ‘“The body”? Her body? No.’

  ‘Why didn’t you call the police?’

  ‘Maybe I feared I’d wind up in a room like this, trying to answer questions like that. With someone looking at me the way you are right now.’

  ‘If you’d made the call, I wouldn’t be asking the question.’

  ‘I’m sure you’d think of another one.’

  ‘Were you with her that night, Ray?’

  ‘There you go. No, I was not with her that night. As I believe I have told you.’

  ‘Let’s say we’ve got proof you were.’

  ‘I’d say that’s impossible.’

  ‘Let’s say your DNA was on her.’

  The room hummed. A wave of ice broke over my thighs and rode its way to the summit of my spine. ‘I’d say it must be old DNA,’ I heard myself saying. ‘I was with her earlier that week. As you know.’

  ‘No.’ His voice went gruff. ‘This – the stuff I’m talking about was new. It puts you with her the night she died.’

  A pair of reading glasses hung round his neck on a black cord. He put them on his nose now, just to have something to do. The DNA talk made him uneasy. So how did he think it made me feel? If I could leave my genes on her and not remember it, my life was very close to not worth living. But suddenly I recalled something, or thought I did. I saw her stretched out on her bed, alive. Her flesh was smooth and plump and intact. All her blood was still inside her. She was smiling at me and saying something I couldn’t quite hear. It felt like a real memory, but what do false memories feel like? I waited for more. It didn’t arrive. Meanwhile the sound of me saying nothing stretched and deepened.

  I said, ‘Okay. I think I was probably there.’

  ‘Probably?’

  ‘I forget things, Ted. You know that.’ Eye contact was mandatory here. ‘I’m missing a big chunk of that night. But if the DNA says I was with her, I was with her. I’ll take the DNA’s word for it.’

  ‘You’ve told me you don’t forget the big things.’

  ‘I lied about that. I assume you can see why.’

  Was it Vagg time yet? Was it ripcord time? We were close. We were very close.

  ‘My head lets me down. It’s not normal. I’m well aware of that.’

  He watched me over his frames, silently.

  ‘We’re at the nub of this now,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah.’ He breathed heavily through his nose. ‘I think we are.’

  ‘I forget things. That alarms me as much as it alarms you, I can assure you. But it doesn’t make me a murderer.’

  He let that one drift and rot in the silence, then get slowly swallowed by the frigid hum of the machines. After a while I said, ‘That’s when I must have left my fingerprints, too. The night she died. I told you I was there a few nights earlier. I told you my prints got left there then. That was untrue. That visit did not happen. If I was ever there at all – and clearly I was, I must have been – it was on the night she died. So: I lied about that too. Again I assume you can see why.’

  But I was pushing it on the assumptions now, as well as on everything else. I was gravely testing the bounds of Lewin’s tolerance for nuance. We were well outside the pale of normal innocence now, way out into the badlands that lie just this side of guilt. What I really needed here, instead of a cop, was a reader of literature, if there were any of them left. I needed a fan of Charles Bukowski, a lover of Henry Miller. I needed someone with a fine feel for the gradations of degeneracy: someone who knew just how much of a scumbag a man can be without being a murderer. Lewin, in this crude binary room, had almost entirely ceased to be my man. The way he looked at me, now I was telling the truth, made me wish I was still lying. He looked disappointed: which meant, by a normal man’s standards, that he was appalled. On top of that he looked puzzled, thrown by the sheer weirdness of my output: that strange brew of bad lies, bad truths, and bad memory. He looked like a Grandmaster playing a psychotic. His confusion was unprecedented. And maybe it was the one thing still keeping me out of cuffs
.

  ‘You just told me – a minute ago you said you drove to the house the next morning,’ he said. ‘The front door was open. You walked in and found the body. So – that was a lie too?’

  ‘No.’ I steeled myself. Things were about to get weirder. ‘That happened. I think I was there twice. I think I went away and came back.’

  He waited.

  ‘Stay with me on this, Ted. This is the truth. Maybe you’ll see why I kept it to myself. I remember being in the car that night. I remember wanting to see her, and I remember heading there, but I don’t remember getting there or being there. You’re telling me I made it. You’re saying I left some DNA. That doesn’t shock me. I’ve always suspected it. I’m appalled that I don’t remember it, but we’re not here to talk about my feelings. The point is I was there – for a while. But I left. I took off when it was still dark. Don’t ask me why. I wish I remembered, but I don’t. Here’s what I do remember. When the sun came up I was driving back there. You know the rest. It was light when I got there: true. The door was wide open: true. She was already dead: true. All true.’

  I thought about lifting my shirt to show him where she bit me. Why not, since he knew everything else? But I still have this stubborn old-school urge to keep a few things to myself.

  ‘Why would you turn around and go back?’ Lewin said.

  ‘Good question. Maybe she gave me a call on the road. Did she? You seem to know more about that night than I do.’

  His face revealed nothing. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘would you have left in the first place?’

  ‘I’ve thought about that too. Want me to speculate?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I think she was expecting someone else.’ Maybe I threw that out too hastily, too crudely. But I have started to think that subtlety is about as useful as prayer.

  ‘A boyfriend?’

  ‘If I had to guess, I’d say it was something to do with her job.’