He walked some more. He tried to kill time. It kept not dying. He thought about Trixie and Tara. He believed they were out of his life now. He believed they must have fled the house on the morning of the Durack incident, as he had. He believed the sight of massed police vehicles in the street had filled them with a desire to be elsewhere. And now, with Streetwise’s corpse gone, with their rent-free lodgings seized and sealed off, with their personal effects impounded by one of the most flawed police probes in living memory, they had nothing to come back for any more. There was nothing left to tie them down. And no doubt being missing and presumed dead agreed with them. No doubt it suited their gypsy lifestyle, their corpse-like work ethic. Yes, he felt certain that they were gone now, and were never coming back.
He went and bought some lunch. He tried to eat it. He largely failed. Leaving the refectory, he got bumped into by an odd-looking young man dressed in a safari suit and dark glasses. Briefly this strange little fellow rested his small white hand on Fenton’s chest; and then was gone.
He walked around campus some more. He returned to the library, and tried again to read. Before long he became aware of an anomalous presence in his breast pocket. He pulled it out. It was a folded-up letter, manually typewritten, three stapled pages long. It had the appearance of a circular, a Christmas bulletin, the typeface dulled by several generations of photocopying. Additional material, handwritten in fresh blue biro, identified the author as Pamela Scratch. Fenton recalled the boy in the safari suit: that strangely androgynous little guy who had bumped into him so weirdly, touching his chest with that tiny white hand.
Dear 
,
This is a letter from the margins, a bulletin from the void. Out here in the mute zone of my exile I drift like a ghost, alive and yet not alive. But what is the condition of Woman anyway – if not a state of permanent exile, a death in life. A voiceless drifting under a lifelong injunction to remain Silent! And who is Neville Claude Aggot: if not Man himself, the logic of white western maleness carried to its logical terminus! Yes, he is every man you pass on the street, stripped of his briefcase and three-piece suit, relieved of the crushing burden of keeping his true desires hidden!
I regret nothing. Those who snigger at my plight like schoolchildren, they embarrass themselves. They disgrace themselves. They miss the true point of this whole affair. For they are blind to the crucial difference between the real Neville Claude Aggot, and "Neville Claude Aggot" the media construction – this 2-dimensional monster created by our TV sets, by the opportunistic hussars of our adversarial "justice" system, by our scaremongering politicians.
From day one, SNARBY has implored the public to look beyond this simplistic construct – to recognise, and to love, the real human being who has lived and suffered behind it. Neville the beaten child. Neville the victim of years of systematic abuse.
The man who invaded my home and fouled my personal belongings was NOT the real Neville Claude Aggot! He was not the Neville Claude Aggot I knew and campaigned for. Indeed, at the very moment he kicked down my front door, the true Neville Aggot ceased to exist. At that moment, Neville Aggot became his media image. He had stared too long into the abyss of his TV: and finally he surrendered, he succumbed, he finally became what they wanted him to be – what they had been telling him for years he really was! Neville the "knife-wielding maniac." Neville the "twisted predator." The sexist fugitive. The hoarder and slasher of female undergarments. The phallocentric masturbator-at-large.
As far as I am concerned, the real Neville Claude Aggot is dead now. He has drowned in the data stream. The seductive power of the media image. Isn’t that the true evil here? Isn’t that the monster we should all be fearing? Isn’t that the crime we should all be denouncing, and putting on trial?
But instead we chase shadows.
Yes, the real Neville Aggot is dead. And I mourn that. I mourn his loss. And I restate, without a second’s hesitation, my unswerving dedication to the ideals he represented.
But as for the new Neville Aggot, this bastard child of the information age … For him, I have nothing but sad contempt.
So: to all those who have stuck by me, and sent out messages of solidarity, and sweetened my plight with vibes of goodwill, my profound thanks. May the years bring you love, and the peace which passes understanding.
To those who haven’t, fuck you all.
For me, the rest is silence. And who is to know how much longer it will last? I could be anywhere now. I could be anyone, wearing anything. My disguises are various – they invert cultural norms, they transgress gender boundaries. I could be that hobbling old lady in the distance, that diminutive "bloke" beside you at the urinal, that genderless figure in the motorbike helmet, the sideburned young dude in the stetson hat.
Walking past you in a silence I didn’t choose, alive but not alive, absent but not dead.
I could be anywhere.
I could be you.
Peace,
Pamela Scratch.
And then this handwritten postscript, just for Fenton:
Well Fenton – have you worked it out yet? Have you figured out the truth? Here it is, you idiot. I love you. I’ve loved you since we were 5. The fact that you never figured this out for yourself is the final tribute to your massive self-involvement! WHY ELSE do you think someone like me would keep wanting to have coffee with someone like you? For your "rapier wit"? For the "trenchancy" of your political insights?
Don’t get me wrong, Fenton. Loving a person like you is not something I enjoy. Don’t flatter yourself. In fact, for a long time I’ve hated myself for it. But these last few days have given me ample time to think. To reassess. To "come to terms." And I now accept this ludicrous passion as an essential part of who Pamela Scratch is. The gaping chink in my armour. My one fatal flaw. "Mother" Nature’s little joke on me! In the end, you just have to laugh.
So: what do I "want" from you? That’s what you’re asking by now, isn’t it? I know you well enough to know that. Well, the answer is … nothing. Nothing. I don’t want you "inside" me or anything. I’m not that naive. I don’t want to "settle down" with you and have 2.4 of your kids. Again, don’t flatter yourself. I just want this, Fenton. I want you to know. I want you to know, and I want you to squirm. Because I have been watching you, Fenton. I have been watching you all along, much closer than you could have feared! And I know who you are. I know exactly who you are. You have got away with none of it. Your childish ploys to push me away. Your asinine attempts to pretend we were never friends. I have witnessed them all. I have stored them all away. Like when I went to the toilet in the coffee shop that time and you just walked out! Did you honestly think I wouldn’t notice that? Did you honestly think I’d believe that was a "mistake" on your part, some kind of innocent misunderstanding that the coffee was over? Or that night at your house when you actually pretended to push something heavy against your front door! Did you think I missed that too? Did you think I somehow failed to perceive on my way out the door that there was nothing in front of it! Yes, Fenton, you actually stood there in the darkness pretending to shove something really heavy across the floor, didn’t you? Ask yourself, Fenton – what sort of person does things like that? What can you say about a person who would stoop to that?
So Fenton, that’s my message. I know you. I know you as well as you know yourself. I can see right through you.
And you have got away with none of it.
And by the way, I want my fucking hat back.
And then her scrawled initials, P.S., seeming to promise an afterword that never came.
So Pamela Scratch loved him. How icky.
“Well?”
And now it was two o’clock, and here she was. Her, Charmaine. And already he could see that it was going to be bad, very bad. He felt like a condemned man on his last day of life, working through a final checklist of things to do.
“Well?” she said again. “What do you want to see me for?”
“I don’t know. Just to see you. Again. Before …”
“Before what?”
“Before … I don’t know. Before you got the wrong impression of me. But I think I’m a little late there, aren’t I?”
She didn’t reply. She looked down at the table and started to scratch its surface. She watched herself doing it. She appeared to be steeling herself to say something terrible. He looked at the back of her hand and thought fairly seriously about laying his own hand on top of it. That way he would at least get to know what it felt like before he bowed out, the back of it, the veins and knuckles submerged beneath the skin like things in a rock pool. Would it feel cool or warm? But he knew already how she would respond to that, the way she would emphatically but not too rudely withdraw the hand from his grasp, firmly asserting her bodily rights and his lack of them. That he could do without.
“What you said on the phone,” she said finally, looking up at him. “The other night.”
He tried to smile, tried to raise his eyebrows in self-deprecation.
She said: “What exactly … What did you …”
“You don’t want me to say it again?” Still working at the attempted smile, still struggling to get it off the ground.
“I don’t know. I guess I just want the truth.”
“People always say that, don’t they?” He gave the doomed smile one last go. “But doesn’t it sort of depend on what the truth is?”
She answered with a silence that made the question sound more lame than in his view it really was. He looked at her stubborn and sullen face and tried to remember why he had thought it would be a good idea to see her now. He couldn’t for the life of him recall. If this was his last shot, his last chance to be saved, then he was finished. He was through.
He said: “All right. The truth. I love you. I’m in love with you. I never stop thinking about you. I’d give anything to have you. That’s why I joined the Maoists. That’s why all of this is happening. See?” he said, when he was done. “You looked so much happier back when I was lying.”
She said nothing. Her face expressed a desire to be at another table, any other table, sitting with pretty much anybody but him.
“I wish,” he said after an excruciating while, “you’d stop looking at me like that.”
“How am I supposed to look at you?”
“I’m sitting here telling you the whole world revolves around you. And you’re looking at me like …” He tried a little laugh, a friendly little guffaw to salvage the mood. “Like I’m confessing to a crime.”
She said, reddening: “I thought you were my friend.”
Well, she had him there, in a way. He could feel himself starting to hate her. He looked right into her face and said: “Dump him. He’s an idiot and you know it. He doesn’t deserve you. I do. Give me a chance. Please. I promise you won’t regret it.”
She looked down at one of her own chewed fingernails so she didn’t have to look back at him. “It doesn’t work that way,” she said.
“Doesn’t it work any way you want it to work?”
“Well maybe I don’t want it to work that way.”
“Well maybe you should,” he said.
Now she did look at him, and a look of semi-compassion came on to her face, as though she wished she could do something to help him – but something other, something infinitely less generous, than what he had in mind.
“Fenton,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
She got a lot into those two words. He heard the cold wind of eternity in them, the dead sound of a door closing forever. He felt his head and neck wilting forward, a craving in his face to lay itself flat on the table. It made it about halfway down there and then just halted, too weary to slump forward any further, too scared to straighten up again, just drooping there over the table as if in shame. He was mildly amazed that he wasn’t crying, but he had entered a territory well beyond tears.
“This is madness,” he said to the dull surface of the table. “Is there nothing I can say? Nothing? Is it really so inconceivable that I … that you and I could …”
She said: “You’ll find the right person one day.”
He pitied her, in a way, for thinking that might be a useful thing to say. Still addressing the table he said: “Have you honestly never thought of it? Of dumping him? Never? People do it every day. People move on. People … It’s not illegal. People do it. It happens to people a lot better than Gus.” Somewhere on the ransacked desk of his mind he had the proper speech ready, the one he’d always been going to make, the point-by-point enunciation of his watertight case. But where was it? And what was this shit he was stammering out instead? “If you’d just give me a chance. A day. An hour. Is there something I can do? Anything? Am I overlooking something? Tell me. Please. I’ll do whatever you want me to.”
“Fenton,” she said with a great effort. “I don’t even know you. I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you believe in.”
“What I believe in?” Incredulously he lifted his face.
“What you’re all about. What you think.”
“But surely you can see the irony in putting that question to me?”
She looked at him blankly.
“Gus,” he said. “Gus! What do you think Gus believes in?”
“Well at least he believes in something,” she said, a bit nastily.
“He believes in multiple murder!”
She did an exasperated thing with her face.
“Well, you want to know what I believe in,” he snapped. “There’s your answer. For the last six weeks this big fat fucking psycho has been trying to kill people and I’ve been trying like hell to stop him. I’m sorry you find the subject so tiresome. But doesn’t that give you an inkling of what I might believe in? Since you suddenly find that question so important?”
“What, that’s it, is it?” Her anger was spiking up to equal his now, maybe even to exceed it. “That’s what you believe in, is it? In not killing people. Gee, Fenton. I think most people believe in that.”
“Do they? You wouldn’t know it from where I’m sitting. Gus doesn’t. Col and Smithy don’t. Warren didn’t, till Gus made him blow off his own fingers. And I can’t say that you – I can’t say that your stance on it’s all that bloody clear.”
She sighed. “Can I go now, Fenton?”
“Okay,” he said, “I stand for you. I believe in you. How’s that? Is that enough?”
She looked at him sadly, as if he just didn’t know where to stop.
“Please,” he said, trying to introduce a note of sweet reason, a note of concession and conciliation that he privately felt to be far more than she deserved. “I’m doing my best here. I’m trying hard not to turn this into an argument. But you keep looking at me like, like I’m the bad guy. Which is a bit rough, don’t you think? It’s Gus who’s the terrorist. All I’m doing is pointing that out. You keep acting like that’s the bigger crime. I mean, be fair. I’ve already lost here. Do I have to be the villain as well?”
“And what makes you think you’re so much better than him?” she asked him, inevitably. He seemed to get this question a lot, these days. Streetwise, Aggot, Gus, Lego, Pamela Scratch – wasn’t there anyone he was self-evidently better than? Did he have to keep spelling it out?
“He’s a terrorist, for Christ’s sake. Everyone’s better than a terrorist. A lot better. If you can’t judge a terrorist, who can you judge?”
“And what about you, Fenton? You’re good at pointing out other people’s foibles – ”
“Foibles!”
“– but what about you? What are you? You join a group you don’t even agree with. That you have contempt for. You make a mockery out of everything these guys believe in. You lie to Gus, you pretend to be his friend –”
“Hang on. What are you saying now? That pretending to believe in that stuff is somehow worse than actually believing it? That telling a few lies is somehow just as bad as trying to kill someone? Or worse? I mean, come on. Let’s not lose all perspective. There is a difference. Don’t look at me like I’m, like I’m splitting hairs. I’m not clean – I never said I was. All I’m saying is, Gus is much dirtier. He’s filthy. If you can’t see that by now …”
“Everything’s so clear-cut to you, isn’t it? You always see things from your point of view.”
“Well who else’s point of view am I meant to see them from?”
“It never seems to cross your mind that you might be wrong.”
“When people who actually are wrong start thinking that way, maybe I’ll give it a try.”
How nice it would be if some impartial third party could keep score during conversations like this one: some bow-tied referee who could step in around now and inform her that she’d been soundly defeated and that the time had come for her to wipe the look of distaste and weariness off her face and start conducting herself with a little deference, a little humility. But as it was, the quality of his arguments was measured only by the intensity of the loathing on her face. The better his point, the more she hated him. He looked into her burning eyes and thought that if he was capable of making her dislike him this much then he must have had something going for him, once. He must, at some long-dead moment, have made some sort of positive impression on her. But what was the good of knowing that now? Now that it was all over, now that she’d quite definitively had enough of him. Now that she was visibly aching to leave. Why indeed was she still here? Why hadn’t she picked up her stuff and gone several minutes ago? She seemed to be obeying some unwritten rule of engagement that compelled her to stay. She seemed to feel one last obligation, as the party who had just destroyed the other’s life, to stay put and listen to his final words.
“I’m sorry,” he said, supplying them, “that this has all been such an inconvenience for you. I never meant it to be. I’m sorry I’ve put such a crimp in your life. But don’t worry, this is the last time I’ll ever bother you. As of tomorrow, I doubt I’ll be around any more. I wish I’d left a better impression on you. I am the good guy in this, believe it or not. But don’t worry – I’ve given up trying to convince you of that. Just tell me this. Purely out of interest. Just so I have this straight. Where do you think Gus was the other night? Wednesday night, the night he said he was going ten-pin bowling. At two in the morning, mind you. You must have known he was up to something. What do you suppose it was?”
She just looked at him.
“You don’t want to know, do you?”
She just looked at him.
“You want to keep turning a blind eye to it. Well, I’ll tell you where he was. He was round at Ivan Lego’s place with an axe and a meat cleaver. He was climbing up on his roof so he could waste him in cold blood and blame it on Neville Aggot. What do you think of that?”
For a long time she didn’t reply. Then: “So you lied to me, then. When you told me it was over. That was just a lie, was it?”
“Yes, yes, I’m a liar. We know that. We’ve established that. But your boyfriend’s a murderer. Let’s stay focussed on that. Let’s hear your opinion on it. Do you disapprove of it, or what?”
“But he’s not. Lego’s not dead, Fenton. I saw him this morning.”
“That,” Fenton said slowly, hunching low to the table, tugging in frustration at his own hair, “is beside the point.” To his vague surprise two big hanks of the stuff came away easily in his fists. So now he was going bald into the bargain. “The point is, Gus wanted to kill him. He attempted to kill him. He was going to kill him. Do you understand? He just happened to fuck it up. If he hadn’t fallen off his roof, Lego would be dead. And the bus driver, too. That old guy on the news. That was Col and Smithy. You must have guessed that. Gus sent them round there to kill him. And yes, I know, he isn’t dead either. But again, only because they botched the job. Only because they fucked up as well. The point is, Gus wanted them to do it. He sent them round there to do it. What do you think of that?”
“And you knew that?” she said.
“Could we leave me out of this for just one minute?”
“So you did know that?”
He sighed. “All right, let’s try last night. Where do you think he was then?”
“You knew. They went there to … You knew that, and you just let them? You did nothing?”
“And now you know,” he sourly replied. “And what are you going to do about it? Dump Gus? No. I didn’t think so. So let’s not talk about us. I’d say we’re about as bad as each other, wouldn’t you?”
Somehow she kept evading the vast spotlight of his main argument, losing herself in the shadows around its edges. Worse, he could feel himself starting to lose his way too, slipping into regions of dusky ambiguity, losing his grip on the massive central issue.
“But don’t you see,” he said sharply, to jolt both of them back to their senses. “It’s Gus that’s done this to us. It’s him who’s put us in this situation. We’re just trying to live with it. Last night,” he abruptly went on. “Want to know where he was? I’ll tell you where he was. He was buying an untraceable handgun from a guy in an alley. Want to know why? Want to know what it’s for? So we can shoot Robert Browning in the head with it and make it look like suicide. Because Lego caught us in the act, you see. He caught us trying to kill him. He’s got photos of Gus on his lawn. And now he’s forcing us to kill Browning instead.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she said.
“I know it is. That’s what I said. But as Gus said to me, it is happening. It’s happening anyway. Tonight.”
She looked at him with sudden concern. Something about that final word had rattled her. Tonight. At last, after all these weeks, he had slipped one through her defences and landed a scoring blow. Finally her mask of weary scepticism was falling away. And the look that began to replace it was so queasy and grave, so eloquent of serious inner disturbance, that he almost wished he hadn’t put it there, almost wished he could erase it and go back to fighting a losing battle.
“Tonight,” she said.
“Suddenly I seem to have your attention.”
“At ten o’clock,” she said.
“Uncanny,” he said.
“He told me,” she said after a long moment, “he had to go prawning.”
For a good few seconds Fenton allowed these words to hang and mature in the silence. They required no embellishment, no gloss. They pretty much said it all. He was still wondering, indeed, whether he hadn’t perhaps gone too far, disturbed the balance of things too violently. But he knew already that he was about to go further.
“Want to hear the best part?” he asked her quietly. “He wants me to pull the trigger. He hasn’t even got the integrity to do it himself. When I suggested he should, he cried.” He knew she would hear the authentic ring of Gus in that detail, the unfakeable watermark of the master. “Oh, he’ll drive me over to Browning’s place. He’ll hand me the ‘piece.’ He’ll wait outside in the van while I do it. But apart from that …”
“But you’re not going to do it,” she said matter-of-factly. As if this were obvious, a given. As if it went without saying.
“That’s not the point.”
“But you’re not, are you?”
“The point is, Gus wants me to do it. What do you think about that?”
“But you’re not.”
“I’m not the point here. Don’t you see? I am not the point.”
“Fenton. Why did you say you won’t be around any more? You’re not … You can’t be. You’re not thinking of actually doing it.”
“Maybe I should. You seem to have this thing for unrepentant killers.”
She looked at him with disgust, waiting for his proper answer.
“Why shouldn’t I do it?” he said. “Because it might get Gus into trouble?”
Still she waited.
Finally he said: “I don’t know. Maybe I’ve got something in mind. Or maybe I haven’t. I don’t see why I should tell you. Maybe I thought … maybe I thought you’d give me some good reason not to do it. Maybe I thought you’d … I don’t know. Maybe I thought you’d give me something to cling to. But fuck it. You keep looking at me like I’ve killed someone anyway.”
She said quietly, “You realize what you’ve done? Now I have to talk to him. To Gus. About this. I have to say something to him now.”
“Good. I think it’s high time you had a little chat.”
“I haven’t got a choice now. You can see that.”
“Fine. Do it. I’m sick of taking the heat for him. I trust you’ll look at him with as much contempt as you’re looking at me with now. If not more.”
“I have to tell him everything. I have to tell him about you. I have to tell him what you said.”
“You do that. And give him my best, won’t you? Tell him I’ll see him at twenty-two hundred. And tell him – do me one last favour. Tell him not to forget that piece.”