In the cab of the Kombi Gus took a final look at him. Tears were in the big man’s eyes.
“When this thing’s done Fent, we’re through. You know that, don’t you?”
“The feeling’s mutual.”
“Just one question, mate. Why?”
“I love her.”
“So do I, mate. So do I.”
On the fifth floor he walked along an open gangway, moving past shut doors and windows toughened with internal wire. The screaming voices were right above him now, one male and one female, rising in venom, drenched with a promise of bare-knuckle violence that sent a charge of animal fear through his gut and balls, a primal dread that found no solace in what he was packing. He tightened his grip on the butt. What did Browning spend his salary on? Where did it all go?
In front of Browning’s door he paused, took a last look down at the street. The white roof of the waiting Kombi down at the opposite kerb, the cigar glowing sullenly behind the windscreen.
The door wasn’t locked. He eased it open. Now he was in a dark hall. Worn carpet covered the floor. Light spilt in weakly from an open door at the far end. Music wafted in from an unseen stereo. The hollering of de factos on the floor above went on, in muted form. High and rickety piles of books lined both sides of the hall, some of them taller than he was, all of them about one book shy of collapse. The song on the stereo was something old and bad and repetitive, playing at moderate volume. Dylan? Worse. The Velvets? Conceivably. He moved on towards the open door, easing his way through the rickety book stacks, his feet making no sound. A sorry figure joined him on his right: himself in a dusky hall mirror, piece half-drawn. It gave him a sick look then slipped cravenly away. Parts of the lit room were skewing into view: the back wall, a curtained window, a kitchen sink. The song on the stereo finished. In the silence between tracks there was a clink of metal cutlery against plate or bowl. Then the next song began. Now he could see the offending stereo, garrisoned by loose heaps of vinyl LPs. The gun was out of his pocket and in his hand. In the lit room more bookpiles rose eerily from the floor like ant dwellings in a desert. And now the edge of a wooden table, with a human elbow resting on its surface.
Robert Browning was sitting at the table alone, bent over a bowl of orange-coloured soup. He looked up as Fenton entered the room. The light around the table was wan, sepia-toned. Fenton found that the piece was fully out and levelled more or less at Browning’s chest. His other hand, the non-gun hand, had lowered the briefcase to the floor and flattened itself out towards Browning in a gesture of placation or reassurance intended to negate or soften or apologise for the effect of the raised piece.
Fenton said, “Don’t worry. I’m not going to do it.”
Browning looked back at him without fear. He contemplated the piece. He seemed to know at least roughly what was happening. “Lego?” he said.
Fenton nodded. “But there’s a way out of it.”
“The thing with the note,” Browning said calmly.
“I’m going to put the gun down now, okay?”
“You told me it was under control, but it wasn’t.” The spoon was stalled halfway between the bowl and his mouth. Orange soup hung in it, not dripping. The domestic incident in the flat above went obscenely on. “And now here you are. Pointing a gun at me.”
“I’m going to put it down,” Fenton said again. Already he was back at the stereo, screwing down the volume on the Velvets. “Don’t do anything, okay? I’m putting it down.” He placed it down flat on the turntable’s lid, barrel to the wall, the silenced record still turning under the smoked perspex. “There’s a way out of this, but we haven’t got much time. There’s someone waiting downstairs. If I’m not back down there in ten minutes, he might come up here. Do you understand? That could be awkward. We have to move fast.”
“Yes.” Still his spoon hung there, not dripping. “We wouldn’t want this to get awkward.” Smoke rising from the spoon, the soup just staying put, its surface unruffled. “What’s in the briefcase?”
“Evidence.” He put the case up on the table beside Browning. “Stuff to frame you with.” He popped the latches. He raised the top. He held up a couple of sample items, each one sterile in its own clear bag: a broadsheet newspaper missing sharp-edged swatches of text and headline; a work-in-progress death threat on which the missing swatches were pasted down, in incriminating formation. “I’m supposed to get your prints on it and plant it round the house.”
“As proof I wrote the death threats.”
“Exactly.” He began to unpack the rest of the briefcase’s contents: the glue pot, the scissors, further surgically altered publications, one item per clear plastic bag.
“Hence the gloves.”
“Yes.”
“And then you’re supposed to shoot me. Dead.”
“Yeah. And leave the gun in your hand.”
“So it looks like suicide.”
“Exactly. But there’s a way out.”
“So it looks like I snapped and ended it all, in the act of writing him one last threat.” Only now did Browning return the untasted spoon to the bowl. “Suicide. Unfinished death threats. The last refuge of the aggrieved humanist. Is my Selected Yeats in there?”
Fenton handed it to him, the faded emerald paperback in its pristine plastic sheath.
“Rather an extreme plan.” Browning upended the sheath and let the volume slide out into his hand. “But Lego never did go in for subtlety.” He flipped to “The Second Coming”: it was half gone, radically deconstructed, its yellowed remnants draped like old coleslaw over the exposed page beneath. He slowly nodded. “And I suppose it makes sense, in a perverse kind of way. First you get rid of all the words. You take the language out of literature. The art out of the arts. The humanity out of the humanities. When that’s done, what’s there left to get rid of? Except us, the humans. The imperfect, the incorrect. The ghosts in the machine. And what about you, Bland? How do you fit into this? What exactly has he got on you?”
“Robert, we haven’t got much time.” All the fake evidence was out now, sitting in a neat pile on the table. “This is what I suggest. I suggest we plant all this stuff around the flat. We give him that. We give him that part of it. But you … You could disappear. Tonight. You could just pack a few bags and go. And the rest would be up to you. Think about it. You could disappear without a trace. You could take a new name. You could turn up any place you wanted to. Any place but here.” He stretched this part out, padding it, selling it hard, staving off the moment when Browning could just douse it all with a simple no. And what was he going to do then? “It’d be entirely up to you. You could move to another state. Another country. It’d be like a brand new start for you.”
“Or,” Browning said, “I could just take the gun and shoot myself in the head. Would that make things easier for you, Bland?”
“It’d be a brand new start for you,” Fenton said again. There was no call for sarcasm, he felt. “You could take a new name, a new job. Become a new person. It’d be a chance to remake your life.”
“I see. Because why would I want to hang on to my life as it is?”
“Well … ” Was there a polite way to endorse this suggestion? Fenton just let his hand describe a brief arc that took in the whole small room, the sink, the soup, the single chair, the spousal homicide brewing on the floor above.
“A delicate point, Bland. Thank you for advancing it so tactfully.”
“But you know what I mean,” Fenton said.
“Oh, I do, I do. But the way I see it, you’d still have a body problem, wouldn’t you? A corpse problem. Lego wants one. What’s he going to do when he doesn’t get it?”
“What can he do? I’ve thought this through. If he asks, I’ll say there was a struggle. I’ll say I had to put two bullets in you. Or three, or four. I’ll say I had to dump your body. But I doubt he will ask. It’s not his style. So far he’s kept his distance. I don’t see why that’d change after you’re … After you’ve gone. Why would he take that risk? He’ll still have got basically what he wants. You out of the picture. You linked positively to the threats. In a way, everyone will be happy.”
“In a way,” Browning said.
Fenton said nothing.
“Assuming,” Browning added, “that I don’t mind walking out on my whole life tonight.”
Fenton looked down at the pile of fake evidence, fidgeting with it, neatening its edges.
“And that I don’t mind going out as the pathetic lone nut.”
Fenton neatened the pile further, resisting a growing urge to look at his watch. Were these gibes to be the thanks he got for not blowing Browning away?
“And what if I say no, Bland? What are you going to do then? Pick up the gun? Put it in my mouth. Pull the trigger?”
Fenton spread his hands. “I don’t know. I don’t. All I know is, something’s got to happen tonight. Something final. If it doesn’t, this is only going to get worse. He won’t let it end this way.”
“Maybe I should go for the gun now, Bland. Should I? I’m a little closer to it, I think. I think I could get to it first. And even if I didn’t … You’re not going to shoot me, are you? I think we both know that. I could just walk over there, couldn’t I? You wouldn’t stop me. I could just walk over there and pick it up and this wouldn’t be my problem any more. It’d be yours again. And Lego’s. And whoever else you’re mixed up with. The guy downstairs. You could all clean up your own mess.”
“And you,” Fenton said, “could go back to living your life as it is now. Teaching Lego Studies II twice a week. Is that what you want?”
Browning maintained a long silence. Then: “Perhaps you should disappear, Bland. Seeing you’re such a fan of the concept. Seeing you think it’s such a good idea.”
“I’ve thought about that too. But it wouldn’t solve anything. I’d be leaving other people in danger. Including you. It wouldn’t be fair.”
“But this is.”
“This way it’ll all be over. No loose ends.”
“Again, assuming I don’t mind vacating my life at a moment’s notice.”
“Well do you?” Fenton snapped, tiring of the innuendo.
“I must say, Bland, I like this new you. Decisive. Blunt. Maybe if you’d been like this all along …”
He left the rest of that thought unspoken, the prick. Fenton looked at him silently, still fighting this mammoth urge to look at his watch.
Finally Browning said: “All right, Bland. I’ll stop torturing you. You’ve guessed right. The idea does appeal to me.” He looked down at his Selected Yeats. “I’ve thought about it before, of course.” His thoughtful fingers riffled the musty page-corners. “Who hasn’t thought about it? Disappearing. Becoming someone else. But we never end up doing it, do we? We stay in our ruts. We stay put, because that’s what’s expected of us. We keep waiting for the right excuse to go, the sign that never comes. And I suppose this is mine. I don’t suppose I’ll get a better one. When you live by yourself and it isn’t working, who is there to say ‘This isn’t working’ to? Who is there to walk out on – except yourself, the whole thing. So: this is your lucky night, Bland. I’ll do it. I’ll go away, tonight. There’s nothing much to keep me here, as you’ve so delicately pointed out. But I impose a strict condition. No death threat stuff. I won’t go out as the fall guy. That I won’t have. I won’t give him that victory. You have to put all this stuff back in your briefcase, and take it away with you, and burn it. A straight disappearance – that’s as much as I’m willing to give you. Take it or leave it.”
Browning looked at him sternly. Fenton didn’t much care for his tone or manner, but knew that a great display of unqualified gratitude was required of him now. He therefore extravagantly extended his right hand and said: “Robert, I can’t thank you enough.” He was already thinking he could come back and plant the stuff later, if that should wind up seeming necessary.
Not without affection, Browning looked at the offered palm. He did not, however, accept it. “I’ve got a special reason for doing this, Bland. I’ll tell you about it in a minute. But I’m not done with my conditions yet. I’ve got another one. For you, this has to be it. Whatever it is you’re mixed up in, extricate yourself from it. Immediately. I want your word on that. You got extremely lucky this time. Your next victim might not be so obliging.”
“I will, Robert, I will. I swear. In fact, I’m out of it already. This is the end of it, tonight. There won’t be any more victims. I can promise you that.”
“And that” – Browning pointed at the firearm – “that goes into a deep body of water.”
“Of course. Absolutely. And again Robert – thanks. You don’t know how grateful I am for this. You really don’t.”
“Another condition. I’m still not done. If Lego does ask, I want you to tell him nothing. Is that clear? Answer him with silence. He claims to revel in it. I want him to wonder about this forever.”
“Absolutely.” How many conditions did the man have? “Let him wonder.”
“I want him to spend the rest of his life not knowing exactly what he’s guilty of.”
“Exactly. Fuck him.”
“I want the little eunuch’s stump of his conscience to awaken, and trouble him at night.”
“The one thing he’ll never know,” Fenton said, nodding with understanding.
“Oh, there are many things he’ll never know, Bland.”
There was a mutually contented silence.
Then Fenton said, in delicate reference to the time factor: “Can I help you pack or anything?”
Browning tilted back his head and loosed a rich bray of derisive laughter. “Honestly, Bland! You could at least let me move at my own pace!” Laying both his palms on the table, he levered himself wearily to his feet. He ambled through the kitchen area and disappeared through a doorway in the far corner. He flicked on a light in there. It had to be his bedroom. The walls were lime-green. There was a high wooden wardrobe, a bureau awash with loose change. A balled-up black sock on the floor.
“I don’t suppose you’ve arranged some transport for me?” Browning called out, taking down a floppy brown suitcase from the wardrobe. “A plane ticket? A lift to the bus station?”
“Not really, Robert. No. Sorry.”
“Jesus.” This more in amusement than in anger. “So I’m walking too, am I?” He flopped the suitcase down on what had to be a bed, a noiseless surface not visible from Fenton’s vantage point. “You want to hear why I’m doing this, Bland? You want to hear my special reason?” He went and opened unseen drawers, his shadow moving none too hastily on the walls. “Because I’d have let it happen too. Whatever it is you’ve let happen, I’d probably have let it happen too, back when I was your age. Twenty-five years ago, I was you.” He came back past the open door with an armload of clothing. “They got you by increments, didn’t they? They chipped away at you, a piece at a time. And you thought you were on top of it, didn’t you? You thought you were still you. And then one day you woke up and didn’t recognize yourself any more. As I have. We’re the same person, Bland. I feel it in my gut. We’re two aspects of the one personality. Which means that unless you’re very careful, in twenty-five years’ time you’ll be me. I’d think about that, if I were you. Tell me this, Bland.” He came and stood in the doorway. “What started it off? Idealism? Love?”
“Love,” Fenton said, wishing Browning would cut down on the chit-chat, and focus on getting out of here. Did he have to turn everything into a wry introspective monologue?
“I knew it.” Browning spanked the doorframe with satisfaction, then disappeared back into the room. “We are the same person. We’re ghosts. Projections. We’re fragments of someone else’s autobiography. Someone at thirty looking back on the spineless young fool he once was, and looking ahead to the bitter old wreck he might become. If he’s not careful. If he doesn’t watch out. So, I’ll save both of your skins, and I’ll leave. I’ll give both of you this nice neat ending.”
Fenton had restored all the framing materials to the briefcase. He had snapped both its latches shut. He therefore had very little left to do now, except supervise Browning’s departure. He was thinking, on the whole, that he probably wouldn’t come back and plant the stuff later. A deal was a deal. Anyway, Browning’s plan had more justice than his own, more elegance. It handed Lego the slightest victory possible, and shafted him pretty deeply at the same time. And it let Browning bow out with a little dignity, which was only fair.
“We should all be in love once,” Browning mused in the bedroom. “Just once. If we’ve been in love, we know exactly what it’s like to be insane.”
“Who said that?” Fenton stepped closer to the doorway.
“No one. I'm saying it now.”
“Oh.”
“Read Liber Amoris. Read De Profundis. Read Proust.”
Fenton moved in closer still. He said to the wall: “Robert, I’m sorry it had to be you. You’re the one person … You never screwed me around. You never … I really enjoyed your course. Your lectures. I’m sorry it had to be you.”
Something of the kind had to be said. He would be glad later on that he’d said it, as excruciating as it felt to say it now. He waited for Browning to say something in return. But Browning seemed to be pointedly declining to do that. Or maybe he was waiting to see if there was more.
There wasn’t. Fenton returned rapidly to more practical matters. “All these books, Robert,” he guiltily said. “I doubt – I don’t think you’ll be able to take them now. Maybe I could send them on after you. Box them up …”
“Forget it. The idea’s to make a new life for myself, right? So, no books. Books are a load of crap. And academia is a ship of fools. Maybe I’ll try something outdoorsy this time round. Work with my hands, like Rimbaud. Go to sea or something. The trouble with fighting a losing battle is that you lose, Bland. All the time, over and over, day after day. When you walked in here pointing that gun at me, I was overcome by the strangest sensation. I didn’t want you to shoot me. I wanted to go on living.” He moved back and forth past the open doorway, conveying garments to the suitcase in chest-wide bales, loose sleeves and leggings dangling from his arms like the limbs of sleeping children. “Not life as it is, obviously. But life in general. Existence. Not being dead. We throw in the towel so quickly, don’t we? We give up so soon on the idea that our life can be what we want it to be.” He was getting right into the spirit of the thing now. He almost seemed to be enjoying himself. “I mean, we all start out believing that. Thinking we can grow up to be whatever we like. But somewhere along the line we let that idea go. We give up on it. And we sit through the rest of our life like it’s a bad film. Watching ourselves do things we’d rather not be doing, being someone we never wanted to be. What else did Larkin say?”
The question was rhetorical. Browning came to the doorway to supply the answer himself:
“Not what we think truest, or most want to do:
Those warp tight-shut, like doors. It’s more a style
Our lives bring with them: habit for a while,
Suddenly it hardens into all you’ve got.”
He caught himself being declamatory, and offered his usual smile, the smile entirely void of mirth. “My last lecture.” He faded back from the doorway and got back to packing. “‘Life is first boredom, then fear’,” he called out, as an afterthought. “‘Whether or not we use it, it goes.’ Maybe I’ll take up billiards. Or Tai-Chi, whatever that is … Mountain-climbing. Windsurfing. The sky’s the limit, as you say. Maybe I’ll become a prick!” he mused with vigour. “Pricks seem to have a pretty good time of it, on the whole. Don’t they? The kind of guy who pats women on the bum. A snow reporter. A passionate lover of the Arts – all the Arts, equally, without discrimination! A guy who works hard and plays harder. A guy who likes fast cars and faster women. A guy who plays racquetball. In a headband. What identity do you do choose, when every possibility is open to you?”
“You could write,” Fenton offered. Standing back from the doorway, watching the departing humanist pack his bags, he was beginning to feel a little left out. “I thought maybe you could write.”
“No, Bland. No. I believe I’m through with that, too. Rejection, it gets to you after a while. It wears you down. Go through it often enough, you start to wonder if acceptance is really what you want. Anyway, art is over, isn’t it? It’s finished. It’s the baby that got thrown out with the bathwater. No, I think I’ll find something more constructive to do with my time than that.”
“So you’d been thinking of doing this anyway?” Fenton said. “Clearing out? Starting again?” Perhaps this was an unworthy thought, but he was starting to feel that his gun-toting intervention had been given considerably less than its due. He was starting to feel that it was Browning who ought to be thanking him.
“Of course. As I say, who doesn’t? Isn’t it every thinking person’s dream, to seize one’s life by the reins? But don’t think that gets you off the hook, Bland. You still have a lot of thinking to do. You still – ”
He stopped there. A sound from outside had cut him off. It was the long and impatient clarion call of a Kombi’s horn.
“Your friend?”
“He hasn’t heard a shot,” Fenton said sickly. “He’s wondering why he hasn’t heard a shot.” Jesus – what if Gus should come up here and stick his nose in now, now that things were at last going right, now that decorum had finally and painstakingly been achieved? What if the fat fool should ruin the whole thing now? “He’s thinking he should have heard one by now.”
“So fire one,” Browning said. His voice was muffled and nonchalant, his head buried in the walls of some closet or robe.
“You’re joking.”
“Put one into the wall or something. If that’s what he wants to hear.”
“But what if someone calls the police?”
“People around here mind their own business, Bland. If I called the police every time I heard something that sounded like a gunshot … Why don’t you put one through the roof? See if you can’t hit one of these charming people on the other side. Or there’s always the front wall, if you’re averse to that. There’s no one on the other side of that. Apart from your impatient friend …”
Silently Browning got on with his packing. Fenton went to the stereo. He took up the piece. He approached the front wall, weaving through pillars and toadstools of literature. So he was about to fire a gun. He took aim at the nice wide stretch of plaster under the curtained window. He wondered whether to cock the thing first or just pull the trigger. He went for the trigger, thinking that it probably wouldn’t work, that it would fail and grant him a temporary reprieve.
Instead there was a sensationally loud report and with astonishing promptness a neat round black hole had appeared in the white wall and a thick backspray of powdered wood and plaster was lashing his face and dryly matting his tongue. He coughed and spat. His eyes watered. Empty air whistled high in his ears. His shooting hand was simultaneously numb and abuzz with pain.
And now from down on the street there came another sound: the sound of a Kombi’s ignition key being turned and returned with wanton urgency. The engine caught and flared and was unceremoniously wrenched into gear. Then a candid squeal of departing tyres. Fenton pulled back the curtain just in time to see the flustered rear wheels taking a corner in the middle distance, broadying shamelessly out of his life.
“Some friend,” called Browning from the bedroom.
Fenton let the curtain drop. Through the windy whistling in his ears he realized that he was now stranded, a very long way from home. He then recalled he had no home to go back to anyway. A faint white haze hung in the room. He put the gun down on a stack of books, and numbly realized that it was over. It was all over. Browning was going; Gus was gone. The plot was finished, and no one had been maimed or arrested or smeared or shot. The miracle had occurred. And here he was, standing at the end of it. So why did he merely feel numb? Why didn’t he feel much better? Why did he feel no sense of accomplishment? Why was he starting to feel that Browning was the lucky one? “Maybe I’ll build myself a rude cabin in the woods, like Thoreau,” Browning was saying. “Clear myself a spot by a lake. Chop wood. Catch fish. ‘To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. Our failure is to form habits …’ Perhaps I’ll take up surfing. Boogie-boarding. Something really lowbrow and fun. When was the last time I dived into an ocean, Bland? Ten years ago? Fifteen? Jesus! I want to be the kind of person who goes out for breakfast. Yes. Maybe I’ll go to Paris and sit in cafés and watch the world go by. Now that is something I’ve always wanted to do. They say all the chairs there point outwards, towards the street.”
Vaguely Fenton lingered outside the bedroom door, watching Browning’s shadow cross and recross the wall. There was no call to hurry things any more. Now that the plot was over he had nothing left to do. Nothing. And was this envy he was starting to feel? No. It couldn’t be.
But it was. There was no mistaking it. He envied Robert Browning. He wished he could be the one packing his bags instead, the one making the journey. He wished some person had long ago had the decency to burst in on his life, and point a loaded gun at him, and tell him he had no choice but to become someone else.