7
The lecture theatre was packed. All the seats were taken, and a jabbering surplus of crowd spilled up and down the room’s tiered flanks. Fenton, arriving a good minute or two before Ivan Lego’s scheduled entry, could only weave and shove his way into a standing berth against the back wall, wondering if he’d walked into the wrong theatre by mistake. The size of the audience, and the way it was simmering with excitement, suggested that something far more entertaining than a lecture by Ivan Lego was about to take place.
But then he spotted Lego himself down the front: present already, and engaged in some very unorthodox preparations on the stage. He was in the right place, then. It was all these other people who weren’t. After another moment or two he spotted her, standing against the wall about halfway down, happily chatting to some lanky geek in a tennis shirt. Having looked at that till he could take no more, Fenton returned his attention to the strange composition of the crowd around him. It contained, for some reason, suited professors from other departments. Green-shorted members of the grounds staff. A contingent of smartly dressed older ladies resembling a reading group on a field trip. An armed guard speaking gravely into a walkie-talkie, with the badge of his security firm displayed on both arms of his short-sleeved shirt. The woman from the refectory who called everybody love, standing on her toes to get a better look down at the stage.
Unusual things were happening down there. For one thing, the lectern was missing. In the space it normally occupied, there stood two black swivel chairs. Ivan Lego sat in one of them, with one long cream-clad leg draped easily over the other. A woman in T-shirt and jeans was tensely bent over him, applying make-up to his obligingly tilted face. A protective paper bib was tucked under the non-collar – the anti-collar – of his collarless coat. A tiny black microphone was clipped to one of his breast pockets, trailing a thin black cord that looped out of view somewhere near his waist. A pair of chunky television cameras stood shyly back on the apron of the stage, tended by headphoned cameramen in too-tight T-shirts. One of them was training his lens experimentally on Ivan Lego. A live close-up of the bibbed philosopher appeared on a monitor at stage left, oscillating wildly in size as the cameraman found his range. Further technicians moved around the carpeted stage with no special urgency, as though the start of proceedings was still some way off. One of them was arranging a jug of water and a glass on a small table at Lego’s elbow. Another was down on his hands and knees amid the black spaghetti of electrical cords and cables, sticking them down to the carpet with a roll of tape. On either side of the stage stood a tall metal pole crowned by a battery of industrial-strength lamps. These encased the whole scene in a crisp white prism of artificial light.
Occupying the chair beside Lego’s was a chubby man of perhaps fifty-five, wearing a bow tie and a red beret. He revolved nervously in his seat, tapping a biro against an apparently empty clipboard that lay across his knees. Fenton recognised him as Quentin Salient: presenter of ArtsBeat, the most prestigious arts programme on TV. The only arts programme on TV, come to think of it. Salient! Fenton felt the fire of an ancient hate rekindle within him. Some months previously he had read a profile of Salient in the People section of a weekend newspaper, under the aegis of a regular feature entitled My Sunday, in which moderately famous people were required to describe how they spent their days off. Salient’s ideal Sunday morning had turned out to consist, in his own words, of “curling up with a good thriller, my dog Django, and a croissant.” In an adjacent colour photograph, larger by far than the article itself, a stiffly posed Salient smirked up at the camera from atop a vast unmade bed. Wearing recently ironed pyjamas and his trademark red beret, he held a thriller in one hand and a once-bitten croissant in the other, while balancing a small and obnoxious-looking cur on his thighs. Asked in another part of the article to nominate his pet dislikes, Salient had offered: “People who say ‘Classical’ music when actually what they mean is Romantic music – or indeed serious music of any kind.”
Reading that article, Fenton had developed an immediate and unshakeable conviction that he was being lied to. Although he had no firm evidence to go on, he felt strangely certain that Salient did not in fact spend his Sunday mornings in the way he claimed. It just struck Fenton as wildly improbable that a man could combine, to pleasant effect, the three quite disparate acts of reading a book, eating pastry, and snuggling with an animal. Wouldn’t Django get fur, or slobber, on the croissant? Wouldn’t jam get smeared on the thriller? Wouldn’t it be far more efficient simply to kick the dog out, eat the croissant while it was still hot, and then turn one’s full attention to the book? Looking at Salient now – perched rotundly down there on the stage, small-talking with Ivan Lego in the glazed, half-hearted manner of a man whose earpiece is having something pivotal said into it by his producer – Fenton felt surer than ever that the man was a grotesque fraud. Yes, the chubby little shit had quite clearly made the whole thing up! But why? Just to make it known that he named his pets after Belgian jazzmen? There had to be more to it than that. But what? The answer seemed destined to elude Fenton forever, and this only made his hatred of Salient grow.
He forced his attention back to Charmaine, half the crowd away, still laughing it up with this wiry cock in the tennis shirt. Looking at her from this distance, Fenton found it nearly impossible to believe that not ten minutes ago she’d been chatting to him like that, resting that same promiscuous hand on his forearm instead. Still less could he believe he had voluntarily walked away from that. No: run away from it, sprinted away from it, fled the scene like the abjectest of criminals. What a fiasco! What a supremely regrettable performance! He knew already that it was the kind of incident that was going to ruin his peace of mind for years to come, playing over and over and over in his head like disaster footage and making him want to wince and clutch his balls and gouge out his own eyes for possibly the rest of his life. The badness of it had been surreal, epic, scarcely believable in scope and intensity. A stronger man would have been back at her side right now, working furiously to expunge her memories of the whole scene. But Fenton wasn’t strong. Arguably, he wasn’t even a man. Already he’d caught himself wondering, once or twice, whether it might be possible never to be at her side again. Perhaps, he cravenly speculated, he might be able to woo and win her by remote modes of communication only: letters, phone calls, morse code transmissions, semaphore, a series of increasingly frank videotapes …
Was he cut out for it, for the long and grim decathlon of prising away somebody else’s girlfriend? Probably not. Almost certainly not. But what difference did that make? Did that mean he was going to stop trying? Did asthmatics give up breathing just because they weren’t very good at it? Looking at her now, he knew that he wasn’t about to stop wanting her. He didn’t even want to stop wanting her. The idea that he might one day have her was still the most magnificent thought he was capable of having. Quite possibly it was the noblest fucking dream ever dreamt by man. In any case, he wasn’t remotely ready to stop framing his whole life around it. To stop, even to entertain the idea of stopping, would be to open his mind to the heinous possibility that she might never be his. And this was a thought he shied rigorously away from, like the thought of his own death. Like the thought of what she and Gus might get up to when they were alone.
So yes, he would go on. But something would have to be done about the vomiting, clearly. The chundering had to be addressed. Because he was going to need, if he was to stand any realistic chance of getting her, to do much quality work at her side. He was going to need to operate there for extended periods of time, in a state of perfect mental and physical equilibrium. He was going to need to be charming there, and relaxed, and responsive, and verbally spry. Which meant that his current inability to be next to her for more than two consecutive minutes without wanting to throw up (or let slip an unforgivable fart, or partially or even fully shit himself) had to be dealt with, aggressively and soon. And it wouldn’t be good enough just to tame the impulse, either – to subdue it to the point where he could hold out for ten minutes in her presence, say, or fifteen, before having to run away and vomit. No: what was required, almost immediately, was an ability to be next to her for a very long time without feeling like running away and vomiting at all. Without the concept of vomiting so much as entering, on even the most abstract of levels, his head. Then, and only then, would he be free to devote all his mental and physical powers to the ridiculously delicate task of making her his.
A contented hush had started to settle over the audience around him now. Down on the monitor, the word SILENCE was flashing. Laggard crew members scurried, crouching, off the set. A passage of classical or serious music – the puckish theme tune of ArtsBeat – issued from the PA. Quentin Salient leant towards Ivan Lego and gave him a soothing pat on the knee, a final thumbs-up. Then the music faded out, and Quentin Salient turned hungrily to the place on the camera where the autocued text of his opening remarks awaited him, hanging there for him like a ripe fruit.
“Good evening,” he said, although it was the middle of the day, “and welcome to. No. I’ll go again.” He bent sideways and coughed once, then erectly readdressed himself to the camera. “Good evening,” he said again, “and welcome to the. No. Good evening, and welcome to a special edition of ArtsBeat. We come to you tonight from the University of ——, where it is my privilege to be joined by a thinker and writer of truly international standing. Professor Ivan Lego is a veteran ruffler of conservative feathers, a seasoned challenger of some of our deepest and most cherished mythologies. While more conventional thinkers have lamented his rise to prominence” – Lego endorsed this observation with a wry nod – “others have hailed him as the self-styled apostle of a new philosophy. Tonight, in a rare media appearance, Ivan Lego launches what may well prove to be his boldest coup yet. He has written a novel which is set to change the way we think about novels. Entitled Empty Pages, Lego’s novel consists entirely of blank pages – several hundred of them, containing not so much as a comma of type. This week, after months of industry whispering, the book will finally hit bookstands around the world. But tonight, Ivan Lego joins us to discuss the work and its ramifications.”
Salient swung crisply around to face Ivan Lego. “It is an audacious move, isn’t it Ivan Lego, publishing a book entirely devoid of words?”
“No,” said Ivan Lego. “On the contrary: is it not all previous novelists who have demonstrated audacity, by presuming to violate the pure potentiality of the blank page? By assuming the right to colonise its so-called nullity? Tradition informs us that the blank page is a zone of pure absence. A muteness which is at the same time not- mute, because it is heard by the writer to issue a plea – silence becoming, at this paradoxical moment, audible, loquacious – to issue a plea for its own erasure, an injunction to be filled, a demand to have ‘meaning’ imposed on it from without. Thus writing has historically been considered an act of creation. I have long proposed the converse: that an empty page is not empty but full, teeming with the endless interplay of all possible meanings. That, in the same way as a block of marble contains all possible sculptures, a blank page must be viewed as harbouring, in equal measure, all possible documents: the Magna Carta, a speech from Titus Andronicus, a shopping list, a love letter, a suicide note, an extortionist’s demands, a fascist’s dogma, a revolutionist’s manifesto. That so-called silence, the so-called empty page, is in fact the site of an endless interplay between and among this infinity of possible meanings. That the act of writing demolishes this interplay, this infinite tension. That, at the moment of writing, the pluralism of infinite possibility is abolished by the tyranny of the particular. Writing must therefore be viewed, I maintain, not as a creative act but as a destructive one. Writing, any writing, is always, at its root, an act of semantic genocide.”
Quentin Salient nodded thoughtfully, as though all this was perfectly in order. “We’re getting into the territory, aren’t we,” he suggested, “of your celebrated notion of meanability?”
“Meanability is the term I coined some time ago,” Ivan Lego allowed, “to designate that hum of infinite potentiality which silence contains – which silence is – and which writing destroys. Other modes of critical analysis tell us how language can and does, in this or that particular context, function as a tool of power, a mechanism of oppression. The concept of meanability advances the far more radical notion that language is oppression. That language, that is to say, owes its very existence to a foundational act of suppression – namely, the suppression of non-language. Speech is always the silencing of silence. Writing is always the erasure of the blank …”
As Ivan Lego went on in this vein, a disturbance was occurring at the theatre’s rear. Somebody outside was, rather tastelessly, trying to get in, creating ripples of restlessness in the area of the double exit doors. The crowd there was being made to shuffle disapprovingly sideways so that one of the closed doors could creak heavily in on them. An expanding wedge of sunlight spilled in through the widening breach. Standing in it was the backlit figure of Robert Browning, gripping the half-open door by its horizontal metal bar, neither properly inside the theatre nor properly out of it, blinking into the relative gloom like a dazed animal. Within a second or two his eyes found the illuminated and fluently discoursing figure of Ivan Lego. Browning grimaced as if tasting something foul. Waves of audience unrest were fanning rapidly out from him. People were twisting around in their seats to see why other people were twisting around in theirs. A perturbed security guard hastened up the stairs to restore order. He pushed his way to Browning’s side, and drew him into some sober-looking negotiations. These ended with Browning’s coming all the way inside the theatre, so that the security guard (shaking his head as if now he had seen it all) could quietly push the door shut behind him. Through all of this Browning’s eyes stayed fixed on Ivan Lego, bound to him by an unseen tether of hate. The security guard moved away – but not too far away. He remained in position near the stairhead, eyeing Robert Browning with professional unease.
Down on the stage, the interview proceeded. Salient was wanting Lego to say something, to say a lot, about the difference, the pressing and vital difference, between a regular empty page, any old empty page, and the kind of empty page to be encountered, by its buyer, in a copy of Empty Pages. And Lego, in reply, was talking like one of his books again – one of his other books, his old books, his books with words in them, with many, many words.
“On one hand, a page that has deliberately and strategically been left blank. On the other, the page that is blank merely because it has not yet been written on. The difference, I hope it is by now clear, is radical. The former is the opposite of, the negation of, the latter – while also containing the latter, containing it as a possibility in the sense that it contains all possibilities. To clarify: only when we have looked, directly, on the page that has been politically left blank can we properly be said to have encountered meanability in its pure form. So, yes. Empty Pages is, as you suggest, an implementation, a putting-into-practice, of the notion of meanability. The book rejects, more rigorously than any book before it, the tyranny of the written word. It shuns the possibility of particular or definitive meaning in order to embrace instead the meaning of possibility. It declines to privilege any word, any language, any thought, any genre, any character, over any other. It entertains all possible themes, characters, plots, modes, styles, situations, political stances, and disallows none. Naive critics will allege that the book says nothing. I reply, pre-emptively, that it says everything. Virginity, yes. Certainly. But sterility, no.”
“You fraud!” cried a stricken voice from the theatre’s rear. Ivan Lego looked up with a mildly quizzical frown. The audience too looked around. And there, near the back wall, at the centre of a widening space in the crowd, stood Robert Browning, with one quivering index finger pointing right down the length of the hall at Lego.
Security personnel hurried towards him from all points. The guard who had let him in was back at his side already, gripping his elbow and making a firm but non-violent attempt to steer him back out. Browning ignored him. “How can you all just sit there?” he yelled. Sections of the crowd were hissing to drown him out. “Rise up! Walk out! Lynch him! Do something, for Christ’s sake!” Four guards were on him now, one on each limb, bearing him out supine like a stretchered corpse. “He’s taking you for a ride!” he shouted, fully horizontal now, lying eerily still, putting up no physical fight. “Are you all insane?”
Ivan Lego, with moderate interest, watched him go.
“Don’t swallow it!” Browning cried finally from beyond the open door. “Don’t let him – ”
But then the door was slammed, and whatever he said afterwards went unheard.
Already making his way towards one of these was a small man of about seventy, wearing long baggy shorts and a Hawaiian shirt whose armpits were darkened by twin South Americas of sweat. His skin bore an all-over tan no less mahogany-coloured than the exteriors of the imitation desk. He had a grey moustache as limp and wispy as floating seaweed, and wore a red beret identical in every respect to Quentin Salient’s. Although he looked like the kind of man whose proudest cultural attainment is an ability to raise his lower lip over his nose when posing for photographs, he was in fact Vladimir Vonk, Conceptual Sculptor in Residence, installer of The Door and other equally distinguished works. Quentin Salient, catching sight of Vonk’s headgear, abruptly detached himself from Ivan Lego and hurried over to intercept the aging sculptor before he could take his seat. A heated-looking discussion ensued, with each man doing a lot of gesticulating at the other’s beret. The woman in the complex headphones moved calmly towards them to mediate.
Shuffling past this contretemps with a vagrant-like lack of urgency, possibly en route to one of the other chairs, was an unkempt woman of around fifty. She blinked a lot, and had a long and brambly cataract of unrestrained grey hair. This was Rosemary Robinson-Robinson, a Visiting Fellow at the University’s Centre for Radical Thought, where she was known to be compiling a 20-volume critical edition of the diaries of a semi-literate and long-dead English charwoman so obscure, so neglected, that it had taken the work of Robinson-Robinson to uncover the very fact of her having existed. Married to another academic also called Robinson, she had been obliged to take her present surname to demonstrate that she hadn’t taken his. She wore pale-blue nylon slacks of a vintage and quality seldom worn in public except by effigies of Guy Fawkes. There appeared to be, on the back of them, a fair amount of recently deposited soil and leaf matter. No brassiere figured beneath her T-shirt, which was tight, frayed, V-necked and maroon. On the whole she seemed to have dressed under a misapprehension that she would be painting her house all day, or working with some notoriously tenacious brand of putty. And she was looking about herself with an air of concussed puzzlement, as though wondering where she was and how she’d come to be here. Her incessantly blinking eyes spent more net time shut than open. Her lips worked in silent monologue.
Swaggering towards the third chair was a much younger and altogether more compact personage, dressed entirely in black. A dark bowler hat was perched, with ironic intent, at a perilous angle on the back of her head; her fist was raised in solidarity towards some friend or acquaintance in the crowd. She was, in short, Pamela Scratch. She carried a messy armload of paperwork, possibly containing the text of a speech; and a long cardboard cylinder of the kind used for storing rolled-up maps and posters. She took her seat at the fake desk and stowed the cylinder carefully beneath it, while smiling a secret smile.
Behind her, Vladimir Vonk appeared to have been issued with a galling ultimatum about his beret. He ripped it off his head and flung it bitterly to the floor. An alert stagehand scooped it up in the manner of a ballboy and whisked it off the set. Vonk collapsed sulkily into the chair next to Pamela’s. His scalp proved to be not merely bald, but also startlingly less tanned than the rest of him, capped by this beret-shaped and slightly off-centre disc of abhorrently white skin over which he was now trying, without much success, to arrange the glistening anchovies of his few remaining hairs.
Salient too resumed his seat, looking less than fully appeased by his victory.
The word SILENCE reappeared on the monitor, and flashed intemperately.
And then Quentin Salient was able to relower himself into the soothing bath of the autocue. The time had come, he read from it, for the second portion of the programme. The portion where a panel of distinguished analysts from the University of —— would discuss, and assess the implications of, Lego’s book. After alleging that these analysts needed no introduction, Salient introduced them: Vladimir Vonk, conceptual installationist; Rosemary Robinson-Robinson, the Visiting Fellow who had never gone away; and Pamela Scratch, present in her capacity as spokesperson for the student group SNARBY. Perhaps Pamela Scratch, Salient proposed, could get the ball rolling. She had, he understood, been issued with an advance copy of Lego’s book. How, on behalf of SNARBY, did she respond to it?
Pamela Scratch nodded her thanks, tamped square her notes, and faced the nearest camera. “Eight years ago this month,” she solemnly told it, “an unemployed labourer named Neville Claude Aggot fell victim to one of the most egregious miscarriages of justice in the legal history of this state. Today, at the age of thirty, he languishes in a maximum security facility for the differently sane. There he remains confined to a cramped cell which for as many as twelve hours a day admits no natural light. His sentence is effectively indeterminate, his file stamped ‘never to be released.’ SNARBY – Secure Neville Aggot’s Release By Yuletide – is a non-profit organisation devoted to raising public awareness of Neville’s plight. But SNARBY’s campaign is still very much in its infancy, and its funding situation remains parlous.” She turned officiously to Salient. “Quentin, when this goes to air, could this maybe be the point where you put our phone number up on the bottom of the screen?”
She had moxie, you had to give her that. But maybe moxie was something all lunatics had automatically, as part of the basic lunatic package. In any case, her inquiry seemed to have caught Quentin Salient badly off guard. He was hunkered chubbily forward in his chair. He appeared to be halfway through retrieving something from underneath it. Looking up into the silence in a startled way, he urged Pamela to continue with aggrieved motions of his hand.
“Despite this chronic lack of resources,” Pamela accordingly went on, having smoothly refaced the camera, “SNARBY has single-handedly, in the matter of a few short weeks, placed this University at the very vanguard of the Aggot liberation movement. This despite a conspiracy of silence from the mainstream media on the Aggot case that verges on an outright scandal. Which brings me to this book. Empty Pages. Well, the title pretty much says it all, doesn’t it? 300-odd pages, each one of them totally silent on the plight of Neville Claude Aggot. Which I consider symbolic, Quentin, sadly symbolic, of the docile silence that the whole of our so-called intelligentsia has seen fit to maintain on this issue.”
Here she broke off to throw a withering look at Ivan Lego’s chair. But Ivan Lego proved to be no longer sitting in it. He had temporarily left the set to confer with someone over in the theatre’s front corner, near one of the exit doors. Quentin Salient, for his part, had by now found what he’d been seeking under his chair. It was a croissant! He was still holding this up to his mouth, having just taken a covert munch of it. His jaw was frozen in mid-chew. Once more he made strenuous manual signals for Pamela to proceed.
“Well this,” she declared, her voice tightening with rage, “is exactly the kind of apathy I’m talking about. So. Okay. Let’s break some of the silence, shall we? Let’s dare to say a few things that have never been said about this case.” She was pawing through her chaotic notes, extemporising angrily till she found the right document. “Let’s dare to ask some of the questions that never got asked.” Still shuffling papers. “The questions that Aggot’s inept lawyers never saw fit to raise at his trial. For example: how is it possible for a man to be both unemployed and a labourer? Which one was he? A or B? A simple enough question, you might think. But one that’s yet to receive a satisfactory answer. Right,” she decisively said, having found what she was looking for. “Let’s start with Neville’s arrest, shall we? Let’s start with the poisoned tree of his arrest. Which occurs with rather unseemly haste, to say the least. With suspicious promptness, in fact. Some thirty-six hours after the Baker slayings, to be exact. In a massive and well-orchestrated pre-dawn raid on Neville’s suburban home. Hardly, one might think, a measure consistent with Aggot’s legal right to be presumed innocent. Arresting a man at dawn, in fact before dawn, and conducting a massive search of his home and his wall cavities – hardly something you’d do to a man you presumed to be innocent! And what about this search? What do you suppose the police allegedly recovered, during this initial search of Aggot’s home? A search that Aggot isn’t allowed to be present at, by the way. Or any of his legal representatives, for that matter. Not that he’s even got any legal representatives at this stage. Not that that basic and fundamental human right has yet been accorded to him. So. Given all that, should it really surprise us that this ‘search’ of Aggot’s house should turn up exactly what the police are looking for? A veritable treasure trove of damning evidence that implicates him in the crime? For example: under a towel in Aggot’s basement, searchers will claim to have located the following items: a bloodstained hunting knife; a ring subsequently identified as the property of one of the alleged murder victims, namely 20-year-old ‘Kirsty’ Baker; a bracelet, also identified as belonging to Kirsty Baker; and – yes, we’re not quite finished yet! – and a blood-soaked ski-mask. All this, I repeat, is found, allegedly, under one towel in Neville Aggot’s basement. One towel. A single towel. A conveniently large towel, one might think. At SNARBY, we like to refer to it as the ‘magic towel.’ It sort of calls to mind,” she improvised, making a deferential little half-turn to her left, “some of the conceptual work of Vladimir Vonk. Like The Door,” she improvised further, deftly weaving the adjacent sculptor into the fabric of her polemic, “like The Door, we seem to be confronted here with a sort of deliberate affront to our common sense …”
“Balls,” Vladimir Vonk muttered in reply, in his lard-thick foreign accent.
Pamela took this in her stride. Like a veteran newsreader skating over a technical hitch, she looked unflappably back to the camera and said: “‘Kirsty’ Baker. This, we might remember, is the victim the sexist mainstream media will seize on. The victim they’ll keep referring to as a ‘happy-go-lucky teenager.’ Thus ensuring that any slim chance Aggot might still have of getting a fair trial – well, thus ensuring that that goes flying fully out the window, along with all his other rights. But how can a teenager be twenty years old? Another one of those unresolved questions that this case is rife with. And how can any female in this day and age be happy-go-lucky? Maybe it was all this jewellery she owned. Maybe it was the fact that she still lived with her parents at the age of twenty. An age by which most women in the third world are veterans of the sweat-shop floor – if they’re not already dead, lying forgotten in unmarked graves, unmourned by the Western media. Uncomfortable questions, these. But again, questions that have never been properly asked. Questions that our complicit mass media prefers to pass over in silence …”
Ivan Lego was still over near the frontal exit, supervising the efforts of a lady administrator from the department of socioliterology who was pushing a large wheeled trolley in through the door. Under Lego’s whispering guidance she positioned this contraption near the bottom of the side stairs. On its lower deck sat four large cardboard cartons, taped shut. On its upper deck was an electronic cash register that bore the stuck-on logos of several leading credit-card companies. Taped to the register was a sign saying: Empty Pages – $29.95 per copy – Please retain receipt to ensure continued enrolment.
“But let’s return,” Pamela Scratch was saying, “to the issue of the magic towel. Let’s ask ourselves what the official story, the police story, requires us to believe. It requires us to believe, first of all, that Neville Claude Aggot, having just murdered a well-to-do family of four, and finding himself with a bloodstained murder weapon on his hands, a weapon that he desperately needs to get rid of, can come up with no better hiding place for it than under a towel. Under a towel located in his own house, I might add. A towel lying out in plain view in his own basement. Plausible? I leave that question to the viewer. And incidentally, what are we supposed to think this towel was doing down there in the first place? A towel in a basement? What is there in a basement to get dry from? Who even has a basement? SNARBY has now been able to establish, thanks to a few rudimentary enquiries that Neville’s shamefully incompetent lawyers never saw fit to make, that the home’s bath and shower facilities were both located on the ground floor. So it seems a moot question, to say the least, why Aggot would wish to keep his towels a whole floor below that. Or are we seriously being asked to believe that he was in the habit of padding down the stairs to his basement, nude and dripping wet, prior to towelling off?”
Parts of the audience were starting to shift and murmur with impatience now, as if wondering when someone in authority was going to cut Pamela off. The novelty of the lights and cameras was starting to wear thin; people were beginning to understand that they were trapped here, locked in, duped into supplying the applause track to an hour of boredom they couldn’t switch off. Ivan Lego had somehow, without having visibly crossed the set, transferred himself to the stage’s other side, where he was quietly overseeing the wheeling-in of a second mobile checkout facility. Quentin Salient was vigilantly plucking flakes of yellow pastry off the front of his shirt.
“Similar questions arise,” Pamela now alleged, “in relation to the blood-soaked ski-mask. What – to ask the fundamental question – what was a man like Neville Claude Aggot doing with a ski-mask? Are we seriously being asked to believe he was a practicing ski-er? This man brought up in a grim series of juvenile institutions? This man whose father was not, to put it mildly, the kind of pop who strapped the family’s skis to the roofrack and drove them off to the snowfields for the weekend? So I ask again: what was Neville Aggot doing with a ski mask? An item which even expert ski-ers view as something of a luxury. An optional extra. So I’m told. Here, in other words, is yet another key piece of evidence that seems to have just materialised out of nowhere. But let’s pause here. And let’s imagine, just for a moment, that the police version of events is correct. Let’s imagine that Neville Aggot really did own this mask. Let’s imagine that he really did, at some obscure point prior to the murders, experience this mysterious compulsion to buy a mask and go ski-ing. For the first and only time on record, mind you. And out of the sight of all witnesses, naturally. And despite the notable handicap of owning no equipment besides a mask. Accept this scenario, and the issue of the multiple bloodstains on the mask becomes crucial. Because as a novice ski-er, isn’t it at least distinctly possible, if not in fact highly likely, that Neville Aggot would have suffered precisely the kind of accident that would cause his mask to become soaked with several different types of blood? Including, primarily, his own? The police can’t have it both ways on this question. SNARBY hereby repeats its call for this crucial piece of evidence to be liberated from the clutches of the so-called impartial experts, and re-examined in an open and accountable forum.”
The audience writhed and whispered.
“But SNARBY is well aware,” Pamela went on, with a grave change of expression, “that there will still be, even now, viewers who remain convinced of Neville Claude Aggot’s guilt. Viewers who just can’t bring themselves to accept the likelihood of massive police fraud and evidence-tampering, abetted by the lies of a compliant mass media. To these people, I say this: your donations are every bit as crucial to SNARBY as the donations of those who consider Neville innocent. Because SNARBY’s activities do not begin and end with the belief that Neville Aggot is necessarily an ‘innocent’ man, in the narrow legal sense of that term. Indeed, even within SNARBY’s own ranks there are a range of opinions on this question. People are always surprised when I tell them this. But the fact is, SNARBY has never categorically ruled out the possibility that Neville Aggot maybe did have a hand in these crimes. Maybe he was somehow involved. Maybe, having been systematically deprived of the rudimentary education that you and I take for granted, maybe he really did think a towel was a pretty good hiding place for a murder weapon. These questions may never be definitively answered. But in the end, the fight to secure Neville Aggot’s release goes well beyond such literal-minded definitions of ‘guilt’ and ‘innocence.’ Instead, it raises the far more fundamental issue of social justice. And from that standpoint, Neville Claude Aggot has been paying his debt to society since the day he was born. In fact he has paid it already, many times over. Surely to God the time has come for us to start repaying our debt to him.
“So, to those viewers who remain convinced that Neville maybe was in some way involved in this affair, I ask you to leave aside the narrow issue of legal ‘guilt.’ Instead, I urge you to ponder the following questions. Has Neville Claude Aggot committed genocidal atrocities, or condoned child starvation on a massive scale? Has he ordered air and ground forces to engage in covert bombings of civilian targets? Has he wiped out whole peoples in the name of religion? Has he manipulated the democratic process in foreign lands to prop up corrupt and murderous regimes? Obviously, the answer to all these questions is no. Of these crimes, Neville Claude Aggot is quite clearly not guilty. And yet men who are guilty of such crimes, men who commit them every day, are allowed to go on serving in high public office, while Neville Claude Aggot rots in Butterfly Lodge. And when all is said and done, what do we really achieve by keeping a man like Aggot behind bars? Is it going to bring the Bakers back? Is it really likely to ‘reform’ Neville, to ‘improve’ him? If a petty thief comes out of prison an expert forger, if an expert forger comes out a hardened safecracker, then what’s a multiple murderer going to come out as?”
On this dark note, Pamela spread her hands wide and let her argument rest.
Silence. Ivan Lego, sensing that he was once more required on set, strode coolly back to his chair. Quentin Salient put his TV face on again, all tight and interested. “Mmm,” he intoned, swinging round to face Lego. “Ivan Lego?”
Lego lifted both eyebrows in genuine surprise. “You won’t be leaving that in, surely?”
Pamela Scratch scoffed loudly into her mike.
Quentin Salient permitted his TV face to slacken. “I hear you, Ivan,” he ruefully exhaled. “But they might find it a bit confusing if she gets introduced and then never says anything.”
“You’re not,” Pamela Scratch incredulously cried, “contemplating this cover-up!”
“So cut her introduction as well,” shrugged Ivan Lego.
Pamela scoffed again.
Vladimir Vonk said: “While we’re at it, beret-boy, might we excise her hideous and ill-informed slur on my Door?”
Salient grimaced like a man on a headache ad.
“Think of the alternative,” said Ivan Lego to Pamela Scratch. “Do you really want to be seen proposing, on prime-time TV, that the media is engaged in a conspiracy of silence about a case that you then proceed to talk about for ten solid minutes?”
“I note that she gets to keep her hat,” commented Vladimir Vonk bitterly.
“It’s a paradox,” Pamela Scratch told Ivan Lego. “I thought you revelled in them.”
Salient rubbed hard at his anguished temples. Rosemary Robinson-Robinson stared, blinking, at a mysterious but fixed point in the middle distance.
“At the point where paradox shades into bullshit,” said Ivan Lego, “I stop revelling.”
“She sports it with perfect impunity, this ridiculous hat of a Victorian gentleman!”
Salient: “You realise we’re looking to fill fifty minutes here …”
“Maybe you could just lose my ‘conspiracy of silence’ comment, and put everything else to air,” Pamela Scratch proposed. “I could live with that.”
“Oh for the sake of God!” cried Vladimir Vonk. “Could we stop mollygrubbing this spoiled little girl and maybe get onto my portion of this circus?”
By this stage Salient was beyond caring. With an exaggerated and rather peevish sweep of his palm, as if whatever happened from now on was destined to be a matter of laughable inconsequence anyway, he gave Vonk the floor. Vonk, after some brief but strenuous gyrations in search of the right camera, embarked on a long and impassioned speech about the way that Lego’s book, as far as he could see, challenged only one assumption – namely, the assumption that a book should have words in it – whereas he, Vladimir Vonk, had personally supervised the construction of sculptures that challenged two, three, even four assumptions at once – that is to say, double, triple, or even quadruple the number of assumptions challenged by Lego in his book. “And yet where,” Vonk demanded, “are the trumped-up media fun-fairs in honour of my work? Where is the troupe of television sycophants licking my boots? Where” – he spanked the rickety desk with one of his tanned hands, causing its flimsy components to wobble dangerously – “are the hordes of installation-loving young girls for whom I sculpted away my youth?”
Beside him, with no warning of any kind, and with no connection whatever to the point at hand, Rosemary Robinson-Robinson began to speak. “Let me say this,” she said, aiming a fusillade of blinks at a nearby patch of carpet. “Let me say this and no more. As a comment on the logic of late capitalism. This morning, on my way here, to this, I got lost. God forbid the University bean-counters should put up a sign or something. Or a map. Anyhow, I was lost, I was hot, I needed a place to sit down. None of these things are actually against the law yet, as far as I know. None of these things are actually illegal. So anyway, my eyes fell on this bench. This shady-looking bench under a tree.”
Beside her, Vladimir Vonk involuntarily stiffened. Suddenly this strange narrative had his full attention.
“And first things first,” the dishevelled scholar was saying. “The thing stinks. It pongs. Smelled like it was made out of rotting fish or something.”
Vonk’s eyes widened in horror.
“I mean, welcome to life in the land of the land of the campus bureaucrat. Millions of dollars in their coffers, and this is the state of their public benches! So anyway, I sat on it – ”
Vonk issued a strangled howl. Quentin Salient, who had been attending to some fresh transmission in his earpiece, looked up in alarm.
“– and the whole bloody thing just collapsed. Straight away. Just fell apart like a, like a … Straight to the bloody ground, and me with it. I mean, what sort of bureaucratic bean-counter – ”
“You insane hag!” Vladimir Vonk cried. “That was my Elemental Bench!”
“I mean, if this is the bean-counters’ bottom line – benches you can’t even sit on –”
“Are you totally blind? It had ropes all around it!”
“Mr Vonk,” interjected Quentin Salient, holding up a plump palm, still inclining to the transmission in his right ear.
“– if this is, you know, if this is life in the land of the balanced budget …”
Pamela Scratch was reaching opportunistically under the desk, bringing out the mysterious cardboard cylinder.
“It was supposed to rot naturally into the earth!” Vladimir Vonk whimpered sullenly, more or less to himself.
Pamela withdrew the cylinder’s contents: a long rolled-up poster.
“Mr Vonk,” Quentin Salient said again, “perhaps we could –” But now he was obliged to break off and consider the actions of Pamela Scratch, who had risen from her chair in order to unroll her giant poster towards the audience. Silently, as if the picture on it very much spoke for itself, she unfurled the thing, and held it there for the crowd’s consideration. It was a blown-up black-and-white photograph of Neville Claude Aggot, as high as Pamela’s whole body and several times as wide.
“Miss Scratch,” Salient objected, “Jesus – If we could just – Hey Ivan, no, Christ, not yet!”
This to Ivan Lego, who was up on his feet and striding resolutely towards one of the front exits. He was leaving prematurely! He was transgressively departing from his own book launch! Impassively he disappeared out the door, with the woman in the complex headset in flustered pursuit. In the confusion, Pamela Scratch stepped up onto her chair, the better to display her vast poster. It was the controversial press photograph of Neville Aggot at age fifteen, crouching on his charcoaled front lawn after the fire-related death of his mother. Certain background details – the blackened houseframe, the smouldering caravan – had been airbrushed out. But no retouching work, or not nearly enough of it, had been done on the look in the boy’s eyes – that look of utter neutrality, so terribly inappropriate to the circumstances. A look that implied he was wondering if the photographer might be flammable too. Even so, Pamela Scratch seemed to feel that the image counted unequivocally in SNARBY’s favour. She held it aloft with serene confidence, as if it furnished eloquent and clinching proof of the absurdity of Aggot’s continued incarceration.
And then she raised a boot to step up onto the desk. Perhaps she had been planning to do this all along. Or perhaps she considered the audience’s reaction to the picture to be unsatisfactory, and ascribed this lukewarm response to the image’s lack of elevation. Either way, her plucky right boot ventured up from behind the great poster and began to grope blindly around for the desk’s surface, as if she had wholly failed to notice what that surface was made out of, or as if she had noticed but decided that the justness of her cause would enable her to stand on it anyway.
People were crying out in alarm already.
Then her boot came down: and with an intricate and tindery crackle, a sound like a distant bushfire or a bitten chip, the whole frail structure imploded. The giant face of the young Neville Aggot pitched horribly forward and down, pulling Pamela Scratch rapidly after it. In a spray of atomised veneer she descended, landing with a gruesome and amplified thump near the suddenly visible legs of Vonk and Robinson-Robinson.
And from that point the proceedings degenerated into farce.