Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

“Where are you going at this hour of the morning? Are you going to see Terry?”

“No, Mum, I don’t know where he is.”

She gripped me by the arm. I saw something terrible in her eyes. They looked like they’d been crying, draining her body of salt and other essential minerals. Her illness was taking its toll. She was already thinner, already old. She said somberly, “There’s been another attack. It was on the radio. This time another cricketer- they found him with his head bashed in and a cricket ball stuffed in his mouth. They’re saying your brother did it. Why, why are they saying he did it?”

“Because he probably did it.”

She slapped me hard across the face. “Don’t say that! It’s a lie! Find Terry and tell him to go to the police. If he hides, it just makes him look guilty.”

The bus came while she was still babbling hysterically. “And if you can’t find Terry, then for God’s sake, find that double!”

I stepped onto the bus and found a seat. As it drove off, I looked out the window at my mother. She rested one hand against a tree while picking gravel off the soles of her feet with the other.

I arrived at Harry’s to see him glaring at me through the front window. As I entered, I resisted a powerful urge to hug him.

“What are you doing here?” Harry shouted in my face. “I was hoping I wouldn’t see you until you finished! You’ve changed your mind, haven’t you? Fucker! Traitor! You’ve had an attack of conscience! Why don’t you get out of here and go join a monastery, you bloody hypocrite!”

Resisting a smile, I pulled the manuscript from the brown satchel and waved it in his face. His eyes widened.

“Is this…”

My smile couldn’t contain itself any longer. I let it explode.

“So quick?”

“I had great words to work with.”

Harry dived for the manuscript and flicked through it excitedly. When he reached the end, he turned back to the front page. I stood there awhile before realizing that he was going to read the thing to the end. I went into the backyard, which was drenched in sunlight. The pool was now an enormous fetid swamp. The lawn was overgrown with weeds. The metal frames of the banana chairs were brown with rust. I stretched out on one and looked up at the sky. Clouds shaped like pregnant bellies were floating through it. My lids closed and I drifted languidly into sleep. Before I got there, in the half dreamworld, I thought I saw Terry hiding out in one of the clouds. I saw him pull the soft fluffy veil over his face whenever a plane sailed by. Then I fell asleep.

I woke sweating. The sun was sitting on me. Blinking through the bright light, I could see the silhouette of Harry’s head. It seemed enormous. When he leaned into the shadows, I saw him beaming at me. He sat on the edge of my banana chair and locked me in a tight embrace, covering me in kisses. He even kissed me on the mouth, which was revolting, but I took it in the spirit it was given.

“You’ve done me a wonderful service, Martin. I’ll never forget it as long as I live.”

“There was another attack,” I said.

“Yeah, heard it on the radio. Stupid bugger.”

“Any word from him? Any idea where he might be?”

Harry shook his head sadly. “He’s become a true-blue celebrity. He can’t avoid the coppers too much longer. Famous faces make lousy fugitives.”

“Do you think, if they catch up with him, he’ll go quietly?”

“Not bloody likely,” he said, picking up his manuscript and stroking it as though it were a thigh. “Come on. Let’s go make some noise of our own.”

Finding a publisher wasn’t going to be easy, and not only because of the risky content. Harry was a fugitive. If we went to a publisher with Harry’s name plastered all over the manuscript, we might get more than a simple rejection. It was possible one of the publishers might call the police. A double rejection! After much arguing, I managed to persuade Harry that we should keep his identity secret until the last possible minute- right up to the moment of printing we’d withhold the author’s name. But Harry still wanted to come along to choose the publishing house most worthy of his tome. It seemed impossible. He was a wanted man- not in Terry’s league, but police don’t forget to look for escaped criminals just because the press isn’t in love with them. On top of that, Harry’s leg had gotten so bad he could hardly walk. Unfortunately, nothing I could say would dissuade him from personally guiding his legacy into print. It was all too vital to leave in my inexperienced hands.

We went out the following day. With his limp and scraggly beard, he looked like a castaway. I suggested he shave and make himself more presentable, but he insisted that authors always look unfit for society so it was actually to our benefit that he looked like shit. He threw on an old coat despite the hot sun and hid a sawed-off shotgun in the inside pocket. I didn’t say anything. “Let’s go then, eh.” I offered my services as a human crutch and he put all his weight on me, apologizing profusely. It felt like I was lugging a dead body.

The first publisher’s building looked like it would cost you just to enter it, and inside, the lobby was full of mirrors that proved you were a slob. We made our way up to the twentieth floor, sharing the elevator with two suits that had men trapped inside them. The publisher’s offices hogged the whole floor. The top of the receptionist’s head asked if we had an appointment. What little of her face we could see was smiling cruelly as we fumbled a no. “Well, he’s too busy to see you today,” she said in a non-negotiable voice. Harry went into his thing.

“See here. This is one of those opportunities you’ll be kicking yourself about. Just like the publisher who rejected that famous book which went on to sell a gazillion copies. What was the name of that book, Martin? You know, the one that got rejected and went on to sell a gazillion copies?”

I didn’t know but thought I’d better play along. I joined in by naming the best seller of all time.

“The Bible, King James edition.”

“Yes, by God, that was it. The Bible! The receptionist wouldn’t let the apostle through, even though he had a gold mine in his hands.”

“Oh for God’s sake,” the receptionist said, sighing. She glanced down at her appointment book. “He has an appointment at the end of the day, and if that runs short, you can see him for five minutes before he goes home.”

“Good enough, kind lady,” Harry said, winking. I helped him to a chair in the waiting room.

We waited.

Harry was shivering and his hands were hiding deep inside his coat, which made me nervous, knowing what else was in there. His teeth were clenched together as if someone had asked him to smile for a photo twelve hours earlier and hadn’t taken it yet.

“Are you OK?” I asked him.

I could tell his paranoia was firing on all circuits. His eyes circled the room while his neck swung his head from doorway to hallway. Around lunchtime I noticed that Harry had his fingers in his ears. When I asked him about it, he muttered something about a noise. I couldn’t hear anything. A split second later there was a loud bang. I craned my head and through one of the doorways saw a young man kicking the life out of a photocopier machine. I looked at Harry incredulously, and remembered again that when Terry and I had first gone to the prison to meet him, Harry had mentioned something about telepathy being highly developed in the minds of career criminals. Long-term paranoia earns people a certain level of ESP, he had said, or something to that effect. Was it true? I hadn’t taken him seriously then, but now? I didn’t know what to think. I scrutinized Harry’s face. He nodded at me with an almost imperceptible smugness.