Every morning I endured the four-hour bus ride into Sydney, where I spent the day going from publisher to publisher. Most laughed right in my face. One guy had to come out from behind his desk to do it because my face was too far away. It was discouraging. Also, the publishers didn’t like the idea of my hiding the author’s name from them right up to the day of printing. It made them suspicious. Many thought it was some kind of plot to drop them in the shit. You never met a greasier bunch of paranoid, unimaginative, dull-witted merchants in your life. The ones who took the manuscript seriously, who didn’t think it was a hoax or a prank or a plot, called me the worst possible names. They thought the work was an abomination and I was a dangerous, irresponsible anarchist for trying to peddle it. Before they threw me out on the street, they all said the same thing: this book would never be published, not in their lifetimes. I guess that meant that once they were dead, the world could fall into the toilet for all they cared about it.
Harry took it badly. He flew into fits, accused me of being lazy or sabotaging the meetings with ineptitude. That burned. I was slaving my guts out peddling that book of his, but it was the book they didn’t like, not me. Then, and after the tenth rejection, he started cursing the Australian publishing industry instead of me. “Maybe we need to take this to America. Freedom of expression is big over there right now. They have a thing called the right to free press. They have amendments enforcing it. Ideas are encouraged to flourish. Here the industry’s as stale as week-old bread crusts. This country’s so fucking conservative it makes you want to puke. It’s a wonder anyone gets anything published at all.” He might have had a point. Maybe the local publishers were just scared. He started talking about buying me a plane ticket to New York, but I shot that idea down the best I could. I didn’t want to go to New York. I couldn’t leave my sick mother or Terry, wherever he was. I was convinced that someday, soon, Terry was going to need me, maybe to save his life. I had to be on hand.
Caroline felt no such duty. She and Lionel arrived at my front door in the near-darkness of twilight to say goodbye. They had sold the house and were moving off. Lionel gave me a hug while Caroline stood shaking her head. “I’m not going to hang around and see Terry killed,” she said. “No one’s asking you to,” I said back, although I did think about it. It began to rain softly. She gave me a hug too, though it wasn’t the squeeze I needed, and as I watched her guiding her blind father out into the night, I felt as though I had renounced my humanity. I called out “Bye!” as she disappeared into the darkness, but it was as though I meant, You go ahead, I’m not a man anyway. There’s nothing human about me, so you be off.
A week later I was at Harry’s watching television when Terry called. After giving him an earful, Harry threw me the phone.
“How are you holding up?” I asked frantically. “They’re saying you got shot.”
“In the ankle! Who shoots ankles? Look, don’t worry about me, mate. I got a bird who does wonders with iodine. I’m tired, that’s about it. Otherwise I’m OK.”
“You’re famous.”
“Isn’t it wild?”
“It’s going to get you caught.”
“I know.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Look. Maybe I started this thing without too much thought, but I realized pretty quick that I’m doing something here, something I feel is important. Everyone’s on their best behavior. No one’s cheating. No one’s playing dirty. No one’s ripping anyone off. No one’s screwing anyone. Sport’s going through a reformation. Everyone’s taking the ethics seriously.”
“How can you talk about ethics! You’re a cold-blooded murderer! I think you should give yourself up.”
“Are you nuts? This is who I am! This is what I was put here to do!”
“Caroline came home.”
There was a sharp intake of breath. I could hear Terry moving around, dragging a chair across the floor. Then I heard him sit.
“Where is she? Does she know? Can you take her a message?”
“She left again.”
He took another breath, this time deeper, and I waited a full thirty seconds before I heard him let it out. He cracked open a can of something, then swallowed maybe half by the sound of it. He still didn’t say anything. Caroline’s absence seemed to weigh more heavily on both of us than murder.
“So are you going to stop or not?” I asked.
“Listen, Marty, one day you’ll understand all this. The day you believe in something. Oops. Gotta go. Pizza’s here.”
“Hey, I believe in-”
Click.
I put down the receiver and kicked the wall. It’s normal to think that the laws of physics don’t apply when you’re angry, that your furious foot will pass through brick. Nursing my injured toe, I felt extremely agitated. The sound of profound gratification in Terry’s voice was enough to put me on edge. He didn’t give me a chance to tell him I’d found my belief. I was doing something important too. He didn’t know I’d been irresistibly drawn to Harry’s book and was instrumental in getting it published. Well, how could he? I wasn’t getting it published. And why not? Terry was doing everything possible to murder those sportsmen, but was I really doing everything I could for the book? The idea began gnawing at me that I didn’t have it in me to go all the way, to go with total devotion down a road on which it was impossible to do a U-turn. Terry was displaying absolute ruthlessness and obstinacy in pursuit of his goal, and I needed to apply the same ruthless obstinacy to follow my path incessantly; otherwise I was just another frightened worthless hypocrite unwilling to put himself on the line for his cause.
I made a groundbreaking decision.
If the next publisher rejected the book, I simply wouldn’t accept his rejection. I would reject his rejection. I wouldn’t take no for an answer. I wouldn’t take never for an answer. I’d demand he publish it, and if that meant holding him hostage until it was in the stores, then so be it. It would be easy enough to get my hands on a gun. You only had to open a cupboard at Harry’s or plunge your hand deep into the sugar bowl to find a semiautomatic. Of course, I despised guns and all the baggage that went along with them, like bullet wounds and death, but on the other hand, I liked the idea of breaking another one of the Ten Commandments, especially since I didn’t honor my father either. They couldn’t very well force you to suffer for two eternities, could they?
That night before going home, while Harry was out cold on vodka and sleeping pills, I plunged my hand deep into the sugar bowl. The pistol inside came out covered in sticky crystals. I brushed them off into a cup of tea and drank it. I could taste the gun.
The next day I left my house when it was still dark. Terry hadn’t made a whisper in the world for at least a week and there were no reporters camping in our yard, although their cigarette butts were wet with dew. I took the bus into the city. The office building of the next publisher on the list was across the road from Central Station. Before going in, I studied the train timetable in case I might need to make a hasty getaway. One train or another was leaving every three minutes, if I wasn’t too particular about the destination. I bought a whole bunch of tickets, gateways to everywhere.
The lobby had a blackboard under glass listing the building’s residents in white letters. There, on the fourth floor, was the name of my last hope. Strangeways Publicati ns. The “o” was missing. It wasn’t too difficult to see why. On the sixth floor was a company called Voodoo Cooperative Clothing, while on the second floor resided another company called Ooooops! Stain Remover Inc.
I took the elevator to the fourth floor. There was a bathroom at the end of the corridor. I went inside and hung my head over the toilet bowl for a good twenty minutes, strategizing, before going back out into the corridor and making my way to the door of Strangeways Publications. Before knocking, I reached into my bag. The gun was still there, but the sugar was gone. There was nothing sweet about it anymore.