by Peter Barry
When I’d caught my breath and studied the layout of the land ahead, I crept forward to a bush at the end of the wooden shed and then, keeping as low as possible, ran along behind the remains of an old stone wall. About a hundred yards past the apartment block, I headed to my left, directly towards the front line. I picked out a ruined outhouse and a few bushes in front of me. This was the most dangerous part. I’d be a sitting duck if he didn’t recognise me, and I’d be exposed to snipers in the city at the same time.
The sweat stood out on my forehead, and ran down into my eyes. I was saturated, but as soon as I stopped moving I felt the chill on my skin. I considered turning around and going back, but thought it was too interesting an experience to pass up. I told myself not to be pathetic: this is what it’s like to live down in the city, this is how exposed they must feel as they walk along the street. With that grim consideration in mind, I ran for the cover of the ruined outhouse.
Even when I reached it, I didn’t feel safe. Now I was certainly exposed to him. If he didn’t immediately realise who I was …
Had he seen me? Was he even there? I turned cautiously, not hiding my face, even though I half expected a bullet to smash into it at any second. It was difficult not to screw up my eyes.
I was in the perfect spot, well hidden from any sniper in the city. I could only be seen from the apartment block then. It was less than a hundred and fifty yards away, possibly a hundred and thirty. I scanned the windows, most of them – if not all of them – without glass. The black rectangular holes dotted the face of the nondescript building, a few covered with plastic sheeting.
Then I saw an almost imperceptible movement on about the sixth floor, in a corner window. If I hadn’t been looking for it, I wouldn’t have noticed. I guessed it was the barrel of a rifle. I was being watched, I knew that, I could feel it; my senses were working overtime. I wanted to shut my eyes against the impact of a bullet, but instead forced myself to smile and wave. The tip of the barrel was lowered, raised again, as if for a second look through the telescopic sights, then lowered once more. The figure retreated from the window. I guessed what he was doing: he wanted to be in a position to see me, but remain out of sight of enemy snipers. He stood up. It was him. I recognised him from his body shape – stocky. I could see him clearly. It was him, no doubt at all. I’d guessed right: he was there. He was gesticulating, slapping his thighs, possibly laughing that machine-gun laugh of his: huh, huh, huh, huh! It was hard to tell. But I could imagine his baby face all lit up, his boyish enthusiasm. I scanned the other windows, and could see no one else. I raised my rifle above my head and laughed out loud. I even did a little jig. He was signalling to me, doing his best to be friendly, trying to worm his way into my good books – my good books! That’s a laugh, that’s poetic. What would he know about good books?
I understood what he was saying from his gestures: ‘What are you doing here? What brings you to this god-forsaken spot?’ That’s how he would have put it, and those were the words Mulqueeny would have used too. ‘You can’t just barge in here uninvited, you know,’ in his rude, posh, postprandial voice.
He was definitely having problems believing what he was seeing. He didn’t know what to do; he looked beside himself. He was tapping his head as if I was a crazy foreign mother, and pointing his rifle at me, laughing all the while. He lowered his rifle and slapped his thighs again. He gestured for me to come into the building, into his office, the inner sanctum, a no man’s land for would-be authors. ‘Oh, you’ll invite me in now, will you, Mulqueeny? Well, it’s too late to try to make up now, much too late. That was your big mistake.’
It was a good time. I wanted to shout up to him: ‘Try rejecting this, arsehole.’
Instead I adjusted the sights and raised my rifle too, laughing all the while. Then I stopped laughing, holding my breath, trying to keep the rifle steady, and put a bullet in his brain, right in the middle of his forehead. It looked to be the perfect shot, considering I’d done it so fast.
My little endomorphic friend stood in the window for a short while. He could have been calling out for Ms Diane. I could see through the sights that he looked a little shocked, as if he’d been sobered up in double-quick time by a bucket of cold water being poured over his head. Or like a fish had been suddenly emptied out of a flower vase onto his lap. He was obviously now appreciating what a terrible mistake he’d made turning down my manuscript. There again, he may simply have been stunned by the view spread out before him. He took one step forward, as if to see it better, then crumpled beneath the window sill. For a moment it appeared as if he was going to fall out of the window, but he didn’t – not that it would have made much difference. It was perfect, apart from the fact that his death had been so quick. I wish it could have been a lingering one for the literary agent.
I stayed where I was for about ten minutes, watching and waiting for any signs of life – not from the man in the apartment block, who I knew was dead, but from anyone else. But there was nothing. The world was empty. Mortars flew overhead on their lonely trajectories, travelling from nowhere and disappearing into nowhere. Explosions and gunfire sounded distant. I sat and smoked a cigarette. I felt at peace in no man’s land, at home, not in danger, sheltered beyond the realm of others, outside – from everyone, from both sides. I was quite alone.
I picked up my rifle and scratched an extra line on the butt. I reckoned I deserved 500 Deutsche Marks for shooting this one, this enemy, no doubt at all – probably more. And I thought to myself, ‘I’m a killer now, a real killer. I have no more time for art.’ I felt good, I felt very, very good. No one was going to laugh at me now. Ms Diane was unlikely to snigger at the death of her boss, most unlikely. That would shut her up good and proper.
Later, I headed back to my own private eyrie in the forest. I saw no one on my return journey, apart from the army truck driver who dropped me off on the Pale road without uttering one word on the whole trip. Mr Stinky, however, buzzed a halfhearted welcome. Except for him, my brief sortie had gone, as far as I could tell, unnoticed.
Tonight, after I’ve finished writing in my notebook, I know I’ll sleep like a baby. I will rest my head on my copy of The Information, and my head will be full of information.
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I remember, when I was young, blowing up balloons. It must have been at Christmas, because I never had birthday parties, my father didn’t believe in them – a waste of money, he said. Puff, puff, puff … The skin of the balloon was so tight, so stretched. Puff, puff, puff … Will it take any more air? Puff, puff … I remember thinking, if I blow one more time, it will burst. And I did – puff – a strong blow, and the balloon burst in my face.
I feel a little like that now. My head is like that balloon. It’s very close to bursting. One more breath, one more puff, and perhaps I too will burst, my brains flying in every direction, my skull just shattered, empty fragments.
Why did I do it? I don’t know. I have no idea. I couldn’t give a satisfactory reply if someone asked me. Perhaps it was that perfectly motiveless act, without reason, which evolved out of nothing, owing its existence to no other occurrence. Perhaps I just wanted to clear the world of literary agents, especially bad ones. There again, let me argue, it could simply have been that I was being particularly creative, creating and acting out what might possibly make an interestingly dramatic scenario. Perhaps it was both. But to a degree it was premeditated, even though I hadn’t thought about it in any great detail.
I returned to the Vraca camp two days later. A few of the men nodded, one even slapped me on the back. That’s about as affectionate as these men can be. No one mentioned Santo. Maybe they don’t know about him yet. I asked one or two people where he was, and they shrugged, indifferent. There was a new man in his bunk, but not in mine, which was strange – as if people sense these things.
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I find it difficult writing in my journal now. It seems pointless, and requires too much effort.
&nb
sp; It’s early September. The weather’s cooling down.
Yesterday, on the floor of the apartment I’m – not living in, but existing in – I found a broken mirror, smashed into many, many pieces. I picked up a shard and looked at the sliver of face I saw within it. I haven’t seen myself for weeks, and was curious as to whether my appearance would be different in some way, reflecting the changes in my life.
I shave rarely nowadays, so there was a coarse growth around my lower face. The eyes stared out at me as if caught by surprise. My hair was uncombed, and made me look wild. I could have done with a wash. But I couldn’t truly say that I looked very different, although there was something about the eyes. It was still ‘me’ in the mirror, not someone new. It was the school janitor, the bloke who lived in the rundown sixties flat on Shoot Up Hill, the unrecognised scribe, the ex of Bridgette’s. I think I’d hoped for, or expected, a noticeable change – although I’m not sure I know what I meant by that. I was disappointed that I appeared so normal, abnormally normal, and could only conclude that the mirror was lying, that it had decided to hide from me the fact that I was a different person.
Am I losing it? It’s occurred to me that this could be the case. My grasp on reality is becoming more tenuous, it seems. Every action I go through is an imitation. I’m pretending. I’m one of the great pretenders. I do know that this, whatever it is, is what people do, this is how people behave, this is how they talk to each other, and smile or frown. When they do it, it’s authentic, natural; but when I do it, it’s not authentic, it’s not genuine. I’m acting. I’ve always tried to behave like people expect me to, and say the things they expect me to say. Some of the time I take them in, fool my audience, and some of the time they can see right through me. I’m certainly never happy with my performance. I can see straight through it, the tricks and mannerisms, the pretence. I can’t fool myself, it seems. I write it down, this reality, this life I’m now leading, in the hope it will become fiction, even turn into literature, but I know I could well be wasting my time. We’re living in a post-literary world, as everyone’s so keen to point out, and I’m just one of many picking over the corpse of the novel. By producing so many corpses myself, I’m closer to the action than most writers, of course, and that’s surely no bad thing.
This morning I found myself standing at the apartment window. Such an innocuous statement, yet far from ordinary, about as far from everyday as one can possibly get in this far-from-everyday part of the world. I leant on the sill, and looked across to the hills on the other side of the city. I placed Mr Gilhooley next to me. He has been a good companion for the past five or six months and I thought it appropriate, on such an occasion, that we were together. ‘It’s time for us to leave, Gilhooley,’ I said to him. ‘Thank you for your company.’
He wasn’t too happy about this, I can tell you. ‘Can’t you go by yourself?’ he asked plaintively in his squeaky, unpleasant voice. ‘And aren’t we a trifle exposed? Shouldn’t we seek cover?’ He was probably thinking fondly of my little cupboard under the stairs at school. Wouldn’t he have liked to be hiding in there, with the janitor he so despised, right at that moment!
I rested my elbows on the sill. I didn’t answer him. My rifle was propped up beside me. At first I was tense, which is normal when you’re expecting a bullet to penetrate your brain, but soon I relaxed. I admit to keeping my eyes shut a lot of the time, as if not wanting to see what was heading my way, while I hummed some tune or other – I don’t know what. I spoke a little to Mr Gilhooley, but every time I started a sentence, I wondered if I’d be given the opportunity to finish it. Happily, it was only small talk, primarily about his school, although I do also remember confessing to him about being plagued by feelings of mediocrity. I’ve been feeling discarded recently, as a person, son and lover, but primarily as an author. Delete from records. Not wanted on voyage. Put outside with the garbage. It’s not a pleasant feeling, even though I’ve renounced the writing profession. I’m about to die, I think, and I’m about to die with the knowledge that no one will remember me. Nor will anyone remember my books – how could they, when they haven’t read them? When no one remembers you, you cease to exist, and that’s a lonely thought. It makes me feel hollow. My life has amounted to nothing. Salieri achieved more than me, much more.
In October last year, about five months before I came to Sarajevo, the spacecraft Magellan, having mapped almost the whole of Venus, concluded its mission with a suicidal dive onto the surface of the planet. I could imagine the beeps, the static, the disembodied voices of NASA control, and then … and then … and then … the silence from the vastness of space. No more transmissions, no more information, just nothing – no thing.
All of this was going through my head, and I was telling Gilhooley about it. He, however, was not overly sympathetic when I told him of these doubts and fears, and said, in his smarmy schoolmasterly way, that he craved silence – ‘craved’, for fuck’s sake; who else could come up with a word like that? He told me to get a grip on myself or some such cliché.
I felt like Graham Greene playing Russian roulette when he was young. I wanted to die, I think that’s what I wanted. Why else would I have done such a thing? It struck me as being a good idea at the time, it was as simple as that. Maybe I was bored. But this is the astonishing thing: no one shot at me. Obviously I’d made a serious mistake killing the enemy sniper who’d been hunting me for so long. He’d never have missed an opportunity like this. I don’t know what every sniper in the city was doing right then. Could they have all gone off for a tea break? I was annoyed: had I gone to all this trouble over the past few months to remain out of sight, and for no reason? Finally, after a good half-hour I straightened up, and was about to retreat from the window when there was an ear-shattering crack! and Mr Gilhooley went flying backwards across the room. I froze. I closed my eyes. My breathing was heavy, steady, as if I’d been in a deep sleep. Gilhooley was muttering and mumbling away on the floor behind me, but I ignored him. I waited, it seemed for an eternity, my eyes shut tight. And then it dawned on me: whoever was out there was not going to shoot me, not when I was presenting myself as a target. He wanted to hunt me. I decided to leave the window. Without hurrying, I picked Gilhooley up off the floor and retreated to the back of the room. The headmaster was complaining loudly about how this was the second or third time he’d been shot and yet I was still unscathed. ‘It’s so unfair,’ he said, ‘the way you stick me out in the open, a lightning rod for all the world to see.’ I told him he’d scarcely been sympathetic to the fears and doubts I’d just been voicing, and that he should try to get a grip of himself and pull himself together. He stopped whimpering then, and sank into a quiet sulk. I wasn’t sure I could be bothered to patch him up again.
I sat on the floor and lit a cigarette. My hands were shaking. I noticed that, but only after the event. I’d obviously decided there was little reason to live, but nor, as far as I could tell, was there much of a reason to die.
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When I’ve finished writing this sentence, this sentence I’m writing now, I shall close this Collins notebook for the last time and throw it, along with its companion volume, if possible with a degree of nonchalance and urbanity, into the far corner of this room, where I’ll leave them to rot or perhaps, you never know – and I truly don’t care – to one day rise up, well up – even spew forth – on the tide of universal testimony.
And at the end, the very end, is the Word.
Acknowledgements
This novel has had a very long gestation, and many people have helped and encouraged me along the way. I thank them all, but in particular Barry Scott at Transit Lounge for his generosity, and for being brave enough to go where no one else dared. Penelope Goodes for her professional, sensitive editing. Lindsay Barry for her patience in putting up with my dreams for far longer than anyone else. Merrin Cameron for her persistence in clearing so many blockages to publication. Dr. Leonie Naughton, my sometime muse, who sadly did not sta
y for the champagne. Bryan Keon-Cohen who is travelling the same path as me and always encourages. Most importantly, I wish to thank Elizabeth Orr, my favourite and most loyal reader, for her love and support, and for her endlessly perceptive, if frequently painful, criticisms.
An earlier version of I Hate Martin Amis et al. was the winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript.
Peter Barry is an itinerant mongrel. He’s English, French, Irish and a Channel Islander. Born in England, he was brought up in Scotland. He has lived in Edinburgh, London, Paris and Sydney. For the meantime he lives with his wife, and works as a copywriter, in Melbourne.
