Miles Walker, You're Dead Read online

  PRAISE FOR LINDA JAIVIN

  EAT ME

  ‘This tossed salad of erotic scenarios charms as few examples of its genre ever have.’ Kirkus Reviews

  ‘A vivid erotic fantasy…This expertly crafted novel is challenging and hugely entertaining. Its erotic tales and power-play are compelling.’ Everywoman

  ‘The sexiest thing to come out of Australia since Mel Gibson…And it’s funnier, too.’ Glamour

  ‘Yum…even the steamiest sex scenes…soar into satire. Jaivin never loses sight of her self-declared goal, which is to wrench the writing of erotica from its male practitioners, dress it up with style and sly humor, and restore it to women.’ LA Times

  ‘Something like Waiting to Exhale (or Waiting to Swallow)…You’ll enjoy this tasty romp—you’d better, you slave—and you will thank Jaivin for the exquisite pleasure.’ Paper

  ‘Steamily erotic.’ marie claire

  ‘The opening chapters of Linda Jaivin’s novel Eat Me make the famous fridge sequence of 91/2 Weeks look about as explicit as a public information film.’ British Vogue

  ‘Everybody’s talking about Eat Me.’ Playboy

  ‘I laughed out loud at a kiss that goes on for six pages while the participants ponder each other’s intentions… very funny stuff.’ Washington Post Book World

  ‘Linda Jaivin’s novel will probably do for Lebanese cucumbers what Delia Smith’s books did for cranberries. But Jaivin’s recipes, revealing the erotic versatility of every piece of fruit and veg on the supermarket shelf, are more suitable for the bedroom than the dining room…The prose is as raw as it comes.’ Observer

  ROCK N ROLL BABES FROM OUTER SPACE

  ‘Witty and wickedly satiric…The plot is rocket-fueled and the puns almost literally fly off the page. Few writers have skewered the rock and roll world so savagely and accurately and with so much delight.’ Washington Post Book World

  ‘Linda Jaivin’s Tom Robbinsish sex writing gives the story a rapid pulse and gratifyingly sweaty palms.’ New York Times Book Review

  ‘An erotic romp—no holes barred.’ Elle

  ‘An outlandishly delightful, X-rated science-fiction fantasy…reads like the insatiable literary love child of Douglas Adams, Kurt Vonnegut, and Susie Bright.’ Sonoma County Independent

  ‘Her characters are an unorthodox blend of the sharply observed everyday and the sci-fi cartoon…A layered text which navigates the minefield of contemporary gender and sexuality with finesse and humour.’ Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘Just the right balance of zaniness, hipness and charm… its parody of slacker culture and ufology is a hoot.’ Booklist

  Linda Jaivin is a Sydney writer and translator. This is her third novel.

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Fiction

  Eat Me

  Rock n Roll Babes from Outer Space

  Non-fiction

  New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Chinese Rebel Voices

  (co-editor with Geremie Barmé)

  Confessions of an S & M Virgin

  Miles Walker, You’re Dead

  Linda Jaivin

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House, 22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Linda Jaivin 1999

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published 1999

  Printed and bound by Griffin Press

  Designed by Chong Wengho

  Typeset in 10.5/14.2 Stempel Garamond by Midland Typesetters

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Jaivin, Linda.

  Miles Walker, you’re dead.

  ISBN 9781875847563.

  I. Title.

  823

  Ebook ISBN 9781921799914.

  This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

  for Tim who is for me

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Praise

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Still life (bound and gagged)

  Underpainting (allegorical, large canvas)

  Futurism, according to plan

  Romanticism is ultimately fatal

  Video art with anchovies

  The last art hero

  Sticky like paint

  New wave

  Our very own Medici

  Expressionism yourself

  Painting is dead

  Surrealism

  Bellus homo

  Classical Greek

  Let’s make a deal

  Performance art (with police)

  Installation

  Narrative art

  The thing is

  Primitivism

  Smash ing

  Bomb shell

  Found objects (1)

  Found objects (2)

  Preview

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. The Council provided me with a studio at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig, in County Monaghan, Ireland, an idyllic environment where much of the first draft was completed.

  I am also grateful to the Eleanor Dark Foundation, which granted me a three-week fellowship at the Varuna Writers Centre in the Blue Mountains, to which I’ve returned many times since; Varuna is my writing home away from home. I want to thank director Peter Bishop for his warm support and encouragement.

  Thanks also to John Birmingham for the loan of ‘Sativa’, Jonathan Nix and Simon Bates for permission to quote from their song ‘Plinth’ (credited in the text to ‘Nixon Bates’), the inspirational Toronto writer Russell Smith for passing on the ‘ABC’ theory of creative genius espoused by Trimalkyo, and a policewoman—who must go unnamed—for letting me have a look at her belt and handcuffs. Mandy McCarthy read several drafts, helped with typing, and offered useful suggestions and support. Jonathan Nix, Simon Bates and Tim Smith also read and commented on the final draft, as did my very supportive agent Rose Creswell and Annette Hughes. Tim loved and understood me through the two years it took to write this novel. And, as always, I am more grateful than I can say to my artful editor, Michael Heyward, and everyone else at Text Publishing.

  Still life (bound and gagged)

  My name is Miles Walker. Remember it. I’m keen on immortality. I’ve got to be. I’m twenty-three years old. I’m the best fucking painter of my generation. And I’ve got four hours to live.

  In a world where millennial hopes collide with apocalyptic expectations, making people just a little bit crazy, where nations go to war to prevent war, where conspiracy theories are rife and bio-hazard a way of life, I should’ve known that my own career was unlikely to follow a predictable path.

  The path I’ve followed, as you’ll see, has led me to a cramped cabin on a cruise ship in Sydney Harbour on what promises to be a spectacular New Year’s Eve. But while the rest of the world passes into a new era, I will just pass. To add visual insult to physical injury, I will die staring at beige chipboard walls, a barely double bed with a shiny seashell-patterned coverlet, a vase of dusty plastic roses on a laminate bedside table, and a hideously cheerful blue and white p
olka-dot curtain obscuring the view from a tiny window that doesn’t even have the romantic decency to come in the shape of a porthole.

  Though the cabin is minuscule, the Dinkum itself is huge. I didn’t exactly get the grand tour before I was locked in here, but there’s a brochure on the bedside table giving the ship’s vital statistics. She’s fifty-two metres from bow to stern, has a draft of 1.4 metres and can get up to eight knots. She rents out for harbour cruises, parties, and conferences. In addition to sixty-five cabins like this one, she’s got dining ‘saloons’, lounges, a galley, and a semi-exposed ‘disco deck’ on top of this one that can accommodate three hundred revellers. There’s at least that many up there now by the sound of it. Over the steady doof of the music, which is pumped into the breezeway outside my cabin via a tinny loudspeaker, I can hear a swell of happy voices, shrieked greetings and the clink of glasses.

  In one of his chattier moods, my captor, Verbero, told me that our host, the gallery owner Trimalkyo, is costumed in the robes of a Roman emperor, complete with a laurel wreath. But Nero won’t get to fiddle while Rome burns tonight. This ship is ground zero. At least I know what’s going on. Trimalkyo and his cohort don’t have a clue. I’m not sure which is better—to have a few hours to think over your life, or just to go. No warning, no agonising, no regrets. Just one big party and then—boom.

  We might be in the middle of Sydney Harbour, but I can barely smell the salt air. This is due to the pall of ‘Mist off the Sea’ stick disinfectant that sits decaying on the narrow shelf above the bed. ZakDot would appreciate the irony in this.

  ZakDot is an irony junkie. His name is short for Zak.com.au. He changed it by deed poll a few years ago. ‘It’s no longer enough to have a website,’ he explained. ‘I want to be a website.’ Someone pointed out that he’d become a server, not a website. ‘I knew that,’ he bluffed.

  ZakDot is my best friend by default—de fault of all the sane, normal people in the world for not stepping forward to fill the position. He’s got orange hair, tweezed eyebrows, a fake beauty spot, and a tattoo of a martini glass, complete with bubbles, on his arse. I discovered the tattoo under somewhat traumatic circumstances. He smears kohl under and around his eyes, which are brown, and wears satin smoking jackets. ‘Decadence is the new black,’ he says.

  My own wardrobe consists of shapeless maroon and navy blue pullovers, paint-spattered tshirts and old jeans. I couldn’t tell you what colour socks I’m wearing now. ZakDot could tell you what colour socks he had on last week. And the week before that.

  Someone once told ZakDot that there was a boy in a Newtown band even cooler than he was. ZakDot laughed. ‘The very concept of “cool”,’ he replied, raising his palms and hooking down the first two fingers of each hand to make quotation marks around the word, ‘is so over.’ Still, I could see that this unnerved him.

  Me, I’m in touch with my inner dag. It’s a low-maintenance social position.

  While ZakDot would love the idea of Mist off the Sea, not even he would recognise the most ironic detail of this whole set-up—the cheaply framed and discoloured reproduction of a painting by Winston Churchill called Cap d’Antibes that’s hanging on the wall. If Churchill had stuck to politics, then another politician I know might have kept away from art—and artists—and I wouldn’t be here tonight. Or dead tomorrow.

  If you’ll excuse me for a moment, I can hear a key turning in the lock. Friend or foe? Not that there’s much to the distinction when even your friends wish you dead. For your own good. I’ll get to that story.

  It’s Verbero. Foe-o-rama. He is wearing some sort of medieval muu-muu with a tasselled belt. My eyes goggle at the sight.

  ‘It’s a fancy dwess party, arsehole.’ As he slips inside, he lets in a warm breeze. I breathe in the original organic version of Mist off the Sea.

  ‘Well? Thought it over, Walker?’ Against the sheen of his pale skin, Verbero’s pupils are a dark matt. His chiselled nose and brow look as if they were knocked off from classical statuary. His lips are alizarin crimson. Verbero has evil good looks, like a Hollywood villain, accessorised with a black goatee and diamond nose stud.

  He is holding a bottle of Veuve Cliquot and two long-stemmed glasses. Setting them down on top of the brochure, he starts to drop his keys too but, noting my obvious interest, tosses them onto the bed instead. They land on a polyester periwinkle. Without removing his eyes from my face, he extracts a comb from the pocket of his robe and draws it through his neat black hair. ‘Well, you little pwick? Weady to play ball?’

  I’d answer, but I’m also suffering from a speech impediment. Mine is a recent affliction, known as a gag. The gag consists of a small red rubber ball and two black leather straps, fastened at the back of my head. I saw pictures of gags like this in an exhibition of Photographie Cruelle that Trimalkyo’s gallery put on several years ago. In the good old days. Before Destiny. Before the Troubles. When art ruled the world. When all the little children of our little country wanted to grow up to be choreographers and installation artists and performance poets and postmodern theorists. When Gallery Trimalkyo was the trendiest, most happening gallery in Paddington, which is to say Sydney, which is to say, so far as Sydney was concerned, the universe. When collectors like Aurelia Cash fanned themselves at openings with their chequebooks and everyone felt refreshed. When I had the leisure to be irritated by Lynda Tangent’s triangle paintings and the impenetrable ravings of Cynthia Mopely. When ZakDot could lie around with a cabbage leaf on his face, call it art, and come away with the class medal. When everything was fine and stupid all at once. When my ambitions were unbound and so was I.

  The reason I don’t remove the gag and walk out of here is that Verbero has also handcuffed and tied me to my chair. My left eye still throbs from when he punched me—right after that messy incident involving the prime minister’s dining room table and immediately before he forced some pills down my throat. They knocked me out even more efficiently than his fist. When I came to, I was in this cabin on this boat—the one place in Sydney I hoped not to be on this night.

  Verbero leans down towards me and I flinch, but he’s only removing the gag. I will tell him of the danger, and he’ll surely free me to find my friends and put a stop to this insanity. Three hours and fifty minutes is plenty of time. I am giddy with relief. Verbero’s hands shake and he grinds his teeth like he’s trying to start a fire with them.

  ‘You ought to cut down on that stuff,’ I say, clearing my throat and working my jaw. ‘You can lose the use of your nostrils, you know. I once read an interview with David Bowie where he said that—’

  ‘Shut the fuck up, ya stupid pwick.’ Verbero lives in a world populated by animated genitals. In addition to those with low IQs or having intercourse there are big ones, lazy ones and bloody ones. When he mistakes you for a body part, it’s to your advantage to act in a conciliatory manner.

  Verbero walks behind me. I twist my neck to see what he’s up to. My back is something I like to keep an eye on when he’s around. ‘Don’t twy no funny business,’ he warns, retrieving his keys from the bed and uncuffing me. He sounds like Elmer Fudd doing a Peter Lorre impression on speed.

  I don’t know how much funny business he thinks a skinny, beat-up artist still tied to his chair can try. On the other hand, the last few months have been chockers with funny business. I shake the stiffness out of my hands and arms.

  He hands me a glass. ‘Welcome to the hospitality suite,’ he sneers. I ping the flute with a fingernail. Crystal.

  ‘Cheers,’ I say, as he pours the bubbly. ‘Happy New Year.’ With the gag out of my mouth, I’m feeling expansive. ‘You know,’ I observe, ‘that bottle is worth more than I was used to living on in a week. You politicians do it in style.’

  Verbero is the prime minister’s chief of staff. I don’t think he likes being called a politician. He narrows his dark eyes.

  I take a sip. I study the crystal and, out of habit, imagine how I might represent the sparkling translucence on canvas. C
admium yellow mixed with lemon and titanium white perhaps. The thought of titanium white makes me smile. There’s a story to that as well. I tip the perky golden liquid down my throat and hold out my glass. ‘Oh, and I wouldn’t mind a ciggie either.’ I’m ready to ease into the revelation about the explosive device that, according to my best calculations, ZakDot is helping the fierce and beautiful Maddie to plant on the ship right about now.

  ‘Well?’ he demands, cutting into my thoughts. ‘Have you thought it over?’

  Oh, God, not this again. ‘Yes, I have,’ I reply. ‘And the answer is—no fucken way. But listen, Verbero, there’s something—’

  He doesn’t let me finish. ‘Don’t you feel the slightest sense of wesponsibility?’

  ‘An artist is only wespons-, uh, responsible to his art. Now, can we leave the subject of Destiny aside for a moment? I really have—’

  I don’t even see it coming. As he slaps me, the crystal flies out of my hand and shatters against the table.

  ‘Ow. Fuck.’ I can taste blood in my mouth. Tears spring to my eyes. I wipe my lips with my sleeve. ‘I can’t believe you hit me again.’

  ‘Believe it, cawwot-top,’ Verbero replies. He jerks my hands away from my face and wrenches them back behind my chair.

  ‘Look, Verbero.’ My voice has gone all pathetic. ‘I don’t want to play any more games. I’ve something important to tell you. If you don’t let me go right now we’ll all die. I’m not jo—’

  Before I even see it coming, the gag’s in. The handcuffs are back on. ‘Nice twy,’ he says, smirking.

  He’s split my lip, and my jaw hurts so much I can scarcely feel my black eye. The gag is biting into the corners of my mouth. I’m furious, with myself as much as him, and scared. Why didn’t I speak up while I still could?

  Verbero goes into the toilet, to do a line of coke, I presume.

  I could pray, but I’m not sure if I believe in God. Or rather, my god is Art. Art helps me find meaning and make sense of life. On the other hand, Art doesn’t have a great track record in the search-and-rescue department. The police would be more helpful at this point.

  The police. The word triggers a pang of longing. I have a funny relationship with the police. But there’s no time to meditate on that now. Panic has started to set in. C’mon Miles, I tell myself. You’re resourceful. You can figure something out. You survived for years on the government’s youth allowance, after all. Do something. Anything.