Excerpt Four: Quill

Quill From Chapter Twelve

Quill
By Neal Drinnan

... Pascal sat with Tammy in a Balmain café. It would be the last time they went out for one of their intense chats. In the old days, a week didn't go by without Pascal and Tam doing coffee or cocktails or a night on the tiles. They'd been inseparable since puberty.

"I always think it's strange," Tammy sighed, as she rolled a cigarette from her little 1920s tin of tobacco.

"What's strange?"

"How brilliant, shiny people with loads of potential never rub off onto their partners. It always seems to be the other way around."

"What's the other way around?"

"Well, when people are weak and insecure -- even mean -- and they're in a relationship with a brilliant-shiny, they always drag the shiny down. You see it all the time."

"Are you saying that about people in general or about someone specifically, Tam?"

"I dunno."

"You're talking about Wolfie and me, aren't you?"

"I never mentioned names, did I? God, you're starting to sound as paranoid as him."

"It seems to me like my little group of friends have already had their grand court case---the verdict is well and truly in, and Wolfgang's out."

"What do you expect us to say -- me to say. He's a boor, he keeps you on such a short leash I can't even see the chain any more. I love you, Pascal, but it is totally and absolutely beyond me how you could go from Humphrey to... that in the space of six months. The most painful thing is you can't even see what's happened. You're like one of Pavlov's dogs."

Pascal laughed dismally. "Now we've enshrined Humphrey, haven we? Humphrey, lost somewhere between the dogma of his own ego and the glittering towers of New York's publishing houses. Alright, I'm Pavlov's dog, Humphrey's dog; beg for Humphrey, jump for Humphrey, sit on Humphrey's bone. Well maybe that's all -- I---fucking know, Tammy. Woof woof."

"Oh, don't be so bloody melodramatic. You're pushing thirty now, you're no one's boy toy any more, the whole world doesn't go weak at the knees every time you wiggle your tush, and you're grown up enough to know what's good for you. I always admired you, Pascal, but I don't any more, can't any more... "

Tammy had to be Teresa -- and in reality she'd never been quite that confrontational. She'd pleaded with her eyes, said too much after too many drinks and finally stopped phoning him altogether, but if she read Je Louse she wouldn't think that Elliot was too wide off the mark. In fact all of them were probably having a ball reading the fucking thing. The thought made Blaise feel even worse. A poor lost love, a laughing-stock. And a Pavlov's dog to boot. He was trembling like a puppy, as discomfort crept over him like a rash. He had nowhere to hide, and even Woodie's attempts at colluding with him over the whole malodorous thing merely made his flesh crawl.

He flicked to the end. He had eighty pages to go. For a short-lived objective moment, he suspected he might be bored with the book by now, were he not the star of the show. Somewhere in another book he'd read a line that went: "... the couple shared their silver anniversary and the prize for their endurance was a hatred that nothing short of twenty-five years could have purchased." He'd thought it cruel and cynical, even as it rang true. Was that what he was pursuing? Hatred. If things were bad now, they would only get worse. Why did everyone coo over lengthy relationships -- especially gay ones? Was the quantity of time really so much more important than the quality? It was as if sometimes the cosmos got bored with the tedious bickering of everyone's codependency, it groaned, shuffled everything around and made sure you had to move on, no matter how scared and neurotic you were at the thought.

He had hoped desperately as a teenager that his own mother would leave his stepfather, a man in whom Blaise had never found any merit. His mother had simply said, "When you're my age, you'll understand how limited my choices are. Maybe as a man you'll never have to know." It sounded absurdly defeatist to him. "The lesson, darling, is make the right choice the first time." Yet here he was, imprisoned at thirty. Surely his choices weren't all used up yet; she'd been a good fifteen years older than he was now when she was hatching such dire epithets.

"The honey-tree of youth, each sweet drop that drips, suckled by famished admirers, an eager mating place for busy bees. Yet when the honey runs out, the branches are bare and few seek its shade and nectar." Bloody Elliot and his florid metaphors. Blaise had never cared for them that much, yet they ran through his head at times as if he'd learnt the books by heart. It was only Intra Venus that he'd read three times, the dedication burnt into his memory: "For the Blaise in my heart, a furnace of love that never dwindles."

But dwindle it had, and he'd be a fool to think otherwise. They were mere words. They were said, but they're done with now. Blaise needed all the pride he could garner if he was to continue facing the story before him. Tears welled up again as he realised that Elliot could not have really loved him and written such an exposé. Was he so desperate for another bestseller that he was hawking his soul, "my soul, the secrets we had shared." Was this his In Cold Blood? And where to from here -- commit a murder just to have done it? Writers, skiters.