Shirker

Reviews

Imagine Raymond Chandler filing from New Zealand with a little help from Anne Rice and Jean-Paul Sartre, and you’re still not close to imagining the oddity of this weird, wonderful novel. Taylor’s structural instincts are so unerring and his tersely elegant language so seductive that the story never once falters – even as it morphs from a murder mystery into an exploration of passion and mortality. – Entertainment Weekly

"New Zealander Chad Taylor’s Shirker is a novel out of time: it sources both the tough-talking crime fiction of Chandler and Hammett and subtle Gothic supernaturalism... But it’s also relentlessly plot-driven, a rarity in this age of cutesy post-modernism... Aside from a passing mention of the Internet, [the novel] could have been written 60 years ago. Taylor’s mature, highly refined prose suggests a young author with an old soul – his resistance to fashionable cynicism and the paucity of pop-culture references gives Shirker a timeless quality." – Andre Mayer, Eye

The work of a good storyteller and, as debuts ought to be, full of promise. – Robin W. Winks, Boston Sunday Globe

"New Zealand strikes back... Shirker is a terrifying exploration of violent and sexually charged obsessions – a literary thriller, with prose so cool, and images so compelling, it’s film noir in novel form." – Buzz

"Shirker is a strange and fascinating book. It is set in a New Zealand city, but the story seems to unfold in another world. Bizarre events occur and explanations continually elude both the reader and the central character, a man who, by chancing on a murdered body, is drawn into a grotesque fantasy controlled by a mysterious figure. It’s a beautifully written and skilfully constructed nightmare from a writer of great imagination." – Sunday Telegraph

Hip... A terrifying examination of murder and sexual compulsion. – The Sunday Times (UK)

Taylor’s prose is colourful yet crisply controlled...the Auckland setting is atmospherically evoked, the action ingeniously conceived and smartly paced. – The Scotsman

INTENSE – Scotland on Sunday

A hallucinatory Gothic mystery set in seedy clubs catering for fetishistic tastes, with a Nosferatu-esque villain casting an ominous shadow over proceedings. With a tight and observant style, Taylor has weaved an engaging tale with obsessive peripheral detail... He may touch upon lofty notions of mortality – but it is his cinematic sense of location and narration that whisks us towards the novel’s inventive finale. – The Times

"Sucked into an investigation of a junkie’s horrible death from being thrown into a glass recycling bin, Ellerslie Penrose uncovers a strange world of kinky brothels and mysterious players in a weird deception where fantasy and reality blur. An old journal holds the key but someone is prepared to murder to hide its most peculiar truth. Taylor’s prose has an old-fashioned precision that greatly enhances the notions of time put on hold and life without end that permeate the plot and serves to keep the reader temporarily off-kilter. – The Herald

"Much more ambitious, and weaving a seductive web of existential anomie, is Chad Taylor’s Shirker (Canongate), a fascinating and obsessive novel from New Zealand... Ellerslie Penrose, a part-time futures broker, finds a junkie’s body in an Auckland dumpster, steals his wallet and embarks on a hallucinatory journey into the shadow life of the dead man. This brings him into contact with fantasy bordellos, mysterious manuscripts, bizarre antiques dealers, and a sleazy nest of quirky happenstance. Oddly detached from its subject matter, this is as hypnotic as they come; it’s also miles away from the conventions of your average country-cottage crime or pig-headed cop yarn. One for the connoisseurs." – The Guardian

"If you are just looking for something different and a bit challenging at the end of summer, I recommend Shirker, the first novel published in the United States by New Zealander Chad Taylor. It is a haunting and hallucinatory story in which the protagonist appears to die in the opening chapter but returns to narrate the story of the last days of his life. Weird? You bet... I found the story profoundly compelling, one that will take me a while to shake." – St Petersburg Times

"A tale that is hypnotic, sensual, and hints at the supernatural... You probably won’t read a stranger mystery novel this year. – The Plain Dealer

A complicated journey into a world of not-so-sensual erotica and sometimes confusing intrigue, compelling in its ugliness and powerful in its obscurity. – Gadfly

SHIRKER

For Debra

I

I was born beneath a bigger sky. The Year of Our Lord eighteen hundred and seventy-four – for years were the Lord’s then, and He was ours. Planets circled undiscovered. Neptune was a 28-year-old, Mars lined with fresh canals. The sparkling blackness between the gas-lamps: your sky is so much smaller, bereft of distance and mystery. You look up to it and wonder a little less.

I admit to a similar transformation. I too have been reduced in the interim: an epic shrunk to a cartoon. I am foolhardy and laughable, now, and this story, when it ends, will be the toast of children and the empty-headed.

To this fate, however, I remain indifferent – where children and the empty-headed stand in the new order is hardly clear. To me it seems they are astride you all. Their wants have become giant. They rule you, crowding all with their shiny, multi-coloured toys, their music pounding at the walls. I am tired of your appetite for colour: skin, hair, clothes, buildings, homes, wrappings – everything is vermilion now, the variety frenetic. The bed-ridden Matisse worked on paper so bright the doctors feared it would blind him. He died before that could happen: it is you who have fallen sightless, scalded by your contemplation of brilliant things.

Forgive me. My mind wanders. My sinuses, blocked by the usual city allergies, smell lacquer and wood polish; my cataracts discern the most minute details. I have spent so much time becoming old, you understand, letting go of the things which youthful senses take for granted, that recollections when they appear are clear and vivid. An echo pretending to be a reprise.

I arrived carrying a cardboard suitcase and a brown paper bag filled with notes, coins, jewellery. The everyday amassed, a sum of things far greater than their worth. I can report no pattern to this increase in value: one decade it is china, another it is machines, and another it is buttons. Whatever: circumstances have required me to maintain such a collection. A lonely man draws many things around himself for warmth.

I think I am hungry. The food is over-elaborate. Nobody comes. I speak to a box. In the weeks I have lain here I have come to love its mechanism. It sits patiently by my bed: it is one of your better creations. When it is listening – which is always, the moment I open my mouth – it purrs, its record light candy-red. I awake in the dark and test it: I cough or clear my throat. And it burns, faithfully. It waits in attendance.

The days are uniform. A series of pillows, plastic cups, cramped motions, pains.

Uniform.

CHAPTER 1

The younger of the two policemen crouched to unstrap the watch from my unmoving wrist. He held it up and read out the time from its stopped, dangling face.

‘Five-fifteen,’ he said, wincing. ‘Guess that’s when he bought it.’

Broken glass fanned out from my body in a white flower, testimony to the force with which my 160 lbs had passed through the top-storey window and fallen to strike the street below.

‘So what do we call that?’ he asked his friend, sealing my watch in a plastic bag and putting it in his pocket. ‘Time of impact or something?’ He looked down at my feet. ‘Nice shoes,’ he said.

So that’s what it came down to, my life of thirty-something years. That’s where it starts and that’s where it ends: nice shoes, and the steps I have taken in them, the places I have been, the premises I have entered. I could blame the whole thing on a pair of brown Oxford wing-tips, not too much tooling, with their new laces courtesy of the local hotel. They have been resoled twice, now, their toes shod with curved steel tap-plates. They were made for me by a man named Bob Cleft. I had always promised myself I would have my shoes hand-made. Growing up, you wear such terrible shoes. Things your brothers wore, handed down. They don’t fit. Your stride suffers.

Bob I found in a workroom in one of the corridor alleys running through the central city – a long time ago, before they started tearing up all the buildings in central Auckland and planting empty glass towers. The street was damp, its stone walls and moss recalling the prison and execution yard that stood there even longer ago, before I was born. The door was heavy and patched with clipped tin, and inside smelled of sawdust and machine oil. The shelves and cutting benches were dirty white pine stacked high with leather and cardboard patterns. A black iron sewing machine stood in the back room, and between it and the workroom the wall was divided into nicotine-stained shelves filled with feet, the lasts from his many clients over the years. Some pairs were wrapped in yellowed linen, others linked with parched black tape. The children’s feet were snug in crumpled newspaper. The remainder lay bare, their soles brushed with sawdust and dry leather clippings.

Bob wore half-framed bifocals with thick lenses and pursed his lips round a moistened rollie when he was concentrating. He asked me to leave my socks on and sit on his work stool, and then he squatted and cupped my foot in his leather apron, wrapping the measuring tape around it five or six different ways. He wrote the figures with a carpenter’s pencil on a blue-lined index card and told me to come back the following week.

When I returned he had made my feet in wood. They were lying on the workbench. The wood was younger and they were marked with my name in waxen capitals, but when he was finished he would store them on the rack alongside the others, turn their soles to face the light of the weak yellow bulb.

On the first fitting he poured us both tea from a decorated aluminium pot while I tried on the shoes. I stood up, and he rested his cup and saucer on the window sill and bent down to chalk the leather. Then he had me take them off again so he could confirm his measurements, holding each shoe like some hollow ornament, the thumb and forefinger of his right on the heel, the tip of his left forefinger on the toe. And then abruptly he said, ‘I’ll give you a call when they’re ready.’ I had to come back a second time, for a second pot of tea. Every pair equalled two visits, two cups of tea, two helpings of macaroons.

I remember Bob’s voice above the soft, drizzle-hushed patter of traffic passing the window, a lower pane frosted with the steam from his stained china cup. People don’t look after shoes nowadays, he was fond of telling me; we used to unscrew the studs from football boots and wear them for work; I had a box camera with a perfect lens; learned to drive when I was 14 years old.

The first pair of shoes he made me were black and buckled. He put a special welt between their soles and uppers and lined them with new leather. The pair I’m wearing now he cut in brown calfskin and reinforced the eyes for the laces. For my correspondent shoes he chose green suede, and into my black calfskin semi-brogues he inserted steel-caps. They weren’t intended for violent ends: the steel acted as a permanent last, preserving the shape of the toe.

On the final fitting I would lace his work and admiringly turn my feet as Bob stood back with one arm across his chest. Then I would hop down from the bench and feel the sole press up into the arch of my foot, the lining cup my heel. My repaired posture disclosed its marring. I would locate a pain in my shoulders, a crack in my lower back. I would cross the workroom floor and revel in the evenness of my step. I would feel certain again. Bob would finish his tea with a loud slurping noise and swill the leaves around in the bottom of the cup and say, ‘Well, I won’t be keeping you.’ And it would be time to pay him and leave.

I paid him in cash instalments, $500 a pair. He made good money. I asked him about rent, once. Bob shrugged, three tacks between his lips, hammering a sole with a circular motion. He knew the workroom, like other buildings in the area, was marked for demolition, or at least for energetic renovation. Maybe, handing over the wad of notes and not worrying about the change, I’d unconsciously treated each job as the last. Either way, it shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did when I arrived at the workshop door one day to find the sign saying closed. I pressed my face against the window. The rooms had been emptied. The workbench was on its back, legs in the air, the departed forms of every client marked by gaps in the sawdust on the empty shelves.

I stood on the stone steps pretending I hadn’t seen it coming but of course I had. Each time I visited the street traffic was thicker, more congested, and all the shops nearby were gradually being replaced, a slow-business restaurant here, an empty car park there. I knew the current would catch him eventually.

Since then I’ve crossed hundreds of streets in his shoes, claiming them as mine by the distances I have covered. I have walked yards and metres, miles and kilometres, stood waiting in the rain, stomped on the accelerator pedal and, despite a promise to the contrary, kicked ribs and shins. They have always held their shape. My arches haven’t fallen and my back doesn’t ache. I have stood through bad times. And in good times. I’ve put them on and walked out.

Good shoes make every step a sure one. Children may trip themselves up but the pavement hardens as you get older. You don’t get up as easily. How many times I have learned this, I’ve lost count. But I do keep track of the other details. Bob Cleft, for instance, I think of all the time.

I thought about him as my feet were clawing the air and the turbulence of my falling form saw them rise, first level with my face and then, gradually, above my head. I stared at my shoes as I plummeted head first, trying to right myself, trying to think what would be the best way to fall, to survive. As the ground rushed up, the city stretched out to embrace me, to reclaim me as its own. The realities of my life were returning as sure and as hard as the ground beneath. Falling, I could see everything as it really was. Instead of being an industrious man engaged in vital tasks, I had ignored everything that was important until it was too late. Falling to my death, I was granted this wisdom of hindsight. The actual drop took only seconds: the decisions I had made – my true fall – commenced much earlier.

It started in the morning, in the dark place behind my office I call a bedroom. I coughed and fumbled for my watch. Three o’clock: it was getting worse. I lay there for a long time and then got up and made a pot of tea. I drank it staring out the window. I watched the night. I counted the colours and the cars passing by; people stopping at the pie cart below. I tracked the cleaners making their way through the office block at the opposite corner. They set out on the top floor and worked down in steps. There were three of them; one with the mop trolley, two with bags. The baggers moved like an advance party, emptying waste paper baskets, scoping out new offices. The mopper followed more slowly. They met on one of the lower levels and ate sandwiches on the boardroom table. They spoke softly while they ate, made jokes, swapped sections of the newspaper. Every night, twenty floors, mops and buckets and a packed lunch. Cleaning the building looked like the real work. All people did during the day was come in and make a mess.

Thinking at that time of night is good, normally. The silence permits words and ideas and the phone doesn’t ring: you’re left alone to sort things out. You can flick through an album of people you won’t see again or places you’ll never go, the acclaim you’ll never receive: the second quarter of the clock can be a reassuring place.

I made another pot of tea and sliced some blue cheese, the crumbling segments sticking to the blade. The hour was so quiet I didn’t hear it coming. I was wiping my hands when I realised dawn was upon me.

I looked around. Sepia had washed over the room. The shadows were long and dark and without detail, the highlights burnished.

The furniture could have been chosen by another person: the papers, the battered office equipment; things had altered since I’d examined them last. The place suddenly resembled a stage set. I experienced the abrupt sensation of waking up in a movie theatre, halfway through a film. That’s how it felt and, blessed and hindered by a dead man’s hindsight, I believe that’s how it actually was. With that sunrise, the world changed.

I got up and pushed back the chair. I showered and put on my good suit. I was due for a morning appointment with a vice-pinstripe at Brands, a glass tower firm with lavender doors, at which I was going to tell him what to do with all their money. I deal in futures – ironically, when you think about it. I plan investments, calculate returns, recommend new ventures on the experimental, free market roller coaster that New Zealand has become: I make guesses, in other words, and hope they turn out good. Intuition is my speciality, which goes some way to explain the shapes I can see when I squint at these scenes from the corner of one eye. But for now let’s just leave it for the boring job that it is, the thing that I don’t really do that takes up a great deal of my time and other people’s trust.

As the minute hand of my watch passed eight I was walking along the street. The city was settling down to work, swapping stories about the weekend and trying to work out its schedule. Office windows flickered with the static of white shirts and work-space dividers, rubber plants and undelivered memoranda. Every corner and hoarding was covered with posters advertising Mardi Gras. The parade was less than a week away: Mardi Gras, spring celebration.

Sponsor-paid TV spots apologised for any disruption to traffic. Pale blue banners hung from the street lamps, transparent in the early sun. Mardi Gras, parade, Mardi Gras. Everyone was going to the parade.

The parking lots had been filled by the morning commuters. The drivers left queuing outside had cut their engines and buried themselves in their newspapers, wound down the window and listened to the radio, raked back the seat to stare up at the vinyl.

They watched me walk by, wondering if I was anything to do with the police cars they had glimpsed earlier, but I wasn’t. I still had an hour for breakfast and I was planning to kill it at the Apollo.

The Apollo was a tiny wood-grain and chrome cafe in Vulcan Lane, two blocks from Brands. Every summer its business spilled out into the street, blocking the pedestrian traffic with tables and chairs, the doors held open by a blackboard saying breakfast lunch juice. There was an arcade game in the corner. I tried playing it once, punched in 20 cents to pilot an arrowhead blip rolling backwards and forwards along the bottom of the screen and firing – sadly, pathetically – at phalanx after agile phalanx of pucks, counters and napkin rings. I had four lives and they lasted less than a minute. I was thinking maybe this morning I would do better. The Apollo was run by Lee, who wore thick-rimmed spectacles and a tattoo on his shoulder. Lee surfed, and I was wondering what would happen to the morning menu when summer came.

I was also thinking how my trousers draped softly with each step and that my breath didn’t taste good. My chest was tight.

Something was congested, deep down. If you had asked me I would have attributed my condition to the change of season but the seasons were always changing. You might have suggested my earlier wakefulness had been caused by transmissions in the ether from the man whose body I was about to find but, like my congestion and spring, it seemed more likely to me that they were simply things that happened at the same time. Walking that morning, I didn’t know he had been dead for five hours and I didn’t know his name. I didn’t even know he was there until I turned the corner and saw the crowd. The only noise was the whine of an empty bus as it passed and footsteps and my disordered, soon to be irrelevant thoughts. There was no high window, no poisonous umbrella tip or shot being fired.

All I saw was a street and a crowd. And that was my mistake. Right there, in the faces of strangers and expressions I only now realise were knowing: that was where my fall began.

II

CHAPTER 2

The crowd was standing at the entrance to Insurance Alley, a seven-foot-wide service corridor running between two big Shortland Street office blocks. The walls on either side are windowless and five storeys high, the space a ziggurat of fire escapes falling to bitumen paved with trash. The entrance is illuminated at night by an insurance company neon and the far end, opening on to Shortland, is blocked by a waste-glass disposal bin. Entering after sundown a body is rendered invisible, making it a haven for a pre-pub joint or a $25 unit of sexual relief.

This morning’s crowd wasn’t in the market for either. There were over a dozen of them, Mostly commuters, and they were huddled before a uniformed policeman who addressed them with an outstretched hand. The entrance itself was crossed with plastic tape babbling the words Police Line Do Not Cross.

I slowed as I passed and then stopped, listening to the cop telling everyone in a steady voice over and over again that they should all get on to work, to their jobs, or to somewhere else if they didn’t have jobs because there was nothing to see, or certainly nothing anybody would want to look at. He wore the same fixed expression as the drivers queuing for the parking lot.

Trying to get a better look, I stepped between some of the people and, glancing down, saw something between their feet: a black square.