Buses were lined up on either side of the outdoor shelter, engines throbbing, fumes spewing out into the morning air. He’d be in New York in a few hours, he told himself; on a plane as soon as possible after that. Meanwhile he needed to get a ticket, a bottle of water, something to eat. He passed between the buses, focusing determinedly on his objective as he breathed their acrid stench: Tranqué Bay, the land he was going to buy with Charlie’s “moolah,” the turquoise house on the hill. Dimly, as he came out into the open forecourt, he became aware of something encroaching on him, some vague darkness that seemed more an emanation of the horror still present inside him than anything external. He ignored it, keeping his mind on the vision he’d had the night before, of a new existence, the new person he was going to become. He made himself think of the joy of those sparkling mornings, racing past the old stone ruins to the beach and plunging into the waves with the smell of salt air filling his lungs and the palms along the shoreline tossing in the breeze as if in their own raptures of delight. People were jostling around him: passengers going in and out of the ticket office, taxi drivers looking for fares, officials from the bus company. Again the sense of some encroaching darkness intruded; a shape that was somehow both a solid object entering his field of vision and at the same time a kind of blackly spectral embodiment of what he had done, looming back on a surge of renewed horror. He focused tenaciously on the bright image, as if the sheer glittering intensity of it, pictured with sufficient conviction, might be enough to draw him forward through the many obstacles and difficult passages that lay ahead.
He was still seeing it in his mind’s eye when the black Ford Explorer that had emerged from behind the ticket office and been slowly approaching him all this while came to a halt a few feet off. The doors opened, but even as Detective Fernandez climbed out and strolled calmly toward him, followed by Officer Lombardi, it was some time before he was able to adjust from the glare of that sunlit future, and understand what was happening.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to my editors, Jill Bialosky and Robin Robertson, for their patience and astute advice.
also by James Lasdun
FICTION
Delirium Eclipse
Three Evenings and Other Stories
Besieged (selected stories)
The Horned Man
Seven Lies
It’s Beginning to Hurt
POETRY
After Ovid: New Metamorphoses (coedited with Michael Hofmann)
Woman Police Officer in Elevator
Landscape with Chainsaw
Bluestone: New and Selected Poems
MEMOIR
Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2016 by James Lasdun
All rights reserved
First Edition
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please
contact W. W. Norton Special Sales at specialsales@wwnorton.com or
800-233-4830
Book design by Fearn Cutler de Vicq
Jacket design by Alex Merto
Jacket photograph by (woman) © 13 / Siri Stafford / Ocean / Corbis; (water) Pete Ryan / Getty Images; (shadow) Tom Sullam / Millennium Images, UK
Production manager: Anna Oler
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Lasdun, James, author.
Title: The fall guy : a novel / James Lasdun.
Description: First Edition. | New York : W. W. Norton & Company, [2016]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016018259 | ISBN 9780393292329 (hardcover)
available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016018259
ISBN 978-0-393-29233-6 (e-book)
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.
Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT