I imagine a hair dryer falling into her bath: Her limbs twitch and her hair smokes as she dies. “Richard Cheeseman is victim of a gross miscarriage of justice, and using his misfortune as a stick to beat me with is vulgar beyond belief, even for Dr. Aphra Booth.”
“Thirty grams of cocaine was found in the lining of his suitcase.”
“I think,” says Event Moderator, “we should get back to—”
I cut him off: “Thirty grams doesn’t make you a drug lord!”
“No, Crispin; examine the record — I said drug smuggler.”
“There’s no evidence Richard Cheeseman hid the cocaine.”
“Who did, then?”
“I don’t know, but—”
“Thank you.”
“—but Richard would never take such a colossal, stupid risk.”
“Unless he was a cokehead who thought his celebrity placed him above Colombian law, as both judge and jury concluded.”
“If Richard Cheeseman were Rebecca Cheeseman, you’d be setting your pubic hair on fire outside the Colombian embassy, screaming for justice. The very least that Richard deserves is a transfer to a British jail. Smuggling is a crime against the country of destination, not the country of departure.”
“Oh — so now you’re saying Cheeseman is a drug smuggler?”
“He should be allowed to fight for his innocence from a U.K. prison, and not from a festering pit in Bogotá where there’s no access to soap, let alone a decent defense lawyer.”
“But as a columnist in the right-wing Piccadilly Review, Richard Cheeseman was very hot on prison as a deterrent. In fact, to quote—”
“Enough already, Aphra, you bigoted blob of trans fat.”
Aphra springs to her feet and points her finger at me, like a loaded Magnum. “Apologize now, or you’ll have a crash course in how Australian courts handle slander, defamation, and body fascism!”
“I’m sure all Crispin meant,” says Event Moderator, “was—”
“I demand an apology from that Weightist Male Pig!”
“Of course I’ll apologize, Aphra. What I meant to call you was a preening, sexist, irrelevant, and bigoted blob of trans fat, who bullies her graduate class into posting five-star reviews of her books on Amazon and who was witnessed, on February the tenth at sixteen hundred hours local time, purchasing a Dan Brown novel from the Relay Bookshop at Singapore Changi International Airport. Some public-spirited witness has already downloaded the clip onto YouTube, you’ll find.”
The audience gasps as one, most gratifyingly.
“And don’t say it was ‘just for research,’ Aphra, because it won’t wash. There. I do hope this apology clarifies matters.”
“You,” Aphra Booth tells Event Moderator, “shouldn’t give a stage to rank, fetid misogynists, and you,” me, “will need a libel lawyer because I am going to sue the living shit out of you!”
Aphra Booth: Exit stage left to sound of thunder.
“Oh, don’t be like that, Aphra,” I call after her. “Your fans are here. Both of them. Aphra … Was it something I said?”
I CYCLE OUT of the strip of souvenir shops and cafés, but a minute later end up down a dead end at a dusty parade ground. There are Second World War — style huts, and I half recall being told that Italian prisoners of war were interned on Rottnest Island. This train of thought conveys me to Richard Cheeseman, as so many trains of thought do, these days. My fateful act of vengeance in Cartagena last year didn’t so much backfire as explode with horrifying success: Cheeseman is now 342 days into a six-year sentence in the Penitenciaría Central, Bogotá, for drug trafficking. Trafficking! For one little sodding envelope! The Friends of Richard Cheeseman managed to wangle him a private cell and a bunk, but for this luxury we had to pay two thousand dollars to the gangsters who run his wing. Countless, countless times have I ached to undo my rash little misdeed but, as the Arabic proverb has it, not even God can change the past. We — the Friends — are using every channel we can to shorten the critic’s sentence, or to have him repatriated to the U.K. at least, but it’s an uphill struggle. Dominic Fitzsimmons, the suave and able undersecretary at the Ministry of Justice, knew Cheeseman at Cambridge and is on our side, but he has to act with discretion to avoid charges of cronyism. Elsewhere, sympathy for the lippy columnist is not widespread. People point to the life sentences doled out in Thailand and Indonesia and conclude Cheeseman got off lightly, but there’s nothing “light” about life in the Penitenciaría. Two or three deaths occur in the prison every month.
I know, I know. One man alone could extract Cheeseman from his Bogotá hellhole and that is Crispin Hershey — but consider the cost. Please. By offering up a full confession, I’d be facing prison myself, quite possibly at Cheeseman’s current address. The legal fees would be ruinous, and no friendsofcrispinhershey.org would procure me a private cell, either — it’d be straight to the piranha tank. Juno and Anaïs would cut me off forever. So a full confession would be tantamount to suicide, and better a guilty coward than a dead Judas.
I can’t do it to myself. I just can’t do it.
Beyond the parade ground the dusty track fizzles out.
We all take a few wrong turns. I turn my bike around.
THE AFTERNOON SUN is a microwave oven, door wide open, cooking all exposed flesh. Rottnest is small as islands go, only eight square miles of naked rock and baked gullies, twists, and bends, ups and downs, and the Indian Ocean is either always visible or always around the next bend. Halfway up a hill I dismount and push. My pulse bangs my eardrums and my shirt’s sticking to my unflat torso. When did I get so sodding unfit? Back in my thirties I could’ve streaked up this slope, but now I’m so knackered I’m nearly puking. When did I last ride a bike? Eight years ago, give or take, with Juno and Anaïs in our back garden at Pembridge Place. One afternoon in the holidays I made an obstacle course for the girls with plank ramps, bamboo-stick slaloms, a tunnel out of a sheet and the washing line, and an evil scarecrow to decapitate with Excalibur as we cycled by. I called it “Scrambler Motocross” and the three of us held time trials. That French au pair, I forget her name, made ruby grapefruit lemonade and even Zoë joined the picnic in the fairy clearing behind the foaming hydrangeas. Juno and Anaïs often asked me to set the course up again, and I always meant to, but there was a review to write, or an email to send, or a scene to polish, and Scrambler Motocross ended up being a one-off. What happened to the kids’ bicycles? Zoë must have disposed of them, I suppose. Disposing of unwanted items proved to be her forte.
Finally, gratefully, I reach the ridge, remount my bike, and coast down the other side. Iron trees untwist from the beige soil around gloopy pools. I imagine the first sailors from Europe landing here, searching for water in this infernal Eden, taking a quiet shit. Yobs from Liverpool, Rotterdam, Le Havre, and Cork; sun-blacked, tattooed, scurvied, calloused, and muscled as all buggery, and—
Suddenly I’m aware that I’m being watched.
It’s strong. It’s uncanny. It’s disturbing.
I scan the hillside. Every rock, bush …
… no. Nobody. It’s just … Just what?
I want to go back to the beginning.
AT THE NEXT turnoff, I follow the road to the lighthouse. No spray-cloaked monarch of the rocks, this; the Rottnest Light is a stumpy middle finger sticking up from a rocky rise, grunting, “Sit on this, mate.” It keeps reappearing at odd angles and in wrong sizes, but refuses to let me arrive. There’s a hill in Through the Looking-Glass that does the same until Alice stops trying to arrive there — maybe I’ll try the same. What’ll I think about, to distract myself?