Drawing support from a clump of bracken it had blindly caught hold of, the thing, the hand, was now joined by its twin. I wanted to die. I wanted to run away, back, forward, right, left, it didn’t matter, just away – but I couldn’t. I could only mutely look on as the two hands were followed by a head – Evie’s head! It was like the climax to one of those splatter movies when, after being pummelled, garrotted, filleted, set alight and blown to invisible smithereens, the terminally mangled villain succeeds yet again in pulling himself together and running ever more amok. Her hair dishevelled, her eyes blinking convulsively behind her clouded-over pince-nez – yes, she was still wearing them! – Evie laboriously dragged her fat, sodden body onto the path and lay there for a few minutes, belly up, puffing and panting like a giant beached sea-cow. Then she slowly got to her feet and stood facing me.
I recovered at last a semblance of my voice.
‘This can’t be happening!’ I spluttered. ‘You’re dead!’
‘Oh no, I’m not,’ she replied, extracting a sliver of wet fern from between the two most prominent of her false front teeth.
‘But you must be!’
‘I tell you I’m not.’
‘But how could you have survived that fall? How could you not have drowned?’
She looked at me with more contempt on her face than I have ever seen on any set of human features, then let loose a bitter, hoarse, peculiarly horrid laugh.
‘Because I’m a cardboard character!’ she cried. ‘I’m made of cardboard –
‘What?!’
‘How does it feel to be hoist on your own petard, Gilbert? For all your much-vaunted, much-flaunted “affection” for the genre, you’ve remained such an elitist that you simply cannot help patronising not just whodunits themselves but those who write them and those who read them. You used me as your protagonist, not once but twice, yet instead of taking the trouble to flesh me out, physically and psychologically, you allowed yourself to fall back, again and again, on the crudest of stereotypes. Even my so-called trademark tricorne hat you pinched from Marianne Moore! And if any critic picked up on that crudeness, why, you would airily retort that it was all part and parcel of your postmodern pastiche of Agatha Christie!
‘You made yourself absolutely critic-proof, didn’t you? If the writing was brilliant, it was yours; if it was bad, it was poor old Agatha’s. Neat, very neat. Except that, in your case, it wasn’t out of postmodern playfulness so much as laziness and sheer downright incompetence that you fabricated a character as shallow and two-dimensional as I am. You may have described me as plump, even just a few sentences ago as
‘And that was also your undoing. Poetic justice, Gilbert. When I landed at the foot of the Falls, I merely bobbed along on the surface of the current like the page of a book – like this page, if you will, of this very book – until I got ensnarled in a conveniently overhanging branch. Disentangling myself, I crept and crawled and clawed my way back up the cliff. Oh, I won’t deny it was frightening at times, but there wasn’t a chance of its ever proving fatal. You can’t drown paper. Or cardboard. Or me.’
‘You’re not just a witch,’ I screamed at her, ‘you’re a bitch! A real f**king c**t! Eeyow!’
Blood started spurting from my martyred mouth. It felt as though I had just stuffed a thicket of nettles down my throat and it took me a moment to understand that what had shredded it could only have been – I repeat, this cannot be happening! – it could only have been that mouthful of asterisks! Asterisks that belonged to Evie’s style, not mine!
‘That’ll teach you to be foul-mouthed in the presence of a lady,’ she crowed at me. ‘And what it also proves is that I’m now by far the stronger of us two. It’s only by exploiting me as your heroine that you’ve enjoyed any real public success. Gilbert Adair the postmodernist? What a joke! What a farce! What you don’t seem to realise, Gilbert, is that this is 2011. Postmodernism is dead, it’s so last century, it’s as hopelessly passé as Agatha Christie herself. Nobody gives two hoots about self-referentiality any longer, just as nobody gives two hoots, or even a single hoot, about you. Your books are out of sight, out of sound, out of fashion and out of print, but you just won’t let go, will you? You just won’t give up. Even now, even in this very chapter, even with this very conceit – the author failing to kill off his own best-loved character – you’re hoping to seem more postmodern than Borges or Burgess, Barth, Barthes or Barthelme. Botheration, now you’ve got me doing it! But it won’t work, Gilbert. Nothing, I repeat, nothing will ever again work for you without me. Your need of me is a lot greater than my need of you.’
