Everything You Need: Short Stories (17 page)

The message had just finished when Chris caroomed out of the bathroom smelling of toothpaste and moisturizer.

‘’ny messages?’

‘Just a wrong number,’ he said.

She shook her head slightly, apparently to clear it, rather than in negation. ‘Coming to bed then?’ she asked, slyly. Waggling her eyebrows, she performed a slow grind with her pelvis, managing both not to fall over and not to look silly, which was a hell of a trick. Richard made his ‘Sex life in ancient Rome’ face, inspired by a book he’d read many years before.

‘Too right,’ he said. ‘Be there in a minute.’

But he stayed in the study for a quarter of an hour, long enough to ensure that Chris would have fallen asleep. Wearing pajamas for the first time in years, he slipped quietly in beside her and waited for the morning.

A
s soon as
Chris had dragged herself groaning out of the house, Richard got out of bed and went through to the bathroom. He knew what he was going to find before he took his night clothes off. He could feel parts of his pajama top sticking to areas on his chest and stomach, and his crotch felt warm and wet.

The marks on his stomach now looked like proper cuts, and the gash on his chest had opened still further. His penis was covered in dark blood, and the gashes around it were nasty. He looked as if he had collided with a threshing machine. His ribs still hurt a great deal, though the pain seemed to be constricting, concentrating around a specific point rather than applying to the whole of his side.

He stood for ten minutes, staring at himself in the mirror. So much damage. As he watched, he saw a faint line slowly draw itself down three inches of his forearm; a thin raised scab. He knew that by the end of the day it would have reverted into a cut.

Mid-morning he called Susan at her office. As always he was surprised by how official she sounded when he spoke to her there. She had always been languid of voice, in complete contrast to her physical and emotional vivacity — but when you talked to her at work she sounded like a headmistress.

Her tone mellowed when she realized who it was. She tried to pin him down to a date for a drink, but he avoided the issue. They’d seen each other twice since she’d left him for John Ayer; once while he’d been living with Chris. Chris had been relaxed about the meetings, but Richard hadn’t. On both occasions he and Susan had spent a lot of time talking about Ayer; the first time focusing on why Susan had left Richard for him; the second on how unhappy she was about the fact that Ayer had in turn left her, without even saying goodbye. Either she hadn’t realized how much the conversations would hurt Richard, or she hadn’t even thought about it. Most likely she had just taken comfort from talking to him, in the way she always had.

‘You’re avoiding it, aren’t you,’ Susan said, eventually.

‘What?’

‘Naming a day. Why?’

‘I’m not,’ he protested, feebly. ‘I’m just, busy, you know. I don’t want to say a date and then have to cancel.’

‘I really want to see you,’ she said. ‘I miss you.’

Don’t say that
, Richard thought, miserably.
Please don’t say that
.

‘And there’s something else,’ she added. ‘It was a year today when...’

‘When what?’ Richard asked, confused. He knew that they’d split up at least eighteen months ago.

‘The last time I saw John,’ she said, and finally Richard understood.

T
hat afternoon he
took a long walk to kill time, trolling up and down the surrounding streets, trying to find something to like. He discovered another corner store, but it didn’t stock paté either. Little dusty bags of fuses hung behind the counter, and the plastic strips of the cold cabinet were completely opaque. A little further afield he found a local video store but he’d seen every thriller they had, most more than once. The storekeeper seemed to stare at him as he left, as if wondering what he was doing there.

After a while he simply walked, not looking for anything. Slab-faced women clumped by, screaming at children already getting into method for their five minutes of fame on
CrimeWatch
. Pipe-cleaner men stalked the streets in brown trousers and zip-up jackets, heads fizzing with horseracing results. The pavements seemed unnaturally grey, as if waiting for a second coat of reality, and hard green leaves spiraled down to join brown ashes already fallen.

And yet as he started to head back towards Kingsley Road, he noticed a small dog standing on a corner, different to the one he’d seen before. White with a black head and lolling tongue, the dog stood still and looked at him, big brown eyes rolling with good humor. It didn’t bark, merely panted, ready to play some game he didn’t know.

Richard stared at the dog, suddenly sensing that some other life was possible here, that he was occluding something from himself.

The dog skittered on the spot slightly, keeping his eyes on Richard, and then abruptly sat down. Ready to wait. Ready to still be there.

Richard watched him a moment longer and then set off for the tube station. On the way he called and left a message at the house phone on Kingsley Road, telling Chris he’d gone out, and might be back late.

A
t eleven he
left The George pub and walked down Belsize Avenue. He didn’t know how important the precise time was, and he couldn’t actually remember it, but this felt about right. Earlier in the evening he had walked past the old flat and established that the ‘To Let’ sign was still outside. Probably the landlord had jacked the rent up so high he couldn’t find any takers.

During the hours he’d spent in the pub he had checked the cuts only twice. Then he’d ignored them, his only concession being to roll down the sleeve of his shirt to hide what had become a deep gash on his forearm. When he looked at himself in the mirror of the gents his face seemed pale; whether from the lighting or blood loss he didn’t know. As he could now push his fingers deep enough into the slash on his chest to feel his sternum, he suspected it was probably the latter. When he used the toilet he did so with his eyes closed. He didn’t want to know what it looked like down there now: the sensation of his fingers on ragged and sliced flesh was more than enough. The pain in his side had continued to condense, and was now restricted to a circle about four inches in diameter.

It was time to go.

He slowed as he approached the flat, trying to time it so he drew outside when there was no-one else in sight. As he waited, he marveled quietly at how different the sounds were to those in Kentish Town. There was no shouting, no roar of maniac traffic or young bloods prowling the streets looking for damage. All you could hear was distant laughter, the sound of people having dinner, braving the cold and sitting outside Café Pasta or the Pizza Express. This area was different, and it wasn’t his home any more.

It was time to say goodbye.

When the street was empty he walked quietly along the side of the building to the wall. Only about six feet tall, it held a gate through to the garden. Both sets of keys had been yielded but Richard knew from experience that he could climb over. More than once he or Susan had forgotten their keys on the way out to get drunk, and he’d had to let them back in this way.

He jumped up, arms extended, and grabbed the top of the wall. His side tore at him, but he ignored the pain and scrabbled up. He slid over the top without pausing and dropped silently onto the other side, leaving a few slithers of blood behind.

The window to the kitchen was there in the wall, dark and cold. Chris had left a dishcloth neatly folded over the tap in the sink. Other than that the room looked as if it had been molded in an alien’s mind. Richard turned away and walked out into the garden.

He limped towards the middle of it, trying to recall how it had gone. In some ways it felt as if he could remember everything; but in others it was as though the sequence of events had never happened to him, but was a tale told by someone else:.

A phone call to an office number he’d copied from Susan’s filofax before she left.

An agreement to meet for a drink, on a night Richard knew that Susan would be out of town.

Two men, meeting to sort things out in a gentlemanly fashion.

The stalks of Susan’s abandoned plants nodded suddenly in a faint breeze, and an eddy of leaves chased each other slowly around the walls. Richard glanced towards the living room window. Inside, it was empty, a couple of pieces of furniture stark against walls painted with dark triangular shadows. It was too dark to see and he was too far away, but he knew all the the dust was gone. Even that little part of the past had been sucked up and buried away.

He felt a strange sensation on his forearm, and looked down in time to see the gash there disappearing, from bottom to top, from finish to start. It went quickly, as quickly as it had been made.

He turned to look at the verdant patch of grass, expecting to see it move, but it was still. Then he felt a warm sensation in his crotch, and realized it too would soon be whole. He had hacked at Ayer there long after he knew he was dead; hacked symbolically and pointlessly until the penis which had slipped into Susan had been reduced to a scrap of offal.

The leaves moved again, faster this time, and the garden grew darker, as if a huge cloud had moved into position overhead. It was now difficult to see as far as the end wall of the garden, and when he heard the distant sounds from there Richard realised the ground was not going to open up. No, first the wound in his chest, the fatal wound, would disappear. Then the cuts on his stomach, and the nicks on his hands from where Ayer had resisted, trying to be angry but so scared he had pissed his designer jeans.

Finally the pain in his side would go; the first pain, the pain caused by Richard’s initial vicious kick after he had pushed his drunken rival over. A spasm of hate, flashes of violence, wipe pans of memory.

Then they would be back to that moment, or a few seconds before. Something would come towards him, out of the dry, rasping shadows, and they would talk again. How it would go Richard didn’t know, but he knew he could win, that he could walk away back to Christine and never come back here again.

It was time. Time to go.

Time to move on.

F
inally I decided
I’d had enough and I wasn’t going to put up with it any more and it was high time something was done the hell about it. My father was a vague character at best but there’s one way in which I evidently do take after him. Once he’d decided to do something, apparently, that was it. That thing was going to happen, and it was going to happen
now
. As soon as I realized I was clinically fed up with the situation, compelling verbs were required — and there was only one immediate course of action I could think of. I grabbed my coat and looked for my gun, but I couldn’t find it. Sometimes it’s here, sometimes it’s not, and probably it wasn’t such a great idea to take it anyhow. I had a mission, a simple goal. I didn’t need a weapon.

I needed focus.

I knew tracking down a writer wasn’t going to be an easy task. They’re everywhere but yet nowhere, too — a state of affairs I’m sure reminds some of them of one conception of deity. (Is it called ‘Pantheism’? I can’t remember. I probably shouldn’t know anyway). I have only ever been in New York, except for a couple of short chapters in a small town nearby called Westerford. It was never clear to me how I even got to Westerford, however — as I was just cut there and back on chapter breaks — so that idea was a non-starter and to be absolutely honest I suspect he just made the place up anyhow.

Bottom line was that I was stuck with looking for him in the city. If I’d believed he knew the place very well then this would have been a very daunting prospect — NYC is a hell of a big patch of ground even if you stick to the island and don’t start on the other boroughs. I had reason to suspect that his knowledge was limited to Manhattan, however, and far from comprehensive even there.

I made a list of locations, the places I knew well, and got out into the streets.

S
ix hours
later my feet hurt and I was getting irritable. I’d looked everywhere. Everywhere I could remember having been, or where scenes with other characters had taken place, or that I’d heard described by other people — finally washing up at the Campbell Apartment in Grand Central Station, a bar surprisingly few people know about. I’d been there once for a meeting about a job that got derailed. The meeting had always felt to me like filler, but I’d liked the venue. Dark, subterranean-feeling, dirty light filtered through a big stained glass window. It looked and felt exactly as described, and so I thought it likely the guy had actually been there, rather of merely having read about it. He wasn’t there now, though.

I had a drink anyway and left and started to walk wearily back down 5
^th
Avenue, cigarette in hand. It was mid-afternoon and starting to get colder. I’d had plenty of time to consider whether what I was doing was a good idea (and if it even made any kind of ontological sense), but something I evidently inherited from my mother (much better fleshed out as a character than my father, featuring in two long, bucolic memory sequences and a series of late-climax flash-backs) is that once I’ve embarked on a project, it does tend to get done.

So I walked, and I walked some more. Instead of cutting over to 3
^rd
and down into the East Village — which is where I live, for better or worse — I went the other way, switching back and forth between 6
^th
, 7
^th
, and 8
^th
, down through Chelsea, back over to Union Square, then over and down into Meatpacking, though only briefly, because I didn’t seem to know it very well.

No sign of him, anywhere. I didn’t know what I was expecting, if I was hoping I’d just run into him on a street corner or something, but it didn’t happen.

He evidently didn’t know what was going to happen next, how to get me onto the next series of events.

The short paragraphs were a giveaway.

He was treading water.

It was a hiatus.

So I made my own choice.

I
was
down on the fringes of Soho when I spotted another Starbucks. I’d already been in about ten. He is forever dropping a Starbucks into the run of play — situating events there, revisiting recollections, or having people pick up a take-out to engineer a beat of ‘real life’ texture. Each was well-described, as though he’d actually been there, and so I’d taken the trouble to seek them out. This one was new to me, however.

The interior was big enough to have three separate seating areas, and looked comfortable and welcoming. It smelled like they always do. There was the harsh cough of steam being pumped through yet another portion of espresso. Quiet chatter. Anodyne music. People reading Letham and Frantzen or Derrida and Barthes.

Weird thing was, it felt familiar.

Not familiar to
me
, but still... familiar. I know that sounds strange. I knew that I didn’t know the place personally, but it felt like I
could
have. I decided I might as well have yet another Americano, and was wandering over toward the line when I realized some guy was looking at me.

I turned and looked back at him. He was in an armchair by a table close to the window. Late twenties, with sharply defined and well-described facial features. Something about him said he was no stranger to criminal behavior, but that’s not what struck me most about him.

He looked how I felt. He looked weary.

He looked stuck.

I took a pace in his direction. ‘Do I know you?’

‘Don’t see how.’

‘That’s what I thought. So why are you staring at me?’

‘You look familiar,’ he said. ‘Like... I dunno.’

‘Can’t be. I’ve never been in here before.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yes. I’ve done stuff in the Starbucks on the corner of 42
^nd
and 6
^th
, the one on 6
^th
between 46
^th
and Times Square, and another at an unspecified street address up near Columbus Circle. Also I’ve stuck my head in a bunch more today, uptown, and on the way down here, just in case. But I’ve never been in this particular one. I’m sure.’

He shook his head, sat back in his chair, ready to disengage. ‘Sorry to have bothered you.’

I was struck by a crazy thought.

‘Who’s your writer?’

‘Michael Marshall Smith,’ he said, diffidently, fully expecting the name not to mean anything to me.

I stared at him. ‘No way.’

‘What,’ he said. He sat forward again in his chair, looking wary. ‘You’re... you’re one of his too?’

‘Well yes, and no. Actually I’m in a Michael Marshall novel — different name, different genre, but the same guy.’

‘Holy shit.’ He looked at me, dumbfounded. ‘That’s outside the
box
. I never met someone else before. I mean, the people in this place, obviously, but not someone from a whole other
story
.’

‘Me neither,’ I said. I pulled a chair over to the table. ‘You mind?’

‘Go ahead,’ he said, and I sat.

We looked at each other for a full minute. It felt very weird. I’ve met other characters before, of course — but only ones from my own story, like the guy said. They had their place and were all situated in relation to the star at the center of their firmament: which would be me.

This guy wasn’t like that. He was totally other. I had no idea what he was about.

‘How come you’re here?’ he asked, eventually. ‘I mean, suddenly, like this. You’ve never been in this place before. But now here you are.’

‘I got tired of waiting,’ I said. ‘Bored of being in that scummy apartment in the East Village. He barely even knows the area. Spent half a morning walking around it, like, five years ago. That’s all. There’s a couple of streets that are pretty convincing and he nailed a few local shops — including a deli and a liquor store, thank God — but after that it’s basically atmosphere and a few well-chosen adjectives.’

‘How long do you have?’

‘About a hundred and fifteen thousand words.’

He stared at me. ‘You’re in a
novel
?’

‘I’m the protagonist, dude.’

‘Shit.’

I shrugged. He sat back in his chair, caught between envy and resentment. ‘Jesus, then you don’t know you’re born. I’m only in a short story, and even by the standards of the form, it’s pretty fucking brief. Three thousand words. Whole thing takes place right here in this Starbucks. I don’t even get to go
out the door
. I don’t know shit about the city. I can
see
it, through that the window, but that’s all I get.’

‘Hell,’ I said. ‘That’s tough.’

‘Tough is right. And look at what I’m wearing.’

I’d already noticed his clothes were nondescript. Jeans. A shirt in some indeterminate color. Shoes that I couldn’t even see. ‘Pretty vague.’

‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘I don’t have a coat because I don’t do anything but be in here and so he didn’t bother to describe one, not even a thin jacket hanging over the back of my chair, for Christ’s sake.’

‘That’s understandable,’ I said. ‘He can’t be bogging down with extraneous details, not at your kind of word length. Plus if he did mention a coat, people might assume it was going to become relevant at some point and get pissed off when it wasn’t. Any good editor would pick him up on it, blue line it out.’

‘Yeah, maybe so. But it gets
cold
in here, come the middle of the night.’

I thought about that, and about the idea of being trapped in one location forever, pinned to one small location for eternity. It made me feel cold too.

‘I’m going to find the guy,’ I said. ‘Tell him I’m grateful for being — though some pretty harsh things happen to me, especially in back story — but I’d like some broader horizons now.’

‘
Find
him? How the hell do you hope to do that?’

I shrugged. Again. I shrug a lot. ‘By searching the city — the parts of it he knows, at least. That’s what I’m doing now. It’s how I ran into you. Which is something that’s never happened to me before, and that makes me think that I’m achieving
something
, at least.’

‘But what are the odds of banging into him?’

‘Not good. I know that. But weren’t there any coincidences in your story?’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know. Things that were kind of convenient, that helped drive the plot forward without too much hard work?’

He thought about it. ‘Not really.’

‘There were in mine. Small things, he didn’t take the piss with it, but—’

‘“Take the piss”? What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘See, that’s interesting. We don’t say that here, do we? It’s a British expression, I think. I’m supposed to be American born and bred, yet once in a while I’ll say something that’s a little bit off.’

‘Maybe the guy
is
British, but sets his stuff here in the US. Blame the copyeditor for not picking up on it.’

‘Could be. But my point is that while he didn’t fall back on any whopper coincidences, he was happy to ease the way every now and then with a combination of circumstances that was a little convenient.’

‘I guess in a novel you have to, maybe. My thing, it happens in real time, so he didn’t need to resort to that kind of kludge.’

‘Right. But given that I’m driving
this
story, I’m hoping that my rules apply. And so it’s possible, if I keep walking, there’s a small coincidence out there waiting to happen. Like meeting you.’

I waited for him to think about this. It was strange, but also exciting, to be dealing with someone new,
completely
new, who wasn’t subservient to my protagonist status. It felt as though doors might be opening. I didn’t know where they’d lead, but I was starting to think I could find them. If I
believed
enough. Maybe I could make it back to Westerford after all, that leafy town upstate where I’d been for those brief chapters. I could start a new life, do new things. Perhaps I could even get to the beach down in Florida featured in a small flashback. That would be great, but actually
anywhere
would do. Somewhere new. A place I could stretch my wings and find some other way to be.

The guy was frowning at me. ‘Are you okay?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You stopped talking. Just sat there looking intense.’

‘Sorry. I had a stretch of interior monologue. Slightly lyrical. Takes a while to get through.’

‘I guess you first-person guys get a lot of that. Me, I’m in third. I just
do
stuff, pretty much.’

‘So let’s
do
stuff,’ I said. ‘Let’s get out of this generic coffee house and go looking for him.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Why?’

He looked sheepish. ‘I don’t think I can leave here. I’ve never been through that door. My whole life, I’ve been in here. I think that’s it for me.’

‘Have you ever tried? Gone up to the door and pulled on the handle and seen what happens?’

He looked down at his feet. ‘Well, no. I’m just supposed to do what I do, right?’

‘Not necessarily,’ I said. ‘I’ve spent longer with the guy than you, remember. I think he kind of likes it when one of us does something off our own bat. There was a minor character in my book, he dies in the end, but he sometimes got the chance to go do his own thing, and the writer would work around it. Maybe you’re the same way.’

‘I don’t want to die in the end.’

‘No, of course. Not saying that’s going to happen. Just... if you’re like me, if you’re the narrator, the audience
knows
you’re going to live — unless the guy’s prepared to do something tricksy or flip into unreliable narrator at the end. So there’s a set arc for me, and I kind of have to stick to it, because I manifest the story and vice versa and he can’t screw with that. But with the more minor characters — no offense — he can let them roam free a little more, see where they end up.’