Remember Why You Fear Me (72 page)

She stayed with me all night. When I awoke, her head was resting on my chest. My all too solid chest, ribs hard, skin hard, hard enough to support her, hard enough to keep her safe.

I stroked at her hair, still so severely pulled against the skull. I teased a few strands out, they came loose in my hand.

She stirred.

“Good morning,” I said.

Her eyes were wide open in a moment, flat and hard and so wide. “We have to tell him,” she said.

“Right,” I said. “Good idea. Do you want me to be with you for that, or shall I just . . .  ?”

She left.

I got washed and dressed. I spent a long time getting washed and dressed. By the time I came out of my bedroom the deed was done, Mrs. Saras had told her husband she was leaving him for a pasty Englishman with no appreciation of art. Saras was slumped in a chair, all the swagger had gone out of him.

“This is what you really want?” he asked her.

“You knew this would happen someday,” she said.

“Someday,” he said, “yes. But I am so proud of you. So very proud.”

She said nothing to this. I cleared my throat to speak, realized I had nothing to say, closed my mouth again—but it was all right, neither husband nor wife had turned to me, it was as if they didn’t know I was even there.

“And where do we go?” he asked. “Where do you want to do this?” And he looked at me for the very last time. “Where do you want to go today?”

“The statue of Christ the Redeemer,” I said. “Let’s all go there.”

His eyes flashed with fury at that, just for a second. Then he nodded, turned away from me forever. “So be it,” he said.

Saras got changed into one of his designer suits. To me he looked much like his old self, leaner, snappier, the confident sneer playing around his mouth. But as we made our way to the ticket entrance, at the bottom of the Corvocado Mountains, no one seemed to give him a second glance.

“I’ll pay for these,” I told my hosts, “this is on me.” They didn’t bother to argue. The woman behind the glass window of the ticket booth told me there was no point visiting the statue today; there was heavy cloud, I wouldn’t see a thing. “It doesn’t matter,” I said, and she shrugged, and sold me three admissions.

Other tourists, it seemed, were just as stupid as we were. The tram that pulled us up the side of the mountain was packed. Children were leaning against the windows, their parents were taking photographs of anything and everything. Saras stared dead ahead, he took no interest in the view. He came out of his reverie only when a band began to play the samba with guitars and maracas—at this he allowed his eyes to roll in despair. I reached for Mrs. Saras’ hand, but she didn’t want to be held.

Seven hundred metres in the sky, Christ loomed down on Rio de Janeiro. But in the clouds we couldn’t see Christ’s head, it might as well have been replaced by Saras’ for all it mattered. I stared down over the railings at Rio, but Rio was lost within a smog of thick white, there may have been no city beneath us at all, it may have been smoothed away and erased forever.

“I love you,” Saras said to his wife.

“I know,” she said.

He seemed to wait for something else, anything else. When it didn’t come, he smiled at her politely. He moved his head towards her. She moved her head the same. He kissed her smartly on both cheeks.

And then she kissed him.

And he moved his head towards her lips in acceptance—but these weren’t pecks to the cheek she was offering, they were hungry sucks with the mouth full open, she was nuzzling into his face, first one side, then both sides. I could see the spit spill out the sides of that mouth of hers, and how that mouth grew, how big it was, Saras’ face being taken in with hefty gulps. And then, suddenly, she pulled away. And already I could see that his cheeks were softening, where she’d kissed was putty, the skin was starting to drip. And he looked so very old.

He stumbled back. He gave a bow (to her, but not to me), then quickly turned away and I could no longer see that face and oh, how it melted. And he disappeared into the cloud.

“Goodbye,
carissimos amor
,” she said, softly.

She turned to me.

“And now,” she said, “I’m yours.” And she smiled with that mouth still so wide, still with flecks of white saliva at her lips. “And now,” she said, “you have to find a name for me.”

“I can’t think of a name,” I said.

“You will,” she said. “A name that we can both enjoy.” And she leaned forward to kiss me on my cheek.

And I recoiled.

I did not mean to recoil.

We held the distance between us. For a moment her lips stayed fixed in mid-pucker, as if giving me the chance to relent, to put everything back the way it should be. Then the lips sagged back. The nostrils flared. The eyes were dead. And the hair looked so severe, and disappeared hard into the skull. And there was that distance, and we both held it. For the longest few seconds.

She said, “Do you love me?”

I said, “No, I don’t love you.”

She nodded at that. She didn’t wait for an explanation. She turned, she walked into the cloud, and she was gone.

I said that I regretted one lie I told. I said I loved her, I said I didn’t love her. And whichever one was the lie, that’s the one I regret.

There is little else to add.

Saras has not been seen since. The authorities now suspect he is dead, but he hasn’t been given a funeral yet, everybody is still hanging on waiting to see. Green and Grant think this is another one of his games, that he will pop out into the limelight again before too long, it’s some new piece of art with Saras as the subject. Gladwell thinks Saras has killed himself. Gladwell thinks Saras couldn’t bear the thought of old age, of the fading powers of his artistic vision, of his oeuvre measured against the eternity before him, etc, etc, he thinks Saras has done an Arbus, he’s done a Rothko or a Kahlo, he’s done a Van Gogh. “Why are artists such depressives?” he said to me. “Why are they all so fucked up?” And he laughed, and said he and I were better off just collecting the money! But Gladwell wasn’t there, Gladwell doesn’t know anything, Gladwell was never hugged by Saras and called his friend, and I don’t care that Gladwell is an executive and my immediate senior, as time goes on it strikes me that Gladwell is something of a complete fuckwit.

Gladwell, Green and Grant are all in agreement, however, about shelving plans for the exhibition. If Saras couldn’t hang on until he was eighty, there’s no point in hosting an eighty year retrospective of his life. Just a few months longer, maybe, and his art would have been of use to us.

Mrs. Saras
was
seen again. The police in Brazil began an investigation into her husband’s disappearance, and for a couple of days the international newspapers had pictures of Mrs. Saras on the cover. But there is no evidence of foul play, and the great love Mrs. Saras showed her husband does not seem to be in doubt. She is in mourning, just as the whole of her country is in mourning. Mrs. Saras has told the press that the greatest tribute she can pay him is to explore her own interest in fine art; her painting was a talent her late great husband encouraged and nurtured all the years of their tragically short marriage; his work will live on through hers. Her first exhibition was a small one, admittedly, but it had a lot of media attention—she was photographed, all smiles, such pride, heavy make-up concealing the scars on her face, a big German shepherd dog her constant companion.

And she now has a first name. It’s Jessica. Jessica Saras. It’s not the name I would have chosen for her.

Margaret tells me she wants a baby, and I am doing my best to provide. It would be nice to create something, I think.

The new stories in this collection were written whilst enjoying a year’s residency at Edinburgh Napier University, attached to the Creative Writing MA course. For all the friendship, support, and meaty literary discussions (and food! and expeditions in the snow!), thanks to Sam and Stuart Kelly, and to David Bishop. And also to the wonderful talented students, who sometimes took what I said with great seriousness, and just as often, when I most needed it, laughed at me.

These new stories are part of my hundred stories project, in which one hundred bold people have volunteered their names as characters. So thanks to Jason Zerrillo, Laura Marshall, Steven Baird, Craig Boardman, Simon Harries, Andrew Kaplan, and Sarah Hadley for allowing me to do terrible things to their namesakes—and Edward Wolverson, whose own name got cut from this edit! If you want to read the rest of the venture, it’s being showcased as
justsosospecial.com
.

Thanks to all the past editors who worked on these stories—but, in particular, to Xanna Eve Chown and Steve Jones. Xanna has ploughed her way through no less than three complete books of mine now, and greets all of my stupidest schemes with cheerful diplomacy. She’s back for more soon. She’s nuts. Steve keeps on commissioning me for horror stories, no matter how rude I am to him personally, and introduced me to this whole genre with such great generosity. He also wrote the introduction to this book, for which I am very grateful—even though everything within it is a specious lie.

To Helen Marshall, who’s edited
this
book—and besides being a smashing editor, is also one of the very best short story writers I know. She worked with me on this whilst polishing off her frankly rather brilliant collection, and I felt a strange mixture of guilt and relief that I was taking her away from her own work, and yet that there was someone looking over my words who so innately understood them and got the rhythm. For the past couple of years she’s been the best and most loyal of friends, always encouraging my ideas and inspiring me with her own. Helen, I am at once hugely jealous of how good you are, and even more hugely proud that I know you. You’re one in a million.

To Suzanne Milligan, my agent and pal. Always supportive, always patient, Suze has the remarkable ability to listen to all my little writing paranoias and make me feel I can beat them all. I’ve had quite a few agents over the years, and some of them were really good, but Suze is the first one that I really
want
to impress. She’s also the first one to introduce me to the joys of Argentinian red wine. (Which reminds me, we must really share a bottle of Malbec again soon, preferably somewhere very swanky and tall with an impressive view of London.)

And lastly—but, really, never lastly—to my wife, Janie. We first began dating fifteen years ago, when I cast her in a play I was directing. It wasn’t a very good play, actually, but she was very good in it, and made it seem better. She’s always been great at that, making the bad things better. Over the years she’s seen me change from someone writing domestic comedies for the theatre to writing—well,
this
—a bunch of weirdy wobbly horror stories. And she’s never minded, and has trusted me all the way. I write obsessively, and sometimes that makes me grumpy, and more often, rather distracted and selfish—and every single time she forgives me. Especially if the story I turn out has a good scare in it. She likes good scary stories. I hope she enjoys these.

Robert Shearman has worked as a writer for television, radio and the stage. He was appointed resident dramatist at the Northcott Theatre in Exeter and has received several international awards for his theatrical work, including the Sunday Times Playwriting Award and the Guinness Award for Ingenuity, in association with the Royal National Theatre. His plays have been regularly produced by Alan Ayckbourn, and on BBC Radio by Martin Jarvis. His two series of
The Chain Gang
, his short story and interactive drama series for the BBC, both won the Sony Award.

However, he is probably best known as a writer for
Doctor Who
, reintroducing the Daleks for its BAFTA-winning first series, in an episode nominated for a Hugo Award.

His collections of short stories are
Tiny Deaths
,
Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical
, and
Everyone’s Just So So Special
. Collectively they have won the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, the Edge Hill Short Story Readers Prize, and the Shirley Jackson Award, celebrating “outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic.”