The Lonely Dead (34 page)
There was a welcome page with Jessica's bright, smiling face. A link to the webcam page itself, which was dead. Another page where she had written about her hobbies — song writing, which I guess made sense of the guitar — and a few pages of specimen stills. Only one of these was semi-nude, and I flicked past it. It was the others that spoke. Pictures of a young woman, going about her life, watching her television and reading her magazines. The way she really had been, still there: something more than the cold body in the tray of a cabinet in an LA morgue. I still found it hard to rid my head of the idea that I'd seen her in the forest, but I knew it was just a trick of the mind.
I did a little hacking and got past the browser, into the folder on the server itself. Copied the contents down onto my own computer. To keep them safe, I guess, in case the guy did ever get around to cleaning out. When I'd finished I noticed there was a text file amongst them. I opened it up. It was short, a few brief diary entries she'd evidently decided not to link to from the site. The Feds would have had it all along, and there was certainly nothing there that would have helped. The last entry was dated three days before she died. It was about some guy called Don, who she thought maybe liked her a little, wondering whether she should call him sometime.
I closed Bobby's laptop and thought of him for a while, in his silent place deep inside my head. It's where they all go to: the cemeteries in our heads. Back there, behind your eyes, where you can't see them whichever way you turn. But the things they did, the people they were, it's all still true. It doesn't have to be lonely in there. You can visit, from time to time.
—«»—«»—«»—
The next morning I got up late. It had stopped raining but the wind was back in force. Out of my window I could now see a long stretch of beach — grey sand, grey water, grey sky — between craggy cliffs.
A while later Nina knocked on my door. 'You up for a walk?'
'What — because it's such a lovely day?' We wandered the empty streets, grabbed a coffee or two, sniggered at bad art. Spent a few hours down on the sands, alone in all the world, sometimes together, sometimes apart. We watched big rough waves crash down and around the rocks, cheered brave birds as they wheeled hectically in the stormy chaos above. In the mid-afternoon the wind got so fierce and strong that you could stand with your arms outstretched and lean into it, trusting it to hold you up. So we did, as sand whirled around us and the world spun.
When it began to rain again we found a place half sheltered at the foot of high rocks and sat, a little distance apart, and watched the sea. I realized then why we respond to the sound of the waves, and the falling of rain, and wind in the trees. Because they are meaningless. They are nothing to do with us. They are outside our control. They remind us of a time, very early in our lives, when we did not understand the noises around us but simply accepted them in our ears; and so they provide blessed relief from our continual needy attempts to change our world in magic deed or endless thought. Meaningless sound, which we love against the anxiety of action, of pattern-making, of seeking to comprehend and change. As soon as we picked up something and used it for a purpose, we were both made and damned. Tool-making gave us the world, and lost us our minds.
For an hour we did nothing, two people on the edge of the world, with our backs to it all. When it got dark we went back to the hotel. I took a shower, changed my clothes, then went around the wooden walkway to knock on Nina's door.
'Hey,' she said.
'You want to go get a drink?'
She raised an eyebrow. 'Is this like, a date, or something?'
'No,' I said. 'It is not.'
A couple of streets away we found a place called Red's Tavern where you could sit and drink strong beers they made upstairs. After a while the bar began to fill with locals, and eventually a pick-up band coalesced down the far end. A couple of guitars, a lap steel, a violin and washboard; people sat and played for a while, wandering off and back as the whim took them. The lamps were low and warm and I realized, for the first time, that the woman opposite me had auburn lights in her hair. We listened to the music the band made, and we clapped and sang along when everybody else did, and we watched the barmaids dance and laugh behind the counter as they filled pitchers with beer as clean as stream water, and I finally got myself a bowl of chilli and it was not bad at all.
The band was still playing, but more quietly, when we left them to it. We walked back to the hotel, bought a bottle of wine from the market on the way. We lit the fire in my room and split the window open a little, so we could hear the sound of the waves and the crackling of the wood at the same time. We sat on the floor with our backs to the end of the bed, and we talked for a long time, talked until it was late and yet didn't feel late at all.
We kept putting wood on the fire because we didn't want it to burn down, and in the end the room was dark and warm enough and didn't need any more words.
She made the first move.
She's like that.
Acknowledgements
A big thank you to my editors, Jane Johnson and Susan Allison, for their patience and guidance, and to my literary agents Jonny Geller and Ralph Vicinanza. Thanks to my publishers, in particular Sarah Hodgson, Kelly Edgson-Wright, Fiona Mcintosh, Jane Harris and Amanda Ridout for their amazing support; to Lavie and Ariel for hard work on the net; to Nick Marston and Bob Bookman in film; and to Phyllis Siefker, Frank Joseph, Melanie Nixon and Ella Clark, whose non-fiction provided snippets of background (apologies for what I've done with it).
Finally, as always, love and thanks to Paula for putting up with me while I'm writing. And also when I'm not.
About The Author
Michael Marshall is a novelist and screenwriter. Before writing the bestselling
The Straw Men
he had already established a successful writing career under the name Michael Marshall Smith. His groundbreaking first novel,
Only Forward,
won the Philip K. Dick and August Derleth awards; its critically acclaimed successors,
Spares
and
One of Us,
have both been optioned by major Hollywood studios. He lives in North London with his wife.
