Everything You Need: Short Stories (29 page)

She’d tried. Evidently the drawer was broken.

She left the room and went back downstairs. Later she went to bed and lay there, sleepless, for several hours. What if he’d been wrong?

What if everything she needed wasn’t in there?

What
then
?

F
iona’s visit
next day was a fly-by, mid-morning, on her way to some meeting or other. She seemed distracted at first, as if these daily visits to her mother — never part of their routine before John’s death — were beginning to feel a little like... not a chore, exactly, but an errand secondary to the main order of business.

Sheila caught herself thinking this and felt depressed and sad. Not at the thought, but at herself for entertaining it. That wasn’t how Fiona would be feeling, and Sheila knew it. Fiona was busy. Her life went on, as all lives must. The dead die in order to remind us how non-dead are the lives of those who remain; we have children to provide us with role models to remind us the way we think now is not the only way to think. Fiona was not “distracted”, merely a woman leading her own life, one that currently involved the death of her father and dealing with a grieving mother, but which also still held commitments to the living and to the future.

Sheila understood this. But still, when Fiona dropped a mention of how The Grand in Brighton was doing out-of-season deals, it was all she could do to turn away, and remain silent, rather than saying something she would have regretted.

M
id-afternoon
, Bob rang again. Actually he said his name was Kevin this time but he appeared to be fundamentally the same person. He also wanted to talk to her about her mobile phone contract. Sheila did not say that John dealt with those things. She told him instead that she was unable to find their phone contract. The man assured her that this was not a problem, not in the slightest, and that the great offers he wished to make available to her were not dependent upon it.

Sheila listened for a few moments but then gently put the phone down. Of course it mattered whether she could find the contract. Otherwise why would they
have
such things?

She spent the rest of the afternoon in her chair in the sitting room, in silence. She was waiting for something. What, she didn’t know.

L
ater
, she stood in front of the window onto the garden, watching twilight darken and fade. When it was properly dark, she went upstairs.

This time she looked through the top cabinet properly, searching each drop file. Although she found many, many pieces of paper — John had obviously maintained a policy of retaining absolutely everything, even for appliances she knew for a fact had gone to the great dump in the sky many years previously — there was nothing in there about their mobile phones.

She closed the drawer. She realized it was now after nine in the evening. She realized also that she hadn’t eaten anything for dinner. Or lunch. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d drunk anything, either.

Had she made tea again after Fiona left, late morning? She wasn’t sure. She didn’t think so.

She felt dry, and tired, but knew that she had to do this, and do it tonight.

The second drawer was as hard to pull out as it had been the night before. She still couldn’t work out why, and tonight at least she wasn’t crying. It simply didn’t slide properly. She searched through all of the files, going straight to BROADBAND to begin with, as it had occurred to her that whoever was supplying them/her with that service might be in the market to sell mobile phones too, and John might have taken advantage of some special deal or other (he had always read direct mail diligently, rather than throwing it away, in case they were offering something worth having. Sheila had never understood how he was able to tell if something was worth having or not).

Their Internet supplier apparently did
not
also provide their mobile phones. Neither did anyone else in any of the second drawer’s drop files. By the time she was only halfway through it Sheila’s back was aching. She pulled John’s old chair over from the desk, but it didn’t help much. For the last few files she was leaning her elbows on the sides of the drawer. Her stomach had stopped growling some while ago, as if it had lost faith. Her mouth was arid. When she blinked she could hear the lids scrape across her eyeballs, or it seemed like she could. She felt a little light-headed as she sat upright. It didn’t matter. She could have a snack afterward if she felt like it. The clock on the desk said it was now well after eleven, in fact coming up for midnight. The house was silent and cold around her.

That made no difference. She was finishing this tonight. She had to find the thing, and if everything she needed was in here, then here was where it had to be.

She closed the second drawer.

T
en minutes
later she was crying. She didn’t know whether the tears were of grief or frustration or both and it didn’t matter. What mattered was that she couldn’t open the bottom drawer. As with the night before, it would slide out about a centimeter but then come no further. She’d gone down on hands and knees in front of it, holding the handle with both hands, and pulled with all her might. She’d got one of the pens from the desk and poked it through the gap at the top, running it right along the edge in the hope of dislodging anything that might be obstructing it within. She done that one way, then the other, then back - faster and faster, until a combination of despair and fury broke the pen into three pieces.

She’d broken a pen that John had used to write things and sign things, but achieved nothing else.

She tugged at the handle some more. She hit the drawer with her fists. Her tears were constant now, and she felt dizzy and her head was aching. The room seemed to sway as she pushed herself back up to her feet.

‘You said it would be in here,’ she shouted, catching herself unawares. She’d had no idea she was going to say anything, much less shout it. ‘YOU SAID THIS HAD EVERYTHING I NEED.’

She kicked the drawer, hard, and then again, heedless of the pain in her toes. She relished it, in fact, bitterly triumphant at being able to make herself feel something, at breaking out of the endless grey fog. She felt even dizzier now but didn’t care — she believed she’d finally understood what people feel in the moment before they end it all, a kind of frantic glee, a rich dedication to self-harm and self-destruction and to the realization that none of it mattered and you could just keep escalating the pain until it exploded into silence.

She pulled her foot back, screaming incoherently, and kicked the drawer with all her force.

There was a soft
thunk
.

Sheila froze. The sound hadn't been loud, but it cut through the haze all the same.

Something had happened inside the drawer. Something had been dislodged or freed.

She lurched back toward the cabinet and leaned down, panting. She grasped the handle. She pulled. It slid open smoothly.

John was inside. He was bent and folded and turned over on himself, like a blanket stuffed into a too-small drawer. He had been so very thin at the end. His head seemed to lie on top of the rest of him, top toward the front, face pointing upwards. His eyes were open.

They swiveled to look at her. ‘Hello, dear,’ he said.

Sheila fell to her knees, reaching for him. She tried to pull him out but he was too tightly jammed into the drawer. There was no way of ever getting him out.

She gave up trying, and though her eyes were so tear-blurred she could barely see, she saw him start to smile in the same old way as she leaned over to bring her lips down toward his mouth.

S
he woke
the following morning in her bed. When she remembered what had happened she got up, wrapped her robe around her, and went through to the office. The bottom drawer was shut. She knelt down in front of it and pulled, gently, not expecting it to open.

But it did. It was empty inside but for ten hanging files. Each had a plastic tag at the top, but no label.

She flicked slowly through them.

In the last she found a single index card. She took it out and found something written in John’s handwriting. Not as she remembered it from their first letters to each other, or on so many birthday and Christmas cards, but as it had become in the final months, in the last days. Weaker, but defiantly neat, and still characteristically his.

‘For your filing,’ the note said. ‘Put everything you need in here. Love, J.’

F
iona arrived at mid-day
, this time bearing lunch from Marks & Spensers. She looked tired. Sheila helped her unwrap the sandwiches in silence, and then the two of them stood side by side for a few moments, looking out at the street outside.

‘I don’t want to go to The Grand for tea, not this time,’ Sheila said. ‘Let’s try the Metropole instead.’

Fiona turned to her and smiled, properly, for the first time since her father died.

B
ob rang again
, in the afternoon. This time he was called Justin. He still had a great new offer to discuss.

Sheila told him to bugger off.

W
hen I began
to read tales of horror and the dark fantastic in the late 1980s, some of the first collections I read (and to my mind some of the best ever written) were Stephen King’s. I used to love his story notes at the back — partly because his prose is sufficiently habit-forming that I would have been content to read his To Do lists — but also because I was fascinated to hear where the stories had come from, and how they’d come about. I always made sure I saved them until the very end, however. While it’s not as destructive as learning how a magic trick is done, pulling aside the veils on a story has similar effects: you’ll never again be able to read it in the same way. Sometimes this adds another layer of interest, like a director’s commentary track on a great movie, but it also runs the risk of popping the fragile bubble of make-believe that helps a story work in the first place.

There will be spoilers in the following notes, so be warned: either save them until you’re done with the story, or — if you don’t want to know how or indeed why the rabbit was put into the hat before the show — don’t read them at all.

Be further warned that you will not find the meaning of life in here, nor any notably useful pointers on the writing of fiction. These are merely a few observations about how the stories in this collection came to be written, and why. Like the speech given by the father of the bride at a wedding, they’re there as background information, and do not constitute or imply a verbal guarantee that the marriage will work.

T
HIS IS NOW

I wrote this story for the BBC when they were putting together a website dedicated for genre or ‘cult’ fiction. [Sidebar: it’s weird how some spellcheckers insist that you spell ‘website’ as ‘Web site’, and want to capitalize the ‘internet’ as if it’s a place, like Germany (though of course in some ways it is). Our relationship to these spaces is changing faster than software can keep up with.] I can’t remember whether the BBC wanted something specifically about vampires, but that’s what I ended up doing — though I kept their role very low-key, and in fact took a certain amount of trouble not to even call them by that name.

So much genre fiction is, of course, not about what it appears to be about — and what it’s usually
really
about are crucial turning points in people’s lives, viewed in retrospect. The realest and scariest monsters are internal demons, the specters of regret and guilt and lack of fulfillment, awareness of the entropic end of love, or the first shivers occasioned by the realization of our own ageing, and the eventual inevitability of death. These things are, I suspect, what this story’s actually about.

Sounds like a hoot, right?

T
HE WOODCUTTER

This is the most recent story in this collection — the most recent I’ve written at all, in fact. It’s also the only story I’ve so far written in the chair where I’m sitting right this moment, in a new house I’m still not even close to being used to. I guess the story must therefore be at least partly a reflection on having moved to a different country, though I don’t feel the way the protagonist does (at least not consciously, or for more than a second, once in a while).

The idea at the core of the tale has been knocking around my head for quite some time, waiting for a home. I remember watching a pub magician working the tables one night in the Crown and Two Chairman in Soho, and thinking: but what if those
aren’t
tricks?

T
HE LAST BARBECUE

I wrote this for Stephen Jones’s ZOMBIE APOCOLPYSE! FIGHTBACK, the second in his series of shared world (or shared narrative) confections in which he expertly weaves a story out of contributions from many different writers.

Part of the venerable cannon of “Where I went on my holidays” fiction, my segment is set on the shore of South Lake Tahoe, where my family had recently spent a few days. Tahoe’s a strange place. Beautiful, yes, but otherworldly. Waves gently lapping upon a sandy shore, as tots dip their toes in the silky water. Snow-capped mountains all around. A hot air balloon serenely crossing the sky in the far distance. There’s something about the environment that puts me in mind of living on some gigantic spaceship in the far distant future, and coming to the People’s Recreational Facility for my annual week-long break from toiling on the hydroponic farms.

Lake Tahoe is also, interestingly, not far from the Donner Pass. I didn’t realize this when I wrote the story. I love it when that happens.

T
HE STUFF
THAT GOES ON IN THEIR HEADS

One of the most intriguing but unnerving aspects of being a parent is watching your child’s development, in particular observing the mingling of changes in their personality caused by external influences, with elements that seem hard-wired. Just as it can be a struggle to comprehend that your kid really
can’t
see that 6 + 6 = 12, it’s sometimes hard to remind yourself that their brains haven’t had decades to wear familiar and comfortable tracks, to develop mental highways that have big, obvious signs above them and which anyone can follow and understand.

Children’s minds are cloudy and unpredictable, perhaps even unknowable. The last great wilderness. The boundaries within are more permeable, too. What they believe to be the case may be true, even if it’s not.

U
NNOTICED

Another story with a real world inspiration. When we first came to live in Santa Cruz we rented a wonderful house over on the East Side, one block from the ocean. It had been hand-built by some guy in the 1940s and featured an upper deck which afforded a rare degree of prospect for the neighborhood. It felt a little like living on a ship. That area of Live Oak is primarily made of up old, single-story vacation rentals or small houses, but dotted amongst these on the main roads are occasional larger buildings of less discernible purpose. I became intrigued by one of these, and it gave birth to this story.

And yes, there genuinely was a large vintage car taking up most of the reception area. I could, I suppose, have gone in and asked about it, but I prefer most mysteries to persist, rather than be solved.

T
HE GOOD LISTENER

This story came about because I was invited to contribute a piece of fiction to an online initiative under the joint aegis of Sony and
The Guardian
newspaper, who wanted to explore how new technology would continue to be incorporated into the fabric of our lives. I wrote the story and then recorded my reading of it in a zany sound studio on the edge of Santa Cruz, which appeared to be in the middle of either being built or knocked down, I was never sure which. As the recording was then zapped over the internet to a London studio before being installed on the web as a podcast, the whole experience was pleasingly self-reflective: an example of new technology’s reach.

The place where the story is set — the Dream Inn hotel — is of greater significance. We came to live in Santa Cruz because we wound up being “stranded” here for several weeks when an unpronounceable volcano in Iceland grounded European air travel. (Note: telling people over the phone that you’ve been “stranded” in a boutique beach hotel in California… tends to piss them off). We had zero expectations of the town and only ended up there in the first place by accident. Fate gave us a chunk of time to get to know it, and we came very quickly to like the place very much. It as this that set us on course to eventually leaving London after a quarter of a century, and going to live in California instead.

And I suppose it’s the little quirks of fate, and unexpected encounters, that this story is about.

A
ND A PLACE
FOR EVERYTHING

An early story, this one riffing off an childhood interest in Zen and positioning things in space.

That’s.

About.

It.

S
UBSTITUTIONS

This one had a simple genesis — and it’s pretty much what happens at the beginning of the story. Often the stories that are most fun to write are these where you take an event from real life and say: “But what if something different had happened at the end? What if? What then?”

I was at home one morning trying to work, when a van arrived from Ocado, the North London default for supermarket delivery. I’d already absentmindedly unpacked half of the bags which had been deposited in our kitchen by the cheery delivery guy, before flags started to go up.

Gradually I realized...
this isn’t our stuff
.

What I found interesting about this was partly the fact it took a while for me to cotton on, and thus how much commonality exists between people living in the same area (if I’d been confronted with a bumper pack of tofu in the first bag, the penny would have dropped sooner); mainly that I’d never realized how much something as simple as your shopping said about who you were, and the life you might be leading. Your own bags are full of the mundane stuff you expect to see in your fridge, and therefore seem to have no narrative. They do, however, as you realize when you get a surprise peek into someone else’s world.

I called the delivery company and they sent the guy back and it all got sorted out quickly and simply. That’s the mundanity of real life.

Short stories
aren’t
real life. In stories you can take an event or idea wherever you want... even if where it ends up isn’t nice.

D
IFFERENT NOW

This is an earlier story than most in this volume. It was written soon after I'd come to live in London, and slots neatly into my Early Miserablist period. As opposed to my Slightly Later Miserablist period, which I’m working on now. The classic miserablist short story form involves a young, alienated man living in a small flat in an anonymous urban environment and being confronted with the breakdown of a relationship while the world goes wonky around him.

This is a
classic
Miserablist short story.

U
NBELIEF

You very rarely come across unthemed anthologies these days. The idea of a group of stories
not
bonded together by some high concept, however wearisome – celebrity lesbian vampires, vacation-based science fiction tales with the word “spatula” in them – is apparently a tough sell. The problem with these themed anthologies is you often end up (to my mind) with a bunch of stories that wouldn’t stand up without the structuring conceit, and that perhaps didn’t really need to be written in the first place.

The challenge of an unthemed anthology is being put in the rare position of having no constraints . Writers are forever bitching and whining about being pigeon-holed or forced to meet publisher or reader expectations: being told to “do whatever you like,” however, can bring you up short. What
do
I like? If no one was watching, what would I do?

When Neil invited me to contribute to STORIES, therefore, I was becalmed for a while. Then I wrote
Unbelief
, which is a rather short, odd story. There probably aren’t many editors in the world who would have taken it. But... they did. Bless them.

W
ALKING WOUNDED

This is a story about transitions. After spending many years lurching in and out of an important and at times wonderful — but in its later stages rather dysfunctional — relationship, I’d finally broken free (or was I pushed?) and found the person who would become my wife. This tale’s motif of sorting through baggage doubtless tells its own story.

The bit where the narrator cracks a couple of ribs was, sadly, inspired by Real Life Events. Nearly twenty years later they still give me gyp from time to time.

A
UTHOR
OF THE DEATH

This collection is by Michael Marshall Smith. You may or not be aware that I also write novels under the name Michael Marshall. (If this is news to you, then go out and buy them. Buy them all. BUY THEM NOW.)

The distinction between the two writers has never been especially clear in my mind, but one afternoon I wondered: what if, out in the world, it made an actual difference which guy was doing the writing? The title is a play upon critical theory’s daft notion of the death of the author, of course, and overall it’s kind of a silly story, perhaps. But I had fun writing it... and if someone out there has the same reaction to reading it then that’s my job done, right there.

S
AD
, DARK THING

There are two small facts worth noting about this story. The first I that it was the first tale I ever set where I’m now living — Northern California. I wrote the story while back in London, between our second and third exploratory trips to the region, and the fact I was ready to try placing fiction here probably shows that a big part of my mind had already moved in.

The second is it’s one of those stories that dropped into my head almost fully-formed. My friend Stephen Jones emailed one morning, saying: “Just saw this phrase — thought you might be able to do something with it.’

The phrase was “Sad, dark thing”.

I sat very still for a few minutes, while an oblique, melancholy story seeped into my head, as if some odd narrative substance was dripping around the inside of my skull, outside my control.

Then I emailed Steve back, saying yes, I believed I could, and thank you very much. Hopefully I paid back the favor later, in that the story I wrote wound up going into Steve’s BOOK OF HORRORS, one of the first published by Jo Fletcher’s new imprint. It was also nominated for a British Fantasy Award.