He had barely managed to climb inside and shut the door before it lurched off once more, running to its timetable as surely as Alice’s white rabbit, and as Masters fell back into the seat he thought; this is a memory, an idealised moment from the past, correct in the details down to the curious acrid smell of such carriages and the itchy bristles of the seat, but not something that’s really happening now - merely a culmination of fragments seen and experienced, not fact but fiction, someone else’s fiction.
He pushed down the window and leaned from it, searching the track ahead. Where the stalled carriage should have been was nothing at all, no carriage, no track, no hills or sea, no night or day, just nothing.
And he thought; I’ve fallen asleep like one of my students, that’s all it is. There’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s simply that I’ve lost the ability to tell reality and fantasy apart. Right now it seems I’m fictional but I know I’m real, for I have real memories. He thought hard and tried to recall something, a moment so exact and specific to his life that it would prove he was real, so that the fiction would break up around him like an unfinished short story. He tried to think of Jane and Peregrine, whom he knew had been having an affair for nearly two years, but could not conjure a single past memory from either of them. He thought about this evening, and the way it conformed to the most absurd conventions of a typical Hallowe’en short story; the stormy night, the train ride, the mystery destination, the tale-telling guests. Stay calm, he told himself, and remember, remember, he repeated as the train hurtled toward a stomach-dropping oblivion, remember something real and true, remember the last time you were truly happy.
And then a real moment came to him.
A dead, hot day in mid-July. The air is countrified, dandelion spores rising gently on warm thermals, the lazy drone of a beetle alighting on dust-dulled hedge leaves. A suburban summertime, where the South London solstice settles in a sleepy yellow blanket over still front gardens.
Westerdale Road has its characters; the bad-tempered widow who appears in her doorway at the sound of a football being kicked against a wall, the deaf old couple whose pond freezes over every winter, so that they have to thaw their goldfish from a block of ice in a tin bath beside the fire. Some of the houses have Anderson shelters in their gardens, converted to tool-sheds in time of peace. Others still keep chickens, a distinctive sound and smell that excites the neighbourhood cats. Further along the street is a “simple” man who sits on his front step smiling inanely in the bright sunlight.
Masters forced himself to remember, to stop himself from ceasing to exist. These weren’t his memories, he realised with a shock, they belonged to someone else entirely. What were they doing in his head?
Many street names conjure pastoral imagery, “Combedale Road”, “Mycenae Road”, “ Westcombe Hill”. At noon the silent sunlight scorches the streets. Housewives stay deep within the little terraced houses, polishing sideboards, making jellies, listening to wirelesses in cool shadowed rooms. Their men are at work, mopping their brows in council offices, patrolling machine-room floors, filling out paperwork in dusty bank chambers. Their children are all at school, reciting their tables, catching beanbags, and in the break following lunch there is a special treat; the teacher unlocks a paddock behind the playground of Invicta Infants, and here is a haven from the hot concrete, a small square meadow of close-cropped emerald grass hemmed in with chicken-wire. Here we are allowed to lie on our stomachs reading comics, passing them between each other. It is peaceful, warm and quiet (the teachers do not tolerate the vulgarity of noise) and although we are in a suburban street, it feels like the heart of the countryside. And here is the heart of all remembered happiness.
Confused, Masters began crying as the carriages dissolved around him and tumbled away through the night sky, the foundations of his life evaporating as he fought to recall anything at all that made him human.
What was it about this area, what did it possess to make it so special, so irreplaceable and precious? A few roads, a pond behind a wall where sticklebacks were trapped in jars and dragonflies skimmed the oily water, a railway line with a narrow pedestrian tunnel beneath it, a station of nicotine-coloured wood and rows of green tin lamps along the platform. Some odd shops; a perpetually deserted furniture showroom, damp and dark, its proprietor standing ever-hopefully at the door, a model railway centre, a tobacconist selling sweets from large jars, a rack of Ellisdons Jokes on a stand, none of them living up to their packet descriptions, a chemist with apothecary bottles filled with coloured water and a scale machine, green and chrome with a wicker weighing basket, a bakery window filled with pink and white sugar mice, iced rounds, meringues and Battenburg cake. An advertisement painted on a wall, for varnish remover of some kind, depicting a housewife happily pouring boiling water from a kettle on to a shiny dining room table. Cinema posters under wire. A hardware shop with tin baths hanging either side of the door.
This confluence of roads and railway lines is bordered by an iron bridge and an embankment filled with white trumpet-flowered vines, and populated by families with forgotten children’s names-, Laurence, Percy, Pauline, Albert, Wendy, Sidney. No ambitions and aspirations here, just the stillness of summer, the faint drone of insects, bees landing on flowerbeds in the police station garden, tortoises and chickens sheltering from the heat beneath bushes, cats asleep in shop windows with yellow acetate sunscreens, and life being lived, a dull, sensible kind of life, unfolding like a flower, the day loosening as slowly as a clock spring - an implacable state which children thought would never change, but which is now lost so totally, so far beyond reach that it might have occurred before Isis ruled the Nile.
The lecturer had no memories of his own because he did not truly exist. Just like any flesh and blood human being, the creation that was Harold Masters reached his time unexpectedly and without resolution, and so dissolved into a tumble of threadbare tissues. With no plot momentum to drive him and no memories of his own, just borrowings from the mind of his creator, he turned over and over into nothing and was gone. And in that moment, he was the most real.
The storyteller in the mind’s eye of Harold Masters sits at his chipped writing desk staring up at shelves of books, his eye alighting on an old 78 rpm record, and it dawns on him that he took Masters’ name from the label, which features a dog and a gramophone. He wonders how many other characters’ names came from spines of books and recollections of friends. A video of Brief Encounter, a copy ofDracula, a photograph of New York, a lottery ticket, a drawing of a phoenix, a brandy bottle, a hotel brochure, a dog’s collar, an Arsenal scarf, childhood notes. He looks for the patterns that shape his own life and finds only tarmac, concrete and steel, the dead carapace of something lost to all but his mind’s eye.
His own past is as dead as his - and Masters’ - recollection of it.
Dr Beeching closed the branch lines, road planners cut the streets in half, smashed down the houses, constructed swathes of concrete through the hills, the roads, the railways, the gardens, and like a bush cut through at the root, everything familiar died. The shops of his childhood were boarded up, homes falling to the wrecking ball, friends divided, families relocated. Now oil-drenched vibrations pulse the once-still air. A bright patch of pavement remains where once he stood with his face to the sun, free as the sky.
That was his reality.
Everything now is fiction.
They feel different, he notes, fact and fantasy. The former rooted in observation and experience, the latter bound by publishers’ conventions. Sitting in the small cold study, the storyteller determines to leave behind his outmoded world of locked-room mysteries and vampire soaps in search of something real. But how hard will it be to leave such a cosy niche for a place with endless horizons and no parameters? Even letting go has a learning process.
He pushes back his chair and goes to the open window, inventing as hard and as fast as he can. It is a beautiful spring morning, and the breeze causes his eyelids to flutter. There is bri
ne in the air. He looks down from the window-ledge at the thin white clouds racing far beneath, then loosens his belt and steps out of his trousers. It only takes a moment to remove his T-shirt, pants and socks. Drawing a deep breath, he walks confidently out on to the rope-covered surface of the springboard, determined not to show that he is scared.
How the releasing of shackles makes his body feel lighter than air.
Poor old Harold Masters, not being allowed to finish his story. It was so obvious to see where his tale was going that there was simply no reason for the author to finish it himself, not when his readers could put together the clues and do the job for him. The burden is always on the author to rediscover ways of surprising his audience, and that task has been fulfilled, albeit in a rather unorthodox manner.
It’s good to be standing at the edge, he tells himself, bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet. There’s a new world ahead. As the old century closes, he can leave behind his plots and characters. There are some excellent practitioners of the art who seem more than happy to close up the store behind him. There will always be the attraction of lies.
His body is pale and unused to such exposure. The clouds below appear as if seen from an airplane window. He moves further to the end of the board and gives a few experimental bounces. Then he bends his knees, jumps into the air, comes down on to the board and straightens his legs. The tension released in the board springs him high into the air, so high he feels he could punch a hole in the sky. For a brief moment it seems as if he could stay like this forever.
And for those who are left back on the ground, blinking in the sharp sunlight, those who are all too familiar with where they have been, the question for them now is how not to look back, how not to look down, but where to begin.
Where to begin.
And the answer, of course, is right - here.
<
* * * *
NEIL GAIMAN
The Wedding Present
Neil Gaiman has had a busy yearpromoting his bestselling fairy tale for adults, Stardust, and working on the movie version for Miramax. For the same company he scripted the English language version of Hayao Miyazaki’s anime, Princess Mononoke, and he is currently developing the film version of his BBC-TV series Neverwhere.
On the publishing front, he is writing a scary children’s book entitled Coraline, a novel with the working title American Gods, a picture book called The Wolves in the Walls, and a Japanese Sandman tale titled The Dream Hunters.
“I had the idea for the story about ten years ago - at a friend’s wedding reception,” Gaiman reveals. “I was sitting at the next table to Ray Harryhausen. I thought “I’ll write a story and give it to the happy couple as a wedding present,” and then I realised what the story was about and decided that they might not appreciate being given it as a present. So I didn’t write it. I decided to wait until some friends got married who’d like it.
“The weeks went by and the months and the years. And when people got married, I always wound up getting them towels or toasters or things, because I thought they might not appreciate the story.
“And then, last year, I was writing the introduction to my short story collection Smoke and Mirrors. I was trying to talk about where stories came from, and I mentioned that there were stories I had never written - and it occurred to me that the right wedding would probably never come along, so I might as well write the story anyway.
“So I did. I put it in the Introduction to Smoke and Mirrors. People who don’t read introductions will never know there was a story in the collection that they never read.”
* * * *
A
fter all the joys and the headaches of the wedding, after the madness and the magic of it all (not to mention the embarrassment of Belinda’s father’s after-dinner speech, complete with family slide-show), after the honeymoon was literally (although not yet metaphorically) over and before their new suntans had a chance to fade in the English autumn, Belinda and Gordon got down to the business of unwrapping the wedding presents and writing their thank-you letters - thank you’s enough for every towel and every toaster, for the juicer and the bread-maker, for the cutlery and the crockery and the teasmade and the curtains.
“Right,” said Gordon. “That’s the large objects thank-you’d. What’ve we got left?”
“Things in envelopes,” said Belinda. “Cheques, I hope.”
There were several cheques, a number of gift tokens, and even a £10 book token from Gordon’s Aunt Marie, who was poor as a church mouse, Gordon told Belinda, but a dear, and who had sent him a book token every birthday as long as he could remember. And then, at the very bottom of the pile, there was a large brown, business-like envelope.
“What is it?” asked Belinda.
Gordon opened the flap, and pulled out a sheet of paper the colour of two-day-old cream, ragged at top and bottom, with typing on one side. The words had been typed with a manual typewriter, something Gordon had not seen in some years. He read the page slowly.
“What is it?” asked Belinda. “Who’s it from?”
“I don’t know,” said Gordon. “Someone who still owns a typewriter. It’s not signed.”
“Is it a letter?”
“Not exactly,” he said, and he scratched the side of his nose and read it again.
“Well,” she said, in an exasperated voice (but she was not really exasperated; she was happy. She would wake in the morning and check to see if she were still as happy as she had been when she went to sleep the night before, or when Gordon had woken her in the night by brushing up against her, or when she had woken him. And she was). “Well, what is it?”
“It appears to be a description of our wedding,” he said. “It’s very nicely written. Here,” and he passed it to her. She looked it over.
It was a crisp day in early October when Gordon Robert Johnson and Belinda Karen Abingdon swore that they would love each other, would support and honour each other as long as they both should live. The bride was radiant and lovely, the groom was nervous, but obviously proud and just as obviously pleased.
That was how it began. It went on to describe the service and the reception clearly, simply, and amusingly.
“How sweet,” she said. “What does it say on the envelope?”
“Gordon and Belinda’s Wedding,” he read.
“No name? Nothing to indicate who sent it?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Well, it’s very sweet, and it’s very thoughtful,” she said. “Whoever it’s from.”
She looked inside the envelope to see if there was something else in there that they had overlooked, a note from whichever one of her friends (or his, or theirs) had written it, but there wasn’t. So, vaguely relieved that there was one less thank you note to write, she placed the cream sheet of paper back in its envelope, which she placed in a box-file along with a copy of the Wedding Banquet menu, and the Invitations, and the contact sheets for the wedding photographs, and one white rose from the bridal bouquet.
* * * *
Gordon was an architect, and Belinda was a vet. For each of them what they did was a vocation, not a job. They were in their early twenties. Neither of them had been married before, nor even seriously involved with anyone. They met when Gordon brought his thirteen-year-old Golden Retriever, Goldie, grey-muzzled and half-paralysed, to Belinda’s surgery to be put down. He had had the dog since he was a boy, and insisted on being with her at the end. Belinda held his hand as he cried, and then, suddenly and unprofessionally, she hugged him, tightly, as if she could squeeze away the pain and the loss and the grief. One of them asked the other if they could meet that evening in the local pub for a drink, and afterward neither of them was sure which of them had proposed it.
The most important thing to know about the first two years of their marriage was this: they were pretty happy. From time to time they would squabble, and every once in a while they would have a blazing row about nothing very much that would end in tearful reconcili
ations, and they would make love and kiss away the other’s tears, and whisper heartfelt apologies into each other’s ears. At the end of the second year, six months after she came off the pill, Belinda found herself pregnant.
Gordon bought her a bracelet studded with tiny rubies, and he turned the spare bedroom into a nursery, hanging the wallpaper himself. The design was covered with nursery rhyme characters, with Little Bo Peep, and Humpty Dumpty, and the Dish Running Away With the Spoon, over and over and over again.
Belinda came home from the hospital, with little Melanie in her carrycot, and Belinda’s mother came to stay with them for a week, sleeping on the sofa in the lounge.
It was on the third day that Belinda pulled out the box-folder, to show her wedding souvenirs to her mother, and to reminisce. Already their wedding seemed like such a long time ago. They smiled at the dried, brown thing that had once been a white rose, and clucked over the menu and the invitation. At the bottom of the box was a large brown envelope.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 10 - [Anthology] Page 11
