“Don’t go out. Stay with me. I’ll be scared . . . ” X was getting fretful, poor lad. You could see a tear running down his dirty cheek. “Say home tonight, please.”
“Rubbish,” typed Dan decisively. “I don’t get no fun in life hardly at all, me—and no wonder. You’re like a bloody drag anchor, you are. You can watch telly with your Uncle Bob till nine, and then it’s off to bed.” Off (ta-ta-tat, space), to (ta-tap and space), bed (ra-ta-tat, full stop, space, space). He was quite unaware he was saying it out loud.
In his dingy cupboard, X shrank back into a fetal tuck. “But I want you to stay with me!” A more attentive ear might have responded to the pleading—to the neediness that accented the word you at the heart of the sentence.
“Shurrup.” She would say that. It was just like her. She listened only when she chose to, when insecurity and sentimentality coincided for a while in her fickle heart, and she needed to play the loving mother, needed to feel needed. Anyway. Back in your cupboard, little feller. None of your old harry. Doing Liza now, shush.
“I’ll hide! I’ll run away!”
“Do what you bloody want, then, only quit pesterin’ me, willyer? Little bastard.” Nice way to treat a kiddie, that. And your own boy, too. She was a piece of work, that Liza—talk about hard! Still . . . Dan settled back into the comfy chair, and allowed his eyelids to close for a moment. He was concentrating on the image of Liza, posed like a model with braced extended leg, adjusting her garter belt, tugging up her stocking-tops—never know what you might pick up down the town, eh, Lize? Not a night for tights, man pet.
In the cupboard, X pressed himself even more tightly into the crack between the walls, out of sight for the moment and consequently out of mind. Under his breath he was muttering, choked and wretched, “I will, too. I will, you’ll see. Just see if I don’t.”
But no one saw, no one at all. Even as he squeezed all the way through, passed beyond the bounds of imagination, no one suspected. Everyone was looking the other way at the time: Bob with his Party Seven in front of the telly, Liza shouting House down the bingo, Dan lost in lubricious daydreams as the Powerbook teetered dangerously on his sharply steepling lap.
When he awoke from his reverie, just in time to catch the Powerbook as it started to slide, the cupboard was empty. No X. Well, what did you expect? It was only a story, after all. Downstairs with Bob watching telly, wasn’t he? He blinked, took a swig of cold coffee, and got back to work.
He wrote on till well past nine, stopping only when his stomach creased up with a huge refractory gurgle. Breakfast, then. He splashed some water on his face before dressing and the walk into town. A baguette at the chi-chi little bistro off Leadworks Lane ought to hold him for the time being. He was just beginning to get nervous about his da—his get-together, but it was a good nervous, he told himself. Roll with it, relax. Remember, you’re a published author. Show her your awards.
In this respect, it was a trifle unfortunate that he walked on into town after breakfast, stopping at the Texas Cool Book Depository on Foregate Street. Among the cheerfully indiscriminate piles of remaindered stock in which they dealt, it came as something of a slap in the face to discover Volumes One, Two and Three of the Chronicles of Nevernesse going for £1.99 each, three for a fiver all marked stock. Wahey. Published author, there you go. Coming to a high street clearance store near you.
“Bollocks,” he said aloud, grinding the three fat paperbacks in his hands. For the second time in the space of a week, he was making a spectacle of himself in a bookshop—only this time there was no Molly to the rescue. An elderly customer glared at him, and the young student-looking lad on his other side said, “Yeah, they’ve got all sorts in the back, though, Matrix novels and that. It’s not just that Bilbo shit.”
The erstwhile purveyor of Bilbo shit, overcome of a sudden with a weariness nigh on inexpressible, retreated to the counter, where he handed over five pounds in return for five years’ worth of his authorial blood, sweat and tears. The books would do as a slightly showboaty present for Molly, he supposed, once he’d peeled the Final Reduction stickers off.
Behind him as he paid up, wholly unnoticed by Dan, a small boy stood and watched, rubbing his eyes with his sleeve.
Later that evening, parking up outside Molly’s place in Mickle Trafford, Dan’s nervousness was mounting. There was room on the herringbone brick driveway for a fleet of limos, let alone Dan’s clapped-out Cavalier, and the house, good god the house: prime stockbroker belt four-bedroom detached, conservatory round the back, room for an orangery.
Ringing the doorbell he felt grubby and disheveled, like a miner coming off shift. He was trying to catch his reflection in the faux-leaded double glazing when Molly opened the door on him craning his neck like an imbecile. Just as well she chose not to notice.
“Hello!” A brilliant smile; that hand on his arm again. In an instant, Dan straightened his posture by several degrees, a trained ape who could just about pass for human. “You found it, then!”
Dan tried to think of something suave and soignée to say instead of “Yeah,” but it wasn’t coming. In the end, his unique spin on the casual affirmative was to leave an embarrassing pause beforehand, then elongate the word itself like a village idiot, grinning foolishly all the while: “ . . . Yeeeeh.” But no crassness he could commit seemed to tell against him. He was still invited in for five minutes while Molly finished getting ready. Damn, she was so into him. It was great.
The house was . . . it was the sort of house that Dan always felt wary of entering, in case he broke anything or left stains on the fabrics and fittings. The sort of house you saw in advertisements for pension policies, the gray-haired hunk embracing the glamorous granny in the warm glow of financial independence and good double glazing. No one he knew socially lived in a house like this: there were Angie’s parents, of course, in Alderley Edge, but he doubted they’d let him in the front door these days. They weren’t like Molly, who was tripping back down the stairs with a brilliant smile on her face. Helplessly, he held out the books he’d bought at the Depository. He ought really to have had them leather-bound, to fit in with the décor.
“Is that a present? Oh, how lovely! Have you signed them?”
It honestly hadn’t occurred to Dan to sign them. They were remaindered paperbacks, for god’s sake. It’d be like monogramming toilet tissue. “Sorry, no, I will if you want . . . ” He took her pen, and scrawled across the title page of each volume.
As had always been the case at conventions and long ago in-store P.A.s, none of the signatures really resembled the others. They looked like a forger having three goes before kiting a cheque. Angie always said it was a confidence thing. Well, obviously she’d know; what remained of his confidence had been blasted away the minute she’d said “There’s this guy at work called Malcolm . . . ” Anyway.
“There you go,” he said, handing her back the last paperback. Never mind Malcolm just now. This was miles out of Malcolm’s league. Dan had moved up a division.
“Brilliant,” she said, crossing to the bookshelves. “Now I can take these spare ones to the charity shop.” Dan goggled. She’d bought the lot. All five volumes of Nevernesse, plus the anthos and the Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror of 1995.
“Good God, where on earth did you get those?”
“I tried in Borders, but they didn’t have them in stock,” she said, and Dan did his best not to grimace. “So I put your name into Amazon, and got the lot. I haven’t started them yet, though—I hope you’re not put out?” She said it as if she was actually concerned—as if what Dan thought about anything could possibly make a difference.
“No, no. I’m just surprised you bothered, that’s all.” Which he was, genuinely.
Molly made a little moue. “My first author? I should think not. I’ll read them all, of course. What a lot of work! You must be very dedicated.”
“Well, you keep reading them, and I’ll keep writing,” said Dan. He thought Say Uncle might be more up h
er street, though. He could visualize it on the shelf, in between Berain’s Dawn: The First Chronicle of Nevernesse and Mummy Did a Bad Thing, by Chastity Bobs. Chastity Bobs?
“So tell me about your new thing, the one you’re writing now,” she said, slipping a light jacket over her shoulders, and Dan was obliged to make up a new rule on the spot.
“You never do that with work in progress,” he said, as if it was something he, John Grisham and Stephen King would chant to each other over cocktails in the green room when doing Letterman or Leno. “Breaks the spell.”
“Well, we wouldn’t want to do that, would we?” said Molly with great seriousness. “Ready, then?
“As I’ll ever be,” Dan said gamely.
On the drive up the M53, Dan dreamed in vain of charming country pubs run by retired majors in cravats serving gourmet bar meals to the Cheshire set—somewhere Molly might feel at home. But nowhere they passed seemed even halfway acceptable: nary a single home-made sausage on a bed of caramelized-onion mash. As they got out of the car at the retail park, he was framing his brief yet heartfelt apology for even mentioning the words Pizza Hut, when she surprised him yet again by racing him to the doors and, once inside, whispering her top tips for the salad bar into his ear while the waiter seated them. Once again, Dan had read a woman all wrong. Surprise, surprise, hold the front page.
Gradually, over the course of the meal (a twelve-inch skinny margherita, olives, no anchovies, they shared it slice for slice), he began to get her measure, together with something of her backstory. She’d been divorced just three years now: her husband, a corporate pensions manager, had run off with his secretary, which would have been pretty unremarkable in their social circle had not the secretary’s name been Brian. She’d got the house (with mortgage long since paid off) and a comfortable settlement, which she augmented with some bookkeeping on a freelance basis for a big firm of solicitors in town. She was on the local board of magistrates, she belonged to a book club at Borders, just across the car park (they came here after the meetings for pizza and further discussion), and she had (as previously advertised) no children. And—hey, even Dan could pick this much up—she was very lonely, very tired of being alone.
The other thing? The really rather amazing thing? She seemed, even on this briefest of acquaintances, to like him very much. Dan liked her, too, come to that: it’s hard not to think fondly of those who think fondly of us. So, what were the two of them going to do about it? That was the question.
Pizza cleared away, they crossed the car park to the multiplex, where Guillermo del Toro’s new film was showing, his Oscar-tipped remake of The Innocents. Less than half-an-hour in, Molly was clutching Dan’s arm in fright, and when the fear subsided, what do you know? She didn’t pull away. Experimentally, Dan slipped his hand into hers. A squeeze and a stroke told him all he needed to know. It was like being sixteen again.
The next ten minutes or so were largely lost on Dan, who if truth be told had expected little from the evening beyond yet more chances to embarrass himself round the ladies—pizza cheese down his shirt front, misunderstandings in the back row, noisy mortification and the manager called. Instead, he sat there not quite able to believe his luck, super-sensitive to the utterly comfortable touch of Molly’s hand in his own, running through a host of pleasurable scenarios for the remainder of the evening. It was all too much. He had to go for a cigarette.
Excusing himself sotto voce, he slipped out into the foyer and explained his craving—the cigarette part of it at least—to the bored teen at the ticket check. She nodded in the direction of the doors in a way that suggested he could pretty much please himself, short of leaping from roof to roof of the cars outside with no clothes on—actually, just do what you want, yeah? Another hour-and-a-half and she was out of here, see ya.
“Thanks,” he said, heading for outside without waiting for the automatic “Yeah, wh’evah” that followed him through the automatic doors. He was fumbling his Marlboros out along the way.
As the doors slid shut behind him he was already sucking down his first drag. Oooh, good. The idea was that if you smoked it very fast, the smell wouldn’t have time to settle in your clothing, and you could eat a handful of those breath mints on the way back in. Fresh breath might be useful later on, or so he hoped.
He’d smoked the cigarette halfway down in three prodigious gulps when he became aware he was not alone. Of course, you always got gangs of kids hanging round outside the movies: clearly the next best thing to actually watching the film was leaning on the poster while swapping grubbily pornographic assessments of its leading lady. Except . . .
Except this wasn’t a gang of kids. It was one kid, and a very small one at that, standing just behind the poster for Holiday in Guantánamo. Outside the multiplex it was already getting dark, and the light streaming out from the foyer silhouetted a pair of thin legs, shuffling together in that want-a-wee way small children have when they’re anxious. Obscurely apprehensive, Dan made no move to investigate. None of his concern.
Two more monster drags took him most of the way down to the filter. Hurriedly, Dan ground the butt out, filled his mouth with mini-mints and made to go back inside. Just as he’d reached the sliding doors a voice came from behind him: “Mister?”
He knew that voice. Except, of course, he didn’t, because this couldn’t be—it just couldn’t, that’s all. So imagine Dan’s discomfiture when the small voice came again: “Mister, me feet hurt.” Hort, that dopey North-East vowel sound that gave the game away. “Mister?”
Dan stepped back, out of the sensor’s range. The automatic doors slid shut. The small figure came out from behind the poster stand.
It was X.
Take as read for the time being Dan’s gobsmacked response: the gaping, the eyes standing out on stalks, the involuntary swallowing of breath mints and the coughing fit that followed. The hand disbelievingly extended, is-he-real? Real as he ever was, eidetically speaking; but solid to the touch? Apparently, yes—and cold, very cold, shivering slightly in the mean April wind. Bloody hell. He’d no idea it could work that way, that a character sufficiently fleshed out could become . . . well, fleshed out. It never used to. Seeing was believing, before this, when it had all been in his control. But now . . .
What did this fresh development signify? What the hell was happening? Specifically, what was happening to him? He’d known he was under a certain amount of strain, what with the separation and everything else, but he’d thought he was coping. Really he had. And now, this. The boy gazed up at him through eyes swollen from too many tears, and Dan just stood there, unwilling to believe the evidence of his own senses.
A couple on their way out of the cinema glanced in his direction—in their direction, Dan supposed, X’s and his. Reflexively, Dan moved closer to the boy, the better to shield him from prying eyes. No one else must see this thing, not least because it was the easiest way of believing that no one else could see it.
As soon as he got within range, the child clutched at him. Hung on for grim death and would not let go, no matter what. Amazing, how real it felt, how exactly like the real thing. Dan, whether sane or otherwise, would back his powers of imagination against anyone’s, but this was as if X was actually standing right in front of him—a condition which every faculty he possessed assured him was most certainly the case. He had to promise to put him in the car before the kid would so much as give an inch.
“Can’t I come back in the fillums with you?” pleaded the boy, his unhappy face pressed against Dan’s fiercely churning stomach. “Please? I’ll be dead quiet an’ that.”
“No, you can’t,” hissed Dan, bewildered by the sheer irreducible wrongness of what was happening here—plea-bargaining with a character he’d made up. “It’s a fifteen certificate, the usher’ll tell us off.” Even as he said it he was thinking, What the hell sort of an excuse was that? Why not go hog wild, he reproached himself: Why not write yourself into the story and give yourself superhero superpowers? Then if th
e usher does say anything you can zap her into cinders. So long as we’re making stuff up, I mean.
“But it’s dark out here.” There was a whiny, fearful edge to the small boy’s voice that played terribly on Dan’s twanging nerves. It was as if, any time now, he might just burst into tears and start wailing, and that would definitely not do. No scene, not here, not now. Just do something, he told himself in blank panic—just get this, this situation dealt with here. After that you can spend all evening analyzing yourself. You unbelievable fucking nut-job, you.
And then, flooding back into his mind, came the other main business of the evening. Molly. Oh god. What was he going to do about Molly?
First things first, though. “In the car—now,” he hissed, manhandling the boy off his feet—his bare feet, for god’s sake—and jogging towards the car park. Again; so convincing to the touch. Weight and texture, unbelievable.
How did he do that? What combination of misfiring neurons and wild creativity had conspired to create this implausible thing he held? Either he was the number-one prize eideteker of all time, or he ought to be sectioned, there on the spot. He’d often wondered what it would be like, if he were actually to go crazy in the end, proper raving mad. Now he knew. It would be like sprinting across tarmac late at night with an imaginary seven-year-old in your arms, telling him lies preparatory to cramming him into the boot of your car.
“It’ll be fine,” gasped Dan as he ran, “all nice and snug, you can lie down in the back and go to sleep. I won’t be long. I think there’s a rug.”
Lies, all lies—but it didn’t matter, because by then all this would be over, wouldn’t it? The hallucination, or whatever it was, would dwindle into insignificance as soon as the boot slammed shut, and he was back holding Molly’s hand. Actually—yes. That would do it. Once he was back with Molly, all this would be a dream. Surely. And afterwards, first thing tomorrow, he could look it all up in a book, T for tulpas, S for schizophrenia, N for nut-job. Get help, see someone. Right now, this was just imagining things, no big deal, it was what he did for a living, but it had to stop. He had to get a grip. It didn’t matter that he could actually feel the weight of the boy in his arms, or hear his tremulous protestations of fear all hot and panting in his ear. It didn’t matter, because it was all in his imagination, from working too hard and not eating at proper hours. The stress of the separation from Angie. Those magic mushrooms he took, just the once, all those years ago. Whatever.
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