More Tomorrow: And Other Stories

by Michael Marshall Smith

  In 1955, ten years before Susan was born and five before she married, Geraldine Stanbury went on a holiday. She was gone three weeks, touring around European ports with a couple of friends from college. On their return, the ship, which was called the Aldwinkle, was hugging the coast of England against a storm when a disaster occurred. The underside of the ship’s hull was punctured and then ripped apart by an unexpected rock formation, and the boat went down. By an enormous stroke of good fortune an area within the ship remained airtight, and all three hundred and ten passengers and crew were able to hole up there until help arrived the next morning. In the end, not a single person was lost, which perhaps accounts for the fact that the wreck of the Aldwinkle has failed to become a well-known part of English disaster lore.

  Susan’s mother told her this story often when she was a child, laying great stress on what it had been like to be trapped under the water, not knowing whether help would come. As Susan told me this, sitting tensely on the rug in our flat, I was temporarily shocked out of drunkenness, and sat up to hold her hand. A couple of weeks previously we’d come close to a small argument over where to take the holiday we had been looking forward to. Having been raised in a coastal town I love the sea, and had suggested St Augustine, on the Florida coast. Susan had demurred, in an evasive way, and suggested somewhere more inland. The reasons for this now seemed more clear.

  After Mrs Stanbury had left, the story of her near death continued to prey on her daughter’s mind, though in different ways. As she’d grown up, questions had occurred to her. Like why, for example, there had not been a light showing at that point in the coast, when dangerous rocks were under the water. And why no-one in the nearby village had raised an alarm until the following morning. The ship had gone down within easy view of the shore: was it really possible that no-one had seen its distress? And if someone had seen, what on earth could have compelled them to keep silent until it should have been too late?

  The village in question was Dawton, a negligible hamlet on the west coast of England. As I held Susan that night, trying to keep her warm against the bewilderment that years of asking the same questions had formed, I suggested that we should visit the village sometime, to exorcise the ghosts it held for her. For of course no-one could have seen the ship in distress, or an alarm would have been raised. And lighthouses sometimes fail.

  When we got up for work the next morning, both more than a little hung over, such a trip seemed less important. In the next couple of weeks, however, during which we had two further nights on which the hardships of the day drove us to spend the evening in the pub where we could not be contacted, the idea was mentioned again. It was a time for clearing out, in both our lives. One of the ways in which we were battling against the avalanche of trivia, which still sometimes threatened to engulf us, was by sorting out the things we could, by seeking to tidy away elements of our past that might have detrimental effects on our future together.

  And so on the Friday when Susan finally demanded we get out of town, I suggested a pilgrimage to Dawton, and she agreed.

  As the archaic bus drew closer to the village I noticed that Susan grew a little more tense. I was about to make a joke about something, I’m not sure what, when she spoke.

  ‘It’s very quiet out here.’

  It was. We hadn’t passed a car in the last ten or fifteen minutes. That was no great surprise: as the afternoon grew darker the weather looked set to change for the worse, and judging from its size on the map, there would be little to draw people to Dawton unless they happened to live there. I said as much.

  ‘Yes, but still.’ I was about to ask her what she meant when I noticed a disused farm building by the side of the road. On its one remaining wall someone had painted a large swastika in black paint. Wincing, I pointed it out to Susan, and we shook our heads as middle-class liberals will when confronted with the forces of unreason.

  ‘Hang on though,’ she said, after a moment. ‘Isn’t it the wrong way round?’ She was right, and I laughed. ‘Christ,’ she said. ‘To be that stupid, to do something so mindless, and still to get it wrong…’

  Then a flock of seagulls wheeling just outside the window attracted our attention. They were scraggy and unattractive birds, and fluttered close to the window in a disorganised but vaguely threatening way. As we watched, however, I was trying to work out what the swastika reminded me of, and trying to puzzle out why someone should have come all this way to paint it. We were still two miles from Dawton. It seemed a long way to come to daub on a disused wall, and unlikely that such a small coastal town should be racked with racial tension.

  Ten minutes later the bus rounded a final bend, and the village of Dawton was in sight. I turned and raised my eyebrows at Susan. She was staring intently ahead. Sighing, I started to extricate our bag from beneath the seat. I hoped Susan wasn’t building too much on this sleepy village. I don’t know what I was expecting the weekend to bring: a night at a drab bed and breakfast, probably, with a quiet stroll down the front before dinner. I imagined that Susan would want to look out across the sea, to try to imagine the place where her mother had nearly lost her life, and that would be it. The next day we would return to London. To hope for anything more, for some kiss that would heal all childhood wounds, would be asking a little too much.

  ‘You getting off, or what?’

  Startled, we looked up to the front of the bus. The vehicle had stopped, apparently at random, fifty yards clear of the first disheveled houses that stood on the land side of the road.

  ‘Sorry?’ I said.

  ‘Bus stops here.’

  I turned to Susan, and we laughed.

  ‘What, it doesn’t go the extra hundred yards into the village?’

  ‘Stops here,’ the man said. ‘Make your mind up.’

  We clambered rather huffily down out of the bus onto the side of the road. Before the door was fully shut, the driver had the bus in reverse. He executed a three-point turn at greater than his usual driving speed, and then sped off up the road away from the village.

  ‘Extraordinary man,’ said Susan.

  ‘Extraordinary git, more like.’ I turned and looked over the low wall we had been dumped beside. A stone ramp of apparent age led down to a stony strip of beach, against which the grey water was lapping with some force. ‘Now what?’

  From where we stood the coast bent round to our left, enabling us to see the whole of the village in its splendour. Houses much like those just ahead accounted for most of the front, with a break about halfway along where there appeared to be some kind of square. Other dwellings went back a couple of streets from the front, soon required to cling to the sharp hills which rose less than two hundred yards from the shore. An air of decay hung over the scene, of negligent disuse. The few cars we could see parked looked old and haggard, and the smoke issuing thinly from a couple of chimneys only helped to underline the general air of desertion. Susan looked contrite.

  ‘I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have come.’

  ‘Of course we should. The answering machine will be half-full of messages already, and I’m glad it’s listening to them and we’re not.’

  ‘But it’s so…dismal.’ She was right. Dismal was the word, rather than quiet. Anywhere can be quiet. Quiet just means that there isn’t much noise. Dawton was different. Noise wouldn’t have been an improvement.

  ‘Dawton’s dismal,’ I said, and she giggled. ‘Come on. Let’s find a disappointing guest house that doesn’t have a TV in each room, never mind tea- and coffee-making facilities.’

  She grabbed me by the hand, kissed my nose, and we turned to walk. Just a yard in front of us, obscured by sand and looking much older than the one on the wall we had seen, another swastika was painted on the pavement. Again it was the wrong way round. I shook my head, puzzled, and then walked over it on our way towards the houses.

  ‘We could try this one, I suppose.’

  ‘What d’you reckon?’

  ‘It doesn’t look any nicer than the ot
her one.’

  ‘No.’

  We were standing at one corner of Dawton’s square, outside the village’s second pub. We had already rejected one on the way from the guest house. We weren’t expecting a CD jukebox and deep-fried camembert, but we’d thought we could probably find better. Now we were beginning to doubt it.

  Susan leant forward to peer through the window.

  ‘We could go straight to a restaurant,’ I suggested.

  ‘If there is one.’

  In the end we nervously decided to have a quick drink in the pub. If nothing else the landlord should be able to tell us where the town restaurant was. Susan pushed the heavy wooden door, and I followed her in.

  The pub consisted of a single bare room. Though it was cold no fire burned in the grate, and the predominance of old stained wood failed to bring any warmth to the ambience. A number of chairs surrounded the slab-like tables, each furnished with a tattered cushion for a seat. The floor was of much-worn boards, with a few faded rugs. There was no-one to be seen, either in the body of the room or behind the bar.

  After a searching look at each other, we walked up to the bar, and I leant over. The area behind was narrow, almost like a corridor, and extended beyond the wall of the room we were in. By craning my neck I could see that there appeared to be another room on the other side of the wall. It could have been another bar except that it was completely dark, and there were no pumps or areas to store glasses. I pointed this out to Susan, and we frowned at each other. At the end of the bar area was a door, which was shut. After a pause, I shouted hello.

  It wasn’t much of a shout, because I was feeling rather intimidated by the sepulchral quiet of the room, but it rang out harshly all the same. We both flinched, and waited for the door at the end of the corridor to be wrenched open. It wasn’t, and I said hello again, a little more loudly this time.

  A faint sound, possibly one of recognition, seemed to come from behind the door. I say ‘seemed’ because it was very faint, and appeared to come from a greater distance than you would have expected. Loath to shout again, in case we had already been heard, we shrugged and perched ourselves on two ragged barstools to wait.

  The situation was strangely similar to that which we had encountered on entering the guest house in which we would be spending the night. We had only walked about ten houses down the line from where the bus had deposited us before we saw a sign nailed unceremoniously to the front of one of them, advertising rooms for the night. We’d entered, and loitered for a few minutes in front of a counter before an elderly woman creaked out of a back room to attend to us.

  The room we were shown was small, ill-favoured and faced away from the sea. Naturally it had neither a television nor drink-making facilities, and you could only have swung a cat in it if you had taken care to provide the animal with a crash helmet first. As the rest of the house seemed utterly deserted we asked the woman if we could have a room with a sea view instead, but she had merely shaken her head. Susan, fiendish negotiator that she is, had mused aloud for a moment on whether a little extra money could obtain such a view for us. The woman had shaken her head again, and said they were ‘booked’.

  I discovered a possible cause for this when down in the sitting room of the house, waiting for Susan to finish dressing for the evening. It was a dark and poky room, notwithstanding its large window, and I would not have chosen to spend much time there. The idea of simply sitting in it was frankly laughable. The chairs were lumpy and ill-fashioned, their archaic design so uncomfortable it seemed scarcely conceivable that they had been designed with humans in mind, and the window gave directly out onto a gloomy prospect of dark grey sea and clouds. I was there only because I had already seen enough of our small room, and because I hoped I might be able to source some information on likely eating places in the village.

  At first I couldn’t find anything, which was odd. Usually the guest houses of small towns on the coast are bristling with literature advertising the local attractions, produced in the apparent hope that the promise of some dull site thirty miles away might induce the unwary into staying an extra night. The house we were staying in, however, clearly wished to be judged on its own merits, or else simply couldn’t be bothered. Though I looked thoroughly over all the available surfaces, I couldn’t find so much as a card.

  I was considering without much enthusiasm the idea of tracking down the old crone to ask her advice when I discovered something lying on the sill in front of the window. It was a small pamphlet, photocopied and stapled together, and the front bore the words ‘Dawton Festival’. It also mentioned a date, the 30th of October, which happened to be the following day.

  There was nothing by way of editorial on the Festival itself, bar the information that it would start at three o’clock in the afternoon. Presumably the unspecified festivities continued into the evening, hence the drabness of our berth. The guest house’s more attractive rooms had obviously been booked for two nights in advance, by forthcoming visitors to what promised to be the west coast’s least exciting event.

  I couldn’t glean much of interest from the booklet, which had been typeset with extraordinary inaccuracy, to the point where some of it didn’t even look as if it was in English. Most of the scant pages were filled with small advertisements for businesses whose purposes remained obscure. There was no mention of a restaurant. The centre spread featured a number of terribly reproduced photographs purporting to show various notables of the town, including, believe it or not, a ‘Miss Dawton’. Her photograph in particular had suffered from being badly photocopied too many times, and was almost impossible to make out. Her figure blended with the background tones, making her appear rather bulky, and the pale ghost of her face was so distorted as to appear almost misshapen.

  I was about to shout again, this time audibly, when the door at the end of the bar seemed to tremble slightly. Susan started slightly, and I stood up in readiness.

  The door didn’t open. Instead we both heard a very distant sound, like that of footsteps on wet pavements. It sounded so similar, in fact, that I turned to look at the outer door of the pub, half-expecting to see the handle turn as one of the locals entered. It didn’t, though, and I returned to looking at the door. The sounds continued, getting gradually closer. They sounded hollow somehow, as if they were echoing slightly. Susan and I looked at each other, frowning once more.

  The footsteps stopped on the other side of the door, and there was a long pause. I was beginning to wonder whether we wouldn’t perhaps have been better off with the first pub we’d seen when the door suddenly swung open, and a man stepped out behind the bar. Without so much as glancing in our direction he shut the door behind him and then turned his attention to the ancient till. He opened it by pressing on some lever, and then began to sort through the money inside in a desultory fashion.

  I think we both assumed that he would stop this after a moment or so, despite the fact that he had given no sign of seeing us. When he didn’t, Susan nudged me, and I coughed a small cough. The man turned towards us with an immediacy and speed that rather disconcerted me, and stood, eyebrows raised. After a pause I smiled in a way I hoped looked friendly rather than nervous.

  ‘Good evening,’ I said. The man didn’t move. He just stood, half turned towards us, with his hands still in the till and his eyebrows still in the air. He didn’t even blink. I noticed that his eyes were slightly protuberant, and the skin round his ears looked rough, almost scaly. His short black hair was styled as if for pre-war fashion, and appeared to have been slicked back with Brylcreem or something similar. A real blast from the past. Or from something, anyway.

  After he’d continued to not say anything for ten seconds or so, I had another shot.

  ‘Could we have two halves of lager, please?’

  As soon as I started speaking again the man turned back to the till. After I’d finished there was a pause, and then finally he spoke.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. It wasn’t really a
reply. It was just a response to the last thing I was expecting a publican to say.

  He said: ‘Don’t have any beer.’

  I blinked at him. ‘None at all?’

  He didn’t enlarge on his previous statement, just finished whatever he was doing, closed the till, and started moving small glasses from one shelf to another, still with his back to us. The glasses were about three inches high and oddly shaped, and I couldn’t for the life of me work out either what one might drink from them or why he was choosing to move them.

  ‘A gin then.’ Susan’s voice was fairly steady, but a little higher than usual, ‘with tonic?’ She normally had a slice of lemon too, but I think she sensed this would be a bit of a long shot.

  She got no reply at all. When all of the small glasses had been moved, the man opened the till again. Beginning to get mildly irritated, in spite of my increasing feeling of unease, I glanced at Susan and shook my head. She didn’t smile, but just stared back at me, face a little pinched. I looked back at the man, and after a moment leant forward to see more closely.

  His hair hadn’t been slicked back, I realised. It was wet. Little droplets hung off the back in a couple of places, and the upper rim of his shirt was soaked. There had been a fine drizzle earlier on, enough to make the pavements damp. We’d walked most of the way from the guest house in it, and suffered no more than a fine dusting of moisture. So why was his hair so wet? Why, in fact, had he been out at all? Shouldn’t he have been tending his (surprisingly beer-free) pumps?

  He could have just washed it, I supposed, but that didn’t seem likely. Not this man, at this time in the evening. And surely he would have dried it enough to prevent it dripping off onto his shirt, and running down the back of his neck? Peeking forward slightly I saw that his shoes were wet too, hence the wet footsteps we had heard. But where had he come from? And why was his hair wet?