More Tomorrow: And Other Stories

by Michael Marshall Smith

  The tape started just as they were building up in to the second fuck. Anne lying on her back, groaning quietly as he sucked her nipples and coaxed between her legs. Then he gently pulled one of her hands across and placed it down there, while he straddled her chest, tugging at his cock, getting it to the point where he could commend it to her mouth for further encouragement. A section of this and then he withdrew, climbed off and turned her over, ready for—but it was wrong. It was all very wrong.

  He wasn’t there on the tape.

  Anne did all the things he remembered. She moved in all the right ways. Her body showed the impressions of his hands. Her mouth opened, and her hands lifted up, as if controlling his thrusts. Then it shut, she looked up at nothing and turned over, the imprint of his fingers on her buttock. But she almost looked as if she was the only person on the bed.

  David swore, yanked the tape out of the camera and threw it across the room. He grabbed another camera, plugged it in. Tape from the living room. He knew that worked. He’d already watched the MPEG. He rewound, watched it again.

  Anne drank alone.

  Anne’s buttons undid themselves. Her zipper undid itself, and her pants dropped to the floor.

  Anne backed out of the room, giggling, her hand held out as if pulling an invisible rope.

  It was fucking horrible. The tape was so screwed up it made it look like he hadn’t even been there. Of course he had been, there was no question of that: the evidence was still in front of him. She hadn’t undone her own buttons: her hands were nowhere near them at the time. He’d been there, he’d done that. But if he couldn’t see it—how the fuck was it supposed to count?

  He furiously lit another cigarette. Went and retrieved the thrown tape. He could hardly send it back as evidence of how faulty their merchandise was, but he could note the serial number. He’d need to quote it. Obviously a whole batch was screwed up. They’d probably already had complaints. They were sure as fuck going to get one more.

  He sat down again. His heart was beating hard and ragged. His head felt terrible. The dislocation he’d felt before Anne arrived was back in force. For just a moment he wavered, doubted the point of his life, realising that everything else he did had become superfluous, that the films were all her cared about, the only things that spoke directly to the man he knew himself to be. It only lasted a second, and then he was back again. Back, and angry. He needed grounding, that was all.

  Hands moving like independent robots, one took the mouse and flash-navigated through the file structure on his computer, heading for one of the Greatest Hits compilations. The other tugging at the knot in the cord of his dressing gown, pulling it aside and finding what was inside. He double-clicked the file, already kneading in his lap. Okay, so one had got away. Technology had conspired against him. But there was so much already stored to enjoy.

  The film, ‘Dogs I have Known’, flipped up onto the screen. He was proud of the title. A score of women in the doggy position, intercut with the little ladies gnawing on his bone. It was his finest hour, his finest hours, in fact: stripped of dead wood and cutting straight to chase after chase.

  But he wasn’t on it. Not in a single scene.

  Feeling sick with confusion he raced back and forth through the tape, checking sections more than once. Monica, Claire, Janine. The women moved under his direction, but he wasn’t there. Anne, Marie, Helen, Liz. Parts of their bodies opened to accommodate him, but there was no him to be seen. Sue, Teresa, Rachel, Nikki, Maggie, Beth. And him fucking nowhere.

  Closed out, checked another film. The same.

  And another. And another. He staggered to his feet. He felt very strange now. Almost as if he was floating.

  There was something wrong with his head.

  Maybe it hadn’t been alcohol. Perhaps he’d been slipped a drug the night before, a delayed psychedelic, by some fucker at the club where he’d been. Wherever it was—he still couldn’t properly remember. It couldn’t all be gone. Not the things they’d done for him. The things he’d made them do.

  No, it was a drug, because things off the screen were looking strange now too. The table looked insubstantial. The little lamps, carefully placed around the room, these too seemed odd: as if flicking from one state to another outside his control. He pushed himself away from the desk, staggered back into the room. He felt sick, hollow, as if his grip on reality was fading.

  Maybe not a drug, he thought suddenly. Not exactly. Not something slipped into a drink. Maybe one of the woman had come back, or her man. Some kind of revenge: because now he thought about it, some of them did come back, for ‘just one more time’ visits every now and then. Maybe one had left something in the room. Something which slowly leaked out, a gas, permeating the room and gradually fucking him up. Building up over days, weeks. His only respite the time he spent out of the apartment. Like when he…

  He couldn’t remember when he’d last left the apartment. He couldn’t remember the night before. He couldn’t remember where he’d been. Maybe he hadn’t been anywhere, and it was only the gas which was making him think he had. Filling in the gaps, trying to explain the way he felt. He reeled across the room, heading for the corridor. Fresh air. He needed fresh air. He needed to get out and then find out which bitch had done this to him. And then he thought maybe he’d break his ‘virtual contact only’ rule. Maybe he’d just find her and fuck her up bad.

  As he careered across the room he seemed to move in a series of jump-cuts. When he passed the mirror he didn’t even notice that he was not reflected in it.

  He barrelled into the corridor, doing his best to run but losing all speed to his thrashing. The drug was building up in his head. Maybe Anne had triggered it. He’d felt odd before she came, but nothing like this. She could have pushed him over the edge. As he hauled himself along the corridor, face pressed against the cool wall, he tried to imagine what he’d do to her next time she visited. She didn’t like rough stuff, he knew. He’d tried it, carefully choreographed for the cameras. Well next time she was going to take it anyway.

  He didn’t feel sick any more, just so light-headed he could barely think. Everything seemed too white. He couldn’t even feel the wall now, but he could see the door. He reached for the handle, turned it, and yanked it open.

  Outside there was nothing but a black void.

  He turned, but his corridor wasn’t there either now. It was just black all around, the last of the light fading out.

  His last thought was this:

  This isn’t right. Don’t you understand? This is me.

  Anne checked her email before she went to bed. The usual stuff: a few things from work, a couple of articles she’d sent her agent after, a newsy letter from her sister in New South Wales.

  And one from PRIVATE ENCOUNTERS.COM. She opened it.

  Dear Anne—

  Grovel, grovel: what can I say! You were right—it wasn’t your sensor pads at all. The site engineers finally tracked down a deep code fault with the charactergen, and it looks like it’s been accumulating for some time. As a result, the David Mate has been permanently withdrawn from service. Unfortunately this means that ‘he’ will also have disappeared from any sensual transcripts of previous SavedEncounters™ you had archived on our secure server—but rest assured he will be replaced within 24 hours, for your revisiting pleasure.

  I do apologise for any inconvenience, and hope that a $30 rebate (against further purchase) and the promise of Generation IV EncounterMates™ just around the corner will encourage you to ‘log in’ again very soon!

  Yours sincerely

  Julie North, Customer service.

  Anne nodded to herself, pleased to have been proved right. It just hadn’t felt the same. And the prospect of revisiting old times, but with a different Mate, sounded really rather interesting.

  She grinned greedily to herself as she shut down the computer. Whatever. She’d had enough.

  For tonight, anyway.

  Last Glance Back

  I was walk
ing up Leighton Road, my mind on something else. Most people who walk up Leighton Road try to have their mind on something else, and with good reason, but there’s no other way of getting from Kentish Town tube to my flat. It had been a long day at work, but not a bad one, because Jenny had been there. Though we worked in different parts of the office, we could sense each other through the walls—and had spent a very warm lunch hour wrapped round each other in a pub. After a month I still found it odd being at work with someone who was now also my girlfriend, strange having to be corporate with each other when co-workers and clients were around. My mood tended to vacillate wildly between irritation at having to deal with other people, joy when Jenny walked into the room, and chagrin at not being able to grab hold of her. Previously secular ground had become more complicated, and while in some ways that was magical, it could also be rather tiring.

  Jenny was out drinking with girlfriends that evening, then spending the night in her own flat. This left me to my own devices for the first time in what felt like quite a while. I was already missing her, but that wasn’t what I was thinking about. We’d snatched a drink together before she headed off toward her mates, and Jenny had mentioned the idea of living together. She’d lofted it very casually, so that the conversation didn’t run smack into it, but also in a way that said she’d already done some thinking on the subject. Most of me had leapt at the idea, but I’d found myself saying it needed considering, and that’s what I was doing. Considering it.

  Leighton Road was sparsely populated with migrating locals, shambling home to their sofas or drifting in the other direction towards the takeaways and pubs. Like most of those who were homeward bound, my head was down. When I raised it in anticipation of a side road, I saw a girl wandering down the street towards me.

  The first thing I noticed were her eyes, which were blue and blurred behind tears. The area round them was already reddened with crying, the skin a blotched pink which stood out against the pallor of the rest of her face. Stood out to me, at least. Nobody else seemed to pay her any attention at all, so intent were they on hurrying home to their televisions.

  The area round Kentish Town tube is a mecca for tramps, and you tend to see the same ones again and again; the one who shouts; the one with the cider; the one who didn’t look like he should be there a year ago, but now looks as if he should. I’d never seen this girl before, however, and while she was obviously homeless she didn’t quite seem like a derelict. Not yet, anyway. Her hair was ragged blonde and hung in dreadlock rats’ tails around her face, but remained fairly presentable, as did the faded pink top and equally tired orange leggings. Her neck was strung with ethnic necklaces, and cheap bangles rattled round her wrists. I was surprised not to see a stud in her nose.

  I’ll be honest and say I don’t usually have a great deal of patience with the type, but this girl appeared in front of me fully-formed in grief, and her wordless distress caught my attention, her sense of being completely cut off from the world around her and locked in some inner pain. She could only have been about seventeen, and she looked doomed. She was floating down the pavement so vaguely that I thought she must have only the most shadowy sense of the distinction between it and the road, but as she came closer she held out her hand.

  I know I shouldn’t feel like this, but after daily acquaintance with people begging, my policy on giving money depends largely on how I’m feeling about my own world. With her it was different. I felt I had to give her something, even though she seemed barely conscious I was there. I rummaged clumsily in my back pocket and pulled out some change. A quick glance said there were three, maybe even four, pound coins amongst the shrapnel, but I placed the whole lot in her hand.

  She peered vaguely at it as I stepped past her, and then suddenly looked up. For a moment her eyes were clear, and she was someone real, surprised back into the world.

  ‘Hey, thanks,’ she said, bewildered. ‘Thank you.’

  Flushing, I nodded curtly, and then carried on walking up the road towards the flat I paid £270 for each week. After about ten yards I took a quick glance behind me. She was still standing there, still staring into her palm, as people walked either side of her not even noticing she was there.

  The flat felt odd without Jenny in it. I’m a card-carrying materialist who needs his quota of consumer goods around him, but the places I’ve stored them in have never seemed to mean much to me. I get bored with the corner shop, with tramping the same streets and struggling down the same broken escalator in the Underground, and for the last four years I’d moved at least annually. I like places, in general—and as somewhere to be, they’re fine. But as a constant, as somewhere to hang your life, they are not to be trusted. They’re too impassive, and they don’t care about you, not really. They’ve seen occupants before you, and they will see others once you’ve gone. I’d always felt that my real home would be in a person, and now I believed I’d found her. In the last month the flat had been changing behind my back, relaxing into shape, becoming a place I cared about, simply because she was there.

  After a shower I wandered around it for a while, noticing her shoes, an empty packet of her brand of cigarettes in the bin, flicking through one of her magazines—and in a quiet, warm way thought how marvellous it was to have Jenny in my life. And in my flat. So why this feeling of trepidation at the thought of her moving in, or rather at the thought of us both moving out and finding somewhere to live together?

  I could understand part of it: I’d spent the last two years largely by myself. There’d been a few women in that time, but not many, and all had been glancing blows that both parties had been happy to let fade. I’d got used to solitude and independence, to making plans that included only myself, to being the centre of my world.

  And I’d hated it, of course. Suddenly I remembered Saturday afternoons pacing around the flat, faster and faster, trying to achieve escape velocity. Sometimes I made it out the door and paced round town instead, trying to think of something I could face doing by myself, again. It was that and evenings in front of the television, or with a book, or spent leafing through the videos in the local store, trying to find one I hadn’t seen. I hadn’t minded being by myself. What I’d minded was being emotionally homeless, culturally pointless. Now that I had a home, maybe I was worried about losing space to be by myself, of being constrained. Well, I could make sure that I had time, could preserve some backstage areas. Jenny would probably need some space herself, though I hoped not. I wanted to be with her all the time. Why should she want time away from me?

  Suddenly realising the circle I’d come in, I shook my head. Silly. All I needed was time to adjust to the idea.

  Feeling better, I glanced at the clock. It was only eight o’clock. A whole evening by myself stretched in front of me.

  What was I going to do?

  At ten-thirty I woke on the sofa, surprised by darkness outside. My book lay spilled beside me, and a cold cup of coffee sat on the table. I hauled myself upright, yawning massively, and peered querulously around for my cigarettes.

  After microwaving the cup of coffee I settled back down by the window, and gazed blearily at the street outside. It was very dark, a belt of cloud obscuring the moon and the streetlights either broken by local yobs or shrouded in trees. The street looked strange, perhaps because for once I felt that there was a real difference between it and where I was sitting, that the flat wasn’t simply warmer and brighter.

  From nowhere an image popped into my mind, like a still photograph. It was of predominantly bright colours in front of variegated grey, and it took me a moment to work out what it was, by which time it was already fading. It was the girl I’d encountered on Leighton Road, from the neck down. The breasts inside her pink top were small, but nicely shaped, her thighs smooth beneath orange cloth.

  I blinked, slightly shocked. I hadn’t noticed any of this when she’d been in front of me, and wasn’t interested in noticing it now. I’m not like that, and with Jenny in my life everyone else was behind a
sheet of glass, and I was happy for it to be that way. It must have been a stray image, something left over from the material my mind had been processing while I slept.

  I stood up with no real purpose, and wandered across to the other window. It made sense to go to bed, but it seemed too early. Instead I collected up my keys and went for a walk.

  It was a little colder than I was expecting, and I decided to just take a turn round the block. The surrounding streets are very quiet at night, apart from occasional shouting lunatics and sudden janglings from public phone booths, as phone calls went unanswered.

  As I walked I thought of Jenny, and wondered what she was doing and thinking at that moment. Was she describing me to her friends, and sounding as if she missed me, or was she off in her own world, plugged back into old friendships and past times? Her friends would have known Chris, the man she’d left for me. For a moment I felt a shiver of pure, naked insecurity, a feeling I hadn’t had to deal with for several years. When my relationship with Annette had crashed and burned after half a decade of heavy turbulence, I’d done everything I could to shield myself from that kind of wound. Yet here I was again. Jenny could hurt me. I’d signed up, and I wasn’t entirely safe any more. And presumably, neither was she.

  When I got back I sat up for a while, and read a little more of my book. Jenny didn’t call. I hadn’t expected her to.

  As I drifted off to sleep later that night I caught a fragment of a dream. My hand reached out towards someone, and in it there was a ten pound note.

  ‘Would this be any use to you?’ I heard a voice ask.

  As the girl took the note and looked at me, knowing what I wanted to buy, and not caring, I realized the voice had been my own.

  I slept badly, and was in a ragged mood as I trudged through fitful winter sunlight towards the tube. I’d be seeing Jenny, but apart from that the day ahead held little but stress. Not real anxiety, of course, nothing relating to anything that mattered: merely the workaday run-of-the-mill white noise that comes with employment, along with your pay packet, bad coffee, and an inexhaustible supply of Post-It notes. I was becoming increasingly convinced that I didn’t want to work for a living. Not a very original thought, but strongly felt all the same. I wondered if any of the people walking in the opposite direction felt any better about the whole deal, if they believed they were growing up instead of merely older. Most of them looked as if they didn’t feel anything about anything, as if they were deep in mechanical indifference.