More Tomorrow: And Other Stories

by Michael Marshall Smith

  Suddenly she marched into the living room, already at maximum temper, and shouted incoherently at me. Shocked, I half-stood, trying to work out what she was saying. In retrospect I was probably half asleep, and her anger seemed to fill the room with its harsh intensity.

  She was shouting at me for getting a cat. There was no point me denying it, because she’d seen it. She’d seen the cat under the table in the kitchen, it was in there still, and I was to go and throw it out. I knew how much she disliked cats, and anyway, how could I do it without asking her, and the whole thing was a classic example of what a selfish and hateful man I was.

  It took me a while to get to the bottom of this and start denying it. I was too baffled to get angry. In the end I went with her into the kitchen, and looked under the table. She was very insistent. By then I was a little spooked, to be honest. We looked in the hallway, the bedroom and the bathroom. Then we looked in the kitchen again, and in the living room.

  There was, of course, no cat.

  I sat Nancy on the sofa. She was still shaking, though her anger was gone. I tried to talk to her, to work out what exactly was wrong. Her reaction was disproportionate, misdirected: I’m not sure even she knew what it was about. The cat, of course, could have been nothing more than a discarded shoe seen in near-darkness, maybe even her own foot moving. After leaving my parents’ house, where there had always been a cat, I’d often startled myself by thinking I saw them in similar ways. Nancy’s family had never had one, but the same principle still held. Maybe.

  She didn’t seem especially convinced, but did calm a little. She was so timid, and quiet, and as always I found it difficult to reconcile her as she was then with her fire-eating Corporate Woman act, the way she spent so much of the time. I turned the fire on and we sat in front of it and talked, and even discussed her eating. Nobody else knew about that part of her life. I didn’t understand it, not really. I sensed that it was something to do with feelings of lack of control, of trying to shape herself and her world, but couldn’t get much closer than that. There appeared to be nothing I could do except listen, but I hoped that was better than nothing.

  We went to bed a little later, and made careful, gentle love. As she relaxed towards sleep, huddled in my arms, I caught myself for the first time feeling for her something that was a little like pity.

  Alice and I had dinner again about a week later. This time it was less of an accident, and took place further from home. I had a late meeting in town, and by coincidence Alice would be in the area at around about the same time. I told Nancy I might end up having dinner with my client, but she didn’t seem to hear. She was preoccupied, some new power struggle at work edging towards climax.

  Though it was several weeks since the previous occasion, it didn’t feel at all strange seeing Alice in the evening, not least because we’d talked to each other often in the meantime. She’d started having two cups of coffee, rather than one, each time she dropped something off, and had once phoned me for advice on computers.

  While it didn’t feel odd, I was aware of what I was doing. Meeting another woman for dinner, basically, and enjoying it. Enormously. When I talked to Alice my feelings and what I did seemed more important, as if they were a part of someone worth talking to. Part of me felt that was more important than a little economy with the truth. To be honest, I tried not to think too hard about it.

  When I got home Nancy was sitting in the living room, reading. ‘How was your meeting?’ she asked.

  ‘Fine,’ I replied, ‘Fine.’

  ‘Good,’ she said, and went back to scanning her magazine. I could have tried to make conversation, but knew it would have come out tinny and forced. In the end I went to bed and lay tightly curled on my side, wide awake.

  I was just drifting off to sleep when I heard a low voice in the silence, speaking next to my ear.

  ‘Go away,’ it said. ‘Go away.’

  I opened my eyes, expecting I don’t know what. Nancy’s face, I suppose, hanging over mine. There was no-one there. I was relaxing slightly, prepared to believe it had been a fragment of a dream, when I heard her voice again, saying the same words in the same low tone.

  I climbed carefully out of bed and crept towards the kitchen. Through it I could see into the living room, where Nancy was standing in front of the main window in the darkness. She was looking down at something in the street.

  ‘Go away,’ she said again, softly.

  I turned quietly around and went back to bed.

  A couple of weeks passed quickly. Time seemed to do that, that Autumn. I was very immersed, what with one thing and another. Each day held something that fixed my attention, and pulled me through it. I’d look up, and a week would have gone by, with me barely having noticed.

  Speaking to Alice was now a regular part of most days. We talked about things that Nancy and I never touched upon, things Nancy simply didn’t understand or care about. Alice read, for example. Nancy read too, in the sense that she studied memos, and reports, and genned up on the current corporate claptrap being imported from the States. She didn’t read books, however, or even paragraphs. She read sentences, to asset-strip from them what she needed to do her job, find out what was on television, or hold her own on current affairs. Every piece of text was a bullet point, a step towards some bottom line.

  Alice read for its own sake. She wrote, too, hence her growing interest in computers. I mentioned once that I’d written a few articles, years back, before I settled on being a barely competent graphic designer instead. She said she’d written some stories, and after regular nagging from me, diffidently gave up copies. They were vignettes about life in London and about being a motorcycle courier, a profession with its own heroes and lore. I don’t know anything about fiction from a professional point of view, so I can’t say how innovative or clever the pieces were or whether the TLS would have described them as ‘A new synthesis of narrative dialectics’. But they held my attention, and I read them more than once, and that’s good enough for me. I told her so, and she seemed pleased.

  We saw each other a couple of times a week. She delivered things to me, or picked them up, and sometimes I chanced by Sad Café when she was sipping a cup of tea. It all felt very low key, very friendly—though in retrospect it was a long simmer, a relationship reducing towards an ever more intense flavour.

  Nancy and I got on with each other, in an occasional, space-sharing sort of way. She had her friends, and I had mine. Sometimes we saw them together, and performed as a social pair. We looked good together, like a series of stills from a lifestyle magazine. Life, if that’s what it was, went on. Her eating vacillated between not good and pretty bad, and I carried on being bleakly accepting of the fact that there didn’t seem much I could do to help. So much of our lives seemed geared up to perpetuating her idea of how two young people should live together, that I somehow didn’t feel that I could call her bluff and point out what was lurking beneath the stones in our existence. I also didn’t mention the night I’d seen her in the lounge. There didn’t seem any way of tabling it for discussion.

  Apart from having Alice to chat to, the other good news was the new cat in the neighbourhood. When I glanced out of the living room window it would usually be there, ambling smoothly past or hunkered down on the pavement, watching movement in the air. It had a habit of sitting in the middle of the road, daring traffic to give it any trouble, as if it knew what the road was for but was having no truck with it. The twitch of her tail seemed to say that she knew this had once been a meadow, and that as far as she was concerned, it still was.

  One morning I was walking back from the corner shop, clutching some cigarettes and milk, and came upon her, perched on a wall. If you like cats there’s something rather depressing about having them run away from you, so I approached cautiously. I wanted to get to at least within a yard of this one before it went shooting off into hyperspace. To my delight, it didn’t move away at all. When I got up next to her she stood up, and I thought that was it, bu
t it turned out to be just a recognition that I was there. She was happy to be stroked, and to have the fur on her head runkled, and responded with a purr so deep it was almost below the threshold of hearing. Now that I was closer I could see the chestnut gleams in the dark brown of her fur. She was a very beautiful cat.

  After a couple of minutes of this I moved away, thinking I ought to get on, but the cat immediately jumped off the wall and wove in figure eights about my feet, pressing up against my calves. I find it difficult enough to walk away from a cat at the best of times. When they’re being ultra-friendly it’s impossible. So I bent down and tickled, and talked fond nonsense. I finally got to my door and looked back to see her, still sitting on the pavement. She was peering around as if wondering what to do next, after all that excitement. I had to fight down the impulse to wave.

  I closed the door behind me, feeling for a moment very lonely, and then went back upstairs to work.

  Then one Friday night Alice and I met again, and things changed.

  Nancy was out at yet another work get-together, in the centre of town. Her company seemed to like running the social lives of its staff, like some evangelical church intent on infiltrating every activity of its congregation. Nancy mentioned the event in a way that made it clear that my attendance was far from mandatory, and I was quite happy to take the hint. I do my best at these things, but doubt I look as if I’m having the time of my life.

  I didn’t have anything else on, so I just flopped about the house for a while, reading and watching television. It was easier to relax when Nancy wasn’t there, when we weren’t busy being a Couple. I couldn’t settle, though. I kept thinking how pleasant it would be not to feel that way, that it would be nice to want your girlfriend to be home so you could laze about together. It didn’t work that way with Nancy, not any more. Getting her to consider a half-hour lie-in on one particular Saturday was a major project in itself. I probably hadn’t tried very hard in a while, either. She got up, I got up. I’d been developed as a human resource.

  My reading grew fitful and in the end I grabbed my coat and went for a walk down streets which were dark and cold. A few couples and solitary figures floated up and down the roads, in mid-evening transit between pubs and Indian restaurants and homes and buses. On the way elsewhere. The apparent formlessness of the activity around me, the Brownian motion of its random wandering, made me feel quietly content. Though I’d no idea where it was, I could picture the room in which Nancy and her colleagues stood, robotically passing catch-phrases and info-nuggets up and down the office hierarchy. I would much rather be here than there.

  But then I felt the whole of London spread out around me, and my contentment faded. Nancy at least had somewhere to go. All I had was miles of roads in winter light, black houses leaning in towards each other. I could walk, and I could run, and in the end I would come to the edge of the city. Then there would be nothing I could do except turn around, and come back. I couldn’t feel anything beyond the gates, couldn’t believe anything was out there. This wasn’t some yearning for the countryside, or far climes: I like London, and the great outdoors irritates me. It was more a sense that a place which should hold endless possibilities had been tamed by something, bleached out by my lack of imagination and courage, by the limits of my life.

  I headed down the road towards Camden, so wrapped up in heroic melancholy that I nearly got myself run over at the junction with Prince of Wales Road. Rather shaken, I stumbled back onto the curb, dazed by a passing flash of yellow light and a blurred obscenity. Fuck that, I thought, and crossed at a different place, sending me down a different road, towards a different evening.

  Camden was busy as hell, and I skirted the purposeful crowds and ended up in a back road instead. It was there that I saw Alice.

  I felt my heart lurch, and I stopped in my tracks. She was just walking along the road, dressed in a long skirt and dark blouse, hands in pockets. She appeared to be alone, and wandering down the street much as I was, in a world of her own. It was too welcome a coincidence not to take advantage of, and, careful not to surprise her, I crossed the road and met her on the other side.

  We spent the next three hours in a noisy, smoky pub. The only seats were very close together, crowded round one corner of a table in the centre of the room. We drank a lot, but the alcohol seemed to work in an unusual way. I didn’t get drunk, but merely felt warmer and more relaxed. The reeling crowds of locals gave us ample ammunition to talk about, until we were going fast enough not to need any help at all. We just drank, and talked, and talked and drank, and the bell for last orders came as a complete surprise.

  When we walked out of the pub the alcohol suddenly kicked in, and we stumbled in unison on an unexpected step, to fall together laughing and shh-ing each other. Without even discussing it we knew neither of us felt like going home, and we ended up walking down the steps to stroll by the canal instead. We walked slowly past the backs of houses and speculated what might be going on beyond the curtains; we looked up at the sky and pointed out stars; we listened to the quiet splashes of occasional ducks coming into land on the still waters. After about fifteen minutes we found a bench, and sat down for a cigarette.

  When she’d put her lighter back in her pocket Alice’s hand fell near mine. I was very conscious of it being there, of the smallness of the distance mine would have to travel, and I smoked left-handed so as not to move it. I wasn’t forgetting myself. I still knew Nancy existed, was aware of how my life was set up. But I didn’t move my hand.

  Then, like a chess game of perfect simplicity and naturalness, the conversation took us there. I said that work seemed to be slackening off, after the busy period of the last couple of months.

  Alice said that she hoped it didn’t drop off too much.

  I smiled. ‘So I can continue to afford expensive computers that don’t do quite what I expect?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘So that I can keep coming to see you.’

  I turned and stared at her. She looked nervous but defiant, and her hand moved the inch that put it on top of mine.

  ‘You might as well know,’ she said, ‘If you don’t already. There are three important things in my life. My bike, my stories, and you.’

  People don’t change their lives: evenings do. There are nights that have their own momentum, their own purpose and agenda. They come from nowhere and take people with them. That’s why you can never understand, the next day, quite how you came to do what you did—because it wasn’t you who did it. It was the evening. The universe itself comes and takes you by the hand and leads you through a revolving door after which things are never the same.

  My life stopped that evening, and started up again with a second, and everything was a different colour.

  We sat on the bench for another two hours, wrapped up close to each other. We admitted when we’d first thought about each other, and laughed quietly about the distance we’d kept. Alice admitted it hadn’t been pure coincidence that had brought her to Camden that evening, but a faint, still hope that we might just bump into each other. She was embarrassed to admit it, but I thought it was pure magic. After weeks of denying what I felt, of simply not realising, now that I had hold of her hand I couldn’t let go. It felt extraordinary to be that close to her, to be able to feel the texture of her skin on mine and her nails against my palm. People change when you get that close to them, become much more real. If you’re already in love with them then they expand to fill the world.

  In the end we got on to Nancy. We were bound to, sooner or later. Alice asked how I felt about her, and I tried to explain, tried to understand myself. In the end we let the topic lapse.

  ‘It’s not going to be easy,’ I said, squeezing her hand. I was thinking glumly to myself that it might not happen at all. Knowing the way Nancy would react, it looked like a very high mountain to climb. Alice glanced at me, nodded, and then turned back towards the canal.

  A cat was sitting there, peering out over the water. First moving myself eve
n closer to Alice, so that strands of her hair tickled against my face, I made a noise at the cat. It turned to look at us, and then ambled over towards the bench. ‘I do like a friendly cat,’ I said, reaching out to stroke its head.

  Alice smiled, and then made a noise of her own. I was puzzled that she wasn’t looking at the cat while she made it, but then saw that another was making its way out of the shadows. This one was smaller and more lithe, and walked right up to the bench. I was still a little befuddled with drink, and when Alice turned to look in a different direction it took me a moment to catch up.

  A third cat was coming down the canal walk in our direction, followed by another.

  When a fifth emerged from the bushes behind our bench, I turned and stared at Alice. She was already looking at me, the smile on her lips like the first one of hers I’d seen. She laughed at the expression on my face, and then made her noise again. The cats around us sat to attention, and two more appeared from the other direction, almost trotting in their haste to join the collection. We were now so out-numbered that I felt rather beset.

  When the next one appeared I had to ask. ‘Alice, what’s going on?’

  She leaned her head against my shoulder.

  ‘A long time ago,’ she said, as if making up a story for a child, ‘None of this was here. There was no canal, no streets and houses, and all around was trees, and grass.’ One of the cats around the bench briefly licked one of its paws, and I saw another couple padding out of the darkness towards us. ‘The big people have changed all of that. They’ve cut down the trees, and buried the earth, and they’ve even levelled the ground. There used to be a hill here, a hill that was steep on one side but gentle on the other. They’ve taken all that away, and made it look like this. It’s not that it’s so bad. It’s just different. The cats still remember the way it was.’