One of Us

by Michael Marshall Smith

  She would take the sandwich and go out back, slipping through the fence and walking out into the woods. It was just a patch of forest, nothing magical, and she rarely pretended it was. You didn’t need to. It was just nicer to be there than in the house, surrounded by the smell of paint and swatches of fabric and colour charts where all the colours looked the same. She had a path down to the stream and would sit and eat her sandwich listening to the water and watching the little water bugs do their stuff. It was a mystery to her why they bothered to do anything. They were hardly alive long enough to make it worthwhile, and their brains were too small for them to remember anything that they’d done. Kind of like some of the characters in the afternoon soaps, except the bugs didn’t have plastic surgery. After an hour or so her mother would call her in to bathe. Her mother’s voice carried. There was never any problem hearing it, even on the days when it was a little less clear than usual.

  Laura was pretty, and did well in school. She had her mother’s cheekbones mitigated by her father’s grin, and she could do both English and Math. She had plenty of friends, and her parents got on okay most of the time. Everything was fine, just another one of those lives that everybody has until a certain point, until the hold goes on the picture, and everything turns to noise.

  One day the house got burgled, and Ray Hammond was the policeman who came to investigate. He was capable and reassuring, and he had a very nice manner. He stood in the living room taking notes and making everybody feel better about what had happened—even Laura’s mother, who’d previously been pitching a fit even though not much had been taken and most of it had belonged to Dad.

  They never got the stuff back, but they did see more of Ray. He got on well with Laura’s dad, and came round some evenings to sit on the back porch and drink a beer. Laura would hang around on the edges and listen, and often Monica would be there too. Ray and Laura’s dad were actually pretty similar: two men who’d found out what they liked doing, and who wanted to carry on doing it without too much fuss. But Ray was a little younger, of course, and sometimes Laura’s mother asked why he wasn’t trying to make a name for himself, take the sergeants’ exam or get transferred out of the Sheriff’s into the LAPD. At first Ray just laughed and said life was too short: but after a while he didn’t, and sat thinking instead, with a thoughtful look on his face.

  Laura was, of course, an expert on Ray’s facial expressions by then. She was at that age, and Ray had one of those smiles and one of those winks. He didn’t look like he was undressing her the whole time. He looked like the kind of man who would take you out to dinner somewhere you could wear a nice dress and have waiters pretend that they were glad that you were there. He wasn’t like the boys at school, turned mute or obnoxious by their hormones, oozing needs so rank you could smell them at ten yards, their faces turned fox-like and calculating except in the eyes, where they were scared. Ray looked like he knew who he was, and that’s the kind of person you want to want you—at any age, and especially when you’re young.

  But he was much older of course, and didn’t really notice her at all, and Laura spent that spring in eddies of agony. Ray dropped by, and talked to Dad and Mom. Sometimes asked her how she was doing at school and seemed to listen to her clunky answers. Laura ferried beers and emptied the ashtray: her mother didn’t like smoking as a rule, but tolerated it in Ray. Laura wasn’t surprised by this. Principles are principles, and healthiness is all very well when you’re old, but you only had to watch Ray light up and take that first deep pull to understand that smoking was not only very grown-up, but also extremely clever.

  Life went on. It wasn’t like the introduction of Ray into their world changed everything. Her mother still supervised painters, her dad still went out to work and came back with his clothes smelling of pizza. Laura did her homework, hung with her friends, went to parties. A TV season came and went, the air got warmer and the water bugs patiently progressed through their life cycle. But running like a dark rich thread throughout everything else were her feelings, emotions which she could feel were making her older—shaping her mind like a plane on freshly-cut wood.

  Love and death are very similar, because they’re the times in your life when you most want to believe in magic, when you yearn for some symbolic act or retrospective edit which can change the world you find yourself in. I know this all too well. When the cat which Helena and I owned died, I went out walking on the beach by myself a couple of nights later. Helena was at home, perched on a sofa still liberally covered with hairs from a creature that wasn’t alive any more. We’d comforted each other as much as we could, and we both knew that time was the only thing that would make any real difference. Words, as usual, were only words, and never led to anything like peace. I stood and looked out at the sea, and the sight of infinity made things seem a little better, for a while: but I knew that as soon as I turned away the small things would close in again. Then I happened to look down, and saw a few pebbles strewn around me on the sand. For a crazy moment I had a half-notion that time could be made concrete, and that perhaps there was another way it might make a difference. If each of the pebbles could be made to mean a second of time, and I collected five, perhaps I could somehow use them to change the last five seconds of our cat’s life, to give him the opportunity to do something other than dart blindly in the path of a car. Feeling an idiot, but not caring because there was no-one to see and nobody would ever know, I counted up five of the pebbles. I don’t know why just that many: it was a number that popped into my head. I squeezed them in my hand and tried to use my mind, the same as when as a kid I would spend whole evenings giving myself headaches trying to influence the flip of a coin. Please, I said, to Whomever It Concerned: let these stones save that life.

  When I opened my eyes nothing had changed, but I couldn’t seem to throw the pebbles away, and I slipped them into the pocket of my jeans. They’re still together somewhere, in the ornamental box Helena had bought me. When I ran from LA after the Trans-virtual episode I got Deck to go round to the house and collect my stuff. It’s in storage somewhere, and the pebbles lie dry and forgotten, not meaning anything except to me.

  Laura tried the same kind of things, but to a different end. She wrote letters with kisses at the bottom and hid them in special places; she watched the skies and made pacts with clouds; she used her charm to get a handful of cigarettes off a boy at school and smoked them by herself down by the stream. She felt like a river herself, powerful but constrained in an underground cavern, nosing inexorably for the fissure which would send her gushing up into the sun.

  One day she found it.

  Ray was in the area after sorting out a fender bender half a mile down the road. He stopped by on the off-chance someone was in, but there was no reply at the door. Laura’s mother was out consulting with one of her stable of what Dad called ‘posterior designers’. Dad was still at work. Ray had just come off duty, and the day was very hot, and he really liked the idea of a beer: so he elected to hang around, wait for someone to show up.

  He sat round the back for a while, and then heard a sound from down in the canyon. At first he ignored it, then wondered if it was an intruder or some kind of animal, and decided to go check it out.

  What he saw as he moved quietly down the side of the valley was neither of those things, but Laura. She was sitting on a flat rock in the middle of the stream, staring down at the water and inexpertly smoking a cigarette. Unbeknownst to him, she was also repeating his name to herself in a complex rhythm, and just beginning to feel a little foolish about it.

  Then she looked up and saw him, and despite everything that happened to her later, every numb disappointment and bitter evening, after that moment she never quite stopped believing in magic. In some ways that was the worst thing: a perpetual expectation which was never fulfilled again. And in the rest of his life, until she shot him fourteen years later, Ray Hammond never again quite saw anything like the sight of her sitting there and turning to look up at him.

 
; ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, feeling awkward. It came out too professional, like he suspected her of planning a B and E.

  ‘Waiting for you,’ she replied, and immediately felt an utter moron. It had sounded much better in her head.

  He laughed, and it was okay. ‘No, really.’

  ‘Watching the bugs. Stomping on them every now and then.’

  ‘You shouldn’t do that.’ He smiled sardonically. ‘All God’s creatures are sacred.’

  Laura knew he’d been raised religious, but that he didn’t set much heed by it now. ‘What, even that?’ she said, pointing out the fat slothful bug that lived under the next rock and which won her ‘ugliest creature in the stream’ competition every day without fail.

  Ray peered at it. ‘Possibly not that one,’ he agreed. ‘Could be a representative from the other side.’

  He squatted down, lit a cigarette, and they talked a little while. Laura seemed different to him when her parents weren’t around. Older, more distinct. She told him about the stream, and the things that lived in it. He listened, and laughed, and after a while offered her a cigarette from his packet. As she leaned into his cupped hands to light it, a line was crossed and something was sealed.

  Then they heard the distant sound of a car pulling into the driveway up above. Ray said goodbye politely, flicked his butt in the water and went off to be with a grown-up.

  Laura kept the butt in a box in her bedside table, and bided her time. Over the next few weeks it occurred to Ray occasionally to swing by the Reynolds’ place a little earlier than had been his custom, and he usually found Laura down there on her rock. After a while, if he didn’t, he’d sit there and wait. They talked about stuff, and looked at the light, and sometimes she made him a little uncomfortable by how close she sat.

  Uncomfortable because he knew there was one thing that he must absolutely not do.

  There is a moment everybody knows. A moment which is so ordinary, so commonplace—and yet which is the culmination of a long and complex chess game to those involved. After walking miles across uneven ground, you suddenly come upon a road. You sit at slightly different angles to one another, the alteration maybe no more than a single degree; and eye contact goes a little skewed, gaze being used for something more than just seeing. People seem less separate from each other, and especially you from them.

  Finally one afternoon they kissed, and the kiss went long, and when Laura heard the sound of her mother’s car up above she moved her hands over Ray’s ears so he wouldn’t leave. Once two people’s lips have touched the relationship between them can never be quite the same again. They didn’t kiss the next time, but they did the time after that. Ray didn’t ask her about school any more. Laura knew what she wanted to happen, and how slowly it should progress.

  She wanted it to be right, to be perfect. She wanted it to be the way it should be. Of what was going through Ray’s mind she had absolutely no idea.

  Because one afternoon she was waiting for him, standing by the stream. He was much later than usual, which was driving her crazy, because she’d decided that today might be the day for something new to happen. She heard a rustle in the bushes behind her, a particular kind of sound which she’d half-thought she’d heard before, on some of the times they’d kissed.

  She turned quickly, and saw her mom, tall and thin.

  ‘Just thought I’d tell you it’s over, sweetie,’ her mother said, with that look of spiteful glee in her face. ‘Why swop spit with a stick insect, when there’s a real woman who’ll suck your dick?’

  And then this, much faster, as if none of it really mattered and it had already been consigned to flames:

  She told her father, but he didn’t believe her. In her heart she knew it was true, because Ray never came down to the stream again, but the real proof didn’t come until afterwards. Afterwards was when her father got killed in a car wreck, and Mom and Ray stopped hiding what they were doing. She knew they couldn’t have killed him, because they were sitting on the deck behind the house drinking beer together when it happened, and also because it would have been just too National Inquirer. She didn’t work out until later that her father’s car might not have been heading for the bridge support by accident, that he might have believed his daughter after all and made his own decision about how to deal with it.

  After a while Ray moved in; not long after that Mom announced that they were moving down into LA. Ray had decided that her mom was right, and that he should start doing something about his career. People generally decided that Mom was right about things: it made life a lot easier. Ray tried to talk to Laura, and was back to asking about how she was doing in school, but Laura didn’t answer.

  Laura wasn’t doing so well in school any more, as it happened, and had now screwed half the guys in her class.

  Two days before the removal vans came Laura bought a train ticket with money she’d saved or stolen from dates. She turned up on the doorstep of her dad’s sister in Seattle, who hated her mother with a passion. Ray came looking for her, but Aunt Ashley bawled him out in the yard of the house and he went away. He didn’t try again, and her mother couldn’t have cared less. Laura hadn’t worked out.

  Then there was just ten years of living. She got jobs, moved around, tried different parts of the country and discovered they were all the same. After a couple of years she dropped the pretence of being stupid and got better jobs, for what little difference that made. In bad jobs you served people shit at lunch-times; in good jobs you learned to eat shit all day long. She bought nice clothes and went out a lot, and developed a brittle-bright sense of humour to hide behind. She learnt how to do the things that men wanted her to do, and fell in love and got raped and got hit.

  Some times were a little better than others, but mainly it was just a blur, like watching the world from the window of a train which was going too fast in the wrong direction. She got in the habit of taking a drink earlier in the day, never noticing that it didn’t achieve anything except making her want another. Sometimes when she was really drunk she’d tear up her clothes, because she knew why her bosses liked her to wear them. You won’t see this written in any management consultancy report, or hear it tricked into a corporate slogan, but the truth of the matter is this: clients like dealing with girls who dress up nice and look like they might be fun to fuck. Other times she’d wear them with style and with only a little fear in her smile, trying to find a little pride in herself that wasn’t merely the flipside of a yearning hatred. It wasn’t very long before she really couldn’t tell the difference any more.

  She wore out her friends. She wore out herself. She did everything with the power turned up as high as it would go, and had no way of recharging her soul. She drank more, spent afternoons in a prickly haze of incomprehension and evenings in lonely fury. She kept her secrets.

  She started having those nights.

  The ones that go on and on and on, the nights where you go out with friends, and drink too much, and after a while all their faces begin to look the same. You listen and nod, and smile uncertainly, but everybody’s talking a book code based on some volume you’ve never read. You come wheeling back out of the john mid-evening, nose clicking from the first line of the second gram, and all the lights behind the bar sparkly and bright—and you look round all the tables and you can’t work out which you came from, which people are supposed to matter to you. Then someone calls your name and you go sit with them again, trying to listen to what they’re saying: but all you can really hear is the voice in your head telling you that you need another drink. So you order before you finish the one you’ve got, just in case, and nobody says anything but you know what they’re thinking and you decide that you don’t care. The party breaks up at midnight but that’s too early for you: by then the shouting inside your head is so loud you can barely hear yourself say goodbye. You get home somehow, via dangerous episodes in bars and alleys that you’ll never remember, and then the real fun begins.

  Cross-legged on t
he floor you drink, hoping each mouthful will hurt; occasional flurries of spastic movement as you try to work out what to do with your hands. When everyone else is gone your world is just a tiny box with the walls pressing in, messages on the phone you can’t bear to play, much less listen to, and nothing in the apartment that you can recognize as meaningfully yours.

  Then later, sprawled in underwear, your clothes all around you covered in spilt alcohol and cigarette ash: but that doesn’t matter because by that time in the night you believe you’re never going to wear them again. The little chatterer in your head is constant by now, snarling like a wolf in a trap, but neither it nor your own voice seems able to say anything that makes any sense. It feels like day will never come, or that if it does it can only be darker than this night you sit shivering in.

  Experimentally you prod your stomach with a fork, hard enough to draw blood. But that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, so you scratch up your legs with your nails.

  And then sit crying, looking at your scored thighs, remembering the way they used to be. Young skin, unblemished, part of a girl. Now, like your tits and your ass and your mouth, just places you can’t understand any more. Your body has become the road too-often travelled, and it leads nowhere you want to be. No longer is it your place in the world, but just an adjunct of other people’s lives and the parking lot of their desires. You become trapped in limited and dark loops of thought which go round and round and get smaller and smaller until they’re so tight they cut off the supply of reality to your mind.

  Everything has simply stopped making sense, feels like a badly-designed computer game in which you fall into a pit that doesn’t kill you, but from which there’s absolutely no escape. For a time you kick against the walls, but they get higher, no matter how hard and fast you press all the buttons you can find. And sooner or later you’ll realize there’s one you haven’t tried yet. The power switch.