Nowhere: Volume II of the Collected Short Stories and Novellas of Ian R. MacLeod

by Ian R. MacLeod

  The sign said, SOUTH OVER EAST, TAILORS FOR THE DISCERNING. NIGHT AND DAY WEAR A SPECIALITY. It hung askew. Max kicked the door open and backed in with Nina. He saw that the bell had been fixed. It rung brightly, and at the sound of it, the little man came out through the bead curtain.

  Max laid Nina out on the counter, and water spilled across the ancient linoleum. The sky that had enfolded her was cheap rotten canvas now. He watched as the scissors sliced it away.

  “You’re taking your payment, right?”

  The little man sighed and smiled. He lifted a damp gleaming tress of Nina’s hair, and began to cut.

  With what money he had left in the bank, Max saw that Nina had a decent funeral. He would have arranged Vernon’s too—even put them in the same earth under the same headstone—but despite the searches that were organised along the cost of the island, his body was never found. A few of their friends turned up at the service, but they were nervous and embarrassed, torn between giggling and tears. Standing in the graveyard, breathing in the clean smell of the new earth, Max decided that only he and the little man in the grubby suit who stood on the far side of the grave really knew what life was about. He pondered the irony: that you had to live through to the end of things before you discovered what was important, and that by then it was too late.

  When the service finally ended, Max debated following the little man, tracing him back towards the shop whose location had now slipped his mind. But the trees were bowing and the weather was cooling as he walked down between the houses, and the leaves were swirling and the shutters were banging outside the bistro in his favourite square. And he was tired.

  Max sat down and ordered a cup of coffee at the table that had always been Nina’s favourite, watching the waiter as he carried the rest of the furniture inside. He settled with the last of his money. The waiter scowled at him for the absence of a tip. Then he went back to the Corienne to face the music of his unpaid and unpayable bill.

  The maître de was surprising decent about it all. He offered Max a job in the kitchens, which Max took. And the work was hard and predictable, and after two seasons when he got to be a waiter, although the few people he had once known who still came here didn’t seem to recognise him. They just complained about the service, and laughed and shook their heads in sad wonderment at the island’s decline, that the Corienne of all places should stoop to employing someone as inefficient—as antique—as this grey old man. But Max kept busy, which meant that he stayed reasonably happy.

  Every few months, he would discover that he had succeeded in saving enough money to go out for the evening, and would re-visit some of the cheaper haunts, places that he and Nina had once loved, although—even if he could have afforded it—he would never have considered going to the casino.

  He’d get pleasantly drunk in some cafe, and listen to the music and watch the pretty women. Then he’d walk slowly back to the Corienne, humming to himself, looking up above the rooftops at the perfect sweep of the stars and at the bright, bright moon. On nights like that, it sometimes seemed to him that the moon had a face like Nina’s, and that she and was smiling down at him, wreathed against the darkness in billows of gently swaying hair.

  Afterword

  Islands are always a promising setting for a short story, especially one that plays as fast and loose with reality as “Nina...” does. They allow the writer (and especially one who hasn’t travelled that widely, as was the case when I wrote it) much greater freedom to create somewhere which, without the need for too much research about local customs or flora and fauna, they and the reader can quickly identify as a fairly archetypical kind of place. Those shops, as well, which offer every kind of wonder and promise, which many a story starts off with someone entering, are also useful archetypes. After that, the rest is up to how the writer’s imagination can fill a story’s sails.

  STARSHIP DAY

  The news was everywhere. It was in our dreams, it was on TV. Tonight, the travellers on the first starship from Earth would awaken.

  That morning, Danous yawned with the expectant creak of shutters, the first stretch of shadow across narrow streets. The air shimmered with the scent of warming pine, it brushed through the shutters and touched our thoughts even as our dreams had faded. For this was Starship Day, and from tonight, nothing would ever be the same. Of course, there were parties organised. Yacht races across the bay. Holidays for the kids. The prospect of the starship’s first transmission, an instantaneous tachyon burst across the light years, had sent the wine sellers and the bakers scurrying towards their stocks and chasing their suppliers. And the suppliers had chased their suppliers. And the bread, the fruit, the hats, the frocks, the meat, the marquees, the music had never been in such demand. Not even when... Not even when... Not even when. But there were no comparisons. There had never been a day such as this.

  As if I needed reminding, the morning paper on the mat was full of it. I’d left my wife Hannah still asleep, weary from the celebrations that had already began the night before, and there were wine glasses scattered in the parlour, the smell of booze and stale conversation. After starting with early drinks and chatter at the Point Hotel, Hannah’s sister Bernice and her husband Rajii had stayed around with us until late. At least, they’d stayed beyond the time I finally left the three of them and went to bed, feeling righteous, feeling like a sourpuss, wondering just what the hell I did feel. But some of us still had work to do on this starship morning. I opened the curtains and the shutters and let in the sound and the smell of the sea. I stacked a tray with the butts and bottles and glasses. I squeezed out an orange, filled a bowl with oats and yoghurt and honey. I sat down outside with the lizards in the growing warmth of the patio.

  Weighted with a stone, my newspaper fluttered in the soft breeze off the sea. Page after page of gleeful speculation. Discovery. Life. Starship. Hope. Message. Already, I’d had enough. Why couldn’t people just wait? All it took was for the tide to go in and out, for the sun to rise and fall, for stars and darkness to come, and we’d all know the truth anyway. So easy—but after all this time, humanity is still a hurrying race. And I knew that my patients would be full of it at the surgery, exchanging their usual demons for the brief hope that something from outside might change their lives. And I’d have to sit and listen, I’d have to put on my usual caring-Owen act. The stars might be whispering from out of the black far beyond this blue morning, but some of us had to get on with the process of living.

  Hannah was still half-asleep when I went in to say goodbye.

  “Sorry about last night,” she said.

  “Why sorry?”

  “You were obviously tired. Rajii does go on.”

  “What time did they leave?”

  “I don’t know.” She yawned. “What time did you go to bed?”

  I smiled as I watched her lying there still tangled in sleep. Now that I had to go, I wanted to climb back in.

  “Will you be in for lunch?”

  “I’m—meeting someone.”

  Bad, that. The wrong kind of pause. But Hannah just closed her eyes, rolling back into the sheets and her own starship dreams. I left the room, pulled my cream jacket on over my shirt and shorts, and closed the front door.

  I wheeled my bicycle from the lean-to beside the lavender patch and took the rough road down into town. For some reason, part of me was thinking, maybe we should get another dog; maybe that would be a change, a distraction.

  Another perfect morning. Fishing boats in the harbour. Nets drying along the quay. Already the sun was high enough to set a deep sparkle on the water and lift the dew off the bougainvillea draped over the seafront houses. I propped my bike in the shadowed street outside the surgery and climbed the wooden steps to the door. I fed the goldfish tank in reception. I dumped the mail in the tray in my office. I opened a window, sat down at my desk and turned on the PC, hitting the keys to call up my morning’s appointments. Mrs Edwards scrolled up, 9:00. Sal Mohammed, 10:00. Then John for lunch. Mrs Sweetney
in the afternoon. On a whim, I typed in

  About the starship.

  PLEASE WAIT

  What do you think will happen?

  Again, PLEASE WAIT.

  The computer was right of course. Wait. Just wait. Please wait. A seagull mewed. The PC’s fan clicked faintly, ticking away the minutes as they piled into drifts of hours and days. Eventually, I heard the thump of shoes on the steps and I called, “Come right in,” before Mrs Edwards had time to settle with the old magazines in reception.

  “Are you sure, Owen? I mean, if you’re busy...”

  “The door’s open.”

  Ah, Mrs Edwards. Red-faced, the smell of eau de cologne already fading into nervous sweat. One of my regulars, one of the ones who keep coming long after they’d forgotten why, and who spend their days agonizing new angles around some old neurosis so that they can lay it in front of me like a cat dropping a dead bird.

  As always, she looked longingly at the soft chair, then sat down on the hard one.

  “Big day,” she said.

  “It certainly is.”

  “I’m terribly worried,” she said.

  “About the starship?”

  “Of course. I mean, what are they going to think of us?”

  I gazed at her, my face a friendly mask. Did she mean whatever star-creatures might be out there? Did she mean the travellers in the starship, waking from stasis after so many years? Now there was a thought. The travellers, awakening. I suppose they’ll wonder about their descendants here on Earth, perhaps even expect those silver-spired cities we all sometimes still dream about, or maybe corpses under a ruined sky, dead rivers running into poisoned seas.

  “Mrs Edwards, there probably won’t be any aliens. Anyway, they might be benign.”

  “Benign?” She leaned forward over her handbag and gave me one of her looks. “But even if they are, how can we ever be sure?”

  After Mrs Edwards, Sal Mohammed. Sal was an old friend, and thus broke one of the usual rules of my practice. But I’d noticed he was drinking too heavily, and heard that he’d been seen walking the town at night in his pyjamas—not that either of these things was unusual per se—I’d rung him and suggested a visit.

  He sat down heavily in the comfortable chair and shook his head when I offered coffee. There were thickening grey bags under his eyes.

  He asked, “You’ll be going to Jay Dax’s party tonight?”

  “Probably. You?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said, tired and sad and eager. “I mean, this is the big day, isn’t it? And Jay’s parties...” He shook his head.

  “And how do you really feel?”

  “Me? I’m fine. Managing, anyway.”

  “How are you getting on with those tension exercises?”

  His eyes flicked over towards the cork notice board where a solitary child’s painting, once so bright, had curled and faded. “I’m finding them hard.”

  I nodded, wondering for the millionth time what exactly it was that stopped people from helping themselves. Sal still wasn’t able to even sit down in a chair for five minutes each day and do a few simple thought exercises. Most annoying of all was the way he still lumbered up to me at dos, his body stuffed into a too-small suit and his face shining with sweat, all thin and affable bonhomie although I knew that he’d only managed to get out now by tanking up with downers.

  “But today’s like New Year’s Eve, isn’t it?” he said. “Starship Day.”

  I nodded. “That’s a way of seeing it.”

  “Everything could change—but even if it doesn’t, knowing it won’t change will be something in itself too, won’t it? It’s a time to make new resolutions...”

  But Sal got vague again when I asked him about his own resolutions, and by the end of our session we were grinding through the usual justifications for the gloom that filled his life.

  “I feel as though I’m travelling down these grey and empty corridors,” he said. “Even when things happen, nothing ever changes...”

  He’d gone on for so long by then—and was looking at me with such sincerity—that I snapped softly back, “Then why don’t you give up, Sal? If it’s really that bad—what is it that keeps you going?”

  He looked shocked. Of course, shocking them can sometimes work, but part of me was wondering if I didn’t simply want to get rid of Sal. And as he rambled on about the pointlessness of it all, I kept thinking of tonight, and all the other nights. The parties and the dances and the evenings in with Hannah and the quietly introspective walks along the cliffs and the picnics in the cool blue hills. I just kept thinking.

  The lunches with John that I marked down on my PC were flexible. In fact, they’d got so flexible recently that one or the other of us often didn’t turn up. This particular John was called Erica, and we’d been doing this kind of thing since Christmas, in firelight and the chill snowy breath from the mountains. I’ve learnt that these kind of relationships often don’t transfer easily from one season to another—there’s something about the shift in light, the change in the air—but this time it had all gone on for so long that I imagined we’d reached a kind of equilibrium. That was probably when it started to go wrong.

  It was our usual place. The Arkoda Bar, up the steps beside the ruins. There was a group a few tables off that I vaguely recalled. Two couples, with a little girl. The girl was older now—before, she’d been staggering like a drunk on toddler’s splayed legs; now she was running everywhere—but that was still why I remembered them.

  I almost jumped when Erica came up behind me.

  “You must be early—or I must be late.”

  I shrugged. “I haven’t been here long.”

  She sat down and poured what was left of the retsina into the second glass. “So you’ve been here a while...”

  “I was just watching the kid. What time is it?”

  “Who cares? Don’t tell me you’ve been working this morning, Owen.”

  “I can’t just cancel appointments because there’s some message coming through from the stars.”

  “Why not?”

  I blinked, puzzled for a moment, my head swimming in the flat white heat of the sun. “I do it because it’s my job, Erica.”

  “Sorry. Shall we start again?”

  I nodded, watching the golden fall of her hair, the sweat-damp strands clinging to her neck, really and truly wishing that we could start all over again. Wishing, too, that we’d be able to talk about something other than this goddam starship.

  But no, Erica was just like everybody else—plotting the kind of day that she could witter on about in years to come. She wanted to rent a little boat so that we could go to some secret cove, swim and fish for shrimps and bask on the rocks and watch the night come in. She even had a little TV in her handbag all ready for the broadcast.

  I said, “I’m sorry, Erica. I’ve got appointments. And I’ve got to go out this evening.”

  “So have I. You’re not the only one with commitments.”

  “I just can’t escape them like you can. I’m a married man.”

  “Yeah.”

  The people with the little girl paused in their chatter to look over at us. We smiled sweetly back.

  “Let’s have another bottle of wine,” I suggested.

  “I suppose,” Erica said, “you just want to go back to that room of yours above the surgery so you can screw me and then fall asleep?”

  “I was hoping—”

  “—isn’t that right? Owen?”

  I nodded: it was, after all, a reasonably accurate picture of what I’d had in mind. I mean, all this business with the boat, the secret cove, fishing for shrimps...

  I held out my hand to pat some friendly portion of her anatomy, but she leaned back out of my reach. The people with the kid had stopped talking and were staring deeply into their drinks.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “This isn’t working, is it?”

  I kept a professional silence. Whatever was going to be said now, it was better tha
t Erica said it. I mean, I could have gone on about her selfish enthusiasm in bed, her habit (look! she’s doing it now!) of biting her nails and spitting them out like seed husks, and the puzzled expression that generally crossed her face when you used any word with more than three syllables. Erica was a sweet, pretty kid. Tanned and warm, forgiving and forgetful. At best, holding her was like holding a flame. But she was still just a rich Daddy’s girl, good at tennis and tolerably fine at sex and swimming and happy on a pair of skis. And if you didn’t say anything damaging to her kind when you split up, they might even come back to you years later. By then they’d be softer, sadder, sweeter—ultimately more compromising, but sometimes worth the risk.

  So I sat there as Erica poured out her long essay on How Things Had Gone Wrong and the sun beat down and the air filled with the smell of hot myrtle and the sea winked far below. And the little girl chased blue and red butterflies between the tables and her parents sat listening to the free show in vaguely awestruck silence. It even got to me after a while. I had to squint and half-cover my face. Selfish, calculating, shallow, moody. Nothing new—Erica was hardly one for in-depth personal analysis—but she warmed to her subject, searching the sky for the next stinging adjective. Some of them were surprisingly on target—and for her, surprisingly long. I thought of that scarred and ancient starship tumbling over some strange new world, preparing to send us all a message. And I thought of me, sitting in the heat with the empty bottle of retsina, listening to this.

  “You’re right,” I said eventually. “You deserve better than me. Find someone your own age, Erica. Someone with your own interests.”

  Erica gazed at me. Interests. Did she have any interests?

  “But—”

  “-- No.” I held up a hand, noticing with irritation that it was quivering like a leaf. “Everything you said is true.”

  “Just as long as you don’t say we can still be friends.”

  “But I think we will,” I said, pushing back the chair and standing up.