Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders

by Neil Gaiman

  We were coming up to Blackfriars Bridge. “It’s real?”

  “Sure. New York State Lottery. You bought it on a whim, in the airport, on your way to England. The numbers’ll be picked on Saturday night. Should be a pretty good week, too. It’s over twenty million dollars already.”

  He put the lottery ticket in his own wallet, black and shiny and bulging with plastic, and he put the wallet into the inside pocket of his suit. His hands kept straying to it, brushing it, absently making sure it was still there. He’d have been the perfect mark for any dip who wanted to know where he kept his valuables.

  “This calls for a drink,” he said. I agreed that it did but, as I pointed out to him, a day like today, with the sun shining and a fresh breeze coming in from the sea, was too good to waste in a pub. So we went into an off-licence. I bought him a bottle of Stoli, a carton of orange juice, and a plastic cup, and I got myself a couple of cans of Guinness.

  “It’s the men, you see,” said the professor. We were sitting on a wooden bench looking at the South Bank across the Thames. “Apparently there aren’t many of them. One or two in a generation. The Treasure of the Shahinai. The women are the guardians of the men. They nurture them and keep them safe.

  “Alexander the Great is said to have bought a lover from the Shahinai. So did Tiberius, and at least two popes. Catherine the Great was rumored to have had one, but I think that’s just a rumor.”

  I told him I thought it was like something in a storybook. “I mean, think about it. A race of people whose only asset is the beauty of their men. So every century they sell one of their men for enough money to keep the tribe going for another hundred years.” I took a swig of the Guinness. “Do you think that was all of the tribe, the women in that house?”

  “I rather doubt it.”

  He poured another slug of vodka into the plastic cup, splashed some orange juice into it, raised his glass to me. “Mr. Alice,” he said. “He must be very rich.”

  “He does all right.”

  “I’m straight,” said Macleod, drunker than he thought he was, his forehead prickling with sweat, “but I’d fuck that boy like a shot. He was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “He was all right, I suppose.”

  “You wouldn’t fuck him?”

  “Not my cup of tea,” I told him.

  A black cab went down the road behind us. Its orange “For Hire” light was turned off, although there was nobody sitting in the back.

  “So what is your cup of tea, then?” asked Professor Macleod.

  “Little girls,” I told him.

  He swallowed. “How little?”

  “Nine. Ten. Eleven or twelve, maybe. Once they’ve got real tits and pubes I can’t get it up anymore. Just doesn’t do it for me.”

  He looked at me as if I’d told him I liked to fuck dead dogs, and he didn’t say anything for a bit. He drank his Stoli. “You know,” he said, “back where I come from, that sort of thing would be illegal.”

  “Well, they aren’t too keen on it over here.”

  “I think maybe I ought to be getting back to the hotel,” he said.

  A black cab came around the corner, its light on this time. I waved it down, and helped Professor Macleod into the back. It was one of our Particular Cabs. The kind you get into and you don’t get out of.

  “The Savoy, please,” I told the cabbie.

  “Righto, governor,” he said, and took Professor Macleod away.

  Mr. Alice took good care of the Shahinai boy. Whenever I went over for meetings or briefings the boy would be sitting at Mr. Alice’s feet, and Mr. Alice would be twining and stroking and fiddling with his black-black hair. They doted on each other, you could tell. It was soppy and, I have to admit, even for a cold-hearted bastard like myself, it was touching.

  Sometimes, at night, I’d have dreams about the Shahinai women—these ghastly, batlike, hag things, fluttering and roosting through this huge rotting old house, which was, at the same time, both human history and St. Andrews Asylum. Some of them were carrying men between them, as they flapped and flew. The men shone like the sun, and their faces were too beautiful to look upon.

  I hated those dreams. One of them, and the next day was a write-off, and you can take that to the fucking bank.

  The most beautiful man in the world, the Treasure of the Shahinai, lasted for eight months. Then he caught the flu.

  His temperature went up to 106 degrees, his lungs filled with water and he was drowning on dry land. Mr. Alice brought in some of the best doctors in the world, but the lad flickered and went out like an old lightbulb, and that was that.

  I suppose they just aren’t very strong. Bred for something else, after all, not strength.

  Mr. Alice took it really hard. He was inconsolable—wept like a baby all the way through the funeral, tears running down his face, like a mother who had just lost her only son. It was pissing with rain, so if you weren’t standing next to him, you’d not have known. I ruined a perfectly good pair of shoes in that graveyard, and it put me in a rotten mood.

  I sat around in the Barbican flat, practiced knife-throwing, cooked a spaghetti Bolognese, watched some football on the telly.

  That night I had Alison. It wasn’t pleasant.

  The next day I took a few good men and we went down to the house in Earls Court, to see if any of the Shahinai were still about. There had to be more Shahinai young men somewhere. It stood to reason.

  But the plaster on the rotting walls had been covered up with stolen rock posters, and the place smelled of dope, not spice.

  The warren of rooms was filled with Australians and New Zealanders. Squatters, at a guess. We surprised a dozen of them in the kitchen, sucking narcotic smoke from the mouth of a broken R. White’s Lemonade bottle.

  We searched the house from cellar to attic, looking for some trace of the Shahinai women, something that they had left behind, some kind of clue, anything that would make Mr. Alice happy.

  We found nothing at all.

  And all I took away from the house in Earl’s Court was the memory of the breast of a girl, stoned and oblivious, sleeping naked in an upper room. There were no curtains on the window.

  I stood in the doorway, and I looked at her for too long, and it painted itself on my mind: a full, black-nippled breast, which curved disturbingly in the sodium yellow light of the street.

  GOOD BOYS DESERVE FAVORS

  My own children delight in hearing true tales from my childhood: The Time My Father Threatened to Arrest the Traffic Cop, How I Broke My Sister’s Front Teeth Twice, When I Pretended to Be Twins, and even The Day I Accidentally Killed the Gerbil.

  I have never told them this story. I would be hard put to tell you quite why not.

  When I was nine the school told us that we could pick any musical instrument we wanted. Some boys chose the violin, the clarinet, the oboe. Some chose the timpani, the pianoforte, the viola.

  I was not big for my age, and I, alone in the Junior School, elected to play the double bass, chiefly because I loved the incongruity of the idea. I loved the idea of being a small boy, playing, delighting in, carrying around an instrument much taller than I was.

  The double bass belonged to the school, and I was deeply impressed by it. I learned to bow, although I had little interest in bowing technique, preferring to pluck the huge metal strings by hand. My right index finger was permanently puffed with white blisters until the blisters eventually became calluses.

  I delighted in discovering the history of the double bass: that it was no part of the sharp, scraping family of the violin, the viola, the ’cello; its curves were gentler, softer, more sloping; it was, in fact, the final survivor of an extinct family of instruments, the viol family, and was, more correctly, the bass viol.

  I learned this from the double bass teacher, an elderly musician imported by the school to teach me, and also to teach a couple of senior boys, for a few hours each week. He was a clean-shaven man, balding and intense, with long, cal
lused fingers. I would do all I could to make him tell me about the bass, tell me of his experiences as a session musician, of his life cycling around the country. He had a contraption attached to the back of his bicycle, on which his bass rested, and he pedaled sedately through the countryside with the bass behind him.

  He had never married. Good double bass players, he told me, were men who made poor husbands. He had many such observations. There were no great male cellists—that’s one I remember. And his opinion of viola players, of either sex, was scarcely repeatable.

  He called the school double bass she. “She could do with a good coat of varnish,” he’d say. And “You take care of her, she’ll take care of you.”

  I was not a particularly good double bass player. There was little enough that I could do with the instrument on my own, and all I remember of my enforced membership in the school orchestra was getting lost in the score and sneaking glances at the ’cellos beside me, waiting for them to turn the page, so I could start playing once more, punctuating the orchestral schoolboy cacophony with low, uncomplicated bass notes.

  It has been too many years, and I have almost forgotten how to read music; but when I dream of reading music, I still dream in the bass clef. All Cows Eat Grass. Good Boys Deserve Favors Always.

  After lunch each day, the boys who played instruments walked down to the music school and had music practice, while the boys who didn’t lay on their beds and read their books and their comics.

  I rarely practiced. Instead I would take a book down to the music school and read it, surreptitiously, perched on my high stool, holding on to the smooth brown wood of the bass, the bow in one hand, the better to fool the casual observer. I was lazy and uninspired. My bowing scrubbed and scratched where it should have glided and boomed, my fingering was hesitant and clumsy. Other boys worked at their instruments. I did not. As long as I was sitting at the bass for half an hour each day, no one cared. I had the nicest, largest room to practice in, too, as the double bass was kept in a cupboard in the master music room.

  Our school, I should tell you, had only one Famous Old Boy. It was part of school legend—how the Famous Old Boy had been expelled from the school after driving a sports car across the cricket pitch, while drunk, how he had gone on to fame and fortune—first as a minor actor in Ealing Comedies, then as the token English cad in any number of Hollywood pictures. He was never a true star but, during the Sunday afternoon film screening, we would cheer if ever he appeared.

  When the door handle to the practice room clicked and turned, I put my book down on the piano and leaned forward, turning the page of the dog-eared 52 Musical Exercises for the Double Bass, and I heard the headmaster say, “The music school was purpose-built of course. This is the master practice room…” and they came in.

  They were the headmaster and the head of the music department (a faded, bespectacled man whom I rather liked) and the deputy head of the music department (who conducted the school orchestra, and disliked me cordially) and, there could be no mistaking it, the Famous Old Boy himself, in company with a fragrant fair woman who held his arm and looked as if she might also be a movie star.

  I stopped pretending to play, and slipped off my high stool and stood up respectfully, holding the bass by the neck.

  The headmaster told them about the soundproofing and the carpets and the fund-raising drive to raise the money to build the music school, and he stressed that the next stage of rebuilding would need significant further donations, and he was just beginning to expound upon the cost of double glazing when the fragrant woman said, “Just look at him. Is that cute or what?” and they all looked at me.

  “That’s a big violin—be hard to get it under your chin,” said the Famous Old Boy, and everyone chortled dutifully.

  “It’s so big,” said the woman. “And he’s so small. Hey, but we’re stopping you practicing. You carry on. Play us something.”

  The headmaster and the head of the music department beamed at me, expectantly. The deputy head of the music department, who was under no illusions as to my musical skills, started to explain that the first violin was practicing next door and would be delighted to play for them and—

  “I want to hear him,” she said. “How old are you, kid?”

  “Eleven, Miss,” I said.

  She nudged the Famous Old Boy in the ribs. “He called me ‘Miss,’” she said. This amused her. “Go on. Play us something.” The Famous Old Boy nodded, and they stood there and they looked at me.

  The double bass is not a solo instrument, really, not even for the competent, and I was far from competent. But I slid my bottom up onto the stool again and crooked my fingers around the neck and picked up my bow, heart pounding like a timpani in my chest, and prepared to embarrass myself.

  Even twenty years later, I remember.

  I did not even look at 52 Musical Exercises for the Double Bass. I played…something. It arched and boomed and sang and reverberated. The bow glided over strange and confident arpeggios, and then I put down the bow and plucked a complex and intricate pizzicato melody out of the bass. I did things with the bass that an experienced jazz bass player with hands as big as my head would not have done. I played, and I played, and I played, tumbling down into the four taut metal strings, clutching the instrument as I had never clutched a human being. And, in the end, breathless and elated, I stopped.

  The blonde woman led the applause, but they all clapped, even, with a strange expression on his face, the deputy head of music.

  “I didn’t know it was such a versatile instrument,” said the headmaster. “Very lovely piece. Modern, yet classical. Very fine. Bravo.” And then he shepherded the four of them from the room, and I sat there, utterly drained, the fingers of my left hand stroking the neck of the bass, the fingers of my right caressing her strings.

  Like any true story, the end of the affair is messy and unsatisfactory: the following day, carrying the huge instrument across the courtyard to the school chapel, for orchestra practice, in a light rain, I slipped on the wet bricks and fell forward. The wooden bridge of the bass was smashed, and the front was cracked.

  It was sent away to be repaired, but when it returned it was not the same. The strings were higher, harder to pluck, the new bridge seemed to have been installed at the wrong angle. There was, even to my untutored ear, a change in the timbre. I had not taken care of her; she would no longer take care of me.

  When, the following year, I changed schools, I did not continue with the double bass. The thought of changing to a new instrument seemed vaguely disloyal, while the dusty black bass that sat in a cupboard in my new school’s music rooms seemed to have taken a dislike to me. I was marked another’s. And I was tall enough now that there would be nothing incongruous about my standing behind the double bass.

  And, soon enough, I knew, there would be girls.

  THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF THE DEPARTURE OF MISS FINCH

  To begin at the end: I arranged the thin slice of pickled ginger, pink and translucent, on top of the pale yellowtail flesh, and dipped the whole arrangement—ginger, fish, and vinegared rice—into the soy sauce, flesh-side down; then I devoured it in a couple of bites.

  “I think we ought to go to the police,” I said.

  “And tell them what, exactly?” asked Jane.

  “Well, we could file a missing persons report, or something. I don’t know.”

  “And where did you last see the young lady?” asked Jonathan, in his most policemanlike tones. “Ah, I see. Did you know that wasting police time is normally considered an offense, sir?”

  “But the whole circus…”

  “These are transient persons, sir, of legal age. They come and go. If you have their names, I suppose I can take a report…”

  I gloomily ate a salmon skin roll. “Well, then,” I said, “why don’t we go to the papers?”

  “Brilliant idea,” said Jonathan, in the sort of tone of voice which indicates that the person talking doesn’t think it’s a brilliant id
ea at all.

  “Jonathan’s right,” said Jane. “They won’t listen to us.”

  “Why wouldn’t they believe us? We’re reliable. Honest citizens. All that.”

  “You’re a fantasy writer,” she said. “You make up stuff like this for a living. No one’s going to believe you.”

  “But you two saw it all as well. You’d back me up.”

  “Jonathan’s got a new series on cult horror movies coming out in the autumn. They’ll say he’s just trying to get cheap publicity for the show. And I’ve got another book coming out. Same thing.”

  “So you’re saying that we can’t tell anyone?” I sipped my green tea.

  “No,” Jane said, reasonably, “we can tell anyone we want. It’s making them believe us that’s problematic. Or, if you ask me, impossible.”

  The pickled ginger was sharp on my tongue. “You may be right,” I said. “And Miss Finch is probably much happier wherever she is right now than she would be here.”

  “But her name isn’t Miss Finch,” said Jane, “it’s——” and she said our former companion’s real name.

  “I know. But it’s what I thought when I first saw her,” I explained. “Like in one of those movies. You know. When they take off their glasses and put down their hair. ‘Why, Miss Finch. You’re beautiful.’”

  “She certainly was that,” said Jonathan, “in the end, anyway.” And he shivered at the memory.

  There. So now you know: that’s how it all ended, and how the three of us left it, several years ago. All that remains is the beginning, and the details.

  For the record, I don’t expect you to believe any of this. Not really. I’m a liar by trade, after all; albeit, I like to think, an honest liar. If I belonged to a gentlemen’s club I’d recount it over a glass or two of port late in the evening as the fire burned low, but I am a member of no such club, and I’ll write it better than ever I’d tell it. So here you will learn of Miss Finch (whose name, as you already know, was not Finch, nor anything like it, since I’m changing names here to disguise the guilty) and how it came about that she was unable to join us for sushi. Believe it or not, just as you wish. I am not even certain that I believe it anymore. It all seems such a long way away.