What You Make It: A Book of Short Stories

by Michael Marshall Smith

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, eventually. ‘That's pretty much the way it is.’ The man nodded, as if coming to a decision. ‘I thought so. Do you want a refund?’

  It took me a moment to realize he was talking about the watch.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘That's all right. I'll keep it anyway.’

  ‘Good,’ he said, turning away. ‘I'm sure that somewhere inside it still keeps time.’

  I'm looking for work at the moment. I'm not sure what kind. I stopped writing corporate videos a few months ago, halfway through another one about Customer Care: thirty different ways to make your clients think that you give a fuck about them, when both you and they know you don't. I only got to number fourteen. I decided that I'd helped write enough code, and that I wasn't going to do it any more. The sheep can worry themselves.

  I still eat in the Shuang Dou a couple of nights a week, but I haven't seen the red-faced man again. It doesn't matter. I don't think he could tell me anything I don't already suspect. I've still got the watch too, and sometimes it seems almost as if the flashing figures are going to settle, become strong enough to read again. It hasn't happened yet, but I believe that, some day, it will.

  I went back to the shop the day after the conversation, but the window was vacant. By pressing my face up against the glass I could see that everything had gone from the inside too. It was completely empty, dust already settling.

  On the inside of the door was a sign, roughly hand-lettered but securely sellotaped, as if to withstand a long wait.

  ‘Back later,’ it said.

  ALWAYS

  Jennifer stood, watching the steady drizzle, underneath the awning in front of the station entrance. She waited for the cab to arrive with something that was not quite impatience: there was no real hurry, though she wanted to be with her father. It was just that the minutes were filled to bursting with an awful weight of unavoidable fact, and if she had to spend them anywhere, she would rather it were not under an awning, waiting for a cab.

  The train journey down from Manchester had been worse, far worse. Then she had felt a desperate unhappiness, a wild hatred of the journey and its slowness. She'd wanted to jig herself back and forwards on her seat like a child, to push the train faster down the tracks. The black outside the window had seemed very black, and she'd seen every streak of rain across the window. She'd stared out of it for most of the journey, her face sometimes slack with misery, sometimes rigid with the effort of not crying, of keeping her body from twitching with horror. The harder she stared at the dark hedges in shadow fields, the further she tried to see, the closer the things she saw.

  She saw her mother, standing at the door of the house, wrapped in a cardigan and smiling, happy to see her home. She saw the food parcels she'd prepared for Jennifer whenever she visited, bags of staple foods mixed with nuggets of gold, little things that only she knew Jennifer liked. She saw her decorating the Christmas tree by herself in happy absorption, saw her in her chair by the fire, regal and round, talking nonsense to the utterly contented cat spreadeagled across her lap.

  She tried to see, tried to understand, the fact that her mother was dead.

  After her father had phoned she'd moved quickly through the house, throwing things in a bag, locking up, driving with heavy care to the station. Then there had been things to do. Now there was nothing. Now was the beginning of a time when there was nothing to do, no way to escape, no means of undoing. In an instant the world had changed, had switched from a home to a cold hard country where there was nothing but rain and minutes that stretched like railway tracks into the darkness.

  At Crewe a man got on and sat opposite. He had tried to talk to her: to comfort her or to take advantage of her distress, it didn't matter which. She stared at him for a moment, lit another cigarette and looked back out of the window. She judged all men by her father. If she could imagine them getting on with him, they were all right. If not, they didn't exist.

  She tried to picture her father, alone in the house. How big it must feel, how hollow, how much like a foreign place, as the last of her mother's breaths dissipated in the air. Would he know which molecules had been inside her, cooling as they mixed? Knowing him, he might. When he'd called, the first thing, the only thing she could think was that she had to be near him, and as she waited out the minutes she tried to reach out with her mind, tried to picture him alone in a house where the woman he'd loved for thirty years had sat down to read a book by the fire and died of a brain haemorrhage while he made her a cup of tea.

  For as long as she could remember there had been few family friends. Her parents had been a world on their own, and had no need for anyone else. So different, and yet the same person, moving forever in a slow comfortable symmetry. Her mother had been home, her father the magic that lit up the windows, her mother had been love, her father the spell that kept out the cold. She knew now why as the years went on her love for her parents had begun to stab her with something that was like cold terror: because some day she would be alone. Some day she would be taken in the night from the world she knew and abandoned in a place where there was no one to call out to.

  And now, as she stood waiting for a cab in the town where she'd grown up, she numbly watched the drizzle as it fell on the distant shore of a far country on a planet the other side of the universe. The trees by the station road called out to her, pressing their twisted familiarity upon her, but her mind balked, refused to acknowledge them. This wasn't any world she knew.

  In three weeks it would be Christmas, and her mother was dead.

  The cab arrived, and the driver tried to talk to her. She answered his questions brightly.

  At the top of the drive she stood for a long moment, her throat spasming. Everything was different. All the trees, all the pots of plants her mother had tended, all the stones on the drive had moved a millimetre. The tiles had shifted infinitesimally on the roof, the paint had faded a millionth of a shade. She had come home, but home wasn't there any more.

  Then the front door opened spreading a patch of warmth onto the drive, and she fled into the arms of her father.

  For a long time she hung there, cradled in his warmth. He was comfort, an end to suffering. It had been him who had talked her through her first boyfriend's abrupt departure, him who had held her hand after childish nightmares, him who had come to her when as a baby she had cried out in the night. Her mother had been everything for her in this world, but her father the one who stood between Jennifer and worlds outside, in the way of any hurt.

  After a while she looked up, and saw the living room door. It was shut, and it was then that finally she broke down.

  Sitting in the kitchen in worn-out misery, she clutched the cup of tea her father had made, too numb to flinch from the pain that stabbed from every corner of her mother's kitchen. On the side was a jar of mincemeat, and a bag of flour. They would not be used. She tried to deflect her gaze, to find something to focus on, but every single thing spoke of her mother: everything was something she wouldn't use again, something she'd liked, something that looked strange and forlorn without her mother holding it. All the objects looked random and meaningless without her mother to provide the context they made sense in, and she knew that if she could look at herself she would look the same. Her mother could never take her hand again, would never see her married or have children. And she would have been such a fantastic grandmother, the kind you only find in children's books.

  On the kitchen table were some sheets of wrapping paper, and for a moment that made her smile wanly. It had always been her father that bought the wrapping paper, and in years of looking Jennifer had never been able to find paper that was anywhere near as beautiful. Marbled swirls of browns and golds, of greens and reds, muted bursts of life that had lain curled beneath the Christmas tree like an advert for the whole idea of colour. The paper on the table was as nice as ever, some a warm russet, the rest a pale sea of shifting blue.

  Every year, on Christmas morning, as she sat at her customary end of
the sofa to begin unwrapping her presents, Jennifer had felt a warm thrill of wonder. She could remember as a young girl looking at the perfect oblongs of her presents and knowing that she was seeing magic at work. For her father would wrap the presents, and there were never any joins. She would hold the presents up, look at them every way she could, and still not find any Sellotape, or edges of paper. However difficult the shape, it was as if the paper had formed itself round it like a second skin.

  One evening every Christmas her father would disappear to do his wrapping: she had never seen him do it, and neither, she knew, had Mum. In more recent years Jennifer had found the joins, cleverly tucked and positioned so as almost to disappear, but that hadn't undone the magic. Indeed, in her heart of hearts she believed that her father had done it deliberately, let her see the joins because she was too old now for a world where there could be none.

  She could remember once, when she'd been a very little girl, asking her mother how Daddy did it. Her mother had told her that Dad's wrapping was his art, that when the King of the Fairies needed his presents wrapped he sent for her father to do it, and he went far off to a magic land to wrap his presents, and while he was away, he did theirs too. Her mother had said it with a smile in her eyes, to show she was joking, but also with a small frown on her forehead, as if she wasn't sure if she was.

  As Jennifer sat staring at the paper, her father came back in. He seemed composed but a little shocked, as if he'd seen the neighbours dancing naked in their garden. He took her hand and they sat for a while, two of them where three should be.

  And for a long time they talked, and remembered her. Already time seemed short, and Jennifer tried to remember everything she could, to mention every little thing, to write them in her mind so that they would still be there in the morning. Her father helped her, mixing in his own memories, as she scrabbled and clutched, desperate to gather all the fallen leaves before the wind blew them away.

  Looking up at the clock as she made another cup of tea she saw that it was four o'clock, that it would soon be tomorrow, the day after her mother had died, and suddenly she slumped over, crying with the kettle in her hand. Because the day after that would be the day after that day, the week after the week after, next year the anniversary. It would never end. From now on all time was after time: no undoing, no last moment to snatch. There would be so many days, and so many hours, and no matter how many times the phone rang, it would never be her mother.

  Seeing her, her father stood up and came to her. As she laid her head on his shoulder he finished making the tea, and then he tilted her head up to him. He looked at her for a long time, and she knew that he, and nobody else, could see inside her and know what she felt.

  ‘Come on,’ he said.

  She watched as he walked to the table and picked up some of the wrapping paper.

  ‘I'm going to show you a secret.’

  ‘Will it help?’ Susan felt like a little child, watching the big man, her father.

  ‘It might.’

  They stood for a moment outside the living room door. He didn't hurry her, but let her ready herself. She knew that she had to see her mother, couldn't just let her fade away behind a closed door. Finally she nodded, and he opened the door.

  The room she walked into seemed huge, cavernous. Once cosy, the heart of the house, now it stretched like a black plain far out into the rain, the corners cold and dark. The dying fire flickered against the shadows, and as she stepped towards it Jennifer felt the room grow around her, bare and empty as the last inaudible echoes of her mother's life died away.

  ‘Oh Mum,’ she said, ‘oh Mum.’

  Sitting in her chair by the fire she could almost have been asleep. She looked old, and tired, but comfortably warm, and it seemed that the chair where she sat was the centre of the world. Jennifer reached out and touched her hand. Kissed by the embers of the fire, it was still warm, could still have reached out and touched her. Her father shut the door, closing the three of them in together, and Jennifer sat down by the fire, looking up at her mother's face. What had been between the lines was gone, but the lines were still there, and she looked at every one.

  She looked up to see that her father had spread three sheets of the pink wrapping paper on the big table. He came and crouched down beside her and they held Mum's hand together, and Jennifer's heart ached to imagine what his life would be like without her, without his Queen. Together they kissed her hand, and said goodbye as best they could, but you can't say goodbye when you're never going to see someone again. It isn't possible. That's not what goodbye means.

  Her father stood, and with infinite tenderness picked his wife up in his arms. For a moment he cradled her, a groom on his wedding day holding his love at the beginning of their life together. Then slowly he bent, and to Jennifer's astonishment he laid her mother out on the wrapping paper.

  ‘Dad…’

  ‘Shh,’ he said.

  He picked up another couple of sheets of paper and laid them on top of her. His hands made a small folding movement where they joined, and suddenly there was only one long piece of wrapping paper. Jennifer's mouth dropped open like a child's.

  ‘Dad, how …?’

  ‘Shh.’

  He took the end of the sheet lying under her mother, and folded it over the top. Slowly he worked his way around the table, folding upwards with little movements of his hands. Like two gentle birds they slowly wove round each other, folding and smoothing. Jennifer watched silently, cradling her tea, at last seeing her father do his wrapping, and as he moved round the table the two sheets of paper were knitted together as if it were the way they'd always been.

  After about fifteen minutes he paused, and she stepped closer to look. Only her mother's face was visible, peeking out of the top. It could have looked absurd, but it was her mother, and it didn't. The rest of her body was enveloped in a pink paper shroud that seamlessly held her close. Her father bent and kissed his wife briefly on the lips, and she bent too, and kissed her mother's forehead. Then he made another folding movement, brought the last edge of paper over and smoothed, and suddenly there was no gap, no join, just a large irregular paper parcel perfectly wrapped.

  Then her father moved and stood halfway down the table. He slid his arm under his wife's back, and gently brought it upwards. The paper creaked softly as he raised her body into a sitting position, and then further, until it was bent double. He made a few more smoothing motions and all Jennifer could do was stare, eyes wide. On the table was still a perfect parcel, but half as long. He slid his hand under again, and folded it in half again, then moved round, and folded it the other way, gentle and unhurried. For ten minutes he folded and smoothed, tucked and folded, and the parcel grew smaller and smaller, until it was two feet square, two feet by one, six inches by nine. Then his concentration deepened still further, and as he folded he seemed to take especial care with the way the paper moved, and out of the irregular shape emerged corners and edges. And still the parcel grew smaller and smaller.

  When finally he straightened there was on the table a tiny oblong, not much bigger than a matchbox, a perfect pink parcel. Jennifer moved closer to watch as he pulled a length of russet ribbon from his pocket, and painted a line first one way round, then the other to meet at the top. As he tied the bow she looked closely at the parcel and knew she'd been right all along, that she'd seen the truth as a child. There were no joins, none at all.

  When he had finished, her father held the little shape in his hands and looked at her, his face tired but composed. He reached out and touched her cheek, his fingers as warm as they'd always been, and in their touch was a blessing, a persistence of love. All the time she'd been on this planet they had been always there, her father and mother, someone to do the good things for, and to help the bad things go away.

  ‘I can only give you one present this year,’ he said, ‘and it's something you've already got. This is only a reminder.’

  He held up the parcel to her, and she took it. It felt
warm and comforting, all her childhood, all her love in a small oblong box. She felt she knew what she should do, and brought the present in close to her, and pressed it against her heart. As she shed her final tears her father held her close and wished her Happy Christmas, and when she took her hand away, the present was gone from her hand, and beat inside her.

  The journey back to Manchester passed in a haze of recollection, and when she was back in her flat she walked slowly around it, touching objects in the slanting haze of early morning light. She wished she could be with her father, but knew he was right to tell her to go back. As she sat in the hallway she listened to the beating of her heart, and as she looked at reminders of Mum she let herself feel glad. It would take time, but it was something she already had: she had her mother deep inside her, what she'd been, the love she'd given and felt. She was her mother's pride and joy, and while she still lived her mother lived too: her finest and favourite work, the living sum of her love and happiness. There would be no goodbyes, because she could never really lose her. She could never speak to her again in words, but she would always hear her voice. She would always be inside her, helping her face the world, helping her to be herself.

  And Jennifer thought about her father, and knew her heart would soon be fuller still. She knew it would not be many days before another parcel was delivered to her door, and that it too would be perfectly wrapped, its paper a pale sea of shifting blue.