‘Nicola? Is that you?’ The darkness of the living-room tensed around me. ‘Are you okay, love?’
She was crying. ‘Simon, I’m frightened. Please listen.’ Her breath caught in her throat, and I thought she was going to choke. Then, suddenly, she was calm. ‘I’m pregnant.’
‘Oh, no.’ I felt cold with guilt. As if I’d thrown up on the table and the whole family was watching me. ‘I’m sorry, Nicola. It’s all my fault.’ She made an odd, throaty sound. ‘What do you want to do?’
The same sound again. I realized she was laughing. ‘Oh, Simon. You’re such a div sometimes.’ There was a pause. ‘It’s not you. I mean, it wasn’t you. It’s not yours.’ In the silence that followed, I heard a car drive past; then another. I couldn’t do anything but put the phone down. She didn’t call back.
That weekend, I went to Clayheath. After a day spent with my revision notes, endlessly rereading the same text, I caught the train in mid-evening. I thought I’d try the garage, maybe leave a message for her there. By the time I reached the swimming baths, it was already dark. Sodium light painted the roadway. The garage was on the far side of the park. Or was it the near side? I tried to superimpose a memory of the district on the blank grid ahead of me, but all I could imagine was Nicola’s face. And her body. Abruptly, I turned a corner and saw a featureless office building I didn’t recognize. Two roads diverged from a traffic island with a tilted bollard. They were both lined with unvarying grey terraces, no lights visible behind the drawn curtains.
As I struggled to hold on to a sense of direction, a van swung around the corner from behind me. At the same time, a small dark shape loped awkwardly across the road towards me. The two collided with a scream of brakes and pain. The van slowed, then sped away. Its tyres left a thin red wound in the tarmac.
A cat. Probably the same cat I’d seen here a few weeks earlier. From where I stood, I could see that it was beyond help. I could also see what had made it so clumsy. Spilling from its torn gut was a litter of bald, helpless kittens. They must have been kittens. But in the flickering light of the street lamp, they reminded me of what I’d seen in the glass jars. Their enlarged heads, blind swollen eyes, tiny clutching hands with pale fingers. There were seven or eight of them, all exactly the same. Unable to live or die. Unable to change.
Swallowing a mouthful of acid saliva, I turned and walked slowly back to the swimming baths. Caught the bus. My head was a whorl of milky light, a fingerprint on an icy road. On the train going back to Birmingham, I began to feel steadier. What made me vomit, weeping tears of pain and relief, was going to the urinals in New Street Station and seeing a coin-operated Durex machine.
* * * *
There isn’t much more to tell. I stayed in Birmingham, took my O levels and passed most of them, applied myself to the task of growing up in Thatcher’s new Britain. Instead of becoming a journalist, I became an accountant. Somehow, my curiosity about the world had gone. In 1990, I moved to Guildford and became a financial consultant. I put on some weight, bought a maisonette, had a succession of girlfriends. Somehow I could never resist a new face, or experience affection without desire.
One weekend in the spring of 1997, I was up in the Midlands on business. Election fever was at its height, reminding me of 1979. I drove through South Birmingham, playing The Jam on my car stereo: ‘The Butterfly Collector’, ‘Going Underground’, ‘Dreams of Children’. That night, I decided to go back to Clayheath.
But it wasn’t there. When I looked for it in my new A-Z, the district no longer existed. I wasn’t even sure which districts it had been absorbed into. I decided to let the train and bus route take me to it; but the branch line had been discontinued. Finally I checked the Yellow Pages for swimming baths within a few miles of Netherton. There was only one.
It took me a long time to find it, driving through the narrow Black Country streets on a quiet Sunday morning. The sky was tinged with pink, like marble.
* * * *
Perhaps I was distracted by images of streets that no longer existed; or perhaps I didn’t want to find real evidence of a place I’d long ago bulldozed and redeveloped in my mind. But at last I drove up a long straight road, behind a bus that stopped outside a tall Victorian building with a carved lintel and several deep steps.
My neck stiffened, as if I had a chill. I parked the Audi and got out.
Apart from that building, nothing was the way I remembered it. In place of the crowded terraces, a jumble of housing blocks and prefabricated industrial units sprawled between the pitted roads. I couldn’t see the park, nor any trees at all. A new expressway cut across the end of the high street before circling around a giant plastic-fronted garden centre, like a rubber ring around a baby floating in a pool of whitish concrete. I turned back towards the swimming baths. It wasn’t only the image of Nicola that made me start to cry at that moment. It was the knowledge of how I’d been, then and ever since. Eighteen years of selfishness and waste. I blinked, rubbed my eyes and stared at my hands. Then I started running towards the car.
Ten minutes later I was speeding along the Halesowen Road into an acid sunlight, telling myself that what I’d seen had meant nothing. For those few moments, as I’d walked past the steps outside the old baths, I’d seen my hands somehow turn into hands that weren’t left and right, that weren’t mirror images of each other. They were the same hand twice: both palms up, both thumbs pointing to the right.
Nothing ever changes. We just tell ourselves it does.
<
* * * *
RICHARD A. LUPOFF
Simeon Dimsby’s Workshop
Richard a. lupoff celebrated the publication of his fiftieth book, The Great American Paperback, in 2001. This was a work of cultural history that won glowing praise from periodicals as varied as Playboy magazine and the scholarly Wilson Quarterly. Most of his work, however, has been fiction, including several dozen novels and more than 100 short stories.
Much of his fiction has been collected in such volumes as Before 12:01 and After, Claremont Tales andClaremont Tales II. His latest publication is Marblehead: A Novel of H. P. Lovecraft, the manuscript of which was recently rediscovered, having been lost more than twenty-five years ago.
‘In “Simeon Dimsby’s Workshop” I return to the wondrous, long-ago days when I was an avid reader and fan,’ explains Lupoff, ‘admiring the glamorous figures who filled the pages of lurid pulp magazines and dreaming of the time when I would join their ranks.’
* * * *
I
t took Regis Hardy six years to sell his first short story.
He would rise early each morning and put in an hour of mental effort, bending over a notebook, striving for the right combination of words that would elicit a letter of acceptance instead of the rejection slips to which he was accustomed. When he kissed his spouse, Helena, good-bye after a light breakfast of toast and half a grapefruit, he would ride the municipal bus to his job in downtown Elmwood, California.
The men and women around him occupied themselves in a variety of ways: perusing copies of the ElmwoodDaily Express-Bulletin, listening to their favorite music on portable CD players, reading paperback novels. Often regular riders on the Number Eighteen line would greet one another and discuss the events of the world, or of their personal lives, as they traveled to work. High-school students engaged in horseplay. College students would take part in serious and arcane discussions of Kierkegaard, Aeschylus, or the millions of dollars they expected to make in the high-tech world as soon as they received their degrees.
Not Mr Hardy. He lived near the end of the Number Eighteen line and always got a seat on his way to work. He would ride with his eyes closed, imagining the doings of the men and women in his stories, striving to capture just the right event, image, or turn of phrase to make his current opus the one that would carry him across the threshold of literary status from that of ambitious amateur to that of acclaimed professional.
Mr Hardy worked at the Department of Socia
l Services. He took his lunch each day in the department’s cafeteria, notebook laid flat beside his plastic tray and yellow wooden pencil in hand, working, always working on his stories. And every night, after dinner with Helena, he would retreat to his private corner and work for another hour on his stories before joining his wife to watch the evening news.
Six years.
And then the miracle happened.
Mr Hardy received a letter from the editor of Mayhem Monthly. The editor had read Mr Hardy’s submission, ‘Vampire Town’, and was pleased to tender the enclosed purchase agreement for the story.
The payment was minuscule and the magazine, which had rejected numerous of Mr Hardy’s efforts in the past, was a minor one, but Mr Hardy was ecstatic. He could see a doorway opening before him. He imagined a room filled with the literary figures he had admired, almost worshiped, all his life, eagerly welcoming him to their world and to their own glamorous company.
Filled with pride, Mr Hardy showed the letter to his wife, who threw her arms around his shoulders and planted a congratulatory kiss on his cheek.
That night, inspired by the delicious taste of success, Regis Hardy worked on his current story-in-progress for two hours rather than one. Later, lying in bed, Helena’s soft breathing and warm presence filling him with marital contentment, he projected an imaginary motion picture on the ceiling, peopling each frame with characters of his own invention and creating a sound track filled with mood-inspiring music, crackling dialog and exciting sound effects.
It would be pleasant to report that Mr Hardy, having at last achieved the mystical transformation from amateur to professional writer, was immediately greeted with nothing but editorial accolades, but such was not the case. Following the solitary sale to Mayhem Monthly there came a series of rejection slips from a broad spectrum of periodicals.
But Regis Hardy was not one to surrender his treasured dream, especially after having sold ‘Vampire Town’.
Some months later came a double red-letter day. There was another letter of acceptance, this one fromInterstellar Stories. The work in question was a novelette titled ‘Narcotics from Neptune’. The same day’s postal delivery included a brown manila envelope. The envelope contained two copies of the issue of Mayhem Monthly featuring ‘Vampire Town’.
The Hardys sat happily side-by-side admiring Regis’s story and the black-and-white illustration that accompanied it. To be candid, the illustration was decidedly on the crude and slapdash side, nor had the artist captured quite the flavor of Mr Hardy’s story, or the detail of his description. But Mrs Hardy patted Mr Hardy affectionately on the cheek, and he did feel that another milestone had been passed on the roadway to success.
As the months and years rolled by Mr Hardy found that he was receiving fewer rejection notices and making more sales. He was able to move to higher-paying and more prestigious markets. He cracked Image of the Imagination and Exciting Adventure Annual and finally New Modern Gangster Quarterly.
He built a proud ‘brag shelf’ of magazines containing his works. He admired the many black-and-white illustrations that accompanied them, and invited Mrs Hardy out for a celebratory cocktail and dinner when Wilderness magazine honored him with a full-color cover painting of a scene from his story ‘Cannibal’s Canoe’.
His hair was thinning and his temples were grey now, and he suspected that Mrs Hardy’s flaming titian locks retained their brilliance only with the assistance of expensive chemicals, but he chose not to raise the subject in conversation. He had never made a living from his writing. He had kept his day job at the Department of Social Services, but he knew in his heart that the job was merely a means to the end of supporting his writing endeavors.
Only two goals had eluded him.
Despite numerous attempts he had never been able to sell a story to Grave Yarns. In each case the story in question had been successfully placed in another market, nor was Grave Yarns the highest-paying or most prestigious of periodicals. But it was a venerable publication, almost legendary in the community, and Mr Hardy had long dreamed of winning a place in its pages. That was the first of Mr Hardy’s remaining unfulfilled ambitions.
The second was to see his stories collected into a book. He had approached a number of publishers and been turned away with the advice that he procure the services of a literary agent. He had then approached a number of agents only to be turned away by them with the advice that he write a novel if he wished book publication. Collections of short stories were virtually impossible to place, he was told.
By this time Mr Hardy was nearing retirement age and looked forward eagerly to leaving the Department of Social Services. He would then be able to devote all of his energies to his literary endeavors. Mrs Hardy had already taken early retirement from her own job, and offered her husband encouragement with his plan.
By the time a letter arrived at the Hardys’ modest home bearing the return indicia of Grave Yarns Mr Hardy was forced to don his trifocal spectacles in order to read it. But the game was most assuredly worth the candle as Mr Hardy found that he had at last captured the proverbial brass ring on the ever-turning carousel of literature. The editor of Grave Yarns was pleased to accept Mr Hardy’s submission to the magazine, ‘Even the Dead Have Rights’.
Only one goal remained now on Mr Hardy’s agenda, and that was book publication. He had not been wholly frustrated in even this enterprise, for several times his stories had been included in anthologies. These books, some colorful and some drab, some of them beautifully bound and jacketed volumes and others cheaply made paperbacks, held a special place of honor in the Hardy living room. But a collection devoted entirely to his own works was a dream the realization of which continued to elude Mr Hardy.
And then Mr Hardy received a letter from a publisher unfamiliar to him. Surely this was one he had never contacted, nor even read of in the trade journals to which he assiduously subscribed. The writer of the letter introduced himself as the proprietor of a new firm, Mantigore Press. He was seeking to publish the works of deserving but previously overlooked authors. He had been an admirer of Mr Hardy’s atmospheric and effective prose for some years, and if Mr Hardy found himself in a position to place a collection of his stories with the new company, Mantigore Press was prepared to issue a contract immediately, and to offer a small but realistic advance payment against royalties to be earned.
The letter was signed, Auric Mantigore.
Regis Hardy was so excited that his wife had to spend the better part of an hour calming and soothing him. He then responded to Auric Mantigore’s letter with a quick and enthusiastic reply in the affirmative.
Thus it was that, in due course, Mantigore Press announced the impending publication of Return to Elmwood: the Collected Stories of Regis Hardy.
Mantigore Press was headquartered in the city of Repentance, Maine, some 3,000 miles from Elmwood, California. At first Mr Hardy conducted his business with Mantigore by postal means, but when Auric Mantigore informed him that the distinguished artist and resident of Repentance, Simeon Dimsby, had been engaged to create a jacket painting and interior illustrations for Return to Elmwood, Mr Hardy could contain himself no longer.
Over a modest evening meal he broached his plan to his wife. ‘We are both now retired, Helena. Our pensions are small but adequate to our needs, and we have some savings. I would like to travel to Repentance, Maine, to meet Auric Mantigore and the great Simeon Dimsby. I intend to write to Messrs. Mantigore and Dimsby and propose such a meeting. If they are amenable to my plan, I would be most pleased to have your company on the trip, and to arrange for your inclusion in our festive gathering.’
There were tears in Helena Hardy’s eyes as she voiced her approval of her husband’s notion.
Even before watching the evening news on that occasion, Regis Hardy penned letters to Auric Mantigore and Simeon Dimsby, broaching his plan. While similar in content, the two letters were not identical. That addressed to Simeon Dimsby included a paragraph in which Mr Hardy express
ed his admiration for Dimsby’s work. Many artists had attempted to capture the essence of Regis Hardy’s stories, but none had fully succeeded, at least in his opinion. But he was confident of Dimsby’s ability to do so, and hoped fervently to meet the great illustrator.
Not long after writing to Mantigore and Dimsby, Regis Hardy received responses from both. Mantigore explained that he was a busy man whose responsibilities occupied him for many hours each day. Further, he was obliged by commercial considerations to spend most of each month traveling. Consequently, he suggested that Hardy and Dimsby make such arrangements as they saw fit. If available, Mantigore would join them. If unable to do so, he would nonetheless offer his best wishes.
Regis Hardy was mildly disappointed by Auric Mantigore’s letter, but he was positively elated when he read Simeon Dimsby’s. The artist had developed a great fondness for Hardy’s stories and was most enthusiastic about Return to Elmwood. He had already created preliminary sketches for his illustrations and worked out what he referred to as his ‘concept’ for the dust-jacket painting. He indicated a date by which he hoped to have the final versions of the drawings in hand, and suggested that Regis Hardy come to his, Dimsby’s, home and workshop on that date.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 13 - [Anthology] Page 34