What You Make It: Selected Short Stories

What You Make It: Selected Short Stories
Michael Marshall Smith

The first ever collection of Michael Marshall Smith’s award-winning short stories.The first piece of fiction Smith ever wrote – a short story called The Man Who Drew Cats – won the World Fantasy award. It’s included here along with many others, some unpublished, which show the incredible versatility of one of the most exciting writers working in Britain today. The collection is stuffed with surreal, disturbing gems including:‘When God Lived in Kentish Town’ Someone comes up to you when you’re quietly eating your stir-fried rice in a great Chinese take away, and tells you: ‘I’ve found God’. You try to ignore them, right? But what if they have, and what if He works in a drab old electrical store on Kentish Town Road and he’s not getting many customers?‘Diet Hell’ Some people will do anything to fit into their old jeans.‘Save As…’ What if you could back up your life? Save it up to a certain point and return to it when things went horribly wrong?‘Everybody Goes’ An idyllic childhood day from a long, hot summer. The kind you want to last for ever. All good things must come to an end, mustn’t they?

MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH

WHAT YOU MAKE IT

A book of short stories

Dedication

This collection is dedicated to the three people without whom … to Nicholas Royle, Stephen Jones and Howard Ely.

Table of Contents

Introduction (#uad46ad2c-0a4e-55bc-967b-ba71c4927c72)

Chapter 1 - More Tomorrow (#u565d1d31-bead-5442-98d4-73af7234d2c2)

Chapter 2 - Everybody Goes (#u60e470ee-2b8d-5cc9-befa-c8e590b376e5)

Chapter 3 - Hell Hath Enlarged Herself (#uae11f4b1-85d9-5e24-b90a-aaa1900f27b4)

Chapter 4 - A Place to Stay (#u88c451dc-ef97-5bed-85fb-83dc7c219e47)

Chapter 5 - Later (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 6 - The Man Who Drew Cats (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 7 - The Fracture (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 8 - Save As … (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 9 - More Bitter Than Death (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 10 - Diet Hell (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 11 - The Owner (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 12 - Foreign Bodies (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 13 - Sorted (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 14 - The Dark Land (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 15 - When God Lived in Kentish Town (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 16 - Always (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 17 - What You Make It (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 18 - The Truth Game (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Praise (#litres_trial_promo)

By Michael Marshall Smith (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Introduction (#ub160bac1-c67f-5aed-84fb-c6cdd2afc5dc)

I like short stories. I hope you do too, because this isn't a novel. If an honest-to-goodness novel is what you're looking for, then put this volume back on the pile. Propped up, so other people can see it. Or better still, take it with you anyway. You can snuggle down into novels, draw them over your head like a warm duvet and go away for a while. It's like taking a road trip in another country – while the land's got you in its clutches, you can't go home again. Short stories are different. They're evenings out, or day trips, an hour spent gazing out to sea. You don't have to do lots of packing beforehand or set timer switches or arrange for someone to feed the cat, but they leave their mark on your life all the same. Sometimes more so: short stories don't have the luxury of time to draw you in – so they have to come in low, under the radar, and hit you with the very first shot. They're doorways to other worlds, perpetually left ajar, dreams that you experience while you are still half awake.

Novels are time out of time: short stories are part of real life, and sometimes the shortest song can contain the longest single note.

What follows is a selection of the stories I have written in the last decade. Some of them are about fairly normal things, others less so. A few come at similar ideas from different angles, others stand alone; some have a life of their own now, having previously appeared in a variety of formats, while others are shiny new. They include both the first story I ever wrote, and the most recent. Everything else is bracketed between them. Through one of those coincidences which seem too telling to be merely random, while I was putting this collection together I was in Edinburgh for the Book Festival. In the evening I took my wife – who was but a dot on an unseen horizon when the first of these stories were written – to the place where I was sitting when I got the idea for that first short story, just over ten years previously. It was a strange feeling. Two days later, back in London, I attended a book launch for the writer who did more than any other to inspire me to write in the first place – and whose fiction I'd been avidly reading on that day in Edinburgh a decade before. This was the writer's first official visit to this country in seventeen years, and it seems odd that it should fall in the same week that I had stood on The Mound in Edinburgh and remembered how it had been.

But that's the way life is, a sea of coincidences and strangenesses and dark heartbeats – and what follows is an attempt to capture something of it. Then it was 1987. Now it's 1998. These stories chart the journey from there to here, and I hope that amongst them you'll find a couple of evenings to remember.

Michael Marshall Smith

London, October 1998

MORE TOMORROW (#ub160bac1-c67f-5aed-84fb-c6cdd2afc5dc)

I got a new job a couple of weeks ago. It's pretty much the same as my old job, but at a nicer company. What I do is trouble-shoot computers and their software – and yes, I know that sounds dull. People tell me so all the time. Not in words, exactly, but in their glassy smiles and their awkward ‘let's be nice to the geek’ demeanour.

It's a strange phenomenon, the whole ‘computer people are losers’ mentality. All round the world, at desks in every office and every building, people are using computers. Day in, day out. Every now and then, these machines go wrong. They're bound to: they're complex systems, like a human body, or society. When someone gets hurt, you call in a doctor. When a riot breaks out, it's the police that – for once – you want to see on your doorstep. It's their job to sort it out. Similarly, if your word processor starts dumping files or your hard disk goes non-linear, it's someone like me you need. Someone who actually understands the magic box which sits on your desk, and can make it all lovely again.

But do we get any thanks, any kudos for being the emergency services of the late twentieth century?

Do we fuck.

I can understand this to a degree. There are enough hard-line nerds and social zero geeks around to make it seem like a losing way of life. But there are plenty of pretty basic earthlings doing all the other jobs too, and no one expects them to turn up for work in a pin-wheel hat and a T-shirt saying: ‘Programmers do it recursively’. For the record, I play reasonable blues guitar, I've been out with a girl and have worked undercover for the CIA. The last bit isn't true, of course, but you get the general idea.

Up until recently I worked for a computer company, which I'll admit was full of very perfunctory human beings. When people started passing around jokes which were written in C++, I decided it was time to move on. One of the advantages of knowing about computers is that unemployment isn't going to be a problem until the damn things start fixing themselves, and so I called a few contacts, posted a new CV up on my web site and within 24 hours had four opportunities to chose from. Most of them were other computer businesses, which I was kind of keen to avoid, and in the end I decided to have a crack at a company called the VCA. I put on my pin-wheel hat, rubbed pizza on my shirt, and strolled along for an interview.

The VCA, it transpired, was a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting effective business communication. The suave but shifty chief executive who interviewed me seemed a little vague as to what this actually entailed, and in the end I let it go. The company was situated in tidy new offices right in the centre of town, and seemed to be doing good trade at whatever it was they did. The reason they needed someone like me was they wanted to upgrade their system – computers, software and all. It was a month's contract work, at a very decent rate, and I said yes without a second thought.

Appleton, the guy in charge, took me for a gloating tour round the office. It looked the same as they always do, only emptier, because everyone was out at lunch. Then I settled down with their spreadsheet-basher to go find out what kind of system they could afford. His name was Cremmer, and he wasn't out at lunch because he was clearly one of those people who see working nine-hour days as worthy of some form of admiration. Personally I view it as worthy of pity, at most. He seemed amiable enough, in a curly-haired, irritating sort of way, and within half an hour we'd thrashed out the necessary. I made some calls, arranged to come back in a few days, and spent the rest of the afternoon helping build a hospital in Rwanda. Well actually I spent it listening to loud music and catching up on my Internet newsgroups, but I could have done the other had I been so inclined.

The Internet is one of those things that more and more people have heard of without having any real idea of what it means. It's actually very simple. A while back a group of universities and government organizations experimented with a way of linking up all their computers so they could share resources, send little messages and play Star Trek games with each other. There was also a military connection, and the servers linked in such a way that the system could take a hit somewhere and reroute information accordingly. After a time this network started to take on a momentum of its own, with everyone from Pentagon heavies to pin-wheeling wireheads taking it upon themselves to find new ways of connecting things up and making more information available. Just about every major computer on the planet is now connected, and if you've got a modem and a phone line, you can get on there too. I can tell you can hardly wait.