What You Make It: Selected Short Stories. Michael Marshall Smith

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СКАЧАТЬ a cigarette. This wasn't to avoid the issue, but rather to prepare myself for the length and vitriol of the answer I intended to give – and to tone it down a little. I hardly knew the woman who'd asked the question, and had no idea of her tolerance for short, blunt words. I wanted to be gentle with her, but if there's one star in the pantheon of possible nightmares which I certainly don't believe in, then it has to be bloody vampires. I mean, really.

      I was in New Orleans, and it was nearly Halloween. Children of the Night have a tendency to crop up in such circumstances, like talk of rain in London. Now that I was here, I could see why. The French Quarter, with its narrow streets and looming balconies frozen in time, almost made the idea of vampires credible, especially in the lingering moist heat of the fall. It felt like a playground for suave monsters, a perpetual reinventing past, and if vampires lived anywhere, I supposed, then these dark streets and alleyways with their fetid, flamboyant cemeteries would be as good a place as any.

      But they didn't live anywhere, and after another punishing swallow of my salty margarita, I started to put Rita-May right on this fact. She shifted herself comfortably against my chest, and listened to me rant.

      We were in Jimmy Buffett's bar on Decatur, and the evening was developing nicely. At nine o'clock I'd been there by myself, sitting at the bar and trying to work out how many margaritas I'd drunk. The fact that I was counting shows what a sad individual I am. The further fact that I couldn't seem to count properly demonstrates that on that particular evening I was an extremely drunk sad individual too. And I mean, yes, Margaritaville is kind of a tourist trap, and I could have been sitting somewhere altogether heavier and more authentic across the street. But I'd done that the previous two nights, and besides, I liked Buffett's bar. I was, after all, a tourist. You didn't feel in any danger of being killed in his place, which I regard as a plus. They only played Jimmy Buffett on the juke box, not surprisingly, so I didn't have to worry that my evening was suddenly going to be shattered by something horrible from the post-melodic school of popular music. Say what you like about Jimmy Buffett, he's seldom hard to listen to. Finally, the barman had this gloopy eye thing, which felt pleasingly disgusting and stuck to the wall when you threw it, so that was kind of neat.

      I was having a perfectly good time, in other words. A group of people from the software convention I was attending were due to be meeting somewhere on Bourbon at ten, but I was beginning to think I might skip it. After only two days my tolerance for jokes about Bill Gates was hovering around the zero mark. As an Apple Macintosh developer, they weren't actually that funny anyway.

      So. There I was, fairly confident that I'd had around eight margaritas and beginning to get heartburn from all the salt, when a woman walked in. She was in her mid-thirties, I guessed, the age where things are just beginning to fade around the edges but don't look too bad for all that. I hope they don't, anyway: I'm approaching that age myself and my things are already fading fast. She sat on a stool at the corner of the bar, and signalled to the barman with a regular's upward nod of the head. A minute later a margarita was set down in front of her, and I judged from the colour that it was the same variety I was drinking. It was called a Golden something or other, and had the effect of gradually replacing your brain with a sour-tasting sand which shifted sluggishly when you moved your head.

      No big deal. I noticed her, then got back to desultory conversation with the other barman. He'd visited London at some point, or wanted to – I never really understood which. He was either asking me what London was like, or telling me; I was either listening, or telling him. I can't remember, and probably didn't know at the time. At that stage in the evening my responses would have been about the same either way. I eventually noticed that the band had stopped playing, apparently for the night. That meant I could leave the bar and go sit at one of the tables. The band had been okay, but very loud, and without wishing them any personal enmity I was glad they had gone. Now that I'd noticed, I realized they must have been gone for a while. An entire Jimmy Buffett CD had played in the interval.

      I lurched sedately over to a table, humming ‘The Great Filling Station Holdup’ quietly and inaccurately, and reminding myself that it was only about twenty after nine. If I wanted to meet up with the others without being the evening's comedy drunk, I needed to slow down. I needed to have not had about the last four drinks, in fact, but that would have involved tangling with the space-time continuum to a degree I felt unequal to. Slowing down would have to suffice.

      It was as I was just starting the next drink that the evening took an interesting turn. Someone said something to me at fairly close range, and when I looked up to have another stab at comprehending it, I saw it was the woman from the bar.

      ‘Wuh?’ I said, in the debonair way that I have. She was standing behind the table's other chair, and looked diffident but not very. The main thing she looked was good-natured, in a wary and toughened way. Her hair was fairly blonde and she was dressed in a pale blue dress and a dark blue denim jacket.

      ‘I said – is that chair free?’

      I considered my standard response, when I'm trying to be amusing, of asking in a soulful voice if any of us are truly free. I didn't feel up to it. I wasn't quite drunk enough, and I knew in my heart of hearts that it simply wasn't funny. Also, I was nervous. Women don't come up to me in bars and request the pleasure of sitting at my table. It's not something I'd had much practice with. In the end I settled for straightforwardness.

      ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And you may feel absolutely free to use it.’

      The woman smiled, sat down, and started talking. Her name, I discovered rapidly, was Rita-May. She'd lived in New Orleans for fifteen years, after moving there from some god-forsaken hole called Houma, out in the Louisiana sticks. She worked in one of the stores further down Decatur near the square, selling Cajun spice sets and cookbooks to tourists, which was a reasonable job and paid okay but wasn't very exciting. She had been married once and it had ended four years ago, amid general apathy. She had no children, and considered it no great loss.

      This information was laid out with remarkable economy and a satisfying lack of topic drift or extraneous detail. I then sat affably drinking my drink while she efficiently elicited a smaller quantity of similar information from me. I was 32, she discovered, and unmarried. I owned a very small software company in London, England, and lived with a dozy cat named Spike. I was enjoying New Orleans' fine cuisine but had as yet no strong views on particular venues – with the exception of the muffelettas in the French Bar, which I liked inordinately, and the po-boys at Mama Sam's, which I thought were overrated.

      After an hour and three more margaritas our knees were resting companionably against each other, and by eleven-thirty my arm was laid across the back of her chair and she was settled comfortably against it. Maybe the fact that all the dull crap had been got out of the way so quickly was what made her easy to spend time with. Either way, I was having fun.

      Rita-May seemed unperturbed by the vehemence of my feelings about vampires, and pleasingly willing to consider the possibility that it was all a load of toss. I was about to raise my hand to get more drinks when I noticed that the bar staff had all gone home, leaving a hand-written sign on the bar which said: LOOK, WILL YOU TWO JUST FUCK OFF.

      They hadn't really, but the well had obviously run dry. For a few moments I bent my not inconsiderable intelligence towards solving this problem, but all that came back was a row of question marks. Then suddenly I found myself out on the street, with no recollection of having even stood up. Rita-May's arm was wrapped around my back, and she was dragging me down Decatur towards the square.

      ‘It's this way,’ she said, giggling, and I asked her what the hell I had agreed to. It transpired that we were going to precisely the bar on Bourbon where I'd been due to meet people an hour-and-a-half ago. I mused excitedly on this coincidence, until Rita-May got me to understand that we were going there because I'd suggested it.

      ‘Want СКАЧАТЬ