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

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      ‘I don't know,’ she said. ‘What have you got?’ This confused me until I realized that a third party had asked the original question, and was indeed still standing in front of us. A thin black guy with elsewhere eyes.

      ‘Dope, grass, coke, horse …’ the man reeled off, in a bored monotone. As Rita-May negotiated for a bag of spliffs I tried to see where he was hiding the horse, until I realized I was being a moron. I turned away and opened my mouth and eyes wide to stretch my face. I sensed I was in a bit of a state, and that the night was as yet young.

      It was only as we were lighting one of the joints five minutes later that it occurred to me to be nervous about meeting a gentleman who was a heroin dealer. Luckily, he'd gone by then, and my attention span was insufficient to let me worry about it for long. Rita-May seemed very relaxed about the whole deal, and as she was a local, presumably it was okay.

      We hung a right at Jackson Square and walked across towards Bourbon, sucking on the joint and slowly caroming from one side of the sidewalk to the other. Rita-May's arm was still around my back, and one of mine was over her shoulders. It occurred to me that sooner or later I was going to have to ask myself what the hell I thought I was doing, but I didn't feel up to it just yet.

      I wasn't really prepared for the idea that people from the convention would still be at the bar when we eventually arrived. By then it felt as if we had been walking for at least ten days, though not in any bad way. The joint had hit us both pretty hard, and my head felt as if it had been lovingly crafted out of warm brown smoke. Bourbon Street was still at full pitch, and we slowly made our way down it, weaving between half-dressed male couples, lean local blacks and pastel-clad, pear-shaped tourists from Des Moines. A stringy blonde popped up from nowhere at one point, waggling a rose in my face and asking, ‘Is she ready?’ in a keening, nobody's-home kind of voice. I was still juggling responses to this when I noticed that Rita-May had bought the rose herself. She broke off all but the first four inches of stem in a business-like way, and stuck the flower behind her ear.

      Fair enough, I thought, admiring this behaviour in a way I found difficult to define.

      I couldn't actually remember, now we were in the area, whether it was the Absinthe Bar we were looking for, the Old Absinthe Bar, or the Original Old Absinthe Bar. I hope you can understand my confusion. In the end we made the decision on the basis of the bar from which the most acceptable music was pounding, and lurched into the sweaty gloom. Most of the crowd inside applauded immediately, but I suspect this was for the blues band rather than us. I was very thirsty by then, partly because someone appeared to have put enough blotting paper in my mouth to leech all the moisture out of it, and I felt incapable of doing or saying anything until I was less arid. Luckily Rita-May sensed this, and immediately cut through the crowd to the bar.

      I stood and waited patiently for her return, inclining slightly and variably from the vertical plane like some advanced form of children's top. ‘Ah ha,’ I was saying to myself. ‘Ah ha.’ I have no idea why.

      When someone shouted my name, I experienced little more than a vague feeling of well-being. ‘They know me here,’ I muttered, nodding proudly to myself. Then I saw that Dave Trindle was standing on the other side of the room and waving his arm at me, a grin of outstanding stupidity on his face. My first thought was that he should sit down before someone in the band shot him. My second was a hope that he would continue standing, for the same reason. He was part, I saw, of a motley collection of second-rate shareware authors ranged around a table in the corner, a veritable rogues' gallery of dweebs and losers. My heart sank, with all hands, two cats and a mint copy of the Gutenberg Bible on deck.

      ‘Are they the people?’

      On hearing Rita-May's voice I turned thankfully, immediately feeling much better. She was standing close behind, a large drink in each hand and an affectionate half-smile on her face. I realized suddenly that I found her very attractive, and that she was nice, too. I looked at her for a moment longer, and then leant forward to kiss her softly on the cheek, just to the side of the mouth.

      She smiled, pleased, and we came together for another kiss, again not quite on the mouth. I experienced a moment of peace, and then suddenly I was very drunk again.

      ‘Yes and no,’ I said. ‘They're from the convention. But they're not the people I wanted to see.’

      ‘They're still waving at you.’

      ‘Christ.’

      ‘Come on. It'll be fun.’

      I found it hard to share her optimism, but followed Rita-May through the throng.

      It turned out that the people I'd arranged to meet up with had been there, but I was told that they'd left in the face of my continued failure to arrive. I judged it more likely that they'd gone because of the extraordinary collection of berks they had accidentally acquired on the way to the bar, but refrained from saying so.

      The conventioneers were drunk, in a we've-had-two-beers-and-hey-aren't-we-bohemian sort of way, which I personally find offensive. Quite early on I realized that the only way of escaping the encounter with my sanity intact was pretending that they weren't there and talking to Rita-May instead. This wasn't allowed, apparently. I kept being asked my opinion on things so toe-curlingly dull that I can't bring myself to even remember them, and endured fifteen minutes of Davey wank-face telling me about some GUI junk he was developing. Luckily Rita-May entered the spirit of the event, and we managed to keep passing each other messages on how dreadful a time we were having. With that and a regular supply of drinks, we coped.

      After about an hour we hit upon a new form of diversion, and while apparently listening avidly to the row of life-ectomy survivors in front of us, started – tentatively at first, then more deliciously – to stroke each other's hands under the table. The conventioneers were now all well over the limit, some of them having had as many as four beers, and were chattering nineteen to the dozen. So engrossed were they that after a while I felt able to turn my head towards Rita-May, look in her eyes, and say something.

      ‘I like you.’

      I hadn't planned it that way. I'd intended something much more grown-up and crass. But as it came out I realized that it was true and that it communicated what I wanted to say with remarkable economy.

      She smiled, skin dimpling at the corners of her mouth, wisps of her hair backlit into golden. ‘I like you too,’ she said, and squeezed my hand.

      Wow, I thought foggily. How weird. You think you've got the measure of life, and then it throws you what I believe is known as a ‘curve-ball’. It just went to show. ‘It just goes to show,’ I said, aloud. She probably didn't understand, but smiled again anyway.

      The next thing that I noticed was that I was standing with my back against a wall, and that there wasn't any ground beneath my feet. Then that it was cold. Then that it was quiet.

      ‘Yo, he's alive,’ someone said, and the world started to organize itself. I was lying on the floor of the bar, and my face was wet.

      I tried to sit upright, but couldn't. The owner of the voice, a cheery black man who had served me earlier, grabbed my shoulder and helped. It was him, I discovered, who'd thrown water over me. About a gallon. It hadn't worked, so he'd checked my pulse to make sure I wasn't dead, and then just cleared up around me. Apart from him and a depressed-looking guy with a mop, the bar was completely empty.

      ‘Where's Rita?’ I asked, eventually. I had to repeat the question in order to make it audible.

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