Only Forward. Michael Marshall Smith

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СКАЧАТЬ Red Neighbourhood. Not only did I find him, but I got him and his lover (also a rodent) on a thru-mono back to Sniff Neighbourhood in under twenty-four hours. First-class seats, smoking section. All true, apart from the last bit.

      The plan also catered for my own personal needs in a rather lovely way. I was hungry, and intended to hang out in the first hotel in a restaurant-orientated fashion. I left the park and headed up the promenade.

      Play was kind of weird, I found. Not weird weird, but weird, well, quiet. I guess when I think of resorts I think of the upmarket end of LongMall and the whole of Yo! Neighbourhood, which are geared to providing visitors with a full-on pleasure explosion. ‘Jesus,’ people tend to feel when they’ve spent a day or two in those places, ‘that’s enough fun. More than enough. Let me out.’

      Play had the hotels, it had the beach, and it had a fun fair. That was it, and in the gathering darkness it had a forlorn air, like a Neighbourhood on the coast out of season. The street overlooking the beach was almost deserted, with just a few couples wandering slowly up and down, up and down.

      I spent a couple of minutes leaning on a rail looking down at the river. Probably it had originally been natural, but over the years the banks had been remodelled with little twists and turns which were too attractive to be pure geography. Little jetties poked out into the leisurely water, and there were a few small beach huts dotted across the sandy areas. I could probably have stayed there quite a while, listening to the gurgling, but I had only four hours before eleven, so I reluctantly turned away.

      The first hotel on the strip was a hunk of faded deco grandeur called the Powers. I geared myself up a bit, recapping the standard stuff about Stable being a super place to be and ad-libbing a few new thoughts about it being great to be on holiday, and walked in.

      The lobby was deserted. I went up to the porter’s desk, pinged the huge bell, and planned out most of the rest of my life, in some detail, before a small and shrivelled man creaked out of a back room. I established from him where the restaurant was and headed for it. This was also deserted, but looked a fairly flash sort of place, so I shouldered my misgivings and helped myself to a table, there being no one around.

      No one continued to be around for quite a while. After about fifteen minutes a slim girl dressed entirely in black wandered by the table, apparently by accident, and on seeing I had a menu in my hands obviously decided to take my order for the hell of it.

      Feeling chipper despite the desolate quiet, I asked her what she would recommend. She shrugged. I waited, but that was it, so I went back to the menu and selected a main course at random. She didn’t take out a pad or anything else to write this down on, and I was beginning to wonder if she really was just some passing art student, and was losing interest in the game, when she asked if I wanted anything to drink. I told her I did, and described it in some detail. She didn’t write that down either. She just left.

      I finished planning out the rest of my life. I toyed with several alternative careers, imagined what the person I could be happy with for ever would be like, decided where we’d live and for how long, what colour we’d have the walls in each room of the apartment and the probable careers of our children. Then I picked another career, and a different type of person, and planned out the whole of my life that way too.

      Then I thought of all the people I knew and planned their lives out for them, in even greater detail. I had a solid crack at predicting the fur colour of Spangle’s great-great-grandchildren, taking into account fifteen different possible mating permutations. I went to the toilet twice, smoked most of a packet of cigarettes and fashioned a really quite realistic bird out of my paper napkin.

      Then finally, like some optical illusion, the art student reappeared. I found myself frankly incredulous that she didn’t now have grey hair and walk with a stoop, and decided it must be her great-granddaughter bringing my order, concluding an ancient and mystic hereditary task passed down the family line. She swayed over to the table and plonked a glass of something that clearly wasn’t what I’d ordered in front of me, followed by a plate. Then she disappeared again.

      I stared at the plate for a very long time after she’d left, trying to work out what the appropriate response to it was. Dark brown triangles of substance lay on the plate, partially overlapping each other, with a few strands of green substance spread over them in a net-like way. There was also a small pool of something else. Everything put together would have a combined volume, I estimated, of a little over a cubic inch.

      I leant over my plate again and stared quite closely at the stuff on it. It could have been whale brain, it could have been modelling clay: without recourse to the techniques of forensic science I simply couldn’t tell. The overall effect was so entirely dissimilar to anything I had ever thought of as food that for a time I felt compelled to consider other possibilities; that it was the art student’s current collage project perhaps, or a stylised plan of a proposed shopping centre seen from the air, placed in front of me as a discussion point while I waited yet longer for the actual food. In the end I decided to try eating it: I couldn’t really afford to waste any more time. I cut off a mouthful of the triangular stuff, and dipped it in the pool of whatever the hell it was. After one chew all my previous confusion disappeared.

      It was definitely a model of a shopping centre.

      Pushing the plate tiredly away from me I took a sip of my drink. I don’t know what it was, but it had alcohol in it, so I decided I’d finish it with another cigarette before pushing on to the next hotel along.

      When I looked up I immediately noticed that someone else had entered the restaurant and was sitting about six tables away, gazing benignly at the menu. For a long time I just stared at him, my cigarette burning closer and closer to my fingers.

      It was Alkland.

      Let me explain what I mean about the rough beast of unpleasantness I mentioned earlier, the one for ever slouching towards my life to be born.

      There is a little god somewhere whose sole function is to make sure that there’s a lot of grief in my life. The rough beast doesn’t just visit me occasionally: there’s a regular fucking bus route. Most of the reason for this is that I end up with the jobs that no one else could handle, but part of it is this little bastard god who sits there keeping a steady eye on the grief meter, giving the lever a jog every now and then. What’s happened, I suspect, is that someone on the other side of the universe has made a pact with the guys in charge, selling his soul for a grief-free life. The grief has to be used up somehow, otherwise it would just pile up and make the place look untidy. So they give it to me.

      And what is really weird is that it always comes in equal-sized packets. Some jobs are a bastard from minute one, continue to be a bastard throughout, and finish in a bastard way too. Others, however, start off alarmingly smoothly, full of unlikely coincidences and strange good fortune, and those are the ones that I really hate. Because it means that they’re saving all the trouble for later, that all the dangerous, strange and unpleasant grief that I know I have coming to me has coalesced in a pulsating mountain somewhere further along the line, and is sitting there waiting for me to run into it.

      My cigarette eventually burnt my fingers and I stubbed it out. There was simply no question that it was Alkland who was sitting not five yards away from me. I didn’t have to consult the cube in my pocket to be sure of that. Sitting there, taking his time over the menu, he was like an advert for how lifelike cube images were. He looked a little tired, and his suit was rather crumpled, but otherwise he was exactly as I had expected.

      I picked my knife and fork back up and moved the crud on my plate around a bit, covertly glancing across the room. The Actioneer, was, I suspected, a little tenser than he looked, but all in all he was doing quite a good job of it. No one else had entered the restaurant with him: evidently СКАЧАТЬ