Smoke and Mirrors (3 page)

She wiped her face. Then she unlocked her jewelry drawer and took out the envelope and opened it. She pulled out the cream-colored sheet of paper and ran her eyes over the neatly typed words. The Belinda on the paper had crashed their car while drunk and was about to lose her driving license. She and Gordon had not spoken for days. He had lost his job almost eighteen months earlier and now spent most of his days sitting around their house in Salford. Belinda’s job brought in what money they had. Melanie was out of control: Belinda, cleaning Melanie’s bedroom, had found a cache of five and ten pound notes. Melanie had offered no explanation for how an eleven-year-old girl had come by the money, had just retreated into her room and glared at them, tight-lipped, when quizzed. Neither Gordon nor Belinda had investigated further, scared of what they might have discovered. The house in Salford was dingy and damp, such that the plaster was coming away from the ceiling in huge crumbling chunks, and all three of them had developed nasty bronchial coughs.

Belinda felt sorry for them.

She put the paper back in the envelope. She wondered what it would be like to hate Gordon, to have him hate her. She wondered what it would be like not to have Kevin in her life, not to see his drawings of airplanes or hear his magnificently tuneless renditions of popular songs. She wondered where Melanie—the other Melanie, not
her
Melanie but the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God Melanie—could have got that money and was relieved that her own Melanie seemed to have few interests beyond ballet and Enid Blyton books.

She missed Gordon so much it felt like something sharp being hammered into her chest, a spike, perhaps, or an icicle, made of cold and loneliness and the knowledge that she would never see him again in this world.

Then she took the envelope downstairs to the lounge, where the coal fire was burning in the grate, because Gordon had loved open fires. He said that a fire gave a room life. She disliked coal fires, but she had lit it this evening out of routine and out of habit, and because not lighting it would have meant admitting to herself, on some absolute level, that he was never coming home.

Belinda stared into the fire for some time, thinking about what she had in her life, and what she had given up; and whether it would be worse to love someone who was no longer there, or not to love someone who was.

And then, at the end, almost casually, she tossed the envelope onto the coals, and she watched it curl and blacken and catch, watched the yellow flames dancing amidst the blue.

Soon the wedding present was nothing but black flakes of ash which danced on the updrafts and were carried away, like a child’s letter to Santa Claus, up the chimney and off into the night.

Belinda sat back in her chair, and closed her eyes, and waited for the scar to blossom on her cheek.

And that is the story I did not write for my friends’ wedding. Although, of course, it’s
not
the story I did not write or even the story I set out to write when I began it, some pages ago. The story I thought I was setting out to write was much shorter, much more fablelike, and it did not end like that. (I don’t know how it did end originally anymore. There was some kind of ending, but once the story was underway the real ending became inevitable.)

Most of the stories in this volume have that much in common: The place they arrived at in the end was not the place I was expecting them to go when I set out. Sometimes the only way I would know that a story had finished was when there weren’t any more words to be written down.

Editors who ask me for stories about “ . . . anything you want. Honest. Anything at all. Just write the story you always wanted to write” rarely get anything at all.

In this case, Lawrence Schimel wrote asking for a poem to introduce his anthology of stories about foretelling the future. He wanted one of the verse forms with repeating lines, like a villanelle or a pantoum, to echo the way we inevitably arrive at our future.

So I wrote him a rondel about the pleasures and perils of fortune-telling and prefaced it with the bleakest joke in
Through the Looking-Glass.
Somehow it seemed a fine starting point for this book.

I’d been having a bad week. The script I was meant to be writing just wasn’t happening, and I’d spent days staring at a blank screen, occasionally writing a word like
the
and staring at it for an hour or so and then, slowly, letter by letter, I’d delete it and write
and
or
but
instead. Then I’d exit without saving. Ed Kramer phoned and reminded me that I owed him a story for an anthology of stories about the Holy Grail which he was editing with the ubiquitous Marty Greenberg. And seeing nothing else was happening and that this story was living in the back of my mind, I said sure.

I wrote it in a weekend, a gift from the gods, easy and sweet as anything. Suddenly I was a writer transformed: I laughed in the face of danger and spat on the shoes of writer’s block. Then I sat and stared glumly at a blank screen for another week, because the gods have a sense of humor.

Several years ago, on a signing tour, someone gave me a copy of an academic paper on feminist language theory that compared and contrasted “Chivalry,” Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott,” and a Madonna song. I hope one day to write a story called “Mrs. Whitaker’s Werewolf” and wonder what sort of papers that might provoke.

When I do live readings, I tend to start with this story. It’s a very friendly story and I enjoy reading it aloud.

Every Christmas I get cards from artists. They paint them themselves or draw them. They are things of beauty, monuments to inspired creativity.

Every Christmas I feel insignificant and embarrassed and talentless.

So I wrote this one year, wrote it early for Christmas. Dave McKean calligraphed it elegantly and I sent it out to everyone I could think of. My card.

It’s exactly 100 words long (102, including the title) and first saw print in
Drabble II,
a collection of 100-word-long short stories. I keep meaning to do another Christmas card story, but it’s always December 15 before I remember, so I put it off until next year.

My literary agent, Ms. Merrilee Heifetz of New York, is one of the coolest people in the world, and she has only once, to the best of my recollection, ever suggested that I should write a specific book. This was some time ago. “Listen,” she said, “angels are big these days, and people always like books about cats, so I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if someone did a book about a cat who was an angel or an angel who was a cat or something?’ ”

And I agreed that it was a solid commercial idea and that I would think about it. Unfortunately, by the time I had finally finished thinking about it, books about angels were the-year-before-last-year’s thing. Still, the idea was planted, and one day I wrote this story.

(For the curious: Eventually a young lady fell in love with the Black Cat, and he went to live with her, and the last time I saw him he was the size of a very small mountain lion, and for all I know he’s growing still. Two weeks after the Black Cat left, a brown tabby arrived and moved onto the porch. As I write this, he’s asleep on the back of the sofa a few feet away from me.)

While I think of it, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank my family for letting me put them in this story, and, more importantly, both for leaving me alone to write, and for sometimes insisting I come out to play.

This story was nominated for a 1994 World Fantasy Award, although it didn’t win. It was written for Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s
Snow White, Blood Red,
an anthology of retellings of fairy tales for adults. I chose the tale of “The Three Billy Goats Gruff.” Had Gene Wolfe, one of my favorite writers (and, it occurs to me now, another person who hid a story in an introduction), not taken the title many years earlier, I would have called it “Trip Trap.”

Lisa Snellings is a remarkable sculptor. This was written about the first of her sculptures I saw and fell in love with: a demonic jack-in-the-box. She gave me a copy of it and has promised me the original in her will, she says. Each of her sculptures is like a story, frozen in wood or plaster. (There is one on my mantelpiece of a winged girl in a cage offering passersby a feather from her wings while her captor sleeps; I suspect that this one is a novel. We’ll see.)

The mechanics of writing fascinate me. This story was begun in 1991. Three pages were written and then, feeling too close to the material, I abandoned it. Finally, in 1994, I decided to finish it for an anthology to be edited by Janet Berliner and David Copperfield. I wrote it higgledy-piggledy on a battered Atari Portfolio palmtop, on planes and in cars and hotel rooms, all out of order, jotting down conversations and imaginary meetings until I was fairly sure it was all written. Then I put the material I had in order and was astonished and delighted that it worked.

Some of this story is true.

Over a period of several months a few years ago, I wrote three narrative poems. Each story was about violence, about men and women, about love. The first of the three to be written was a treatment for a pornographic horror movie, written in strict iambic pentameter, which I called “Eaten (Scenes from a Moving Picture).” It was fairly extreme (and, I’m afraid, is not reprinted in this volume). The second was a retelling of a number of old English folktales called “The White Road.” It was as extreme as the stories it was based on. The last to be written was a tale about my maternal grandparents and about stage magic. It was less extreme, but—I hope—just as disturbing as the two stories that preceded it in the sequence. I was proud of all three of them. The vagaries of publishing meant they were actually published over a period of years, so each of them made it into a best of the year anthology (all three of them were picked up in the American
Year
’
s Best Fantasy and Horror,
one in the British
Year
’
s Best Horror,
and one, somewhat to my surprise, was solicited for an international best erotica collection).

There are two stories that have both haunted and disturbed me over the years, stories that have attracted and repelled me ever since I encountered them as a small boy. One of them is the tale of Sweeney Todd, “the demon barber of Fleet Street.” The other is the tale of Mr. Fox—it’s a sort of English version of Bluebeard.

The versions in this retelling of the story were inspired by variants on the tale I found in
The Penguin Book of English Folktales,
edited by Neil Philip: “The Story of Mr. Fox” and the notes that follow it and a version of the tale called “Mr. Foster,” where I found the image of the white road and the way that the girl’s suitor marked the trail down the white road to his gruesome house.

In the story of Mr. Fox, the refrain “It was not so, it is not so, and God forbid it should be so” is repeated as a litany, through the recounting of each horror that Mr. Fox’s fianceé claims she saw in a dream. At the end she throws down the bloody finger, or the hand, that she took from his house and proves that everything she said was true. And then his story is effectively over.

It’s also about all the strange Chinese and Japanese folktales in which, ultimately, everything comes down to Foxes.

This, like my graphic novel
Mr. Punch,
is close enough to the truth that I have had, on occasion, to explain to some of my relatives that it didn’t really happen. Well, not like that, anyway.

Lisa Tuttle phoned me one day to ask me for a story for an anthology she was editing about gender. I have always loved SF as a medium, and when I was young, I was certain that I would grow up to be a science fiction writer. I never really did. When I first had the idea for this story, almost a decade ago, it was a set of linked short stories that would have formed a novel exploring the world of gender reflection. But I never wrote any of those stories. When Lisa called, it occurred to me that I could take the world I’d imagined and tell its story in the same way that Eduardo Galeano told the history of the Americas in his
Memory of Fire
trilogy.

Once I’d finished the story, I showed it to a friend, who said it read like an outline for a novel. All I could do was congratulate her on her perspicacity. But Lisa Tuttle liked it, and so do I.

John Aubrey, the seventeenth-century collector and historian, is one of my favorite writers. His writings contain a potent mixture of credulity and erudition, of anecdote, reminiscence, and conjecture. Reading Aubrey’s work, one gets an immediate sense of a real person talking from the past in a way that transcends the centuries: an enormously likable, interesting person. Also, I like his spelling. I tried writing this story in a couple of different ways, and I was never satisfied with it. Then it occurred to me to write it as by Aubrey.