RAMSEY CAMPBELL
No Story in It
‘Grandad.’
Boswell turned from locking the front door to see Gemima running up the garden path cracked by the late September heat. Her mother April was at the tipsy gate, and April’s husband Rod was climbing out of their rusty crimson Nissan. ‘Oh, Dad,’ April cried, slapping her forehead hard enough to make him wince. ‘You’re off to London. How could we forget it was today, Rod?’
Rod pursed thick lips beneath a ginger moustache broader than his otherwise schoolboyish plump face. ‘We must have had other things on our mind. It looks as if I’m joining you, Jack.’
‘You’ll tell me how,’ Boswell said as Gemima’s small hot five-year-old hand found his grasp.
‘We’ve just learned I’m a cut-back.’
‘More of a set-back, will it be? I’m sure there’s a demand for teachers of your experience.’
‘I’m afraid you’re a bit out of touch with the present.’
Boswell saw his daughter willing him not to take the bait. ‘Can we save the discussion for my return?’ he said. ‘I’ve a bus and then a train to catch.’
‘We can run your father to the station, can’t we? We want to tell him our proposal.’ Rod bent the passenger seat forward. ‘Let’s keep the men together,’ he said.
As Boswell hauled the reluctant belt across himself he glanced up. Usually Gemima reminded him poignantly of her mother at her age — large brown eyes with high startled eyebrows, inquisitive nose, pale prim lips — but in the mirror April’s face looked not much less small, just more lined. The car jerked forward, grating its innards, and the radio announced ‘A renewed threat of war — ’ before Rod switched it off. Once the car was past the worst of the potholes in the main road, Boswell said ‘So propose.’
‘We wondered how you were finding life on your own,’ Rod said. ‘We thought it mightn’t be the ideal situation for someone with your turn of mind.’
‘Rod. Dad — ’
Her husband gave the mirror a look he might have aimed at a child who’d spoken out of turn in class. ‘Since we’ve all overextended ourselves, we think the solution is to pool our resources.’
‘Which are those?’
‘We wondered how the notion of our moving in with you might sound.’
‘Sounds fun,’ Gemima cried.
Rod’s ability to imagine living with Boswell for any length of time showed how desperate he, if not April, was. ‘What about your own house?’ Boswell said.
‘There are plenty of respectable couples eager to rent these days. We’d pay you rent, of course. Surely it makes sense for all of us.’
‘Can I give you a decision when I’m back from London?’ Boswell said, mostly to April’s hopeful reflection. ‘Maybe you won’t have to give up your house. Maybe soon I’ll be able to offer you financial help.’
‘Christ,’ Rod snarled, a sound like a gnashing of teeth.
To start with the noise the car made was hardly harsher. Boswell thought the rear bumper was dragging on the road until tenement blocks jerked up in the mirror as though to seize the vehicle, which ground loudly to a halt. ‘Out,’ Rod cried in a tone poised to pounce on nonsense.
‘Is this like one of your stories, Grandad?’ Gemima giggled as she followed Boswell out of the car.
‘No,’ her father said through his teeth and flung the boot open. ‘This is real.’
Boswell responded only by going to look. The suspension had collapsed, thrusting the wheels up through the rusty arches. April took Gemima’s hand, Boswell sensed not least to keep her quiet, and murmured ‘Oh, Rod.’
Boswell was staring at the tenements. Those not boarded up were tattooed with graffiti inside and out, and he saw watchers at as many broken as unbroken windows. He thought of the parcel a fan had once given him with instructions not to open it until he was home, the present that had been one of Jean’s excuses for divorcing him. ‘Come with me to the station,’ he urged, ‘and you can phone whoever you need to phone.’
When the Aireys failed to move immediately he stretched out a hand to them and saw his shadow printed next to theirs on a wall, either half demolished or never completed, in front of the tenements. A small child holding a woman’s hand, a man slouching beside them with a fist stuffed in his pocket, a second man gesturing empty-handed at them… The shadows seemed to blacken, the sunlight to brighten like inspiration, but that had taken no form when the approach of a taxi distracted him. His shadow roused itself as he dashed into the rubbly road to flag the taxi down. ‘I’ll pay,’ he told Rod.
‘Here’s Jack Boswell, everyone,’ Quentin Sedgwick shouted. ‘Here’s our star author. Come and meet him.’
It was going to be worth it, Boswell thought. Publishing had changed since all his books were in print — indeed, since any were. Sedgwick, a tall thin young but balding man with wiry veins exposed by a singlet and shorts, had met him at Waterloo, pausing barely long enough to deliver an intense handshake before treating him to a headlong ten-minute march and a stream of enthusiasm for his work. The journey ended at a house in the midst of a crush of them resting their fronts on the pavement. At least the polished nameplate of Cassandra Press had to be visible to anyone who passed. Beyond it a hall that smelled of curried vegetables was occupied by a double-parked pair of bicycles and a steep staircase not much wider than their handlebars. ‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ Sedgwick declared. ‘It’s like one of your early things, being able to publish from home. Except in a story of yours the computers would take over and tell us what to write.’
‘I don’t remember writing that,’ Boswell said with some unsureness.
‘No, I just made it up. Not bad, was it?’ Sedgwick said, running upstairs. ‘Here’s Jack Boswell, everyone…’
A young woman with a small pinched studded face and glistening black hair spiky as an armoured fist emerged from somewhere on the ground floor as Sedgwick threw open doors to reveal two cramped rooms, each featuring a computer terminal, at one of which an even younger woman with blonde hair the length of her filmy flowered blouse was composing an advertisement. ‘Starts with C, ends with e,’ Sedgwick said of her, and of the studded woman ‘Bren, like the gun. Our troubleshooter.’
Boswell grinned, feeling someone should. ‘Just the three of you?’
‘Small is sneaky, I keep telling the girls. While the big houses are being dragged down by excess personnel, we move into the market they’re too cumbersome to handle. Carole, show him his page.’
The publicist saved her work twice before displaying the Cassandra Press catalogue. She scrolled past the colophon, a C with a P hooked on it, and a parade of authors: Ferdy Thorn, ex-marine turned ecological warrior; Germaine Gossett, feminist fantasy writer; Torin Bergman, Scandinavia’s leading magic realist… ‘Forgive my ignorance,’ Boswell said, ‘but these are all new to me.’
‘They’re the future.’ Sedgwick cleared his throat and grabbed Boswell’s shoulder to lean him towards the computer. ‘Here’s someone we all know.’
BOSWELL’S BACK! the page announced in letters so large they left room only for a shout-line from, Boswell remembered, the Observer twenty years ago — ‘Britain’s best SF writer since Wyndham and Wells’ — and a scattering of titles: The Future Just Began, Tomorrow Was Yesterday, Wave Goodbye To Earth, Terra Spells Terror, Science Lies In Wait… ‘It’ll look better when we have covers to reproduce,’ Carole said. ‘I couldn’t write much. I don’t know your work.’