Michael Marshall Smith
Maybe Next Time
Michael Marshall Smith lives in North London and Brighton with his wife Paula and two cats. His first novel, Only Forward, won the August Derleth and Philip K. Dick Awards; his second, Spares, was optioned by Steven Spielberg and translated in seventeen countries worldwide; his third, One of Us, was optioned by Warner Brothers.
His most recent novels, The Straw Men and The Lonely Dead (a.k.a. The Upright Man), published under the name “Michael Marshall”, have been international best-sellers, and he is currently working on a third volume in the series.
Smith’s short fiction has won the British Fantasy Award three times, and is collected in What You Make It and the International Horror Guild Award-winning More Tomorrow & Other Stories. Six of his tales are currently under option for television.
About the following story, the author reveals: “Every now and then the reality of time hits you: the fact that it really is passing, and that there will come a point where the seemingly random things that happen every day will reach a conclusion, and stop, and then they will be all that ever happened.
“The act structure of one’s life will then finally become evident — but only when it is too late to do anything about it: too late to punch up the action in the middle section, or spread some more laughs throughout, to take it all just a bit more seriously — or perhaps less seriously. This story came from one of those realizations, and wonders what it might be like if the universe worked otherwise.”
At first, when David Began to consider the problem, he wondered if it was related to the start of a new year. January in London is not an exciting time. You’d hardly contend the month showed any part of the country at its best, but there were places — the far reaches of Scotland, perhaps, or the stunned emptiness of the midland fens — where you could at least tell it was winter, a season with some kind of character and point. In London, the period was merely still-grey and no-longer-New Year and Spring-not-even-over-the-horizon. A pot of negatives, a non-time of non-events in which you trudged back to jobs that the festive break had drunkenly blessed with purpose, but which now felt like putting on the same old overcoat again. But still, however much David unthinkingly lived a year that began in the Autumn — as did most who had soldiered their way through school and college, where promise and new beginnings came with the term after the summer — he could see that January was the real start of things. He thought at first that might be it, but he was wrong. The feelings were not coming after something, but pointing the way forward. To May, when he would have his birthday. To May, when he would be forty years old.
The episodes came on quietly. The first he remembered happened one Thursday afternoon when he was at his desk in Soho, pen hovering over a list of things to do. The list was short. David was good at his job, and believed that a list of things to do generally comprised of a list of things that should already have been done.
His list said he had to (1) have a quick and informal chat with the other participants in the next day’s new-business meeting (2) have a third and superfluous scan through the document explaining why said potential clients would be insane not to hand their design needs over to Artful Bodgers Ltd (3) make sure the meeting room had been tidied up and (4)…
David couldn’t think what (4) might be. He moved his pen back, efficiently preparing to cross out the numeral and its businesslike brackets, but didn’t. He dimly believed that his list was incomplete, in the same way you know, when wandering around the kitchen periodically nibbling a biscuit, whether you finished it in the last bite or if there’s a portion still lying around.
There was something he was supposed to do… nope, it had gone.
He went home, leaving the list behind. When he covertly glanced at it towards the end of the meeting the following morning, his sense of mild satisfaction (the pitch was going well, the new clients in the bag) was briefly muted by the sight of that (4), still there, still unfilled. The list now had a (5), a (6) and a (7), all ticked, but still no (4).
For a moment he was reminded of the old routine—
Item 1: do the shopping
Item 2: mow the lawn
Item 4: where’s item 3?
Item 3: ah, there it is… — and smiled. He was disconcerted to realize that the most senior of the clients, a man with a head which looked carved out of a potato, was looking at him, but the smile was easily converted into one of general commercial warmth. The deal was done. By lunchtime he was on to other things, and the list was forgotten.
This, or something like it, happened a couple more times that month. David would find himself in the kitchen, wiping his hands after clearing away the dinner that Amanda had cooked, thinking that he could sit down in front of the television just as soon as he had… and realize there was nothing else he had to do. Or he would take five minutes longer doing the weekly shop in Waitrose, walking the aisles, not looking for anything in particular but yet not quite ready to go and take his position in the checkout line. In the end he would go and pay, and find himself bagging only the things he had come out looking for, the things on his and Amanda’s list.
February started with a blaze of sunshine, as if the gods had been saving it for weeks and suddenly lost patience with clouds and grey. But it turned out that they hadn’t stocked as much as they thought, and soon London was muted and fitful again. David worked, put up some shelves in the spare bedroom, and went out once a week to a restaurant with his wife. They talked of things in the paper and on the news, and Amanda had two glasses of wine while he drank four. But plenty of mineral water too, and so the walk home was steady, his arm around her shoulders for part of the way. Artful Bodgers continued to make money, in a quiet, unassuming fashion. The company’s job was to take other companies’ corporate identities and make them better. Spruce up or rethink the logo, make typeface decisions, provide a range of stationery to cater for all contingencies: business cards, letterheads, following-page sheets (just the logo, no address), document folders, fax sheets, envelope labels, cassette boxes for the video companies. They had the latest Macs and some decent young designers. Their accounts department was neither mendacious nor incompetent. Everyone did their job, well enough to weather the periodicity of corporate confidence and wavering discretionary spend. His company was a success, but sometimes David thought the only interesting thing about it was the name. He’d chosen it personally, on start-up, seven years before. Everyone else — including Amanda — had thought it a bad idea. All too easy to take the second word and run with it. Who wants to hire bodgers, even if you know it’s a little joke? David fought, arguing that it showed a confident expectation that clients would never feel the need to make the association. He won, and it worked, and there were other times when David thought that the name was probably the most boring thing about the company, too.
One evening in February he found himself in Blockbuster, looking for a film he couldn’t name. He was twice becalmed at pub bars, both times with clients, having remembered what he wanted to drink, but then forgotten it again. On both occasions he bought a glass of Chardonnay, which was what he always drank.
Once again, too, David found himself hesitating in the midst of jotting a note at work: apparently unsure not so much of what he was going to write as of the precise physical nature of the act. He hadn’t forgotten how to use a pen, of course. It was more a question of choice, like recalling whether one played a tennis backhand with one or two hands on the racket. When he eventually started writing, his handwriting looked odd for a while.