The lecturer had no memories of his own because he did not truly exist. Just like any flesh and blood human being, the creation that was Harold Masters reached his time unexpectedly and without resolution, and so dissolved into a tumble of threadbare tissues. With no plot momentum to drive him and no memories of his own, just borrowings from the mind of his creator, he turned over and over into nothing and was gone. And in that moment, he was the most real.
The storyteller in the mind’s eye of Harold Masters sits at his chipped writing desk staring up at shelves of books, his eye alighting on an old 78 rpm record, and it dawns on him that he took Masters’ name from the label, which features a dog and a gramophone. He wonders how many other characters’ names came from spines of books and recollections of friends. A video of Brief Encounter, a copy ofDracula, a photograph of New York, a lottery ticket, a drawing of a phoenix, a brandy bottle, a hotel brochure, a dog’s collar, an Arsenal scarf, childhood notes. He looks for the patterns that shape his own life and finds only tarmac, concrete and steel, the dead carapace of something lost to all but his mind’s eye.
His own past is as dead as his — and Masters’ — recollection of it.
Dr Beeching closed the branch lines, road planners cut the streets in half, smashed down the houses, constructed swathes of concrete through the hills, the roads, the railways, the gardens, and like a bush cut through at the root, everything familiar died. The shops of his childhood were boarded up, homes falling to the wrecking ball, friends divided, families relocated. Now oil-drenched vibrations pulse the once-still air. A bright patch of pavement remains where once he stood with his face to the sun, free as the sky.
That was his reality.
Everything now is fiction.
They feel different, he notes, fact and fantasy. The former rooted in observation and experience, the latter bound by publishers’ conventions. Sitting in the small cold study, the storyteller determines to leave behind his outmoded world of locked-room mysteries and vampire soaps in search of something real. But how hard will it be to leave such a cosy niche for a place with endless horizons and no parameters? Even letting go has a learning process.
He pushes back his chair and goes to the open window, inventing as hard and as fast as he can. It is a beautiful spring morning, and the breeze causes his eyelids to flutter. There is brine in the air. He looks down from the window-ledge at the thin white clouds racing far beneath, then loosens his belt and steps out of his trousers. It only takes a moment to remove his T-shirt, pants and socks. Drawing a deep breath, he walks confidently out on to the rope-covered surface of the springboard, determined not to show that he is scared.
How the releasing of shackles makes his body feel lighter than air.
Poor old Harold Masters, not being allowed to finish his story. It was so obvious to see where his tale was going that there was simply no reason for the author to finish it himself, not when his readers could put together the clues and do the job for him. The burden is always on the author to rediscover ways of surprising his audience, and that task has been fulfilled, albeit in a rather unorthodox manner.
It’s good to be standing at the edge, he tells himself, bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet. There’s a new world ahead. As the old century closes, he can leave behind his plots and characters. There are some excellent practitioners of the art who seem more than happy to close up the store behind him. There will always be the attraction of lies.
His body is pale and unused to such exposure. The clouds below appear as if seen from an airplane window. He moves further to the end of the board and gives a few experimental bounces. Then he bends his knees, jumps into the air, comes down on to the board and straightens his legs. The tension released in the board springs him high into the air, so high he feels he could punch a hole in the sky. For a brief moment it seems as if he could stay like this forever.
And for those who are left back on the ground, blinking in the sharp sunlight, those who are all too familiar with where they have been, the question for them now is how not to look back, how not to look down, but where to begin.
Where to begin.
And the answer, of course, is right — here.
Neil Gaiman
The Wedding Present
Neil Gaiman has had a busy yearpromoting his bestselling fairy tale for adults, Stardust, and working on the movie version for Miramax. For the same company he scripted the English language version of Hayao Miyazaki’s anime, Princess Mononoke, and he is currently developing the film version of his BBC-TV series Neverwhere.
On the publishing front, he is writing a scary children’s book entitled Coraline, a novel with the working title American Gods, a picture book called The Wolves in the Walls, and a Japanese Sandman tale titled The Dream Hunters.
“I had the idea for the story about ten years ago — at a friend’s wedding reception,” Gaiman reveals. “I was sitting at the next table to Ray Harryhausen. I thought “I’ll write a story and give it to the happy couple as a wedding present,” and then I realised what the story was about and decided that they might not appreciate being given it as a present. So I didn’t write it. I decided to wait until some friends got married who’d like it.
“The weeks went by and the months and the years. And when people got married, I always wound up getting them towels or toasters or things, because I thought they might not appreciate the story.
“And then, last year, I was writing the introduction to my short story collection Smoke and Mirrors. I was trying to talk about where stories came from, and I mentioned that there were stories I had never written — and it occurred to me that the right wedding would probably never come along, so I might as well write the story anyway.
“So I did. I put it in the Introduction to Smoke and Mirrors. People who don’t read introductions will never know there was a story in the collection that they never read.”
After all the joys and the headaches of the wedding, after the madness and the magic of it all (not to mention the embarrassment of Belinda’s father’s after-dinner speech, complete with family slide-show), after the honeymoon was literally (although not yet metaphorically) over and before their new suntans had a chance to fade in the English autumn, Belinda and Gordon got down to the business of unwrapping the wedding presents and writing their thank-you letters — thank you’s enough for every towel and every toaster, for the juicer and the bread-maker, for the cutlery and the crockery and the teasmade and the curtains.
“Right,” said Gordon. “That’s the large objects thank-you’d. What’ve we got left?”
“Things in envelopes,” said Belinda. “Cheques, I hope.”
There were several cheques, a number of gift tokens, and even a £10 book token from Gordon’s Aunt Marie, who was poor as a church mouse, Gordon told Belinda, but a dear, and who had sent him a book token every birthday as long as he could remember. And then, at the very bottom of the pile, there was a large brown, business-like envelope.
“What is it?” asked Belinda.
Gordon opened the flap, and pulled out a sheet of paper the colour of two-day-old cream, ragged at top and bottom, with typing on one side. The words had been typed with a manual typewriter, something Gordon had not seen in some years. He read the page slowly.