The Collected Short Fiction

Beyond Words (1986)

Liverpool's dying of slogans, Ward thinks. Several thousand city council workers are marching through the littered streets under placards and banners and neon signs, Top Man, Burger King, Wimpy Hamburgers, Cascade Amusements. Songs that sound like a primer of bad English blare from shops under failing neon that turns words into gibberish. The chants of the marchers and the chattering of signs lodge in Ward's skull, crushing fragments of the story he's trying to complete. He dodges between stalls that have sprung up in Church Street, hawking cheap clothes and toys and towels imprinted like miraculous shrouds with a pop star's face, and into the optician's.

"So you're a writer, Mr. Smith. I don't get many of those in my chair." The optician's round smooth face is a little too large for the rest of him; Ward's reminded of a lifesize seaside photograph with a hole to stick your face through. "You must need eyes in your job. We'll just have these off," the optician says, and deftly removes Ward's spectacles.

Just a few words may be all that he needs, a solution hidden deep in his mind, but the slippery idea seems more distant than ever. Ward imagines the unwritten words turning red, the bank manager frowning and shaking his head, and is terrified that the resolution of the story may be gone forever—terrified of losing the ability to write now that Tina is soon to quit her job to bear their child. He's straining his mind desperately when the optician fits a pair of medievally heavy glassless spectacles on his nose and slides an eye-patch in front of his left eye, a lens before the other.

As the eye chart lurches into focus, its letters glaring blackly out of the backlit rectangle, Ward reads it all at once, instantly. The words seem a solution to everything, to problems which have yet to arise as well as those he's grappling with. Then he sees that they aren't words at all; what's sounding in his inner ear is the rhythm of the letters, the way he thought their groups should sound. He sets about pronouncing the letters, down to the bottom line that's almost as small as his handwriting.

"Well, Mr. Smith, you'll be glad to hear you don't need new glasses." Seeing that Ward isn't entirely, the optician continues, "I should see your doctor about your headaches or give yourself a holiday from writing."

If I go away the writing comes too, Ward thinks, shivering in the April sunlight at the bus stop. A windblown polystyrene tray squeals along the stained pavement like a nail on slate. The ghost of a giant spinal column fades from the rumbling sky, a fat woman trots delicately past him—a ball trying to grow into a ballerina, Ward thinks, fighting off the crowd of images that clamor to be caught in words. A bus carries him through Toxteth, where youths with bricks are besieging a police station, and into Allerton, shops growing smaller under signs like samples of typefaces. In Penny Lane, where Ward lives, a coachload of Beatles fans is chattering in

Japanese as he lets himself into the house. He runs up the stairs, whose well is smaller than its echoes pretend, and into the flat overlooking the school.

Tina's lying on the sheepskin rug. Her hands are splayed on the bare floor, her red hair seems to stream across the boards from her pale delicate face. Her four months' pregnancy bulks above her in the flowered mound of her maternity smock. "How are you?" Ward says.

"We're both fine. Listen." She clasps his head gently while he rests one ear against her belly. He thinks the heartbeat he's hearing is his own, racing in an elusively familiar rhythm. "How are you?" Tina murmurs.

"Just eyestrain, he said."

"You shouldn't write so small. No good saving paper if you end up losing your vision. Even I couldn't read that last story."

"Guards against plagiarism," Ward says, then smiles. "You know I don't mean you. We're collaborators. That's our first collaboration swimming round in there."

"I'm glad we'll be together."

She means at the birth, and perhaps she's referring to the way she feels excluded from his work. He can't see how to share a process that takes place in his head and on the blank page. "Publishers called, by the way," she says as if reminded. "It's all written down."

It isn't Ward's publisher. He doesn't recognize the name, not that many people seem to know his or that of his publisher. He calls and finds he's reached a new house. "When can we meet for lunch?" Kendle Holmes demands heartily. "I've a proposition to put to you."

"I could come down to London tomorrow?" Ward asks Tina, who nods.

"I'll see you here at one," Holmes says, and tells him where.

Anxious to round off his story so as to be ready for whatever Holmes may propose, Ward heads for the library. In the story a writer haunts libraries in search of comments readers scribble in his books. He begins to find the same handwriting in the margins of every copy wherever he goes, comments addressed more and more directly to him. He becomes obsessed with catching the culprit, but what happens when he does? Nothing Ward can think of that he finds worth writing. When schoolchildren crowd into the library, disarraying his thoughts and the already jumbled shelves of books, he gives up wandering the aisles in a vague vain quest for his own work and walks home as the shops light up the streets.

Tina's lying on the bed in the main room, a computer manual propped against her belly. Ward makes omelettes in the small not quite upright kitchen before she goes to work. Later he listens to the radio, wincing at abuses of language; he can never shrug off the proliferation of solecisms until he's composed a letter of protest in an attic of his mind, even though he never commits it to paper. He's still listening in the dark when Tina comes home, too tired to make love.

In the morning he goes to London, so early that he's a hundred miles from Liverpool before he feels awake. Trees, irrepressibly green, pirouette intricately in the fields while he listens to the rhythm of the wheels, muffled by the vacuum within the panes. Fitting words to the rhythm might lessen his awareness of the sound and let him think what the writer has to confront in the library, but all he can make of the rhythm is WHAT THE WORDS ARE WHAT THE WORDS ARE WHAT THE WORDS ARE ... The rhythm seems almost familiar, but he can't tell what's missing, any more than he can put an ending to his story.

Dozens of black cabs pile down the ramp below Eus-ton; Ward thinks of a coal chute. One carries him up into the sunlit maze of traffic, past pavements laden with pedestrians and words. It's his first experience of London, and the rifeness of streets overwhelms him; so does the cost of the ride. By the time he reaches Greek Court, where Hercules Books have their office, his ears are throbbing rhythmically.

As soon as Ward announces himself to the brisk young woman behind the glossy white horseshoe desk, Holmes strides out of his office like someone who's been waiting impatiently for the doors of a lift to open. He's thinner than he sounded on the phone, and dressed in a green suit. When he sways forward to give Ward a darting handshake Ward thinks of a sapling, bowing.

He sweeps Ward round the corner, into an Italian restaurant where he orders drinks and conveys Ward's order for lunch to the waiter. "Now are you going to be the next Tolkein?"

Ward's at a loss for words. "Well. . ."

"Of course you aren't. You're the first Ward Smith, the voice of modern British fantasy. That's what the public will say when they've heard of you, and I'm saying it now."

"That's very kind."

"Not kind at all. It's true." Holmes blinks his bright blue eyes twice and rubs his long smooth chin. "I really like your one about the scriptwriter who's haunted by the character he created, can't get rid of him because he's forgotten where he got the name from."

"Gnikomson."

"Right, the Swedish detective. I love the ending when the writer's going to light his first cigarette in years until he sees the No Smoking sign reflected in the train window. 'And then, of course, Gnikomson stood on his head and vanished.' How did that collection of yours do?"

"Pretty well for a book of short stories, they tell me," Ward tells him, shaking his head.

"I take it your wife works too."

"Until she has our baby."

"Good, good, but dear, dear. And will Clarion Press have something else by you out by then?"

"I'm just trying to finish a story to round off another book," Ward says, shaking his head again as if that may dislodge the throbbing.

Holmes rubs his chin as if it's a magic lamp. "Sounds to me as if they aren't looking after you as you deserve to be looked after. If they haven't commissioned you to write a novel yet, I'd like to."

The rhythm in Ward's ears is becoming entangled in his thoughts. "Tell me what to write, you mean?"

"Have you a novel in mind yourself?"

"I've been thinking about one off and on." Ward doesn't mean to shout, but he has to speak up to be sure of what he's saying. "I had the notion of a story from two viewpoints, only really you're always reading the opposite viewpoint from the one you think you are. You'd realize that when you notice wrong words cropping up in each one, and then the whole meaning of the story would change completely."

Holmes gazes at him to make sure he's finished. "Sounds fascinating. A bit obscure for a first novel, don't you think? We want to put your name in as many heads as possible. I think a writer who's as much in love with words as you are has a trilogy in him. Say a trilogy about magic, the power of words. Say a professor of languages who finds he's a magician and he's needed to save humanity. Does that get you thinking?"

Ward's backing into himself, he finds the attempt to shape his ideas so threatening. "I don't know if the people at Clarion Press would want me to write for someone else."

"If you feel they've earned your loyalty that much you mustn't let me come between you. Take a look at how they're doing in the shops before you go home." Holmes changes the subject, so abruptly that Ward feels as if it has been snatched from beneath him. As they part after lunch, Holmes says, "Think about what I said, if you like, and let me know if you change your mind."

Ward feels vulnerable again at once. The prospect of writing someone else's idea seems threateningly meaningless, as meaningless as the cadence that's repeating itself over and over in his ear, like a distant muffled voice he's never heard yet feels he ought to recognize. It's between him and the world. He goes looking for his book in Charing Cross Road, to bring the world closer.

The first two shops sell second-hand books only. The dusty ranks of forgotten names, books like so many decaying untended gravestones, dismay him. He heads for Foyle's, the bright spines, the outstanding embossed titles. But the subdued cover of his book isn't there, nor in any other bookshop. "Whispers and Titters," he mutters fiercely over the murmur in his ears, as if pronouncing the title will make it appear on the shelves.

He hasn't time to visit Clarion Press. He jogs to Euston so as to save money, then tries to phone Clarion before he's stopped panting, but there's no reply beyond the sound that has lodged in his ear. On the train he tries to doze, and eventually the song of the wheels lulls him: whispers and titterings, whispering titterings, waspishly tittering, waspishly whispering ... But when he lurches awake as the Liverpool suburbs speed by, the cadence he's been carrying with him fills his ears like water, and he feels as if he's drowning.

Tina's waiting for him, beaming expectantly over the spread of her computer manuals on the dining-table. "How did it go? Was it worthwhile?"

"I can't tell you yet. I mean, I don't know." He feels as if he won't know anything until his ears are clear. He can't even taste the chili con carne she has waiting for him. Nor can he make love; his sensations are on the other side of the noise in his ears, and feel as if they belong to someone else. Floppy's a disk, not an impotent dick, his mind chants in time with the noise.

He can't sleep for more than a few minutes. Whenever he jerks awake he thinks an intruder is in the room, stooping at him in the dark and muttering. He holds himself still; it takes very little to wake Tina just now. For hours he feels as if the day will never come, as if he'll never see the doctor.

"Tinnitus," the doctor says.

Ward has waited over an hour to see him, but at once he's glad he has: there's a word for what he's suffering, and that must mean an answer, a cure. "What causes it?" Ward says eagerly.

"Deafness, possibly. You don't suffer from deafness? Catarrh, then, or wax in the ears." When he fails to find either he measures Ward's blood pressure, and frowns. "Of course there are cases where it doesn't seem to be a symptom of anything else."

"I'm one of those, am I? What can we do?"

"To be blunt, nothing except hope it goes away eventually."

"But I make my living as a writer," Ward pleads. "How can I work like this?"

"Many tinnitus sufferers have to cope with more difficult jobs." The doctor lets his face soften. "If you find you aren't able to sleep, sufferers often leave a radio playing."

Ward buys a pair of headphones, whose price dismays him. As he lets himself into the flat he's dreading Tina's sympathy, her sense of being unable to help him. He avoided telling her that he was seeing the doctor, in the hope that he'd come home cured. When he tells her why he bought the headphones she takes his hands, but even this contact seems to be taking place in the distance beyond the incessant noise. "Is there anything I can do?" she murmurs.

"Not unless you can get inside my head."

"I wish I could, believe me."

He dons the headphones and lies on the bed while she works at the table. He can tell by the way her hands creep up the sides of her face that she hears the headphones squeaking. His only chance of ignoring the tinnitus, however momentarily, is to turn the radio up loud enough to blot it out.

He has to grow used to it, he tells himself as he lies sleeplessly beside Tina. People adjust to living next to motorways or near airports. People cope with tinnitus, the doctor said so. Yet being one of many doesn't make it any easier for Ward: in fact, he thinks he might have coped better if it were unique to him, instead of something that can afflict anyone, randomly and meaning-lessly. Whenever he turns up the volume minutely on the radio, seeking to fill his head with late-night chatter, Tina stirs beside him.

When the night's darkest, exhaustion overtakes him. A silence between radio programs wakens him. For a few seconds he's alone with the noise in his ears, and as he hangs between sleeping and waking, he hears precisely what it has been trying to say, sees the glowing letters whose message has grown blurred with so much repetition. The simplicity and profundity of the message, such a secret contained in so few words, make him feel large as the night, immensely meaningful, utterly peaceful. Before he knows it, his peace turns back into sleep. He doesn't waken until daylight probes the room. He can't remember a word of the secret he heard in the dark.

His ears continue mumbling when he pulls off the headphones. The message is still there if only he can clarify it to himself. As soon as Tina leaves for the office, glancing anxiously at him as if she feels her sympathy hasn't reached him, he begins to write. He writes every phrase he can think of that fits the rhythm of the mumbling. At first he writes only phrases that mean something to him, then he makes himself relax and scribbles anything that comes to mind, scribbling larger so as not to strain his eyes. Before lunchtime he has to go out for more exercise books.

When he hears Tina's key in the lock he slaps the latest book shut and stows the pile under the bed, his head aching with the notion that he was about to stumble on the message. She wouldn't have noticed; she rushes straight to the bathroom. He strokes her head and murmurs consolingly and tries to feel the emotions he's enacting. "Don't worry about me," he mutters when she's able to ask how he is. All he wants to hear now is the mumbling.

But he has to sleep. In the darkest hours he gives up trying to hear words, only to find as he reaches to turn on the radio that Tina's still awake. "Sorry," he whispers. "Go to sleep."

"I'm trying."

"I'm not much use to you, am I?"

"I love you all the same."

"I'm serious." He pulls off the headphones and props himself against the pillow, which feels no softer than the rest of reality. "You're going to need more support than I can give you while I'm like this. Do you think you ought to move in with your folks for a while? Then you'd be able to sleep as you should."

"Would that make life easier for you?"

"It might."

"I'll call them in the morning."

He can't interpret her tone, out there beyond the tinnitus. He'll leave the radio alone and put up with a sleepless night on her behalf. Whenever he drifts toward sleep he feels close to distinguishing the words. Every time he jerks awake before he can grasp them, and realizes that Tina's still awake beside him.

In the morning, when she calls her parents, her eyes are red and moist: from sleeplessness, he assumes. He collects the mail from the downstairs hall, two bills and a letter from Clarion Press. Tina's arranging to go to her parents after work as he tears open the letter. The tinnitus seems to lurch closer as he reads the photocopied paragraphs. Clarion Press has been declared bankrupt. Not only have they ceased publishing, but even the unsold copies of his book are in the hands of the receiver.

Tina blinks at the letter as if she's not sure how she feels about it. "What do you want me to do now?" she murmurs.

"What you were going to do. What else?"

"I thought you might be glad of my support, that's all. I thought you were."

"Yes," Ward says with all the conviction he can muster. He hugs her tight, willing her to leave so that he may be able to think. Everything she says now distracts him—everything she says is pulled into the shape of the tinnitus. "I'll call you," he says as he walks her to the bus, "I'll come and see you," but he thinks she can sense his imminent overwhelming relief.

He sits at the table and tries to think. Hercules Books Are The Answer For You, his mind throbs; children chanting tables in the school seem to be chanting it too. He has no chance of finding another job to support himself and Tina, not with the clamor in his ears; he can't imagine even coping with interviews. But there's still Hercules Books, still Holmes' proposal of a trilogy, and if Ward can finish the library story there will be a collection for Holmes to publish while Ward tries to work on the novels. He carries the phone as far from the chanting as the cord will stretch.

"Hercules Books? Kendle Holmes, if he's there. Sorry, speak up, I can't make out a word. Ward Smith is speaking. He asked me to call."

The rhythm's deafening. It has invaded his speech. Even if he gets through to Holmes, he won't be able to hear him. They have to meet face to face. "Coming to town now. I won't expect lunch," he shouts, and replaces the receiver gently as if that may make up for his hysteria. But when he carries the phone back to its dark square beside the bed, he finds that at some point he has pulled the plug out of the wall.

It mustn't matter. He can only go. He gathers the typescripts of all the stories he's completed for the book and stuffs them into a Safeway bag. A bus carries him through charred streets to a train that's leaving for London in five minutes. He should be there just after lunch.

He tries to doze, rocked by the train. A slowing wakens him. The chattering arable landscape is winding down; it stops outside his window. Apart from the odd timid lurch of a few feet, the train makes no further move for almost two hours.

He avoids looking at the stoical pensioners opposite him, who appear to be chanting even though their lips are pinched shut, and leafs through his typescripts. "Phosphorescent Montmorency," "Cave Maria"—the titles he worked so hard to frame no longer convey anything to him, and he can't read more than a few words of the stories. A few pages of computer printout have strayed into the pile, and the stories mean as little to him. He shoves the pile into the bag and shrinks into himself, away from the wordless clamor, the senseless framing of landscape.

At last the train jerks forward, speeds to Euston. A huge voice explains the delay as Ward runs along the platform, but even that voice can't reach him. He mustn't take a taxi, he still has time to run. Euston Road, Tottenham Court Road, Charing Cross Road—he dashes past miles of signs, hugging himself to squeeze the spikiness out of his armpits. Hordes of books and commuters and vehicles jumble by, and give way to Greek Court. Ward dodges out of the crowd, taking the uproar with him, and shoulders his way into Hercules Books.

The receptionist in the melamine horseshoe mouths at him, but he hears a different rhythm. "Sorry I'm late, but my train was held up," Ward shouts. "Ward Smith, the writer. I'm here to see Holmes."

He stands his ground when she steps round the horseshoe, shaking her head and pointing at her watch. Suddenly he darts past her and flings open the door of the inner office. Holmes is alone, leaning back in his chair, reading a manuscript piled on his desk. He looks more surprised than pleased to see Ward. "Kendle, it's me," Ward says, trying not to bellow. "I've got something for you."

He hands Holmes the Safeway bag, waits while he frowns over the contents. "You'll publish these, won't you, while I compose. A fantasy trilogy, that's what you said. About time I extended myself."

When Holmes looks up, Ward hardly needs him to speak, his eyes say so much. "I can write your novels. Give me a chance," Ward pleads.

Holmes speaks then, though inaudibly to Ward. He points at the manuscript he's been reading. Surely nobody could have written a trilogy so swiftly, but perhaps he's claiming that the manuscript or the writer can be developed. A sense of meaninglessness more profound than anything he's experienced hitherto spreads through Ward, so profound that it feels like relief. He can do nothing for anyone, and nobody can need him as he is now. He swings round dizzily and heads for the streets, feeling as if he may fly.

The thought of Tina slows him. He should call her, not least to explain that Kendle Holmes will presumably be returning the typescripts, which she's welcome to sell on her own behalf if she can. He huddles in the nearest phone booth as the hordes of books surrounding him decay imperceptibly, as the commuters and the traffic do, dust of the future. All the sounds around him are decaying too, merging into a single rhythm. If anyone answers the phone he won't even know whose voice it is, let alone what she's saying.

He makes for Euston through the evening streets, the dwindling crowds. He's glad he knows his way there, doesn't have to try and read the street names. But going to Tina will only make the situation harder for them both. On the way to Euston he repeats her parents' number over and over to himself. Thank heaven it fits the rhythm. At Euston he dials it, then counts to ten. "I'm not coming back," he says. "Blame me, not yourself. All my money is yours, all my manuscripts too. Look after the baby. I love..." He can't say he loves her, it doesn't fit the rhythm. Perhaps emotions don't. He repeats everything he's just said, then he makes for the ticket windows.

Scotland is farthest and sparsest, he thinks. Tinnitus booms in his ears and his brain. Signs all around him are chanting the chant. He must get beyond signs, the unbearable clamor, unstable changing of signs. Ten hours to Inverness, farthest of all—details he learned for an unwritten tale. Night wipes out England, the train races in. The fluorescent cradle rocks him to sleep.

Dawn is in Inverness, lighting the signs. Ward leaves the town just as fast as he can. Opticians' shops make him falter, then run. He heads for the mountains beyond the firth, for the unpeopled roads and peaks, for the comfort of names in no language he knows.

Winds and rain slash him, mists isolate him. Food he finds growing, and sometimes in bins. He no longer remembers his life or his name, he no longer washes or cares how he smells. His body is something that carries him on; he is only the chant. What remains of his voice chants it constantly now. Perhaps he is chanting words that he can't hear. Perhaps he must walk until he's understood. Should he welcome that prospect or shrink from it fearfully? The rhythm must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on, must go on. must go on, must go on,