The Monster’s Corner: Stories Through Inhuman Eyes

THE OTHER ONE by Michael Marshall Smith

KERRY MUTTERED under her breath but did up her seat belt in response to the stewardess’s request. She’d flown the Atlantic more than enough times to know that the fasten-your-seat-belts sign went on a good half an hour before touchdown: One of her personal flying rituals (along with reading the safety instructions, bringing her own food, and accepting every single offer of an alcoholic drink) was to buckle up only when the spinning gray of runway was visible out of the window. There’d been three puling babies in her cabin alone, however, the plane had been full to bursting and moreover short-staffed, and she could tell that, behind her professional smile, the stewardess was close to the edge. So Kerry did what she was told. She was, after all, reasonably good at that.

Belt secured, she sat and stared at the back of the seat in front. She’d been awake throughout the eight-hour night flight, and now that it was coming to an end she felt the usual hollow tiredness, mingled with depression.

England. Bloody England.

From a few rows behind came the now-familiar sound of a baby sharing its confusion and discomfort with the world, urgent with the selfishness of the infant. Kerry realized the flight had doubtless been far, far worse for the infant’s parent, but still wished both mother and child had been checked as baggage instead. She fished in the seat pocket and retrieved the Bose headphones. They’d been outlandishly expensive, but there wasn’t much point listening to music through anything less than the best. With the buds slotted comfortably into her ears, she found the album on the iPod she’d bought on the first day of the trip and cranked the volume up high.

She smiled as the opening track crashed into her head and, eyes closed, gently rocked in her seat to the beat. She so nearly hadn’t gone, but Washington had been a lot of fun, in the end. A hell of a long way to go to watch her best friend (finally) get married — leaving Kerry as the last single girl in their crowd, cheers for that — but a good excuse to get out of the country for a week. And what a week. The small but bullish English contingent (mainly old school friends of Diane, whom Kerry hadn’t known) had done their best to have a good time in a foreign land, to show the locals that when it came to alcohol consumption, Brits were all about Shock and Awe. They’d succeeded, big-time, and Kerry still carried the vestiges of her sixth hangover in a row.

“… and there are aaaaiiiiiiii-aaiinnGELS!”

She suddenly realized she’d started singing along to the music, and opened her eyes. The man across the aisle was smiling at her. She stared at him blankly until he turned away, then jacked the volume up again and closed her eyes as the second track began.

She’d downloaded the album almost at random in a Starbucks right after buying the iPod, before she’d met anyone, before the party started. Downloaded quite a few albums, in fact, but this was the one that had stuck. Everything about the jangly guitars and raucous girly harmonies brought to mind music from thirty years ago, back when you saved your pocket money and bought the latest single by your fave band, rushing home to tear it to shreds on a cheap turntable, annoying the crap out of your parents as a bonus. Nobody had fave bands or listened-to-shreds albums these days. They had nonlinear playlists instead, and — if they were old enough, stuffed into a bookcase in a disregarded corner of the living room — a few ancient LPs (one Dire Straits, one Phil Collins, one mid-period Bowie, one syrupy Vivaldi), some Oasis or Chemical Brothers CDs (to show they were still trying to keep on top of things in the 1990s), sandwiched between doomed attempts to learn to like club music when you weren’t on drugs, and stuff they couldn’t even remember buying. Nobody hated anybody else’s choice in music anymore, either, aside from knuckle-dragging online “reviewers” who one-starred anything that hadn’t been on The X Factor. Nobody had the backbone to truly hate anything, these days: They were too busy liking — Facebooking or tweeting whatever track they were listening to, right this minute, right now. On the assumption, presumably, that all their virtual friends would give a flying fuck, that they would interpret these bleatings as a sign of character, rather than a yelp for attention in a digitized void. When everyone wears headphones, music is not sociable anymore.

As the music pumped through her head, Kerry felt herself transported to a room in the Embassy Suites Hotel in D.C., back into the arms of someone she was never going to see again. She’d been a bad girl (well, a bad woman, actually, let’s face it), and the window for being able to ignore this fact would close the second the jumbo’s wheels smacked back onto English soil. Richard was going to be pissed off at her, and knowing him, she’d pay for a good long time. On the verge of tears, she pushed the volume up to full and filled her head with memory.

She felt the impacts as the wheels touched down. The double thud of a textbook landing, like a heavy hand knocking on a sepulchral door.

Welcome back to the morgue.

She turned the iPod off, blinking rapidly, and sat waiting while everyone else stood up and milled impatiently in the aisles, three hundred sheep eager for the slaughter of Real Life.

The immigration queue took even longer than usual, and by the time she handed her passport to the fatuously jolly official, Kerry’s mood had plummeted further. Maybe it was guilt over what she’d done, but she seemed to be taking the return to England even harder than usual. She knew that in a couple of weeks everything would seem normal. Her rut was there, ready and waiting, the random set of circumstances that she’d colluded in turning into her life, her story, the Kerry Jones Experience. She didn’t want her present anger and depression to fade, however, didn’t want to be accepted back into the fold. She stared balefully at the passport official, mentally daring him to give her a hard time: The photo had been taken only three months previously; she was even wearing the same jacket, for God’s sake. He merely welcomed her back, though, his accent sounding strange and provincial and dull, and waved her on toward baggage retrieval.

Welcome back?

To what?

She waited for her bag to meander out onto the belt, very much wanting a cigarette. Her consumption had skyrocketed during the week in Washington, and the duty-free cache wasn’t going to last long. She was supposed to be giving up, of course, turning into clean-living, gym-rat Kerry, the better version of herself that always seemed just out of reach. Wasn’t going to happen today. Tomorrow didn’t look great either.

Her bag eventually emerged blinking into the light, as if by accident, and she hauled it onto her shoulder and tromped off toward Customs. Slowing as she approached the channels, she tried to decide a question that had mildly stressed her out for the entire flight. She didn’t know for sure if the new iPod had to be declared, but eventually elected to head down the Nothing to Declare channel. She never got stopped anyway. She looked like a good girl.

A Chinese man with a stupendously large suitcase veered in front of her, and she accelerated round him, anxious to get out of the airport and onto the final leg of her journey, onto the tube up to Camden. She wanted a bath, some tea, and a cigarette, preferably several. She didn’t want to see or talk to anyone.

“Good morning, madam,” a firm, female voice said, and Kerry felt a hand on her shoulder. “Would you mind stepping this way, please?”

She let herself be led to one of the tables by the young Scottish woman, her guts taut with weary anxiety. It was just her luck, just her sodding luck.

“So,” the woman said, “where have you been?”

“Washington,” Kerry replied, loading the word with as much cheery innocence as possible, as though hoping through pronunciation alone to demonstrate herself incapable of transgressing any law.

“Anything you want to tell me about?”

Kerry decided to go for it. “Well, there is one thing,” she said, putting her bags onto the table.

The woman’s eyes remained friendly. Sort of.

“I bought an iPod,” Kerry continued, offhand. “I don’t know whether I should have decl — ”

“If you didn’t know, then you should have gone down the other channel. That’s illegal, by itself. And yes, you should have declared it.”

The woman unzipped Kerry’s suitcase and started lifting her clothes out onto the table. Other passengers strolled by, flicking curious glances, relieved that some stranger had been sacrificed to the dark gods of Customs, and not them. Kerry watched as her holiday was picked out and strewn over the surface. The dress she’d worn to the bridal shower. The card Diane had given her to thank her for coming all that way. A souvenir ashtray stolen from the Embassy Suites. Her lips twitched slightly when she saw this last. The first time John’s hand had touched hers had been an accident, as they simultaneously stubbed out cigarettes, early one evening two days before the wedding.

“What were you doing in Washington?” the woman asked, unzipping Kerry’s toiletries bag and tipping out the contents.

“I was at a wedding,” Kerry chirped, still doing her best to seem Trustworthy and Normal, though thrown sufficiently off balance to half-fear that Washington, D.C., was well known to be off-limits to British nationals, but somehow no one had told her, and she was falling further and further into a trap. “My best friend married an American, and they had the wedding there.”

The woman gave no reaction to this, and instead unscrewed the cap of Kerry’s shampoo. She squidged a little out of the container and squinted into the bottle.

“What are you looking for?” Kerry asked, striving for a tone of bright and innocent inquiry.

“Drugs.”

“Oh.” Drugs, she thought. Drugs.

Feeling dizzy, she let the woman get on with it, and stopped trying to pretend to be something she was not. Lyrics from the album thudded in her mind as she watched the process, wondering how she’d be feeling now if she actually was a drug courier or terrorist mastermind, and not a midranking and terminally bored PR, if at some point in the muddy “whatever” of the last two decades she’d taken a different course. Unbidden, the word “excited” popped into her mind, and she frowned.

Meanwhile, the official set about dismantling her toothpaste dispenser.

Twenty minutes later, flushed and embarrassed, Kerry trekked the long corridor toward the tube. The Customs woman had relented in the end, and even let her off the duty on the iPod, though sternly admonishing her not to do it again. What was weird was that there hadn’t been even a perfunctory attempt at a body search. Kerry could have had her jacket pockets stuffed with heroin or explosives or rare penguins and got away with it. She rather wished she had, in fact. The run-in with officialdom had affected her badly. She felt strange, untethered. She’d listened to the album too much on the flight, and songs were coursing round her head. She believed there was precious little sugar in her heart anymore, though. Precious little of anything, in fact.

On the tube she reached into her bag and pulled out her notepad. The last few pages were filled with self-motivational notes she’d scribbled on the flight, while everyone else was asleep or submitting to some inane movie. She always stayed awake on the way back to England, because that was the last chance she had to feel good, to feel like she was away from home, from her job, from Richard, from everything. Already she could feel that sense of perspective and freedom ebbing quickly away. Tomorrow she’d be back at Whitehead PR, selling her life by the day in the pursuit of percentage points of popularity for companies producing crap that people didn’t need. She’d be back in a flat that cost a fortune to rent and made her feel caged, and she’d be back in the same country as Richard. Which meant back with Richard, whatever the technicalities of the situation might be. Richard with the so-handsome face, Richard with the custom BMW, Richard the Funds Manager. Richard who’d had two sizable affairs with high-powered fund manageresses, and yet who still got mileage out of Kerry’s sole previous one-night digression, five years before. Richard who was now totally unrecognizable as the genuinely funny and charming boy she’d met in her second year at university; Richard who no longer had the faintest idea of what she was like, and seldom gave the impression that he cared.

And yet … Richard whom she couldn’t seem to make a break from. Richard who, in some indefinable, unhelpful, dire way, she still loved.

They weren’t even supposed to be going out with each other. They were “taking a break” to “recharge batteries” that she believed had long ago cracked and died in the sun. She knew she was going to have to tell him about John, nonetheless, and she knew what the result would be. Richard wouldn’t give her the relief of leaving her. He’d merely chalk up another point on the complex scoreboard they tended, and stay around, filling up the background. Not making her happy, but not going away.

And John? John the quiet Canadian, who’d understood her immediately, who’d got her, reawakening the girl of twenty years ago with one crooked grin? She’d never speak to him again. What would be the point?

It was only an hour and a half after touchdown, but already her notes made no sense. “Be yourself,” they said, “Remember the way you used to be,” and “Listen to the album.” She knew what these feeble homilies meant, and also that they were a waste of paper and ink. When she’d been away, the album had been everything, because it had nailed what she was feeling, liberated a younger self. Along with John, and alcohol — and just an ounce of freedom — it had wrenched open a path back to a teenager who laughed a lot and wore bright 1980s colors and didn’t give a damn what other people thought.

But that teenager was still sitting on the plane, all alone and peering out at the drizzle. That girl thought Miami Vice was cool, had never heard of e-mail or eBay, and bought wine because it was dirt cheap, not because the Sunday Times said it was good.

That girl didn’t have a job she hated and a car to run, friends to tolerate, a life to withstand. That girl was dead, head smeared across the road by the hit-and-run accident of growing up.

She was thirty-eight years old now, for fuck’s sake.

Suddenly Kerry slumped forward in her seat, hitched over by a sob she’d had no idea was coming. She couldn’t live like this anymore, drifting toward death in some endless Plan B. She couldn’t accept this was all there was. She wanted a Blue Adonis of her own, and she wanted to run off down midnight streets, shouting at the sky and frightening passing dogs. She didn’t want to go back to a relationship where there was always something to discuss, something to sort out, something to forget.

She threw her head back and stared at the roof of the carriage, head whirling, thoughts spinning, feeling her heart break and the world finally split.

She switched lines at King’s Cross, on a whim, taking the City branch of the Northern Line before she really knew what she was going to do. Richard, predictable/dependable bastard that he was, took his lunch at 12:30 precisely, returning to the office exactly an hour later. She’d be just in time to catch him going back in. She’d say hi, surprise him. Why, she had no idea. It was something different. It was something she’d never done before. It was something new, and right now she needed the promise of that more than just about anything.

She put the headphones back in and restarted the album at the first track. People in suits stared at her as she bobbed her head to the music. She stuck her tongue out, feeling ridiculous but exhilarated, and wondered whatever had happened to Molly Ringwald. She must presumably be alive, somewhere. No longer a movie star. No longer young. But still, in some diminished sense, Molly Ringwald. Did she get up in the morning and stare in the mirror, wondering what had happened to the other her, the Zeitgeist girl? Was that other Molly still out there somewhere, still bright-eyed, still new, wondering where her world had gone?

Kerry kept turning the music up, and up.

She stepped out into the City with the music still pounding in her ears. It was so loud by now that she couldn’t help tripping along in time to the beat, and even did a clumsy Madonna twirl, oblivious to the weight of her shoulder bag and how ludicrous she must look. Madonna didn’t twirl much anymore, of course: She was a mother now (famously so, controversially so, please-shut-up-about-it-now so). But Madonna had twirled once, and they’d all twirled together, and Kerry still remembered how.

She had a few minutes to spare when she reached the point in the street opposite Richard’s office. She decided to wait until she actually saw him, not declaring her presence ahead of time with a text message, instead hoping against hope that he’d arrive arm in arm with some secretary or up-and-coming foreign-equities specialist, so she could quietly turn away and never speak to him again. While she waited, she stood staring at the oh-so-imposing entrance of his building, across the wide and busy road, wishing someone would have the balls to bomb it, her head still bobbing to the music, wondering why she was really here. She didn’t want to speak to Richard, didn’t want to see him smile. She was tired of making do, of being good, of toeing the company line. She was tired of the fact that he couldn’t understand a single thing that went on in her head. She was just tired.

Full stop.

End of.

Her eardrums were beginning to hurt, too. The music was pushing things out of her brain, last in, first out. She wished she had been carrying drugs, a case full of heroin and dirty needles; she wished she was drunk, sprawled across a hotel room floor, or panting naked on her hands and knees above someone, lowering her open mouth toward his; she wished she didn’t have a career or friends or a home. She wished she had a knife.

Finally she saw him, through the curtain of fast-moving cars and trucks. Dark brown hair falling over the face she knew so well, with the naturalness that only £150 haircuts can maintain, his suit hanging across gym-squared shoulders. He looked hatefully smug. He was in context. Head full of stocks and mezzanine-financed leverage buyouts, a player in a platinum-card jungle.

And … he wasn’t alone.

Kerry stared through the traffic, hardly able to believe her fantasy had come true. Richard wasn’t by himself. He was with a woman. An attractive woman.

They were holding hands.

She blinked, unsure what to do. Shout? Storm across the road? Or just walk quickly away, and send him the mother of all e-mails when she got back home?

Richard and the woman stopped a few yards from the door to his office. They stood close, face-to-face, talking. Kerry quickly fished in her shoulder bag and yanked out her little camera, suddenly knowing what would be even better than a brutal e-mail: taking a picture and sending that instead. No accompanying text, just an image. There had been too much talking over the years, far too many words. There didn’t need to be any more.

She held the camera up and zoomed in. For maximum impact, she wanted the picture to …

Then she froze.

She zoomed in a little further.

The woman Richard was talking to was her.

They were saying:

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure,” Kerry said, squeezing his hand. “I’ve moved all my stuff in, haven’t I?”

“I know. I know. But …”

“I’m not going to change my mind, Richard. We should have done this years ago.”

“We should. And I’m sorry we didn’t. That was my fault. It’s just … I’m still trying to catch up. Since you decided not to go to the States for that woman’s wedding, everything’s changed. It’s … all different.”

“What kind of different? Bad different?”

Richard smiled, and it was a real one, the smile of a man who had been bored, and who’d been bad, and who’d been kind of an asshole, but who was allowing himself to believe that he could be another way, that something had happened and life didn’t have to be how it had been.

“No,” he said. “The other one.”

After they’d kissed, Kerry watched him go into his building. He looked surprised, and disconcerted, and cautiously happy, as he had for most of the last week. Just before he disappeared into the elevator, he winked. She winked back.

Then she turned to look across the busy street, at the woman who looked exactly like her, who was still holding her camera and staring at her, still openmouthed. The plane-bedraggled Kerry. The can’t-say-yes Kerry, the Kerry who seemed intent on pushing happiness beyond her own reach, the Kerry who demanded perfection from the world and was unable to understand that contentment is a matter of choice. The Kerry who’d made her own bed, by leaving enough room for someone else to slip into her place, an alternative who’d been waiting a long, long time.

Kerry hoped that other Kerry had enough clothes in her shoulder bag to last a while, because the flat she thought she was returning to had been vacated two days after she flew to America, its contents thrown away or given to charity or moved into Richard’s place in Islington. There would be changes to be made there, too, in time. Richard wasn’t perfect. He would never be. But he’d get closer. Under her guidance. With her love. Nobody gets perfect, ever. But they can get enough.

Kerry raised her hand and waved. She tried not to smile as she did so, or to feel too pleased with herself, but found it impossible. The woman on the other side of the street deserved this, after all. She ought to be happy, really. She’d wanted something different.

She’d got it now.