What You Make It: Selected Short Stories
The first ever collection of Michael Marshall Smith’s award-winning short stories.The first piece of fiction Smith ever wrote – a short story called The Man Who Drew Cats – won the World Fantasy award. It’s included here along with many others, some unpublished, which show the incredible versatility of one of the most exciting writers working in Britain today. The collection is stuffed with surreal, disturbing gems including:‘When God Lived in Kentish Town’ Someone comes up to you when you’re quietly eating your stir-fried rice in a great Chinese take away, and tells you: ‘I’ve found God’. You try to ignore them, right? But what if they have, and what if He works in a drab old electrical store on Kentish Town Road and he’s not getting many customers?‘Diet Hell’ Some people will do anything to fit into their old jeans.‘Save As…’ What if you could back up your life? Save it up to a certain point and return to it when things went horribly wrong?‘Everybody Goes’ An idyllic childhood day from a long, hot summer. The kind you want to last for ever. All good things must come to an end, mustn’t they?
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MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH
WHAT YOU MAKE IT
A book of short stories
Dedication
This collection is dedicated to the three people without whom … to Nicholas Royle, Stephen Jones and Howard Ely.
Table of Contents
Chapter 3 - Hell Hath Enlarged Herself
Chapter 6 - The Man Who Drew Cats
Chapter 9 - More Bitter Than Death
I like short stories. I hope you do too, because this isn't a novel. If an honest-to-goodness novel is what you're looking for, then put this volume back on the pile. Propped up, so other people can see it. Or better still, take it with you anyway. You can snuggle down into novels, draw them over your head like a warm duvet and go away for a while. It's like taking a road trip in another country – while the land's got you in its clutches, you can't go home again. Short stories are different. They're evenings out, or day trips, an hour spent gazing out to sea. You don't have to do lots of packing beforehand or set timer switches or arrange for someone to feed the cat, but they leave their mark on your life all the same. Sometimes more so: short stories don't have the luxury of time to draw you in – so they have to come in low, under the radar, and hit you with the very first shot. They're doorways to other worlds, perpetually left ajar, dreams that you experience while you are still half awake.
Novels are time out of time: short stories are part of real life, and sometimes the shortest song can contain the longest single note.
What follows is a selection of the stories I have written in the last decade. Some of them are about fairly normal things, others less so. A few come at similar ideas from different angles, others stand alone; some have a life of their own now, having previously appeared in a variety of formats, while others are shiny new. They include both the first story I ever wrote, and the most recent. Everything else is bracketed between them. Through one of those coincidences which seem too telling to be merely random, while I was putting this collection together I was in Edinburgh for the Book Festival. In the evening I took my wife – who was but a dot on an unseen horizon when the first of these stories were written – to the place where I was sitting when I got the idea for that first short story, just over ten years previously. It was a strange feeling. Two days later, back in London, I attended a book launch for the writer who did more than any other to inspire me to write in the first place – and whose fiction I'd been avidly reading on that day in Edinburgh a decade before. This was the writer's first official visit to this country in seventeen years, and it seems odd that it should fall in the same week that I had stood on The Mound in Edinburgh and remembered how it had been.
But that's the way life is, a sea of coincidences and strangenesses and dark heartbeats – and what follows is an attempt to capture something of it. Then it was 1987. Now it's 1998. These stories chart the journey from there to here, and I hope that amongst them you'll find a couple of evenings to remember.
Michael Marshall Smith
London, October 1998
I got a new job a couple of weeks ago. It's pretty much the same as my old job, but at a nicer company. What I do is trouble-shoot computers and their software – and yes, I know that sounds dull. People tell me so all the time. Not in words, exactly, but in their glassy smiles and their awkward ‘let's be nice to the geek’ demeanour.
It's a strange phenomenon, the whole ‘computer people are losers’ mentality. All round the world, at desks in every office and every building, people are using computers. Day in, day out. Every now and then, these machines go wrong. They're bound to: they're complex systems, like a human body, or society. When someone gets hurt, you call in a doctor. When a riot breaks out, it's the police that – for once – you want to see on your doorstep. It's their job to sort it out. Similarly, if your word processor starts dumping files or your hard disk goes non-linear, it's someone like me you need. Someone who actually understands the magic box which sits on your desk, and can make it all lovely again.
But do we get any thanks, any kudos for being the emergency services of the late twentieth century?
Do we fuck.
I can understand this to a degree. There are enough hard-line nerds and social zero geeks around to make it seem like a losing way of life. But there are plenty of pretty basic earthlings doing all the other jobs too, and no one expects them to turn up for work in a pin-wheel hat and a T-shirt saying: ‘Programmers do it recursively’. For the record, I play reasonable blues guitar, I've been out with a girl and have worked undercover for the CIA. The last bit isn't true, of course, but you get the general idea.
