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Neil Gaiman

KEEPSAKES AND TREASURES: A LOVE STORY

I first met Neil Caiman in person at a strange and wonderful little duck of a convention, a kind of summer camp for writers at Roger Williams College in Newport, Rhode Island, called NECON. I did enjoy meeting him during a panel we did together on fairy tales, where I distinguished myself with my lack of knowledge (or interest, if you must know) on said subject—but where Neil showed off his own knowledge to marvelous effect. My real reason for attending NECON, to be perfectly honest, was to track down Gaiman (I had been E-mailing him for months, trying to get him to turn in a story for this book).

Neil Gaiman is, of course, author of the wildly successful Sandman comic book series and the creator of that perky young woman named Death; he is also the prose author of Neverwhere, Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett), and the collection Angels and Visitations, among many other works.

In the end, as you can see, my pursuit of Gaiman was successful. Neil did, at the wire, turn in the following story—again, to marvelous effect.

I am his Highness’ dog at Kew

Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?

ALEXANDER POPE.

On the Collar of a Dog which I Gave to His Royal Highness

You can call me a bastard if you like. It’s true, whichever way you want to cut it. My mum had me two years after being locked up “for her own protection;” this was back in 1952, when a couple of wild nights out with the local lads could be diagnosed as clinical nymphomania and you could be put away “to protect yourself and society” on the say-so of any two doctors. One of whom was her father, my grandfather; the other was his partner in the North London medical practice they shared.

So I know who my grandfather was. But my father was just somebody who shagged my mother somewhere in the building or grounds of Saint Andrew’s Asylum. That’s a nice word, isn’t it? Asylum. With all its implications of a place of safety: somewhere that shelters you from the bitter and dangerous old world outside. Nothing like the reality of that hole. I went to see it before they knocked it down in the late seventies. It still reeked of piss and pine-scented disinfectant floor-wash. Long, dark, badly lit corridors with clusters of tiny, cell-like rooms off them. If you were looking for Hell and you found St. Andrew’s you’d not have been disappointed.

It says on her medical records that she’d spread her legs for anyone, but I doubt it. She was locked up, back then. Anyone who wanted to stick his cock into her would have needed a key to her cell.

When I was eighteen I spent my last summer holiday before I went up to University hunting down the four men who were most likely to have been my father: two psychiatric nurses, the secure ward doctor, and the governor of the asylum.

My mum was only seventeen when she went inside. I’ve got a little black-and-white wallet photograph of her from just before she was put away. She’s leaning against the side of a Morgan sports car parked in a country lane. She’s smiling, sort of flirtily, at the photographer. She was a looker, my mum.

I didn’t know which one of the four was my dad, so I killed all of them. They had each fucked her, after all: I got them to admit to it before I did them in. The best was the governor, a red-faced fleshy old lech with an honest-to-goodness handlebar mustache, like I haven’t seen for twenty years now. I garotted him with his Guards tie. Spit-bubbles came from his mouth, and he went blue as an unboiled lobster.

There were other men around St. Andrew’s who might have been my father, but after those four the joy went out of it. I told myself that I’d killed the four likeliest candidates, and if I knocked off everyone who might have knocked up my mother it would have turned into a massacre. So I stopped.

I was handed over to the local orphanage to bring up. According to her medical records, they sterilized my mum immediately