Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [145]
A dog shivers out the end of its life meanwhile, huddled in the doorway of a 24-hour liquor store. The light inside is so yellow it looks like the old guy asleep behind the counter is floating in formaldehyde. When she was younger, the woman might have done something to help the dog. Now she finds she doesn’t really care. The emotion’s too old, buried too deep—and the dog’s going to die anyway.
I don’t know how long we wait, standing in the shadowed doorway, hiding deep in her expensive coat. She gets through half a pack of Kims, but she’s smoking fast and not wearing a watch. It feels like an eternity, as if this corner in the wasteland is all I’ve known or ever will see; as if time has stopped, meandered to a halt, and sees no compelling reason to start flowing again.
Eventually the sound of a car peels itself off from the backdrop of distant noise, and enters this little world. She looks, and sees a sweep of headlights up the street, hears the rustle of tires on asphalt, the hum of an engine happy with its job. Her heart beats a little more slowly as we watch the car approach, her mind cold and dense. It isn’t even hatred she feels, not tonight or any more. When the cancer of misery has a greater mass than the body it inhabits, it’s the tumour’s voice you hear all the time. She’s stopped fighting it now.
The car pulls up thirty yards along the street, alongside an address she spent two months tracking down, and ended up paying a hacker to find. The engine dies, and for the first time she glimpses the man’s face through the dirty windshield. Shadowed features, oblivious in their own world of turning things off and unfastening the seatbelt. Seeing him isn’t climactic, and comes with no roll of drums. It just makes us feel tired and old.
He takes an age to get out of the car, leaning across to gather a pack of cigarettes from off the dash. I don’t know for sure that’s what he’s doing, but that’s what she decides. It seems to be important to her, and what she feels about this man is far too complex for me to interpret. She is calm, mind whirling in circles so small you can’t really see them at all, but her heart is beating a little faster now, and as he finally opens the door and gets out of the car, we start to walk towards him.
He doesn’t notice, at first, still fumbling with his keys. She stops a few yards from the car, and he looks up blearily. Drunk, perhaps—though she doesn’t think so. He was always too much in control. Probably just tired, and letting it show while there’s no one around to see. He’s older, greyer than she was expecting, but with the same slightly hooded eyes. He looks early fifties to me, trim, a little sad. He doesn’t recognise her, but smiles anyway. It’s a good smile, and may once have been quite something, but it doesn’t reach the eyes any more.
It’s about now that the other car first appears, far down the other road. I didn’t notice it the first time, and she never does. She just stares at him, waiting. A generic smile isn’t enough, some tired and distracted muscle contraction. We want him to know who we are.
“Help you?” he asks eventually, peering at her. He stands by the car, back straight. He’s not frightened, sees no need to be, but he’s beginning to sense this is not a run-of-the-mill encounter. All he sees is a skinny woman in a good coat, but there’s something about us which disturbs him, reminds him of someone he used to be.
“Hello, Ray,” she says, and then nothing else, waiting for him to remember.
Maybe it’s something in her face that does it, puts him in mind of a grin long ago. His eyes open wider and some measure of confidence returns, his face relaxing a little. A picture of reliability. They look at each other for a while, but by now my attention is on the sound of the car. I know it’s coming, big and silver and fast.
“It’s Laura, isn’t it?” Ray asks eventually. Her name is still there, near the front of his mind. Maybe it always has been, the way