ever constructed.
Only Forward starts with a bang. It moves off with a series of even louder bangs. We meet Stark, and watch as he takes a job (it’s a dame, of course. It always takes a dame to start a story like this). Stark’s world-weary voice is irresistible (and to whom is he telling this tale? to us? to himself?) and it allows Smith to give us all the information he needs to (and to palm all the cards, coins, doves and cats he needs to). The story takes us to The City and to such neighbourhoods as Colour, Red, Stable and, my favourite of them all, Cat. Comic book, pulp places, each of them recognizable, each with its own dangers and joys.
Stark grows up as the novel goes on, because most first novels are, somewhere deep inside, coming-of-age novels. He moves from adolescence to responsibility in two very different ways.
Despite the gallimaufry of genres and of kinds of content in here, Smith, holding onto his novel, is always in control of his material, even if, sometimes, he seems to be wrestling it into submission, like a man clutching a fire hose as it bucks and sprays. But, once the possibility that this is all a dream, or a form of wish-fulfilment, is allowed out, it never goes away. It becomes harder to read the second half of the book literally, and easier to see it as a solo fugue, in which nothing is occurring outside Stark’s head.
Publishing Only Forward was a glorious flare that went up to let the world know about the arrival of a writer of talent and facility and a little genius. It won the British Fantasy Award and, six years later, when it was published in the US, the Philip K. Dick Award, doubly appropriate because it is a work of profoundly Dickian fiction: snarky gadgets, argumentative places, frangible realities and all.
Twenty years on, Michael Marshall and Michael Marshall Smith are twin stars who are continuing to burn brightly and with power. He’s more selective now about what he puts into his books, although the emotional power and the ability to plot have never let up or slackened. But this book was where it started. It’s impossible to forget the ending, and it has a very odd beginning, too. Did I mention all the stuff that happens in between?
Neil Gaiman
PART ONE The Paper Over the Cracks
But what if I’m a mermaid
In these jeans of his with
Her name still on them
Hey but I don’t care ’cos sometimes
I said sometimes
I hear my voice and it’s been
Here, silent all these years.
Silent all these years Tori Amos
Once there was a boy in a house. He was alone because his father was out at work, and his mother had run round the corner to the store. Although the boy was only four, he was a reliable child who knew the difference between toys and accidents waiting to happen, and his mother trusted him to be alone for five minutes.
The boy was sitting playing in the living room when suddenly he had an odd feeling. He looked around the room, thinking maybe that the cat had walked behind him, gently moving the air. But he wasn’t there, and nothing else was out of the ordinary, so the boy went back to what he was doing. He was colouring a picture of a jungle in his colouring book, and he wanted to have it finished before his father got home from work.
Then there was a knock at the door.
The boy stared at the door for a moment. That’s what the feeling had been about. He had known there would be a knock at the door, just as he sometimes knew that the phone was going to ring. He knew that it couldn’t be his mother, because he’d seen her take the keys. He also knew that he shouldn’t open the door to strangers when he was in the house alone. But something made him feel that this didn’t count, that this time was different. After all, he’d known about it beforehand. So he got up, and walked slowly over to the door. After a pause, he opened it.
At the time his family were living high up in a block of flats. Outside their door was a balconied walkway which went right round the floor and led to lifts round to the right. It was midmorning, and bright spring sun streamed into the room, the sky a shining splash of white and blue.
On the balcony stood a man. He was a big man, wearing tired jeans and nothing on his feet. His torso was naked except for tiny whorls of hair, and he didn’t have a head.
The man stood there on the balcony outside the boy’s flat, leaning against the wall. His head and neck had been pulled from his body like a tooth from the gum, and his shoulders had healed over smoothly, with a pronounced dip in the middle where the roots had been.
The boy did not feel afraid, but instead a kind of terrible compassion and loss. He didn’t know what the feelings were in words of course. He just felt bad for the man.
‘Hello?’ he said, timidly.
In his head the boy heard a voice.
‘Help me,’ it said.
‘How?’
‘Help me,’ said the voice again, ‘I can’t find my way home.’
The boy heard a noise from along the balcony and knew it was the lift doors opening. His mother was coming back. The man spoke once more, spoke to the boy as if he was the only one who could help him, as if somehow it was his responsibility.
‘I want to go back home. Help me.’
‘Where’s your home?’
The voice inside his head said something, and the boy tried to repeat it, but he was young, a child, and couldn’t get the word right. He heard footsteps coming towards the nearest corner, and knew they were his mother’s.
‘I can’t help you,’ he said. ‘I can’t help you,’ and he gently closed the door, shutting out the light. He walked stiffly back towards his book and all at once his legs gave way and left him on the floor.
When his mother came in moments later she found the boy asleep on the carpet, with tears on his face. He woke up when she hugged him, and said that nothing was wrong. He didn’t tell her about the dream, and soon forgot all about it.
But later he remembered, and realised it had not been a dream.
I was tired.
I got up, crawled out of the maelstrom of sheets, at 9.30 this morning. I took a shower, I drank some coffee. I sat on the floor with my back to the wall and felt my muscles creak as they carried a burning cigarette from the ashtray to my mouth, from my mouth to the ashtray. And when I first thought seriously about taking a nap, I looked at the clock. It was 10.45.
a.m.
I was still sitting there, waiting to die, waiting to fossilise, waiting for the coffee in the kitchen to evolve enough to make a cup of itself and bring it through to me, when the phone rang.
It was touch and go whether I answered it. It was right on the other side of the room, for Christ’s sake. I wasn’t geared up for answering the phone, not this morning. If I had’ve been, I’d have been dying quietly on the other side of the room, near where the phone is.
It rang for quite a while, and then stopped, which was nice. Then it started again, and went on for what felt like days. Whoever was on the other end clearly didn’t know how I felt, wasn’t empathising very well. At all, in fact. I decided it would be worth getting to the other side of the room just to tell whoever it was to go away.
So I let myself sag gently to the