The Neil Gaiman Reader Read online

  Mrs. Whitaker looked at Sir Galaad, most comely of all knights, sitting fair and noble in her small kitchen.

  She caught her breath.

  “And that’s all I have brought for you,” said Galaad. “They weren’t easy to get, either.”

  Mrs. Whitaker put the ruby fruit down on her kitchen table. She looked at the Philosopher’s Stone, and the Egg of the Phoenix, and the Apple of Life.

  Then she walked into her parlor and looked at the mantelpiece: at the little china basset hound, and the Holy Grail, and the photograph of her late husband Henry, shirtless, smiling and eating an ice cream in black and white, almost forty years away.

  She went back into the kitchen. The kettle had begun to whistle. She poured a little steaming water into the teapot, swirled it around, and poured it out. Then she added two spoonfuls of tea and one for the pot and poured in the rest of the water. All this she did in silence.

  She turned to Galaad then, and she looked at him.

  “Put that apple away,” she told Galaad, firmly. “You shouldn’t offer things like that to old ladies. It isn’t proper.”

  She paused, then. “But I’ll take the other two,” she continued, after a moment’s thought. “They’ll look nice on the mantelpiece. And two for one’s fair, or I don’t know what is.”

  Galaad beamed. He put the ruby apple into his leather pouch. Then he went down on one knee, and kissed Mrs. Whitaker’s hand.

  “Stop that,” said Mrs. Whitaker. She poured them both cups of tea, after getting out the very best china, which was only for special occasions.

  They sat in silence, drinking their tea.

  When they had finished their tea they went into the parlor. Galaad crossed himself, and picked up the Grail.

  Mrs. Whitaker arranged the Egg and the Stone where the Grail had been. The Egg kept tipping on one side, and she propped it up against the little china dog.

  “They do look very nice,” said Mrs. Whitaker.

  “Yes,” agreed Galaad. “They look very nice.”

  “Can I give you anything to eat before you go back?” she asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Some fruitcake,” she said. “You may not think you want any now, but you’ll be glad of it in a few hours’ time. And you should probably use the facilities. Now, give me that, and I’ll wrap it up for you.”

  She directed him to the small toilet at the end of the hall, and went into the kitchen, holding the Grail. She had some old Christmas wrapping paper in the pantry, and she wrapped the Grail in it, and tied the package with twine. Then she cut a large slice of fruitcake and put it in a brown paper bag, along with a banana and a slice of processed cheese in silver foil.

  Galaad came back from the toilet. She gave him the paper bag, and the Holy Grail. Then she went up on tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek.

  “You’re a nice boy,” she said. “You take care of yourself.”

  He hugged her, and she shooed him out of the kitchen, and out of the back door, and she shut the door behind him. She poured herself another cup of tea, and cried quietly into a Kleenex, while the sound of hoofbeats echoed down Hawthorne Crescent.

  On Wednesday Mrs. Whitaker stayed in all day.

  On Thursday she went down to the post office to collect her pension. Then she stopped in at the Oxfam Shop.

  The woman on the till was new to her. “Where’s Marie?” asked Mrs. Whitaker.

  The woman on the till, who had blue-rinsed gray hair and blue spectacles that went up into diamante points, shook her head and shrugged her shoulders. “She went off with a young man,” she said. “On a horse. Tch. I ask you. I’m meant to be down in the Heathfield shop this afternoon. I had to get my Johnny to run me up here, while we find someone else.”

  “Oh,” said Mrs. Whitaker. “Well, it’s nice that she’s found herself a young man.”

  “Nice for her, maybe,” said the lady on the till, “But some of us were meant to be in Heathfield this afternoon.”

  On a shelf near the back of the shop Mrs. Whitaker found a tarnished old silver container with a long spout. It had been priced at sixty pence, according to the little paper label stuck to the side. It looked a little like a flattened, elongated teapot.

  She picked out a Mills & Boon novel she hadn’t read before. It was called Her Singular Love. She took the book and the silver container up to the woman on the till.

  “Sixty-five pee, dear,” said the woman, picking up the silver object, staring at it. “Funny old thing, isn’t it? Came in this morning.” It had writing carved along the side in blocky old Chinese characters and an elegant arching handle. “Some kind of oil can, I suppose.”

  “No, it’s not an oil can,” said Mrs. Whitaker, who knew exactly what it was. “It’s a lamp.”

  There was a small metal finger ring, unornamented, tied to the handle of the lamp with brown twine.

  “Actually,” said Mrs. Whitaker, “on second thoughts, I think I’ll just have the book.”

  She paid her five pence for the novel, and put the lamp back where she had found it, in the back of the shop. After all, Mrs. Whitaker reflected, as she walked home, it wasn’t as if she had anywhere to put it.

  Murder Mysteries

  1992

  The Fourth Angel says:

  Of this order I am made one,

  From Mankind to guard this place

  That through their Guilt they have foregone

  For they have forfeited His Grace;

  Therefore all this must they shun

  Or else my Sword they shall embrace

  And myself will be their Foe

  To flame them in the Face.

  —CHESTER MYSTERY CYCLE,

  The Creation and Adam and Eve, 1461

  THIS IS TRUE.

  Ten years ago, give or take a year, I found myself on an enforced stopover in Los Angeles, a long way from home. It was December, and the California weather was warm and pleasant.

  England, however, was in the grip of fogs and snowstorms, and no planes were landing there. Each day I’d phone the airport, and each day I’d be told to wait another day.

  This had gone on for almost a week.

  I was barely out of my teens. Looking around today at the parts of my life left over from those days, I feel uncomfortable, as if I’ve received a gift, unasked, from another person: a house, a wife, children, a vocation. Nothing to do with me, I could say, innocently. If it’s true that every seven years each cell in your body dies and is replaced, then I have truly inherited my life from a dead man; and the misdeeds of those times have been forgiven, and are buried with his bones.

  I was in Los Angeles. Yes.

  On the sixth day I received a message from an old sort-of-girlfriend from Seattle: she was in L.A., too, and she had heard I was around on the friends-of-friends network. Would I come over?

  I left a message on her machine. Sure.

  That evening: a small, blonde woman approached me as I came out of the place I was staying. It was already dark.

  She stared at me, as if she were trying to match me to a description, and then, hesitantly, she said my name.

  “That’s me. Are you Tink’s friend?”

  “Yeah. Car’s out back. C’mon. She’s really looking forward to seeing you.”

  The woman’s car was one of the huge old boatlike jobs you only ever seem to see in California. It smelled of cracked and flaking leather upholstery. We drove out from wherever we were to wherever we were going.

  Los Angeles was at that time a complete mystery to me; and I cannot say I understand it much better now. I understand London, and New York, and Paris: you can walk around them, get a sense of what’s where in just a morning of wandering, maybe catch the subway. But Los Angeles is about cars. Back then I didn’t drive at all; even today I will not drive in America. Memories of L.A. for me are linked by rides in other people’s cars, with no sense there of the shape of the city, of the relationships between the people and the place. The regularity of the road
s, the repetition of structure and form, mean that when I try to remember it as an entity, all I have is the boundless profusion of tiny lights I saw from the hill of Griffith Park one night, on my first trip to the city. It was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen, from that distance.

  “See that building?” said my blonde driver, Tink’s friend. It was a redbrick Art Deco house, charming and quite ugly.

  “Yes.”

  “Built in the 1930s,” she said, with respect and pride.

  I said something polite, trying to comprehend a city inside which fifty years could be considered a long time.

  “Tink’s real excited. When she heard you were in town. She was so excited.”

  “I’m looking forward to seeing her again.”

  Tink’s real name was Tinkerbell Richmond. No lie.

  She was staying with friends in a small apartment clump, somewhere an hour’s drive from downtown L.A.

  What you need to know about Tink: she was ten years older than me, in her early thirties; she had glossy black hair and red, puzzled lips, and very white skin, like Snow White in the fairy stories; the first time I met her I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world.

  Tink had been married for a while at some point in her life and had a five-year-old daughter called Susan. I had never met Susan—when Tink had been in England, Susan had been staying on in Seattle, with her father.

  People named Tinkerbell name their daughters Susan.

  Memory is the great deceiver. Perhaps there are some individuals whose memories act like tape recordings, daily records of their lives complete in every detail, but I am not one of them. My memory is a patchwork of occurrences, of discontinuous events roughly sewn together: The parts I remember, I remember precisely, whilst other sections seem to have vanished completely.

  I do not remember arriving at Tink’s house, nor where her flatmate went.

  What I remember next is sitting in Tink’s lounge with the lights low, the two of us next to each other, on her sofa.

  We made small talk. It had been perhaps a year since we had seen one another. But a twenty-one-year-old boy has little to say to a thirty-two-year-old woman, and soon, having nothing in common, I pulled her to me.

  She snuggled close with a kind of sigh, and presented her lips to be kissed. In the half-light her lips were black. We kissed for a little on the couch, and I stroked her breasts through her blouse and then she said:

  “We can’t fuck. I’m on my period.”

  “Fine.”

  “I can give you a blowjob, if you’d like.”

  I nodded assent, and she unzipped my jeans, and lowered her head to my lap.

  After I had come, she got up and ran into the kitchen. I heard her spitting into the sink, and the sound of running water: I remember wondering why she did it, if she hated the taste that much. Then she returned and we sat next to each other on the couch.

  “Susan’s upstairs, asleep,” said Tink. “She’s all I live for. Would you like to see her?”

  “I don’t mind.”

  We went upstairs. Tink led me into a darkened bedroom. There were child-scrawl pictures all over the walls—wax-crayoned drawings of winged fairies and little palaces—and a small fair-haired girl was asleep in the bed.

  “She’s very beautiful,” said Tink, and kissed me. Her lips were still slightly sticky. “She takes after her father.”

  We went downstairs. We had nothing else to say, nothing else to do. Tink turned on the main light. For the first time, I noticed tiny crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes, incongruous on her perfect Barbie doll face.

  “I love you,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Would you like a ride back?”

  “If you don’t mind leaving Susan alone . . . ? ”

  She shrugged, and I pulled her to me for the last time. At night Los Angles is all lights. And shadows.

  A blank, here, in my mind. I simply don’t remember what happened next. She must have driven me back to the place where I was staying—how else would I have gotten there? I do not even remember kissing her good-bye. Perhaps I simply waited on the sidewalk and watched her drive away.

  Perhaps.

  I do know, however, that once I reached the place I was staying, I just stood there, unable to go inside, to wash, and then to sleep, unwilling to do anything else.

  I was not hungry. I did not want alcohol. I did not want to read or talk. I was scared of walking too far, in case I became lost, bedeviled by the repeating motifs of Los Angeles, spun around and sucked in so I could never find my way home again. Central Los Angeles sometimes seems to me to be nothing more than a pattern, like a set of repeating blocks: a gas station, a few homes, a mini-mall (doughnuts, photo developers, Laundromats, fast foods), and repeat until hypnotized; and the tiny changes in the mini-malls and the houses only serve to reinforce the structure.

  I thought of Tink’s lips. Then I fumbled in a pocket of my jacket and pulled out a packet of cigarettes.

  I lit one, inhaled, blew blue smoke into the warm night air.

  There was a stunted palm tree growing outside the place I was staying, and I resolved to walk for a way, keeping the tree in sight, to smoke my cigarette, perhaps even to think; but I felt too drained to think. I felt very sexless, and very alone.

  A block or so down the road there was a bench, and when I reached it I sat down. I threw the stub of the cigarette onto the pavement, hard, and watched it shower orange sparks.

  Someone said, “I’ll buy a cigarette off you, pal. Here.”

  A hand in front of my face, holding a quarter. I looked up.

  He did not look old, although I would not have been prepared to say how old he was. Late thirties, perhaps. Mid-forties. He wore a long, shabby coat, colorless under the yellow streetlamps, and his eyes were dark.

  “Here. A quarter. That’s a good price.”

  I shook my head, pulled out the packet of Marlboros, offered him one. “Keep your money. It’s free. Have it.”

  He took the cigarette. I passed him a book of matches (it advertised a telephone sex line; I remember that), and he lit the cigarette. He offered me the matches back, and I shook my head. “Keep them. I always wind up accumulating books of matches in America.”

  “Uh-huh.” He sat next to me and smoked his cigarette. When he had smoked it halfway down, he tapped the lighted end off on the concrete, stubbed out the glow, and placed the butt of the cigarette behind his ear.

  “I don’t smoke much,” he said. “Seems a pity to waste it, though.”

  A car careened down the road, veering from one side to the other. There were four young men in the car; the two in the front were both pulling at the wheel and laughing. The windows were wound down, and I could hear their laughter, and the two in the backseat (“Gaary, you asshole! What the fuck are you onnn, mannnn?”), and the pulsing beat of a rock song. Not a song I recognized. The car looped around a corner, out of sight.

  Soon the sounds were gone, too.

  “I owe you,” said the man on the bench.

  “Sorry?”

  “I owe you something. For the cigarette. And the matches. You wouldn’t take the money. I owe you.”

  I shrugged, embarrassed. “Really, it’s just a cigarette. I figure, if I give people cigarettes, then if ever I’m out, maybe people will give me cigarettes.” I laughed, to show I didn’t really mean it, although I did. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Mm. You want to hear a story? True story? Stories always used to be good payment. These days . . .”—he shrugged—“. . . not so much.”

  I sat back on the bench, and the night was warm, and I looked at my watch: it was almost one in the morning. In England a freezing new day would already have begun: a workday would be starting for those who could beat the snow and get into work; another handful of old people, and those without homes, would have died, in the night, from the cold.

  “Sure,” I said to the man. “Sure. Tell me a story.”
r />   He coughed, grinned white teeth—a flash in the darkness—and he began.

  “First thing I remember was the Word. And the Word was God. Sometimes, when I get really down, I remember the sound of the Word in my head, shaping me, forming me, giving me life.

  “The Word gave me a body, gave me eyes. And I opened my eyes, and I saw the light of the Silver City.

  “I was in a room—a silver room—and there wasn’t anything in it except me. In front of me was a window that went from floor to ceiling, open to the sky, and through the window I could see the spires of the City, and at the edge of the City, the Dark.

  “I don’t know how long I waited there. I wasn’t impatient or anything, though. I remember that. It was like I was waiting until I was called; and I knew that sometime I would be called. And if I had to wait until the end of everything and never be called, why, that was fine, too. But I’d be called, I was certain of that. And then I’d know my name and my function.

  “Through the window I could see silver spires, and in many of the other spires were windows; and in the windows I could see others like me. That was how I knew what I looked like.

  “You wouldn’t think it of me, seeing me now, but I was beautiful. I’ve come down in the world a way since then.

  “I was taller then, and I had wings.

  “They were huge and powerful wings, with feathers the color of mother-of-pearl. They came out from just between my shoulder blades. They were so good. My wings.

  “Sometimes I’d see others like me, the ones who’d left their rooms, who were already fulfilling their duties. I’d watch them soar through the sky from spire to spire, performing errands I could barely imagine.

  “The sky above the City was a wonderful thing. It was always light, although lit by no sun—lit, perhaps, by the City itself; but the quality of light was forever changing. Now pewter-colored light, then brass, then a gentle gold, or a soft and quiet amethyst . . .”

  The man stopped talking. He looked at me, his head on one side. There was a glitter in his eyes that scared me. “You know what amethyst is? A kind of purple stone?”