Jigs & Reels: Stories Read online

  He made his smile especially winning and said, ‘You know, I know we’ve met before, but I have the most terrible memory for names . . .’

  The lady looked absurdly crestfallen. ‘It’s Kate,’ she said. ‘Kate O’Grady. Surely you remember me?’

  It would help, thought K., if she didn’t put on that terrible American accent. Theme night it might be, but if he was supposed to remember her in that get-up – ‘Of course it is! Kate,’ he said, showing his teeth. ‘How stupid of me! It’s just that I’ve had a pig of a day, and you know my memory—’

  ‘I sure do. We all do, Neil.’ She laughed as if she’d made a joke. Then she looked at him again, and her face fell. ‘You don’t remember, do you?’ she said. ‘It’s been a long time, and I wasn’t sure you’d know the others, but I sure thought you’d remember me.’

  God, had he slept with her? K. didn’t think he had, but her face was crumpling and now she looked ready to cry. ‘Of course I do, Katie,’ he said warmly. ‘But I’ve had a terrible day, and with the costume and everything—’ He drank his salty beer, hoping she would leave it at that. ‘It looks great, by the way. Really suits you. Western night, is it? Look, is there a phone in here I could use? My mobile won’t work and I need to call a—’

  K. faltered, suddenly aware that the piano had stopped playing. He was conscious of the silence, of eyes turning towards him, of the intent look – the hungry look – on those faces.

  ‘He don’t know Katie,’ muttered a man in a red-checked shirt.

  ‘Don’t know Katie?’ said the piano player incredulously, and for the first time K. noticed that everyone in the pub was wearing a gun.

  ‘Look, is there a phone here I can use?’ K. knew the guns were not real, but there was an atmosphere in the pub – or was it a saloon? – which made him somehow uneasy. These little places often resented Londoners, he knew; resented his looks and his success. More than a few of the regulars looked ready to hurt him, and of course no one – not his publisher, not one of his friends – knew where he was.

  ‘A telephone?’

  ‘Yes. My mobile won’t work and I need to call my—’

  ‘Ain’t got none,’ said the man in the red shirt.

  ‘Well, maybe someone here might—’

  ‘Ain’t no call here in Dogtown.’

  This was taking the Western theme a bit too far, thought K. And the dialogue was terrible; it sounded like a budget B-movie translated from Spanish. And yet there was something dreadfully familiar about all of this. The train, the bar, the woman – and yes, he did remember her, or at least now he knew why she had seemed so familiar – Kate O’Grady, hostess of Dogtown’s only saloon, in that old and half-forgotten story.

  ‘You may not know who I am,’ said K. nervously.

  ‘Oh, we know you,’ said the man in the red shirt. ‘You’re Neil Kennerly.’

  ‘Kennerly?’ That had been his name, long ago. But he’d thrown it away with the rest of his life: with his notebooks and stories, his films and comics. He could have sworn that no one knew about Neil Kennerly – but then again, no one knew Last Train to Dogtown.

  Behind him, the regulars were coming closer. K. heard his name whispered – in awe, curiosity, and something else which he could not quite identify. Eagerness? Excitement? Greed? Now, the piano player reached in his pocket and pulled out a grubby notepad. Silently he held it out, his face slicked with sweat, his hand trembling slightly. Then the red-shirted man did the same; then one of the women at the bar; then the albino, his cards falling from his hand; then the man in the bowler hat – all holding out scraps of paper, stubs of pencil with that look of hope, of hunger in their flat bright eyes.

  ‘What do you want?’ said K.

  ‘Your sign, sir,’ said the pianist shyly.

  ‘Aye, your sign,’ said the man in the bowler hat. ‘We writ the rest for ourselves. We’ve been waiting.’

  ‘Waiting?’ said K.

  The barman nodded.

  ‘Waiting?’ repeated K. in a low voice.

  The barman looked at him. ‘Too long, Mr Kennerly,’ he said slowly. ‘Much too long.’

  In silence and in disbelief, K. looked around the saloon. He knew them all now: Jaker at the bar; Sidewinder Sam the piano player; Whitey Smith the albino; the red-shirted Pasadena Kid (fastest gun in the West) . . . Could this be some kind of a tribute by obsessive fans? Had these people somehow managed to get hold of a copy of his old story (with the Internet, anything was possible), and was this some kind of convention?

  He had to get out – perverse tribute, coincidence or otherwise, this was too much. He’d take his chances with the night – surely there would be a phone somewhere close by. Otherwise, even sleeping in the train was better than this.

  ‘Goin’ someplace?’ It was the man in the red shirt, the one his mind stubbornly referred to as the Pasadena Kid.

  ‘Look, mate, I’m not sure what’s going on here—’

  The Pasadena Kid put a hand to his gun. ‘You ain’t goin’ noplace, Mr Kennerly,’ he said. ‘We got business, you and me.’

  ‘We don’t want no trouble,’ said the barman hesitantly. ‘Remember what the Sheriff said.’

  ‘Keep out of this, Jaker,’ said the Kid. ‘I got a brother shot in the lung. I need to know, one way or the other.’

  ‘Sure,’ said the albino. ‘And I wanna know if I ever found that abandoned gold mine.’

  More voices now joined the protest. ‘Yeah, Mr Kennerly, I want to know—’

  ‘Do I find the guys who shot my father?’

  ‘And what about them Injuns—’

  ‘And the train?’

  K. had been besieged by fans before, but never on this scale; never with such desperation. Their fingers plucked at his sleeves; he could smell whisky and beer on their breath. And now they were pressing closer, hands outstretched, each holding a scrap of paper, a notebook, a crayon, a stick of chalk. K. was half-submerged in a sea of battered notebooks and scraps of paper.

  ‘Your sign, Mr Kennerly—’

  ‘I don’t usually give autographs,’ said K. as he backed away.

  ‘Please—’

  ‘I need it – I want it—’

  ‘Leave me alone!’ shouted K. ‘I’ll call the police!’

  He thought that at the mention of the police, the autograph hunters drew back just a little. But there was only confusion, not fear, in their reddened faces. Sidewinder Sam gaped at him, showing teeth like wooden pegs. Whitey Smith held out a sheet torn from a notebook, looking close to tears.

  Kate O’Grady was watching with an expression of faint contempt. ‘You really don’t know, do you?’ she said. ‘You haven’t guessed what this place is? What we are?’

  ‘How should I know?’ said K.

  ‘Because you put us here, Neil,’ said Kate. ‘You created us. We’re your out-takes, your loose ends, the bit parts that never made the final draft. We’re the characters in the stories you didn’t finish, the minor players, the cameo roles, the people you wrote out, or lost interest in, or gave up on or forgot. All this –’ she gestured around her, ‘this is Dogtown, from the old Western you never quite finished. Over there –’ indicating vaguely south, ‘you’ll find your Raiders from Planet 51. Back there –’ pointing now in the opposite direction, ‘you’ll come to the Perilous City, and the cannibals – all very hungry by now – that you put there when you were nine years old. Go far enough past Dogtown and you’ll hit the Dinosaur Swamp; or the alien women in silver loincloths from Kozmo the Rocketmaster, or you might come across one of your discarded adverbs wandering aimlessly through the woods, or some superfluous dialogue, or any one of the lost players in your little games, all of us who got passed over when it came to tying up loose ends, all of us waiting our turn, waiting for you to remember us.’

  K. stared at her. ‘This can’t be happening. You’re all insane.’

  ‘Just listen to what you’re saying now,’ said Kate implacably. ‘B-movie dialogue, from those old films
you were always watching, Neil. Can’t you even recognize your own clichés?’

  K. thought about that for a moment. Perhaps he should play along and humour them, he thought to himself. Crazy they might be, but there were too many of them to fight his way out, and besides, he’d never been a fighter. With a hand that trembled slightly, he initialled the blank pages, the grubby notebooks. ‘Why me?’ he said at last.

  ‘Easy,’ said Sidewinder Sam. ‘We want to get out of Dogtown. Sheriff’s bleeding us dry here. We gotta get out.’

  ‘But why would you need me for that?’

  Kate looked impatient. ‘Because you’re the only one here who outranks the Sheriff. You wrote him in, and only you can help write him out.’

  ‘Write him out?’

  ‘Absolutely. We want an ending. A road home. A happy marriage. Anything. As it stands, all Kate O’Grady ever does is hang around the Golden Wagon, dab blood from the hero’s cut cheekbone and act as a sexual decoy to keep the ruthless, sadistic Sheriff off his trail.’ She shrugged. ‘Call me picky, but that’s not how I envisaged my future.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘As for the Sheriff, the last thing he wants is an ending. What he wants is to maintain the status quo. He knows there can’t possibly be a happy outcome for the likes of him.’ She turned to the others, still standing around K. with pencils at the ready. ‘Come on, then. What are you waiting for? Sheriff could be here any minute.’

  K. shook his head. ‘You can’t really expect me to believe all this. It’s ludicrous.’

  ‘I don’t care what you believe. All I wanted was your sign.’

  ‘But I still don’t see—’

  Kate made an impatient gesture. ‘Because your endorsement gives us the power. Because signing makes it—’ At that moment she seemed to catch sight of something behind K., and she stopped, her hand clenched around her notebook so hard that the knuckles showed white. Then she went for her pencil and began to write.

  There was a sound of thunder, and Kate fell to the ground with a sudden, shocking splash of red across her frilly bodice. And in the silence that followed, K. heard slow footsteps, and he knew even without looking that this was One-Eye Logan, the (ruthless, sadistic) Sheriff of Dogtown.

  ‘Well, look who it ain’t. Our very own friend, the scribbler.’

  Slowly, K. looked up. He saw a leathery face bearded with grey stubble above a jacket of ancient leather on which winked a silver star. The man’s single eye – the other was concealed beneath a leather eyepatch – was like a nugget of rock. On a bandolier around his shoulder hung a red leather notebook and a paperback Thesaurus. The gun in his right hand was still smoking.

  ‘Katie!’ It was Jaker, the barman, his face now contorted in a frenzy of rage and grief. He went for his notebook, but his opponent was faster, and Jaker fell clutching his chest in a drift of bloody sawdust.

  At the bar, the Pasadena Kid stood hesitating, one hand halfway to his jacket pocket.

  The Sheriff patted his notebook. ‘Don’t do it, Kid. I got you covered.’

  The Kid stood fast, eyeing him appraisingly.

  ‘Drop it,’ said the Sheriff. ‘Nice and slow.’

  The Kid lowered his eyes, as if in acceptance. Then, almost too fast for the Sheriff to see, he drew his notebook and pen.

  For the third time, the big gun flashed, and there was a sound of thunder.

  The Sheriff turned over the body with the toe of his boot. ‘You was fast, Kid,’ he said, thoughtfully. ‘Some said you was the fastest draw in Dogtown. Me, I wasn’t so much a draw as a thumbnail sketch, but you makes the best with what you got, don’t you, eh?

  ‘Game’s over, boys,’ he said, addressing the regulars. ‘Put your hands up. And no funny stuff. So help me, if I see a man with as much as a pencil stub in his hand I’ll blow him clean away. That clear?’

  Heads nodded, and one by one and sullenly, the rebels of Dogtown laid down their notebooks and pens. ‘Good,’ said the Sheriff, keeping them covered. ‘And now, Mr Kennerly, sir – or do they call you something else nowadays? – we got business to settle, you and me.’

  But K. was staring at the bodies on the floor. There was no doubt at all that they were dead; the air smelt of blood and Bonfire Night, and their contorted faces and mangled limbs had nothing in common with the corpses in the Westerns he had watched as a boy. ‘You killed them,’ he said in a dazed voice. ‘You really killed them.’

  The Sheriff shrugged. ‘Self-defence,’ he said. ‘I read books. I done my research. I know what happens to the guy in the black hat when the third act comes around. And I like it here, Mr Kennerly; I like being in charge. Ain’t gonna let no two-bit scribbler write me out of the plot, no sir.’ And he turned the muzzle of his gun slowly towards K. ‘Bread and circuses, isn’t that what the Roman guy said? Keep ’em fed, and keep ’em entertained? And when you pare away the dross, don’t you agree that the circus element has been the better part of both our businesses, Mr Kennerly, sir?’

  Weakly, K. nodded.

  The Sheriff smiled. ‘You see my problem,’ he said. ‘You left me in charge, sir, and it plumb ain’t fair to come back twenty years on and take it all away. It ain’t fair, it ain’t right, and I ain’t standin’ for it. Besides,’ said the Sheriff, opening his red notebook, ‘ruthless and sadistic, that’s what I am, that’s what I’m good at, and that’s what I’m gonna stick to.’

  ‘And what happens to me?’ said K., eyeing the Sheriff’s poised notebook.

  One-Eye gave a modest smile. ‘I reckon there’s been enough shooting,’ he said. ‘All the same, sir, you must see how I can’t risk lettin’ you go. I’m not sayin’ I’ll do a better job than you, mind, but I’ll give it my damnedest try, you can be sure of that.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said K.

  ‘Sure you do,’ said One-Eye, licking the end of his pencil. ‘One way or the other, sir, there’s got to be an end to this tale. It’s what these folks have been saying all along. A wedding, a funeral, hell damn, there’s a buttload of different choices out there, sir, and I hope you’ll trust me to make the right one. In fact –’ the Sheriff looked modest, and his rough cheeks flushed a little, ‘in fact I’ve drafted up a bit of something for us to try out right now, just to see what it looks like. Run it up the flagpole, you might say, sir, and see who salutes.’

  K.’s throat was too dry for him to say anything, but he managed another weak nod.

  The Sheriff looked pleased. ‘I’m glad you’re being so reasonable, sir. Besides, I think you’ll like what I’ve got planned.’

  ‘What’s that?’ said K. in a small, small voice.

  ‘Well,’ said the Sheriff, ‘call me conservative if you like, but oldies are still goldies, ain’t they? Besides, it’s good for folks to have something to look forward to.’ He smirked, and once again K. thought he flushed a little. ‘Tell me what you think, sir. Of course I respect your opinion. But this is Dogtown, life’s hard, entertainment’s scarce, and I think we’d all agree it’s been a long time since we had ourselves a good hanging.’

  The G-SUS Gene

  In Blackberry Wine, a character finds himself unable to live up to the promise of his first novel, and falls back on writing second-rate science-fiction to pay the bills. His pen name is Jonathan Winesap, and he has never quite grown up. Neithe – I’m glad to say – have I.

  EVERY LIFEFORM’S DEATH diminishes me, for I am a part of lifekind.

  Chant 363 of the InnerSelf LifeCreed, circa 2141. Two thousand repetitions a day for the first twenty years. Do I remember them all? The hell I do.

  The Common Good is the Only Good. There’s another one. Twenty-five thousand repetitions so far, and counting. Suffer in My Name, and Ye Shall Enter the Eternal Database of Redemption.

  They say no one can get inside your mind.

  Bullshit.

  They’ve been inside mine so often there’s nothing left that they haven’t scrambled and poached, picked apart, put together, psychescanned and mesc-ed with
and rebuilt with cortisynth and hyperthalamus and generally fucked with. I mean, I might even be imagining you altogether. I might finally have gone crazy. They can do that, you know – send you crazy for a while, all part of the great InnerSelf Experience, I guess. Who knows, it might be my turn for that this time. What the hell, there’s been worse.

  You don’t believe me? Man, I’ve been a cripple to get in touch with my helplessness, a bondage whore to feed my feminine side, a soldier to rid me of my distrust of authority – and that was just the Normforms. Finforms, zero-dwelling Aquaforms half a mile from tail to snout, methane-breathing Xenforms, I’ve seen ’em, done ’em all. And you know what?

  It’s all bullshit.

  I guess they were trying to do me a favour. A skycycle, driven at speed at an immovable object at three hundred and twenty an hour, can leave a hell of a hole in a guy. Or was that just another one of the InnerSelf programs? There are days when I can’t even remember that. No, on reflection they’d never have done that to me. Too much fun.

  Suffer In Me. Suffer With Me. Through Suffering Alone Shall Ye Find Redemption. The Kingdom of the Mind is the Ladder to the Stars. Post-hippy bullshit of the purest ray serene, piped out at a precisely calculated assimilation rate on a frequency even my brain can’t black out. Sense-enhancers to stop me fighting it. And an authentic InnerLife program – one of thousands – to verify my enlightenment ratio. Get your head round that, sis. Or whatever.

  Fact is, brain matter’s in short supply around here. Even such lowgrade matter as mine has to be refined and recycled. Twenty years ago – inasmuch as time still matters nowadays – we did something, don’t ask me what, split the wrong atom, shifted the wrong antigen, pressed the wrong button, screwed with Cosmic Forces and infected the species. Result? Near-total wipeout. I was mostly out of my skull at the time so I wasn’t taking much notice, and nowadays I’m out of my skull all the time. I was Chosen. You too, perhaps. Yippee.

  Welcome to the wonderful world of formaldehyde.

  Wanna know something? I’m glad you’re here. We could put our heads together – sorry, bad taste – I don’t know, what do they call it now? interface or something – compare notes. I like to think you’re female. Not that it matters any more – or so the InnerSelf people tell me – but I like to think it anyway. Let me introduce myself. Oz ‘Mad Dog’ O’Shea, Hell’s Rider, multiple rapist, murderer, drunk, and till recently sole occupant of Booth 235479, InnerSelf Developments (New York City). Subject Under Surveillance Category G (Genetic Redevelopment to you, sis), subcategory Experimental. Membership number 390992. But you, sweetheart, can call me Oz.