Dead Letters Anthology (31 page)

It was only when I stepped out on the top floor that I had second thoughts. I should have called him from the lobby. We’d have lunch. What did I care if the woman at reception, who looked almost young enough to be my daughter, saw us together?

I turned around, but it was too late, the elevator had gone. I pressed the button to recall it. I would start this story over. Maybe I’d meet him in the lobby as he came in from smoking a cigarette – hotel rooms were all no-smoking now. Maybe he’d given up smoking, like everyone else I knew, but even if he didn’t want a smoke, he wasn’t going to sit alone in a hotel room all day, waiting for someone who might never arrive. I’d ask the receptionist to call his room. If he was in, he would come down. If he was out, I’d leave a note. And if he wasn’t here at all, and I had been completely wrong about what the card had meant – I’d go home and forget about it. No one else would ever know.

My stomach growled. Where was that elevator? I strained to hear any sound of it, and stabbed the button several times with no result. I was hungry and impatient. Since I was here, I might as well try the room.

Immediately outside the elevator niche a sign on the wall showed the numbering system and indicated which way to turn. The number I was looking for was on the right, about halfway along the long, curving hallway. I stopped outside the door and listened. The silence was undisturbed. I held my breath and knocked: timidly at first, then more assertively.

Nothing happened.

Then I looked at the brass-colored door handle, set into a brass square with a slot at the top. He had sent me the key so I could let myself in – but suddenly I didn’t want to.

What kind of game was this? Sending an anonymous plastic key card did not constitute getting in touch. What made him think that after twenty-two years without a word, he only had to whistle? No, not even whistle; make me guess and seek for him. But what made me think this was his game?

The back of my neck prickled. Was somebody watching me, silently, through the fish-eye lens of the spy-hole?

I hurried away, back to the elevators, and slapped the button, my breath coming fast and anxious. I imagined Marshall waiting behind that closed door, waiting to humiliate me. But even if, somehow, he knew – that was not his style. I imagined a psychotic, murdering stranger, or him, horribly changed.

‘Come on, come on!’

But the elevator would not be summoned. How long had I been waiting? I shouldn’t even be here. I was wasting time. I charged away down the other curving arm of the corridor, the branch I had not taken. But I saw no sign for Emergency Exit or Stairs, although I went to the very end and then walked slowly back, checking each door as I passed.

There must be a staircase, if only for use in case of fire. It was surely illegal to erect a multi-story building without fire escapes. Most big hotels had more than one. Yet I found no doors that could be opened without a key, and I couldn’t remember seeing any kind of exit sign on the other side, either.

Returning to the elevator niche, looking down the other half of the long, curving corridor, I remembered his song about the hungry hotel, ‘built in the shape of a smile’.

I knew then that the elevator was never going to come, no matter how long I waited. I wasn’t really surprised to find I couldn’t get a signal on my phone. I can take pictures with it, and record this message, but how is that going to help?

Eventually I will have to use the key, because that’s the only thing left to try.

Maybe I’m dreaming, and when I use the key, I will wake up. Maybe it will open an ordinary room, with a window looking down onto the parking lot, and a telephone that works. But I don’t think this is that kind of dream.

I’ve been thinking about my childish belief that babies got made by people dreaming together, and I’ve been thinking about that song he made up for me, and now I seem to be inside it. (I wish I could remember how it ended!)

Maybe we dreamed this hotel together, and maybe the key will open the door to a room where he’s waiting for me, and it will be like the one night we spent together, only it will last forever.

Or maybe it will just be the end.

Lisa Tuttle lived in Austin in the 1970s, in London in the 1980s, and since 1990, has stayed in a remote, rural part of Scotland. Her short stories have won awards and been widely anthologised. Her first novel,
Windhaven
, was written in collaboration with George R.R. Martin, first published in 1981, and has since been translated into many languages and frequently re-printed. Her eighth novel,
The Curious Affair of the Somnambulist and the Psychic Thief
, is a new departure, the first in a series of fantastical mysteries set in the 1890s, and is scheduled for publication in 2016.

Ian is one of those names, isn’t it? I know half a dozen Ians. One or two in their thirties, two or three around my age, and a couple well into their seventies. It’s one of those names that’s neither fashionable, nor unfashionable.

At that time I was working mainly as an editor for a small publisher and I was very aware that editors (and agents) took to social media at their own risk, since it had become one of the best ways for new writers to make their acquaintance. I was being stalked on Twitter by a guy called Ian. Haunted might even be
le mot juste
, and I don’t know why I say that, rather than ‘the right word’, because, as a self-identifying chippy northerner, I have nothing but scorn for people who pepper their newspaper columns and Facebook posts with French and Latin expressions suggesting the kind of relaxed confidence only an Oxbridge education can instil.

Ian, who I guessed would be in his twenties or thirties – his thirties as it turned out – followed me one bright, chilly autumn morning when I was sitting at my improvised desk checking Twitter every five minutes because I couldn’t settle to any of the various jobs I was meant to be getting on with. I examined his profile. I liked his photograph. A lilac-tinted head-and-shoulders with severe parting and blurred face, it reminded me of something, but I couldn’t think what. In addition, the mini biog attracted me. Like most people who followed me on Twitter in those days, he was writing a novel, but his sounded interesting. He didn’t say much about it, but the title – and I was struck by the boldness both of the title itself and of his announcing it in a public medium while the novel was, apparently, still some way off being finished – was
LONDON
, with zeroes for Os. I didn’t immediately follow him back, but was for some reason prompted to get up from my desk and grab my jacket.

There was a small pile of post on the floor in the hall. I sorted through it. A circular from the council. A couple of fast-food menus. A brown envelope addressed to someone I’d never heard of. A former resident, I presumed. Jane seemed to get a lot of these and hardly any post for herself.

I was staying at my girlfriend’s place between Stoke Newington and Dalston. She always said she lived in Stoke Newington, a claim that was backed up by her postcode, but her front door was just five minutes’ brisk walk from Dalston Kingsland. I skirted the station and walked west on Balls Pond Road for a few minutes before turning left and then left again into a residential street that would ultimately lead me onto an unusual diagonal back towards Kingsland Road. Jane and I had often walked up and down this street to admire the houses. They had windows that went down almost to the ground, protected by retractable security grilles. We would fantasise about buying one of these houses, a fantasy that required us to believe we had a million and a half in the bank, a million and a half more than we actually had, and then console ourselves that at least we were spared the inconvenience and indignity of living with a retractable security grille.

I walked on down to the canal and then along it for a short stretch and back up the main drag, calling into the supermarket opposite Dalston Kingsland. I found myself standing in the tinned soup aisle holding a basket containing a bunch of spring onions and a lemon. I looked at the Heinz soup cans and thought about Andy Warhol’s soup cans, their endless repetition, and realised that I liked these soup cans better than Warhol’s, because Warhol’s were all the same, whereas these were the same but different – different flavours and, therefore, different text, type and illustrations. I had always liked definitive postage stamps for the same reason – the identical image of the Queen’s head, but a different price, a different colour – and immediately I realised why I had liked Ian’s profile picture on Twitter: because it reminded me of the Belgian definitive stamps of the 1960s that I had collected as a child, with the repeated picture of the Belgian king in various pastel shades.

When I came out of the supermarket I got my phone out and went on to Twitter and followed Ian back, but then a moment later unfollowed him. It was too soon; I didn’t want to appear eager.

I became aware of him keeping an eye on my tweets and interjecting from time to time in some conversation I might be having with a writer or an agent or another editor. He judged those interruptions just right – respectful, but not overly so, confident without appearing arrogant – so that they didn’t feel like interruptions. It was exactly the kind of perfectly judged approach that gives the impression of being effortless and is probably far from it. I daresay he spent hours composing those witty rejoinders and cutting remarks, which were never at my expense, of course. (Oh, how well behaved he was in the beginning.) They were minor masterpieces of irony and concision. After one particularly funny, apparently offhand tweet, I followed him back, and his first direct message arrived later that day. I knew what it would say.

The publisher I worked for had posted a line on their website stating clearly that they were closed to submissions. At the time I was receiving at least two emails a day that would begin,
Hi Nick
… My friend, the writer Joe Cross, once told me what he thought of people who began emails with
Hi Joe
. It wasn’t people assuming they could call him Joe that bothered him, but the use of
Hi
instead of
Dear
. So,
Hi Nick
, these emails would begin.
I know you’re closed to submissions
… But would I make an exception to consider their 100,000-word historical saga? Would I please find time to have a quick look at their dystopian fable? Would I perhaps be able to cast an eye over their series of so-called flash fictions disguised as a novel?

They were remarkably similar, these emails, as if the writers had bought a template from a subscription service or done a module on a creative writing MA about how to charm overworked editors. Mainly they’d had an agent, who had taken them on, raving about their novel, then submitted it to all the major houses, where it had been knocked back, and the writers had then suggested they send it to one of the smaller places, but the agents had said they didn’t deal with those places. Of course not; there was nothing in it for them. So, the agents were fired and were probably delighted to be fired and the writers could submit to people like me, only to find we weren’t open to submissions, but we’d make an exception, wouldn’t we? For them? Even though none of them seemed to have gone to the trouble to assess my taste by checking out the books I had actually acquired.

Ian’s approach, via direct messages on Twitter, was different. He was serious, but it was like he didn’t really care. I guessed it was a front and he cared a great deal. But the thing was, when he told me a bit about the novel, it was like it had been written just for me. It was about London, he said. That was the first and most important thing. It was also about despair. And it was about holes in the fabric of reality that may or may not exist. And maps, he said. And spies. Spies? Yes, spies, but they weren’t that important. OK, I said. I was hooked. The question, for me, then, was could he write? There was only one way to find out. So I said he could email it to me and I’d have a quick look.

A quick look turned into me reading the whole thing in two days. Be suspicious of those people who claim to read entire novels, even short novels, in a single sitting. That’s not reading; that’s turning the pages. Just as writing a novel in a month isn’t writing; it’s typing. A couple of chapters in, I started making notes – corrections, editorial suggestions. That was how confident I was I would be telling him I wanted to publish it. It was so good, he was going to have to fuck it up quite badly for me to change my mind. He didn’t fuck it up.

Having decided I wanted to publish it, I found myself on edge, not sure if I
should
publish it. I walked around Jane’s flat, weighing up the pros and cons. In one corner of her bedroom a glass-eyed mannequin with a red wig balanced on a stand. I called her Jane.

‘What do you think, Jane?’ I asked her. ‘I’ve never met Ian. His novel is extremely bleak. It’s claustrophobic with existential despair and the narrator is deeply unsympathetic.’

I paused.

‘No, you’re right,’ I said. ‘I do always insist that characters don’t have to be likable, just believable.’

I straightened the mannequin’s wig, studying her glassy-eyed stare. She was wearing a summer dress of Jane’s, blue, which matched her eyes, unlike Jane’s, which were green.

I wasn’t questioning my view about the likability or otherwise of characters, but I was concerned about what I might be getting into. A widely held opinion is that it is a mistake to conflate narrator and author, yet a convergence of Ian and his narrator was precisely what I feared.

What if Ian was like his narrator? Did it even matter? Well, yes, I tended to believe it did. Not in general, but in this particular case. I kept a Wankers Shelf – a section of my library reserved for authors so narcissistic they asked their publisher to stick their author photo on the front cover of their book, or they wrote a piece for publication constructed around extracts from their fan mail; for authors so convinced of their own greatness they refused to ‘get out of bed for less than a grand’ when invited to contribute to an anthology; for authors who were just wankers – wankers to their editors, wankers to their publicists, wankers to booksellers, wankers to their readers. Just wankers.