Michael Smith - Only Forward

Harper Voyager

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

First published in Great Britain as a Paperback Original by

HarperCollins Publishers 1994

Copyright © Michael Marshall Smith 1994

Excerpt from ‘Silent all these years’ written by Tori Amos, copyright © Sword and Stone Music 1991.Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2015

Michael Marshall Smith asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008117443

Ebook Edition © April 2015 ISBN: 9780007325368

Version: 2019-02-27

For my family: David, Margaret and Tracey, and in memory of Mr Cat.

Contents

Cover

Title

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction by Neil Gaiman

PART ONE: The Paper Over the Cracks

The beginning

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

PART TWO: Some Lies

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

PART THREE: Requiem

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

The End

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Other Books By

About the Publisher

There is an audacity we possess when we are young, a cockiness and a knowledge that stems from, I suspect, two very different things: firstly, we don’t care what the rules are (we don’t even know what the rules are that we are breaking, as we break them. We want it all). Secondly, we may not have much time, we don’t know: if we are going to scrawl our names on the walls of the world we must do it in letters of fire a thousand feet high, and we must do it now .

So when you are a young writer, you put in everything you’ve got.

In the case of Michael Marshall Smith, also now sometimes known as Michael Marshall, you write something that manages to be, at the same time (or at least, in the same book), a work of futuristic parodic science fiction, a jaded and bitter private eye novel, a work of magical realism, a realistic psychological novel, and which contains in itself one of the most excellent pieces of dream fiction 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

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.