Everything You Need: Short Stories Read Online Free
Author: Michael Marshall Smith
was then, and this is now.
The Woodcutter
I t was a mistake . Not his first mistake, but a big one. Spike knew it was. He could think of no other way of generating cash, however, and London — as he’d discovered soon after he arrived — was not a cheap place to live. It wasn’t like he was even making so much. A couple of handfuls of pound coins in each pub, maybe thirty quid per venue. A hundred and fifty pounds a night, if he was lucky. Not chickenfeed, but hardly easy money either — especially as he tried not to work the same patch night after night and so had to keep finding new areas and different pubs. Not to mention that one evening in five he would leave a place and find a couple of guys waiting for him outside, men who’d either threaten to beat him up unless he handed over his earnings (and then beat him up once they had the cash) or else get straight to beating him up while taking the money, as if to save time. Regardless of the methodology, being beaten up — and financial loss — were regular features of his evenings. He’d be forced to take a couple nights off afterwards, to let facial swellings go down or allow time for his hands to start working fluently again, which also cut into his earning ability. In the two months he’d been in the city he’d been lucky to clear five hundred a week. Try living in London, finding somewhere decent to sleep, something to eat — even for someone like Spike, who consumed little of substance — never mind incidental costs like dry cleaning your jacket to get the blood off, for that much. It’s hard.
It’s hard and cold and lonely.
During the day he walked the streets and killed time in parks. He dawdled in bookstores. He nursed an Americano for an hour at a time, choosing a different coffee shop each day, sitting outside despite the low winter temperatures, watching the streets. If you keep yourself clean and tidy and walk with apparent purpose then cities are accommodating, especially a city like London, for two thousand years a scrappers’ den that has been willing to accept — or at least tolerate — just about anyone.
Can’t find a job? Come to London and do our laboring and bar work. Home country having a meltdown and people starting to kill each other the whole time? Try a spell in London town. On the hunt for adventure, larks, and high times, and think you can ignore the rules?
Ah, maybe not that last one.
That had been the first mistake.
He kept an eye for others like him. Someone who might be willing to pass back the message that he’d realized the error of his ways, and was very sorry, and could he please come home now? He saw them once in a while but they were all very superior and took him in at a glance. They refused to have anything to do with him, focusing on their missions, gone for good the next day. He didn’t know any of them from before and so he didn’t understand how they could have tagged him as bad news so quickly, but he came to fear he’d been away so long now that he stood out, that something was beginning to fade, that if he was stuck here much longer he’d lose what made him different. He didn’t know if that was even possible, but still the idea made him afraid.
He hadn’t lost The Thing yet, however. He knew that because of the way he kept himself in food and lodging and — after he’d acquired the habit — cigarettes. He liked the look of smoking, he tried it, he kept doing it. Impulse control had never been his strong suit. At the end of each long afternoon he went back to his room. He’d found small, grimy lodgings off Goodge Street, more of a guest house than a hotel, cheap because it was not at all nice. It was close to the British Museum, though, another good place to kill time. It was also just around the corner from a large YMCA, and he stopped by its bar on the way out each evening. When he found himself in conversation with one of the young travellers boarding there — German, Italian, American,
The Woodcutter
I t was a mistake . Not his first mistake, but a big one. Spike knew it was. He could think of no other way of generating cash, however, and London — as he’d discovered soon after he arrived — was not a cheap place to live. It wasn’t like he was even making so much. A couple of handfuls of pound coins in each pub, maybe thirty quid per venue. A hundred and fifty pounds a night, if he was lucky. Not chickenfeed, but hardly easy money either — especially as he tried not to work the same patch night after night and so had to keep finding new areas and different pubs. Not to mention that one evening in five he would leave a place and find a couple of guys waiting for him outside, men who’d either threaten to beat him up unless he handed over his earnings (and then beat him up once they had the cash) or else get straight to beating him up while taking the money, as if to save time. Regardless of the methodology, being beaten up — and financial loss — were regular features of his evenings. He’d be forced to take a couple nights off afterwards, to let facial swellings go down or allow time for his hands to start working fluently again, which also cut into his earning ability. In the two months he’d been in the city he’d been lucky to clear five hundred a week. Try living in London, finding somewhere decent to sleep, something to eat — even for someone like Spike, who consumed little of substance — never mind incidental costs like dry cleaning your jacket to get the blood off, for that much. It’s hard.
It’s hard and cold and lonely.
During the day he walked the streets and killed time in parks. He dawdled in bookstores. He nursed an Americano for an hour at a time, choosing a different coffee shop each day, sitting outside despite the low winter temperatures, watching the streets. If you keep yourself clean and tidy and walk with apparent purpose then cities are accommodating, especially a city like London, for two thousand years a scrappers’ den that has been willing to accept — or at least tolerate — just about anyone.
Can’t find a job? Come to London and do our laboring and bar work. Home country having a meltdown and people starting to kill each other the whole time? Try a spell in London town. On the hunt for adventure, larks, and high times, and think you can ignore the rules?
Ah, maybe not that last one.
That had been the first mistake.
He kept an eye for others like him. Someone who might be willing to pass back the message that he’d realized the error of his ways, and was very sorry, and could he please come home now? He saw them once in a while but they were all very superior and took him in at a glance. They refused to have anything to do with him, focusing on their missions, gone for good the next day. He didn’t know any of them from before and so he didn’t understand how they could have tagged him as bad news so quickly, but he came to fear he’d been away so long now that he stood out, that something was beginning to fade, that if he was stuck here much longer he’d lose what made him different. He didn’t know if that was even possible, but still the idea made him afraid.
He hadn’t lost The Thing yet, however. He knew that because of the way he kept himself in food and lodging and — after he’d acquired the habit — cigarettes. He liked the look of smoking, he tried it, he kept doing it. Impulse control had never been his strong suit. At the end of each long afternoon he went back to his room. He’d found small, grimy lodgings off Goodge Street, more of a guest house than a hotel, cheap because it was not at all nice. It was close to the British Museum, though, another good place to kill time. It was also just around the corner from a large YMCA, and he stopped by its bar on the way out each evening. When he found himself in conversation with one of the young travellers boarding there — German, Italian, American,
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