Best British Short Stories 2019

by Nicholas Royle

  I wrote a book of my own. I thought that publishing a novel would answer some question I had not fully articulated. I wasn’t so naive as to imagine life would change in any practical way, but I had a notion that when I saw the thing in print I would know why it had been worth doing: why I had spent four years of evenings and weekends shut in my room, instead of giving that time to the young woman who found Gaunt’s work excessively male, and to our daughter. I expected that once published, the book would feel different from all the failed fragments, terrible stories and unworkable novels I had been writing and discarding for as long as I could remember. But when I picked up the first proof copy I found that each page was a mass of flaws and vulnerabilities. The book’s whole purpose, it appeared, was to expose the limitations of its author. The debt to Gaunt was painfully obvious. I had known he was one of my touchstones, but now I saw I had produced nothing but a thin imitation. Even my title seemed shamefully Gauntian, and for a while, I cast around for an alternative that would at least throw readers off the scent. But nothing else fit, and I had to accept that the book was called The Heights of Sleep.

  I had slept poorly in the last weeks of the final draft, lying half-awake for hours with structural problems flailing in my head. Then I would slip into a dream in which the world was a single infinite house in whose grey rooms and gardens I kept accosting family and strangers, trying to convince them of a peril that had been revealed to me alone. Every time I dreamt it there was the same shock as I grasped that they knew the abominable truth already: they had been living with it all along. I had never had a recurring dream before, and I grew concerned it might not go away. But once the book was signed off I stopped remembering my dreams.

  My editor asked for a list of writers to send advance reading copies, the idea being that if they liked the book they might give us a quote for promotional purposes. I hesitated before including Gaunt’s name. He would see at once that I had written a knock-off of his early stuff; he’d be furious, or he’d pity me, or sue me for plagiarism. In the end, though, I decided to send him a copy. If not now, I told myself, then when? He probably wouldn’t read it anyway. And in the days that followed, I felt lightened, as if I had been freed from a compulsion.

  A few weeks later my editor forwarded me a message from J. S. Gaunt. He was grateful for the copy of The Heights of Sleep. He never gave publicity endorsements, but he had enjoyed the book. He looked forward to my next one, and in the meantime, I should get in touch if I ever wanted to meet up.

  A bright, cramped, Italian coffee bar: grubby Formica, Soho crowding past the window, light echoing off steel surfaces, the espresso machine’s snarl. I got there early and was immediately mired in logistics. Which table? Should I order now? Would I recognise him? How should I make myself known? I was rearranging my coat on the back of my seat when I saw him standing in the entrance, blinking as if the scene were a surprise. Close-cropped hair no longer grey but white. Leather jacket, hoodie, worn jeans, biker boots, messenger backpack. My pulse beat in my temples as I stood up. I wanted this to be over already, and at the same time, I wanted us to hit it off so well that before we knew it we’d be falling out of a late bar in the small hours of tomorrow morning.

  He ordered a double espresso, and I asked for the same. My copy of Form, which I was planning to ask him to sign, lay on the table between us. He did and did not look as I had expected. He looked like a man of his age, with liver-spots at his hairline, grey hairs in his nostrils and a trace of milk in his pale blue eyes. I had taken up poker as a result of reading his accounts of the game. He saw it as a practice in which you could discover your illusions about the world: not as a metaphor for anything, but poker as a way of actually confronting yourself. I wanted to tell him how this idea had beguiled me, but it seemed a weird thing to bring up, and besides, I was hardly in a position to swap poker stories with a veteran of the card table. I had played a few nights with friends and then let it slide.

  I emptied two sachets of sugar into my coffee. Gaunt sipped his straight. I told him that one of my most vivid memories was of lying in a park in hot July sun, smelling the chlorine from an outdoor pool and reading the whole of Among the Masquadors in an afternoon. I told him I was extremely interested in the way he had taken his stories ‘Taboo Parade’ and ‘The Insufferablist’ and crossbred them to produce his novella Persephone Potts. I told him I was all too conscious that my review of Harm hadn’t even scratched the surface of what was really going on in that book. I told him I had a theory that whatever the daughter sees in the upstairs bathroom is linked with the crooked murder investigation in the central section of Form. I told him I had read on the internet that he had finished the third book in the sequence and I couldn’t wait to see how the pattern was going to unfold. He asked me what I was working on now.

  I was dumbfounded less by the question than by the fact I hadn’t thought to have an answer ready. I stumbled through a couple of half-formed ideas. Then, confused, I told him how nervous I had been about sending him The Heights of Sleep, given the book’s debt to his work.

  Gaunt looked puzzled.

  ‘I hadn’t noticed a resemblance,’ he said.

  At that, we both seemed to lose the thread of the conversation. Gaunt looked at the ceiling and I swallowed the sludge at the bottom of my cup.

  He began to talk about Cynthia Cleaver. She had been kind to him when he was starting out, he said. There had been one night, around the time of his second book, when she had asked him round for dinner. I leaned forward, excited, because – it now seemed obvious – this must be the reason distinguished writers met with tyros: to pass on this kind of story.

  Cynthia Cleaver was an important name to me, not that this was unusual on my part. She was the kind of writer I could only have admired more if she had been a little less well-known. I had first come to her when I did The Fox’s Tower as an A-level text, but it took me years to realise what a figure she actually was. Cynthia Cleaver: prolific experimental novelist in genres from kitchen-sink gothic to surreal satirical SF to postmodernist Victorian pastiche, leftist campaigner, feminist provocateur, folklorist, writer of stage plays, screenplays and radio plays, translator of Beowulf and the Arabian Nights, travel writer, pioneer of long-form first-person cultural criticism, tireless polemicist, reviewer of everything from literary fiction to sixties fashion to punk rock to pornography to political rallies. She had died in middle age, eleven years after I was born. I had a shelf of her books.

  Gaunt was explaining that in the late seventies Cleaver liked to invite young writers for dinner, two or three at a time, at her house beside Hampstead Heath. She would roast a joint and serve it in her little basement kitchen, then pour the wine and hold court. Along with Gaunt, Cleaver had served dinner that night to Will Stagg and Charlotte Borden, both of whom at that time were trendy youngsters who had done a few things. Stagg was as much of a dick then as now, Gaunt said, and Borden was going through a troubled period. As for the young Gaunt himself, he was callow, arrogant and rude. He was convinced that they were laughing up their sleeves at him and that they thought he should be mopping floors for a living. He shook his head.

  ‘I must have talked some rubbish that night.’

  But Cleaver, he said, had been equal to his shortcomings as a dinner guest. Briskly, discreetly, with a glint of irony – and doing the same for the other two idiots at the table – she had coaxed him into loosening his grip on his own ego. She conducted an acerbic conversation, demanding hard thought and quick wits from her guests. She didn’t let you off on any particular point, but she drew you up to her level. The atmosphere in Cynthia Cleaver’s kitchen told you that writing was too serious a matter for writers to be allowed to get in its way.

  ‘I saw things differently after that,’ Gaunt said.

  We ordered more coffees. Out of sheer discomfiture, I picked up the copy of Form and opened it at random. It was the passage where Vincent gets kidnapped. I told Gaun
t – chuckling at how unlikely it sounded now I came to say it out loud – that I had always had this notion of something hidden in his work, something with its own separate existence. He looked blank. I began to speak faster and less coherently as I tried to get across what I meant. Not a point or an idea, I said, not a pattern or a design, but something big, something else, something you’ve been getting at all this time. A kind of fractal shape, so we have to know how to calculate it before it can appear. I wasn’t explaining well, I said. I heard a pleading note in my voice. At that moment, I felt that I was not asking Gaunt to confirm the existence of the secret figure, but to deny it.

  He did not reply. He wasn’t surprised by what I had said; only embarrassed by the jumbled emotional demand I seemed all of a sudden to be making. Twenty minutes later we parted at a bus stop.

  * * *

  That day, seven years ago, was the last time I saw Gaunt. Life has changed since then, but I’ve been working on my next book the whole time. I still have a way to go. It’s an ambitious one, I suppose.

  Encouragement is important, and I often look at my copy of Gaunt’s novel Germ, which arrived in the post a month after we met in the coffee shop. It has an inscription from the author. The date, my name, his name, and one other word: Upward. When I first saw that, the meaning was clear. Now it seems less so. I emailed Gaunt to thank him for the book, but there was no reply.

  For a long time, I blamed myself for not having struck up a friendship. Now and then I felt I had defeated the whole purpose of writing The Heights of Sleep. The regret was useful, though, because it drove me on in the early stages of this new book. I liked to imagine that when it was finished it would redeem that failure. It would show beyond a doubt that I understood.

  Gaunt dropped out of sight after Germ was published. He wasn’t reviewing. Nothing fresh came up when I searched for his name. My editor, in one of the conversations we still occasionally had, told me she had heard he was working on a new project. I imagined him in a late surge, setting out on a new inward journey at an age when most would be content to rest on an honourable career. Then one day I saw an arts-and-culture item which said that the cult author J. S. Gaunt had died at the age of seventy-six after a short illness.

  I could hardly claim to have known the man, but it did have an impact. We would never have another book. We would never have another inimitably Gauntian sentence. Whatever happened on this planet from now on would happen without him. For a while I stopped writing, the first shock turning into gloomy months in which I couldn’t see the point. The woman with whom I had once argued over a literary festival was sympathetic, but I knew she thought it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if this was the end of my attempt at a second book. It might be good news for us all. It’s a pity she felt like that, and a pity I didn’t try harder to change her mind.

  But setting a project aside can produce new insights, and soon I was seeing things I hadn’t noticed before. Unfinished as it was, the work in progress showed traces of a pattern or a shape that had yet to be revealed. I hadn’t planned it, but there it was, lurking in the edges. One night I dreamed that the world was one infinite house, and woke up convinced that if I could finish my work I would grasp the secret that was hidden there. A form would resolve itself into existence, the figure that had been implied all along although it had nothing to do with what the story appeared to be about.

  Since then, I carry on. Some days progress is good, others not. I’ve learned not to force it. When the work won’t come, I walk around the city, not thinking about where I’m going. Not long ago I walked all day, and at the end of the afternoon found myself standing on an enclosed pedestrian bridge between a shopping centre and a multi-storey car park, watching the people in the street below. I stood for several minutes with my forehead close to the bronze-tinted glass, and then I saw my wife and daughter. They came out of an overground station and waited at the lights, hand in hand. They crossed the road and began to walk along the pavement, passing underneath me. I moved to the other side of the bridge to keep them in sight.

  I watched them for as long as I could. I didn’t know why I was so afraid of losing them in the crowd, or why I was filled with this unexpected joy, this certainty that everything had been worthwhile. My daughter was wearing a plastic raincoat I hadn’t seen before. My wife looked young. They were nowhere near home.

  Nude and Seascape

  ANN QUIN

  Her head grew out from the surrounding rocks, part of the grey pock-marked structure of the shore, that was probably why he felt no surprise. The body, admittedly, might not be in harmony or in tone, a little too pink, still it could be considered a good contrast. Hair mingling with seaweed floated in a pool of pus-like water. Dark hair crawled up the wrist, stiff fingers stretched out, as though in a last attempt to grasp an insect, flatten some sea-creature, or just to cover a small area of sand for reassurance. He noted the absence of a ring.

  He lit a cigarette and glanced at the cliffs, austere white knights, ready to advance. Inhaling he quickly looked down. If he moved round, his back to the sea, then his shadow fell directly upon the body, and from a certain angle it looked almost beautiful. Definitely the pink fleshiness spoilt everything. He took his coat off, and gently covered the body up. Even then the head emerging from the grey gabardine was far from satisfactory. He struggled into the coat, the lining was damp, the cigarette went out, he had no more matches. He threw the cigarette away, watching it float, drift between the strands of hair, finally, like a boat, it bobbed up and down in the same place. He picked it up and threw it towards the incoming tide. A few gulls circled above, cat-calling, one swooped and tried to peck the woman’s hair, he waved the bird off, it scornfully screeched into the wind. It began raining. He brought his hat well down, and pulled his collar up, looking round for a flat piece of dry rock to sit on. He felt distracted by the body that was such a separate thing from the fine formation of the head, and he could no longer look to his shadow for assistance in the matter of improvement. He would move the body further up.

  He caught hold of the woman’s shoulder, cold but how soft! He dragged her across the pebbles and rocks, soon he would have her in the right position, he looked round for a suitable place. Driftwood, pieces of iron, newspaper, saturated orange peel, broken bottles, this would never do for a background. If he could only have smoked, he would have solved the problem in no time. He stared at the body, it had become patterned by pebbles, the hip-bone jutted out, that also was covered with sand and small stones; at least the crude pink had been relieved. But he would have to find an entirely different setting.

  Perhaps round the cliff there would be a clear expanse of sand, clean polished pebbles, a desert compared to the jungle he was now in. He curled his fingers into the armpits, feeling the razored hair, and recalled how he had never touched anyone there. About half way he rested, sliding his hands away from the body, so that the head lolled to one side. In such a position the body alone took on a certain eye-catching quality, fish-like in the way it curved, but it was unfinished.

  The cliffs from a closer quarter looked less menacing, he could see a line of damp clay at the top, an ink stain that spread, or blood, even a hair line, anything, it didn’t really matter, it was there in its reality, entirety, whatever he chose to identify it with. This time he would carry the body. The rain felt like pellets of earth on his back where the body did not cover him. He heard the waves, but did not feel the spray, he tasted salt in his dry mouth, and noticed his hands were speckled with blood. As he approached the cliff that was like a piece of cake cut out against the darkening sky, the weight on his back became heavier. He stepped over the rocks, and at one time slipped, the water splashed his trousers, sliding down, though he hardly noticed.

  This side was clear, except in one place where there had been a landslide. However there was plenty of sand, and the pebbles were noticeable for their scarcity. As he lowered the body he was aware of the dar
kness that had enveloped everything. He sank down, everything, it seemed, had been wasted. Was it really too late? He glanced round, but the rain swept over the beach, even the cliffs could not be seen. He felt for the body as a blind person would, and wiped away the sand, pebbles and seaweed; smooth flesh, though still wet, under his groping hands. He would find shelter for the night, there must be a cave somewhere. Soon he came up against the cliff, and only then realised that he had left the body behind. He was filled with overwhelming sadness, as though separated from a loved one, his mistress, wife, mother, women he had loved, or never loved. He stumbled forward and fell. He crawled the rest of the way down, feeling the sand, like insects, creep into his shoes.

  The tide was nearly in, he could hear the waves lashing the rocks nearby. Where was the body, perhaps already carried out? He came to the water’s edge, turned right, feeling sure he must be near it by now. In his haste, he practically tripped over the body; clasping the head he could have cried out in relief. He dragged the body across the sand, running backwards, until he felt the cliff again, here he propped the body, and began searching for shelter. At last he found a place, not exactly a cave, but adequate enough for a night. He went back quickly, the rain spat on his face, the wind swept his hat off; his hands were cold, but his head was bathed in sweat. Catching hold of the woman’s hair he pulled her into a corner between a breakwater and the cliff.

  The morning light so dazzled him that he had to shield his eyes before he could see anything. The tide had receded, probably now on the turn, which indicated it was well past mid-day. How had he overslept at such a time as this? However it wouldn’t take long to accomplish what he had set himself. He looked the body over critically, already with the objectivity of familiarity; it wasn’t all that pink, not even fleshy, apart from a slightly swollen belly, not nearly as bad as he had thought at first.