Best British Short Stories 2019

by Nicholas Royle

  Cece’s expression – sag of irritated eyes.

  ‘Any time you want to, sweetie. You just be my guest.’

  Her phone has been dead since the weekend. A blessing, in many ways. The power in the house is off, has been off since she arrived, and she has no idea how to turn it on. The fuse box in the cellar is unknown territory. She makes coffee on the gas stove, eats shrink-wrapped ham and bread and butter, pickled onions from a jar. In the evenings, when the sun peels away from the easternmost parts of the house, she retreats by degrees to the brighter rooms until there is no more daylight, and then she goes to sleep.

  She cannot watch television, though this is only a minor irritation as all she ever really watches are the shopping channels and the twenty-four-hour mediums. Call now for a personal consultation with an experienced psychic in the comfort of your very own home. Her type of television is the sort that Daniel says speaks to a weakness of character (although admittedly a lot speaks to Daniel of a weakness of character: a fondness for jelly sweets, the refusal to give dogs human names, hair grown past the shoulders, the Tolkien books). He has, in the past, tried to educate her, turning on the History Channel, documentaries about beluga whales. The first time, walking in on Nicola watching QVC in bed, tangle of orange peel in her lap, he had cocked his head to the side and squinted at the screen.

  ‘What’s that they’re selling?’

  ‘Fabergé eggs.’

  ‘Not real ones?’

  ‘I don’t know. If you buy half a dozen, they send you a hutch to keep them in.’

  She had an itchy dialling finger, an overzealous eye for a bargain. The weekly thud of pink-wrapped packages in the letter cage had quickly become a source of tension, Daniel stiffly handing over boxes containing pizza scissors, ceramic knife sets, printed scarves, cultured pearls set in abalone.

  ‘What have you bought this time?’

  ‘It’s a hand-carved set of wooden fruit. I thought we could display it in the hall.’

  ‘I keep the Japanese maquettes in the hall.’

  ‘I know, but there’s space for two things.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I think that’s a kiwi. I don’t know. They don’t look quite how they looked on TV.’

  On the beach, a red-haired woman is walking a child along the sand on a pair of elastic reins. The child can be no more than three, jangle-boned, with the shambling, drunken gait of one whose legs have only very recently been introduced to one another. Lashed to the red-haired woman’s wrist, he drags towards the headland, where the men with litter-pickers have now paused to inspect their haul. It is low tide, the sea pretending innocence. Squinting down along the line of the shore, Nicola watches the gentle pull of outgoing water, the glassy sink and swallow, waves drawing back like lips revealing teeth.

  There is a sudden commotion, the tethered child making a lurch towards something in the sand – a jellyfish, split open and unbodied, a mess of tentacles and bells and polyps that the men running clean-up operations have failed to sweep away. The red-haired woman gives a mighty tug on the reins, enough to haul the child back and halfway off his feet, at which surprise he stumbles over and starts crying. From the deck, Nicola watches as one of the men from the clean-up crew approaches to assess the situation, the red-haired woman already yanking the child up by his wrist and shaking him – the twist of nails in skin. The man holds up his hands, litter-picker swinging jauntily outwards: what seems to be the problem, ma’am? The woman turns on him, jabs a finger into his chest, gesturing first to the litter-picker and then to the jellyfish. The child, wrist still grasped in her other hand, staggers back and forth with her gesticulation, snivelling quickly curtailed by fascination at this sudden opening of hostilities. The man drops his hands, drops back. He swings his litter-picker down, planting it in the sand before changing his mind and looping it upwards, tapping it into his palm like a policeman with a truncheon.

  The two of them argue, duelling pointed fingers. The crux of the matter seems to be that the red-haired woman holds the clean-up crew responsible for the child nearly stumbling on a jellyfish, while the man holds the woman responsible for not purchasing a shorter set of reins. The woman jabs at his chest twice more, the man parrying each time with the litter-picker. In her head, Nicola constructs bits and pieces of the conversation – argues both cases, for and against. Meanwhile, the child, working his wrist free of his mother’s grasp, totters back towards the jellyfish with renewed purpose, as the voices of the adults are lost to an easterly wind.

  She has been here over a week now and still considers herself to be essentially engaged in a siege situation. The food is not holding up quite as she had imagined: two pints of milk, one already curdled; a bag of oranges, three eaten, six rotted; six tins of tuna, one of sweetcorn; two packets of ham, two of prawns, two salami; a pineapple, impenetrable; the jar of pickled onions; a multipack of crackers; a block of cheese; a bar of chocolate; a loaf of bread turned white with creeping mould.

  If she were Cece, she would have brought along pasta or potatoes, food suitable for long internments with only a gas cooker for company. If she were Cece, she would have thought to bring a can-opener too. By the third day, she is roiling with pickled onions, sore-gummed from shards of cracker. The unrefrigerated ham is growing an odd, oyster-coloured film along its rind.

  This ignobility of rotted bread and milk is not what she would have hoped, though she can’t deny it adds something bohemian to the situation. The house – dust-sheeted, its swimming pool drained – seems oddly suited, in its current state, to meals of Sun-Maid raisins and orange cheese eaten on the floor. In the afternoons before the sun runs out, she sits in the dining room overlooking the steep incline of cliffs, stacking miniature towers of crackers which she then covers with marmalade and eats over several long minutes, pretending entire banquets from her customary place at the table’s head.

  Daniel has already gutted the place of anything really worth taking. The majority of the furniture sold at auction as long ago as November, and most of the blue and white also seems to have been snaffled up around that time. Faded patches where the paintings used to hang – a common phenomenon for which Nicola was once startled to realise there is no formal name – disfigure every room in the house. An exercise in barefaced deception. Daniel had gone ahead and sold the Persian rugs and a good percentage of the silver even before asking for a divorce.

  What remains – somewhat pointedly, in Nicola’s opinion – are many of her QVC acquisitions. A shelf of Russian dolls painted to resemble the Muppets. A machine for counting change. A large pottery cat in whose hollow skull umbrellas can be stored. Between the empty spaces left by Daniel’s confiscations, her personal effects remain like a series of insults. A lamp shaped like a goldfish bowl, an egg timer filled with indigo sand. These objects sit around the house like a dumping of useless artefacts, archaeological pieces too mundane to be brought back from the dig.

  The divorce has been in the works over six months and Nicola has given up trying to keep track of where things stand. Her finger has mottled up around her wedding ring, a swell towards the knot of the knuckle like the time she ate rock oysters on her fifteenth birthday and had to be taken to A&E. Every morning, before the heat of the day takes her body and makes it sticky and intractable, she grasps the ring and circles it, twisting back and forth in a vain attempt to take her finger by surprise, slip it up and off before the swelling can stop her. It never works – her left hand is too clever for her right.

  ‘Bacon grease,’ Cece had said on the telephone (this was some months before Nicola stole Cece’s car to drive down to the beach house and summarily surrendered her right to good advice). ‘Or soak your fingers in salt water. It pulls the moisture out of the skin.’

  ‘I tried that,’ Nicola had replied. ‘And grapefruit balm and salt scrub and keeping my hand elevated fifteen hours a day. Nothing works.’

  ‘
Well, I don’t know, then.’ Cece’s children in the background barked instructions for a game of Twister – left hand red! ‘Cut your finger off or just don’t get divorced, I suppose. What do I know.’

  Ball lightning hits the patio doors. Wild blue bounce, like a tumbling of hailstones. She watches the storm from the kitchen windows and wonders whether the buffeted sea will soon expel more bodies. Her telephone psychics would be helpful here. I’m sensing some sort of invertebrate, a whole lot of them, in fact.

  The night she and Daniel met, there had been a thunderstorm. A feeble happening, in truth, three cracks of lightning and a drop in pressure, though still enough to keep Cece’s dinner guests entertained. Cece had not seated them together, more concerned with fixing Daniel up with a friend of hers who sold Mannerist art and owned a pack of shih-tzus named for the phases of the moon. Gibbous is a little scamp, he keeps Crescent and First Quarter on their toes.

  ‘My sister’s the pretty one,’ Cece had announced, by way of introduction when Nicola first arrived. ‘Our father called her the precious cargo. So everyone be on your best behaviour.’

  She had seated her next to an older man who had lectured her on jurisprudence for the duration of the fish course and then excused himself for the lavatory with an expression which very much suggested that Nicola had been the one boring him. It was at this point that Daniel had slid in beside her, leaving the shih-tzu owner, as Cece would lament some time later, quite humiliated five seats down.

  ‘You looked in need of rescuing,’ had been his opening salvo. The sudden vastness of him, dark block against the lightning spill.

  ‘I can take care of myself,’ she’d responded, squaring shoulders, though he had only shaken his head.

  ‘Can’t leave a lady in danger, as my father used to say.’

  He had driven her to the beach house that very night – three hours of frantic getaway in a vast September dark. She had let him carry her off, very much as a prize from a captured citadel, let him talk in circles about showing her this place he thought would suit her, a refuge from the pressures of the world. Holding her hand to steer her out of the path of some fox mess in the driveway, he had murmured, ‘Watch your step,’ in a manner both cautionary and imperative. He had kissed her in the hallway, led her out onto the deck.

  Of course, divorcing had been different. No thunderstorm, only a spiralling wind.

  She doesn’t sleep well. She tries honey, pulls up lavender from the bushes that straggle through the slats of the deck. Daniel has had the bed removed, yet still she sleeps within its confines, rectangular phantom in the centre of the room. From this pretence of space, she can play-act other nights, other weekends, when the house was furnished with more than the memory of things.

  Midnight in a hot September, beat of moths against the overhead lamp. July, slick with sweat, Daniel mixing prairie oysters and complaining about his eyes.

  A month after they were first married, they had driven up to the house in a sultry twilight, car lights on the water dimmed to white. Crashing in, stumbling to the bedroom, she had pushed him backwards, bared her teeth like knuckles, accused him of driving drunk.

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ he had snorted – the furtive joy of him, grabbing at her hair. ‘Orange juice all night. Someone had to be the designated driver if you were going to get all drunk drunk.’

  ‘Drunk drunk,’ she had repeated, enjoying the sound of it. The dense forgiveness of his expression, the hard clasp of hands on her waist.

  In the morning, she had woken to a drifting of summer rain. Heavy arms around her, tricky to escape. Rolling out, she had considered Daniel, snoring gently, glaring in his sleep, as if in disapproval. She had known him then, seen his werewolf skin beneath the surface. Without waking him, she had left the room and wandered out onto the deck in her dressing gown, bare feet slippery on the slats. Beyond the sand, the water had frothed with animation, as though rising up to meet the rain. The tide had been on the wane, the beach filled with the everyday litter of ascophyllum, cuttlebones and beer cans. The spider crabs had emerged from their hiding places and made for the relative safety of the flats.

  There has been no knocking since the third day, when someone from the offices of Daniel’s lawyer had driven down in a Prius and camped outside the house.

  ‘The point is to nip this in the bud,’ he had called through the letterbox, fanning fingers through the copper flap like some encroaching insect. ‘We can sort this out quickly and quietly. Call it a brief lapse in judgement. It’s been an emotional time. Tricky business, difficult decisions. No harm, no foul. Et cetera.’

  Sitting at the bottom of the hall stairs, she had nibbled on salami and pictured Daniel’s lawyer – his almost uncanny hairlessness, as though he had been dipped in lye. At their last meeting, he had leant over the table towards her and she had watched a bead of sweat travel in a seamless line from his crown to the centre of his lip, where he had halted it with a quickly darting tongue. Do correct me if I’m wrong, of course, but both my records and my client’s testimony state that you have actually never worked, Mrs Carmichael. That you have in fact been dependent on the generosity of others your entire life – is this the case?

  At the letterbox, the fingers had flapped, retracted, the voice behind the door becoming irritable. ‘Mrs Carmichael, I don’t know you but I can’t imagine any sane woman would want to be stuck with an injunction, let alone a charge of trespassing, and that’s what’s going to happen if you continue this stunt. If you just open the door and talk with me, I’m sure we can sort this out.’

  Shrugging a shoulder, Nicola had crossed to the door – barricaded with a scuttle of chairs – and posted the remainder of her salami out through the letterbox before wandering away. (She regrets this gesture now, a little. With the ham on the turn, there is scant protein left amongst her rations.)

  Whether or not the threat to return with an injunction was a serious one, there have been no visitors since the first. Of course, there may well have been phone calls but she is thankfully in no position to say. She has, it is true, half-expected Cece to come chasing her, but perhaps her sister’s current lack of a car is owed something for that delay.

  In the dining room, between marmalade-slathered crackers, she acts out scenes of high drama, imagining scenarios, gesticulating to the blank spaces on the walls.

  ‘What did you think you were achieving?’ her sister would say – her narrow limbs, ponytail cuffed in Hermès. ‘Daniel takes the beach house in the divorce so you immediately drive down and barricade yourself in? You know my children practise better conflict resolution than you.’

  ‘He doesn’t even want it,’ Nicola would reply. ‘He owned it before we met, he never used it. And yet now he’s threatening to sell it. Just because he knows I want it. He’s like a child who wrecks a toy he never plays with when his mother tries to give it away.’

  ‘That is ten-pence psychology,’ Cece would say. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. If anyone’s being childish here it’s you.’

  ‘You’re supposed to be on my side,’ Nicola would whine – whines aloud, too, in the dining room, to no one.

  The jellyfish return again the next day. Flooding the shoreline in the early morning like a littering of plastic, the beach foul-breathed after a stormy night. The summer is becoming unpredictable, rain-swollen – a white, fetid season, filthy with cloud.

  From the deck, Nicola watches the commotion. Teenagers with their phones out, filming videos of one another poking jellyfish with sticks. Towards the foreland, an elderly couple are walking arm in arm, in matching jackets. The woman is bent over, great chin and wattle hanging down beyond her breastbone. The man, though tall and relatively sprightly, walks bent over to the same degree, keeping pace with her halting step. As they approach a jellyfish, the man rears upright, just long enough to scout a clear path around the obstacle, before dropping back into his imitation h
unch and towing the woman safely up the bay.

  Throughout the morning, Nicola watches for the red-headed woman and her tethered child, although neither one appears. Around noon, a television crew arrives to shoot a brief piece – the hosts of a general-interest show Nicola half-remembers Daniel watching, talking genially to each other with their shoes encased in plastic bags. ‘Potential tourist attraction, yes – but is this plague symptomatic of something more serious, Cathy?’ – ‘Actually, Tim, I think you’ll find that “plague” is a word usually only applied to insects.’

  Behind them, the teenagers dance about for the cameras, sticking out their tongues and waving until the director has to pause filming to ask them to settle down.

  In the afternoon, she sits in the living room and tries to ignore her growling stomach. She is approaching emergency levels with her rations but the prospect of leaving the house to search for food seems only to invite invasion. If she were Cece, she would have brought a cooler. If she were Cece, she would have thought this through.

  She sets up the plastic chess set and plays herself with a jumbled, Ludo-like approach to the rules, jumping bishops over knights and moving queens with abandon. Early on, Daniel had showed her a photograph of himself at a junior school chess tournament – ten years old, top-heavy with braces and a nose to grow into, sourly clutching a participation prize.

  ‘I hadn’t cracked the code yet,’ he had said, laying the chess set out between them, and she had loved him for his straight teeth and strident nose and the fact that he couldn’t bear to lose at anything. He had taught her chess strategies and combinations, smacking her hands away from impulse moves.

  ‘There are safer ways to get there,’ he would say, time and time again, repositioning her pawns around the king. ‘You don’t have to be silly about it. There’s never any need to lose, if you only use your head.’