Best British Short Stories 2019

by Nicholas Royle

  The estate agent calls out, ‘Are you OK out there?’ She sounds a little desperate.

  ‘Never better,’ say I, and it’s true.

  ‘Let me know if you need any more info, won’t you?’

  How I hate lazy, slangy abbreviations.

  Curtilage, curtilage . . .

  ‘Of course. I won’t be much longer.’

  Back in the bedroom I snap the heads from two ceramic spaniels and remove all the light bulbs I can reach. I take out my scalpel, expose that elegant 10A blade, and then notice a subtle change in the light. Mrs T— is standing in the doorway. She looks enormous; a bandaged yeti slumped on a Zimmer frame. I’ve made the mistake of believing she was contributing to the hum of conversation that continues from her room. Silly me. I retract the blade and slip the scalpel behind my back. We look at one another.

  She starts to shriek, really shriek.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing back here? Thought we told you to stay away after last time. Croydon not good enough for you? Why don’t you piss off back to your blonde slag, we don’t want you—’

  Curtilagecurtilagecurtilage . . .

  And then Mr T— is next to her, all ‘There there’, and ‘Come on, Mother’, and ‘It’s not Richard, love’. He shuffles her – suddenly silent and pliable – away, and I’m alone again, touched at this obvious affection, and relieved that he didn’t notice any damage. I flip back the ghastly, quilted duvets (twin beds, unsurprisingly), slice quickly down the centre of each mattress, and rearrange the covers. That won’t be noticed that for ages.

  The agent looks relieved to see me: dementia has its limitations. Mr T— mutters an apology and his wife, enthroned once more, smiles at me as if we’ve never met. Injecting a degree of ripe heartiness into my voice I tell the trio that I’ve seen enough of this lovely property. Two of them deliver their lines as readily as I have, the third nods and grins absently, and when all brisk niceties have been observed the agent and I see ourselves out, promising an early response.

  It’s milder than in the house, and the change in temperature seems to permit more ambient noise: dogs yap and a thrush pipes away cheerfully. The mother-ship has moved on, or assumed a higher altitude, allowing cooler currents and this livelier atmosphere to circulate below her clammy, drooping under-parts. The agent (still arse-aware) leads me back between the gnomes and we hit the pavement. She turns on her eroded heels, lights up and inhales suicidally, circumflex eyebrows jitterbugging.

  ‘What did you think? Potential? It’s not in the best of condition but it’s a very good price and there’s space for a decent conservato—’

  Slowly, deliberately I make a cut-throat gesture. The agent looks confused, as well she might. I step right up to her and stare into her eyes for four seconds: I count them off in my head. She backs off, almost tripping, clutching her handbag to her belly. I shove her aside and walk away briskly.

  She shouts rash obscenities from her car as she speeds past, but wisely doesn’t stop.

  A mile or so away, having taken the circuitous footpath-and-alley route I’d planned earlier (in case of constabulary involvement), on a quiet bridge over the town’s less-than-pristine waterway I take out the SIM card from the pay-as-you-go mobile and drop it into the water. It glints and bobs, then disappears, or perhaps I just lose interest. A little further downriver I drown the phone, hurling it mid-stream: you can’t be too careful and I’ve got plenty more at home.

  Though I’m already contemplating my next outing I pause to inspect today’s trophies. Coincidentally, they’re all engraved with the same legend: J. RABONE & SONS. MADE IN ENGLAND. The old man’s fingers have rubbed away the silver-plating on the spirit level and its bright, brass core catches the sun, very cheerfully. The dividers feel just so in my hand; the folding rule is a miracle of pivots.

  I feed them to the nearest drain and jog to the station, replenished.

  Kiss

  Elizabeth Baines

  A couple stop in a tube station entrance, and a man nearby tightens his fingers around a detonator in his hand.

  They lean together to kiss, the crowd flowing around them, a moment you can hold like a still from a film, the young woman lifting her face, silver jacket, blond hair in a ponytail, the young man bending, dreadlocks bunched at his neck in a red band.

  A moment in a progression of moments, leading towards the moment their lips will meet, running on from all the moments before: the couple rising up out of the underground through the musty-smelling wind, the stale breath of old London with its shades of Bedlam and The Ripper still shifting in the tunnels with the soot-coloured mice that run between the rails, leaning together, the young man behind, the young woman leaning back, new lovers drunk on touch: while above in the glittering day, the young man with the bomb in his backpack crosses the road towards the tube station entrance, nervous, looking over his shoulder in the way he’s not supposed to, been told not to, a gleam of sweat on his faintly shadowed upper lip. And the moments before that, as the young couple sat in the rattling train, the young woman’s ankles crossed in her green sneakers, the young man’s jutting thighs hard in tight jeans, and above in the street the lad with the backpack stood ready to alight from a bus and was jostled so he fell against the metal post. And his heart turned over, but nothing happened, and in those seconds, he breathed again, though as he stepped to the pavement he was afraid that the fuse was damaged and panicked that his mission would fail.

  And the history before: the night the young couple met, lights strung in the trees in a south London garden, reggae blasting through open windows, his lithe frame silhouetted, hers pale against dark shrubs. A girl you could see as privileged, a man you could assume to be righteously, rightfully angry, and in the first few seconds, as they were introduced, that was just how they saw each other: he on his bristling guard, she potentially afraid and ashamed; and then, as he handed her a drink, each recognised in the other – she in the soft gleam of his eyes, he in the brave lift of her chin – the courage of a survivor.

  While across London, over the narrow gardens and the roofs of the terraces, over the low- and high-rise council estates, the wide ebbing river and the traffic run of Euston, the young man who would carry the backpack rang the bell to an upstairs flat. Three others bent over a table scattered with batteries and wires, the boom of a nightclub, decadent sound of the non-believers, thudding up through the floor.

  And the pasts further back, the stories dovetailing towards this moment.

  A tall house on Highgate Hill with a laurel bush in the garden, family dinner with solicitor parents in a shining kitchen extension, the girl’s younger brother and sister squabbling, her mother mildly scolding as she spooned out the pasta, then touching her husband’s shoulder as she turned with the saucepan. Father looking up at her mother and smiling, as if he had eyes for no other, as if the night before, when the others were sleeping, he hadn’t crept into the girl’s room, hadn’t hissed in her face afterwards, It’s just between you and me. Though he didn’t need to say it, how could she tell her mother, how could she tell anyone? A thing that wasn’t supposed to happen. She stared at her father acting as though it hadn’t. Perhaps it hadn’t. Perhaps she had dreamt it; perhaps she was evil, filthy-minded. Perhaps she was mad. No, she wasn’t dreaming; she had to face that when it happened again. But yes, perhaps she was mad, perhaps there was something wrong with her, for it to keep on happening. In school she kept away from the other girls, sat in the library at lunchtime, her limbs heavy and frozen, while they went off down the road to hang around the café and gossip and call to the boys. Envious, no not envious, too removed from them for envy, trapped behind a barrier, her inability to account for herself, even to herself.

  But did her mother guess anyway? She would wonder that, years later. And did she blame the girl? For she reserved for the girl a strictness she never applied to her siblings, and a critical tartness of manner that m
ade the girl feel constantly stupid and dashed. Though she didn’t like to admit it to herself, she didn’t want to think she was unloved. Fifteen years old, she sat on her mother’s bed beside her mother as she got ready to go to a function, her mother patting her own hair in the mirror, taking up her bangles and asking, Which one? The girl was flattered to be asked and chose with care, a deep blue and a turquoise to go with the colours in her mother’s kaftan, and her mother, pleased with the choice, drew them onto her wrist. An intimate moment, for which the girl was glad. And in that moment, she had the notion of telling her mother, weighed it in her mind as she’d weighed the bangles in her hands. Her mother leaned forward to adjust her mascara, and the girl watched a little crease appear at the back of her neck and was overwhelmed by a sense of her mother as vulnerable, and of the devastation that such a revelation would create. And that was when her mother, meeting her eyes in the mirror, said tartly, quite nastily, That lipstick doesn’t suit you.

  Then the years of anorexia, that wish to be no longer the person you see in the mirror and weighing you down, to flee her; the dropping out of university, the lack of room in your head for facts and complicated thoughts about things it was hard to make matter, the lack of point in it all. And finally, one dark night, the attempt to escape at last with a can of lager and a packet of pills.

  And the long road to recovery, which she was still treading that night at the party in the south London garden, but there she was, treading it, or rather, standing still against the dark bushes as the young man with the dreadlocks turned towards her, carrying his own past of oppression.

  The monkey noises and gestures, those grammar school boys going past in the morning as he turned out of the Bristol council estate, the sly and not-so-sly slurs in the playground. He stopped going, doubled back to the empty house – his lone mother gone to her hospital cleaning job – or hung around the shopping precinct. His mother summoned to the school, the anger and sadness in her eyes. The taunts didn’t stop, and as he grew his anger grew too: he would flip and lash out, and in the end, he was expelled. The sleek police car drawing up alongside as he walked in the streetlight, a teenager with dreadlocks; once, on a two-mile walk, he was stopped several times. He had learned the necessity of controlling his temper, but he couldn’t help a gesture of exasperation, he threw up his arms, and later his mother would find him in the police station covered in bruises.

  And then the long fight for justice, and calmness, and work for a charity helping young people with such problems, and a soft summer night in a south London garden shaking hands with a new worker, the pale young woman.

  And as the young man with the dreadlocks stood in court in the dock and the young woman came to in a hospital bed with a drip in her arm, the twelve-year-old boy who would eventually carry the backpack sat neatly in his uniform passing his exams, the pride of his grocer father, destined for university and the life of a doctor. But as he walked home through the winter evenings something was awry. The dark street was a gulf between squat cliffs of housing, acrid light leaking from mean squares of windows, congealed sticky rubbish, a dog slinking, guilty or sly, from a deep black alley, like the gulf between the life of his home – his anxious, conscientious parents, eager to please in this land they came to – and the life of school and the high street where the kids hung at weekends in their hi-tops, careless and entitled. He belonged in neither world. He belonged nowhere; his future, mapped out by his parents, was a mystery to him, alien. He had no real purpose of his own. Until one day after mosque, someone touched his arm and drew him aside.

  And here they are now, three young lives converging, and the lives of those milling around them, the young people in jeans, the men and women carrying cases with laptops and papers, parents with a child in a pushchair, which the young man with the backpack has been trained not to see as individual people with lives, only to think of the glory of martyrdom and reward in heaven.

  And here is the moment when his thumb touches the plunger, and if the fuse has become disconnected the crowd will keep flowing and the couple will complete their embrace and move on to wherever their relationship will take them, or the pulse will hit the fuse and the air around it will fly out faster than the speed of sound, and in the blast and the shock waves that follow, and the sucking vacuum created, those linear narratives will shatter, the fragments spin – a mother’s resentful face in the mirror, the hatred and fear in a policeman’s eyes, lights glowing in a south London garden, and the moment conceived but never fulfilled, the perfect conclusion, the kiss.

  Badgerface

  LUCIE McKNIGHT HARDY

  Dod’s back and he’s looking meaner than ever. He’s come straight to the pub and even though I’m working he grabs me in a headlock and rubs his fist against my crew cut, and it hurts but I can’t say anything so I just close my eyes really tight. When he’s finished, he swings me round and puts his hands on my shoulders in a ‘let me look at you’ kind of way. His neck is short and wide and the tendons are sticking out, taut like ropes.

  ‘Haven’t got any less ugly, have you, Badge?’ he says. When he’s finished looking at me he lets me go and walks straight over to the bar and asks Sandra for a pint of Felinfoel. He drinks it down in one go and asks for another and I know it’s going to be one of those nights.

  In the six months that Dod’s been gone, he’s become enormous. His arms are huge, the muscles bulging from under the sleeves of his khaki t-shirt, swelling the tattoos and disfiguring them. The snake has become a python, not the elegant black mamba it was when he left, and the graceful bluebird has turned into a massive, irate eagle. There’s an angel that sits on his shoulder, her arms stretching up into his sleeve, and even though I can’t see it, I know that she’s holding a harp above her head. She’s swollen taut across his biceps, and looks more pregnant than devout. Even his thighs are straining against the material of his combat trousers. I wonder why he’s come here in his work clothes, why he doesn’t put on a track suit or jeans like all the other men in the village, but then I look over to where he’s standing against the bar, halfway down his second pint, the flotsam and jetsam of the Ceffyl Du floating around him and I know why he’s done this. The Hero’s Return. He’s getting pats on the back and shots of whisky bought for him, and Sandra’s undone the top button of her blouse in celebration. I pick up the rest of the glasses and push my way through the throngs of well-wishers and put the pint pots down on the bar. There are still paper ghosts hanging up on the shelf behind, even though Halloween was yesterday.

  ‘Bless him,’ Sandra says in my direction, looking sad and disgusted at the same time. Dod catches my eye and winks and holds up his pint to me in a tiny salute.

  When I get home, Darren’s sitting on his own in the kitchen. He’s chugging on a can of Stella and a Marlboro Light and I know Mam’ll kill him if she finds out. I nod at him and fetch a can from the fridge. I sit down opposite and wait for him to speak. He doesn’t, so I decide to get in first.

  ‘Dod’s back.’

  Still he doesn’t say anything. He stares at me for a while then he takes another swig of lager and pokes his fag end into the hole in the top. He crushes the can in his hand. He chucks it on the table.

  ‘It’s all right, Champ,’ he says and he walks out. He’s the only one who calls me Champ. Everyone else calls me Badgerface. Apart from Mam, who calls me by my proper name.

  I open the top part of the window and flap my hand to clear the smoke and then I wrap his can up in a Spar bag and push it down the side of the kitchen bin. Then I sit there, drinking my beer and thinking about nothing.

  I hear Dod get in sometime in the early hours. The pylons have been buzzing again, and I’ve been awake on and off even before the front door smashes open against the wall. Tonight the pylons are louder than usual, and I find myself wondering if this is because Dod’s back. Then I tell myself that’s stupid, and that’s when I hear the door crash open.

 
There’s the sound of a scuffle, and I think it’s probably Dod falling over onto the pile of shoes and coats in the hall. The landing light goes on, and I know it’ll be Mam. She’s been fretting about today. Ever since he phoned to say he was coming back she’s been jumpy, cleaning the house even more than usual, making sure there are fresh sheets on the bed and playing Shirley Bassey extra loud. She’s had her roots done and her nails are all silvery-pink. Now I can hear them in the hall, and she’s shushing him and he’s coughing and then they’re quiet for a moment. Kissing, I think.

  ‘Baby doll.’ Dod thinks he’s whispering but he’s too drunk to talk quietly and Mam’s shushing him again. Mam’s got a frilly nightie, a baby doll nightie, and that’s what Dod calls her in the first week when he gets home, after he’s been away on ops. It’s all ‘Baby Doll’ in the first week when they can’t keep their hands off each other, and they lock themselves in their room for hours at a time, and Dod’ll come out now and again to hand me a couple of twenties and an order for the Chinese and the offy. It’s Baby Doll for the first week.

  For the second week it’s, ‘You Slag.’ For that week they’ll just fight and shout and Mam will start wearing more make-up under her eyes and sit at the kitchen table in her dressing gown, staring at her fingernails and picking away at the nail polish. She’ll spend more time on the phone to Auntie Gaynor, and when she puts the phone down, she’ll still be crying. That’s the second phase, the You Slag phase.

  Then it’s just pure indifference, for both of them. It’s as though they don’t even know that the other one is there and they exist in two isolated versions of reality, getting their own food, making their own cups of tea. They’ll go out separately, him to the Ceff, her with the girls, and they won’t even tell the other one where they’re going. Ships that pass in the night, Darren calls them.