Best British Short Stories 2019

by Nicholas Royle

  Just as I checked the time, I heard the squeal of the security gate three floors down. I flushed, washed, and ran in to switch on the two older children, and then lastly, in the bedroom, E. Her little fingers curled and grasped, and her lips plumped back up as the flow of subcutaneous activity restarted. This was the best bit about using the switch: for those first few minutes my children and I were together and fresh again, and there was a kind of crystalline peace. I picked E up and rocked her as she blinked and jerked a fist toward the sweet oval of her yawning mouth.

  B turned his key in the door and I went to meet him, and that night everything was fine.

  * * *

  On day twenty the sky lifted to dove grey, and I drove us out to the big Asda, spinning arcs of water from the wheel-arches. As I parked, the rain hardened again. C thought his cagoule felt ‘squishy’ and refused to put it on, then refused to be put into it. When he started shouting my fingers reached, so easily now, for the switch. Nothing happened.

  I flicked it up and down, up and down, but nothing. I took hold of his contorting face and turned it to me, looking for an answer from him, as if he had overcome the switch by the force of his own will. This sudden gesture took him aback and he did in fact stop crying. For a second, we held each other’s gaze and I was struck by the absolute strangeness of him, this person who had come from me, and it seemed he saw the same strangeness in me.

  I lifted his sister, D, from the other side. I tried her switch. Again, nothing happened. She squirmed away from me and went to peer into the tiny convex mirror set within the wing mirror, enjoying her own distorted face. E was asleep in her car seat and I didn’t want to trouble her.

  I looked around the car park, hoping perhaps to see another person in the same situation. The car park was tidily kept, with good space for each unit of car to sit quietly to itself, sure of its locked doors. Racing cloud reflected without sound in the rain-beaded roofs, and for a moment I was calmed, the noise of the children dimmed. But there was no one to help.

  Who exactly was I looking for? Someone like me or someone unlike me?

  There was no one like me, I thought. All of the people I encountered during my days seemed fine, sloshing backward and forward with the tides of each day like happy seaweed. I, however, was up there on the surface, clinging to a broken raft, gazing into tarry liquid that would one day take me down. And that was with the switch to turn to. Now, if that had stopped working, I couldn’t see how I’d be able to navigate the days at all. The laptop and my phone did much to help, but they wouldn’t act directly on the children, these merchants of chaos who were forever plying their trade.

  I didn’t know what to do, so we entered the blue-white cavern of the supermarket – me pushing the trolley with E on the plastic seat, C and D trotting close to my legs – and I began to perform the shopping. Parallel lines of goods and lights. Staff dressed in clean white mesh aprons as if they were butchers and bakers. I soon clocked that I was the shopper in whatever scene they were playing out and the role began to feel like a good fit. Once the trolley was convincingly half-full, I felt safe enough to take an interval and I lay down on the floor between the long chest freezers. C and D ran up the aisle and down the ones either side, figure-of-eighting around the gondolas, and I was held by the cold white tiles under me and the cold white striplights above, and the pattern of the children running.

  Soon, three people stood over me: a young male security guard, and two women like me. One was tapping at her smartphone. I felt a pull toward the pretty box in her hand, the universal object that could join the hands of everyone worldwide, and which, like the knife of a fugu chef, cleaned and sliced life into something that might not kill us.

  The security guard felt for my pulse, which seemed unnecessary, but his warm hand on my wrist was nice. I smiled up at him. Yes, I was fine, and yes, these were my children; they were also fine. With kindness in his eyes he asked me whether I thought I could get up. Of course, I said, and climbed to my feet, straightening my clothes. The other adults drifted off, disappointed.

  At the checkout, as I packed, D reached up for the handle of the trolley and started rocking back and forth, which looked like it felt good. I wished there was a trolley I could stretch up for, but of course I was grown, far too grown, and as I put my card in to pay I felt myself looming over the checkout, some giant redwood whose trunk was mostly rotted through.

  When I got home I went to the laptop while the children ran about in their coats. Eventually they went into the kitchen, I registered noise, and I glanced up from the laptop as they came out carrying bowls, slopping milk and bits of cereal. They would be fine.

  Time passed, and B came home. The scene made him stop on the threshold.

  After he had tidied up the worst, B went out with the three children and I heard him drive off.

  There was a period of heavy quiet and then he came back, carrying E.

  The next thing I knew, B was pulling me to my feet, and in the bathroom he put a toothbrush in my hand with the toothpaste already on it.

  Once I was in bed, he sat on top of the bedclothes and said C and D were spending the night at his mother’s. I said I was tired. He told me to get some sleep, but I didn’t want to go to sleep.

  – But if you’re tired.

  – Not that kind of tired.

  He sighed.

  – Tell me what happened.

  – I don’t know.

  I did know. Everything was broken because I’d overused the switch – not just by using it on all three of them at once, but by using it so often, for so long. It was the accumulation of time I’d spent detached, from all of the messy world, as if I’d been flying and flying and inadvertently strayed out of the influence of gravity, and now I didn’t have the fuel to get myself back to Earth.

  But to explain would have meant explaining about the switch, and I was worried that the switch might just be a metaphor, that I was simply a bad and neglectful person. It struck me that I might be losing my mind. B waited for me to say something and I waited for him to say something, but neither of us said anything and eventually he turned off the light.

  I woke several times with that same feeling of losing my mind: a tangible sliding sensation in my skull, as if it were a shallow bowl filled with fluid, in a neverending process of being nudged off the edge of a table. My fingers began to ache, and I realised I was gripping the edge of the mattress.

  I went to the living room, entered the machine world of the laptop.

  It wasn’t yet dawn when B came in, shut the lid so fast I had to snatch my fingers away, and turned without speaking. I didn’t think; I lunged for his neck, my thumbs on the nape and my fingers around his throat, on his hard Adam’s apple. He grabbed my wrist and pulled one hand away, but the other still groped the back of his neck for a switch. Sounds were coming from me, and a sour heat I could almost smell. I expected to be thrown, shoved backwards into the furniture, but instead he reached behind him and took hold of my hand, firmly and warmly, as if he were pulling me up from a cliff edge over which I’d slipped.

  We stood for a moment, two bodies in the sudden silence.

  – It’s stopped raining, he said. Come on.

  With E asleep in her car seat in the back, B drove us through the lightening streets and out of town, taking the twisting hill roads and turning onto the lane above the reservoir. He stopped by a gap in the stone wall from where we could look down. The water was as high as I’d ever seen it, a plane of rippled steel under the dawn sky. The engine ticked.

  – It’s ages since we’ve come out here, I said at last. There’s been so much rain.

  His silence hollowed my words.

  I carried on.

  – Remember we went up on Saddleworth, and we put the tent up behind that wall and we couldn’t hear the road, and no one could see us from any direction?

  – Yeah, he said after a
moment. That freezing night in midsummer. You wouldn’t let me make a fire.

  – I know, I’m sorry. I just wanted to have the night, as it was.

  That summer I was pregnant for the first time and my new state came with the sudden understanding that yes, everything in the universe was expanding. We lay there for hours, outside in the cold, and it stayed light, and still light, like the night would never come. Stones dug into my spine through our blanket and the chill got right to my marrow; we held hands and I watched it come dark, and then the night seemed it would never end. Such deep cold in midsummer: all the rules had been changed. The stars swam above us and I could easily have slipped off the hard ground into the billowing heart of the rest of existence, and I knew death would feel the same. I had nothing to hold on to, no certainty, and I had never been happier.

  In the back seat, E stirred and shifted, then settled. With my eyes down, I told B about the shallow bowl of fluid in my skull, about flying out of the reach of gravity, the rotting redwood, the cold white of the supermarket floor. I told him about the seaweed and the raft, about the terror that textured my days, and finally I told him about the switch. Then I flung open the car door and jumped out and vomited onto the grass.

  I used to live okay without the switch. We lived okay without the laptop. Then Ben brought it home, a fresh silver box swaddled in white polystyrene, and showed me the many ways in which it would improve our lives, and it did, and I gradually came to forget the time before, and who we were then.

  Ben closed his door softly and stood over me, and a wind brought the clean scent of the reservoir. I looked up at him.

  – I want to go back, I said.

  My husband gathered me in, held my head against his chest. He whispered something, touched my hair. I have always liked his body, his man’s body with its solid thighs, its uncumbersome chest, above all its neat and predictable rhythms. But in all my fleeing from the soft, the unnameable, I had forgotten there could also be this tenderness in him, and what allowing it to touch me might mean. I shook.

  Evie began to wail, in her way that I understood meant nothing was wrong except she was lonely and afraid and bewildered to find herself where she was, and we would go to her, Ben or me, or both of us, in a minute. For now, the way his embrace pulled my head against him sent the texture of her cries through the bars of his ribs, resonant with the harmonics of her and him and me, and I listened as the hardly bearable music played out through that delicate instrument.

  Optics

  REN WATSON

  In the middle of a power cut, they sit on the floor in the dark. They have left the curtains open and the moon is high outside the window. Beth cannot remember the last time they sat so close this way. Evan holds her left hand and plays with each finger in turn, and she rests her head on his shoulder, feeling for the slight movement of his body as he breathes. The room feels still and small, as though the walls have drawn in around her.

  – I’ve noticed something, she says. She is thinking of the tiny, needle-thin place on their daughter Rose’s little finger where there is light. When she holds Rose’s hand up, the light comes through the hole. It looks like a star.

  – What have you noticed? Evan says.

  She tells him.

  – That doesn’t sound possible. He says he will wake her and look.

  – It’s gone ten, she says. Leave her be. She’ll never settle again.

  He lets go of her hand but doesn’t get up. He nudges her head from his shoulder. He stretches and yawns and says he might go to bed, but he doesn’t get up. She wants to talk about other things, but she doesn’t. The stillness has gone.

  She falls asleep there on the floor and when she wakes again at four, she is alone. The power has returned and all the lights have come back on. In the kitchen, the radio she had listened to earlier has come back to life. She turns all the lights out and switches off the radio, climbs the stairs and gets into bed next to him but the sheets are cold and she cannot sleep.

  In the morning, they stand Rose in the bathroom and examine her hand, which is soft and perfect and still hot from sleep. There is nothing there.

  After the hole in Rose’s finger disappears, another one comes, just under her jawbone. It is the size of a button. Beth can see right through to the other side of her. The edges of the hole are fuzzy. She rubs her eyes but it doesn’t change. If anything, it has grown a little larger, a little brighter.

  She calls her mother, who likes to make things out of paper. Birthday cards, flowers, origami swans. Before Rose was born, she made two cards for the baby, one pink, one blue, but she sent neither. Her gift to Beth after the birth was a bar of soap. It was wrapped in pleated paper and fastened with a gold sticker. When Beth looked up the brand, she found they stopped making it in 1985. She wants me to know, Beth had thought, that I haven’t really been on this Earth for any time at all.

  Now, as Beth talks, she can hear scissors working in the background. She imagines her mother ankle deep in clippings, fragments of paper falling all around her like snow. She remembers her mother showing her how to make paper dolls, but they always ended up separate instead of joined together.

  She tells her about Rose, but her mother says there is nothing wrong with the child.

  – It’s all in your head, she says. – You still have a vivid imagination.

  – Maybe because I’m so tired.

  – She’s three, her mother says. – Why is she still getting you up at all hours?

  – She’s my first. What do I know?

  There was a time when Beth would believe in anything. When it snowed, her father would take her to look for yeti footprints in the fields. Sometimes they found them.

  She takes Rose to the doctor. Rose sits on a plastic chair, her legs dangling, swinging her sandalled feet. Beth points out the places and the doctor looks, then sits back and frowns.

  – They seem to come and go, Beth says.

  – Do you worry a lot? the doctor says. – Some people think too much about what can go wrong with the human body.

  Beth used to lie in bed counting her heartbeats. She read that a human heart makes billions of beats in a lifetime. She thought that when you reached a certain number, you would drop dead. She used to breathe deeply, trying to slow everything down.

  – I’m not worried, she says.

  The doctor gives her some cream to use three times a day.

  Beth always understood physics better than biology. At school, she liked making circuits. They were predictable, logical. There used to be diagrams in the Sunday paper of things blown apart so you could see how they worked: photocopiers, faxes, cameras, televisions. Her father used to cut them out and save them for her. You could see how all the parts fitted together and know exactly what was inside. But most things work differently now. There are things happening all the time that she cannot see. Things working invisibly, through the air around her, through her, as if she isn’t there.

  Now there is another one below Rose’s right knee, bigger again, the size of a ten pence piece. When Beth puts her hand over it, the skin does not feel any different. Rose is still warm, still solid, as if there is no missing piece. But when Beth takes her hand away again, there it is. Rose thinks this is a game. She puts her hand on Beth, then lifts it away quickly and looks to see if anything has changed underneath.

  Evan knows a lot of facts, such as, there’s only enough gold in the world to fill two swimming pools, and there will never be any more. He knows about stars, planets, black holes. He knows how insignificant people are, how if you crammed all of time into a single day, human lives would be imperceptibly short.

  He knows about the sky, about light and space, what is visible and what is not. He knows about words and how the word lesion derives from the Latin for injury and hurt. He writes the word sky-sion on a piece of paper.

  – Maybe this is what they are, he says
.

  – You’ve given them a name, she says. – And I thought you didn’t believe in them?

  – Whatever you say.

  – Do you believe me or not?

  – I don’t know, he says. – How can I, without seeing for myself?

  – You think I’m crazy, she says.

  – Well are you?

  * * *

  Beth goes to the doctor again to say the cream isn’t really working. She gives her the piece of paper.

  – Is this something? Is it a real thing?

  The doctor reads the word and laughs. She folds the paper and scores it with her thumbnail while she talks, then drops it in the bin.

  – It’s just a word I use to describe them, Beth says. – I thought it might help.

  The doctor writes a prescription for Beth.

  – Giving something a name doesn’t make it real, the doctor says.

  Beth thinks of footprints in the snow, of paper dolls who ought to be joined at the hands, but have been severed.