The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories

by Victoria Hislop

  ‘This way,’ I said, as I turned in the seat and knotted it under her chin, ‘is more dignified.’ I was already a foot taller than her and I was worried someone from school might see us and think she was my girlfriend, instead of my mother. My brother sat in the back of the car while my mother swung at the stake with the mallet. The rain had muddied the surface of the ground, but barely soaked in at all. It was still hard going. It started to drizzle. I held the Lorazepam® High-Potency Benzodiazepine golf umbrella over my mother’s head with my arm outstretched so I didn’t have to stand too close to her. If anyone drove past and saw us I hoped they would think I was more in the role of caddy than lover.

  Increasingly, when I thought about my father, my memories of him were not so much of actual events or incidents, but of the things he left behind. My father had a moustache and one of his eyes was sleepy. The sleepy eye was more noticeable in photographs than in real life. Not many adults have a sleepy eye – or perhaps it’s difficult to tell because so many of them wear glasses. There was a framed photograph of my parents on their wedding day next to the telephone in the hall. My mother is wearing a too-big navy suit in the photograph. Her cheeks are uneven and she looks seasick. My father seems happier – his moustache, if not his mouth, is smiling. His eyes are downcast though. He is looking at the most striking thing in the photograph – his massive white wrists. My father told me the story of the photograph one night when he’d been drinking and my mother wouldn’t let him in the house. He climbed through my window and spent the night on the floor next to my bed. The story was this: a few months after the date with my mother, my father had another date. This date was with a girl he really liked, a girl he wanted to marry. He paid a friend who worked in a garage to give him the keys to a sports car for the evening so he could take the first rate girl out. Showing off, he took a corner too fast and crashed into a brick wall. The girl was unhurt, but my father broke both of his wrists. Because of this he was wearing plaster casts on his wrists when he married my mother a couple of months later. The casts give my father a serious and masculine appearance in the wedding photograph. The weight of them on his wrists make his arms look heavy, almost burdened, with muscle. And the thickness and hardness of the casts straining at his shirt cuffs is menacing. He doesn’t look like a sales clerk, he looks like a boxer.

  Underneath the photograph, in the drawer of the hall table, there are three boxes of white biros with blue writing on them – Aldactone® Spironolactone Easy To Swallow Tablets. One afternoon after school I try all of the biros on the back cover of the phone book. Out of fifty-four biros, only seven work.

  Because my mother goes on a few dates with one of the real estate agents and it doesn’t work out, she has to leave her job. She goes on benefits and is made to do courses. Her course at the local neighbourhood house is called ‘Starting Again for the Divorced and Separated’. My mother does her homework in her My New Life Workbook in front of the television. When she gets up to go to the toilet during a commercial break I take a look at what she’s written. Under ‘What motivates me?’ she has answered, ‘flowers’.

  My mother asks me and Nathan to go with her to a Parents without Partners picnic. It’s at an animal nursery. I can tell that Nathan doesn’t mind the sound of it, that he would like to pet the lambs and the rabbits. But I say we are too old, that it’s dumb, and by holding Nathan’s eye for long enough I get him to agree. My mother goes without us. She meets a man who works on prawn trawlers in the Gulf of Carpentaria. The man has a daughter whom he sees sometimes when he’s in town. My mother has a lot of late-night telephone conversations with the man on the prawn trawler. She has to say ‘over’ when she finishes what she is saying, because he is using a radio telephone. When the prawn season finishes, my mother’s new boyfriend moves in with us.

  I have become so familiar with the playmates in my father’s Playboy magazines that they don’t work anymore, so I read the articles. In Playboy forum, men write in and describe how they meet women in ordinary places; the petrol station, the laundromat or the video library, and they have sex with them against the bowser, the dryers, or on the counter. When this happens a friend of the woman with different-coloured hair often arrives unexpectedly and has no hesitation joining in. And if the first woman at the petrol station, the laundromat, or the video library has small breasts, her friend will always have large breasts – or the other way around. After I’ve read all of the articles I look at the ads and the fashion pages and choose things. I choose Rigs Pants, Lord Jim Bionic Hair Tonic, Manskins jocks, Laredo heeled cowboy boots with a fancy shaft, and Aramis Devin aftershave – the world’s first great sporting fragrance for men. I think I hear someone outside, but it’s just a pair of dusty boxing gloves that hang from a nail on the back door of the shed. When it’s windy the gloves bang into each other. I can no longer remember if the boxing gloves belonged to my father, or if they were in the shed before we came to live here.

  Nathan joins the gymnastics team at school and I get a checkout job on Thursday nights and Saturday mornings. Nathan’s legs are bowed and he doesn’t have any strength in his upper arms. When he does his exercises his shorts ride up and his orange jocks show. The gymnastics teacher says his vaulting technique is poor. He tells me that Nathan doesn’t look like he’s trying to jump over the horse, more like he’s trying to fuck it. He tells me this because I am standing next to my mother in the school quadrangle at open day where we are watching a display of gymnastics. I am wearing my Coles New World tie and the gymnastics teacher must think I am my mother’s boyfriend. Nathan is best at the type of gymnastics where he has to throw a stick or play with a ball – a type of gymnastics that might have been invented by puppies. Because Nathan’s wrists are weak he wears special white tape around them. He brings some of the tape home – he says the gymnastics teacher gave it to him, but I doubt it. Nathan wears the tape on his wrists every day during the school holidays. When the tape gets grubby he puts more over the top until his wrists are so thick he can’t hold his fork properly. When he’s talking he throws his hands around in the air and watches them. This is something I’ve seen my mother do when she has just changed her nail polish.

  By over-ringing the total on a number of small sales, it is safe to take around five dollars out of the till at work each week. It’s better not to take an even amount. Four dollars thirty-nine is good. Playboy magazine costs two dollars. I don’t buy it every month. I buy it when the cover looks like it will go with the covers of my father’s magazine already in the shed.

  My mother takes her wedding photograph out of the frame on the hall table and replaces it with a picture of herself and her new boyfriend on a fishing trip. The photograph shows my mother and Wayne standing on a jetty together, each holding a fishing line with a white fish dangling from it. My mother’s face is puffy with the strain of holding the fish aloft. Her lips are open and stretched tight, just like the fishes’ lips. If it were a group portrait you would have said my mother and the fish were related. My parents’ wedding photograph is relegated to a drawer in the hall table where the envelopes and takeaway menus are kept. The photograph rises to the surface every time I search for a piece of paper to take down a message. It is crumpled now and smells of soy sauce.

  There is a letter in the latest Playboy that I think might be from my father. In the letter a man describes an encounter he has with a woman at a bodybuilding centre. The man describes himself as well built, with a full head of hair and a moustache. He is lifting weights on his own late one night when a beautiful girl comes in to clean the equipment.

  The girl is wearing a short pink cleaner’s dress which fits poorly across the chest. Because her washing machine has broken down and she is poor and has no change for the laundromat, she is not wearing any underpants. The girl says hello to the man shyly and starts cleaning. The man is sweating heavily – sweat is running off his biceps like he’s standing under a waterfall. The man notices that the girl is watching him. He decides to do a few rou
nds with the punching bag. He calls the girl (she has been bent over rubbing the weight-lifting bars with a cloth), and asks her to help him lace up his boxing gloves. As soon as the girl gets close to the man, she is intoxicated by his sweat. She ties the laces of the boxing gloves together so he is her prisoner. She tells the man to sit down on the bench press, then she takes her dress off and rides him like he’s a bucking bronco.

  The letter is signed, Hot and Sweaty, Tweed Heads. I hope that it is my father’s letter. I hope the girl in the story is the same girl my father took out on a date when he broke his wrists, and when she finally takes off his boxing gloves and they hold hands, I hope they are not joined by one of her friends with different-coloured hair. I place the magazine on the top of the pile so Nathan will read it too. I hope Nathan will think that our father is happy. I want Nathan to understand that our mother was never going to make things work with our father. She was the wrong girl. And because she was the wrong girl, Nathan and I were the wrong sons. It could never have been any other way.

  Diving Belles

  Lucy Wood

  Lucy Wood is a British author. She grew up in Cornwall and completed a Master’s degree in Creative Writing at Exeter University. The short story collection, Diving Belles, is her first published work.

  Iris crossed her brittle ankles and folded her hands in her lap as the diving bell creaked and juddered towards the sea. At first, she could hear Demelza shouting and cursing as she cranked the winch, but as the bell was canulevered away from the deck her voice was lost in the wind. Cold air rushed through the open bottom of the bell, bringing with it the rusty smell of The Matriarch’s liver-spotted flanks and the brackish damp of seaweed. The bench Iris was sitting on was narrow and every time the diving bell rocked she pressed against the footrest to steady herself. She kept imagining that she was inside a church bell and that she was the clapper about to ring out loudly into the water, announcing something. She fixed her eyes on the small window and didn’t look down. There was no floor beneath her feet, just a wide open gap, and the sea peaked and spat. She lurched downwards slowly, metres away from the side of the trawler, where a layer of barnacles and mussels clung on like the survivors of a shipwreck.

  She fretted with her new dress and her borrowed shoes. She tried to smooth her white hair, which turned wiry when it was close to water. The wooden bench was digging into her and the wind was rushing up her legs, snagging at the dress and exposing the map of her veins. She’d forgotten tights; she always wore trousers and knew it was a mistake to wear a dress. She’d let herself get talked into it, but had chosen brown, a small victory. She gathered the skirt up and sat on it. If this was going to be the first time she saw her husband in forty-eight years she didn’t want to draw attention to the state of her legs. ‘You’ve got to be heartbreaking as hell,’ Demelza advised her customers, pointing at them with her cigarette. ‘Because you’ve got a lot of competition down there.’

  Salt and spray leapt up to meet the bell as it slapped into the sea. Cold, dark water surged upwards. Iris lifted her feet, waiting for the air pressure in the bell to level off the water underneath the footrest. She didn’t want anything oily or foamy to stain Annie’s shoes. She went through a checklist – Vanish, cream cleaner, a bit of bicarb – something would get it out but it would be a fuss. She pulled her cardigan sleeves down and straightened the life-jacket. Thousands of bubbles forced themselves up the sides of the diving bell, rolling over the window like marbles. She peered out but couldn’t see anything beyond the disturbed water.

  As she was lowered further the sea calmed and stilled. Everything was silent. She put her feet back down and looked into the disc of water below them, which was flat and thick and barely rippled. She could be looking at a lino or slate floor rather than a gap that opened into all those airless fathoms. A smudged grey shape floated past. The diving bell jolted and tipped, then righted itself and sank lower through the water.

  Iris held her handbag against her chest and tried not to breathe too quickly. She had about two hours’ worth of oxygen but if she panicked or became over-excited she would use it up more quickly. Her fingers laced and unlaced. ‘I don’t want to have to haul you back up here like a limp fish,’ Demelza had told her each time she’d gone down in the bell. ‘Don’t go thinking you’re an expert or anything. One pull on the cord to stop, another to start again. Two tugs for the net and three to come back up. Got it?’ Iris had written the instructions down the first time in her thin, messy writing and put them in her bag along with tissues and mints, just in case. The pull-cord was threaded through a tube that ran alongside the chain attaching the bell to the trawler. Demelza tied her end of it to a cymbal that she’d rigged on to a tripod, so that it crashed loudly whenever someone pulled on it. The other end of the cord drooped down and brushed roughly against the top of Iris’s head.

  She couldn’t see much out of the window; it all looked grey and endless, as if she were moving through fog rather than water. The diving bell dropped down slowly, slower, and then stopped moving altogether. The chain slackened and for a second it seemed as though the bell had been cut off and was about to float away. Then the chain straightened out and Iris rocked sideways, caught between the tension above and the bell’s heavy lead rim below. She hung suspended in the mid-depths of the sea. This had happened on her second dive as well. Demelza had suddenly stopped winching, locked the handle and gone to check over her co-ordinates one last time. She wouldn’t allow the diving bell to land even a foot off the target she’d set herself.

  The bell swayed. Iris sat very still and tried not to imagine the weight of the water pressing in. She took a couple of rattling breaths. It was like those moments when she woke up in the middle of the night, breathless and alone, reaching across the bed and finding nothing but a heap of night-chilled pillows. She just needed to relax and wait, relax and wait. She took out a mint and crunched down hard, the grainy sugar digging into her back teeth.

  After a few moments Demelza started winching again and Iris loosened her shoulders, glad to be on the move. Closer to the seabed, the water seemed to clear. Then, suddenly, there was the shipwreck, looming upwards like an unlit bonfire, all splints and beams and slumped funnels. The rusting mainframe arched and jutted. Collapsed sheets of iron were strewn across the sand. The diving bell moved between girders and cables before stopping just above the engine. The Queen Mary’s sign, corroded and nibbled, gazed up at Iris. Empty cupboards were scattered to her left. The cargo ship had been transporting train carriages and they were lying all over the seabed, marooned and broken, like bodies that had been weighed down with stones and buried at sea. Orange rust bloomed all over them. Green and purple seaweed drifted out through the windows. Red man’s fingers and dead man’s fingers pushed up from the wheel arches.

  Demelza thought that this would be a good place to trawl. She’d sent Iris down to the same spot already. ‘Sooner or later,’ she said, ‘they all come back. They stay local, you see. They might go gallivanting off for a while, but they always come back to the same spot. They’re nostalgic bastards, sentimental as hell. That makes them stupid. Not like us though, eh?’ she added, yanking Iris’s life-jacket straps tighter.

  A cuckoo wrasse weaved in and out of the ship’s bones. Cuttlefish mooned about like lost old men. Iris spat on her glasses, wiped them on her cardigan, hooked them over her ears, and waited.

  Over the years, she had tried to banish as many lonely moments as possible. She kept busy. She took as many shifts as she could at the hotel, and then when that stopped she became addicted to car boot sales – travelling round to different ones at the weekends, sifting through chipped plates and dolls and candelabra, never buying anything, just sifting through. She joined a pen pal company and started writing to a man in Orkney; she liked hearing about the sudden weather and the seals hauled out on the beach, his bus and his paintings. ‘I am fine as always,’ she would write, but stopped when he began to send dark, tormented paintings, faces almost hidde
n under black and red.

  She knew how to keep busy most of the day and, over time, her body learned to shut down and nap during the blank gap straight after lunch. It worked almost every time, although once, unable to sleep and sick of the quiet humming of the freezer – worse than silence she often thought – she turned it off and let the food melt and drip on the floor. Later, regretting the waste, she’d spent hours cooking, turning it into pies and casseroles and refreezing it for another day.

  She ate in front of films she borrowed from the library. She watched anything she could get her hands on. It was when the final credits rolled, though, when the music had stopped and the tape rewound, that her mind became treacherous and leapt towards the things she tried not to think about during the day. That was when she lay back in the chair – kicking and jolting between wakefulness and sleep as if she were thrashing about in shallow water – and let her husband swim back into the house.

  Then, she relived the morning when she had woken to the smell of salt and damp and found a tiny fish in its death throes on the pillow next to her. There was only a lukewarm indent in the mattress where her husband should have been. She swung her legs out of bed and followed a trail of sand down the stairs, through the kitchen and towards the door. Her heart thumped in the soles of her bare feet. The door was open. Two green crabs high-stepped across the slates. Bladderwrack festooned the kitchen, and here and there, on the fridge, on the kettle, anemones bloomed, fat and dark as hearts. It took her all day to scrub and bleach and mop the house back into shape. By the time she’d finished he could have been anywhere. She didn’t phone the police; no one ever phoned the police. No one was reported missing.