Best British Short Stories 2015

by Nicholas Royle

  Sometimes, she thinks she hears the slapping sound of black plastic sandals hitting floor tiles echoing through the house, and turns her head sharply. But there’s never anything there.

  One morning she awakes abruptly to the sound of someone banging on the door, the same insistent sound ringing out again and again. It takes her a second to realise that she’s horizontal instead of vertical, fantasy book resting heavily on her chest. She struggles out of bed, dragging the bedsheets on the floor, dressed in her mother’s fancy silk nightgown and saggy pink underpants (she ran out of clean pairs of her own long ago). Yellow dust motes float through the air, following her down the hallway as she stumbles forward, still dazedly clutching the book to her torso like a shield.

  Once again she just barely opens the door, so that only her face can be seen. He’s holding a walking stick, beating the bars like a monk ringing church bells in one of her Arthurian novels.

  ‘Oh,’ he says, his face framed in the diamond-shaped gap, ‘you came!’ His eyes widen in what is unmistakably delight. The whites of his eyeballs are lined with yellow and red; the cracks in his face look deeper and darker than ever. There’s a low-pitched rumbling in the distance she hasn’t noticed until now, the sound of a low-flying plane or helicopter. He’s dressed in the same robe, but the plastic bag is gone, his feet no longer bare; instead he’s now wearing a pair of shiny black rubber boots with yellow bottoms. For some reason the sight of those boots make her feel the most frightened she’s ever been in her life; goosebumps break out on her neck and sour liquid leaks from her tonsils.

  ‘Be a good girl,’ he says. ‘Open the door.’

  ‘It’s locked,’ she says. She’s turning away when he presses his face against the bars and reaches out, fingers fluttering urgently towards her.

  ‘Mija,’ he says. ‘Time to go.’

  ‘Could you please not touch me?’ She uses the book to roughly push his hands away. The buzzing of the helicopter or plane returns for a bit, circles overhead, is replaced by a single engine. He says something else, speaking in a low voice, but his words are muffled beneath the sound of shots rattling out. She flinches.

  ‘Don’t worry about it, mija,’ he says. ‘It’s nothing.’

  This time, she looks directly at him. But he’s already abruptly turned away, the hem of his robe swirling through the air like a cape.

  The tiles feel cool and steady under her feet as she backs away. The book clatters loudly against the floor as it falls. She watches herself, dragging the bed sheets along the floor, heading towards the back of the house, to the washing machine and boxes of champagne. She’s standing in front of the Baby Jesus sticker, spreading her fingers on his face, pushing down hard. The door opens easily. It only takes a few seconds to take everything in: the bed with thin yellow sheets, the window with scratchy brown curtains, everywhere the strong smell of soap. She opens the closet but there are only rows of white dresses hanging headless and limbless from hangers, aprons limp, no shoes to be seen. There are thick gobs of candle wax on the windowsill by the altar. On the floor by the bed, propped up by the wall, is a framed photograph of the three of them: she, her brother and Angelina. Hair hanging in her eyes, smiling sweetly.

  She crawls into the bed, dragging the sheets with her, the sharp smell of mothballs itching her sinuses.

  She thinks, I have got to figure this out.

  She thinks, If only I had more time.

  She doesn’t know it yet but there’s something waiting for her. It could be a future or it could be something else. It could be the plastic accelerator of a car pressing stickily against her leg, the man’s wet fingers on her legs trembling as he helps her pull her saggy underpants back up from her ankles, mumbling over and over again I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you, mean to hurt you. Or maybe she’s in an enormous orange tent next to the raging, overflowing river on the border, one orange tent among many, where she wakes up at the same time every morning to stare at the silhouette of a lizard crawling across the fabric, and think about how she needs to head to the Red Cross tent to get into the line early. Or maybe she’s running through a field, grass stinging against her legs and an aluminum taste in her mouth, the thudding footsteps and clink of machetes against belt buckles behind her getting louder and louder.

  Or maybe it’ll be something else. It could still happen. She could be lucky. She could be sitting in the giant concrete shell of a classroom in Europe or Australia, her pen moving slowly across a notebook, her eyes never leaving the professor as he speaks at the opposite end of the table.

  It’s still possible. But for now all she has is the round ball of the keychain in her hand, the rattling metal, and as she watches the keys dangle from her fingers, she thinks about how there’s not a single key among the many that she recognises, not a single one she can pick out and say with confidence, this key opens that door, opens this one. None of it belongs to her and none of it ever has, in the same way that nothing in the house was ever hers and the tightly clenched muscle squeezing out blood in her chest has never really been hers either. For now there’s only the cool metal in her hand that rattles loudly as she lifts her hands towards the dirty silver lock.

  ‘Oh!’ he says. The door makes a loud scraping sound against the ground as it swings open. ‘You clever girl.’ He lets out a deep sigh that could also be a groan of pain. Behind him the hedge rustles and she turns her head sharply. It could be the flash of a white apron or the metallic shine of a machete. It feels like noticing the shadow of her own half-closed eyelid, something that had always been there and should have been seen at least a thousand times before.

  The Iron Men

  BEE LEWIS

  THE OTHERS THINK sunset is the best time, but I prefer sunrise. There is something comforting about seeing my shadow stretching out in front of me, a visual marker of the hours and days to come. I could be a sundial. The beach is quieter in the morning and each new day brings with it a promise that bends the horizon. The joggers stick to the promenade, their pounding heels driving the world forward. In the evenings, they run along the shoreline, blotting my view. I don’t jog. I stand and absorb the air, my pores soaking up the sodium chloride and the ozone, which in fact isn’t ozone, it’s dimethyl sulphide.

  Sometimes, there are horses and riders. They gallop past, sending clods of sand flying and leaving crescent moons in their wake. The horses are fleeting but I can feel them long before they come into view. Their hooves beat a tribal rhythm, replacing the thrum of my heart. I feel them at first in my feet, then my knees, then my pelvis, until finally they splinter up through my chest and out of my skull. Just as quickly, they are gone.

  A bit further down the beach from me, Paddy contemplates the world around him by paddling in the spume. He started coming here before I did, after his wife had an affair. He doesn’t talk about it, but he wears the pain on his face like decay. He smiles across at me and I can tell he is happiest in that exact moment, with infinitesimal photons beaming down on him and the foamy sea tickling his ankles. Man and nature.

  A little girl in a red coat squeals and runs along the sand. Here, in north-west England, the sand is mainly silicon dioxide, better known as quartz, but in the Caribbean, say, it would be calcium carbonate, created by millions of years of shellfish habitation. The girl’s flowery Wellingtons splash through the rivulets of water, coursing down from the dunes to the sea. She is carrying a sun-bleached stick that is almost as tall as her and, up ahead, a Jack Russell is barking encouragement. Two adults come into view. They must be her parents. They walk slowly, deliberately, hands in animated conversation. The woman has long hair that snakes in front of her face in the breeze as she listens to her companion. He calls to the girl and she stops, before turning towards him, knees bent as though ready to sink into the sand. The adults catch up with the girl and, taking her hands in theirs, swing her between them. The dog yaps and circles them, wanting to join in
.

  I used to be afraid of dogs. I have been ever since I was a little boy and our neighbour’s dog barked all through the night. The sound invaded my dreams, giving me night terrors, where wolves chased me through the rain-glistening streets. Years later, my morning walk to work would take me past a small scrub of green, where the dog walkers congregated. It was a daily test of my mettle. I challenged myself to go by without giving off the scent of fear. Now I think of it, it’s possible I was more afraid of their owners. One morning, a quiet lady in a blue, quilted jacket, stopped me. Her black Labrador sat, patiently waiting.

  ‘You don’t like dogs, do you?’

  I looked at her closely, unnerved by the intervention, not sure how to respond. Would she think me a coward? And would I mind if she did?

  ‘No, not really. I can’t read them, you see. I can’t tell what they are thinking.’

  She looked at me, her eyes level, steady, and said, ‘It’s simple really. They want love and security, a place to sleep and food to eat. They are not so different from you and me.’

  Her words stayed with me, coating my heart. I started looking out for her, Julia, and Jet, the Labrador. They’d walk part of the way to work with me. It took me a while to find the courage to ask her out, but I needn’t have worried, we fitted together like hydrogen and oxygen. The result was something bigger than just us on our own. I asked her to be my wife and we lived together, not far from here. When our daughter, Sally, was born, we moved to a larger house further up the coast, but still close enough to the school I taught at.

  I miss teaching the wonders of chemistry and physics to shiny-faced students, innocent with untapped potential. I try not to think of it too often. Not on days like this, when the haematite sea meets the mercury horizon.

  My arms ache to hold my daughter. I look out, across the Irish Sea, and imagine her running along the shoreline, like the little girl with the stick and the Jack Russell. She’d be nearly twenty now.

  There is another man standing close by. He, too, stares out to sea and breathes in deeply. I wonder if he can he smell the chemicals from the oil refinery at Stanlow. He sees me looking and half salutes; brothers in arms. He takes his clothes off and folds them in a neat pile next to where he is standing. Then he resumes staring, scanning the horizon for something he has lost.

  Loss. It hits me in the guts again, and each time the blow hurts just as much as the first time. Sometimes, I see my pupils, heads bent in concentration, or chewing the ends of their pens, daydreaming. Without warning, I remember Sharon’s face staring up at me as I stand at the front of the class, chalking the chemical formulas onto the board. She wore her red hair tied back in a single ponytail, a frown of concentration pleating her features. She was always an easy student to teach because she tried hard. Not especially clever, but able to apply herself well and her natural curiosity blossomed with the extra tuition I gave her.

  My home life was more than I ever expected to have. Julia filled the house with love, while filling the cupboards with cakes and treats for Sally and me. We spent our weekends walking across these dunes, or further up the coast at the nature reserve, feeding the red squirrels. Our happiness came from simple things. All we needed was a car, a picnic rug and a Thermos flask. When it changed, no-one seemed to care what my opinion was.

  I spend my time here reciting poetry. Not for me, the words of Larkin, Yeats or Heaney. I recite the Periodic Table, running my tongue over the elements, trying them on for size. My favourites are the noble gases: helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon and radon. They sound to me like a potent task force of mythological super heroes. I marvel at the elegance and simplicity of the building blocks of the universe. We are made of stars. When the sun dies, and this world ends, the elements in the Periodic Table will remain and combine to form something new. Life is a series of chain reactions.

  Sometimes, I can go many days without thinking of Sally or Julia or Sharon. But then something will remind me. It always does. I hate the rain the most, because the rain reminds me. I picture Sharon again, standing in the rain at the bus stop, shoulders sloping with hopelessness.

  ‘Hop in, I’ll give you a lift. You’ll be soaked.’

  Sharon got into the car, silent and grateful. Giving her a lift home seemed like the right thing to do – it wasn’t out of my way. It became a regular thing. We mostly talked about school and her homework or her guinea pigs, but one day she was monosyllabic on the journey home and when we pulled up outside her house, there were tears in her eyes.

  Sharon sat still, the effort to speak taking all her concentration.

  ‘Dad’s gone and Mum won’t stop crying.’

  Fat, salty tears spilled down her cheeks and misery seeped out of every pore. I put my arm around her shoulder and pulled her close to me, like I would when Sally fell and scraped her knee, or when she’d fallen out with her best friend. I’d learned how from watching Julia.

  ‘It will be okay, sweetheart. It will be okay.’ I stroked her hair and no-one was more surprised than me, when Sharon reached up to kiss me. I pulled away, brushed it aside; thought it best to ignore it. Then I stammered something I don’t remember and said goodbye. Sharon looked sad, then angry and stormed up the short path to her front door. I drove away from her house, to a chorus line of twitching curtains.

  By the time I got to school the following day, it was clear that I wouldn’t be able to ignore the problem. I was called to the Headmaster’s office. His round, porcine eyes bored into me and his throat-clearing underlined his disquiet.

  ‘I . . . ehm . . . think it best if . . . ehm . . . suspended . . . need to investigate . . . serious allegations . . . ehm . . . best for you and . . . ehm . . . the child.’

  The Headmaster actually meant for the benefit of the school, but was too cowardly to say so. The sound of his embarrassment rings in my ears still.

  It didn’t seem to matter to anyone that I didn’t touch her, that I wouldn’t do that. The words were out there, causing their own chain reaction, and people chose to believe what was convenient, over what was the truth. I try to blot out the memory of the gaggle of reporters camped outside the house; Julia’s accusing face; my suitcase packed and waiting for me in the hall when I got home. The headlines in the papers were hard to bear. Not just for me, but for my family. I remember seeing Sally for the last time. Her puzzled face, her outstretched arms, her plaintive call for her Daddy. A wave of pain crashes over me.

  I was charged, of course, and there was a trial. My defence barrister quickly stripped fact from fiction and the jury understood that it was a schoolgirl crush, not reciprocated in any way by me. After all the months leading up to the trial, the matter was dealt with in just 48 hours. At any other time, the efficiency would have delighted me. I was exonerated. Except it wasn’t as easy as that. Mud sticks – I won’t go into the physics of it – but it does. By that time, Julia had taken Sally away and it was too late to take back the barbs she’d thrown.

  My life changed, decayed, oxidised. The iron in my heart fused with the hydrogen and oxygen that used to be Julia and me. The cascades of tears that I cried bound the new compound and, deep inside, the rust started to eat away at me. Day after day, I stood and stared out, until one day, I was powerless to stop the change. It began in my feet; they became leaden, heavy, as I slowly turned to iron. Now, my body is delaminating. The sea sloughs layers of rust and metal, like skin. The end result will be the same as if I had been buried in the ground. I will break down into my component elements and disperse, returning to the stars. All that remains of the old me is my consciousness – and even that will evaporate in time.

  In another life, I would have liked to be a Classics scholar. The geometry and philosophy of the ancient Greeks fires my imagination almost as much as their contribution to the Periodic Table. Another day has passed and Apollo’s fiery chariot will soon disappear in the west. We are bathed in the golden glow that Paddy call
s ‘God-light’. I’m aware of another presence nearby. This time, it’s an older man and, as he sheds his clothes to absorb the dying rays of the sun, he nods and mouths over to me, ‘Bankruptcy.’ He turns away from me to stare out to sea like the rest of us. The iron in the haemoglobin carrying oxygen from his lungs thickens and multiplies, turning him to metal from within. His movements slow as the change takes place and, before sunset, he is one of us.

  We number nearly a hundred now. We stretch for miles over the sands, silent, contemplative. We all have our stories. In our quiet, determined way, we look out to the horizon, reflecting on the events that brought us here. Each one of us stands apart from the rest, but we maintain the collective communion of hope. Time passes whilst ferrous oxide ravages our outer shells, returning us to the universe. The view I have changes daily, a moving landscape before me. I don’t have to go anywhere to see the world turning. It’s all here.

  Festschrift

  JONATHAN GIBBS

  CAN THERE BE, can there honestly be a more stirring monument to the depthless mysteries of the male mind than this: that there exists, for each and every one of us, a lifetime tally of sexual accomplishment? A number it is given to few to know precisely, but an empirically valid one nonetheless. It is the figure you look back on, on your deathbed, and, proverbially, would never wish lower than it is. Not, you understand, the number of distinct sexual partners, which is after all a more manageable and quantifiable statistic, but of the individual acts themselves, stacked up in fair years and fallow.