Best British Short Stories 2015

by Nicholas Royle

  Yes.

  Think of it.

  I’m thinking.

  Even a hug can’t do it, the social gesture that mimics the sexual act so brazenly, and insidiously. The bliss of contact, the shock of boundaries overstepped; the breadth of physical coverage, as it happens; the brevity of it, when it’s over. And I don’t mean that in a facetious way, I say.

  I know you don’t, you say, and I nod and close my eyes.

  You were a good listener, after all, I think. I’m not making that up.

  These, then, were the thoughts that buoyed along in my wake as I entered the room, took a glass from a tray and insinuated myself into the slow social whirlpool of the evening: that all these clever abstractions – these ideas – were a poor stand-in for the physical facts in which they originated, and which they seek to disguise, dispel, refute. Words are a poor cloth in which to dress our acts.

  The thought, inserted like the tip of an unbent paperclip under the skin of my pride, that I might actually offer myself, now, in a belated show of esteem, or gratitude, or penance.

  There’s something I want to tell you, I might say, but I can’t tell you it here.

  Or, I think we have some unfinished business, Leonard.

  What nonsense, you say, and of course you’re right.

  I wouldn’t, couldn’t, say that, any more than I could clamp my mouth on his, take him by the tie and lead him, strutting like a whore, from the room. These were just goads, small injuries perpetrated upon myself, to bring myself to myself, put myself in my place, distract myself from the fact that in a few hours I would be standing up in front of everyone and addressing Leonard, and not knowing, not knowing in any manner or form, how I was to do it. What modulation of emotion was I supposed to apply to the words I had written for myself to speak; words that were, after all, not just to him and about him, but of him, from him, using him and his ideas, the bulk of his body of work, as if it could be some kind of compliment to dance around the room in someone’s clothes, or clothes you had made out of their clothes, and say, Look at me, even as you’re pointing at them. The global forest. The critical ecology. Ideas carried on the wind like seeds. What bollocks.

  No wonder I’ve come as far as I have.

  I crossed the room, then, ignoring Derek’s discreet wave from one group, my American friend’s raised glass from another, and walked directly to where Leonard was, cutting across the aesthetic logic of the tiles as surely as if I were chopping the hands from the statues of saints. I felt falling from me as I went, as if they were items of clothing, all the things I thought I might have said, the prepped and primped and manicured lines, such that I felt sure I looked, to the onlookers, whether they were looking or not, not just naked, but obscene. A middle-aged woman, with no clothes! And no idea of the right thing to say!

  Leonard saw me come, and moved to welcome me into his group.

  I leaned forward – I was in heels; those were my heels clicking – to hold his arm with my free hand, and press my wrinkled lips against his more wrinkled cheek.

  ‘Leonard,’ I said, and he said my name back to me.

  ‘You’re looking well,’ I said, and drained my face of any possible physical indication that I might mean more by the words than simplest social nicety. Or in fact that I might not. I tried in other words to give the impression that we were both safely beyond the point at which such a statement might be in any way ambiguous or uncertain. Communication as blind exchange, a corrupted potlatch in which blankets are piled up on the shore, in a world where nobody needs blankets. Or where blankets offer no warmth, no protection.

  Whether anyone else there was persuaded by this, or even cared, I don’t know, but in any case Leonard – graciously, or naively, or just plain normally – seemed to take it at face value, and his acceptance seemed to put the others at ease. They smiled, and let me in their conversation, which was about the fly-past of a dozen hot air balloons they had seen in the skies above the city that day. I stood and listened, trying to mentally align myself with whatever angle they had taken vis-à-vis the whole death and cancer thing. Sure, why not, let’s talk about hot air balloons, but are we talking literally, metaphorically, obliquely, palliatively, heartlessly? In any case the music recital started quite soon after this.

  And in any case I was soon on my third glass of sparkling wine.

  You know where this is going.

  You shake your head. How can I, you say.

  How can you not?

  We sat in rowed semi-circles of seats and listened, and it was good to give myself over to the tedium of the music. To know that we all submitted ourselves to it by way of a tribute to Leonard, his miraculous stoicism, his courage physical and intellectual. That he could be alive, and his death stepping ever closer, and yet that he would choose to sit and listen to music, when all it does, all it can do, is give that death a cue, a rhythm, a dance step by which it may approach.

  After we had listened for a while there was a break and the music mutated from a formal recital to a sort of disco, if that’s the word (and it’s not). The players, as I said, were colleagues or ex-colleagues of Leonard. Or friends. Perhaps they were just friends. Perhaps that is what this was all about. Chairs were moved, instruments plugged into amplification. The players started again, standing now, the tempo altered, though not the music that was played, it seemed to me, and people danced. I couldn’t have been more surprised.

  You danced, of course, you say.

  Of course. Why do you say it like that?

  Like what? I was only stating the obvious. I’ve never known you not dance. You’re a good dancer.

  Well, thank you.

  You’re welcome.

  I danced, yes, and Leonard danced, whom I suppose I must have seen dance before, at some point, in the twenty-five years of our acquaintance. Our friendship. Our acquaintance. He danced in a way that I found intensely moving. He was like a baby elephant, swaying around the dance floor with a complete lack of coordination or, really, self-awareness, or awareness of others. People sort of ignored him, and sort of acknowledged him, giving him space. An old man, or nearly old man, or nearly dead man, aping the moves and affectations of the young, or of what he thought of as the young – even I knew enough to know that no one danced like that any more. Not that any of the real youngsters danced – they were too uncertain about the social-academic etiquette of how to dance in an ancient hall of an ancient university hosting an international conference that was stuffed with your elders and betters. This wasn’t like a wedding, where the celebration of the happy couple’s hopes for the future was a licence – or an edict, really – to abandon your usual constraints and dance, damn you, no matter how poorly. The only higher agency that applied here was Leonard’s impending death, slinking its way around the outer edges of the group, and our knowledge of it – and how, as a post-grad or early career researcher, you were supposed to express yourself with regards to that through the medium, as they say, of dance, would have been beyond me, I’m sure.

  A couple of youngsters did dance, I saw, eventually.

  I saw, because one of them, perhaps I’d seen her in the audience, or at the coffee station, was dancing with my Greek-looking American friend, whose name you may have noticed I’ve refrained from using, out of delicacy, or something like it. She was dancing very close to him, and he to her, and I watched them as I danced. My dancing, as you know, alternates between phases of heightened awareness of the other dancers, and phases of a complete lack of the same. He wasn’t a bad dancer, he had a very limited repertoire of moves, but was always moving, slightly, ponderously, rather as if wanting to give the impression that at any moment he was about to start really dancing. She, on the other hand, was a bad dancer, but was making up for this with a familiar repertoire of affectations that somehow took the place of dancing: placing herself provocatively close to him, shaking her hair, throwing back her head to l
augh, responding every time he touched her arm.

  They were dancing at the edge of the floor, where perhaps they thought they would be less seen. But they had been seen, I could see. I could see, because he kept looking at me, or for me; every time she lowered her head to drink, or turned her head to look at her friends, who were looking on with something like awe, something like nervous ecstasy, he would shoot a glance over at me. The look in his eyes was one I recognised. It was a plea, a defiance, a confusion: the emotion that rises to the surface of the male psyche whenever it is confronted by something it thinks it wants but isn’t sure. When it is confronted by the possibility – such a shock to the male mind – that it doesn’t want what it wants to want.

  I lie in bed and look at you, and wait for you to say something. You lie there, propped on your elbow, looking back at me, and I feel once again the sharp clenching pain of having done the thing that was right, but which left me bereft. Of the two of us, I was the one who left, yet I am left like this. Left, left, left. Felt, felt, felt. You would help me with this, I feel sure, this snare of words caught in my throat, caught in my mind’s throat. You’d get down on your knees on the floor next to me and untangle it, like a mess of cables under a desk.

  Perhaps if I had gone to bed with Leonard, that time, things wouldn’t have happened the same. Things brought to a head sooner would have sorted themselves out more easily.

  What happened with the girl and your . . . American friend, you ask.

  The young woman – the girl, really, they are girls at that age, what claim can they have to womanhood? – the girl left the room, to go to the toilet, I assume. If she had gone for a cigarette, after all, he would have gone with her. Unless he was scared of losing sight of me. I watched her go, then danced my way across the floor to him. He stood there, wavering slightly, while the music built itself into another meaningless crescendo. He looked forlorn, as if he’d already had sex and this was the comedown. He looked unequal to the gale of possibilities buffeting around him, all whirling to the rhythm of the violin and the guitar and some kind of drum.

  ‘Hello,’ he said.

  ‘Who’s that then?’

  He knew her, I knew. I could tell. She wasn’t just some early career researcher from the other side of the world. She was from his department. I took the glass that he was holding for her from his hand, and drank from it.

  ‘That... Ah.’ He laughed, and I smiled for him, for his laugh.

  I don’t know what I was thinking – perhaps you can help me. Perhaps that’s why you’re here. To tell me what I was trying to do. Tell me, was I trying to save him from doing something he would regret, something that might cause him harm, even though I owed him no duty of care, and her, certainly not?

  And her, was I trying to rescue her from something I’d been busy telling myself all along that I now wish I had never avoided, myself? For he, my American friend, would one day be dying of something – this much was certain – and this notch, this drunken conference notch, this notch with a clever blonde girl half his age, was something that would one day be regretted, if it hadn’t taken place.

  Or was I acting for none of these reasons, but simply following my own impulses, those clichés, whatever they are, if they even exist any more, I don’t know.

  And the worst of it is, I fear I won’t know your answer, now, when I need it most of all – not now, and perhaps not ever – for, just as I was anticipating your next words, or framing them in my mind, your next kind words – and you knew how to be kind, you do know that, don’t you? It’s just that you didn’t know how not to be cruel, too, how not to be vicious – just then, as I say, the body in the bed next to me, there where you’d been lying, looking at me across the foot or so of rucked and fucked-in bedclothes, moved, turned and made a sound that seemed to mark an entry into semi-consciousness, and, as if we’d actually been speaking out loud, you and I, for real, and we’d woken him with our hushed words, his two eyes opened, and looked at me, and the mouth smiled, and it wasn’t you, for it was you.

  Five Thousand Lads a Year

  JENN ASHWORTH

  I HAD MY own keys but the screw on the landing walked me down to the seg anyway.

  ‘He’s in number four,’ he said, ‘down the end. Ring the bell if he gets lively.’

  He left me to it, even though they’re supposed to wait outside. Lazy get. As a civilian, certain rules apply. They don’t let the nurses or the teachers sit in a prisoner’s pad on their own. It’s a security issue, yours and theirs. But over the years here I’ve gained a bit of respect. There’s only one writer in residence so I’ve had to carve out my own way of working. I banged on the door.

  ‘You in there, mate? Not done a Shawshank on us, have you?’

  I already knew the lad’s name was Lee and he’d been sent to the block after smashing up his pad. That’s generally what the lads do when they want a transfer. Under the old governor, they’d only have to do it once and they’d get shipped out. The lads aren’t stupid: if they got themselves into debt with drugs or gambling, it would go like clockwork: smash smash, then off to pastures new.

  All that ended under the new governor. She had a totally different attitude. End of her first month, she called a general staff meeting – officers, civilians, the lot of us. They had to put the establishment on lock-down so we could all get there.

  ‘We won’t be manipulated,’ she said. ‘We will not let prisoners play the system. This is how it’s going to be: if a man damages prison property he will go to the segregation unit and he will stay there until he is willing to cooperate with us. No transfers. No exceptions.’

  Her wish is our command. The screws call her Maggie behind her back and this is the predicament our Lee, too young and too pig-headed to back down, had found himself in. He had been down there on his own three weeks. He’d upped the ante and stopped eating after two. His personal officer was on long-term sick leave and he wouldn’t see a nurse. They couldn’t make him. That’s the thing. They can lock them up, but they can’t make them do anything.

  ‘Let me go,’ I said, once word got back to me about it. ‘I talk to five thousand lads a year. I know how to approach them. I’ve never made a mistake yet.’

  He was laid on the bare springs of the bed – the mattress was on the floor, wet and ripped. The way he was curled up, his face nearly touching the wall, his tee-shirt had ridden up at the back and I could see the bones in his back. His pad was a complete state. The girl from the library had obviously been down to him. He’d shredded the books – there were pages everywhere, scattered all over the show.

  ‘Do me a favour, Lee, and turn around so I can see your face.’

  He didn’t move. What a lot of people working in prisons don’t understand is that you can’t just talk at them. You’ve got to engage them. They start, without exception, by thinking there’s something airy-fairy about being a writer. That it isn’t quite manly. The first thing I need to do is earn their respect. So I told him I make more cash doing this than I ever did as a lorry driver. I told him about my caravan in Pembrokeshire, my flat in Andalucía.

  ‘Twenty thousand hits a year on my website, and corporate clients including a major football team and a bank I won’t name now, but which you will have heard of. I’m probably earning more than your brief is. Fact.’

  You’ve got to approach them on their own terms. Does a hell of a lot more good than some high-heeled psychology trainee going down there with a smile and a clipboard.

  ‘Do you remember being at primary school? You do remember. You do. You remember Miss grabbing her book and saying, “Come on, lads, pack up and come and sit on the carpet. Time for a story.” You remember running, don’t you? Running towards that carpet. And her turning the book around so everyone could see the pictures. What was it? Goldilocks? Three musketeers, something like that? You were all up on your knees, weren’t you? Craning your necks so you could see
what comes next.’

  He didn’t answer; just put his arms round his head. At least he hadn’t nodded off. Most of them go nocturnal after a week or so in the block. He was skinny, jail pale, with prison-done tattoos on his arms. M.U.F.C above his elbow. A heart with some blurred initials in it over that.

  ‘That heart for your mum?’ I said. ‘The one on your arm?’

  Nothing.

  ‘Did you ever call your teacher “Mum”? Course you did. And do you know why? It was because you loved her. You loved her. Because she told you stories.’ I always end there, with the same question. ‘Now, what’s your story?’

  The one about the primary school teacher always gets them talking. Doesn’t matter who. Prisoners, builders, lawyers. It even works with my clients at the bank. I go to their staff conferences. I do them some poems about teamwork and I always finish with ‘Soul Alight’, which is a great one about finding your own truth, speaking it clearly, and dancing to its beat. I get them up out of their seats. They’re that used to a man in a suit with a power-point that when I turn up, with my scarf and my hair, a fish out of water, they really sit up and listen. I make a difference. They always ask me back. That’s how I got the flat in Andalucía, actually. We spend a month there every Christmas, without fail. It’s good to get away from things for a while. To chill out for a bit and let the dust settle. I made a YouTube video of me doing ‘Soul Alight’ and it’s got nearly a quarter of a million hits.

  I asked Lee to tell me about his family. I’d seen his file. Knew he had a little sister, in the care system somewhere. By the time he gets his Cat D, she’ll probably be adopted out, but he could have been looking forward to seeing her all the same. I asked him what her name was. Asked him if on the out, he’d had a dog, a ferret, what cars he were into. Anything. He just laid there. I was on the brink of going when he moved so quickly, swinging his legs round and sitting up on the edge of his bed, that he made me jump.