Best British Short Stories 2015

by Nicholas Royle

  On Saturday morning I find her at Starbucks. She sits in the window looking out at the street while I buy coffee. We both like to sit and watch the world go by. A guy next to her is talking on a bluetooth headset and a small white dog sits quietly on the floor next to him, round black eyes following the people coming in and out. Outside, a woman selects flowers from a street vendor, picking up baby’s breath, then dahlias in the same shade of orange as the falling leaves. A line of red acacias beautify the sidewalk. A man in a flapping overcoat dashes across the road to make the bus. But he isn’t running to make the bus, I realise, as Elsie leans forward and taps on the glass. It’s that man, that guy she works with, smartly dressed, clean-shaven, like a fucking advert for cologne. Elsie gets up and rushes out with her latte, the small white dog in tow. I look at the headset man in confusion as the barista hands me my coffee. Then I realise the dog was sitting at Elsie’s feet, not his at all. I burn my mouth on the coffee as I take a sip and run after her.

  I look left and right as I exit the doors, and notice them further up the street. He is holding the dog leash and they are laughing. He stretches out a hand and touches the knitted hat she’s wearing, teasing her. My heart is pounding in my chest as I follow them three blocks to the dog park. I watch them cavorting with the small white dog, taking pictures on Elsie’s phone. What the hell is happening? I sit down on a bench to think. I take out my phone to see what’s changed, but then, suddenly, they’re coming toward me, walking with the stupid white mutt. I can’t stop myself from staring at her. I’ve got to talk to her, I have to talk to her, before —

  She sees me and links her arm through his, lowering her eyes. She passes me as if I am nothing. ‘There’s that guy again,’ I hear her say in a stage whisper. ‘Do you ever feel like...’ But they move out of earshot. I watch them walk away, holding hands. I wait until they’re far along the street before I get up. I walk back to my building, across the street from hers. I press the button for the elevator, watch the number change above the doors as it rises from the basement. The doors part and there is the woman with the orange flowers. I step inside and she offers me a polite smile. I stand a little behind her in the elevator, close enough to smell her perfume, and she presses the button again. The doors meet. The number five glows.

  Green Boots’ Cave

  JIM HINKS

  1.

  AS NIGHT FALLS on May 14th 2006, David Sharp reaches Green Boots’ Cave, a shallow overhang of rock on the north-east face of Everest, 450 metres below the summit. It’s known as Green Boots’ Cave because the body of Indian mountaineer Tsewang Paljor lies very prominently here, face-down in the snow: his legs, in lime-green climbing boots, splayed at the entrance, among discarded oxygen bottles.

  This is David’s third attempt. He’s twice before turned back within a few hundred metres of the summit – conceding to weather, and to depleted oxygen. This time he’s climbing alone, with no Sherpa assistance, no radio, and only two small bottles of oxygen for emergency use. The night is closing in and he must decide what to do.

  Perhaps he halts now at Green Boots’ Cave, in the hope of getting through the night on what oxygen he has, and making a summit bid in the morning. Or maybe he pushes on and gains the summit, then descends to the cave to shelter as the temperature drops. Let’s say he does, because we cannot know, and why deny him this? Let’s say he makes it and then climbs back down to huddle beside Green Boots. It’s here, sitting with his hands clasped around his knees, his hood up over his head, that David freezes to death.

  This is where you come in. As he freezes, David begins to dream, and he dreams that he is you. It’s not like the dreams people have when asleep – those lurid, anxious, magic-lantern shows of things just out of reach. This is a vivid and complex dream of your whole life, in real-time, from your birth, right up until where you are now – whatever circumstances led to you read this story. Consider the following:

  The tiny worlds you made, playing on the floor as an infant. The first time you realised you were clever. When it felt as though the world was revealing its secrets to you. When the chasm between who you hoped to be and who you are began to open. The foolish things you said. When you lay awake trying to rewrite them. When you told yourself ‘I will change’ and did not change. When you looked in the mirror and thought ‘you again’. The accommodations you’ve made with yourself. How you’ve kept going, and what it required of you. How boring it has been, and how quickly it has passed.

  Contemplate these things, then return to the story at section 3 (below). If you don’t wish to participate in this way, please continue reading section 2 (directly below).

  2.

  Once, when I was a teenager, my parents went away for the weekend, and I had a party in our family home. The usual stuff happened, including breakages and people being sick, and a fair amount of drug taking. In the early evening, before the party had really got going, me and some friends got very stoned in my parents’ living room, or the front room, as we called it. Maybe we had a bong or a bucket.

  Someone there suggested I try this trick, which they, in turn, had been shown by someone else. It was one of those tricks to make you faint. Perhaps you know the kind – you make yourself hyperventilate, then stand up (or crouch down?) while clasping your arms around your chest. The type of thing that runs through schoolyards for a few months, and then some asthmatic kid dies somewhere, and you have a school assembly warning you not to do it.

  I tried it, not expecting it to work, but it did work. I was on my parents’ couch, with everybody looking on, my older sister too, concerned. I did the hyperventilation thing, then the standing or crouching, and then I was out.

  I dreamed the longest dream I’ve ever dreamed. It lasted years. It was a dream of my own life, from birth. It was every bit as detailed as my life had been, though of course, in the dream, I had no knowledge that I was dreaming, nor of my life outside the dream: that I was passed out on the couch at my parents’ house, with my friends looking on.

  In this way, I lived the first seventeen years of my life twice over. Finally the dream caught up to where my life actually was. I had the party, I had the friends round, and the bong, and the fainting game. I came round on the couch.

  I felt as weary as someone who has not used their muscles for seventeen years. My body ached and I found it difficult to speak. I asked my friends how long I was out for. It worked? they said. I thought you were just pretending. You were out for, like, a few seconds, at most.

  3.

  The circumstances of David Sharp’s death are the cause of much debate and ill-feeling among mountaineers, because over the night and into the next morning, more than forty other climbers will pass within several feet of him on their way to the summit, and again on their return. There is a fixed rope running past Green Boots’ Cave, and David is clipped to it. To pass him, they must unclip their own ropes, and reattach them beyond him.

  Afterwards, these people will argue about whether he was dead or alive, or alive but beyond help, when they passed. Some will say his face was charred by frostbite, that they assumed he was long dead. Others will report that they were astonished to see tiny puffs of mist forming at the nostrils of this corpse – that somewhere inside his frozen body an ember of life still burned – but, unable to move by himself, he was beyond help. Some will say he was mute and insensible. Others will claim, or admit, that he was able to speak to them. It will be rumoured that he came to for a moment, that he awoke to his circumstances and said, ‘My name is David Sharp and I am with Asian Trekking.’ It will be rumoured that a team of mountaineers wearing helmet cameras, making a documentary for the Discovery Channel, capture this on film, but the footage, if it exists, will not be released.

  Before the film crew passes, David Sharp dreams he is you. You, with your grooved habits, your memories, your worries, your contentment, your hope; the entire morass of you that’s impossible to grasp at once but is t
here, surely, just as you know your reflection would be there if you were to look in the mirror. This is what fills his mind, 450 metres below the summit of Everest, his eyes open but unseeing, insensible to cold or wind or pain, or to the body of Green Boots beside him, as the forty climbers pass by on their ascent, and again on their way down, the lights of their head-torches flickering across his eyes, one after the other.

  He is you entirely. Except that, he realises, something about being you doesn’t feel right. Something is haunting you. A sense that there is something else. Something lurking behind every thought and feeling you have. Something going on that you will realise if you can only wake up to the fact.

  The Clinic

  USCHI GATWARD

  IT’S SET UP to look like a home, with sofas and a coffee table, but nobody’s fooled. I haven’t been here since she was a newborn. Stupid of me.

  ‘She’s a bit tired today,’ I say. ‘Busy day yesterday. We went to the park. She didn’t want to get up this morning.’

  The clinician smiles briefly, a little wanly. Her assistant sets out cubes on a mat on the floor. At the touch of a keypad a mounted camera in the corner swivels towards us. Behind a glass screen another clinician watches.

  Cara’s spotlessly dressed in her smartest clothes. I’m wearing my dumbest outfit, complete with slogan.

  Dean clears his throat. ‘She might not be at her best,’ he says.

  ‘Put her down on the mat,’ says the clinician.

  I put Cara down and she reaches immediately for the shapes. She looks at them. Starts to put them together, clumsily. She piles them up but they fall down.

  ‘This is normal,’ says the assistant. ‘By eighteen months she’ll be able to do it.’

  ‘Does she babble?’ says the clinician.

  ‘Babble?’ says Dean. ‘Oh yes – she talks.’

  She sure as hell didn’t get her brains from him.

  ‘Talks?’

  ‘Gabber-gabber-gabber,’ says Dean. ‘Mum-mum-mum.’

  The assistant smiles.

  ‘Is she walking yet?’ says the clinician.

  I shake my head. ‘She crawls a lot more than this normally,’ I say, as the assistant holds out a toy to her, arm’s length away. ‘She’s a bit tired from yesterday is all.’

  Cara crawls towards the toy. The clinician seems satisfied and touches the screen on her device. ‘We don’t record brain activity this time,’ she says. ‘Just run basic checks.’

  She taps her keypad and a Perspex box to our right emits a high-frequency sound. Cara turns towards it and a puppet waves at her. She laughs. The clinician repeats the task several times, different frequencies and different directions. Then with no sound, just the puppets waving.

  The assistant passes Cara a pen. Cara pincers her fingers. ‘Good.’ Into her device she says: ‘T33. NA.’

  ‘We’ll see you again at fifteen months,’ says the clinician. She consults her screen. ‘Which will be some time in June.’

  Cara stares at my T-shirt and starts to form a shape with her mouth. I scrunch up the shirt and zip up my jacket.

  Back in the anteroom she’s weighed and measured, her stats plotted on a graph – reassuringly unexceptional for her age – and then we are free to go.

  We walk home. From her buggy Cara says, ‘I liked the puppets.’ And then she falls asleep.

  We take the path by the nature reserve. The daffodils are out.

  ‘We got away with it,’ says Dean. ‘For how much longer, though?’

  At home, I put Cara to bed to sleep off the cough syrup.

  Over dinner I say, ‘I wonder if we just don’t talk in front of her.’

  ‘We can’t keep her with us for ever,’ he says.

  At Wednesday baby group she’s spotted. By one of the other mums, newish. Her child’s well dressed. New spring trousers already, rolled up at the cuff. Woollen waistcoat and brown leather boots, though he’s hardly walking. One of those.

  Cara’s sitting in the toy kitchen, stirring some play food round and round in a pan.

  ‘She’s a clever little thing, isn’t she?’ Harsh-eyed.

  I laugh. ‘Is she? Saves it all up for when we go out then.’

  ‘What you got there, Cara?’ says the woman.

  ‘Egg,’ says Cara.

  The woman purses her mouth and says nothing more, eyes hard with satisfaction. Cara abandons her saucepan and crawls to the bookcase, clambering up it and pulling down picture books much too old for her. I read them to her to quieten her down but I know that the woman can see me, peering over from her place at the sand-table.

  After the session the manager catches me. She wants to make a film of me reading to Cara. She’s never seen a baby that likes books so much. I laugh uneasily.

  ‘Think about it,’ she says.

  I stop taking her to the groups so regularly. I tell people she’s had a cold. I tell them we’re going to the park more often now that the weather’s better.

  ‘I hope she’ll be walking by summer,’ I say. ‘I can’t wait.’

  And I get people to give me tips about trikes and trousers and surfaces to try her on. I go to the more active groups, leave the quieter ones alone. But a week or two later I lift Cara onto the top of a slide and she says, ‘One, two, three – go!’ quietly, but I look around and there’s the new woman, watching me.

  ‘Go!’ I say, and push Cara down the slide.

  I look up again and she’s still looking. She holds my gaze for a moment and then slowly turns away.

  At lunch that day, Cara counts out her beans onto her highchair, one to twenty.

  ‘If I eat one, it will be nineteen,’ she says.

  ‘That’s right,’ I say.

  ‘If I eat two, it will be eighteen.’

  I don’t reply.

  ‘Mummy? It will be eighteen.’

  ‘Eat your beans,’ I say.

  After lunch she wants me to read to her. I say no – no more books now, I’m tired. While I load the dishwasher she crawls to the pile and pulls one out, then sits on the floor and studies it, turning the pages delicately. She furrows her brow. I take it from her, gently, and switch on the TV.

  I’d heard of this before, on the internet. Archived chats. Coded suggestions. Always accompanied by post deletions. And then posters who just stop posting. It doesn’t end well.

  I start to overbuy, little by little, in my grocery order – small, cheap things that won’t be noticed by the software; things that are easy to pack and that don’t require cooking. Flat tins of sardines are the best, but I have to be careful – too many will raise a flag, so I get one extra every week – just enough to look like the baby’s eating more and likes tinned fish, I reckon. I vary the other items – one week hot dogs, another baked beans. In this way I collect twelve tins within six weeks.

  We eat a bit less, and save what else we can. We run through everything in the store cupboard – anything we can’t take – and eat that instead. Pasta, rice, noodles, dried pulses, instead of valuable tins and vacuum packs.

  I go to a shop in the next district and spend some of next month’s tokens there, filling my basket with party foods and a small birthday cake. I buy birthday candles too, and a birthday banner, and household candles, and a cigarette lighter. In another shop on the way home I buy another lighter.

  At baby group, I sow the seeds. I give out that we’ll be staying with my sister for the summer, with a view to moving there. I tell them she’s got an allotment.

  ‘It won’t feed all of you, though,’ says the new woman, sharply.

  ‘Maybe not, but we’re going to learn how to work on it,’ I say, mildly. ‘My sister doesn’t have the energy to make the most of it, she’s not in good health. And we’ll pool our tokens. Anyway, it’s not definite – we’ll see how we get along over the summer and then think about it.
’ I smile.

  ‘I didn’t know you had a sister,’ says one.

  ‘No . . . we haven’t seen much of each other in recent years. She’s not in good health.’

  ‘What about Dean’s job?’ says someone else.

  I sigh. ‘That’s part of it really. We always worry about him being laid off, things never look good. He can pick up some work with my brother-in-law over the summer, and then his boss’ll take him back on afterwards if it doesn’t work out. We won’t need much money out there. They’ve got a generator.’

  I wish I had a sister. With an allotment and a generator. Some safe place where Cara could be well, and we’d just be country bumpkins, not worthy of notice. The clinic appointment comes through, and I open it with a lurch.

  Cara needs a pox jab. She’s not quite old enough for it, but we’ll have to be gone before she is. I could take her and tell them that we know someone who’s got it, but we might be caught out, and we can’t risk that. I could go to the walk-in centre in a panic and say I saw a boy with spots, and act a bit stupid when they ask for details, but it’s still a risk. But then we’ll come up on the records anyway when we miss the jab in half a year’s time.

  I take the risk, at the walk-in centre, and they agree to do her. Cara knows what’s up. When she sees the needle she screams. ‘No, mummy! Hurts!’ The nurse doesn’t bat an eyelid. I realise that she hasn’t looked at Cara’s date of birth.

  On Dean’s day off I leave him with Cara and head out to pick up the last supplies. The camping shop is in the next district but one, in a row of specialist traders. I’ve passed it before but never had any call to go in. As I push the door, a bell ting-tings. Proper old school. A skinny old man comes out of the back of the shop, newspaper in hand, and nods ‘Morning’ to me before taking a seat on a stool behind the counter and settling back down to read. I take out my phone and scroll down my list, brushing through the racks of cagoules, examining elasticated inner cuffs and breathable linings. I look at map protectors and whistles and torches, and then at thermal underwear.