Best British Short Stories 2015

by Nicholas Royle

  ‘Tom, don’t do that. Just relax and let it happen but promise you’ll keep your clothes on.’

  She drops a handful of mushrooms and I swear I can see them pop like golden sherbet in her mouth.

  ‘You look like you need company,’ she says.

  That sounds exciting but somehow worrying too. I feel an overwhelming panic taking me over and I want to shit again. I go inside, burrowing. I see Lola and our cats mouthing along to an advert on the television, Cats would buy Whiskas, and I feel a blanket, my jacket over my head. It’s the saddest feeling I’ve ever had and I start crying again. It seems like I’m crying for ages. When I take the jacket off my head it’s raining and Nadine is dancing like a maniac at the top of a slope.

  ‘Stop moaning about your girlfriend and your cats, just leave them!’ she shouts.

  I didn’t know I’d been talking.

  ‘We don’t make love any more,’ I say.

  ‘Well, you shouldn’t be fucking your cats anyway, it’s illegal!’

  ‘Lola isn’t a cat!’

  And suddenly we’re both laughing. Nadine stands tall on a burial mound braying like a donkey, her huge toothy mouth turned up to the sky. I’m chattering and guffawing like monkeys and I can’t stop.

  Nadine runs over, still laughing I think, and taps me with a knuckle on my forehead.

  ‘You’re making my brain hurt, Tom, stop talking about her.’

  ‘Do you miss Gavin?’ I ask and I see her face change, a landslide after an earthquake so all the features melt and drop, her mouth softening and caving in, water running down her cheeks and across her lips.

  ‘You fucking bastard, Tom! You’re trying to do my head in.’

  I try and grab her but touch her breasts by mistake.

  She screams in my face and pulls off her top and throws her bra onto the ground.

  ‘Just like all the other fuckers, Tom! Come on, cop a feel, that’s what you want, isn’t it?’

  She pulls my hands towards her breasts and I struggle to stop them touching. They’re scarred red, small slash marks, yellow burns across the breasts and over her nipples.

  ‘Come on!’ she screams.

  ‘Nadine, stop, please.’

  I am trying to climb out, sober up . . . rescue.

  I grab her in a bear hug and start making reassuring animal noises, it’s what comes naturally, ‘grrr grr’ slowly becoming ‘there there’. After a while she stops struggling, stops crying. I repeat the ‘there there’ mantra, squeezing tighter and tighter until she jabs me in the ribs.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Tom, I’d rather you touch my tits than suffocate me.’

  I let go and she puts her top back on.

  ‘Come on then,’ she says, taking my hand, ‘I’m soaking and it’s not working here. Let’s go back and find somewhere dry to sit and ride it out.’

  ‘Not inside, I like it out here,’ I say. ‘There’s something about being outside, the earth.’

  ‘Oh, I can tell you like the earth, you kept trying to cultivate it with your shit.’

  ‘I didn’t, did I?’

  ‘You did so.’ And she points to a crap, shaped like a giant mushroom dome, a few feet away.

  ‘Clever, that one,’ she says and we start laughing again, and we keep on laughing until we find a bench under a large oak tree in a quiet part of the hospital grounds to shelter from the rain. There we sit together barely speaking, my brain slowing, settling, but still flickering connections, wondering if hers are making the same ones but somehow knowing she wants to have her thoughts to herself and not hear mine, watching the leaves dance and spin before settling on the grass, the giant October sun dropping below the hills, the sky grey and blackening, the stars, the stars . . . and when I wake up Nadine is gone.

  Secondhand Magic

  HELEN MARSHALL

  A BAD THING is going to happen at the end of this story. This is a story about bad things happening, but I won’t tell you what the bad thing is until you get there. Don’t flip ahead to the end of the story. Stories like this only work if you don’t know what the bad thing is until you get there. Wait for it to happen, don’t try to look ahead, don’t try to stop it from happening. Because you know how magic works? When you try to cheat it, it just gets worse and worse and worse. That’s the way of it. So, please. Just wait for it. I’ll ask nothing else from you. Cross my heart.

  Sayer Sandifer had very few of the ingredients necessary to be a true magician. His patter? Weak and forced on account of a childhood stutter he got when he turned four. His fingers? Short, stumpy things that couldn’t make a silver dollar disappear no matter how long he practised. His sense of timing? Awful. And worse yet – crime of all crimes! – he had no assistant. The fact of the matter is that lacking any of these things might not have been enough to sink him, but all of them? What chance did the poor boy have? And at twelve years old he was just learning the first and only real lesson of being grown-up: that wanting a thing so bad it hurt didn’t mean getting a thing, not by a long shot.

  The only thing Sayer did have going for him was the prettiest set of baby blues you ever saw. That wasn’t nothing. Not for a magician. And those eyes were only useful for one thing: getting an audience. When Sayer put on his star-spattered cloak and the chimney-pot hat he had swiped from Missus Felder’s snowman the winter before; when with utter seriousness and intent he knocked on your door at eight in the morning while the coffee brewed and the scent of fresh-mown grass drifted through the Hollow; when you had just kicked up your heels to browse the paper in search of discount hanger steak and sausages, then Sayer would be there.

  ‘Missus S-S-Sabatelli,’ he would stutter. Or if he was having a particularly bad day then he might not get that far, you might see him swallowing the word like a stone and searching out a new one. The first name instead, ‘Marianne,’ he might say and bless him for being so formal. ‘I require your attendance this afternoon at the house of my mother and father. Please bring gingersnaps.’

  And maybe you’d fall in love with him just a little bit right then, the way you could tell just by looking that he knew he didn’t have the right stuff in him yet for magic, but he wanted it, oh, he wanted it. He’d chase it even if it meant looking a fool in front of all his mother’s friends. He’d stand there, trembling, waiting for you to deliberate. Waiting for you to make some sort of pronouncement upon him. And you’d know how badly you could hurt him, that was the thing, you’d know you could crush him right there if you were of a mind to do so.

  ‘Whatever for?’ you might ask, hoping to surprise him, hoping to give him a moment to deliver a staggering statement of pomp and circumstance of the kind you knew he ought to have rattling around inside his head, because, God, you just wanted this kid to have it in him. Have that special something, even if it was just a flair for the dramatic. But, no, Sayer didn’t know the turns of phrase yet, he didn’t know that a magician was supposed to do something besides magic. You couldn’t expect him to, not at twelve years old, not even if he had studied the masters like Maskelyne, Thurston, Houdini and Carter. Which he hadn’t. All he had was a ‘Magic for Beginners’ tin set an uncle had gotten him for Christmas – the same Christmas Missus Felder’s snowman had lost its chimney-pot hat and knitted scarf.

  What Sayer didn’t know was that magic was never at the heart of being a magician. There was supposed to be something else. Something kinder.

  But, as I said, what Sayer did have – what made you say ‘Yes, sir, gingersnaps it is!’ – were those wide baby blues of his. Eyes a kind of blue I never saw before, blue like a buried vein. His father’s eyes.

  Joe Sandifer had all the things that Sayer lacked: clean and polished patter; his fingers long and grateful like he’d filched them off a piano man; a near perfect sense of when to come and when to go; and you can bet your bottom dollar that he was never without a partner. Us girls, married though
we were, still resented Lillian Sandifer a little for managing to grab hold of good old Joe. Handsome Joe. Joe who could lie like it was easy and beautiful.

  Sayer might have had the beginnings of what Joe had, and would surely have discovered more as he passed the five-foot mark, but for now he was too much of a kiddie. A little lamb. All he had was his dignity, which he tugged as tight about him as that star-spattered cloak. And that dignity was the one thing that we in the Hollow were scared to death to take away from him.

  Thus, we dreaded that Tuesday morning knock.

  Thus, we dreaded that chimney-pot hat.

  We dreaded the hungry eyes of Sayer the Magnificent.

  Maybe it seems cruel to you that I’m talking like this about a poor runt of a kid with his heart stitched onto the red-and-black satin handkerchief he tugged out of his sleeve – courtesy, again, of that ‘Magic for Beginners’ tin box. I swear I’m not trying to be cruel. It’s the world that’s wild and woolly. The world that cursed a stutterer – who couldn’t holler ‘sunshine’ or ‘salamander’ – with a name like Sayer Sandifer.

  You want to know I’m not cruel? Shall I prove it to you? Let’s make him a Milo. Milo’s a good name for a kid his age. Milo Sandifer. Easier with that ‘M’. At least for a little while. Until he grows out of it. We can do that much for the little guy, can’t we? The poor duckling?

  When the time came, and we all knew it without really having to look, we went over as late as we possibly could. We being the women of the Hollow, me with my plate of gingersnaps. Just as the boy asked.

  Lillian had set up the backyard with lawn chairs. An old red-striped beach umbrella in the northeast corner, just past the rhododendrons. Card tables covered with plastic cups and lemonade for the parents. Nothing is quite so apologetic as homemade lemonade in these circumstances.

  ‘Thanks for coming, Minnie,’ Lillian whispered as I laid down a plateful of gingersnaps like the boy asked.

  ‘It’s nothing worth mentioning,’ I told her. ‘I need me some magic today, you hear? Must be he’s got a sense for these kind of things after all.’ I let her smile at that. ‘It’s a good day for it too.’

  ‘Some kind of good day,’ Cheryl Felder muttered. She scowled at the top of her chimney-pot hat poking out from behind the stage and curtains that Joe constructed special. Poor Milo. He never quite figured out that of all the women in the Hollow, Cheryl was the one you didn’t want to mess with. Most kids know this sort of thing; they can sense a real witch with a bee in her bonnet if you catch my drift. Or maybe he was just bolder than we gave him credit for.

  The other women were coming in then. They laid out licorice strands and tuna fish sandwiches with trimmed corners, whatever the boy asked for. Lillian didn’t meet our eyes at first, but then she all of a moment did and, you know what? – give her credit, her eyes were just blazing with pride for little Milo. That buttered us up some. You could see it changing people. Missus Felder’s face, well, her face was the kind of face you might associate with sucking lemons, but even it got a little bit of sugar into it.

  And the rest of us? Well, I’d always liked the boy. He had a proper kind of respect and reverence, and if there’s two things a magician ought to fluff his hat with, it’s respect and reverence, magic being no easy business, magic being a thing that ought to be done carefully. Not that I ever suspected poor Milo could mend a cut rope or pull the secret card, but there you have it. He would try, and we, the ladies of the Hollow, we kept company mostly by Hoovers and the Watchtower babble and crap society; we would smile those husband-stealing smiles of ours come Hell or high water.

  And so the show began.

  ‘And now for the Lost Suh-suh-suh . . .’

  Milo’s face screwed up with concentration so hard you could see a flush of red on his neck. Lillian was saying the word alongside him in the audience, but he wouldn’t look at her. Missus Felder shifted in her chair.

  ‘And now for the . . .’

  His hands palsied and twitched as he shuffled the oversized Bicycle deck, patterned blue flashing in front of our eyes. But no one was watching the cards. We were all watching his mouth. We were all clenching the edges of the Sandifers’ lawn chairs.

  ‘For the Lost Suh-s-s . . .’

  He paused again. That moment stretched on and on like putty. Just when we thought it was about to snap. Just when we thought he was about to snap – you could see Missus Felder leaning forward now, she might’ve said something, none of us would’ve dared, we knew you didn’t speak for a stutterer, not ever, but she would’ve, she had the word on her lips and she was going to give it to him – that was when Milo swallowed, pushed up the brim of the chimney-pot hat with his wrist.

  ‘Beg pardon, ladies,’ he murmured ruefully, but it was out and the words were solid. ‘And now for the Lost . . . Sisters.’

  The applause was bigger than it had been for any of the other tricks. Milo took it as his due.

  ‘For this I need a volunteer. Anyone?’

  No one budged. We couldn’t, not yet. We weren’t ready for it.

  ‘Anyone? Ladies, please. Ah, good. You there. The . . . missus in the blue dress.’

  It was Ellie Hawley from across the street in the blue cotton frock with the raglan sleeves her husband brought back from Boston. We were all a bit thankful. She was a good sort. The type who knew to bring licorice strands to a boy’s magic show.

  ‘I’m hard of hearing, boy,’ Missus Felder said. ‘Which was that?’

  God, we were thinking together, do not make him say it again.

  It was no good though. She was smiling. Her words were sweetness and light, and she was smiling like she was some sort of old biddy about to offer him tea and biscuits. You couldn’t trust a smile like that. Oh, boy, not ever.

  ‘I, uh, suh-suh-s-sorry, folks.’ The hat tilted forward again. Milo pushed it up, and licked his lips. ‘I meant . . .’ He paused. Why was he pausing? Don’t pause here, boy, we were thinking. Stick with Ellie Hawley. She’s already getting up. She’s halfway to the stage now, boy. Stick with her.

  But we could see the look coming over his face. It was a proud look . . . and something else, something I couldn’t quite tell yet. A look older than he was. He knew that Ellie was the easy choice. He knew it the same way we knew it. He knew this was a trap, but there was something in him that wouldn’t let it go. We were watching. We were waiting. Milo was fighting with this thing, and we let him do it.

  ‘ . . . you there, in the front. Missus Felder. Puh-puh-please. Come on up here. Ma’am.’

  No, we were thinking together, do not ask for her. Do not do it, boy. Do not call on her, boy. Can’t you see the Devil has come to your garden party? Can’t you see the Devil has gotten into Missus Felder, and there ain’t no way to cheat the Devil if you let her up on stage with you?

  Missus Felder, she just smiled.

  She took her time getting there, walked almost like an old woman even though she didn’t look forty yet. Passed Ellie Hawley along the way, just swished past her blue dress with the raglan sleeves.

  ‘Well, boy,’ said Missus Felder.

  ‘Thank you, Missus Felder,’ Milo said like he meant it. He shuffled the cards again, each of those big, blue Bicycles. Missus Felder watched primly, patiently, hips swaying slightly as she shifted her weight from side to side. As he was shuffling, you could see Milo starting to look for the words, starting to line them up in his mind like bowling pins so they’d fall down easily once he got going.

  Just as he opened his mouth to start the patter, Missus Felder piped up:

  ‘Aren’t you going to ask me my name?’

  Milo paused at this, chewed back those words he had all lined up for the show. ‘Nuh-no, Missus Felder. They all nuh-know it already.’

  She nodded at this, like it was what she had been expecting all along. We all breathed a sigh of relief, but half of us were s
aying something pretty foul with that breath, let me tell you. Milo smiled a little wobbly smile and got with the shuffling again until he was all good and ready.

  This time he got three words into the patter – three perfect words, three flawless, ordinary, magical words –

  Then: ‘Aren’t you going to ask me where I’m from?’

  Milo shook his head, and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. His hands missed the cards and three of them went flying out: an eight of spades, a red jack, and the two of diamonds. Milo tried snatching them out of the air, but he missed with those little hands of his and they fluttered like white doves to the grass.

  He placed the deck down steadily on the card table, and all the while Missus Felder was watching him with a look as wide and innocent as his own. There was a hush. We all knew something was coming. The kid knew something was coming. The kid was the kind of kid born with enough sense to know when something was coming but not enough to figure how to get out of the way. We could see the poor kid’s hands were trembling. He stooped to grab the cards, and as he was stooping, off slid that the black magician’s hat.

  Missus Felder was faster than a rattler. Like lightning striking or tragedy.

  The hat was in her hand then. She was holding it up to the audience. She was squinting at the inside of the brim of it.

  ‘My boy,’ she said, squinting away, ‘my boy, it seems as if you’ve dropped this.’

  Milo straightened up right away with only the red jack in his hands. He was staring at the hat. He was staring at Missus Felder.

  ‘Aww, c’mon,’ someone whispered in the audience; we didn’t know who, but we loved that person.

  ‘Come now, Milo, we can’t have the magician without his hat, can we?’

  Milo didn’t move. No one moved. No one dared to. Only the breeze tickling at the edges of his star-spattered cape.

  ‘Come here, boy. Now.’ Her voice cracked like a whip. Milo couldn’t ignore it. None of us could ignore it, our feet itched to stand. Ellie Hawley went so far as taking that first step forward before she caught hold of herself and paused.