Best British Short Stories 2015

by Nicholas Royle

  ‘Yes, but we must allocate at least one period a week for it. It’s one of the main criteria for entry that schools in our locality are looking at. It’s only right that all of our pupils should have the opportunity to practise these vital skills.’

  The Director of Studies was talking about next year’s timetable, one of the few topics of genuine importance and interest. Craft put down his pencil.

  ‘How are we going to fit these extra lessons in? The school day is quite long enough as it is, Todd.’

  ‘No one is suggesting that the school day should be any longer. As I have made clear these lessons are already in place in the Junior School. What I am proposing is that the number of Classics periods should be reduced from three to two. I have discussed this with the Headmaster.’

  ‘You have my support on this one, Todd.’

  With dismay, Craft realised that they were proposing yet another reduction in the number of Latin lessons. Vengelo was the head and only member of what was still called the Department of Classics, though Greek had been abandoned long ago. In spite of himself, Craft suddenly found that he was talking.

  ‘Do you really think that Angus is going to be able to get them through their exams on two periods a week? I know for a fact that he’s finding it hard enough on three.’ They were looking at him. He had made the error of mentioning someone who was not present by name, a procedural legerdemain of the very worst sort. Discussion was supposed to take place at a suitably elevated level of abstraction, and proper nouns were seldom permitted to denote people unless the intention was unimpeachably phatic. Stung, he decided to continue.

  ‘Anyway, I thought that the whole point of these verbal and non-verbal reasoning tests is that you can’t cram for them. They’re supposed to give some sort of objective assessment, aren’t they?’

  The Headmaster was looking at him with an expression of impatience mingled with disgust.

  ‘We would not be suggesting this change if there wasn’t sound educational justification for it. Educational research has shown that children can and do improve their scores significantly. As for the Department of Classics, I’m sure they’ll cope . . . John.’

  With a sour shrug of the shoulders, Craft fell silent. In spite of his years of not disloyal service, his position at the school was less strong than he would have liked. One by one, the forms that he taught had ceased to understand a word that he was saying. At first incomprehension had been confined to the less able sets, but now even the scholarship streams were restless and apparently incapable of following stories and poems that had enthralled previous generations. At first, he had been able to buy a little time by jettisoning any text that had pretensions to literary merit, but now he was having difficulty finding a single book that was bad enough to command their attention. There was one form that couldn’t even watch a video in silence.

  The Headmaster had begun to explain how form masters would assume responsibility for marking the weekly verbal reasoning tests and giving the results to the Director of Studies. It was hard to believe, Craft reflected, that the whole business would not end in Vengelo’s enforced resignation. Although they were not especially close, they had worked together for almost two decades and had recently taken to meeting for a drink once a week, a shared revulsion to the new regime having at last created a bond. Craft wondered what he should say to his friend, who was at that moment

  running towards across the floodplains in the direction of the river Ver. In bad winters the field had been so wet as to have been impassable, were it not for the narrow causeway that connected the two bridges. But now the stream that had once flowed under the first bridge had disappeared and the Ver itself had been reduced to a sluggish green trickle. Nevertheless, there was something almost Japanese about the scene: the two bridges, the ancient trees, the delicate summer grasses. Vengelo stopped and turned round. The blond boy was now crossing the first bridge, but there was no sign of the others. He hoped that the Hong Kong Chinese were not lost. As he waited, he looked around and saw that a burnt-out car had been left close to the river bank; he could just see that it had no number plates. It had probably been stolen in London, driven down here and doused in petrol. Giving way to a desire, which he recognised as rather childish, to be the first one to reach the bridge, Vengelo broke into dignified trot. On the other side of the Ver was a park with mature trees and a grey Elizabethan house. Cattle sheltered under horse chestnuts. As he approached the river bank, three anglers stood up. The tallest, a youth of about seventeen, wore a purple shell suit and a baseball cap. With him were a middle-aged woman in a track suit and a lilac top and a boy with gooseberry hair.

  ‘Have you got a knife?’

  The woman was speaking, and Vengelo noticed that she had hardly any teeth.

  ‘Not on me.’

  ‘It’s just that we’ve caught this lobster.’

  ‘A lobster?’

  Vengelo was assailed by a sudden sybaritic vision: what else were they going to fish out of the river: a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket, a crisp salad and dish of buttered new potatoes?

  ‘Yes, we’ve caught this lobster.’

  ‘Congratulations!’

  ‘No, you don’t understand. We don’t want it. We want to put it back, but we can’t; it’s stuck on the line.’

  The pale blue-pink creature, which was probably some species of freshwater crayfish, lay still on the grass; the barb at the end of the line was stuck deep into its side.

  ‘I’m sorry, I can’t help you.’

  As the runners arrived, they too began to look at the crayfish, and the tall youth, who had the appearance being slightly simple, questioned them in the hope that they would somehow be able to liberate the creature. Tanfield, the only boy to be correctly dressed in the official cross-country strip, had knelt down and was examining the barb carefully. Irritated, Vengelo ordered the runners to the other side of the bridge.

  Once they were in the park the questions came:

  ‘Can’t we go swimming?’

  ‘Not today.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The river’s too shallow.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to rescue those people’s lobster?’

  ‘It’s not a lobster.’

  ‘Please let us go swimming, sir; it’s hot, sir.’

  ‘Oh all right. You can splash about, but you mustn’t swim. It’s not deep enough. Has anyone seen Wu and Shu?’

  No one had seen Wu and Shu. Perhaps they’d been left so far behind that they’d decided to make their own way back to school. If anyone from the senior management team saw them return unaccompanied . . .

  ‘It’s Tanfield, sir. He’s been wounded, sir. You must come at once.’ Vengelo had been dimly aware of commotion on the other side of the river. He hurriedly crossed the bridge to find an apologetic Tanfield holding the crayfish and the line of the fishing rod. It appeared that Tanfield, driven by misguided compassion and curiosity, had remained with the angler who had then persuaded him to free the creature; in doing so, he had somehow ended up with a barb in his forefinger. The only consolation was that Tanfield had remained calm and there was surprisingly little blood.

  ‘Go on, sir. I don’t mind if you just rip it out.’

  Vengelo inspected the finger a little more closely and then gave an experimental tug. There was no gentle way of easing the barb out. It would just have to stay where it was.

  ‘Can we have our rod back?’

  ‘Be quiet. I’m thinking.’

  ‘You can’t leave with our rod.’

  ‘You’ll just have chew through the line, won’t you.’

  Just how many of the school’s health and safety regulations had he broken? He had forgotten the mobile phone, omitted to fill in a risk assessment form, lost two members of his group and now the son of one of the most influential parents had been wounded in an encounter with some sor
t of lobster. At seven o’clock he was due to meet John Craft in the Cat and Fiddle. It was the one occasion of the week when he had company, the one time when he had an opportunity to exercise a little dry Scottish humour, and he had been looking forward to telling him about his meeting

  with Murray Donoghue, the newly appointed Australian Deputy Headmaster, who had been in charge of break detention when Mr Vengelo had been to see him that morning. Two boys in the front row looked up and smirked.

  ‘And what can I do for you, Mr Vengelo?’

  A parody of the British manner. General laughter and the sound of a pencil case falling to the floor. Donoghue raised a hand for silence before turning to Mr Vengelo, who was craning confidentially towards him. It would be something to do with the running club. Not so much a disaster waiting happen as one parading itself before their very eyes, that’s what he’d told the Headmaster.

  ‘It’s about my club. In this very hot weather, I’ve been letting the boys have a dip in the Ver. They’ve always been allowed to do this, but I thought I’d better just check that this is still OK.’

  Donoghue looked at Mr Vengelo closely. With that belly on him and in this heat it would be a miracle if he made it round. The guy should appoint a spade monitor and tell the kids to bury him where he falls. And what was the paratrooper’s haircut about?

  ‘Well, strictly speaking, you should have a qualified swimming pool warden present. Are you sure you want to go running in this heat?’

  ‘They’re looking forward to it. It’s more of a fun run than a training session. The Ver’s not very deep at the moment. Frankly, it would be an achievement to drown.’

  Something of the freedom of his childhood on a Queensland farm came back to him. The kids were twelve to thirteen years old, for Christ’s sake. Why couldn’t they paddle in a stream that came up to their ankles?

  ‘Well OK – but I didn’t say so.’

  ‘Sorry to bother you, but there are just so many . . .’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me. Remember to fill in a risk assessment form.’

  As the door closed behind Veneglo, Donoghue sighed. Strictly speaking it would have been better to put a stop to the whole thing, but with the Curriculum Development Committee meeting in games time they were short staffed. And it was hard to know how to treat these old guys, Vengelo and the other one, the one with the white face who looked as if he was actually dying, John

  Craft, who, three hours later, shifted restlessly in one of the most ergonomically unsatisfactory chairs ever to have been designed, whilst two and a half miles away from the room in which the Curriculum Development Committee was meeting, the tall youth in the purple shell suit succeeded in biting through the line, thus releasing Tanfield and regaining control of the rod, at the very moment that the Headmaster began a ten-minute speech on the ways in which he saw curriculum development developing, which concluded as Tanfield and Mr Vengelo ran-walked up the gravel drive towards the neo-Gothic mansion that had once housed a teacher training college, and where a secretary, who was just about to leave for the day, was persuaded to drive Tanfield, still holding the creature, back to school, leaving Mr Vengelo, alone on the drive and not within supervisory distance of any of his pupils, to consider the repercussions of entrusting a pupil in his care to an adult whom he had never seen before, a lady now alone with a strange child, who was holding what appeared to be a crayfish resting on a bed of spaghetti, as he gave directions to the school, where the Headmaster had left the new classroom block and was walking back into his cool dark study, whilst Mr Vengelo waited for the cross-country runners to join him and wondered what on earth had happened to Wu and Shu, who had clearly made no attempt to keep up with the others and would have to report to the study, in which the Headmaster would soon be seated in front of his computer, with just five minutes to work on his revisions to his policy document on line-management, before a red car would come down the long drive from the main road and two figures, a middle-aged woman and a boy carrying a crayfish/small freshwater lobster, would get out and walk towards the front door which is once again locked, for it seven o’clock and most of the staff and pupils have gone home. It is a little cooler and the evening light is a deeper shade of sherry-gold. A few boarders with brightly striped towels over their shoulders wander past the rose garden on their way to the swimming pool, from which a faint splashing can still be heard. An angora rabbit has escaped from the animal hutch and sits on the cricket pitch. In a bungalow at the edge of Barnet the secretary thinks about the school whose sign she has driven past for fifteen years, but whose buildings she had never seen until today; she thinks of the long drive, the boys playing croquet on the front lawn, so small beneath the ancient trees; the wisteria hanging over the porch, the sun-polished ivy. She could never have afforded a place like that for her son. Bandaged, Tanfield has returned from Accident and Emergency and is using his one good hand to access the internet. Soon he will find his creature, the one that he rescued and put in the lake. He cannot believe that it might already have been dead. He learns that crayfish can be called yabbies, ghost shrimps, crawdads, mudbugs, carmels, spoondogs and tiny creek lobsters. The study of crayfish is astacology, and they like crevices. Some are good at escaping and others, to judge from the pictures, are best served with a side salad. A few are kept as pets. He hopes his crayfish will be happy in its new home. John Craft reminds his wife that he is going to the pub and takes the car keys off the hall table. It isn’t going to be a good evening. Somehow he must find a tactful way to warn Vengelo. Mind you, at this rate it looks as if they will both be for the chop. He still cannot forget the way that his colleagues were looking at him, as if he were some sort of antiquated ghost, perhaps the one with a face like ‘crumpled linen’ in . . . was MR James? An author he’d long ago had to stop reading to the children. Since it is the one evening when he knows he will have company, Mr Vengelo has left his edition of Horace in his bedroom. It has been a difficult day, but he is a little more cheerful now. The Tanfields were surprisingly understanding, and apparently Accident and Emergency had been extraordinarily efficient. A relief to learn that he had done the right thing in leaving the barb exactly where it was. He represses a shudder when he remembers how close he came to pulling it out. Once inside the Cat and Fiddle he is surprised to find it half empty. No doubt most of the customers are in the beer garden. He is looking forward to telling Craft about Murray Dohoghue and the risk assessment form. What these people are incapable of understanding is that the real dangers are often unforeseeable. How could he possibly have anticipated the incident with the lobster or whatever it was? Perhaps they would now ask him to write a policy document: ‘Crustaceans and Cross-Country Running’. The Polish barman wonders why the man with the funny haircut is laughing. In the study, which is the coolest room in the school, the Headmaster has finished his document on line-management. Now he has just one more task before he can go home. Vengelo has become impossible. Forcing a pupil into a complete stranger’s car is utterly unacceptable and flies in the face of everything that the school’s child protection policy has been set up to achieve. Of course having to get rid of a member of staff at this point in the academic year is far from ideal, but the examinations are over and if a suitable replacement cannot found for September it will not be a disaster if Classics is dropped altogether. Few schools seemed to want it. Of course, some parents would object, but they would be a tiny minority. As he lifts up the phone, he is sure the Chairman of the Governors will agree. At the bottom of the lake the crayfish lies next to the wheel of an old bicycle. Even if it is still alive, it will not survive for long. No, it is lost now, along with all those who can only dream of fresh water.

  The Common People

  REBECCA SWIRSKY

  AND THE PEOPLE-OF-THE-COMMON had a wide open, green area. They kept this area trimmed and neat and glowing, as though it were a smooth billiard table. They were good citizens, these people, whose living areas were maintai
ned in efficient, spruced fashion. A community of roughly 500, theirs was an infrastructure of which they were proud. ‘Good morning!’ called the bustling widow to her neighbour who lived in the cedarwood stucture next door. And they stared up happily into the empty bowl of sky.

  Slap-bang in an amber afternoon, a caravan arrived. The caravan’s spoked wheels rolled, causing red and green and white flakes of paint to settle over the grass. Because the heat was so hot, and the afternoon densely still, not even the dogs of the area took notice. The caravan’s awkward piebald lowered its neck towards finely trimmed grass. Two men jumped out. They wore rings in their ears, and natty red neckerchiefs with white dots. As the piebald was apt to wander, the men tethered it to a small stake. Lazily chewing stalks, the men lay on their backs and squinted at the sky, speaking in quiet undertones.

  As if by direct connection to this first arrival, a pick-up truck pulled onto the grassy communal area. The engine switched off, shuddering and grumbling. The truck’s dented fenders were grubby. Loud, foreign-sounding music blared from speakers. Unlike the caravan, this truck was not quaint. Women and men spilled out, children also, ranging from toddlers in nappies to almost-adult. Even the young children rubbed their backs, as if they’d been bumped or jolted as the truck drove over potholes. Directing this dazed group was an old woman, bent and powerful with age. A cherry-red scarf was tied underneath her chin. She directed the making of a fire. When the flames were merry, a brass teakettle was produced from a streaked gunny sack. Cigarettes were rolled and strolls taken around the nearby pond. The younger children played tag and chase, and stick-in-the mud. Presently, the children approached the homes adjoining the grassy communal area. Not having seen mullioned glass before, the children made faces at the swirled panes, which looked like hardened tree sap. They waggled tongues and scrawled dirty words in the mist from their breath, wheeling away with laughter.