The Story

by Victoria Hislop

  Small children were undoubtedly tiresome, but the way she indulged hers made them ten times worse. Like so many of her generation she seemed to be making a huge song and dance about the whole business. She was ridiculous with them, ludicrously over-indulgent and lacking in any sort of authority. It was when he had commented on this in passing that the auditory hallucinations had begun.

  ‘I don’t want to do to them what you did to me, you old beast,’ the voice had growled, guttural and shocking, although her lips had not been moving. ‘I don’t want to hand on the misery. I don’t want that horrible Larkin poem to be true.’ He had glared at her, amazed, and yet it had been quite obvious she was blissfully unaware of what he had heard. Or thought he had heard.

  He must have been hearing things.

  Now he held up his wrist and tapped his watch at her. She waved back at him, giving one last puff into the paper bag before scurrying to the fridge for the ice and lemon. As he watched her prepare his first drink of the evening, he decided to test out the audiologist’s theory.

  ‘Sit with me,’ he ordered, taking the clinking glass.

  ‘I’d love to, Dad, but the twins…’ she said.

  ‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘Look at them, you can see them from here, they’re all right for now.’

  She perched on the arm of the chair opposite his and started twisting a strand of her lank brown hair.

  ‘Tell me about your day,’ he commanded.

  ‘My day?’ she said. ‘Are you sure? Nothing very much happened. I took the twins to Tumbletots, then we went round Asda…’

  ‘Keep talking,’ he said, fiddling with his hearing aid. ‘I want to test this gadget out.’

  ‘…then I had to queue at the post office, and I wasn’t very popular with the double buggy,’ she droned on.

  He flicked the switch to the T-setting.

  ‘…never good enough for you, you old beast, you never had any time for me, you never listened to anything I said,’ came the low growling voice he remembered from before. ‘You cold old beast, Ruth says you’re emotionally autistic, definitely somewhere on the autistic spectrum anyway, that’s why she went to the other side of the world, but she says she still can’t get away from it there, your lack of interest, you blanked us, you blotted us out, you don’t even know the names of your grandchildren let alone their birthdays…’

  He flicked the switch back.

  ‘…after their nap, then I put the washing on and peeled some potatoes for tonight’s dinner while they watched CBeebies…’ she continued in her toneless everyday voice.

  ‘That’s enough for now, thanks,’ he said crisply. He took a big gulp of his drink, and then another. ‘Scarlett and, er, Mia. You’d better see what they’re up to.’

  ‘Are you OK, Dad?’

  ‘Fine,’ he snapped. ‘You go off and do whatever it is you want to do.’ He closed his eyes. He needed Elizabeth now. She’d taken no nonsense from the girls. He had left them to her, which was the way she’d wanted it. All this hysteria! Elizabeth had known how to deal with them.

  He sensed he was in for another bad night, and he was right. He lay rigid as a stone knight on a tomb, claustrophobic in his partially closed-down head and its frantic brain noise. The deafer he got the louder it became; that was how it was, that was the deal. He grimaced at the future, his other ear gone, reduced to the company of Matthew Herring and his like, a shoal of old boys mouthing at each other.

  The thing was, he had been the breadwinner. Children needed their mothers. It was true he hadn’t been very interested in them, but then, frankly, they hadn’t been very interesting. Was he supposed to pretend? Neither of them had amounted to much. And he had had his own life to get on with.

  He’d seen the way they were with their children these days – ‘Oh, that’s wonderful, darling! You are clever’ and ‘Love you!’ at the end of every exchange, with the young fathers behaving like old women, cooing and planting big sloppy kisses on their babies as if they were in a Disney film. The whole culture had gone soft, it gave him the creeps; opening up to your feminine side! He shuddered in his pyjamas.

  Elizabeth was dead. That was what he really couldn’t bear.

  The noise inside his head was going wild, colossal hooting and zooming and pressure-cooker hiss; he needed to distract his brain with – what had the doctor called it? – ‘sound enrichment’. Give it some competition, fight fire with fire: that was the idea. Fiddling with the radio’s tuning wheel in the dark, he swore viciously and wondered why it was you could never find the World Service when you needed it. He wanted talk but there was only music, which would have to do. Nothing but a meaningless racket to him, though at least it was a different sort of racket; that was the theory.

  No, that was no better. If anything, it was worse.

  Wasn’t the hearing aid supposed to help cancel tinnitus? So the doctor had suggested. Maybe the T-setting would come into its own in this sort of situation. He turned on the tiny gadget, made the necessary adjustments, and poked it into his ear.

  It was like blood returning to a dead leg, but in his head and chest. What an extraordinary sensation! It was completely new to him. Music was stealing hotly, pleasurably through his veins for the first time in his life, unspeakably delicious. He heard himself moan aloud. The waves of sound were announcing bliss and at the same time they brought cruel pain. He’d done his best, hadn’t he? He didn’t know what the girls expected from him. He’d given them full financial support until they were eighteen, which was more than many fathers could say. What was it exactly that he was supposed not to have done?

  Lifting him on a dark upsurge into the night, the music also felled him with inklings of what he did not know and had not known, intimations of things lovely beyond imagination which would never now be his as death was next. A tear crept down his face.

  He hadn’t cried since he was a baby. Appalling! At this rate he’d be wetting himself. When his mother had died, he and his sisters had been called into the front room and given a handkerchief each and told to go to their bedrooms until teatime. Under the carpet. Into thin air.

  The music was so astonishingly beautiful, that was the trouble. Waves of entrancing sound were threatening to breach the sea wall. Now he was coughing dry sobs.

  This was not on. Frankly he preferred any combination of troublesome symptoms to getting in this state. He fumbled with the hearing aid and at last managed to turn the damned thing off. Half-unhinged, he tottered to the bathroom and ran a basin of water over it, submerged the beastly little gadget, drowned it. Then he fished it out and flushed it down the lavatory. Best place for it.

  No more funny business, he vowed. That was that. From now on he would put up and shut up, he swore it on Elizabeth’s grave. Back in bed, he once again lowered his head onto the pillow.

  Straight away the infernal noise factory started up; he was staggering along beat by beat in a heavy shower of noise and howling.

  ‘It’s not real,’ he whispered to himself in the dark. ‘Compensatory brain activity, that’s what this is.’

  Inside his skull all hell had broken loose. He had never heard anything like it.

  Up at a Villa

  Helen Simpson

  Helen Simpson (b. 1959) is a British novelist and short story writer. She worked at Vogue for five years before becoming a writer full-time. Her first collection, Four Bare Legs in a Bed and Other Stories, won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and her second, Hey Yeah Right Get A Life, won the Hawthornden Prize. In 1993 she was selected as one of Granta’s top twenty novelists under the age of forty.

  They were woken by the deep-chested bawling of an angry baby. Wrenched from wine-dark slumber, the four of them sat up, flustered, hair stuck with pine needles, gulping awake with little light breaths of concentration. They weren’t supposed to be here, they remembered that.

  They could see the baby by the side of the pool, not twenty yards away, a furious geranium in its parasol-shaded buggy, and the large
pale woman sagging above it in her bikini. Half an hour ago they had been masters of that pool, racing topless and tipsy round its borders, lithe Nick chasing sinewy Tina and wrestling her, an equal match, grunting, snaky, toppling, crashing down into the turquoise depths together. Neither of them would let go underwater. They came up fighting in a chlorinated spume of diamonds. Joe, envious, had tried a timid imitation grapple, but Charlotte was having none of it.

  ‘Get off!’ she snorted, kind, mocking, and slipped neatly into the pool via a dive that barely broke the water’s skin. Joe, seeing he was last as usual, gave a foolish bellow and launched his heavy self into the air, his aimless belly slapping down disastrously like an explosion.

  After that, the sun had dried them off in about a minute, they had devoured their picnic of pissaladière and peaches, downed the bottles of pink wine and gone to doze in the shade behind the ornamental changing screen.

  Now they were stuck. Their clothes and money were heaped under a bush of lavender at the other end of the pool.

  ‘Look,’ whispered Tina as a man came walking towards the baby and its mother. ‘Look, they’re English. He’s wearing socks.’

  ‘What’s the matter with her now,’ said the man, glaring at the baby.

  ‘How should I know,’ said the woman. ‘I mean, she’s been fed. She’s got a new nappy.’

  ‘Oh, plug her on again,’ said the man crossly, and wandered off towards a cushioned sun-lounger. ‘That noise goes straight through my skull.’

  The woman muttered something they couldn’t hear, and shrugged herself out of her bikini top. They gasped and gaped in fascination as she uncovered huge brown nipples on breasts like wheels of Camembert.

  ‘Oh gross!’ whispered Tina, drawing her lips back from her teeth in a horrified smirk.

  ‘Be quiet,’ hissed Nick as they all of them heaved with giggles and snorts and their light eyes popped, over-emphatic in faces baked to the colour of flowerpots.

  They had crept into the grounds of this holiday villa, one of a dozen or more on this hillside, at slippery Nick’s suggestion, since everything was fermé le lundi down in the town and they had no money left for entrance to hotel pools or even to beaches. Anyway they had fallen out of love over the last week with the warm soup of the Mediterranean, its filmy surface bobbing with polystyrene shards and other unsavoury orts.

  ‘Harvey,’ called the woman, sagging on the stone bench with the baby at her breast. ‘Harvey, I wish you’d…’

  ‘Now what is it,’ said Harvey testily, making a great noise with his two-day-old copy of The Times.

  ‘Some company,’ she said with wounded pathos. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘Company,’ he sighed. ‘I thought the idea was to get away from it all.’

  ‘I thought we’d have a chance to talk on holiday,’ said the woman.

  ‘All right, all right,’ said Harvey, scrumpling up The Times and exchanging his sun-lounger for a place on the stone bench beside her. ‘All right. So what do you want to talk about?’

  ‘Us,’ said the woman.

  ‘Right,’ said Harvey. ‘Can I have a swim first?’ And he was off, diving clumsily into the pool, losing his poise at the last moment so that he met the water like a flung cat.

  ‘She’s hideous,’ whispered Tina. ‘Look at that gross stomach, it’s all in folds.’ She glanced down superstitiously at her own body, the high breasts like halved apples, the handspan waist.

  ‘He’s quite fat too,’ said Charlotte. ‘Love handles, anyroad.’

  ‘I’m never going to have children,’ breathed Tina. ‘Not in a million years.’

  ‘Shush,’ said Joe, straining forward for the next instalment. The husband was back from his swim, shaking himself like a Labrador in front of the nursing mother.

  ‘“Us”’, he said humorously, wiggling a finger inside each ear, then drubbing his hair with the flats of his hands. ‘Fire away then.’

  She started immediately, as if she knew she only had two or three minutes of his attention, and soon the air was thick with phrases like Once she’s on solids, and You’d rather be reading the paper, and Is it because you wanted a boy? He looked dull but resigned, silent except for once protesting, What’s so special about bathtime. She talked on, but like a loser, for she was failing to find the appropriate register, flailing around, pulling clichés from the branches. At some subliminal level each of the eavesdropping quartet recognised their own mother’s voice in hers, and glazed over.

  ‘You’ve never moaned on like this before,’ marvelled Harvey at last. ‘You were always so independent. Organised.’

  ‘You think I’m a mess,’ she said. ‘A failure as a mother.’

  ‘Well, you’re obviously not coping,’ he said. ‘At home all day and you can’t even keep the waste bins down.’

  Nick and Tina were laughing with silent violence behind the screen, staggering against each other, tears running down their faces. Joe was mesmerised by the spectacle of lactation. As for Charlotte, she was remembering another unwitting act of voyeurism, a framed picture from a childhood camping holiday.

  It had been early morning, she’d gone off on her own to the village for their breakfast baguettes, and the village had been on a hill like in a fairy-tale, full of steep little flights of steps which she was climbing for fun. The light was sweet and glittering and as she looked down over the rooftops she saw very clearly one particular open window, so near that she could have lobbed in a ten-franc piece, and through the window she could see a woman dropping kisses onto a man’s face and neck and chest. He was lying naked in bed and she was kissing him lovingly and gracefully, her breasts dipping down over him like silvery peonies. Charlotte had never mentioned this to anyone, keeping the picture to herself, a secret snapshot protected from outside sniggerings.

  ‘The loss of romance,’ bleated the woman, starting afresh.

  ‘We haven’t changed,’ said Harvey stoutly.

  ‘Yes, we have! Of course we have!’

  ‘Rubbish.’

  ‘But we’re supposed to change, it’s all different now, the baby’s got to come first.’

  ‘I don’t see why,’ said Harvey. ‘Mustn’t let them rule your life.’

  The baby had finished at last, and was asleep; the woman gingerly detached her from her body and placed her in the buggy.

  ‘Cheer up,’ said Harvey, preparing for another dip. ‘Once you’ve lost a bit of weight, it’ll all be back to normal. Romance et cetera. Get yourself in shape.’

  ‘You don’t fancy me any more,’ she wailed in a last-ditch attempt to hold him.

  ‘No, no, of course I do,’ he said, eyeing the water. ‘It’s just a bit… different from before. Now that you’ve gone all, you know, sort of floppy.’

  That did it. At the same moment as the woman unloosed a howl of grief, Nick and Tina released a semi-hysterical screech of laughter. Then – ‘Run!’ said Joe – and they all shot off round the opposite side of the pool, snatching up their clothes and shoes and purses at the other end. Harvey was meanwhile shouting, ‘Hoi! Hoi! What the hell d’you think you’re playing at!’ while his wife stopped crying and his daughter started.

  The four of them ran like wild deer, leaping low bushes of lavender and thyme, whooping with panicky delight, lean and light and half-naked – or, more accurately, nine-tenths naked – through the pine trees and après-midi dappling. They ran on winged feet, and their laughter looped the air behind them like chains of bubbles in translucent water.

  High up on the swimming-pool terrace the little family, frozen together for a photographic instant, watched their flight open-mouthed, like the ghosts of summers past; or, indeed, of summers yet to come.

  Plunder

  Edna O’Brien

  Edna O’Brien (b. 1930) is an Irish novelist, playwright, poet and short story writer. Her first novel, The Country Girls, is often credited with breaking silence on sexual matters and social issues in Ireland following World War II. Due to the controversy caused by the
book, O’Brien left Ireland for London where she has remained. She has written over twenty works of fiction and received the Irish PEN Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001.

  One morning we wakened to find that there was no border – we had been annexed to the fatherland. Of course we did not hear of it straightaway as we live in the wilds, but a workman who comes to gather wood and fallen boughs told us that soldiers had swarmed the town and occupied the one hotel. He said they drank there, got paralytic, demanded lavish suppers, and terrorised the maids. The townspeople hid, not knowing which to fear most, the rampaging soldiers or their huge dogs that ran loose without muzzles. He said they had a device for examining the underneath of cars – a mirror on wheels to save themselves the inconvenience of stooping. They were lazy bastards.

  The morning we sighted one of them by the broken wall in the back avenue we had reason to shudder. His camouflage was perfect, green and khaki and brown, the very colours of this mucky landscape. Why they should come to these parts baffled us and we were sure that very soon they would scoot it. Our mother herded us all into one bedroom, believing we would be safer that way – there would be no danger of one of us straying and we could keep turns at the watch. As luck had it, only the week before we had gathered nuts and apples and stored them on wooden trays for the winter. Our mother worried about our cow, said that by not being milked her poor udder would be pierced with pain, said the milk would drip all over the grass. We could have used that cow’s milk. Our father was not here, our father had disappeared long before.

  On the third morning they came and shouted our mother’s name – Rosanna. It sounded different, pronounced in their tongue, and we wondered how they knew it. They were utter hooligans. Two of them roughed her out, and the elder tugged on the long plait of her hair.

  Our mother embraced each of us and said she would be back presently. She was not. We waited, and after a fearful interval we tiptoed downstairs but could not gain entry to the kitchen because the door between it and the hall was barricaded with stacked chairs. Eventually we forced our way through, and the sight was grisly. Her apron, her clothes, and her underclothes were strewn all over the floor, and so were hairpins and her two side combs. An old motorcar seat was raised onto a wooden trough in which long ago she used to put the feed for hens and chickens. We looked in vain through the window, thinking we might see her in the back avenue or better still coming up the path, shattered, but restored to us. There was one soldier down there, his rifle cocked. Where was she? What had they done to her? When would she be back? The strange thing is that none of us cried and none of us broke down. With a bit of effort we carried the stinking car seat out and threw it down the three steps that led from the back door. It was all we could do to defy our enemies. Then we went up to the room and waited. Our cow had stopped moaning, and we realised that she too had been taken and most likely slaughtered. The empty field was ghost-like, despite the crows and jackdaws making their usual commotion at evening time. We could guess the hours roughly by the changing light and changing sky. Later the placid moon looked in on us. We thought, if only the workman would come back and give us news. The sound of his chainsaw used to jar on us, but now we would have welcomed it as it meant a return to the old times, the safe times, before our mother and our cow were taken. Our brother’s wooden flute lay in the fire grate, as he had not the heart to play a tune, even though we begged for it.