Oh, there was dancing, she said, and her anger seemed to have dissipated, or transferred itself somewhat. We danced.
She went into the sitting room and over to the stereo. She bent down – he watched the material of her dress shift to accommodate the flow of the anatomy beneath it – and brought out from a low cupboard a stack of CDs. Accommodate, he thought: horrific, unforgivable word. He was repeating himself.
She slid it . . . Christ, she put the fucking compact disc into the sodding machine and pressed play. Picked up her drink and came towards him.
So, Mark, Mark. Marky Mark. What’s going on in that head of yours?
He smiled, as cover.
As cover, he smiled.
I’ve been thinking about you, he said.
Well, I’ve been thinking about you, too. I’ve been thinking about you especially hard in the last few minutes.
And before he could come back with some no doubt asinine reply to that they were kissing again. Thank God, he thought. Very gently, very deliberately, he lifted a hand and put it through her hair at the side of her hand. Her head. The side of her head. Ran his fingers through the strands, separating and defining them, as if to honour each one. She seemed to appreciate this, and began to push at him more with her mouth, implicating and exploring him, and making a use of her relative lack of height that he found just delicious. So much so that he gave, or let out, or emitted, a quiet grunt or groan. Or moan. Please more of a moan than a groan, he thought, reaching after the awful sound, to hear it again, fix it in his mind.
She was on tiptoe, one hand on his upper arm to steady herself. Her other hand on his waist. His shirt ridden up, she had her hand on his belt, the thumb inside the waistband, and she slid it around, as if unthinkingly, towards his back pocket. He shifted his stance, to stop her getting even slightly near the pages of his story – not a story, not yet; just notes, really – and this brought the front of his jeans into contact with the front of her, the what, the declivity of her? She gave a sort of moany groan – she was doing it now, too, whatever it was – and it carried within it, the sound, particles of what sounded like laughter. She slid her hand back around and pressed it against him, flat on the raw denim.
Oh god, she said, talking now to his shirt. What are we going to do with you?
Eyes closed, he found a way to press himself harder against her hand, and she pressed back, actually holding him, as best she could, through his jeans, showing through the action of her palm her intimate understanding of the matter. He pushed even harder, hating himself, but wanting above all to find some way of expressing himself, his intentions, his delicate reservations, past history, world view, thoughts on the nature of signification, the problem of endings, Wittgenstein, Kelly Brook, the de Stijl movement, the novels of Michel Houellebecq and Chris Cleave, any or all of this.
He shifted himself and tried to reciprocate, moving his hand to the front of her dress, but she outflanked him, still kissing, shaking her head in the kiss – Uh-uh, she said, or otherwise intoned – twisting her hips to deflect or dissuade him. He turned his head to the side, and felt his body be jerked forward two, three times as she tugged his belt out from its buckle. He thought of dressing and undressing his children, the thousands of instances of it, their patience and passivity in the face of it, the way they held out their legs, or raised their arms. She opened his fly, pop-pop-pop went the buttons, and he said, well, something. Who knows what he said. To her or himself. Something about a text not sent. An exclamation, exhortation, appeal to the deity.
Is this what you want? she said, and he bit his lip, unwilling to trust himself to words. She had his what, his cock? his dick? his fucking prick free of his underwear now and was working, quite unconscionably, away, with a solicitude that seemed to go quite beyond intimacy, that was almost incestuous. His hand was on the mantel shelf. The other on her shoulder, bracing himself.
Please, he said.
What?
Please.
Shh, she said, and he heard, too, the quiet susurration of a tissue being drawn from its box. He opened his eyes in fright and saw books, hundreds of them, up, down, left and right. None of them his, but each one of them chock full of adultery, even the ones entirely free of it. His gaze skittered desperately across their spines, pressed hard as a cliff face, nowhere safe, nowhere to hold onto, to come to rest. This can’t be it, he thought, as his fingers gripped tight on her shoulder and she leaned into him, thinking no doubt of the carpet, closing the gap between them, and as he felt her forehead buck gently against his shoulder he thought: not this. This can’t be what it’s like.
The Spiral Stairwell
A TRUE STORY
Jay Griffiths
It happened in Bristol, during the Blitz. Every night, Len drove an ambulance to collect the dead and the injured. He would be given a slip of paper with a typed address, a message sending him across the city to houses bombed with explosives or incendiary devices. His job was to find whatever remained.
One night, having done several journeys through the siren-scarred night, he returned to base and went to the control room. The controller was a slow, careful woman. He held out his hand impatiently for the next message-slip with the next address on it. The address he was given was his own.
The sky is falling, the sky is falling, the sky is falling. He had often read this story to his daughter at bedtime. He couldn’t get the line out of his head now.
‘Does the sky ever fall in real life?’ she had asked.
‘Never, my little princess, never.’
He had stroked her silky hand. She put all her small fist in his and her trust made him a lion, as he carried her up the cast-iron spiral stairwell to her bedroom, with a window to the stars.
Now he holds the message-slip in his hand. Motionless, he stares at the controller. She doesn’t know that where a stranger’s address should be, he sees his own. He is seized by an agony of heroism which turns his mouth to metal in a moment. He says nothing but takes the paper and walks to the ambulance. His knees don’t shake but they don’t bend either.
Anti-aircraft lights are scoring his deep, dark veins and all his lovely inner night is torn open.
All sounds recede. The fall of information on deafened ears. The typed letters indent the paper like the beloved marks of baby teeth on the books in his study.
Then panic. The siren, screaming itself white in the black night, is screaming inside his silence.
Dry-mouthed, he wants to take the message back to the controller, and tell her she’s an idiot, that she made a stupid mistake. Then he wants to rip up the message, tear it to shreds, burn it and stamp on the ashes. But even if he does, the message won’t go away. The writing is on the wall. A written warning. It is written, it is written, it is written.
Suddenly, the paper seems alive to him and he clutches at it, fearing to drop it. He twists the paper between two fingers as he pushes his round glasses up over his nose and grasps the wheel. Why am I holding onto it? Am I likely to forget, for God’s sake – and his mind swings with his hands on the wheel turning the corner as fast as he can – am I likely to forget what it says? It is my most precious memento. All I will have left of my world is the little scrap of paper which describes it.
He grips it for dear life. The message is now an icon, the print of an address burnt onto his mind like the print of a dress which will be burnt on to the body of a small girl in Hiroshima. The future is in the present. East is West and the girl is his own daughter. Lateral explosions. Collateral damage. East of the sun and West of the moon, he hums, madly. ‘Love . . . makes one little roome an everywhere,’ and his whole world is in that address.
I am the only one who knows what this message means. And what it means is that I am alone in a world deworlded. He can read the message forwards and backwards, from the present into the future and from the future into the past. This is the message of infinit
e destruction and he will carry the message wherever he must.
Driving across Bristol, he is driving from the world of the living to the world of the dead. Tension fuses his hands onto the steering wheel as the skies, prised apart from the heavens, crash to earth.
The sky is falling now. On all my world.
Of all the houses in all of Bristol, you had to drop bombs on mine. That house was my whole world, you bastards. You bastards, you bombed my whole, entire world.
His round-toed shoes gunned the accelerator, when suddenly a tabby cat ran into the low headlights and he slammed on the brakes. Damn it to hell, must this war take everything? Even a little pussy cat?
He is there. He is there. He is there.
Part of the roof is on fire.
The house is still standing.
Hope corkscrews through him, hurting him.
He pulls open the door and then he sees.
His whole world is trembling in the balance.
All the glad world held to ransom in that moment.
Hanging by a thread.
For an incendiary bomb has fallen on the house but – by all the angels who ever loved me – he gasps, the bomb has fallen in the dead-centre of the cast-iron spiral stairwell.
There it burns. Caught, burning its fury, exquisitely, caught in the nick of time, in the nick of place. Tucked in the spiral banisters, the bomb rocks and fizzes.
Underneath it, deep in the cellar, dark and implicit as a womb, his wife and children are tucked together: his world and worlds to come. The children are whimpering: he sees his daughter first, her eyes full of fear and fireworks, transfixed by the bomb. It is seared onto her retina and I know that for the rest of her life she will never understand how people can actually like fireworks.
‘Dad is here, Dad is here, Dad is here,’ her brother shouts out, breaking the spell, and she sees him as never before. Hero. Mountain. Tree. Lion. Dad.
His wife is calculating if it is safe to edge out of the cellar now. The children don’t think: they run to their father, he lifts them to kiss them, but they are not kissable children now, they are small, frightened animals, and they burrow into his body, tucking themselves into the deep dark of his overcoat.
‘You’ll be right as ninepence, my darlings, right as a trivet, right as rain, right as . . .’ and his voice was too choked to go on.
‘The sky did fall, Dad. Might it ever fall again?’
‘Never, my little princess, never.’
It was months later. He was taking his little daughter up the stairwell to her bedroom with a window to the stars. Memory turns in spirals, like a stairwell, like the double helix of DNA, like whorls of galaxies. As he carried her, he remembered not only her near-death but also her conception.
His wife was looking sternly at him, telling him he was a bit tipsy. So he tickled her. And tickled her again till she giggled. I imagine them giggling when a little spurt of starlight shot out of him, giggling seeds which laughed their way into her earth-night and one shooting star, with perfect aim, found its way right into the centre of her whorls and inner spiral stairwells, exploding on the scene, a tiny bomb of life: sherbet, yeast, champagne, fireworks, starworks. Ping! My mother.
The Incalculable Weight of Water
Richard Knight
He hauls his aching body forward to the dam wall, up the grassy bank in the warmed silence of a July afternoon. He’s too old for climbing hills. Ann has been pushing this idea for years. She’s waiting for him now, in the café next to the car park, and he knows that by the time he makes it back down there he will certainly have taken too long. She’ll get up and sigh and tell him, tell him that he’s too old, as though that somehow explains everything.
Ann has asked him several times over the years why he likes to climb up high. Once, years ago, she came with him out of interest, in the time when they first tussled with each other’s strangeness and were happy in that struggle. It was before they’d even thought of marrying, years before Oliver was born. They’d eaten a sandwich, he remembers now, in the lee of this same dark wall, the mist swirling around their young, loose-limbed bodies. She’d mocked him gently about the view he’d promised and he knew by the end of that day that she would never come with him again, preferring the company of the radio, her books or her friends. But he still remembers that image, still sees it now tilting back like a framed photograph; Ann at its centre shivering with the thick-cut sandwich pinched between forefinger and thumb, not liking his walk but loving him still. That trip was conceived from the possibilities of love.
Perhaps she’s right, he thinks, looking up and feeling the beginnings of a slight mountain breeze that cools his sweating face. The sky is a densely packed blue, almost solid and unmarked over the blackened grit-stone wall. He senses the incalculable weight of water that squats behind that wall, unseen, menacing. He’s been here before in winter wind and heard it lapping, lashing the stone and agitating for release. But today, a fine day like this, he imagines it will be lifeless, a darker likeness of the unblemished sky.
He should recognise the birdsong by now. Are they curlews? He can’t remember if it’s the right season, but he doesn’t wonder about it for long. He’s walked up here many times, but not really for the bird life. He squints under the sun, mapping the route in his head along the ridge to the west of the reservoir and back down to the car park. Flying ants swarm there in late summer but he hopes it’s still too early for them.
It’s so quiet up here he imagines he could whisper her name – her straightforward name, no need for a gratuitous ‘e’ – and that it would slice through the stillness and she’d somehow hear it down there. He thinks it, he even parts his mouth slightly, but doesn’t push the necessary air out. In the right pocket of his walking trousers he grasps the phone that Ann makes him carry and switches it on. It’s mid-afternoon and now it feels as though the heat is humming as he waits for a sequence of glaring screens to load.
It had been Ann’s idea to come out today. There was no use just sitting around waiting, she’d said. They had her mobile number, the one she used all the time now. These days he was more often than not bemused as he watched the world alter, swinging away in a direction he couldn’t quite understand, but Ann had always just accepted how things moved. As Oliver said, usually after they’d both failed to hear his call ringing on the kitchen handset, there’s little point having a home telephone these days. Oliver often sent Ann text messages, which were sometimes relayed across the patterned wool carpet that separated their chairs. Early that afternoon she’d made the suggestion – which was more of a decision really – and put his boots in the car and driven them to the visitor centre. The boots had been the sign. He knew then she wanted to be away from him.
He cups his hand around the old Nokia and turns his back on the sun. As ever, there’s no signal. The small icon of an antenna in the top left corner of his screen droops like a plant wilting in the heat. She’ll work it out, he thinks. She won’t be worried; she knows how it is. God, she’s enough to worry about herself. He puts the phone back in his pocket. High above his head an aeroplane trails an erect stream through the blue and he wonders which resort it’s heading for. For a second or two he closes his eyes against the glare of a summer idyll, the awful images of everyday happiness.
His heart thuds and he suddenly feels light-headed. He reaches the wall, holds out a hand to its rough contours. The breath of the breeze cools his brow and he steadies himself there, peering out across a vast sheen of thick, peaty water. This strip of the world, this strange flat landscape, is as empty as ever.
This is what he comes for.
The stillness consumes him for a moment and he lets it, lets it sink in until it rings through his skull.
Ann thought they’d have rung in the morning.
‘You’d think they would,’ she’d wondered aloud at lunchtime through the tinny babble of the ki
tchen radio, as he cut woody cores from slices of tomato. ‘Why keep people hanging on? It isn’t fair. Thoughtless, really.’
He didn’t think she needed to hear a reason and muttered his agreement. She was talking to make noise, to fill spaces. Now he feels the sweat between his eyebrows and his eyelids, takes off his glasses and wipes it away with the back of his wrist. He hadn’t realised it was quite so hot when he set out an hour ago. He hasn’t brought water with him. Another hour and he’ll be back in the café with a cool drink, but he’s dreading it already. He fears the evenness with which Ann will accept the news, whatever that is, and turn her mind to the future; to plans, ideas, images that he can’t even bear to picture. Up here the world is unmoved, unmoving. Up here his mind is at rest briefly, out of range, lacking a signal. He blinks and puts his glasses back on.
At first he sees it as a small island. It’s summer after all, a rare fine one, and the water level in the reservoir is already quite low. Over by the west shore there’s a slim, black mound, maybe twenty yards out in the water. Curious, he walks further along the embankment. He has to go in that direction anyway, to get to the path that runs along the ridge. At the end of the wall he stops and shields his eyes from the glare of the sun.
The black coat is filled with air. Who would throw their coat into the reservoir, he wonders? Nearer though, dropping onto the small rocky beach, he recognises an arm, a white hand. He stumbles on a stone, his arm shooting out instinctively as he rebalances and stands, struck suddenly immobile by the lifelessness of the corpse. His heart pounds, as a kind of reassurance, a chaotic celebration of his own life. He hesitates at the edge of the gently lapping water.
Before he knows what he’s doing, he’s ankle-deep in the reservoir. The black water ripples into wide chevrons in front of his shins. Each short stride takes him inevitably towards the startling prospect of a dead body. He stops for a moment and looks back, as though there might be clues suspended in the humid air; about when this happened, how it happened, why it happened. But there’s nothing. He turns back to the corpse. The white hand he’d thought was floating is in fact resting on a black bin bag. The body could have been here a long time, he suddenly realises. The moment of death might have passed months ago, when a coat would still have been needed. Would he worry about keeping warm in a winter coat just before his own planned death? He stays there, the water below his knees, the question stilling him for a second. He feels a compulsion begin to rise, an urge to wade just a little further and tug at the coat, at the hood that hides the face. But he’s fearful of the nothingness, the dreadful emptiness he might see there.
The Best British Short Stories 2014 Page 3