The Best British Short Stories 2014

by Nicholas Royle

  The Jewel of The Orient

  Louise Palfreyman

  It was raining, a fine drizzle that could only be picked out against the sullen glow of the streetlamps, their pumpkin brightness glaring into the dark. Beneath the lights, reflections of orange diffused across wet concrete. It glistened with moisture that pooled in little eddies, black rivulets trickling towards the drains. I was sitting at the desk in my bedroom, looking out from the first-floor flat of a terrace in the Pennines. It was positioned in a narrow side street which rose from the main road leading down to the centre of the village. On my first visit I had pictured mill workers wearily trudging home to pots of steaming broth and pale mucky faces at the table. Taken with this image, I told the letting agent I intended to move in the following month. But now I was here, there was something claustrophobic about being crammed in on top of each other, rising up the hill in a stack of stone and slate.

  A skinny white cat darted across the street, ears flat against the shower that was fast becoming a downpour. I watched it climb the steps to the front door of the house opposite, and it mewed to be let in, its call a strange harsh sound. Within seconds the door opened a fraction, and a long, slender arm extended downwards in welcome. The cat shot past, and the door closed.

  I had seen her around the past few days. Moving tends to mean you spend a lot of time out on the street . . . to and fro, to and fro. She’d nodded at me one morning as I was tackling my book collection. No words were exchanged, and I could see from her frame that she wouldn’t be much use to me anyway. So I nodded back and carried on with my labours, trying to look manly as I lifted a box and carried it inside, imagining my shoulders to be broader than they actually were.

  The following day we met, by chance, in the local shop, a faded general store with a freezer full of ready meals, a poor selection of wine, and postcards at the till.

  ‘You’ve just moved in, haven’t you?’ she said.

  Ten out of ten for observation, I thought.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Is there a pet shop around here?’

  ‘Oh! What have you got? A cat? I’ve got a cat. He’s called Freud.’

  ‘Ah, a cat with depth,’ I said, starting to flirt though in truth I thought it a ridiculous name. She laughed.

  ‘Yes, he’s quite something . . . So? What is it? A cat or a dog?’

  ‘Fish, actually. Siamese fighting fish.’

  ‘Oh, ok . . .’ She seemed intrigued. It was a great chat-up line, with the right girl. ‘I haven’t seen you move a tank in.’

  ‘No, the tank went in before I did and the water has been settling. The fish are gradually going in, from smaller containers. They fight, you see, especially when they’re stressed. You can’t keep males together, so mine are all female.’

  I was very worried about my fish. It had taken years to build the current community. I worried about water temperature, fin rot and aggression. In nineteenth-century Malaysia people bet their homes on the outcome of sparring matches that could go on for hours. The King of Siam was a great collector and sanctioned the fights as something of a national sport. I kept all this to myself.

  ‘No males . . . interesting,’ she said. ‘Your very own underwater harem. Well I don’t think they do fish food in here and the nearest pet shop is about fifteen miles away . . . Maybe they’ll eat each other, if they get hungry. Anyway, see you around.’ She paid for her milk and left. I found her a bit strange, but that didn’t stop me wanting to fuck her.

  She lived at No.9 and as the rain intensified I looked at the ferns in her front garden. They were clumped along the steps to the front door, and had taken on a prehistoric sheen in the streetlight. I rolled a pencil up and down an A4 pad of paper. I was trying to write. It wasn’t happening, and I wondered why I had positioned my desk by the window. A movement in the bedroom opposite mine caught my eye. I remembered why. She came to the window and closed the curtains. She must have seen me but she didn’t give any indication that she had. I felt inches from her. The curtains were ivory and almost completely transparent. I didn’t know why she bothered. She stretched and yawned, then lay on the bed on her stomach, her bare feet playing with each other as she leafed through a magazine. Her hair fell over her shoulders, meaning I couldn’t see her cleavage like I had done the night before, when her hair had been tied back.

  She read for a while and then slipped the magazine to the floor and rolled over onto her back, rubbing her neck which must have stiffened with the awkward posture. I imagined my hands on her skin. I rearranged my legs beneath the desk. She was wearing a vest top and no bra beneath it. Her hand traced over her stomach as she lay, staring at the ceiling. What was she thinking about? After a while she sat up and, with her back to me, slid the top over her head, revealing the long, elegant sweep of her spine. Her hair tumbled out of the vest and cascaded down her back, feathery like the fronds of freshwater plants. Heteranthera zosterifolia. Star grass.

  ‘Turn round . . . turn round,’ I thought, unable to look away, unable to move. She stayed cross-legged on the bed with her back to me, dressed in only a low-slung pair of faded joggers. She was the kind of woman who looked extremely sexy in beaten-up leisurewear.

  ‘Infinitely fuckable,’ I thought, my palm moving along the ridge in my jeans, my fingers hovering at the zip.

  She turned round after a few moments and sat facing me. My hand fell still. Between her breasts was a rude and clamorous scar. It ran in a straight line from her sternum to below her navel. I felt insulted by its presence, outraged that it should have marred such perfection. Its red, welt-like prominence was clear enough to make out behind the thin veil of the curtains, which also failed to shield her eyes. She was staring across at me, watching for my reaction. I stayed at my desk, and stared back at her. My hand, concealed from her view, was still at the top of my flies. She brought her hand to between her breasts and rested her fingers at the top of her scar.

  I felt uneasy, but I was transfixed. I ran my fingers down the length of my zip. She ran her fingers down the length of her scar. I traced a finger back up my zip. She traced a finger back up from her navel to between her breasts. My fingers tweaked the zip fastening. She pinched the top of her scar. I started to undo my zip. She started unzipping her skin. My hand stopped, hers continued. As she moved her fingers down the red trail on her abdomen, light spilled out until, on reaching the end of the scar it was as if a door had been opened, just slightly, leaking light from within. As her scar opened wider it became a shaft that bisected her bedroom window and shot out into the darkness of the street, catching the raindrops in its path.

  Freud jumped on the windowsill. He sauntered through the beam, tail aloft, and sat at the other side, facing it. He stared intently into the swirl of light. Freud’s owner stared at me. I stared back at her, then at what was coming from her abdomen. Brightly coloured fish started to appear in the light, swimming in air as the rain fell, the frill of their fins fanning out in an invisible current. Freud raised his paw and batted them this way and that. They moved as one, flashing their iridescence in the steady stream, shining blue and green, orange and red. B. splendens. The Jewel of the Orient. Siamese fighting fish . . . my Siamese fighting fish. I looked over at the tank in my bedroom. It was empty and the light was out. When I looked back across the street, Freud had gone and the room was in darkness. His owner was nowhere to be seen. I looked down at the tarmac of the pavement in front of her house. The only light now came from the streetlamp, and I could just make out flickers of movement in the eddies and rivulets as my beautiful jewels rolled and gasped in the gutter.

  What’s Going On Outside?

  Stuart Evers

  Karel sat at the card table peeling his third orange. His hands were large and powerful, his fingers nimble and dextrous. By the time he’d finished, the flesh of the orange was clean, pithless and perfectly round. For a short time he admired his handiwork, then split the orange into segments.
He ate them with a speed that suggested he feared one might be stolen. When done, he sucked the juice from the fingers of his left hand and with his right removed another orange from the plastic sack at his feet.

  ‘For the love of God, Karel,’ Eugene said. ‘How many oranges can one man eat?’

  Karel looked up from his fourth orange, his nail already under the peel. The older man – canted, pocked face, grey eyed – was stretched out on the right-hand bed, a newspaper just below his eyes.

  ‘Would you like one?’ Karel said. ‘I have plenty.’

  ‘Speak Russian, Karel!’ Eugene said. ‘It’s almost midnight. It’s much too late in the day for English.’

  ‘Would you like one?’ Karel said in Russian. ‘I have plenty.’

  ‘You know I can’t abide oranges,’ Eugene said. ‘You know I can’t even stand the way you peel your oranges. So just be quiet, okay? Be quiet and eat your fucking oranges.’

  The answer was nine: one man – or at least the one who was Karel – could eat nine oranges in one sitting. The last two are not pleasant: too sweet by that point, too sticky on the fingers, no matter how many times you wash them. And their room was the furthest away from both bathroom and kitchen. Those last two oranges are something like an ordeal; but Karel always likes to push things. That’s what his father used to say. What Eugene says, too.

  ‘Does it not give you a stomach ache?’ Eugene asked, setting aside his newspaper and tapping a cigarette against the wall.

  ‘They’re on special offer downstairs,’ he said. ‘A whole bag for a pound. And they’re good oranges, too. Try a piece.’

  Karel held out a segment of orange, Eugene pointed to his lit cigarette.

  ‘They’re good for you,’ Karel said. ‘Vitamins and things. You should eat fruit. It’s good for you.’

  ‘Nothing is good for you,’ Eugene said. ‘Everything’s going to kill you one day. Don’t you read the papers? Don’t you watch TV?’

  ‘No one’s died from eating oranges.’

  ‘Perhaps no one’s eaten as many as you have. Maybe you’ll be the first man to die of oranges. The first man to eat his body weight in oranges and then drop dead.’

  Karel laughed and his shoulders went down and up like he was working the jackhammer. He stopped and went back to his orange.

  ‘Your father would never have eaten fruit the way you do.’

  Karel looked up from peeling. He smiled.

  ‘He’d have eaten the peel as well,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t you be disrespectful,’ Eugene said.

  He shook his head and picked up his newspaper. Karel watched him move from the bed to the window. It was a broken sash, three floors up. They had the best room because Eugene had been there longest and got to choose his roommate and where he slept. When he’d first arrived, he’d shared a bedroom with five other men, sleeping in shifts, the smells and noises like something from a farmyard. Now there was a wardrobe and a dresser, a card table and just two single beds, a window out of which to look. Eugene opened the sash and hung out, smoking his cigarette. He could smell the exhaust fumes from buses, sweet pastry being baked. Most of all he could smell Karel’s oranges.

  ‘What’s going on outside?’ Karel asked.

  Their room was above a greengrocer with a view down onto the main road. The shops were Turkish, Kurdish, Greek; open all hours. There was always something to see, either down at street level or in the flats and bedsits opposite their window. In the smaller window at one o’clock to them, a man was jigging a small child up and down. He wasn’t wearing anything on his top half and was animatedly, though to Eugene mutely, singing as he bounced the child around.

  ‘There are a few lights on. The man with the baby’s there.’

  ‘The wife?’

  ‘No. No ladies tonight.’

  ‘There never are any ladies, are there?’

  ‘No. They’re all such teases, aren’t they?’ Eugene said.

  Karel sat at the card table peeling his fifth orange. His hands were large and powerful, his fingers nimble and dextrous. By the time he’d finished, the flesh of the orange was clean, pithless and perfectly round. For a short time he admired his handiwork, then split the orange into segments. He ate them distractedly. When done, he sucked the juice from the fingers of his left hand and with his right removed another orange from the plastic sack at his feet.

  ‘I’m not sure I can take another night of this,’ Eugene said.

  ‘You say that every night,’ Karel said. ‘Every night the same.’

  ‘Is it any wonder?’ And talk Russian, you sound like a dope in English.’

  Eugene tapped a cigarette against the wall as Karel chewed on the first segment of his sixth orange. Karel said nothing. He said nothing again. And for the third time.

  ‘So out with it,’ Eugene said. ‘You look like a fish. A big stupid fish.’

  ‘There is nothing to say,’ Karel said. ‘Nothing important at least.’

  Karel started on the seventh orange. The peel did not come away in a perfect roll. The peel looked ragged, like a label picked from a beer bottle.

  ‘How long have we lived together? How long have we known each other? You are my son. My blood is not your blood, but you are my son, as close as is possible. Like Joseph to Jesus. I know, Karel. I know that something is on your mind. Your father looked the same way when things were on his mind.’

  Karel put down the half-peeled orange and stood. Triangular torso and bullet-headed, smooth pink skin. The woman he did odd jobs for called him The Tank. She liked to watch his forearms as he moved gravel from one part of the garden to another, drinking tea with her friends as he worked. She was a good woman. She reminded Karel of his mother.

  ‘It’s nothing, Gen. Nothing really.’

  ‘Say nothing then. Say nothing for the rest of the night. Let’s sit ourselves in silence! You can look like a dopey fish all evening.’

  There was half of the orange left. It sat on the plate by its ragged skin. He looked up at Eugene and then back down at the orange. Were he to say something the conversation would last the night. The thought tired him enough to leave the last of the orange.

  Eugene opened the sash and hung out, smoking his cigarette. There were two men arguing outside the greengrocers. One was carrying a large leather bible. A bus rattled past, a van with a defective exhaust.

  ‘What’s going on outside?’ Karel asked.

  ‘Two men are arguing,’ Eugene said. ‘I don’t know the language, but it’s an argument.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘There are a few lights on. The man with the baby’s there. His wife too. They’re all singing. She has a top on, but he doesn’t.’

  ‘How do they look?’ Karel said.

  ‘They look tired,’ he said.

  Karel sat at the card table peeling his tenth orange. His hands were large and powerful, his fingers nimble and dextrous despite their stickiness. By the time he’d finished, the flesh of the orange was almost pithless. He split the orange into segments and ate them with a speed that suggested he feared one might be stolen. When done, he sucked the juice from the fingers of his left hand and with his right removed another orange from the plastic sack at his feet.

  ‘And you’re just going to sit there, are you?’ Eugene said. ‘Eating your oranges? Eating one after another?’

  The tenth one tasted of nothing; the eleventh one the same. Karel was not even bothered by the stickiness of his fingers. There had been twenty oranges in the plastic sack and he felt he could eat them all.

  ‘What’s wrong with eating oranges?’ Karel said.

  ‘It’s the way you eat them,’ Eugene said. ‘Your father would be ashamed at the way you eat them, the way you peel them, with your long nail.’

  ‘Nina likes the way I eat oranges,’ Karel said. ‘She says it’s like art.’
He picked up the perfect coil of peel to show Eugene.

  ‘Does she know how many you can eat though? Does she have any idea of the smell? And speak Russian for the grace of God!’

  ‘She’s normal. She likes the smell of oranges,’ Karel said in Russian.

  ‘She says that now, but believe me she’ll soon—’

  ‘Can you just be quiet and let me eat my oranges?’ Karel said and looked the other way. Half of the orange remained. He could not even think about eating it. It would dry up there, pucker in the summer evening’s breeze.

  Eugene tapped a cigarette against the wall, went to the window and opened the sash.

  ‘Are you seeing her tonight?’

  ‘We’re meeting at ten.’

  ‘You’re going out that late at night? You need to be up in the morning. We have a job.’

  ‘I’ll be awake.’

  ‘No good will come of this. Let me tell you that.’

  Eugene lit his cigarette and looked out of the window, down onto the street. All the men and women, all the boys and girls. He wondered what Karel’s mother would make of it all. What a woman, what Nastia, would make of this house of men. The smells and manners, the grubby nests of sheets. Nastia who called, whose face appeared at the computer screen when he was out. Eugene was always out when Nastia and Karel talked. He did not want to see her, hear her. The way she spoke, the way the words sounded from her mouth. Not like that, anyway.

  ‘What’s going on outside?’ Karel asked.

  ‘There are a few lights on. The man with the baby’s there. Jigging him up and down.’

  ‘He’s too rough with that boy,’ Karel said. ‘Every night too rough.’

  ‘The child’s got wind. Even I can see that.’