Best British Short Stories 2016

by Nicholas Royle

  The chef is slumped over a stained steel surface, tired, a good wine at his head. He looks up and smiles at her. It is the best part of his day. The love of the restaurant around him, and now, this sweet woman. She leans on the work surface and faces him, smiling back.

  He remembers her complaining, wailing friends. One tried to get the restaurant shut down. Another threatened arson. Her brother, he was the worst. He came to his home, and begged.

  – If she does this, my friend, she will give up everything. Home. Job. The chance of children. And worst of all, she will be second best. You make her second best.

  – I know, he said. But she is stubborn.

  He has learned to live with guilt. Some days, he thinks it is harder for him. So many of the staff become angry, especially the women. To love them both is tiring. But he has come to respect the woman’s choice.

  He groans, content, as she steps behind him, puts her arms around him, nestles into the sensitive skin at his neck.

  – Hello, my love, she says. He reaches behind him, hooks his hands at the small of her back. They look up, towards the ceiling, as if making architectural decisions.

  – Has anything changed? she asks, like she has every night, for years.

  They listen to the restaurant, creaking and warm.

  – No, he sighs.

  – Ah then, she says. Perhaps, tomorrow.

  They kiss.

  It is the same as it always is, except it seems to them both that the kiss deepens and ripens, year on year. First he kisses her eyelids, brushing his lips over lashes and the small wrinkles beginning to sprout nearby. He swallows her breath, and she his. They lick each other, something like small animals at the mother, nipping, careful, so they do not hurt, or encourage fire. They are slow and careful and respectful, listening to the room around them. He can taste her smile on his lips. She can feel the change in his body, the way his skin thickens when she touches him, the shrug of his shoulders as he controls himself, again. She thinks that if there is one single night when his wanting is gone, she will leave this place; if there is one night where his shoulders flatten and the kiss is the kiss of a brother.

  He makes a small, grunting noise against her lips.

  – Ah.

  So quiet.

  She can feel the kick of his penis against his belly, and the love in his fingertips, as he pulls his face away and kisses her fingers.

  She is happy.

  Few, she finds, understand.

  The woman who lives in the restaurant stays there until her hair turns and her muscles soften. The chef dies at home, in his bed, thinking of her and of his restaurant. A week later, the maître d’ finds her still and cooling body, her head on the soft white cloth of the table, and thinks again, as he often has done, about slicing off her still-juicy lips and sautéing them in butter to make a pie. He tries to move her body, but finds that her atrophied feet are welded to the floor. He yanks and tugs, calls for help, and several men pull and push, saying well now, be careful, respect to the lady dead and all that, but there is no success. Eventually they stop when the restaurant begins to creak and to roll dangerously, like a ship listing on a bad sea.

  By the time the maître d’ returns with an undertaker and a pickaxe, the woman’s feet have become tile like the floor; her body is no longer flesh but velvet; and her eyes are glass beads. In fact, as the maître d’ looks on, he sees that the woman has become nothing more than an expensive dining chair, pulled up to the table, and perfect for it.

  – Love, grunts the maître d’. He is very old. He taps the restaurant walls and leaves them to it.

  Robert Sheppard

  Arrivals

  The babies are coming.

  We don’t know where they’re coming from. We don’t know how long they’ll stay.

  Worse, we don’t know how many there will be.

  Worse still, much worse, we don’t know what they want.

  To prepare ourselves we focus on the little things.

  What manner of baby should we expect? Will they be new-borns, prune-faced and spastic-limbed, crusted with blood like a tampon? Will they be premature, delivered by Caesarian from brain-dead mothers on ventilators, miniature sticky tree-frog arms, heads as tight as nuts?

  Or plump sitting-up Renaissance god-babies awaiting the Madonna’s supporting lap, prescient and knowing? Or will they be already toddlers, padding around on their Christmas dinner legs like the stars of nappy advertisements, cooing until they knock their recently sutured skulls against the sharp edges of our furniture?

  We are not prepared.

  Perhaps there will be twins. Or triplets, or more, the split-cell progeny of some fertility experiment who cannot be parted, screaming and teething in uncanny unison. It would wear my husband and me out, at our age. Imagine. One baby lies on its back, exploring itself, pissing an arc over its head. While another extrudes a turd like a saveloy just as you lay it on a clean nappy. Or yet another, gasping, beetroot with colic, fisting its sticky-eye and bellowing. At three o’clock of a chill winter’s night.

  Will they arrive out of a whirlwind, like the dark cloud of cupidons with sparrows’ wings grafted to their down that was reported to the Earl of Essex at the end of the sixteenth century, tearing around the Adur estuary between churches Saxon and Norman? A portent of the impending Nuptials of Queen Elizabeth, I believe.

  My husband says not to worry, everything will be taken care of. But it’s easy for a man. Never having to worry if he’s late. Never having to make sense of a Boots kit which won’t come out with it, yes or no. Not to mention stirrups and forceps – not that they’d be needed for these babies, of course.

  These babies are different, coming as they are, announced in the way they’ve been, all questions with no answers. Boy or girl is the least of it.

  Compressed babies. Boneless babies. Soldier babies. Metal babies. Hairy babies. Vegetable babies. Pre-recorded babies. Adult babies. Piano babies. Sun babies. Mountain babies. Feral babies. Choral babies. Burning babies. Rubber babies. Baby babies. Rhino babies. Pinhead babies. Pregnant babies. Dryad babies. Cyborg babies. Personality babies. Bush babies. Radio babies. Banshee babies. Babylonian babies. Weightless babies. Sublunary babies. Jazz babies. Intuitive babies. Blue babies. Metaphorical babies. Flatpack babies.

  Before any babies are permitted to appear, their emissaries arrive to check the ‘necessary arrangements’, they say. They show up in many guises, none of them encouraging. There are skeletons coughing in tattered jackets too large for them, rivened long grey faces better suited to the pall or hearse. Or porky matrons in tight starch uniforms, one degree too jolly, like embezzlers of a hospice. They attach themselves to selected families. Ours is a sponge-faced girl with uncoordinated eyes and little to say. She moves a selection of mouth-shapes to the sounds she makes – one of them is a laugh, I think.

  It’s impossible to imagine any of them caring for babies.

  The babies must look after them, says my husband, clapping his hands after I get her out the front door. He pulls open two beers at last. She’s promised to bring a baby tomorrow, I think.

  That night I dream of an old straw hat full of eggs, like lottery balls waiting to be picked. They jostle one another, trying to squeeze to the top. One which succeeds is about to hatch, its shell elbowed and tapped from within. But it’s time to wake up.

  My husband demands eggs for breakfast and I scramble three. I beat the mixture until it has the consistency of sick, the texture of play dough. I am careful to keep some milk to one side.

  We must wait in our front gardens to see who’ll receive the babies today, pram cowls open to the skies, the pink mouths of fledglings. We stand under the breathless blue sky without the whisper of a seed from the Downs stacked silently behind.

  Well before noon, it’s clear that the babies, like the gods and the devils before them, have deserted us. My
husband beside me is breathing faster and faster and I fear he’ll hyperventilate.

  Those of us who have dared to think of ourselves as parents in waiting can no longer control our trembling lips. We blubber on each other’s shoulders, bereft, it’s true, but still harbouring unfathomable depths of something we cannot give a name to.

  Mark Valentine

  Vain Shadows Flee

  In memoriam Joel Lane

  He was called Old Bide-y because he sang ‘Abide With Me’ all the time. Sang might be generous: slurred it, hummed it, mumbled it. Most of the words had been lost to him a long time ago, but he made up his own, which were not too far off the originals, and raised his voice on the lines that he thought he knew more surely. It was not just the first verse or two either, but all eight of them. Sometimes the effect of his impromptus was strangely effective: ‘The starkness weepens’ was one, and ‘Angels this day all around I see’ another. He probably did too.

  After he reached the last line, which he would sometimes render ‘In life, in death, O Lord, Abide-y me’, giving the finish a particularly personal gloss, there would be a short pause which anyone who could hear but not see him might suppose was for reflection. In fact, the pause was for some diligent swigging, though I concede he might have reflected as he swigged. Once the bottle had been lowered, he usually vented some wind and began to sing again. If you didn’t have to listen to it all the time, the hymn, and his version of it, could be quite affecting, on first encounter.

  Bide-y had a bald, scabbed head that sometimes had a sheen like a fallen halo, and a long beard, a pale brown tangle like a great hank of pipe tobacco. His nose resembled a purple toad and often dripped the equivalent of pondweed. His wandering of choice was along the canal, which he would sometimes follow out from the city into the country. It was much less peopled than the roads, and had places where, sometimes perilously, he could sit or lean: locks, bridges, gates, even a few rusting iron benches.

  From time to time, someone in the town would decide that something should be done about Old Bide-y. Usually they explained this was for his own good. It wasn’t that his cracked, blurred voice had been bellowing out at the shoppers and tourists more loudly than usual, nor that the keen smell under the dripping, lime-slimed canal bridge might perhaps be traced as much to his efflusions as to the damp. Certainly not, they would say: we all regard him with affection, but if he goes on like this much longer he is going to come to harm. But it would always take some time to decide what was to be done and, more especially, who was to do it. By then, Bide-y, who had ways of finding out what was going on, would have vanished for a while, out along the further reaches of the canal.

  There were others who just wanted to know Bide-y’s story. He must have a story, they would say. How did he get like that, what did he do before, and why does he sing the hymn? There were theories, of course. Obviously, it was supposed he was a defrocked vicar, or a choirmaster who had gone out of true (and out of tune). But others said he was an ex merchant seaman, maybe a radio operator, who’d been in a ship that sank (off the Spanish Sahara, in one picturesque version). He and his shipmates had sung the song as the boat went down, and only he had survived. I was fairly sure none of these tales came from him, because Bide-y never answered questions about his past. You could not tell from his silence whether he was trying and failing to remember, or taking refuge in a studied reticence. But he knew all right what they said about him, and would play up to the roles, quoting resonantly from the prayer book or rolling out what might be supposed to be nautical banter. Usually, however, he forgot these misleading impressions, and just sang. And swigged.

  Sometimes, of his own accord, though, he would volunteer fragments.

  ‘I have been to bury head, you know,’ I once heard him say. I thought about this a bit and decided he must mean he’d gone away to get some silence, to put his heads in his hands and let the world go by. So I responded cautiously along these lines. He stared at me, frowned, and repeated what he had said, adding, as I thought, ‘where the old light lived’. It took quite a lot more puzzled discussion, with Bide-y pulling his gingery beard in frustration, before I understood he was talking about the author of the hymn, Henry Lyte, who lived on a Devon seacliff, Berry Head. He’d been there, he said, years ago, to pay his homage.

  ‘And in his church,’ Bide-y added, ‘they said the light went out one last time, see? He had TB, did he. Had to go abroad for his health. At the last service that he took in his own church, he went round snuffing out the candles, one by one, and singing his song. The last of the Lyte, get it? Except they also say he still does it, some evenings. If you watch the church windows when dusk falls, you can still see the blessed candles going out.’

  He ruminated on this vision, then belched, and added, inconsequently: ‘I knew another hymn-making parson once, he played the euphonium. What was it he wrote?’

  But at this point, leaning back on his elbows on the canal bank, a bottle in his coat pocket had clanked against a stone, and he was reminded of more important matters.

  He was a bright man once, that was what all the stories about him suggested. Whatever his present state, his mind had been keen, and he knew surprising things. That much of the chatter might be true, although the idea that he was now somewhat dimmed was not one that he himself would accept. From what I gathered, Bide-y did not see his existence now, which mainly consisted of singing, drinking and sleeping, as in any sense a descent. And in his way he was a generous gentleman. He would always try to get passers-by to sing along with him and, on the rare occasions when a few, from sport or sympathy, would do so, he would murmur for them under his breath the next line, or his version of it, before they got to it. He would also offer anyone the glass mouth of the bottle never far from his own lips. And he would, under certain circumstances, listen to anyone else’s story, even if sometimes his concentration wandered and his head lolled.

  Bide-y made some use of the book service for the homeless, which came to the town in a van once a fortnight. I sometimes helped out, and that was how I first got to know him. After that, I would sometimes walk along the canal to look for him, listening for his singing, like a worn and scratched 78 rpm disc, of that mostly wistful melody, which rises, however, to a hesitant kind of affirmation. ‘Eventide’ it was called, he told me, and not the tune that the Reverend Mr Lyte himself gave it, which was less memorable.

  The truth is I was lonelier than Bide-y ever seemed to be, and I enjoyed his company, once I’d inured myself to the cidery fumes and the way the hymn would suddenly start up again in the middle of a conversation. The book he borrowed most from the van, a fat paperback whose brittle pages were always spilling loose from the spine-glue, was Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes. The cover depicted the famous crowned giant comprised of many human figures, like scales: an image of society, the body politic. Bide-y would sometimes stop singing enough to study this picture, and peer at the words inside: then the bottle was only subjected to thoughtful sips rather than the great tilting cascades he usually preferred. I asked him what he thought of the book. I had tried reading it myself once, as an earnest seventeen-year-old. I liked the quaint diction, but mostly I liked the idea of being seen to read what I then thought was an arcane obscurity. Bide-y was succinct. Fingering his beard, he said: ‘It’s a bloody big bugger.’

  Once I took to him a young man, Jake, with porthole spectacles and red slacks, who was doing a project called Voices for the Homeless or something like that. His idea was to record his subjects talking about themselves, so that they would be understood as individuals, and not just as problems, and so that maybe people would help more if they could relate to a real life and personality. He didn’t get very much from Bide-y about himself, as I’d warned him, but he did get a fine full-throated performance of the hymn, complete with many Bide-y-isms. I made sure I got a copy of it.

  The only change he got out of Bide-y was when he had the shrewd idea of throwing in a
few questions based on the song. ‘When other helpers fail, Bide-y, it says. Did anybody fail you?’ There was a silence, then Bide-y spat into the canal. ‘All of them, mate. Apart from this.’ And he tapped the bottle he gripped.

  ‘Aha, I see. Well, what about Come not in terrors,’ Jake pursued, ‘any terrors for you now?’ But Bide-y just went on repeating ‘All of them, mate,’ as if that answer would do just as well for the second question, so Jake then tried a quiet question that he made sound casual. ‘So when the darkness deepens, like in the song, where do you go, Bide-y?’ But at this Bide-y became dignified. ‘I have several nocturnal abodes, young man. I shall invite you to them when we are better acquainted.’

  In fact, we mostly knew where he went. In the warmer parts of the year, he stayed out, his vinegary skin inured to most bursts of rain or cool winds. There were a couple of tunnels, with crumbling white mortar and green streaks of moss, that he used as a shelter, and some derelict feed-sheds for the long-gone barge-horses, where he made a sort of pallet from the dank slats and some soiled sacking. But when the first frost came, he knew these wouldn’t do. So reluctantly he joined the queue at 6pm to get in the overnight hostel, which had twelve beds, and could take more in blankets on the floor if it had to. He sometimes emerged from this kitted out with improved clobber, but also just as often with bruises where a fellow inmate had objected to the constant singing of the hymn.

  After a while the hostel was closed down. The empty factory opposite had been converted into flats and loft apartments. The shelter’s customers had been used to sitting on its steps while they waited for the night hostel to open, and they just carried on when The Ironworks, as it was now called, acquired a new oak door and a secure entry system. No matter how often the concierge shooed them away, they always clustered back on the stone steps. Cogs whirred: funding began to falter, and when later that year the lease came up on the hostel’s building, it was not renewed. There was a larger, fresher place in the nearest city, twenty miles away, and for a while a mini-bus was organised to pick up the former guests and take them there each night, and back, if they wanted, in the morning. But gradually that petered out, with fewer taking the journey, until it was quietly stopped. Some stayed in the city, others drifted away. Bide-y was persuaded to go for a few weeks, but he didn’t like the city, and so, I suppose, he began risking more often the winter nights out, going further afield to find a berth somewhere.