Shortly after we entered Kings Lynn, Laura started telling me something I’d not heard before. ‘I remember being in the womb,’ she said. ‘I remember hearing my mother’s voice. A wonderful lady came and rearranged my cord. She told me to be still. After I was born she came quite often. She always shone like she was inside a diamond, and we conversed in a language lost to me now. She prophesied it was going to be a bumpy road for me with plenty to suffer. She said I must be strong and endure everything with integrity, and never lose hope that there would be an end to it.’ I hardly knew what to think of this. Was such a thing possible? Or was she, in fact, mad? We had seemed to be traveling faster, once we reached Norfolk, as if the air were cushioning our feet, speeding us on. Then, one morning in a café, as we warmed our hands on mugs of coffee, she said more. ‘I knew as soon as I was born that daylight has a false gleam about it. Don’t you see that, that you simply can’t trust anything in this world? I also knew I would never be the type to get past the post without a struggle.’
She paused to drink some coffee and unwrap a bar of chocolate, and I was mindful of how very strange conversations with Laura could be; how little, in fact, I contributed. I never had faith in anything supernatural, and can’t have been much real comfort to her. I know I’m not the comforting type, never was.
‘The Madonna told me I am the child of yellow laughter,’ she continued. ‘I’m still not sure what she meant, but it makes me think of banks of yellow cowslips or fields of crops under a summer sun and I draw strength from those images. Of course, from the very start she warned me that night would close about me. I would suffer for a length of time, and for years I would be grief-stricken. She urged me to hope and pray, and never give in to despair.’
She paused again, pulling from her rucksack the tangled ribbons with their writings. The script looked like Sanskrit.
‘What does it all mean?’ I said.
‘A priest did this to me.’ Her whispered words came like the edge of a razor. ‘I was totally mucked up by him, everything spoiled.’
‘But your mother, surely . . .’
‘My mother was absolutely in on it. And I had no father to put a stop to what this man was doing. Every week when he came to our house she more or less placed me in his hands, and I think she did it because he gave her money. He’s in prison now, some of his victims eventually went to the police, but nobody knew about me. And that’s what made me such a pushover for Ruthie to treat badly. She wasn’t the first, either.’
We reached Little Walsingham and the journey was over. Moon-stark fields fell away on all sides in a landscape hard and bare.
‘“Benedicite, what dreamed I this night?”’ she said, her voice distant. It sounded like a poem I didn’t know. ‘“Methought the world was turned upsodown . . .” I did have the strangest dreams last night,’ she went on. ‘It seemed like the wind was tearing some trees apart and there was screaming like banshees. People were terrified and hands clutched at me. I was confused and so frightened, but then a sweet voice began singing and it calmed me.’
In fact, I too had had a dream, one I decided to keep to myself. In it I saw a great number of swans flying high in formation against a dramatic vermillion sky, and I heard a voice whisper, ‘See, they measure the infinite mile to a joyous new dawn.’ Of course, I had no clue what it meant, and assumed it was all down to Laura’s talk of the day before. And, too, our wearying journey had placed under the microscope my feelings for her. She only loved women, so far as I knew; I’d only ever loved men. Yet I loved her like a sister at least. So what did I really want for her? What did I want for us? And something deeper, down where truth really hides, told me I wanted nothing for us. ‘Us’ was just a temporary illusion.
At the centre of town we found the Anglican shrine. Laura was silent now. She grasped my hand tightly, almost viciously, as we walked through the gardens to the church, and then, within that building, entered the little Nazareth house. A statue of the Virgin stood at the far end, swathed in embroidered silk that caught the candlelight in compressed reds, yellows and blues, rich as a medieval altar-cloth. Placed carefully at the sides of the terracotta-tiled floor were scarlet glass containers in which many candles flickered. They made the air hot and cloying. There were no seats.
Entering that silence was like walking into an altered gravitational field, such an unexpected silence you felt it could shatter a universe. Shocking new knowledge began rushing at me, so fast I couldn’t comprehend. I couldn’t, wouldn’t, take it in. Fought it, finally refused it. Laura’s hand released mine and fell away as she crumpled to lie on the floor, apparently out for the count. It seemed best then to leave her with whatever was happening to her. I was of no further use.
I went out, into the grim January day, into the garden. The gently curving herbaceous beds looked burnt out. The plants had mostly been cut back to brownish clumps and the soil was hard and wet with just a bit of colour where some evergreens stood against the Norfolk winter.
I couldn’t stop my mind’s racing. Image after image arose, all the stages of our journey, reviving how I had felt all along the way without realising. How finely ingrained and rich with nostalgia all the memories were.
A gardener stood by an incinerator, burning waste. He wore a red handkerchief to cover his mouth, his jeans were muddy and torn. He watched me as he dropped more twigs and rubbish into the flames, but made no effort to speak. A priest went briskly past and was gone again, and I waited silently in the gardener’s company.
It must have been at least half an hour later that Laura came from behind me. She was brisk, wide awake now. She pulled all the ribbons out of her rucksack and threw them in the incinerator, and the gardener laughed suddenly with her, as if they were sharing a private joke.
‘How are you now?’ I said.
‘She’s my real mother. She didn’t let me down. It feels absolutely wonderful.’ She turned to the gardener, extending her hand. ‘Hi. I’m Laura.’
‘I know,’ he said, shaking her hand.
They turned then, both of them, to look at me, and I heard a voice say, ‘Look up, look at the sky.’ The voice repeated the words, but I would not look. I would never look. I could only turn away, fully conscious of the misery I was choosing for myself. I had, in fact, already begun the long, long journey home.
Ian Parkinson
A Belgian Story
I met him in an empty bar on the Belgian coast in winter. He was sitting alone drinking green tea – an affectation I presume to be common amongst English writers. I ordered a beer and sat by a window to watch the rain and the darkening of the early evening. A woman with faded blonde hair was breastfeeding her infant child at a nearby table. I tried not to look, and noticed as I glanced across the room that the only other customer in the bar was staring at her. I looked at him, at his creased shirt and clean-shaven face, turning away when our eyes met.
Outside on the street, a solitary figure passed along the promenade in the fading light, leaning into the rain.
I looked at the grey line of the sea, at the flat grey expanse of the beach.
I hated Belgium more and more with the passing days. But then I hated everywhere, and one northern European seaside town was much like any other. The south, too, had its misery. Rome, Nice, Barcelona. I had wandered all of their streets alone, at night, and with nothing to do. Alone and waiting, my immigration papers lost within the machinations of yet another bureaucracy.
One day I will be happy, I told myself. But then one day I will be dead, too.
I finished my beer and ordered another, dwelling in the thought of death and an eternity of nothingness. It meant nothing to the patron to hear me ordering alcohol, to see me draining my glass, even if he had been able to discern a foreignness to my appearance. My bleak thoughts too would mean nothing to him. But despite myself, these things were still a forbidden insult to the shell of the religion remaining inside me, an
d still pierced the lead balloon of my pride. The woman feeding her child fastened her blouse and settled the bill as the patron ostentatiously dried the bottom of a fresh glass of beer and placed it on a paper disc on the grimy table in front of me. The man sipping at his green tea watched the woman leave, his eyes following her rear to the door and out on to the street.
I looked up at the clock on the wall. It was half past six and I had been out of bed for less than two hours. When I stood and passed by his table on my way to the toilets, the man with the green tea looked at me and nodded. For some reason he decided to follow me, standing at the pissoir to my left as I urinated. I immediately thought of the homosexual I had seen crucified in Raqqah, his twisted legs nailed at the feet, the dust coating his ribcage.
‘Do you speak English?’ the man asked.
I looked at the detritus floating in the trough of the pissoir. Belgian toilets are truly amongst the most disgusting in the world, perhaps second only to France.
‘Yes, a little,’ I replied after a moment’s hesitation.
‘Where are you from?’ the man asked.
‘What do you mean?’ I replied defensively.
I turned away to wash my hands at the sink, watching the man over my shoulder through the cracked glass of the mirror.
‘I mean, are you here on holiday?’
I laughed weakly.
‘Only a madman would come to Belgium on holiday in winter.’
‘Only a madman would come to Belgium on holiday in summer,’ the man countered.
I agreed and left to go back to my table. My suspicions hadn’t been justified: the man had been back and forth to the toilet all evening, perhaps as a result of the copious amounts of green tea he had consumed. It had been a coincidence that we had needed to urinate at the same time, and he had seen nothing indecorous about following me.
I sat down and looked out of the window at the streetlights of the promenade. The patron had turned on the television behind the bar, muting the volume as he flicked through the channels. I looked at the transparent reflection of the screen in the glass: an aircraft dropping bombs in a desert of grey dust, the photograph of a missing young woman, a weather report for the west coast.
The sea and the beach had disappeared into the blackness.
‘I could tell that you were a stranger here.’
I turned my head, startled by the sudden volume of the man’s voice in the silent little bar. He smiled and nodded his head. I wanted to ask him why it was that his shirt was so creased, and yet his face was clean-shaven and the skin a little pink as though he had not long since washed.
‘I’m not a stranger here,’ I said. ‘I’ve been here for a long time.’
The man looked sideways at the patron and took a sip of green tea. I turned back to the window and watched as his reflection approached me from behind.
‘You don’t mind if I sit with you, do you?’ he asked. ‘It’s just that I like to sit at this particular table so that I can look out of the window. I have to watch for Louise.’
I didn’t say anything. I thought of refusing his request, but the words didn’t come out of my mouth. Besides, he had already carried over his pot of tea.
‘Who’s Louise?’ I asked, somewhat reluctantly, by way of an attempt at politeness.
‘My girlfriend. She’ll be on her way to work.’
I took a drink of beer, imagining that the man’s girlfriend worked in one of the massage parlours hidden behind the promenade. And instantly, I regretted that thought. Raising my head to the black window, I tried not to picture the body of the adulteress, but I knew that it would come whether I liked it or not, the small mound of clothing and an upturned hand.
I had only seen her hand, her fat little fingers and the dirt beneath her fingernails. Would it surprise you to know that I had laughed along with everyone else?
‘Oh, I nearly forgot . . .’ The man stood up and went back to his table to fetch a package wrapped in paper.
‘What is it?’ I asked, surprised at myself for having asked such a direct question, a question at risk of inviting a certain reciprocity.
‘I bought a gun,’ the man said, lowering his voice. ‘For the rats.’
He nodded his head and glanced at the patron, who was still busy flicking through the channels on his muted television.
‘A pellet gun. For the rats in my apartment. I’ve tried everything. They say they’ve become immune to poison.’
‘So you intend on shooting them?’
‘They come out at the same time every night. They have habits, like human beings.’
‘I know. I used to shoot rats too. I was a security guard at a factory. When I was at university.’
‘Maybe you could help me? I’ve never used a gun before.’
‘If you’d like . . .’
‘Oh, wait, there’s Louise!’
A young woman waved at the window and the middle-aged man waved back as she passed.
‘So you know what you’re doing then? With a gun, I mean. You’re a good shot?’
‘Yes, I’m a good shot.’
‘Well, that’s settled then. You can help me, teach me to shoot.’
‘I’m not sure an apartment is the right place for target practice.’
‘Why not? That’s where the rats are.’
I smiled and finished my second beer.
‘I’ll get you a beer. In payment.’
‘If you want me to shoot your rats, we’d better go now.’
‘They don’t come out for another hour at least. My name’s Nicholas, by the way. Nicholas Boyle. I’m a writer.’
I shook his hand and thanked him for the beer carried over by the patron.
‘What do you write?’ I asked.
‘Novels, mainly. But I’m writing a travel guide to Belgium at the moment.’
‘Will it include anything on rats?’
‘Probably.’
The man took his mobile phone out of his pocket and raised it to his head.
‘Hello . . . ? No, I think you’ve got the wrong number.’
He hung up, narrowing his eyes and glancing furtively at me as he slid the phone back into his trouser pocket.
‘Listen, I have to go somewhere, but I won’t be long. Will you wait here for a few minutes? I’ll leave the gun with you.’
Before I had a chance to answer he’d left the bar, turning left and heading in the same direction as the woman who had waved at the window. I listened to the rain beating against the glass. The wind was picking up – howling through the wires strung along the coast.
Killing a few rats would give me something to do in the evenings. They say where there is one, there are a dozen.
The competition lasted until early February when the writer was forced to give up his apartment and return to England to attend to a personal affair. I was pleased to have something to occupy my mind throughout the bleak winter months. Not that I wouldn’t have found a certain solace in enduring those long evenings alone on the Belgian coast.
Nicholas kept score in a little notepad he would often produce from a pocket inside his worn blazer, and within a few days his aim was equal to my own, despite the months I had spent in a training camp.
‘It’s like the Graham Greene novel,’ he said, jotting down a kill before removing the animal’s body by the tail and throwing it from the bathroom window.
‘Do you know which I mean?’ he called, striding back into the living room and picking up the gun. ‘I think it was called The Heart of the Matter.’
‘No. I’ve never heard of it.’
‘You should read something by him. He’s good. But he can be a bit . . . religious.’
I stared at the floor, raising my eyes to the hole in the wall where sooner or later the next rat would appear. I had never talked to him about my past, or a
t least if I had, I had lied.
‘Anyway, I think it begins with two men staying at a hotel in the middle of nowhere, and since they have nothing to do they pass the time killing cockroaches. For drinks, I think.’
He took a shot at the empty hole and passed me the gun.
Our game had evolved a set of rules and a points system. Two points for a kill, one point for a squeal, half a point for a wounding. You were deducted half a point if you hit the wall, and one point if the lead pellet ricocheted around the room.
I pushed a slug into the barrel and cranked the spring.
‘Can you see anything?’ Nicholas asked.
‘No, I don’t think so.’
It would go on like that for hours until we were bored, each of us shooting into a black hole, until eventually the tip of a nose would appear.
We didn’t know where they were all coming from, so many of them that I had lost count, even if the writer took a certain pleasure in reminding me how close the competition was between us.
‘What should we give as a prize to the winner?’ Nicholas asked.
‘Will there ever be a winner?’ I said. ‘I thought you wanted to get rid of the rats?’
‘I did, but it’s looking more and more unlikely. There must be an infestation.’
‘Perhaps there’s a plague.’
‘Yes, just imagine it: the entire town closed off and we’re all left to go slowly insane, like in the Camus novel – but in Belgium, not Algeria.’
‘I haven’t read it,’ I said.
‘No, neither have I.’
I took aim and fired, catching at the plaster.
‘Ha ha!’ shouted Nicholas slapping his knees with both hands.
Best British Short Stories 2016 Page 5