Meanwhile the castle has grown and grown. She doesn’t have to worry about money, with her salary, Jan’s life insurance, and a mortgage paid off steadily in the thirty years since they bought the flat from the council in 1983. She’s been spending it on turrets, and gilt chandeliers and tableware, and her own personalised crest of arms. Her castle has a drawbridge with a moat, and she doesn’t often let the drawbridge down. She likes knowing it’s there, glistening inside pixels, almost blending into the castle’s strong walls. The castle has a turret at each corner, with walkways running between them. The walkways are protected by walls with arrow-holes cut in them, so that her archers can crouch down and shoot at any invaders from a safe height.
Mrs Świętokrzyskie wanders around the central, tallest tower, her armour flashing, her flaxen hair static in the breezeless computer air. She can see for miles, over the market, the village, and the two neighbouring castles (one of them Bernard’s), and out into the deep green forest, a mass of barely defined colour which, if she scrolls sideways, fills the whole screen with a luminous dark green.
She leaves that screen on, dreaming in the background, when she gets up to make herself a cup of tea or an omelette, or to organise her small piles of laundry. It makes a nice addition to her living-room, with its heavy furniture and dusty TV; the pictures of flowers done by a real artist, a volunteer at the hospital; the pile of letters asking her to Save the Children or buy a LOVEfilm subscription, and the one giving the details of the appointment which she has to go to today. Because now, she has a second secret.
Only Dr Patel knows this secret.
Dr Patel works in the same hospital as Mrs Świętokrzyskie, but in a little white room very different to Mrs Świętokrzyskie’s geriatric wards which are enormous, lines of old people stretching almost into space so that she can’t see to the far end of one when she’s standing at the door. Dr Patel stumbles over her name, nothing like the clear international sound of her own. Mrs Świętokrzyskie thinks that glossy black hair must look beautiful when it’s let down.
The doctor bites her lip like a child. ‘Mrs Svetoskushky, I’m afraid your tests didn’t return very p-positive results. Unfortunately, I have to tell you that a defective valve was found in a coronary artery located by the right aorta.’
Mrs Świętokrzyskie looks at her.
‘In your heart. Located adjacent to the organ – that is, very close. Now, this is a difficult situation to manage. We’ll do, I’ll do, our very best.’
Mrs Świętokrzyskie’s face is still. She’s thinking to herself that a Revivor potion could take care of that, or at the most, a hundred dolllars forked over to see the Wise Woman.
‘A transplant?’ she says out loud.
The young doctor flushes. Mrs Świętokrzyskie hadn’t known Indians could go that colour. ‘Yes, that would be ideal, Mrs Svetusky, but unfortunately – the waiting list is quite long. And, ahem, unfortunately preference is given to younger patients. Also, well, to non-smokers.’
Mrs Świętokrzyskie fondles the thin cigarette packet and cartoon-coloured lighter in her skirt pocket. She’s more scared that she’d thought she would be. ‘I stopped to smoke in 1991,’ she tells Dr Patel, ‘but – unfortunately I started again. In the year 2000.’
She imagines the golden leopards back home, prowling around the castle, shining, waiting for her.
At W.H. Smith she buys a will form wrapped in cellophane. After some hesitation she leaves the flat to Gabriela. Josef is the child she loves the most, he’s the one she thinks about, but Gabriela sounds so ragged down the phone, and that bony flat in Glasgow hasn’t got room to swing a cat.
‘I leave in my Last Will and Testament my Flat to my Daughter Gabriela and her Children.
‘To Josef my Son I leave my Bank Account and the Contents when I am decease. Also any Contents of the House that he want if Gabriela is agreeable.’
That’s the right way to put it. She suspects Josef will take the TV and computer, and maybe her mobile phone, but specifying those sounds sad. She doesn’t want to quibble over possessions with her children from beyond the grave. She looks at her form, then adds another gift: a secret one written in smaller, scratchier handwriting.
Next to her bed, the big musty marital bed, there’s a bedside table. On the bedside table are her glasses, a sprig of lavender and a mug of water for the night. There’s a little drawer in the underside, where she puts her will together with a sealed white envelope marked with Bernard’s full name, address and the words STRICLY PRIVET AND CONFIDENTA. Inside the envelope there’s a little piece of paper with Mrs Świętokrzyskie’s MagiKingdom username and password written on it carefully, in blue ink.
Another night she sits again in her big green armchair, battling with someone called Lady Pomona, a blonde with a tall red pointed hat and feathery wings, far below her own skill level. Bernard isn’t online tonight.
She moves her hand to the mouse to double-click on the weak point in Lady Pomona’s armour, the spot where her right wing joins her body – and she’s stopped by the sight of her own physical wrist, which seems to be glowing. She sees her own hands every day, but now the joint glows whiter and whiter as she looks at it. Her skeleton pushing to be let out of her body.
She stares and stares at her wrist, ignoring the computer’s faint hisses of defeat. Up in Yorkshire, Bernard’s hand switches on his monitor. His feet twitch in comfy slippers. In ten years he’ll be as old as Mrs Świętokrzyskie, the folds of silk lying beneath his skin will rise to the surface.
The white light of Mrs Świętokrzyskie’s wrist reaches the white light coming from the computer screen and unites with it. Her hair fizzes and the veins in her hands crackle. The blood bunches up at a critical, delicate point and something in her brain goes phut, as the hand drops to a stop on the fluttering keyboard and lies still. Too slowly to see, her flesh begins losing its pinkness. Underneath, the ridges of her bones are still irradiated with life.
It wasn’t the heart valve in the end, not that faulty right aorta, which let her down. It was a brain aneurysm, the type that no-one can predict or prevent. It could have struck her twenty years ago, or passed her by completely and gone on to her new next-door-neighbour, the Ethiopian woman whose kids leave their toy cars out in the hall.
The unexpected aneurysm makes the will in the bedside drawer look very odd, for a few days. Josef mutters darkly about it until his sister finds Dr Patel’s name on her mother’s kitchen calendar, and calls in, and finds out how short Mrs Świętokrzyskie’s life expectancy was, anyway.
If you touched the small window in the alley now, and peered into Mrs Świętokrzyskie’s flat, it would look quite different. The magazines are gone and the pink lamp is inside a cardboard box. The computer monitor sits in Mrs Świętokrzyskie’s armchair, cables tangled around it like a rose thicket.
A tall dark man and a blonde, pregnant woman are moving around. Obviously they don’t live here. Their body language shows they’re annoyed by the clutter, the flowered wallpaper, even small things like the hard-boiled eggs in the fridge or the meter on the boiler.
Josef picks up a letter; he is a handsome man but failing a little around the chin, whose rough bristle doesn’t quite disguise his face’s downwards slope. ‘This is mine, anyway. She left me the bank account. Didn’t she always say she was saving for a rainy day?’
‘Josef, don’t open her post,’ Gabriela says. She’s justified, because opening the letter does him no good.
‘Forty five fucking pounds and fifty pence?’
‘No, it can’t be – Mum had a load saved up. She had what Dad left, for a start.’ Then Gabriela looks more carefully at the bank statement. She heaves a cardboard box of Mrs Świętokrzyskie’s possessions up onto her hip like a child. ‘Chriiiiiist . . .’
Josef addresses the paper at arm’s length. ‘What the fuck . . . ? The last thing on here is sixty quid to something called “Mag
iKingdom” . . .’ He scowls at Gabriela. ‘Did she buy Maggie a load of toys or something?’
‘No, she didn’t . . . Look, Joe, here they are again. Oh look, and there. God, two hundred quid that time . . . And there’s a subscription fee here too.’
‘“Oh look”? That’s all you can say? Who’s Mum been giving all her money to?!’
‘Alright. Alright. We can look into this. Hey, we can Google it. Maybe it’s some medical thing, something to do with her illness, you never know.’
Gabriela plugs the monitor back in, but when she presses the round button to power it up, a window flashes up that hasn’t been closed since Mrs Świętokrzyskie’s death. Her mother confronts her in a metal bra. The avatar doesn’t have a human face: instead a peacock’s beak tilts towards the screen. Artificial green eyes shine.
‘WELCOME ZELDA,’ says the screen. ‘SELECT TO CONTINUE PLAY.’
That screen stays up for quite a long time. Gabriela’s instinct, and then Josef’s, is to log in. But the log-in requires a password, and they have no idea. They didn’t know that their sixty-three-year-old mother lived in a world with passwords. What on earth might she have chosen?
The security question is ‘Where did you meet your partner?’ Not ‘What is your job?’ or ‘Which of your daughters is dead?’ They can’t answer it – after trying POLAND, and then, as a possibility, WORK, they give up.
‘I’m finding out what this shit is, anyway.’
With blunt fingers Josef types a new username for himself. His sister stands behind him, head tilted to one side, her hand on her hip, as he starts to explore the MagiKingdom.
Gabriela breathes down the phone. ‘God, Joe . . . It’s serious money.’
On her marble-textured kitchen counter is a tabloid announcing a new MagiKingdom record. Apparently a lot of people know about MagiKingdom, though it’s never registered in Gabriela’s life before. One item, a red jewelled sword called The Terminator, has just sold for twenty thousand dollars at an online auction.
Twenty thousand dollars. Does their dead mother have one of those tucked behind her sharp-beaked avatar, behind the mysteries she’s left as hurdles?
Even if she doesn’t, Josef’s already established that a MagiKingdom user can put a big chunk into buying armour, potions, fortifications for their castle – and none of them last for long without needing renewing.
‘Why did she just flush it all away?’ he moans.
‘She always felt pretty secure, I guess. Dad’s pension was for her life – and she had the flat.’
‘What are you trying to say?’
‘What? She left me the flat, she left you the bank account.’
‘But there’s nothing fucking in the bank account!’
‘Well . . .’
‘Don’t say that like that, Ela. There must be a mistake. Either that, or it had already got to her brain.’
‘Just ’cause you were her favourite, doesn’t mean she was blind. She knew if you had the house or any decent sum, you’d rip through it in a year—’
Josef hangs up.
He pays a hundred pounds to ask a solicitor if the will is valid, after all.
Mr Moncrieffe says that DIY will forms are carefully designed to be legally binding. ‘What they want to do is, they want to make the procedure accessible,’ he says. He does note, when Josef is almost out of the door, that the will contains one unexplained legacy that Josef seems to have overlooked. The envelope, a sealed envelope which is mentioned, and the instructions to send it on to an address in Huddersfield . . . ?
Josef tells him he’s already sent the letter on, when they’d first read the will, he’d thought nothing of it. ‘I thought it was personal stuff – you know, sentimental stuff. Maybe she had family there, or old friends . . .’
Mr Moncrieffe smiles and begins to speculate inside his head.
Josef leans against Mrs Świętokrzyskie’s hall table and pulls her shining white landline so close into his face that the flesh around his mouth begins to swallow the sound. He calls Directory Enquiries, then the Huddersfield phone number they give him. Bernard Davies. Such an English name.
‘So Klara was your mam. Yes, she left me the account. I s’pose Wladyslawa’s worth a bit, yes – there’s a good trade in MagiParts. And then there’s the knapsack . . .’
‘Excuse me. What the fuck did you just say?’
The funeral was only five years ago. That was when Josef dumped his girlfriend, left his flat and moved back in with his mother to the room they’d all shared when they were small, still filled with Ela’s university textbooks, Wladyslawa’s dolls and the secret condoms she’d left in the bottom drawer of the Ikea dressing table. None of it had been touched since Wladyslawa had stopped calling.
After almost a decade of worry and not-knowing, of seeing her face pinned up in every phone box, topping the naked models in every tabloid, behind every waving copy of the Big Issue, Josef knew where his sister was. She was in the ground. Gabriela left baby Tomasz – no Magda then – in Scotland for the funeral, and she and Josef led their mother away past the grave, past the haze of yellow chrysanthemums. They told her that none of it was her fault, and that they’d look after her forever.
Josef breaks up with the current girlfriend, so he can concentrate. He pays another two hundred pounds to Mr Moncrieffe to find out if leaving someone passwords, leaving them passwords which contain all your wealth and lock it forever away from your children, is really properly legal.
But Bernard has a whole host of emails with kisses at the ends, indicating that Mrs Świętokrzyskie was of sound mind when she left him what amounts to all her money, that he knew her, that this isn’t the kind of fraud that’s illegal. Josef imagines Huddersfield as a dark cave, black and damp and burrowed deep into the earth; Bernard as an elderly dragon guarding his mother’s treasures which he has no right to. He telephones Bernard until the Huddersfield police get in touch with the Rotherhithe station, who threaten him with a restraining order.
Bernard Davies sits down heavily in his ergonomic chair. He can feel himself getting older now every time he sits down, and it’s worse in this dark basement. But this is where he set up the computer, years ago before Carol left, and moving it has always seemed like too much work.
He feels bad for the boy, the man, who keeps calling. He shouldn’t have dropped his sister into the conversation like that. He supposes he’d known that Wladyslawa was the name of Klara’s dead child, but they’d both used it so frequently to refer to the castle that he’d stopped really thinking about it. Himself, he’d named his castle ‘Ambrosia’, a nice fancy-sounding name that reminded him of the tinned custard Carol used to serve with ginger cake. These foreign names just sound grander.
He’s told Josef, ‘Your mother was a very special lady.’ Tried to make him see reason. But the man began yelling and cursing, using bad language, and Bernard replaced the phone neatly on the receiver.
Now he hesitates before launching MagiKingdom, using Klara’s account. In Wladyslawa he walks about the battlements just like Klara used to. The wind ruffles his golden hair and the white mink around his collar. Below, in the green forest, the army of leopards turn and snarl. In the distance he sees Ambrosia, the castle belonging to his other self.
He leans forward and looks right into the screen. The avatar which used to be Klara leans forward too, a mirror image. He scrolls to bring it close up: a young woman’s eyes and forehead – the eyes wide, long-lashed, green, the forehead creamy-white – but underneath, the savage steel beak. The combination is what first drew Bernard to her. Not just a young lass, perhaps one who’d be after calling the police if he spoke to her, or her mam would. A peacock. A peacock in mink furs. A peacock in mink furs and a metal breastplate, with beautiful eyes.
The avatar walks forward into the castle, passing down the great hall, ignoring the servants who duck out of her way. So
mewhere inside the graphics, the screen glare reflects a thin version of Bernard’s true face, his shaggy beard and unlovable lips. Somewhere inside Wladyslawa, safe as a womb, is Mrs Świętokrzyskie.
Neil Campbell
A Leg to Stand On
They wandered over from the university. It was one of those pubs that had been a coach house. It was more a bar than a pub though. A slim radiator ran up the wall between the front windows and there were German wheat beers like Krombacher and Paulaner. As usual at that time on a Wednesday afternoon the French barmaid Severine was working. Her blue bicycle was locked to the lamppost outside. Once, she had put on Facebook, ‘Hard man needed for my bottom please.’ Pale light shone across the wooden tables and floors. Outside, tall trees swayed in the wind and leaves collected on the grass beside the halls of residence. Jack got the beers in: a pint of Hell for himself and a pint of Gold for Neal. They sat at their usual table near the door. It was a big table with six chairs around it, room enough for people to join them as the light faded.
Jack sat at the head of the table holding court. He was a big fella’ with a goatee beard and leaned on a cane like Orson Welles. He wore a flat cap and when he’d had too much he began swinging the cane around like a bat.
‘It was before they trained at Platt Lane. They had this place in Cheadle,’ he said.
‘So you were actually on the youth team.’
‘Oh yeah. Midfielder. Colin Bell was my hero.’
‘I asked my dad about Colin Bell. And I said to him that Agüero and Silva must be better than Colin Bell was. And my dad shook his head and said that they had to play a few hundred more games for the club yet.’
Best British Short Stories 2016 Page 8