Best British Short Stories 2016

by Nicholas Royle

  ‘You’re out of breath, little man,’ she said.

  Memet panted a little until he couldn’t hear himself any more, and he reached into his pocket.

  ‘My grandmother sent you this,’ he said, holding out the triumvirate of blue glass beads towards her. Elif took it from his open hand and examined the talisman in her palm.

  ‘Yes.’ She nodded to herself. She continued to stand in the doorway.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Memet asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ Elif said.

  ‘You can’t see anything from there,’ Memet advised her. ‘If you want to look out properly you have to look over the balcony.’ And he stood at the balcony wall and peered over. He was just about tall enough to do so now, and took great pride in it.

  ‘I can see our bins from here.’

  Elif laughed. ‘Nice view,’ she said.

  She stepped over to the wall and bent forward to lean her arms over it, shielding her protruding stomach. ‘Back home, none of our houses were this tall. But we could see all the way to the end of the world. Miles and miles of grass, and trees, and cotton.’

  ‘My dad says that where he grew up you could hear the sea all day, even when you were in school.’

  ‘He’s from an island,’ Elif said. ‘I’ve never seen the ocean.’

  Memet was incredulous. ‘But even I’ve seen it, and I’m only little. Haven’t you ever been to Southend?’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘It’s the seaside, everyone knows that.’

  ‘No. I haven’t been to Southend. Even when I came over here on the airplane I couldn’t see the ocean out of the window. Except once, when the cloud cleared, I saw some mountains.’

  ‘I’ve never seen a mountain,’ Memet said, impressed.

  ‘You could see mountains from my house,’ Elif said. ‘On the horizon, right at the edge of the world, I used to think.’

  Memet and Elif contemplated the sight of two kids who had come out of one of the opposite blocks and were now walking round a blackened car. It had been burnt out the night before. Memet had thought it looked pretty then, like bonfire night, but then some firemen came and put it out. The fire engine was quite exciting, but Memet had seen plenty of those already.

  ‘Elif, have you got a mummy and daddy?’

  Elif shook her head.

  ‘Do you wish Uncle Suleyman was still here?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘What about you? Do you miss your mummy?’

  Memet didn’t want to answer this, so instead he asked her something that had been bothering him for ages. ‘Why is your belly so big now? Have you eaten lots and lots of baklava?’

  ‘No,’ Elif laughed, but it sounded odd to Memet. Too loud, somehow, too short. ‘I’m going to have a baby.’

  ‘A baby? Why?’

  Elif didn’t say anything for a bit, and then she said, almost to herself, ‘It will keep me company, I suppose.’

  ‘Back home, the old women told me I would never have children,’ she added.

  ‘Were you naughty?’ Memet asked. ‘Is that why they wouldn’t allow you?’

  Elif looked down at him through narrowed eyes.

  ‘No, I wasn’t naughty.’

  ‘Then why wouldn’t they let you have children?’

  ‘It’s not like making someone stay in their room, or stopping them from having any sweets,’ she said. But then she continued, ‘You’re right though. They did think I was naughty.’

  ‘Why? What did you do?’

  ‘I didn’t do anything,’ Elif said, looking back at the burnt-out car. ‘But people in the village thought I was doing naughty things.’

  ‘Like playing in the road when you’re meant to be getting bread from the shops?’

  ‘No, like cursing chickens so they don’t lay eggs. Or looking at someone’s husband and then the next day he’s ill.’

  ‘How did you do that?’ Memet asked. This was even more impressive than the mountains.

  ‘I didn’t!’ Elif cried. ‘Or maybe I did, I don’t know. Maybe we all do things without knowing what we’re doing.’

  The two kids down below heard Elif’s cry, and looked up. They shouted rude words at her, and held up their fingers in an ‘up yours’ gesture.

  ‘Be careful,’ an adult admonished them from an unseen window. ‘She’s a witch, she’ll put a spell on you.’

  ‘She doesn’t scare me!’ declared one of the kids, but the other one looked away.

  ‘Come inside,’ Elif said to Memet. ‘I’ll make you some toast.’

  Inside was just as it always was, dark and dusty and overheated. This time Memet sat in the kitchen while Elif made some toast under the grill, and boiled water for tea. He dipped his toast into the milky tea Elif made for him and watched the crumbs swirl around on the beige surface.

  ‘Your tea will get cold,’ he said to her, imitating something his grandmother would say.

  Elif smiled and took a sip from her own cup.

  ‘Would you like to see some mountains?’ she asked him.

  Memet was uncertain. ‘I can’t be away too long, or Gran will get worried.’

  ‘I have some pictures from home,’ Elif said. ‘You can see the mountains in the background of some of them.’ She lifted herself up off the chair with a little heave and went out of the room. Memet heard a shuffling noise from what was most likely the bedroom, and then Elif returned, carrying the small navy vinyl suitcase she’d had when Memet had first seen her exit Suleyman’s cab two years before.

  ‘I’ve not shown these to anybody, not even your grandmother.’ She dusted off the bottom of the case, placed it on her lap and opened it. She took out a bundle of small square photographs, three inches by three inches with a white thin border, and passed them over to Memet. ‘Wipe your hands first,’ she said. ‘I don’t want tea and toast on them.’

  Memet wiped his hands on his trousers and mutely took the proffered photographs. They were all from Elif’s wedding to Suleyman. Even to Memet’s untrained eye, he could see that Elif now looked much older than she had in the photographs, even though they were only from a couple of years ago. A lot of the pictures had been taken in the evening, and Elif’s wedding headdress glittered red and gold in the flashbulb. She didn’t look happy, exactly, Memet wouldn’t say that, but there was a look in her face that she didn’t have now, sitting opposite him.

  ‘Hope,’ Elif said, suddenly. ‘I had so much hope.’ Memet looked at her and noticed, with a child’s acuity, the fine lines developing around her dark eyes, which had acquired a sunken look as if they were being sucked back into her face. It was the kind of look his mother had when she had been vomiting.

  ‘Where are the mountains?’ he asked.

  Elif shuffled through the pictures until she found one.

  ‘Here,’ she said. The photograph was blurry, and obviously one taken by mistake. There were no people in the picture. A disembodied arm jutted into one side but behind that all you could see was a blurry, sunny distance, with dark shapes in the distance. Elif pointed to one of the tiny dark peaks. ‘That’s where my mother came from,’ she told him. ‘People used to say she was naughty too.’ She paused. ‘The old women told me that when my mother first came to the village, she was already carrying me in her belly but no one knew at first. She wouldn’t tell them who the father was, and some people said I had no father, that my mother was a witch and got me from the devil. They didn’t say that to my face. Not the grown-ups anyway.

  ‘I used to ask my mother if I could have a father like most of the other children, and she said I already had one, but that he stayed out all night instead of coming home to her, and once, when he had done this three nights in a row, when the sun came up he turned into a cockerel. She said there was nothing she could do, so she left him there on one of the farms, and came down to our village on t
he plains.’

  ‘My dad says my mummy went away because of cancer.’

  ‘Yes,’ Elif said. ‘I know.’ And she kissed Memet on the cheek.

  That was the last time he saw her. She had bundled the photographs back into her little suitcase, given Memet a round red boiled sweet to take away with him, and told him to thank his grandmother for the talisman. About a week later, when he came home from school, he saw his grandmother coming out of Elif’s block.

  ‘Have you been to see Elif?’ he asked her, anxious that he had missed the chance of a visit.

  ‘No, Memet, she’s not here any more,’ his grandmother said.

  He stopped in front of her. ‘Where is she?’ he asked.

  ‘Come inside for tea, child,’ his grandmother said, and took him by the hand.

  Instead, Memet heard from others on the estate what had happened, or at least, their versions of it. The baby had decided to come early. Elif had been screaming from inside her flat for hours before one of the neighbours decided to call the police. When they arrived, they had to break down the door, and immediately called an ambulance. Accounts varied as to what was actually delivered. The more sedate versions were that the baby was stillborn, but wilder imaginations postulated everything from the birth of a two-headed boy to a goat. ‘What is wrong with these people?’ Memet Ali’s father would say. ‘Why do they believe such nonsense?’ Whatever Elif had given birth to, it hadn’t survived. People felt sorry for her, but not that much. They found out she wasn’t meant to be here, of course – I could have told them that a year ago – So what’s going to happen to the flat? – What’s going to happen to her? – They’ve sent her home. Wish I could have my plane ticket bought for me. I could do with a bit of proper sunshine.

  For several weeks, Memet would take a short detour after school to walk up to her flat. The door and windows had been boarded over with pale chipboard. Memet would stare at the cheap wood for a few minutes and then go home for tea. Then one day, there was a proper front door again. Memet knocked but no-one answered. When he got home, he asked his grandmother, ‘What happened to the baby?’

  ‘What baby?’ she asked, lighting the oven.

  ‘Elif’s baby.’

  She put in a baking tray. ‘It died,’ she said.

  ‘Was it my brother?’ Memet asked.

  His grandmother stood up. ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just thought it would be nice to have a brother. Or a sister.’

  Memet’s grandmother eyed him carefully. ‘This will be a while cooking. Why don’t you go out and play? You shouldn’t be with grown-ups all the time.’

  Memet went slowly down the stairs and out into the courtyard. A girl from his school was skipping rope by herself.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  ‘Hello,’ Memet said. ‘I’ve got a brother.’

  ‘No, you haven’t,’ she said.

  ‘I have too.’

  She stopped skipping. ‘Then how come I’ve never seen him?’

  ‘He doesn’t live here. He lives on a farm.’

  ‘Is he a farmer?’

  ‘No, he’s a cockerel.’

  ‘You can’t have a cockerel for a brother,’ she said.

  ‘Well I have. And Elif’s father was a cockerel too.’

  The girl nodded thoughtfully. She’d heard funny things about Elif.

  ‘I think I heard your brother this morning,’ she said. ‘When I woke up I could hear him crowing.’

  ‘Yes,’ Memet said, ‘that was him.’

  And then they went to look for bloodstains in the stairwell three blocks down, where a man was supposed to have been stabbed the night before.

  David Gaffney

  The Staring Man

  A plastic silver birch from the edge of the paddling pool had been snapped off during transportation and Charlotte was gluing it back on when the old man came over.

  He had delicate, almost transparent skin, and his pale-blue watery eyes were so deep set they looked as if they were sinking into his face.

  ‘I thought that this might help with the consultation,’ he said, handing her a sheet of A4 paper. It was a print-out of a black and white photograph of a young couple dangling a baby’s feet in the water of the original paddling pool.

  He prodded the image. ‘That’s me. That’s my wife Dorothy, and that’s Heather. She’s three there – 1958.’

  The couple looked innocently happy, their small trim frames somehow weightless, as if in those days there had been less gravity.

  ‘You can keep it. I have the original.’

  ‘Thanks very much,’ said Charlotte. ‘We could display it next to the model. If that would be OK?’ And she indicated with her hand the greasy dayroom-yellow wall of the resource centre, where it would hang.

  ‘Please do,’ he said, and then began to walk around Charlotte’s scale model of the refurbished park and its amenities, looking at it from every possible angle, as curious as if it were a 3D map of his own mind.

  ‘I didn’t know there were people like you,’ he said after a time.

  ‘There’s a need for it,’ Charlotte said. ‘We make things smaller so that people can understand them better.’

  ‘Show us how the world would look if everything was simpler.’

  ‘We depict what you can see, not what you know is there.’

  ‘So then what happens? You show it to the families and the old men who sit in the sun, and see if they like it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘And if they don’t?’

  ‘They can go and fuck themselves,’ Charlotte said.

  The old man looked at her for a while, then laughed.

  ‘Your role is not usually outward-facing?’

  ‘You got it,’ she said.

  ‘How do you know where to place each human figure? Do you have . . .’ He paused and looked to the side. ‘. . . “artistic freedom”?’

  ‘They had an awayday and filled a flip chart. The models should not look like separate individuals, but like a group who are co-operating. They should look intelligent and altruistic.’

  The old man tickled the head of one of the model people as if it were a small animal. ‘They do indeed look like that,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, and they read periodicals.’

  ‘I have no idea how you achieve it, Miss—?’

  ‘Charlotte Lander-Howe.’ She put out her hand and the old man shook it. He was wearing a trilby hat with a fishing feather in it like her grandfather had used to.

  ‘I have to convey all that from their position in the model and how they are spaced in relation to each other.’

  ‘And they all look exactly the same,’ the old man said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Charlotte. ‘It’s kind of a serving suggestion.’

  ‘I’m called Mooney, by the way. Ted Mooney.’

  His eyes were dragged towards a certain figure at the edge of the paddling pool, and he bent down and looked at it intently.

  ‘Why is that man staring up at the sky?’ he said. ‘It looks as if he has spotted a plane about to crash, or a storm coming in. Sorry, I was an English teacher and my imagination runs away.’

  The miniature person he was referring to was one of Charlotte’s favourites and, like the three-legged dog in a Ken Loach film, he appeared in every model she made.

  ‘Staring man,’ Charlotte said. ‘He adds something intangible. Takes you out of the model and makes you feel there is something beyond. In my last project I stood him beside an abattoir and he added a spiritual dimension, as if he was searching for God in a world where people killed things.’

  Ted Mooney went quiet when she said this, and glanced towards the door. Then his pale eyes flicked all over the model again, searching.

  ‘What I find strange,’ he said, ‘is th
at I see no staff.’

  She pointed to a low building of liver-coloured bricks. ‘That’s the park keeper’s office.’

  ‘Is he there now?’ said Ted Mooney.

  ‘Ah, Mr Mooney,’ she said. ‘No. We don’t model the unseen. That’s kind of written on the napkins at the model makers’ conference. There is nothing but the surface.’

  The old man didn’t seem to have anything else to say and they stared at the stilled little figures on the scale model for a spell. Tinkling posies of sound drifted in from the school nearby.

  ‘Do you have any older photographs?’ Charlotte said, eventually.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘You move on, you concrete over it.’

  ‘I thought maybe your parents might have used the pool.’

  He took off his trilby and sat down at the side of the model.

  ‘My parents were Catholic and devoutly religious, and when they found out Dorothy had been divorced they told me that they were not so bothered about seeing me any more. I tried everything, but they tore up my letters and posted back the shreds.’

  Charlotte sat down next to him. ‘But what about—?’

  ‘Heather. Yes. When we had Heather, little Heather, I thought that would change their minds. But the minute they clapped eyes on that child my parents grimaced and turned away. “God did this thing to you for a reason,” my mother said. “God sent you that poor girl because of your sins. That’s what happens when you turn your back on your faith.” I never saw them again. Didn’t want to, after that. Family bonds, they say you can’t break them. But you can, and sometimes they can never be fixed. Me and Dorothy were not in the least upset by Heather’s condition. We loved her, loved her more than any person can love another person, and she loved us back.’

  ‘You must bring them both here, to see my scale model,’ said Charlotte.

  ‘They passed away. Dorothy was 87 and Heather, well. She had only a certain time allotted. In some ways it’s for the best. Who would have looked after Heather when we were gone?’

  Ted Mooney picked up his trilby, put it on his head and smiled at her, his pale eyes searching her face as if she might have an answer to his problems from the past.