Best British Short Stories 2016

by Nicholas Royle

  – You know he’s gone, don’t you?

  – You mean to the conference?

  – Don’t be stupid, Ralph.

  He had known. It was true. It was like pain arriving. First it circled and then it cut you in half.

  – How long have you known?

  – Not known, not really. Suspected.

  – How long have you suspected?

  – About as long as you have.

  She pulled on the cigarette.

  – Don’t pretend it’s all my fault.

  She was right, she was only telling him what he knew in sheepish glances, cancelled evenings out, Simon’s hurry always to be somewhere that was somewhere else.

  – I’m sorry.

  She stubbed the cigarette out on a plate. A habit she knew Ralph hated.

  – Shit! Now I’m really sorry.

  She wiped away the ash with her finger.

  – Forgot. Again . . .

  Then, somehow they were smiling at each other. Ralph never knew how Simon found out he knew. It wasn’t easy in the Department, but the place was deserted half the time anyway with central timetabling and colleagues on sabbatical. They’d never advertised that they were an item and they never told anyone it was over. Ralph met Stella a few times more than he usually did for lunch, usually in one of the bars around the campus, but that was all. Apart from pain of a different kind that kept him awake at night now. When he went back to work there had been a colossal sense of hurt. Visceral. As if work had hurt him. The first staff meeting had been difficult, when they’d ended up sitting almost side by side, looking up from the agenda and minutes to exchange wry glances. Ralph had felt naked then. But then it became easier. It became a fact of life, a fait accompli.

  The path left the trees now and reared up into a left-hand curve where the old vine terraces began. The low walls that kept back the hillside had collapsed and he had to pick his way over scree. In a few places prickly pears had colonised the land and he scratched his leg trying to negotiate them. A trickle of bright blood ran down his right calf. He dabbed it with a tissue, but the blood kept coming. Ever since the op he’d been taking low-dose aspirin to prevent clotting. But if he cut himself the blood flowed. After the angiogram a big Nigerian nurse had leaned on the wound in his femoral artery when the cannula had gone in, pressing until the bleeding stopped, telling him about her kids back in Abuja.

  After the first game of tennis they’d played together, when it had all been new, Simon had licked the sweat off his chest in the shower. There seemed no going back on each other then. He had the gentlest hands of any lover Ralph had known, man or woman. Not that there had been many women. Though Stella had sometime been a convenient front for them both. She lectured in Gothic literature and wore trademark black polo-neck sweaters and slacks. On one arm she had a tattoo of a snake eating its tail in a figure of eight. That was considered pretty racy in academia, though Ralph often thought it was an image of academia. She was a Reader now, as from the last appointments round. He’d had the grace to feel glad for her. Her new book on the Brontës had been well reviewed. His own, one and only, book on the sonnet form and its links to Renaissance music had sunk like a stone into the usual dismal university libraries. No one else would want to read that. He’d be lucky to collect half a dozen citations. The Dean was already hassling about the next research excellence thing. Exercise? Framework? He couldn’t remember. Bullshit, anyway.

  Ralph was panting now. His hips and legs ached with the effort of constantly climbing. He could feel the steady bumping of his heart. There were a few yards of flat path as his route ran parallel to the hillside before climbing again. He came to a flat rock jutting out from the slope and sat down to rest. The sea was a vertical plane, a blue-grey veil. The town was fainter, the church a pointillist’s dab of white. Scrubby trees spread out below him, khaki green. A pigeon or dove broke from cover and crossed the valley frantically, as if a predator was patrolling the tree line. He’d seen a sparrowhawk take a blackbird like that once, almost in front of his face on the south campus. So close he’d ducked. One minute gliding from the trees, the next an airburst of feathers. Then the hawk sculling away with the dead songbird in its claws. Oddly enough he’d found that invigorating, as if he walked on into the day more alive. When in fact he was he was on his way to the Emily Dickinson lecture theatre to enlighten Part II students about modern forms of the sonnet. All those bleak, hungover faces lined up in semi-circles.

  Ralph felt in his shoulder bag for the bottle of water. He took a long swig, spraying the last of the mouthful into the dust. A libation. Droplets sparkled, then darkened like old blood. He set off again already scanning ahead for the next resting place, feeling balls of sweat trickle down his sides under the shirt. He remembered Simon’s tongue lapping at him the way a cat lapped a saucer of milk. For a theorist he was amazingly . . . well, immediate. For someone who spent his time with Foucault, Derrida and Lacan, he knew the secrets of touch. In theory, theories exist. In practice they don’t. Who was that? Latour? Ralph halted where the path widened a little, breaking some dried leaves from a sage bush and smelling his fingers. The herb was pungent as wood smoke. He flexed his left leg and rubbed the scar where it ran deepest behind his knee. He had a little birthmark there that looked like a rabbit. Funny how those things stayed with you all your life, like having green eyes or the way your fingernails grew or the hair on your chest tapered. His chest had been parted with a saw, shaved, cranked open and then wired back together. Before the op, he’d asked the surgeon – the Greek – what the procedure would be like. Invasive, he said. Then, later with a smile: It’ll be traumatic, but don’t worry, eh? You’re going to be OK. He was right, it was like being invaded.

  He hadn’t wanted anyone around when he went to the theatre. The anesthetist had been an Irishman, about his own age. Jovial. He’d had the pre-med, then waited as time dissolved around him. He’d slipped away from consciousness and they put him under and started work. Diverting his blood supply, cutting away diseased vessels, grafting new ones. Like the way they’d tended the vines he was walking through. Six hours of surgery. Death and resurrection. When he came to, it was evening. He’d been worried that he’d wake up shouting obscenities under the effects of the anaesthetic. But he felt at peace, and was being washed by a beautiful Malaysian nurse who had gold hoops in her ears. She was smiling at him, teeth glinting, eyes dark as occlusions in honey. His body, still painted with iodine, looked radiant, as if he’d been coated with gold leaf. His chest was seared with a bloody line and his pubic hair gleamed like copper wire. He had the sensation of floating in warm water, of a wide dark river with fire playing over the surface. A small apocalypse in which he felt like a river god with his bride, her hands light as tender flames across his body.

  It must have been hours later when he woke again and Stella and Simon were sitting beside the bed. He didn’t remember this later, but they said he’d been in good form. Pleased to see them, genial, peeping down his tee shirt, smiling sardonically, babbling. That would be the legend back in the Department. He hadn’t feared pain or death, but the end of life: the axe, not its shadow. He’d waited for days before the op to have the tests that would confirm him as viable. He’d had lung capacity tests and more x-rays. Thank God he’d never smoked. Then the surgeon had appeared early one evening, flipping through Ralph’s notes to pronounce him an excellent candidate before rattling through his own survival rates.

  After the op and that visit from Simon and Stella, he’d been alone in the ward. Not alone in fact, but alone in some profound sense with his hurt. He’d remembered Raleigh’s words to the executioner as he examined the axe: Let me see it. Do you think I’m afraid of it? This is a sharp medicine, but it is a physician for all diseases. And he’d realised that he wasn’t really viable, after all. That sharp medicine had done its worst. He was stranded with his wound, his constant need of care. He was dependent. The ho
urs had passed in a slow ache of realisation. Morphine had reduced the tangible to phantasmagorical shadows. The pain was coming closer; something stalking him, something he already knew. He asked the sister for some painkillers and he saw her approaching the consultant who was making a ward round. He’d stopped to fuss with Ralph’s drip and reassure him about the operation. He’d done a quadruple bypass in the end, the Greek. When the ache began he felt as he’d been sawn in half, which he had. He saw the surgeon turn away from the nurse before she even asked her question. It was three hours later when the pain was rasping along his sternum that the ward sister came by with some tablets.

  The first signs had first come on five years ago when he’d been playing cricket for the University. The senior team, that is. He’d bowled twelve consecutive overs: five maidens, twenty-seven for none because he’d been dropped five times. It was probably his best ever spell, the ball swinging away late, pitching just short of a length outside off stump and then seaming towards first slip. He’d crafted each over, swinging the odd ball in, getting some to lift from a length, even making some cut into the stumps. The batsman was an old adversary, a Professor of Music, and they’d been able to share a joke between overs. Then he’d stood under the trees on the boundary with an ache spreading from chest to shoulder. It came back when he was playing tennis, then cycling. He’d gone to his GP and been referred to cardiology and had the treadmill test. He didn’t believe that there was anything seriously wrong with him. Re-reading Lolita he found that Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert had suffered from intercostal neuralgia and he’d Googled it out of curiosity. It was a condition of the intercostal muscles that mimicked angina. Perfect. When the young cardiologist had told him – categorically – that there was nothing wrong with his heart he’d tried that bit of theory out on her. She’d smiled. No, she hadn’t read Nabokov. Yes, it was possible.

  Before the op they put him in a ward with men who’d already had it, coughing with rolled-up towels pressed to their chests. After the op, he was kept awake by old men who’d had heart or lung operations, breathing into oxygen masks and nebulisers, struggling for their lives or what was left of them. They’d brought a guy in, younger than him, who’d lain deliriously calling for his mother, shouting at ghosts. Oh you fucking bastards! His eyes were magnified behind smeared glasses and his hair was tangled with sweat. Oh you cunts! He pulled off his monitor so that the beeper sounded all night, ripped out his cannula so that blood sprayed the bed sheets. Let me not be mad, Ralph had prayed, let me not be, please.

  He never imagined any of that when he walked away from the cardiologist with his Nabokov story and nothing wrong with his heart. When there was everything wrong with it. When something was working away inside him. He never found out why it hadn’t been spotted, but five years later when the shoulder pain came back he had an MRI scan to check for a compressed vertebra. It was like being trapped in a toothpaste tube with a pod of whales calling. Nothing. Apart from the usual wear and tear. Then a humourless Slovakian neurologist had advised him to revisit cardiology. Hobbling back to the car, he realised that she was right. That he might be running out of time. The heart attack came two days before he was due to take a treadmill test again. Not a pain in the chest, but an intense ache in his jaw and shoulder. Simon had driven him to the hospital as he held a pack of ice to his clavicle. Friday night and the town had been full of young people out on the lash, boys in tight jeans and tee shirts, girls in short skirts and plunging halter tops. All that life, that vibrancy, that need, that sexual drive. He’d never been afraid to die, but he’d been afraid of losing Simon through dying. That had happened anyway. It was a fucking joke, really. Though he should have seen it coming, Paul Kretzinski and all.

  The path was so steep now that Ralph could only walk in moderate spurts. Thirty or forty paces or so, then a rest, then forty more and a rest. The sun had swung higher in the sky and he could feel it burning behind his knees. He paused to rest his hat on a rock, smear on more sun cream, wipe the sweat from his neck. The sun glinted on a windscreen down in the village. There was a very faint breeze up this high, but the air was heated from its passage overland. The sea was crimped into wave crests and the wind surfers were almost invisible from this height. He could just make out one of the trawlers putting to sea. Yesterday he’d wandered down to the harbour with his camera in the early evening. They’d let him into the fish auction with a few other tourists as the crates of fish came by on the conveyor and the traders made hoarse bids in Catalan. A tall African sailor was shovelling ice into crates, muscular, high shouldered and narrow hipped. His skin gleamed in the dim interior light. He was a kind of perfection. But Ralph felt no desire, not even in the abstract.

  He passed crates of squid, hake, cod. Some pink fish he didn’t even recognise. Then a swordfish. It gleamed like beaten silver, its eyes huge and inky and indelibly sad. It had made him melancholy, as if what had happened to him had suddenly coalesced, had melded with all the other sadness of creation. He’d felt like an intruder, hadn’t taken a photograph, an image that would sit uselessly on his hard-drive. Another memento mori. The camera was his way of putting a membrane between him and the world. Simon had told him that once, cruelly accurate.

  Back at the flat he’d written in his notebook, covering the pages with fine script. He was supposed to be working on a new academic book this summer, but he’d started writing poems instead – actually writing poems instead of writing about them. It was nearly twenty years since he’d published some ‘promising’ work in Poetry Review and the TLS, so it had all come as a bit of a surprise. He was due a term of research leave next year and he hardly knew what to do with it now. Maybe he’d go for a book of his own poems now that creative writing was all the rage. You had to laugh. The University was filling up with writers who needed to make a living on the side and what lazy, self-serving bastards most of them were.

  The last hundred or so yards up the path were a slog though dust and sifting gravel. The breeze stiffened, bringing some relief from the heat. He saw a green wheelie bin, then a steel barrier. Incongruously, the path ended at the car park for the monastery where a road zigzagged up the north side of the mountain in a series of stacked hairpin bends. The car park was about five hundred years from the restored buildings, the path sagging into a dip then rising up to the squat towers and crenellated walls where the monks had looked down on everything and everyone below. It was said that the locals had sacked the place in the sixteenth century. It wasn’t hard to imagine, living in the village under their gaze. The monks with all that wealth and self-sufficiency, their olives and vines and bakeries and tanneries, creaming it as the villagers flogged up and down the path with half-starved mules to trade with them. Ralph took another swig of water, stooping to pick dried grass and broken stems from his socks where they were scratching his ankle. The blood had dried on his right leg, congealing in a rivulet that matched the scar on the other. He was knackered but exultant. He’d done it. So fuck the lot of them, whoever they were. It was meant nothing: slog, slog, slog to the top. But it felt good. It felt like meaning. And he was looking forward to coffee and agua mineral in one of the cafés on the seafront when he got back. He’d feel good then, feel that he’d achieved something he’d set out to do. That was advance retrospection: another theory, but one that worked. One that existed, like experience did.

  Ralph rested on the barrier for a few minutes. Three workmen arrived in a white Seat van and began to put on gauntlets and facemasks. They unloaded strimmers and started them up in a fug of white smoke, cutting back the grass and thistles at the edge of the steel barrier. When Ralph walked on they snarled behind him like a three-headed dog.

  He’d decided not to enter the monastery. Not this time. Sometimes he liked that holy feeling, that sense of connection with the past and a necessary God. But not today. He glanced at his watch. There was moisture clinging to the inside of the glass. His own sweat. It was only ten forty-five. He’d made it in good
time, getting up before the main heat of the day set in. He followed the path to the side of the perimeter wall where there was a shady garden with a drinking tap set into a stone recess where he splashed his face.

  The view to the northwest showed the Pyrenees still dusky in the morning’s heat. On the road below a posse of cyclists went past in yellow jerseys, toes pointed, legs pumping almost in unison. Ralph filled his water bottle from the brass tap, lingering in the shade. His route home lay down a gentler valley that would take him round the bay on the coastal path and back into the town. He’d have time for a shower and a change of clothes before taking the hire-car to meet Stella at Gerona. He placed his bag and hat and water bottle on the wall and took a photograph of them with the mountains in the distance. The last time he’d done this Simon had been with him and he had a shot of him leaning forwards and laughing, halfway through saying something. That’d been two years ago. One thing a scholar of the sonnet should know is that things change suddenly and then end.

  Ralph sat on the wall and felt the breeze feather over his face. He imagined Stella clumping towards him, with her wheeled suitcase and ridiculous shoes and tattoo, to hug him and ask him how he was. Tomorrow, they’d settle into the flat together, reading, bitching about their colleagues, walking, swimming, touring bars in the early evening before settling down to eat somewhere. He’d choose the balconied restaurant where they’d have tuna salad with olives or gazpacho. Then freshly caught merluza and white wine. Then coffee and crema catalana and sweet Spanish brandy. She’d skip out between courses for a smoke and he’d warn her about cancer and she’d flick her finger against her nose, laughing, glad he was alive to goad her. Tomorrow, he’d watch her freckled body spread out on the stones of the beach, without desire but with a kind of amazement. He’d realise that his heart was good, that he was healed of all but the deepest pain and unworthiness. He’d realise that in their own unachievable way they loved each other – without passion, without longing, but with a kind of recognition.