The Best British Short Stories 2013

by Nicholas Royle

  The nearest raven cautiously edged a couple of paces away from Doodles as he passed but otherwise maintained its air of dignified alertness. None of the ravens seemed to be looking for worms, or doing anything but stand amid the dying grass, motionless, lost in meditation. The blackness of their plumage seemed lurid and their normal size was magnified fifty per cent. Perhaps it was the effect of the rain, which had been falling with a mild persistence ever since he’d reached the Lido. Doodles’ glasses were speckled and distorted by watery blobs.

  He stopped and glanced back at London. The gherkin was a dull grey and looked less like a gherkin than a styptic pencil. The financial district was a heap of grey cardboard boxes. Only the Telecom tower had clarity. Its encrustation of pale dishes resembled fungi on a dead trunk. The metaphor made him think of the path beyond the golf club at Seaton.

  At the foot of the slope a toy train rattled along the line from Gospel Oak, passing a plum-coloured running track. The rain was much denser to the south and the city was fuzzy and smudged by mistiness.

  He turned and went on. Beyond the final raven a grassy track skirted the mown area and went up to the brow of the hill. On the skyline a few trees huddled together for company. Doodles moved on to this pathway, the ground beneath his boots suddenly malleable and springy, yielding to his weight with a low squelch of pleasure. He trudged up to the top, the rain determined to glue his jeans to his kneecaps.

  An enigmatic rectangle of concrete came into view. As he reached it – was it a covering or the base of something which had long ago been removed? – Doodles was enveloped by mist. A squall of rain struck him hard across the cheeks, which made him think of Alice. How her hot temper and fondness for drugs had excited him in the old days! But now he was alone, half a stone heavier, blundering blindly down a hillside, lashed by icy splashes, embraced by a thickening fog, seeing nothing but a patch of thorns. He was starting to feel like a character in The Pilgrim’s Progress – Mr Wandering Wet-Man. At one point he slipped and almost fell into a narrow ditch concealed by an emerald blanket of wild cress, saved not by Christian fortitude (he had exhausted his quota by his ninth year) but by the thick tread of his boots, size eleven feet, gigantic thighs, and a yoga-friendly sense of balance.

  Slithering and skipping, Doodles reached the base of a broad grassy valley. The Diazepam and his momentum bore him giddily as far as the bare, branchless trunk of a strangely uncontoured tree, the smooth surface of which was a uniform chocolate brown. Seizing hold of it to halt his onward movement – the edge of a cliff or a ravine might be just a few metres away in the mist – Doodles was shocked to find himself clinging to cold, greasy metal. As if that human contact triggered synthetic climatic effects, the mist evaporated and Doodles discovered that he was standing underneath some sort of large eight-legged structure. He wondered if it was a drowsy, monstrous spider and he had lately been exposed to a massive dose of radioactivity. That would explain the shrinkage.

  It was only when he ran, screaming, towards the nearby lake and momentarily glanced back that he saw what it was. A massive desk with an equally massive high-backed five-spined chair tucked underneath it. Whoever it belonged to – King Kong? – had evidently gone off for a coffee.

  Where was everyone? Hampstead Heath was completely empty. Doodles reached the broad tarmac path which passed alongside the lake. Sweating, he ran along it to the next lake and beyond. A muddy gleaming track led up another hill towards woodland. Best to get under cover, he thought, and crossed a tiny bridge coated with chicken wire. Half way up he paused to let a big black shining slug cross. The twin blobs of its antennae swayed from side to side, as if sensing his presence. When it had reached the grass on the far side of the hardened, well-trodden earth Doodles dodged past it and ran on into the wood. Here, vertical strips of lighting were fixed to the trees, joined by loops of finger-thick wiring. Three or four minutes later he saw another, smaller lake. Beyond it was a stage, protected by a helmet-shaped canopy. To his right, stacked deckchairs dripped in a roped-off clearing. Behind them a grey portable toilet leaned at a perilous angle.

  Kenwood House came into view, put there by that same surrealist film director. Gravel displaced the tarmac. The magnolia tree was a lush green and nothing at all like the day it had been when he had made Alice laugh by rolling sideways down the slope. He had collided with the metal fence at the bottom, hurting his head and his ribs. A park ranger wearing the insignia of English Heritage ticked him off. Doodles apologised, explaining that he was a Celt and that Alice had run out of money for drugs. The ranger snarled and strode off home to his collection of artefacts from the Weimar Republic. That day the magnolia tree bore an extravagant white, wedding day blossom. Doodles took Alice’s hand and led her through the hornbeam tunnel, afterwards presenting her with a photocopy of pages 702 and 703 from a hardback novel where the hero also walks into this same leafy arbour. Doodles passed through and on towards Dr Johnson’s summer house, inside which he encouraged Alice to drink from his flask of whisky to ease the shivering. It wasn’t there, and only now did he recall that it had been destroyed by fire.

  He went on across the lawn to Hepworth’s ‘Empyrean’, which holds the meaning of life. Alice nodded with a deep understanding. Today it was desolate and deserted and people had scratched their initials on the surface. Doodles, who was six and a half feet tall, felt as if his stomach consisted of a large oval-shaped hole. He went inside the house and looked at the dull Vermeer, which established how much guitars had changed. The incomplete circle behind Rembrandt’s shoulder disturbed him, as it always did. Much of the painting seemed fuzzy and dark and out of focus. Doodles remembered it was time for his eye test.

  The gallery was empty. Even the attendants had deserted their corner chairs. On the velvet cushion of one a PD James crime thriller lay asleep on its big smug stomach.

  The library was sickly with gilt. The enormous bookshelves with their big interminable matching volumes suggested Hollywood’s idea of what a private library should be like. A leaflet gave interesting facts. It took three men eight days to fit the mirrors in this temple of kitsch and neo-classical mediocrity. The only object of interest was a stone bust of Homer, formerly the property of Alexander Pope. It looked significantly different to the bust of Homer once belonging to Alexander Pope in the painting which hung over the fireplace.

  On the way back everything was the same, except reversed. Doodles paused to let the slug go by. The lakes were windswept and desolate. The rain fell in the alternative slant. The giant’s desk and chair were still, like the surrounding landscape, unoccupied.

  The ravens had gone. On the way down to the Lido, Doodles met a hooded woman coming the other way who gave him a warm smile. He exchanged it for one many degrees lower.

  Returning along Chetwynd Park Road, drenched Doodles felt his mood sag. He was very wet and very cold, and the day seemed as blustery and rainswept as that Sunday when the circus departed. All morning there was a crash and clatter of dismantled scaffolding and folded machinery. The lions groaned in their cages and tyres span amid liquid mud. The next day the blueprint was marked out in the field in circles and rectangles of brown dead grass edged by perforations where pegs had stabbed the earth.

  A pretty ending. But no Sunday when a circus departed existed in his memory. Doodles did not wear glasses. He was only five feet four, and losing an inch every year. The train was obviously not a toy and the metaphor was arthritic and lazy. The ravens were there earlier but they were not ravens but rooks. Trees have no emotions and do not crowd together for company. Seeds are spilled but only a few take root. The anthropomorphic tendencies in this story are deplorable. The ground emitting a low squelch of pleasure! Rain with malign intentions against the jeans worn by Doodles! And ‘plum coloured’ is a meaningless description, since plums are variously coloured – empurpled, green, rouge, blotchy-brown and so on. Ditto ‘chocolate coloured’. My favourites in a box are always the white ones
. And Doodles did not almost fall into a ditch, for there wasn’t one. No wild cress attracted his notice. And there was a mistake made in remembering the library. In fact it took eight men three days to fit those preposterous mirrors.

  Between paragraphs twelve and thirteen Doodles went into the coffee bar at Kenwood and ate a hummus and grated carrot wrap, washed down with cappuccino. Giancarlo Neri’s installation was not a surprise and was the express reason Doodles went to Hampstead Heath on Wednesday 24 August 2005. There was no mist around the desk and chair and Doodles did not scream. The slug, which was slug-sized, was not there on the way back. It was in fact the day after the Hampstead trip that Doodles went to Tate Britain to see the Joshua Reynolds exhibition, and not thirty-two minutes but several hours later at Oxford Circus that he encountered the hoarding for the new Rolling Stones album. In between he went to the Twining’s shop opposite the Royal Courts of Justice and bought six packets of Irish Breakfast, his favourite tea. After that he went to Waterloo station to meet someone who was arriving on the Portsmouth Harbour train. The slope he rolled down was in Scotland. There was no ranger. There was a girl and there were drugs but her name was not Alice and she and Doodles never went to Hampstead. The Diazepam was years ago and back then named Valium. Alice never existed, except in a Victorian classic. But the route mapped out in this story is entirely accurate.

  The Stormchasers

  Adam Marek

  It’s so windy today. My son Jakey and I are at the window watching leylandii bow to each other, and the snails being blown across the patio like sailboats.

  We’ve been watching for fifteen minutes or so when Jakey says, ‘I’m scared.’

  ‘Of what?’ I ask.

  ‘Of tornadoes.’

  ‘Listen,’ I say, ‘no tornadoes are coming here. Even if we got in the car right now and drove around all day like the stormchasers on TV, we’d be lucky to find one. Very lucky.’

  ‘But what if we did?’

  There is a noise from behind us. We both look at the fireplace. The wind is playing the chimney like a flute.

  ‘Even if we were really lucky and did find one,’ I say, ‘in England it would be a tiny thing. We don’t get the big ones here.’

  ‘An F4?’ he asks. We have watched documentaries about tornadoes together since he was a baby. Among six-year-olds, he is an expert.

  ‘No way,’ I say. ‘An F2, if we were really lucky.’

  ‘Big enough to suck up a person?’

  He is imagining the tornado like a straw in the sky’s mouth, I can see this.

  ‘Nuh-uh,’ I say. ‘Just big enough to fling a couple of roof tiles about, or knock over some flowerpots, or break a greenhouse to pieces.’

  ‘But what if . . .’ he starts.

  He is not going to believe me, sitting here in the house with the wind whoo-whooing around our walls like a ghost.

  ‘Go get changed out of your jim-jams,’ I say. ‘I’ll show you that there’s nothing to be afraid of.’

  While Jakey looks for his shoes, I pack lunch for us in a cotton shoulder bag: for me, chicken-liver pate and apple chutney sandwiches, and a flask of Earl Grey tea; for Jakey, cheese spread sandwiches, a fun-size Twix and two cartons of apple juice.

  ‘All set?’ I say when he gets to the bottom of the stairs. He is wearing the bright yellow sou’wester and macintosh that he has finally grown into. I bought them for him before he was born, when he was just in my imagination.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ he says.

  ‘We’d better go say goodbye to mum,’ I say.

  We creep upstairs together, peep around the bedroom door. Mum is still in bed. She has the light out. Yesterday the dentist at the hospital pulled four wisdom teeth from her mouth. She has been in bed for a whole day, and mostly silent.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she says. Even her voice sounds wounded.

  ‘We’re going tornado chasing,’ Jakey says.

  ‘We won’t be long,’ I say. ‘Can I get you anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you feeling okay?’ Jakey asks.

  She pulls the duvet over her head. ‘Just go away,’ she says.

  We drive.

  ‘It feels good to be out, doesn’t it?’ I say. ‘Seen any tornadoes yet?’

  Jakey looks around. He says nothing.

  The bendy roads between the hedgerows are full of fallen branches so I go slow. We live in the countryside, a little house all on its own. In the summer, from the air, our plot is a dark green triangle in the middle of a bright yellow sea of rapeseed. I have seen it from the air, in a microlight. The photograph I took is in our bathroom. I stare at it every time I pee.

  ‘Where shall we go?’ I say. ‘If we were proper stormchasers, Jakey, we’d have a Doppler radar and a laptop so we could find the tornadic part of the storm.’

  ‘We are real stormchasers,’ he says.

  I’m watching the road carefully but I can see his pout from the corner of my eye.

  ‘You’re right,’ I say. ‘But we don’t have Doppler, so we’ll have to rely on our instincts. You take a look at the sky and tell me where you think the tornadoes will touch down.’

  Jakey presses the window button till the window is open the whole way. He sticks his head out. I slow the car and move into the middle of the road so he doesn’t get hit by the sticky-out branches that the hedge-mower has missed. I’m going slow enough that I can watch Jakey. He is looking up into the sky, holding the door frame with both hands. The wind is throwing his shaggy hair all around his head. His hair is cornfield-blond, the same as mine. His mum’s is almost black. ‘Yet another thing he got from you, not me,’ she sometimes says.

  ‘That way,’ he says, pointing north-east.

  When we get to the motorway, the car is hard to control. The wind bullies our left-hand side. The windscreen wipers are overwhelmed with this much rain. We feel enclosed, in the car. We are like a head in a hood. Jakey gets to choose the radio station. He chooses pop music. He sings along.

  ‘How do you know the words to all these songs?’ I ask.

  ‘Mum listens to this radio station,’ he says.

  I do not like pop music, but I do like to hear Jakey sing.

  We’ve been driving for twenty minutes, when ahead we see a smudge of yellow on the horizon. The rain is thinning. The cars coming towards us on the other side of the motorway have their lights off. In the rear-view mirror is a procession of lit headlamps, bright against the bruise-black sky.

  ‘We should turn around,’ I say.

  ‘No. It’s this way,’ Jakey says.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  We reach sunlight. The wet tarmac around us is steaming.

  ‘Are you sure the tornadoes are this way, Jakey?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Shall we turn around?’

  It looks like the end of the world back the way we came. Within the wall of cloud, there’s a heck of a light show.

  ‘Okay,’ Jakey says.

  I come off the motorway and go round the roundabout three times – our game when Mum’s not in the car. Jakey giggles, pinned to the door by physics.

  We go back the way we came. I break the speed limit now because the storm is running away from us. We eat our lunches from our laps while we drive.

  ‘If you’re scared of tornadoes,’ I say, ‘why do you want to see one so badly?’

  Jakey shrugs, finishing his apple juice. It gurgles at the bottom of the carton.

  ‘Well, I told you we’d be very lucky to see one. Stormchasers drive thousands of miles to find them, drive around for weeks sometimes.’

  ‘How far have we driven?’

  ‘About 80 miles. Shall we go home now? Mum’ll be wondering where we are.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says.

  The sun follows us back. W
e lead it all the way to our front gates. Jakey picks up handfuls of the leaves that are heaped against our porch and drops them again. I put Jakey’s lunch rubbish in the cotton bag before I get out. I open the front door and we both go inside.

  ‘We’re home!’ I call, wiping my feet.

  No answer.

  I tiptoe upstairs. Our bed is empty.

  ‘Dad!’ Jakey calls out.

  I run downstairs.

  In the living room, the coffee table is on its side against the wall. One of its legs is broken off. The TV is face down on the carpet. The mantelpiece above the fireplace is bare. All the photos and pinecones and holiday souvenirs are on the floor. Some are smashed on the slate tiles in front of the wood burner. On the walls, the pictures are all at angles. Jakey’s toys are tipped from his box.

  In the middle of it all, sitting on the floor with her arms round her legs, and her forehead on her knees, is mummy. Her knuckles are bloody.

  Jakey moves towards her. I hold him back with my hand.

  ‘Don’t. There’s glass,’ I say. ‘You okay, mummy? Did you see it, the tornado? When it came through?’

  No answer. No movement.

  Only she and I know that the story about the dentist was a terrible lie.

  Mrs Vadnie Marlene Sevlon

  Jackie Kay

  On the way home from a long and final day in Sunnyside Home for the Elderly, Mrs Vadnie Marlene Sevlon was relieved to notice a little breeze. Much better than yesterday when the weather was close, so close she felt the low pressure in the air. As long as there is a little breeze, a person can cope with most things – even if she is in the wrong place. It’s the days when there is no breeze at all when Vadnie is convinced she made a mistake. But it wasn’t like there ever seemed much choice. It wasn’t like she could just take her pick. Only people with money have choice; only rich people can take their pick; everyone else must stumble from pillar to post, from hope to promise, and believe in luck and God, or maybe just God, or maybe just luck, depending on the day and the breeze. Vadnie Marlene Sevlon often said her own name, her whole name, to herself when she was alone. Perhaps because it reminded her of back home, her mother shouting Vadnie Marlene Sevlon, come and get your dinner, or maybe because it made her feel less lonely or maybe even just to remind herself of who she was. Time for you to get up, Vadnie Marlene Sevlon, she would say in the morning; bed for you now, Vadnie Marlene Sevlon, she would say at night. And in between the morning and the night sometimes not a single living soul said her name out loud.