The Best British Short Stories 2013

by Nicholas Royle

  His phone rings. She tells him she’s tired, that today has not been the best of days, that —

  ‘When will I see you?’

  She’s not sure – the weekend, maybe. She’ll come up on Saturday, yes. Saturday early.

  ‘The milk train?’ he says. Then he asks after the cat.

  There is no cat. The cat disappeared, she says, weeks ago. She has heard of this before: they have some instinct that tells them their time is drawing near, and they go off alone to meet their maker in private.

  When he looks out of the window again his son is not there but the rabbits are, out of their hutch and pressed up against the wire. He closes his eyes and sees the wood across the valley, ‘the largest in the county’; he enters its shade, its darkness, hears rustlings and flutterings and sudden sharp cries. Though they have done nothing to deserve it – but when was anything decided on merit? – animals have the last word, even the last laugh. They are primed for this, it’s in their genetic engineering. The thought is like a mouthful of food that tastes very different from what you’d expected, from what you’d imagined.

  A year later she is in Budapest, visiting Hannah. Hand-luggage only, and she still doesn’t wear a watch. Instead, on her wrist there is a sequence of numbers, written in biro and starting to smudge. It is a cold afternoon, autumn, but they are eating outside, on a terrace. Life is complicated. Also with them, but not just now at the table, is a Peruvian child, a boy of around six, with flat black hair and eyes so clear and deep she could swim in them.

  ‘Oh, him,’ she says, in answer to something Hannah has said. Him, in distinction from the other him, James, whom they’ve been talking about for the past half-hour. It’s like being part of a reading group, discussing the characters.

  She is holding a stuffed animal, a sheep, which the boy has more than relinquished. He is over there, crouched in a corner of the terrace, exploring. They have been swimming in the pool of an old and expensive hotel that predates the communist era and has come out the other side with surly changing-room attendants untrained in the ways of customer service. She feels lucky to have all her life been free.

  Except that she is not free. She feels she is on the set of a film, whether farce or thriller she doesn’t yet know. The boy is the adopted child of Hannah and her Hungarian husband; the husband has been cast adrift by Hannah but is determined to climb back on board and has taken to following them around, stalking them. He refuses to drown. Hence the numbers inked on her hand, which she must punch into the alarm system in Hannah’s apartment within ten seconds of entering. She scrabbles around in the dark, trying not to panic, imagining that she will be arrested and taken to an underground cellar and interrogated under a blinding light and will have her fingernails slowly pulled out.

  ‘He has wonderful eyes,’ she says. And adds, having given herself the cue: ‘He has a wonderful cock. Effervescent.’

  The boy comes to his mother with a spider cupped in his hands. ‘A boy spider or a girl spider?’ he wants to know. He speaks English like an American. (This, she has been meaning to say, is why Hannah cannot leave him alone in the apartment while she’s at work, alone with the TV tuned to American game-shows; and why she herself cannot abide indoors in that clean, functional but badly windowed flat, where you have to switch on a light even to make breakfast, for more than an hour; why she must take the boy out and thereby condemn herself to the frantic punching of the code on the keypad when they have run out of things to do. But she has only been here for two days.)

  ‘For god’s sake,’ Hannah says, laughing. She is happy, or believes she is. She delivers a lecture on the good life – Hannah is not unlike Marcia, in her belief that life can be made to fit – while all the time attending to the boy’s asking, asking. Why do spiders have so many legs? How long do spiders live? Is this a baby spider or a grown-up?

  The couple at the next table are tourists, like herself. German, Dutch? The man is intent on the map at the back of his guidebook, folded out on the table. The woman is looking across the river, so entranced she appears to have forgotten what it is she should be doing with the forkful of food she has raised. Should she put it back on her plate? Or into her body? If so, through which opening?

  Now a man is walking towards them: the waiter, or a secret policeman, or Hannah’s outcast, desperate husband.

  She really doesn’t mind which. She sips wine; it’s not for her to say. She looks beyond the man to where the woman at the next table is looking, across the river sparkling in the afternoon sunshine.

  OK, the boy says, but how does it know it’s grown up, why doesn’t it just keep on growing more legs?

  Sometimes in old films the camera pulls back from the intimate – the kiss, the fight, the horses being saddled – to show the backdrop panorama: the cityscape, its domes and spires and palaces, the snow-capped mountains. How beautiful, you think. And then just as you begin to suspect that it’s not for real, that it’s a painted backdrop, they cut to the next scene. The budget was tight, you can understand this, it wouldn’t stretch to a whole crew staying for months in a luxury scenic location. You can forgive, if there’s anything to be forgiven, which there isn’t. But not too tight for a painter to paint that landscape, with all the hours of research and the patience of each brushstroke, even though it will be on screen for barely more than a second.

  Just Watch Me

  Lesley Glaister

  Exhausted from a fit of coughing, he sits hunched over in the bed. She lays her hand between his shoulder blades. The skin is clammy, the pores a field of tiny gasping flowers. When she touches her lips there, the taste is salt. On his right shoulder there’s a tattoo, the Chinese character for wisdom he says, but he could have told her anything. How would she know? Years have blurred the design and now it could be a fading bruise, a mesh of broken capillaries, a leak of blood beneath the skin.

  ‘Coming to bed, then?’ His tone is tetchy. He strains further forward to peel away from her palm. He reaches for and struggles into his pyjama jacket, shrugging off her attempts to help. He suffers from sweats and chills, and now he’s chilly; she can see the pimpling of his skin.

  ‘In a tick,’ she says.

  He settles back against the pillows, reaches for his book and reading glasses.

  ‘Can I get you anything?’ she asks.

  He clears his throat, gives her a professorial look from over the specs, and finds his page. He sits motionless in the attitude of one about to read, waiting for her to leave.

  In the bathroom she brushes her teeth and unwinds a length of floss. The mirror above the basin is stippled with bits from between his teeth and hers. Disgusting really, if you look at it. The trick is to look through it, which she does as she distorts her face to fossick between her teeth. She sluices her mouth with mouthwash and treats the mirror to an ivory grimace.

  Bed then. The cold tap needs fixing, even when you screw it tight it trickles; she should call a plumber. A washer is all it needs. That trickling. Her bare feet contract on the lino as it tickles free a memory. That comically awful room in where was it? Somewhere hot and dissolute. Naples? Venice? You had to go down a flight of dirty stairs to get to the lavatory or shower, but in the bedroom, only inches from the bed, there was a bidet with a trickling tap.

  They’d had to avoid each other’s eyes as they were shown the room. It was funny, of course, but oddly disturbing. At least it had disturbed Rose.

  ‘It makes sex seem like something dirty,’ she said, when the stout, whiskery landlady had left them alone.

  ‘It is something dirty,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that the point?’

  This was before they were married, before Gina, before the gaps between her teeth or the rubbery folds around her waist.

  She’d pulled her dress over her head and stood in her sandals and knickers watching him wriggle out of his jeans. That flat, darkly furred stomach, the tautness of it, always
made her catch her breath. His skin was dark against hers, hot against hers, and the sex was dirty there in the stuffy little room. Dirty, but beautiful too.

  It was where Gina had been started, though of course they didn’t know that till some weeks later. And it was definitely Venice, glittering Venice with its stench of drains.

  Afterwards she made him shut his eyes while she squatted, hot feet on the cool marble and squirted a jet of water onto her swollen flesh. As she dabbed herself dry, she noticed that his eyes weren’t quite shut, that he was watching through his lashes.

  ‘I told you not to look!’ she said.

  ‘I love to watch when you don’t know.’

  She stepped into her knickers and his eyes followed them up her legs.

  ‘Don’t stare.’

  She turned away to put on her dress. She’d bought the dress especially for this holiday – pale blue cotton, halter-necked to show her shoulders off. That her shoulders were the loveliest part of her was her own and private opinion – especially when lightly tanned. She’d have liked to make herself look nice – to primp a bit – in private. It made her self-conscious that he was sprawled there, quite relaxed in his nakedness, hands behind his head, watching her every move. She brushed her hair hard and pulled it back – a little too tightly – in a rubber band.

  ‘Let’s go for a beer,’ he said and yawned and stretched luxuriously. ‘God, I love holidays.’

  They walked in silence to a pavement café and he ordered beer and she a cup of tea. All the shaded spots had gone and they had to sit in the full glare of the sun. He was wearing a white shirt and looked darkly devastating. She saw a woman gawping at him from another table and felt both annoyed and proud. The skin on the back of her neck began to tighten in the sun and she let down her hair to cover it. The tea was disappointing, a bag floating in warm water. She had only chosen it to make some sort of obscure point, and she eyed his coolly beaded glass of lager enviously.

  ‘So, what’s up then?’ he asked, in a tone of exaggerated patience.

  ‘You promised not to look,’ she said.

  ‘You’re not still sulking over that! Christ! You should be glad I want to look.’

  ‘How do you like being stared at?’ She dropped a greenish sliver of lemon into her cup.

  ‘Doesn’t bother me.’

  ‘Even if I watched you doing something private?’

  ‘You can watch me do anything you like.’

  ‘Anything?’

  He lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, leant back and extended his crossed legs. It was like a challenge.

  ‘Have a shit?’ she whispered pathetically.

  He hooted. ‘If you want.’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Do you want?’

  ‘Of course not!’ Blushing, she gulped her tea.

  They sat in silence and she watched him watch other women flaunt past, until he said: ‘Remind me, Rose. What are we arguing about?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Aware of the eyes of the other woman on him, she leaned forward to touch his knee and he smiled, believing himself forgiven. No not forgiven, in his opinion there was nothing to forgive, but believing she’d got over her silly tizz.

  Now she switches on the shower, undoes her dressing gown. She notices mould on the shower-curtain; you can get a spray for that. It gets harder to lift her leg over the side of the bath but she does it and stands under the warm, irregular sprinkle of water. Get a power-shower, Gina says. Gina picks holes when she comes home now – get a this, get a that – and brings rubber gloves with her. However did they spawn such a clean-freak child, and out of that lovely dirtiness?

  Although it’s bed time, she lets her hair get wet. She lathers her body with gardenia soap, enjoying the fragrance, the slickness of her skin. One day she’ll cut her toe-nails, but not tonight. Tonight they are too far away.

  ‘Watch you do anything?’ she challenged later, after a bottle of wine.

  ‘Anything.’

  His eyes were so dark then, with such a spark. Dark light you’d say if that wasn’t nonsense. That holiday they were at it all the time, but she never used the bidet in the room again, preferring to wrap herself in his musky shirt and go downstairs to wash in private. He didn’t care. He would even kneel and pee in the bidet, only a couple of feet from her head. And later, as he slept, she’d lie and listen to the trickle of the leaky tap, like something silver running through the night.

  Can’t go to bed with dripping hair, she’ll soak the pillow and wake up a fright. She turbans her hair in a towel, puts on her dressing gown and pours a little brandy, just a teeny one. Brandy on a Tuesday night. Decadent; whatever would Gina say? She swigs it down. Tastes vile along alongside the mint of mouthwash – but it’s cheering. Is it Tuesday, after all?

  The gas-fire lights with a gasp of surprise – this time of night! She kneels before it, teasing out the tangles, allowing the orange glow to warm and dry her hair. The bones in her knees press uncomfortably against the rug, an old stained thing that still smells of the last dog – and he died years ago. She sighs. Get a new one – rug not dog. Sometimes Gina has a point. There are teak shelves running up either side of the fireplace and on each a dusty treasure that has been there years: souvenirs, framed photographs, and at the bottom, something she’d forgotten, a pebble painted to look like a snail. Rose fishes it out and weighs it in her hand. Gina painted this for Eric for Fathers’ Day, when she was 7 or 8, and he used it as a paperweight. Rose smiles at the clever way it’s painted, very precise and almost life-like – very Gina. And then she puts the pebble back.

  He never hid the evidence. When she found the note it was folded under this paperweight. She was in his study, dusting maybe, or just poking around, and had lifted the paperweight to admire it – not seeing the note at first.

  And then the paper, smart blue Basildon Bond, caught her eye.

  Idly, she picked it up and read.

  You fool. Dear fool. How can something that’s so wrong feel so right? Here’s your other cuff-link. Do be careful! Before too long . . . Pxxx

  She read it twice. There was only one thing it could possibly mean. And he’d put it under Gina’s paperweight. That was the worst thing, seemed, ridiculously, the worst thing in that first moment of knowing. And because she couldn’t bear the note to touch Gina’s work of art, she left it unfolded and un-weighed down, which he might have noticed. But if he did, he never said.

  It was around this time that he started doing ‘over-time’ and what a cliché. She felt almost sorry for him when he came back with his excuses, hardly excuses at all, excuses so lame they needed zimmer frames to help them through the door.

  ‘You’re late,’ she remarked one night, looking up from the news.

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Work?’

  ‘Sort of, got held up with a . . . thing.’ He looked ruffled, stubbly, tired. By then he’d started wearing specs and the light reflecting in them hid the beauty of his eyes, his hair was growing thin, his stomach soft, but someone fancied him. She was quite impressed by that. Not just impressed but terrified; not just terrified but riveted.

  Someone beginning with P: Pauline? Penelope? Patricia? She didn’t know anyone beginning with P who was the least bit likely. When she did the laundry she examined his clothes for traces. He was having sex with P, she could tell this from the curious wrong tang of his underwear. Once she found a curly auburn hair caught in the weave of a sock. Often she would catch the edge of perfume – a heavy sophisticated musk or crushed orchid smell – certainly nothing like her own fresh and simple eau de rose.

  And then, one day, quite by accident, she saw him – saw them. On a Saturday morning, after a furtively taken phone call, he claimed he had to go into the office to sort out some emergency, but would be home by six at the latest. They had people coming for dinner and he promised to be there to set the table, open the wine; all the difficult stuf
f, she’d muttered.

  She saw him enter the Goat and Thistle. At least, she thought so, not absolutely certain at first. She’d caught a sloping shoulder, a jacket the right shade of green, but the glimpse had been too quick for her to be sure.

  What had taken her to town that day? Hair, was it her hair? It must have been her hair. She walked past the pub and turned the corner – yes, it must have been her hair; the salon was down that cobbled street. But there was time before her appointment and she had turned back, passed the pub once more. The door swung open on her third perambulation belching beery air and smoke. She could do with using the Ladies, she thought, and why not have a snack there? It was lunchtime, after all. Going into a pub alone was not something she had ever done, but there was no law against it.

  The interior was gloomy and dominated by the flashing neon of games machines – Kerang – Lucky Strike – Gold Rush. The bar was L-shaped with booths of seats and tables and stools along the bar. She wore a breezy preoccupied expression; if she ran into him she was ready to express surprise. If he turned out to be alone, she’d join him; if he were not alone, as he was likely not to be – what then? She gulped in a breath and went to the bar.

  ‘Yup?’ the youngster behind it said. He was chewing gum and she winced at the squelch of it.

  ‘Small shandy,’ she said, picked up the curling laminated menu, and chose at random. ‘And a cheese and onion roll.’

  ‘Right,’ he said, and snapped his gum. ‘Sit down, I’ll bring it over.’

  The leatherette seats in the empty booth looked sticky. She peered round the corner to where the dartboard and lavatory entrances were. More empty tables there – she took a step and then she saw the back of Eric’s head. He was facing away from her, in one of the booths. Opposite was P or at least Rose assumed it was P. Her heart did a frantic stutter and she turned, looked at the door. Should she flee? Why had she ordered cheese and onion when it was bound to repeat on her all day? She could do with a brandy rather than a shandy. What was she doing? What on earth did she think she was doing?