The Best British Short Stories 2013

by Nicholas Royle

  She forced in a breath. It was all right. Unless he turned, he would not see her. And P did not know her. She looked terrifying. Her hair was auburn, thick, upswept, and her lips darkly glossed. Of course she was younger, maybe fifteen years Rose’s junior, but in sophistication she seemed older, intimidatingly, maturely female. You couldn’t say she was beautiful and certainly not pretty, but she was all woman, attractive, sexy woman. And she was actual.

  She was leaning across the table towards Eric, talking intently. She had lines between her brows, arched brows, professionally plucked or waxed. Her skin had a proper made-up finish. She looked tended. Someone who took care of herself. Rose turned to leave. Nothing lost. She hadn’t even paid – but here came the youth with the roll on a tray, thick shards of onion protruding from white pap.

  ‘Here?’ he said, indicating a seat at a table.

  ‘No here.’ Rose pointed to one of the booths, from where she’d be less obtrusive but could continue to watch. She took a step towards the booth – that dark red, sticky seating – and she had to clutch the edge of the table, made unsteady suddenly by the thought of biting into all that onion. ‘I don’t feel . . . ’

  Alarmed, the youth banged down the tray, looked for help towards the bar where there was nobody to help. He took her arm steered her to the seat. ‘You all right?’ he said.

  ‘Just a . . . ’ she murmured.

  ‘Can I get you anything else?’ he said. ‘An aspirin p’raps?’

  He was a sweet boy, she saw. She forced her lips into a smile. ‘It’s all right,’ she mumbled, ‘thank you, I’ll be all right in a minute.’

  She sat and watched the bubbles crawl up the sides of her glass. One of the machines blurted out a fanfare followed by the chunter of coins. She turned to watch an elderly man shovel them into his jacket pockets; he did it in a feral surreptitious way and immediately started feeding them in again. He had hairs like stuffing coming out of his nose and the machine made his flesh flash red, yellow, green. This was the sort of pub Eric would refer to as ‘hole in the wall’; not the sort of place they went to together, on holiday say, not the sort of place any of their acquaintances would be likely to frequent; he would think himself quite safe.

  P got up and Rose put her head down, catching only a pair of pointed boots with sharpish little heels that clacked as she walked past. Rose flexed her toes in her own scuffed loafers. Eric hadn’t moved. Once P had passed, Rose leant out to have a better look. She was wearing a short jacket and skirt suit – and her hips were disproportionately wide, thighs solid under a nylon sheen. Something to get hold of, would be Eric’s opinion, she could almost hear him say it. Rose was a slight, small bosomed person, with bitten nails and straggly eyebrows. What a contrast he was having.

  She picked the onion out of her roll and took a bite of bread and cheese, which tasted strongly of margarine. The food wadded itself against the roof of her mouth and she had to swallow hard to send it down. She took a sip of shandy; and stood to go. As she passed the bar, P turned and Rose caught the expression in her eyes, all flirty bright and bold – and fixed on Eric.

  The air outside had a new bite to it, and the daylight, after the dim interior, seemed shimmery and reckless. She was late for her appointment but didn’t apologise. She had her hair cut shorter than ever before, and sipped strong sweet coffee to try to stop the trembling of her hands.

  At the dinner party that night she drank too much, laughed too loudly and burned the boeuf en croute. Their friends left early, looking quite alarmed. And when they’d gone, she took a rather startled Eric to bed. It was interesting to see his body, to feel him in action, as a stranger would. As P did. What did she see in him? What did they do together? How did Rose compare?

  Afterwards, they sat up in bed, each with their book. His the biography of a Labour politician, hers a novel.

  ‘Thought I saw you today,’ she remarked, idly turning an unread page.

  ‘Unlikely,’ he said, without looking up.

  ‘In town – I was in for my hair.’

  ‘It’s nice,’ he said. ‘Takes years off.’

  ‘You think so? What if I dyed it red?’

  He frowned and went on reading.

  She nursed the affair as if it was her child. After Gina there had been miscarriages and a full-term stillbirth, a boy, dark-haired, firm browed and terribly, utterly still. A boy that Eric wouldn’t have mentioned, a boy that had left an empty twitchy sensation in Rose’s arms for all those years.

  She tried not to become obsessed with the affair, but it was a hobby of a sort, an interest. It was a project. She wanted it to run its course and then to end. Like a dog let off the lead to roam in the park, Eric was allowed this adventure, providing, like a dog, he came home when it was over.

  Rose made it easy for him. She never quizzed him about his lateness, or why he’d suddenly become indispensable in the office on Saturdays. She never asked him why he smelled wrong. She’d take his clothes from the washing hamper and bury her nose there trying to give a name to the smell – it wasn’t frankly sexual, more mucky sweet – digestive biscuit and hamster cage was the nearest she could get – and always a trace of that heavy perfume. She found theatre tickets in his wallet once; she found the receipt for a lavish cookery book. That hurt. Rose was a damn fine cook, Eric liked to say, and she hated to think herself rivalled in that area; it seemed more of a betrayal for him to enjoy another woman’s food than to sleep with her. And he can rarely actually have slept with her. Maybe a ten-minute post-coital doze, but never the journey of a full night.

  Not until Brighton anyway. Every year for the past decade he’d taken Rose along to the annual conference – many of his colleagues took their wives or husbands. There were dinners in the evening and over the years she’d made friends with other spouses, during they day they’d shop and lunch and swim together. And after the conference, when all the others had gone, Rose and Eric got into the habit of staying on for a day or two, just lazing, making love in the afternoons, spending time together, romantic time. A dirty weekend he called it, though it was never the weekend. But it would usually be dirty enough in its way, for her anyway, if not, maybe, for him.

  And then that year – the year of P – he said, casually over dinner, ‘I thought you might give the conference a miss this year. There’s been cut-backs and I know the others aren’t going – Matt’s wife; Peter’s wife. It’s a pared down affair, a shame but there you are.’

  She can remember looking down at her pale blue dinner plate, the slice of quiche half eaten, the innocent new potatoes, the tomatoes in their peppered oil, the pooling green of that oil soaking into the pastry as she waited for her expression to obey her.

  ‘I might come anyway,’ she said when she was able to raise her eyes. ‘We can still have our time.’ She took a mouthful of the quiche but her throat had closed up and it clumped damp and inert on her tongue as he continued, with smooth confidence:

  ‘Let’s wait till the end of the month, shall we? Have a proper holiday instead?’

  She hadn’t answered and he’d taken that as yes. Rose had checked that it was the same hotel, and by phoning Peter’s wife had ascertained that his lie was just that, an utter lie. There were no cut-backs, other spouses would be there. Other spouses and P, of course.

  When he returned from the conference she washed his clothes and didn’t ask him how it went. But she did begin to check his diary. On Wednesday, after the list of meetings, there was scrawled a ‘P’. And on Wednesday Eric came home late and weary. In bed Rose sniffed his shoulder and caught the scent of unfamiliar soap. The following Monday, he had jotted ‘P’ again. By 5.30 Rose was waiting outside the office. She wore a raincoat, far too large, borrowed from a neighbour and had tied a headscarf over her hair. It wasn’t much of a disguise and, of course, had Eric bothered to look he’d have recognised her. If he did, she was ready to say she was just passing, an
d what about a drink? But stopping him wasn’t her purpose.

  She waited in a doorway across the road from his office exit. It was a blowy day and rubbish tangled round her feet. The wind was nasty, sharp edged, the sort that can blow tears from your eyes. He came out at 6.30, head down, preoccupied, and hurried away. She followed him to a small hotel; of course it would be a hotel. Just before 7, P arrived, the wind messing her hair, her fur collar pulled tight around her throat. P stepped into the revolving door and so, one revolution behind her, did Rose.

  The lobby was bright with mirrors and pale furniture and on the reception desk a bowl of green apples gleamed as if polished. P went to the reception desk and Rose went too. She stood beside P and saw, with a frisson of alarm, that her wedding finger was empty. Her nails were dangerous curves of vermilion and Rose scrunched her own bitten nails into her palms.

  ‘I’m meeting Mr Thomas,’ P said. Rose winced. He could at least have used a pseudonym.

  A smooth-faced girl looked in the register. ‘Room 12, lift to your left,’ she said.

  ‘Do you have a brochure?’ Rose said, standing, perhaps, a bit too close. ‘I’m thinking of staying.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ P said and stepped round her.

  ‘Do I know you?’ Rose asked her.

  P’s eyes were hazel, her lashes clumpy black; her front teeth were square and lipstick smudged, the smell of fur and perfume coming off her was almost sickening. She looked less polished, not as perfect this close to, nor as intimidatingly poised. ‘I do not think so,’ she said. She had an accent of some kind; Spanish was it? ‘Please excuse me.’ She went towards the lift and Rose hastened to the stairs. It was not her plan but she couldn’t help herself.

  ‘Madam?’ the girl called after her. ‘Your brochure?’

  The stairs were carpeted in a migraine-inducing pattern; abstract prints hung up the walls. Rose reached the first floor as the lift wheezed open and P stepped out and turned towards Room 12. Rose watched. She watched the swing of P’s hips inside her coat, she watched her pause outside the door, take out a lipstick, wind it up, press it to her lips and blot them with a tissue. She watched her lick a finger and slick each eyebrow. She watched her pat her hair before she knocked. She watched the door open and swallow the woman. And then she stood and watched the door, for twenty minutes or so. It was a perfectly ordinary door with a brass number 12 and a spyhole like a fish’s eye, but only for looking out of. If she could have peered in, would she? She caught a movement and jumped at the pallid blur of her own reflection, in the glass over an abstract nightmare in black and red.

  After a time she took the lift down; the interior smelled, she thought, faintly of that furry musk, a crushed and vaguely meaty smell.

  ‘Watch me do anything,’ he’d said.

  Hair dry enough now, she brushes it, enjoying the painful snarl of tangles. She rubs in the rose body cream he’s bought her every year since their first Christmas. She unfolds a fresh nightie enjoying the smooth, ironed cotton falling over her skin. Eyes might dim and hearing fade, sense of taste become less acute but the sense of touch, that doesn’t go.

  Her bare soles pick up grit from the landing carpet. Tomorrow she’ll get out the vacuum, have a proper go at it. How hard to stay clean for even a moment in this world.

  Eric’s asleep, his mouth hanging open, trailing drool. She eases the book from his hand, picks up the postcard he uses as a bookmark. It’s a view of Venice, sent by Gina many years ago.

  Dear Mum and Dad, I know how you love the city, and so do I. Though it’s a bit smelly isn’t it? Went all down the Grand Canal in a Gondola. Love you, Gina.

  Rose puts it in the book and closes it. Gently she removes Eric’s specs, putting them on top of the book ready for him to reach for in the morning.

  She bends down to look more closely at his face, bleached to a weird radiance by his special daylight lamp. You can see the ghost of the sexy man – sexy man she managed to keep despite it all. After he’d dropped P there’d been no one much; no one serious, and he’d been flattened, quieter, tireder. But he’d been there.

  She examines the line of the nose, the shape of lips, thin now, liverish and wet. Behind them the teeth are grey. No one would want to kiss those lips now, no other woman. The breath that struggles out between them has a smell she does not want to recognise. The whole room has taken on that smell.

  She goes to the window and draws back the curtain to allow in the freshness of a summer night. Light from the room slants down onto the daisy-spattered lawn: all those tiny pursed up petals glowing.

  Watch me do anything, he said. He hasn’t many weeks to go, the doctor tells her. And she will be here, watching.

  Hostage

  Guy Ware

  I knew you once: but in Paradise,

  If we meet, I will pass nor turn my face.

  ­– Browning

  1

  All the way home she had the feeling something wasn’t right. It was late, but not too late for the last train, and dark on the walk from the station – but what would she expect? Autumn had almost collapsed into winter: the last leaves huddled around streetlights like pickets at a brazier, throwing the pavements into irregular, shifting shadow. She was drunk, of course, but that wasn’t it. Outside the station the road works that had been there in the morning, that had been there for weeks, weren’t there. The corner shop was closed, its windows shuttered and blank. It was after midnight . . . of course it was shut. She was just drunk.

  The team had been out after work, because it was Thursday and the markets had been up and down, but mostly because it was Thursday. She and Shazia had downed a couple of margaritas before someone started in on pitchers of sangria. When the lights came on – bright, scouring lights that showed up all your pores – the bouncers held the doors open, letting cold November air do their work for them. They said, Haven’t you got homes to go to? Yes, she thought, she had.

  So: she was drunk – drunker than she probably ought to be at her age, on a Thursday; drunk enough to fall asleep on the train. Ordinary drunk, then – not paralytic, not like she couldn’t walk; and anyway, it wasn’t that. It was just something floating in the corner of her eye. Something tugging at her like a detail in a thriller she knew must be a clue if she could only work out why. Sometimes, she’d try to puzzle them out, but mostly she would just plough on, knowing it made no difference, knowing it would work itself out anyway.

  The back door was unlocked, the way he left it when she was out late. She dropped her case in the kitchen, by the table; in the dark she could just make out a small pile of keys, a mobile and a couple of letters, one from the bank.

  She climbed the stairs. Rob had rolled over to her side of the bed. She tipped him back as far as she dared and slipped in beside him. He rolled again and curled his arm around her, kissed the back of her neck, but she knew he was still asleep. She peeled him off and shoved him onto his back, hoping he wouldn’t snore.

  When she woke, his side of the bed was warm, but he wasn’t there. Then he was there, at the window, cracking open the blinds on a drear, grey winter’s morning, saying brightly: ‘Another day in paradise.’

  She curled herself tighter and pulled the sheet over her head. He said, ‘Don’t let your coffee get cold. Love you.’ Then he left.

  She thought she heard other voices – high, light, insubstantial – before the front door closed and a car engine coughed into life outside. She pushed back the sheet. She must be late. The grey November light was bright enough to pin shut her eyes. She opened them again more slowly.

  The blond IKEA wardrobe with the loose hinge was on the wrong side of the room. It should have been on the left, in the alcove between the fireplace and the bay window instead of on the right. She got out of bed, supporting her head with her hands, and opened the wardrobe door. The clothes were not hers. They were like hers: the labels and the styles seemed famili
ar, but familiar like memories, not like daily life. The shoes were mostly flats and there was no sign of the silk and mohair suit she usually wore to shore up a hangover. She picked something equally expensive but functional, and headed downstairs to the kitchen, where she found a table with three dirty bowls and glasses and, clasped to the fridge by a hinged magnetic frog, a photograph of a man being hugged by two identical girls, all tangles of dark shiny hair blown across perfect adolescent skin, upon whom she knew, with a sudden, cold-eyed sobriety beyond all doubt, she had never in her life set eyes before.

  2

  He had read, or heard – he could not now be sure which, or when; but the dictum had stuck in his head because it had seemed so extravagantly untrue – that all relationships are power relationships, that one partner always holds more power than the other, and that the power depends on the weakness of the other, on which of them needs the other more; no equilibrium is ever reached.

  A few years later, it had seemed to him true; it seemed to him, furthermore, that he had the power; that, of the two of them, it was she who needed him, he who could, if it came to it, just walk away.

  Then they had the girls – twins – and everything became harder. Harder to stay; harder even to imagine leaving, until one day – the girls would have been nine – he had watched Aimee screw up her eyes and push the plunger on the hypodermic in her diabetic mother’s thigh while Nicole looked on, her face a perfect blend of fascination and disgust, and he realised quite suddenly, without having thought of it for years, that he no longer had the power, that the woman he thought he had chosen to love had acquired reinforcements. It was now unthinkable for him to live without her strength, much less abandon it of his own accord. And then she disappeared.