The Best British Short Stories 2013

by Nicholas Royle

  3

  Shazia, pressing her hand over the mouthpiece of her telephone, said: ‘You’re late.’

  ‘It’s a long story.’

  Shazia grinned. ‘I saw the first four acts.’ She widened her eyes, expecting gossip. But, as Ines dumped her bag and slumped into her chair, a tropical-grade shit-storm broke over the world of traded reinsurance and for the next seven hours neither she nor Shazia had time to talk. A tidal wave of greed and fear rushed west towards them, gathering pace as one by one the eastern markets closed, until the wave broke, somewhere over Amsterdam and they were done and could leave the Yanks to wipe up the mess. They reckoned they were maybe just the tiniest fraction of a point ahead. But at least they hadn’t lost, and it was the weekend.

  They were waiting for four Bloody Marys – it saved time queuing – when Shazia demanded details. ‘You weren’t sick on the tube?’

  Ines told her some of it, while Shazia listened, open-mouthed. ‘This happened? This isn’t something you daydreamed on the way in?’

  Ines shook her head.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’ Ines paid for the drinks and they shoved their way to a corner where there was a shelf large enough to put their glasses down.

  ‘You must have realised? I mean, come on.’

  Ines thought about the picture of the man with the two girls. But she wasn’t going to mention that, not even to Shazia. Instead she said that as she left the house that morning – a between-the-wars semi like her own, but with a gate on the right hand side of the garden, not the left – as soon as she began walking to the tube, it was obvious what had happened. She’d just turned the wrong way.

  Shazia said, ‘Well that explains everything.’

  ‘Last night. At Bank, you know?’ Ines said. ‘Where you go down the escalator, and then back on yourself and down again, and then turn right for northbound and left for south, or whichever way it is. I do it every day and I still couldn’t say for sure. I just don’t look. But, whatever, I must have turned the wrong way. By the time I got to the station this morning I was sure it was going to be Morden, Collier’s Wood, something like that.’

  ‘And was it?’

  ‘South Wimbledon.’

  ‘Class.’ Shazia lived in Clerkenwell; Ines somewhere further north than Shazia said she’d ever been, somewhere just below the M25.

  They finished their first drinks, started the second. When it looked like Ines wasn’t going to say anything more, Shazia said, ‘Was he cute?’

  Ines honestly didn’t know: she hadn’t looked.

  ‘So he could be?’

  ‘That’s not the point.’

  ‘It’s always the point. If he’s cute, you could have this whole secret life thing going on. How exciting is that? You could just disappear into the fantasy world of . . . South Wimbledon.’ Shazia’s straight face cracked. Choking on laughter and vodka she pointed at Ines: ‘Your face!’

  ‘I don’t want to disappear. I don’t want a new start. That’s what men do.’

  Shazia sighed. ‘Men, right.’

  ‘Right. Men rip everything up and start again when they can’t cope with what they’ve got.’ Then she thought of the photo on the fridge, of the man and the two girls, arms around each other, smiling, eyes screwed up against the sunshine.

  ‘So what did you tell Rob?’

  ‘I crashed at your place?’

  Shazia shook her head, but it was mock disbelief, not refusal.

  Ines thought she was the best. An angel.

  Shazia said, ‘And tonight?’

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  Ines looked at her friend, whose face was not quite in focus.

  ‘At Bank. Tonight. Are you turning left or right?’

  4

  It had been a good week. Grief had kept its distance, slinking like a cowed dog in the shadows, never coming up too close. The twins hadn’t mentioned their mother; there’d been no junk mail in her name. But this afternoon he’d left work early, knowing what would happen. The bank had written to them both: their fixed-rate mortgage deal – the deal she had arranged – was about to expire; if they did nothing the monthly payments would go up a hundred pounds or so. Another hundred pounds he didn’t have, on top of all the other hundreds of pounds he didn’t have now she wasn’t here, wasn’t working, wasn’t being paid.

  In the bank he sat at a wooden table in a frosted glass box while an adviser showed him leaflets, scribbling rings around figures with a ball-point pen. She said they could save him money, then gave him the forms and said to bring them in when he and his wife had both signed. And there it was, the black dog, snarling, saliva dripping from its teeth.

  ‘I’ve been through this.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I’ve been through this with you – with this bank – a hundred times.’

  ‘I don’t understand, Mr Bridges. It’s a joint mortgage; we need both your signatures.’

  He found himself goading the dog on. ‘I wish to God I could get my wife to sign the forms, but I can’t. I can’t.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Watch my lips. I don’t. Have. A wife.’

  She said, ‘I’m very sorry, Mr Bridges. If . . . there’s been . . . some change in your circumstances . . . ’

  And he was off, roaring, now. ‘Change? That’s the problem, isn’t it? Nothing changes. Five years. Five years. You know this. I’m not divorced. She’s not dead. She’s missing. If she were dead the insurance would pay the whole fucking mortgage and I wouldn’t have to be here!’

  The door to the glass box opened. Two men in suits stood in the corridor. The older one said, ‘Is everything all right, Alice?’

  He’d done what he could. He’d reported her disappearance to the police. She’d gone to work, he said. She’d left her phone, her keys and her insulin on the kitchen table, and just not come back. The policewoman made notes, and he said forgetting stuff wasn’t that unusual. It wasn’t the point. She had spare medicine at work. But no one had seen her since Thursday morning. The policewoman told him not to worry. Lots of people go missing: three quarters turn up within forty-eight hours. But it was already Saturday. He hadn’t reported it on Friday because he thought she might have gone out after work and stayed over with a friend. She did that sometimes. The policewoman said ninety-nine percent turned up within a year. A year? A year? He’d thought she was going to say a week or two.

  Later, when a year had passed and he’d put up posters and trawled the internet and a friend had made him a website so people could report they’d seen her; when he’d followed up the first few sightings and been to Hove and Middlesbrough and Cardiff with photos in his hand, and had caught himself about to buy a ticket to Denver, Colorado; when he’d had a serious conversation with someone at the support group about visiting a medium, even though he’d never, ever believed in all that crap; when, after all that, he read on one of the sites he still looked at that 210,000 people are reported missing in England and Wales every year, and he calculated that, even if ninety-nine percent turned up – one way or another, because he knew by now they didn’t all turn up alive, or happy to be found – setting that aside, he worked out, even one percent still meant that more than two thousand people simply vanished – for ever – each and every year: about six a day, every day.

  Had he done everything he could? Of course he hadn’t. And if he had, what difference would it make?

  Just a week ago, Aimee had said it would be her friend Rosie’s birthday at the weekend and she was going to sleep over at Rosie’s house, OK? And he had said it wasn’t. It was not OK. He said you had to plan these things, you couldn’t just up and disappear without talking to people first. Aimee said she was talking to him. She said: ‘No wonder Mum walked out!’ He knew it was a teenage ritual, but he still fe
lt sick, winded. He felt as if he’d never breathe again. He felt the way he’d felt when Aimee, as a toddler, had waddled between parked cars out into the road and he’d watched, paralysed, as a taxi driver slammed his brakes and swerved and the wheels of his monstrous cab rolled over her feet. He shouted, at the toddler, at the teenager. He howled and raged and part of him watched, a small voice in the back of his head saying, Is that the best that you can do?

  5

  It took seven years, but when the sonographer somehow plucked twins from the blizzard of their early scans they were as happy and scared and excited as any parents could be. When it became clear that the twins were conjoined, they listened to the doctors and they read reports Rob printed off the internet and they knew that they would cope. They read about Chang and Eng Bunker, the ‘Siamese Twins’ who travelled with PT Barnum’s Circus; about the Chalkhurst sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, born in Kent in the twelfth century and still commemorated in local cakes. They read about separation techniques and survival rates. The next time they saw the consultant he told them that, in a small number of cases – less than ten percent – one of the conjoined twins was smaller, less developed and parasitic on its larger sibling.

  Ines said, ‘Parasitic?’

  ‘It will never mature and cannot survive independently.’

  Rob said, ‘She.’

  They agreed, just before the birth, that they had no choice. The parasitic twin would die, the doctors could say that at least. But about her host – her sister, Rob said – they were less secure: her life was bracketed around with percentages.

  Rob said the percentages made no difference, and she agreed. Now that they had come this far, there was no choice.

  6

  When he got back from the bank he found a letter for Mrs Bridges – she rarely used her married name – from a catalogue company; on his laptop was an email from a man who’d seen her in Coalville, which turned out to be in Leicestershire. He opened the letter in case she’d made a purchase that might give him some kind of clue, at least tell him she had been alive.

  It was a random mail-shot.

  Nicole came into the kitchen. She stood behind his chair, laid her chin on his shoulder. She said she’d finished her homework, would he like her to cook dinner? He asked where Aimee was.

  ‘Drum class, Dad. It’s Thursday.’

  Aimee came home just before six, and he caught a look between the girls that said what kind of day he’d had. She said, ‘Hi, Dad. You’re home early.’

  Nicole said, ‘He went to the bank.’

  ‘And?’

  Nicole shook her head.

  Aimee said, ‘Shit.’

  He looked up, let it go.

  Sometimes, she came back. He’d leave the door unlocked and sometimes, like tonight, when the girls were asleep and the house was quiet, he’d pour himself a whisky – even though he had work tomorrow – and take the tumbler and the bottle up to her study in the attic and scour the internet for signs, for any faint electromagnetic trace she might have left to prove she was alive. Or dead. No longer knowing which he wanted most. It was on nights like these that he would creep downstairs to bed at two or three a.m., and she would come home, late from some work do, and slip silently into bed beside him; he would wrap an arm around her waist and kiss the back of her neck. She would not be there in the morning. Sometimes he wondered what he would do if she ever were.

  He put the letter back in its envelope. The gummed strip was sticky enough to re-seal. He turned it over, crossed out her name and wrote: Not known at this address.

  7

  That night, at Bank, she hugged and kissed Shazia goodbye. She took the escalator down, then down again. At the bottom, she turned left, or right – whichever – and caught the train that came. She would plough on, knowing it would make no difference now that she had come this far, knowing it would work itself out anyway.

  Even Pretty Eyes Commit Crimes

  MJ Hyland

  I’d walked home after a twelve-hour nightshift to save on bus fares, and to clear my head, and by the time I got to my flat, I was desperate for a shower and some kip.

  But there’d be no sleeping that morning: when I turned the corner, there was my father, sitting on my doorstep and holding a pineapple.

  He hadn’t told me he was coming and I’d no idea what he was doing there. We hadn’t seen each other for a few months, mostly because I’d stopped inviting him round. Things weren’t good between me and my wife and I didn’t want him to know about our troubles.

  ‘Hello, Dad.’

  ‘Ah, there you are, James.’

  ‘What are you doing here so early?’

  ‘It’s after eight o’clock. I was about to head off. I thought you’d be home earlier.’

  My father didn’t wear a watch but seemed always to know the time.

  ‘I had to stay on a bit longer,’ I said. ‘The ward was short-staffed and ten hours turned into twelve.’

  Besides the pineapple he had nothing else with him, not even his briefcase, which he took everywhere. He was dressed like a tourist; crisp, clean khaki shorts, long white socks and a short-sleeved shirt. ‘I was hoping to chat with you for a minute,’ he said. ‘If that’s alright.’

  Chatting on the doorstep was the last thing I wanted. Not with the sun boring a hole in the back of my neck.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘But I’ll be hitting the sack soon.’

  ‘I won’t keep you long, son. You must be knackered.’

  He was right, but he didn’t know the half of it.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ I said. ‘I’ve been on the graveyards for six weeks.’

  ‘Graveyard shifts! I bet there aren’t many in St Vincent’s who like you saying that.’

  ‘Dead right,’ I said.

  He smiled, and I did too.

  The next-door neighbours’ dogs started barking then, loud and sharp. They were old dogs, kept tied to a concrete post with short ropes, and when the day was gearing up to be a scorcher, they seemed to sense they’d soon run out of water, and then the barking started, panicked and piercing.

  My father shook his head.

  ‘Those Italians need to train their Kelpies to stop barking,’ he said.

  ‘Or look after them better.’

  ‘You should call the RSPCA.’

  ‘I will. You’re right.’

  He shook his head. ‘Poor sods.’

  I was desperate to go inside, rest my legs and get rid of my hot shoes and socks.

  ‘So, do you want to come in?’

  ‘If it’s not too much trouble.’

  ‘We’d best be quiet, though,’ I said. ‘Janice won’t be out of bed yet.’

  I held out my hand – to help him up from the doorstep.

  ‘Here, Dad. Grab hold.’

  ‘I’m alright,’ he said. ‘No need.’

  I’d had thirty years to get used to Australian summers, long days with no distinct parts – hot in the morning, noon and night – with a glare that came off every footpath and parked car; a heat so strong it’d killed dozens of people; mostly pale Brits and the like, who went outback in brand-new caravans, all done up with extra cupboards and foldaway-beds, and never came out again.

  My father, on the other hand, was made better by the sun; it made him even more buoyant. He might’ve been sixty-five, but on that morning, I was more beaten and tired than he’d ever been.

  ‘Where’s your car?’

  ‘At the mechanics.’

  I hadn’t noticed my car was gone but it wasn’t at the mechanics, and that meant my wife had taken it, and she didn’t like to drive; not unless she had a load of shopping and needed the boot or she had some passengers.

  ‘Let’s get inside,’ I said.

  My father went in ahead of me and while I took off my shoes, he stood in the hallway and took a
long, hard look round.

  He peered through the opened doors into the lounge-room, kitchen and bedroom and this wasn’t idle prying: he was looking for Janice, and he was looking for her because he suspected her of straying, the same way he’d suspected my mother.

  ‘Where’s Janice?’ he said. ‘She works in the afternoons, doesn’t she?’

  ‘She’s probably gone to the shops.’

  She hadn’t gone to the shops and it was obvious the bed hadn’t been slept in, and wherever she was, she must’ve taken off during the night, probably not long after our fight over money and after she said this as I was heading out the door for work:

  ‘You’re boring now, James.’

  So, maybe it was over. The way she’d said this had a cool and expert tone, a bit like my mother’s tone when she analysed people, mostly people she didn’t like, or couples who sit in cafés reading the newspaper and not talking to each other. ‘They’re boring each other,’ my mother used to say. ‘They’re probably only days away from divorce.’

  While I changed into a pair of sandals, my father looked at the wedding photos on the wall above the phone table.

  ‘I had more hair then, didn’t I?’

  ‘Yes, and I was a bit taller.’

  I’m not sure why I said this, except maybe that when I looked at the photographs of me and Janice – taken two years ago – both of us all done up in our finery, I looked happy, probably happier than I really was. That’s the problem with photographs.

  ‘The shops don’t open till nine,’ he said. ‘Maybe she’s gone to that Jewish deli. The one down on Florence Street. They even make bagels on Christmas Day.’

  ‘I don’t know, Dad. But it doesn’t really matter. She’ll be back soon enough.’

  I’d no idea where she’d gone, and if she was gone for good this time, and my father was going to see the very thing he’d predicted the last time he’d come round to the flat. Janice had gone off to stay with her sister for a few days and my father said, ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying, but Janice even looks a bit like your mother. Don’t you think? And she’s . . . what? Seven years younger than you? Not far off the difference between me and your mother . . .’ and on he went.