Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups

by Ben Holden

  So – very quiet now – breathe deeply, follow her in . . .

  She Frequented Cemeteries

  by Dorthe Nors

  She started frequenting cemeteries that summer, preferring the ones others rarely visited. She could go straight from social events with white wine, canapés, and peripheral acquaintances, cycle to the nearest cemetery, and find the corner where no one ever really went. At the far end of Vestre Cemetery, by the Inuit and the Faeroese and the war graves, down by the disused chapel was a quiet spot. Well away from the plots where brewers, publishers, and prime ministers lay shoulder to shoulder and were dead. There was no edged grass, no small ponds with specially purchased ducks. Most of all, it resembled the hinterland of Jutland, depopulated and with plywood boards across the windows, and through it all a diagonal tunnel of willow trees. No one ever went there, so that was where she liked to go. In the same way, she was fond of the Jewish cemetery and the Catholic cemetery, and, provided she chose the right times and the right spots, Assistens Cemetery could be quiet, too.

  Her favorite, though, was just between Frederiksberg and Valby. It was best in the twilight. In late July the evenings were still long and the place was like an overgrown park. Walking along the paths in the cemetery she found the unkempt graves of long-forgotten painters and poets, and at the northern end she came across a section where roses grew everywhere. The bushes had grown over the stones, weeds had tangled up in them, and they were the same roses her mother had at home. Pink, with small flowers, and no one bothered to cut them back. When she got to this part of the cemetery she would stroll peacefully around the paths as if she was drawing arabesques with her feet.

  She was thirty-five years old and that summer she was avoiding her girlfriends. Now and then they would call her and ask about meeting up, but she would decline whenever possible. She knew they would be troubled by her situation, and that her way of dealing with what she claimed had happened would excite them and cause them to speculate impulsively. On a few occasions she tried to explain the situation to them, but it had not been pleasant. A few of them had tried to talk her out of it, suggesting her condition was the result of loneliness or biology. One had interrogated her. Was she quite sure, was it wise, wouldn’t it be better if . . . All of them wanted to give her advice, even if she didn’t need any. She knew why she was going to the cemeteries, why she continued to walk back and forth, and around and about, eating ice cream and rolling rose petals between her fingers. She was waiting, and while she was waiting she was putting something behind her and trying to find a new way of looking at the future. She walked slowly and if not devoutly then at least pensively and with a sense for the little things she didn’t feel she’d noticed for years. She saw the wild cats that lived in the bushes. She saw how they drank water from the pond in the middle of the cemetery. She saw the magpie’s young and the graves that had fallen in and the gravestones that had tipped over so it looked like the dead and their monuments were about to change places. As summer passed she saw the plants grown and fade, and some evenings she would pick a few of the pink roses and take them home with her to put in a vase on the bedside table. She thought mostly about how hard it was to be allowed to believe that good would arrive and how things would be when in spite of everything it did.

  What had happened wasn’t exactly spectacular. She had met a man. That was all. She loved him, and the way she loved him made her settle into a place inside her where intangible things took on natural substance. She felt at home there and she knew at some point she would look back on this summer as the one when she stopped holding back. Her feelings were strong and reciprocated. She sensed it, yet she knew also it would take some time before they could be together. He was in mourning for things he’d lost, and his mourning was unhurried. She could see that when he looked up at her from the table. But she was all right with it, because when he looked at her she was in no doubt and could abandon herself to the hope that he would bring all the good with him when he came.

  But there was no way she could explain this to her girlfriends. They demanded evidence. They wanted to know who had died, why he kept crying, and if it really wasn’t just his own fault. They wanted to know if she’d looked into him and if she knew what laying down arms involved. She mustn’t get her heart broken, they said. And all the time they jumped from floe to floe with their dreams of disappearing into the current, losing control, abandoning themselves. Always trying to fill in the empty spaces and keep things moving in the meantime. Doing their best to avoid going home too early to their little apartments that reminded them of coffee bars and bus shelters every time they stepped through the door. Love, nothing less. That was what they wanted. That was what they craved, unconditionally. It was what they talked about when they put their arms under hers and dragged her through the parks, as though the parks were eyes in a storm that had to be sat out, and now she had found it. But she couldn’t tell them. There was no way she could share it with them, so that summer she frequented cemeteries.

  She would focus on her job, including her hospitality duties, but when it was done she would get on her bike and be gone. In the early evening she would pass through the iron gates into Park Cemetery, stroll past the dead painters, the poets, and head for the place where the pink roses were. When she got there she would walk between the graves, and as she went she closed her eyes to the parts of reality the others were keeping a watch on and imagined the man, who could only be with her in spirit, lacing his fingers in hers. They would walk there in various scenarios, sometimes silently, but together. They would be walking there when he said he loved her. Things like that would be said as they walked side by side through the cemeteries in the various stages of their as-yet-uninitiated time together. She had no trouble picturing the man zigzagging in between the small plots with a child on his shoulders. She could see the man and the child leap out from among the bushes where the wild cats lived. She could feel him kiss her behind the cemetery toilets, see the child fall and hurt itself, hear the wheels of the buggy squeak. Often he would sit down on one of the benches a little farther on and pat the space beside him so she would sit there with him, and that was what she did.

  There was nothing secretive about it. She was in love with someone, and while it was going on she thought about the good that had happened and the good that was going to happen. The noise of traffic on Søndre Fasanvej and Roskildevej remained a distant hum as she stole names for the child from the gravestones, and it felt nice, the same way it felt nice to let her thoughts sink into the earth where one day they themselves would lie, white through to the bone and tangled up in each other while the world carried on above them. That was okay, she thought. That kind of death was a good thing, and she would tell him that when he came, and she would tell the child when it was old enough, and perhaps a particularly distraught girlfriend one day. Until then she would keep it to herself, frequent the cemeteries, waiting and occasionally squatting down to see the cats stretch their necks toward the water.

  (2008)

  Translated by Martin Aitken

  Daniel Hahn has over forty books to his name, as a writer, editor or translator. He is the co-editor of the award-winning Ultimate Book Guide series of reading guides for children and teenagers, and of The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature (the latter with Humphrey Carpenter (1946–2005) and Mari Prichard). He is currently chair of the Society of Authors.

  ★

  The Hug

  by Thom Gunn

  It was your birthday, we had drunk and dined

  Half of the night with our old friend

  Who’d showed us in the end

  To a bed I reached in one drunk stride.

  Already I lay snug,

  And drowsy with the wine dozed on one side.

  I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug,

  Suddenly, from behind,

  In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed:

  Your instep to my heel,

  My shoulder-blades aga
inst your chest.

  It was not sex, but I could feel

  The whole strength of your body set,

  Or braced, to mine,

  And locking me to you

  As if we were still twenty-two

  When our grand passion had not yet

  Become familial.

  My quick sleep had deleted all

  Of intervening time and place.

  I only knew

  The stay of your secure firm dry embrace.

  (1992)

  ★

  Going Up and Coming Down

  by Muriel Spark

  How many couples have met in an elevator (lift, ascenseur, ascensore or whatever you call it) throughout the world? How many marriages have resulted?

  In their elevator there is usually an attendant, sometimes not.

  She goes up and down every weekday. At the 1.05 crush and the 2.35 return she generally finds him in the crowded box; looking up at the floor number display, looking down at the floor. Sometimes they are alone. He, she discovers, comes down from the twenty-first.

  His office? On the board downstairs six offices are listed on the twenty-first floor: a law firm, a real estate office, an ophthalmologist, a Swiss chemicals association, a Palestine Potassium (believe it or not) agency, a rheumatologist. Which of these offices could he belong to? She doesn’t look at him direct, but always, at a glance, tests the ramifying possibilities inherent in all six concerns.

  He is polite. He stands well back when the crowd presses. They are like coins in a purse.

  One day she catches his eye and looks away.

  He notices her briefcase while she has her eyes on the floor numbers. Going down. Out she pours with the chattering human throng, turns left (the lobby has two entrances) and is gone. On the board down there are listed four offices on Floor 16, her floor. Two law firms, a literary agency and an office named W. H. Gilbert without further designation. Does she work for Mr Gilbert, he wonders. Is Gilbert a private detective? W. H. Gilbert may well be something furtive.

  Day by day she keeps her eyes on his briefcase of pale brown leather and wonders what he does. The lift stops at Floor 9, and in sidles the grey-haired stoutish man with the extremely cheerful smile. On we go; down, down. She wonders about the young man’s daily life, where does he live, where and what does he eat, has he ever read the Bible? She knows nothing, absolutely nothing except one thing, which is this: he tries to catch a glimpse of her when she is looking elsewhere or leaving the elevator.

  On the ground floor – seconds, and he’s gone. It is like looking out of the window of a train, he flashes by so quickly. She thinks he might be poorly paid up there on the twenty-first, possibly in the real estate office or with the expert on rheumatism. He must be barely twenty-five. He might be working towards a better job, but at the moment with very little left in his pocket after paying out for his rent, food, clothes and insect spray.

  Her long fair hair falls over her shoulders, outside her dark green coat. Perhaps she spends her days sending out membership renewal forms for Mr Gilbert’s arcane activity: ‘Yes, I want to confirm my steadfast support for the Cosmic Paranormal Apostolic Movement by renewing my subscription’, followed by different rates to be filled in for the categories: Individual Member, Couple, and Senior Citizen/Unwaged/Student.

  Suppose there is a power failure?

  She looks at his briefcase, his tie. Everything begins in a dream. In a daydream she has even envisaged an inevitable meeting in a room in some place where only two could be, far from intrusions, such as in a barn, taking shelter from a storm, snowed up. Surely there is some film to that effect.

  He does not have the married look. That look, impossible to define apart from a wedding ring, absent in his case, is far from his look. All the same, he could be married, peeling potatoes for two at the weekend. What sign of the zodiac is his? Has there been an orchard somewhere in his past life as there has in hers? What TV channels does he watch?

  Her hair hangs over her shoulders. He wonders if she dyes it blonde; her pubic hairs are possibly dark. Is she one of those girls who doesn’t eat, so that you pay an enormous restaurant bill for food she has only picked at?

  One night the attendant is missing. They are alone. Homicidal? – Could it possibly be? He would only have to take off his tie if his hands alone weren’t enough. But his hands could strangle her. When they get out at the ground floor he says, ‘Good night,’ and is lost in the crowd.

  Here in the enclosed space is almost like bundling. He considers how, in remote parts, when it was impossible for a courting man to get home at night, the elders would bundle a couple; they would bundle them together in their clothes. The pair breathed over each other but were mutually inaccessible, in an impotent rehearsal of the intimacy to come. Perhaps, he flounders in his mind, she goes to church and is better than me. This idea of her being morally better hangs about him all night, and he brings it to the elevator next morning.

  She is not there. Surely she has flu, alone in her one-room apartment. Her one room with a big bed and a window overlooking the river? Or is Mr Gilbert there with her?

  When she appears next day in the elevator he is tempted to follow her home that night. But then she might know; feel, guess, his presence behind her. Certainly she would. She might well think him a weirdy, a criminal. She might turn and catch sight of him, crossing the park:

  Like one, that on a lonesome road

  Doth walk in fear and dread,

  And having once turned round walks on,

  And turns no more his head;

  Because he knows, a frightful fiend

  Doth close behind him tread.

  Does she go to a gym class? She must have caught me looking just now. He knows she does not wear a wedding ring or an engagement ring. But that does not mean very much.

  She looks at his briefcase, his tie, the floor, the floor number. Could he be a diamond merchant with a fold of tissue paper, containing five one-carat diamonds, nestling in his inner pocket? One of the names on the board could be a cover.

  Other, familiar people join them on every floor. A woman with a white smile that no dentist could warm edges towards him while he edges away.

  *

  One day at the lunch hour he looks at her and smiles. She is there, too, in the evening with only four other people plus the attendant for the elevator. He takes the plunge. Would she be free for dinner one night? Thursday? Friday?

  They have made a date. They eat in a Polish restaurant where the clients are served by waitresses with long hair even blonder and probably more natural than Doreen’s.

  How long does it take for floating myths and suppositions to form themselves into the separate still digits of reality? Sometimes it is as quick or as slow, according to luck, as fixing the television screen when it has gone haywire. Those stripes and cloudscapes are suddenly furniture and people.

  He is employed by one of the law firms up there on the twenty-first, his speciality is marine insurance claims. Doreen, as she is called, remarks that it must be a great responsibility. He realizes she is intelligent even before Doreen Bridges (her full name) tells him she works for W. H. Gilbert, (‘Bill’), an independent literary agent, and that she has recently discovered an absolutely brilliant new author called Dak Jan whose forthcoming first novel she has great hopes for. Michael Pivet lives in a bachelor apartment; she shares room with another girl in another part of the city.

  And the curious thing is, that all the notions and possibilities that have gone through their minds for the past five weeks or more are totally forgotten by both of them. In the fullness of the plain real facts their speculations disappear into immaterial nothingness, never once to be remembered in the course of their future life together.

  (1994)

  ★

  PATRICK NESS

  ‘Dual Balls’ by Nicola Barker has nothing to do with sleep or circadian rhythms, but it is the funniest short story ever written and, as such, belongs in every antholog
y on earth.

  It breaks many, many, many rules of comedy – it has a very long build-up, sexual devices aren’t at all funny – but by the end, I am, without fail, crying with laughter every single time I read it. In fact, when I teach writing classes, I use it to judge my students. The larger the percentage who think it’s hilarious, the more talented I know them all to be. The larger the percentage who think it in bad taste, the longer the hours of impending classroom drudgery for their poor teacher.

  Dual Balls

  by Nicola Barker

  Selina Mitchell had never been particularly free-thinking. Since she was fifteen she had been completely under the sway of her dominant and rather single-minded husband Tom and her dominant and rather light-headed friend Joanna. She had always lived in Grunty Fen. If you grow up somewhere with a name like Grunty Fen you never really see the humour in the name, and Selina was no exception to this rule. She never thought it was a particularly amusing place to live. In fact she hated it most of the time. It was physically small, socially small and intellectually small. It wasn’t even close enough to Cambridge to bask in any of the reflected glory; but if ever Selina had cause to write a letter to London or Manchester or Edinburgh for any reason she invariably wrote her address as Grunty Fen, Cambridgeshire. She hoped that this created a good impression.

  The only scandal that had ever caused real consternation, discussion and debate in Grunty Fen was when Harry Fletcher had started to wear Wellington boots to school (in summer) and the school had been forced to alter their uniform rules in order to acknowledge that Wellingtons were a legitimate item of clothing for school wear. The teachers had seen this new allowance as a victory for the environment over the purity of education, a muddying of the intellectual pursuit. The kids all wore wellies to school for a while and then switched back to mucky trainers after their initial joie de vivre had worn off.