The Best British Fantasy 2014

by Steve Haynes

  On the fifth night the lights went out.

  I was in the observation car, my sketchbook open on my lap, no longer afraid of what may appear beneath my pencils. A few other travellers shared the car, talking or playing cards, for the most part. They left me alone. They thought me dull and awkward, unable to joke or boast or flirt.

  Elena entered. I knew her by the rustle of her skirts, the way she hesitated in the doorway. She sat down beside me and opened her book. We had taken to sitting like this, in companionable silence. It was a relief, not to need words.

  I was about to pick up my pencils again when we were plunged into darkness. We reacted with no more than an intake of breath. No-one spoke. No-one moved. We sat in darkness such that I had never known, with no sound at all but the rails beneath us.

  It felt like an age, but could only have been a matter of minutes before the lights came on again and we all looked at each other and burst into nervous laughter.

  ‘Nothing to worry about!’ cried someone.

  ‘These things happen,’ said someone else, ‘Quite normal, I’m sure.’

  One of the ladies drew a shuddering breath and began to sob.

  Elena stood up. ‘Come’, she said, ‘Quickly.’ She took my hand and led me out of the carriage, down corridors where worried faces peered around doors and guards shouted for calm.

  Her urgency scared me more than the darkness had.

  ‘Listen.’ She stopped. We were alone in the space between two carriages, where a samovar bubbled away and a couch for the guard was tucked up against the wall. A bulb above us flickered.

  ‘There’s something here.’ She looked around, her eyes midnight blue in the dim light. She took both of my hands in hers. ‘You have to trust me,’ she said.

  I trusted her. The first person I had ever trusted.

  She reached up to touch my face, her hands as chilled as if she stood in the snow. She moved closer to me and from somewhere just out of sight I thought I heard a muffled noise, like scuffling footsteps. ‘Don’t look,’ she said, ‘Don’t look at anything but me.’

  I looked in her eyes and saw that the blue was flecked with silver. Her lashes were wet. I had never been so close to another person.

  The noise came closer, closer. Elena’s arms reached around my neck, her body pressed so close to mine I could feel the beating of her heart. Closer still and I thought I heard a breath and a sound like the licking of lips.

  For the briefest of moments Elena’s head turned. There was a hiss. A noise like a wet thing hitting the wall and the scrabble of fingernails. Then silence.

  She let go, pushed me away, and in the dim light her irises were flooded with waves of dark ink, her hair wet, her fingers, whether reaching for me or warding me off I did not know, long and thin and crabbed. A vein stood out on her forehead, a thread of blue beneath skin stretched tight over bone.

  ‘Monsieur Orphan,’ she whispered.

  And I stumbled away, stumbled down the rocking carriage, the hissing still in my ears and her hands still reaching like ghosts at my back. Stumbled all the way to the cattle-sheds where the three southerners sat hunched on their bunks.

  But if I had hoped to have time to gather my scattered wits, I was sorely mistaken. The men darted towards me.

  ‘There was something here,’ one whispered, ‘something – ‘

  But I was not listening. I looked at their faces.

  ‘What?’ they said, ‘What is it?’ – scrambling for the cracked mirror on the wall, pushing each other out of the way to be the first to see.

  Each of them was missing the colour of their eyes.

  It is recommended that you drink two glasses of vodka washed down with milk before bedtime, so that you may have a dreamless sleep.

  The next morning it began to snow. Patterns appeared in ice on the window, like the lacquer tracing on the houses of the wealthy in Beijing. When I put my fingers to the glass, the patterns moved.

  The southerners stayed huddled in their bunks as other rumours sped around the train. A woman who had lost the little finger on her left hand. Another whose hair had turned into brittle yellow grass. A man who swore he could no longer see the colour red.

  ‘Are we close? Are we close?’ whispered someone down the carriage, over and over again. ‘Are we there, are we close?’

  ‘Nearly there,’ I whispered back. ‘Nearly there.’

  The last night came. I combed my hair in the mirror and I walked towards the lights of the dining car.

  The tables were pushed against the walls and a man sat in the corner with a violin, playing a reel as couples danced, their bodies pressed close together, sweat beading on their foreheads. Through the crowd, I saw her, alone and watchful.

  ‘May I have this dance?’ I held out my hand.

  She raised her eyes to mine, and I could not tell if she wished to frown or to smile.

  ‘Remember what I said about foolish men.’

  ‘I remember.’ I said.

  She took my hand. ‘You said you trusted me.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Then you must do what I say. Tonight especially. You must do what I say.’

  ‘I will,’ I said, ‘I promise.’

  We stepped into the crowd.

  ‘We will pass the dividing line soon,’ said Elena.

  ‘And enter Europe.’ The word sounded strange on my lips.

  ‘We will dance into a new continent,’ she said.

  I felt her hair against my neck, her cool hand in mine. The music was unfamiliar, a celebration and a lament all at once.

  Faster the violin played, and faster. Elena laughed as stray curls flew in front of her eyes. Couples spun around us, colours turning to dark gold beneath the lights, hair stuck to skin, lips parted, breathless.

  I saw my cabin-mates, holding each other’s arms, their white eyes stark against their flushed skin. I saw the woman with hair of yellow grass. And Elena, in my arms, her face lined with blue veins, her eyes cloudy, her hand in my hand long-nailed and pale. Water dripped from her hair. As I brushed her skin a few iridescent scales dropped onto her dress.

  We danced into a new continent.

  I wanted to lean forward and brush my lips against hers. I wanted to stay like this, as close as we were. To imagine we were alone in all the great unknown spaces of Siberia and that nothing could harm us because she would keep all the bad things away.

  I felt the tears well up in my eyes, but I was not ashamed.

  I looked down and saw that her hair had turned to silvery white. I could feel water trickling over my fingers, down her back, soaking her dress. The tears pooling in my eyes flooded down my cheeks. Heavier and heavier they flowed, over my lips and into my mouth. I struggled to draw a breath. I blinked and blinked but the water had blinded me and I felt something change, felt her stiffen in my arms, felt her try to pull away. She raised her eyes to mine and she spoke words that I could not hear, that I did not want to hear, that were Let me go. But I held her tight, though I was weakening, held her as she twisted and twisted in my arms, wet and slippery and icy cold, and her fingernails were in my skin, clawing at me, pushing me away, but I wasn’t afraid, I wasn’t afraid at all and for a moment she was still and I think I saw her begin to smile, but there was only darkness before my eyes, and the roaring of water.

  Those who make the journey make it only once. You can see its traces, if you know how to look. You can see the iron that runs through them, forever.

  They told me I was lucky. That I’d had a close escape.

  ‘Stronger than you look!’ they said, ‘To fight it off like that.’

  ‘To think it had been here all this time. . .’ They shook their heads. ‘Monster’, they said.

  They admired me.

  And though I searched the train, banged on every cabin door, made myself into a madman, it was
all to no end. She had vanished.

  We arrived in Moscow in a rainstorm, crossing the border wall into the frontier town. A week later I stood outside the Gare de Lyon in Paris with my suitcase and my box of paints and walked into the city I had travelled thousands of miles to reach.

  And here I remain. Paris is filled with sunshine and music. There are roses in bloom in Montmartre. I paint. You may have seen me, I have a spot on Rue Azais, just below Sacre Coeur. I call out to the tourists to come, let me sketch you a portrait! Only a few francs. A memory to treasure, my friends, come, sit, once I studied at the Conservatoire des Arts, I am not just any street pedlar.

  And they come, the pleasure-seekers of Paris, and I draw. I like the women the best, I like to draw their dark hair and full lips, the contours of their cheekbones. I have made something of a name for myself – they seek me out, those who are in the bloom of their beauty and youth, because they know I can capture it forever.

  And all the time, I look for the face I saw on a train, in the middle of a lost country, many years ago. All the time I hold on to that thin iron thread that links the two halves of my life together, that links me across all those miles, across continents, to what I was, and what I became.

  They are here, somewhere. The ones who are like her, who hide behind human faces, who walk amongst us. I have spent my life seeking them out again. This is my price, the price we must all pay, we who ride the train across that terrible, wondrous expanse. Unique to every traveller, it is said, and although the price is high I cannot regret it. I am not afraid.

  For I know they are here, and that one day amidst all the many faces I draw I will find one that is twisted and strange and beautiful.

  And they will tell me what she was, and what she wanted, and where she has gone.

  NINA ALLAN

  Higher Up

  I didn’t see the twin towers fall.

  I heard them, though. I can never quite get that sound out of my head.

  I was ten years old when it happened. I was in London with my parents. My father was having lunch with a client in some snazzy restaurant. My mother and I were in a bookshop somewhere in the West End, although the different parts of London all looked the same to me then, we could have been anywhere. What I remember is one of the sales staff, rushing up to the guy on the History counter and asking if he’d heard the news.

  ‘There’s been a bomb,’ he says. ‘A bomb at the World Trade Center.’

  It is 3.15 by my wristwatch, 10.15 in New York, although I don’t find that out until later. I am browsing through a book of paintings, artists’ representations of the Christian saints, and have just reached Tiepolo’s painting of St Agatha, gazing skywards with glassy eyes while a pasty pageboy in a yellow dressing gown stands holding her severed breasts on a silver tray like pink blancmanges. I find it ghastly, but fascinating. Only a man could have painted that, I think. This is when I first hear the sales guy mention the bomb. My stomach drops, the way it does in the car when my dad hits a bump in the road. I am terrified of bombs, and kidnappings, and hijackings, all the stuff I see on the news and have nightmares about. My mother is keen for me to watch the news on a regular basis. She thinks it is important for me to know what is going on in the world. I have not told her about my nightmares because I am afraid it would make me seem childish. The guy behind the counter says he hasn’t heard anything.

  ‘Has anyone been killed?’ he says.

  ‘I don’t know,’ says the other guy. He shakes his head. ‘They didn’t say.’

  They begin talking together in low voices. I sneak a glance at my mother, who is standing nearby. I see she’s gone all stiff and straight, the way she always does when she’s eavesdropping. My mother’s name is Ruth. She puts down the book she was reading – something about Venice? – and turns round, scouting the area, scanning for my position on her escape-proof radar.

  ‘Elaine,’ she says. ‘Come on, we’re going. What on Earth are you looking at?’ I hate my name. The way my mother says it, it has a gilded, princess ring to it that I am embarrassed by. When I am thirteen I start calling myself Laine. If anyone calls me Elaine I refuse to answer.

  ‘Nothing,’ I say. I want to ask her if we’re leaving because of the bomb, but I don’t. I don’t want her to know that I’ve been listening in. I take one last look at poor St Agatha then quickly re-shelve the book, being careful to put it back in the same place I found it.

  ‘Why are we going?’ I say. I think that to not make any fuss at all might look suspicious.

  ‘It’s getting late,’ my mother says. ‘Your father will be expecting us back at the hotel.’ We go outside and she takes my hand, steering me determinedly through the pedestrians and the hooting traffic. In the tightness of her grip I sense a closely vibrating current of worry, as if she’s lost her way but is doing her best to pretend she knows where we are. We enter the Tube at Marylebone. I gaze at the word, signposted above the station entrance and then again against the tiled, curving wall of the tunnel, trying to make the letters that spell it out fit with the name the way my mother has pronounced it.

  Mary-le-bone, I say to myself. Marry-li-bun. It can be made to fit, after a fashion anyway, so long as you say it quickly enough.

  I like the way the word looks written down, a long caterpillar of a word, its four syllables clacking deftly into place like piano keys. I repeat it in my head, over and over in time with the jouncing, rattling rhythm of the speeding Tube train.

  When we arrive back at our hotel room my father is there. His jacket is off, flung carelessly across the end of the bed. I think how strange this is – normally my father always hangs things up. The television is on and my father is watching it. There is something odd about this as well, something unsettling. Daytime TV-watching is something my father normally frowns upon.

  ‘Have you seen this, Ruth?’ he says. My father’s name is Lionel. ‘This is incredible.’ He barely turns round. It is as if he doesn’t want to take his eyes away from the TV screen for even a second.

  ‘I heard something about a bomb,’ says my mother. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘It’s not a bomb,’ says my father. ‘A plane’s crashed into the World Trade Center. Some sort of air accident. No one seems to know what’s caused it.’

  Neither of them say anything else, not for ages. They stand together, shoulder to shoulder in front of the television set, which is high up on the wall, screwed to some kind of flexible metal bracket. You have to crane your neck to see it. My own view of the screen is blocked almost entirely but then my parents seem to have forgotten I am even there. My mother glances back at me once, just quickly, and I get the feeling she’s checking to see if she’s remembered to bring me back with her. Once she’s sure I am in the room she turns straight back to the TV. I sit down on their bed, a huge double divan with a fitted bedcover, and tug off my trainers. They are red high-top Converse sneakers, the real thing, not some naff Primark rip-off, and I adore them. I sit cross-legged on the bed, staring at my parents’ backs in a way I hope approximates to what my gran (that’s my mum’s mum – my Birmingham nan died three years ago) always refers to as daggers drawn.

  My ideas about what is happening are still vague. From what my father said I am able to work out that there has been a plane crash, but I don’t know what the World Trade Center is, or even where it is. My first thought is that it is somewhere in London. The idea terrifies me, and it is perhaps for this reason that I don’t make more of an effort to see what is happening on the TV screen. I listen instead, trying to piece together a story from sound alone. There are shouts and many sirens, some people screaming, but over and throughout everything there is a kind of uncanny, breathless hush, as if whatever it is isn’t over yet, as if people are waiting to see what will happen next.

  At some point I realise that all of the voices I can hear have American accents.

  ‘Is it in America, Dad?’ I as
k quietly. I don’t expect an answer – both my parents seem so preoccupied – but my father replies almost at once. It’s as if he too has been waiting. Waiting for me to ask him a question so he can explain things.

  ‘Yes, Elaine,’ he says. ‘It’s in New York.’ He still doesn’t turn round, and all at once I have a funny feeling about why that is.

  He can’t look at me, I think. He can’t look at me because he’s scared.

  The idea is awful, almost more awful than the thought of a plane crash, which is something that terrifies me even more than bombings and kidnappings.

  I have a secret fear that planes are too heavy to fly, that it’s only through luck that any of them stay up at all.

  If the height of a building is determined by the number of occupied floors it has, the World Trade Center, with 110, held the record for the world’s tallest building for nearly four decades.

  It was beaten only in 2010, when the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in the United Arab Emirates took over the record with 163. The Burj Khalifa rises out of the ground like a gracefully gleaming rocket in steel and glass. Even in photos it looks impossible, not of this world.

  ‘Come on,’ my father says eventually.

  It is three hours since my mother and I returned to the hotel. ‘We’d better go and get something to eat.’

  I am hungry by now but it seems wrong to want to eat, wrong to leave the hotel room, wrong to do anything at all other than stay still and listen. I keep hearing the sound, the ‘oomph’ that is not quite a boom, not quite a crash, but something that is somehow worse than either of those things, which are both bad, the totally one-off crumping sound that is the sound of the second plane driving its way deep into the south tower.