Six Shorts - The finalists for the 2013 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award

by Haddon, Mark

  10

  You figure you can keep it to a one-time thing. But the next day you go right back. You sit gloomily in her kitchen while she fixes you another cheeseburger.

  Are you going to be OK? she asks.

  I don’t know.

  It’s just supposed to be fun.

  I have a girlfriend.

  You told me, remember?

  She puts the plate on your lap, regards you critically. You know, you look like your brother. I’m sure people tell you that all the time.

  Some people.

  I couldn’t believe how good-looking he was. He knew it, too. It was like he never heard of a shirt.

  This time you don’t even ask about the condom. You just come inside her. You are surprised at how pissed you are. But she kisses your face over and over and it moves you. No one has ever done that. The girls you boned, they were always ashamed afterward. And there was always panic. Someone heard. Fix the bed up. Open the windows. Here there is none of that.

  Afterward, she sits up, her chest as unadorned as yours. So what else do you want to eat?

  11

  You try to be reasonable. You try to control yourself, to be smooth. But you’re at her apartment every fucking day. The one time you try to skip, you recant and end up slipping out of your apartment at three in the morning and knocking furtively on her door until she lets you in. You know I work, right? I know, you say, but I dreamed that something happened to you. That’s sweet of you to lie, she sighs and even though she is falling asleep she lets you bone her straight in the ass. Fucking amazing, you keep saying for all four seconds it takes you to come. You have to pull my hair while you do it, she confides. That makes me shoot like a rocket.

  It should be the greatest thing, so why are your dreams worse? Why is there more blood in the sink in the morning?

  You learn a lot about her life. She came up with a Dominican doctor father who was crazy. Her mother left them for an Italian waiter, fled to Rome, and that was it for pops. Always threatening to kill himself and at least once a day she would have to beg him not to and that had messed her up but good. In her youth she’d been a gymnast and there was even talk of making the Olympic team, but then the coach robbed the money and the DR had to cancel for that year. I’m not claiming I would have won, she says, but I could have done something. After that bullshit she put on a foot of height and that was it for gymnastics. Then her father got a job in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and she and her three little siblings went with him. After six months he moved them in with a fat widow, una blanca asquerosa who hated Lora. She had no friends at all in school and in ninth grade she slept with her high school history teacher. Ended up living in his house. His ex-wife was also a teacher at the school. You can only imagine what that was like. As soon as she graduated she ran off with a quiet black boy to a base in Ramstein, Germany, but that hadn’t worked. To this day I think he was gay, she says. And finally after trying to make it in Berlin she came home. She moved in with a girlfriend who had an apartment in London Terrace, dated a few guys, one of her ex’s old Air Force buddies who visited her on his leaves, a moreno with the sweetest disposition. When the girlfriend got married and moved away Miss Lora kept the apartment and got a teaching job. Made a conscious effort to stop moving. It was an OK life, she says, showing you the pictures. All things considered.

  She is always trying to get you to talk about your brother. It will help, she says.

  What is there to say? He got cancer, he died.

  Well, that’s a start.

  She brings home college brochures from her school. She gives them to you with half the application filled out. You really need to get out of here.

  Where? you ask her.

  Go anywhere. Go to Alaska for all I care.

  She sleeps with a mouth guard. And she covers her eyes with a mask.

  If you have to go, wait till I fall asleep, OK? But after a few weeks it’s Please don’t go. And finally just: Stay.

  And you do. At dawn you slip out of her apartment and into your basement window. Your mother doesn’t have a fucking clue. In the old days she used to know everything. She had that campesino radar. Now she is somewhere else. Her grief, tending to it, takes all her time.

  You are scared stupid at what you are doing but it is also exciting and makes you feel less lonely in the world. And you are sixteen and you have a feeling that now that the Ass Engine has started, no force on the earth will ever stop it.

  Then your abuelo catches something in the DR and your mother has to fly home. You’ll be fine, la Doña says. Miss Lora said she’d look after you.

  I can cook, Ma.

  No you can’t. And don’t bring that Puerto Rican girl in here. Do you understand?

  You nod. You bring the Dominican woman in instead.

  She squeals with delight when she sees the plastic-covered sofas and the wooden spoons hanging on the wall. You admit to feeling a little bad for your mother.

  Of course you end up downstairs in your basement. Where your brother’s things are still in evidence. She goes right for his boxing gloves.

  Please put those down.

  She pushes them into her face, smelling them.

  You can’t relax. You keep swearing that you hear your mother or Paloma at the door. It makes you stop every five minutes. It’s unsettling to wake up in your bed with her. She makes coffee and scrambled eggs and listens not to Radio WADO but to the Morning Zoo and laughs at everything. It’s too strange. Paloma calls to see if you are going to school and Miss Lora is walking around in a T-shirt, her flat skinny rump visible.

  12

  Then your senior year she gets a job at your high school. Of course. To say it is strange is to say nada. You see her in the halls and your heart goes through you. That’s your neighbor? Paloma asks. God, she’s fucking looking at you. The old whore. At the school the Spanish girls are the ones who give her trouble. They make fun of her accent, her clothes, her physique. (They call her Miss Pat.) She never complains about it—It’s a really great job, she says—but you see the nonsense firsthand. It’s just the Spanish girls, though. The whitegirls love her to death. She takes over the gymnastics team. She brings them to dance programs for inspiration. And in no time at all they start winning. One day outside the school the gymnasts are all egging her on and she does a back handspring that nearly staggers you with its perfection. It is the most beautiful thing you ever saw. Of course Mr. Everson, the science teacher, falls all over her. He’s always falling over someone. For a while it was Paloma until she threatened to report his ass. You see them laughing in the hallways, you see them having lunch in the teachers’ room.

  Paloma doesn’t stop busting. They say Mr. Everson likes to put on dresses. You think she straps it on for him?

  You girls are nuts.

  She probably does strap it on.

  It all makes you very tense. But it does make the sex that much better.

  A few times you see Mr. Everson’s car outside her apartment. Looks like Mr. Everson is in the hood, one of your boys laughs. You suddenly find yourself weak with fury. You think about fucking up his car. You think about knocking on the door. You think a thousand things. But you stay at home lifting until he leaves. When she opens the door you stalk in without saying a word to her. The house reeks of cigarettes.

  You smell like shit, you say.

  You walk into her bedroom but the bed is made.

  Ay mi pobre, she laughs. No seas celoso.

  But of course you are.

  13

  You graduate in June and she is there with your mother, clapping. She is wearing a red dress because you once told her it was your favorite color and underneath matching underwear. Afterward she drives you both to Perth Amboy for a Mexican dinner. Paloma can’t come along because her mother is sick. But you see her late that night in front of her apartment.

  I did it, Paloma says, cheesing.

  I’m proud of you, you say. And then you add, uncharacteristically: You are an extraordinar
y young woman.

  That summer you and Paloma see each other maybe twice—there are no more make-out sessions. She’s already gone. In August she leaves for the University of Delaware. You are not surprised when after about a week on campus she writes you a letter with the header MOVING ON. You don’t even bother finishing it. You think about driving all the way down there to talk to her but you realize how hopeless that is. As might be expected, she never comes back.

  You stay in the neighborhood. You land a job at Raritan River Steel. At first you have to fight the Pennsylvania hillbillies but eventually you find your footing and they leave you alone. At night you go to the bars with some of the other idiots who stuck around the neighborhood, get seriously faded, and show up at Miss Lora’s door with your dick in your hand. She’s still pushing the college thing, offers to pay all the admission fees but your heart ain’t in it and you tell her, Not right now. She’s taking night classes herself at Montclair. She’s thinking of getting her Ph.D. Then you’ll have to call me doctora.

  Occasionally you two meet up in Perth Amboy, where people don’t know either of you. You have dinner like normal folks. You look too young for her and it kills you when she touches you in public but what can you do? She’s always happy to be out with you. You know this ain’t going to last, you tell her and she nods. I just want what’s best for you. You try your damnedest to meet other girls, telling yourself they’ll help you transition, but you never meet anyone you really like.

  Sometimes after you leave her apartment you walk out to the landfill where you and your brother played as children and sit on the swings. This is also the spot where Mr. del Orbe threatened to shoot your brother in the nuts. Go ahead, Rafa said, and then my brother here will shoot you in the pussy. Behind you in the distance hums New York City. The world, you tell yourself, will never end.

  14

  It takes a long time to get over it. To get used to a life without a Secret. Even after it’s behind you and you’ve blocked her completely, you’re still afraid you’ll slip back to it. At Rutgers, where you’ve finally landed, you date like crazy and every time it doesn’t work out you’re convinced that you have trouble with girls your own age. Because of her.

  You certainly never talk about it. Until senior year when you meet the mujerón of your dreams, the one who leaves her moreno boyfriend to date you, who drives all your little chickies out the coop. She’s the one you finally trust. The one you finally tell.

  They should arrest that crazy bitch.

  It wasn’t like that.

  They should arrest her ass today.

  Still it is good to tell someone. In your heart you thought she would hate you—that they would all hate you.

  I don’t hate you. Tú eres mi hombre, she says proudly.

  When you two visit the apartment she brings it up to your mother. Doña, es verdad que tu hijo taba rapando una vieja?

  Your mother shakes her head in disgust. He’s just like his father and his brother.

  Dominican men, right, Doña?

  These three are worse than the rest.

  Afterward, she makes you walk past Miss Lora’s spot. There is a light on.

  I’m going to go have a word with her, the mujerón says.

  Don’t. Please.

  I’m going to.

  She bangs on the door.

  Negra, please don’t.

  Answer the door! she yells.

  No one does.

  You don’t speak to the mujerón for a few weeks after that. It’s one of your big breakups. But finally you’re both at a Tribe Called Quest show and she sees you dancing with another girl and she waves to you and that does it. You go up to where she’s seated with all her evil line sisters. She has shaved her head again.

  Negra, you say.

  She pulls you over to a corner. I’m sorry I got carried away. I just wanted to protect you.

  You shake your head. She steps into your arms.

  15

  Graduation: it’s not a surprise to see her there. What surprises you is that you didn’t predict it. The instant before you and the mujerón join the procession you see her standing alone in a red dress. She is finally starting to put on weight; it looks good on her. Afterward, you spot her walking alone across the lawn of Old Queens, carrying a mortarboard she picked up. Your mother grabbed a second one, too. Hung it on her wall.

  What happens is that in the end she moves away from London Terrace. Prices are going up. The Banglas and the Pakistanis are moving in. A few years later your mother moves, too, up to the Bergenline.

  Later, after you and the mujerón are over, you will type her name into the computer but she never turns up. On one DR trip you drive up to La Vega and put her name out there. You show a picture, too, like a private eye. It is of the two of you, the one time you went to the beach, to Sandy Hook. Both of you are smiling. Both of you blinked.

  Junot Díaz is the author of Drown (1997) and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 2008. His most recent publication is This Is How You Lose Her (2012), a collection of linked narratives about love told through the lives of New Jersey Dominicans, as they struggle to find a point where their two worlds meet. He is the recipient of a PEN/Malamud Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Born in Santo Domingo, Díaz is also a professor at MIT.

  The Gun

  by Mark Haddon

  Daniel stands in the funnel, a narrow path between two high brick walls that join the playground to the estate proper. On windy days, the air is forced through here then spun upwards in a vortex above the square of so-called grass between the four blocks of flats. Anything that isn’t nailed down becomes airborne. Washing, litter, dust. Grown men have been knocked off their feet. A while back there was a story going round about a flying cat.

  Except there’s no wind this morning, just an unremitting mugginess that makes you want to open a window until you remember that you’re outside. Mid-August. A week since the family holiday in Magaluf, where he learned backstroke and was stung by a jellyfish, a week till school begins again. He is ten years old. Back at home his sister is playing teacher and his brother is playing pupil. Helen is twelve, Paul seven. She has a blackboard and a little box of chalks in eight colours and when Paul misbehaves she smacks him hard on the leg. His mother is doing a jigsaw of Venice on the dining table while the tank heats for the weekly wash.

  He can see the legs of a girl on the swings, appearing, disappearing. It is 1972. ‘Silver Machine’ and ‘Rocket Man’. He cannot remember ever having been this bored before. He bats a wasp away from his face a car door slams somewhere. He steps into the shadow of the stairwell and climbs towards Sean’s front door.

  There will be three other extraordinary events in his life. He will sit on the terrace of a rented house near Cahors with his eight-year-old son and see a barn on the far side of the valley destroyed by lightning, the crack of white light appearing to come not from the sky but to burst from the ground beneath the building.

  He will have a meeting with the manager of a bespoke ironworks near Stroud, whose factory occupies one of three units built into the side of a high railway cutting. Halfway through the meeting a cow will fall through the roof.

  On the morning of his fiftieth birthday his mother will call and say that she needs to see him. Despite the fact that there is a large party planned for the afternoon he will get into the car and drive straight to Leicester only to find that the ambulance has already taken his mother’s body away. Only later will he discover that he received the phone call half an hour after the stroke which killed her.

  Today will be different, not simply shocking but one of those moments when time forks and fractures and you look back and realize that if things had happened only slightly differently, you would be leading one of those other ghost lives that sped away into the dark.

  Sean is not a friend as such but they play together because they are in the same class at school. Sean’
s family lives on the top floor of Orchard Tower whereas Daniel’s family lives in a semi-detached house on the approach road. Daniel’s mother says that Sean’s family are a bad influence but she also says that television will damage your eyes if you sit too close and that you will die if you swim in the canal, and in any case Daniel likes their volume, their expansiveness, their unpredictability, the china greyhounds on either side of the gas fire, Mr Cobb’s red BMW which he polishes and T-Cuts lovingly on Saturday mornings. Sean’s older brother, Dylan, works as a plasterer and they have a balcony which looks over the ring road to the woods and the car plant and the radio mast at Bargave, a view which excites Daniel more than anything he saw from the plane window between Luton and Palma. That thrilling shiver in the back of your knees when you lean over and look down.

  He steps out of the lift and sees Sean’s mother leaving the flat, which is another thing that makes Daniel envious, because when his own mother goes to the shops he and Paul and Helen have to accompany her. Try and keep him out of trouble. Mrs Cobb ruffles his hair. She is lighting a cigarette as the silver doors close over her.

  Sean’s jumbled silhouette appears in the patterned glass of the front door and it swings open. I’ve got something to show you.

  What?

  He beckons Daniel into Dylan’s bedroom. You have to keep this a total secret.

  Daniel has never been in here before. Dylan has explicitly forbidden it and Dylan can bench-press 180 pounds. He steps off the avocado lino of the hall onto the swirly red carpet. The smell of cigarettes and Brut aftershave. Posters for Monty Python and The French Connection. ‘Jimmy Doyle is the Toughest.’ A motorbike cylinder head sits on a folded copy of the Daily Express, the leaking oil turning the newsprint waxy and transparent. There is a portable record player on the bedside table, the lid of the red leatherette box propped open and the cream plastic arm crooked around the silvered rod in the centre of the turntable. Machine Head. Ziggy Stardust.