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

by Haddon, Mark

  She just started going, Richard said. I don’t know why. I was on top of her. Help me turn her over.

  He moved to Richard’s side and the two of them rolled her. There was foam across her face and in her hair, the smell of bile and alcohol. He tried to keep her head still but her neck muscles were snapping up and down. Her eyes were white in her skull, her jaw clamped, the spit oozing out.

  What the fuck. Evie! Evie! Call an ambulance. Should we drive her?

  No. I’ll call.

  Richard leapt up and went downstairs. The convulsions were so strong it felt as if her spine would break. Then they began to ease. Richard came back in. He had trousers on. His face was ghastly.

  They’re coming. Christ, what the fuck is the matter with her. What kind of fucking depraved game is this?

  ~

  A junior doctor asked him questions in the family room of A&E. About the fit. About whether she’d had headaches lately, or vomiting, vision or memory loss – he did not think so, he said. And her behaviour: had there been any changes? In what way? Had he been concerned?

  They had ruled out stroke, toxicity. She was sent for a CT scan. The junior was evasive, professional, but the scan was not a good sign, he knew. Richard had followed the ambulance in a taxi, had sat with him on the hard plastic chairs while they’d sedated her and run tests, had fetched coffee. But they did not talk. I didn’t know, he wanted to say, though no blame had been directed. The silence was blame. The repeated inquiries about his wife’s state that he’d been fielding from his friend for the last few weeks was blame. There was no point in them both waiting. He promised to call Richard with any news.

  A consultant came and found him in the family room. The scan had shown an area on the brain that appeared abnormal, in the prefrontal cortex. They didn’t know yet what it meant. But the appearance was suspicious.

  Do you mean a tumour?

  We need to investigate.

  The same questions were asked, more focussed, the chronology of her cravings, her confusion, her promiscuity, the man nodding at the answers, as if already confirming a diagnosis. When they let him see Evie she was asleep. He found her hand under the sheet. She didn’t wake. In the light of the small overhead lamp she looked normal, un-extraordinary.

  Everything after was the penalty for some unknown crime. The MRI pictures. The whitened shape. She was lucky and unlucky, they said. The mass, though probably benign, was big. He couldn’t remember the word after the meeting and had to look it up. Meningioma. It was not in the important tissues - he did not really understand what could be unimportant inside the brain - but pressure was swelling the surrounding area, interfering with her functions, her cognition, her self. Over the next few weeks she had more fits. The second broke her wrist. She choked on her vomit and infected a lung.

  She was given drugs to control the seizures. They began radiotherapy. The operation was scheduled. He could barely stand to think about the procedure – the position was difficult, she was ineligible for Gamma Knife or endonasal surgery, she needed a craniotomy. He looked online. The pictures were medieval. Rent open heads. Pinned-back scalp. Lilac membranes and manes, so horribly wet and delicate. In one video a surgeon described the sound of cracking the skull, like opening a can of coke. They would try to keep the incisions behind her hairline, but plastics might be required. The risks were extensive; leaks, aneurysms, coma.

  She still wanted sex. She still strung wrong words together, talked like a Charismatic, her mind slipped and was instinctive. But she knew what it was now. She was self-conscious, and fought for rationality; she contained it. When they were in the act she would claw away and start to howl and they would stop.

  This isn’t me, she’d say. I don’t know if it’s me.

  She was not afraid. She knew she would live. Recovery would be tough, unpredictable, relearning; she might not be or feel exactly like the same person, ever again, but she would live. He didn’t know if it was her, believing, or the lambency, the mania of the illness. It was an illness now. It had a name.

  They had told Richard soon after the final diagnosis, convincing him to come over for dinner, saying that the meeting was vital, not a set-up. He had wept. Evie looked at him, expressionless, and left the room.

  Jesus Christ, Alex.

  She’ll be OK, he said. She’s tough.

  Richard shook his head.

  Do you not understand. What don’t you understand.

  They sat without speaking, sipping their drinks, until the evening dissolved.

  Richard phoned the morning of the surgery but did not come to the hospital. He phoned regularly but did not visit. The decision to withdraw was obvious, even gracious. It was difficult, but he didn’t mind. He was glad that it wasn’t completely broken off. On the phone they talked about things of no consequence. Work, weather, the past. They never talked about that night, though he thought of it, often, more often than he should.

  Sarah Hall is the author of Haweswater (2003), which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for best first novel, The Electric Michelangelo (2004), which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Prix Femina Etranger and was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, and The Carhullan Army (2007), which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was listed as one of the 100 Best Books of the Decade by The Times. Her most recent novel, How to Paint a Dead Man (2009), won the Portico Prize for Fiction 2010 and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Her first collection of short stories, The Beautiful Indifference, was published in 2012. It won the Portico Prize for Fiction 2012, the Edge Hill Short Story Prize and was short-listed for the Frank O’Connor Prize. Besides writing, Hall has judged prestigious literary awards such as the John Llewellyn Rhys, the David Cohen Prize for Literature, the Northern Writers Awards and several short story competitions. She lives in Norwich with her partner, who is a doctor.

  The Dig

  by Cynan Jones

  The boy had not slept. He was gawky and awkward and had not grown into himself yet.

  When his father came to rouse him he found the boy awake with expectation.

  Warm, remember, said his father.

  The boy nodded loosely in the way he had. The way was to have a minute hesitation before doing things. This came from trying to be eager and cautious at the same time around his father.

  He was long and thin and he could have looked languid without this nervousness but instead he looked underdeveloped. When he got out of bed in his T-shirt and shorts it emphasized the awkward gangliness of him. He had the strange selection of muscles teenage boys’ bodies either grow or don’t but the skin on his face was a child’s.

  He got dressed and went downstairs. In the kitchen he sat at the table with the kind of extra-awakeness not sleeping can give you and started automatically to spread paste onto the sliced bread. He had a low-level excitement running through him. A day off school. He felt the same illicit closeness to his father as he did when they went lamping and in these times he was capable of forgetting that his father did other things.

  His father put the tea on the table and filled the big flask and then they sat and blew on the tea and drank it. Then they went out.

  They took the dogs from the run and got them in the car and drove off the estate. The boy found the smell of the sawdust and dog shit in the run hard to bear in the early morning. The smell of it was a strange note against the deodorant he enveloped himself with.

  He had not been digging before and was trying to imagine it. He imagined it frenzied and was excited by this. He did not know it would be steady, unexciting procedural work and that it would not be like ratting at all.

  He had broken his own dog to rats himself and this gave him pride. When they picked on him in school he kept his pride in this. He hung on to it.

  The boy’s father parked up the car and they sat seeing the dog runs and the broken machinery and the boy was momentarily stupefied by the darkness and emptiness about the place. In the car lights he could
see just beyond the runs the bodies of cars like some disassembled ghost train littering the field.

  The big man heard them pull up outside and saw the car lights catch and reflect on the mesh of the run and came out to them. The boy had a brief inarticulate awareness that his father shied a little when he saw the big man come from the house. He hadn’t seen that in his father before. The boy thought the man looked like some big gypsy.

  The man leaned into the window and the dogs in the back came alive at this new presence and set off a yapping, which set off a yapping in the dog sheds beyond. The car was full of a deodorant smell that got into your mouth.

  They yelpers? asked the big gypsy.

  They’re good dogs, said the boy’s father.

  It stinks, said the man. It’s a girl’s bedroom.

  The big gypsy looked accusingly at the boy and the boy felt himself redden. He felt the nervous flush go up in his throat.

  They’re good dogs, said the boy’s father.

  We can’t have them hard-mouthed, said the man.

  No. They’re good dogs, the father said.

  We can’t work with hard-mouthed dogs, the big gypsy said. The big gypsy was looking at the terriers, taking them in. The boy could feel there was a grown-man tension.

  Then his father said: They’re not hard-mouthed, mun. They’re good dogs.

  There were three terriers in the back. One was the big Patterdale, Jip, thirteen inches at the shoulder and a solid fourteen pounds. He was about as big as you’d want for a badger dig without being too tall in the shoulder to suit the holes. It was why the man had called the boy’s father, thinking of the big boar.

  What’s the pup? said the big gypsy. He nodded at the boy’s dog and the boy felt the redness on his throat again.

  He’s just along, said the boy’s father. The big gypsy looked at the pup.

  He’s not going down, said the big gypsy. He had to take the badger and there was too much risk the young dog would not be able to hold him. The boy felt this shame and the crushed feeling from school came up in him.

  He’s just along, the boy’s father said.

  They parked up in the machine yard of the big farm and got the dogs out and coupled them dog to bitch with the iron couplings. This was one of the bigger, richer farms locally and had years ago been one of the manor farms that worked under the big house. You could tell the historical management of it by the wider fields and the way the big oaks were spread out in them.

  In the east a powder of light was just coming and in the barn the tractors looked immense and military. At the edges of the fields the trees were still a solid deep black.

  They coupled the boy’s pup to the older dog and coupled the gypsy’s older bitch to the big Patterdale. They had to couple the right dogs. Dogs that could work together at rat could fight at a badger dig, as if they sensed the individuality of the process.

  They got the tools and divided them up to carry; then they took the big five-litre tubs of water from the van and the bag with the tin drinking bowls and the food and gave them to the boy. They weighed on him immediately. It was crisply cold and with their thin handles the weight of the water bottles burned on his fingers.

  They went through the gate and down the lane, letting the dogs run in front of them, passively aware of which dog took the lead of the other as they rooted in and out of the hedgeside at the dying scents laid down in the night.

  Mud had gathered in the track and the overnight rain left it wet and the boy, alert and cold and over-awake, took in the sucked sounds underfoot and the clinking of the coupling chains and the body sounds of the dogs as they pushed through the undergrowth of the bank. He was using the gulping sounds of the water sloshing in the tubs as a kind of rhythm to walk by.

  The thin light was beginning to increase and the few beanshaped flowers on the gorse stood out with unnatural luminosity. The men’s feet went down hard and solidly in the lane, but the boy constantly tripped on the loose stones the winter’s rain had brought down, as if he didn’t have enough weight to himself.

  They went off the track and whistled the dogs in as they went over a field, the lambs prone and folded next to their mothers. Some of the smaller lambs wore blue polythene jackets against the rain and they looked odd in that first light and overprotected.

  The boy could hear the ewes crunching and one or two faced the dogs and banged a foreleg on the wet ground, giving a thump that sounded like kicking a ball. He wished he could play, really play, but he was clumsy against the other boys. He loved the idea of himself playing and his inability was just another little cruelty. Even now, he looked out across the lightening field and saw himself catch a high kick, the crowd of trees a fringe of spectators coming to their feet as he took the ball. But then – the school field, the ball smashing off his fingers to the laughter of the other kids, the teacher’s shouted scorn. That was the reality of him and it brought up a wad of sick and anger.

  They worked their way down through the topped reeds that stubbled the slope at the base of the field and stopped by the brook and the boy set the water down. They put the dogs to lead. His pup was shaking a little with excitement.

  He’s got rats somewhere, he said. The sentence came out on the swell of pride and he realized it was the first time he had talked in front of the man.

  The man lifted up a tub of water and unlidded it and took a rough swig.

  Keep them in, he said. The bank’s snared.

  The mink had made their way up from the fur farms by now. They were not indigenous and so it was righteous to kill them. They took out the fish and the waterside birds, even kingfishers from their nests in the burrows, and had annihilated the watercourses as they came up.

  It was as well to be able to produce something they could legitimately hunt if by chance they were stopped. It would explain the dogs. In reality, though, they should shoot the mink to make it look like they’d run it into a gun.

  The boy was made thirsty by the river and wanted to drink but he did not like the idea of drinking the water after the big man had drunk from the tub.

  In the relative openness of the lane and across the field the dawn light had been enough, but here things closed in and they checked the snares with the torchlight.

  Bar the one, the snares were empty. The boy heard the dogs whine with the scent of something and the man signalled them to hold back and the boy put the water tubs down and stretched his fingers. Then the boy heard the dull crack of the mink’s skull and for a while did not register what the sound was. The man had hit it with a foldaway spade.

  They went on. The water had become convincingly heavy to the boy now. The scrub began to encroach the bank until it was thickened and difficult to pass and after a while they cut away from the stream. It was heavy going but somehow the big man had mobility in it and seemed to fit into the countryside in a way the other two did not.

  The dogs sniffed in and out of the torch beams ahead of them and the men pushed through the sprawling holly as they drove into the wood. Every now and then they disturbed something, and there was a clatter in the branches or the tearing of undergrowth as something fled. The wood thickened. Everywhere there were branches down and in the strange beams of light some looked animal and prehistoric.

  From working with the hunts the big man knew most of the land roundabouts. The hunts called in the terriermen to bolt their foxes, or sometimes to dig them out if they had gone to earth, and in the country covered with the dogs he’d had more than a chance to scout the land and get to places most people would never go. He had noted the vast majority of the local setts, and the information was a paying commodity for him, and he checked the setts regularly in the way a herdsman might his flock.

  Some of the setts he knew of had been there for generations, and in other districts he had heard of those, particularly in the more impregnable places, in the harder chalk soils and rocky hillsides, that went back centuries.

  Each clan of badgers had a group of setts, swapping between the
m periodically, sometimes with the seasons, and he needed always to know which of these was occupied. He tried not to take badgers from the same clan too regularly, to allow the family groups to recover and breed, and in this it was like he farmed the animals to ensure there were always badgers to be had.

  They staked the dogs some way from the sett and poured them water and took a drink themselves. The boy had a queer feeling about the man’s mouth being on the water and still did not want to drink it.

  The trees had opened up a little and you could see the light finally coming through. There was a moment of greater coldness, like a draught through a door, and the boy felt an unnerving, as if something had acknowledged them arriving there. They had made a lot of noise moving through the wood and when they stopped they heard the birdsong and the early loud vibrancy of the place.

  First dig? said the man.

  The boy nodded, with that hesitancy. They could hear the dogs lapping and drinking at the water bowls.

  The big man had been up to the sett the afternoon before and seen the heap of freshly scuffed soil and the drawn-out bedding outside the entrance. The sett was on a slope and looked to head deep in and there was much undergrowth and thin sycamore on the cover.

  He’d gone out a little from the entrance and found the dung pit that in the colder weather was often close to the sett this time of year. The fresh spores looked soft and muddy from the badgers’ predominant diet of earthworms. In the mud around were scrapings and footprints and from their impress he knew it was a big fullgrown boar. A sow would put up a better fight if she had cubs to defend, but there was something more competitive to the size of a big forty-pound boar. They wanted a spectacle.

  On the nearby trees were the unhealed scars where the badgers had cleaned their claws and rubbed off the dirt from their coats.

  The main hole’s up there, said the gypsy. He gestured up the slope. We’ll put in the dog, he said. He meant Jip, the big Patterdale.