I couldn’t think how to reply. Then she said: ‘Why don’t you come in, for some lemonade?’
We went through Lucy’s front door, through their hall and into the back kitchen. Lucy poured out two glasses of Corona lemonade from a stippled bottle taken from the fridge and we went out into the garden. Then we sort of played in her Wendy House for a bit until her mum came out into the garden with Lucy’s little sister.
‘Hello!’ she said brightly. ‘You must be Elliot. I had a nice chat with your mum yesterday, Elliot. We have to go now. Lovely that you’ve made friends with Lucy. Bye!’
We played a bit more in the Wendy House. Soon it was time for me to go.
Every day this scene would repeat itself. Without ever arranging it in advance, I would hang around outside the house and Lucy would come out and invite me in to play in her garden. We would play doctors and nurses. Silly baby stuff, considering that we were eleven-year-olds.
Soon I was deeply in love with Lucy. There is no other way to describe it. And it was more poignant and intense for the lack of any sexual feeling. Just a hot, sick feeling in my tummy. And when Lucy would start to make fun of me and be cross with me, the feeling was even worse.
It all came to a head one Saturday afternoon. Lucy and I were listlessly playing and little Chloë would try to join in, but she was sharply dismissed: ‘Go away, Chloë!’ She hung back, talking sadly to her doll. I was hot and bad-tempered and finally Lucy asked me what the matter was.
‘May I give you a kiss?’ I asked.
Lucy was silent, and I stared down at the ground, astonished at my own boldness, but smugly conscious of having turned the tables. Suddenly, Lucy said to Chloë: ‘Come here!’
Obediently, she followed as Lucy led her over to their shed, whose door had a dartboard and three darts. She plucked out the darts, stood Chloë up against it and, taking a box of coloured chalks from somewhere, proceeded to draw a loose outline around the little girl’s head and shoulders, about twelve inches clear. Then Lucy offered the darts to me.
‘There. If you can throw all three darts so they stick in the door, inside the line, but without hitting Chloë, then I’ll kiss you.’
Saucer-eyed Chloë stayed perfectly still against the shed door, clutching her little doll.
‘OK,’ I said, taking the darts and positioning myself about seven feet away. I sized up my first throw, the dart-point lined up at eye-level, rocking back and forth on the balls of my feet. Then I threw.
The dart landed just above Chloë’s head.
‘Well done,’ said Lucy coolly. ‘One down, two to go.’
I cleared my throat. After a few more little feints, I threw the second dart.
This one landed just to the left of Chloë’s neck, inside the line. That counted. But now her lower lip was trembling; her eyes brimmed and she was starting to shift alarmingly about.
‘Stay still, Chloë!’ ordered Lucy. ‘All right, Elliot. Third and last dart. Get this right, and it’ll be a very big kiss for you.’
My hand trembled. I wobbled my arm freely from the shoulder, to loosen it up, jogging briefly on the spot.
Then I raised it and prepared again. I threw. A clumsy one – in the direction of Chloë’s left eye. She flinched, turned; and it went into her ear. Chloë put her hand up to it; a trickle of blood ran down her forearm.
I panicked. I ran up and pulled the dart out of her ear. She screamed. And Lucy’s father ran out into the garden. My little victim ran up to him and hugged him around the waist, sobbing desperately.
‘What the bloody hell’s going on here?’ he thundered.
‘Elliot was playing a sort of William Tell game daddy,’ said Lucy with a sweet smirk.
Her father walked up and smacked me once across the face. Then he stood aside as I blubberingly ran out through the kitchen and back to my house. I never dared tell my own parents what had happened and soon after that, Lucy’s family moved away and I never saw her again.
It all came back to me with this very attractive woman in front of me.
‘Daddy used to talk about you a lot over supper,’ she said. ‘I think he knew he shouldn’t have hit you.’
‘Oh, I really can’t remember,’ I replied.
We were standing flirtatiously close.
‘I don’t think you ever got that kiss, did you?’ she said.
‘No,’ I said Elliot. ‘Well, I wasn’t entitled to it.’
‘This party is very boring,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘Why don’t you come up to my room and I’ll give you a kiss now.’
She turned on her heel and went back through the party and into the foyer. I followed.
We got into the lift, in which we were alone. We kissed.
Once at the sixth floor, we got out and headed for her room three doors along. Once inside, we kissed again, rolling on the big double-bed. I began clawing her clothes off and, panting, she plucked at my belt.
‘Oh Elliot!’ she gasped. ‘Call me by my name. Say my name.’
At that moment I swept up her hair, to kiss her neck, and this revealed her ear, cut and disfigured by my dart. In the next instant, I complied with her request:
‘Chloë . . .’
I left her room some time after that. She checked out early this morning before I was up.
Ah. The man on reception says my taxi’s going to take a while yet and he wants to know if I’d like a complimentary drink from the bar.
I think I shall ask for a Corona lemonade.
The Dark Instruments
LAURA POCOCK
They are neatly laid out on the workbench in size order, starting with the smallest on the left. That’s important. Keeping your tools handy is one thing. But when you reach for a heavy-duty, skew chisel knife, that’s what you want to pick up. Details matter.
Unfortunately, some nights you can never be sure that you’ve returned everything to its proper place. Even if you remember arranging everything precisely – even if you distinctly remember checking and rechecking – sometimes doubt lies next to your head on the pillow and whispers in your ear that you are wrong. That something’s out of place.
So you get up.
You walk across the bare floorboards, dragging your calloused feet through the dust. The key to the garage is hung up in its usual spot by the door – you take this as a good sign that everything’s five-by-five. But you still need to check just in case.
Just in case. The phrase you use so often now that hearing it has become as commonplace as the sound of your own name. Unplug the electric heater, just in case. Lock the window, just in case. You never finish the sentence or conceive the consequence of inaction: just in case what, exactly, never comes up.
There is a chill in the air tonight but you don’t mind. It barely registers. You concentrate on the task: you fumble the key into the lock with a shaking hand and slide the garage door up. The smell hits you immediately.
You pretend to ignore what’s under the white tarpaulin on the table in the middle of the garage. You walk around it, as though the peaks and troughs in the tarp don’t inspire any fascination. Out of the corner of your eye, you see it move, but you pretend you don’t. And there, resting on a green towel in size order, are your knives.
They wink up at you from a square of moonlight let in by the window, but when you run your fingers down each tool, your hand casts a long shadow across the blades. Your fingers walk along the white beech wood handles and the ergonomic tactility pleases you. Little beauties. Everything is just as it should be.
When you turn around to go back to the house, you see it again. The tarpaulin. You hold your breath and you allow your greedy eyes to take in the entire table. You reach out to touch it. You’d known all along that walking past and pretending to ignore it a second time was out of the question.
This is the
real reason you got out of bed. A small part of you knows that. The knives were just an excuse. A cold breeze rustles the tarp and it moves like before. Now that you’re here anyway, you tell yourself you might as well have a little look. Make sure everything’s A-OK. You take a fistful of the tarp and are just about to whip it off, when a light flashes in your eyes.
‘Who’s there?’ whispers the light-bearer.
You drop the tarp. In the white beam of the flashlight, you feel caught. Your instinct is to put your hands in the air, but you know this will imply guilt and you quickly let your arms fall to your sides.
‘Oh hell, Marshall! You about gave me a god-damned heart attack!’ you cry. This is good. You deflect blame.
‘Sorry, Bobby!’
You sigh. No one else has called you Bobby since you were a teenager. Marshall had never adjusted to calling you Robert. This isn’t the time to correct him.
‘I heard a noise out here. I saw your garage door was open so I assumed the worst,’ says Marshall.
‘Would you get that light out of my eyes?’ You pat your chest with your right hand.
‘Sure, sure.’ He points the flashlight downward and now you can see his wide eyes. ‘What are you doing out here? It’s past two in the morning.’ The eyes move around the garage, searching for answers before finally landing on your face.
You think. You have known Marshall since you were both kids, but you were always in the smart class. You can talk your way out of this. Your mind shuffles a deck of possible answers and finally lands on the sympathy card. You can’t play this card often. If you do, it stops working. But this is an emergency.
‘Ah, well, it’s my knee again. I’ve been trying to get organised out here and a few days ago I knelt down to move some of those paint cans. It’s been keeping me awake since.’
‘Can’t they do anything for that knee? With you being a decorated war hero and all, you’d think that—’
You let him talk. You’ve heard this speech before. He’s just getting to the part where he calls it a travesty and you begin to wonder what his reaction would be if you told him the truth. Your mouth is now full of the sentence you could say. You could tell him what the doctors have told you: that there is no pain.
There’s no physical reason for the pain you’re experiencing, Mr McNeil. It has healed well for a gun-shot wound, barely any scar-tissue. You’ve been to three doctors and they’ve all confirmed it. What would Marshall make of that? You test the water with:
‘They don’t really know what’s wrong with it.’
But this just invigorates his rant about what this country is coming to. No, Marshall is the wrong person to talk to about this, and you have allowed him to dictate the line of conversation too long. You remember where you are. Marshall’s proximity to your secret. There’s a tightness in your chest and you realise it’s been there since the moment he shone the damned flashlight at you. He needs cutting off.
‘So anyway, sorry to have woken you, Marshall. I couldn’t sleep. I thought I might have left the heater on out here, so I got up to check.’
‘You oughta be careful, walking around in the dark,’ says Marshall. He grips his dressing gown tight in the centre to save his chest from the cold air. ‘You don’t want to make that knee worse.’
‘No, not at all,’ you agree. ‘Well, it’s getting late, so . . .’
But you can tell he’s not fully listening. He has finally seen the table, and is walking towards it.
‘Whoa – what’s all this?’
You sigh.
‘It’s just a project I’ve been working on.’ You don’t like where this is going but once the cow is already dead, you may as well eat the steak. ‘Would you like to see?’
‘Would I ever!’ He points the torch back in your face, and you are smiling now.
‘All right, Marshall. Just do me one favour first: pull the garage door closed behind you. We wouldn’t want to expose what’s under here to the wind.’
‘Good idea.’
You watch him slide the garage door to the ground. He does it slowly, quietly, like you should have on your way in. You click your tongue and give him a nod.
‘Attaboy.’ He never seems to mind that you speak down to him. If anything, you sense that he likes it, which is odd for a guy in his thirties.
If you had known twenty minutes ago that you’d be about to do this, you’d have stayed on the couch, counting the ceiling slats. But you’re here now, and it can’t be helped. You tell Marshall to take two corners of the tarp and gently lift before moving it to the side of the table, so as not to disturb what’s underneath. Wouldn’t want to spoil the impact.
Together, you lift the tarp like unmaking a bed, and the objects below are revealed. You suddenly feel vulnerable.
Marshall gasps.
‘Oh, my…’ He stands with his hands pressed together in front of his chest. He seems to instinctively know you don’t want him to touch. He knows these are yours.
You watch him as he looks at the miniature model town you’ve created with your hands. The model buildings and trees stand proud in the beam of Marshall’s torch. Look at us, they seem to say. Aren’t we special?
‘Bobby! I had no idea. I knew you were talented in shop class when we were kids. I’ve always loved those chess sets you make . . . but this is something else!’
You say nothing. You just watch him and tell yourself you can show him the town without revealing its secret. Your secret.
‘This is Woodbury, isn’t it?’ he asks, but he doesn’t take his eyes off the miniature town to see me nod. ‘Oh, wow! It’s all here. You got Main Street all perfect: Barney’s Hock Shop, the pancake house, Chick’s Hardware Store.’ He shakes his head in what seems like awe.
You can’t quite be sure, but you think that the feeling in your chest is pride. You figure this is how new parents must feel when they are told their babies are beautiful.
Marshall walks a few steps around the table. When his hand brushes against a rough indentation, he shines the torch to reveal a compass carved into the surface. He chuckles and shakes his head again.
He moves north of Main Street to Little Hill. The model of All Saints Evangelical Church is nestled into the side of the hill, just as it is in the real Woodbury.
‘Would you get a load of this?’ He claps you hard on the back. ‘Kristy and me, we got married in this church.’
You say nothing. The truth is, Marshall’s wedding is one of those memories that are now so hazy, so tarnished by the fact that the following week you shipped out and your life went to hell. But you don’t mention that. Instead you try to bury the thought by staring at your handiwork.
‘Best day of my life,’ he continues. ‘Before Little Jim was born, anyway. Hey – you even got the missing stained-glass window.’ He looks at you in confusion. You panic. Could Marshall figure you out? ‘But why would you include that? It wasn’t exactly a great moment for the town, to hear that vandals had broken it.’
Your heart feels like mortar rounds firing in your chest.
‘It’s a coincidence, that’s all. I’m still working on the church. Stained glass is no simple thing in miniature, you know.’
Good. This is good. Marshall is nodding and his attention is caught by the next tiny treasure. You watch in dismay as he reaches out to touch the yellow school bus in front of Woodbury Elementary. You had thought there was an unspoken understanding of no touching, but apparently not. Your stomach lurches as he turns the bus upside down and spins the rear left wheel with an index finger. He giggles like a kid and sets the bus back down.
‘This is unbelievable, Bobby. I always wondered what you were up to in here. How long did it take you?’
‘I don’t know, it’s just a hobby.’ You shrug and give him your best Aw, shucks smile. A hobby. It had started out so innocently.
‘A hobby tha
t could earn you some proper moolah, friend. You should start a website. “Tinkertowns.com” has a nice cha-ching to it, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Ha!’ You try to say very little. Your palms are sweating. You realise now that you just want him gone.
Marshall moves west, toward the houses.
‘You even got our street. Kristy would love this.’ He bends down to look at the model of his own house, 1360 Rovello Drive. ‘These are so realistic, I feel like I could look through Randy’s window and see his X-Men posters.’ He shakes his head, then stands up straight. ‘Have you ever put lights in these houses? You could make bespoke Christmas villages.’
You clench your fists. You tell him that wouldn’t be a good idea. It’s not safe.
‘So you’ve tried it?’
You try to appear calm. You say yes.
‘So what happened?’
You tell him it had started a fire. Your eyes flit briefly to the shelf where the burnt model house stands. You blink a few times to try to cover yourself, but Marshall is already walking to the shelf and has no reservation about taking the charred building down.
‘I see now. You’re right, this could have been nasty.’ He turns it in his hands and places it back on the shelf. When Marshall moves back to the table, you think you’ve gotten away with it.
‘Listen, Marshall, I’m beat. I think we should get back to our beds, what do you say?’ You think you’re speaking normally under the circumstances.
‘Well, I could just about look at this thing all night, but I guess you’re right.’
You want to let out a sigh of relief but you know it would be a huge tell to let slip on the final hand. Marshall helps you cover the town with the tarp, and you even manage to crack a joke about ‘tucking her in’. When you’re out of the garage and the door is locked tight, you think you are safe.
Then he turns to you.
‘Wait.’ He frowns. He is whispering now that you are back outside. ‘That burnt house. It was the Henry place, right?’ He takes a few steps to the right and leans to look in the direction of Phillip Henry’s newly restored house.
Best British Short Stories 2017 Page 9