Best British Short Stories 2017

by Nicholas Royle

  He talked about going to the south of France, to Saint Marie de la Mer, where gypsies came from, their spiritual home. I used to hope I could visit there, because it was warm and different. He knew the names of flowers, trees, hurly teams. I wondered how, when he had never gone to school, never been forced to, but my sister Rena said he must have got it from books nicked from a shop or a library. Dad said he was shifty and too clever and any fool knew that a lad who wore those shirts and thin ties was after something.

  After days away, he would bring me a small piece of jewellery, or a stone with a glint, shells or ribbons and laces I could only dream of, for tying up my hair. Cassie, his sister, and Rena plaited my hair, discussing styles, which colour would be best, whether they should brush up the stray strands or let them fall. They kept hair pins between their lips in front of the mirror my father scavenged from a house that was demolished. They contemplated my face and what would suit it, tied clumps of hair in ribbons and set in slides.

  They put me in dresses nicked from wherever they went. Preening themselves in the squat mirror, they were going to challenge the world in the dance halls and almost achieved it but that Cassie had a child at sixteen and went to live with a man who was older. Rena was fifteen and said she would never be caught that way and she wasn’t, but she never had the chance with us to watch over, especially Jem. He was a lot of work. She taught him the most of what he would need, numbers and letters. When we stopped in country places we used to go walking the lanes for fruit. He would hang on my arm, almost up to my shoulder, swung my plastic bag with his, juices from the berries leaking after us. Thin and wiry, one of the men said, slight as a wave but I don’t know. I’ve only seen waves once from a distance.

  When he wasn’t around, it was my job to find him, like the time one summer on one of the better sites. I went in the washroom and Colum was with him, flicking water, making Jem dance. Droplets flying, Colum had flooded the floor. I worried we might be kicked out by the warden but Jem got excited and ran out with his towel sopping wet.

  Colum said we should get some air. I followed him out while Jem’s voice could be heard in the distance. Colum asked if I’d been up this way before and did I know about the river hidden at the side of the canal where the grass was long and the willows threw down their branches?

  When we got to the rough ground by the river, he pulled off his tee-shirt and said he was going in. He was so thin there were shadows on his ribs and his belly curved in.

  ‘That colour suits you,’ he said, referring to the red and lavender ribbon and it pleased me.

  Afterwards we lay on the grass. Putting his mouth on mine, he drew me close and then it was too late. The day was heavy and stunning. He was the river going through me; words, songs; stories from his grandmother. He locked me into him. His fingers lay on my back, fragile as insects, his lips were going lower and lower. He ran his hand on my arm and down my legs as if he didn’t quite believe I was there and water shifted. The air was still and loud with noise. A bird rose. I wanted to weep.

  ‘I’m thinking of leaving,’ he said.

  He wanted to live in one place, be in the country and off the road. Wouldn’t he need a job? I asked.

  ‘There were other ways,’ he said.

  He would go back over where there was more space and he could be free. You could grow your own food, have hens, live in the fields. What about his family? Wouldn’t they miss him? He said he didn’t care. They’d have to get used to it, his father was a blackguard and the soonest he could, he was going off.

  ‘Would that be now or later?’ I asked.

  He said he didn’t know. He put his face to my neck and fiddled with the plait at the back of my head, pulling the ribbon off. He ran it over his knuckles so that they came white, then dragged it through his mouth behind his teeth. He tied it around my neck, saying it suited me there. His mouth was wet. I thought he would eat me. I couldn’t say any more, even if I didn’t want him to go; what he did, or wanted to do, was always separate, grown up. I was scared. He wasn’t like one of Brid Canty’s boys who were in a remand centre after terrifying a shopkeeper with a knife. They were always out of control though once Brid said at least her sons were men and not the like of other fellas wearing clothes the colour of petticoats.

  I couldn’t breathe. He eased himself up, brushed his hands on his trousers and looked across to the waste field where we had the parties. He wanted to go there, and would I come? I said I was expected, for there wasn’t anyone to cook, so I replaced my clothes, rearranged my hair and carrying my shoes walked back across the ragged grass. I watched him that night from our small window but drew the curtain and got on with washing the cabbage. That talk, notions of leaving unsettled me.

  Next time I saw him, it was outside and November. The men had made a bonfire and slung wood onto the rubbish so Rena, Jem, Dad and me stood in the warmth of the flames until the fireworks started. When the drink was gone, there was music and when that was done, singing. Voices seared out, ‘The Wearing of the Green’ and ‘The Croppy Boy’. Words fizzed in my head. Jem gathered the lids of bins and hit them with sticks. Two years younger than me, he had always been bolder. Rockets shrieked into the sky, sequins of pink and blue thrown into the dark. Stars were falling. That was the last I saw of him.

  Afterwards, when Dad went to pieces, a family took me in but I never got used to them. I still can’t live in a house, something to do with walls, one room leading to another, so you can’t get out. One night, I woke to a fierce howling. It was the the flutter of birds in the eaves and the wind, so strong, like a child calling.

  They let me go back today, but he drifted, saying he couldn’t bear the closeness of cities. He was cramped. He didn’t bother to find work. There was no point, everything he wanted, or valued or prayed for had sunk. When he came for me, the strain on his face told more than I wanted, Jem wandering off that evening and not being seen since. It was never the same again. Dad started drinking and said Jem had escaped into the air on wings and he wished he could join him. I had dreams of my father, the rosary passing through his hands, purple beads like blood, the cross falling, repeating the words in a low murmur.

  Rena left. She had an eye for the road. We got a text from the coast, then Birmingham, Liverpool and Leeds. She was working her way from us. I had to read and re-read the words to him. The last time she wrote she had got a job, in a salon, she called it. I sat on my nails so as not to bite them, hoping she would come home.

  I’m in a job like hers, though I look after flowers not hair. I am gardener or I want to be. I got that from my mother, liking gardens and plants. Dad said the hanging baskets were her idea. They were not strong, only plastic, so the holes kept getting bigger until they rotted. The strain was too much and telling so Dad had to take them down.

  I want to see Dad. He could be anywhere, up north, in Scotland, maybe gone back over. When the weather was good he wanted to be there, stalking the fairs, looking for cattle. I see him journeying but lost. I’d like to tell him how I ran into Colum in Balham and how he said he recognised me by the back of my head and my voice. Sitting on a red plush seat under a picture of Queen Victoria, he rose to kiss me, as though it was days, not years, since we met.

  He told me Cassie was still on the road but with another man and three kids. I asked what happened to his clothes and he said they were not needed on the buildings. He smiled that nice wide smile but he had changed. His face was harder and tanned. I read lines in his brows and round his mouth. Time had got him. He was in a room in a tall house with small windows but as soon as he got money he was off, he said. That could take a long time, I said.

  ‘As long as it takes, I’ll wait,’ he said.

  I asked what had been bothering me for years. Jem. Colum looked into his drink. The silence lasted years. He fiddled with the beer mat, passing it between his fingers. He said he went to the river that evening. Jem had arrived up saying he
had a good pile of cans and he was going night fishing. He asked Colum if he wanted to go along. Colum said he hadn’t time and it wasn’t his idea of fun, sitting around in the wet dark waiting for a fish to decide to bite. They had a row. Colum had said Jem was a young pup not fit to be out on his own. Jem said he had seen Colum and me by the willow. If Colum didn’t give him the price of a bottle of whiskey, he’d tell our dad. Colum told him to head off.

  That was the last he saw of him, Jem wearing a long dark coat, carrying a rod and his bag. Later he heard of men seeking him by the fields and the canal, all the way to the river. It was lugged up with leaves, rotting pieces of wood from old boats, heads of elderflower glowing their clouds of white, cartons, dust, shadows and leaves, floating downstream.

  Ariel

  DAVID ROSE

  Cross-hatching of branches against the sky; a Beatles song warping the urban night . . . How little it takes to conjure his shade, dissolve the years.

  I hear his whistling in the washroom echo the tune I didn’t then know. I lagged behind in everything.

  It was l965, my first job. I was sixteen, spotty and shy. He was . . . I never knew how old Keith was. Thinking back, he couldn’t have been so very much older – three years, four, maybe more. But he was a world ahead. He was part of the adult world I was sidling into; he was what I aspired to be. Even his spots were swarthily sophisticated.

  I apprenticed myself to him: his way of knotting his tie, of leaving his collar button undone, the way he draped his jacket, matador-like, across his arm – I took careful note. How I envied his accent, his easy adenoidal ‘Roight, wack!’ We all affected Liverpudlian accents in those days, but ours were ersatz; his, I knew, was the real thing, his living in Slough a temporary aberration – he couldn’t have been born there.

  It was hard work keeping up. I had just mastered the tie and saved up for the Chelsea boots when he soared ahead again – into leathers, zipped boots and helmet: he had bought a motor-bike. It changed our lives.

  A white Ariel, it was, its distinctive front forks the classiest thing I had seen. It would be there when I arrived in the mornings, parked beside the bike shed, still quivering. I would lay my hands lovingly on the petrol-tank, squeeze the brake-lever and dream.At five o’clock, I would watch him donning his jacket, zipping himself in while I held his gauntlets, squire to his leather-clad knighthood. Following him down the stairs, I would listen enviously to the click of steel-shod boots.

  Then, while he mounted and spurred the Ariel, I would pedal off frantically to reach the road, knowing he would roar up behind me, throttle down, and with a hand on my shoulder, propel me along until, at the roundabout, with a shouted ‘Roight, wack, see yer tomorrer’ he would roar off, leaving me prey to inertia.

  One day, I let down my back tyre, pretending a puncture, hoping desperately that he would offer a lift on his pillion. He offered to mend the puncture. ‘Looks like a dodgy valve,’ he said with an expert glance, and slid on his gauntlets. I was glad, though, afterwards. Something would have subtly changed between us. How could Pegasus have a pillion rider? My place was still pedalling forlornly behind. Besides, I would have a bike of my own one day – I was already saving. Not a white one, though, not straight off. I would graduate to that.

  Something did change that summer, but in a different way: Keith bought another bike – a Thruxton 500cc – a racing job, and a battered van, transporter-cum-workshop. I felt then that I would never catch up.

  Weekends he raced at Brands Hatch. Monday mornings I would be caught up in his cloud of esteem, sitting on his desk as he relayed the race to the Accounts Department. One race in particular stands in my mind. As the flag went down, he couldn’t get started; he had to run and push, the engine turning just as the leaders caught him up. He joined them, edging into the pack. At the finish, he was placed third. Nobody realised he was one lap behind. In my eyes, that put him indisputably first, his mocking insouciance worth any number of hollow legitimate wins.

  I was settling into work by this time, with gumption enough to enter the typing pool alone, to flirt, even, with the post-girl, secure in Keith’s patronage. Suddenly, his hand was removed. With a cheery wave and a ‘Roight, wack, be seein’ yer’ he left the firm.

  Looking back, I realise that was just what I needed. My apprenticeship was finished. After the initial inertia, I picked up speed on my own account. I would slip off my cycle-clips and click up the stairs, jacket coolly draped over one arm. I would whistle ‘Eleanor Rigby’ in the washroom. There were school-leavers to impress, typists to take out. My confidence, though feigned, was effective. I knew I would always be one lap behind, but no-one seemed to notice.

  I was still saving hard. Eventually, I did it – my own ­motor-bike. Not an Ariel, but a Triumph Tiger Cub. Still, it was a start. Nobody rubbed neatsfoot oil into leather with such voluptuous pride as I.

  I commandeered Keith’s parking space by the bike shed, my oil-drip mingling with his on the asphalt – we were now blood-brothers. At five, I would click down the stairs, wink at the juniors, and with practised nonchalance, kick up the prop-stand and swing astride.

  I was now fully fledged. My spots had dried up, my confidence increased to the point where I now carried a spare helmet and offered pillion rides to typists. One of them accepted. She would giggle and wriggle up her mini-skirt, holding me tight round the waist as I roared off, waving to the lad from Stock Control.

  That Christmas, I traded in my Tiger Cub for an Ariel.

  I was to see Keith just once more. He came back to the office to see us all, above all to show us his pay-slip. He had a job at Ford’s in Dagenham. On a good week with bonuses, he earned as much as my monthly salary. He took us out to the car park. He had bought a Jaguar.

  My story now becomes a very ordinary story: I married my typist, sold my Ariel, bought a maisonette, then a semi-detached.

  But Keith, again, was a world ahead.

  It was some years before I learned of it. A clichéd story, but far from ordinary.

  A dark night, a souped-up car, an oily road, a placid tree…

  And me? I still have ahead of me maybe twenty years of slow, frantic pedalling.

  Is-and

  CLAIRE DEAN

  She was the only one watching – nose against glass – as the ferry navigated the turbines. They swooped noiselessly, churning sea and sky. They looked more delicate and awkward close up, like gargantuan flowers, and they went on for as far as she could see.

  Gareth was sitting four rows back flicking through something on his phone. He’d made it clear she was irritating him, making a show of herself for a pointless view. Other passengers watched the news on big screens or dozed. The ordinary breakfast news felt incongruous in this place between places. The island was only sixty miles from the coast she’d lived on all her life, but she’d never seen it. The guidebook talked of the mists of a great magician that kept it hidden.

  As they left the turbines behind, the sea and sky settled into mute bands of grey, but she still couldn’t see the island. She returned to her seat and rested her head against Gareth’s shoulder. He remained intent on his phone. Hers had lost signal and wouldn’t get it back until they got home. Gareth had forgotten to tell her before they set off that he used another sim card on the island.

  She reached for the guidebook and started to reread the section of walks.

  ‘You don’t need that,’ Gareth said without looking up from his phone.

  ‘I like reading it,’ she said. ‘I just like it. I haven’t been before. I’m allowed to enjoy it.’

  ‘I’ll show you everything.’

  She let the book fall closed on her lap and rested her head against him again. ‘I’m lucky to have my own walking, talking guidebook.’ She took hold of his hand. He continued to thumb his phone.

  She dozed and when she opened her eyes again the sky had cleared to a startling blue.
People were lined up against the front window. The island was there and she’d missed it appearing. She tried to sidle in between an elderly woman and a couple of middle-aged bikers. The island was small at first but it quickly became too big to be contained by the window. The view shifted with an accelerated zoom. She hadn’t taken in everything about one image of the island before it grew closer and there was more to see.

  The table filled the back of the room and she caught herself on a corner as she squeezed into the place that had been laid for her. The tablecloth was crocheted and there were napkins in heavy metal rings. There were only two places set. ‘Isn’t your mum . . .’

  ‘No.’ Gareth piled his plate high with potatoes and peas from china dishes. Gareth’s plate held three slices of anaemic-looking ham. She had been given one. There was a bottle of lemonade on the table. No wine. She needed a drink. She could hear the radio from the kitchen, where his mum had hidden herself away.

  ‘If it was a problem us eating here . . . I mean we could have eaten out.’

  ‘No, Mum wanted to cook for us.’ He unscrewed the lemonade. There was no hiss of air. No bubbles in her glass. It must have been at the back of a cupboard for years.

  The Anaglypta walls were cluttered with paintings. Each was a swirl of garish colours formed into a landscape. They glinted from some angles, but looked rutted and gouged from others. There were more of them, clearly by the same amateur hand, in Gareth’s room. ‘Are they places on the island?’ she’d asked as they unpacked their bags. ‘Did your mum do them?’ He’d just shrugged.