We sat in the immaculate dining room while Andrea served hors d’oeuvres. I asked Ruth what she got for Christmas, ‘I...’ she struggled to remember.
‘She got a Carlisle United away strip,’ beamed her Dad. ‘And... a season ticket.’
‘Wow, Ruthie.’
Andrea’s muscley arms were tensed. ‘She also got a pony. Which is what she’s always wanted.’
‘Oh. Yeah. Forgot about that.’
Ruthie leaned into me. ‘Want to see what my family got each other? Shall I show you.’
‘Not now, Ruthie,’ smiled Andrea. ‘We’re about to eat.’
All through the meal, Ruthie said nothing out loud. But I could see that the unsatisfactory people round the table were less real to her than the family upstairs. She was talking to them in her head. When Andrea went into the kitchen to sort out the Christmas pudding, Ruthie dragged me upstairs.
There was the other Dillon family, gathered around a poorly animated Christmas tree. ‘It doesn’t seem right to leave them on their own while we’re down there eating,’ said Ruthie. She must have got some kind of expansion pack because the tiny dad was doing magic tricks for his children. When each trick finished they would throw their heads back to an angle of ninety degrees and applaud – their hands a hummingbird blur of appreciation.
‘Look. Look what the dad got the mum.’
She must have bought some sort of expansion pack. I’d never seen branded products in Sims before. Dad had bought Mum a bottle of perfume. Charly.
‘You know that’s a really cheap perfume.’
‘I know but it’s what she was wearing the day he met her.’
‘They don’t even make it any more.’
‘I know. That’s why she’s so surprised, look.’
Tiny Mum really was very surprised. She had her arms in the air and was more or less spinning with pleasure.
Tiny Peter by the way got all kinds of stuff for his bedroom – a multigym, a double bed, coffee making facilities. ‘It’s like a flat. So he can be happy,’ said Ruthie. ‘And look how happy he is.’ His Aspiration Meter was twitching away at the top of the dial.
Real Mum came half an hour later. I hadn’t seen her since the split up. She gave me a hug and asked about uni. I got my coat and said we’d all come with her and Ruthie. But in the kitchen, Ruthie was slumped across the table, groaning about having a temperature.
‘What’s wrong with her?’ asked her mum.
‘Nothing. She’s fine. She’s been having a great time.’
‘Having a great time? She looks half dead.’
Peter tried to put her coat on her. ‘Come on, Ruthie, we’re going to Grandma’s,’ he said.
‘Too hot,’ said Ruthie.
There was a massive row about how Ruthie had got so ill without anyone noticing. It was obvious that she wasn’t going anywhere but new arrangements could only be made after grudges and resentments had been aired at high volume. In fact things were only really settled when Andrea walked out, slamming the door behind her.
I watched her go from the window. I said, ‘Temperature. She really did read that manual, didn’t she?’ At the time it seemed funny that Andrea stood in the drive and beat her thighs in fury, for all the world like a Sim that’d wet itself.
And later when I sat around the tree with Ruth and Peter and their mum and dad, I thought it was sweet that her game had come true for a moment.
Mum opened her present, almost dropped it in surprise, then threw her hands up in the air. ‘Charly!’ she gasped. ‘How did you remember?’
‘You know I’m not sure.’
‘They don’t even make it any more. Where did you get it?’
‘The internet.’
‘But why?’
‘You know, I can’t remember.’
She kissed him. She kissed him on the lips. Ruthie was watching them, as intently as a child playing a computer game.
Two days before the start of term, I went round to sort out the travel arrangements. ‘Big news,’ said Peter. ‘Andrea has gone.’
‘What?’
‘Completely gone away and never coming back.’
‘How’s your dad?’
‘Fine I think. He just keeps smiling.’
Peter just kept smiling too. He carried on smiling as he told me he wasn’t going back to university.
‘You’re not what?’
‘I’m not going back to university.’
‘What are you talking about? Why aren’t you going back?’
‘Why would I want to leave here? Look.’
He gestured towards the endless winter mud flats. I remember a scribble of geese drawn on the sky.
‘It’s mud,’ I said. ‘And geese. Even the geese can’t stick it all year.’
‘It’s home,’ he said.
‘OK so you’re not coming back. OK. Fine. Thanks for telling me. You could at least try and not smile about it.’
Because he was smiling. A wide, blank smile.
‘Why are you smiling?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
So Peter’s mum and dad got married again that Easter. I came home for the wedding. I was happy for them. Really I was. I got changed in Ruthie’s room. When I came in, she paused her Sims game. I watched them on the monitor as they subsided into their chairs, all smiles. The mother was in a wedding dress.
During the afternoon, I tried to talk to Peter about uni. ‘Come back,’ I said. ‘Everything’s worked out here. They won’t miss you. You could start again in September.’
At first he seemed to struggle to know what I was talking about.
‘Manchester. Come on. Come back with me. It’s good.’
Then his eyes brightened, as though he’d remembered something good.
‘Manchester!’ he said, and he sounded just like his mum had sounded when she said, ‘Charly’! Like he’d recovered some forgotten treasure. I really thought he was going to say yes, but then he span on his heel very suddenly, almost involuntarily, and walked away into the party, passing his blandly smiling parents. Passing Ruthie, who was frowning until she caught my eye. Then she smiled too.
The sudden spin on the heel; the sentence bitten off in the middle; the involuntary quickness of it all made it seem less than human. It troubled me then. And it troubled me afresh when I saw it again ten years later.
The thing is, it wasn’t the only time I saw it that day. Later in the afternoon, I was walking back along the prom. Cars from the party were parked all the way back to the town. A figure came jerkily up the steps from the shore, pausing on each step as if each step was an effort of will. An angular restless figure. Only when it turned to face me, did I recognise Andrea. It wasn’t that her face had changed, but her deportment had. She moved like something mechanical and remote controlled.
‘Sue...’ she hissed. Her eyes were wide and urgent. She grabbed my forearm. ‘Listen to me.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘I...’ Her eyes I remember were staring and wide, like terrified eyes, but oddly expressionless. ‘I... please...’
‘I’m listening.’
Then she turned, just as Peter had turned, spinning on her heel and walking rapidly away. As suddenly as if a switch had been thrown. I looked up and saw Ruthie on the prom. She waved to me, a big, enthusiastic wave. She ran up and hugged me and thanked me for being her friend and told me she was sad that it was all over between me and Peter. She tickled me under my arms. I think it was this scene that made me forget that moment with Andrea. That made me forget looking over the handrail later and seeing her beating her thighs in that jerky, Sims-like way.
I only remembered that moment when I went back to Silloth with Adé. When Peter leaned in to whisper something, then turned suddenly away. When I saw for a second a look of horror and pleading flicker across his eyes, before the bland smile resettled itself. As though someone was trying to escape from that body. That body which had not changed. But which now subsided into a chair as though its p
ower source had been cut off, as though it was on pause.
‘Bye then,’ said Adé. ‘Lovely to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you.’
It was only when we opened the door to go that the little girl came running in from the garden.
‘Are they going?’ she cried. ‘Oh. Don’t go. Don’t go...’ and she hugged me round the waist and tickled my ribs a little.
‘Who’s this?’ smiled Adé, rubbing the child’s lovely, twisted red hair. ‘You must be Peter’s little girl. What’s your name?’
‘Ruthie,’ said the girl, looking up at me and smiling. ‘Stay,’ she said. ‘Stay and play.’
And I saw that she wasn’t Peter’s little girl at all. She was Ruthie, the same Ruthie, ten years on but still eight years old.
Anette and I Are Fucking in Hell
Etgar Keret
SHE WAS SWEATING, I was sweating, the ground was sweating. We could feel the rumbling in her bowels, sense that in another minute, she’d open her mouth to vomit. ‘Tell them to stop,’ she pleaded, her hand stroking my damp, greasy hair, ‘please, make them stop.’ The imps capered around us, screeching in their shrill voices, making obscene gestures. Every once in a while, they ran a long, filthy fingernail over my ass or hers, giggling annoyingly each time. And we fucked. When my tongue caressed her nipple, the acrid taste of the sulphur got into my mouth too. I felt her hand slide down my wet back, or maybe it was one of the imps. I forced myself to stick my tongue out again and trailed it slowly down her body, trying to ignore the taste, the smells, the sounds. I reached her crotch. The imps clapped and whistled in ecstasy, but I tried to ignore them, focused on my moving tongue. She started to moan, but didn’t close her eyes for a minute. Her gaze was fixed somewhere on the ceiling and she must have seen the giant blind bats hanging upside down over our heads, or the ones that were flying around the room, dropping their shit pellets. You can’t ever close your eyes here, not when you’re asleep, not when you pass out, not when you’re making it with a woman. And there’s another special thing about this terrible place – you have a constant hard-on, if you’re a man, and if you’re a woman, you’re always wet, and the whole sex thing turns into an almost involuntary act, like breathing, like breathing moldy air that makes your lungs convulse as if you’re about to puke.
One of the imps jumps right over us, scoops up a little bit of the vomit on her stomach with its finger and leaps around in the air waving it to the others. My tongue is still going at it, and she keeps moaning. As I raise my body to penetrate her, my erect penis disturbs a dozing rat. The imps are in a frenzy now. They bombard us with gobs of phlegm and pellets of bat shit. Our shame and suffering delight them, and we can’t stop. If only I’d listened to the preacher when I was a kid, if only I’d stopped when I still could.
Translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverstone
Contributors
A. S. Byatt was born in Sheffied, South Yorkshire, and educated at Newnham College, Cambridge, and Somerville College, Oxford, She is the author of eight novels to date: Shadow of a Sun (1964), The Game (1967), The Virgin in the Garden (1978) Still Life (1985) which won the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen ward, Babel Tower (1996), A Whistling Woman (2002), Possession: A Romance (1990), won the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and The Biographer’s Tale (2000). She has also written two novellas, published together as Angels and Insects, several works of non-fiction, and five collections of short stories: Sugar and Other Stories (1987); The Matisse Stories (1993), The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye (1994), and Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice (1998). She was made a dame in 1999 and currently lives in London.
Ramsey Campbell Ramsey Campbell is described by the Oxford Companion to English Literature as ‘Britain’s most respected living horror writer’, and in 1991 was voted the Horror Writer’s Horror Writer in the Observer Magazine. His many award-winning novels include The Face That Must Die, Incarnate, The Overnight, and The Grin of the Dark. He has also published thirteen collections of short stories to date, most recently Told by the Dead (2003).
Frank Cottrell Boyce is a novelist and screenwriter. His film credits include Welcome to Sarajevo, Hilary and Jackie, Code 46, 24 Hour Party People and A Cock and Bull Story. In 2004, his debut novel Millions won the Carnegie Medal and was shortlisted for The Guardian Children’s Fiction Award. His second novel, Framed, was published by Macmillan in 2005. He also writes for the theatre and was the author of the highly acclaimed BBC film God on Trial. He has previously contributed stories to Comma’s anthologies Phobic and The Book of Liverpool.
Ian Duhig has published four poetry collections, including Nominies (1998) which was named as one of the 1998 Sunday Times Poetry Books of the Year and received a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation; and most recently, Lammas Hireling (2003) which was a Poetry Book Society Choice. His first short story was published in The Book of Leeds (Comma, 2007).
Matthew Holness won the Perrier Comedy Award in 2001 for Garth Marenghi’s Netherhead, and has since appeared in The Office, Casanova, and his own Channel 4 television series Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace and Man to Man With Dean Learner. His first short story was published in Phobic (Comma, 2007).
Etgar Keret is an Israeli writer whose award-winning short story collections include Pipelines, Gaza Blues (with Samir El Youssef), The Bus Driver Who Thought He Was God, The Nimrod Flip-Out, and Missing Kissinger. He is the author of three graphic novels, several award-winning scripts for TV, and the novella Kneller’s Happy Campers, which was adapted by director Goran Dukic into a feature-length film Wristcutters: A Love Story starring Patrick Fugit and Tom Waits. His fiction has been translated into sixteen languages and has been the basis for more than 40 short films.
Hanif Kureishi's first play, Soaking the Heat, was performed at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1976. Since then he has enjoyed success as a playwright, screenwriter, novelist and short story writer. His first novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, was published in 1990 to widespread acclaim, and won the Whitbread First Novel Award. He has published also three collections of short stories: Love in a Blue Time, Midnight All Day and The Body and Other Stories.
Alison MacLeod is the author of two novels, The Changeling and The Wave Theory of Angels. Her first collection of short stories, Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction, was published in 2007. She lives in Brighton and teaches creative writing at the University of Chichester.
Sara Maitland grew up in Galloway and studied at Oxford University. Her first novel, Daughters of Jerusalem, was published in 1978 and won the Somerset Maugham Award. Novels since have included Three Times Table (1990), Home Truths (1993) and Brittle Joys (1999), and one co-written with Michelene Wandor – Arky Types (1987). Her short story collections include Telling Tales (1983), A Book of Spells (1987) and most recently, On Becoming a Fairy Godmother (2003).
Adam Marek’s stories first appeared in Parenthesis (Comma 2006), and New Writing 15, edited by Maggie Gee and Bernardine Evaristo. His debut collection Instruction Manual for Swallowing was published by Comma Press in 2007.
Christopher Priest is the author of ten novels and two collections of short stories. The Glamour won the 1988 Kurd Lasswitz Best Novel award and The Prestige won the 1995 World Fantasy Award, the 1995 James Tait Award for best novel and was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. In 2006 it was adapted into a feature film by Christopher Nolan.
Jane Rogers was born in London in 1952 and lived in Birmingham, New York State (Grand Island) and Oxford, before doing an English degree at Cambridge University. She has written seven novels, including Separate Tracks, Mr Wroe’s Virgins, Island and Voyage Home, as well as original television and radio drama. Her short stories were collected in Ellipsis 2 (Comma 2007).
Nicholas Royle is the author of five novels – Counterparts, Saxophone Dreams, The Matter of the Heart, The Director’s Cut and Antwerp – as well as one collection of short stories, Mortality (Serpent’s Tail, 2006). He has edited twelve anthologies of shor
t fiction including A Book of Two Halves, The Tiger Garden: A Book of Writers’ Dreams, The Time Out Book of New York Short Stories, and Dreams Never End (Tindal Street Press).
Gerard Woodward was born in London in 1961 and studied art and anthropology. He has published four poetry collections: Householder (1991), which won a Somerset Maugham Award; After the Deafening (1994); Island to Island (1999); and We Were Pedestrians (2005). His first novel, August, was shortlisted for the 2001 Whitbread First Novel Award, and was followed in 2004 by I’ll Go To Bed At Noon (2004), shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and the third in this semi-autobiographical series, A Curious Earth (2007). His first collection of short stories The Caravan Thieves was published this year.
Special Thanks
The editors would like to thank the following people for their advice and support throughout the project: Tom Spooner, Tim Cooke, Libby Tempest, Deborah Rogers, Andy Darby, Lin and Jon Shaffer, and Hot Chip.
Recommended Read
The Captain
by Adam Marek
from The Stone Thrower
GREG HEARD THE beep of the dump truck's reverse alert and was instantly awake. He charged down the stairs, slammed open the many bolts on the door, and yelled 'Stop!' But his voice was lost in the sound of the truck's wheels crunching gravel and the hissing of its hydraulics.
The New Uncanny Page 22