Best British Short Stories 2018

by Nicholas Royle

  ‘This damn little picture is blurring my eyes,’ he complained rather crossly. ‘It seems to be everywhere!’

  ‘I noticed that myself,’ I admitted.

  ‘I can’t get it out of the way: the best thing to do is to cover it up.’

  I gave them a small sheet of paper each and we all three pinned the sheets down upon our respective pictures. I felt a certain amount of relief at not seeing that ugly face and, tapping my stand with my fiddle bow, said, ‘Are you fellows ready?’

  Two silent nods, and we began.

  And now, how can I describe what happened, or how it happened? It is fixed in my mind and yet I cannot find words suitable to impart to you the horror of our experience. I think the music was the worst part of it all. As we played, I could hardly believe that this . . . this hellish sound was really being created by our own fingers. Hellish. Demonic. Those are the only words for it, and yet in itself, it was none of those things. But there was something about it that conveyed that ghastly impression, as though the author had composed it with the wish to convey profane emotions to its executants. I confess that I was frightened – really and truly afraid – possessed of such fear as I have never experienced before or since: fear of something awful and all-powerful which I did not understand. I played on, struggling to drop my fiddle and stop, but compelled by some force to continue.

  And then, when we were half-way through, a strangled cry from Ian broke the horrible spell. ‘Oh God, stop it, stop it! This is awful!’

  I seemed to wake as from a dream. I lowered my violin and looked at the young man. He was white and trembling, with dilated eyes staring at the music before him. He looked, with his thin face and yellow hair, like a corpse.

  I murmured hoarsely, ‘Ian, what is the matter?’

  He did not answer me. With one hand, he still held his cello; with the other – the right one – he made a sign of the cross and murmured, ‘Christ – oh, Christ, have mercy on us!’ and sank in a dead faint onto the carpet.

  In two seconds, galvanised into action, we were beside him and, Arnold supporting his head and shoulders, I administered what aid I could to him, though my intense excitement made me of little use. He was very far gone, and it took us nearly twenty minutes to revive him. When he opened his eyes, he looked at us both, a prey to abject terror, then, clutching at my coat in fear, he murmured, ‘The music . . . the music . . . it’s possessed. You must destroy it at once!’

  We exchanged glances, Arnold and I. Arnold seemed to say ‘I told you so’ and I accepted the rebuke. But I obeyed. This music was evil and had to be destroyed. I rose to my feet and went to the music stand. Then I suddenly felt the blood draining from my face and leaving my lips dry. For the music lay on the carpet – clawed to pieces. Only the grinning man on his dromedary was intact . . .

  It was some weeks later, when we had somewhat recovered from our experience, that I ventured to open the book I had recently bought and which had been the cause of so much trouble. I had the name Paymon on the brain, and quite by chance, I opened the Infernal Dictionary at the letter P. I had no intention of looking for the name Paymon. I did not, of course, think it existed in any dictionary. I merely turned the pages over and looked at the illustrations. At the sixth or seventh page of that letter, my attention was attracted by the only picture in the column – that of a hideous little man, seated on the back of a dromedary. The name Paymon was written beneath it, along with a small article, concerning the illustration.

  I read avidly. ‘Paymon: one of the gods of Hell. Appears to exorcists in the shape of a man seated on the back of a dromedary. May be summoned by libations or human sacrifices. Is very partial to music.’

  ADAM O’RIORDAN

  A THUNDERSTORM IN SANTA MONICA

  HARVEY WAS SITTING with Teresa in the courtyard of Aguilo, a fashionable restaurant on Abbott Kinney. They had come straight from the airport. Teresa would drop him at the house after lunch before returning to the office, but promised they would do something special that evening. This was Harvey’s third trip to Los Angeles in the past eighteen months. He had met Teresa at a private view in London. She had been at Vassar with Eric Harkness, a friend who owned the advertising agency where he occasionally worked freelance as a copywriter. She was in the city looking to finance a film. At the private view she had mocked the untidy blocks of colour on the massive canvases, each named after a Station of the Cross, and he had liked her for that. That night they had made love in her hotel suite overlooking Hyde Park. As Teresa slept, the sheets tangled around her legs, Harvey sat smoking in an armchair by the window, looking out at the chain of orange lamps winding through the deserted park.

  At ten to six, after an hour dozing beside her, Harvey kissed Teresa on the ear and left. He heard her murmur as he clicked the door shut and had been surprised to find himself hesitating in the corridor, his corduroy jacket draped across his arm. The jacket smelled of fried food and damp, of his cramped studio apartment, with its three exterior walls and bad light after midday, where he had moved after his marriage had broken down.

  A fortnight later her note arrived, alongside an envelope bearing his accountants’ insignia and stamped ‘URGENT’. Eric must have given her the address. Teresa’s letter asked him to come to Los Angeles. No strings, no promises. Why not? Harvey asked himself, as he rinsed a handful of cutlery in the sink, rubbing the cold tines of a fork with his thumb as he waited for the tap to run hot. It might be what he needed. Shake things up. Harvey borrowed the money for that first flight to LA from Eric, who watched from behind his desk, making a steeple of his stubby fingers as Harvey explained what the money was for. Harvey, in a tubular steel chair, tobacco tin on his knee, rolled a cigarette as he waited for Eric’s response to his petition. ‘Go. Soak it in,’ Eric said in his terse, semi-Anglicised way as he tore the cheque from its book and slid it across the desk. He beckoned Harvey in for a hug – beaming, gregarious, like a small-town mayor, his arms spread wide before his chest. Harvey wondered if Eric and Teresa had once been lovers.

  What had been a whim had now become an expensive and, Harvey knew, unsustainable habit. It wasn’t the sex, the tide of Teresa’s desire hard to navigate or predict; sometimes animalistic, his torso raised with welts and scratches as they lay together in the afterglow. Other times, as tentative as teenagers as Teresa’s hands slowly mapped the geometry of Harvey’s face. It wasn’t the play at coupledom they made on strolls along Venice boardwalk past the street performers and panhandlers with their brassy handwritten signs. And it wasn’t their in-jokes at the industry parties Teresa was obliged to attend, where they met and mocked with a look or squeeze of the hand the people, restless in their spheres, who came to court Teresa’s influence. Other-worldly models teetering unsteady as foals in their high heels, their big, underwater eyes expressing a desire to act; downtrodden actors locked into five-year deals with prime-time shows, confessing a compulsion to direct; directors sick of being pushed around by studio heads, who now wanted to exec-produce for themselves. ‘I can confirm it: the earth is tipped towards Los Angeles, all the prettiest girls roll this way,’ Harvey told Eric one evening during that first trip, feeling alien and unfettered for the first time in years. He had Teresa pinned to an island table of a sports bar as he talked. They had retreated inside after walking by the ocean to see if they could catch a glimpse of the famous green flash said to appear on the horizon at sundown. ‘Here, Teresa wants to speak to you,’ Harvey said passing the phone, looking up at the massive glistening athletes, sweat-drenched on the big screens around the bar.

  No, it wasn’t any of these things, Harvey told himself. What he was hooked on, he was sure, was the eleven-hour lacuna of the flight and all it entailed. It began at take-off. The cabin hushed. The cutlery rattling in the galley as the plane gained speed, the plastic cabin beginning to creak. The engines roaring like beasts heard from the bowels of an amphitheatre. The focused quiet of an examination hall as passengers concentrated on keeping calm and pretending
what was happening was perfectly normal. The plane would continue to ascend, the patchwork of fields dropping away below as London’s suburbs petered out into countryside. As the plane gained height Harvey would feel his body respond, increasing the pressure on his heels, righting itself as it tried to adjust to the altitude. Until the nose of the plane dropped a few degrees and the plangent note of the electronic gong told passengers take-off was over and they were free to undo their seat belts. After the thrill of take-off came the endurance test of the hours mid-air. He would start and then abandon films, leaving their protagonists frozen on the small screen. Harvey relished this restlessness, the boredom of a quality last known in childhood. Then would come a few hours of fitful sleep. Slack-mouthed, snapping awake as his neck gave under the weight of his head.

  Then, just when the tedium seemed interminable, the limbo of the flight never ending, the captain would come over the intercom and announce the final hour in the air and the beginning of the descent. Then came the prospect of landing and the dissipating tension as time re-engaged and found its thrust. Now the plane would pass for miles over Los Angeles, the low-rise city: its dense acreage of parking lots and freeways punctuated by the oasis of a baseball ground or a football field: the light charged with a biblical intensity. Looking out to the brown mountains that hemmed in the city and seemed to drive its seething mass towards the ocean. Then the sound of the landing gear like a winch hauling the world below towards the belly of the plane and a final thrill: that burst of speed towards the runway. Then the judder as the plane touched down, past the tower and the terminals until he could make out the faces of the baggage handlers and engineers in their coveralls. Then the spell was broken. He would adjust his watch. He was certain it was this – not Teresa, not the distance from his life in London – that he had come to crave.

  In the courtyard of Aguilo, a bank of railway sleepers and an ivy-covered wall provided shade from the swimming-pool-size section of sky. Teresa was busy at her BlackBerry straining to hear over the noise of the lunchtime crowd, as she pushed the glossy black tear of the headset into her ear. She looked over to Harvey who had paused his meal, anxious not to finish before Teresa had started hers. She flashed two fingers at him, grimacing theatrically. Harvey set down his fork and watched a Mexican busboy in his fifties deliver a baked egg floating in a pool of green lentils to a pregnant woman at the table opposite. A skinny compatriot refilled her water glass. A blond waiter with a clover tattooed behind his ear hovered nearby with his notepad, as if scoring their performance.

  Harvey inspected himself in the back of his spoon. His eyes were puffy from the flight. He was still a little tanned from his last trip out. The lines on his brow had grown deeper over the past few years. He tilted the spoon to inspect the few silver strands that had recently appeared at his temples. As Teresa continued her conversation Harvey noticed a girl in a floral-print dress, looking up at him from her dessert. She could be no more than nineteen, wore no make-up or had been made-up to appear as if she wasn’t wearing any. Harvey couldn’t decide. She had a soft, cherubic face and wore two slides in her short hair in an attempt to suppress the natural curl or disguise a recent change in length. He caught her eye and she looked away.

  Harvey glanced over to Teresa, still on the phone, the food on her plate untouched. She had been there to meet him at the airport. He had spotted her checking her watch by the Arrivals board. Teresa would be forty-eight next month. Compared to the girl she had an unshowy beauty, but she carried herself with a lightness that was itself girlish. When Teresa had spotted Harvey at Arrivals, she had run to hug him. She had brought him flowers: huge sunflowers, their long stems wrapped in brown paper. Harvey imagined her picking them out, double-parked outside the florist on Washington Boulevard, shaking her head at the alternatives before holding out a crisp twenty when the right bunch was proffered. All this without breaking from her conversation on her BlackBerry.

  ‘You made it!’ Teresa had said. Then pulling him close into her, ‘So good to have you back, baby.’

  The plane had been empty when Harvey boarded. At check-in he had gambled on a seat in a central section between the bulkheads. In front of his seat there was a fold-down platform for a bassinet. Harvey had reasoned that a mid-week midday flight to Los Angeles would not be full of families. As a tinny aria was pumped through the cabin, he wondered if he might have the whole row to himself. He changed into his complimentary flight socks, pushed his shoes out of sight below his seat and buckled himself in. Contemplating the flight ahead he closed his eyes.

  ‘Nick Antonopoulos,’ said a voice.

  The words pulled him from a maze of memories, a fervid series of unconnected images, summoned before take-off in his semi-dreaming doze. The voice repeated:

  ‘Nick Antonopoulos.’

  Harvey opened his eyes this time and looked at the hand held out to him. Standing above him was a man in his thirties. He was dressed in khaki slacks, the crease ironed sharp down the front of each leg, and a black long-sleeved polo shirt, the shining nylon like something a professional golfer might wear. His dark hair was clipped militarily short around his ears and at his neck. He seemed generically clean-cut, politely forthright, indistinguishable from many other Americans you might meet in airport lounges travelling on business across the western world. He was smiling softly, a large and sensual mouth, a smile that suggested he was amused by the archetype he found himself inhabiting. Nick Antonopoulos gave off the impression that the two men shared a long-standing arrangement to meet and that he was now finally making himself known. Harvey offered his own hand and attempted to stand, before realising this was impractical.

  ‘Second flight of the day for me,’ Nick said, smiling more broadly now as he unpacked his briefcase. He pulled out a magazine. On the cover were arrayed pyramids of unnaturally bright apples and oranges. As he sat down Nick gestured to the cover and explained that he worked in the fruit industry. He had spent the previous night in Versailles, in what he described as a heinously small hotel room, where he had been attending his firm’s annual European sales conference. He was now flying to Los Angeles, deputising for his manager at the International Conference where he would be delivering a paper on the drivers and barriers behind consumers’ fresh fruit choices. He would be flying back to England after two nights at the Four Seasons on Doheny. At first the men exchanged a few platitudes: the clichés and curiosities of international travel; stories from Nick’s life on the road, told with great exuberance where little actually happened. A mention of his wife and two daughters at home in Windsor where they had moved recently, and where, walking through the Great Park one day with his daughter, he was sure he had seen Queen Elizabeth drive past.

  As the plane taxied towards the foot of the runway, Nick took a mobile phone from his briefcase. He scrolled through the names, then pressed his thumb on the touchpad.

  ‘Samantha?’

  Something in the sureness of Nick’s responses gave Harvey an unexpected comfort.

  ‘OK. About to take off now. Love to the kids. Talk later. I know. I know,’ and then with a lingering smile, ‘OK.’

  Nick finished his call and turned off the phone, gesturing with a raised palm to the air-hostess who had been approaching with a frown. He turned and flashed a smile at Harvey.

  When they hit the turbulence Harvey was sleeping. The map on the headrest screen was the first thing he saw when he opened his eyes. They were somewhere over northern Canada. The jolt was so hard it lifted him from his seat, his lap belt biting into the top of his pelvis. He glanced to his right and saw Nick gripping his armrests, bracing himself against the movements of the plane. The plane was rattling harder now, throwing passengers from side to side. Harvey heard a sharp intake of breath from an air-hostess as she pulled herself along the aisle to the jump seat. He watched as she exchanged a brief and unmistakably fearful glance with her colleague in the aisle opposite. Now the noise of the engines increased as if struggling to keep the plane airborne. Harvey k
new something was terribly wrong. An elderly woman in the row to their right had begun to sob and was being comforted by her husband, who was patting her bony shoulder ineffectually with one hand, while gripping his armrest with the other. Her husband’s single-serving wine bottle had fallen from his tray and was cannoning along the aisle as the plane was buffeted roughly. Harvey thought of the footage he had once seen of an office during an earthquake in the Philippines. Then he thought about the flight deck, as he knew from the reconstructions he had watched on TV, the pilots wrestling at their dual controls trying desperately to keep the plane aloft, some series of fatal mistakes already placing them beyond safety. Harvey was sure this was the end. In a moment the plane would be lost in vast white tracts below. It would be days before the rescue parties reached them, or what parts of them were left. Their luggage, the bright clothes picked out for beach holidays in California, would be strewn for miles across the snow. It was then that Nick placed his hand on top of Harvey’s. He gripped it strongly with a force that left Harvey in no doubt it was deliberate, before returning it to his own armrest. Neither man looked at the other but it was understood by Harvey that he had been reached out to in his last moments. That humanity had prevailed and that men had faced their fate together. They endured several minutes more of extreme turbulence before the plane’s movements became at first less frequent and then less severe. The first officer came over the intercom to announce they had hit several big pockets of air as they passed around a storm front and that as they were expecting a little more chop up ahead, he would be leaving the seat-belt sign on for now. The first officer sounded relieved to be delivering this news.

  As the flight wore on, both men retreated into themselves but Nick continued to offer the same amused, ironic smile whenever Harvey got up to stretch his legs or use the toilet. Harvey watched Nick scrolling through spreadsheets on a laptop, biting the thumbnail on one hand while running the forefinger of the other down the columns of numbers. As they waited to disembark, standing in the aisle of the business class section, the empty seats littered with newspapers and magazines, Nick turned to Harvey and offered him his card. ‘This is me. Keep in touch,’ he smiled, and patted Harvey on the back. Harvey placed the card in his pocket. He wanted to thank Nick Antonopoulos, if not for his company – for a few minutes of conversation over the eleven hours in the air could hardly be called company – then for his proximity. To tell him of the unexpected comfort his fleeting companionship had given him. He felt he was taking leave of an old friend. But instead he nodded and smiled and said, ‘Yes, thanks, well, good luck with everything.’