Best British Short Stories 2018

by Nicholas Royle

  Harvey stood in the empty living room of Teresa’s house, more drunk than he would have expected to be from the bottle of Gavi at Aguilo. When Teresa had dropped him off she had pointed out an elderly neighbour in front of one of the smaller houses across the street, staring at them from below a Stars and Stripes the size of a double bedspread that flew above his lawn. ‘Poor Republicans. Worst kind,’ Teresa said as Harvey got out of the car. ‘I’ll see you later.’ She had waved an arm from the window as she drove off. The house was between owners – Teresa had taken up a series of sublets since selling her own place in the Palisades. She was waiting for the market to even out before buying somewhere new, probably farther up the coast towards Malibu. Where, in her fantasy life, she would hike and paddleboard every weekend and buy two Weimaraners and walk the ghost-grey gundogs out along the shining sands each evening. But as she had to travel so often for work this place was fine for now. The living room of Teresa’s house was bare except for a few sticks of furniture: an oversize easy chair that sat on top of two thick wooden rockers, some wilted roses in a narrow-necked vase, a pair of shot-silk curtains in translucent green that only partially covered the doors leading on to the brick terrace with its hip-height wall and the small lawn slanting upwards above it. Harvey walked through the rooms of the house, absent-mindedly opening and closing the closets and drawers. This was the third rental Harvey had visited Teresa in. No matter how earnestly she talked about the life she planned in Malibu, she seemed drawn to these temporary, transitory, anonymous spaces, the residue of someone else’s life hanging about them still.

  He walked into the bedroom and stood under a lacquered wooden fan on to which four flower-shaped light-fittings were fixed. As he looked at the made-up bed Harvey remembered his last trip. The afternoon he arrived Teresa had been lying reading a script with the cover across her as Harvey dressed after showering. She had drawn back the duvet to reveal her naked lower half, instructing him to ‘kiss it’. She had smelled of fresh laundry and as he kissed her, as asked, he had tasted that unmistakable sweet, dry alkaline. He sat for a moment on the corner of the bed looking at a pile of jewellery on Teresa’s bedside table, the rings and fine chain-link bracelets tangled up inside one another, remembering that summer afternoon when the tang of eucalyptus came through the open window.

  The rooks were loud in the garden outside, their raw cawing and flapping audible. Harvey went into the en suite bathroom. The surfaces were crammed with conditioners and beauty creams with French names: Beurre de Karité and Crème Vital. Harvey took a towel from the rail and, walking back through the bedroom and out of the sliding doors, arranged it for sunbathing on the lawn. He lay back and felt his face warming in the sun. He closed his eyes and tried to reconstruct the face of the girl from Aguilo. He tried to imagine what she might look like naked. Her high breasts, the silvery down in the small of her back, her long, tan, slightly bowed legs. How her skin might smell up close in the well of her collarbone or might feel as he ran his fingertips across it. If she would taste like Teresa or if she would have some different tang or musk. Unthinking, he tucked his erection under the belt of his jeans, rolled over on to his front and took a cigarette from the box. There was a single match left hanging from the book he had picked up at a bar back in London. He bent the head back against the strike-strip and clicked his fingers. He lit the cigarette and let the burning match fall on to the grass. He took a long drag, then watched the blue ribbons of smoke from his cigarette dissolve into the clear sky. Above him he heard a single-propeller plane heading towards Catalina. He looked up at the acacia in the far corner of the garden, the fringe of late afternoon light around its outer edge. He thought back to the last view of London from the cab on the way to the airport. How the trees were nearly bare. He remembered the wet leaves on the pavements and the gardens of the Victorian houses as he waited in traffic.

  As the afternoon wore on Harvey worked his way through a pile of old magazines, Italian and French Vogues, that Teresa had stacked in the corner of the living room. Picking up a new magazine every time he went inside to light another cigarette from the stove the previous owner had painstakingly restored, that Teresa had told him about in the car on the way over, the makers’ names, O’Keefe and Merritt, how the previous owner couldn’t afford to have it shipped to his new place. Harvey’s cigarette butts littered the terrace like the droppings of a caged bird. He thought he should collect them before Teresa got back, which would be any time now. As he lay out in the garden, the light softening, the late sun sluicing over his closed eyes, he felt a heaviness fall over him. He told himself he must not sleep.

  He was woken a few moments later by the telephone. By the time he reached it the answer-machine had kicked in. He listened to Teresa’s voice:

  ‘Harvey, baby, I have some bad news.’ There was a pause. ‘I have to fly to New York . . . tonight. Don’t be mad,’ then as if angered by her display of weakness, ‘I told you when you booked your ticket this was always a possibility.’

  Then she added in a staccato burst, ‘The car’s at the studio. Won’t be more than a couple of days. I’ll call you from the airport.’

  Harvey thought he should be angry but registered that anger was not forthcoming. He walked out into the garden and stood on the brick terrace. The light was fading now and a sliver of crescent moon was clear in the blue sky. Teresa’s neighbours were home. He had heard their car pull up as he listened to her message. Now he was back in the garden he heard them bickering behind the flannel bush separating the two properties. Then their back door slamming, followed by the sound of a man pedalling hard on an exercise bike in the garden. Harvey’s drowsiness had lifted. Maybe some exercise would do him good. He would take a stroll. Closing the doors to the garden, he pulled a woollen sweater from his hand luggage and picked up the spare set of keys from the counter.

  It was a short walk from the house to Lincoln Boulevard, where the freshly mown lawns suddenly gave on to four lanes of loud traffic and neon signs. Harvey walked along Lincoln past the strip malls offering manicures and discount household goods, the ten-dollar tyre balancing, the car lots and charity shops with rotating signs on their roofs, past the taco shack where he had eaten hog maws with Teresa on his first trip out. The only other pedestrians were off to work night shifts or, having served their purpose for the day, were waiting at the bus stops to be ferried out of the city. Harvey had ridden on one on his first visit when Teresa had been delayed and unable to meet him at the airport. It had seemed to him a kind of mobile psychiatric ward, where the ill and the underpaid were condemned to spend their days. He stopped a few blocks before Pico outside a bar that advertised itself as a ‘British Pub and Restaurant’. The exterior was painted to resemble the whitewashed wattle-and-daub of an English country cottage. He peered in through the tinted and unwashed windows. The bar was hung with photographs of soccer players from the 1970s, some of whom he recognised, and faded reproduction advertisements for ale. He decided to go in. He took a seat at the bar and ordered a glass of lager, looking up at the three antique horse brasses set in the ceiling beams, a collection someone had begun and then clearly abandoned. The barmaid who served him had looked younger in the gloom as he had entered the bar, but up close Harvey saw the skin on her face was heavily lined and creased from what could only be decades of overexposure to the sun. She set the drink down on a paper napkin in front of him, strings of bubbles rising up inside the amber glass. ‘What’s that?’ a grizzled man with a muzzle of pure white stubble, wearing a foam baseball cap with the name of a local haulage company on it, called out to the barmaid as she flicked through the channels on the TV above the bar. ‘Storm. Blowing in from Alaska. Time to go home, old man,’ she said, patting his arm. Harvey waved his glass at the barmaid, who promptly set another beer down in front him. Perched on his stool, Harvey watched the bar fill up. The after-work crowd of middle managers and studio assistants, here to shoot a few frames of pool or watch a soccer game on the big screen. Harvey watched a
pockmarked, mustachioed man flirting with a fat Latina. It seemed almost everyone in the bar was talking about the storm, questioning the barmaid, who was now the self-appointed authority on the subject, as they came to order more drinks. There was an atmosphere of growing excitement and anticipation in the crowded room as if a foreign dignitary were visiting the city. The bar filled up and then thinned out again but Harvey kept to his stool drinking steadily, unnoticed among the regulars. Before he left he changed three dollar bills into quarters. The barmaid was reluctant to spare the change until Harvey waved a thumb in the direction of the pool table in its tent of fluorescent light. Looking at his watch, in the second it took the numbers to swim into focus, Harvey saw that it was getting on for midnight now and he was drunk. He staggered on to Pico, the electric power lines on their wooden masts buzzing above him. He wanted to see the Pacific Ocean, to be near that massive expanse of water. To hear the waves breaking on the sand of Santa Monica State Beach, the fierce hiss as each one sank into the shore.

  It was raining as the pier came into view but Harvey could make out the lights of the fairground that occupied part of it. As if the big wheel was reeling in the weather from out at sea. Mountainous inky clouds formed on the horizon. His sweater was soaking, the wet wool releasing an acrid, peroxide smell. As he scrambled up the terrace of planting to the mouth of the pier, Harvey spotted a phone booth and stumbled towards it. He fed a handful of quarters into the slot and punched in a number. The phone rang several times before someone picked up.

  ‘Nick, Nicky?’

  The person on the other end of the line swallowed. Harvey heard the whistle and sigh of heavy nasal breathing, then the sound of someone rolling over heavily and faintly behind that the springs of the mattress.

  ‘Nick, it’s Harvey . . . from the plane.’

  ‘Mmmm.’ Then nothing but the crackle of the line.

  ‘I wondered if . . . if you wanted to meet? For a drink or something?’

  ‘Mmmm,’ lower this time. There was a pause and a soft click, then a recorded voice instructed Harvey to replace the receiver.

  The rain was falling heavily now, bouncing high off the slats of the pier, blurring the lights of the houses farther up the coast. Harvey stepped over the guardrail and made his way down the deserted pier as if walking out on to a frozen lake, the boards slippery under his feet. The lights of the fairground rides were reflected in the pooling water. He looked out to the ocean as the first fork of lightning split the sky. He imagined Nick Antonopoulos rolling back to sleep, waking early to call his wife and run through his speech for the sales conference. Wondering what had disturbed him in the night, the memory of someone using his name and wondering if he had dreamt it. Teresa, mid-air, working through a list of red-flagged emails. He thought of the storm clouds forming earlier in the day over the Gulf of Alaska, the pressure driving them down the length of the country, over Point Conception with its white lighthouse where they had picnicked last trip, all the way down to Santa Monica, the rain taking shape then falling on the lanes of traffic on Lincoln Boulevard. He stood at the end of the pier at what seemed like the very tip of this city. He listened to the thunder out at sea. A white line of lightning cut sideways through the cloud bank. He would stay here a while longer, Harvey thought, and see the storm through.

  JANE McLAUGHLIN

  TRIO FOR FOUR VOICES

  THE CHILD ALWAYS wears modish nostalgia – almost, but not quite tipping over into fancy dress: blue cotton with an organdie overall, black patent bar shoes, Alice band on her dark hair.

  I can hear them speaking French, but I know they are not French. Americans, Bostonians probably.

  From my balcony I can see the hotel gardens, terraced down in stages to the rim of the gorge. Each level lushly planted, meticulously mowed and trimmed. On the first level below me is the croquet lawn, surrounded by hibiscus in full flower and small palm trees.

  The father and daughter are playing. Their voices rise and fall in the warm breeze wandering up the valley. In the daytime he always wears a pale linen suit, Visconti-style. He has dark hair slicked back and gold-rimmed spectacles.

  Laughter, an intertwining of a man’s voice and a girl’s. A rhythm of moving in physical harmony. Click of mallet on ball.

  He plays a terrible shot, hitching the ball into the air.

  ‘Espèce de con!’ she shouts at him.

  He walks over to her and wags his finger at her, roguishly. She flounces her skirt and makes a gesture of two hands brushing her face that says ‘So what?’

  Later, in the lobby, I hear him call:

  ‘Amelia! Come for dinner!’

  She appears, wearing a red silk kaftan and trousers.

  They walk past. She flashes a smile, he looks straight ahead.

  They sit to the left of the tall windows overlooking the terrace. The mother is of a different period – Pre-Raphaelite features and mane of dark hair. A robe of grape and night sky, trimmed with expensive embroidery. The parents sit formally, straight in their chairs, making occasional low conversation.

  The child roams the tables between courses, greeting the diners, chatting.

  Then it is my turn. She seats herself opposite me, her red silk arms on the table. She asks me questions politely, with the total confidence of the child who talks mainly to adults.

  I tell her how I have driven up the road from Malaga and will be going on to Arcos to meet my friend.

  ‘Oh I so love the pueblos blancos. I’ve been coming here since I was three. Papa is writing a book about them.’

  She pronounces the syllables of ‘Papa’ with even stress, not in the old-fashioned English way.

  She is animated, charming, her dark eyes brilliant. I wonder at the privileges that have made her so accomplished.

  Then she leans towards me.

  ‘I’m going to tell you a really big secret!’

  Again I am charmed, intrigued.

  ‘It’s so important, I want someone to know!’

  I am silent during the pause.

  ‘I hate my Mama. I am going to kill her.’

  I lean back and stare at her.

  ‘No. You can’t say that. You mustn’t make up such stories.’

  ‘Oh it’s not a story. I am really going to do it. My Papa is going to help me. He hates her too. He wants to marry another lady, one who writes books like he does.’

  ‘I have to speak to your parents.’

  She gestures at their table. It is empty.

  ‘It doesn’t matter what you say to them. She will think you made it up. You’ll see. Nobody will know. It will be suicide. She has tried to kill herself twice already.’

  ‘You cannot say those things. It is not amusing. Maybe you don’t have enough to do here but there is no reason to make up tales that upset people.’

  ‘Oh I don’t mean to upset you. But I am not making it up. My mama is a wicked witch and she deserves to die.’

  I will not listen any longer. She must not be encouraged. She needs help. Or if she doesn’t, I do. I get up and go to the window. Night has fallen over the mountains.

  I cannot see the road any longer. The most beautiful road in Europe, they say. I drove it. How I wanted to do it. The hairpins, the precipitous drops, the steep ascents and descents, keeping my eyes on the road, trying not to be distracted by the soaring crests, the fantastic valleys.

  Before I went, on the internet I read of fear. People who wanted to drive the road, but said they were afraid. Accidents, collisions, falling into the precipitous drop. But nothing blocked my dream of the road. So beautiful, everything I had hoped. And where does it lead me? Here, into the mind of a demented child.

  When I turn, she is standing in the doorway of the dining room. She waves and runs down the corridor.

  I sit down for a moment on one of the velvet chairs. Trying to make sense of the conversation, maybe even pretend it has not happened.

  Ignore it? I cannot get it out of my head. Tell someone, and get involved? But who? M
aybe the mother is indeed unstable and that is why the child is like this.

  And what if it is true? Suppose the woman is found at the bottom of the gorge? Would I question the story that she had flung herself there?

  I see the vertical walls of rock, the rippling waters of the swimming pool, failed brakes on one of the hairpins, the sound of the shotguns in the clay pigeon range at the end of the lower terrace.

  These things are in my head now and I cannot get them out. Her words have taken control.

  The next morning I open the shutters onto the balcony. Mist lies over the slopes of the mountains, the crests floating above it like islands.

  After breakfast I sit reading there. The blue of the sky grows more intense as the mist dissolves and the sunlight grows strong.

  I watch three people going down towards the gorge. First the woman, wearing a bright blue shirt and baggy linen trousers, striding out towards the crest of the hill. Behind her: father and daughter, side by side on the path, holding hands, skipping sometimes over roots or loose rocks.

  Then they wind slowly down a path that leads to the rim of the precipice. The woman in the blue shirt climbs up onto a rock that juts out over the chasm. The other two remain below.