Best British Short Stories 2015

by Nicholas Royle

  Later that night she’s sitting on the couch reading one of her Arthurian fantasy novels, another one filled with knights kneeling before queens and saying things like My lady, perchance you have misunderstood me. She never needs to raise her eyes to know where Angelina is or what she’s doing – the sound of her black plastic sandals slapping against the floor tiles is like a noise made by the house itself. Without looking she knows when Angelina’s opening the silverware drawer, lighting the candles to chase away flies, setting the last of the dishes on the table. The radio in the kitchen crackles loudly with static, drowning out the newscasters’ gruff voices.

  She’s almost at the end of the chapter when she feels a stubby finger gently tracing her scalp. ‘We really need to fix your hair, mija,’ Angelina says, in that same shrill, high-pitched voice she’s been listening to her whole life. ‘It’s bad to have it in your eyes all the time like that.’

  ‘That won’t be necessary,’ she says, not looking up from the page.

  When Angelina’s hands linger close to her face, she uses the book to push them away, ducking irritably from their overwhelming smell of onions and stale, powdered milk. She turns a page as the sandals slap slowly back to the kitchen.

  During dinner she drips a giant spoonful of curry sauce onto her plate and swirls around the lettuce leaves and onion slices to make it look like she’s eaten something. When she pushes the chair back from the table Angelina is already there, reaching for her plate with one hand and squeezing the flesh on her lower arm with the other. ‘My God, but you’re skinny!’ Angelina says, the same high-pitched shrill. ‘Eat more! How are you going to fight off men?’

  ‘Could you please not touch me?’ she says, jerking her arm away, but the tiny nugget of pleasure that’s formed inside her just from hearing the word skinny is already giving off warmth.

  Angelina says something else, speaking in a low voice this time, but her words are muffled beneath the trumpets of the national anthem, blasting from the kitchen radio, in its usual slot just before the news.

  ‘What?’ she says, but Angelina’s already abruptly turned away, her white apron swirling through the air like a cape.

  ‘Don’t worry about it, mija,’ Angelina says, not looking back. ‘It’s nothing.’

  She doesn’t wake up till mid-morning. Because Katrina and the others won’t be coming by until Monday, she doesn’t shave her legs and wears a baggy pair of yellow basketball shorts instead of jeans. The day is already uncomfortably hot. She heads outside to the pool and smokes a cigarette under the grapefruit tree, careful to stand in the shade to protect her skin. It never feels like a holiday weekend to her until she’s smoked, until she gets that jumpy feeling in her stomach that makes her want to stand very still. In the distance she hears the low rumble of the neighbour’s automatic gates opening, the crunching of car wheels on the gravel road, and she takes another long, slow drag.

  Back in the kitchen, she opens the refrigerator and drinks directly from the pitcher of lemonade, ice cubes clanging against the glass. As she puts the pitcher on the counter there’s a loud blast of the doorbell. It echoes through the house, followed by six blunt buzzes, as though it’s a signal she should recognise.

  ‘Angelina!’ she calls out. She waits but there’s no sound of sandals slapping against the floor tiles, heading to the front door.

  The buzzing is long and sustained this time. ‘Christ,’ she says. ‘Angelina!’ When she was very young she would just stand in the middle of a room and scream Angelina’s name over and over again, not stopping until she came running, apron flying out behind her, but that’s not the kind of silly immature thing she would do now.

  She takes another long swig of lemonade to hide her cigarette breath, just in case it’s one of her mother’s friends. It would be just like her to send someone to check up. As she walks down the hallway it’s hard to decide what feels worse, the damp cloth of the T-shirt sticking to her armpits or the sweaty bare skin of her collarbones. At the front door she runs her fingers through her hair, tucking strands carefully behind her ears.

  The first door is made of heavy brown wood, covered in stickers Angelina gave her years ago, with a yellow bolt that slides easily open. The second door is made of white crisscrossing bars, forming diamond-shaped gaps that reveal the front yard and crackly bushes, the dried-out banana trees and dry brown hedge surrounding the property. Behind the hedge is the neighbour’s automatic gate, the gravel road leading to the main highway, and beyond that are the fields of sugar cane and palm trees, the eucalyptus forests and the mountains.

  Standing a few steps away is a man. He’s grinning in a way that makes him look slightly embarrassed, rocking on his heels, arms crossed behind his back.

  ‘Well, here I am,’ he says. ‘Let’s go.’

  He’s wearing a shapeless brown robe, hanging off him as if empty, the creases flat. His feet are bare and caked in red clay, legs thin and hairless.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ he says. He brings an arm forward, a dirty plastic bag hanging from his wrist. ‘It took me a lot longer to get here than I thought. I came as fast as I could.’

  The plastic bag sways back and forth, hitting the front of his thigh. ‘Lord, am I thirsty. Does that ever happen to you, when you have to walk a long way?’ He licks his lips with a dark purple tongue. ‘Never mind, don’t worry about answering now. We’ll have lots of time to talk.’

  ‘Can I help you?’ she says, taking a step back.

  The man’s face suddenly becomes a mass of deeply ingrained lines. He isn’t old or wrinkled but his face is still cracked with deep splits, as if only just recently patched together. ‘You mean she didn’t tell you I was coming?’ His voice comes out high-pitched and sad in a way that sounds deeply familiar to her, like something she’s been listening to her whole life, though she cannot say why or how.

  ‘Daddy!’ she calls out over her shoulder, her voice echoing down the hallway. ‘There’s somebody here to see you!’

  ‘Princess,’ he says, the lines in his face growing even deeper. ‘Come on. Don’t do that. You know that I know they’re not here.’

  She stares at the lines. Some are thin like strands of hair, others deep like someone gouged the skin out with a scalpel. She takes another step back, tucking her body behind the brown door so that only her head is poking out. He kneels and starts ripping grass out of the ground, letting it fall in a tiny pile.

  ‘I just don’t understand why she didn’t tell you,’ he says. ‘I spoke with her about it the other day and she said it would be fine. It doesn’t make any sense.’ His voice gets more high-pitched and shrill the longer he talks.

  ‘Look, I don’t even know you,’ she says. It creates a sudden fluttering in her chest to use a loud voice like that, to be rude without caring, like the time she saw her father slap the hands of the street children reaching for her ice cream on the park picnic table.

  ‘Don’t know me?’ His mouth turns downwards. ‘Don’t know me from Adam, huh? Have you heard that expression?’ He rubs a hole into the ground, sticks his index finger in it and wiggles it around before covering it up again.

  ‘At least it’s a beautiful day,’ he says, ‘for us to run.’ Just like that his head snaps up and he looks directly at her, narrowing his eyes in a way that makes her stomach leap and hit the back of her throat.

  ‘Are you ready,’ he says, ‘to run?’

  ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry I can’t help you.’ She’s closed the door to the point that she’s looking at him through the thinnest crack possible, torso leaning forward in an L-shape.

  ‘Hey,’ he says, rising quickly to his feet, blades of grass drifting down from his robe. ‘Mija. Seriously. How lost are you? I’m here to help you —’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she says again, right before closing the door completely, not finishing her sentence: I don’t have the key. She’s staring at the Bert & Ern
ie sticker now, plastered there by Angelina years ago, their smiles bright and beaming as they drive their firetruck down the street. The jumpy feeling in her stomach is still there.

  Angelina’s room is at the back of the house, next to the washing machine and the stacks of cardboard boxes filled with champagne. She forces herself to walk there as calmly and slowly as possible, the doorbell blasting and buzzing. The pale green door is covered with a giant Baby Jesus sticker, dimpled elbows raised smilingly heavenwards. On the floor lined neatly against the wall is a pair of black plastic sandals. She places her hand on the center of Baby Jesus’ face, but doesn’t push down. ‘Angelina?’ she says, softly at first, then louder. ‘Are you there?’

  She checks the rest of the rooms in the house, just to be sure. She checks her parents’ bedroom, her brother’s, her own (also with a Baby Jesus sticker on the door). She makes sure the back doors are locked and tugs experimentally at the bars over the windows.

  With Angelina gone, she has no choice but to prepare lunch herself. She props the fridge door open with her torso, scooping the rice and lentils out of the Tupperware containers with her hands curved like claws. The doorbell is still going, one long sustained note. By now the annoyance is bubbling inside her like the sudsy bubbles fizzling at the top of a shaken Coca-Cola bottle. She’s already rehearsing the words in her head, picturing herself standing furiously in front of Angelina, arms akimbo, head tilted just like her mother’s that time she addressed the electricity repairman, the one she suspected of stealing from them. How could you do that, she’ll say. Unacceptable. You know that I’ve never been left home alone before – completely un-fucking-acceptable. Good luck finding another job; I hope your bags are packed and ready. Are they ready?

  It’s only that evening – when Angelina still isn’t back, when she cannot get through to her parents, when their cellphones ring and ring – that she starts to get the feeling that something is happening.

  The first thing she does is phone Katrina. She’ll know what to do – she’ll send her chauffeur along with the bodyguard; they’ll come and take her away. But the telephone is silent when she presses it against her ears, the plastic heavy in her hands. She flicks the lightswitch back and forth a dozen times, pushes her thumb down on the TV power button as hard as possible, but the screen stays black and silent. She turns on Angelina’s radio, the ridged wheel imprinting her fingertip as she rapidly surfs through the hisses and crackles. She finally finds a programme that seems to consist (as far as she can understand) of a fuzzy voice ranting endlessly about the need to drive out all the rebels, smoke them out of the mountains, exterminate them all, punctuated by short blasts of the national anthem. It creates a tight feeling in her chest. She switches the radio off, pries out the tiny yellow batteries with a kitchen knife and puts them away in the drawer with the silver bell Angelina used to ring to announce dinner. She spends the rest of the day in her bedroom, curtains shut tight, watching Disney movies on her laptop. The battery dies seconds before the Beast’s magical transformation into a handsome prince, and after that she just lies there without moving, knees tucked near chin, ears tensed for the sound of car wheels on the road, keys rattling, the doorknob turning.

  The next day is Monday, the holiday – Katrina’s chauffeur never arrives. By mid-afternoon she heads outside to check the generator, more in hope than expectation. It’s located in the back yard by the garage, bars across the door to prevent stray dogs and street people from sneaking in and sleeping. She stands there rubbing her arms, studying the thick braids of red and green wires, the forest of rust-encrusted switches. The gardener was the only person who knew how it worked, back when the power would go out due to bomb attacks in the city centre. He’d head to the back of the house, wiping his hands off on his denim shorts and two minutes later, as if by magic, the lights would fly back on. Her brother would whoop, bolting to the computer room, her parents smiling in forehead-crinkling relief as the soothing tones of BBC broadcasters returned, and she would blow out the candles and pick the wax off her algebra homework with her nails. Now, as she stands there by herself, she takes a last long, slow look at the impenetrable cluster of wires and switches, before trudging slowly back to the house.

  The computers in the office seem like medieval relics. The screens stare at her, blank and impassive as grey-faced children asking for coins at traffic lights. In the end, she closes the door and bolts it. It’s not like there’s anything else in the room that’s useful anyway: her parents’ skis from Yale, faded blue and pink tapestries covered in dead moth wings, the wooden toucans and leopards she played with as a child, their eyes coloured in with washable markers, Christmas presents from Angelina that she opened politely before stuffing them away, brightly patterned shirts and alpaca shawls she’d never dream of wearing, not even alone in her bedroom.

  If necessary they’ll come for her. She’s certain of it. Some kind of international peacekeeping army. Professional rescuers, speaking Norwegian, blue berets. Pale faces pressing smilingly against the white bars of the door, extending their arms as she runs to the kitchen to get the keys out of the blue wicker basket on top of the fridge. Their uniforms will smell like dairy, and they’ll take her away in a shiny black car with squeaky plastic seats. Embassy members, the international community.

  She won’t just be left here. She won’t be forgotten.

  Mostly she wanders through the house, drifting from one room to another. The days blend lifelessly together, thick grey fuzz growing over each one like the dust accumulating on the unspun fan blades. She spends hours reading her fantasy novels, lying stomach-down on the bed. She reads childhood favourites, like a novelisation of Star Wars: A New Hope with half the pages missing, ending shortly after the scene where Luke bursts into Leia’s cell: My name is Luke Skywalker, and I’m here to rescue you. She stares at the page for hours, the words blurring until they could be saying cheese sandwich, cheese sandwich over and over again.

  She never puts anything away. She starts eating the canned food her parents reserved for parties, strange things like silvery fish floating in red sauce and olives in slimy black liquid, and leaves jars of sticky jam and cans of condensed milk licked clean and shiny on the kitchen counters. She rummages through school papers, re-reads syllabuses from long-ago classes (eighth-grade English with Mr Rover, World History with Mrs Márquez). She finds ancient notes Angelina wrote to excuse her from PE swimming class, every letter in each misspelled word painfully scrawled out in shaky capital letters. She opens her mother’s make-up drawer, spills peach-coloured powder all over the sink, smears herself with eye shadow, ignores Angelina’s high-pitched cries in her head: Mija, what a mess! What do you think you’re doing? She pulls dusty boxes out of the closet and plays never-ending games of Monopoly, moving the tiny silver pieces around the board in infinite rotations: the dog, the thimble, the shiny boot last of all.

  One night she feels both brave and desperate enough to stand outside by the pool and hug the grapefruit tree. It’s so quiet she can hear the water move, gently lapping against the concrete walls. She strains her eyes as she looks towards the mountains, almost convincing herself that she can see the fires, as small as the orange dots burning at the end of her cigarettes. She wills herself to smell smoke and gunpowder, hear the explosions and gunshots of incoming American forces, foreign backup support. Scrunching her eyes and pressing her face against the scratchy tree trunk, she can almost hear the helicopters, the clang of the metal doors as they slide open, the thud of the knotted rope ladder as it hits the ground by her feet. But when she opens her eyes there’s only ever the scratchy grey fungus draped over the tree like a fisherman’s net.

  Back in her bedroom, she presses her face against the window, standing on her tiptoes, attempting to see over the stone walls into the neighbour’s yard. But all she sees is the sunlight, glistening off the shards of glass, and the motionless metal face of the automatic gate, still silently shut.

&nbs
p; Later, she stands outside of Angelina’s room, hand resting on Baby Jesus’ face. Looks down at the sandals, waits for the picture to form itself in her mind. Angelina, dressed in her white apron (what else could she be wearing?), carefully unlocking the front door, heading outside. Dawn is breaking, the earliest morning birds are singing. Or maybe it’s still dark, the sky speckled with stars. Angelina’s humming, hands in her pockets; Angelina’s frowning, face scrunched up in her classic sour scowl. No matter what she imagines, the picture always abruptly ends the moment Angelina rounds the hedge corner, apron swirling through the air. Walking busily, purposefully, on her way to – what? Towards who?