Best British Short Stories 2015

by Nicholas Royle

  The giant woman above him, scattered laughter, he had tried to cover his face with his hands.

  The sleeping compartment was smaller than he would have guessed. The seat backs and curtains were blue, and everything else was grey. Everywhere there were levers and tilts and multi-level sections of surfaces serving different purposes. There were buttons to be pressed in yellow and blue and red. There were arrows up and arrows down. There were signs of warning – Caution! – and a row of stubby red lights, alerts of various kinds related to the sink, mirror and toilet. A bed suspended from the ceiling blocked the upper half of the window. The second bed, he thought, must be made up somehow from the seats, with the table pushed back. The two seats faced each other. Joanie was in the one facing forwards. He was watching the world slip away behind the train.

  The guard’s handiwork was laid out on the table between them like a hybrid of Monopoly and Patience, careful lines of overlapping counterfoils with route stops stamped out in caps: BUFFALO, NY; ERIE, PA; SOUTH BEND, IN.

  Joanie opened a route guide. It was large enough to obscure her face. ‘Henry Hudson,’ he heard her murmuring behind it, ‘The Wonder Years. General William Jenkins Worth.’

  Putting the guide down, she inspected their surroundings. She pointed out a narrow post-box slit that sat between them underneath the window. ‘That,’ she said, ‘is where the table folds into.’ She nodded to herself. She looked past his head to the compartment wall. ‘See all those lights?’ she said. ‘They have a light for everything.’ She squinted. ‘They have a reading light. They have a main light. And they have a mirror light.’ She turned her attention to her own seat, glancing down and about, animated, like a snuffling creature of some sort on a hunt. She had been resting her arm on what appeared to be a step to the top bunk, but with a little encouragement it flipped up and she found herself looking at a metal funnel. ‘Oh my, it’s the john!’ She let the lid drop and sat back.

  He wished she would wash her hands. From where he was sitting he could see that a sink was hidden just above her head – flagged by hand towels and wrapped bars of soap – but she hadn’t seen it.

  He tried to focus on the magazine that he found in his hands, that he must have picked up somewhere. The feel of it: the gloss tacky against his palms. He saw her looking. He rolled it into itself, made a tube of it. It was a women’s magazine.

  As the train lurched, the door to their compartment slid open and shut, open and shut. Across the corridor, in the compartment opposite, a pair of legs was visible from the knees down – pale chinos, buffed brogues.

  ‘He did not!’ a woman’s voice exclaimed, loudly.

  ‘I swear to God,’ came the dry response.

  ‘He did not!’ the woman exclaimed again.

  Back and forth the door went, back and forth. Across the way the pair of legs uncrossed and re-crossed – fingers drummed on one knee.

  The door opened and shut. He started counting it: gave it numbers.

  1, 2; he counted.

  1, 2.

  1, 2.

  ‘Okay,’ Joanie said, making a face, swiping an invisible something from the air with one hand. ‘Would you mind? Would you mind latching that?’

  There was a hook you could slip over a nub of metal to secure the door. He was able to lean from his seat and flick it into place. Now the legs were obscured. The voices were faint. It was just the two of them.

  It had started a couple of months in. He hadn’t noticed at first. He had been aware instead of changes in his hands. His fingers developed blistered patches – tiny, swollen, liquid puffs. He noticed these before the counting. He bothered them. He broke the surface of the skin to let the liquid out. It became a thing – and then the counting. Once he had noticed the counting he watched himself doing it with an awareness that seemed to offer nothing in the way of helping him stop.

  1, 2.

  1, 2.

  Like breathing.

  Joanie’s head fell back against the seat, and in a short time she was snoring softly.

  Through the window he watched the rail tracks multiply and diminish, the telephone wires running overhead. He looked beyond the tracks to the water, and beyond the water to the land opposite, the dense woodland hills.

  Joanie’s breathing had changed. It was heavy and slow. With the door shut the sound was amplified. It seemed to him that the whole compartment was breathing with her, that he was locked in the humid cavern of her chest.

  Looking up, he was surprised to see she was awake and studying him.

  ‘Why have you locked the door?’ she asked. Her voice was querulous. Her eyes were small and scared. She was pushing her hands downwards on her legs in a rhythmic way, like a cat working the edge of a couch. And she was looking again at the magazine he was holding tight in his hands.

  ‘The noise,’ he said.

  She kept kneading at her thighs with her hands.

  ‘You asked me,’ he said. ‘You asked me to. And then you slept.’ He put the magazine along with the guide in the slot between window and table.

  ‘Oh.’ She remembered now. ‘So I did. So I did.’

  Rain started to beat down – pellets of water strumming the top of the carriage like hoof beats. The sky dimmed.

  ‘My,’ Joanie said, taking it all in. ‘My-oh-my-oh-my.’ She propped her elbows on the table, clasping her hands in a gesture of pleasure. ‘Oh! I love the rain when I’m tucked up,’ she said.

  She kept talking. The rain was so loud that he could not hear what she was saying, but he could see her mouth working.

  He counted her face:

  eye, eye;

  eye, eye, nose.

  When the rain eased off a little Joanie settled back in her seat. ‘Where are you headed?’ she asked. ‘Are you going all the way?’

  Lately, when he dreams – if he gets to dreaming – vast clouds bank on the horizon. Waves gather, scraping the pitch-black belly of the sky. He wakes, knowing the clouds must spill, the waters must break. Dreaming, he manages to make it all stop, and wait.

  Give me time, he asks. Just give me time to work this out.

  At home, in the kitchen, he counts the mugs above the sink, and in the bathroom the tiles on the wall. In the hallway, he counts the line of boxes for mail. In the subway, he counts the pillars on the platform, and once on the train he counts the lights that appear in the darkness of the tunnels.

  When he counts he tends towards multiples of 2, never goes past 6. Mostly he sticks to 1, 2.

  Beads of water were being pulled, one by one, backwards, across the window pane.

  ‘You don’t say much,’ Joanie said.

  They passed an old-fashioned station – lampposts with elegant lampshades, the roof of the building bordered with filigreed woodwork.

  ‘I’m really very easy to get along with,’ she said.

  They passed a bridge, a criss-cross of girders. They passed a stationary freight train, the wagons a deep green, here and there bursting into blossoms of white graffiti. In the narrow spaces between the wagons he saw, at intervals, a momentary flash of gravel, rail tracks, grass, water, hills, and sky.

  ‘Utica,’ said Joanie.

  She leaned forward, putting both hands flat on the edge of the table, like a contestant in a game show. She held her face in a crush of concentration, and then let it relax.

  ‘Erie!’ she said. ‘Sandusky!’ Her eyes were all lit up. ‘I’m guessing where you’re going.’

  Lately, when he sleeps, he loses his bearings, can’t remember where he is: at the hospital, in the chair bedside his wife’s bed, or alone at home, where he tries to fall asleep on the daybed, watching television, listening to the radio.

  When in his dreams he becomes aware of his bladder, he mentally traces two routes to the bathroom before attempting to get to his feet. Route one takes him out of the chair, across the slumbe
ring ward, across the corridor glossed with night lighting, past the nurses’ station, past the drinks machine, to the left, or to the right, either one will do. Route two, at home, he kicks the sheet off and pads in his boxers in a beeline. He doesn’t need a light. He knows the way. He wipes his hands at the sink – thoroughly – a habit he can’t shake, reaching all the while for water, paper towels, antiseptic gel.

  The restaurant car’s booths had the same blue upholstery as the sleeping compartment. There were groups of people already seated, but the car was not yet full.

  ‘They run a tight ship,’ Joanie said. ‘You see if they don’t.’

  A woman seated them – pale, and skinny, and drawn. She hovered beside an empty table a moment but then sidestepped to seat them at the one opposite, where a young couple were already deep in their menus, side by side.

  ‘You go,’ Joanie said, and he slid on in to take the seat closest to the window. She edged herself down then, on to the end of the couch, beside him. They were facing backwards. He was facing the girl, and Joanie facing the boy. It was an arrangement better suited to old friends, or a double date. The couple didn’t acknowledge their arrival at all.

  ‘You ready?’ the attendant asked, turning her attention to the couple.

  Only the girl looked up. ‘Yes,’ she said. Her hair was cut in a neat bob. She was maybe in her early twenties.

  The attendant waited, pen hanging mid-air over a pad.

  ‘Number 28,’ the girl said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Both of you?’

  ‘Yes. Thank you,’ the girl said, tucking her hair behind her ears; first the right, then the left.

  1, 2.

  The boy was still immersed in the menu.

  Sometimes they get muddled – routes one and two – sometimes he’ll be halfway to the hospital bathroom and he’ll panic, believing, suddenly, that he is in his boxers, for all the world to see, or maybe, worse, his fly is unbuttoned, or maybe, worse still, he has a hard-on. It is not possible, of course. He never falls asleep in the chair beside her bed dressed only in his boxers, and even at home, alone, it is a long while since he has woken up hard. Some switch has flipped. He’s not even sorry.

  ‘No drinks?’ the attendant asked.

  ‘Can we have water?’ the girl said.

  ‘You can have water.’ The attendant’s hand hovered over the pad as she cast a glance at the boy. ‘Both of you?’ she asked. The boy didn’t move, didn’t acknowledge her at all.

  ‘Please. Thanks,’ the girl said. She tucked her hair behind her right ear; once, twice. It was just the gesture. There was no hair needing to be tucked.

  The attendant shifted her feet side to side as she ticked off the boxes on her sheet. ‘You sleeper or coach?’ she asked.

  ‘Sleeper,’ the girl said.

  ‘Number?’

  ‘Nine.’

  ‘Car?’

  ‘4911.’

  ‘Both of you?’

  ‘Yes,’ the girl said.

  The only other thing to say about routes one and two is this: he cares about them inasmuch as they get him from here to there, from bladder-full to bladder-empty. These are essentials. Energy expended on anything else is wasted. In the versions he imagines, asleep, as in the versions when he is awake, he walks with tunnel-vision – everything else, everything around the edges, he shuts out.

  ‘I need you to sign,’ the attendant said.

  She leaned forward and handed one sheet to the girl and put another one down on the table with the pen in front of the boy. ‘Both of you,’ she said. The boy didn’t look up. He tilted his head towards the girl, who nodded, and pointed at the bottom of the sheet. He took up the pen now. When he was done the girl signed hers and took both sheets and handed them back.

  The attendant tore the customer copies from her own copies, deposited them on the table, and left.

  At the hospital, he shuts out the other patients, the nurses, their sympathetic smiles, their chat. He shuts out the people who mill around by the drinks machine, and those sitting on the endless rows of plastic chairs.

  At home, he shuts out the postcards they have been sent by friends, family, that over time they have stuck to the cupboard above the sink. He shuts out the picture that she painted, badly, in Corsica – rocks, sea, sky – that he had framed and hung in the middle of their living room wall. He shuts out all the bits and pieces they found together on day trips, museum trips, foreign trips.

  From the restaurant car, with windows on both sides, facing backwards, he could see the whole panorama. On his right, the river; on his left, salt marsh, weatherboard houses, porches bearing the ubiquitous national flag.

  The menu was a yellow oblong. Non-Egg Entrée, he read. Egg Substitute. Dinner Special. The list of numbers ran to 79, but some of the numbers did not have options alongside. He wondered what would happen if you ordered 31 when there was no option listed.

  ‘Grits. Oh my,’ Joanie said. ‘I have not had grits since . . . I don’t know when.’

  He was watching the couple opposite. He kept expecting one of them to make eye contact, to say something, but neither of them did.

  At home he shuts out things other people wouldn’t see if they walked with him on his short route: her reading on the daybed with a look of the deepest, most peaceful concentration; or banging pots together in their kitchen in the morning to wake him up; or in the bath sloshing the water, chattering – him, stationed on the toilet lid close by, elbows on knees, eyes on her, listening. No. They wouldn’t see any of that. He would rather not see it himself. He shuts it out.

  ‘Where are you all from?’ Joanie asked.

  The girl gave Joanie a wary smile that did not extend to her eyes. The boy no longer had a menu, but kept his gaze down nonetheless.

  ‘DC,’ the girl said.

  ‘Do you like it?’ Joanie asked. ‘Have you always lived there?’

  ‘We like it,’ the girl said. ‘Not always. No.’

  ‘Where are you from originally?’

  ‘Michigan.’

  ‘What about you?’ Joanie asked the boy, but still he didn’t look up.

  The girl nudged the boy’s hand gently where it lay on the table top, and he did look up, a question in his eyes, his head turned to her. The girl leaned in and said right into his ear, ‘Where are you from, the lady is asking.’ He frowned, moved closer, studying her lips, as if all the answers were there. She tried again, gesturing at Joanie, and finally then he took their companions in.

  ‘I don’t hear well,’ he said, loudly, so that people nearby were twisting in their seats to look. There was a small distortion in the way he spoke, but the words were clear.

  He turned back to the girl then. He nodded, very slightly, just once.

  She did the same. And she smiled at him.

  It was the briefest exchange.

  The sleeping ward, early that morning, had brought him back to night flights they had taken together. Cabin lights off and shutters down. Air hostesses – attentive like nurses – drifting up the darkened passageways, shadowy moths in the half light, now and then summoned by a lone glow.

  He had enjoyed being lodged for those hours in the purring heart of the jet, while beside him his wife, who could never sleep on a plane, talked quietly, non-stop, spinning tales to keep her mind off the fact they were in a tin can, too high, trawling her memory bank for odd fragments, sending a stream of offerings to him through the fuggy cabin air – a picnic in Maine, a school trip to the city, the particular challenge of a long-forgotten ballet pose. Their heads would be resting close, and as he listened he would feel her breath on his ear, across his cheek, his nose.

  It was so stealthy, the memory, that it had taken him by surprise. He was tired. His defences were down. He had tried to make it stop, but something had already taken hold – vice-like at the back of his neck, reaching d
eep into his chest.

  He had left the hospital. It was still early. The streets were almost empty.

  He walked in Central Park where the trees were black-barked and lacquered in the rain, the ground studded with fragments – foliage frayed and cast down by the wind. He bought a coffee in a coffee bar in a mall at Columbus Circle. He walked on south towards the glint and flare of lights in Times Square, which he tracked from several blocks up, great swatches of colour against the buildings, pulsing towards the leached sky.

  At Madison Square Garden, instead of continuing to his office, he followed the stream of bodies heading for Penn Station.

  A normal interaction: something to bring her with him into the world. At Hudson News: a bottle of water and a magazine. A conversation with the woman at the counter.

  But as she gave him change – the woman’s skin against his.

  And then staring at the hoarding for Amtrak, choosing at random, buying a ticket. Waking from his daze on board the Lake Shore Limited.

  The First Day

  TAMAR HODES

  HELENA LOOKED OVER to the tiny figure sitting next to her in the car. Betsy barely took up half the seat. Her little face was tight with anxiety.

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ said Helena, reassuringly. ‘Everyone feels nervous on their first day.’

  She moved her hand off the steering wheel to touch and comfort Betsy. She squeezed her tiny hand for an instant; then returned it to the wheel. She needed to concentrate. Here in the New Forest, three horses were heaving their suede bodies slowly at the side of the road. One walked nonchalantly in front of the car and seemed in no hurry. Helena braked. She had heard of accidents caused by wandering animals here and she didn’t want an unfortunate incident, today of all days. Betsy needed her to be calm.

  ‘Look at the horses. Aren’t they lovely?’

  Betsy nodded.