Best British Short Stories 2015

by Nicholas Royle

  And so it goes.

  And it goes and it goes and it goes.

  Until one day Milo came back.

  ‘Missus Sabatelli,’ he said when I opened the door to him, that bright June Tuesday with the scent of fresh-mown grass drifting through the neighbourhood, nine in the morning, just like he used to.

  He was a grown man then, the height of his father, with his father’s good looks and easy smile. A handsome man. The kind of man you’d fall in love with, easy, but the kind of man you’d never know if he loved you back.

  ‘Milo,’ I said, and I had to hold on to the doorframe. I was half expecting him to be wearing that star-spattered cloak of his, to chew on his words as if they were gristle in his mouth. But he didn’t.

  ‘Thank you for that kindness,’ he said, ‘but I’m not Milo any longer. I’ve learned a thing or two since then.’ I saw then that he was right. Whoever he was, he wasn’t little Milo Sandifer.

  ‘You’ve come back,’ I said. I shivered. For him it was June, but for me the wind was already blowing crisp and cool, carrying the smoky scent of September with it. Time was running faster and faster ahead of me.

  ‘Yes,’ Sayer said, lingering on that ‘s’ with a lazy smile as if to show me he could do it now and easily at that. ‘I’ve come home again. Would you mind if I stepped inside, Marianne? I’m not one to gab on porches, and if it’s not too impertinent I could use a cup of coffee something fierce.’

  ‘Of course, boy.’

  He chuckled, and the sound was rich and deep and expansive. I stepped aside, and he took off his hat as he came in. Not the hat, of course. The one he wore was an expensive, grey trilby that matched his expensive, grey suit and his expensive, leather shoes. He followed me into the kitchen: I regretted that I hadn’t had time to clear up properly that morning, but he didn’t seem to mind so much. He said nice, polite things about the colour of the curtains and about the state of things in general, and when he sat it seemed as if he were too big for the chair, as if that chair wanted to hold a small boy in it but had now discovered a man instead. The coffee’s aroma was thick in the air, and I found I could use a cup myself so I poured for both of us, and served it plain. He seemed the sort to take his coffee black.

  I was nervous. It had been some time since there had been a man in my house.

  ‘You found your way then?’ I asked him.

  ‘I did, ma’am. I surely did.’

  ‘And you know about your mother?’

  He smiled, but this time there was something else to the smile. ‘I do,’ he said. ‘Missus Felder told me of all that, and I’m sorry for it, I suppose. She whispered it to me while I was gone. She cajoled, she begged, and she pleaded. She has a tongue on her could scald boiling water, Missus Felder does, could strip paint off a fence.’

  His eyes were bright blue, and surprisingly clear. I wondered if he was lying to me. I could see he had learned how to lie. Like lying was easy and beautiful.

  ‘You didn’t come back for her,’ I said.

  ‘I did not.’ He paused, and breathed in deep, like he never smelled coffee before and found it the finest thing in the world. ‘I could say that I was unable.’ He glanced at me underneath a fan of handsome eyelashes, quick as a bird. ‘But you know that’s not true, you know that’s not how magic works, don’t you? I wanted to stay. I wanted to stay, and it didn’t matter. What Missus Felder did – your sister, yes, I know about that – what she did was cruel in its own way, sure, but not in the way you’d think—’

  ‘No, boy,’ I cut him off. He looked surprised at that, like he was not used to people cutting him off. I wondered who this new boy was, this boy that Cheryl and I had made. ‘We figured it out, of course, though it was too late for anything to be done. You were always a boy who was looking for magic, even then, even then you were, and we knew it, Cheryl and I both knew it, but we had hoped it might be a different sort of magic. A kinder sort.’

  ‘But it wasn’t,’ he said.

  ‘No, it wasn’t. You found something in there, didn’t you?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘And you stayed for it.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now I have taken what I need from it,’ he said, and he flexed his fingers, long and graceful. They were not the fingers he had when he was a boy, those poor stubby things that couldn’t palm a quarter or pull off a faro shuffle. These were magician’s fingers.

  ‘So I see you have, my boy. Has it done ill for you or aught?’

  At this he paused. I could see he wanted to get into his patter now, and it was not the same kind of pause as when he was young, when he knew the word but still it tripped him up; this was a different beast.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said at last. ‘I want you to tell me. That’s why I’m here, I suppose, Marianne.’

  ‘No one can tell you that, Sayer.’

  He took to studying his fingernails. Maybe he learned that trick from Cheryl, not looking at a person. ‘I think you can. I think you are afraid to tell me.’

  A shiver ran down my spine like ice melting. I tried to shake the feeling though.

  ‘No, boy.’ He looked up at that word. ‘Your sense of timing was always characteristically awful. You never learned how to wait for a thing. Don’t you know that? When you try to cheat magic, it just gets worse and worse and worse. What you found in that hat – some sort of secondhand magic I’m reckoning, that piece of truth you were looking for all that time – it’s yours now. It ain’t your daddy’s magic. It ain’t Lillian’s either. Poor, sweet Lillian. You’ve suffered for it, and you’ve caused suffering for it, so it’s yours to own, yours to do with as you will.’

  ‘There is a bad thing coming at the end of this,’ Sayer told me. He reached out that long-fingered hand of his, and he touched me on the wrist.

  ‘I know, boy,’ I said. ‘We always know these things. Time’s always racing on for us; even if most other folk can’t see it properly, you can. But, God, the thing we never learned right, Cheryl and I, is that magic is about waiting, it’s about letting the bad things happen. It’s about letting the children pass on into adults, and the mothers grieve, and the fathers lose their way, or find it, and the sons come home again when they are ready to come home. That is the thing you will not have learned in that place you went to, because that is only a thing you can learn out here. What are you going to be, Sayer Sandifer? Why, whatever it is you choose to be. You saw what was coming that day when you invited her up on the stage with you. Boy, there were twenty people out in the audience who loved you, who would have waited with you, who would have helped you get there on your own, but you wanted what she had and so you took it.’

  The words were hard stones in my own mouth, but I had chewed them over so long that I had made them round and smooth and true.

  ‘Where is my sister?’ I asked him.

  ‘She’s gone now,’ Sayer told me, and this time I could tell that he wasn’t lying. I didn’t know what kind of a thing he was, this man drinking his coffee in front of me, this man who had taken power into himself but not knowledge, not wisdom, not the patience of a boy who learns to speak for himself.

  ‘Well,’ I said, and the word hung between us.

  I felt old. I felt the weight of every summer and winter hanging upon me.

  I knew it would only happen if I let it. I knew it would only happen if I wanted it to happen. I knew this just as my sister knew it.

  Then Sayer laid down his grey trilby on the table, and, lo and behold, it was the thing I’d been looking for after all. The hat, the chimney-pot hat. That little piece of secondhand magic. He turned it over so that I could see that yawning chasm inside – the pure blackness of it, deep and terrifying. The place he disappeared to. The place he found his way out of.

  ‘You could marry me,’ he said. ‘You always loved me, and I can see ther
e’s no man about now. Living like that can be awful lonely.’

  The words pulled at something inside me. He was right. I was lonely. This life of mine felt old, misshapen, stretched out by the years. But I did not want him. I did not want that stranger. ‘No,’ I said.

  He sighed and shook his head like it was my tragedy. My funeral.

  ‘I’m not cruel,’ he said to me in that handsome, grown-up voice of his. And he looked at me with eyes wide as two silver dollars, but flat-edged and dull as if the shine had been worn off them by residence in too many dirty pockets. ‘I swear I’m not trying to be cruel. It’s the world that’s wild and woolly.’

  And I knew that magic only worked if you let it. I knew that magic only worked on a thing that wanted it. But I was tired, and I was tired, and I had lost my husband, and I had lost my sister, and I had lost that little boy I loved.

  Sayer pushed the hat toward me.

  I took it up carefully, studied the dilapidated brim, fingered the soft black silk of it.

  And Sayer smiled. Just once.

  And then the bad thing happened.

  Fresh Water

  CHARLES WILKINSON

  WHATEVER THE BOY was holding was a little too pale, and perhaps a little too pink, the Headmaster now realised, to have been extracted from a living body, but there was nevertheless something arterial about it that reminded him of the aftermath of open heart surgery. And why on earth was Tanfield, normally one of his more tractable pupils, standing outside the front entrance of the school accompanied by a bemused, middle-aged woman whom the Headmaster had never seen before?

  A few minutes earlier the Headmaster had been sitting securely in front of the computer in his study working on a new line-management policy. It was one of the hottest days of a particularly hot summer, and the blinds were drawn. The lake was at its lowest level for many years and now so shallow that even the junior boys were being allowed to take the boat out unsupervised. In a glassy haze, a desultory cricket match was taking place on the main field, but the majority of the school had decamped to the swimming pool, and a distant splashing provided a soothing soundtrack to his administrative meditations. When the bell rang the Headmaster waited for the clatter of high heels on parquet flooring before recalling that he had given his secretary the day off. In many ways, it was, he thought, greatly to be regretted that it had become necessary to lock the front door during the day, but a series of thefts and acts of petty vandalism, not the least of which had been the disappearance of his wife’s handbag from the hall, had resulted in a review of the school’s security arrangements; and the dismal fact was that he was now sometimes obliged to answer the door himself. Although the school was located in a patch of countryside, London and its Home Counties outriders were now well over the horizon, colonising the spaces between once isolated villages, tearing down the big old houses and building fifteen properties where one had stood before. Transport links had improved and on the main road outside the school gates the traffic was grid-locked by three in the afternoon. When the wind was in the right direction, you could just hear the trains carrying commuters to and from Kings Cross.

  Dreading another incident, the Headmaster got up with a sigh and made his way to the door. The previous Saturday evening, whilst the school was in the Assembly Hall listening to the Summer Concert, one of the highlights of a crammed calendar of events, a gang of youths on bicycles had swept down the main drive, breaking the windows of parental cars parked on the verge, before escaping with a collection of mobile phones that police were still attempting to trace. As he opened the door, apprehension was rapidly followed by bewilderment, that was in turn succeeded by something like the beginning of process that would lead to an understanding of the significance of the extraordinary tableau before him: the unknown woman, whose expression seemed to echo his own perplexity; his pupil, Tanfield, paler and larger eyed than usual, cradling the third member of the trinity, as if it were all that remained of a once much-loved infant: a little flayed torso, a dull blue-pink heart, a tangle of veins and ribs like tiny claws. But the fact that Tanfield was dressed in the cross-country running team strip, now a dirty medicinal white, suggested that whatever bizarre concatenation of events had culminated in the scene before him could not be unconnected with Mr Vengelo

  who, some thirty-five minutes previously, was to be seen running down a narrow gravel track enclosed by tall hedges that led to a wooden bridge. A hundred yards behind him, the first of his pursers, a tall boy with lank blond hair whose sun-reddened skin clashed with an orange and maroon T-shirt that had been bought at Camden Town market, clambered over the five-barred gate at the top of the hill. In the early ’80s, when Mr Angus Vengelo had first joined the school it would not have been unusual to see him at the head of the field, or at least keeping comfortably abreast of some of the more athletic boys, but at the age of forty-nine his longstanding habit of drinking three pints of Benskins Best Bitter every night after work, combined with a penchant for a late-night single malts, had finally undermined whatever claims to athleticism he might once have had. During his eighteen years as master in charge of the cross-country team, Vengelo had come to know every road, lane, path, hill, style, bridge, gate and stream within running distance of the school, and so when his fitness had first started to fade, it had been a simple matter to send the boys on a long route whilst he took a short cut that enabled him to emerge, much to their chagrin, triumphantly in front of them. Since the arrival of the new headmaster, whose fertile awareness of health and safety issues proliferated in the form of a multitude of memos, emails, notices, and letters to parents and colleagues, Vengelo had thought it prudent to stick to the same course as the boys, even though he had been reduced to the humiliating expedient of awarding himself a start of five to ten minutes. When even this ruse failed to keep him ahead of the pack for long, he had instructed them to wait at certain agreed points on the course: the bridge over the river Ver, the stile at the entrance to the park, the old oak tree, the entrance to the neo-Gothic pile, once the home of an American banker now a training college for teachers. Every year he got a little slower and arrived at the meeting points to increasingly ironic applause. But for once lassitude had infected even the keenest runners, and Mr Vengelo was able to enjoy the rare sensation of being in the lead, although strictly speaking the summer training sessions were not competitive.

  As the ground dipped slightly, the weight of Mr Vengelo’s stomach impelled him forward, giving him the pleasant sensation of having accelerated effortlessly. A decade ago he had been stones lighter; now although his legs and arms were still slim, his great belly, encased in a white, skin-tight top, peered over the rim of his black tracksuit bottom like a boiled egg jammed into a cup that was too small for it. In deference to the hot weather, and partly as a belated acknowledgement that the side parting was irrevocably out of fashion, Mr Vengelo, who already had a small head, had instructed his barber to cut his unruly, yolk-yellow hair close to his scalp, so that now, only faintly conscious of the absurdity of his appearance, as he half rolled, half ran down the hill, he appeared to be all stomach. Once he had reached the bottom of the hill, and the first bridge was in sight, Mr Vengelo gave himself an approbatory pat on his right thigh and smiled, a smile that soon dissolved in a pink pool of dismay as he realised that he had once again forgotten the mobile phone that he was supposed to take whenever he went running with the boys outside the school grounds. Then he remembered what had distracted him: he had been on his way to get changed when he had met his colleague

  the Head of English, John Craft, perhaps Vengelo’s only ally in the Staff Common Room and the longest serving member of staff, who was making his way with a martyred expression to a session of the Curriculum Development Committee, one of the most influential of the many committees that had replaced traditional staff meetings.

  ‘It’s virtually impossible to sit down in this place. There isn’t even time for a cup of coffee.’
>
  ‘Would you rather go running with the boys?’

  ‘I think I’m a bit old for that.’

  ‘I think I’m a bit old for it too!’

  At the moment that Vengelo met his cross-country group, which had been augmented by two Hong Kong Chinese, under the wellingtonia on the front lawn, John Craft arrived five minutes late for the Curriculum Development meeting. The Headmaster looked up from the document he was reading, but did not acknowledge him. Possibly in order to prevent people from getting up to make cups of coffee, the session, the fifth in under a fortnight, was taking place not in the comparative comfort of the staff room, but in the newest classroom block, a building that was principally noted for its tall glass windows, which could only be opened very slightly and with great difficulty, apparently a clever, post-modernist nod to Hardwick Hall. Everyone had taken off their jackets, and the Head of Science had even removed his tie. When Craft sat down in the empty chair next to him, his colleague leant over and whispered something about ‘conical-shaped line-management structures’. Resisting the temptation to point out that ‘conical-shaped’ was tautological, Craft made an attempt to understand what the headmaster was saying. Apparently it had once been thought that line-management structures should be linear; subsequently a case had been made for a triangular model, but now the most advanced educational theorists favoured ‘the conical-shaped option’.

  At some point in the year Craft had been told who his line-manager was. Since the arrival of the new headmaster, most of the colleagues with whom he had worked for years had been replaced by vigorous young South Africans or Australians, broad-shouldered games players with well-laundered hair, small moustaches and a freshly acquired determination to deliver their host country’s National Curriculum; they were soon awarded ‘positions of responsibility’. No doubt one of them was his ‘line-manager’, whatever that meant. But which one? Craft pretended to make notes on a sheet of A4 paper. He had only three more years to go before retirement. There had been a time when he had contributed freely, perhaps even volubly, to staff discussions, but under the new dispensation his views had been poorly received. The thing to do, he had decided, was say as little as possible and try to avoid annoying anyone who might be important.