Best British Short Stories 2015

by Nicholas Royle

  At least schooling is easier now there are only numbers and images – and shapes, their dimensions, their colours. We don’t have to name them: we feel their forms and put them into our hearts, our minds, or whatever that space is, abandoned by language. We trace the shapes of the countries on school globes with our fingertips. And they all feel like tin.

  Being ostensibly silent, for a while social media was still a valid form of communication, though touch-keyboards began to be preferred to those with keys. On websites people posted photos of silent activities, as well as those involving white noise – drilling, vacuuming, using the washing machine – during which communication could patently not take place. Some questioned, in the comments boxes below, whether these photos might be staged, but doubts were put to rest when the majority began to frown even on the use of writing. Some of us wondered whether Internet forums could themselves have been the final straw: the way we’d wanted what we said to be noticed and, at the same time, to remain anon: the way we’d let our words float free, detach from our speech-acts, become at once our avatars and our armour.

  Trad media was something else. The first to go ‘non-talk’ were high-end cultural programmes, those ‘discussing’ art and books. Popular shows featuring, say, cooking, gardening, home improvement, and talent contests, relied on sign language and were frowned upon by purists. On the highbrow broadcasts, critics’ reactions were inferred from their facial expressions by a silent studio audience. Viewers smiled, or frowned in response, but their demeanours remained subtle, convoluted, suited to the subjects’ complexities. Fashions in presenters changed. Smooth-faced women were sacked in favour of craggy hags whose visual emotional range was more elastic. As all news is bad news, jowly, dewlapped broadcasters with doleful eyebags drew the highest pay-packets. This was considered important even on the radio.

  There were no more letters to the editors of newspapers. There was no Op to the Ed, then no Ed, but newspapers continued to exist. Their pages looked at first as they had under censorship when, instead of the offending article, there appeared a photograph of a donkey. But, after a period of glorious photography, images also departed, and the papers reverted to virgin. Oddly, perhaps, the number and page extent of sections remained the same. People still bought their dailies at the kiosk: men still slept under them in parks. Traditions were preserved without the clamour of print. It was so much nicer that way.

  Not everyone agreed. There were protests, often by unemployed journalists and photographers, but these were mostly silent: we had internalised the impoliteness of noise and were no longer willing to howl slogans. The personal being the political, this extended to domestic life. Fewer violent quarrels were reported. With no way to take things forward, relationships tended to the one-note. Couples who got on badly glared in mutual balefulness; the feelings of those who loved were reflected in one another’s eyes.

  If, at an international level, there was no news, at a local level there was no gossip, so most of us felt better. We ceased to judge people, having no common standards. The first wordless president fought her (his? its? – as we could no longer give it a name, gender scarcely mattered any more) campaign on a quiet platform, gaze fixed on the distant horizon. He (she? it?) knew how to play the new silence. The opposition, opting to fill the gap left by speech with random actions, was nowhere. A more liberal, thoughtful community emerged. Or so some of us believed. How could we tell?

  There were conspiracy theories: a cold war of words conducted by the international literati; uncertain terms between the word banks. Granted, old folks have always complained that a man’s word isn’t worth as much as it used to be, that promises nowadays are ten-a-penny, but radical economists did chart a steep devaluation. Once, they remembered, you could have had a conversation word for word, though a picture had always been worth a thousand words. That was the system: we knew where we stood, and it was by our words; but the currency went into free-fall: a picture to five thousand, ten thousand words, a million! Despite new coinages, soon it was impossible to exchange a word with anyone, unless you traded in the black market of filthy language, and, if you did, there was always the danger you’d be caught on corners, unable to pay your respects. The government reacted: ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ replaced milk at school break-time and, in order to prevent civil discontent, grown-ups received ration books of good terms. For every provision, of course, a restriction. New laws were parsed: if you didn’t keep to the letter of the law, you could be had up in court for uncivil wrongs.

  Some clung to individual words to fill the gaps as language crumbled, but, without sentence structure, they presented as insane, like a homeless man who once lived on the corner of my block and carried round a piece of pipe saying, ‘Where’s this fit? Where’s this fit?’ to everyone he met. Except that the word-offerers didn’t form phrases, they just held out each single syllable aggressively, aggrievedly, or hopefully.

  As for the rest of us, words still visited sometimes: spork, ostrich, windjammer . . . We wondered where they had come from, what to do with them. Were they a curse or a blessing? We’d pick them up where they dropped like ravens’ bread on soggy ground.

  Of course the big brands panicked, employed marketeers to look into whether we’d ever had the right words in the first place. Naturally, we were unable to read the results of their research. The government launched a scheme (no need for secrecy as there are no rumours): bespoke words were designed along lines dictated by various linguistic systems, and tested. As someone who, until recently, had lived by her words (if there are words to live by: as you know, I actually live by the church), I was involved or, perhaps, committed. Under scientific conditions, we exchanged conversations involving satch, ileflower, liisdoktora, always asking each other if this could be the magic word. We cooed over the new words, nested them, hoping meaning would come and take roost, but meaning never did.

  A scattering of the more successful experiments was put into circulation and, for a while, we tried to spread the words at every opportunity. Despite sponsored ‘word placement’ in the movies (which were no longer talkies), the new words slipped off the screen: our eyes glazed over. The problem, as it always had been in our country, was one of individualism. By this stage no one expected words to facilitate communication. The experiment resulted not in a common language, but in pockets of parallel neologisms. Being able to name our own things to ourselves gave us comfort. I suspect some people still silently practise this, though, of course, I cannot tell. I have a feeling their numbers are declining. Even I have stopped. It proved too difficult to keep a bag of words in my head for personal use and to have to reach down into its corners for terms that didn’t come out very often. They grew musty. Frankly it was unhygienic.

  It was sad to see the last of the signs coming down, but it was also liberating. In the shop that was no longer called COFFEE, you couldn’t ask for a coffee any more, but that was OK. You could point, and the coffee tasted better, being only ‘that’ and not the same thing as everyone else had. It was never the same as the guy behind you’s coffee, or the coffee belonging to the person in front. No one had a better cup than you, or a worse. For the first time, whatever it was was your particular experience and yours alone. The removal of publicly visible words accelerated. Shop windows were smashed, libraries were burned. We may have got carried away. As the number of billboards and street signs dwindled, we realised we had been reading way too much into everything. What did we do with the space in our minds that had constantly processed what we read? Well . . . I guess we processed other things, but what they were, we could no longer say.

  Some of us suspected that new things had begun to arrive, things there had never been names for. They caused irritation, as a new word does to an old person, but because there was nothing to call these new things, there was no way to point them out or even to say that they hadn’t been there before. People either accommodated them or didn’t. We’re still not sure whether t
hese things continue to live with us, or if we imagined them all along.

  Those people who prefer the new silence are frightened that one day the word will turn. It’s a feeling I share, if warily. Words, we had thought, were the opposite of actions, but, delving deeper, we found they were also opposed to themselves. Whatever we said, we knew contained the seed of its opposite. ‘It’s fine today,’ ‘I respect you,’ ‘Will you take out the trash?’ suggested the possibility of bad weather, cruelty, and refusal. It had become so difficult to say anything. Our awkwardness got to us. In the republic of words, ‘I love you,’ induced anxiety. ‘How was your day?’ would elicit merely a sigh. I think people just got tired, tired of explaining things they’d already said to one another, exhausted by the process of excavating words with words. We were oversensitive perhaps. Do you think we have dumbed ourselves down?

  The last time I saw you we spent days walking around my city. The only voices we heard were foreign: tourists or immigrant workers. You spoke their language but only I could understand the silent natives.

  We walked the streets in no direction, following no signs. ‘What’s that billboard for?’ you asked, pointing to the wordless yellow one that was all over town. I told you, ‘That’s an advert for the billboard company.’ You were – temporarily – lost for words. We took photos of the sky disturbed by silent exhalations from the city’s rigid gills – air vents linked to aircon, to the underground system – but they were all lungs and no voicebox. They couldn’t breathe a word. It was cold, so cold I could see my breath next to yours, solid in the frozen air, mingling with the steam of restaurant dinners, of laundries, with warm gusts of metro dust.

  The night you left, we went to a shabby bar by the station, where we drank bad wine. You talked with the people who worked there: an underclass still allowed to speak because they spoke a different language. They could effect the business we despised, butter us with the courtesies we could no longer practise. Their jobs involved asking for our orders (we would point to the desired item on the illustrated menu), telephoning abroad for crates of imported beer and vodka, telling us to have a nice day. Inside, the bar was red as a liver. We worked a little on ours. As we parted we held each other for a little too long and only almost failed to air kiss.

  I am interested in failure, as are we all here, because I think it’s where we’re at. Words failed us a while ago. What will fail us next?

  You like women who are quiet? In the end it was not so difficult to let you go; you were only interested in the sound of your own voice. Pretty soon we had nothing left to say to one another. I listened; you looped the same old tape. I tried things that were wordless; I took your hand and pressed it, but feelings meant nothing to you. We were always words apart.

  Don’t tell me I’m being unreasonable.

  Don’t talk to me about your girlfriends in the speaking world. Don’t repeat the sweet nothings you whisper to them. Don’t tell me about the ones you have yet to meet, who are no doubt wishing aloud for some such coincidence. Don’t write back. It is no good calling me; I won’t pick up. It’s no good texting me, or sending me emails. There’s no need to tell me anything. I know it all already. And nothing you could say to me would help.

  We’re in different places. I’m dead to the word, and you don’t have a care in it. You’re on top of it; it weighs heavy on my shoulders. So I won’t go on. I love you and I’m not aloud, won’t allow myself to say it any more. There’s no future in it. You wouldn’t want a wife who didn’t understand you, whose eventual resort could only be dumb insolence – just saying. Love’s a word that makes the world go round right enough. It wheels and spins like a coin unsure where to land: heads or tails. Wherever it fell, I would have gone right on to that word’s end, for want of a better word, and, like other temporary Miss Words, I do most sincerely want a better word, but I can’t say I’ve ever heard of one.

  When I see they’re still using words in your country I feel only half-envious, a quarter . . . I also feel a strong swinge (is that even a word?) of embarrassment and pity. Don’t be offended; I’m trying to tell it like it is.

  You probably think we’ve all gone quiet over here, that you’ll never hear from us again. Yes, it is quiet, but we are still thinking. In ways you can no longer describe.

  Contributors’ Biographies

  JENN ASHWORTH was born in 1982 in Preston, Lancashire. She is the author of three novels – A Kind of Intimacy, Cold Light and The Friday Gospels. Her short stories have appeared in MIR 9, The Manchester Review, Dogmatika, Beat the Dust, Jawbreakers and Bugged, among other places. She reviews fiction for the Guardian and lectures in creative writing at Lancaster University.

  NEIL CAMPBELL is from Manchester. He has two collections of short stories, Broken Doll and Pictures From Hopper, published by Salt, and two poetry collections, Birds and Bugsworth Diary, published by Knives Forks and Spoons, who have also published his short fiction chapbook, Ekphrasis. Recent stories have appeared in Unthology 6 and the Stockholm Review. His first novel is due for publication by Salt in 2016.

  EMMA CLEARY is from Liverpool and taught English and Creative Writing at Staffordshire University. In her critical work, she writes about maps, jazz, and the city in diasporic literature. She lives in Vancouver, BC, where she is working on her first novel.

  USCHI GATWARD was born in east London and lives there now. Her stories have appeared in the Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology Volume Six, Brittle Star, Southword and Structo, and have been performed by Liars’ League in London and New York, and at the Wilderness Festival in Oxfordshire.

  JONATHAN GIBBS was born in 1972 and lives in London. His debut novel, Randall, is published by Galley Beggar Press, and was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize 2015. His short fiction has appeared in Lighthouse, The South Circular, Allnighter (Pulp Faction), Gorse and The Best British Short Stories 2014, and has been shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize. He blogs at tinycamels.wordpress.com.

  JIM HINKS is an editor at Comma Press, an independent publisher specialising in short fiction. He is currently reading for a PhD in narrative structure in the short story at Edge Hill University, and writes his own stories in the name of practice-as-research. He is the inventor of MacGuffin, an online jukebox for short stories and poetry in text and audio form.

  TAMAR HODES was born in Israel in 1961 and has lived in the UK since she was five. For the past thirty years, she has combined teaching English and creative writing in schools, universities and prisons with her own writing. Her novel, Raffy’s Shapes, was published by Accent Press in 2006 and she has had many stories on Radio 4 as well as in anthologies and magazines. In January 2015, she was a finalist in Elle’s writing competition. She is married with two grown-up children.

  BEE LEWIS was born into a large, Irish family of story-tellers. She grew up in Liverpool and now lives on the south coast, in East Sussex, with her partner and their Irish Setter. She is reading for an MA in Creative Writing and is working on her first novel. She is also working on a short story collection inspired by modern sculpture.

  ALAN McCORMICK is Writer in Residence at Kingston University’s Writing School. His story collection, Dogsbodies and Scumsters, was longlisted for the Edge Hill Prize in 2012. He also writes flash shorts in response to Jonny Voss’s pictures. They work together as Scumsters, have been published regularly at 3:AM and keep a blog at www.scumsters.blogspot.co.uk.

  HILARY MANTEl is the author of numerous novels, a memoir and two short story collections. Born in Glossop, Derbyshire, she has won many awards for her work, including the Man Booker Prize twice, for Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies.

  HELEN MARSHALL is an author, editor, and doctor of medieval studies. Her debut collection, Hair Side, Flesh Side (ChiZine Publications, 2012), won the 2013 British Fantasy Award for Best Newcomer. Her second collection, Gifts for the One Who Comes After, was released in September 2014. Born and raised in Canada, she
lives in Oxford and holds joint Canadian/UK citizenship.

  ALISON MOORE was born in Manchester in 1971. She is the author of two novels – The Lighthouse (2012), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012 and won the McKitterick Prize 2013, and He Wants (2014) – and a short story collection, The Pre-War House & Other Stories (2013). She lives near Nottingham with her husband Dan and son Arthur.

  K J ORR was born in London. Her short fiction has been broadcast on Radio 4 and published by the Sunday Times, Dublin Review, White Review, Lighthouse and Comma Press, among others. She is Pushcart nominated, and has been shortlisted for awards including the BBC National Short Story Award, the Bridport Prize and the KWS Hilary Mantel International Short Story Prize. Her debut collection, Light Box, will be published in 2016 by Daunt Books.

  JULIANNE PACHICO was born in Cambridge, grew up in Colombia and now lives in Norwich. Her stories have been published by Lighthouse, NewWriting.net and Daunt Books. She is currently completing a linked collection.

  TRACEY S ROSENBERG is a novelist and poet living in Edinburgh. She has a PhD in Victorian literature from the University of Edinburgh and has published a historical novel, The Girl in the Bunker (Cargo Publishing, 2011), set during the final days of the Second World War. Her second poetry collection, The Naming of Cancer, came out in 2014 from Neon Books.

  HELEN SIMPSON is the author of Four Bare Legs in a Bed (1990), Dear George (1995) and Hey Yeah Right Get a Life (2000). In 1991 she was chosen as the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year and won the Somerset Maugham Award. In 1993 she was chosen as one of Granta’s twenty Best of Young British Novelists. Her most recent collection, Bunch of Fives, was published in 2012. She lives in London.