The Best British Short Stories 2014

by Nicholas Royle

  ‘My god,’ she said.

  At the same time Hampson said: ‘I knew you when we were kids!’

  ‘You wouldn’t leave me alone,’ she said.

  ‘I was quite stricken.’

  ‘I know you were,’ the woman said.

  Hampson paid the bill. ‘I was seven years old,’ he said, ‘and you were, what? Thirteen?’

  She laughed. ‘I bet you can’t remember my name either.’

  Hampson had a couple of tries but she was right. As he was leaving, she called after him, ‘It’s Beatrice.’ And then: ‘Are you going to be stricken again?’

  Hampson said he didn’t know how to answer that one.

  ‘You haven’t changed,’ she said, as if he’d already done something which demonstrated it.

  The house – it was called ‘Pendene’, everything had to be called ‘dene’ round there – was large, square, detached, surrounded on three sides with empty parking space and, at the back, a long, overgrown garden. It wasn’t much. Hampson’s room wasn’t much either. It lay at the end of a long, badly lit second-floor landing, which still smelt of food cooked there in the 1960s: a section of a room – perhaps twelve feet by ten, painted white, accessed from a fire-door with the remains of broken bolts laced down the inside – so literalistically partitioned out of the original Victorian space that the light filtered in from about two-thirds of a bay window. The day he moved in, before he went down to the storage with his things and met Beatrice again, he had looked out of the window and watched a woman, thirtyish, long hair and nice legs in skinny jeans, walking diagonally across the road towards him from a house twenty yards down.

  The garden wall, so overgrown with ivy it was bowing into the street, cut off his view of her. Shortly afterwards she was followed by a man in a pale blue shirt, who vanished in the same way. The next time Hampson looked up she was walking towards him again. The wall obscured her. The man followed about a minute later, and the wall obscured him. This happened three times, in bright sunshine. Hampson never saw either of them walk back towards their house. They didn’t speak to one another. Up the street – towards the square where the buildings began to look a little less bleak, more as if they housed families of human beings – the gardens were full of camelias and early-flowering clematis.

  For the first three or four days he didn’t do much. He had a job to go to, pushing software in a local design firm, but it wouldn’t start for a week. He pottered around, refamiliarising himself, feeling his way across the joins between the old town – with its herringbone brick and lapboard architecture, its carefully cultivated links to notable soldiers and writers of the Edwardian afternoon, and its quiet graveyard backwatered behind yews – and the new, which wasn’t much more than a housing estate, some car parks, and a loop or two of bleak, dusty pubs and charity shops tucked between the chalk cliffs and brutalist sea defences known for lost geographical reasons as Shining Dene. There wasn’t a lot to it, but Hampson already knew that. The promenade. The beach with its reclaimed Victorian railway track. A couple of Regency crescents on a hill which attracted a dry cold wind.

  If you were bored – and Hampson soon was – you could go up on to West Hill and stare out towards France. One lunchtime he went into the English Channel, a pub about a hundred yards back from the clifftop, and Beatrice was sitting there at the back. He bought a drink and went over. He asked if she minded him joining her, she asked him why she should mind. Unable to disentangle anything from that, he said:

  ‘This is a weird place.’

  ‘It’s a town of the dead,’ she said.

  ‘I meant the pub,’ Hampson said.

  At the back it was hollow with plastic beams and tobacco-stained artex; a whitish sea-light crept in among the tables nearest the window, overexposing the floorboards, the sleeping dogs, the customers’ feet. Every support pillar was papered with posters – ‘Club Chat Noir’, ‘Maximum Rock & Roll’ – and a sign behind the bar advised, ‘No bloody swearing’. For a moment Hampson and Beatrice stared companionably around, then she said:

  ‘So. London.’

  ‘London,’ he agreed.

  ‘I’d kill to be in London,’ she said. ‘Why’d you leave?’

  He couldn’t answer that. He hadn’t answered it for himself. ‘I suppose you get sick of it,’ he said. ‘You get sick of pretending it’s not crap.’ But it had been less about London and more about not fitting into your own life, not being described by the place you live in. Not being seen into life, by others or yourself. He had been lonely there even though he knew people: but Hampson told her a different story. ‘Vomit’s the London keynote,’ he said. ‘If you like to stand in a puddle of someone else’s in a tube train on a Friday night, London’s the place to be.’

  ‘But why come here ?’ she said. ‘Nothing happens here.’

  ‘Nothing happens there, either.’

  She laughed at that. ‘Except the vomit,’ she said.

  ‘The vomit’s world class. Good solid stuff. We can be proud of that.’

  She made a face.

  ‘I don’t think I’ll have another drink.’

  ‘Of course you will,’ Hampson said.

  After that, he often popped into the storage at lunchtime. He took a couple of things out then put them back the next day. She teased him about it.

  Hampson was a small man, perhaps five foot six. He couldn’t see anything wrong with that. In her high-heeled shoes Beatrice sometimes had an inch or two on him. He was excited by her and didn’t see why he shouldn’t show it. They chatted. They shared this funny small-town teenage history. It was all very pleasant and explicable but it wasn’t going any further. Then, after a fortnight or so, Hampson was dawdling through the centre of town on his way to the cinema to see a film called Shame. It was a warm evening, just after dark, with a light rain and static patches of mist out to sea. As Hampson crossed one of the High Street junctions, Beatrice walked straight out of a house about a hundred yards in front of him. In the moment the door slammed, she was just a figure to him, in a pencil skirt and some sort of jacket with a pinched-in waist; then he recognised her from her walk, short tapping steps echoing back to him. He followed her without a thought. They were soon out of the centre, heading along the Bourne past the Ship Museum into the old town, where she knocked on a door; waited for a moment or two; called, ‘Emily? Can I leave them with you tomorrow? Emily?’ and receiving no answer went up a steep, narrow little passage and out into one of the Regency enclaves that faced the sea. It wasn’t an area Hampson remembered. She was too far ahead to call her name; anyway, shyness kept him from calling out to anyone in public. He thought he would make himself known when he caught up with her, but he never did. Instead he hung back, listening to the sound of her heels on the pavement. He never saw where she went. The cloud broke: moonlight gave the deserted streets a flattened perspective, as if the two of them were in a picture: suddenly Hampson became anxious and turned off.

  Next day he went to the storage at lunchtime and asked her out.

  ‘You took your time,’ she said. ‘What about Sunday afternoon?’

  They rode the West Hill funicular railway to the park at the top of the cliffs. She stretched her arms. ‘It’s great,’ she said, ‘that you can get so high above it all.’ A moment later she was gone. Hampson stood where he was, waiting for her to come back. There was a strong smell of cut grass, then fried food from the cafe at the top of the funicular. If he looked off to his left he could see her sitting on a bench about a hundred yards away. Behind her the town fell away towards the sea. Was she looking back towards him? He couldn’t be sure. Suddenly a flock of gulls poured down the Bourne and circled over the shops and houses, screaming and calling; then spread out along the esplanade and diffused like fog.

  ‘I just went off for a bit of a wander,’ she said when she came back.

  ‘No problem,’ Hampson said.

/>   ‘It’s a bit neat, this park. Don’t you think?’

  ‘I quite like it.’

  ‘I was just sitting on a bench down the path,’ she said.

  Two or three boys kicked a ball about on the grass behind them, and in front the sea was dissolving into the sky behind the tall black net shops and the art gallery. ‘That yellow lichen on the roofs down there,’ Hampson said, ‘I wonder what it is?’

  She laughed.

  ‘I thought you were a local,’ she said.

  From there they went up on to the golf course, where groups of children hunted around all weekend for lost golf balls, paying particular attention to the base of the old black smock mill. There was a constant wind which seemed, Beatrice said, to come all the way from France. ‘Look!’ she said. From up there you could see clearly how the houses flowed between the downs, filling up the valley with humanity or something like it. Hawthorn and sloe grew on the edge, low, lichenous, wind-sculpted, dense. Lower down a fox sat calmly in a small sloping field between woods and allotments, watching some people tend horses. There were little valleys, warm, still and full of life, a few hundred yards from the sea. ‘Anything can happen here,’ she said, ‘safe and out of the wind.’ They ended up at the Open Art cafe, which offered an all-day breakfast sandwich, fragile-looking wildflowers in old glass bottles and the Sunday afternoon gathering of the Philosophical Society.

  ‘What’s the topic for this afternoon?’ someone asked Hampson, as if he and Beatrice were members too. For him, Hampson said, to some laughter, it would have to be the existential quality of the art on the walls: several versions, in different sizes, of a sunbather sitting naked on the shingle, seen from behind, hugging her knees, framed in such a way as to render the whole experience anxious and claustrophobic – the sunshine, the beach, the wideness of the air, all denied. They were all called ‘Woman From the Sea’, with a hashmark and a number.

  ‘Well I enjoyed that,’ Beatrice said when they were back in town.

  ‘Come out one evening,’ Hampson suggested.

  ‘I can’t,’ she said. She stood awkwardly on the pavement outside a pub called the Plough, waiting for him to kiss her cheek; then laughed and walked off up the hill. ‘But we could do this again,’ she called back. Then she stopped and turned round and added: ‘I’ve got kiddies. Two.’

  He couldn’t imagine that. He sat in his room later that night, watching the TV with the sound turned down, and tried to remember what she had looked like when they were younger. He couldn’t remember much of anything. A smile, a pleated uniform skirt. Wet light shining off the seafront benches, streets steepening away north and east into middle-class cul-de-sacs. A gang of Year Ten girls laughing about something they had seen, or perhaps done, in the Shining Dene public toilets where moths with fawn pillowy heads and eyes like cheap red jewels lay stunned and immobile on the windowsills of the lavatory stalls. If he tried, he could remember how he felt – it was a small boy’s crush – and someone giving him a sweet; but he was afraid that if he tried too hard he would begin inventing things, so he put it out of his mind and went to bed. A couple of evenings later he waited beneath the old railway arches until he saw her come out of the storage place, then allowed her forty yards’ start and followed her home. There was a qualitative difference between this time and the last: he understood what he was doing. Also what he was feeling. Curiosity. Excitement. On top of that, a kind of peculiar self-satisfaction, as if following her made him superior.

  It was cold and lively up there. The shabby white stucco façades, the columned doorways peeling and cracked in daylight, had under the moon a pure, abstract look. By day you could tell from their mismatched curtains and rows of doorbells that they had been divided as thoughtlessly into flats as ‘Pendene’; at night they curved away like fresh illustrations of themselves in watercolour and architectural ink. Beatrice approached a house. He watched her put key to lock, listened for her footfall in the hall, waited until a ground-floor window lit up; then turned up his coat collar and went back down into the town.

  After that he followed her most evenings. Sometimes he was tempted to make his way straight to the house and wait for her to arrive; but another feeling kept him honest: he wanted the sound of her heels, the lucky emptiness of the streets, the sense of the two of them being figures caught moving on an almost abstract ground. Her life seemed simple. Hampson couldn’t see much of it. The children ran about playing some game upstairs. They had a television up there. Beatrice called out to them from the bathroom or the kitchen. They seemed happy. Later, she might sit for an hour on her own in the yellow-lit front room, staring ahead of herself. Crouched painfully in a soft patch of the bit of garden at the back of the house, he found himself shaking with attention. His hearing sharpened until he thought he could hear her breathe. When she leaned forward to pick up a magazine he could feel his heartbeat rocking his upper body. Walking home afterwards, he felt dizzy – as if he had been released from some vast effort – and at the same time quite unreal. It would have been easy to believe that, at night, the town had no existence except as a picture – or not one but several of them, stacked planes, layered and imbricated in the rising salt air and faint sound of waves, implying three dimensions yet completely two-dimensional.

  One evening as he hid in the garden, he realised someone else was in the room with her. She was listening to someone he couldn’t see; someone, perhaps, who had been there all along; a male voice, first questioning then reassuring. From then on, Hampson wondered if he too had company. Though he never saw anyone, might other men be crouched in the garden near him at night, their attention as excited and obsessive as his own?

  All the time he was following her at night, they had an easy familiarity by day. They sat in the English Channel at lunchtime, eating a pint of prawns each. When she could organise childcare they visited the art cinema and had arguments about Michael Haneke. It was a normal relationship, although Hampson often felt she was trying to tell him something without actually saying it. She took him to a famous house a few miles inland. This confection of butter-and-honey stone, built by an Edwardian author to enclose the memory of his dead son, had first passed into the hands of the Bloomsbury group – who, in their anxiety to control the cultural conversation and contribute to English post- Impressionism, had painted watery greyish designs on the wallpaper and doors – and now belonged to the Nation. Standing in extensive gardens, behind warm brick walls and tall yew hedges, it boasted an oast house, a box maze and a fully operational watermill from which visitors were encouraged to buy flour. Beatrice and Hampson took the Saturday tour, after which she led him through a little wooden gate into one of the more intimate gardens, which featured a rectangular pool and some statuary among exuberant cottage garden plantings. There, she sat him down on a bench.

  ‘Look!’ she said. ‘I love this!’

  Hampson wasn’t so impressed. The rim of the pool had been tiled by amateurs – an effect less of Tuscany than of the mouldy bathroom in a Spanish holiday villa – and all you could make out in the clouded water was a kind of feathery weed moving to and fro. It might have been growing on something, Hampson thought, some shape he couldn’t quite bring to mind. Overseeing the pool from a short plinth of home-made concrete was a ten-inch figure without head or legs but with detailed, slightly disproportionate male genitals. There were similarly broken or partial bodies all over the garden – both sexes reduced to loins and buttocks half hidden by foliage.

  ‘Isn’t it calm?’ she said.

  ‘Very calm,’ Hampson agreed. But he hated the place and couldn’t wait to get away: within a week he was having a dream in which it seemed less like a garden than the site of a crime. Limbs had been torn off for reasons unfathomable; the aesthetic of careful disarrangement – of humorous disarray – tried but failed to dissimulate the rage that lay behind it all. Hampson knew he wasn’t looking at a celebration of Mediterranean influences and classical fo
rms, or even the operations of a disturbed mind. One night he woke up understanding the difference between the garden and his dream of it: in the dream all those dismembered trunks and torsos were real. The knowledge exhausted him. He groaned and turned over. He fell asleep again. He had begun the night throwing body parts into the pool: he spent the rest of it trying to force an object the colour of a plastic lobster into an open pipe.

  When he woke again it was six the next morning and the sun was out. He walked down the hill to Shining Dene, where he found two old women already swimming from the shingle. They ran laughing into the sea, carrying between them a child’s bright blue-and-yellow plastic inflatable upon which were printed the words HIGH VELOCITY SPORT, which they lost for a moment in the surf; then, still laughing, ran out again. They shouted and waved to someone on the cliff above, stumbled about in the shallows chasing one another. Hampson, puzzled by their energy, sat under the sea-defences, pulling up clumps of chamomile and yellow horned poppy. Down among the roots he found beads of a material resembling cloudy plastic, washed in by the tide. It was difficult to tell what they had been; on the shingle, the difference between organic and inorganic was constantly eroded by water, weather, sun. This idea made him think about the object in his dream. It had looked crustacean but felt fleshy and limp. It had been about the size of a seven-year-old boy. The old women finished swimming, dried themselves and tugged on their vast shorts. Soon after that, he began avoiding Beatrice during the day and stopped following her at night.

  He couldn’t have said why. He was angry. He hadn’t liked the pool, he blamed her for the dream; he was angry that he had to follow her.

  He didn’t phone and he didn’t answer when she phoned. He took the train up to London once or twice a week. It was the same as ever: he would spend the evening in Soho getting pissed, wind up outside the Bar Italia with all the other digital creatives, clutching a beaker of hot chocolate too glutinous to drink. He would grin vaguely into the warm drizzle and wonder what to do next. He missed her. He missed their walks together. In a week or two, he felt, he would be all right again: meanwhile this was the best his personality would let him do. Eventually she came to find him.