Thursday, after midnight. The corridors and studios of ‘Pendene’ exuded a false warmth; the smell of old cooking oil hung in the corners. The residents were locked down in silence for the night, while, outside, strong winds came blustering down the Channel from the Hook of Holland. Hampson sat in his room playing Death Camp 3 for the X-Box through an old Sony TV set, out of which issued faint hissing noises he couldn’t fix. When Beatrice knocked on his door he opened it but sat down again immediately. She was wearing black jeggings and a short white lozenge-quilted parka with fake fur round the hood. The cold came in with her. ‘I don’t know how you got in,’ was all Hampson could think of to say. He kept his eyes on the screen, after a minute adding: ‘They’re supposed to keep the outside door locked at night.’
‘You’re going too far with this,’ Beatrice said, looking around as if the room were part of it.
‘How far is that?’ Hampson said.
‘Don’t be puerile.’
She lifted the lids of the as-yet-unpacked boxes of books, poked the bin bags into which Hampson had compacted his clothes when he left London. ‘It’s like the back room of a charity shop in here,’ she concluded. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself.’ She switched the electric kettle on and the TV off, then knelt down in front of him so that he had to look at her. Her hands were cold. He wondered briefly if she had come to have sex with him. Instead she smiled with a kind of painful intensity and urged him: ‘Listen to me.’
‘How are the kiddies?’ Hampson said.
‘Listen,’ she said, ‘no one can show you anything if you won’t involve yourself.’
‘I don’t know what you mean by that.’
She shrugged and let go of him.
‘Come and find me when you do,’ she said.
A few nights later he turned on the TV and a woman was striding around in a derelict house shouting, ‘We could put a pa sha in here! Plenty of space for a pa sha!’ For a moment Hampson had absolutely no idea what she could be talking about. Then he saw that it was the bathroom she was in.
He turned the TV off again and went out to look for Beatrice, and soon he was following her once more, every night, up the quiet steep streets on the landward side of the town, or along the deserted sweep of the seafront. They were a hundred, two hundred yards apart, the two of them, in the night wind and strange light. Everything was very silent. There never seemed to be an ordinary passer-by. Hampson felt rapturous, even though, after a while, he saw that after all they weren’t alone. Other men were following her too, a dozen at a time; some women, too. Though Hampson saw them, they didn’t seem to see him. They had the look of the figures in Stanley Spencer’s ‘Beatitudes of Love’ paintings, shabby, collapsed and watery, rather grotesque. He wondered if he looked like that to other people.
To a degree, he felt relieved by this turn of events. He felt as if some weight had been lifted; a weight and perhaps a barrier. But his dreams didn’t improve. He dreamed of Beatrice’s children, who he’d never seen: they were a boy and a girl, toddlers in matching woollen coats, their little gloves dangling on elastic from the ends of their sleeves. He dreamed of the beach at Shining Dene. He dreamed of a hollow below the Downs, where the sun fell through dense, wind-sculpted hawthorn on to ashes, on to candle grease dripped over the stones of a temporary hearth. An event enacted itself in front of him, some episode which transfigured everything, in which a madwoman strode across the golf course to the smock mill, carrying her coat across her arms like a child. Soon there were lots of women, all carrying their coats that way, like sleepy children across their arms; but now they were throwing them off a pier into the sea. Lines of people followed one other person down to the sea, where they first sang an old Morrissey number, ‘Every Day is Like Sunday’, and then something, coat or child, was let fall into the water. All this dream-content seemed so distant! At first it was musing, lyrical but simple and matter-of-fact. It seemed strange but kind: the arms of the coats fluttered and gestured as they fell: they were like the expressive arms of performers in a charming traditional drama. But then someone was being killed and dismembered at a distance, in a rusty enamel bath or perhaps an empty brick sump. Hampson was helping with it. Great chunks of translucent, whitish flesh were falling heavily apart along clean cutlines. They were weighty and substantial, but there was no blood. It was more like fat. On waking he thought, I can’t do this any more. He didn’t really know what that meant: it was just the kind of thing you thought. But he knew he had to get things out into the open.
‘You know full well what’s going on,’ he said, when they were alone in the storage place next day. ‘You always knew.’
She smiled. She looked at him sidelong.
‘I don’t get it,’ Hampson said.
‘Why should you?’ she said. ‘Why should you get it, after all?’
‘You’ve made me into a voyeur,’ Hampson said. ‘That’s not what I am.’
‘I know. You’re a man escaping the London vomit. Ask yourself if that’s all you are.’ She came out from behind the counter and offered him her hand. When he took it, she led him through the office and into the storage itself. Rows of shoddy cubicles stretched away in all directions, their plyboard doors fastened with little cheap padlocks. ‘People leave stuff here for a decade or more,’ she said. ‘When they come for it again, their lives have changed. They might as well be going through someone else’s things. A lot of it they don’t even recognise. They don’t know why they didn’t just throw it all away and save themselves the trouble.’
‘Other people are following you too,’ Hampson said.
That made her compress her lips and turn away abruptly. ‘I don’t want to know,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to know what you see.’
‘What have you got that they want?’
No answer.
That night he followed her down towards the sea. She knew he was there, and he knew she knew: there was a satisfaction to that. He knew she was smiling, though she never looked back. He was one among many, but Hampson didn’t mind: he had seen them all before, trailing after her up and down the windy streets; they were easily recognisable. He could also identify other groups of followers, following other individuals. Some were women, some were men; some were members of the Philosophical Society. It resembled a midnight paseo, in which everyone in the town went down on to the vast, brutalist sweep of the sea-defences and filed along them in the transparent, motionless dark. After crossing Marine Drive to the seaward stub of the High Street, they all paused for a moment on the apron between the car park and the Brazilian JuJitsu Academy, halted, apparently, by the smell of the salt. For a moment they had an air of being discarded, agitated by a breeze too faint to feel in their world. And the thoughts you had when you watched them were the same, like the continual blowing or silting-down of the chalk detritus from the cliffs. Groynes of piled rock, with acres of flint shingle strung between them so that from above they looked like webbed fingers, reached out from the land; the sea, though calm as a pool, gave the impression of hidden disorder. Beatrice walked down between her followers to where the shingle steepened. Everyone was smiling. They were all watching her. They all shared the secret now, even Hampson. He watched Beatrice walk slowly into the water until it closed over her head. Her hair was left floating for a fraction of a second, then it vanished too. But he knew not to follow her, or call out to anyone, or otherwise raise the alarm. When he turned away at last, he was alone on the sea-defences and it was morning. The blunt chalk headlands, already busy with commuter traffic, stretched away east, decreasing mistily into the distances of Peacehaven and Hastings. He looked at his watch. Beatrice was waiting for him in the shadow of the sea wall. She had the two kids with her, peaky-looking little things about two years apart, one girl, one boy, who stared up at him as if they were thinking something that couldn’t be put into speech.
She said, ‘I thought I might find you here.’
&
nbsp; ‘Are you following me?’ Hampson said.
Beatrice laughed. The kids laughed. Hampson tousled their heads. They went all four of them and got some breakfast. He had never thought life was infinite. He had always understood that focus was the key, although he was prepared to admit he had often focussed on the wrong things. Earlier in life he had felt too much anxiety over that. From now on he wouldn’t feel enough, even though he knew his focus was slipping off the right things. Like everyone else he would begin to look forward to the evening, two or three glasses of wine. He would eat too much.
Hospital Field
Siân Melangell Dafydd
Owning something ancient adds weight to life. Your tree: nut-skinned, sturdy, harmony in a pot, which has grown up to be tiny, perfectly asymmetrical and squat, with teardrop, razor-edged leaves, which has grown up beautiful, is finally being delivered home. You stuff all your other belongings into a rucksack: underwear, toothbrush, books, and you negotiate customs, ticket turnstiles and packaged sandwiches while your two hands are firmly wrapped around its roots in a blue glazed terracotta pot. You think it looks like it ought to have been a teapot, not a plant pot; blue as sea in summer, shining about its soil. Your fingers sweat all the way home but you hold it and hold it, adjusting your fingers when their bones ache.
Your girlfriend asks you how old it is.
‘It’s very old,’ she says, ‘it must be.’ You tell her you have no idea and probably won’t, unless it dies and you get to cut its trunk to count the tiny age circles, ‘but really, really, do you think I’m ever going to get to do that?’ you ask her. You both agree on ‘old’.
On the mantelpiece it goes, then, next to a painting by a school-friend artist and a black and white photo of your grandmother looking young on a boat. Against a white wall, you are pleased with its shape and how the light from the window throws its shadow diagonally and larger than life. The tip of its right out-reaching branch throws the longest shadow, hitting the rim of a photograph by a semi-famous Cambodian. The chair you sit on to play your guitar lives in the right place so that when you look up again from folk songs and breathe deep, there it is, perfectly crooked and alive in your home.
Your bonsai dies or it seems to be dying: you’re not sure which. It takes seven days to get to such a state. On the morning of the eighth, the little feet of its blue pot are covered in leaves, and the palms of the leaves are closed. On the ninth morning, even more. You break your waking ritual. Instead of going first thing to loo-kettle-radio-shower, you pop your head into the living room to check the damage. You’ve learned to expect disappointment before your eyes are fully open. On the floor, leaves crunch like grains of rice into your parquet gaps.
Your girlfriend says you should be talking to your tree, and laughs.
‘Which language?’ you ask. She suggests English is a poor second to Japanese but you could give it a go since singing hasn’t charmed it into feeling at home.
You tell it about your day, about the man across the way on the seventh floor who had a heart attack and had to be taken out of his flat in a crane through the window, his chest naked to the freezing air and pumped by a machine. You even ask it if it’s listening and then prod the soil which is just as it should be, according to the instructions.
Day fourteen and leaf three shrivels and drops in front of your very eyes. It scrunches to powder between your thumb and forefinger and flakes back to where it fell in the first place. You leave the dust there.
Something must be done. You journey to the other side of the city after work, to a place you hardly ever go – journey to the very end, just because you’re after a specialist and that’s where he’s to be had. It’s where the canals merge, large maples and damp benches, and street sweepers hosing the roads down between passengers and cyclists. The shop is the size of a locksmith’s, has mini grass-plants you don’t recognise hanging from upside-down pots on a washing line. A miracle man works here, clearly.
‘I have come to ask about my bonsai,’ you tell him.
He asks if you bought it here.
‘No.’
‘Did you bring it with you?’
‘No.’
‘Where is it?’
‘At home, losing its leaves.’
‘That’ll be the problem: your home,’ he says. ‘Take it outside and it might survive. At the very least don’t keep it cooped up,’ this man said, pressing his black fingernails into his palms, ‘not for more than, say, seven days on the trot.’
You repeat ‘cooped up’ in exactly his tone: high-pitch disgust. You wonder whether he imagines you in an apartment with trees in chains, just like the silver birches in the Bibliothèque François Mitterrand.
‘I need to lock up,’ the man says, as if he’s seen into your soul and seen padlocks, and you watch his hands as he fiddles with the keys. You trust those hands.
You report back over dinner.
‘It is hot here,’ your girlfriend says, ‘very hot.’
‘You’ve never said that before,’ you tell her.
‘But it is though,’ she says and blows out with puffed cheeks.
‘This isn’t hot,’ you say. You point at the thermometer which shows something between seventeen and eighteen degrees and you knew it would. ‘My dad has it fixed on twenty three.’
‘We’re not talking about your comfort, or your dad’s.’
‘Is it too hot, then?’ you ask her.
She tells you that in your place she would have worn a jumper instead of cranking up the heat. That, for sure, this shows that you’re more urban than she is. But, no it’s not too hot, no. You’re not sure if she’s lying and start watching her differently. She sleeps untidily at night: kicks down the duvet. You pull it back up. Another clue is that she gasps in her sleep. How could she, you tell yourself, how could she?
In the morning she makes coffee while you crouch in front of the bonsai.
‘It’s not personal,’ she says. ‘It’s science.’
‘You mean nature,’ you suggest.
‘Same thing,’ she says. ‘It’s just the way things are.’
You tell her elms die outside. There’s a foreign disease out there that gets them.
‘But not the miniature elms maybe,’ she says, ‘they’re made of stronger stuff.’
You don’t give in; you consider the balcony but you don’t do it. It’s a decorative plant, so what’s the point of it if it can’t be seen? So, contained in this beautiful, perfect flat, with artwork by foreign photographers of children with stories in their eyes and no shoes, your bonsai loses its last-but-one leaf.
You bend low and analyse the tiny point of contact between leaf and bark; try to find what is it that gives up right there. You fail, but find yourself staring until your lower back aches. You’re tempted to pluck out the remaining leaf, to get the whole thing over and done with. But this posture isn’t natural for you, and actually really hurts, so you stand up straight, resist the urge to touch the tree, and grab your coat to head to work. On the bus, you tell yourself that you really are killing it and should have stuck it on the balcony.
The last leaf is on the mantelpiece on your return. The tree is gone, the marble polished where the pot stood. It’s been manhandled again, this time carried by sweaty hands to share a garden with grasses, with bruised heads of great burnets, liquorice milk-vetch covered in sun-spots, devil’s-bit, blood-veined eyebright, clots of comfrey and meadowsweet frothing above it all. It’s abandoned there until it feels better. Once in a while, she brings it in; places it in the middle of the kitchen table and tucks into a plate of poached egg on toast, dandelion and sorrel salad, picks at her nails and the muddy feet of the bonsai pot; drinks tea. She grows nut-skinned; sometimes wonders – did you ever know that you were the one who changed everything – and takes another sip of tea. Sometime around the bonsai’s hundred-and-fiftieth year, you die, mid-crane-lift o
utside your apartment window.
Roof Space
David Grubb
I am up here in the roof space. I am Michael.
I am waiting for my father to come up into this space above where we live. To join me with the tracks and trains, the arrivals and departures, the timetabled lives, these journeys.
My father has often come up here into the roof space and we have constructed this world of coming and going, this necessity. These platforms and disciplines, these engines and carriages and flags, these entrances and exits, these sidings and announcements, these inventions.
I am up here in the roof space and when my father arrives there will be announcements and whistles and precision and everything will work and for hours at a time we will be in command.
Not like downstairs. Not like the house beneath. Not like the rooms and the demands and the crying. Not like the father then.
I am up here in the space above all that. I am waiting for my father to command and the way the trains obey and the way that the station clock is a sort of god and we all know where we are. But even now I do not tell my father about the passengers.
He does not see them. He would never understand.
He understood clocks. He understood watches. They are like small gods making sense of our days. He understood table manners and declensions and the meanings of bird migrations.
He does not have time for fictions and jokes and tricks and with the exception of the trains in the roof space there is very little he shares with me.
In the roof space there is glow and shine and so much to keep an eye on and so many things that might go wrong. Beneath the roof space lights and timetable and things to maintain and check on, each evening and at weekends, my father so happy, more than content, sometimes humming, always in control, always ahead of things. He seemed to trust me.
The Best British Short Stories 2014 Page 6
