‘He’s too rough with him.’
‘Since when did you think that?’
‘I’ve always thought that,’ Karel said.
Karel sat at the card table peeling his first orange. His hands were large and powerful, his fingers nimble and dextrous. He took no time or pride in peeling the orange. He ate a quarter in one, then a half. Then peeled another.
Outside an ocabasi a woman with tightly pulled-back hair was smoking a cigarette. Eugene watched her take a phone from her handbag and press a button. Karel’s phone rang. He answered it, licking his fingers. Eugene watched the woman speak. He heard her talk into Karel’s ear. He heard the frustration in Karel’s English. His manic corrections. He heard him say no three times; say no three ways. Eugene watched the woman end the call. She looked to the window where he was smoking. He waved and she walked away, up the hill.
‘Are you not seeing her, then?’ Eugene said.
‘Not tonight, no,’ Karel said in Russian.
‘You go and see her, don’t worry about me. Don’t let me ruin your fun.’
‘You wanted to watch the football together. I told her that’s what I was doing.’
‘But —’
‘No,’ Karel said. ‘We watch the football.’
Karel had a laptop and when Eugene was in they watched American cop shows, Russian soap operas, British football. It was a nothing match that night, but they sat on their beds, the laptop propped up on an orange crate, and drank a few bottles of Budweiser. At the end of the game, Karel’s phone rang. He answered with apologies, but moved on to anger. The call ended and Karel ate the last of the orange.
‘Trouble in paradise?’ Eugene said.
‘I’m going to bed,’ Karel said. ‘A long day tomorrow.’
‘Every day is long,’ Eugene said.
‘She’s a beautiful girl, that Nina,’ he said. ‘But the most beautiful women are from Minsk. I remember the first —’
‘I must sleep. Please, Gen, let me sleep now.’
‘It’s not even eleven.’
‘I know, Gen. I know.’
Karel sat at the card table peeling an orange. His hands were large and powerful, his fingers nimble and dextrous. By the time he’d finished, the flesh of the orange was scuffed with pith and odd spots of rind. He left it in the middle of his plate.
‘Were you always in love with my mother?’ Karel said. It was a Saturday and so there was vodka. Eugene was looking out of the window, the windows opposite empty save for nets and curtains.
‘Yes, always. Everyone knew that. Your father used to make jokes. When I was a young man they called me lapdog. I didn’t care.’
Eugene was by the window, smoking the last of his cigarette, a can of beer in his hand. Outside there were three women hailing a taxi, a kid in a baseball cap talking loudly to another boy.
‘Does she ever talk of me?’ Eugene asked.
‘She says you’re the kindest man she’s ever known.’
‘Ah!’ he said. ‘Well you know what that means.’
Karel took a sip of his vodka and his phone wriggled in his pocket.
‘Maybe in another life you could have been my father.’
Eugene wanted to strike him. To get up from the bed and cuff the boy around the ear. So stupid a reaction; this man, his not-son, was the size of a bear, had arm muscles to make boxers seem girlish. He could never hit him. The anger passed.
‘I wouldn’t have made much of a father,’ Eugene said and sat down at the card table. ‘You were lucky there. Your mother was lucky too.’
It had changed nothing: his story, his confession. He’d hoped the boy would understand. That men who wander fall in love easily. That Karel’s mother was just the first and therefore most pungent of memories. That Eugene knew best. Karel peeled another orange and Eugene went to the window, opened the sash.
‘What’s going on outside?’ Karel asked.
‘The man and the woman and the child are there. They —’
Eugene looked over his shoulder and Karel was talking on his phone in a low voice. As he listened to Nina, Karel mouthed sorry in Russian.
Eugene plotted his route again on the small map, though he already knew exactly where he was heading, how long it would take and where to get off the bus. Karel’s laptop was useful now he knew how to use it. He had used GoogleEarth and had seen the road on which Karel lived. There were no shops, no bedsits and studios running like a mezzanine above them; just blocks and blocks of flats, trees outside on the pavement, cars double parked in white-lined bays.
Despite the planning, Eugene was a half-hour early. There was a bar around the corner and he drank an expensive bottle of Budweiser while a large crowd watched the rugby. He ordered vodka and the bar staff, as accented as him but better dressed, served him his drink. The customers were eating roast dinners, drinking wine and beers and Bloody Marys. The pitch of the referee’s whistle cut through the loudness of their voices. Some of them looked at him. He downed his drink and headed out the door.
There were forty-seven buzzers outside Karel’s block. He pressed number 22 and Karel answered as quickly as peeling an orange. He was buzzed through and Eugene took the stairs two at a time. Concrete grey. A smell that made him hold his breath. At the top of the stairs he saw a long corridor with a single door open. Karel appeared, wide smile on wide mouth, wiping his hands on a dishcloth.
‘Gen!’ he called out down the corridor. ‘So good to see you!’
‘Karel, my boy, speak Russian,’ Eugene said. ‘It’s Sunday; don’t you know to speak Russian on a Sunday?’
‘Come on in, Gen,’ he said after they embraced. ‘Come see my new place.’
The flat was ferociously tidy, three rooms – kitchen/living room, bedroom, bathroom – with laminate flooring and the cheapest kind of furniture. There were two bowls of nuts on the coffee table and the small dining table was set for three. Nina was stirring a large pot on the stove. She looked like she had been stirring the pot for a hundred years.
‘I brought some things for you,’ Eugene said and took out some beers from his shoulder bag.
‘Thanks,’ Nina said. ‘Good to see you, Gen,’ She kissed him on the cheeks.
‘You’re looking well,’ he said tapping her stomach. ‘It must agree with you.’
She nodded and Karel put his arms around her. She pushed him away and went back to stirring the pot.
‘We have a balcony too,’ Karel said and opened the fridge, poured beer for them both. ‘Let’s go outside, yes?’
They opened the door onto the smallest balcony Eugene had ever seen. It was just about big enough for them to stand side by side. There was an ashtray set on a very small wooden card table.
‘So how are you?’ Karel asked.
‘Fine. You?’
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Excited.’
‘You have a lot to be excited about.’
Eugene smoked a cigarette and they both drank their beer and both agreed how good it was to see each other at last. Then Nina called Karel inside to help with serving lunch.
Nina was a fine cook and Eugene had three helpings of stew.
‘You can come any time, Gen,’ she said.
‘Thank you, Nina,’ he said. ‘I would be honoured.’
After they had cleared the plates, the two men went outside again. The wind had got up and there were teeth in it. They agreed the food was good, that Nina was a fine cook.
‘I have something for you,’ Eugene said as they went back inside. Out of his shoulder bag he took a plastic sack and handed it to Eugene.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘I thought you must be missing them.’
‘Thanks, Gen,’ he said. ‘Look, Nina, Gen has brought us oranges!’
‘Oranges?’
‘Yes, look, from the shop I used to live above. Best oranges I eve
r tasted.’
‘They were nice, yes,’ she said and shrugged everyone back to the table.
Karel sat at the table peeling an orange. His hands were large and powerful, his fingers nimble and dextrous. By the time he’d finished, the flesh of the orange was clean, pithless and perfectly round. He passed the plate with the orange to Nina. She split open the orange and quickly ate it. He peeled another, split it, and quickly ate. Eugene watched the two of them, the juice on their chins, the way they licked the juice from their fingers. He watched them smile and, with his right hand, Eugene took an orange from the plastic sack. He dug his thumbnail into its flesh and began to peel.
Tides
OR HOW STORIES DO OR DON’T GET TOLD
Elizabeth Baines
There’s a scene that keeps coming back to me: the two of us standing at a wall by the sea one evening in Wales, me and him. It was dusk, the tide was out and just beginning to come in. It feels to me as if this moment is the focus of a story, our story, the point from which the tale could go backwards to all that happened before, and forwards, beyond that night. I see us from outside, silhouetted against the sea and the sky, me in my leather jacket, he in his waterproof – we’d been walking in the mountains – two figures in a tableau, the hero and the heroine of the narrative to be told.
But the light was fading, and as I stare into the memory the thing we were watching then is taking my attention now: the slip of sea coming in between the black and slick-shiny mud flats. The sky is fading, but this little river is paradoxically brightening, as if pulling all the light down into itself. It glistens like mercury, and even as we watch it’s coming nearer and growing, because there on the straits the sea comes in quietly but fast from different directions at once.
And I can’t yet see how to tell the story, or where to go from that moment, just the two of us together there at that wall by the sea.
I could pick the time he betrayed me, which would make the story a Gothic drama. It was autumn. The smell of rot was in the air and berries outside the window dripped like darkening blood. I wanted to lock him out for his betrayal, though his footstep on the path was like the footstep of the vampire to whom no door could be barred . . .
But I’m distracted from our story. Other stories are crowding me, the ones I was thinking of then by the sea, stories misty with legend and others concrete and linear with the building stones of history. My eye – then, and now in my memory – is drawn to the island across the water, black against the sky, plump with trees and the tales of the people who regarded them as sacred and there on that shore fought the Romans with hair and robes flying and torches flailing and blood-curdling cries. And nearer, drawn on the tide of that growing river, are the stories of the other invaders and travellers, the Celtic monks pulling onto the once-wooded shore where we stand, the Norman king who cut the trees down and built the castle looming behind us, setting the contours of Constantinople in the blue-green light of this north-western land.
Our figures, mine and his, are becoming indistinct to me in the dark.
And I’m thinking now, as I was thinking then, of the time in my childhood when I lived nearby, an English-speaking invader myself: my own story, which ended long before I met him, featuring custard made from powder and canings at school, and which can be a jovial realist tale or a misery memoir, depending on my mood.
It leads me on – stream-of-consciousness – to remember now that earlier that day we’d been shopping. He whizzed around with the trolley and I went straggling behind, sidetracked by the fact that the supermarket assistants spoke mostly in North-West English accents, not Welsh. Later on we made an inquiry in a shop that hadn’t yet opened for business and was still being stocked with huge ugly soft toys by three Asian-looking guys. They were from our own town in England, I commented, but, surprised, they said no, they were locals, and when I asked them where they got their accents they said they had no idea.
And I stood in the pedestrianized High Street while he went to the bank machine, and watched a giant-seeming seagull drop onto a toy-town-seeming chimney, while a young mother, like my own mother here once, struggled by with a pushchair and kids, and I couldn’t decide if it was a bad end to a story – a culture and a language swamped, in spite of the educational and heritage initiatives, by the Englishness sweeping down the new roads and the TV channels – or actually a good one, riddance of the differences that created old enmities.
Or maybe – more like – there’s just no end to the story.
He came from the bank machine towards me, took my arm, waved back at the guys through the glass; we waved together, him and me: that’s how we are now, a companionable couple, we went off for a companionable walk in the hills, it’s not the heart-stopping thing it once was.
I could tell that story, the time I ended it between us. I could make it a feminist re-telling of a fairy tale: the waking princess (me) kicking the prince away from the glass coffin, ie my house which I had to myself again at last. I could end it there and people would be glad of a satisfying ending and none would be any the wiser, leaving out the way the house then filled with shadows, the fact that I stopped eating, that I longed for the sound of his step on the path again, and when it came, like a stroke on skin, rushed to the door and the light flooded in . . . And then I wouldn’t be able to mention those years we spent together with the children – years like a TV sitcom – or indeed the two of us standing by the castle and the straits all that time later, side by side, not quite touching, watching the day dying, this image which just now seems central to it all.
The dark came down, the island was lost to us; the only thing to be seen was that river, still brightening and growing, and we turned into the pub under the castle wall just behind.
We’d bought a paper and tried to read it, but it was Saturday night and the pub was noisy and full. In spite of the bitter weather young women were wearing the briefest, most glittery fashions and they shrieked with a confident abandon which within easy living memory would never have been allowed in this town. Young men bellowed. A lad nearby pulled his shirt from his trousers and kept showing off his belly and every now and then staggered like a toddler up to a fortyish guy sitting nearby and performed a low drunken bow.
Twenty today, that older chap explained, and then engaged him, my companionable man, in conversation. I turned to the paper and read that the terrible summer had been caused by storms in the Arctic, which in turn had been caused by the warming of the seas elsewhere in the world. And then I looked back up and here in the pub it seemed the wrong story: the flowing drink, the skimpy clothes and bare flesh were the real and concrete components of a better-known, more comforting one, the certain progression of the familiar seasons.
My eye was caught by a teenage girl in the doorway, in a little-girl dress with puff sleeves and high princess waist, and I was swamped by nostalgia, which of course is what such fashions are designed to do to you, and I thought of myself in the time before I made all my choices, when all the narratives were open, when I couldn’t have imagined I’d be sitting here one day with a man I almost lost, once because I nearly gave him up and once because he nearly died.
I could tell that last too, as a complete and rounded story, a grim, realist tale: the symbolic slam of the ambulance door, the ice-rink of the hospital corridor, his skull pushing up through his skin, the emergency operation. Would I mention my sense then that nothing had meaning and that my life after all was no story, or would I lie, since he recovered, and make those symbols fit a narrative arc with a happy ending?
I looked beyond him, and framed in the pub window was that channel of sea, now hugely swollen, still lit with a light that seemed to come from nowhere.
The other guy was still talking to him, in an accent part Welsh and part something else. He came from Liverpool, he was saying, and when he had kids here he vowed he’d bring them up properly Welsh. His son was the friend of that lad whose birth
day it was; they were in the Welsh Guards, and the reason they were making hay this weekend was that the following week they were off to Afghanistan.
Outside the window the river broke an invisible barrier and poured across the mud flats.
The chap saw where I was looking. He said, did we know that the council sold the land on the harbour for a single penny to developers, to be rid of the responsibility of protecting the town when the sea level rises?
It was time to go. We picked up the paper.
Outside the sea had drowned the mud flats altogether and was lapping blackly, high against the wall.
The light was all gone.
We joined hands in the dark, in the oncoming rush of all the possible stories.
The Sea In Birmingham
Mick Scully
Cyril’s eyes are extraordinary. Every time I shave him, I say that to myself. A rare blue. So clear. All the secrets of the world there. Not watery. Not glazed. Just clear blue. Sometimes, in the sitting room, he will beckon me over. I have to crouch down because he wants to whisper. ‘I was a sailor, you know, in the navy.’
‘Would that be with Nelson, Cyril?’ I ask.
‘No.’ He chuckles. ‘The war.’
‘The Great War?’
‘They’re all great, son.’
Now I can’t get him into his room. ‘There is a woman in the mirror,’ he says. ‘She lives there.’
‘I don’t think so, Cyril.’
‘There is, son. A woman – in the mirror.’
Matron Judy comes into the corridor. ‘Lucky you, Cyril,’ Matron Judy says, and, taking Cyril’s shoulder, she walks him firmly into the room. ‘She’ll probably come out tonight and you can have lots of fun.’
Matron Judy positions Cyril in front of his bed and starts to undress him. He tries to protest, raising his hand, but she has his belt. She pushes his hand away and his trousers fall. ‘Sit, Cyril.’ A small shove and he is sitting on the bed. His neck cranes backwards, towards the mirror.
The Best British Short Stories 2014 Page 12
