The Best British Short Stories 2014

by Nicholas Royle

  The boy skidded down the mound and ran home. The streets were still silent, but they would be so early in the morning. In the living room the telly was still on, the cup still on the settee arm. The boy pounded up the stairs, not caring if he woke his mum and got into trouble. But she wasn’t there. Her bed was empty.

  The boy raced back to the mound. There were an impossible number of birds gathered on top of the lamppost watching him. The light had switched off, ready for a new day. At the top of the mound, he peered into the little broken-brick houses. The gaps he’d left for windows were too small to let in much light; he couldn’t separate any tiny people from the darkness. He pressed his fingers into the grit and dust. He had to try again. He gathered small mounds of dust and emptied rainwater from the old polystyrene cups onto them. He moulded houses and steeples and the chimney and the tower for the town hall clock. The buildings were misshapen and muddy.

  ‘Aren’t you going to ask me to give you the people back?’

  The boy looked up at the lamppost. The creak of its voice had disturbed its hat, and wings were thrust out here and there.

  ‘No,’ said the boy. ‘I’m going to go and get them.’ As his words touched the air it thickened with dust and as he rubbed it between his fingers he knew he could make himself small.

  The boy was no longer at the top the mound, but standing in the dusty street outside his house. He looked up at the sky, trying to see the edges of the bigger town where there was a mound of rubble on top of which he’d built this town. But the sky was too wide. He walked through the doorway without a door to his house and found his mum, dust collected in the lines round her eyes, sitting in front of the greyish lump of the telly. ‘Mum.’

  She didn’t look up. ‘Don’t interrupt, love,’ she said, ‘this is a good bit.’ So he took a deep breath, and blew. He blew at the telly and at the walls and at the clouds of dust that surrounded him. He ran out into the street, climbed to the top of a mound of dust and he blew and he blew and he blew the town away.

  At the top of the mound he was king. The ruins of the three small towns lay scattered at his feet. He could hear cars and footsteps and voices and the nine chimes of the town hall clock.

  When the boy turned away from the mound and the lamppost, he found the streets were coated in dust. Soft greyish-brown snow. He felt the gritty air between his fingers and knew that if he rubbed it he could slow time down. But he didn’t want to be in charge again, at least not for a while. He wanted to go home to bed.

  Guests

  Joanne Rush

  They say February is the best month to step on a mine. If it is under enough snow it may not detonate. The snow begins in December, like the first gospel; by February it is several feet deep. It is a matter of record that, on Candlemas night in 1994, a group of women from the village of Lisac, in flight from Mladić’s army, crossed the mined snowfields to safety. They did not speak, or they spoke only in whispers. They held the barbed wire apart for each other. Then did they run or crawl or dance, knowing that at any moment the solid ground might buck them into quick oblivion, the snow convert to flames?

  It is the first of June, 2011. My husband will be glad the snow is gone, despite the increased risk of being blown up: he found the Bosnian winter very cold. He said so last Christmas, in a rare phone call. He didn’t mention Bosnia openly, of course, because the British government has no official presence there. Each time he phones he tells me not to worry. He says he’s not in danger, but I know this to be untrue. There are no exact maps of the minefields in Bosnia. Even now, sixteen years after the war ended, a donkey sometimes loses its life; or a child, or a spy.

  I met my husband when I was nineteen years old. I had come up to Cambridge from a village in Warwickshire to study Computer Sciences. He had come up from Victoria City, Hong Kong, for the same reason. In Cambridge it is called coming up even if you come down. We were called compscis. Only students of unfashionable subjects were given abbreviations: as well as compscis, there were natscis (Natural Scientists) and asnacs (an acronym for Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic). When I got to know my husband, he would say these all sounded like animals that hadn’t made it onto the ark.

  Getting to know him didn’t happen at once. There were lots of other compscis, most of them dishearteningly loud, and for a while we hovered shyly on opposite edges of this crowd. We finally met on the last Tuesday of Michaelmas term, in the café of the William Gates building. I often ate lunch there; he rarely did, but the kitchen on his college staircase had been declared unsafe. I found this out because he was behind me in the queue for jacket potatoes. One of the first things I noticed about him was that he breathed in, almost inaudibly, before each sentence: a slight inverted gasp which gave a feeling of urgency to his utterances. I also noticed that his elbows stuck out slightly, and that he had very fine black hair, like a mole.

  He asked permission to sit beside me, and conscientiously tucked his elbows in. Then, impelled by the dual forces of hunger and loneliness, he plunged into his potato and his life story. His name was Jon. His mother was English, his father Chinese; he had arrived in Cambridge – which was very beautiful, but the cyclists were suicidal and everyone was on drugs – after a twelve hour flight to Heathrow, eight weeks ago, and he was still living out of a single suitcase; he had sent his other possessions ahead ‘by sheep’, and they were yet to turn up, though he had called the lost property line ‘a tousand times’.

  In the weeks to come, I would grow to love the crisp Cantonese consonants that occasionally snuck into his English sentences, and his unsteady phonemes. Already I was entranced by his suitcases, voyaging from Hong Kong to Cambridge by sheep.

  What followed our first, word- and potato-filled encounter, was an almost entirely non-verbal companionship. Then as now, Jon preferred computer languages to human ones, and most of the time I found this restful, but it did make things harder when we were apart. He particularly disliked telephones. So what stands out most brightly in my memory of the summer at the end of our first year, when I returned unwillingly to my parents in Warwickshire, and he went home to Hong Kong, is the day he sent me a postcard of Victoria Harbour with two lists on the back:

  Things we like

  1. Quiet

  2. King’s College Chapel

  3. Different sides of the bed

  Things we dislike

  1. Bicycles on pavements

  2. Weed

  3. Crowds

  Beside the second list was a pencil sketch of an ark, in which were two blobs. In case I should mistake these for his still lost suitcases, or even the miscreant sheep, he had printed below them: COMPSCIS.

  ‘What do you feel about mmharriage?’ Jon asked me, at the beginning of our fourth year in Cambridge. (He doesn’t stutter, but with certain English words he sometimes fumbles a catch.)

  We planned a very modest ceremony. His parents couldn’t come – they didn’t like flying – but mine were there: my father gruff, my mother querulous. She had already made plain her feelings about my mmharriage to ‘a half yellow man’.

  ‘Of course I’m not racist, dear,’ she said, a number of times. ‘It just that he’s so quiet. Don’t you want someone more like us?’

  1. Quiet, I thought. 2. King’s College Chapel. 3. Different sides of the bed.

  Things did get more complicated later on, but I never doubted the soundness of this basis for love.

  Jon’s supervisor took him aside a few weeks before we graduated. She had been asked to recommend someone for a job at GCHQ. ‘Legalised hacking,’ she called it: exactly the sort of thing he’d be good at. I was already planning to set up as a freelance web designer, and neither of us wanted to face London. So we moved to Cheltenham Spa.

  Our shabby third-storey flat was not a castle, unless of the air. It had white stuccoed ceilings, quietly peeling, and few comforts at first beyond a second-hand dinner table and a very low
futon bed. Nevertheless we were happy there.

  For two years Jon was deskbound in Cheltenham. But twelve months ago he was invited to a meeting about an important operation, co-run with the Americans, which needed someone in precisely his field of expertise. If he agreed, he’d be stationed at an old British military base in Bosnia. They couldn’t say exactly how long for. My husband is a man of principle: he does things he doesn’t want to do because he feels he should. I’ve got fewer principles: I just hoped it wouldn’t take long.

  Jon left for Bosnia in June 2010. That summer I kept myself busy, working from home. My job meant I spent a lot of time on the phone, explaining to clients the difference between mythology and technology, turning their dreams and visions into navigable sites – I’m not an imaginative person, but I’m good at detail. I got through one day at a time.

  At the end of our street was a coffee shop, which was Polish and sold astonishing cakes. When the flat felt too empty I worked there instead. The waitress wore a black panelled apron with DONT ASK written across it in wobbly white velcro letters, or sometimes ASK ME L8R. ‘Wait one minute,’ she said. ‘Sernik arrives from kitchen.’ This was often the closest I got to a real conversation all day.

  When I wasn’t working, I went for long walks. Sometimes I walked past GCHQ, that vast blister of glass and concrete on the edge of the A40. I’d been told it had a street inside, and a computer room the size of the Royal Albert Hall. Jon’s face appeared in there each day, pixelated, on a plasma screen. ‘Good morning, Cheltenham,’ he said. ‘See and hear you fine.’ Then he vanished, replaced by a man in Beirut or Kabul.

  Autumn came, then winter. The waitress in the Polish café said I was looking peaky, a word she’d recently learnt. I stopped going there so often: I didn’t like people fretting. But I still took long walks, sometimes right up into the Cotswolds. On these walks I allowed myself to picture Jon. I did this cautiously, small bits at a time. His hands. The blurred edge of his jaw. Never whole.

  I spent Christmas alone, after some deliberation. In the morning I ate half a croissant and started crying. The tears took a long time to stop. At four o’clock Jon phoned. ‘Happy Christmas,’ he said. He sounded far away. He asked me how I was, and I told him I was fine. ‘It’s very cold here,’ he said. We talked for a stilted quarter of an hour. He said, ‘Take care of yourself. I love you.’ Then he added quickly, ‘Listen, I may be onto something. I can’t explain on the phone, but it might mean I’m back soon.’

  ‘I hope so,’ I said. I put the receiver down, expecting to feel happy. But instead I felt more sad. My husband didn’t know that leaving someone could not be put right simply by coming back to them. Delicacy, filaments, were beyond him. He had strong hands, but that meant his forte was lifting heavy objects: small things slipped through his fingers, fragile things cracked in his grip.

  When Christmas was over, I had a stroke of luck. A maritime museum in the south of England commissioned me to design a website. Charles, the man I spoke to on the phone, said they didn’t want to use templates: everything must be bespoke. It was a challenging project; it would take three or four months to complete. I was anxious to begin.

  A few days after that I ran out of milk, and popped into town for more. When I got back, there was a diminutive old lady in a headscarf standing in my kitchen, grinding coffee in a brass mill. At her elbow was a small copper jug. ‘Dobro jutro,’ she said. Her smile was animated, but she was clearly dead.

  Over the weeks that followed, unaccommodated ghosts filled the flat. The oldest arrived first, shapeless, clutching suitcases. They came from Mostar, Sarajevo, Banjaluka, from eighteen years ago. They had walked past engines blown out of vehicles and the half-cremated remains of other human beings, they had fallen over cliffs, stepped on mines, and been shot with guns – in the eye neatly once or the back many times. They had borne most, without a doubt, so it was not up to me to question where they chose to put it down.

  It was a busy time for me. Charles phoned several times a week to discuss my progress, which was never fast enough for his taste. But it was nice to have company when I finished work in the evenings, and mostly the ghosts were no bother, though sometimes they moved things and it took me a while to find them. When I walked past they reached out to touch me. Their hands grazed my shoulder, tugged on my hair. None of this was malicious: all they wanted was my attention.

  At first their conversations were unintelligible to me, like the lyrics of music that is playing in another room. But over time the words separated out and acquired meaning.

  When they perceived this, the gosti – ghosts, guests – became more demanding. They needed paprika, they needed clean towels. They needed someone to listen to them, and who else was there?

  In spring more ghosts arrived: mostly men. They appeared to be waiting for something, and to ease this process they got hold of my husband’s single malt whisky. They also smoked constantly, dropping the butts on the carpet. I don’t mean to be rude, but it wouldn’t have killed them to use an ash tray.

  As the flat filled up, it was the living room that attracted the greatest number of ghosts. The fumes from home-grown Bosnian tobacco mixed with the earthy smell of American cigarettes accepted as bribes or bought on the black market: Smokin Joes and Camel Reds were passed across my coffee table by card-playing Muslim soldiers whose fingers were stained pollen-yellow with nicotine. ‘Čmaru jedan,’ they muttered. ‘Baja pojela ti jaja.’ You arsehole. I hope a bug eats your balls. When they were winning, they switched to old battle songs. ‘The scent of lilies fills the meadow,’ they hummed under their breath. On the other side of the room a dead Serb glared.

  One of the ghosts, a young boy, stood apart by the TV. My attention was drawn to him because of his wing-like elbows, which reminded me of Jon. He was clutching a bass guitar, although his hands had been destroyed by a shell.

  ‘That one is my grandson.’

  It was the old woman with the coffee pot, the one from the first day; she’d walked through the wall beside me. I wished they wouldn’t do that: it left marks.

  ‘He’s a good boy, but I don’t like his music – all that banging and shouting. You want a little coffee? Yes you have time. Sit here next to me.

  ‘Tchk! Look at this. My doctor calls them liver spots. I said to him Doctor, it looks to me like I’m going mouldy. He gives me cream for them but I don’t like to use it, Allah never meant for us to cure old age.

  ‘Now Tarik, that grandson of mine, he’s a Muslim but you wouldn’t know it. I’ve seen him drinking šlivovica, he even eats sausage rolls. Well like his daddy he was raised in Sarajevo so it’s not surprising. Young people there just glue their eyes to the West, it’s always been that way. Tarik’s in a rock band with three older boys I don’t like much. They call themselves Histerija, and worship some London noiseniks by name of Led Zep Lin. The only time I went to one of their concerts I had to put my hands over my ears. “Ja sam budućnost,” they kept on shouting. Such nonsense. I think all the jiggling about was meant to be dancing, but it looked more like some kind of fit.

  ‘Just a few weeks after that the siege started. You know, every morning of my life I’d woken up to the tram bells, but on that day they stopped dead and didn’t ring again for three years. It seemed like everything stopped, even gravity. Snipers were killing people in the streets, and by the time anyone dared go out for the bodies they’d got stiff. I’ll never forget how the arms stuck out and the heads twisted sideways instead of flopping. Or the shelling either: it was like that rock concert all over again.

  ‘My husband, may Allah rest him, left the house each evening to stand on the street with other Sarajevan men and talk. Those poor men looked worse than the dead and no wonder: they’d eaten bread made of oats, then of the stalks of hazel bushes, then of ground apple skins. They said the West had forgotten us, but it’s my opinion the West never knew we existed. Of course Tarik listened to them. He knew he
was a Muslim by then, surely enough: he thought he’d grow up into arms. But I sent him out to buy beans the day the mortar hit Markale market in February ’94, and sixty-eight people died. That shell blew off both his poor hands, though what killed him was the fragment that got buried in his skull.’

  Tarik stood in the corner of my living room, clutching his guitar. ‘I am the future,’ he whispered. Angry chords curled around him. ‘Ja sam budućnost.’

  ‘Motherfucking Chetnik!’

  ‘Sisterfucking Turk!’

  The coffee table across the room from us collapsed, and playing cards swooped through the air like startled birds. Two red-faced men in black leather jackets squared up to each other: the glaring Serb had tripped over a card player’s foot. I thought they were going to fight, but the card player’s friends grabbed him by the shoulders and the Serb allowed himself to be shunted back to our side of the room, grumbling loudly and cracking his knuckle-tattoos into his palms.

  Such eruptions were frequent, especially at first. ‘You did this,’ the ghosts accused each other. ‘You did that.’ But their voices were tired: it was hard for them to remember which flag to kiss and which to burn. The elderly ghosts were happier recalling their vegetable gardens than their disputes; they sat together to drink šlivovica and reminisce. And the soldiers from different armies exchanged cigarettes more often than blows. So in my living room Bosnian Muslims, Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Sephardic Jews gathered and pooled like drops of water.

  In March or April – I’m not sure which – Charles began to call more persistently, wanting to know when the website would be finished. ‘Is something wrong?’ he said. Eventually I took the phone off the hook.