The Best British Short Stories 2014

by Nicholas Royle

  When Isla returned, however, she was in a different mood. Daniel was already in bed, reading. When he heard the door go, he pretended to be asleep. He listened to the sound of Isla dropping her bag in the hall, easing off her shoes. When she entered the bedroom, she sat alongside him and began to stroke his hair. He could smell the wine on her breath.

  ‘You’re awake, aren’t you?’ she said.

  Daniel smiled, but kept his eyes closed.

  ‘I’m sorry about earlier,’ she said. ‘It was just a surprise. I didn’t react very well.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said, opening his eyes. ‘I should have asked. We can change the dates. I’ve looked into it.’

  ‘No. You were right. We should go at the weekend. It’s our wedding anniversary.’ She smiled.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Daniel wondered what role Grace might have played in getting Isla to change her mind, what level of sacrifice this whole new mood implied. ‘I mean, we could go another time. I really don’t mind.’

  ‘I’m quite sure,’ she said.

  ‘What about Warwick, the conference?’

  ‘Balls to Warwick. You’re my husband. It’s not as if I’m giving a paper or anything.’ Then she added, as what seemed an afterthought, but which could just as well have been a theatrical diversion to conceal the fact that she already knew the answer to her question: ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’ he said. ‘I thought you knew.’

  ‘What do you mean? Of course I don’t know. How would I know?’

  ‘Just wondered if a little bird had told you.’

  ‘No. No little bird. Where are we going?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  ‘This is intriguing. Which little bird? Do you mean Grace? Does Grace know?’

  Suddenly Daniel felt much better, as if a weight had been lifted. Perhaps Josep was reliable after all.

  On the Friday, as they were leaving the apartment for the airport, Daniel grabbed, at the very last moment, on a whim, the copy of Graham Greene’s collected stories from the table in the hall. A colleague, Steve, had lent it to him months ago, after Daniel and Isla had watched The Third Man and liked it. Daniel hadn’t got round to looking at it and thought that maybe the flight would be an opportunity. Then he could give the book back to Steve, lifting another weight from his conscience.

  Isla was in a chirpy mood as the taxi weaved through the streets around Paddington Station. She kept looking at Daniel, touching his arm, and asking: ‘Where are we going?’ To which he replied with a smile and by raising a finger to his lips: ‘It’s a secret.’ Of course, at the airport, he would have to reveal their destination, but he maintained the suspense for as long as he could, watching her as she tried to work it out, the expression on her face changing. When it finally dawned on her, as they neared the departure gate, she broke into a grin.

  ‘Barcelona!’ she said.

  Daniel opened the book on the plane, shortly after they had levelled out. Isla was already asleep next to him, which he didn’t think anything of at the time. He browsed the contents page, looking for the shortest story he could find. He wanted a quick fix, a hit, something that he could get into and out of in the least time possible; something that he could race through and get to the end.

  The shortest story was called ‘The Overnight Bag’. It concerns a man, Henry Cooper, travelling by plane from Nice to London, carrying an overnight bag. At the information desk he is given a telegram. It is from his mother. She wishes him a safe journey and looks forward to seeing him on his return. So far, so normal. As he read the story, Daniel felt a pleasant flash of recognition. On the one hand, this was because he knew the airport at Nice, could imagine its location, and, on the other, because he and Isla had just passed through an airport of their own and, although neither he nor Isla were carrying what could be called an overnight bag, they both had hand luggage and had, on boarding the plane, been faced with the dilemma of what to do with it, whether to place it on the seat, under the seat, or in the overhead locker.

  In the case of the story, Henry Cooper is very particular about his overnight bag. He places it ‘tenderly on the ledge of the information desk as though it contained something precious and fragile like an electric razor’. Later, on the plane, he sets it down on the empty seat next to him and secures it with a seatbelt. When a woman, sitting alongside the seat on which he placed the overnight bag, asks him why he is being so particular, he replies that he doesn’t want it shaken about. When she places her own bag on top of his, he reacts testily: ‘I don’t want it squashed,’ he says. ‘It’s a matter of respect.’

  As Daniel read, Isla shifted in her sleep, so that her face was turned towards him, rather than towards the aisle. Her head was back, her straight brown hair half covering one of her eyes. She had a vague, almost apologetic smile on her face, as if, in a dream, she was having an experience that was both pleasant and troubling at the same time. Daniel looked at her for some moments thinking this, trying to penetrate her consciousness, to glean her thoughts, before brushing his fingers down her cheek and returning to his book.

  The woman reacts angrily to Cooper’s concern regarding the bag: ‘What have you got in your precious bag?’ she asks. To which Cooper evenly replies: ‘A dead baby. I thought I had told you.’ This, as Daniel could well understand, sends the woman into paroxysms of bewilderment. She splutters that he shouldn’t be doing this, that the baby should be in a coffin and not an overnight bag, that there must be regulations for this kind of thing. Although Daniel smirked, picturing what he imagined was a rather pompous old woman, he was forced to consider what kind of regulations there might be for the event of transferring a dead baby from one country to another. He was sure there would be several forms to fill in. From this, he found himself contemplating a possible sequence of events that might lead to him, Daniel, having to conceal a dead baby in his own hand luggage.

  Cooper explains to the woman that his wife didn’t trust a foreign coffin. ‘Then it’s your baby,’ the woman says. ‘My wife’s baby,’ Henry Cooper corrects her. ‘What’s the difference?’ ‘There could well be a difference,’ he says, sadly.

  Daniel paused. He didn’t quite know what to make of things. Cooper didn’t seem a trustworthy character, not that Daniel thought that mattered particularly, but his language seemed at odds with the reality it claimed and the effect was distracting. Well. He would carry on, to see if things would work themselves out. There was a bottle of water in the seat pocket in front of him and Daniel took it out and drank from it, rolling the water around in his mouth as if to extract maximum benefit. He felt an itch in his side and, having scratched it, lifted his shirt to examine the surface of his skin. Nothing there but a small red mark, as if he had been bitten by a tick.

  He read what remained of the story. There was a rather bizarre and comic episode with a taxi driver, who drives Cooper home. Although it is a cold day, Cooper asks the cabbie to turn off the heating, out of concern for the dead baby. ‘Dead baby?’ the cabbie says. ‘He won’t feel the heat then, will he?’ Boom, boom. When Cooper reaches home, his mother is waiting for him. He places the overnight bag in the hall. She has laid out his slippers. They talk a little about his trip and he relates a peculiar tale about a severed human toe being found in a jar of marmalade. When his mother goes to put on the shepherd’s pie, Cooper goes through to the hall. ‘Time to unpack,’ he thinks. He has a tidy mind, we are told. And there the story ends. There is no further mention of a wife, a baby, and the true contents of the bag are left unresolved at the end of the story.

  Daniel sat there with the book in his lap staring at the half-page of white space at the end of the story, where someone, Steve perhaps, had written, in pencil: yes, well? Daniel knew how this mystery annotator felt, or, rather, he knew how he felt and assumed the annotator felt the same. He turned back a few pages and began to read again, in case he had missed somethin
g, some clue. As he did so, however, the pilot announced their descent into Barcelona. Daniel didn’t like landing. In preparation, he slid the book into the seat pocket in front and turned to Isla. She was still sleeping and when he tried to rouse her she responded slowly.

  ‘Is,’ he said, shaking her. ‘We’re landing.’

  She opened her eyes and looked at him, bewildered, as if she were returning from another realm of consciousness in which she had not been herself. ‘Already?’ She glanced quickly to either side, and then put her hand to her chest. ‘My god, what a dream,’ she said. ‘It was like.’ She paused. ‘I don’t know what it was like. Have you got any water?’

  Daniel passed her the bottle and then sat back, watching, as she drank from it.

  ‘Have I really slept through the whole flight?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Completely ridiculous. I’m not even tired.’

  Daniel reached for her hand and then closed his eyes. The plane shook as it passed through some turbulence. He thought about the story. It troubled him, made him uneasy. He couldn’t have said precisely why it troubled him, even to himself, but already, as they made their descent into Barcelona, swinging wide over the city lit against the dusk, it preoccupied him to an unusual degree. He squeezed Isla’s hand. She squeezed back.

  Daniel was still thinking about the story as they went through passport control. The queue moved slowly. What was it that upset him so? The obvious thing to think would be that it was the suggestion of the dead baby, that this in some way hinted to an unspoken sense of loss within him regarding the decision he and Isla had taken – long ago, before they were married – not to have children. They just couldn’t be arsed, or so they told themselves. They were either working too hard or having too much fun. Although subsequently they talked it over from time to time, wondering about the difference it might have made to their lives and whether they had changed their minds, Daniel was clear that they had never regretted it. Yes, they had friends whose children they liked, spent time with, but they never wanted the same for themselves, they never felt a lack. It wasn’t that. It couldn’t be that.

  In the baggage hall there was a further wait. Isla was still drowsy from sleeping on the flight and she leaned against Daniel, one arm around his neck, as he stood there staring at the unmoving carousel, occasionally and distractedly kissing her hair.

  The more he thought about it, the more Daniel began to think that the story was actually unpleasant, offensive even. Some coldness at its heart had made him shiver and he was not grateful for the effect. He wished he had never read the story, wished he had never picked the book up from the table in the hall, wished Steve had never loaned it to him.

  There was quite a wait before the carousel got going and the people waiting – an assortment of families, couples, groups, people on their own, whispering into mobile phones – gave all the signs of growing impatient. As he waited, Daniel came to think that his problem with the story centred entirely on the character of Cooper. He didn’t like him, it was simple: didn’t like the way he behaved, the way he turned so felicitously from one situation to the next, switching personas, fazed, it seemed, by nothing. Of course, Daniel, in thinking, had realised that there was no baby in the story in the first place, nor was there a wife. This made it worse, Daniel thought, grasping for a rationale for his distaste. They were all constructs of Cooper’s imagination; versions of his life that he chose to wear in public like clothes, sending out a false message. Really it was this that Daniel didn’t like, this duplicity. He couldn’t think why it bothered him particularly now, except to say that it was suddenly as if he had been introduced to a certain quality in himself that either he had not known about or had chosen to ignore or worked hard to suppress.

  Around him, groups of people made comments about Catalan efficiency, looked at their watches, harrumphed. The delay frustrated Daniel too. It was, for the time being, as if they were in an in-between state, both there, in Barcelona, and not there, held back, in some way restrained, kept in England, or on the plane. As a consequence, with the story occupying a considerable part of his brain, Daniel didn’t feel able to concentrate on his actual thoughts; nor could he commit himself fully to the act of imagining the anniversary weekend to come.

  Finally, a half-hearted cheer went up. The luggage carousel had started to move.

  With Isla cross-legged on the floor and Daniel standing with his arms folded, they waited as bag after bag passed before their eyes. Other passengers came forward to collect their belongings, hoisted them onto their shoulders or onto trolleys and headed out through the automatic doors to the arrivals hall. Beyond it, Daniel could glimpse the darkening Barcelona night, its palm trees and taxis. Only once in his life had he had the experience of his bags not coming out onto the carousel. It soon became apparent that he was about to have the experience for a second time and it was as if he knew it before it had even happened.

  Daniel looked at his watch. They would be late for Josep, for one thing. More than that, they would be late to bed, which would mean they wouldn’t want to get up early, which, in the normal run of things would be fine, but as things stood, Daniel had plans for the morning, things he wanted them to do, not booked exactly, but certainly mapped out in his mind. They could be flexible, of course, but still. As the time passed and the number of people left waiting dwindled, Daniel began to develop a competitive streak, cultivating a sense of enmity towards the other people waiting, making judgements on their respective predicaments, weighing up whether they deserved the arrival of their bags more than he and Isla deserved the arrival of theirs.

  ‘It’s no good,’ he whispered to Isla. ‘Just you wait and see. They’ve lost it. They’ve lost the fucking bag.’

  ‘Wankers,’ Isla whispered back, each time someone else went to collect a bag.

  In the end, it was just the two of them and a man of roughly Daniel’s age, with close-cropped blond hair, a blue suit and an open-necked floral shirt. He had first noticed the man back in England, at the departure gate, in the queue, and now here he was again. The carousel squeaked emptily along. Rather than looking at the man, Daniel concentrated his attention on the mouth of the carousel, looking for every advantage, willing their bag to arrive, while at the same time knowing, deep down, that it would not. In the game of his imagination, the question of whose bag emerged next had become a matter of life and death.

  Eventually, a bag did emerge. From a distance, it looked like theirs, but just as Daniel was thinking this, the man moved forward, with a glance across at them, as if he were fully conversant with the rules of the game, understood the gravity of the situation.

  ‘That’s our bag,’ Isla said, whispering into Daniel’s neck.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Daniel said, not quite loudly enough.

  At the carousel, the man, having lifted the bag off, paused. He examined the bag closely. He opened one of the compartments and peered inside, rummaging around with his hand. Eventually, he looked up at Daniel, one arm still in the bag. ‘Actually, this isn’t mine,’ he said. ‘It must be yours. Sorry.’

  ‘I wondered,’ Daniel said.

  ‘Same type of bag,’ the man said, calmly, before handing it to Daniel. ‘Same colour and everything.’

  ‘Well,’ Daniel said. Now he looked at the bag, just to be sure. It was theirs. ‘Thank you,’ Daniel said. ‘It is ours. Perhaps someone has taken yours by mistake.’ He had meant to say it generously, but in the circumstances he feared that it sounded sarcastic, a little bitter even.

  When he returned to Isla she squeezed his arm. ‘Well done, darling, saving our bag from the nasty man.’

  ‘I’m sure it was a genuine mistake,’ Daniel said.

  ‘Nonsense. He would have nicked it if you hadn’t said something.’

  After they had cleared customs, they stood outside the termi
nal waiting for the bus. The air was hot, oppressive. Daniel rifled through his hand luggage.

  ‘Shit,’ he said.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I left that bloody book on the plane.’

  ‘Oh, love,’ Isla said. ‘Do you want to go back?’

  ‘No. It’s not worth it. We’re late enough as it is. Maybe I’ll call tomorrow. Only it’s Steve’s.’ He was about to say something else, something about the story, about how it was probably a good thing he had left the book on the plane, when it became apparent that Isla’s attention had been caught by something over his shoulder.

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘It’s that man. The one from the carousel.’

  Daniel turned and looked. It was him. He strode out of the arrivals hall. It appeared his bag hadn’t arrived; he wasn’t carrying one at any rate. He walked straight across the pedestrian crossing, causing taxis to stop, and got into a car that was waiting for him at the side of the road. A woman was in the driver’s seat but she didn’t turn to look at him as he got in. As soon as his door closed, the car moved off, the man’s gaze meeting Daniel’s as they drove past.

  ‘Was he English?’ Isla said.

  ‘I think so. He sounded it, didn’t he?’

  Suddenly, Isla doubled over and yelped in pain.

  ‘What is it?’

  She gathered herself quite quickly, standing up fully and taking a deep breath, in the way that somebody does when encountering a challenge. ‘I don’t know.’ She put her hand against her stomach. ‘This sudden pain.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Where I’m touching,’ she said. ‘Where do you think?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Daniel said. ‘Do you mean here?’ He moved his hand to cover the spot.

  ‘Yes, there. I’m sure it’s nothing.’

  ‘It didn’t seem like nothing,’ he said, taking her head in his hands.