Best British Short Stories 2016

by Nicholas Royle

  The book van ended soon after because it was harder to find the people who used it now they couldn’t cluster on the former factory steps: and donations were drying up anyway. Before I finished my last stint I looked for the shabby copy of Leviathan. It wasn’t there. I guessed that Bide-y had taken it with him. No-one would care about that, the books often disappeared, and this one, this seventeenth-century treatise on the commonwealth, with its faded pages beginning to fall away, wasn’t exactly popular. I had a vision as I closed up the shelves of Bide-y shambling along, with a miniature in his pocket of the embodied figure on the frontispiece. The many-hundred faces had been changed into grotesques, leering, shouting, grinning, or with tongues lolling towards the sword and the crozier that the giant held aloft. When Bide-y tried to haul the mannequin out, as if it were a bottle, the faces that were its flesh bit at his fingers.

  Back at my bedsit, I listened to the recording Jake had made of Bide-y singing. Something in the slithery croaking made me think of tarnished silver, the glimmering words encrusted with the corrosions of his voice. Remembering the scene Bidey had evoked, of Henry Lyte, the hymn-writer quenching the tapers at the end of his last service, coughing, and muttering the consoling words he’d composed, I glimpsed in the fading light there an altar vessel, a chalice or a monstrance, ancient and dented, its lustre dimmed, but still used for the sacraments. But as Bide-y’s voice bellowed the words from the speakers, faltering at times, then picking them up with a sudden bleary rush, such mystic pictures were soon banished. His forceful presence reasserted itself in the room as the recording paused and started up again, and this time I smiled at the way he gripped onto the lines, as if for support, and could see him swaying, his eyes closed, his amber beard smeared to his skin, his fingers miming the song with movements of his own devising: fluttering, swooping, pointing, clutching.

  One morning not long after, I called in on Jake at the college. It was in early February. The stalks of grass were like white daggers, and each paving stone was an atlas of frosted stars. Neither of us had seen Bide-y for some weeks. We took the canal path from the bridge by the park, where the pink and pale blue plastic pouches of dog muck bags hung crystallised like abandoned Christmas decorations. The long green mirror of the canal reflected the rear of empty warehouses, the blind stare of their blackened windows and the rusting winches reaching out like the arms of dead titans. The rubble and the dead leaves crunched underfoot. When we spoke, our breath plumed out as if the words were making their own fragile, evanescent scroll. We stopped to look inside each shack on the way, and called out as we came to a tunnel, our voices echoing back to us in the gloom. At any moment we hoped to hear the familiar voice in mid-verse: ‘Come not to sojourn’, perhaps, which Bide-y often rendered as ‘Come not so sudden’, or ‘Come, friend of sinners’, which often sounded more like ‘Come, friendly scissors’ the way he sang it.

  We caught sight a few times of dark huddles in the distance we thought might be him. These made us hopeful, though bothered that there was no singing. They turned out in turn to be fat black bin bags someone had dumped on the towpath, an oil drum with the chalked message ‘waste’, and the charred remains of a bonfire surrounded by bent beer tins and crushed burger wrappers. At intervals, we each found ourselves murmuring the melody of the hymn, as if this might make an answering. None came, unless it was in the echoes under the bridges where it sometimes seemed there were three voices, not just our own .

  By the time we got out into the open country, where the canal ran between high bare hedges through fallow, clodded fields, we knew we were not going to find him. The cold green corridor stretched on emptily ahead. There was a brittle silence over the whitened world beyond.

  So the way that stories usually end is this. I tell you that I found out that Old Bide-y went back to Brixham, Devon, where the Reverend Mr Henry Lyte once had his parish, and was received there into the care of his long-lost family, sobered up a shade, put on a suit of sorts, and could be heard joining in the hymns at the back of the candle-lit church at vespers or compline. Or that it turned out Old Bide-y really was a retired sailor, and made his way back to Saltsea Haven where the mission to seamen took him on and kitted him out in a navy jersey and a peaked cap, and he sang with gusto in the varnished pews of the Fisher of Men Mission Hall each Tuesday night and Sunday morning. Or maybe instead that some day his frost-kindled body was found in an overlooked culvert, and the town gave him a solemn funeral with a brass band playing Bide-y’s favourite hymn and the tinkling and crinkling collection enough to pay for a fortnight’s bed and board at the city hostel. We could also suppose that one day, in some far city, you or I, or Jake, could hear in the distance the singing of the hymn, only charged with a strange pure surge of joy, and begin to run towards it, only to find it always remains ahead, sonorous, winged, like a summoning. We could suppose that.

  I don’t know. I don’t know what happened to Bide-y because, like so many, he just disappeared, fled, like the vain shadows of the song. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. So often is. We don’t live a story, any of us, only a sentence.

  Jessie Greengrass

  The Politics of Minor Resistance

  My shifts begin at eight in the morning and end at five in the afternoon or they start at eleven in the morning and end at eight or at two in the afternoon to end at eleven; or when as fairly frequently happens due to sickness or poor management we are short-staffed they might go on longer. My place of work is a large warehouse on an industrial estate inside which are rows of desks with, corresponding to each one, a phone, a computer, a chair. Attached to each phone is a headset. The headsets are designed for someone with a standard-sized skull, but my skull is abnormally large and, as a result, the fit of the headphones is inadequate. Even on their widest setting they have to be overextended, and as a result the pads sit at an angle on my ears, flattening their exterior ridge and digging into the anterior one. This in turn reddens my ears and has produced in them over time a permanent dent which can be quite painful. For those with smaller than average skulls, the corresponding problem is that the strip of plastic which attaches the left earpiece to the right pivots down to rest on the back of the neck, displacing the earpads and rendering the voice transmission muffled. In addition, we all suffer from a kind of fungal eczema about the ears and hairline caused by excessive sweating against the nylon covering of the earpieces.

  I have learned, on entering the warehouse, to decouple a part of my brain. That mechanism which controls my interest, the more individuated parts of my personality, desire and aspiration, curiosity, courage, delight, is left to turn freely in thin air, its cogs biting on nothing; and although it remains aware, the thoughts it generates are mere epiphenomena, no longer able to intrude into the causal process which links together my eyes, ears, fingers, and mouth. When a phone call comes through, the script determined by the marketing department of whichever company has outsourced their telesupport or telesales to the company for which I work appears automatically on my computer screen. I am required only to read it, and then, after the person on the other end of the phone has spoken, to select an appropriate response from those made available to me. And so on. This process requires less perhaps than one tenth of my conscious mind, enough only to raise the alarm on those few occasions when repetition of the regulation text is not sufficient either to resolve the issue at hand or to frustrate my interlocutor into silence. On such occasions I pass the call on to someone else, who I presume is in a different warehouse. I am not required to be helpful. I am not required to understand. I am a Chinese room: an unthinking algorithm between input and output.

  Under such circumstances, engaging in the luxury of daydreaming, while superficially appealing, can be dangerous. Scraps of fantasy have a tendency to become caught between the words of the pre-approved text, the freewheeling part of my brain intruding in a way that might be hypothesised to be angry but which presents as puckish, the work of a whimsical ghost in t
he machine; for example, while I will intend to say, Do you have your reference number to hand? what will come out of my mouth will be: Do you have your reference number Tahiti? or: Can I take your success? Once, when ending a call and after saying Thank you and Goodbye I realised that I had also said: I love you.

  There is not a particular desk which is mine. On arrival, I choose between those which are free, but not all desks are equal: some desks are better than others. Those near the door are liable to be overseen, your computer screen clearly visible to anyone entering the room. Those in the middle allow you to go unobserved but make it difficult for you to stretch or to leave momentarily to use the toilet or to fetch a glass of water from the poorly maintained water fountain. Those along the wall allow you to lean against it but also bring you into close proximity to radiators whose thermostatic control is erratic at best. The most popular desks are those by the windows. The windows have vertical blinds which are always drawn, their slats lying flat to the plane of the glass, and behind the blinds the glass is covered with anti-shatter film like the squared paper pages of a school maths book. This film has been badly applied so that it bubbles and folds, which in conjunction with the blinds means that it is never possible to see out of the windows; but still we are drawn to them. They represent to us both freedom and, to an extent, defiance, although the object of this defiance is non-specific, having to do with generic self-assertion and with resistance to an institutional programme of standardisation that begins as soon as we arrive; with an attempt to render meaningful those few choices which remain open to us. In fact, though, this idea of ourselves as engaged in a constant assertive struggle is nothing but phantasm. We cannot see through the windows, we cannot comfortably lean against the walls. Regardless of the radiators, every part of the building is at any time either too hot or too cold. Time away from our desks is electronically monitored and strictly controlled. Our calls are recorded. We are each equally observed. It makes no difference at all where we sit and, therefore, it can make no difference what we choose. That our choices are without consequence renders them also empty of meaning; and if each morning we tell ourselves otherwise then perhaps it is only another way of pacifying that part of the psyche which must be decoupled in order to perform, for nine or ten hours at a stretch, the task for which we are brought here.

  Beyond our warehouse there is a stretch of tarmac and then there is a cut-price furniture showroom and then another stretch of tarmac and an empty shed. The windows of our building are such that, even were one able to see clearly from them, all but the empty shed would be obscured by the elevation of the furniture showroom; and even if this were not the case then all that would be visible would be a car park and, beyond it, the narrow strip of bleakly landscaped garden which forms the frontier of the industrial estate. It is in this supposed green oasis that we are encouraged to spend what breaks we are offered, although it is not welcoming. The grass is kept meanly cut. The bushes seldom flower. At the centre is a fountain, broadly circular and made of stone. Water slides out through a hole at the top of the fountain, spreading into an even dome, and runs in a thin film across a hemisphere of polished basalt before disappearing again. The behaviour that the fountain’s engineering manages to coax out of the water is so unusual that it barely resembles water at all. Everything in the imitation garden is uncanny in just this way: nothing behaves quite as you would expect it to do. The grass is too evenly coloured. The earth is too smooth. The bushes grow into squares. I imagine that in the maquette accompanying the original planning application for the industrial estate tiny brightly coloured model people would have sat alone or in pairs on this strip of grass, or strolled along the gravel paths, or practised t’ai chi where leylandii screen the bins; but I have never seen anyone do a single one of these things. At the end of each shift I walk across this grass and stand on the empty pavement waiting for the bus. I go home to sleep. I do this on five out of every seven days. Sometimes six. Often it is not worth rubbing life back into the unused portions of my mind. I stand at the bus stop and stare across the road at the Royal Mail depot vanishing into darkness and I think of nothing at all.

  Although I am not able to deviate from the set scripts, I do sometimes alter my voice when I speak to the people who call premium phone lines in the thin hope that I will be able to help them. I do this on the occasions when I am for some reason unable to dissociate my mind from my body to the extent that time can pass over me unhindered. On these occasions, my awareness of my existence within the warehouse as unbearable comes in waves; it throbs in my temples and fills my mouth with the taste of sour milk and then I feel that I must suffocate in the gap between one second and another. This gap stretches out in front of me like a desert or the ocean. Sometimes when this happens I answer the phone in an accent that isn’t mine. I make my voice sound as though it comes from Wales or France, from Durham or Holland or somewhere near Glasgow, but I am not very good at doing accents and aware that attempting them poorly invites accusations of racism that even attempting them well would only defer. Instead I try less obvious ideas. I try to sound like someone who has answered the phone in the bath, or like someone who is worrying that what is on the stove might burn. I try to sound like someone who is afraid of flying. I try to sound like Columbo. I try to sound as if I was successful and in control of myself and my destiny. Sometimes I try to sound like an old-fashioned Hollywood starlet. I lower my voice to a whisper and make it deep and husky and fill it with breath. I try to sound as if every word I utter is an invitation. I try to sound as if what I am saying is laced with eroticism. In this voice I say: Can I take the long card number? I say: We can also offer you insurance from as little as nineteen ninety nine per month. I say: Have you tried turning it off at the wall?

  Trevor Fevin

  Walsingham

  After the court case, Laura asked would I go to Walsingham with her.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Because I’ll find healing there. I hear an inner voice telling me.’

  These ‘voices’ of Laura’s were well known to her few friends. Someone I was with for a while used to question whether she wasn’t actually possessed.

  Then she launched into one of her monologues. ‘I can’t really explain except to say night is my enemy. It’s dark and terrible. Night whispers death. Every creature shrinks from it because the dark wants us and we sense it will bite to kill. It will kill if it can. And somewhere this tiny voice I hear is reassuring me. It repeats that night is only a means to the morning, and the morning will take away all my terrors and give me fresh hope, if I can get to Walsingham.’

  ‘We must walk – all the way there,’ she insisted. ‘It has to be a sacrifice.’

  When she had come to my flat months before, Laura’s bruises were livid damson. There were yellow welts under her eyes, a deep indigo arabesque entwined her left jaw. She wasn’t crying but keening dry-eyed. She clasped my hands, not able to speak. ‘We’re going to the police,’ I said, ‘this time we report it,’ and was surprised she didn’t argue.

  We became friends the first day we went up to university. She looked so wretched that day. We found we were studying English and Politics together. It didn’t take me long to figure out that Laura was unstable. She cried without apparent reason, stayed in her room for days on end, missing lectures, and was painfully thin. Soon into her second year she suffered a serious breakdown, dropped out, and never returned to her studies.

  At various times during the next ten years she came to stay with me, but much of her life remained a mystery. At some point she let me know she was with a person called Ruthie, and it was at least three years after this I knew for sure the relationship was violent. Only when it ended did I learn the full story: Laura’s cracked ribs, ruptured spleen, damaged kidney, teeth bashed out. I challenged her many times to do something, get away. I offered her my place to stay as long as she needed, but only now, after the court case, did she take me up on it.

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nbsp; She seemed often to be distanced from reality, though mostly she made sense, at least to me. There was this weird ritual she had, though, of scribbling indecipherable messages on pale blue ribbons and wearing them, while she slept, tied about her legs.

  We set off in bleak January weather, walking and walking, day in, day out. Cold winds made our faces ache, but we were determined, never once thinking to give up and turn back. Neither of us had a job so we didn’t have much money, and the sort of bed and breakfast stops we could afford were often vile. If pilgrim routes once existed from the North of England to Walsingham, I’m afraid they are long fallen into disrepair, leaving us to grapple with tattered maps in the wind and rain. I recall miles of glistening pavements, drab little townships built of mustard-coloured stone, clumpy villages throughout Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire, the vast wintry acreage of Cambridgeshire. On we progressed, through bitter hard rain, thick frosts, biting east winds. We were often soaked, always cold. We lost weight.

  One day a crow flew at Laura’s head, quickly drawing blood and tearing the flesh a little with its beak. It shrieked and came at her like a sorcerer’s hat and she screamed. Even after we had beaten it away, the creature hopped dementedly about in the road, squawking and feinting as we backed off. It was disturbing and we were glum and shaken, waiting medical help at the nearest doctors’ surgery. A few times, we smuggled ourselves into farm buildings where there were stacks of straw bales. Barring the danger of vermin, these nights were the most comfortable: warm, private, and we slept soundly, untroubled by any farmer.