Best British Short Stories 2016

by Nicholas Royle

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘So it was your knee then?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘What, cruciate ligaments?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘They’ve only just started being able to treat them properly recently, haven’t they?’

  ‘That’s right. And it was in the 70s when I did it. They cut it open and did something to it but it didn’t make any odds.’

  ‘Have you read that Paul Lake book?’

  ‘No, don’t know that one.’

  ‘It is a great book. Real heartbreaker. Only the second book to ever make me cry.’

  ‘What was the other one?’

  ‘Woody Guthrie biography. The first one, by Joe Klein. He describes Woody with his daughter and how she was his favourite, and how he used to sing nursery rhymes to her at bedtime. And then it describes how she dies in a house fire. Heart-breaking. And the Paul Lake book, I don’t know, it just got to me. I think it was because I watched most of his career. It was when I used to go with my dad to Maine Road. We went to the youth cup final in 1986 when they beat United. And we watched all those players coming through.’

  ‘I was working at Lancaster, around then.’

  ‘Thing I remember most about Lake was that he could play in any position. He was good in the air and had a great engine and he could pass and he could tackle. And he could score a goal. But what I remember most is him dribbling past about six or seven players and almost scoring great goals. He was a great player. It is not an exaggeration when they say he could have been England captain, is it?’

  ‘No, is it bollocks. He was in the squad for the 1990 World Cup and the only reason he wasn’t in the team then was because he was too young. He was a bit like Bell. He’s the only player I’ve ever seen who had the potential to be as good as Colin Bell.’

  ‘Have you read the Colin Bell book?’

  ‘Not seen it. I was there anyway.’

  ‘Reluctant Hero, it’s called. He said the best bit of his football career was when he made his comeback against Newcastle.’

  ‘I was there with my dad.’

  ‘Oh right.’

  ‘There were grown men in tears.’

  ‘I suppose it was an achievement for him to come back.’

  ‘I remember the tackle. Against United. Martin Buchan. It was a move that Bell used to do all the time. He’d put his foot to the side of the ball, feint one way and then go the other. But Buchan just went right through him.’

  ‘So it must have been great to see him back then. Like you say, made people cry.’

  ‘Yeah, but they weren’t crying because he was back. They were crying because of his leg.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He was dragging it behind him when he ran. You could see it dragging behind him. That’s why people were crying. Because we all fucking knew he’d never be the same. That’s why my dad was crying. You know something, I was with my dad once, watching them training at Platt Lane. This would probably have been in the 90’s. And Bell was there. I think he looked after the youth team then. And he walked right past us. And I never realized how tall he was. He was a big guy. And I looked at my dad, and my dad looked at me, and we were both thinking the same thing. And we didn’t have to say anything. I couldn’t believe it. He was still dragging his fucking leg.’

  Jack and Neal read each other’s finished work. But they never spoke about what they were working on, viewing this as boring. The only time they did talk about work was when their particular bête noire, the reflective commentary, came up.

  ‘Why are we asking these first years to write a reflective commentary?’

  ‘Like we always say, people think it works.’

  ‘They aren’t fucking writers though, are they? Do you think Hemingway ever wrote a reflective commentary? Or Blake? Or anyone that was any good? And we have to mark all this shit.’

  ‘Who decided it was a good idea, that’s what I want to know?’

  ‘Probably some twat in an office. Or an academic in creative writing.’

  ‘Yeah, but they just write essays. They don’t hardly ever get their creative work published.’

  ‘It seems the work can’t just stand for itself any more. You have to be able to explain it.’

  ‘Most of my favourite writers don’t explain their work. My favourite poet is MacCaig. He couldn’t explain his work. He said he just kept the good poems and threw the rest out. Made them up as he went along. Best story writer? Well, there’s loads of them. Carver never said much about his work. I’m reading MacLaverty’s Collected. And he says in the intro that he can’t explain his work. He doesn’t need to. We don’t need him to. The answers are all there in the work itself. That’s why academics can’t write fiction. They analyse it too much; they can’t free themselves up or let themselves go.’

  ‘Just read great literature and then write. The rest is just bollocks. Tangential at best.’

  ‘It is a business. And big business. That gets confused with art.’

  ‘Nobody at that place is interested in art, mate. It is just academics reproducing academics. Money, that’s what it is all about.’

  By the early evening an academic had joined them from the university. Jack and Neal both taught creative writing on the strength of their own publications. But Jack also taught a module on the literature degree. He specialised in the Beats: Kerouac, Burroughs, Corso, Whalen, Diane Di Prima, Lenore Kandel. He said that was why he liked Neal. Neal Cassady. Jack and Neal.

  The English department rarely spoke to Creative Writing but there were one or two mavericks among the group. Dr Dickson was a specialist on Byron, and Jack knew a shitload about Byron too, but he let this Dickson waffle on.

  For his part, Neal hated academia. It was full of sly people. He had been failed on his PhD by someone with considerably fewer publications and this rankled with him. Though it was supposed to be about coming up with something new there was a strange kind of conformity about the academic approach to creative writing. They wrote a book and then took some tenuous aspect of it and tagged it to some French theorist. Then they got their commentary published in some excessively priced journal that nobody ever read, before getting invited to a conference on some random topic like ‘the role of dogs in literature’, or ‘walking and the narrative experience’ or the ‘impact of domestic servitude on creativity’. And these conferences were usually in places like Portugal or Malaysia. It kept the Literature people quiet and it was all a fucking racket.

  Jack and Neal bit their tongues and looked like they were interested, and Dickson kept getting the beers in. It was another way he tried to assure himself of his superiority. And he was always trying to ingratiate himself with Jack and Neal by coming up with some spurious historical evidence that he was in fact working class. He was forever asserting that he was a descendent of Welsh miners on his mother’s side. He had even cried about it once, when the wheat beer got to him.

  As Dickson waffled on, Neal’s eyes lingered on Severine as she finished her shift and went outside to unlock her bike. He loved the way she rode it, no helmet on, sitting upright and with her bag in the straw basket at the front. He always loved women that were a bit different. He thought it was a midlife crisis that had made him try it on with her. God she was young. And that thing she’d said on Facebook. Jesus.

  Dickson was still in full spate, the subject having moved on to football. ‘I was watching England the other evening. They simply weren’t moving forwards with enough speed or precision. It seemed to my mind that Rooney was the only player displaying any quality at all.’

  ‘What do you know about football?’ said Jack.

  ‘As much as you know about the Romantics.’

  ‘Ha, ha, that old chestnut. I’ve told you before, fuckface, ask me anything you like about Blake.’

  ‘And as I have told you befo
re, my old mucker, he wasn’t fit to lace Wordsworth’s boots. Blake was simply mad.’

  ‘No, he was a visionary.’

  ‘No, come on, matey, he was mad. Coleridge, Shelley, all superior. And of course, my man Byron.’

  ‘Here we go.’

  When they all realized that they had started to repeat themselves they necked their last pints quickly. Wandering across to Oxford Road, Jack waved his bag in the air. Cab after empty cab went past them. Overhead, the traffic hurtled by along the Mancunian Way. A stripping wind shifted their jackets as they wavered by the side of the road. Dickson was now on the topic of the role of creative writing in the academy. He said it wasn’t even a proper subject. Then he went under the Mancunian Way to piss through the railings. At this point Jack dropped his bag by the side of the road and lifted his cane. Then he walked across to the railings and thrashed the fuck out of Dickson.

  In the cab they looked at Dickson as he clambered up off the ground. Jack turned and looked at Neal. ‘Listen, say nothing about this. He will be too embarrassed or he won’t remember. And most importantly, right, we know that a lot of creative writing in academia is bollocks, but don’t ever let anyone in the English department suggest it. Don’t let them say anything or we will be fucked. If they can get away with what they can get away with, so can we.’

  Alex Preston

  Wyndham Le Strange Buys the School

  ‘Do you chaps remember Wyndham Le Strange?’ Ginger looks up at us from his paper. I stir my tea, frowning, until an image comes to me – this is how my memory works now – of a pale, ribby boy with the clear eyes of a husky, standing at silly-mid off.

  ‘You know, I think I do,’ I say. Bingo just sits there, hands flat on the table, staring at the misted windows of the café.

  ‘He’s taken an advertisement in the Mail,’ Ginger continues. ‘Here, let me read it.’ He is silent for a moment. ‘Well, I say. It’s about us.’

  ‘Us?’

  ‘He’s asking us to contact him. Old Somptonians. Anyone who was there between o-six and fourteen.’

  ‘I suppose that is us. What is it that he wants? A reunion?’

  We sit listening to the omnibuses rumbling on the Tottenham Court Road, visible only as passing smudges of red on the fogged glass. It has been raining forever, or so it seems, thin icy rain that insinuates, drenches, chills to the grey bone. Wars shouldn’t end in November, I think, stirring my tea again as I let the trailing edges of my mind brush against that half-remembered figure: Wyndham Le Strange.

  ‘Wasn’t there something about the father?’ I ask. ‘Some tragedy?’

  Ginger strokes the wispy moustache that alleges itself on his upper lip. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘now you mention it, there was.’

  Bingo floats his fist above the table, opens it and drops three sugar cubes, which crumble on impact.

  ‘That’s right,’ Ginger says. ‘He was killed in ’sixteen. A Zeppelin raid, poor blighter. Farringdon Road, it was.’

  ‘When is this reunion?’ I ask.

  ‘Next Thursday. I do think we ought to go.’ Ginger looks peppier than he has for a while. He was happiest of any of us at school, a fine student, a better cricketer, in love with the quiet rhythms of the place. Where Bingo and I couldn’t wait to get out – university, London, the world! – I fancy that Ginger might have cheerfully stayed there forever. Even now, with his hair in flying retreat, the moustache, the scar that strings a yellow arc between ear and mouth, there’s something bouncingly schoolboyish about him.

  On Sundays, I visit my mother in Dorking. This particular Sunday happens to be my twenty-fourth birthday, and there is a bottle of sherry on the table, a bunch of dying roses. My mother pours and sips, pours and sips, and we sit in the wash of soft noises that passes for familial silence: the well-remembered ticking of the clock, knives on the faded crazing of Limoges china, the cat meowing itself between our feet. Every so often my mother speaks, her voice hesitant and fluting. ‘Do you remember the year we went to Abersoch?’ or ‘I found your father’s deerstalker hat,’ or ‘Whatever happened to that girl, Lavinia?’ and we sit and watch as the memory spreads itself out on the table before us, glowing.

  We came back as ghosts from the war, haunting the places we once called home, but they had changed utterly, or rather it was that trench foot, trench mouth, the dawn burst of star shells, had changed us. The things we’d seen meant that we could no longer step along the same blithe pavements, could no longer hold the dry, decisive hands of older girls on summer evenings, could no longer look with the same eyes on the wainscoting and gabling, the ivy, the chimney-topped roofs of our homes. Now we live between London’s boarding houses and cafés, her pubs and her parks, striding with collars up through the endless, pitiless rain.

  Bingo has his head out of the train window, a grin on his face, and I’m reminded of my Uncle Frobisher, who drove a Benz to the office each day, his King Charles, Tatters, on the seat beside him, wind-buffeted. Bingo’s dark hair streams behind like smoke from the ashes of his face. He is too thin, gangly and awkward as he leans further into the rushing world. He’s a man who gives the impression of always being on the point of stumbling, as if still learning the grown-up version of himself, as if his body had expected some quite different inhabitant. He trips back into the carriage shock-headed, his face washed clean of age, of emotion, by the wind and rain.

  Ginger, too, is staring out of the window, and I know that he is trying to pick out the villages and farms, the coppice-clad hills and valleys that were signposts to school. I’d never taken the time to wonder why school had meant so much to him, but remember the hectic-cheeked mother who’d come to see him off at Victoria, her own red hair grey-streaked and hopeless. A curdled atmosphere that hung around Ginger’s mentions of home, and he never had us back to visit. Now, though, he is as I remember him on journeys to school all those years ago, on the other side of the abyss, when he’d quiver upright in his seat, his eyes alert to the here and there.

  ‘I say,’ he says, ‘Is that . . . ? Look, over there, is that the church? It is, you know.’ The train begins to slow and finally comes to a noisy halt, its steam swallowed by the river mist. We step down. Expecting others, we stand for a while in our hats and overcoats in the rain, but no one comes and no one leaves on the bare platform. The train pulls off and we make our way up the hill towards the school. Ginger has an umbrella and Bingo and I huddle against him, staring into the wind-blown mist as we climb. Finally, two iron gates, stone gateposts topped with pineapple finials. We make our way onto the driveway, and it is as if we are stepping into the shoes of our younger selves.

  Soon, the great grey school is looming above us, its spires and peaks pronging the swept cloud, its windows lit and welcoming. I think what a good idea it was to come, not just for Ginger, but for all of us. There is a temptation, when you’ve been through hell, to live there afterwards. Going back like this, to the other side, seems one way of moving forward, of pulling our feet from the mud and gore. ‘There’s Le Strange,’ Ginger says, and he’s right.

  Wyndham Le Strange stands in a green smoking jacket in the school’s main entrance arch, a wide smile on his pale face. He is older, of course, his arctic eyes bulging from dark shadows, his blond hair side parted, comb-tracks visible. Campaign ribbons pinned to his chest. He brandishes a cigarette lighter in one hand and with the other ushers us expansively into the hall. ‘I’m so glad you fellows could come,’ he says. ‘I was hoping you would.’ We step uncertainly inside, where a fire burns in the great hearth, and the chandelier rains down golden light upon us, and everything seems gentle and welcoming. Bingo draws in a deep breath of the memory-thick air. Ginger is already standing beneath the notice boards that record successes scholarly and sporting. I see him looking up at his own name, and all the others, sun-kissed just by being there, in the time before. ‘The old place,’ Le Strange says, pulling the heavy oak doors closed and follo
wing us inside. I notice that he walks with a limp.

  ‘When father died, you see . . .’ Le Strange has a low, confidential voice, an ingratiating manner, which means he leans towards us as he speaks, and we toward him. ‘He left me a frightful amount of money. Now not being the business type . . .’ His speech is full of these little put-downs – ‘far be it from me’ and ‘not that I’d know’ – as if he is standing there, lobbing grenades at himself as he talks. We sit in the library, where hand-cut gold letters read WELCOME BACK above the fireplace, and I am sorry that only the three of us have come, that all this performance should be directed at such a diminished audience.

  ‘I’d heard,’ Le Strange continues, ‘that the school had closed down in ’fifteen and, goose that I am, I thought – why not?’ There is a fire in the library, too, every light illuminated. I realise I haven’t felt well like this, warm like this, for years. ‘At first, after I was shipped back, I lived here on my own, but it’s a big place, and I don’t mind telling you it gets lonely. I’m a nervy type, you see.’ He gives a deprecating smile and limps over to throw another log on the fire.

  ‘Which show were you at?’ I ask.

  ‘Wipers,’ he replies, although he pronounces it like the French, Ypres. ‘Gough’s Command.’

  ‘Gosh, you fellows took it rather bad.’

  ‘We did.’ He pats his leg. ‘Anyway, I thought it’d be ripping to have you chaps here, if you’ve time on your hands, and the inclination. I’d keep out of your way, not make a nuisance of myself.’

  ‘We’d love to,’ Ginger says, and I cast a sideways glance at Bingo, who sighs.

  ‘Why not?’ I say.

  The school, emptied of children, teachers and books, but crowded with memories, requires re-exploring. We rush through a labyrinth of endless corridors, up narrow, winding staircases that give onto observatories, rooftop greenhouses, aviaries where the floor crunches with the bones of long-dead budgerigars. One room, at the top of the tallest tower, has been taken over by soft grey bats; another, matron’s old bedroom, is full of moths which paper the walls with their veined wings, rising in a susurrating cloud when the door is opened. We don’t go into the cellars – they are dark and smell of soil and damp. One day, I find Bingo nailing boards across the door that leads down. We stick to the upper reaches, to the warren of panelled rooms and spiral stairways and meandering corridors whose paths are so haphazard and unlikely that it is as if we are inventing them as we go. Sometimes, Ginger and I run along with our arms held out, pretending to be Sopwith Camels. Le Strange hobbles gamely after us, ratatatating. Bingo is a glider, serene and otherworldly.