Best British Short Stories 2016

by Nicholas Royle

  ‘Don’t be. I ate too.’ He looks me up and down and his smile never breaks.

  ‘I didn’t know what I should wear,’ I tell him. ‘I mean, you never said where we were headed.’

  ‘It’s fine. You look okay. Really you do.’

  ‘How come you’re so early?’ I ask. The beer is good but makes me hungry. I wish I really had eaten.

  ‘How come you’re early yourself?’ he asks. His smile is annoying but also calms my nerves. He seems younger and brighter than the night before. He moves around a lot in his chair. If he didn’t smile so much I would guess he was mad with me but why would he be mad? I decide maybe he’s nervous and the idea makes me feel okay. The warm cold hallway and the white building and the crescent of shine come and go.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep so I just came along,’ I tell him.

  ‘Sleep? But it’s 6pm.’

  ‘Yeah, well.’

  ‘You wanna know why I’m so early?’

  ‘I wanna know.’

  He takes a sip of beer. ‘Honestly? I had nowhere better to go.’

  He laughs. I laugh.

  We’re about to leave for the show. I’m in the washroom at the bar. I stand by the basin for as long as I can. I’m not waiting but I’m expecting it. I feel the bulk of him arrive in the doorway behind me and his cologne arranges around me like smoke. I feel the warmth of a hand a little before it reaches the back of my neck. I know he can take care of whoever comes in. The squeeze comes a little harder and I suppose I would like to sleep, just like this, standing. ‘It’s okay,’ he says. He holds my head from behind with the soft part of his thumb under my ear.

  I show my city smarts by hailing a cab but then I go dumb when I remember I don’t know where we’re headed.

  ‘Fifty-Seventh and Seventh,’ he tells the driver.

  ‘You guys are going to . . . ?’

  ‘Quiet! Please, sir. Sorry, but this is a surprise for my friend here.’

  ‘Okay, no problem. It’ll sure be a surprise.’

  ‘Fifty-Seventh and Seventh?’ My mind moves through the streets ahead of the taxi cab. ‘Carnegie?’

  ‘Shoot,’ he says, punching his palm, pretend mad.

  ‘That’s your surprise over, buddy,’ says the driver. ‘You don’t know who’s playing tonight though, huh?’

  ‘Bernstein? Belafonte?’

  ‘Enough!’ says the guy and the driver laughs.

  Less than thirty minutes later I am in the foyer of Carnegie Hall watching society enter through the door. The guy returns from checking our coats. ‘Okay?’ My suit stands out a mile. Guys everywhere looking at guys everywhere. Guys looking at me then looking at him. That I cannot stand.

  I tell him I prefer the aisle seat. It’s maybe twenty minutes later when Judy Garland walks onto the stage, a tiny person from where we’re sitting, only it doesn’t matter because something happens to the air in the room so that it doesn’t really matter where you are. The singing starts up and pushes everything right to the front of me. ‘When You’re Smiling’ is the song and once the music begins people either barely look at one another or else they can’t stop and they pull at each other’s sleeves like children.

  Down on the stage she sings for so long that I mistakenly think the interval is the end of the show. On the staircase he says to me, ‘Fine, fine voice. I would’ve been here alone if not for you.’

  I know it isn’t true but I take it anyway.

  ‘We could see another show,’ he says. ‘Perhaps next month?’

  ‘All the way to New York just for a show? They don’t have concert halls in Chicago?’

  ‘The show would be one reason.’

  Back in the auditorium the seats have grown too warm and his cologne is filling my chest right through ‘That’s Entertainment!’ which cuts my thoughts in two each time they happen. I feel him take a look at the side of my face. The chords are suddenly too much for me. I need everything to slow down. Slow down or be nothing at all. The next time I feel the edge of his finger touch mine it’s during ‘You’re Nearer’ and it’s a stupid game to play and I say ‘Fuck you’ to myself and then ‘Get off me’ right into his ear. Then he doesn’t move a muscle for several minutes, cough, nothing. The music is too much and the tiny silences between the notes are too much and everything is right up in the front of me. Judy Garland is singing ‘If Love Were All’ and at the edge of my sight I feel his chin raise a fraction. I imagine the landing of my fist across his jaw and I imagine the white building over in midtown, and the hallway, the wallet, the movie theatre, the girl, the martini, all of it running in the wrong order. I’m out of my seat and gone.

  June 22, 1969

  I walk into my kitchen and pluck Jeremiah from his chair and place him on my knee to negotiate breakfast. With sticky palms he slaps at the newspaper on the table in front of us where the words read:

  Judy Garland Dead At 47.

  ‘Jeez,’ I say, my breathing gone a little. ‘Jeez.’ I squeeze the boy to me.

  Over my shoulder my wife reads and says, ‘I know. God. It’s too bad. Those poor kids.’

  ‘I heard her sing once.’

  ‘Really? When you lived in New York?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Wow. You never told me that.’

  ‘Carnegie Hall.’

  ‘No kidding? Jeremiah, honey, don’t tear up the newspaper. Daddy’s reading.’

  I press my face into Jeremiah’s hair and it blots out the sound of her singing, and the smell of cologne.

  Crista Ermiya

  1977

  Memet Ali was eight years old when a woman on his estate gave birth to a cockerel. Elif. He remembered that her name was Elif.

  Elif wasn’t exactly pretty, as such. She had a long torso and short legs, so that when she sat down, paradoxically she looked taller. Her hair was dark, thick and long with a slight kink to it that made it easier for tendrils to escape from under her headscarf. The skin on her face was lightly pockmarked on one cheek where she had scratched at chicken pox spots when she was eleven. Her almost-black eyes were large and set slightly too wide apart. Some of the other Turks on the estate, including Memet Ali’s grandmother, said they were the eyes of a woman who saw djinn. Despite these superficial flaws that edged her otherwise ordinary prettiness towards the plain, Elif had acquired the unwanted status of local siren. Although never fully articulated by the neighbours, the reason for this was unfairly straightforward: at the age of nineteen, Elif was already a widow.

  She had arrived two years previously, hair wrapped in a scarf, legs encased in stiff indigo jeans, with a permanent shiver that meant the heating bills would always be high. At first everyone assumed she was Suleyman’s niece, or even an illegitimate daughter. It was a couple of weeks before he admitted that she was his new wife.

  Those who were so inclined sucked their teeth. Memet Ali’s father restricted himself to a mutter, ‘That is not the modern thing to do.’ Mr Ali stubbed out his cigarettes in a metal union flag ashtray, and he insisted his family eat their dinner off plasticised place-mats adorned with the St Andrew’s Cross because when he was younger and newly arrived someone had told him he looked like a Hebridean fisherman with a suntan. On the subject of Suleyman’s folly, Mr Ali said, ‘But what else can you expect from a Turk?’

  Suleyman was from Anatolia, whereas most of the other Turks on the estate were from Cyprus. With other personalities this wouldn’t perhaps have been a big deal, but Suleyman was a naturally conservative man, and although only slightly more than perfunctorily religious, he didn’t drink alcohol, even when it wasn’t Ramadan. Memet was afraid of him, because whenever they came across him in the street, Suleyman would start talking to his father, loudly, about whether Mr Ali would have Memet circumcised at the appropriate age. Mr Ali didn’t appreciate these extempore lectures from Suleyman, but he still insisted that Memet
call the elder man Uncle Suleyman.

  The neighbours were at first surprised (later transforming into malicious glee) when, a few weeks after Suleyman had returned from an extended visit to Anatolia in celebration of his fiftieth birthday, he came home one day with a teenage girl in the back of his cab, obviously just off the plane, and clutching a small vinyl suitcase to her skinny breast. Her wide-set eyes stared around at the estate unblinking, like a shocked kitten recently displaced from its litter. Memet was standing opposite, by one of the communal metal bins trying to throw a small bag of rubbish over the top. Suleyman saw him but instead of calling Memet over for a random harangue, as he would normally do, he pretended not to see the curious boy. Nor did he appear to notice the women leaning over their balconies. He quickly ushered the stranger into his stairwell.

  Elif didn’t go out at first, and then when she did it was always with Suleyman. Memet longed to see her out by herself. He had taken to sitting on the bottom steps of his stairwell after school, in hope of catching a glimpse of her. He was even willing to risk Uncle Suleyman quizzing him over potential plans for circumcision and sometimes accompanied the couple to the shops on the pretence of needing to get a loaf or sugar for his grandmother. Elif didn’t talk much, and Memet couldn’t speak Turkish anyway, apart from a few basic phrases, so their conversation always ran along the same lines. ‘Nasselsen?’ Elif would ask how he was. ‘Choc e, merci.’ I’m fine, thank you, Memet would dutifully reply. ‘Sen Nasselsen?’ And she would ruffle his hair in lieu of her own reply. Uncle Suleyman smiled indulgently. ‘You’re a good boy, Memet,’ he said.

  A year into his marriage, Suleyman had a heart attack in his cab and died in the driver seat, his car lined up in a queue outside the controller’s office. No one noticed until the three cabs in front of him had gone off on jobs and he failed to respond to the next request. The neighbours were studiously over-sympathetic – Poor Elif, what will become of her? – predicting gloom with voyeuristic relish. She’ll have to go back home – yes, but I hear she has no family. Memet Ali’s grandmother, more practical and less susceptible to schadenfreude, went to visit her, widow to widow. She helped Elif organise the funeral: it had taken the astute grandmother less than a minute to understand that Elif was entirely without anyone to help her from amongst Suleyman’s acquaintance. The funeral was attended by members of Suleyman’s mosque, his fellow mini-cab drivers and some Turks from the estate. In the following weeks, the neighbours looked out for arrivals from Turkey, for either Suleyman or Elif, but no-one came. That’s strange, people said. Well, said others, what do we really know about her? Nothing. Maybe Suleyman’s family back home don’t even know he’s dead. How do we know she’s even told them? – He was an old man, maybe he has no close relatives left – He wasn’t that old – Perhaps they didn’t approve of his marriage to Elif – Well, you could understand that. So young! – Suleyman wasn’t that old – No, it’s true, these days 50 is nothing. Strange he should have a heart attack like that. All of a sudden – Are the council going to let her stay on in the flat? – What? And my son on the waiting list these past four years? – Maybe she hasn’t told the authorities about Suleyman’s death either.

  One afternoon, when she was not well enough to go herself, Memet Ali’s grandmother sent her grandson over to Elif with some baklava. She was on the third floor of her block and Memet, against his natural inclination to go running up to see her as fast as he could, was careful to go slowly up the stairs so as not to drop the tray of sweets. When he got there he had to knock five or six times before she answered, and even then, only after he had called out to her through the letterbox. Inside, the flat was dark, all the curtains shut against the daylight, and all the electric lights off.

  ‘Nasselsen Elif?’ Memet asked.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she replied, in English. She walked into the sitting room, but Memet stood in the hallway, eyes unaccustomed to the dark after the light outside. He heard her draw the curtains and the dusty afternoon lit the room.

  ‘Come in then,’ she said.

  He went in, put the baklava on to a low smoked-glass table and stood awkwardly with his hands clasped behind his back, sweating, his elbows jutting out on either side of his body.

  ‘Sit down, Memet,’ Elif said.

  He sat down in an armchair upholstered in a large floral brown fabric that made his legs itch through his trousers. Elif sat down on the settee.

  ‘Baklava.’ She laughed.

  Memet could see nothing especially funny about the Baklava. ‘From my grandmother,’ he said.

  ‘She’s very kind,’ Elif said. ‘Not everyone is.’

  ‘I can be kind to you,’ Memet blurted out.

  ‘The kindness of children. That’s something, I suppose,’ she said.

  Memet couldn’t think of anything to say to this, and so they both sat in silence in the room as the dusty light slowly turned to evening. Memet thought it was like watching someone fall asleep with their eyes open. He should have been bored, sitting down in a room with nothing happening, but he felt a curious happiness watching her as she sat back on the settee, her head tilted up to the ceiling, eyes open but unfocused, her lips unsmiling. She still wore a headscarf, but it looked different these days, something to do with the way she tied it, that made Memet think of the three women in Charlie’s Angels.

  ‘Who is your favourite Angel?’ Memet asked.

  Elif turned her head to look at him. She looked surprised and Memet thought, with a pang, that she had forgotten he was there.

  ‘Everyone likes the one with the blonde hair, but I like the one with the long dark hair, the one with the hair that waves at the bottom.’ He wanted to say, ‘I like her because she looks a little bit like you,’ but he didn’t. And then the doorbell rang. They both jolted, as if they were on a bus and the doorbell was the driver braking too quickly. His dad’s voice came ringing through the letterbox.

  ‘Memet! Are you in there?’

  Elif got up and went to the door.

  ‘Merhaba Elif,’ he said, and then, spying Memet who had followed her into the hallway, hissed, ‘where have you been? Your grandmother has been worrying.’

  To Elif he said, ‘Has he been making a nuisance of himself? I’m sorry.’

  ‘No,’ Elif replied. ‘Memet is a good boy.’ Suleyman’s stock phrase.

  ‘Come here, son,’ Memet called to him. Memet reluctantly edged through the front door past Elif.

  ‘Come again,’ she said, and Memet’s heart lifted and he smiled, until his father said, ‘Yes, I’ll drop by sometime,’ as if she had been speaking to him rather than Memet.

  ‘Poor girl,’ Memet Ali’s father said as they walked back home together to the grandmother. ‘She must be lonely.’

  ‘Maybe she needs more friends,’ Memet suggested, thinking of putting himself forward for the role.

  ‘Yes,’ Memet’s father agreed. ‘Friends.’

  ‘You’re not going over to Elif again?’ the grandmother asked Memet’s dad.

  ‘And what if I am? She needs a friend in these times.’

  ‘She has too many friends these days,’ Memet’s grandmother said.

  ‘I’m just being a good neighbour,’ he told his mother-in-law.

  ‘No. I’m a good neighbour. You are just another man.’

  Memet’s father slammed the door on his way out.

  I’ve heard she likes older men – Easier to get rid of! – Ain’t that the truth. The girl is sly. She just come, take the flat, take the benefit. I been here since 1963, waiting to move since 1973, the council still promising – You know what I’m saying! And all them men-friends. I hear not all them get it for free, you know – Yep, that girl is too clever with herself.

  ‘Gran, what are you doing?’ Memet asked.

  ‘It’s to protect our home,’ she said. ‘This keeps away the evil eye.’

  His grandmothe
r was putting up a mobile with three blue glass beads hanging down from thin leather straps on the inside of the front door, with a white blob in the middle of each bead. Sort of like eyes, Memet conceded.

  ‘What’s the evil eye?’

  ‘It can be many things, Memet. Sometimes it’s a look, sometimes it’s a person, sometimes it’s the devil himself.’

  ‘Why would the devil come here?’

  ‘There are all sorts of unlikely places for evil to come through,’ Memet’s grandmother said. He didn’t know what she was talking about; but this was often the case.

  ‘Mother, what is this?’ Memet’s dad asked when he got home. ‘Are we living in the dark ages? No. This is modern Great Britain in the 1970s. We are not peasants.’

  Memet’s grandmother shuffled in the kitchen, frying blobs of mincemeat for kofte. ‘I promised Emine I would look after you and Memet. Let me do it my way.’

  Memet listened hard; neither his father nor his grandmother ever mentioned his mother. But they didn’t say anything further about her, and Memet’s father let the talisman remain.

  ‘We should tell Elif to get one,’ Memet suggested.

  Neither his father nor his grandmother replied.

  ‘No-one goes to see her now that her belly has got round,’ Memet said.

  There was a brief silence.

  ‘You’re right, Memet,’ said his grandmother. ‘Why don’t you go to see her?’

  Memet’s father shot her a look that Memet couldn’t quite understand. She continued, ‘Open the top left drawer in the dresser in my bedroom. There’s another . . . decoration . . . in there. Take it and give to Elif. After you’ve eaten your tea.’

  Memet, unencumbered this time by pastry sweets, ran up Elif’s stairwell, so that by the time he arrived on her floor he could hear his own breathing, which had got loud in the way that it sometimes did when he was in the playground. Elif was stood in her doorway.