Best British Short Stories 2016

by Nicholas Royle

  ‘I’m going to miss this place like cystitis,’ Mother says. ‘Like thrush.’

  ‘Like a boil on my cock,’ I say.

  ‘Like a bitten tit,’ she says.

  A month, two months of this, and we are living with Mr Hughes.

  ‘How do you like your new bedroom?’ Mother asks as I come down the stairs, my skin still pink from the power shower.

  ‘It’s so much better than the bedroom I had last week,’ I say. ‘There’s a double bed for a start.’

  ‘A double bed? Which side do you sleep on?’

  ‘Whichever one’s dry,’ I say.

  Mr Hughes watches us laugh, and eventually he joins in; though his thick face and reedy moustache suggest tension, perplexity even. He is roasting a chicken and the house is clean and warm and homely; as though he has been waiting much longer than three years for us to arrive. He has prepared roast potatoes and homemade stuffing balls; for afters a gooseberry crumble with real custard. He pours us glasses of champagne as a welcome to our new home.

  ‘Mr Hughes?’ I say. ‘Do we get champagne before every meal?’

  ‘Only special dinners,’ he says, smiling. ‘And call me John.’

  ‘Well, Mr Hughes, every dinner’s special to me,’ I say. ‘You never know where the next meal’s coming from with her’ – I thumb towards Mother – ‘I’ve lived my life in fear of being sold into the white slave trade.’

  ‘It can still be arranged,’ Mother says and we both laugh, and a little later Mr Hughes joins in, again with the tension, again the perplexity. That look becomes the poor man’s constant, niggling expression. I never call him John. After a few months he stops even mentioning it.

  When I turn sixteen, Mr Hughes tries to talk to me (the man has always tried; he is very trying). He feels this is the kind of conversation a man should have with a boy looking down the barrel of adult life. I know this because I heard him say so to Mother. I am in my bedroom; a Woody Allen stand-up record is playing on the turntable he bought for me.

  ‘Can you turn that off for a moment?’ he says.

  ‘It’s the moose routine,’ I say.

  He clicks off the record and sits on my bed.

  ‘We need to talk, Clive,’ he says.

  ‘What about?’ I say.

  ‘Well,’ he says. ‘I’ve always said that I’m not here to replace your father, but there are some things that are best said man-to-man, so I thought—’

  ‘Oh, Mr Hughes, I know all about sex,’ I say. I have been preparing this for a few days and I’m watching Mr Hughes for a reaction. His eyes are wide: this is good.

  ‘Yes, Mr Hughes. I know all about sex. You really don’t need to worry. I know all about it. I know all about foreplay, fingering, heavy petting, hand-jobs, tit-wanks, cock-sucking, cunny-licking, sixty-nines, straight sex, missionary sex, rough sex, anal sex, gay sex, lesbian sex, roleplaying, threesomes, foursomes, bondage, frotting, felching, rimming, fisting, golden showers and pegging.’

  He shakes his head and stands up.

  ‘Well, it’s hard not to,’ I say. ‘My room’s right next to yours.’

  He slams the door on the way out.

  ‘Ooh, shut that door,’ Mother shouts from downstairs.

  Not long after our little talk, Mr Hughes comes home with a red setter. He walks the dog whenever he can, no matter what time of day or night. I call it Mr Hughes, though Mr Hughes calls it Ivanhoe. Mother and I both think this is a funny name for a dog. She always calls it Steve.

  If we are in the hallway when Mr Hughes is ready to take Ivanhoe out, Mother points at the dog.

  ‘I say, that dog’s got no nose,’ she says.

  ‘How does it smell?’ I reply.

  Mr Hughes mouths the punchline and slams shut the door.

  Mother and I say, ‘Ooh, shut that door.’

  The best jokes, she says, get better with repetition.

  Mr Hughes checks into a hotel on the night of the first episode of the third series of Blackadder. Mother only cries after the credits roll. For the first time in months we watch Dad performing the brown-suit routine. We rewind the tape, watch it back, rewind the tape, watch it back. Again, again, again.

  ‘I love the way he winks just then,’ Mum says replaying a section midway through his five minutes. ‘It’s just perfect.’

  ‘It’s great, yes.’

  ‘When he forgot his lines, when he was too drunk, he used to do that wink. Then he’d say, “I only have to wink at a bird and she gets pregnant.”’

  I feed the line. ‘Is that what happened with me?’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘The rubber split, but the effect was pretty much the same.’

  We laugh and later run through some Round the Horne and Goon Show. ‘You have deaded me,’ she says as we go up the stairs. She is wobbling drunk and holds on to the sleeve of my shirt. ‘You have deaded me,’ she says again, but does not laugh.

  We call the new flat ‘the corridor’ for its narrowness – we both love the Four Yorkshiremen sketch – and I keep it tidy, despite Mother’s best efforts. I do homework at the small table and she watches videos. Men come and go, quoting lines from ’Allo ’Allo!. They do not. This is my joke and Mother doesn’t find it funny.

  ‘The only wasteland I know,’ she says after I have explained it, ‘is between the ears of the men who write ’Allo ’Allo!.’

  Men do come and go, though, in the night, in the morning. Mother still looks sharp on her legs, her chest high and supported; her heart-shaped face underneath the elegant yet slightly old-fashioned do. They are always gone when I wake. They are nothing like my father; they are nothing like Mr Hughes. Mother and I joke in the same way, still feed each other lines, but we laugh less than before. Sometimes she sounds like she’s just playing along. Even when I say, ‘To cut a long story short,’ and she says, ‘Too late,’ it doesn’t sound like her heart is quite in it.

  Mother perches on the edge of the bed. I am sitting at the small desk, writing. For a moment I think she’s going to start on like Mr Hughes.

  ‘It’s all right, Mum,’ I say. ‘I know all about the birds and the buggery.’

  She laughs and something lifts slightly in her brow, then falls.

  ‘Trouble at mill?’ I say.

  She starts to cry. Her face make-up darts like military manoeuvres on old maps.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ she says. ‘It’s all my fault.’

  ‘What?’ I say. ‘What’s your fault now?’

  ‘This . . .’ she says. ‘This . . . hiding yourself away. Always at home, always . . . I don’t know, making dinner, tidying up. It’s never normal. I blame myself, I should—’

  ‘The only thing I blame you for is the Suez Canal Crisis, you know that.’

  I put down my pen and smile but she doesn’t even pout. She says nothing. It’s like a pause for timing, but she has nothing more to say.

  ‘Honestly, Mum, I’m fine.’

  ‘No you’re not,’ she says. ‘It’s not right your being here the whole time. What about friends?’

  ‘When I was growing up we were so poor, we couldn’t afford friends.’

  ‘I give up,’ she says.

  She slams the door behind her. Neither of us says anything.

  A week later she comes back from a night out. I am watching the video of my father. The brown-suit routine. She sits down next to me, damp from rain and fog.

  ‘I’ve fixed it,’ she says. ‘You’re booked.’

  I press pause. Dad is standing there, about to imitate an Irish glue sniffer, a roll of Sellotape soon to emerge from inside his brown jacket pocket.

  ‘What?’ I say. ‘What have you booked?’

  ‘You. Cyclone Club. Monday week. First act up. Five minutes.’ She sniffs and wanders to where she keeps the whisky.

  ‘You’re not serious.�
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  ‘Do I ever joke about comedy?’ she says and pours herself a drink. Her face says Gotcha. Since the slammed door, this has been her threat of choice: get out of the house, or I’m putting you on the stage.

  ‘I’m not doing it,’ I say. ‘I can’t do it.’

  ‘Don’t be such a child, of course you can. We’ll write it together.’

  ‘You do it.’

  ‘Me?’ she says. ‘Oh, give over. I’ve told you this before: there are no funny comediennes. There are funny women, but no funny comediennes. Name one that’s any good.’

  I’ve heard this before; I know how it plays out. I follow the lines, hoping it will swing her off topic.

  ‘Joan Rivers.’

  ‘Joan Rivers? An unconvincing drag act with a voice like a synagogue on fire.’

  ‘Roseanne Barr.’

  ‘Roseanne? Like a sack of lesbian potatoes shouting in a mini-mart.’

  ‘French and Saunders.’

  ‘Double acts don’t count. The fact is that alone on stage, women look desperate and whorish,’ she says. ‘And I hate to look desperate.’

  She gets up and looks at her reflection in the mirror. Tests the bounce of her hair.

  ‘Think about it,’ she says. ‘Think about it at least.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say as she ruffles my hair. ‘But I’m not promising anything.’

  ‘It’ll do you good, love,’ she says. ‘Promise.’

  She pauses by the door.

  ‘And you’ll get sex,’ she says. ‘Lots and lots of sex.’

  For inspiration we go through Dad’s old material, the odd jokes he wrote down on menus and cigarette packets, snippets of things he overheard in pubs. Dad was a listener, but not much of an archivist. He was a present-tense comedian. Died young and with him most of his gags.

  We spend the weekend working on the routine, then weeknights working on delivery. She borrows a video-camera from Pam at work – God knows what she records on this normally – and sets it up in the lounge. I start the routine. Nervously and without conviction.

  ‘Fuck off,’ Mother shouts. ‘You’re shit.’

  I do not react well to her heckles, not well at all. I stutter as I try to move on to the next line, but she’s shouting over me, calling me a poof; a fucking nancy boy.

  ‘Mum,’ I say. ‘Please.’

  ‘You need to learn,’ she says. ‘There’s no point in playing nice. Remember that comedy is not only communion between performer and audience, but also between every constituent part of that audience: friends in groups, couples, people on their own. Remember that.’

  The argument starts there; the tape still spooling. The video shows my eighteen-year-old self shouting back at her, her shouting louder, telling me that if I want to succeed, I’ve got to toughen up. She makes no jokes in fifteen minutes of argument, not even an attempt at one. Had Mr Hughes seen that, he might not have ended it. After twenty-three minutes I disappear from shot. You can hear the slam of my bedroom door.

  ‘Ooh, shut that door,’ Mother shouts.

  The Cyclone is a club on the northern edges of the city. Backstage, I meet the three other comedians: an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman. No joke. The Scotsman has slept with Mother. This I know for certain: it’s him who’s got me the gig. The comedians do not speak to me; they just sit on old armchairs drinking bottled beer, talking loudly to each other.

  ‘You said you’d never come back here. Not after what happened,’ the Scotsman says.

  ‘Apparently they’re only really brutal to you the first time around,’ the Englishman says.

  ‘Yes,’ the Irishman says. ‘The first time I came here I was crying piss by the end of the night.’

  The compere is out on stage doing his routine. It is stitched together from better performers’ work. I hear my name being called and the Scotsman pushes me in the back. I come stumbling out onto the stage, into the light. No one laughs. The lights are not as bright as I had expected. I can see the audience, no more than forty strong, and Mother at the bar. I pause for timing purposes. The best jokes exist in the present tense.

  ‘I’ve heard you lot are a tough crowd,’ I begin, ‘but before you say anything, please remember that I was born with ginger hair and I’m an orphan. Until I was twelve, everyone called me Annie.’

  Beat.

  ‘It’s been a hard-knock life, I can tell you.’

  Beat.

  ‘Not many fans of musical theatre in tonight, I see.’

  Beat.

  ‘Like I said, I’m an orphan. My father died young. I still remember the last thing he ever said to me. Remember it like it was yesterday: “Son, please, please, please stop throwing knives at me.”’

  Beat.

  ‘My mother died very soon afterwards. I don’t remember her last words. It was hard to make them out over all the screaming.’

  Beat.

  ‘There’s nothing funny about that, lad,’ a fat man near the front shouts. He is sitting next to a fat woman.

  ‘My, my,’ I say. ‘I used to be as fat as you, sir, but now you’re on benefits, your wife can’t afford to give me a biscuit after I fuck her.’

  There is a collective intake of breath and a few sly chuckles. I smile, sweetly, like a child. It’s mainly the women who laugh.

  ‘My dad actually did die young. That’s true. No joke. He was killed in the Falklands.’

  Beat.

  ‘It always was a rough pub.’

  Beat.

  ‘I’ll tell you how rough it was. This bloke walked into the Falklands once and says to the barman, “What sort of wine do you have?” and the barman says, “Bottle or glass?” “Oh, glass, please,” the bloke says and the barman smashes a pint pot in his face.’

  Beat.

  ‘Like I said, rough place.’

  Beat.

  ‘After my father died, my mother, she remarried. On the morning of the wedding my new dad took me to one side and said: “Clive,” he said. That’s my name, he was clever that way. “Clive,” he said. “I’m going to treat you like my own flesh and blood. I’m going to treat you like you’re my real son.” And he was true to his word.’

  Beat.

  ‘From that moment on he ignored me during the week and beat me senseless every Saturday night.’

  It goes on. Five minutes. The audience is confused and annoyed by my deadpan delivery, by the one-liners, by the uneasy subject matter. It’s a relief when I can call time on the whole sorry mess.

  ‘I have been Clive Porter,’ I say. ‘And you have been my worst nightmare.’

  I walk quickly backstage as the compere bullies the audience into a patchy applause. The Englishman, Irishman and Scotsman are still on the armchairs drinking beer. The Englishman opens a bottle and passes it to me.

  ‘You don’t have a day job, do you, son?’ he says.

  ‘When you get one, don’t quit it,’ the Irishman says.

  When we’re back home and she’s poured us both whiskies, Mother tells me what I have done well – the right level of menace in my put-downs, my timing on some of the weaker jokes – and what I have done badly – stage presence, clarity, poise, switch from set-up to punchline, pitch of voice, facial expressions, audience interaction and volume.

  ‘Your dad would have been proud of you, though,’ she says. ‘Yes, he’d have seen talent there. Real potential. And anyway, it’s a laugh, isn’t it? What could be better than making someone laugh?’

  ‘Making ten people laugh?’

  She punches me on the arm.

  ‘Honestly, your dad would be proud.’

  Two nights later she goes out with the Scotsman to say thank you. I have another gig arranged soon afterwards.

  The best jokes and routines improve with repetition; they appreciate. The only people who tire of them are the comics t
hemselves. My favourite routine of all time is recorded the same year I make my stage debut. Palin is stage right, smoking a cigarette, dressed as a shopkeeper; Cleese enters stage left holding a birdcage. Audience applauds. They laugh before a word has been said. Cleese says he wishes to make a complaint. Wild laughter, wild applause. There are thousands watching in the theatre; millions who watch it later. The audience knows every word. Each of them has their favourite synonym in Cleese’s litany of death; each one is ready to join in. The sketch follows the usual pattern, with Palin asking what the problem is and Cleese explaining that he wishes to complain about the parrot he has just bought. Palin asks what’s wrong with it; Cleese explains that it’s dead. Wild, wild, laughter. Palin pauses and takes an exaggerated look at the deceased bird. Palin glances up at Cleese. The audience giggles nervously. Palin puffs on his cigarette and says, ‘So it is. Here’s your money back and some holiday vouchers.’ The audience laughs, but are cheated. Cleese and Palin, twenty years on and still having to do that fucking parrot sketch. So sick of it, they have to kill it dead. It’s easy to understand; I feel the same necessity even during my third show.

  What’s funny at home, funny with Mother, is not funny outside the flat. I want to ad-lib, freshen up the routine, but I have nothing. I just stand there, microphone in hand, running through the same lines, the same actions. Mother makes notes. This is the new thing: not laughing, just making notes. The audience laughs sometimes, laughs because they are predisposed to. They like the swearing; they like that they need do nothing more than laugh.

  Unasked, the Scotsman puts in calls for me, recommends me. Unasked, Mother accepts on my behalf. Unasked, I am booked for six consecutive nights in various places across the south-east.

  ‘Isn’t that great news?’ Mother says as she holds me, tight enough to let me know I cannot decline.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘It’s great news.’

  That evening, I stay up and watch my father again on the video, his five minutes of fame on Live from the Palladium. He must have done that routine a hundred, a thousand times up and down the country. I was probably conceived a few hours after he’d delivered it at some club in Great Yarmouth. The cassette tapes of his act, which he used for bookings, is the same routine, but just his voice, not his skinny body in the trademark brown suit. I take the tape with me on tour; listen to it in guest-house rooms as the Scotsman and my mother have hushed but audible sex next door.