The Best British Short Stories 2013

by Nicholas Royle

  More than anything now, he wants to feel water on his body. He would choose swimming water over drinking water. He knows about the water gardens in this part of the world, the wide avenues of whispering trees and fountains. There is a religion of water here. He can understand that. He can see that God is dancing in the water under the levee.

  He climbs down from the watchtower. His joints creak, his binoculars slap against his neck, his sweat spirals to the ground beneath the ladder. He pauses at the compound gates. With a sudden instinct, in the free space where solid thought forms, he reaches out and opens the door that is set into the right-hand gate. Still walking, he steps through and out into the world.

  He sets off briskly across the fulvous earth. His feet are scorched by the heat, torn by the sharp spines of scrub, cut on rocks. He begins to run. He takes off his jacket and lets it drop to the ground behind him, peels off the white T-shirt to reveal a bone-thin body. He doesn’t even think about IEDs. He draws in a deep breath of air and lets it out with a low, delighted whoop. In the mountains above he catches a momentary flash of sun on glass, ignores it, and presses on. He is sprinting now, leaping rocks and brush.

  When he comes to the levee he looks back to the compound and sees the watchtower is still empty. He undoes his belt, pulls down his trousers, his boxer shorts, is suddenly pleased by the burn of the sun on his body. He edges to the lip of the levee and stands there, angeline on the rim of a cloud. There is a crack, and it is the sound of a body plunging into water, the sound of thunder, the sound of a rifle shot in hill country.

  He plunges downwards into this water that remembers when it was snow. Water that wound between grazing goats, through poppy fields, beside the small house where two of the young men live who now stand above the stream, looking in.

  The water carries in it iron, zinc, silica, traces of goat and human faeces, the spit of a grandmother from Chitral, opium and poppy stems, the petals of flowers from a wedding at Kachil, potassium, magnesium, gunpowder, human and dog urine, the sweat of a man who bathed that morning at dawn in Tang e-Gharu. Despite the weight of all this, the water bounds along the stream bed, dancing and tear-clear. The young men shoot their guns into the pool for effect and then scamper back to the truck at the foot of the levee.

  Already the force of the current has carried his body onwards, over jagged shallows where it roils white, into another, deeper pool, where swimming creatures are congregating, insect larvae thrusting themselves from the bed into green depths. His foot snags on a root and he is caught, trembling, in the stream, his eyes wide and bright under the water. A plume of blood escapes like the ghost of a watersnake from the hole in his head, is caught by the current, and carried away.

  Voyage

  Adam Lively

  He glanced across the table. Stalin had cracked a joke. He was the only one who ever joked. None of them laughed – not even Stalin. But Stalin did crack jokes. And he had an unpleasant smile, almost hidden by his bushy moustache. The others didn’t even smile.

  They talked politics. They understood little of what each other said – just the odd word like ‘fascism’ and ‘communism’. It didn’t matter. To begin with, he seemed to remember, they had talked across each other. Then the realisation must have come that they had all the time in the world. Stalin could talk through the entire main course and it wouldn’t matter because the next night it would be someone else’s turn.

  Or that was what he thought had happened. He looked down at his plate. Coq au vin – undercooked chicken and some slivers of onion in a watery brown gravy. It was hard to remember anything. He couldn’t remember the waiter bringing the dish. The waiters were hazy – the only faces that were clear were those across the table. All he knew was that the food was disgusting. It made him think of a railway hotel in some small town in the Bavarian highlands – the kind of place where he’d spent solitary nights early in his career after giving a speech to the local party, the kind of place where the waitresses wheeling the sweet trolleys were middle-aged and built like barrels.

  The sudden glimpse of a memory, of sanity, was unsettling. He looked up. Stalin had turned serious. He was winding up his speech on a serious note. When he had finished and wiped his moustache with his napkin, Franco immediately started up, adopting the same tone – quiet, sententious. He hated the way the Spaniard toadied to Stalin – always speaking after him, aping him as though he were some clerk clarifying a few minor points. Franco looked like a bank manager. He looked like one of the local party officials who would introduce him in those depressing Bavarian towns sunk between the hills. He had hated them. And now he hated Franco.

  After dinner they dispersed. He would take a turn on deck. The first moment when he stepped through the door was good, when for a few seconds the air would be fresh on his face and the sound of the sea would be booming. But then the door would slam shut behind him, the night enfold him. He walked a few paces along the deck and looked out over the rails. Always the same view – the mist and the night. Far below, the foam of the bow wave was luminescent on the inky water. The ship was moving fast. It was always moving fast. He looked back down along the long length of it. Franco had said that it had used to sail the Buenos Aires–Lisbon route – but then what did he know? And how had he understood him even if he had said that? He couldn’t remember. Nothing made sense.

  Far in the distance, down the length of the ship, he could see lights in some of the portholes. Who occupied those cabins? The only other person he ever saw on deck was Stalin. He would be walking in the distance, or he would suddenly come upon him, huddled up in a deckchair with a coat wrapped around him, staring out at the mist. They never spoke. He never saw Mussolini or Franco out on deck. He had no idea what they did after dinner.

  He would only stay out on deck for ten minutes or so before making his way back to bed. Every night as he approached his cabin door, down the familiar narrow corridor, he would feel the same niggle of anxiety. There was something wrong with the overhead light in his cabin. When he flicked the switch beside the door it never worked. There were only five paces between the door and the safety of the bedside lamp, but those five paces meant that for a few seconds after the door had swung shut he was in darkness, stepping blindly into darkness, fumbling in darkness for the switch to the bedside lamp. He never liked that darkness. By the time his finger closed around the switch (its feel was familiar to him, he had been feeling it for ever) his body was covered by a light sheen of sweat.

  In the pool of yellow light, he undressed and put on his pyjamas.

  The next thing he ever remembered was going down the corridor to dinner again. Mussolini was having his dessert – Stalin and Franco were watching him intently as he stuffed his face with the cream from a gateau. Mussolini was the only one who seemed to enjoy the food. There were only three desserts on the menu and four main courses. All of it was revolting. The cream on the gateau wasn’t even real – it was the powdered variety. But Mussolini was like an eating-machine. Every night he ate as though this night were his last and he might never eat again. The others, even Stalin, only ever picked at their food.

  The Italian was in the middle of an anecdote. After he had swallowed several large spoonfuls of cream he put down his spoon and continued where he had left off. A dribble of cream remained on his chin. He extended one hand with its palm up and inclined his head in that direction, saying something in a wheedling, whiny voice. Then he extended the other hand and did the same thing in the other direction. It seemed to be an anecdote about conflicting counsel from his advisors. After he had done these voices, back and forth, for a minute or so, he pulled himself straight upward and slammed a fist down on the table. The cutlery bounced. This was him, Mussolini, now. He was being decisive.

  When Mussolini stopped speaking there was a long silence.

  He stared down at the coq au vin. Then Franco started murmuring. He ran a finger round his collar. It was too tight. It was al
ways too tight. He wore a woollen civilian suit that was too thick for the stuffy atmosphere in the ballroom of the ship. They always wore the same clothes – Stalin wore a blue-grey party tunic, Mussolini and Franco military uniform, while he was in a woollen suit that was too hot and a civilian shirt and tie that was done up too tight at the neck. He looked across the table at Franco. How was it that Franco wore a military uniform with a loose collar, while he wore a civilian suit that was too hot with a shirt and tie that were too tight at the neck?

  It was a relief to get out on deck. But he only stayed there ten minutes, because it wasn’t till he was back in his cabin that he could take off that shirt and tie. Before that there was the light switch to find in the darkness. And it seemed only moments after he had put on his pyjamas in the pool of yellow light from the bedside lamp that he was once more walking down the corridor towards the ship’s ballroom, pulling with his finger at the stiff collar that pressed into his neck.

  The table at which they sat was on a curved terrace above the dance floor of the ballroom. There were other tables on the terrace, but none of them were ever occupied. The dance floor was deserted.

  Sometimes, though, the dance floor would be filled by a spectral presence. Tables would appear, and there would be men at the tables. There was talking, sometimes even laughter. Their presence was an indefinite blur, but from time to time out of the blur faces would appear. Brown faces. Black faces. For a moment they loomed out of the obscurity, bearing on their lips an introduction, an obsequy. They bore names on their thick lips – Amin, Mobutu, Pol Pot, Saddam. He shivered with an old disgust at these alien faces. The glimpse of a memory, of sanity, was unsettling.

  Occasionally these blurred, spectral presences would occupy the lower tables of the ballroom. He was unsure how much his companions at the top table were aware of their presence. And then they were gone, and he would be staring down at his cold coq au vin, waiting for the meal to finish. He went out on deck again and walked to the front of the ship. The speed of the vessel was palpable. He looked out from the prow into the darkness. A million tiny droplets of water crashed into his face. He had a vivid sense of the speed of the massive ship as it forged ahead into the darkness, of the mist as a solid substance through which it moved swiftly, unendingly.

  The thought came to him that while he listened night after night to the others at the dinner table, he never said a word himself. Then another thought came to him: that it was the same for them too. They all four barely experienced the same reality.

  He turned, thinking of the darkness and the light switch. He looked down the corridor. He felt the sweat in the darkness and his finger closed around the light switch. He watched the pyjamas in the pool of yellow light. His finger tugged at his collar and he listened to the confusing talk across the table. Around him was the deserted deck of the vast liner. Beneath him was the ceaseless thrust of the engine.

  Curtains

  Charles Lambert

  When Helen gets back from the hospital the house is empty. She leaves her weekend bag by the door and wanders from room to room, the kitchen, the hall, the living room, and then upstairs, pausing for breath on the halfway landing, her hands folded over her stomach. She rests her hand on the door to David’s study, glances into their bedroom but doesn’t enter, then stands at the threshold of the smaller room she had begun to think of as his bedroom or her bedroom, she wasn’t sure, not then, until a twinge of pain across her abdomen sends her scuttling to the bathroom. David knew I’d be home this morning, she thinks, blouse pulled up, leaning her bare skin against the basin. He could have closed the shop for half an hour or asked one of the Saturday girls to come in. She waits for the pain to pass, then splashes her face with cold water.

  She is sitting in the kitchen holding an empty mug when the key turns in the lock and David is home. He puts down a roll of material before hurrying across the hall, his coat half-off, to take her hand and help her up from the chair.

  ‘You told me you wouldn’t be back until this afternoon,’ he says. He sounds apologetic. She can’t remember what she told him, except that they would bring her home. There was no need for him to worry, it’s probably her fault. He drops his coat on the floor, holds both her hands and looks into her eyes until she glances down. She wants to pull herself free and pick up the coat.

  ‘There was no point their keeping me in any longer. All I need is rest, apparently.’ She pauses, tries to smile. ‘And lots of TLC.’

  David lets go her hands. ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea.’

  She shakes her head; he hasn’t understood. ‘No. Not tea. Make me some real coffee, will you? With the thing.’ She makes a plunging gesture. ‘The coffee in that place was dreadful.’

  ‘You are feeling all right, aren’t you?’ He has a right to sound anxious, she thinks.

  ‘I feel fine, David,’ she says. ‘Apart from, you know.’

  He hugs her, finally. She rests her chin on his shoulder and stares at the material by the door. Some remnant from the shop, she imagines, some end of roll he’ll expect me to do something with. To keep me busy until I’m back to normal.

  ‘It’s for the best.’ He lets her go, moving her away from him as though she has no will of her own, each competent hand squeezing a shoulder, both affectionate and dismissive. She stands in the kitchen. His best, her best? Their best? David says there’s no difference. For better or for worse. In sickness and in health. When the pain comes she presses her legs together to relieve it. A trickle of something warm, which must be blood, runs down her inside thigh. She watches him search for the thing she can never remember the name of, to make her coffee.

  Two weeks later he walks into the kitchen with a cardboard box. It is late afternoon. She has been washing spinach; the leaves, with their thread of red, are coarse and gleaming in the colander. It makes her feel sick just to look at them.

  ‘I’ve been finishing the curtains for the living room.’ He moves his head rapidly to one side as if he is trying to dislodge something from his ear. The box will contain some bone he’s had sent to him for his study, some fossilised knuckle from Uzbekistan he’s ordered on the net. He doesn’t have time to think about curtains.

  ‘Look what I’ve brought you.’

  She wipes her hands. He’ll expect something from me, excitement, she thinks, some sign of pleasure. She’s relieved, she’s not sure why.

  ‘What?’ she says. She waits for him to kiss her; he always does since she came back from the hospital, a kiss on her cheek, sometimes the back of his fingers, his knuckles, against her skin. Once he took her face in his hands and stared into her eyes until she blushed, she felt like a suspect with a terrible secret. But today he holds out the cardboard box. It is large and has no writing on it, as though it has no business being.

  ‘What is it?’ She doesn’t trust him, it strikes her. She hasn’t the slightest idea what he wants. She has no secrets.

  ‘Look inside,’ he says. A noise from the box, a rustling or grating, startles her; she steps back.

  He smiles. ‘Don’t be afraid. Open it.’ He puts the box down on the table she has just cleaned and lifts a flap, as if to show her how boxes open. Lifting another, she peers inside to see something pale and soft rise towards her. She jumps back.

  Impatient, David lifts out a blonde plump wriggling thing no bigger than his two cupped hands.

  ‘It’s a Labrador,’ he says. ‘A golden Labrador.’

  Not knowing what to do, she takes the puppy and presses it to her, in the hollow just below her chin. It wriggles until it can lick her hand, its tongue warm, oddly dry. She lifts its face to her face; it paws her cheek, and she drops her head slightly as if for a kiss, then tilts the body to see what sex it is. Male. A twist of blond hair like a paintbrush.

  ‘Their eyesight isn’t up to much at this age,’ David says. ‘It’s probably wondering what you are. All it can see is a great big lump.’<
br />
  ‘How old is he?’ She stresses the he a little.

  ‘Six weeks.’

  ‘Isn’t that too young to be taken away from the mother?’

  David’s face goes hard and closed, the way it does when she tries to talk to him about his fossils, about what he sees in them. Soon after they met he told her, You’ll think it’s wrong, I know, but I can’t bear criticism of any kind. And she said: But why should I want to criticise? You’re perfect. She remembers this often and the one thing she can never remember is what she meant when she said You’re perfect.

  ‘Well? Do you want it or not?’

  She looks into the puppy’s eyes, moving him closer until the outline blurs, and they don’t change at all, they are turned towards hers, both deep and flat. It’s true, she thinks, he really can’t see me. He can’t see what a great big lump I really am.

  ‘Of course I do,’ she says.

  Helen has spent the last fortnight making curtains from the roll of Indian silk David brought home from the shop. It was his father’s shop before him, but David’s never really settled. He told her before they were married he’d dreamed of becoming a palaeontologist, not of working behind a counter, that no son of his would be trapped the way he’s been, not without seeing the world. That was when she agreed that children weren’t needed to make a marriage work. The silk was damaged in transit, he said, but Look how beautiful it is, and he rolled it out in front of her across the living room floor, the way he does with the customers along the counter. He’s right, of course, it is beautiful, a rippling mustard yellow shot with threads of red and royal blue. It should have been saris, he says, but the colours have muddied along one border, it must have been left to stand in filthy water at some point. So now she is making curtains for all the windows, cutting and sewing and lining them with beige cotton, also from the shop. All the windows except for the one in the small bedroom. She goes in there every day and lies down on the bed that should have been a cot, with a pillow on her stomach, staring at the bare glass. She never imagined he’d take her at her word.