The Best British Short Stories 2013

by Nicholas Royle

  As he pulls himself up from the chair, she turns and walks towards the door. She looks behind her and he shoos her on with his hand, like cattle. ‘Go on, away, away.’

  In the hallway, she hurries into the study, closing the door behind her, and crawls under the desk. She listens to his feet shuffle slowly along the parquet floor outside the room and then stop. ‘Katherine,’ he shouts, but she keeps quiet. The sound of his footfall recedes as he climbs the stairs and he calls out to her again.

  It’s quiet now under the desk and she breathes easier.

  Then she hears Charles cry out, and there are bangs and thumps down the stairs, over and over, getting louder and louder. She shoves her fingers in her ears and scrunches up her eyes, lowering her back until she’s in a small ball.

  She’s not sure how long she stays like this but it feels like hours. Slowly, she removes her fingers and it’s silent. The smells of wood and floor polish rise up. The telephone rings, echoing round the hallway, spreading throughout the house, calling to her, but she makes no move to answer it. In her mind, she sees the bathroom, her toothbrush in the glass by the mirror, the bedroom with her bed neatly made. Her breakfast cup and saucer are on the kitchen table, and the clock ticks on the wall above it. In the living room, a thin line of smoke is rising from the last of the cigarette as the phone continues to ring. And then it stops.

  My Wife the Hyena

  Nina Killham

  I am not a bad man. I work every weekday until six. I keep a tidy desk and leave it every night devoid of clutter. I have worked my way up to my own office with a window. It overlooks the parking lot where my four-door sedan awaits. Bought with my first and only merit raise.

  I am a family man. Of course. With three children whom I suspect I love. And a wife who has a steady part-time job which allows for the occasional trip to our caravan by the sea.

  I keep my office door open though no one ever thinks to visit. I don’t know why. Busy people with busy lives, I suppose. But every evening I look up from my papers and listen to my colleagues call to each other when they head out to the corner pub.

  During the yearly office party, my wife and I stand on the periphery, stiff drinks in hand, alone. My wife, I can feel her tense by my side. She is not like the other wives, who are younger, prettier and usually on the other side of the cavernous room. Because they avoid us, me and my wife. As if she is catching.

  Maybe I’m used to it. Her distinctive canine look, her ears twitching, her mouth emitting sharp yaps.

  We’re all used to it. Our children find it perfectly normal to be held by the scruff of the neck.

  Chloe doesn’t bat an eye when her mother barrels into her for refusing to do her homework. My wife clutches at her throat with her fangs until my daughter acquiesces. Chloe just brushes herself off, refuses to look her mother in the eye and bounds into the hall to fetch her book bag.

  It was unfortunate that my boss was once there to witness the struggle. The one time he agreed to come over for a drink. The man had been helping himself to hummus and pita but his bite remained unchewed in his mouth at the shock.

  What are you staring at? Emma – that’s my wife – growled as she padded past.

  The word must have gotten out because the next morning I saw their smiles, one part sympathy, three parts smirk.

  And yes, it’s uncomfortable. This is, after all, my office. The place I go to every day. I am in 8.30 sharp and listen as the others stumble in. I see their smiles flashed to each other as I walk past at noon on my way to buy a sandwich. The low Grrrr the head one emits.

  They don’t see her the way I do.

  They don’t know that alone in my office, I can’t stop thinking of her. Sitting at my desk I find myself dreaming about the way her large tongue hangs dripping when she lies on the bed in a pant. You see, she is everything I want in a wife. Can those men in the other offices say that?

  Every night she reads to the twins, letting the two children lean back against her flanks. Jessie likes to hold her tail and stroke it. Emma flicks it away when it gets too rough.

  In the meantime, I go to the bathroom to brush my teeth. I take one condom out of the pack and slide it under my pillow. And then watch her come to bed with anticipation.

  Most nights she trots in, noses shut the door and opens her large mouth wide in a protracted yawn. Her eyes are rimmed with black, her nose wet and glistening. I lie in bed, covers to my chin, and watch her. She jumps up and flops onto the bed and noses her privates, licking and picking. I try to turn my eyes away. But can’t get away from the sound of the slurping. I feel aroused.

  She always turns three times then flops down, groaning, with her nose on the pillow.

  Emma, I’ll whisper.

  No response. I’ll lift my head and look over. And she’ll be fast asleep.

  Sometimes I’ll put my hand on her shoulder and give it a little shake. The low growl is unmistakable. My hand jerks back. And I’ll watch as her mottled tongue swings itself over her nose again. She settles back into sleep. The sound of her deep breathing actually calms me. And we’ll both slumber deeply, sometimes with my hand on her flank, completely at peace.

  Some nights I get lucky.

  And today is my birthday.

  As I tidy my desk to go home, I think briefly of the usual cards I expect from the children – bought by their mother and scrawled indifferently with their names. I think of the hastily wrapped electrical gadget – invariably the wrong one – from my wife. And the tight, endless call from the great aunt who raised me.

  But mainly I think about my birthday treat.

  Which is why it’s so difficult today to concentrate on work. All day my thoughts have drifted home. I sit here and catch whiffs of her scent.

  Her cooking is never memorable. It is difficult to cook with four paws. And tonight will be no exception.

  After the store-bought cake is eaten, crumbs licked clean, the children will race away. I will gaze with lager-glazed eyes over the kitchen table to where my wife sits, furry ears pricked, her black liquid eyes bright. I will watch as she laughs, as she does most nights, at me, her spotted haunches shaking with mirth.

  Upstairs my children will squabble. But I will look around my kitchen, the kitchen I pay for by sitting in my office every day for the last 15 years, and see my wife’s footprints leading from the door, still muddy and wet. I will listen to her pad around the kitchen, nosing closed the dishwasher, her toenails clicking on the linoleum floor. I will follow her up the stairs.

  I will wait for her, naked, the sheets up to my chin. And I will think of my empty office and of my dismissive colleagues and of their difficult wives. I’ve caught glimpses of the tails dragging beneath their dresses. The spots their make-up fails to completely conceal.

  These colleagues know it’s my birthday. The secretary has pointedly passed along a card for them to sign. I look at their signatures, some big and bold, others small and severely slanted.

  Later when the hours draw to a close I can hear them talking, no doubt wondering if they should invite me, just this once. But the head one mumbles something that produces a loud guffaw. I hear them crowd into the elevator together and listen as the doors close.

  But it doesn’t matter. Really. I would have said no anyway.

  It is my birthday and my wife is planning something nice.

  I hurry home, leaving their card propped up on my desk.

  They act as if I don’t exist.

  But I do exist. I certainly do.

  I am not some joke to be mumbled with a rolled eye, fag in hand and a freshly drawn pint on the table.

  Because they know. They know. They’ve only got to hear their wives laugh, haven’t they?

  Budapest

  Charles Boyle

  In the kitchen, which is the room where they eat, an ancient peasant cat, no fancy breed, is lying aw
kwardly on a chair and panting, though the day is cold. No one is paying it attention. Beyond the window are clouds, fields, the kind of view people call uninterrupted.

  He is trespassing, he has no right to be here, and it feels like freedom.

  ‘The wood across the valley is the largest in the county,’ James announces from the other end of the table, as if he had planted every tree himself.

  ‘There are wolves,’ C says quietly, looking at him, teasing.

  ‘They bay to the moon,’ he says.

  ‘They do more than that.’

  ‘Is it OK?’ asks the woman called Marcia. ‘Should we get it some water or something?’

  She’s worrying about the cat, and he is wary of the drift. If anyone asks if he has animals of his own, he’ll say no. He has no affinity with dumb creatures. And yet just this week he has yielded to pressure – family pressure, normality pressure: he was cornered – and purchased a pair of rabbits for his pair of children. They squat, shivering with fear, or hunger. How is he to know? Their droppings are hard brown beads.

  The cat is ill. It is a fuse easily lit, after so much wine and loosening of voices. James, C’s husband, is intent on spending a large amount of money on an operation to prolong its life. Let it go, C says, as if pushing it to the side of her plate. Anything else is selfishness, not love. He wants to spend that money for himself, truth be told. Take the cat in and bring it back hurt, bewildered, pawing at its shaved and mangled body, or take it in unknowing and put it down. A good life come to term, and no suffering. That is mercy.

  He knows it is her marriage she is talking about. Everything here – the hand-painted plates on the dresser, the photographs, the scribbled lists and numbers of emergency plumbers – is a stage set, history, disposable. Excitement makes him tremble. He wants to turn to whoever is sitting next to him, which happens to be Marcia, and hug her. He knows that if anyone says even the weakest thing funny, he is danger of laughing too loud.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ C says, standing up. Lighter than skin, the folds of her dress cascade; he still has the ghost of it on his fingers from when they came in. She has, he’s noticed, a way of widening her eyes after speaking; she is not apologising at all. ‘Really, you shouldn’t be listening to this. Who wants more wine?’

  Marcia puts her hand over the rim of her glass, as if she’s about to perform a conjuring trick. But James does want, pushing his own glass across the table. It occurs to him that James has him down as gay. There were meant to be just four around the table, C and James and Marcia and his brother, Maurice, recently widowed, whom she’d wanted to put together with Marcia, but when she called and his brother had explained that he happened to be staying then of course, why not.

  Marcia is a counsellor, with devout opinions. Everything can be explained. Everyone else, to her, is like a pet, dependent. James is a retired lawyer, a former colleague of his brother’s; he is, or was, a brilliant mind, his brother has said. C is his fate. A few weeks from now – sooner, sooner – she will turn to him in bed and say: ‘James thought you were gay.’ He is sure of this.

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘He still does.’

  Across the street, Marcia is coming out of the village bookshop with Maurice. She turns away, but they have seen her. There is a pause, until the road is clear, and then they are surrounding her with their togetherness, thanking her for the lunch, fumbling with bags, showing her what they have bought in the bookshop. She is not surprised.

  Maurice has sprained his wrist. He parades his bandage. He was putting the lawnmower back in the shed; he slipped, he fell, he put out a hand to save himself, and now this. For all that he is a lawyer, it’s a wonder he didn’t electrocute himself too. Men are so helpless. He can’t even work a tin-opener. Marcia is cooking for him.

  ‘He did everything, for years and years,’ Marcia says. She means for Alice, Maurice’s wife, who is dead, who died of complications. She was alcoholic, everyone knows this.

  ‘And really, it’s bloody difficult,’ Marcia goes on. She is gleeful, victorious. ‘He’s so stubborn. He’s given so much he’s forgotten how to take. It’s the harder thing, of course, but just as important. We’re starting from scratch.’

  She has known Marcia for a decade, longer. She is happy for her. She hadn’t conceived that life could be so simple.

  ‘She’s a good teacher,’ says Maurice, a schoolboyish gleam in his eyes that takes her aback. He likes his food.

  The eyes, yes, and other small things too – the way he tilts his head to the left when he’s listening – though there is little obvious physical resemblance between the brothers, nothing you’d notice at first glance. She suspects that they get on but they are not close, these brothers. They see things in each other that they don’t like about themselves, they are happy to stay out of range. Brotherhood: the roles assumed, the competition, one pitching camp where the other leaves space unguarded.

  Maurice is still looking at her, awaiting a blessing.

  She is beginning to think like Marcia, to analyse, which is a form of helplessness. She looks over Maurice’s shoulder: the street, the weathered stone buildings, the shopkeepers who chat and ask questions and tot up little sums; and then the green hills, as still as on the picture postcards. The names on the village war memorial – Atkinson, Hancock, Smith, ­Weatherspoon – are a mantra that holds this place in its grip. She met Alice only twice, maybe three times. Once at a law society dinner. There had been a point at which she’d been completely beautiful. Her glance was withering. It was a long marriage; there are children somewhere, out in the world, Hong Kong, Australia. The weather is mild, changeable. At the weekend it will be hot. The traffic on this street gets worse every year. Marcia and Maurice head off towards the post office, her hand cupping his elbow.

  She has a flat in town – really it is her husband’s flat, James’s, there are law books in glass-fronted bookcases, but since he retired it’s almost never used. He wakes in her bed to the sound of shouting voices and the screech of tyres. A fight in the street, he thinks. Grey light, sometime around dawn. Naked, he walks through to the living room and finds her sitting cross-legged on the floor, watching a film on TV. He strokes her hair. Not moving her head, she pats the floor for him to sit beside her. Together they watch two women driving fast through small towns, on the run. She will watch to the end, even though the end is foretold by the music. After half an hour, with the heating still not come on, he sweeps the covering from the sofa and wraps it around them.

  Daily, the world reveals more of itself. Sometimes he feels like a tourist in his own city. He talks to strangers. He tells her about the man he met while walking through the park, a man like a gypsy with his hair twisted around the strap at the back of his baseball cap. The man said he was from the north of Sweden, the far north, and he was a poet – would he like to hear a poem? He said he would rather hear a joke. The man told him a long joke, it must have gone on for at least five minutes, entirely in Swedish or some remote dialect from beyond the Arctic Circle, and by the end the man was doubled up, laughing uncontrollably. She laughs too, not just with her face but her toes, her fingers, her belly.

  Or he is waiting at the barrier when the train comes in and does its meek slow stop and the doors open and the people file through, the busy ones checking their watches and the old women who have been travelling since the days of porters and the students with their crass but ergonomic backpacks, and he carries on waiting till the platform is bare as a seaside promenade in winter and she isn’t there. What she teaches her lovers, he thinks, and not for the first time, is patience.

  There are days when there’s white cloud all morning and mizzly rain in the afternoon and then at seven in the evening the sky clears to china blue and the sun shines undimmed as if it’s never put a foot wrong in its life.

  Not patience of the kind that’s deemed a virtue (it isn’t). There’ve been times when, heading
to her flat, they haven’t been able to wait even that long but have ducked into an alleyway and torn at each other’s clothing.

  He goes home. It would fit better if when he comes in his wife is peeling carrots but she isn’t, she’s just standing in the kitchen knowing there is a next thing to do but having lost track.

  ‘Did you get the . . . ?’ she asks.

  ‘The milk?’

  ‘The milk, yes. We’re out.’

  ‘I forgot,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry.’

  From his room at the top of the house where he now sleeps he can see the rabbit cage in the garden, and his younger child sitting cross-legged in front of it. No sign of the rabbits. They are in their hutch, their little room, sulking.

  He phones her. He doesn’t leave a message.

  On the way to the station, he decides, she came across a maimed owl, which needed putting back in one piece. Or just as she was about to leave a friend called her from Romania, or maybe Hungary – which country is Budapest the capital of? – in tears. She has a problem with timetables, with the 24-hour clock. She doesn’t wear a watch. Her appetite is limitless and like most people with appetite she is also generous. When he pulls on clothes and says he must go she kicks off the sheets and opens her legs, offering, asking to be kissed, lips to lips.

  His son is still there, in front of the rabbits’ cage, waiting for them to appear. All day, all night if need be. Where it comes from, this stubbornness, this dedication, he has no idea. He cannot recall when he has been more proud. If this is his son, he cannot be all that bad: this is a way, one of many he knows, of damning himself.

  The rabbits, he thinks, have been eaten by a fox – there are plenty around, probably more than where she is, in the countryside – but there is no litter of tufts of fur and bloody scraps. Or they have escaped, are returning to the wild, in which case they will not survive for long.