Best Eaten Cold and Other Stories

by Martin Edwards

  He pelts up the hill and cuts right into Rodney Street, then dodges left into the Scotch Churchyard, and ducks behind one of the gravestones, hugging the bag close to his chest. He can’t stop shaking. The gardens of the convent back onto the graveyard; he’ll catch his sister in the grounds during break. He checks his watch – playtime won’t be for another hour-and-a-half. He sits down behind McKenzie’s pyramid to wait.

  He would have gone – in fact, he was already on his way. If the bus hadn’t been diverted. If the driver hadn’t turned down Shaw Street. If the new route hadn’t taken them through Everton. If he’d looked out of the window to his left, rather than his right.

  If, if, if… He would have stayed on the bus and been picked up in Manchester and made his ignominious way home. But in Everton, Orange Lodge and Catholic sectarianism was as strong as on any street in Belfast. A long stretch of grey wall ran beneath the new high-rise blocks on Netherfield Road. If he had turned away, just for a second, bored by the monotony of grey concrete and dusty pavements… But something had caught his eye; he glanced right and had seen the insult, daubed in orange paint on a grey wall – ill-spelt, angry, hateful: ‘THE POPE IS A BASTERD’.

  He recoiled like he’d been spat at. All morning, a rage had smouldered, built from the tinder of grief and loss, fuelled by the shock of finding the device gone and, yes, by the mortification he had suffered in telling his commander. Now it sparked and flared, and he blazed with righteous fire.

  He lurched from his seat to the front. ‘Stop the bus,’ he said.

  The driver didn’t even take his eyes off the road. ‘It’s not a request service, Paddy, lad.’

  ‘Oh, good – ‘cos this is not a request.’

  The driver swivelled his head to look at him. ‘And who d’you think you are?’

  The man took hold of the driver’s seatback and leaned in, allowing his leather jacket to fall open just enough to show the revolver tucked in his belt. ‘I’m the Angel of Death, son.’

  It’s four minutes to three as he heads south west down Birkenhead Road on the other side of the Mersey. He’d crossed the great wide dock of East Float and crossed it again, tracking over every one of the Four Bridges, lost. Forty-five minutes later, he’d fetched up at the Seacombe Ferry terminal, with just a handrail between him and the muddy waters of the Mersey. He could happily have thrown himself in, had a kindly ferryman not asked him if he was off to the parade, and given him clear directions to Wheatland Lane, where he might stand on the bridge and wave to the Queen. He barrels along, the little car’s engine screaming, past a stretch of blasted landscape. His heart is beating like an Orange Man’s Lambeg. It’s two minutes before the hour. She’ll give her speech on the Liverpool side, then motor through to Wallasey; giving him time to find a spot. He will deliver the message for Father O’Brien. He almost misses the sharp turn westward and wrestles the wheel right. The gun slides in his lap, and he catches it, tucking it firmly in his waistband.

  He’s driving full into the afternoon sun, now; it scorches his face, burning through the windscreen, and he yanks the visor down. A sheet of paper flutters onto the dashboard. His foot hard on the pedal, he picks it up, squints at it as he powers towards the bridge.

  It’s a note, written on lined paper, in a child’s neat handwriting:

  Dear Mister,

  I came to see you at the hotel but you weren’t there. I wanted to say to your face that I am truly sorry I stole Father O’Brien’s present. My sister says it’s a Mortal Sin to steal from a Priest. I waited for ages, but the manager told me to push off, and he would of got me arrested if I didn’t so I couldn’t stay. My sister said it would be O.K. if I wrote you a message instead. So I hope you will forgive me and ask Father to forgive me as well. I never opened it or nothing, so I hope it will be O.K. and that you will forgive me.

  Sorry.

  PS – I put it back esac exacly like I found it.

  His eyes widen. He hits the brakes. The car skids, turning ninety degrees, sliding sideways along the empty road. He reaches for the door, but his fingers seem too big, too clumsy to work the handle, he can’t seem to get a grip of the lever. He can’t seem to–

  The thin, electronic beep of the electronic clock in the bag under his seat sounds a fraction of a second before the flash. Then the windows shatter and the grey bodywork blows apart like a tin can on a bonfire.

  Stuart Pawson

  * * *

  Best Eaten Cold

  * * *

  If Jessica Fullerton was the Queen of Short Story Writers, Artemesia Jones was the Two of Clubs. Which was strange, because in many ways their lives had run on parallel tracks. Both came from genteel, middle-class backgrounds: Jessica’s father was a sea captain on the Hull-Rotterdam run, who sent her presents from far-off places, filling her head with fantasies about Arabian white-slave traders, Japanese concubines and stolen kisses on storm-washed decks. Artemesia’s was a pharmacist with a love of opera whose ambition was that his daughter would become an accomplished musician, despite the fact that she had a voice like a foghorn and the coordination of a new-born gnu.

  Both girls were unhappy as children and learned to live in their own private worlds. Both went to finishing school – Jessica to Chamonix in Switzerland, Artemesia to Igls in Austria – and, appropriately, lost their virginity there. Jessica courtesy of a visiting lecturer in his hotel room; Artemesia to the boy who delivered the bread every morning, who said he was a ski instructor in winter. Both found the experience disappointingly unpleasant.

  Jessica married at twenty-one and was widowed twenty-six childless years later. Artemesia was a year older when she wed a boy she met at Midnight Mass one Christmas, but they were divorced within two years on the grounds of incompatibility. Both women started writing shortly after marriage, searching for romance between the pages as a substitute for that lacking between the sheets, but here their respective lives diverged sharply. Jessica’s first attempt at publication was met with a rejection but editorial encouragement, and her second attempt found its way into the pages of Woman’s Own. It was the start of a rewarding career in financial terms, if not totally satisfying emotionally, but she was content with that. The stories came off her typewriter, and later her word processor, like labels for tins of beans moving round a conveyor belt. She employed an agent and a secretary, and moved to the Isle of Man to escape the clutches of the Inland Revenue.

  Artemesia had one hundred and eight rejection notices before a small piece she wrote about corn dollies was printed in the Dalesman. This re-fired her enthusiasm, gave her a track record with which to woo editors, and another twenty rejections later she was rewarded by having a story about a lighthouse keeper’s daughter who falls in love with a one-legged lobster-potter published in My Weekly. In the years since then she’d had sporadic success: not enough to earn her any fame or money; just enough to keep the fires of ambition smouldering and for her to put the magic word ‘writer’ on any document that asked for her occupation. Fortunately her father had left her well provided for, so she was able to maintain the literary lifestyle: the home in Ilkley (Cliffhanger Cottage); two pedigree Persian cats (Charlotte and Emily, although one of them was a neutered male) and attendance at writers’ conferences, symposia and master classes at short intervals throughout the year.

  Artemesia Jones knew all about Jessica Fullerton. She had never spoken directly to her in private but had attended numerous functions where Jessica had been a guest of honour, and once even had the temerity to ask a question after a talk on how to defeat writers’ block. The answer was etched forever in Artemesia’s brain: ‘If you love to write, that is all you need. We owe it to our readers to each tap into our private muse and share the results with them.’ She was familiar with Jessica’s work, too. It was hard to avoid it. Her short stories were regular features on Radio 4 and every woman’s magazine in publication. ‘Jessica’s latest’ across the front cover of a certain style of magazine guaranteed a boost in sales. Every six months a
new anthology of her work came out and she was a regular contributor to other collections. The bulk of her output was sentimental, predictable, adjective-laden tripe, but it sold like bagels in city coffee shops. Queen of the Short Story Writers was a title that rested easily on her ample shoulders.

  So, at a quarter to four one rainy Monday afternoon shortly after the turn of the millennium, Artemesia found herself tuning in to Radio 4 to hear the first of a much-trailed short season of Jessica Fullerton stories, in celebration of the author’s seventieth birthday.

  It was an allegorical tale about a man who lives in a hut in the woods who attempts to tame a grey squirrel he finds with a broken leg. He nurses the animal back to health, feeds it and protects it, only for it to flee to freedom as soon as it is able. The man is upset, but eventually realises that he is like the squirrel, rejecting all those who have tried to help him.

  Artemesia listened with mounting fury. It was her story. Four years earlier – she couldn’t be sure of the date, but about then – she’d written something almost identical. It was a hedgehog, not a squirrel, that her man nursed back to health, and he realised it was his prickliness with people that isolated him, not his desire to be a free spirit, but the essence was the same. She switched off the radio, wandered around like a zombie from room to room, wondering what to do, and eventually made herself a strong pot of Earl Grey tea.

  Two weeks later Artemesia was a delegate at the Short Story Writers’ Association annual symposium, in Harrogate, and the anger had hardly subsided. Mixing and chatting with fellow authors, she’d decided, and casually relating the tale of the ‘fantastically coincidental’ similar story, was the ideal way to erode Jessica Fullerton’s reputation.

  ‘Of course,’ she would tell anyone who was listening, ‘I don’t think for a second that anything untoward has taken place, and dear Jessica’s story was much better than mine, but it does make one think, doesn’t it?’

  And think they did. There’s no copyright on a good plot, but it was reprehensible for a writer to deliberately steal another’s idea. Re-working an old story by someone long dead was acceptable – just – but when they were still alive and kicking… It wasn’t done. It was after the Saturday evening dinner that Raoul Pawinski, resplendent in dinner suit with over-wide lapels, his moustache freshly razored to a thin line on his upper lip, approached Artemesia and, with the slightest trace of a bow, asked if he might have a word with her.

  Pawinski was the son of a pilot who fought with the Free Polish Air Force in the Second World War. He was born in England, his mother a Land Army Girl who worked near the airfield where Pawinski Senior was stationed, but had inherited his father’s clipped accent along with his Y chromosome. Actually, his normal speech marked him as a son of Lancashire, but he’d long ago found that a foreign accent was attractive to ladies, and gave him an opening to explain his exotic, much embellished, origins.

  ‘Mrs Jones,’ he said, ‘I wonder if I could possibly tear you away from your friends and have a quiet word with you. Perhaps we could have coffee…?’

  Artemesia, who had no friends, felt something inside her turn over. She’d been trying to decide whether to sit alone on one of the big easy chairs in the lounge, hoping that someone interesting would join her, or tag on to the usual group of misfits she always found herself with. Pawinski’s approach changed all that. He was dashing and handsome, in a theatrical sort of way. She’d seen him at many similar functions but never spoken to him. It was common knowledge that he’d been married three times, and gossip said that he’d been a test pilot and one of the first men to break the sound barrier, but otherwise he was something of a mystery. He evidently earned a living from writing, but not in his real name. Once, in a story called Clouds of Passion, she’d modelled the hero on him.

  ‘Why, Mr Pawinski,’ Artemesia said, turning on a smile like one of the searchlights his father used to dodge, ‘that would be delightful. Shall we repair to the lounge, where it’s more comfortable?’ Had his heels really clicked when he gave her that hint of a bow, she wondered?

  Pawinski steered her on to one of the big leather settees and sat next to her, closer than she’d expected. He’d overdone the aftershave, she observed.

  ‘First of all, Mrs Jones,’ he said, ‘I’d like to compliment you on that dress you are wearing. The colours are so subtle, and they go so well with your jewellery. Elegant and understated, just like the lady herself, eh?’ He smiled and his pencil-line moustache curled up at the ends.

  ‘Oh, please, call me Artemesia,’ she gushed. ‘You’re so kind.’ She fingered her necklace and wondered what had happened to the three Mrs Pawinskis.

  ‘And you must call me Raoul,’ he told her.

  To rhyme with growl, she thought.

  He ordered coffee and turned his attention back to Artemesia. ‘I’m very interested in what you were saying, earlier, about Jessica Fullerton,’ he confided. ‘Something very similar happened to me.’

  Artemesia swung her knees towards him and leaned forward. ‘With Jessica?’ she asked, unable to conceal her excitement.

  ‘Yes, with Miss Fullerton.’

  ‘Tell me about it. Please.’

  ‘There’s not much to tell. Two years ago I wrote a story about a paramedic who falls in love with an actress he helps after she crashes her sports car, and a year later I found something remarkably similar in one of the dear lady’s collections. Mine was called “Love in the Fast Lane”, hers “Hard Shoulder”. Like you, I put it down to coincidence, but what you have said has made me wonder.’

  ‘It’s always been a mystery to me where she gets her ideas from,’ Artemesia said. ‘They’re always so varied, and she comes up with them like… like…’ a suitable simile failed to produce itself, but Pawinski came to the rescue:

  ‘Stealing them would explain a lot,’ he said.

  ‘It would,’ she agreed. ‘Was your story published?’

  ‘Regrettably, no.’

  ‘But you submitted it?’

  ‘Oh yes, it did the rounds.’

  ‘Where exactly?’

  Pawinski reeled off the names of all the major women’s magazines and Artemesia was dismayed to hear that his target publications were much loftier than her modest ambitions. The fact that he’d been rejected by them all mollified the disappointment.

  ‘Anywhere else?’ she asked.

  ‘None that I remember.’

  ‘Positive?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  The coffee arrived and Pawinski insisted on pouring it and adding her cream and sugar, which she would much have preferred to do herself. He did that ridiculous thing with a spoon and the cream, so it floated on the surface.

  Artemesia was about to make her point by stirring in the cream and adding more sugar, although she didn’t want more, when Pawinski said: ‘There was one other place to which I submitted the manuscript.’

  ‘Yes?’ Artemesia encouraged, lowering the spoon.

  ‘I entered it in the Allerton Bywater festival short story competition.’

  She nearly knocked her cup over with excitement. ‘The Allerton Bywater festival!’ she echoed.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s where I sent my story. That’s how she’s doing it. She knows the organiser and he’s letting her look at all the entries. She steals the ideas. It’s a big prize so must get hundreds – thousands – of entries. God, no wonder we all thought she had such a fertile imagination.’

  ‘The rules state that your manuscript will not be returned,’ Pawinski said. ‘So when it’s all over she simply collects all the non-winning entries and looks through them at her leisure. She takes the idea and writes it up in her own style, improving on the original. Not a difficult thing for someone like her.’

  ‘Well I never! What are we going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘We can’t let her get away with it.’

  ‘That’s true, but we have no proof.’

  Some other people came t
o join them, curtailing the discussion, so they made vague noises about talking later and turned to welcome the newcomers.

  They had an interesting conversation about agents and publishers, with Artemesia hanging on to every word that the others uttered. She’d never had two works published by the same people, so all the talk about editorial interference, royalties and deadlines was a mystery to her. She listened with a mixture of admiration and envy, pleased to be included in the conversation. At ten o’clock Pawinski excused himself and got drunk, leaning on the bar, and at ten thirty Artemesia left the group to go to bed. As she moved away from them two more delegates that she vaguely knew detached themselves from a knot of people standing near the bar and approached her.

  ‘Artemesia,’ the man said. ‘Could we have a word, please?’

  He was called Hillary Stubbs although he removed an l from his name for the medical romances that he wrote. Artemesia had always assumed that he was a retired doctor, but his only medical training was a certificate in first aid earned many years earlier when he worked for his local council. Two nervous breakdowns caused by the stress of examinations as a young man had destined him to a life of low-paid jobs. Writing had given him a new lease on life. For some, it really is cathartic.

  ‘Why certainly,’ Artemesia replied, gazing into his face. He was the cleanest, most well-scrubbed man she’d ever seen, and she wondered if he applied talcum powder to his cheeks.

  ‘Do you know Sonia Cribbage?’ he asked, indicating the small plump woman who had accompanied him as they’d pounced on Artemesia.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ she replied, extending a hand, although they had never actually spoken before now.

  Half an hour later Artemesia resumed her journey up to bed, but her emotions were now a maelstrom of competing feelings. Indignation and anger whirled around inside her, jostling with moral outrage and a strange feeling of justification. She was going to enjoy destroying Jessica Fullerton, whatever way she chose to do it.