Best British Short Stories 2020

by Nicholas Royle

  Something else.

  A woman arrived. One of the beds on the opposite wall. She was beforehand – her procedure. She was beforehand. I was afterwards. It was night. The lights were dim. She blessed the nurse who accompanied her in. She wished her a good life. She seemed to go through some kind of ritual placement of objects. This seemed important, though I struggled to grasp what she was doing or why. I myself had done nothing like it. I had arrived and unzipped my boots and slipped off my clothes. I hadn’t blinked. I’d signed my form. I hadn’t blessed anyone. And then the anaesthetic. Six. Five. Four.

  She had arrived with bags. A lot of them. These bags were plastic. Blue. She clutched them in her fists like a wild array of blue balloons. I was flat on my back, but with my head slightly raised I saw. And I heard the rustling as she took things out of them.

  She had arrived with her husband – I assumed him to be. He stood and watched close by. I remember his head was – tilted to one side.

  She was rustling all the time. It made me smile.

  He watched and I watched as she set things out. Cloth – a length of cloth – on top of the side table. Small items – great care – on top of this. On the the … shelf, table, table-top over the bed – that swivelled over the bed – perhaps it was a basin. I don’t know. Perhaps there was a towel. The last thing she did though – she rolled out a rug. A small rug. Great care. And then she turned to the man, to her husband, asked for help. I think perhaps what she wanted was alignment – the the the the the side table, the edge of the rug, the bed …

  He raised both hands. He said something to her. Perhaps he said … you know, I can’t be sure. His voice was gentle, hard to hear. I can’t be sure what it was he said.

  When he’d gone – the man – and then when she’d gone – the woman – when she’d gone for the procedure, her procedure, a man in green appeared – snorted – a sound like laughter – said, You’re kidding me – cleared her things away. It took no time at all.

  Having seen the effort she had gone to, I found this troubling. I felt – great concern. I had … how can I describe it? I was becoming increasingly anxious that the woman might not return.

  I did not want to think of it. Watching her I’d forgotten where we were. But when they came for her she’d been upset. Nil by mouth. Weak and distressed.

  Now she was gone and all her blue bags.

  It was night time quiet. The lights were low. A storm was flickering in my cranium. I put one hand on top of my head to try to calm things down. Something was shifting, rising, teeming – something … microbial. My eyes were open or shut. Explosions of colour gave way to soft fur. A studio theatre with inky drapes felt familiar and benign but then it fell apart and was a vast and funnelling black hole.

  Later on she was crying. I couldn’t see her. It was dark. Later still I would wonder if she was even real – I couldn’t know. When I’d seen her, had my eyes been open or shut?

  Open, shut, I cried with her. Afterwards I slept.

  I would think of her again much later, but at the time I had things on my mind. For one, I could not seem to get up. My hands, my arms, my legs, moved fairly freely – yes. My head up off the pillow – just a bit, not for long. For the rest, it felt like I’d been stapled lengthways through the middle and the giant staple had attached me to the bed.

  The pain was tremendous.

  My toes remained oddly detached. Long afterwards they seemed to try to move for the rest of me.

  When a nurse showed me the mechanism that could tilt my bed, I pressed the button. My head was raised, my upper body too, the ward came more fully into view. It seemed stable.

  Don’t get me wrong. When I left, I left sleek and slender and upright – a new and improved version of myself full of screws and rods and other things besides. A vague concern I might be struck by lightning. But I had backbone. I was spineless no more.

  I could give you some associations of spinelessness – what it means to be without backbone at all. First up: a man attempting to crawl, flat out, face down in the dirt. This image perhaps comes from a film.

  The dressings came off. There were large staples too. These had held the wounds together. The doctor used pliers. It was hard not to notice how she flinched.

  The scars. The scars were livid. They ran in very straight lines beside the spine. There were rows of tiny legs where the staples had been. These tiny legs looked like they were running and running.

  I’d not processed, somehow, that afterwards – after the procedure – I’d not be able to move, ever again, the way I’d moved before. I had not understood that it would seem to affect every small articulation.

  I would envy the bodies of dancers, and gymnasts. It would seem not impossible, not far-fetched – another version, another me, who might have done just that … that bend, right there.

  In my shoes my toes moved with longing.

  Movement – it was so awkward. There was a way to get in and out of bed. No twisting. Roll. Roll to get up. Roll like a bug to get up.

  Interest in the words exoskeleton, endoskeleton.

  Imagine the tools – the tools they would use – the force it would take – to leave a person rigid – to leave a person full of rods and screws.

  I wanted a reversal. I had a dream where I banged and banged on the door and I begged, Take it out! There is no way back, they said. The whole thing would crumble. It’s part of you now.

  Time passed. Time passed. What had happened to my body was unspoken. Part of me.

  So.

  So time passed. It was much later. I met the translator. Everything she said was provisional. Subject to change. You might think it would be annoying – but I found that I liked it. I hadn’t expected this. If you’d asked me before I would have thought it preposterous for anyone to want to spend their time with someone who would seem never to get to the point. She would say things like, I think … What I mean to say … I have a notion …

  The first time I saw her – an event in a bookstore. The kind of thing where the event is happening but even so the store is open for people to browse the shelves. She was the event. A man asking questions. I’d stopped in after work to look for a book.

  It was the trailing off that caught my attention. I thought perhaps something was wrong with the microphone. I became aware of these – silences, in the conversation.

  When I met the translator, I’d not thought much about the procedure in years. I’d thought of it a lot, at the start. It was hard not to. Then time passed. The scars were no longer livid. Those running legs faded and faded and then they were gone. Perhaps it was now a small thing, a smaller thing. A big thing, but not as big a thing as it had been before.

  There was no pain now. I felt nothing.

  The way she spoke. The way even … if I could describe it. The way even she sat on her chair. Who would have thought that could be so …

  I sat at the back of the store to wait for the end. I spent half the time pretending to read but I was really in a panic staring at my hands.

  Adjustments, refinements, rearrangements. She clutched them in her fists like a wild array of balloons. Pauses in between as she took time to think. Nothing taken for granted. Nothing allowed – not for long – to be fixed.

  And I saw it. I saw this thing running through me. Running me through. Its grip.

  Sometimes she’ll look at me, and I’ll think … I think she looks at me with pity? And I think perhaps that I should tell her, about what happened to me. Though I’m not sure I’d be clear, that I’d know what to say, that it would make sense. Where would I start?

  She’s seen the scars on my back – but that’s not it, that’s not, that’s … that’s not what I’m talking about.

  DIANA POWELL

  WHALE WATCHING

  She was standing on the headland when the whale came into view. Dishrag white, a floating giant barnacle. The man was spread cross-like on its flank, caught in a cat’s cradle of harpoon hemp. There was no-one else to see it, on
ly her. She had started running as soon as it left the harbour; she knew the way. The creature turned towards her, watching her from its one pig-eye; the man looked, too. And then it turned again, facing the open sea.

  The man waved to her, as they disappeared into the mist, towards Ireland.

  ‘Goodbye,’ she said, waving back.

  When she told, toothless gums nah-nahed at her, hands came together and trapped her in a corner of the school-yard. Names boxed her ears.

  ‘Thicko!’

  ‘Fibber!’

  ‘Twpsin!’

  ‘Liar, liar …’

  And yes, next day, at the harbour, the whale was there again, and the waving man was walking about, talking to the crowd.

  ‘There!’ her teacher told her. ‘You mustn’t make things up! That’s what films are for!’

  ‘Miss’ spent her Saturdays at the Palace in the big town. ‘We must visit the set as often as we can,’ she told the school. ‘It will be an educational experience.’ She brought movie magazines into class, and showed them pictures of the stars. One day, she brought the book, which had the same name as the film. ‘It’s too old for all of you, but I shall read you some.’

  ‘Call me Ishmael,’ she began. It was enough.

  She told them how brave the whale-hunters were, how many useful things came from whales.

  They lived in Wales, didn’t they? The children scratched their heads.

  ‘Margarine. So much better than butter, so much easier for cooking! Oil. Potions for your mothers’ lotions and make-up. Where would we be without them?’

  They made models out of newspaper, water and flour. The boys put them in puddles and watched them sink.

  Whenever they visited Lower Town, where the filming took place, teacher’s legs grew longer and shinier. Her lips were red against pale, pillowed cheeks, beneath coils of hair, stacked like lobster-pots. She edged the children towards the stars, careless of the water, the lens of the camera. The director motioned them away, the teacher’s cheeks reddened, even through their whale-oil glaze. Yet they still went back the next day.

  Weeks later, after the film crew had gone, and the coast was quiet once more, she climbed to the headland again. Far below, pieces of rotting carcass were washed along the shore, caught amongst the jagged outcrops, floating in the rock pools, along with a pink hair-slide. Later still, she saw a group of seals playing with scraps of white flesh, passing them from nose to nose, smiling.

  And there was blood, she was certain there was blood … spreading strands like dulse seaweed – on the seals, on the rocks. How could there be blood if it wasn’t real?

  She knew what she had seen, and if she had seen it, it must be true.

  Soon, the people of the town forgot, going back to their fishing and farming, waiting for holiday-makers who never came. In time, another film came along, with new actors. Brighter stars in even bigger cars, who stayed longer; who were Welsh, like them, and drank in the pub, rather than the big hotel; drank in the pub again and again. Other things were different, too. Cameras taking photos of cameras, televisions in every house, some of them in colour. (Marriage.) Phones in every house, to make gossiping easier; cars in every drive, making the world smaller. (Children.) Soon the old film was forgotten. Only she remembered. Remembering, as she dredged nappies through bleach-water, her hands as wizened as the whale. As her husband snored beside her. As she wrote her name in the dust on the shelf, where the book lay. She had bought it she didn’t know when … or perhaps when the librarian told her one too many times, ‘You’ve borrowed this before!’

  A heavy book, as heavy as the creature, full of weighty words that she couldn’t understand, meanings she could never fathom. The Whale meant something. The Hunt meant something. But what? And the teacher had lied when she said it began with ‘Call me Ishmael’. Page after page must be got through before that, lines, paragraphs speaking of Leviathans, and Spermacetti, and Rights and Orks. How they killed, or were killed. Of their bones and teeth decorating the land.

  There was no Great White, the white came later, in the story proper. She drew the book out, from where it stood, amongst thinner, lighter tales of nurses and doctors in love, or Cowboys fighting Indians. She wanted to read it, but the alien words floundered in her head, ‘hypos/Manhattoes/circumambulate’ flailing against the children’s crying and squabbling, and her husband’s complaining. She put it back in its place.

  And soon it didn’t matter that she couldn’t read it. The film came back to her, in a little plastic box she must post beneath the television. She could watch it again and again, while the family yakked and pulled and grew around her. All she had to do was press a button, and rewind.

  When the famous actor died, the local paper printed his picture, writing about his visit to their little town. Scrunching her eyes over her glasses, the points of her scissors laboured around the article, with her thickened knuckles, her stiff thumb. She put the piece in her special box, with all her other cuttings, yellowed by the years.

  ‘I met him,’ she told anyone who would listen. ‘He put his hand on my head, tangling my hair.’ She was afraid for her new pink slide. Her mother had rowed with her for losing the old one on the cliffs. The day she had seen the whale.

  ‘Call me Ahab,’ he said, his voice dragging his words, low. There was something wrong about that … If he was Ahab, there would be only one long black pleated leg facing her. There would be a white line cloven down his face. He wouldn’t smile, which he did, before moving back through the crowd.

  Later, he appeared on the step of the trailer, his cheek forked like lightning. His wooden leg caught between the treads. She was glad. It made sense again.

  ‘The whale bit it off at the knee,’ someone in the crowd whispered. ‘It’s not wood,’ another voice added. ‘It’s the bone of a whale.’

  ‘It’s not bone … it’s …’

  Whatever it was, he was as he should be … if he was Ahab. Until he smiled at her again.

  Her teacher shot slit-eyes at her and pulled her away.

  ‘I know, now, that it was jealousy. I didn’t understand then.’ Perhaps she should have left her story there. But no, the words spilled out of her mouth, bubbling up, as she told how she had seen the whale, far out to sea, with the actor strapped to its side.

  There was no name-calling any more, but faces turned away, hands lifted to stop sniggering breath. People in the market, her children. Not her husband; he, too, was dead by then.

  ‘You’re muddling what you think you saw with the ending of the film,’ Mari, her daughter, told her.

  How did she know? She hadn’t been born then; she herself was only a child, a small child. Had she ever seen the film? ‘Only a million times, when we were growing up!’

  ‘Look!’ she said to no-one in particular: Mari, who had already walked away, her dead husband, an empty room, showing them another photo from her box, one she had cut from a film magazine, when her fingers moved more easily. ‘There! That’s me!’

  And it was, a girl, of about five, with her fringe pulled back by a slide; pink, it would be, if there was colour. A girl with a Peter Pan collar, and Mary Jane shoes. A pleated skirt, with a pin in it. She was standing at the front of the crowd, on the edge of the quay. That was the first day of filming, before the visits with school.

  Her fisherman grandfather had gone there early, hearing they may want him – or his boat – and he had taken her. So she was there, at the very beginning, when the big, shiny cars arrived, when the ship with its three tall masts pulled into the harbour, when the hammering, shouting, dragging, lifting started, to make towers of wood for the cameras, to hide fronts of houses, to make new ones, which were old.

  ‘See,’ her grandfather said. ‘Those ships are just the kind that would have berthed here last century. See, that car … you’ll never see a tidier one round here.’ Time chopped and churned with the tide, in front of her eyes.

  ‘I went every day after that. Early, before school. Late, after.
And then there were our visits with the teacher. That’s how I’m in the photo. I was there so much, always near the front.’

  That’s how she was so quick to spot the whale heading out to sea. Why she was the first to run. Why only she saw it.

  Time was like that now, rewinding, fast-forwarding like her video tapes. Soon, there were grandchildren to tell, to show the yellow pages. When they were small, they nodded and smiled, and said, ‘Yes, how wonderful, Nain.’ She hugged them and their words close. She put them in a different box. But they grew, too.

  ‘Tell us about Taid, Nain,’ they would say. ‘Shall we look at some photos of him?’ Perhaps there were some, somewhere, but she didn’t know where, and her film box was always at hand.

  One of them, his name just beyond reach, took the faded picture from her, looked at it near his eyes.

  ‘This isn’t here, Nain. It’s in Ireland. See the signs in the street behind? And our harbour has the cliff rising above it. That can’t be you.’