Six Shorts - The finalists for the 2013 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award

by Haddon, Mark

  His own bitch was by his feet, with her distant, composed look against the other dogs.

  I want to put her in next. He indicated. Better be a dog goes in first. He was thinking of the big tracks and the possibility of the big boar. A bigger dog would have more chance up front. They knew if you put a bitch down after a bitch, or a dog down after a dog, there were problems most times; but if you changed the sex the other usually came out with no trouble.

  The boy’s father nodded agreement. He was checking the locator, checking the box with the handset.

  The boy was thirsty and looking at the water, not wanting to open the other tub in front of the man.

  Take him round and block up the other holes. I’ll do the other side.

  The gypsy brought out the map he’d drawn of the holes and went over it with the boy’s father. The gypsy asked the boy if he understood and the redness came to his throat under the zipped-up coat collar; but he was feeling the rich beginning of adrenalin now. He was dry and thirsty and had a big sick hole of adolescent hunger but he could feel his nerves warming at the new thing and began to feel a comradeship of usefulness to the man.

  They unwound the sheets of thick plastic and went off and systematically blocked the holes with stones and sheets of plastic and laid blocks across the obvious runs with heavy timber and then went back to the dogs. Then they went up the slope with the two first dogs and gathered around the main entrance and stood the tools up in the ground.

  There was old bedding around the hole, the strange skeletal bracken starting to articulate its colour in the grey light. Jip started to bounce on the lead and strain for the hole as if he could sense the badgers. The strewn bracken might have meant the badgers had gone overnight, but from the way the dog was behaving there was a fresh, present scent.

  The boy looked at the dog straining on the lead and could feel the same feeling in his guts. He felt the feeling he did before the first rats raced out and the dogs went into them.

  The boy’s father knelt with the excited dog and checked the box and collar over again and Jip let his enthusiasm solidify into a determined, pointed thing and stood stockily facing the hole, a determined tremble going through him.

  The boy’s father studied the locator once more and checked the signal, then they sent the dog in.

  The boy was not expecting the delay of listening for the dog. He could feel his stomach roll though. He could feel a slow soupy excitement. This was a new thing. Then deep in the earth the dog yelped. Then again; and his father was instantly by the hole, prone, calling to the dog, calling with strange excitement into the tunnel.

  Stay at him, boy. Good Jip. Good Jippo.

  The boy glanced at the man as his father called this out, as if it had revealed what he was thinking about the way the man looked. But the big gypsy seemed to be rapt, a pasty violence setting in his eyes as he listened and watched Messie, his bitch, solidify, focus. Finally, the dog let out a low whimper of desire.

  You could hear the barks moving through the ground now and they came alternately sharp and muffled until they seemed to regulate and come with a faraway percussive sound.

  The big man moved across the slope. He seemed to swirl in some eddy, then came to a halt, as if caught up on something.

  The big man moved again, listening, and the boy’s father tracked across with the locator until the two men stood in the same place, confirming the big man’s judgement.

  Here, he said. They brought up the tools and they started to dig.

  It was very early spring and the bluebells were not out but made a thick carpet that looked newly washed and slick after the rain. They cut through this carpet and cleared the mess of thin sycamore from the place and the big gypsy cut a switch and bent it into a sack mouth and laid the sack down by where they would dig.

  The ground was sodden with rain and sticky and they worked with the sharp foldaway spades, cutting through the thread roots. The smell of rotted leaves and dug-up soil strengthened. When they came to a thicker root, they let the boy in with the saw. Then they started to dig for real.

  The big man swung the pick and the father and boy shovelled. Within minutes the boy was parched with thirst and hunger and could not shout properly when they called constantly to the dog below. He was dizzy with effort. He was afraid of not being able to keep up with the men. As the hole deepened they shored up the sides of the hole with the plastic sheeting and the work steadied to a persistent rhythm.

  The badger was going nowhere and it was not about speed but persistence now.

  After two hours they stopped for a drink and ate some of the paste sandwiches. The big man ate nothing. The dry soil on the boy’s hands was tide-marked with water from the blisters that had torn and were flaps of skin now and there was a type of dull shock in his back. He had been expecting more action, not this relentless work, and he didn’t understand it.

  The dog had been down for two hours and had continually been barking and yelping and keeping just out of the badger’s reach for that time.

  Every so often, the boar rushed the dog and the dog retreated and the badger turned and fled; and Jip went after him through the tunnels and junctions until they reached the stop end.

  Then the badger turned and ran at the dog again. It was nearly two and a half times the weight of the terrier and armed with fearsome claws and a bite that would crack the dog if he landed it properly. But the dog was quick and in his own way very dangerous. Jip kept barking. Yelping. The badger faced him down and every now and then turned to try and dig himself into the stop end. But then Jip moved in and bit his hindquarters, and the big

  boar swung round again in defence.

  In the confined tunnel of the sett, the constant yelps were deafening and confusing like bright lights in the brain of the badger and it was unsure what it could do. It was then a stand-off. A matter of time.

  They sent the bitch in and Jip came up. He looked like he was grinning. His mouth was open and flecked with spit. The dog was exhausted and thirsty but gleamed with the event somehow and when they took off the box and collar, steam came into the morning air off his body. The boy was confused that they ignored the thick obvious blood that came out of the Patterdale and spread down its throat.

  The boy kept looking nervously at the exhausted bleeding stubborn dog. The fresh blood seemed a synthetic colour against the dun-green slope.

  Messie’s good, said the big man. She’ll hold him for the rest.

  The boy sat and held his blistered hands against the cold metal of the foldaway spade. He had gloves but he did not feel he could wear them. Steam rolled off from the plastic-flask cup of tea and it came off the body of the injured dog. Steam came too off the lifted soil, but no birds came as they might to a garden, as if they knew some dark purpose was at work.

  The man’s bag hung on the tree and the head of the mink protruded. The boy looked at it. The mouth was drawn and the precise teeth showed. He thought of one of his earliest memories, of his father holding a ferret and sewing its lips together so it couldn’t gash the rabbits it was sent down to chase. The mink had the same vicious preciseness as the ferrets.

  Get your dog on it, the man said. The boy immediately felt the redness at being talked to by the big man.

  He nodded.

  She on rats?

  The boy nodded again. He had a panicky lump in his throat.

  Good rat dog should take mink. Start them early.

  The boy felt the swell of pride come up and mix strangely with his nervousness at the man.

  Nice dog, commented the man.

  They’d gone through finally into the roof of the tunnel and it looked now like a broken waste pipe and it was mid-morning when they lifted the terrier out. There was still an unnerving composure to her, a kind of distant, complete look.

  The boy did not understand the passivity of the badger and that it did not try to bolt or to struggle. He had to develop an idea of hatred for the badger without the help of adrenalin and without the exci
tement of pace and in the end it was the reluctance and non-engagement of the animal which drew up a disrespect in him. He built his dislike of the badger on this disgust. It was a bullying. It was a tension, not an excitement, and he began to feel a delicious private heartbeat coming. He believed by this point that the badger deserved it.

  The big man was in the hole alone now, his shape filling it. The boy’s head pumped hotly from the work and finally his nerves sped.

  Have a spike ready, his father said.

  Then the badger came out. It shuffled, brow down as if it didn’t want to be noticed. It sensed them and looked up and the boy looked for a moment into its black eyes, its snout circling. The boy was expecting it to have come out snarling and fighting with rage, but it edged out.

  It had been trapped in three or four foot of pipe for hours and it edged out until it was by the opening and the big gypsy took it.

  He got it round the neck with the tongs and it struggled and grunted and then the man swung it up and into the sack with this great output of strength. Then it kicked and squealed and you could see the true weight and strength of it and the boy didn’t understand why it hadn’t fought at first, at the beginning.

  The badger scuffed and tried to dig and the big man punched the sack and the badger went still. At this, the boy felt a comradeship with the man again and a sense of victory, holding the iron spike there in readiness, as if he was on hand.

  We’ll hang him while we fill things in, said the big gypsy, stop him trying to dig.

  They filled in the hole. Threw in the old roots and stones they’d dug out and finally put back down the sods of bluebells. The place was slick with mud and trodden down and the ground of the area looked like the coat of a sick dog.

  The big gypsy looked at the sack hanging from the tree, at the sack-like weight of it.

  It was the second time he’d dug a badger for the gang. That first time, Messie had been just a pup. He thought of the money. It was worth the risk. He made a point now and then of taking in a badger he found genuinely hit on the road to the Veterinary Investigation Centre and he carried the receipt slips in the van to produce if he was stopped. But that worked only for dead badgers, or to explain the hairs they might find. He had to move the live badger and it wouldn’t matter what else was in the van if they stopped him.

  The big man reached into his bag and took out the mink and threw it to the boy. Its damp weight and the limp, sumptuous ropiness of the animal surprised him as he caught it. The mouth was drawn and he could see the precise teeth.

  You can keep him, the big man said. They’re vermin here. It was like a payment for things.

  The boy felt a glow of pride and the sudden warm teamship with the man that was alien to him and which he had difficulty with. His father looked at him with a strange grin and the redness came to him then.

  He lifted the mink’s lips to see the needle teeth. They were like sewing needles.

  He looked at the needle teeth and felt the fur of the rope-like body. The electricity was gone out of it.

  Give him a shake tonight. The big man nodded at the pup. Good rat dog be good on mink.

  The boy’s father was panting and looked brightened. The boy could see the sweat on his father’s head through the very short hair. The adrenalin was coming in the boy now and he looked at his pup and swelled with pride. He felt a warm cruelty, standing there on the beach of soil.

  I’ll start her tonight, he said to himself.

  Cynan Jones was born in Wales in 1975. His first novel, The Long Dry (2006), won a Betty Trask Award (2007) and led to Jones’s nomination as the Hay Festival Scitture Giovani in 2008. The Long Dry has since been translated into Italian, Arabic and French. His work has appeared in New Welsh Review and a number of anthologies. His novel Everything I Found on the Beach was published in 2011. His most recent work, Bird, Blood, Snow, was commissioned by Seren Books as part of a series that reinvents traditional Welsh tales. In addition to writing, Jones has worked as a teacher, copywriter and wine presenter, sporadically on farms and building sites and also as a tutor in a Pupil Referral Unit. He currently looks after the wine in Hand Picked, a flower and wine shop in Aberaeron. He likes to cook and to drink and to walk and preferably to combine the three.

  Call It ‘The Bug’ Because I Have No Time to Think of a Better Title

  by Toby Litt

  If my mother weren’t dying of ovarian cancer, and I hadn’t come home to be around my father, I might have written a story something like part of the following (Choose Your Own Adventure, please): A young woman, Ela, travels by great glass elevator to one of the geostationary spaceports encircling the toxic Earth. Ela has made contact through some minimal, slangy future form of the internet (retina-based) with Clar, an old woman. Clar’s implant – which I was thinking of calling an ‘imp’ or an ‘iBug’ but am now simply and exhaustedly going to call a ‘bug’ – Clar’s bug is still fully-functioning. For years, Clar’s bug has protected her (a read-out here, an alarm there) from ninety-five percent of humanly-occurring infections, viruses, cancers (that flesh is heir to) (our species-wish to disinherit ourselves). Clar’s bug, note, was an early-ish model, and she could never afford (after the divorce) (basketball player) to upgrade – newer models, assuming we are in 2055, cover ninety-nine point eight percent of humanly-occurring viruses, etc; and the mean average human lifespan can no longer be calculated because, at the top end of the economic scale (Berlin or Mumbai or Yerevan), so few people are dying. It is (the mean average) probably somewhere between two-hundred-and-twenty and two-hundred-and-fifty years. Deaths do still happen – the longer people spend alive together, the more annoying they become one another. There are therefore murders, suicides, domestic accidents, overdoses. But Clar herself is dying in her poor woman’s cell of an untreated because undetected – by her bug – because hyper-rare, degenerative disease. It affects the ability to swallow; it causes constant involuntary tears; it coats the body in lesions. Clar is dying slowly, gently – and Clar, because of who she is, and because that person is a person very like others – Clar does not want to be alone when she dies; and Clar cannot afford off-world nursing; and Clar would rather die than suffer the social humiliation of a return to Earth. Her only asset, apart from her undesirable cell, is her bug – which has a working life of up to three-hundred years. It was designed to be self-installing, and self-uninstalling, so as to be available to the maximum number of consumers, including those in the world’s least sanitary countries (Australia and Haiti and Austria). For bug installation, no surgery is necessary – the new host simply swallows the bug, which is about the size of my mother’s little fingertip and which disassembles in the stomach; for uninstallation, no surgery is necessary – when the bug detects that brain activity has (legitimately) ceased in its host, it reassembles in the liver and makes its way down through their lower intestine, using needle-like pinions, quickly emerging from the rectum. At this point, the bug is ready to assimilate itself to the first health-host that comes along and swallows it. As a precaution against murder, the designers made sure the bugs could not simply be ripped from the living flesh (they embed around the liver) – this would cause signature brain distress, the detection of which causes bugs to become inoperative (unhackably dormant) (anti-vulture defences) until rebooted by a licensed reseller. All this story-information would have to have been conveyed without laborious exposition (see above; mother; apologies). We would have seen Ela meeting Clar – a buzz at the cell door, a slow-sad admittance – white unimagined furnishings, or black; and Clar and Ela would hate one another on sight, without me having to use that phrase. But because Clar has no time to find another watcher-wiper-warder, and because this is Ela’s only chance at a working-order bug, they go ahead. Ela’s bag hits the floor – and she is in Clar’s life, and death. There are scenes, proper scenes with proper dialogue – an early conversation going wrong. ‘I never asked for this,’ one of them would say that. ‘Neither did I,’ the other would shout back – a
lthough ‘Neither’ seems a very unfuture word. ‘I didn’t ask for this!’ ‘You think I did!’ (A bit better.) The story, I should have said (incompetent with tiredness) would most likely have been third-person but with exclusive access to the contents of Ela’s head. She would (we overhear) resent Clar, and think of the cancers she (Ela) might – defenceless, unbugged – even at that minute – be incubating. Why couldn’t fucking Clar just fucking hurry up and die? Her cell contained no hint of human connection; this would be a griefless death – no nieces waving, no nephews trying to be cool and warm. Then, slowly, (and isn’t this a bit schlocky?) (isn’t this where the story would have started to go wrong, to disappoint you?) Ela comes to see (more scenes, more head-details) some value in Clar. At night, Clar tries to cough as little as possible; she doesn’t ask – once, more than once – for something she really needs; she describes for Ela a nostalgic-foodstuff they both turn out to adore. And so Ela doesn’t come (gradually, subtly) to love or like Clar, but she begins almost to respect her. Ela can’t wait for Clar to die; yet Ela begins to feel guilty about her own impatience. Clar has nothing to live for but – still – her life is not nothing. Ela, who has brown hair, also begins (convincingly, gradually) to despise the makers of the bugs, who would probably have been Apple Inc. (I was going to call them ‘bugs’, I should have said earlier, because they are like the listening devices once used by spies to catch out enemy infiltrators.) (Bugs, I was going to call them, because I have a memory of The Gold-Bug – wasn’t it an sf film?) I don’t have much time to do this, copied longhand into a notebook; I have to go (from my father’s house) to collect my partner from the station and drive her to see my mother. My mother would hate to be described, in her current state, so you will have to imagine the state of a person who would hate to be described. Everyone talks of comfortable, in the hospice, but what we all really want is to be secure – secure in health. If implant technology had been available to my mother (here is not my point), if she had been able to swallow a bug (in 2000) – even one designed by Microsoft – software and hardware meeting wetware – she might be alive and coming to our house (in London) this weekend for a weekend that wouldn’t stand out, that in five year’s time (readout, alarm) she would probably not even remember. By contrast, the cell in which Clar is still dying as an annoyed Ela lifts a plastic cup to her lips seems unbelievably devoid of culture. I haven’t got time to imagine the language they might speak (to one another) (space station jargon and Earth-dialect meeting-point). I would like to have put some other future-developments-from-present-developments into the story, along with the minimum that is the bugs, the space station. I would like to have gone into further detail about my imagined money-replacing currency, virtù (social credit, non-transferable or tradable). No time before the hospice visit. Ela looks at a screen on the cell-wall, showing what a porthole in exactly that position would show. Ela looks at Africa and then the Indian Ocean and then, on the horizon, unmoving for weeks, Goa, where (it seems) she lives – so perhaps Ela wouldn’t have been her name. Ela, as she looks at Goa while Clar, increasingly sleepy, dozes – Ela wonders my thoughts: Do the dying really turn their faces to the wall? Is there a death-rattle you know is just that? At least Ela knows she will know when Clar is dead – because the bug will emerge from Clar’s anus, and sit there glowing with a pulse radiating ready – like the glow of an Apple computer dot (sleep indicator light), though surely Apple or Microsoft will have come up with something different (by 2055) to signify technology’s cute eagerness-to-serve (by the time Clar is affluent enough, on the eve of her marriage, to swallow the bug, with a glass of champagne). Pulse, pulse – the bug will show it is maybe not as good as new but still as ready as ever. At this point, because I haven’t had time, because my mother has no time, the story breaks into possibilities. If I had been able to, I might (earlier) have introduced the threat - vulture-like figures who hover around the dying, in the hope of being the first to grab the still faeces-covered bug and shove it down their craven throats. This would have involved some scene-setting of a slum-like space-station, which is a little unbelievable. To be in orbit will surely mean to be rich, or a high servant of the state (not just the ex-wife of a basketball player), for many decades to come. So perhaps Ela and Clar should be relocated from the start, although that means losing the description of the light glinting off the sunward edge of the geostationary space-station – a description I had been looking forward to opening the story with. In the ugly fight version of the ending, Ela stands over Clar’s dying body, pointing some kind of non-laser gun at the vulture-figures. One variant has her fighting them off and chucking the shit-tasting bug into her mouth, and then swallowing it down in compromised triumph. (She will live longer, this Ela, but what kind of psychically damaged life?) Another variant has her successfully swallowing the bug only for it to stick in her throat and choke her to death. (This I call the Tharg’s Future Shock variant of the story, after the cartoon strip in 2000 AD magazine – and there’s nothing wrong with the Thargesque: I got to him long before I did Asimov, Clarke, Lem; long before I knew of The Twilight Zone.) In yet another variant, Ela struggles to snatch the excreted bug away from the vultures and a mass fight develops, from which Ela takes a mental and then a physical step back – No, we watch her think, this is worse than dying. I will take my biological chances rather than sink to this immoral level. I am prepared to wait for someone to die. (I am even prepared to marry a basketball player.) But I am not prepared to scrabble in a dead woman’s crap with half-a-dozen vultures for the chance of twenty or thirty years of compromised life. (Of course, if I had more time Ela would be far less articulate.) But then, at this point, this Ela might or might not change her mind. Fuck ethics, she might think, anything for those extra years – anything to avoid a death like Clar’s, like my mother’s. But Ela can’t get near the bug now, too many vultures have invaded the cell, and finally one of them triumphantly pink-necks it. (Although if Tharg has his way, they would then twistily choke to death. (Zarjaz!)) I have no more time, although there are more variants – and I should say that for each of these endings to be credible, Ela would have to have behaved subtly differently earlier in the story. I have no more time – it’s time to drive to the station and collect my partner, to drive to the hospice to see my poor mother. I can’t describe my bugless mother, as my partner will soon be seeing her, but I could take license to describe Clar as Ela sees her, a few hours before her death. But I won’t – Clar wouldn’t want to be described any more than my mother would. Fictional characters, even underdeveloped ones, should be accorded their human dignity. (Of course, this isn’t my usual reasoned view – but at the moment I cant, I just can’t.) I have to go, the car, the hospice, the time. Clar dies, calmly (I assert) and with dignity, and with no vultures, please – thank you for Choosing Your Own Adventure. Ela washes the glow-pulsing bug carefully, reverently, having learned (from her experience) profound human unschlocky lessons. Ela lays out Clar’s tiny body. Ela looks towards screen-Goa, her maybe-longer future. Ela drinks down the bug with the champagne she has been secretly (even from me) saving. She drinks – to Clar, and (without being aware of it) to my mother.