Best British Short Stories 2017

by Nicholas Royle

  I looked at her. She was smiling at me. Anne smiled at me. Her hand was to her mouth, and she reached for my hand and held it, she studied it, turning it palm up, examining it for personality indicators or signs of the future. When do you go away? she said.

  Tomorrow evening.

  Are you working tomorrow?

  I’ve got to be.

  She nodded, she now was holding my hand with both of hers; both of her hands, she kind of cradled mine. My hand. What was I? Just a damn man.

  That’s why you’re here, she said.

  I couldnt reply. I was the best part of I think what is thunderstruck because this is what I was and felt like crying and felt as if I could cry right there. The whole of life was too good to be true and I was the luckiest man in the whole world and that is the God’s truth so help me my Lord God, the one bright star in the dismal night sky. She was the only only thing. She pushed aside the crisps and studied her drink. She raised her head to look at me but only for a moment.

  What’s wrong? I said.

  She smiled but kept her head lowered. You are always so sharp, she said.

  I saw the worry in her. My hand went to hers, rested on it. It was above her nose where the worry was, in line with her eyebrows. I wanted to stroke there, easing it, the burden there. I glanced at the empty seat beside me. Come round here, I said, please. Come round here: sit beside me. She shook her head and continued studying my hand, which I made to withdraw, it was strange to me at this moment. I shifted on the seat, edgily, although there was nothing wrong. If anyone had asked me, nothing.

  Waves

  NIVEN GOVINDEN

  Of course he should sleep. Now that he was in hospital, there was no question. The hypochondria from before faded once the ambulance showed up. What was clear is that he should rest whilst the doctors investigated.

  — Close your eyes, Jacob. Get your head down.

  — Rest, and let us do what we have to.

  Sleep is all that he trusts in a body that is failing. For each meal he’s unable to hold down, the sheets he cannot keep dry, sleep is the old reliable. He allows the meds to knock him out, regressing to the state of a newborn, illness forcing him to relinquish control and simply fall back onto the elemental tropes of food, rest, and nappy changes. Does he sleep like a baby? How would he know? There is no one around to tell him, his mother long dead, those who purport to love him now nowhere to be seen. He asks whether it is possible for a nurse to watch as he sleeps, to make notes that go beyond monitoring his vital signs, but they mistake this as fear of being left alone, keeping the door of his room ajar as if this will reassure him.

  All he knows is that he dreams, a surfer riding opiate waves as soon as they first appear, thrilled by the force of it. His consciousness drifting in and out of a strong tide. Who says he can no longer have fun in bed? He’s surfing Waikiki from the seventh floor, holding his own for as long as he can, until he drops and lets the drugged sea take him. He rides to exhaustion, paddling until his arms have no strength to even push the hair from his face, his voice hoarse from screams of terror and elation. On his actual visit to Hawaii, he spent no more than two hours in the water, the time not commensurate with the expenditure on custom surf paraphernalia, knowing even before he’d left the Jeep that he despised the instructor’s youthful confidence, how the boy’s ease with the sea was impossible for him to master in a series of ten lessons. He could have built a hut on the beach, sleeping out there for weeks and still not control the sickness lodged in the pit of his stomach, a reminder that nature could not be controlled through force of will, that the discipline needed to surf, the sheer bloody-mindedness, was weaker than his lazy desire. So why now does he return here in these empty afternoons, breeze pushing hard against his soft belly as he paddles into the surf, the tenacity to ride and fall, to ride harder and stronger until there is something approaching harmony between his salt-blistered feet, the board, and the waves? Nothing about that holiday made him happy bar how his legs looked in a pair of long floral shorts, yet all he sees as the frequency of the IV drip increases is the sun breaking over the Pacific, his skin slowly warming as he moves from shadow, its tone chasing honey as it leaves its natural white and blue. He recognises that in health these dreams would not come, so that on waking there is a perverse satisfaction, thankfulness for a tiny part of what this illness brings.

  — Did you sleep well, love? the nurses ask.

  — Are you feeling rested, sweetheart?

  Ignoring that he is unable to speak clearly from the sedatives making his throat dry, the bark and scratch of his voice painful to his ears. Instead, a persistent cheerfulness as he is bathed and changed, making him almost wish to be shouted at for being so helpless. He longs for an exclamation of surprise or irritation from those who tend him, if only to break through the wall of impenetrable stoicism. Something to suggest that it remains in his power to change what is happening to him, but there is only this steadying, impersonal efficiency. It is all well and good to be clean, and have your weak muscles massaged to encourage circulation, but how to control your insides, to lower your blood pressure simply by willing it, to clear the impurities in your blood through thought, to eliminate those organisms that multiply and attack your cells? Why do they never explain the contrary nature of hospitals, he wonders? How it is entirely possible to become sicker after admission than before. And in what way does a lifestyle of healthy diet and exercise help him now? One carrot is no defence for what is happening under his skin: the unspeakable wrapped around cartilage and within tissue, seeping into organs, and lodged deep in the marrow.

  He would escape if he could, from the room and the smell he cannot help but manufacture. Back on the island, O’ahu, he runs laps around his hotel complex, penance for a lack of aptitude in the water. Running he can do, even with his frame, the ease at which his bulk covers ground, over man-made hills, through copses of manicured palms, their growth meticulously planned to please tourists, past thick bougainvillea, heady with fragrance, the scent so perfect as to appear synthetic. Only his sweat to muddy the air. Something accomplished in the perspiration that soaks his T-shirt, the hammering in his chest as he pushes for one more lap, then another, running to the point of dizziness, the Honolulu skyline visible through the trees, until the palms and the golf course it borders onto disappear into a white void.

  There were many simple things he once relied on to take him out of himself: running in the park or propping up a bar; looking a fool by challenging younger men to pool games that were out of his league. Similarly, the test of another vehicle drawing up beside him at the traffic lights, revving his engine and daring a race against a white van or souped-up Fiat crammed with teenagers. Far greater than his pride is his impatience to demonstrate strength or knowledge with those a generation or more behind him, and how this grows with age. The swagger of young manhood a tipping point for his antagonism, which shrinks as his waistline swells. He has a shorter fuse, disintegrating as fast as his brain cells. For all its unattractiveness, the inevitable humiliation by juvenile hands, he is thirsty for these encounters, anything where he can deliver a lesson.

  — Rest, say the doctors. It’s important that you’re comfortable, but we can’t progress if you don’t look after yourself. Stop looking for arguments with the nurses.

  The suggestion being that rest cures all, that somehow all the drugs they pump into him are merely indulgences – a warm-up for the real work that must take place, a remedy beyond the doctor’s realm, something undefined and akin to magic. But he knows that his body does not repair during sleep, white blood cells attacking red, bacterial infections running laps past sluggish antibiotics, each race faster than the night before, more destructive, all conquering. You do not surrender to illness, he thinks. You are not given the opportunity, too busy mulling over your chances to realise that you’ve been gripped by the throat. Illness is a hunting dog that does not shake its prey.
Long after he leaves the hospital, he imagines he’ll remain in a state of shock, his body withstanding multiple jump-starts and meddlings. The months it will take to fully recover, to walk steadily and learn to keep down food. And everything punctuated by sleep. The promise of sleep. The disappointment then, waking to find himself still in bed, and to a body further destroyed.

  A morphine sea pulling him back to the beach, a barbecue set up by the hotel where he drinks one bottle of weak local beer after another until the fizz in his guts sets off a greater fire, his jeering at the hula loud enough to still be heard over the chants and drums, his dancing more unsavoury as the moon over the Pacific grows in brilliance, swelling overhead, as if to project his anger. He looks at his hands gripping the bottle, the skin dry and sagging from his knuckles, wrinkles within creases and spotted with tiredness and dirt. He feels useless and old. Twenty years ago, it was entirely possible that he could have ruled this stretch of beach just by relying on his strength of body and mind. What he has now – aches and pains, clumsy when he’d previously been dexterous, a feral grubbiness replacing sexual allure – brings out the worst in him, his behaviour abhorrent, his language increasingly foul, relishing the sound of his voice as it cuts across the other guests, welcoming an audience despite the clear berth they give him. One of the more fulsome dancers holds his gaze, though she too will reject him later, leaving only the surf instructor to take him by the shoulders and gently nudge him away from the main party.

  — Let’s take a walk, mate. Get some night air in those lungs.

  — You’re Australian?

  — Only in your dream, mate. When you met me I was Polynesian born and bred.

  He’s grateful for the rescue, knowing the ugliness he is creating, yet still resenting the boy’s good sense and confidence to take control of the situation. How he’ll be congratulated as a hero the next morning, an extra bonus at the end of the month, and his pick of the hula girls. His own possibility as a saviour to anyone has long since expired, the injustice sticking in his craw.

  — I didn’t have to fly halfway round the world to get plastered. I can be an idiot anywhere.

  — That I can believe. Let’s keep walking. You’ll feel better for it.

  — Look at you – Hercules in surf shorts. Doesn’t last.

  — I think it’ll do for now.

  — You think you’re it, son. We’ll see.

  What strengthens as power fades, resolve or decay? Waking one morning he has difficulty opening his left hand, fingers bunched tightly into a fist as if independently deciding upon their permanent repose. It takes two nurses to uncurl him, one digit at a time, only for it to settle back to its previous form once they leave. As a consequence, he’s no longer able to feed himself, spoon-fed by whoever is there. This is not giving up, he thinks. More a pooling of resources. The energy it takes to be disgusted I must use elsewhere. The effort it takes him to stay awake and face his enemy, to stare down his hand and the sallowness of his skin, to grip what is left of his wasted flesh, willing back the days when a combination of authority and pure heft could right things.

  He feels his body tense up as he drifts into sleep now, his shoulders hunching when they should melt into the blankets swaddling him, his fists clenched, burning a hole in his palm. He understands the false premise of falling unconscious, that it is neither painless nor restful, and how his body physically resists it by refusing to soften.

  — It’s not uncommon, one nurse comments to another, unaware that closed eyes do not necessarily mean closed ears. I’ve seen them get like this before. Natural instincts taking over. Impulses we don’t realise we even have.

  — You mean, faith?

  — More… persistence.

  Asleep, yet awake, he’s aware that personal power still exists, obscured somewhere deep and impassable, an insect smothered in amber and buried under rock. Falling again, until he’s upturned. Back to imagining the beach, his face now at sea level, damp and claggy from resting on sand, exhausted from effort, dazed from a closing punch to the side of the head, locking the sound of waves between his ears. Still, he reaches.

  — Look at him knocking his fists together. The concentration on his face. Should we wake him?

  — Leave him, nurse. Can’t you see this is what he needs? He’s fighting it. He’s fighting.

  Language

  DAISY JOHNSON

  Harrow Williams was the sort of boy who got away with things. Harrow Williams was not fat, only big; built through with power. She was not small-boned herself, you could have that fact for nothing, but what she liked most about Harrow was that he was taller than all the other boys and spanned across the shoulders like a bear. He’d been big when he was a child, violent with it, but had only seemed now to grow into his size. She’d loved him since they were four and he’d leant over, planted a red-paint handprint onto her chest, almost knocking her down. As if he owned her already.

  And what sort of a device was she? At sixteen Nora Marlow Carr was good at all those things nobody much wanted to be good at. She could do maths in her head the way other people came up with sentences; remembered pretty much everything she saw written down or heard told to her; knew the ins and outs of string theory and could, if she had the urge, take apart a hefty radio and jam it back together. She didn’t sleep much and she knew it made her look like someone had beaten her about the face, but there it was. She was larger than was fashionable; sometimes caught herself looking with something akin to lust at all those bones that protruded out of girls at school; the solipsism of legs and arms, the buds of them. Mostly, though, she thought they looked as if they hadn’t grown properly. She understood – because she was logical and somewhat cold with it – that they saw her with the same confusion; imagined her bready with everything she carried, watched with distaste the motion of her childbearing hips, her milk-carrying breasts and wave-making thighs. She was a natural woman, they sang to one another under their breath when they saw her, and meant nothing good by it.

  Harrow had worked through those bony women and them through him and she’d watched with dry fascination. In reception, it was little Marty Brewer who was the first girl to have her ears pierced and who held his hand for a day before holding someone else’s. Nora listened to the gossip, knew Harrow liked to take a girl on the bus to the cinema in the city and then to Subway. If he liked you enough he’d kiss you on the way back. Later she knew, because she understood about biology, there was more than hand-holding going on.

  The year she turned sixteen she decided enough was enough. She was not the sort of girl who waited for something to come her way and, if she wanted a thing bad enough, she thought she could probably find a way to get it. She waited until after sports when all the other boys had gone home and Harrow was out with Ms Hasin practising for the 2,000 metres. He was heavy for a track runner but there was enough power in those limbs – legs more like a horse than a boy. Everybody said he was building himself up for the next Olympics.

  She went out into the car park and leant against his car and when he came walking up she looked at him. There was no one else there.

  He screwed up his face so lines appeared between his nose and around his eyes.

  Nora, right? he said, as if they hadn’t been in the same school since they were four, as if he’d never planted that red handprint. Well, that didn’t matter now.

  She thought the most beautiful thing she’d ever heard was entanglement theory. She told Harrow that was what they were: two particles forever linked and fated to change one another. He looked at her askance and she tried hard to think how to put it into a language he would understand.

  When she looked back at him he’d taken his cock out. It was not miraculous the way she’d imagined, not beautiful or serene or possessed of any great power. All the same she liked the strange nod of it moving seemingly unconnected to the rest, recognised it was circumcised and liked that; liked the sma
ll, dark spots at its base.

  You need me to tell you what to do? Harrow said.

  She shook her head. She’d read the literature.

  Harrow meant it to be a one-time event and that was a fine thing for him to think, but she knew he didn’t really understand entanglement theory at all, only liked hearing things he couldn’t comprehend, and that it would be a while longer before they’d shake one another.

  She knew the way it worked. She was supposed to be coy and shy and give him her home number and wait to see if he’d call her.

  That was one way of going about it.

  She rang him the next night until he picked up. Didn’t let him speak but told him everything she was going to do to him. When she was done she stopped and let him think on it.

  All right, he said.

  His mother worked the night shift and her parents hadn’t ever worried she was the sneaking-out type, so they met at his. She knew why it was so good, why it was better than everything she’d overheard from the girls at school who spoke about it with a sort of aged disappointment. Because he didn’t think he had to treat her the way he would one of the skinny women he’d marry, and she had nothing to lose. Afterwards he gave her the lines he’d picked up from American films and she let him get them out: he wasn’t looking for a relationship, he just wanted to have some fun; she was a great girl, she really was.

  I’m coming over, she would tell him at school or she’d text him when she was already out the window, sliding down the roof slope, dropping to the grass. Sometimes he said: well, I told you I’m not looking for anything of the frequent-flyer persuasion, or he’d shake his head and say he wished he could, he really did, but his evening had pretty big plans wound up in it. That line only held fast the time it took for her to get her bra off.

  When he said it, she knew it surprised him more than her. She let it rest between them for a moment with his face sort of stiffening as if he’d been electrocuted. Then she said: well, yes. Me too. And that was that. Harrow Williams was the sort of boy who only held one state of mind at a time and once he decided they were on, there was nothing he or anybody else could do about it. She told him she didn’t believe in marriage, that nothing she was ever going to do was for the government or god or anything else beginning with g and that marriage was just a force of control. He looked at her the way he did when she said things he didn’t understand; but after they’d had sex, he told her if she wanted to live at his house they’d need to get it done.