Best of British Fantasy 2018

by Jared Shurin

  “And you were happy?”

  “We were all happy. It was a good way to live: the crops coming in, the demand for sugar was growing as more and more people got a sweet tooth, wanted cakes and biscuits and bags of sugar.”

  “So your family grew beet for sugar?”

  “We did. Had done for generations. There was a factory at Bardney that bought up all we could grow. Then the factory went under.” To go into what happened next is not so happy. Dad’s face. His eyes, as I changed: dark shells. Losing the farm. Mum turning to drink, to drown out the disapproval of those silent villagers.

  “And how was the party?” says the young man.

  I’m not ready to tell him that. “Did you know a lot of the farmers don’t use hedges around here to separate the fields? We use ditches, but you can’t see them as you walk along; it looks like all the land is joined together, owned by nobody. Or by one great big all-knowing farmer, I should say.”

  “You’re religious?” he asks me.

  That’s far too difficult a question to answer. “No more than the next person,” I tell him, and we move on to the next topic, but his words sink into me. So I’m not surprised to find myself in the graveyard at All Saints Church, next to the bridge on the way out of the village, with a handful of bread stolen from the kitchen. I am a collection of these moments, now – these appearances in places with no interlinking journeys between them. My memory no longer flows. I am a series of drops.

  There are no ducks in sight. I throw the crumbs anyway, and spend a while telling the river about my memories of All Saints. The day I wore white and the days I wore black. The water washes the words away, and my mum and dad are with me. At least they smile and do not stare.

  This time it’s the butcher who comes out and says, “Well, you should be an escapologist, shouldn’t you? Come on.”

  “I don’t know why you don’t want me to talk to it,” I say. “It can’t tell anyone.”

  “Whispering to the water, are you?” he says.

  Yes, that’s it – water whispering. I see a painting in my mind, from that time Bill took me to London. We were just married, and we spent the morning in a gallery. Ophelia, with flowers, in the rushes, floating. Her river was nothing like the River Slea, or the ditch water. Both are heavy with mud from the fields; when you fall in there’s not a speck of pale skin left in sight.

  London was an experience. The Thames was a grand sight, and that’s a different sort of river again. We walked along the South Bank, after seeing that picture. I was crying; I had told him everything. He said, “We can be happy. You must promise you’ll try to be happy, that you’ll forget about it, not waste any more time and words on it, it’s just a thing, a problem with your mind, no more than that,” and it was one of the very few times he named it, my unhappiness, and let it take up a moment of his time.

  “I’ll try,” I told him, “but it’s a part of me. Of my family.”

  “We could move away. There’s nobody down here to see, is there? None of your relatives, living or dead.”

  But I said no. I couldn’t leave them. And so I left my chance of happiness – our chance of happiness – behind.

  Enough of happy. I’m sick of happy. The prison of it a weight on my lungs: the thing I should be aiming to feel, and make others feel. It’s a relief when the pleasant young man asks me instead, “Can you remember a time in the village when you were sad?”

  Is this a new session, or the same one? I don’t know. The river has moved on. “You want all the stories, don’t you?”

  “It’s for a local history project,” he says.

  “Oh yes, I remember. So what will you do with this tape of yours?” I lean forward and tap the recorder.

  “It’ll go into an archive along with all the other memories. There’ll be an exhibition in Sleaford Museum.”

  So I’m just one of many. Just a drop in the ocean of old people, muttering on about tea and dances and the war and how things were so much better then. Let there be some truth amongst the flood of their thoughts. Let me speak it, here, although the meaning has moved on.

  “It happened in the summer,” I say. “The murder.”

  He is all attention. I see it in his face. “The murder?” he says.

  “He was the travelling type, working the fields up and down the county, taking work where he could find it. The villagers had been warned against him. There had been some trouble, rumours that he…” I lower my voice, “he liked it rough, beg your pardon. Had hit a girl. These rumours don’t just follow after people. They chase them, catch them up. But she wouldn’t listen.”

  “What happened?”

  “He didn’t turn up for work, and she didn’t come home, and people put two and two together and thought they’d run off, away. I went out across the fields, in my wellies, in my miniskirt, walking until I was right on top of the ditch. I found her there. Her lovely white skin, muddied. She was face up, floating in the water, flowers surrounding her. Her eyes were dark shells. She was so beautiful.”

  “She was…?”

  “Marks on her throat, nearly as red as my skirt, from where he held her down.”

  “He held her down?” he repeats.

  “You’re like a record with a scratch, you,” I tell him, annoyed. “That’s what I said.”

  “Did the police look into it?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know. I only know about her. I saw her. It was the first time I saw one, you see.”

  “That’s shocking. That’s terrible.” He is agog. I’ve given him what he wanted. “What was her name? The woman’s name?”

  “Anna. Anna Pigott.”

  He frowns at me. Then he reaches forward and turns off the tape recorder. “That’s your name,” he says.

  “That’s right. And it’s my great-aunt’s name, too. We’ve got a lot in common. The gift of my family. She was my first, and so many others came after her, all frowning at me, all wanting me to see them, bear witness to them.” I clap my hand over my mouth. I shouldn’t say so much.

  ‘Well,’ he says. ‘Well. Perhaps it’s about time I was going. You must be tired.”

  Water can be clear and true and cold, or it can be muddied and thick and smelly. Sometimes, just like time, it can hardly move at all.

  Later, just after Bill bought the carpet shop and both Mum and Dad had been put in the All Saints graveyard, he said, Don’t tell me about them, I don’t want to hear it, to picture them around us still, and I tried so hard to never mention how they stood beside me, how they smiled at me and watched me as I slept. I tried to never talk to them directly. Bill didn’t like me going out to the ducks and giving my memories to the river instead. But it had to come out of me somehow, in words, in water.

  He said, “We should not have children, Anna. We should end this thing, here.” And I begged him, but he was strong. Stronger than me.

  Bill was a good husband, though, all in all.

  I’m sitting on the bench in the heart of the village. Here they are, standing before me, and their eyes are dark shells. With them I see my grandparents, and their parents, and more. So many of the Pigotts. And the first one who came to me – my Great-Aunt Anna, still muddied, still so sad. Soon I will become one of them, but there will be no new Pigotts with the gift to see me. Perhaps it will mean the end of the village. Perhaps the river will dry up for good. Or perhaps everything will simply trickle on, as it has for a thousand years before, while we Pigotts silently seethe on the banks of the Slea.

  I feel so guilty. I’m not meant to open my mouth about them at all, not to anyone, not even to the river. That’s what Bill said.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell him, lifting my chin to the cold white sky. How strange it is, talking to someone who is not there – to thin air. The villagers will think me touched. “I had to tell someone.”

  “Tell someone what?” says the woman from the bakery, disapproval dripping from her voice. She sighs, and says, “They just can’t keep you still, can they?” She’ll t
ake me inside now, and give me a cup of tea. I hope she brews it for a little longer; you might say tea is always the same but I say it doesn’t matter how often you drink a cup down. It’s like the past. Each drop tastes a little different, every time.

  Coruvorn

  Reggie Oliver

  It is three years ago now since Dennis Marchbanks became a god. Of course he did not know this immediately; the realisation came upon him slowly as such things do and he was decently reluctant to believe it in the beginning. Dennis would have been the first to admit that he is an unlikely god. Do I believe it? Well, that is unimportant; I must simply record what happened, as far as I can.

  Dennis and I had been contemporaries at the same Oxford college. We had both read classical ‘Mods and Greats’, and belonged to the same dining clubs and societies. Dennis was highly intelligent, but not very imaginative and, though conventional in most of his attitudes, he liked the company of unconventional and artistic people; hence, I suppose, our friendship.

  I graduated from Oxford with a modest second and went into literary journalism while Dennis who had got a first in ‘Greats’ stayed on to take a law degree and studied for the bar. In time he became an eminent Q.C, dealing mainly with commercial cases, hence a rich one. We kept up with each other through college reunions and I would often see him at the first nights of plays when I became a drama critic. We occasionally dined together at Brummell’s in St James’ of which we were both members. I would not say that our friendship was really close, let alone intense, but it was of long standing and invariably cordial. We were able to share confidences from time to time, partly because our worlds did not impinge on each other’s too much. Dennis was unmarried and, though he had met my wife once or twice, he had never visited my home.

  One Friday night we happened to meet and have dinner at Brummell’s. (My wife, incidentally, was away visiting relatives in Yorkshire for the weekend in case you are wondering if I had callously abandoned her for this still exclusively male preserve.) We ate together at the long table in the Coffee Room. There were several others dining at the table but they were down at the far end, so we could be fairly sure of not being overheard or interrupted. Dennis was not quite his usual genial self and I asked him what was the matter.

  He told me that he had just lost a case in the appeal court. He had been representing Centaur, the online retailers, whom their employees on zero hours contracts were suing for better rights and conditions. Centaur and therefore Dennis had lost both in the High Court and on appeal. Representing the workers on both occasions was Dame Maggie Standish Q.C, the well-known human rights lawyer and campaigner.

  “No, Jack, it’s not what you think,” said Dennis, taking note of my raised eyebrow. “It was not being bested by a woman or anything like that that irks. As a matter of fact, I think she probably had the better case. Their Lordships certainly thought so. It was the way she treated me. She obviously saw me just as some sort of boss’s lackey, a – what is the term they use? – a ‘lickspittle’? But, dammit everyone needs legal representation, even criminals, even bosses. It’s a human right, after all.”

  “No doubt Centaur paid you well.”

  “Well, yes. If you want the best you have to pay for it. But that’s not the point. There is such a thing as professional courtesy, professional respect. As far as she was concerned, I was ‘less than the dust beneath her chariot wheels’. I think she sees herself as some sort of champion of virtue and anyone who opposes her must therefore be contemptible.” There was a pause. “But I am sure she is a genuinely good and highly principled person.”

  I smiled at his reluctant gesture of magnanimity and he, eventually, smiled back.

  “Just unbelievably arrogant,” he added in an undertone. We both laughed. Dennis was not without a capacity to see the funny side of himself. We moved on to more benign topics, and though he relaxed a little, I could tell there was still something on his mind.

  After dinner Dennis asked me back for a drink at his apartment in Albany, that exclusive and discreet domain of the wealthy and well-connected off Piccadilly. The usual procedure at Brummell’s was to have after dinner drinks in the little snug under the stairs at the club, so I sensed that Dennis was anxious to confide in absolute privacy. I just hoped it was not to be any more railing against Dame Maggie Standish Q.C.

  We took a cab to The Albany. I would have been glad to walk, but Dennis was never an exerciser and thirty years or so of doing well for himself had expanded his figure considerably. He was, like me, in his mid fifties. He had a pleasant round face and thinning sandy hair and, if I had been asked about him at the time, I would have said he was the epitome of contented prosperity and success. He was, as he had put it to me once, ‘not a man of strong urges where human relationships are concerned’, so bachelorhood suited him.

  We were silent in the cab, and, when we arrived at Albany, barely a word was spoken until we had seated ourselves with a large brandy apiece in armchairs on either side of the fireplace in his drawing room. Coming to Dennis’s Albany ‘set’ was like stepping back in time a hundred years or more. The lighting was subdued, the furniture antique but comfortable. Georgian silver gleamed on the sideboard and a faint lustre of gold emanated from the tooled backs of Dennis’s antiquarian book collection. An illuminated glass-fronted cabinet glowed with a small but impeccable collection of famille verte porcelain. Family portraits hung on the walls, a couple dating back to the 18th century, and one to the 17th. The atmosphere was steeped in wealthy, cultured bachelordom.

  “Do you dream a lot, Jack?” asked Dennis when we were settled and had taken our first sip. I was a little taken aback: it was not a familiar conversational gambit of his.

  “Yes. No more than most, I suppose.”

  “I hardly do at all. Or if I do, I remember practically nothing of my dreams when I wake up. At least, I used not to. It all changed a couple of weeks ago. But then, I am not at all sure if it’s a dream I am talking about.”

  He then began to tell me his story. One night, he had returned to the Albany rather later than usual, having attended one of those legal banquets in Lincoln’s Inn. He had given a speech – “rather a good one, though I say so myself” – and was feeling exhausted from his efforts. He could barely remember undressing and getting into bed, but once in bed he fell into a deep state of unconsciousness of this world.

  “I found myself in what I can only describe as another world. I was walking on a hillside towards evening. The sun was setting and I carried a long staff and wore a blue hooded cloak. The landscape was clothed in peace and the colours were deep umbers and greens and azures, such as you see in a landscape by Claude or Poussin. You may think this all sounds very dreamlike, but it wasn’t. It was as vivid as you and I in this room now, if anything more vivid, and, unlike a dream world, it was utterly solid and consistent.

  “One thing that appears in retrospect most curious, though not at the time, was that I seemed to see myself standing on that hillside and yet be inside the person on the hill simultaneously. It could be compared to being in a TV studio and being aware of yourself on a TV monitor at the same time, except that I was the monitor if you see what I mean. There was no effort involved in this double perception, no sense of a ‘divided self’: quite the contrary.”

  The image of himself that he saw was different to the one he presented to me. He saw not a plump, middle aged lawyer but a tall gaunt figure in a long blue cloak with a hood, carrying a staff. He was shod in boots of soft leather and underneath his cloak he wore a closely fitting tunic of dark violet velvet. As he walked, the earth seemed to give way slightly under his feet. “It was like,” he said, “walking on water, though naturally that is something I have never actually done, but it’s how I imagine walking on water to feel like.”

  Dennis’s descriptions of his experiences were full of these precise and pedantic qualifications. At times it was like listening to Henry James at his most delicate and tentative, so I shall continue in third person
précis.

  The sun was sinking, salmon pink, below the horizon, as he walked down the hill towards a cottage from whose roof came an aromatic plume of grey blue smoke. The feelings he had were those of immense calm coupled with that of purpose, though to what end? That he could not say, though he tried to at considerable length.

  The cottage, perched on the hillside, was surrounded by a small garden fenced and gated. Dennis opened the gate and went up to the door on which he knocked with his staff. He noted that the lintel was only just high enough to let him in without his having to bow his head.

  The door was opened by a pleasant-looking elderly woman in a brown, homespun dress who welcomed him into a low whitewashed room. Beside an open fire sat an old man, white haired but still hale. When he saw Dennis, he rose, greeted him and told him that he was most welcome under his roof.

  Dennis tried to convey to me the extraordinary gratification he felt on being received so courteously. His whole being was suffused with benevolence towards this elderly couple and with this goodwill came a sense of power. The old couple – they were husband and wife – asked him to share their simple meal. Dennis told me that he had rarely tasted anything so austerely delicious. It almost persuaded him to eat less elaborately in future, to order only one plain dish at Brummell’s, even to try his hand at cooking for himself occasionally. I took these raptures on the simple life with the scepticism that they perhaps deserved, but he was on fire with enthusiasm when he spoke.

  One incident of interest and importance occurred at the end of his stay with these good people. They had finished the meal and the woman of the house was offering to make up a bed for him. Dennis politely refused their kind offer. He told me that he felt not tired in the least. A kind of calm energy was passing through him.

  As he was explaining his need to set forth again and his gratitude for their kindness, he noticed a small niche in the wall beside the fireplace. It would appear to be some sort of shrine. In it was a lighted candle and a small figure of a cloaked man bearing a staff, carved in wood. It had been carefully painted in muted bluish colours. The image struck him as vaguely familiar.