Best British Short Stories 2018

by Nicholas Royle

  I end the call.

  In the night, beneath my chapel window, yellow sand drifts against the whitewashed walls. It piles high under the staircase.

  At first light, I find the broom.

  The new day brings taps and showerheads. Toby’s been to the wholesalers’. I show him to the en suite where he checks the old taps a final time. ‘Limescale, end of,’ he says.

  No speech today. He’s broken free.

  ‘In Stoke, where I grew up,’ he tells me, ‘the water is beautiful and soft.’

  ‘Miss it?’ I ask.

  ‘Couldn’t wait to get away, to join up.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘I was married for years up there, and like I said, I’ve one teenage boy. I’m only down here because my girlfriend is a local girl. We met online. But being away seems to get harder, not easier, as you get older. Funny that.’

  I nod. I see him as a boy, scrambling down the steep, stern valleys of the River Trent with his rod and box of bait, when he dreamed of seeing farther than the next valley.

  ‘You? Family?’ he asks.

  ‘Not here.’

  ‘Husband?’ he asks.

  ‘Divorced.’

  ‘Significant Other?’

  ‘Dead,’ I say, ‘2003.’

  ‘That bloody year again.’ He unscrews the limescaled taps. ‘Other Persons of Interest?’

  I pass him a towel. ‘That would be telling.’

  He nods and turns to study the blocked showerhead. ‘I thought you must be lonely. Betwixt and between. Now, me, I’d pay to be lonely. When I get home each night, like I said, it’s a madhouse. And at weekends, my boys don’t want to go out to fish with their old dad, not even when I say we’ll put the boat on the water. I try to tidy up and join in with telly nights and that, but mostly I look around my house, and I think where am I? Where the hell am I? I go sit in Madison’s room with a cup of tea or a brew. Sanity. You have to take it where you find it. Like yesterday. A customer in Lewes – you know Lewes? – he forgot to leave the keys.’ He looks back to me and smiles shyly. ‘Guess what I got up to?’

  ‘Burned a cross?’

  He looks at the floor and laughs. ‘You’re peculiar. I like that. I went to Anne of Cleves’s House. No one else there. Had the run of the place. I like History. You like History?’

  I smile. ‘I like History.’

  ‘Teacher? Lecturer?’

  ‘Lecturer.’

  ‘Thought so. No telly. All the books. Your moving men must have been glad to see the back of you.’ He whistles. ‘Lecturer. That’s brave. If I had the choice between having to speak in public or having my fingers broken all over again, I know which I’d choose. Why do you think my teeth are like this? I asked someone once to smash them in, just to get me out of a job interview.’

  My eyes widen. ‘You didn’t.’

  He laughs again. ‘Your face is a picture.’ He looks away. ‘A picture.’

  In the en suite, we negotiate the narrow space. I look down, he looks up, we lift our ribcages and shuffle. I demonstrate the problem with the showerhead, the paltry spray. ‘Low water pressure?’

  We trade places and he clambers into the shower space. As he reaches up to the fitting, he appears, briefly, naked in my mind’s eye, ready to soap an armpit. He’s thirty-six. I did the maths. Younger than I realised, and older in himself than anyone should be. For a moment, he is a still photograph. A freeze-frame. No longer my plumber. I see the solemn gravity of his body, the dark energy of his pupils, the tenderness of his eyelashes and the truth in the unsteady line of his throat.

  Toby strains higher to get a grip on the showerhead, but just as his spanner clamps on, his phone goes off. He passes me the spanner, hits ‘Decline Call’ and mimes, for my entertainment, the cutting of his own throat. ‘My girlfriend. Who else?’ When it rings again, a minute later, he climbs out of the shower, takes a seat on the loo and buries his eyes in his hand. ‘No, love. Not yet. I’ll be here a few more hours.’

  I tidy the towels on the rack.

  ‘Yes, it is a big job.’

  I begin to slide past him, out of the room, but he shakes his head at me.

  ‘Of course I haven’t forgotten.’ He murmurs into his phone. ‘Yes, I have told her.’

  Then he slides the mobile into his pocket and looks past my shoulder. ‘Forgot to say. Doctor’s appointment tomorrow. Not sure when they’ll see me. Apparently, I just have to go along and hope.’

  ‘Nothing serious?’ It’s what you say.

  He massages a spot near his sternum. ‘I’ve been hoping for months it would just go away. Right here. A lump. As big as fuck – sorry.’ He looks up. He’s spooked himself. ‘Had a good look in the mirror the other week. I call it Saddam. It looks like him in profile.’ From his perch on the toilet, he studies the showerhead again. ‘I reckon somewhere in Basra there’s a bloke with a tumour called Tony.’ He extends his palm; I return the spanner. ‘I just hope to Christ it’s not breast cancer. My old navy mates would never let me live that one down.’

  In the night, later than last time, my mobile rings. I hear a TV, a door closing, the scraping of a chair.

  ‘Hello?’ I try.

  ‘Are you the one at the church?’ a girl says.

  ‘Who is this?’ I say.

  I know who it is.

  ‘Is he with you? Is he there now?’

  Outside my window, there’s no moon. You wouldn’t know there was a sea.

  Bearings. Such delicate things.

  I end the call.

  In the morning, I rub the sand from my eyes. It crunches in my molars. Under my new showerhead, I rinse it from my hair and rub it from my scalp.

  When Toby returns three days later, for the final job, the installation of a thermostat, he lowers his gear and a cardboard box to the floor, climbs my staircase and seats himself on the uppermost stair.

  I follow him up and cock my head. ‘So?’

  ‘So?’ he says, his face blank.

  It’s none of my business. ‘What did the doctor say about Saddam?’

  He bites the plastic packaging off the box. ‘Moobs, yes, deffo. Breast cancer, no. No lung cancer either, as it happens.’

  And the lump? I want to ask. What about the lump?

  He opens the box, lifts out my new thermostat, and fishes for the installation instructions. He rummages in his toolbox, lifts out a glasses case and waves his specs. ‘You’d never know I used to be a sniper.’

  Watch.

  A sniper is an expert marksman at a thousand yards. His vision is perfect or near perfect. When he isn’t shooting, he is able to run three miles in eighteen minutes. He can perform a hundred sit-ups and twenty pull-ups in two minutes. He can execute the low crawl, medium crawl, high crawl and hand-and-knees crawl while carrying a hundred-pound pack, an L115A3 rifle and a 9mm pistol.

  He can navigate by day and night. He can draw an accurate field sketch. He understands the vanishing point. He knows the imagination can distort. There can be no history of mental illness.

  A sniper must move undetected. He must not smoke, move suddenly, use soap, wear insect repellent or arouse birds or wildlife. He relies on his spotter. The spotter will calculate wind velocity, the position of the sun, the grid coordinates and the range of all weapons prior to each shot.

  On that searing March day in 2003, four men landed in the Drop Zone of Umm Qasr. ‘Two teams,’ Toby explains, ‘in all that light. Two men too many.’

  In desert areas, camouflage must be tan and brown.

  A sniper uncovers his riflescope only when aiming at a target.

  A sniper must not shine.

  That day, Toby shone. While the four men lay prone on a rooftop across from the corner shop from which the target was about to emerge, Toby’s St Jude medal slipped outside his T-shirt, outside his combats, and glinted in the midday light.

  Later, in the concrete courtyard, the butt of an AK47 would break his skull and knock out his teeth. It would crush his fingers, bre
ak an arm and smash his ribs. Each day, the four men were pushed into the four chairs.

  His first tour, his first assignment.

  One morning, a bird, a warbler of some kind, sang overhead. Kaka-kee, kaka-kee, kaka-kee. Toby didn’t hear the footsteps. Two shots rang out. Only when he opened his eyes did he understand that he wasn’t dead.

  A scan revealed the lump on Toby’s sternum to be a protective scar of bone; a final, slow mending where the ribs had rejoined the sternum.

  I take a seat on the stair below him and stare straight ahead. ‘How did you get out of the courtyard?’

  He stalls, choosing his words for me. ‘The two of us fought our way out.’

  I understand what cannot be said to a stranger, in a stranger’s new home. They killed their way out.

  I don’t turn around. ‘Your girlfriend calls me,’ I say, ‘on your phone.’

  ‘Ah,’ he says. ‘She say anything?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Right,’ he says.

  ‘I suspect she knows you’re keeping something from her.’

  Behind me, he’s nodding. Without turning, I know he’s nodding. And staring at his hands.

  ‘Another woman?’ I try.

  ‘Almost,’ he says. I can hear the smile in his voice. ‘Fatboy Slim.’ He shifts on the stair. ‘At night when it warms up like it has, I sneak out, pull on my waders and fish from his surf. No bathers to bother you, no one to see, and the bass bite best at night in spring and summer. I’m pretty good now at casting, hooking and landing them in the dark. Nice bloke actually. Don’t expect he’d mind. I don’t bother anyone. Before I leave, I hide my fish on the public side and return first thing to collect them, before work.’

  ‘It seems you’ve been spotted. At home, I mean.’

  ‘Point taken. Yep. After the kids are in bed, I slip out our back door. With her friends being over, I didn’t think—’ Behind me, I hear him rub his whiskered face. ‘I leave my phone. I mute it and hide it under Madison’s mattress. Can’t risk it lighting up in the surf in the dark.’

  ‘I’m fairly sure it wasn’t Madison on the line.’

  ‘No. Sorry. I’ll sort it.’

  ‘Maybe she knows you’re keeping something more from her. More than the outings in the dark.’

  ‘I am. As you know.’ He hesitates. ‘And it can keep. Now it can, I mean. That’s what I mean. Now it can.’

  ‘Right,’ I say. ‘That’s good,’ I say.

  I feel his hand, light, fleeting, on my shoulder. ‘You’re a fine Methodist woman.’

  I turn and peer up. His grin is broad.

  ‘That’s a comfort.’ I bite back a smile. ‘But I forgot to say. Our tulips are dead. I mean, totally dead this time.’

  He sighs. ‘Total death. It comes to us all in the end. Including the two beautiful bass I landed last night.’ His smile breaks out again. ‘They’re on ice in the back of the van. Not gutted yet, but I could give you one if you like.’

  ‘You’re all right,’ I say. ‘Next time maybe.’

  I look away again.

  And together, beneath my chapel window, we sit in pools of morning shadow while, somewhere beyond the bright panes, the Portsmouth-to-Caen ferry is slowly returned to port.

  ADRIAN SLATCHER

  LIFE GRABS

  ELVIS WAS IN tears. The big man had watched the film time after time. It had been given to him by the police, who either had no need for it any more, or had finally remembered that the father should get a copy.

  His son’s last movements, caught on CCTV, first as he leaves the school, then, just briefly parking his bike up outside the shop, and you can see him walk in the door, move purposefully to where the sweets and ice creams are, and just a glimpse of him at the till, with a bag of sweets; then, finally – and you wouldn’t know it was him if it wasn’t segued into this montage – cycling away past the blue car, back on the pavement and round the corner, out of the way of the CCTV for ever.

  Little Magnet he used to call his son, sticking to me like a little magnet. He’d called him Malcolm, an old-fashioned name that he hoped he’d grow into. Little Mal, smallest boy in the class, but not afraid of anything or anyone.

  The earlier part of the film shows him clearly. He is at a wedding dancing with the little girl from next door who isn’t that little and towers above him, and then there’s a short panned shot of him caught in the front row of the choir, dressed like all the other little boys and girls, but fidgeting more than most of them. And the latest bit of footage, the bit that Elvis prefers, just taken that last Christmas. The neighbour had brought round the video camera, and it’s Mal speaking to camera, ‘I am Mal, and this is my daddy . . .’ and collapsing in laughter as Elvis comes into the picture and grabs him. Shrieking with joy as he whizzes through the air, head spinning.

  They said it was a man, aged perhaps fifty, with a beard. There’s no CCTV footage of this, just the grab of the blue car, which was later abandoned. The case had never been closed.

  Elvis has the tape in his hand. It’s a precious thing, but tapes aren’t much use any more. The shop said they’d do a tape-to-DVD transfer.

  ‘Be careful,’ he says, handing it over, ‘it’s the only copy I’ve got.’ The boy behind the counter is about Mal’s age. Mal’s age as he would be now.

  When he goes back in the shop a couple of days later Elvis is worried, worried that something will have happened to the tape, but the assistant hands him a bag with two DVD copies and the tape.

  Elvis hands over the money, and says thank you. He doesn’t quite know what to say, but suddenly it’s very important that he knows what precisely the boy has seen.

  ‘Do you watch them?’ he asks.

  ‘What?’

  ‘When people give you tapes do you watch them?’

  ‘I have to watch some bits. The start. The end. If there’s some edits. But those wedding videos!’ He rolls his eyes. ‘Some marriages don’t last that long.’ It’s a joke that feels out of place, and the assistant appears to regret saying it.

  ‘Hi, I’m Simon. I watched it. I remember,’ he says.

  ‘Remember?’

  ‘Remember the disappearance. I was in his class. Actually I was in the year above, but they sometimes put us all together when a teacher was ill.’

  ‘It must seem a long time ago to you. He was only . . .’

  ‘ . . . eight. He was only eight. I was nine. They called us all into assembly and said there had been a terrible thing happened and that if anybody knew anything, anything at all, then they wouldn’t get into trouble but they’d better tell a teacher.’

  ‘I think about him every day.’

  Simon looked a bit embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry, for your loss – you and your wife – it must have been . . .’ His sentence tailed off.

  ‘It’s just me. It was just me and him. That made it worse. She never forgave me.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For losing him.’

  The big man was close to tears, but he’d been close to tears ever since that day. Time dulled the pain, that was all – or rather, it made the pain the one familiar thing. He’d miss the pain, he realised now. There were those soldiers who had their leg amputated and they could still feel the leg there even though it was now just a ‘phantom’.

  Malcolm was just a phantom: they’d never found him and never found the man.

  ‘I remember him, from the video,’ said Simon. ‘All these things came back to me, that I hadn’t thought about in years.’

  ‘Were you friends?’

  ‘Not really,’ he said, ‘it didn’t work like that. There were gangs and you were with one gang and then with another gang, and sometimes it was one big gang, but only for a day or two and then it would break up again.’

  ‘I didn’t know. He seemed to be on his own a lot of the time.’

  ‘We were all alone a lot of the time,’ said Simon. ‘What do you think happened?’

  ‘I think he’s dead’, said Elvis, simply
. It was a lie. But it was easier than the truth. The truth might be that there would be a knocking on his door late at night, with someone from the porn squad, with a load of other videos, showing some men buggering his Little Magnet. For a while, he’d started researching child abductions, even visiting paedophiles in jails. Once he’d shown a picture of Mal, on the beach, to one of these monsters, and the look on his face had been enough for him never to go back. Had he been able to get on his own with him he was certain he’d have broken the man’s neck. He even started looking for pictures on the internet, himself. These were the days when you had to dial up and a photograph would take a few minutes to download. He’d watched agonisingly as his request to one of the newsgroups had come up with his specific request, ‘mixed-race boy, aged between 6-10’. Each time it wasn’t Malcolm, he’d felt both relieved and sad. The tension of waiting for the picture, not knowing if you were going to see something abominable, or just a normal, healthy picture of a boy on the beach, was what made it worse.

  Then they changed the law, so that even looking for these pictures was a crime. Every now and then, late at night, with his much faster connection, having had a few too many drinks, and unable to sleep, Elvis would go searching again. The online world had become more complex, more depraved, it seemed; but the ways into these sites where men traded pictures and videos of young boys weren’t so easy to find, and Elvis wasn’t really looking, he just wanted to find.

  Elvis worked as a security guard, doing nights, and would come in before his shift started. If he came round on a Friday afternoon, it was pretty quiet, and Simon could shut half an hour early and take him round the back, show him all the equipment, the rows and rows of recorders and duplicators.

  ‘Everything’s recorded now,’ marvelled Elvis, ‘and I’ve only so little of Malcolm. It doesn’t seem fair.’

  ‘It’s all digital now – storage – endless,’ said Simon, in the chopped-up way that his generation talked. Elvis realised that his son would speak like a text message if he had lived. Yet, when he’d disappeared there wasn’t such a thing. He marvelled at that as if it was another mystery, almost as powerful as the mystery of the disappearance.