Best British Short Stories 2018

by Nicholas Royle

  ‘They used to wipe the tapes – or rotate them – look . . .’

  He pulled out some footage, similar to the footage on the tape the police had put together, a grainy image with a timestamp at the bottom.

  ‘I collect these from car boots,’ said Simon. ‘I’m making a montage – of stuff.’

  Elvis laughed. ‘I’d like to see it some time. More interesting than all those wedding videos.’

  The next time Elvis came round, Simon called him into the back and sat him down.

  ‘It’s not finished yet,’ he said, ‘but here’s our street . . .’

  He clicked a mouse and the screen started running a film – or rather a series of short films spliced together to tell a somewhat jerky story. Elvis recognised the walk he’d take from his house to the video shop, then it moved off, and took him past the place where Malcolm had gone missing, and over to the school. It was like the footage of the police tape but more complete somehow.

  ‘I’ve split everything up,’ said Simon, ‘and then keep filling in the pieces. Watch again.’

  And this time there were some subtle differences. Where Simon only had one piece of film it was repeated but, where he had more than one, the scene changed subtly. Instead of two boys parking up outside the sweetshop, there was an old lady. The trees changed from summer green to winter brown.

  ‘Can you put him in there?’ said Elvis, suddenly excited.

  ‘What?’

  ‘My video. Malcolm. Can you put that in there?’

  Simon nodded, looking uncertain.

  ‘Do it, please.’

  ‘I’ll just realign the sequence – and pull in – yes, I’ve still got that on the server, Elvis McCardle, got your file here . . .’

  And in it popped. The familiar footage but this time the day seemed different, the world seemed different.

  ‘It’s at this point he comes out of the shop . . .’ said Elvis, and sure enough he did, ‘and past the blue car . . . the blue car’s not there, Simon. The blue car’s not there!’ He sounded delirious with happiness, as if somehow the change of sequence had changed the past.

  ‘It’s a different scene,’ said Simon. ‘I split them as small as they can go.’

  ‘There it is again,’ said Elvis, sadly, as the scene jumped again. The blue car was there and round the corner went Malcolm. ‘I have to see where he goes . . .’

  Simon nodded. He changed the route so that the video now followed round the corner. There was nothing there. The scenery had changed, even the road markings. There was a new speed camera and some speed bumps.

  ‘Re-run that . . .’ Elvis implored.

  Simon did so. This time the footage was older, closer in time to the day when Malcolm had gone missing. It jerked forward. There were two boys on bikes coming the other direction.

  ‘I’ve not seen them before . . .’ said Elvis, ‘maybe they knew something . . .’

  Simon paused the film. The time in the bottom right-hand corner was six months after.

  Elvis sat back in his chair and asked Simon if he could have a copy.

  ‘It’s just an experiment . . .’ said Simon. ‘It only exists on my computer.’

  ‘There must be more clues . . . more things. I need to see him change, grow older, I need to see what happens to him when he leaves the camera,’ he said. ‘I can pay you . . .’

  ‘I’m not sure . . .’

  ‘I might be able to get you more film,’ he said, ‘more old film.’

  The next week he was back with a large holdall full of films.

  ‘Old CCTV footage,’ he said, proudly. ‘Stuff from cases, all copies, just don’t tell anyone where you got them.’

  Everything was on camera these days. He’d read somewhere that there was a CCTV camera for every five people in the country. Had Malcolm gone missing today they might not have found him, but they’d have seen a lot more of him. Everyone had video cameras on their phones, kids taking selfies. As Simon worked on expanding the footage, and putting it into his computer model environment, Elvis stood outside the schools, next to the shops, all these places with cameras. He noted down names and numbers.

  ‘If they’re digital, they’re stored,’ Simon had said, ‘we can probably get the direct feed – we just need to know which systems they are using . . .’

  Elvis got a job as a night watchman for the security company that looked after the area. There was a little room at the top of one of the office blocks where CCTV feeds from private houses, businesses, factories and schools came in. His job was to monitor activity. He took down the information that Simon had asked him for and passed it on; the feeds were now being sucked directly into Simon’s model, making it more complex. Simon had begun applying some other touches taken from computer-gaming environments. He could take a car from one place and move it around. At first it didn’t look realistic, but he soon improved on it, until it was perfect.

  Both of them wanted more. Simon realised that it was still only an approximation of the real world. He overlaid street data, he overlaid map data. Eventually there was nothing more he could do to his structure. Elvis wanted to see his little boy outlive the frame, move beyond the confines of that fateful day, and the few surviving images. The first time they were able to take Malcolm’s bike and transpose it, Elvis cried. His son – or what looked like his son – was choosing to go a different route, away from the blue car, to safety.

  At home that evening he watched the footage that Simon had quickly copied to a DVD. The film was the familiar one, but different.

  ‘What happened to you?’ Elvis wondered, as the footage dissolved. He wondered what his son would look like now. He couldn’t even begin to think.

  Elvis knew what he had to do. He was due on shift in fifteen minutes, the early evening one, a similar time to when Malcolm had gone missing. The night watchman’s job wasn’t just to watch the screens, but to check that the screens were doing their job correctly. Every now and then a screen would blow and whoever was on duty needed to go and investigate. The CCTV cameras would continue to take their evidence.

  He had a plan. It took him three attempts, but eventually he managed to throw a sack over the CCTV camera that was furthest from the office. He knew that whoever was on shift before him would have to investigate.

  Elvis ran quickly across to the shop where Malcolm had gone missing. He lingered outside, cautious of the time. He was lucky. There were two boys on bikes, about Malcolm’s age when he disappeared. Boys on bikes had been stopping at this shop since Elvis himself was a child. It wasn’t perfect. There were two of them, and they might not go the way he wanted. He lingered outside the doorway.

  ‘Here,’ he said, to the first kid as he came out of the shop, ‘can you do us a favour? My boy’s supposed to be here at five. Ryan. You know him?’

  He’d picked the name at random, but he figured there had to be a dozen Ryans in their year.

  ‘Think so, mate,’ the kid said, looking him up and down. ‘Waddayawant?’

  ‘I’ve a dickey leg,’ said Elvis, pointing down. ‘Can you pop round the corner and see if anyone’s coming? I’m in a bit of a hurry. He’s your age, blue coat, racing bike a bit like your mate’s. There’s a pack of smokes in it for you.’

  And Elvis dangled the contraband.

  The second kid came out as the first had biked out of sight.

  ‘Your mate’s gone that way . . .’ said Elvis, pointing in the other direction. He didn’t need the fake hobble now.

  He rushed to where the blue car was parked. He got in the front, and slowly drove out from the spot.

  He turned round the corner.

  Where was the kid?

  Then he saw him. Sat down on the roadside. Bike beside him.

  He drove towards him.

  ‘No sign?’ he said winding down the window. ‘I’ll kill the bugger.’

  ‘Where’s me fags, mate?’

  ‘Oh yeah.’

  Elvis held them out and put them on the passenger seat.r />
  ‘Door’s open.’

  The kid came over to the door, and reached over. Elvis was too quick.

  ‘Hey, mister, let me go.’

  Elvis pulled him over and slapped him in the mouth. The kid started crying.

  ‘Be quiet, and you’ll be all right.

  ‘What do you want?’ the kid shrieked.

  ‘I just want to know what happens next.’

  Elvis, in the blue car, drove away, looking up at every speed camera, every CCTV camera. He knew them all. They all fed into Simon’s model. Updating every few seconds, or live, with the slightest delay.

  I just want to know what happens next, he texted to Simon. The car moved slowly away. It could no longer be observed by any camera.

  M JOHN HARRISON

  DOG PEOPLE

  I MET MYRA at the Arts Club. It was lunchtime on the sort of summer day which makes you want to eat outside, off a table with a luminous white cloth. The girls touch the statue of Aphrodite for luck, imagining her to have blonde hair and bare arms like their own. They look down admiringly at the healthy balding suntanned heads of the men who have signed them in. My own date had failed to appear.

  The Arts Club isn’t a good place to be blown off in, especially at lunchtime. People who have also been blown off, or are about to be blown off, or are about to admit to being blown off, eye you with hatred as you walk past. They want no reminders. Among them that day was the ugliest woman I had ever seen. Her head had the qualities of an ethnic bronze, massive and massively proportioned, all the features of which overstate some powerful but recently obsolete cultural dictum. She swung it slowly left and right. She stared at her watch, ordered a glass of house red.

  ‘I’m waiting,’ I heard her tell the barman, ‘for this wretched person I wouldn’t even recognise.’

  I asked him if I could have a club sandwich. Recently he had stopped cautioning me, ‘And you are a member, aren’t you sir?’ every time I ordered a drink. I told him I would have the sandwich outside. ‘The table nearest Cupid,’ I said. Cupid, a rational little deity, perches out there in the Arts Club garden, on a mossy clam shell between two terracotta urns, shooting his arrow of water into the air above a black pond decorated with green weed. He presides over affairs, one night stands, change. He serves the club members with the endless debacles they mistake for an emotional life. I was ignoring him when the woman with the massive head came and stood by my table.

  ‘You don’t mind,’ she told me, ‘if I sit here.’

  In a way she was right.

  ‘These bloody people who say they’ll meet you,’ she complained. She pulled my Telegraph apart and began to read the food page. ‘I can’t stand octopus,’ she said, as if she had caught me eating one. Then: ‘You don’t say much, do you?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I can’t stand fish of any kind. I suppose you’re doing something this evening?’

  We went to my flat. ‘Flat’ is perhaps the wrong word. I was renting a room from some friends of mine who lived in a maisonette on a council estate in Bow. The estate was constructed like an open box, so that it captured every passing sound. Even the silence was full of ghost aircraft descending far away, a shim or resonance of cries and traffic. At night you could hear young Asian men having their heads kicked in outside Mile End tube station by cheerful BNP members over from Leytonstone for the dog fights. I was as far east as the Arts Club is west, but I could come and go as I liked, and I was never uncomfortable there until Myra said:

  ‘They’re very tidy, aren’t they? Your friends?’

  Then she said:

  ‘My god, is this actually a futon?’

  She was wearing a white linen suit, the skirt of which she soon pulled up round her waist to show me the sandy-coloured fur between her thighs.

  ‘What do you think of that, then?’ she said.

  As soon as I got close enough to have an opinion, she turned away from me and lifted her great haunches in the air, laughing.

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘Can’t we talk first?’ I said.

  When we had finished – or rather, when Myra had come, with a sudden series of barks and groans, shaking her head from side to side and looking back at me over her shoulder – she seemed to expect something else. There wasn’t anything else I could think of. That was the first and last time Myra ever came to Bow. If I suggested it thereafter she made excuses, and we always went to Chiswick, where she owned a garden flat thirty seconds away from the Thames. There she had, as she put it, La Trompette for evenings, Richmond for Sundays, and the kind of neighbours who can easily afford an Audi cabriolet. In Chiswick, sex was noisier. I wondered what people made of us. ‘So long as you can avoid Hammersmith,’ Myra said, ‘Chiswick is heaven.’ To her, Hammersmith was less a place than a condition.

  She was already anxious when we were apart.

  Is ‘anxious’ the right word? It was an anxiety which revealed itself, like most of Myra’s emotions, as irritation. Where it proceeded from, I don’t know. ‘You’ll go to seed in that place,’ she would warn me, if I spent a day working at home. ‘I’m your last chance at a normal life.’

  Eventually I gave in. After Myra’s remarks, Bow had lost its gloss anyway, though I still quite liked the strange shop signs along Roman Road – Spoilt Bitch, Blisters, Shuz-A-Go-Go. (For a while there had been a lingerie shop called Bare Essensuals. It didn’t prosper, and though the sign remained the shop began to sell mirrors instead, as if its owner had decided to cook the impurities out of the narcissistic act and leave only the really good stuff.) Myra hardly seemed to notice when I moved in with her, except to warn me, ‘Don’t get in my way in the mornings.’ The only other thing she said was, ‘Don’t offer to do my washing and I won’t offer to do yours.’ She could see I had been tempted by that. The bedroom smelled of overused bath towels, Myra and Nonoxynol-9. On the bed, the sheets were always pulled about untidily into heaps. Perhaps that was because we were always having sex there.

  Myra hated it if we didn’t have sex, or if I seemed to lose interest in her for a moment. I could see there might be problems with that. Around then my mother, who was seventy three and lived with mixed success in the Midlands, had a small stroke. Unlike Myra’s, my mother’s anxieties had always revealed themselves as anxiety: when she saw the ambulancemen in her front room, she fought. Just as she feared, worse was to come. Her struggles brought on a further stroke, and a coma, and then, for a month or two, Bramley Ward in the local hospital, which she shared with a transient population of equally unconscious but always slightly younger women.

  Most of that time, my sister watched over her. My sister, like many relatives of stroke victims, had convinced herself my mother was still somehow there. The nursing staff explained to her that passing expressions don’t signify awareness, but she couldn’t accept it. My mother wasn’t helping with this. She was smiling as happily as a girl. Some of those smiles were surprising to me, they were surprisingly sexy. It was as if she wanted to share something with us. Sometimes she wanted to share it so much that she was practically winking at us. I didn’t want to know what it was. These were the opposite of a baby’s practice smiles, they were what you got when there was nothing left to practise for. But my sister kept saying, ‘We can’t give up, we mustn’t give up.’

  I didn’t know what to feel about it. I had my own difficulties, sitting by the bed on a plastic chair for an hour in Bramley Ward trying not to interpret that smile, so all I felt was my sister’s need. It pressed me into the walls. She had me cornered there twice a week in the hospital smell and the light of an internal window with a kiddie’s picture taped to it, entitled, probably, ‘My Gran doesn’t say anything any more.’ There were other issues. I had been looking for a better family than ours, my sister said, since I was thirteen.

  ‘Something’s the matter with you,’ she said.

  There was some justice in that: as soon as she spoke, the world had tilted to one side and started to rotate slowly.
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  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘she’s not going to wake up.’

  The vertigo wore off in the cab on the way to the railway station, but though I felt fine by the time I got back to London, I’m not sure I was ever fine again.

  The hospital gave fruit and flower names to all its wards. Bramley Ward. Daffodil Ward. Cherry Ward. Wards were grouped into wings which had the names of famous local people. Despite that, it had no integrity, it wasn’t even itself, and was run as a satellite from some other hospital in the nearest big city. My sister explained to me they were always threatening to close it down; it was probably another thing we shouldn’t give up on.

  So that was the way things worked out. I went up and down to the Midlands, sometimes by car, more often by rail. Each visit, I tried to avoid my sister and catch the early train back to London. At night I lay in the dark imitating my mother’s depthless, lively, transient expressions, thinking we were more alike than I preferred: both of us were afraid of death. As a result my dreams were full of the surprised humiliation I used to feel as an adolescent when forced to see things from someone else’s point of view. I would wake up to find the room rolling slowly to the left and Myra staring intently down at me as if she knew something I was keeping from myself. Whatever it was, it still didn’t enable her to understand me.

  ‘Can we not fuck ?’ I would hear myself beg.

  It was another climate-change summer. The light, like seaside light, seemed to make the streets wider and more spacious. Even London streets had a promise about them in that light. They became esplanades luring me upriver towards Richmond, or, less advisedly, north through Turnham Green until I lost myself in the tissue of residential streets which had worked its way into the fabric of Acton then died; a place neither clean nor dirty, new nor old, inhabited by mid-day joggers and almost defunct pigeons, organisms like me. One afternoon I got back early and sat out under the cherry tree in Myra’s garden. Chiswick Eyot smelled of exposed mud. A dog barked, an engine fired two streets away. A man was saying ‘Yes,’ and ‘Hm,’ into a cellphone, his voice close and slightly hollow, as if he were talking from an empty bath. It was another afternoon of hyperaesthesia. A breeze started up and though the sun was still beating down, the rustling cherry leaves made it sound like rain. Lulled by this, I fell asleep. When I woke up ten minutes later, a rhythmic sound was coming from the garden next door. It had a shuffling, plodding quality, like the sound of someone exercising on a treadmill. The rhythm of it was metronomic. Then a voice said: ‘Venice is nothing but souvenir shops. You wonder how they make any money, with such a high ratio of shop to customer?’