Best British Short Stories 2018 Read online

  But not yet. The sex is still good. It’s good and getting better. The way it always does. Or at least, that was how it seemed to her.

  So she has to schlep across town, find the screaming man, find Kaspar, see art, talk art, debate it, drink coffee. Debate whose turn it is to pay. He always says it’s her turn.

  Would it be petty of her to begin to keep a record of all the coffees, the pastries, the Cokes and beers and hot dogs she’s paid for?

  Yes, it would. Though she keeps a rough tally in her head. For example, the bottle of wine from the deli; Californian Merlot, he’d suggested it, picked it up from the shelf, then while they were queuing at the till (there was only one other person in line) he’d said, ‘Hang on’ and disappeared into the back of the shop where they kept all the fancy imported tea and coffee so she’d had to pay. The cashier was already handing her the receipt when Kaspar reappeared with a packet of crackers. He paid for the crackers, seventy cents’ worth of crumbs in her bed, and he’d drunk most of the wine too.

  What was he? A gigolo? He was certainly arrogant enough to be one, but what did that make her?

  So she’d dressed putting on layer after layer like some mountain climber.

  As soon as she left the building the icy wind hit her. A hard cold wind, implacable as a rock face. After five minutes of battling against the elements she gave up and instead of cutting across the park as she’d planned, she hailed a cab that deposited her outside the museum at twenty minutes to ten.

  She stood in line to check her coat, her hat, her scarf and gloves. It was still early. An older woman ahead of her was theatrically slinking out of a sable coat like a butterfly escaping its cocoon. The animal fur was glossy and alive in a way a fake never was. Except that the animal wasn’t alive. Not any more. The woman was offered a biro to fill in the insurance form, but shook her head no and, her face showing disgust, she dug a fountain pen out of her Hermès bag instead.

  There was money, and then there was money. Oh yes. And then there was no money whatsoever. It was always so.

  Clara had money. The consolation for being an orphan at the age of nineteen. As a student at Columbia, seven years ago, she had, after getting the news of her parents’ death in an automobile accident, lost all focus. She could not sit in the lecture halls or in the library and concentrate. She had been the sort of daughter whose chief motivation in life up until then had been to please her parents. As their only child, they had equally sought to please her. Wished for her happiness and assumed that a part of that must be academic success. It was not something either of her parents had had, and they regretted that – despaired at their early lives, their bright potential squandered on exhausting work for little pay. Their immigrant parents – her grandparents – Italian on her mother’s side, Irish on her father’s, had stressed the necessity of work and money. Money first, then education.

  But with all of them gone – mother, father, all four grandparents, no brothers and no sisters, no aunts, uncles or cousins – she’d found there was no one to please any more. Except herself. And it pleased her to visit the city’s museums with a head almost empty of the desire to learn; to wander about and sometimes gaze in an unseeing way at the objects before her. As if she were in a perpetual dream. Outside of herself. Waiting to awaken, but with no sense of urgency, nowhere to get to.

  This was how she had met Kaspar. Kaspar, tall, broad-shouldered, with richly glossy chestnut-coloured hair that he wore brushed back from his forehead (though wilfully it fell forward). Well, that gave him a chance, an excuse, to run his hands through his hair, which when she watched him, made her aware of a sensual and fatalistic and dark something stirring within her.

  At the beginning she had thought that they would start to see one another with increasing frequency; that they would become a couple. But instead it had become this sporadic, this nameless thing – not quite a relationship, nor a secret affair as neither of them had anyone to cheat on. Once or twice a month they’d meet at a gallery or museum, then he’d come back to her hotel for a few hours. He didn’t stay the night and they never went to his place, which he said, somewhat vaguely, was somewhere in the Village.

  She didn’t know it but Kaspar regularly got his body waxed. At least she didn’t know it until one day she’d felt the sharp nap of sprouting hair on his back and had to draw her hand away as the sensation was so shocking, almost frightening.

  The woman with the sable coat made a mistake filling in the insurance form and had to redo it. Her companion, a handsome, silver-haired, expensively groomed fox of a man, touched the woman’s shoulder tenderly as if to convey to her that she should take her own sweet time, he’d be there no matter what and to hell with the line behind them.

  But the woman shook his hand off impatiently and turned to glare at him. He looked hurt, then when he saw Clara looking at him his expression turned to something like anger. How dare you pity me, his eyes seemed to say, you who are nothing, no one. The moment was chilling and Clara looked away quickly. When she turned back they were gone. She stepped forward with her coat, her scarf and hat ready. The attendant took them, his face impassive, dead.

  He put her coat on the hanger, arranged the scarf around the neck tenderly as if he were dressing a small child.

  ‘You like cats,’ he said.

  It was neither a statement nor a question. His accent was strong, straight out of the Bronx, the ‘s’ at the word’s end had a hard ‘z’ sound.

  ‘Sorry?’ she asked pleasantly, half smiling, wondering if she had misheard him.

  He slapped her ticket on the counter. ‘Next!’ he called, brusquely dismissing her.

  Feeling she could make no sense of anything today, she went off in search of the screaming man.

  She stopped to ask a guard if he knew of a marble portrait bust of a man in agony, in some kind of demented torment.

  ‘Marsyas? He’s in the Petrie Court,’ the guard said.

  She set off through the galleries. Over and over she thought about the cloakroom attendant’s words. ‘You like cats!’ ‘You like cats?’

  He had spat the phrase out of his mouth, like a dog giving a warning sign, baring its teeth and snatching at the air with a growl.

  What on earth had he meant?

  Then she realised – there must have been stray white cat hairs clinging to the surface of her coat and what he’d meant in effect was, ‘Hey ya filthy whore, you don’t brush your coat down, but ya wander in here to look at art like you own the place? Whaddya take me for – you think I wanna touch ya filthy clothes?’

  She felt ashamed. Deeply humiliated – as had been his intent.

  Actually when he’d said ‘You like cats’ she recalled that she had grinned at him in a confused way, thinking his words were a pleasantry, that he was being nice.

  How stupid she must have looked.

  At last she found herself in the Petrie Court, hesitating as she searched for the sculpture Kaspar had mentioned. Hesitating over everything at that moment.

  Straightaway she saw Kaspar, his back turned to her, standing in front of what was the white ghost-like head of Marsyas.

  She read impatience in the set of Kaspar’s shoulders, recognised the increasing coldness he seemed to radiate towards her – even now when he couldn’t see her. The sculpture’s head peeked out over Kaspar’s left shoulder so that the real man and the marble man seemed to be in some kind of terrible embrace. The marble man’s face was twisted away from Kaspar’s in agony and she saw at last that Kaspar hurt people.

  Would always do so. Would hurt her in particular.

  Not by any tangible means, but by the stripping-away of those last tender, hopeful parts of her she still held onto. Kaspar kept her at arm’s length. He revelled in her occasional ignorance. He was cruel. She had tried to please him, and in doing so, she had stepped outside of herself, but she’d failed to see it until now.

  The subject of the sculpture, Marsyas was a satyr who had been tortured. He’d suffered a hideous
punishment for some insult to the gods. Yes, that was it, she remembered now – she’d seen the painting by Titian which showed how he’d been flayed alive, the skin slowly stripped from his body as he hung upside down from a tree like a slaughtered deer.

  She would have liked to move closer to the sculpture to study the carved stone into which human pain was given a hellish eternity. But Kaspar with his thinning hair was blocking her way. Was waiting for her and would wait for her.

  She turned on her heel smoothly and went back the way she had come. She pictured her journey as a tracked shot down a long corridor, then as one long unedited shot – a woman walking swiftly, without hesitation or interest past statues, glass cases, paintings, to the cloakroom where a different man returned her coat.

  Then out into the cold, clear air where the camera would tilt up until the screen was filled with nothing but sky and the only sound would be one long repressed and exultant sigh.

  Escape.

  CONRAD WILLIAMS

  CWTCH

  SALTER WOKE IN the night and this time the screams were real. Raw, lusty, the kind of scream only an infant can make. It seemed so close as to be just the other side of the canvas. This was his first night on the camp site. The family had turned up to their pitch late: Salter had eaten dinner and was reading by torchlight as a middle-aged man in shorts and a waterproof coat cursed over a jumble of poles and pegs. His partner switched on a radio tuned to old pop songs despite the camp rules stipulating no music at any time. Salter had purposefully selected this camp site because it was not child friendly, it didn’t allow pets and it placed a premium on silence. Why couldn’t people adhere to simple rules? Why was there this constant flouting of regulations? It might seem trivial to them – it’s only OMD, lighten up, Grandpa – but this was his holiday, a rare chance to enjoy some rest and recuperation before returning to the grind.

  And now this infant, shrieking [greeting, skriking]. Salter checked his watch. Just shy of five a.m. He rolled off his mattress and flexed the muscles complaining in his back before pulling open the tent flaps and sticking out his head. Folds of drizzle [mizzle, Scotch mist], colour low in the sky: green and pale gold where dawn threatened. Opposite, screaming miles of black. The cries became muffled, as if the parents had noticed his appearance and were trying their best to soothe the child. The poor thing might be teething, or suffering a cold. Well . . . they could have chosen to not bring it here, he thought, knowing that for a few pounds more he could have stayed in a B&B and not been disturbed at all. But part of the reason for this holiday – for these holidays – was because it was what he had done as a young boy. Abersoch, Dolgellau, Port Eynon. Each summer his mum and dad had loaded up the old Austin Princess with tents and fishing rods and they’d follow the M56 to Wales, him in the back seat with a Beano and a quarter of aniseed twists, especially for the trip. Save one for Mo, Dad would say. And he did, every time. His mum and dad would bicker good-naturedly about what they listened to on the cassette player and it was usually his mum who prevailed. Everyone she liked seemed to be called Joan or Joni and all of the songs seemed to be happy and sad at the same time.

  At the end of all this road there’d be the usual bellyaches [gripes, protests, whinges] about pitching the tent in the wrong place, or getting the groundsheet pinned down incorrectly . . . but the bad tempers didn’t last long. He would find a nice spot and bury that final sweet for Mo, Mum would get some pasta going on the camping stove and Dad would tuck into a couple of cans of McEwan’s. There would be rain, and complaints about bad backs. Fish would be caught or, more likely, wouldn’t. They played cards. They told jokes. He had loved these holidays.

  Now he rolled up his night things knowing that he wouldn’t be able to catch hold of the tail of sleep [shuteye, kip, slumber] so there was no longer any point in trying. He dressed quickly and reached for his raincoat, unzipping the tent at speed in order to make as much noise as possible. The violent sound of it was close and waspish in the dark. He would have words with the owner when the office opened at nine. He needed rest and no distractions. So much of his normal everyday life was riddled with noise that he craved these oases in the year, rare and precious holidays that allowed him to reflect and, yes, heal [repair, recover, mend]. He believed he was still coming back from that childhood insult – the shock and the unacknowledged pain; a grief that would not hatch in him – and only silence could provide the environment in which he might achieve that release.

  He walked to the far edge of the camp site where a perimeter fence gave access to a track through the woods. Beyond those trees Craig y Cilau rose like a sheer grey wave. Pockets of golden light opened up on the rock face as breaks appeared in the cloud that had clung to the base of the mountain all night. Already there were climbers arranged upon the limestone.

  Crossing the track he entered the woods at their thinnest point. Sunlight was filtering through here too, gilding the whitebeam and adding varnish to the boughs of rowan and hawthorn. He had no idea where he was going. Away was enough: he could still hear the child’s agonised, red cries rising in the trough behind him. Three hours until Davis, in his self-important tweeds and his moisturised beard, came down from his nice stone cottage to open the office and treat everyone with an air of amused indifference.

  The crack of a twig underfoot highlighted the depth of quiet he had stumbled into. He could no longer hear the child; its shrieks had been replaced by the soft suck and blow of a breeze sifting through the limbs. It was as if the wood had lungs and he had detected the rhythms of its breathing. He could smell moss and fungus, a mix of the clean and the corrupt, and, he was sure, the mineral aroma of the warming rock face. He felt the tension of the last few hours lift a little.

  The family must have been unaware of the regulations, as unlikely as that sounded. Salter was not a father, but he tried to put himself in the shoes of those people now. They’d be more stressed than him, that was for sure. At least he could have a nap this afternoon when fatigue [lassitude, enervation] inevitably caught up with him. They would undoubtedly be asked to move their pitch to one of the neighbouring camps where families were tolerated. He’d help them relocate if that was the case. Everything would be fine.

  He was a little out of breath by the time he broke through the far stand of trees into full sunlight. Since observing the climbers on Craig y Cilau Salter had seen no other people. He craved that sense of being alone, the illusion of the last man on Earth, to the extent that he felt cheated and disappointed [crestfallen, despondent] whenever he spotted a figure clinging to rock, or a car winding along the A465, or the peal of a distressed child in a badly constructed tent. Now though, he was here for a different reason. Mo. Though he couldn’t work out the impulse for it. Could it just be as simple as a need to tidy up the strands of his life now that he was closer to the end than the beginning? For so many years he had avoided coming to the Brecons, but why? It was not as if he could remember much about his sister. He felt that those memories he did have of her were informed by the photographs in his parents’ old albums; Kodacolor prints he had picked through only once since their death. Invariably, the photographs of Mo displayed a toddler with long, fine blonde locks (from birth until her death, they had not cut her hair), her hands outstretched, begging a hug, or for someone to pick her up. Salter was never in these pictures, which was another reason for the buffer between himself and his grief, if grief was what it could be called. How could you grieve for what you had never consciously known? How did you love a sister who had been in your life for only two years?

  He stood at the edge of the trees and opened his arms, opened himself to a feeling that would not come. They had been twins, but there was never any of that rumoured synergy. No telepathic communion. No phantom muscle recollection. The breath in the trees intensified as if in sympathy. He watched the canopy wave. The moment moved on; he came to his senses, feeling self-conscious, foolish.

  Three sheep paused in their cropping to watch as he picked a route acro
ss stony ground. He angled through another field, though a sign on the gate asked that ramblers restrict themselves to the edges. Lines of blue mould in a cracked plastic bathtub drew a map of a world he didn’t understand. He’d always felt apart, on the edge of things, as if life was filled with codes he didn’t have the key to access. He resented his parents for that, believing their withdrawal from the public eye in the wake of Mo’s death had included him too. Their protection of him became smothering, but he never felt it was motivated by true love, more out of guilt, or some misplaced effort to atone [expiate, recompense]. His father had slapped him across the face when he suggested it was a little too late for that.

  They used Mo as a stick with which to beat him. So many times over the years to the point where they no longer had to use euphemisms to suggest that if any child should die, it ought to have been him. It was in the cast of their faces; the language of their ever more stooping bodies.

  Salter had trained to become a teacher, anticipating that spending time with children might help him cope with his suite of insecurities, but all it did was trap him in a prison of ‘what if?’. He daydreamed elaborate fantasies in which he somehow managed to rescue Mo, prevent her from falling into the pond rather than being the one to find her. He set his class exercises and then watched as they frowned over their books, wondering if Mo might have grown up to talk like Susan Webb, or laugh like Debra Barker, or would she have been naughty, like Kathy Bowden?

  He mythologised the discovery of her body, unable to remember what had happened, conscious [aware, sentient] only that he had discovered her because of second-hand stories, heavily censored by parents who did not want him to have to deal with the trauma. Instead he internalised it, torturing himself with any number of death scenes. It was a wonder he didn’t drown too; the pair of them were little older than two, realtively new to the task of walking.