Best British Short Stories 2018 Page 14

  The caves are never empty for long. They cannot stay away from them, as though an itch that started a long time gone has just grown as the centuries have worn on, has built incrementally, as stalagmites grow. We recall being woken by voices at the entrance, dynamite blasts in the deep, the opening out of new chambers. We marvelled at the speed with which they did this. The talk of opening this cave out and extending this passage. Theorising. Mapping and sketching. On paper, the cave’s thin fingers stretch out for miles. There is a passage just beyond this point. We can feel it, the ones with picks and dynamite, say, and continue their digging and blasting. Their voices echo in the chambers.

  It is like this now, but it will return to the way it was before. A flood or a fall. The filling of the caverns with limestone deposits. To the way it will be after the swift passing of men.

  And the slow drawing of a stalactite from a rock.

  And the slow violence of water.

  And the slower violence of time.

  OWEN BOOTH

  THE WAR

  WE INTERVIEWED THE war. The war was depressed, smoking too much. And we were paying for the drinks. The war polished off three bottles of good red.

  We were thinking by the third bottle how can you even tell the difference? The war could tell the difference. The war had been doing this for years. And what did we know about anything anyway? We who weren’t the war. We who would never be the war.

  The war was a mean drunk. The war said things about us that would have been better left unsaid. But wars, we discovered, do not apologise.

  Actually, according to the war, there is only – has only ever been – one war. All wars are the same war. All over the world. The war, so the war told us, contains multitudes.

  Consequently, the war contradicts itself, time and again. The war reserves the right to change its mind. The war which is too big to be tied to facts. The war which, when it acts, makes its own reality (war, says the war, being the locomotive of history, and so on).

  The war likes to refer to itself in the third person.

  The war, says the war, won’t stand for this sort of thing.

  The war, says the war, is tired of your nonsense.

  The war, says the war, thinks you’d better watch out.

  And so on.

  The war claims to have had a job once, claims to have worked in, of all places, a Viennese coffee house, back in the days when that meant something. Back in the early days of the twentieth century. The war remembers the moustachioed waiters gliding between the tables with glasses of Einspänner and piles of apfelstrudel and punschkrapfen, remembers the slanted pre-war afternoon light – that sort of light you don’t get any more – the light glancing off the polished marble table tops, the light skidding along the brass rails and the zinc counter, the light spinning off millions of suspended, dancing dust particles.

  And it was as if all of Europe was suspended, dancing like that.

  The war knew the beautiful, bent neck of every female customer, knew the brave shoulders of every strapping young man.

  It was a time of obscene innocence, says the war, back in the days before the war changed everything. The war which was me.

  Of course the war has regrets. You have no idea.

  I remember every face; every sunrise, says the war. Don’t you think I had hopes and dreams of my own?

  The war smokes all our cigarettes. The war with its feet on our table. The millions of feet of soldiers and prisoners of war and displaced peoples. And all of them needing shoes.

  The war says you try five thousand years of this, ten thousand years of this.

  The war doesn’t go back further than the end of the last ice age. The first thing the war can remember is the retreat of the great ice sheets. Then the carcases of millions of mammoth and woolly rhinoceros and giant ground sloth strewn across the vast plains of Eurasia and the Americas. And the last of the Neanderthals, cornered in some damp, foggy wood on the Atlantic coast, about to get its head smashed in.

  Before that, nothing.

  Not knowing is a relief.

  The war dreams of forgetting.

  The war says, But look at all the things I invented. Smartphones. Superglue. Mass production.

  Wasn’t that . . . weren’t those things more generally the result of capitalism, we ask, rather than war?

  Plastics, the war continues. The welfare state. The motorway . . .

  The war spilling someone’s drink on purpose. The war making dangerous friends at the bar. The war starting a fight and getting us all thrown out of the pub. The liability of the war.

  Under an ice-cream moon the war sits on a beach throwing pebbles into the surf. The sea is glowing with the light of millions of phosphorescing bacteria. The war is subdued, thoughtful. How many hundreds of thousands of years, the war wonders, would it take to throw every pebble on this beach into the sea? Will the war even be around that long?

  Likely a lot of the pebbles would be washed back up onto the beach anyway . . . we suggest.

  High explosives, says the war. That would do it.

  We can’t argue with that.

  And was there also time for romance, we asked, back in those good old days? Was there a special woman in the war’s life?

  Death was my only mistress, says the war, but, oh, she was a glory to behold. Give me another one of those cigarettes. Death in a black cocktail dress, two hundred feet tall. Death wading through filth and horror and not a hair out of place. Death swatting fighter planes out of the sky. Have you ever been with a two-hundred-foot-tall woman, ladies and gentlemen?

  We shake our heads.

  You have to lift your thinking, that’s the first thing you find out. You have to raise your game. A woman like that – it changes your perspective. Her eyes, iced over in the bomb bay of a Lancaster twenty-eight thousand feet above Germany, as I begged her to run away with me. Her devastating smile as we tumbled through the frozen night sky . . .

  Landscapes of the war (not to scale):

  A hollowed out factory, the roof gone

  A burning jungle (plus terrified locals)

  The iron-grey sea at dawn

  A row of partially collapsed buildings, leaning into each other like drunk dancers

  Endless wheat fields, and you can make out every blade of grass, and the tanks in the distance . . .

  The war isn’t without a certain attractiveness. A certain worn and melancholy charisma. The war has kept its hair. Those wounded eyes are still clear. The war, then, trying to get off with our wives and girlfriends, our husbands and lovers. The war trying to seduce our seventeen-year-old daughters, turning the heads of our sons. The war with its grief and melancholy and its wounded eyes, at the windows of our husbands and wives and our sons and daughters in the early hours of the morning.

  That slick bastard. That sneaky fucker.

  Then there was the time the war tried to go on holiday. Soft rain in the mornings, long grey cloud rolling down off the hills. The war, trying to put up a tent. The war flailing around like a dad in an advert, tripping over tent pegs and so on, accidentally flattening whole towns. The war hilariously burning cities and taking the tops off mountains. The low comedy of war . . .

  Is war inevitable? we ask the war.

  As inevitable as the weather, says the war. As inevitable as childbirth and laughter and famine.

  Is war preventable? we ask. Put off-able? Delay-able?

  But the war is crying in the forecourt of the all-night garage at four in the morning, wrestling with the wrapper on a cheese and onion slice. Huge, embarrassing sobs. The self-pity of the war.

  I can’t get the fucking thing . . . it won’t . . .

  The war as a victim – of history, of the modern world, of its own success. The war haunted by the deaths of children. The endlessly photographed deaths of children. The incomprehensible deaths of children. The war in its gigantic self-indulgence.

  A crowd has gathered. At four in the morning, for God’s sake, in the forecour
t of an all-night garage. Where did all these people come from? Don’t they have homes to go to?

  The war wants to tell them about the Russian winter, the Indian campaigns, the conquest of Gaul. The war remembers Viking raids and cannibalism and human sacrifice. The war remembers breaking horses in the high desert, remembers rolling across Asia with the Golden Horde, remembers pulling back the tent flap at dawn to see thunderstorms dancing on the horizon, at the edge of the known world. All that important stuff that nobody wants to hear.

  We take the war home, tell the war it can sleep on our sofa.

  Ceramics! shouts the war as we stumble up the stairs. Clingfilm! The Gatling gun!

  We don’t know if the war even believes any of this any more.

  But the sun is already coming up and the war has fallen asleep at the kitchen table, its huge snores sounding like the end of the world. Probably there are birds singing somewhere. And we have no choice but to start thinking about how we’ll all get through the next impossible day.

  TANIA HERSHMAN

  AND WHAT IF ALL YOUR BLOOD RAN COLD

  WE DO IT gradually. Well, you have to, don’t you. No replacing all someone’s blood in a hurry. We’ve not done it on a real patient, you have to wait, for the right kind to turn up. Exactly the precise situation where this might work. Which doesn’t happen often. The patient who has no other chance, who is going to die. Who is going to die. That kind of patient.

  There’s someone here whose job it is to keep track. Of how many do die. Our mortality rates. She sits at her desk, she has a spreadsheet. She’s excellent with those. She loves numbers, lists, moving and shuffling them around. But every now and then she comes down, stands in a corner and watches. I see her there, like a ghost, as we’re resuscitating, intubating, all the blood, the noise. She hovers there in her corner and there’s a look on her face, I see it as I rush past. I can’t place that look.

  She’s in love. No, not with me. I don’t know who with. Not yet. But she sits at her desk, and although she’s precise, she has files and folders keeping track of heart attacks, infections, of treatments given, of the names of those who fill the morgue, the cold ones whose hearts we weren’t meant to restart, whose infections resisted all our efforts, she’s not focussed. Not any more. She used to be. When she first arrived, she was keen as mustard. As the sharpest mustard. She didn’t come down to watch then. She was all about figures.

  Maybe it’s not love, maybe it’s death. Or deaths. All of it. But I’m pretty sure. Because being surrounded by the almost-dying is what you get used to here. It’s not what begins to slide under your skin; it rolls off. Whatever’s eating her, it’s something else.

  We’ve only practised it, so far, the new technique, on the newly-dead. With permission, of course. There were no loved ones then, we used homeless people, people that no-one claimed. People that no-one visited. Hospital lawyers gave the go-ahead. After all, it’s to save lives, no? And they were already. Unsaveable.

  She wasn’t there then. No-one watched, because we were clumsy, slow, we bungled. It’s a lot of work, the wholesale blood removal. It’s a lot of liquid. Hours. It’s not like we dry them out – we replace the blood. With salt water. It’s cooler, the body temperature drops and then they can stay like that while we try and fix them. That’s the theory, anyway.

  I think the person she’s in love with, our death accountant, isn’t someone she works with. She’s not got that silly, I’ve-just-seen-my-beloved look when she watches us.

  It’s cold. So

  cold. They

  think I don’t

  know. They

  think I can’t. But

  I do. I

  am. Still.

  You know, I’m not the only one, there’s one of me in every hospital. Accountants of doom, that’s what we call ourselves, our joke, when we get together! It’s not like we’re doing the killing, we say, and we do laugh about it because if you don’t laugh about it, when you do what we do, what else happens but that you go home every night, every night, and sit and look at the moon and drink something to stop yourself from thinking about it but then you dream about it anyway, all the ways. You soak it into yourself when you are the one who knows all the dead, all the dying, it’s inside your skin, and you’ve got no barrier, no anti-morbid raincoat, which is something else we laugh about. What a gap in the market! we say as we pass around the Hobnobs. Someone needs to develop that kind of technology, help the doom accountants! Then we giggle, there does seem to be a lot of gigglers amongst us, no matter what age, no matter how long you’ve been doing what we do. If you saw me sitting in my office, if you saw me in front of my computer, you might think I was so serious, checking my spreadsheets, with all the different flavours of death in neat columns, with dates, times, of course. But inside I’m probably chuckling at something someone has sent by email, one of those cartoons, Death doing this, someone cheating Death, you know the kind of thing. We laugh a lot.

  Part of the job gets me out from behind the desk, I have to go and talk to the staff about what the situation is, quite often, I do the rounds, I wander, and I ask quietly, gently, about this week, about the almost-dying, the almost-died, the chances of, the attempts to save, and there isn’t much laughing then, of course, we’re usually in the corridors, I don’t like to take too much of their time. They’re the ones doing the saving, the resuscitating, the caring. I just add it up. I just do the sums. Who’s left us this week, and who gets to stay for a while longer.

  We found one! I know, don’t sound too excited. But – the perfect candidate. They tried everything else on him. Motorbike. Silly bugger. So we snap into action. Not the best coordinated team, despite the practice. I mean, all those years of med school but the minute you come out and there you are, real world, it’s different. There’s no pausing. It’s all blood and insides and people crying and, hopefully, patients hugging you and actually leaving the hospital. Properly.

  So we did it. Drained him and refilled. It all seemed to work. The saline instead of blood. And now we’ve got time. Or rather, he’s got time. We hope.

  It’s cold. So

  cold. They

  think I don’t.

  They

  think I

  can’t. But

  I

  do. I

  am. Still.

  We do talk, when we all get together, about why we ended up in this job, we know it’s not something our parents can boast about, My Daughter the Death Statistician! We know that it’s a job that’s as old as the hills, of course, all throughout history someone was charged with adding them up, the fallen. Or someone took it upon themselves, the Chroniclers. How many died in wars, how many in fires, plagues, pestilence. We humans, we like numbers, we find some kind of comfort, maybe from the fact – we discussed this last time we met – that we’re reading the numbers so it means we’re not one of them, we’re not on The List, not yet, and we can pretend we never will be. Or it’s some kind of talisman, you know: talk about it, read about it, do the sums, but me, never, I’m immortal! We know better than anyone about immortality. We know better than anyone the chances. They’re greater now – clean hands, antibiotics, surgical techniques, robots, nanoparticles, on and on. But still, the viruses get smarter and shiftier, who knows what’s in the air around my desk, or what’s coming in through that window? You just don’t. You just never know.

  And while we’re working on him, Bike Boy, she comes down. She stands for a while in the corner of the room, and then she says, to all of us, What’s happening exactly? And I see my chance, so I tell her. Replacing his blood? she says. All of it? Yes, I say, and she says, So he’s still . . . alive? Without . . . blood? Ah, I say, well, that’s sort of tricky. Tricky? she says, and she tilts her head to one side and I swear she’s almost grinning. He’s in a sort of . . . I say. Suspended animation, I think that’s the technical term, and here her eyes light up, honestly. Oh my god, she says, and her hands do this fluttering thing. I don’t have a column for that, I
don’t have . . . Neither do we! I say, and for a moment we’re both standing and grinning at each other. Then I’m called back and before I turn around she says, How long . . . ? and I say, Well, it’s experimental, you know. We just don’t. We really . . .

  I want to tell everyone, I want to email round and say, Guess what, I had to create a new category, I’ve got a new column, do you know about this, suspended, half-way-between? But of course, I can’t, it’s experimental, it’s hush hush, it’s more than that, hush hush hush HUSH. My fingers are itching to do it, but instead I choose a new colour for the category, I write his name down, a tick in that column. For now. And then I sit, and I think I’m sitting for ages and ages, wondering about it, wondering if he knows, wondering, for the first time really, you’d think I’d thought more about how dead might feel, but this is someone who might feel it and then come back. Come back. Jesus, Mary, Joseph and all the others, this really does feel like some sort of witchcraft.

  They worked on him, Bike Boy, for days. That’s the point of all of this: time. The thing we run out of round here, the main element which we wish we could bag and attach like a drip. Slow it all down, as we run and run, we’re running to try and outrun it. So this, if it works . . . my god. I mean, last night I sat at home and thought, What if we could do this with everyone who comes in? Slip in a drain, slide out all your blood, salt and cool you, and then we’d be walking, dancing, as we fixed you up, no? We could say, Oh look at that liver, hmm, what should we do? And then we’d hang out, drink tea, weigh up our options. And you’d be oh so chilled. And then I thought, But we don’t know anything about what’d be in your head. Would you be having dreams of walking through Antarctica, being trapped inside a freezer, becoming icicles? And then I thought of her, and I remembered how we’d grinned at each other, her and me, at this new thing, this new category. New. New and newness. Isn’t always better, though, is it?