Best British Short Stories 2018 Page 17

  ‘Actually, I’m also in a band,’ she then said.

  ‘Oh, really? What do you play?’

  ‘I sing!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A kind of jazz, sometimes soul, sometimes even hip-hop.’

  ‘That’s quite a mix. Let me know when you play next. I’d love to come.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Ah . . . yes. But an exhibition would be nicer, first.’

  ‘I’ll look out for something.’

  As their dialogue continued, he thought about his concentration on her fork. They were an unfair match. She could dig away at his tartar with sharp objects and he got pleasure from it, but he could not do that in the same way with her mouth, and he was not about to train to be a dentist. He would have to content himself for now with his regular treatment.

  He went back to the Chinese masseuse; she seemed happy to see him again. After the cursory oiling, he wanted to play a bit more, so he asked her if she would put on a mask. He had bought a pack of new masks just in case. She agreed, and there she was sitting in seiza, naked, wearing only the mask. He asked her to slowly pull down her mask and started to examine her teeth, running his index finger along the ridge of her upper row. She looked at him curiously but did not seem put out. She started to pull on him slowly and in turn he explored her teeth even more until he got release. Even after he had come, he started thinking of buying some implements, the kind that had a handle and a short crook. Of course, he would never use it directly, but maybe one day Mariko could teach him . . .

  The next time he saw her was at the surgery; she said the cleaning was almost done for half a year. He was almost depressed by this news, and tried to think of some way of prolonging their sessions, but he consoled himself with the thought that he could meet her somewhere on another date.

  Eventually, months on, they met at an exhibition of modern art that had come to the National Museum of Western Art in Ueno. The exhibition was a stunning compendium of the best examples of modern art that had come to Tokyo in decades and the show united the two of them to an amazing degree. It did not matter what kind of art they saw. They liked everything, but after a while they did seem to have a mutual preference, and that was for the more angular works, especially for the installations that consisted of objects with sharp points or ridges. And most especially one that was of a splayed, skeletal, rusty figure on its back with its mouth open. Possibly, it represented a person who had been tortured or burned in a fire, or simply some decayed sculptural form that had rusted in the depths of the ocean for many years. It was almost impossible to say if it was a found object or a truly sculpted piece.

  It was as Mariko bent over this installation and he moved to follow her inquisitiveness that she did the most startling thing, surreptitiously grabbing his crotch. He had to make a huge effort not to cry out, not really believing she had done this in a public place. But her look confirmed everything.

  They left soon after, tightly holding hands. Her grip was almost hurting him.

  They sat outside a restaurant in the park for a while waiting for a table, barely saying a word until they got inside. It soon came out.

  ‘I have a boyfriend. He scares me. But I want you. I do.’

  ‘I want you, too.’

  ‘It’s deeper than that. He knows about you. He’s been following you when you come to the surgery.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  Fuck!

  ‘What are we going to do, then?’ Yuki blurted.

  ‘Be honest with each other?’

  ‘You mean say what we want to do with each other?’

  ‘Yes, and to each other.’

  ‘I’ve . . . I’ve been going to a . . . place around here.’

  She smiled slightly. Not the reaction he expected. Or was it a smirk?

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You know?’

  ‘He told me.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It’s OK. If you stop now.’

  ‘I was only thinking of . . .’

  She placed a finger on his lips to stop him. It excited him beyond what he had a reasonable right to expect.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘To your place.’

  Then she added, ‘By the way.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Do you have a computer?’

  Once in his flat, he felt both a thrill and a strong sense of matter-of-factness, almost as if he were arriving home with his girlfriend or wife of many years. But he had never been married and had not had a girlfriend for a long time. Where to start now? He went for something mundane, offering her tea whilst sitting on the floor.

  He would turn on the television soon, if for no other reason than to deflect from the erotic reproductions around the room, all quite tastefully done, some from films such as Robbe-Grillet’s Trans-Europ-Express, some by established artists such as Makoto Aida with his vision of young naked girls all mixed up in a blender. Inwardly, he had sighed. There had simply been no time to tidy up or re-arrange his place, given the rapidity of events. At least, there was nothing truly perverted on the walls.

  ‘I . . . I’ll miss you, you know.’

  ‘No, you won’t.’

  ‘I will!’

  She burst out laughing.

  ‘No, you won’t miss me – because I won’t go away!’

  ‘You mean you’ll leave him?’

  ‘Yes, and I’ll show you what you’ll miss till your next appointment.’

  While he took this puzzling information in, she reminded him to fetch his computer. By the time he had brought it and set it up on the table, she had produced from her bag a huge camera and several pieces of rubberised plastic or perhaps silicon that looked almost like geometrical experiments in shape. Then he realised that the folds on the plastic parts were actually handles, and everything fell in to place.

  Taking off her sweater and deliberately unbuttoning her blouse so that he could see just enough of her cleavage to get him hard, she said,

  ‘Do what I say. You’ll like this.’

  After motioning him to lean back on the sofa, she asked him to hold the plastic handles so that they hooked into his lips, spreading them so that he made a grimace, not of pain but one that he was sure hardly presented an image of how he truly looked. Standing, she undid her blouse completely and took off her skirt so that she was only in her tights and bra. She pulled gently on him, then left it to pick up the camera. Placing a small mirror inside his mouth, balanced between the plastic sections, she aimed the camera right into it, oblivious of his distorted features, her crotch a gimbal that anchored her whole body and the camera above him. Eventually, she stopped to take off her tights and took his hand, letting him slide it in just enough to harden him more. When she had finished taking the photos, she took out the SD card and put it in the computer.

  He was half-expecting that it had all been an elaborate ploy to take pictures of his nakedness and put them on the Internet, but actually she indeed showed him photos of his teeth, going into extreme detail about each one’s designation and characteristics – and how best to keep them clean. He did notice perhaps one unintended photo that showed his distorted features, but it was so extreme that he doubted anyone would recognise him from that. But as she showed him the others, she could see that he was getting even more excited, so she pulled on him, eventually taking him in her mouth. With his penis poised over her, then forcing the tip into the narrow spaces between her teeth and the insides of her mouth, the red wall that on the other side was her face, he finally realised that she had a beautiful smile.

  ‘Now,’ she proposed. ‘What do you want to do?’

  CD ROSE

  SISTER

  IN APRIL 1992, shortly before I started taking photographs, my sister went missing. I have never seen her since.

  We were twins, me and Marie, though identical only in our solitude. She was as blonde as I am dark, her skin as dark as mine is pale. As if we’d been ha
lf-swapped, bits of us crossed over in the womb. Chalk and cheese they’d say, refusing to believe we were even related, not trusting our common surname, our strange silent language. We never invented any code or secret babble to protect our world but always knew what the other had done, was doing or would do. Even though I haven’t seen her for so long now or know anything of her whereabouts, I still feel her close sometimes, a part of myself missing.

  I couldn’t say when I started to realise she was different. All of us are mysteries in our way, and her way was close enough to mine as to make it hard for me to see. We walked the same pathway, though looked in different directions. People asked if I worried about her or if she was OK and I’d just nod and say Sure it’s nothing, not seeing what others could. There was nothing strange about her to me, but I often make the mistake of thinking I’m normal.

  Her disappearances were little ones at first, tiny moments when she was, then wasn’t, there. All children do it some way or another, those instants when they make themselves invisible, testing a distracted parent’s anxiety a little longer every time. But Marie was different, she had a way of slipping into and out of being, reappearing at your shoulder the moment you started to notice. At the foot of a shady garden, in a supermarket, on a beach in the summer: the places where children often go for minutes at a time, and Marie would do no different, but then she’d begin to do it at home as well, absent herself just long enough so it was realised and then, the moment people began to worry, reappear.

  Until one day she didn’t. But that would happen much later.

  We never spoke about growing up. I just thought it would happen, but my sister didn’t. She existed in her own space and her own time, letting the world move around her while she stayed fixed, exactly where she was, choosing whether or not to be there.

  Age didn’t touch her. She never did the things I did, go through phases, get spots or boyfriends. When we were teenagers she started not turning up to things or arriving hours too early. She never really found the knack of telling the time, never wore a watch. It got her detentions but she didn’t mind, indifferent to whatever time she had to stay. Recently, looking through some old pictures, I tried to find us but there is no image in which her face isn’t blurred, slightly out of focus or only half in the frame. She was too slow or too fast for the shutter, resistant to chemicals.

  It was later, after I’d gone to university and she’d stayed with our parents, drifting and circling, that I started to get phone calls at strange times of night, the ring in the hallway at 3am ignored by flatmates knowing it would be my crazy sister. Her voice would be slow, as slurred (I thought) by sleep as I was, emerging from the murky night and the dirty receiver, or delayed as if she was calling from the other side of the world. Other times I’d hear a hyperactive babble, impossible to follow, the words piling up on themselves. I thought it was drugs, but it wasn’t.

  She came to visit once, turning up unannounced early one morning, the sun hardly risen. I had no idea how she’d arrived or where she’d come from, but by then such behaviour was normal. She walked into my room as though she knew the place already and built a nest from a pile of books in the middle of the floor. I can’t remember how long she stayed, a week, maybe more, but I do remember she never went out, nor spoke to anyone else. I don’t even remember her eating. She passed the days opening all of my books, sometimes poring over a page or a word for hours, other times flicking through as if she could read them in seconds.

  ‘How do you know,’ she asked, ‘when these things are happening?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘I mean, that these books are full of stories, yes . . . ?’

  ‘Some of them are . . .’

  ‘. . . which happen in the past . . .’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘But when you read them, they’re happening now . . .’

  ‘That’s the effect they can cause . . .’

  ‘So how do we know when anything’s really happening?’

  I was baffled at the time, put it down to her oddness, tried to explain something I’d read about a remote tense, the one we use to talk about something that happened time ago, or that is hypothetical, or even when we just want to be polite, but she’d gone before I could finish.

  I didn’t see her for years after that. Mother told me she went travelling, that she’d disappear, sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks, then reappear again with no word, as if nothing. Marie was always vague about where she’d been, but seeing as she was healthy and clean and not apparently troubled my parents never worried.

  Until the day they found her staring at the clock on the kitchen wall, in tears. ‘It’s just . . . not right.’ All she could say, panic rising in her voice. She couldn’t tell the time any more; I wasn’t sure she’d ever been able to. They took her for a brain scan, fearing some kind of stroke, but it showed nothing. Doctors sighed, gave her antidepressants and telephone counselling. Meanwhile, Marie gave up on the idea of time altogether. She seemed much happier, mother told me.

  It was ’92, late March, the year finally starting to turn, when I got another call. ‘She’s not well.’ She never is, I thought, but listened patiently to my mother’s descriptions of Marie’s ever more frequent absences alternating with long periods locked in her room then accepted her request to go the old house they kept in the country, the one which had been my grandfather’s and where we’d spent summers as children.

  I hadn’t been back there for years, always too cold even in summer, shot through with the smell of damp and rot, miles from anywhere, useless for a hurriedly arranged rendezvous or weekend escape.

  Marie was already there when I finally arrived, sitting on the massive broken-springed sofa we’d jumped on as kids. There was a large stain on one end of it, the result of a bottle of red wine and a row between my parents. She didn’t look up when I walked in. I went to put the kettle on but there was no electricity.

  ‘There’s gas,’ she said. ‘I’ve fixed the gas. I usually put a pan on the hob.’ The water took an age to boil and we sat there in silence. My mother had told me the doctors had looked at her again but found nothing wrong with her, so they couldn’t put her away. ‘But best for her not to be on her own,’ they’d advised her. I handed my sister some tea and searched through her things: the shambling clothes she’d had for years, a worn-out toothbrush, a packet of fluoxetine, unopened. Also, a stack of books, dog-eared and stained, lay on the floor of the tiny upstairs room she always chose. I recognised some of them – ones I remembered reading as a kid. She must have brought them from my parents’ house where they were still shelved on the landing or stacked in cardboard boxes in the attic.

  She seemed no different, so I settled myself in for a long stretch. Little of the looking-after my mother had requested needed doing. I didn’t resent the intrusion, was doing little myself at the time and had enough money to last me a couple of months. Marie could take care of herself, I had no worry about that, food always a minor but annoying essential for her, a piece of toast or some old fruit enough to keep her skinny body from vanishing completely, though I’d often find her having breakfast at midnight, then asleep at noon.

  When asked, which I did with decreasing frequency, she’d tell me she was fine, but as the days wore on I realised she wasn’t. That’s why I stopped asking, the words made no sense to her. It was a twin thing, I suppose, knowing the desperate sadness in her, touching it myself, but having no idea where to go with it. Other times she would move so slowly, be sitting so still, she would take hours to drink a cup of the tea which had become the only thing she’d eat or drink, the liquid so cold when it got to its dregs. Hours became seconds, and seconds could shift into hours.

  I went out most days with the excuse of needing to get milk or cigarettes or a newspaper, but mostly just for my sanity, rambling the long way round to avoid the narrow roadside, cutting through long-forgotten footpaths and the edges of muddy fields. After a week, maybe ten days, I returned t
o the smell of burning. The kitchen was filled with smoke and an acrid stink, but no flames. Marie had put her pan on the hob and forgotten about it. This was what I’d worried about having to do with mother one day, not my sister.

  She was on the sofa, cross-legged, a book open on the space in her lap.

  ‘I only just put it on,’ she said when I confronted her with the burnt pan, ‘a second ago, just as you were going out.’ I’d been gone two hours, at least.

  Many of the books she’d brought with her had now shifted down the stairs and into the main room. I was sure there were more there than a week ago, as if they were breeding. A couple sat, smoke-smelling now, on the kitchen table. Reading was the only thing she could manage to do. Sometimes she would stare at one page or even a single word for hours, other times flick through the pages as though she could read an entire book in seconds, like I remembered her doing all that time ago.

  ‘All these books,’ she said, ‘their pages are empty, perfect blanks until you begin to read.’ Madness is as madness does, I thought: who could say she wasn’t right? ‘When we were children,’ she went on, ‘I read a book full of smoke and fire, shadow and flame. I only remember a boy coming through a doorway, fearing what he’d find in the room. That’s all. I tried to find it again later, looking at pages and pictures and jackets, picking books up and flicking through them, trying to find an illustration or a turn of phrase I recognised, something which brought the story back to me, but even though I came close, often, I never found that book again, never could recall what happened in it, what the story was, or worse than the story, recapture the atmosphere it filled me with. I read every book there, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t there any more. And always, since then, I’ve been going back and looking.’

  I got on with scrubbing the pan, it was the only one we had, and resolved not to let her alone so much. It was in the days which followed that she began to disappear. Only slightly at first, those tiny things she had always done, slipping out of view even though she was in the same room, reappearing just as you’d noticed her missing, nothing but a voice at my shoulder at first, then materialising, and vanishing again as I acknowledged her presence.