Best British Short Stories 2015 Page 2

  Windsor’s not what you think. It has an intelligentsia. Once you wind down from the castle to the bottom of Peascod Street, they are not all royalist lickspittles; and as you cross over the junction to St Leonard’s Road, you might sniff out closet republicans. Still, it was cold comfort at the polls for the local socialists, and people murmured that it was a vote wasted; they had to show the strength of their feelings by tactical voting, and their spirit by attending outré events at the arts centre. Recently remodelled from the fire station, it was a place where self-published poets found a platform, and sour white wine was dispensed from boxes; on Saturday mornings there were classes in self-assertion, yoga and picture framing.

  But when Mrs Thatcher came to visit, the dissidents took to the streets. They gathered in knots, inspecting the press corps and turning their shoulders to the hospital gates, where a row of precious parking bays were marked out and designated DOCTORS ONLY.

  A woman said, ‘I have a PhD, and I’m often tempted to park there.’ It was early, and her loaf was still warm from the baker; she snuggled it against her, like a pet. She said, ‘There are some strong opinions flying about.’

  ‘Mine is a dagger,’ I said, ‘and it’s flying straight to her heart.’

  ‘Your sentiment,’ she said admiringly, ‘is the strongest I’ve heard.’

  ‘Well, I have to go in,’ I said. ‘I’m expecting Mr Duggan to mend my boiler.’

  ‘On a Saturday? Duggan? You’re highly honoured. Better scoot. If you miss him he’ll charge you. He’s a shark, that man. But what can you do?’ She fished for a pen in the bottom of her bag. ‘I’ll give you my number.’ She wrote it on my bare arm, as neither of us had paper. ‘Give me a ring. Do you ever go to the arts centre? We can get together over a glass of wine.’

  I was putting my Perrier water in the fridge when the doorbell rang. I’d been thinking, we don’t know it now, but we’ll look back with fondness on the time Mrs Thatcher was here: new friendships formed in the street, chit-chat about plumbers whom we hold in common. On the entryphone there was the usual crackle, as if someone had set fire to the line. ‘Come up, Mr Duggan,’ I said. It was as well to be respectful to him.

  I lived on the third floor, the stairs were steep and Duggan was ponderous. So I was surprised at how soon I heard the tap at the door. ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Did you manage to park your van?’

  On the landing – or rather on the top step, as I was alone up there – stood a man in a cheap quilted jacket. My innocent thought was, here is Duggan’s son. ‘Boiler?’ I said.

  ‘Right,’ he said.

  He heaved himself in, with his boiler man’s bag. We were nose to nose in the box-sized hall. His jacket, more than adequate to the English summer, took up the space between us. I edged backwards. ‘What’s up with it?’ he said.

  ‘It groans and bangs. I know it’s August, but —’

  ‘No, you’re right, you’re right, you can never trust the weather. Rads hot?’

  ‘In patches.’

  ‘Air in your system,’ he said. ‘While I’m waiting I’ll bleed it. Might as well. If you’ve got a key.’

  It was then that a suspicion struck me. Waiting, he said. Waiting for what? ‘Are you a photographer?’

  He didn’t answer. He was patting himself down, searching his pockets, frowning.

  ‘I was expecting a plumber. You shouldn’t just walk in.’

  ‘You opened the door.’

  ‘Not to you. Anyway, I don’t know why you bothered. You can’t see the front gates from this side. You need to go out of here,’ I said pointedly, ‘and turn left.’

  ‘They say she’s coming out the back way. It’s a great place to get a shot.’

  My bedroom had a perfect view of the hospital garden; anyone, by walking around the side of the house, could guess this.

  ‘Who do you work for?’ I said.

  ‘You don’t need to know.’

  ‘Perhaps not, but it would be polite to tell me.’ As I backed into the kitchen, he followed. The room was full of sunlight, and now I saw him clearly: a stocky man, thirties, unkempt, with a round friendly face and unruly hair. He dumped his bag on the table, and pulled off his jacket. His size diminished by half. ‘Let’s say I’m freelance.’

  ‘Even so,’ I said, ‘I should get a fee for the use of my premises. It’s only fair.’

  ‘You couldn’t put a price on this,’ he said.

  By his accent, he was from Liverpool. Far from Duggan, or Duggan’s son. But then he hadn’t spoken till he was in at the front door, so how could I have known? He could have been a plumber, I said to myself. I hadn’t been a total fool; for the moment, self-respect was all that concerned me. Ask for identification, people advise, before letting a stranger in. But imagine the ruckus that Duggan would have caused, if you’d held his boy up on the stairs, impeding him from getting to the next boiler on his list, and shortening his plunder opportunities.

  The kitchen window looked down over Trinity Place, now seething with people. If I craned my neck I could see a new police presence to my left, trotting up from the private gardens of Clarence Crescent. ‘Have one of these?’ The visitor had found his cigarettes.

  ‘No. And I’d rather you didn’t.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ He crushed the pack into his pocket, and pulled out a balled-up handkerchief. He stood back from the tall window, mopping his face; face and handkerchief were both crumpled and grey. Clearly it wasn’t something he was used to, tricking himself into private houses. I was more annoyed with myself than with him. He had a living to make, and perhaps you couldn’t blame him for pushing in, when some fool of a woman held the door open. I said, ‘How long do you propose to stay?’

  ‘She’s expected in an hour.’

  ‘Right.’ That accounted for it, the increased hum and buzz from the street. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘We’ve a girl on the inside. A nurse.’

  I handed him two sheets of kitchen roll. ‘Ta.’ He blotted his forehead. ‘She’s going to come out and the doctors and nurses are lining up, so she can appreciate them. She’s going to walk along the line with her thank-you and bye-bye, then toddle round the side, duck into a limo and she’s away. Well, that’s the idea. I don’t have an exact time. So I thought if I was here early I could set up, have a look at the angles.’

  ‘How much will you get for a good shot?’

  ‘Life without parole,’ he said.

  I laughed. ‘It’s not a crime.’

  ‘That’s my feeling.’

  ‘It’s a fair distance,’ I said. ‘I mean, I know you have special lenses, and you’re the only one up here, but don’t you want a close-up?’

  ‘Nah,’ he said. ‘As long as I get a clear view, the distance is a doddle.’

  He crumpled up the kitchen roll and looked around for the bin. I took the paper from him, he grunted, then applied himself to unstrapping his bag, a canvas holdall that I supposed would be as suitable for a photographer as for any tradesman. But one by one he took out metal parts, which, even in my ignorance, I knew were not part of a photographer’s kit. He began to assemble them; his fingertips were delicate. As he worked he sang, almost under his breath, a little song from the football terraces:

  ‘You are a scouser, a dirty scouser,

  You’re only happy on giro day.

  Your dad’s out stealing, your mam’s drug-dealing,

  Please don’t take our hub-caps away.’

  ‘Three million unemployed,’ he said. ‘Most of them live round our way. It wouldn’t be a problem here, would it?’

  ‘Oh no. Plenty of gift shops to employ everybody. Have you been up to the High Street?’

  I thought of the tourist scrums pushing each other off the pavements, jostling for souvenir humbugs and wind-up Beefeaters. It could have been another country. No voices carried from the street belo
w. Our man was humming, absorbed. I wondered if his song had a second verse. As he lifted each component from his bag he wiped it with a cloth that was cleaner than his handkerchief, handling it with gentle reverence, like an altar boy polishing the vessels for mass.

  When the mechanism was assembled he held it out for my inspection. ‘Folding stock,’ he said. ‘That’s the beauty of her. Fits in a cornflakes packet. They call her the widowmaker. Though not in this case. Poor bloody Denis, eh? He’ll have to boil his own eggs from now on.’

  It feels, in retrospect, as if hours stretched ahead, as we sat in the bedroom together, he on a folding chair near the sash window, his mug of tea cradled in his hands, the widowmaker at his feet; myself on the edge of the bed, over which I had hastily dragged the duvet to tidy it. He had brought his jacket from the kitchen; perhaps the pockets were crammed with assassin’s requisites. When he flung it on the bed, it slid straight off again. I tried to grab it and my palm slid across the nylon; like a reptile, it seemed to have its own life. I flumped it on the bed beside me and took a grip on it by the collar. He looked on with mild approval.

  He kept glancing at his watch, though he said he had no certain time. Once he rubbed its face with his palm, as if it might be fogged and concealing a different time underneath. He would check, from the corner of his eye, that I was still where I should be, my hands in view: as, he explained, he preferred them to be. Then he would fix his gaze on the lawns, the back fences. As if to be closer to his target, he rocked his chair forwards on its front legs.

  I said, ‘It’s the fake femininity I can’t stand, and the counterfeit voice. The way she boasts about her dad the grocer and what he taught her, but you know she would change it all if she could, and be born to rich people. It’s the way she loves the rich, the way she worships them. It’s her philistinism, her ignorance, and the way she revels in her ignorance. It’s her lack of pity. Why does she need an eye operation? Is it because she can’t cry?’

  When the telephone rang, it made us both jump. I broke off what I was saying. ‘Answer that,’ he said. ‘It will be for me.’

  It was hard for me to imagine the busy network of activity that lay behind the day’s plans. ‘Wait,’ I’d said to him, as I asked him, ‘Tea or coffee?’ as I switched the kettle on. ‘You know I was expecting the boiler man? I’m sure he’ll be here soon.’

  ‘Duggan?’ he said. ‘Nah.’

  ‘You know Duggan?’

  ‘I know he won’t be here.’

  ‘What have you done to him?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ He snorted. ‘Why would we do anything? No need. He got the nod. We have pals all over the place.’

  Pals. A pleasing word. Almost archaic. Dear God, I thought, Duggan an IRA man. Not that my visitor had named his affiliation, but I had spoken it loudly in my mind. The word, the initials, didn’t cause me the shock or upset it would cause, perhaps, to you. I told him this, as I reached in the fridge for milk and waited for the kettle to boil: saying, I would deter you if I could, but it would only be out of fear for myself and what’s going to happen to me after you’ve done it: which by the way is what? I am no friend of this woman, though I don’t (I felt compelled to add) believe violence solves anything. But I would not betray you, because . . .

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Everybody’s got an Irish granny. It’s no guarantee of anything at all. I’m here for your sightlines. I don’t care about your affinities. Keep away from the front window and don’t touch the phone, or I’ll knock you dead. I don’t care about the songs your bloody great-uncles used to sing on a Saturday night.’

  I nodded. It was only what I’d thought myself. It was sentiment and no substance.

  ‘The minstrel boy to the war is gone,

  In the ranks of death you’ll find him.

  His father’s sword he has girded on,

  And his wild harp slung behind him.’

  My great-uncles (and he was right about them) wouldn’t have known a wild harp if it had sprung up and bitten their bottoms. Patriotism was only an excuse to get what they called pie-eyed, while their wives had tea and gingernuts then recited the rosary in the back kitchen. The whole thing was an excuse: why we are oppressed. Why we are sat here being oppressed, while people from other tribes are hauling themselves up by their own ungodly efforts and buying three-piece suites. While we are rooted here going la-la-la auld Ireland (because at this distance in time the words escape us) our neighbours are patching their quarrels, losing their origins and moving on, to modern, non-sectarian forms of stigma, expressed in modern songs: you are a scouser, a dirty scouser. I’m not, personally. But the north is all the same to southerners. And in Berkshire and the Home Counties, all causes are the same, all ideas for which a person might care to die: they are nuisances, a breach of the peace, and likely to hold up the traffic or delay the trains.

  ‘You seem to know about me,’ I said. I sounded resentful.

  ‘As much as anybody would need to know. That’s to say, not that you’re anything special. You can be a help if you want, and if you don’t want, we can do accordingly.’

  He spoke as if he had companions. He was only one man. But a bulky one, even without the jacket. Suppose I had been a true-blue Tory, or one of those devout souls who won’t so much as crush an insect: I still wouldn’t have tried anything tricky. As it was, he counted on me to be docile, or perhaps, despite his sneering, he trusted me to some small extent. Anyway, he let me follow him into the bedroom with my mug of tea. He carried his own tea in his left hand and his gun in his right. He left the roll of sticky tape and the handcuffs on the kitchen table, where he’d put them when they came out of his bag.

  And now he let me pick up the phone extension from the bedside table, and hand it to him. I heard a woman’s voice, young, timid and far away. You would not have thought she was in the hospital round the corner. ‘Brendan?’ she said. I did not imagine that was his real name.

  He put down the receiver so hard it clattered. ‘There’s some friggin’ hold-up. It’ll be twenty minutes, she reckons. Or thirty, it could even be thirty.’ He let his breath out, as if he’d been holding it since he stomped upstairs. ‘Bugger this. Where’s the lav?’

  You can surprise a person with affinity, I thought, and then say, ‘Where’s the lav?’ Not a Windsor expression. It wasn’t really a question, either. The flat was so small that its layout was obvious. He took his weapon with him. I listened to him urinate. Run a tap. I heard splashing. I heard him come out, zipping his trousers. His face was red where he’d been towelling it. He sat down hard on the folding chair. There was a bleat from the fragile canework. He said, ‘You’ve got a number written on your arm.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s it a number of?’

  ‘A woman.’ I dabbed my forefinger with my tongue and slicked it across the ink.

  ‘You won’t get it off that way. You need to get some soap and give it a good scrub.’

  ‘How kind of you to take an interest.’

  ‘Have you wrote it down? Her number?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t you want it?’

  Only if I have a future, I thought. I wondered when it would be appropriate to ask.

  ‘Make us another brew. And put sugar in it this time.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. I was flustered by a failing in hospitality. ‘I didn’t know you took sugar. I might not have white.’

  ‘The bourgeoisie, eh?’

  I was angry. ‘You’re not too proud to shoot out of my bourgeois sash window, are you?’

  He lurched forward, hand groping for the gun. It wasn’t to shoot me, though my heart leapt. He glared down into the gardens, tensing as if he were going to butt his head through the glass. He made a small, dissatisfied grunt, and sat down again. ‘A bloody cat on the fence.’

  ‘I have demerara,’ I said. ‘I expect it tastes the same, whe
n it’s stirred in.’

  ‘You wouldn’t think of shouting out of the kitchen window, would you?’ he said. ‘Or trying to bolt down the stairs?’

  ‘What, after all I’ve said?’

  ‘You think you’re on my side?’ He was sweating again. ‘You don’t know my side. Believe me, you have no idea.’

  It crossed my mind then he might not be a Provisional, but from one of the mad splinter groups you heard of. I was hardly in a position to quibble; the end result would be the same. But I said, ‘Bourgeoisie, what sort of polytechnic expression is that?’

  I was insulting him, and I meant to. For those of tender years, I should explain that polytechnics were institutes of higher education, for the young who missed university entrance: for those who were bright enough to say affinity, but still wore cheap nylon coats.

  He frowned. ‘Brew the tea.’

  ‘I don’t think you should sneer at my great-uncles for being cod-Irish, if you talk in slogans you found in skips.’

  ‘It was a sort of a joke,’ he said.

  ‘Oh. Well. Was it?’ I was taken aback. ‘It looks as if I’ve no more sense of humour than she has.’

  I indicated, with my head, the lawns outside the window, where the prime minister was shortly to die.

  ‘I don’t fault her for not laughing,’ he said. ‘I won’t fault her for that.’

  ‘You should. It’s why she can’t see how ridiculous she is.’