The Best British Short Stories 2013 Read online

  He had forgotten to check his route from the flat before he left and got lost around the edge of town, arriving at the training ground over half an hour late. The squad had already begun a keepball routine when the manager, his arms folded, feet planted apart, saw him running towards them.

  ‘Three full circuits, dickhead. Go.’

  He started immediately into a fast pace, running in the other direction from the outbuilding, and by the time he had been going only a few minutes, and he heard distantly behind him the sound of the mower starting up, his breath was already coming thickly and his heart thumping. He felt his legs and his chest tighten as he ran faster still – without caring how it would look to the manager and the players – not allowing himself to look round until he had reached the turn at the road side of the pitches.

  He saw the small figure on top of the mower as it moved slowly down the side of the furthest pitch and, even from that distance, he knew that it was the other groundsman.

  He completed the three circuits and rejoined the others, careful to keep his head down and join fiercely into the training routine, in case any of them might look at his face.

  He trained on each of the following days with an intensity that caused him, by the end of the week, to be the object of frequent bruising challenges, all of which went overlooked by the manager and his assistant, surprised and pleased as they were at the sudden unexpected competitiveness brought about by their coaching.

  His relations with the other players were not helped either by his insistence on staying behind after the session to train alone, sprinting and sweating, watching, worrying, constantly wondering why – had the two groundsmen swapped roles, or was it something else?

  The sour smell of the cut grass, as he limped cramping back to the changing rooms, was almost overpowering.

  After two weeks of furious training the manager called him into his office.

  ‘Son, this is what I’d wanted to see when I signed you.’

  He was being put back in the first-team squad, the manager told him smugly.

  On Tuesday night he was on the bench for a home match. He spent all of it warming up along the touchline, running up and down the side of the pitch, trying to ignore the occasional shouts from the bored, unhappy supporters in the main stand.

  Even as the match came towards the end of injury time, and he had not been brought on, he continued to stretch and pace along the tidy lush fringe until, as one fan had already pointed out to him, he was more tired than he had been at the end of the two matches he’d played.

  And then, one morning later that week during a chest-control routine, there he was – leaving the outbuilding as though that was where he had been this whole time. Tom tried not to look. He concentrated on the drills, sprinting, jumping, heading, attempting to distract himself from the hollow racing sensation in his stomach that grew each time there was an interval of quiet from the steady hum of the mower. At the end of the session he came in with the others. He showered, turning the knob to its coldest until he was nearly unable to breathe.

  The next day he continued to look away. Only during the runs, when they jogged in a long column, would he allow himself to watch him. And it was at these times that he would see him looking, as if at the whole squad, from where he sat on the mower or rolled crisp, shocking-white lines onto the grass.

  The rest of the squad had showered and changed, but Tom stayed sitting in his towel on the splintered bench until they had all left. Even though he had stopped training alone nobody waited for him any more or asked if he was coming to the canteen or the pub. He sat there for some time before he put his clothes on, then left the room, stepped into the cold prefab corridor, and began walking to the car park.

  He got into his car, which was parked to one side where the gravel surface dipped slightly towards nettle bushes and a low dead tree, and waited.

  The man was one of the last to leave. The assistant manager, the physio, some of the players and the canteen staff had all got into their cars and driven off while Tom sat there.

  He felt his blood throbbing against the headrest as he observed him in his rear-view mirror, coming up the path, calmly approaching the blue car parked on its own in the middle of the car park. He got in and – Tom could just make out his movements through the windscreen – adjusted his radio or something on the dashboard for a moment before starting the engine and slowly pulling away.

  The team won another match, away, resoundingly. Tom did not play. His dad called him afterwards and said that he wanted to come down and see him, or for Tom to come and spend a few days at home. Tom lied and told him that neither would be possible, because the manager was making them do extra, and longer, training sessions. His dad told him again to be patient and keep his sleeves rolled up, that his chance would come, eventually.

  One week on from the reappearance of the groundsman Tom was sitting in the canteen, surrounded by the smell of deodorant and soft exhausted food, at the long central table around which the squad were athletically devouring jacket potatoes, baked beans, chips, chilli con carnes. He was on the bench at one end of the table, facing away from the entrance, and so did not at first see the groundsman coming in. Only when he had come past and stood at the hot grubby glass of the display cabinet did Tom spot him. He was waiting for the server to come back through from the kitchen. Tom watched the back of his head anxiously as he looked down at the cracked empty dishes and the remaining jacket potatoes. Only when he took his plate of potato and beans and walked, without looking over, to an empty table on the other side of the room did Tom notice Balbriggan, sat opposite him, following the man’s movement. Tom went still with fear when he saw the small smile on Balbriggan’s face as he nudged Foley on the arm, nodding in the direction of the groundsman.

  Foley looked around, baffled, not sure what he was supposed to be seeing.

  ‘You know what he is, that guy?’ Balbriggan was staring across the room, his small stupid eyes proud, gleeful.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Him – the new groundsman.’

  Tom looked over now, too, to where the man sat by a window eating slowly and alone, his bright immaculate pitches stretching away through the window beyond him.

  Foley frowned briefly, confused, as Balbriggan whispered into his ear, before turning back to what was left of his chilli con carne.

  Tom sat in his car with the radio on low as the other vehicles departed one by one until only a few remained.

  Balbriggan had continued talking to Foley for some time after they turned their attention away from the groundsman. He complained about the grass, that it was too long, that it should be a fucking rugby pitch. Tom had sat there listening to them as anger, and pity, raged inside him, making him want to stand up and damage something, to damage Balbriggan, to pick up his plate and smash it on the top of Balbriggan’s dense tanned head. He stayed there with his meal half finished until those two and a few of the other players had left the canteen. The man must have been aware of him. He wondered if he was aware too of what the players said about him. Tom looked across only once. He was still eating, his head bent towards his food; the wide, open face difficult to read. Tom had felt again that same faint sadness as when he’d watched him press in paint-pot lids on the table in front of the old club scarf. He stood up, walked over to put his tray onto the stacking tower by the door and left.

  The manager was leaning on his sunroof, talking into his phone.

  Tom could not fully hear what he was saying but he made out ‘board’ and ‘spastic’ before the manager flipped the phone shut and got into his car to leave. When the sound of the engine had died down the lane and the car park was again in silence, Tom got out. Quickly, looking around him, he walked towards the blue car. He stopped for a few seconds in front of it, looking through the windscreen at the few scattered CDs and payslip envelope on the mucky passenger seat, before stepping forward and pulling
out one of the windscreen wipers. He checked over his shoulder, then placed a piece of paper onto the glass and let the wiper retract to pin it in place. Only one word had been written on it, in large letters, slightly crumpled now under the pressure of the wiper. Faggot. Tom stared at it for a moment, then turned, walked unsteadily back to his car, started the engine and drove away.

  J Krissman in the Park

  Laura Del-Rivo

  His outfit was not absurd on an old man in midwinter: knitted ski cap, secondhand coat of good quality and bright white trainers. Privately, to conserve warmth, he was bandaged in a winding sheet of thermal underwear and tubular medical crepe. The frail knees were anointed with menthol.

  J Krissman, the name with which he signed his unpublishable writings, experienced his body as an immediate area of seepage and discomfort. His organs, however, persisted with their functions, such as the filtering of his urine; the skin shed its comet dust of dead cells. Also the skeleton, the specific diagram in bone laced with dainty capillaries, advanced him through the black, green and copper-tinted urban park.

  The winter light made the trees distinct. Pollarded branches ended in bristling knuckles. High in the tallest tree, a slovenly heap of dead vegetation was unmoved by the wind. Krissman considered whether it was possible to quantify in terms of physics the stillness of the squirrels’ dray which seemed in a different dimension from the tonnage of surging air. He remembered that the purpose of his walk was to purify a letter.

  His mouth contained the protein odour of the digestion of dead plants and animals, and words.

  ‘I read your article in the New Scientist on Multiverse Theory describing two hypothetical Universes, one predicated on a cold Big Bang and the other lacking the Weak Nuclear Force. I need to ask, is there a law which states that if the Universe can exist, it must exist?’

  As he spoke, he experienced agitation and wonder, as if winged archangels had sprung up at his shoulders.

  ‘That is, is the hypothetically possible the same as the necessary?’

  Due to the opaque property of matter to the handicapped human eye, the remaining body of Krissman showed no immodesty of skull or bone, no unseemly lolling of lights and liver. He leaked only mild warmth, which activated the volatile film of menthol. However, he was in a rage and pain because in old age his mind as well as his body was becoming uninhabitable. The cause of such turmoil was that he hated humanity, its mass and mediocrity. The hatred had set up camp in his mind and its angry and unpleasant manoeuvres without cessation gave him no rest. He chose the park for his daily walk to avoid as much as possible the pinkish mass of foolish faces.

  Among J Krissman’s rejected writings, THE ANIMAL NOT SOLIPSIST BUT CREATIVE proposed that meaningful existence depended on its being verified and recorded by a life form conscious of being conscious. The author argued that knowledge is secondary creation; thus the dinosaurs were retrospectively brought into full existence. Their terrifying reptilian roar would have been silent without ears. However, by this argument, his own unpublished work did not exist.

  It seemed clear to him that, for serious purpose, humanity was overproduced. Its billions were unnecessary; it was devalued by quantity. He wished it no harm but refused the imperative to love the massed pinkness, which was unloveable. In crowds, the unlovable became the hated.

  Sometimes he felt as if wolves were eating his mind, but he did not know whether the wolves were other people or generated by himself.

  For these reasons, it was necessary for his safety to bandage also his mind, which was more obscene than the stained and discoloured rags of flesh.

  Me Oh Lord You have made to hate. I am even vain of my hatred, believing I am Your chosen hater. By anomaly I am an atheist and supporter of most liberal causes.

  The pollarded branches clubbed the sky. The squirrels’ dray was undisturbed.

  The most dangerous was that the hatred was spreading from his mind to his soul and narrowing his ability to experience wonder.

  A family group occupied a bench. Surrounding them like a gilded bubble was the superpower of the commonplace. Of the two young women, one held a pram containing a baby while a boy of about four clung to the pram handle. A youth, possibly the women’s brother, who accompanied them, shared their sacramental Tesco biscuits.

  This family represented the social class, which Krissman most feared and hated, that proliferated in council estates.

  The cold made him nauseous. His hands were plagued by black tokens; he pressed one subcutaneously bleeding hand over his liver which seemed swollen in its caul. The containment of such hatred was feverishly painful to Krissman. Being rational by type, he tried to analyse his hatred; that is, he tried to hold down and analyse the thing that was painful while the pain was most severe. It was revealed to him that he suffered from frustration of the will: that he willed these people not to exist but they did exist.

  He was persecuted by their existence.

  The wind dragged shapes through the grass around their bench; their wrappings of biscuits and crisps were also blown.

  He dared not speak his thoughts aloud: ‘You are unnecessary and therefore vile. Your love is complacent.’

  The virtue of the young women was that they were ordinary and loving. The power of the ordinary overwhelmed that of the wretched Krissman. The quite pretty sisters hardly noticed him; then fluently dissed him:

  ‘Ohmygod, how spazz was that?’

  Nothing had happened except that an old man had passed a family in a park. The space between buildings was not even a park; only a public gardens with trees, squirrels and benches. At the gate, Krissman turned his mind to the article which had described the other two viable universes. There would be few or no visible stars. He was too uneducated in physics and maths to expand his mind but the effort of trying to do so for several seconds expanded his soul.

  The Swimmer in the Desert

  Alex Preston

  He spits over the side of the tower and pats the handle of the revolver in his belt. The first silver line of dawn traces the outline of the mountains and he realises he can hear water. He has heard it before in the morning but never this clearly.

  Even the night air feels as if it has been breathed a million times, as if some desert djinn is panting stale air straight into his lungs.

  The snows are melting in the high Kush, sending emissary streams needling down the slopes, feeding the wadis of the plateau, the poppy fields that glow red in the foothills. As the air around lightens, he can make out the stream in the distance.

  He’d passed the dry bed a few days before, with the Multiple on foot patrol – eight hours with guns, ammo and water, climbing into the nearest hills, always walking with one foot tapping the ground ahead like a blind man’s cane. They’d found an IED on the main Lashkar Gah road. A basic device buried under a mound of blue-grey aggregate. Later, he’d stood for a while in the centre of a poppy field, the heads of the flowers nodding in a warm breeze. He picked one and tore the petals off. On the way back they’d crossed the riverbed which now babbles with dark water.

  He leans out over the side of the watchtower. The sun begins to rise, and not with the pink diffidence of the sun at home, but already white and cruel as it explodes over the peaks of the Kush. The coming of the light changes the sound of the water. His throat is dry and he reaches down to his belt for his flask to find it missing.

  He doesn’t know who has been taking his things. It has become part of a more general deprivation he barely notices. He came here because he thought it would make something of him; in fact it is unmaking him. The road leading up to the gate of the compound is lined with Hesco barriers. They look fragile, almost transparent. He imagines them as Chinese lanterns, imagines lighting them and seeing them float up into the pale sky. He looks at his watch: an hour to go.

  He lifts his binoculars and follows the course of the stream. A mile to the east it pa
sses under the lip of a rocky levee and fans out into a pool. It looks cool there in the shadows by the rocks. Silver flowers open and close on the sandstone lip that juts above the water as the sun catches the stream. He hasn’t swum since he’s been here.

  He remembers swimming with Marie. They rushed past Dawsholme Park, over the canal, and then they were in the countryside. They pushed their bikes up the steepest part of the hill and then stood on the crest looking down. Two lochs – Jaw and Cochno – separated by a narrow isthmus. After their swim, when they dried off on the banks of the loch, she looked around with quick, narrow eyes and unfastened her bikini top, letting the sun and his gaze fall upon her as she stretched out on the grass. When he kissed her it felt like they were swimming again, nervelessly, over deep water.

  It is time for his relief. The sun is higher now, near-unlookable. He hears the reveille – a short, brutal blast over loudspeakers, and the clatter of breakfast being prepared in the mess. Someone is singing in the shower block.

  His relief is late. The sun detonates above him, raging into the space behind his eyes. He’s aware of every patch of exposed skin. He tries to think of Marie in the loch, but it is too distant and cool a picture. He looks over towards the pool of water and sees it is still in shadows. He feels an urgent need to swim. He imagines standing on the lip of the levee and hurling himself into the water.

  An hour passes. He is sitting in the narrow band of shade on the floor of the watchtower, not even pretending to keep watch.

  Every so often he rises and scans the maze of tunnels for sign of his relief. He knows that they want him to leave his post. That some shameful plan was hatched over beers in the mess last night, the snaking path of its plot ending in his humiliation. He feels himself pitching as if on a boat. He rises again, but this time, binoculars to his eyes, he looks at the pool.