Best British Short Stories 2020 Page 9

  She had seen them on her walks, the big-lobed cactii with their broken limbs, rotting and weakened by the life gathered on them.

  ‘You can make dye with it,’ the old man said. ‘It’s what they used to make the red coats of the British army. And you can paint with it, but you’ll need to stop the colour fading: maybe vinegar or salt – you should try it. I have a lot of cactii in my garden, if you want to experiment.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she murmured, trying not to encourage the man.

  Why did he keep coming to her? He clutched his stick as he leaned down to place the leaf beside her, then staggered up past the fuente again.

  ‘I see you’ve met David,’ Beatriz said, coming over. ‘He’s a famous artist in Spain.’

  ‘He’s invited me to his house to look at paintings.’

  ‘He must have liked your drawings.’ Beatriz studied Anya’s sketchbook. ‘You’re good! You should go. He loves to teach. I can see the two of you becoming good friends!’

  But Beatriz didn’t know about Anya. Anya was not good at making friends. In the office her manager had told her to get better at teamwork, but Anya hadn’t known how. She had trusted no one at the office, feeling their pity and disdain of her, a certain wariness around her, that she had been glad to leave behind.

  ‘Go and see David,’ Beatriz urged.

  ‘Is it safe to go alone?’

  ‘Safe? Ah, don’t worry, it’s nothing like that, he really will just talk about painting – you won’t be able to stop him! Tell me a time and I’ll come and rescue you!’

  ‘There’s no need.’

  She wasn’t going. Of her family, it was her brother who made friends easily. He was the generous one, her mother said. He was open-hearted and kind; Anya was hostile, her heart was hard and closed and secretive.

  Musicians arrived in the plaza: a man and woman with matching golden dreadlocks began to drum. People gathered around them. Another man came pulling a cajón on a rickety trolley and joined them, sitting crouched over the mellow-gold wooden box, his fingers rippling a shuddering rising rhythm with the drums. The drumming rose up above the voices and the splashing of the fuente; it throbbed against the ring of stone houses around the plaza and reached up to the empty blue sky. People started dancing. The drumming was in Anya, it throbbed in her eyes, her ears. She couldn’t draw any more, she couldn’t breathe. She reached for the labyrinth, entering its shade and sudden cool. It curved into quiet, into a tunnel with ragged wooden roof beams and peeling blue walls. She walked towards sunlight at the far end. Stone steps climbed to a cactus, half in bloom half dying, by a gatepost.

  ‘Oh, so you came,’ said the old painter and opened the gate to let her in.

  The painter’s house was built into the rock. The beams of the ceiling were whole chestnut trunks. The walls were painted with ochre from the mountains and hung with Berber rugs. In the kitchen he poured beer into glasses and they sat at the table before a deep hooded fireplace and he showed her his paintings: exquisite, detailed and full of a delicate precise admiration for the place he had discovered and loved. A younger man, tanned and smoking a spliff, came through from an inner room.

  ‘My son, Hector,’ the old painter said.

  A young woman with long black hair followed.

  ‘This is Maria, his girlfriend.’

  They both came over and kissed Anya, greeting her without hesitation, as if they were friends.

  ‘Would you like to stay for lunch?’ Hector asked.

  ‘Oh, no, it’s okay.’

  ‘It’s just some vegetables and couscous,’ Maria added.

  ‘No, I have to be going.’ Anya headed quickly for the door.

  It felt unsafe to stay inside their open-hearted ease for she knew she would be revealed to them.

  ‘Let me give you some cochineal,’ the old painter said, coming with her.

  From the dying cactus he scraped the soft clinging whiteness with a knife, and smeared it into a plastic bag.

  ‘It’s the females that make the dye; they never leave the plant, they just stay there laying eggs until the whole plant dies. They’re reddest when they’ve had their young.’

  She took the bag.

  ‘How long are you staying?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘The house next door belongs to a friend, he rents it cheap if you stay a few months – you could stay and keep drawing.’

  Surely something so unexpected yet longed for could not really happen? Surely it would prove a trap, a mistake?

  ‘That house used to be the old bread oven in the village,’ the painter said. ‘A part of the oven is still there.’

  She gazed up at the square stone house up on the rock, shaded by a giant fig tree.

  ‘Could I look inside?’

  ‘Of course, go in, the guests left earlier.’

  Downstairs, in the kitchen, was the raised stone ledge of the old oven, where village loaves would have risen inside a circle of fire. A ladder went up from it to a bedroom with a desk by a window and a view through the branches of the fig tree to the mountains slumbering in the sun, majestic and indifferent to the flickering of life in the hearts of people.

  When Anya went outside the painter was tending to a geranium. A furry grey cat curled on a stone seat, purring.

  ‘Bye,’ Anya called to the painter.

  ‘Let me know how you get on with the cochineal, I’d like to see the results,’ he said.

  He really did want to know – she saw his eagerness and the curiosity that had once brought him along mule tracks for miles over the mountains to the village that was his now. She felt awkward not kissing him goodbye like a local. And she didn’t want to leave him, but she hurried back to the silence of the tunnel.

  The drumming in the plaza had stopped. There was a smell of garlic and frying onions. A man stirred stew in a pot hung over a fire. A woman in a polka-dot apron laid tables outside a house. Beatriz sat with a group at a table, laughing with a man. Anya didn’t know how to join them. She stayed in the plaza watching the people still strolling around the stalls. Three figures stepped out from the crowd, the principals in an opera, about to begin their song: two women and a small girl in a blue dress. The child’s pale-brown hair fluttered against her cheek as she stood dreamy and musing. The woman holding her hand, the mother perhaps, asked a question, but the child didn’t answer, still caught in dreams. The woman asked louder but the child still didn’t hear. The woman’s voice grew sharp, then a slap cracked the air as she struck the child’s arm. As always there was no warning, no time to prepare. The child’s mouth fell open, her shock turning to shame and the horror of betrayal. Anya felt it rush back to her from a secret place of her own, deep within her.

  The child started to cry, wails of misery writhing out through the voices and laughter. People turned startled. The mother looked harassed and pulled the child by the wrist to go over and join the other woman at a stall. The two women stood looking over amulets and belts and earrings of dull gold, curled into ancient coils. Behind them the child cried alone, her arms wrapped around her, two tiny probing fingers stroking where she had been struck. Her eyes were fixed on the back of the mother, disbelief dark and puzzling in the child’s gaze. Anya knew her question, knew the terror of the answer that might come. An elderly woman paused to stroke the girl’s hair. The mother spun round and the old woman drew back and hobbled away.

  Inside Anya was a wavering trail of pencil lines: one line for each slap, a stroke of her own drawn inside her wardrobe, a secret snaking growth in the darkness. Her tally, her score, a belt of nails to tighten around her; she had worn it for the longest time. Now it was broken, falling open to reveal her naked; unheld she spilled from its grip, formless, unsheathed. She ran into the labyrinth’s silence searching for the way out, but the alley swirled her deeper in. A vine-shaded street unfurled down to a dark still stream, a stone slab, a bridge to cross over into a courtyard overlooked by the terraces of houses. A dog barked down at her fro
m behind an iron railing. She turned into a passageway filled with sun. Outside a bluepainted doorway a snake lay on a step. Startled, it slid swiftly on, silver and olive-green, a line of black diamonds rippling on ahead of her and up around the stone bulges of a wall before disappearing into a hole in a rock.

  Around the rock was a garden with great bushes of lavender, rosemary, marigolds, marijuana and a small square chapel with a bell-tower shaped like a minaret. Anya entered the chapel’s deep chill silence and sank onto a pew, covering her face with her hands as tears ran out from her darkness and the hard stone heart breaking open within. The door banged behind her. She wiped her eyes at once and sat up straighter, but the figures running down the aisle didn’t look at her. A man sat down at a piano. A woman cradled a violin and brought up a bow and the violin’s call soared into the emptiness. The piano eased in, dancing warm and golden, their song rising up to the saints in red gilded alcoves and marble angels reaching down their translucent pale hands to Anya. There was always someone reaching out, there was always the new and golden. It would lead her through the labyrinth to its end, to her new beginning.

  When she left the chapel, the bag of cochineal had burst in her hands. Her tears had dissolved the frail white sheaths to a fierce new redness. She crushed the women and mothers, staining the walls of the labyrinth as she found her way back to the old painter and the ancient furnace next door, ready to take her place.

  ANDREW HOOK

  THE GIRL WITH THE HORIZONTAL WALK

  The heart weighs 300 grams. The tricuspid valve measures 10 cm, the pulmonary valve 6.5 cm, mitral valve 9.5 cm and aortic valve 7 cm in circumference.

  Nicholas Arden looked over the newspaper at his wife, Ellen, buttering his toast at the opposite end of the breakfast table.

  ‘How hard can it be, honey?’

  ‘You haven’t read the script. I’ll need to dumb down.’

  ‘I always said you were too intellectual.’

  Ellen slid the toast across the table, catching the bottom of the paper. The ink was freshly printed and she imagined some of it colouring the butter. Ellen wondered how much it would take to poison someone. Not that she wanted to poison Nick. But she was easily preoccupied.

  ‘I need an angle,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be led by the studio on this one.’

  ‘Then put your foot down. Both of them, if you have to.’

  She waggled the butter knife. ‘Don’t get smart, wise guy.’

  ‘I’m trying to catch you up.’

  It was a diamond-bright spring morning. They sat on the terrace extending from their white-painted house under clear blue light. Beneath them, the swimming pool caught ripples off the sky. Somewhere in the house their two children were getting ready for school. Ellen loved them, but she was thankful of the maid. There was only so much noise she could take.

  Nick folded the paper, wrung out one end with a rueful expression.

  ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘You’re burning to tell.’

  Ellen brushed a toast crumb away from the corner of her mouth with her right-hand pinky.

  ‘I play a photographer, Marilyn Monroe. I get to go platinum. Preferably a wig. Marilyn doesn’t take great pictures, but she’s always in the right place at the right time. Plus she’s pretty – we know how many doors that opens, front and back. She carves out a career for herself, Life, Movieland, Modern Screen, all those covers. She gets invited to all the right parties, then some of the wrong ones. So there’s then a photo of the president, in flagrante. Before you know it, she’s killed.’

  ‘Sounds meaty to me.’

  ‘That’s just the half of it. There’s more. But the dialogue, Nick. It’s so corny. I don’t know why they’ve written her this way. It lessens the role.’

  ‘How?’

  Ellen stood. She ran a hand through her brunette hair, placed another on her hip, pouted: ‘When you see some people you say, “Gee!” When you see other people you say, “Ugh!”’

  ‘I get it. But she’s right.’

  ‘She doesn’t exist. That’s Schulman.’

  ‘The guy with the belly?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘And does she talk like that?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘In the breathy guttural way you delivered that line.’

  Ellen sat. ‘She’s such an actress, but she isn’t one, you know what I mean? That’s how I intend to play her.’

  ‘You’re an actress playing a photographer as an actress?

  That doesn’t sound like acting to me, honey.’

  Ellen shrugged. ‘It’s all in the method, Nick. All in the method.’

  The right lung weighs 465 grams and the left 420 grams. Both lungs are moderately congested with some edema.

  She swept onto the lot in her pink Lincoln Capri. A few heads went up. She was running late but they’d factored that in, shooting scenes around her. She twitched her nose, sinuses blocked and hurting. Seeds pollinated the surrounding air. She waved to Cukor then ran to her trailer. Baker was there. She held up a flesh-coloured bodystocking.

  ‘Have you seen this?’

  Ellen shook her head. ‘What is it, a fishing net?’

  ‘It is if you’re the fish. It’s for the pool scene.’

  Ellen laughed. ‘I am not wearing that.’

  Cukor entered the trailer: ‘My way or the highway, Ellen.’

  She kissed his cheek. ‘Is that why you wanted me in the picture?’

  He shrugged. ‘It’s a closed set. Only the necessary crew.’

  ‘How necessary?’

  ‘It’s a pivotal scene. Entrapment. Monroe has the pictures and she wants something from Kennedy. When he arrives she’s swimming nude. You don’t want to swim nude, do you, Ellen? I know you crave authenticity.’

  ‘I don’t remember this scene in the script.’

  ‘Schulman’s rewriting daily.’

  ‘One hand on the table, one under it.’

  Cukor barked a laugh. ‘C’mon, Ellen. This picture will make you.’

  ‘The Girl With The Horizontal Walk? I’m already made, thank you. Now I’ll be typecast.’

  Cukor touched her arm. ‘It is what it is.’ He put one foot on the trailer step. ‘They’ve agreed the wig,’ he said. ‘It’s in the box. On set in an hour.’

  Ellen watched the door close. She turned to Baker. ‘Some day we’ll have equal rights.’

  Baker nodded. She walked over to the box, sucked open the lid. ‘Here’s the wig.’

  ‘Here’s the role.’ Ellen took the platinum curls and turned them around in her hands, her fingers becoming entangled in the fabric. ‘Looks authentic, at least.’

  Baker nodded, gestured to the chair by the mirror. ‘Are you ready for your transformation?’

  Ellen sat. She closed her eyes, searched for the character. Monroe was there somewhere. It was like peeling an onion. You had to discard the layers until all that was left was raw. Baker elongated her eyelashes, red-lipped her pout, stuck on a beauty spot big enough for a picnic, pinned back her hair and then pinned the wig into it. When Ellen emerged from the trailer she was the photographer, Monroe, a Konica Autoreflex T SLR 35mm camera dangling off its strap on one finger, white jacket, white blouse, white skirt, white heels. She walked the way they wanted her to, right across the lot. Cukor nodded approvingly, standing to one side as she approached the set. She didn’t understand his expression, til he yelled Cut! and turning she saw the camera rolling behind her.

  ‘Cukor. I feel violated. I want to be an artist not an aphrodisiac.’

  ‘Enough of that. We making a movie or not?’

  The liver weighs 1890 grams. The surface is dark brown and smooth.

  Light dappled her body as she turned and twisted under the water. She was embraced. She swam to the bottom, touched it with an outstretched finger, then rose upwards, eyes open. Her breasts were in sway with the motion, the water adding fluidity to their movements, something which rarely happened when wearing underwear. She co
uld see Kennedy standing poolside, his left hand holding his right wrist. Breaking the surface she scattered droplets on his black brogues.

  ‘Hey,’ she breathed.

  ‘Miss Monroe.’ He bent and gripped her extended right wrist, effortlessly hauled her up, residual water stripped from her body as she left the pool, as though she were sloughing a layer.

  She stood exposed in the moonlight. She didn’t want him to take her, and he had to know that, even though she seemed there for the taking. A couple of inches separated them. She watched him unmoving until goosebumps bumped her dry. Eventually he stood aside and let her pass, handing her a towel which barely covered what he’d seen.

  ‘I thought you might have sent someone.’

  His jaw was so chiselled he might have auditioned for Mount Rushmore. ‘I wouldn’t miss this for the world.’

  She walked into the house. Wondered where his bodyguards were. ‘Something to drink?’

  Kennedy nodded. Watched her pour a couple of fingers of bourbon. ‘Nothing for yourself?’

  ‘Maybe when we’re done.’

  ‘Will we ever be done?’

  ‘You’ll have it all. The prints, the negatives. I never intended to take those photos. I stumbled into that room.’

  Kennedy downed the whiskey. ‘You stumble into blackmail, too?’

  Monroe sat down, crossed her legs. ‘There’s a story,’ she said. ‘There’s a pretty girl on the train, not a beauty, but still something to look at. A guy boards and sits opposite. He’s not good-looking either, but he’s not bad. After a while he leans over, and says, I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but would you sleep with me for a thousand bucks. The girl does mind, but she doesn’t say anything because the offer has caught her attention. There’s something she’s wanted to buy, for some time now, a pipedream. And he’s polite, not a bruiser. So she says, yes.’ Kennedy watched Monroe’s eyes dart around the room. She continued: ‘So the guy leans back, crosses one leg over the other. How about for twenty? The girl almost shouts, Twenty! What kind of girl do you think I am? And the man, Mr President, the man says, We’ve already established what kind of girl you are. Now we’re just haggling the price.’