Best British Short Stories 2019 by Nicholas Royle

Author:Nicholas Royle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Salt Publishing Limited
Published: 2019-07-22T19:01:44+00:00

Cluster

NAOMI BOOTH

The man two doors down pursues a secret hobby in the dead of night. This is one of your first discoveries.

You’ve seen him around, in the daytime, in the time before, but only to nod to. He’s a solid man with a mild demeanour and you’ve always assumed he’s a postman, or a hospital porter, or a refuse collector; that he is engaged in some stolid, civic-minded profession. Surely a man like him should have no trouble sleeping. But just a few nights in, you find him out. You haven’t slept at all. The nightlight is a small crescent of brightness in the dark blur of milk and skin and adrenaline that night has become. There is a sound outside. Something clangs as it drops onto the ground: metal against concrete. Shuffling, shoe scuffing, a mechanistic clacking. None of these noises would be loud enough to wake you, if you were fast asleep. But in this new nocturnal world, they are more insistent than daytime sounds. They are intimate, in the same way that voices on the telephone whorl into the dark of your ear, closer even than someone speaking next to you.

You glance at your phone, which now sleeps under the corner of your pillow. You tilt it, make it glow. Three twenty-five. There have been letters from the police, opened by the people in the flat downstairs and left on the table in the shared hallway, letters about burglaries in the area. You should get out of bed and check on these sounds. Even the thought of witnessing a crime is poor motivation, but you make yourself move: you rise up past the Moses basket, make your way to the window. You move the curtain, just a fraction. You look out over two lines of backyards and the black river of cobbles that bisects them. You stand very still, waiting for another sound. It comes again: the jangle of metal, the sound of someone about some secret business. You survey the terraces until you locate the source: two doors down, there’s a small tilley lamp at the end of a yard and a man crouched down beside it. It takes a while for the scene to sharpen into coherence. A man crouches over a wheel, spinning it. A bike is upside down, and the man stoops over it, working on something at the wheel-hub, adjusting it, then spinning the wheel again. You watch for a while. The man’s movements are slow and full of care. He works over the body of the bike with a soft cloth periodically; stands back and puts his hands in his pockets. You let the curtain fall back into place. All this detail, all this secret work, is folded back into the dark. After that, you listen for him in the nighttime, when the baby frets and whinnies awake, over and over again, startling out of sleep as though she is falling, falling, into something terrible, her tiny limbs twitching, her mouth a worried beak; the baby who does not yet know what sleep is, who does not know its softness.

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