Ханиф Курейши - Best British Short Stories 2020

With the index finger of her left hand Christine pulled down and let go, again and again, her lower lip. She did this when she was nervous or puzzled or both together. It was a bad habit, annoying to other people, and she had often been scolded for it by her mother as a little girl. He told me he’s got leukaemia, she said. He said he’s probably only got three weeks to live. And she looked at Jack as though he might know what to make of it. But Jack shook his head: Don’t give me that. You don’t phone a complete stranger to tell her you’ll be dead in three weeks. I never said he was a complete stranger, she answered. I said I couldn’t remember him. And if he’s a stranger to me, he says I’m not to him. He says we were on that poetry course together in the Lake District. And I’m in his address book. – You’re in his address book? – Well there’s nothing very odd about that. Why shouldn’t people on a course swap addresses at the end of it if they feel it has been a special time? The fact that I can’t remember him is neither here nor there really. And, let’s be clear about this, it’s not just me he’s phoning, he’s phoning everyone in his address book, he told me that at once. So he’s into the w’s, said Jack. Not far to go. No, he’s nowhere near the w’s, Christine answered. He’s only in the b’s. – So why, may I ask, did he phone you? – Because on the course I used my maiden name. I don’t mean I told people I wasn’t married. I used my maiden name because I thought that’s the name I’ll use if I ever get anything published. You never told me that, said Jack. Didn’t I? she answered. I’m sure I did. But it’s no odds whether I did or I didn’t. You didn’t, said Jack. And he gave her another look and went very deliberately back into the house.

Christine stayed in the garden. It was pleasant out there, quite like the country really, for a suburban place. Foxes came with their cubs in the summer early mornings and you heard them, the dog and the vixen, barking and screaming in the winter nights. And owls too sometimes, in the hospital’s big trees. She stayed out, fingering her lip. She stayed until around her shoulders she felt chilly.

Indoors, Jack was watching the news. There had been another massacre. I think I’ll go to bed, Christine said. He switched the television off. I’m sorry for this Mr Egglestone, he said, of course I am. But I don’t see why he has to tell everyone in his address book that he’s going to die. Aren’t his family and a few close friends enough? And how many strangers does he have to phone a day, I wonder. He’ll hardly get through them, will he, if he’s only got three weeks. In the Wakelin household, Christine had become the authority on the dying Egglestone. He does have a family, she said. Three girls, to be exact. But his wife left him and took them with her when they were still at school. She said he was selfish, apparently. So he hardly ever sees his family, and he hasn’t told them what his condition is. And perhaps there aren’t all that many people in his address book, perhaps half of them are crossed out dead, they are in ours, and perhaps it’s the old address book that his wife left behind when she cleared out and she started another for her new life and most of the addresses in the old one, the one he’s working his way through now, were her side of the family and her friends anyway, they are in ours, you must admit, there’d be nobody alive in ours if I waited for contributions from you. But how should I know? I’ve never met the man or if I have I can’t remember what he looks like or anything about him. He told me he’d just been told he’d got three weeks to live and he was going through his address book in alphabetical order and he’d reached the b’s and come to me. Now can we leave it at that?

In bed Christine reflected that you shouldn’t let the sun go down on your wrath because one of you might be taken by death in the night and forgiveness be prevented. But it wasn’t wrath, she decided, and really they had nothing to forgive. Anyway, Jack was already asleep. Christine lay awake trying hard to remember anything whatsoever about Alan Egglestone but nothing came back to her. Instead, with sudden emotion, she remembered somebody else on that poetry course in the Lake District, Steve somebody-or-other, quite a young man, a good deal younger than her at least, which he hadn’t seemed to mind but had suggested they bunk off for a walk together one afternoon when there were no workshops and everyone was supposed to be getting on with their own poems quietly. He knew the way up from the old coffin road to Alcock Tarn and beyond into the dale that was known as Michael’s Dale after Wordsworth’s poem about an old man who was building a sheepfold up there but his son had gone to the bad and broken his old father’s heart so some days he climbed into the dale and just sat still by the work in progress ‘and never lifted up a single stone’. Tears came into Christine’s eyes on that line of the famous poem, the poor father, the poor disappointing son, and the young man called Steve who had obviously found her attractive enough to suggest a walk with him to places she would never have gone to on her own.

Next morning Jack got the breakfast as he always did. Nothing much wrong then, Christine thought, and quickly googled Alan Egglestone, to see whether he had become known in the passing years, but nothing came up that could possibly have anything whatsoever to do with him.

After breakfast, in fact just as she was leaving home to do her morning in Oxfam, she told Jack that Google know nothing at all about Alan Egglestone. So it was a waste of money on him as well, said Jack. Christine saw that Jack knew at once that he should not have said such a thing. But she left the house with only a curt goodbye before he could apologise. On the street, walking quickly, she reflected that you should no more leave the house wrathful than you should turn aside to sleep wrathful because you might go under a bus and the wrong that needed righting would remain a wrong for ever. Then quite deliberately in the back of the shop with the other Tuesday Ladies sorting out the tons of stuff families send to Oxfam or Help the Aged when a loved one dies, she thought about Steve and Alcock Tarn and the steep climb beyond into Michael’s Dale. It was early June and the shallows all around the banks of the tarn were entirely black and seething with quite big tadpoles and the word ‘selvaged’ had come back to her out of one of the poems Hardy wrote for his wife when she died and his dead love for her revived, the white-selvaged sea, the black-selvaged tarn. Steve said that in their density but every single one of them distinct, every one of them in the mass a separate possibility of further life, each driven separately into the next stage of its life, they resembled sperm, the selvage of the tarn was spermy. And she had thought that not in the least indecent or embarrassing. Her word and his were such as might occur to you if you suddenly saw something in a new light. And when they began the climb into Michael’s Dale, out of the rock face there a rowan jutted, jutted out and at once rose up, out of rock, out of very little sustenance, out and at once upwards, as it desired to, and flowered densely, creamily, in its own peculiar scent, upwards into the air, out and up over nothing, over thin air, over a sheer fall, upwards. Steve insisted that before they began the climb itself, into the dale, they should get as close as possible to where the tree started horizontally out of the ferny rock and as soon as it could aimed for the sky. He took her hand and helped her, it was almost like rock-climbing, and when they got to the place itself, the very place of the tree’s emergence out of the hill, he concentrated so hard on the sight, on the thing, on the exact nature of the phenomenon, she felt, in a nice way, quite forgotten, nice because she had the double pleasure of contemplating him, his self-and-her forgetting intense attention, and the rowan tree itself by which he was so rapt.