Ханиф Курейши - Best British Short Stories 2020

Back home, Jack had laid the table for lunch, which he never did. He looked very hang-dog and said at once, I’m sorry, Chris, I shouldn’t have said what I said. I know very well your course wasn’t a waste of money, you enjoyed it, didn’t you, and that’s all that matters. Yes, I did enjoy it, she replied, and it did me good. All my women friends noticed the change in me. I was well for nearly two years afterwards, if you remember. Jack cheered up. Now what are we going to do about this poor bugger Egglestone? he asked. Anything or nothing? Nothing, said Christine. What can we do? Nothing. – I mean, he didn’t say he’d phone you again, to let you know how he was getting on? And you didn’t say you’d phone him? No, said Christine. No he didn’t and no I didn’t.

So Jack and Christine Wakelin continued their own slower courses towards their separate ends. And the phone call meanwhile continued to work in them, separately. Christine had heard Alan Egglestone’s voice and could not get it out of her head. Indeed, day by day it became more present there, more insistent. Helplessly she listened to its aftertones of terror and desperation. She recalled how little she had spoken, how he had scarcely given her chance to speak, and what could she have said anyway of any use or comfort? What did he want, except not to die? Did phoning alphabetically through the address book help him in the least? All she heard now was a man talking on his own to a person who did not remember him. She pitied him, but the dominant feeling in her on his account was horror. And she saw Jack watching her. She understood, and it sickened her, that they had Alan Egglestone in common. In bed or at meals or standing side by side doing the washing-up, one or other of them without preamble, as though it were the only possible subject of reflection or conversation, might wonder aloud about him, posing a question, rhetorically, not really expecting an answer. Or from Jack or from Christine came a speculation. Perhaps, said Jack, he was hoping for a miracle. That would be quite understandable. Say there are fifty people in his address book, well perhaps one of them had heard of somebody who stopped a leukaemia dead in its tracks, halted it, by some miraculous means, or held it up for a while at least and won the dying person an extra five years, or a year, even six months? You may be right, said Christine. Though he didn’t ask me did I know any such person. She saw this made Jack wonder again why Alan Egglestone had phoned her at all. Then a day or two later, quite suddenly, she said, It struck me he was maybe going through in that methodical fashion to check there was nobody in the book he owed an apology to or who owed him an apology and he phoned to say there wasn’t much time left for making amends. At that, visibly, Jack’s suspicions really did return: Did he ask you that? – No, he didn’t. But it has occurred to me. And later that same day, actually interrupting Jack who was talking about something else, she said, It’s very wrong of him not to tell his wife and children about his condition. He must want them to feel bad when they find out he’s dead. But nobody should be vindictive when they’re near the end. Phone him and tell him, said Jack rather crossly. – I don’t know his number. – There’s ways of finding out. – I don’t want to find out. I don’t want to speak to him again. I don’t want to hear his voice. I hear it anyway, Jack, all the time. I don’t want him adding to it in the flesh.

Once or twice Jack said outright that her Mr Egglestone was a bloody nuisance. He’d no business phoning people up like that and spoiling their lives just because he was nearing the end of his. Everybody has to die, said Jack. Why is he so special? And he looked with even greater suspicion at Christine, so that she knew he believed there were things she hadn’t told him about the damned poetry course. And in town one day, trailing along with her while she did the shopping, he asked in a false-casual sort of way whether she still had anything from that course, any old letters, poems, photographs, any souvenirs at all that might help her, and him too for that matter, understand why Mr Egglestone had phoned her to tell her he was dying. No, she replied, putting the liver and bacon in her bag, if you really want to know, I threw everything in the bin one morning about two years after it when I started to feel bad again. Everything I owned about that week – it was all in a folder with a ribbon round it – I threw the whole lot in the bin, I watched through the window till the bin men had reached next-door-but-three, then I went out and threw my folder in the bin so they would certainly take it and I couldn’t change my mind. That’s what I did with my souvenirs of the poetry course. You never told me that, said Jack. No, I never told you that, said Christine.

Day by day Christine saw Jack looking more worriedly at her. I know what he’s thinking, she said to herself. Then three weeks after the phone call, to the day, another beautiful evening, down by the beans, he was watering them and she was standing oddly to one side, half watching, half not, and fingering her lower lip in the way he didn’t like but had got used to over the years, he set down the empty can and said, Chris, you’re not going funny on me again, are you?

I met John at the dance summer school. He was standing at the lower set of doors towards the bottom of the hall, half-in, half-out, as if he was hoping to be missed. Cherri was sitting on the empty stage. The other girls had left half an hour ago. When she saw her father, Cherri picked up her yellow rucksack and walked towards us, her chunky pink trainers squeaking on the old lino. The building had once been a theatre and now served as a community centre. As she walked across the hall, I turned to him. Mr Smithley, I said, unable to finish my sentence. I wanted to say that he should have been there earlier. It did something to a child, always waiting for their parents. But he smiled, as though he had been expecting me, not the other way around. I fingered my pendant, readjusted my neckline. I could not tell what he wanted exactly: men were often baffled by my fantastical appearance in a banal environment.

He peered at the name badge pinned on my dress. Vashti, he said. Call me John. He held out his hand and, after a second, I had to withdraw mine because it started burning. So, he said, looking around me but not focusing on anything. What will my daughter learn in the next few months? Barbara’s Premier Touring Dancing School Makes Winners in the Essex Region, he read aloud from the promo poster tacked on the wall. Cherri waited, rubbing her itchy-looking ankles together. She looked nothing like John, with her red skin and fuzzy blonde hair. He frowned at her, like she was a fossil in a museum or something else that had once been interesting. The girls learn to dance and sing, I replied. And even if they don’t go on to a career, they leave with our ethos to guide them through life. What’s the ethos ? he asked, baring small white teeth. Confidence, composure and commitment, I said. His confrontational manner implied great self-assurance or deep insecurity. I could not yet tell them apart.

Have you had a good time? he asked Cherri. I pretended to inspect my clipboard. Her bobbled ponytail bounced up and down in my peripheral vision. I’d noticed her straight away, with her white eczema gloves and thick glasses. She stood not so far from the other girls that it looked odd, but not so close that it was obvious they were ignoring her. During the breaks, she sat on the stage, looking at her flip phone. None of the other girls had phones. It gave her an air of privilege, along with her expensive professional dance clothes. But the clothes didn’t quite fit, or match, in the same way that her skewed pigtails seemed to have been done absent-mindedly.