Ханиф Курейши - Best British Short Stories 2020

Weeks later, after the film crew had gone, and the coast was quiet once more, she climbed to the headland again. Far below, pieces of rotting carcass were washed along the shore, caught amongst the jagged outcrops, floating in the rock pools, along with a pink hair-slide. Later still, she saw a group of seals playing with scraps of white flesh, passing them from nose to nose, smiling.

And there was blood, she was certain there was blood… spreading strands like dulse seaweed – on the seals, on the rocks. How could there be blood if it wasn’t real?

She knew what she had seen, and if she had seen it, it must be true.

Soon, the people of the town forgot, going back to their fishing and farming, waiting for holiday-makers who never came. In time, another film came along, with new actors. Brighter stars in even bigger cars, who stayed longer; who were Welsh, like them, and drank in the pub, rather than the big hotel; drank in the pub again and again. Other things were different, too. Cameras taking photos of cameras, televisions in every house, some of them in colour. (Marriage.) Phones in every house, to make gossiping easier; cars in every drive, making the world smaller. (Children.) Soon the old film was forgotten. Only she remembered. Remembering, as she dredged nappies through bleach-water, her hands as wizened as the whale. As her husband snored beside her. As she wrote her name in the dust on the shelf, where the book lay. She had bought it she didn’t know when… or perhaps when the librarian told her one too many times, ‘You’ve borrowed this before!’

A heavy book, as heavy as the creature, full of weighty words that she couldn’t understand, meanings she could never fathom. The Whale meant something. The Hunt meant something. But what? And the teacher had lied when she said it began with ‘Call me Ishmael’. Page after page must be got through before that, lines, paragraphs speaking of Leviathans, and Spermacetti, and Rights and Orks. How they killed, or were killed. Of their bones and teeth decorating the land.

There was no Great White, the white came later, in the story proper. She drew the book out, from where it stood, amongst thinner, lighter tales of nurses and doctors in love, or Cowboys fighting Indians. She wanted to read it, but the alien words floundered in her head, ‘hypos/Manhattoes/circumambulate’ flailing against the children’s crying and squabbling, and her husband’s complaining. She put it back in its place.

And soon it didn’t matter that she couldn’t read it. The film came back to her, in a little plastic box she must post beneath the television. She could watch it again and again, while the family yakked and pulled and grew around her. All she had to do was press a button, and rewind.

When the famous actor died, the local paper printed his picture, writing about his visit to their little town. Scrunching her eyes over her glasses, the points of her scissors laboured around the article, with her thickened knuckles, her stiff thumb. She put the piece in her special box, with all her other cuttings, yellowed by the years.

‘I met him,’ she told anyone who would listen. ‘He put his hand on my head, tangling my hair.’ She was afraid for her new pink slide. Her mother had rowed with her for losing the old one on the cliffs. The day she had seen the whale.

‘Call me Ahab,’ he said, his voice dragging his words, low. There was something wrong about that… If he was Ahab, there would be only one long black pleated leg facing her. There would be a white line cloven down his face. He wouldn’t smile, which he did, before moving back through the crowd.

Later, he appeared on the step of the trailer, his cheek forked like lightning. His wooden leg caught between the treads. She was glad. It made sense again.

‘The whale bit it off at the knee,’ someone in the crowd whispered. ‘It’s not wood,’ another voice added. ‘It’s the bone of a whale.’

‘It’s not bone… it’s…’

Whatever it was, he was as he should be… if he was Ahab. Until he smiled at her again.

Her teacher shot slit-eyes at her and pulled her away.

‘I know, now, that it was jealousy. I didn’t understand then.’ Perhaps she should have left her story there. But no, the words spilled out of her mouth, bubbling up, as she told how she had seen the whale, far out to sea, with the actor strapped to its side.

There was no name-calling any more, but faces turned away, hands lifted to stop sniggering breath. People in the market, her children. Not her husband; he, too, was dead by then.

‘You’re muddling what you think you saw with the ending of the film,’ Mari, her daughter, told her.

How did she know? She hadn’t been born then; she herself was only a child, a small child. Had she ever seen the film? ‘Only a million times, when we were growing up!’

‘Look!’ she said to no-one in particular: Mari, who had already walked away, her dead husband, an empty room, showing them another photo from her box, one she had cut from a film magazine, when her fingers moved more easily. ‘There! That’s me!’

And it was, a girl, of about five, with her fringe pulled back by a slide; pink, it would be, if there was colour. A girl with a Peter Pan collar, and Mary Jane shoes. A pleated skirt, with a pin in it. She was standing at the front of the crowd, on the edge of the quay. That was the first day of filming, before the visits with school.

Her fisherman grandfather had gone there early, hearing they may want him – or his boat – and he had taken her. So she was there, at the very beginning, when the big, shiny cars arrived, when the ship with its three tall masts pulled into the harbour, when the hammering, shouting, dragging, lifting started, to make towers of wood for the cameras, to hide fronts of houses, to make new ones, which were old.

‘See,’ her grandfather said. ‘Those ships are just the kind that would have berthed here last century. See, that car… you’ll never see a tidier one round here.’ Time chopped and churned with the tide, in front of her eyes.

‘I went every day after that. Early, before school. Late, after. And then there were our visits with the teacher. That’s how I’m in the photo. I was there so much, always near the front.’

That’s how she was so quick to spot the whale heading out to sea. Why she was the first to run. Why only she saw it.

Time was like that now, rewinding, fast-forwarding like her video tapes. Soon, there were grandchildren to tell, to show the yellow pages. When they were small, they nodded and smiled, and said, ‘Yes, how wonderful, Nain.’ She hugged them and their words close. She put them in a different box. But they grew, too.

‘Tell us about Taid, Nain,’ they would say. ‘Shall we look at some photos of him?’ Perhaps there were some, somewhere, but she didn’t know where, and her film box was always at hand.

One of them, his name just beyond reach, took the faded picture from her, looked at it near his eyes.

‘This isn’t here, Nain. It’s in Ireland. See the signs in the street behind? And our harbour has the cliff rising above it. That can’t be you.’

She looked at the picture again. The boy didn’t know how the film men could change things, how they could change young men into old, and back again, legs into ivory stumps, rubbish bins into barrels, how they could paint a cliff in, or take one away.

It was her. She had been there.

The grandchildren came with the summer, sent for sun and fresh sea air. Yet they spent their days staring at screens, and flicked their thumbs up and down. They said you could find the whole world in a phone.

Still, if she asked, they would take her to the harbour. There was colour, now. Blue, red, yellow painted houses. An ice-cream van. Rainbow sun-shades.