To celebrate National Short Story Week, nine of the UK's prominent short story writers have contributed to a short story challenge - writing 100 to 150 words each of a short story with the title Consequences. Here it is...
Consequences
by Tania Hershman, Alison MacLeod, Adam Marek, Julie Mayhew, Jonathan Pinnock, Valerie O'Riordan, Sarah Salway, Tom Vowler, Susie Wild
Too many things. She grabs a pencil and an old envelope. Repeat prescription. Road tax. Library books overdue. Pay cheque in. No, too late for that. The kids will be waiting for her already. Damn. Where are the sodding keys?
The doorbell rings. She freezes. If she doesn’t make any sound, they will go away. Please. Go. Away. Now.
The doorbell rings again. Insistent. Won’t take no. The car is on the other side of the door.
“Hello?” she says.
‘May I come in?’
‘Well, actually, I’m in a bit – ‘
He’s in her kitchen. Hint of tobacco smoke. Late 20s. Mediterranean? ‘You haven’t changed,’ he says, taking hold of her chin. There’s a faint accent.
‘Let go!’ she says, pushing him away. ‘Do I know you?’
He reaches into his pocket. He throws the box down onto the table.
‘Go on,’ he says. ‘Open it.’
Again she goes to protest, to insist he leaves, but the lilt of his voice, his sanguine demeanour, suggests this would be unreasonable on her part.
‘What is it?’ she says, looking at the table.
‘You don’t remember, do you? At all.’
There is a hint of something forming, fragments of a memory gathering at the edges of her mind. A holiday. One of those hedonistic affairs where groups of friends convene on a superficially picturesque island, standards and judgment discarded for a fortnight, lost in a maelstrom of excess. Fifteen or so years ago. The young woman she’d been then embarrasses her now. The box, no bigger than the man’s fist, is carved from redwood, its lustre heightened by the kitchen’s fluorescent lighting. She touches it with the tip of a finger, pushes it an inch or two.
The man lights a cigarette, exhales dramatically.
‘I’d rather you didn’t smoke in here,’ she says.
He pushes the box back towards her. ‘It’s not going to bite,’ he laughs.
The phone rings. ‘That’ll be my kids. I have to go. I’m sorry.’
‘I’ve travelled a long way,’ he says. ‘You have me worried that you really don’t remember me. Please tell me you’re just playing?’
She picks up the phone, and before she gets it to her ear, he says, ‘You’re the one that asked me to come.’
‘I’m on my way to get you both now,’ she says into the phone. ‘I’m leaving right this second.’
‘Both who?’ her daughter says.
‘What do you mean? Is your brother not with you?’
‘Mum,’ she says, ‘have you been smoking crack again or something?’
The man pushes the box right up to the edge of the table in front of her. ‘It’s very important you open this now,’ he says.
‘Anyway I’m not coming home. You promised I could stay at Laura’s.’ Her daughter hangs up before there’s an argument.
She turns back to him. ‘Why have you come now?’ she asks.
‘So you do remember.’
She opens the box, and stares at the silver key inside.
‘But aren’t you too young to have been there?’ The memories are so deep it aches. Then it hits her. Maria’s little brother. It used to be funny when he’d hang around them. She puts the key on her open palm as if weighing it. But if he’s here now, then… ‘Where’s Maria?’ she asks. She has a sick feeling that she knows the answer, and isn’t surprised when he shakes his head, gestures towards the key.
‘I don’t want it now.’ She’s not that stupid girl any more, thank god, so he’s wrong. It will bite. Hard.
He shrugs. ‘It’s your turn.’
In her head, she hears herself agree, she hears herself move towards him, she holds his hand. In her head, everything is clear: there is no kitchen, there are no children, no overdue library books, no house, no car. Her breathing slows, crawls, the air moving in and out, she feels each small inhalation as even time waits. ‘Now,’ he's saying to her, ‘right now,’ and the silver key is in her hand, the silver key that she had not remembered she was supposed to remember. ‘Do it!’ says this man off to one side, out of the corner of her eye. ‘Your turn, your turn...’ and in her head she knows that he is right, the only right thing in her pale and miserable life.
It is three months to the day since the accident. It feels like three hours. Each day as she wakes, the memory of it arrives like a hammer blow to her head. He won’t be downstairs, shovelling muesli into his mouth and rapping – badly – with his earphones in.
Yet there are days when she can almost trick her brain.
Katie has said they should clear out his things together. She said it again this morning when she found her in his room with her face buried in his T-shirt. It was bucketing down outside, but her twelve-year-old daughter, his little sister, marched across the room and heaved up the sash. ‘It stinks in here.’
The key is hot in her palm. ‘Maria... that night... She said it was a game. A party game. Like Truth or Dare, or...’
‘Consequences?’ His smile is courteous, patient even, but his eyes are hard.
She hesitates. She feels wrong footed and cross; her mind cloudy from his interruption, a lack of sleep, a mother’s grief. She thinks that there have been enough consequences for hedonistic teenage behaviour lately. Enough bad effects caused by misjudged booze-fuelled games. She buries the key inside its redwood coffin, pushes it back across the table and glares at him: ‘I can’t just leave. I can’t just drop everything.’
He is still smiling at her. He does not move.
The day was just yawning into existence as they disembarked. On shore the walk is exactly as she remembers – the same narrow island path, the same parched shrubs, the same toothy boulders hiding the same heavy door. It is here that he passes her the small silver key, gives her shoulder that insistent nudge. It is here that she takes her turn.
And this is what it must feel like to die; to see your life rewind. Here she is, transplanted back into a moment that made the world turn differently. She takes the drink from the man. It is not a difficult decision. She simply says ‘yes’ to an elixir for grief, something to colour this pale and miserable life. She sees the look on the man’s face; it is the same as it was back then, when he was a boy. There is outward encouragement and bonhomie, but it cannot mask the disgust, the fear. She is just like Maria, she is giving in. She is choosing this above everything else. Soon all thoughts of overdue library books and a child who doesn’t want to come home and a child who will never come home and the blame, soon they will be diluted. Soon, they will disappear.
She twists; she ducks away beneath his arm.
"No!" He turns, slips on the seaweed-slick stone and falls. She kneels. With her free hand she pinches his nose – years of getting the children to take their medicine – and pours. He spits, swallows; his eyes dilate. He says, “What –” and stops.
On the way home, she unwinds the car window and hurls the silver key into the roadside ditch. The wind whips it away. In the back-seat, he's sleeping, lulled like a baby by the engine vibrations. She leaves him in the emergency room, blinking uncertainly. She will not feel guilt.
She sits in her son's bedroom and cries. She remembers the moment his fingers stilled, the nurse touching her shoulder and squeezing. The room smells like nothing she wants; Katie was right. The evening thickens and she sits and remembers as rain drums through the open window and onto the wooden floor. She will remember: that's her consequence.
© Tania Hershman, Alison MacLeod, Adam Marek, Julie Mayhew, Jonathan Pinnock, Valerie O'Riordan, Sarah Salway, Tom Vowler, Susie Wild
With sincere thanks to all contributing writers. This story also appears on The Short Review website
About the writers
Tania Hershman
Tania Hershman's first collection, The White Road and Other Stories, was commended, 2009 Orange Award for New Writers. She is editor of The Short Review, a journal that reviews short story collections and interviews their authors, and fiction-writer-in-residence in Bristol University's Science Faculty. Her website is www.taniahershman.com
Alison MacLeod
Alison MacLeod's story collection Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction (Penguin) was 'highly recommended' by Time Out and described by the Guardian as 'as inventive as it is original'. Her work has been published in a wide range of literary magazines and anthologies in the UK and North America, and her next novel will be published by Hamish Hamilton in 2011. She is Professor of Contemporary Fiction at the University of Chichester.
www.alison-macleod.com
Adam Marek
Adam Marek was shortlisted for the inaugural Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award. His story collection, Instruction manual for swallowing was nominated for the Frank O’Connor Prize. www.adammarek.co.uk
Julie Mayhew
Julie Mayhew is a playwright and actress. More information at www.juliemayhew.co.uk and on Twitter @juliemayhew. Her favourite short story writer is Miranda July.
Jonathan Pinnock
Jonathan Pinnock has had over 100 short stories and poems published in places both exalted and downright unsalubrious. He has even won a prize or two and had work broadcast on BBC Radio 4. His novel “Mrs Darcy vs The Aliens” will be published by Proxima in Summer 2011. He is married with two slightly grown-up children and he blogs at www.jonathanpinnock.com.
Valerie O'Riordan
Valerie O'Riordan placed first in this year's Bristol Short Story Prize. She's just finished an MA in Creative Writing in the University of Manchester and is working on her first novel. She blogs at www.not-exactly-true.blogspot.com.
Sarah Salway
Sarah Salway is an author, journalist and the co-founder, with Catherine Smith, of Speechbubble Books. Her novels include Something Beginning With and Getting the Picture, and her short stories were collected in Leading the Dance. She blogs at www.sarahsalway.net.
Tom Vowler
Tom Vowler writes and edits fiction. His short story collection, The Method and Other Stories, won the inaugural Scott Prize and is published by Salt Modern Fiction. http://oldenoughnovel.blogspot.com/
Susie Wild
Susie Wild is one of Parthian's Bright Young Things and her debut collection of short stories, The Art of Contraception is out now. As a poet she performs regularly, and publishes here and there, including the recent Bugged book.
http://buggedblog.wordpress.com/ www.brightyoungthings.info
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