Short Stories

By Nicholas Hancock

Hancock has gathered thirty-seven of his ironic short stories. You will find them satirical and humourous.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Apr 24, 2012
• ISBN: 9781467897280

Nicholas Hancock

Nicholas Hancock spent his late adolescence as a gaucho or peon In Uruguay. After a year at the Sorbonne he graduated in languages before emigrating with his wife to Canada, where he taught, obtaining an MA in Etudes québécoises and having three children. In 1989, after his divorce, his novel La Béatification was published. In 1991 during a seven-thousand-mile bicycle ride round the Mediterranean, he met his present wife in Prague. In the year 1998 his French poetry Choses tristes was published, followed by his English poems, Window for a Monad. In 2003 he won the Acorn Prize for his geriatric romance, Daniel and Miriam. There followed Metafizzical Essays and Others in 2010 and Poems in 2011.

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© 2012 by Nicholas Hancock. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse   4/19/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4678-9726-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4678-9727-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4678-9728-0 (e)

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Contents

Dedication

The Final Turn

Double or Quits

Without Appeal

The Planting

Devouring the Sun

Julia and the Charitable Neighbour

The Man Who Died

A Night with Mrs Gascoigne

A Canadian Quilting Fanatic

Paso Doble

Come and See Us Sometime

Our Page

Synchroneity

The Piano Stool

Hemispheres Apart

The Camping Trip

The Wendy House Caper

Grass

A Matter of Life or Breath

Radziwill’s Odds

The Ferry

A Dead Line

Westsex Harvest

Exile’s Bitter Bread

Twenty Times Me

Nanti Saya

The Absurd Turd

Northpaw

Ambassadorial Derring-Do

The Firing Squad

All Our Agents Are Busy

Short: Back and Sides

Sentimental Education

The Popup

Least Said…

Windfall

New-Wave TV

Dedication

This book of short stories is dedicated like my others to my wife Pavla, without whose encouragement they would not have been written.

The Final Turn

That had been a long time ago, long, long ago. Time itself had seemed different then, more elastic than at the end of Stephen’s life. As the past was to grow and the future to shrink, there would be less and less room to fit anything into it, even breathing, even heart beats. The very sight of a calendar would begin to seem as precarious as a bungee jump.

All that was concealed from him now as he sat by the early morning window doing neck exercises at his friend Jaroslav’s in Olomouc, Czechoslovakia, a country recently created by a flourish of President Wilson’s pen. The neck stretches he was doing had been made necessary by a skiing accident in the High Tatras: he would turn through the pain barrier as far as he could one way, then the other. To the left it was Jaroslav’s kitchen; to the right, through a window, was a painful glimpse of grey metallic roofing. Under a row of snow-spikes, each time Stephen turned this way he would see the carefully painted word BRUM and recall childish games as he and his brothers had broom-broomed their way around the family house.

What had possessed that workman to paint his brum? The word didn’t even mean anything in Czech. The nearest they got to it was brumlat, to purr or complain, and it was certain the roofer had intended neither of these.

As Stephen’s university Czech course progressed through autumn into winter, that BRUM came back to him with every right turn he took in his early morning exercises.

And so his life fled past—in retrospect like a speeded up film, almost obscene in its haste to get to the end.

His death bed all these many years later was a pretty trite affair. He was no Schubert to be surrounded by grieving friends; in fact the hospital ward was alive with nurses, senior house officers and a dribble of consultants, most of Stephen’s acquaintances having predeceased him.

Moments before he died, however, a Jaroslav Trnka from Olomouc quite literally hobbled to his bedside.

‘Štĕpán,’ quavered the Czech. ‘When your grandson gave me message you was dying, I got me straight on a plane, flying all the way to Heathrow. Look round at me, Stephen, look round.’

Indeed, Stephen was facing away from his old friend: all Jaroslav could see was the back of a grey tonsure and a bony neck. But suddenly the head was turning to the right; when the Czech saw the face the eyes were unfocused, seemed to be looking through a window at another world.

The dying man’s last cryptic word was ‘Brum!’

Double or Quits

I am nothing if not thorough, but my preparations for cycling around the Mediterranean exceeded all bounds: spare spokes, brake and gear cables, pedals and chain, an impressive array of tools backed by lessons in how to use them, and a first aid kit recommended by St. John’s Ambulance along with their own course to enable me to use it. I even had ten letters of good will from the Mayor of Warrington to Muslim mayors along the way (these I would deliver in town halls of North Africa and the Middle East as serious proof of my own good will and, I hoped, as convenient photo opportunities). My route was planned on a scale of 1:100,000 and happy hours consumed in an armchair rehearsal of the year-long trip.

Before long—I must confess it—I became bored by my own meticulous planning and longed to exchange armchair for saddle and pharaonic preparations for present reality.

Finally (sooner or later it was inevitably to come) I found myself on the eve of my momentous journey, a bowl of oranges before me and four packed green panniers leaning against a wall. I took my sunglasses from their case—bat-like glasses with the word TURBO in white on the left lens—and stood looking at the mirror. The metamorphosis was stark.

And Dunbar’s refrain came back to me (its connection as far-fetched as many in life): Timor mortis conturbat me: I am harrowed by the fear of death.

Taking off my glasses—my sitting room at once relieved of its pall of black—, I smiled my crooked smile and took an orange. The air was at once punctured by minute spores of acid scent, acrid nose-irritation; my teeth closed round sweet pulp. Timor mortis conturbat me. Why? I shrugged. Turbo: Conturbat?—The connection was tenuous and trivial. And another thing: why should the orange appear to be part of the same miasmal harrowing? There was of course dental coincidence, the meeting of incisors through the sweetness—a mere punnish coincidence that left me, nonetheless, disturbed.

Not for long, however. As I bruised my ancient behind through seven English counties and eleven French départements on my black and orange Peugeot, the memory of my fear evaporated; not even glimpses of TURBO on my lens were sufficient to revive it. French beauty and avarice, my own anal numbing and the simple succession of days cleansed the recollection from the barrel of my mind as effectively as a soldier’s two-by-four.

And one afternoon, as I careened at speeds of up to thirty-five miles an hour down a Spanish switchback, my sun glasses were not sufficient to stop the cold tears that distorted mountains, precipice, ribbon road, and a distant cyclist ahead of me. Oh, it was only a rear view of him, a far, far rear view. But, prismatically shattered though the image was, I was certain the cyclist was riding a black and orange Peugeot, that his panniers were green and that, while I could not see the face when he turned for an instant—almost inviting death—, his sun glasses bore a white legend on the left lens. It would be no exaggeration to say that I was indeed harrowed by the fear of death.

At Monroyo I saw him again; between Albaida and Pinoso on a desolate road threaded among pine trees; and approaching Vélez Rubio—or was it Alhama de Murcia?—I saw him again and again, his distant figure hunched over the black and orange bike (orange: what significance? what insignificance was there?)

In Murcia as I stopped to drink my coffee or eat my bocadillo, the barman stared. More and more, the barmen stared. In Andalucia at a café in a place called Baza the man stopped washing glasses for a moment. ‘Thought you were going to Granada,’ he said.

I answered with a fine sense of irritation which I could not have explained: ‘I am.’

What was happening? I could not shake the feeling that there really was someone that had gone before me. What his purpose was I could not surmise; yet I knew that it was of evil intent. And again, was he flesh-and-blood, or was he some emanation from the sicker corners of my mind? At night in my sordid sheets I would tease the frayed edges of this thought till it fluffed up, filling the vacancy of the tiny room, smothering me gradually, alveolus by alveolus.

And finally there was the barman in Guadix. Instead of serving my coffee with the usual instant nonchalance, he took a step back (there was room for no more); his chin retracted into his neck while his eyes attempted to cross themselves.

‘Black coffee,’ I repeated. ‘Please.’

‘Changed your mind, eh? Didn’t like Granada?’ His hands let the coffee drip, his eyes remaining fixed on me as if I had been a ghost. ‘But you can’t have got to Granada and back—not in one day!’

I took the coffee.

So this incubus, this thing that I was pursued by in the very act of following it,—I could not call it a person—was finally letting me catch up with it? I would meet it face to face? Somewhere after sunset, I supposed, on a lonely road, it would step out from behind a rock or a pine tree… And then what? What indeed had I to fear? What could it do? So far I had only been permitted a foretaste, a prevision. It was something like the spectral first notes of a record barely heard above the gentle hiss of the needle on vynil. Yet precognition it certainly was not: too many people had seen it or claimed to have done so for it to be some mere quirk of the mind. I smiled humourlessly and stirred my coffee.

With extraordinary speed, however, I forgot my problem… Not forgot it, then—just put it out of reach as a thought unworthy of a sane, rational mind. By the time I cycled into Granada I could concentrate on nothing but the bumper ahead of me and the other perilously close behind.

There followed, in the twilight, a brief affair with Inmaculada, one of those flower girls that ambush cars with their single carnations; morning followed in good time, lighting the face beside me on the grey pillow, adding fifteen years to the smile that had won me the night before. I was sickened. But I was no longer pursued by a relentless ghost.

And so, having finally exorcised the sick fancies that had followed me from the Pyrenees to the Costa del Sol, I crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and cycled the interminable uphill of the Rif Mountains—past lazy flocks and the whizzing stones hurled by little boys—and on to Tangier.

Here, at la Province or Town Hall, I prepared to present one of my mayoral letters. The first secretary sent me padding after a flunky in djellaba to an airless waiting room where women in abas fanned themselves; from here I was at length summoned to appear before the second secretary, who sent me behind another djellabaed lackey to the Secretary Himself.

‘You will have tea?’

Tea was poured, returned to the pot, poured again. My happiness was sublime: I knew that to go from one secretary to a second and from him to a third was to progress from good to better, maybe to best. I raised the glass of mint tea to my lips.

‘Why?’ he asked patiently, letting his own tea cool.

‘Why what?’

‘Why return? Your gesture was fine in its way. As a single gesture. Do you plan doing this several times?’

I was angry. And disturbed. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Simply this.’ He referred to notes. ‘A week ago—on 1 December—you handed this letter to the Président du conseil in person. At that meeting he graciously presented you with a medallion of the City of Tangier.’

He handed me a paper. It was a photocopy of my letter from the Mayor of Warrington.

Somehow I found my way out of the building.

Once more my mind reached the end of its tether; I subsided into deep depression. However, slowly I came to realise that I was cured for good—assuming the ill derived somehow from myself—or that, the opposite situation obtaining, my tormentor had left me at long last. I visited Casa Blanca (finding it all too technicolour and the Great Mosque too great), bathed in the bracing Atlantic. I lingered there several weeks, lodging at the youth hostel where I quickly became a plump Claud Raynes on tangine, couscous and marzipan fruits.

Then, alarmed at my softness of mind and body, I threw my leg once more over the saddle and headed east for Marrakesh.

Here somehow the evil caught up with me again. As I picked my way between snake charmers and fortune tellers on packed Jemaa el Fna, my mind, too long at ease, sought refuge in the old terrors. Nothing less would satisfy me, I told myself, than a final meeting face to face with the presence that had preempted my every move.

‘Get away from me!’ I cried after a persistent young man. ‘I don’t need guiding anywhere! And I want to be alone!’

The latter was only partly true: as you know, I now craved the company of a certain stooped gentleman in blue sweat pants and rain jacket, wearing a stylish pair of sun glasses with the letters T-U-R-B-O blazoned on one lens. The very—‘person’, I was about to say (no matter: let it be)—the very person I had so longed to avoid I now was frantic to see.

One afternoon in the vastness of the ruined El Badi Palace (it was late December, I remember: the oranges in their sunken groves were ripe), I spurned the entreaties of the official guide who had the effrontery to ask for ten dirhams (something like 70 p). A stork fanned its wings above the pixie-hooded djellaba of the guide as he weathered the storm of bad French, smiling reproachfully.

‘Vous le regretterez!’ he shouted after me as I entered the dark tunnel; his tone had more of the benediction than the curse. For a while I could see nothing; soon the gloom resolved itself into a sharper focus of contrasting blacks. I stepped cautiously round fallen rocks, hoping others would not fall upon my head, towards a pool of light beneath the hole in the vault; here once more my eyes adjusted themselves. Then, as if drawn away from the light, I edged into darkness. There was a faint splintering beneath my feet. I stooped to fumble for the object and backed into the light to see it more clearly. I had a pair of shattered sun glasses in my hand, the O of the TURBO still intact.

‘May I have them back?’ came a voice from the shadows. ‘My glasses?’ Into the spotlight I had now backed from he stepped, holding out his hand. ‘My glasses.’

I leapt at his throat. All the torment, all the questions remained obdurately blocked as, like Inmaculada, the lines round his mouth and eyes…

The guide I had spurned, his robe no blacker than the dark he stood in, his face alone faintly gleaming, helped me to my feet, half lifted my body into the far sunlight where my strength returned as if powered by a solar cell.

‘Hold on!’ I screamed, pushing him away. ‘Where are my glasses?—Où sont mes lunettes?’

But he was already making for the distant figures of tourists. My scream became a roar; the guide did not turn; he did not even shrug. I vaulted the two metres into the orange grove, twisting my foot as I landed. Branches whipped into my eyes, oranges into my nose and hands; I tore the fruit feverishly from its stalks and hurled it incontinently over the concrete revetment. I could not help myself: these were my only weapons. ‘Christ!’ I moaned (non-believer as I was), ‘where are they all coming from? What is this army treading towards me?’

From all sides down the grey paths above me the crowd advanced, each individual identical (identical individuals?) wearing sun glasses, in a fragment of which, by a prodigy of vision, I could clearly discern the white O. Ah yes, I was harrowed by the fear of death. And Dunbar, his Latin drumming robust and true in a sandwich of lowest lowland Scots, kept repeating the goddamn phrase till it banged and clanged inside my head, turned somersaults and laughed and sang. TIMOR MORTIS CONTURBAT ME. TIMOR MORTIS CONTURBAT ME.

And the poet’s dead, he’s dead, rotten dead! And where does that leave me?

He stands above me in his many hundreds wearing my glasses, impervious to the oranges, mostly poorly aimed.

‘Brother,’ goes his thousand-lipped refrain, ‘brother!’

I fall weeping to my knees.

Without Appeal

K arim tumbled to the floor. His eyes opened to the legs around him.

Had he been sleeping? . . . And before that?

Back on his seat, he looked round, hoping to remember where he was. Men and women were seated in four impassive rows against the walls of a grey room; he recognised none of those distant enough to