Winner of the Cambridge Short Story Prize 2025
*
He was late. He’s always late. Struggles with the time, I know that, know that getting here ten minutes early is pointless. But that’s me, and that’s him. So I did what I always do and sat in the car waiting. Maybe for nothing. Maybe it’ll evaporate from him. He’ll be in The Crown, five pints-deep and glassy eyed. I try to remember he’s doing me a favour, he’s helping me. I’ll try to remember that this is part of it. That you can’t get the story without the slips. There’s no remembering without the forgetting. The crystalised yarns that spool into brilliant, tragic skeins from the past means that the present is more watercolour, less present.
The condensation on the windscreen, the carpark full of dog walkers, cutting desire lines across the reclaimed countryside. All a fucking waste of time if he doesn’t… if he forgets. Again.
‘I’ll take you up there, one day young’un.’
The last dregs of lukewarm acrid coffee. How long’s too long?
Then I see him, his familiar gait struggling down the slope, a silhouette against the wool-white sky. He shuffled past the car.
‘Len?’
Half cut. Amber fingertips rub dew drops from his red nose.
‘Young’un. Not late am I?’
‘Nah, Len. You’re alright.’
That’s him, and that’s me.
‘Well. Should we away up the big hill, will we? Get the lay of the land from there, eh?’
*
The Canada Geese, gorged on spectral white bread, skulk through the sleet, ominous triangular footprints. Above, seagulls and pigeons flit too close. Len covers his head and mutters a warning to them.
‘The ducks and the swans I don’t mind, but the fucking seagulls are lethal.’
We walk without words.
The hill almost blends into the countryside. But there’s something ghostly about it, too. It’s not quite here, in the present, as Len and me spiral up the side on carefully carved paths. We’re walking up the waste, the scar tissue dug out from the land. A hill he helped to build, shovelling out stone.
‘Was the biggest waste heap around,’ heaves Len, bent nearly double as he climbs. ‘They’ve done it up bonny now. But after it finished, so to say, by heck was it an eye sore. Ha’way we’ll take a quick sit here, young’un.’
He sits on the bench and looks out over the road to the smoke-black pillars of Penshaw Monument. ‘Was it ever a terrible sight. When I was a young’un meself, I could see the colliery from me mam and dad’s bedroom. Used to watch them, a big long line of men all walking up the road to the colliery. Me father, me older brothers Matthew and Luke, all of them passed to spirit now. But I used to watch them. Didn’t really have a clue what they were doing, where they were going, what they’d do when they got there. I just knew that they went under the earth. Then in the blink of an eye, I’m following them, you know. Doon under the earth meself. Right under here.’ And he points down the hill, beyond the spoil, beyond the paths and reclaimed lakes. Under. I follow his finger. I try to follow his words, the staccato leaps stitching times and places into a patchwork that struggles to make sense.
We sit side by side, sleet soaking through our trousers, heartrates returning halfway up the hill. I ask him what it was like, working in the colliery. I thought he hadn’t heard, lost in the perspicacity of the past. Looking backwards across the fields.
‘I’ll tell you this, young’un. Being totally honest. I never had a clue. I used to just do what I was telt. Never knew what it meant. When I was down the Maudlin Seam… I was always afraid. It’s a hard thing to admit to now, but then… impossible.’
The imagined impossibilities, the remembered traumas. They skew Len sideways, as they do. His eyes close. When they open, a new thoughts – or maybe it’s the same thought, in someone else’s clothes – floods out.
‘Course you’ve got Penshaw Hill over there, where the aaful worm’d lap his tail. You know the song, don’t you young’un? Must do.’
I nod. And my grandfather, distended stomach behind grease-stained blue coveralls, half a mug of cold tea swilled into the hedgerow sits beside me and mouths the words, bellowed incantation from childhood, endless repetition, verse after verse of myth and mundanity. Wisht lads, haad yer gobs.
‘I’d think to meself, you know, the worm’d swally little bairns alive. And then on this side, the Maudlin Seam, it’d swally us all as well. So… no escape, sort of thing. Do you know what I mean. I’m… me heads gone to shite today young’un, I’m neither use nor ornament, me like.’
I feel the strain of the narrative I want to construct. The prompt, the reminder, the desire line through the conversation. Meander if you want, back to the past, but stick to the fucking path, Len. Tell us one thing. Then the next. But it doesn’t work like that.
His silence on subjects is… it’s not deafening, because it’s not shouted. It is multifarious. Maybe that’s a better way of thinking about it. It hides. It hides behind assumed knowledge. Places, people, actions, the working life of the mine, the social life of the club, the everyday realities of endemic poverty. They’re silenced by the feeling that there’s no need to say them, to speak them. They are aspects that everyone he’s ever met, ever spoken to, knows like they know their own name. It would be like commenting on the canvas in describing a painting, or explaining the shape of each letter when writing. These silences omit in flowing dialogue. They give names and places without context. The chronology doesn’t matter, it isn’t the point of these stories, this silence. Time skips, before becomes after, told after. The silence cloaks every events, texts told without context.
These silences are noisy.
But then there’s the other kinds of silence. The personal. They’re quieter. They don’t remember, or sputter out, or divert away. They get confused and wander off. Whenever Teresa is mentioned, whenever her spectre floats into the room. Or the kids… even their names, their ages, their place in all of this. There comes silence. A quiet silence. Ashamed of itself. Hiding something. The self standing in its own shadow, the darkness on the edge of the acceptable, the hazy, liminal edge. And I know in my heart of hearts that he’s not doing it on purpose. On my better days, I even convince myself of that, and I look at the old man in front of me and I know he can’t remember. Or I remember they are his words to give. He does not own me them. It’s a gift. And if he wants to withhold a part, to keep a little corner in silence and occluded, that’s his discretion.
But then a part of me – a part I keep silent – can’t help thinking… is there more to it than that? Do I want there to be? Is it deliberate, this forgetting, this silence. Is it being kept silent, hidden behind the clutter of a messy life? Is the silence the foundation upon which the rest of the story is built? Is it built for me as a diversion? I’m here to hear the noise, so I won’t here the silence.
I wonder what he hears of me. When he interrupts. When he asks again and again. When he struggles to remember my name or circumvents a question. What does he hear? What silences do I hide behind? Miners. Both of us. Him, collier. Me, interviewer. Him, coal. Me, trauma. Both of us extracting, hammering into useable lumps the shiny black darkness. Buried. Inert, but eager to burn. Formed unseen by pressure and time. Then dug up, howked out. Shipped off elsewhere. For someone else.
A spectrum of silences.
His and mine.
That’s him, and that’s me.
It doesn’t work like that.
He doesn’t work like that.
The past and the present. Silence and noise. The dead and the living. Real and imagined. It’s all the same. All little fragments floating over the waterlogged landscape. All ghosts. Ghosts everywhere. Everything. Haunting. Melting the spaces between each fragment. Stories start five minutes, twenty years ago, protagonists die and grow up, born and have sins visited upon them in haphazard orders over a string of disconnected conversations with Len. That’s how it is. That’s him.
You can’t change the path of the waters when they run this deep. You just have to float with them and see what you see.
A trickle of hapless bairns helter skelter up Penshaw Hill. The ghostly maw of the worm invites them in. A rivulet of broken men trudge the pathways from Herrington and Penshaw, Newbottle and Shiney Row and are swallowed by the earth. The ghosts of Len’s brothers Matthew and Luke, his father – distant, taciturn, the absence of not being able to cope reimagined as wisdom. Drunk. The ghosts of the bottle. Spirits, passed down through the family. Len turns to me, the sweet-bitter syrup lingering on his breath.
‘You never know what you’re doing, I suppose is the top and bottom of it. You manage, don’t you, by the skin of your teeth. That’s probably where it was, near as I can manage to recollect, young’un’. Under there. Where I was trapped. When it happened.’
He drifts into silence. The puddle by our feet has frozen over. With the delicate sound of crumpled paper, Len taps it with his foot into spelks. His eyes drift over the landscape. The ghosts hover above us. Men and sons of men. Fearful beasts, cleaved in two.
‘You know it used to be herrings – the silver darlings – that we were famous for. Iron. Coal. Herring. Boats. Now it’s the drink. We love a fickle king round here.’ Another of his thoughts that get stuck somewhere between the brain the glottis. I ask if I can write it down. He asks ‘what for?’ I tell him every time ‘for the book I want to write.’
‘You know, the foreman telt us… long after. After it finished. He says “Len, it could’ve happened to any one of us. It was an accident waiting to happen.” I thought, you bastard, you couldn’t’ve said that twenty year ago? Tell aal the others that blame us. I mean… there’s a… thingy… a… bloody, what’s it called, to remember someone?’
‘A plaque?’
‘Aye, something like that… in the town, by the war memorial. For him. For George. ‘Victim of the Maudlin Seam accident in 1980.’ And he was a victim, don’t get us wrong, young’un. Course he was. But… I was too. I was trapped down there three day with him. His ghost. I seen him. Hovering over his own body. And all them three days he looks at us. And when they got us out, I seen him float off and away. But I had to stop here. Keep working here. On the surface, mind, but still. So who’s the bloody victim? He went down that day just the once. Me, I gan down every bloody night, and every morning I wake up thinking ‘how the fuck’d I get out of there?’ That’s what sets your head against you, young’un. Wasn’t the accident, it’s the surviving that gets you. Anyway.’
And he slaps his knees, the perennial signal that the conversation is over. He stands up, and my knees creak in the cold to join him. He ambles slowly up the reclaimed hill. We’ll stand at the top in silence. I’ll walk back to the car and drive away. I’ll offer him a lift and he’ll laugh and decline and wait for the bus in the cold, smiling a little. He’ll leave and I’ll leave. But the ghosts will remain.
***
Tom Astley is a writer, musician and social researcher from Newcastle Upon Tyne. He wrote his PhD on Punk in Cuba, and has since published research in the fields of popular music, Latin American Studies, and cultural geography. He makes art-rock in the band ‘Belle Skies’ and improvised space rock in the band ‘Echoes of Distant Stars’.