3rd Place in the Cambridge Short Story Prize 2025
*
He lay with his son beside him telling him it was a beautiful day outside the window and he tried to say some thing back to him, something. Anything, but nothing worked, he couldn’t even squeeze his hand, acknowledge the life that was by him, from him, a block, a blink of movement and pulses and thoughts shooting down like lightning through him he could feel the life in his son’s hand while his own was hopeless, helpless, stone and he knew that today he would die it was all twitching away from him, a butterfly evading capture, a dusty flash of red wing.
*
Goes and gets a biscuit when he’s already got one.
*
You could put his home on a trailer and move it elsewhere. Could a high wind come and lift it off the ground? The high hedges protected.
The trees in grey and black sweeping up around him around the site. Biscuity smell coming off things in his mobile home his cocoon his retreat to wrap himself in a duvet inside and watch the telly, to save on electric. To wrap himself up in itchy blankets and never get up again.
His son brought him, dropped him off and stayed to pretend to poke the gas fire and show him where the fuse box was.
It was the seeping smell of this place, the crumbs and dust he found in the folds of his jumper. It was the scrapes of food across the plate.
Dull drip of December rain. He was facing a run of wet grey days, leaf mulch underfoot, a wet hood sticking to his forehead and cheeks.
One egg for Friday, a tin of soup Saturday.
*
The rain thundering down on the estate. His house played like a big bass drum. The whole estate booming out into the air enclosed in rain pushing pounding down. Bounce of the drops back up in chorus in line. Everyone inside of course wrapped up, nose to afternoon telly, albeit dark afternoon like night or twilight grey and pressing.
The voices on the radio, the TV, the computer. He was a TV man, grew up on it, the sitcoms of his youth, Til Death Us Do Part, black and white, Steptoe and Son. Gameshows, Michael Miles.
They had had a warm welcome house, held small parties when the neighbours would come round and chat with drinks in hand, the kids making an appearance knee or waist high, looking askance at the adults at play. Adults in a new mode, of course all smoking in those days. The full glass ashtrays. The ashtrays on stands.
Never knew things would skip, would give up. Didn’t understand mutability, his wife dying. He was stuck.
Climate change will take him away, floating down some river flood.
Scrunched up eyes. Looking inward, seeing nothing, or rather corridors, lanes, tunnels, long sandy beaches of nothing, grey sand.
Facing up to it, son. Facing the right way.
Cart off his soul in a one-wheeled barrow. Take it unsteadily over the rocks and damaged paths on the way, tip it out eventually at the river, the flooded river take it to the flooded plains where grey swills with grey. No one will come along and save it, wrap it up, present it like a wet fur to your beloved.
Wake up the neighbours run about town declaring your love your drunken love.
He wasn’t giving up on the world, he was pausing, he was treading water, he was breathing deep, letting it all come to him in the night, terriers barking outside.
To end, to conclude to make out his will and lie in it.
To go back to a simple diet and a regular routine as if he did have a job. He did he said I did he had a job getting up on cold mornings, laughed to his son, to prove he knew what he was doing. It did get cold sometimes, the heating didn’t come on, it wasn’t he couldn’t afford it, there was a problem. Did he report it, said his son.
What did it matter anyway, death was around the corner waiting for him to show up.
Coughed up enough phlegm yet?
Go put on your lasagne.
How lucky he was to have missed the major wars. Born in one, like the Beatles, die before the next. Maybe.
Eat a chocolate brownie think of the future wait for your son to show up play Radio 5 for the football and news. Gets involved (in his mind) in the phone-in about racism in parliament or kitchen knives used in street violence.
Ban them Rob.
I said Rob how about this for a story. I said to my wife I’m going to remember this and ring up that Rob Burnthead on his radio show.
The trees were waiting for him, he could slip through the trunks, the avenues, slide away with the leaves blowing.
Rob Burnthead will know. Rob Burnthead will understand.
In the dark drizzly days of December short as a matchstick before back into the dark.
Rob Burnthead will advise.
To edge slowly into death, to keep it company.
Thinking he should sweep those leaves up, they might drift and block the drain.
You should ring him up. You should join in.
*
Mimicked heading the ball back and forth with his son in this kitchen. On yer ‘ead. Their mirrored furrowed brows. Same eyes, same eyes he would say.
His son said there’s men his age fronting rock bands and going on tour and bringing out new singles. Oh, pardon me for not bringing out a new single, he replied.
I’ll take you to the supermarket buy you all the shit you need. Let’s make a list.
Carrying the bags, his son said he’d broken up with his wife. ‘You know that dad, I told you last time. You know we weren’t getting on.’ Now in his car or just got out of it. In the way of coming or going, not stopping, Cup of tea stood up. No biscuit. Everybody likes biscuits.
His son used to walk the damp fields around with him before, get him out along the footpaths, calling him sprightly, the grasses growing in rain in wet tingling with rotting leaves, mud spreading and deepening. But that didn’t happen now.
*
It’s largely tits on the telly now, after Chaplin, before football highlights.
He knew about Bob Dylan’s beginnings in Hibbing, Minnesota.
He could see the cow pats and mushrooms smeared across his floor.
Spider going sideways up his wall.
The neighbour said when the farmer cuts down the corn, the corn on the cob, harvests it all, the rats have to get out, in search of new food, so they come here, under these houses. Up on stilts aren’t they? What do Americans call it? Crawlspace? Something like that. Heard one moving this morning under me. Must get someone out. Alfie over there – gestures – promised to get under and have a look. Do a survey. Of the stilts, see if they need tightening.
When the washing machine goes the whole place vibrates. Wooden floor and you get a lot of humidity. What you need is a de-humidifier, you can dry out your towels and duvet too.
Will have to get a Christmas box for the postie. Young chap with a moustache, introduced himself.
Hardly got your coat off and it’s winter again
Bananas on toast to this day.
Buffeted by the November wind, big grey and black sky in ridges stretched across and above the rolling fields.
*
The blue sky remarkable, salty, the air going in and out like a miracle the air full of bees and flies and long-legged insects, gossamer.
What a monstrous washing churning world turning in space flinging itself around the sun, going round and genuflecting to the great red ball burning.
The taking away of loved ones and reducing them to mulch to sugar and sand and dirt.
They’ve let themselves go.
Why did the backs of his legs ache and not his front?
The putty on the window frames, not well done, thumb print, the previous owner who died of course on a settee they assured the son has been taken out.
He called time. He went home. He saw rats. He died on the sofa eating a slice of toast, watching Newsnight. It was a zip-like death, from toes up it spread quickly to hush his mouth mid chew and clamp his brain his eyes still open but no longer watching Victoria Derbyshire.
*
‘My kids think I like Westerns and buy me framed pictures of the sun setting on the Grand Canyon but really it was my dad that liked Westerns, all that time ago, he took me to the pictures to see them. High Noon; Stagecoach. Later, much later The Good the Bad and the Ugly. We’d have a lads’ day out while mum and sisters went off shopping. Sat in the dark together eating choc ices. Was it Claudia Cardinale’s luminous bare back in one of them?’
*
Donald, his son: dad I can see it every interview, see the faces falling as I talk.
You’ve been done enough now, you’re done. And the whole estate, the bartender the bus driver the café worker the shopkeeper.
Hip and bone ache, eyes and ears going, teeth gone. The usual. Leaning on a stick and gossiping with no one in a corner. Still reading print newspapers when Don brings them on Sunday visits, bringing Ronny his son the constantly growing grandson, pretending to chase him with lion roars around the kitchen, or clambering on him, pulling at the scratchy beard. The small hands; fingers. Donny and Ronny, Trump now not Duck. Who could have foreseen? But those visits have dropped off now his son has separated, moved into a flat above a shop, miles away, he said, because you know, costs. Cats? No, costs.
The path that led him here the son the wife the long-gone daughter abroad not dead.
‘I was telling them off in heaven for accepting her. Should have said she had to wait a bit. Too too early. 6 years younger than me. And then that turning to jam in the hospital bed.
‘Blurred my life with hers. We were one outline to others, to ourselves. Cut the apron strings they said at work when I couldn’t come to football, was shopping. Course now she’s gone it’s all I do, watch football, even if it’s not Villa, especially if it’s not Villa. Got all the services, son set it all up for me, he’s good like that,’ he tells the postman. ‘Modern technology.’
*
His son stood on doorstep, you take care, he took a mouthful of manurey air as he said it, he was near tears, but knew his dad wouldn’t see.
*
The wandering, the pills, the sun gone quickly, scurrying away, his son popping up from cupboards, fixing something; his wife later laid in his bed, came apart in his hands. The roof bent the walls bent.
The constant snot and phlegm of later life.
Felt like he was in a caravan sometimes. On permanent holiday he joked with his son.
He had his books, he had his pictures he had his memories; his wife had gone your memories on Facebook kept bringing her back, her FB page still there, didn’t know how to take it down and his son saying it didn’t matter people live on now in infinite webspace. Are having their hundredth birthdays.
He was off on a rant again to the wind and the windows don’t interrupt him, let it all out, deflate.
On the shortest day he looked from his window at the wind rushing around in the few grey hours of light.
*
Two with honey, one with jam. Me and my sisters, lining up for food.
A place burnt down
The gang met in the blackened remains
Every few minutes a competition – who can climb highest up the crumbling wall?
Who can dislodge that can with stones?
The cat in the bag family
Open the Box
*
Honey to suck from the teeth.
Saw a woman enter a house sideways with a wicker basket of food, fruit and stuff like in a 60s film is she Anne Bancroft is she someone my mother’s age in a park in South Shields in the 60s?
Call Rob Burnthead, he’ll know.
*
His son said he’d been here years not one season – winter – as he thinks. Ronny’s grown; you wouldn’t recognise him now. He’s up to here on me, now. Haven’t been able to bring him for years, dad. But I will, next time. See if I don’t.
With her, his wife, the old man’s, the grandad, she nearly went. Had her bags packed. Her metaphorical bags: plans made apparently, a man he barely knew stopped him in the street and told him. He’d been seeing her for years. Years, mate. During his nightshift-at-the-biscuit-factory years, when he didn’t know what days were like. She chickened out in the end, the man said, eyes screwed up. In the end.
Then he remembered her swaying feet from him with this man on the dancefloor at her works do. He was still stood in front of this man in the street, but inside him it was a twenty-storey fall. From the Birmingham high rises.
She would come home and pat her husband’s sides, turn him around at the door, don’t get too close I had fish/garlic for lunch.
*
He looks down at himself lying there. He wishes to rise above. He can’t get tangled up in this now. It’s done, all done, gone. His son says he can’t see what he can see in front of his eyes. He can’t see anything.
*
His son and his son at the open door. The door burst open on him. He was on the floor and light came bursting round the two silhouettes, tall as each other, bending over him and between them taking, carrying him to the bedroom to lay him on the bed, to make him comfortable.
***
Alan Beard has had two story collections published: Taking Doreen out of the Sky (Picador 1999) & You Don’t Have to Say (Tindal St Press, 2010); a third Afternoon Drinking launches in November from Floodgate Press. Tom – Gallon award. Best British Short Stories 2024 (& 2011); Best Microfiction 2024 etc.