The short story by Helena Aeberli

The one art I cannot master, the man at the end of the long table was saying, is that of the short story.

She is not really listening to him, should not be, since they are in no way anything more than strangers, but he has the sort of voice only a man in his sixties or seventies who has been successful in life can have, the sort of voice that commands you to sit up straight and listen, your un-slouching ears tuned in — though perhaps not as successful as he might like to think, for there is something almost too loud about his delivery, prickly in its pridefulness, resisting questioning. He is speaking in English but there is something European in his accent, French maybe or somewhere Eastern, she doesn’t know though surely knowing would change her opinion of him, his high-minded claims to art.

She is no longer an artist herself, and thinks perhaps she never was, had simply suffered for several years a common middle class pretension to creating something outside of herself, rather than offering herself to a system which would not give back. There was a Marx quote an ex who was studying fine art at Kingston wrote her on a post-it, something about fulfilment and capitalism and utopia, but she cannot remember it, like much of her late teens and early twenties it has been swept away into a general blue wash, like the glaring blue sky behind the hotel’s white-washed walls. The post-it is long lost and the ex, Tom, is now a consultant for KPMG, she ran into him at a party six months ago and the first thing he said was wow — then — you’ve barely changed — I wasn’t expecting to see you here. She’s still not sure which bits of that interaction were meant as compliments, if any, whether the wow had more to do with the lack of bra beneath her sheer silk (viscose) shirt or her general lack of status in life. She had wanted desperately to sleep with him again, if only to see where he was living if not the tiny flat in Dalston he had shared with a philosophy lecturer and a drug dealer, but not so much as to make any effort to flirt. He did not seem so keen, anyway. Life’s a journey, huh, Viv, he’d said after a few minutes of forced conversation, then backed away nursing his Corona and his iPhone, leaving her looking at a large framed photo of a female lion, roaring before a deep oasis, and a heart-shaped wooden sign with take it as it comes chalked in its centre.

She’d downed her wine and phoned Tristan instead and had him pick her up and they went home and to bed. It is Tristan she is with now, Tristan who treats her less like a sounding board for his great ideas than as an echo chamber for his personality, which is forceful and athletic and has earned a high-powered position at a government backed distribution business, and who has paid for this holiday and does not require too much of her, bar sex four times a week and someone to watch the football with. He is settling the bill at reception, having finished breakfast in several great gulps, the white of his teeth an Invisalign advertisement, their arctic expanse against the red of his throat. Go ahead — she said, to his expectant glance — and stays, picking through a fruit plate which is attracting flies. Take it as it comes.

I have laid claim to several literary forms but that one has always evaded me, the man at the end of the table is now saying to his rapt audience of two, the German couple next to him who always dress in matching shades of navy and wear walking boots, despite the sand and heat. She wonders if he draws larger crowds for his readings, in bookshops and at literary festivals. He is balding but what is left of his hair is fine and grey, a few strands at his flushed temples still clinging onto an ashy sort of brown. His eyes are beady but steady. She thinks about the prawns she pulled apart for dinner last night, their black gazes, their pink oiliness softening her fingers. Upended, legs in the air, unblinking.

The muse has not been kind.

She herself used to be lively, fizzing with inspiration, taking blue watercolours to the walls of her bedroom and penning cursive verses down the backs of doorframes. At uni studying Geography she accepted the jokes about colouring in whilst selling canvases collaged of cut-up atlases and swirling oils on Etsy, submitted armfuls of poems to the student papers and won several awards.

The eventual problem with both the paintings and the poems wasn’t so much the inspiration than the effort, her brain ran so fast that by the time she had reached for a pen or a paintbrush, the whole scene had played out at triple speed in her mind and was finished, the canvas wiped clean and the paper crumpled, and there was no way to make manifest its traces. Remembering failed her, reconstruction was pointless. Everything was finished by the time she started. It was like watching a wave breaking, by the time you thought to jump it there was nothing left but water. The atlases and magazines she had begun to cut out for collaging were just trash, littering the floor of her tiny student bedroom.

The hotel cat is on the wooden boards by her feet, its tail licking up her leg, tasting salt and suncream.

The writer has now snared the couple who own the hotel, who have limited English and who he is therefore speaking to in a very slow, sonorous tone, the way one might to a dog. English is a hegemony, she thinks glumly, toying with the remaining eggs on her plate, trying to muster some of the passion of Tom, the Marxist ex, though really she is thinking about the beach and how much she will miss it, miss the empty expanse of white sand and the heat which seems to turn her brain to pleasantly inoffensive putty.

I have thought, since you have been so obliging and this place is such a pleasure and an inspiration to me — a pleasure, most truly — that I will leave some printed copies of my work around the place. By the Bibles in the drawers, perhaps — most certainly, signed. But alas, there will be no short stories — I never finished.

He reaches for a purple paisley print handkerchief and blows his nose, very neatly and certainly, whilst they decide how to reply.

She wonders very briefly what it would be like to fuck him. It is funny, she is of the last generation to grow up with sex as something taboo, something hidden and shocking rather than mundane, and she still finds the thought sends a hot frisson of thrill down her belly, though she has slept with several people and knows many who have slept with far more. There was a time as a girl she went on holiday with a friend and her parents and overheard them in the night, through the flimsy walls of the Holiday Inn, grunting and gasping. Maybe she wrote a poem about it, maybe it was then, awake in the sweltering dark, that she decided sex must simply be a chore, another fact of life like office jobs and standing on the train and knee pain after wearing high-heels. She does not think the writer would be an attentive lover, he has a far-off look of self-preoccupation and the voice of a man who labours too intensively. His hands seem soft, but crinkled. He is more spellbound by his words than any of his listeners, except perhaps her.

She wonders when he discovered this handicap, his inability to condense stories into stories, to reduce his capacious vocabulary to the merest sliver of words. She wonders who he was writing them for, those unspun tales, then if the slip of woman opposite him, drowning in blonde curls and white linen, is his wife. If she is a writer too, or was ever.

There were people she knew at uni who had told her she would be great one day, that there were things around the corner. Lecturers who praised her work and friends who tore her poems from the student papers, for auctioning off at a later date, with her autograph. They had told her things were around the corner but when she looked back she realised she had missed the turn. Behind and ahead of her there was nothing but desert and angry cerulean sky. She could not control the car she was driving, she could not turn to look for it, and besides it was easier to drift, between jobs and boyfriends and flat-shares, just about keeping up the facade that all of this was only prelude to some greater, more fulfilling life. At the pub a year or so ago, she’d run into an old friend, who had run the university drama society with an iron fist, crushing all rivals beneath her Doc Marten boots. We were good, she’d said, slinging an arm around her shoulders, though they had not spoken in several years. We were good, weren’t we? She was now a lawyer at a commercial firm and lived in a penthouse in South West London. Did she miss the stage? She laughed — the world’s a stage, I can tell you that, now I’ve seen enough of it. The boyfriend at that time, Cutler, had been insecure in himself and afraid of her unconsummated bisexuality, and had pulled her away by the forearm, seething with jealousy. She had liked his apartment far more than she liked him, so had stayed too long, accepting the sweaty clinginess of his embrace with the passivity of a rock harbouring a rather stringy limpet.

Every morning she felt the deep well of her own inadequacy open up before her and every day she spent shovelling sand into its mouth only left her feeling more hollow.

The writer’s voice was louder than it needed to be, perhaps he was used to enunciating, projecting, perhaps he lectured at a college somewhere, in whatever part of the world he hailed from. But you know, though I have published novels and poetry and even — yes even — edited several editions of the classics in Greek and Latin — I have never managed a short story, not one. His head nodded like a rocking horse, the few strands of ashy hair static at his neckline, pointing downwards, to the line of sweat marks on his linen collar. The floor creaked, the owners shifted, hmmed gently. The cat on the floor whirred.

Tristan was back. He was a presence in the room, muscled and tan, he cut a silhouette out of the nothing. He said nothing but she could read his meaning, it was easy to do. Each body spoke a different language; Tom had always jittered, receded, Cutler, who had preferred out of some public school sensibility to use his last name, had been firmer than needed with his gestures and embraces. Tristan was a pinnacle of certainty. We should leave, his shoulders said, we don’t want to miss the cab. The slightest wrinkle of his blonde eyebrow asked why she was still sitting there, in solitude.

She pushed the plate away, stood up. A fig leaf curled limply against her pinky. It solicited her to stay. Tristan’s calves flexed. Come on, they said, and she thought about how he scheduled time for sex, for the gym, for his one weakness, video games. The leaf fell to the floor.

In a way, I suppose, the writer was saying, it is because a short story is the closest to a human life. How can we ever hope to capture that?

Come on, Viv, Tristan said out loud this time, and she felt her body move down the table, breaking the air into tiny, invisible waves til she reached her appointed place beside him.

How can we ever hope to capture that? They reached the door, looked back. They had spent a week here, would not return, should take it in, soon it would recede and be forgotten, though they had agreed it was beautiful and left a five star review on TripAdvisor, as suggested gently in the visitor’s book.

The writer finally looked up from his soliloquy. His eyes were brighter than she had realised, bluer. It made him look younger, like the self who had known he would be a success one day, who had strived for it til it planted wrinkles in his brow. He met Tristan’s gaze, nodded, a mere imperceptible salute. Then passed swiftly over her, an unnoticed shadow.

Then out of the door, into the blue sunshine.

***

Helena Aeberli is a writer from London. She holds a BA in History and Politics and an MA in Early Modern History from the University of Oxford, with a research focus on gender and medicine in the seventeenth century. She writes the Substack Twenty-First Century Demoniac, which aims to take a closer look at what we’re missing when we get stuck in a doomscroll. She has also written for various student publications, and her short story Tick Tock was shortlisted for the 2021 Oxford Review of Books Short Fiction Prize.

Twitter: @helenarambles