A Short Affair Read online

  For T.M.J.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  by Simon Oldfield

  Editor and Co-founder of Pin Drop Studio

  Foreword

  by Tim Marlow

  Artistic Director of the Royal Academy of Arts

  ‘On Heat’

  by Elizabeth Day

  ARTWORK BY KAY HARWOOD

  ‘Ms Featherstone and the Beast’

  by Bethan Roberts

  ARTWORK BY GABRIELLA BOYD

  ‘Didi’s’

  by Nikesh Shukla

  ARTWORK BY JONATHAN TRAYTE

  ‘A Quiet Tidy Man’

  by Claire Fuller

  ARTWORK BY LUEY GRAVES

  ‘The Lighting of the Lamp’

  by Ben Okri

  ARTWORK BY MARCO PALMIERI

  ‘These Silver Fish’

  by Anne O’Brien

  ARTWORK BY JOHN ROBERTSON

  ‘Panic Attack’

  by A. L. Kennedy

  ARTWORK BY COCO CRAMPTON

  ‘The Way I Breathed’

  by Anna Stewart

  ARTWORK BY FANI PARALI

  ‘Feathers Thick with Oil’

  by Craig Burnett

  ARTWORK BY MURRAY O’GRADY

  ‘Heart’s Last Pass’

  by Douglas W. Milliken

  ARTWORK BY PIO ABAD

  ‘Civilisation’

  by Will Self

  ARTWORK BY EDDIE PEAKE

  ‘Rough Beasts’

  by Jarred McGinnis

  ARTWORK BY DECLAN JENKINS

  ‘Under the Waves’

  by Barney Walsh

  ARTWORK BY MARY RAMSDEN

  ‘Paper Chains’

  by Rebecca F. John

  ARTWORK BY CARLA BUSUTTIL

  ‘Brad’s Rooster Food’

  by Joanna Campbell

  ARTWORK BY JESSY JETPACKS

  ‘Freshwater’

  by Emily Bullock

  ARTWORK BY NICK GOSS

  ‘Morelia Spilota’

  by Cherise Saywell

  ARTWORK BY TIM ELLIS

  ‘How They Turned Out’

  by Lionel Shriver

  ARTWORK BY ADAM SHIELD

  Author Biographies

  Artist Biographies

  About Pin Drop Studio

  Acknowledgements

  Copyrights and Credits

  INTRODUCTION

  Simon Oldfield

  Standing centre stage in a packed theatre as the sun dipped behind the Hollywood Hills, I gazed out at the audience as they jostled for space and spilled into the aisles, eager for our LA debut. Minutes later a film star broke the silence with the opening lines of a short story, and in that moment I realised something extraordinary was happening. That something is Pin Drop, and its essence is captured here, in A Short Affair.

  Eighteen original short stories by celebrated authors alongside writers discovered through the Pin Drop Short Story Award, each coupled with a unique artwork by an artist from the Royal Academy Schools and with a jacket especially created by Eddie Peake. The aim is to create a layered book where pictures and words symbiotically entwine.

  It is thrilling to be at the helm of Pin Drop, weaving short fiction into everything from film to fashion, music and art, and this anthology is a landmark in our journey. It has been a privilege to compile, edit and curate something as wonderfully tangible as this book, in a world where the fast and temporal reign supreme.

  The stories, varied and diverse, offer a remarkable tour of the short-story form with searing prose and powerful narratives that leap off the page. Take these stories with you from place to place, from old home to new home, from sun-drenched holidays to bumpy train journeys. Read them to yourself. Read them to your family, to your lover, to your friends, to your neighbours. Embrace the pleasure of the short story.

  A Short Affair opens with ‘On Heat’ by Elizabeth Day, the story of a marriage teetering dangerously on the brink in the heart of the north London literary set. It is fitting that Elizabeth’s story is first in the anthology because Pin Drop began with us sitting in my London gallery with an ambition to put art and short fiction side by side. I invited Elizabeth to be writer in residence at the gallery and shortly afterwards we began to hold live events where short stories, selected or written in response to the exhibitions, were read aloud to keen listeners.

  Initially, the audiences were intimate, gathered on an assortment of chairs, benches and window ledges. But the ranks quickly swelled, helped along by a flurry of press coverage, word-of-mouth enthusiasm and a shared interest in rekindling an experience left behind as a preserve of childhood.

  Buoyed with excitement, we invited bestselling American author Lionel Shriver to join the gang. The following month, having accepted our invitation, Lionel was standing in the gallery reading her own short story to a full house.

  It is especially pleasing that our relationship with Lionel has continued to flourish and, like many other authors, she has remained part of the Pin Drop family. For this anthology, she has written ‘How They Turned Out’, a story that chronicles the travails of an ageing American pop star.

  A. L. Kennedy was next to join our merry band, accepting an invitation to feature in Pin Drop’s radio debut and, more recently, writing ‘Panic Attack’ for this anthology; a portrait of two strangers painfully entangled and thwarted by the circumstances of their private situations. Nikesh Shukla, who also appeared at Pin Drop in the early days and silenced a packed room with his powerful delivery, gives us ‘Didi’s’, an evocative story of a millennial woman living in New York, the daughter of Indian immigrants, wrestling with the friction between two starkly contrasting cultures as she seeks to define her identity in twenty-first-century America.

  Pin Drop soon moved to bigger stages, thanks to a far-reaching tapestry of trusted friends and relationships. BAFTA, the Royal Academy of Arts, Burberry, Soho House and many others welcomed us through their doors and embraced the spirit of Pin Drop.

  For this anthology our relationship with the Royal Academy of Arts is particularly significant. I have the privilege of curating Pin Drop’s live literary programme at the Royal Academy of Arts. The programme has seen us welcome world-leading authors and actors to the stage, including a number of contributors to A Short Affair, including Man Booker Prize-winner Ben Okri, who paints a poetic tale of seduction in ‘The Lighting of the Lamp’, and bestselling author Will Self, who gives us ‘Civilisation’, a strange and brilliant story of a man, and a society, unravelling at the seams.

  The partnership between Pin Drop and the Royal Academy of Arts now extends to the annual Pin Drop Short Story Award, a platform for new writing, open to published and unpublished writers from anywhere across the globe.

  It is discovering new voices, with their verve and confidence, that makes the Pin Drop Short Story Award so rewarding. Each year, after hundreds of entries have been read, it is utterly thrilling when a story of exceptional quality emerges as the winner. In the inaugural year, Bethan Roberts took the award for ‘Ms Featherstone and the Beast’, a richly layered story set against the backdrop of Thatcher’s 1980s Britain and the Falklands War. Claire Fuller followed with a modern-gothic tale of cruelty and deceit in ‘A Quiet Tidy Man’, and then came Cherise Saywell’s ‘Morelia Spilota’, a suspenseful narrative imbued with lust and intrigue, set against the expansive landscape of the Australian outback. These three stories, recorded by Stephen Fry, Juliet Stevenson and Dame Penelope Wilton for our podcast and film series, are featured in A Short Affair, alongside a selection of the award’s shortlisted writers.

  Anna Stewart gives us ‘The Way I Breathed’, delivered in authentic Scottish dialect. ‘These Silver Fish’ by Anne O’Brien is a quiet
ly intense story set on the water’s edge in Denmark. Craig Burnett, in ‘Feathers Thick with Oil’, has written a story that is at once peculiar and strangely familiar. ‘Paper Chains’ by Rebecca F. John, ‘Under the Waves’ by Barney Walsh and ‘Freshwater’ by Emily Bullock each tell the story of disturbing family situations. Joanna Campbell’s tale of ‘Brad’s Rooster Food’, Jarred McGinnis’s dystopian ‘Rough Beasts’ and Douglas W. Milliken’s American odyssey in ‘Heart’s Last Pass’ deliver powerful, compelling narratives.

  I am humbled and honoured that Scribner, publisher of the great short-story writers from Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald, embraced the potential of Pin Drop and A Short Affair.

  As Pin Drop spreads its wings across America, Europe and beyond, this anthology is part of an extraordinary adventure. I like to imagine that A Short Affair and the stories within it will be devoured in countless places: on a flight to Hong Kong, a train into London, a ferry across Sydney Harbour or at the edge of a great American lake.

  A Short Affair is a slice of Pin Drop, an anthology of original short fiction, bound and illustrated, for you to treasure and share. May it take you on many journeys.

  Simon Oldfield is the Co-founder of Pin Drop Studio and Editor of A Short Affair.

  FOREWORD

  Tim Marlow

  The Royal Academy of Arts’ collaboration with Pin Drop has been an expansive creative project which began in 2014. Pin Drop, it is fair to say, is a visionary organisation that wants to take literature into places that it hasn’t reached before, and it has been an ongoing pleasure to help them find new contexts for the short story and the spoken word, or rather the beautifully written word spoken aloud with intelligence and feeling.

  It is very important for an academy that was founded by artists and architects to remain open to other art forms. The interplay between the visual arts and literature has been an interesting one over the Royal Academy of Arts’ 250-year history. Charles Dickens famously gave the annual speech here in 1853, and Howard Jacobson more recently, and it is a relationship that we keenly continue with Pin Drop.

  We have been immensely fortunate that a number of the illustrious writers in this anthology have come to the Royal Academy of Arts and read their work in public. The results have been both symbiotic and poetically resonant in relationship to what has been on display in the main galleries. These include Lionel Shriver during Anselm Kiefer’s monumental solo show, Ben Okri against the backdrop of Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse, and Will Self during the landmark Ai Weiwei exhibition.

  Extending the relationship between the RA and Pin Drop, Simon Oldfield invited us to partner on the annual Pin Drop Short Story Award. Naturally we agreed, and I have had the privilege of being one of the judges for what has become an important short-story competition. It is appropriate that the award has an open-submission policy, in the context and spirit of the Royal Academy’s annual Summer Exhibition. It has achieved many things, notably the exploration and celebration of emerging talent.

  A Short Affair is, in short, an illustrated anthology that celebrates the marriage (or at least a passionate coupling) of art and literature. It captures between its pages the rich and fruitful collaboration between Pin Drop and the Royal Academy of Arts. It is especially pleasing that many of the stories in the anthology are drawn from the Pin Drop Short Story Award, and that each of the short stories is illustrated by an artist from the RA Schools. We are incredibly proud of the achievements of the students that come through our art school, which – physically as well as metaphorically – lies at the centre of the establishment, and it is inspiring to see some of these young artists bringing their own developing vision and artistic voice so strikingly into play.

  Tim Marlow is the Artistic Director of the Royal Academy of Arts.

  ON HEAT

  Elizabeth Day

  Artwork by Kay Harwood

  ON HEAT

  Elizabeth Day

  JAMES

  There is a dog tied to the railings outside his local cafe. James is more of a cat person, normally, but this dog looks like he needs help.

  Or it.

  Is an animal a he or an it? He’s never been sure.

  The dog is well kept and glossy, with a red leather collar, and he/she/it is panting in the heat, tongue lolling. The sun is beating down, forming a curiously precise semicircle on the pavement around the animal’s shape, so that the effect is rather like a spotlight or a Gestapo interrogation.

  Poor beast, he thinks, observing it from the first-floor window of his study. Must be hell to have a fur coat in this weather.

  The cafe has put out a scattering of tables on the pavement in an effort to be continental. The chrome surfaces refract prisms of sunlight. In the centre of each are salt and pepper shakers, a fake plant and a white bowl containing sachets of tomato ketchup. A woman sits at one of them, bare legs crossed, her denim cut-offs riding high up her thigh. She shows no interest in the dog, preferring instead to tap at the screen of her phone. She is wearing sunglasses and her skin is the palest brown, like the underside of a mushroom. Her nails are painted dark red, the varnish chewed and flaking at the ends.

  She must be nineteen or twenty, he guesses. The perfect age. Ripe, yet unaware of her own beauty.

  He’s been having an affair with an editorial assistant at his publishing house. She’s called Cressida and is absurdly young. Shoulder-length dirty-blonde hair, cut in a blunt fringe across her forehead. Messy skirts and Breton tops. A mouth that never fully closes, even when she’s silent.

  He doesn’t love her. But nor can he stop thinking of her body: the creaseless wonder of her skin; the flatness of her childless stomach.

  He returns to the computer screen, where he has typed a few desultory paragraphs of his latest novel.

  ‘She felt the blister against her shoe,’ he reads aloud to himself, ‘the nuchal-fold tenderness of its pressure.’

  Jesus, what an awful sentence.

  He contemplates it as he sips the bottled drink his wife had given him. It has a fizzy, fermented taste and is called kombucha. The consensus seems to be that it’s terribly good for your digestion. Patsy introduced him to it after his doctor made him stop drinking caffeine. One had to be careful of this kind of thing when one was hurtling towards seventy and did less exercise than one should.

  He glances down at his tummy. Automatic reflex. There’s more of it there than he’d like.

  He pulls up his t-shirt to reveal wrinkly flesh, saggy in unexpected places. And then, because there’s no one around, he lifts the waistband of his jogging bottoms and checks his penis. It lies there, limp and curled, conveying defeat. A smattering of grey in his pubic hair.

  God he misses the Viagra-free erection. What a luxury it had been, and how little he had appreciated it. The delightful frequency of adolescent tumescence. He wishes he could tell young boys what a gift it is to get hard without even wanting to.

  He stares at the kombucha bottle. ‘Unpasteurised, unadulterated, wild-ginger sparkle’ reads the label. He thinks of a redhead he once bedded who scratched his back in the grip of passion, leaving shallow rivulets of pink.

  He misses coffee.

  Patsy, his wife, is always trying to make him healthier than he wants to be. The other day, at breakfast, she had presented him with two amber-coloured pills, swollen like maggots.

  ‘What are these?’ he’d asked.

  ‘Omega-3 complex.’

  ‘Oh darling. Don’t you think I’ve got enough complexes already?’

  She laughed. Patsy obligingly thought all his jokes were funny. It was one of the reasons he had married her. Sometimes he is inclined to think it might have been the only reason.

  ‘Take them,’ she said, patting his hand. ‘For me.’

  He looked at her, at the inconsequential features of her all-too-familiar face. Her eyelids had drooped with age, pulling down at the corners as if they had expended a lifetime’s effort and now could no longer be bothered to stay
taut. It gave Patsy a perpetually sleepy expression.

  She had been pretty once. Not beautiful, but definitely pretty. They had met at a time when James had grown tired of beautiful women.

  There had been so many of them when his second novel had been published. In his thirties, he got invited to fashionable parties and did lines of coke with supermodels in the lavatories while, outside, people talked about him as an ‘enfant terrible’ and a ‘loose canon’ and a ‘wild card’ and all those other clichés used to denote someone who is out of control and dangerous in a sexy kind of way.

  There was so much sex in the Eighties. One-night stands. Threesomes. Foursomes. Sex on yachts. In hotels. In a cloakroom at a party, pushed up against a rail of coats while the woman’s clueless husband greeted guests outside. Once: an encounter with a woman dressed in skin-tight leather who whipped him and talked about his mummy in an underground dungeon in Prague.

  Sex was there for the taking. It was so easy.

  But the problem with beautiful women, he discovered, was that they never cared as much for him as they did for themselves. He once dated a minor actress who insisted on having sex facing away from him in bed. After a few weeks, James realised it was because she wanted to look at herself in the mirror hanging on the wall.

  Patsy was different. Patsy was adoring and sweetly in awe. Patsy, with her tidy bobbed hair and neatly buttoned cardigans, wanted to devote herself to him at the cost of erasing herself. Patsy gave up her job when they got married. It wasn’t as if she’d been a high-flyer – she was PA to a successful banker in the city – and times were different then anyway. None of this guff about women being able to ‘have it all’. Patsy was perfectly content ministering to her creative husband’s needs and raising their two children – a daughter and a son, just as it should be. And James had held up his end of the bargain by reliably producing a novel every two years or so. Some of them were pretty good. One of them had won the Booker. They were comfortably well off and had a house in north London, on a street with a pastoral suffix (Grove) set back from the main traffic but still within easy distance of the urban bustle.