Short Story of the Month, November 2024

We've just arrived back to civilisation and found a great short story of the month for November. It's a "read twicer". Did anything happen while we were away? Ed.

I O U 

by Robert Stone

Copyright 2024 © by Robert Stone. All rights reserved

 

BILL HAD NOTICED, and he noticed it again now, that whenever Brett’s friends felt that they had to speak to him, they didn’t look him in the eyes, as though they might be afraid to do that, rather they looked in his direction, over his shoulder. Brett herself was not like that, not quite.

He made his way through the crowded Union Bar looking for her, threading the labyrinth of the dingy amenities and the miscellaneous scenarios that the students were fabricating for themselves. He had made an impression on her, earlier that day, for the first time, and he wanted to follow that up. He had told her that in serious fiction there has to be a place for fear and for evil and they have to be given a chance, not simply written off as a black hat. That had come unexpectedly from him and she had been taken aback a little, he could tell. He wasn’t sure that he had actually meant it, more that he was trying it out.

So many of the students pretended, performing roles that they surely knew they would discard on leaving the university. They said things that they felt were true now but which they knew would not be true forever. This wasn’t a bad thing, he thought.

He could hear them doing it as he stood, sipped his pint and looked around for Brett. The sociologists were talking about the riots, the civil dissent, as some preferred to call them. Jason was talking now. Bill had once had a weird drunken evening with him in this bar when they had found themselves, to their mutual embarrassment, unexpectedly alone together, which had become good back-slapping fun until Bill had pushed Jason in the chest and he had fallen down, broken his glass and burst into tears. He was saying,

– It’s a combination of unreasonably high self-esteem on the one hand and low achievement on the other. They sense the disparity. They think they deserve more and conclude that they are being cheated. So they want to punish the cheaters even though that does no good.

– A vicious circle. If only they were not so foolish and ill-informed they would realise that poverty and despair are natural consequences of ignorance and stupidity.

That was Annie. She was in all of Jason’s seminars and mocked him, which he only occasionally noticed, without pause.

Bill thought Annie was in love with Jason. He wondered if he, Bill, was in love with Brett. He knew he had been instantly fascinated by her. As soon as he had seen her on that first day he had started to pose. He wanted to think that one day she would look back on the first time she had ever seen him and remember him like this, special. She would never forget it.

He thought she was lovely. She had an acerbic grace. A sceptical hauteur with an unanticipated relish for his salacious stories. These were the phrases he had chosen for her.

She had black hair, very white skin and eyes that perhaps really deserved to be called violet. Skin that made her veins stand out as blue. Was that the origin of blue-bloodedness? She was tough and difficult, edgy and wild. Charming but plain-speaking and above tact. Bill knew that he himself was a crowd-pleaser, all things to all men. He feared she must despise him. She seemed so young too. Where would all that leave her when she was forty? As a literature student Bill knew that praise of beauty was often, usually even, a premeditated revenge. They had attended a Conrad seminar together and when the supervisor had read out the description of Mrs Travers where various shades of scorn were the secret of her acquiescence in the shallowness of events and the monotony of a worldly existence Bill had looked up at Brett and saw her smiling at him as if she had been expecting him to. He thought that was a bit much for someone of Brett’s age.

He found her in the end, she was sitting on the back of one of the banquettes with her feet on the cushions but bending over so far that her head was lower than her friends’ to whom she was speaking earnestly. The style code in the bar was grunge but Brett was wearing a primrose-yellow dress that disappeared so completely against her so pale skin that she seemed almost naked. Bill thought she looked like a flower fairy.

There was a space for him on the edge of this group. When the glasses were almost drained, Bill offered to buy everyone a drink. The students were amazed and delighted. No one drank in rounds here while everyone did in the town where Bill had grown up. One or two seemed wary of taking advantage of Bill’s gullibility but most had been mentally counting the few notes in their wallets and purses for the past ten minutes. One of the gay blokes and a girl he had spoken to in seminars helped him to ferry the drinks back to the table. It cost Bill the best part of thirty quid.

He was much thanked and people suddenly remembered his name.

– How do you afford it, Bill?

– Football betting, he found himself saying, surprised, because it was only partly true and something he had decided to keep to himself anyway.

He conceded that betting was almost always in the bookie’s favour, but there were instances when you could carve out a small advantage.

– Their problem is that they have to offer odds on all of the games, so they have to know about them all and there are so many. Whereas the punter, me, only has to bet on one game. That’s the only fixture on which you have to be an expert. You have to look through the games and see which one the bookie’s got wrong. It won’t be Spurs vs Arsenal, but are they that sure Torquay will beat Bristol City just because they’re top of the division? I don’t think so. City have shown some form away from home. The odds are too long. Someone’s been lazy there and I punish them for it.

– How much do you put on?

Bill grinned at the four eager faces who were really interested.

– And you still have to be lucky, said Brett.

– Oh, yes, you have to get lucky.

When he had been walking back from the bar with the drinks, Brett had been saying,

– People use one another. Altruism is a word without a real-life equivalent. It describes or denotes nothing.

He wondered if she had been talking about him. He hoped so.

They got back to discussing the summer’s riots and race in general. Bill shamelessly told a couple of anecdotes illustrating his father’s rebarbative opinions on the subject, imitating his accent broadly and making everyone laugh, even Brett. His father was a widower now and spent much of his time staring at the traffic out of his front window. He had once been a man of some urbane charm.

When Brett left, Bill hadn’t realised she was going. Her drink was unfinished. And when she was gone the others didn’t seem to miss her or to take the opportunity to talk about her and that surprised him and taught him a lesson.

 

A couple of weeks afterwards when Bill had been working late in the library, he saw Brett standing alone at the bus stop scrolling through her phone. He didn’t recognise her at first. It was dark and she was wearing a blue felt hat a little like a trilby that he had never seen before and she barely acknowledged him. She seemed upset.

He decided to make no effort and stood at the far end of the shelter. He had recently found a college scarf discarded in the street and now he had it wrapped around his neck with one end tossed over his shoulder in a way that only he knew was ironic. He stared at the spiders crouching in the corners and he counted them. The false widows were sleek and sinister and the cross-spiders were encrusted like crabs. He wondered how these would get on if England were as warm as Italy and could sustain a large population of lizards. When he had lived in Italy, a Russian called Gogol had habitually killed all of the lizards he saw on his country walks, striking them with a stick. He said they reminded him of the Devil. Conrad said that in Borneo the lizards called to one another across a room. Perhaps only European lizards were silent. These were the ideas with which he might have entertained Brett had she not been so busy with her phone.

Two lads had approached her while Bill had been counting spiders. They were not students and they said they wanted to borrow her phone for one minute. An emergency. Bill pretended he hadn’t noticed, like a Bad Samaritan. He knew he had been sized up as such and dismissed.

The lads were calling Brett darling, which Bill thought was funny, and they didn’t seem unfriendly, perhaps a little drunk. He wasn’t sure whether they wanted to steal Brett’s phone or simply to talk to her because she was so pretty, then one of them called her a stuck-up cow because she wouldn’t give up the phone. Bill had thought she was a bitch for ignoring him but there was thinking and saying and he knew he had to intervene.

– OK. I think we’ve heard enough from you two.

They hadn’t expected that but they soon squared up to him.

– What did you say?

Bill could now see that this one, the less confident of the two, was attempting a moustache that would be seen nowhere in the university, although Bill’s younger brother had one just like it.

– Do neither of you have you any manners?

Bill knew to always answer a question with another question and if there was no answer to it that wasn’t daft, all the better.

They now said a few things about Bill and his scarf and about his relationship to Brett which were sadly untrue.

– Just fuck off, alright? The pair of you, or I’ll kick you into the middle of that fucking road, said Bill.

This was the critical moment. It was up to them to back down now, or not. Bill thought he knew how to make his face, his eyes even, take on that abysmal deadness that suggests an indifference to anything at all that might happen in the very near future. He did it now. A trick, merely, of course. If a man has ever frightened you, you should know how it’s done. He stared at the nervous one. He knew he didn’t have to appear invincible, only more trouble than it was worth.

They said a few more things, about Bill and about Brett, crude and not funny, but they walked away.

Bill went back to his spiders and Brett to her phone. When the bus came he didn’t follow her upstairs.

 

He saw her before she rang the door-bell. He had been looking out of the window by chance and recognised that felt hat. He buzzed her in and had time to subdue the lighting, he switched on the two bedside lamps, and he opened the window an inch to freshen the place. The room was furnished with a red carpet that absorbed almost all of the light. He put a dirty plate in a drawer.

– You like it dark, she said.

– I can read by the lamps.

– And cold.

He closed the window.

She sat in the only comfortable chair and lit a cigarette without asking or offering. She tucked one long leg underneath herself and she explained that she had come about the other night. She had been surprised that he had travelled downstairs on the bus and she wanted to thank him for his gallantry in saving her from those yobs.

Bill made her a bow. He didn’t believe her for a moment. He knew why she had come. He had heard certain malicious whispers and moreover he knew she lived hand to mouth, wasting her meagre allowance like a rich girl; smoking, drinking, buying designer clothes, dancing in nightclubs and eating in restaurants and spending the summer in Italy, on top of everything else. It was the time of term when everyone was short. She had listened to his foolish boasts about football betting and she wanted to borrow money. She wanted £150 as it happened, a sum which astonished Bill. He had already decided that £20 would have been a cheek, but not unreasonable. This was the rich girl thing again. He wrote her a cheque. She told him he was nice which she rarely meant as a compliment. Brett wasn’t nice, she was glamorous. She had a Pink Panther tattoo on her instep.

She said she would pay him back when the grants came in, of course. Somehow he doubted that exactly but at the same time he also knew that all debts are paid in full in the end. To the uttermost farthing, as Conrad would say. No one gets away with anything.

He wondered why she had to come to him with this business. She would have a cupboard full of cut-up credit cards and an answering machine chock-a-block with messages from once-charmed bank managers with burned fingers. She had lots of friends though. She must have gone through them already or maybe she frightened those people, men and women both, and was too proud to appear as vulnerable before them. He knew that she thought he saw through her and didn’t think enough of him to be bothered by that. He wanted her to believe in him.

She couldn’t very well just disappear immediately with his cheque in her purse, so she drank a cup of tea, or half of one, smoked another cigarette and they talked about the course and their writing, their most recent ideas.

She told him about a madman she had seen in the supermarket, more than once, who simply walked the aisles with his empty wire basket, suddenly stopping and staring about him, chattering constantly, never even so much as touching anything on the shelves.

– He lives in a moment of surprise, in a world without narrative.

She thought she might be able to do something with him.

Bill told Brett that he had been with his girlfriend, Cathy, to visit a church on the edge of town which was only infrequently open to the public and which contained a funeral monument carved by Nicholas Stone. Brett said she knew of Stone and wished she had known the church was going to be open.

– We were looking at the monument and I could hear this noise which was easy enough to recognise but I couldn’t understand where it was coming from. It was a swarm of bees humming that contented drone of a sunny summer’s day in the English countryside. Then I noticed that the window-sill next to the tomb was strewn with the bodies of dead bees like a hundred tiny sacrifices.

– They were coming in through the window, of course, which had one pane open a crack fifteen feet above our heads. It was hard to see the attraction for them and now they couldn’t find their way out again. There was a nest outside under the tiles of the chancel roof. The whole thing had the feeling of something uncanny and also entirely explicable, banal really. And it seemed to be pressing a kind of symbolism on us at the same time as being obviously meaningless, a lack of meaning underlined by the waste involved.

Bill thought there was a danger that Brett would meet this anecdote with some toffee-nosed smirk, the idea of he and Cathy visiting churches, Pevsner in hand, like this was the 1950s. It was more than this too, because Bill knew that Cathy was known as The Vicar’s Daughter among Brett’s friends, if not by Brett herself. This was on account of her manner, the way she spoke and did her hair and her clothes. There were thousands of young women attending this university and Cathy was the only one among them who ever wore a cardigan, always buttoned to the throat. She owned several. Pinned to the cardigan was a brooch in the shape of an owl with two tiny pearls for eyes. Bill had once, charitably, described this as quaint. Cathy knew of her nickname, which had quickly been shortened to The VD. She was hurt and a little bewildered by it.

Bill scrutinised Brett but she gave nothing away. He was very impressed by her, he knew that, but he could see that he might look back on her when all of this was over and with a cynical carelessness find her pathetic. Sometimes he thought he saw a glint of panic in Brett’s violet eyes indicating that she too could foresee that. It was panic, or desperation.

Bill walked behind the lights to get a book and Brett saw his shadow cast in heroic dimensions on the opposite wall. He was thinking how nice if there could have been a pair of Conrad’s cooing lizards there.

After a number of Bill’s more ambitious bets went south he found himself broke and he had to go home a week before the term ended, pleading flu.

 

– Take your anorak off, or whatever you call that coat-thing, said Brett.

She was afraid that Bill had come to dun her. She had still not repaid the £150, not all of it, and she could not repay it now, definitely not.

He emptied his coat pockets of keys, wallet and phone, a habit of his, and slung the coat over the back of a chair. The room was hot, close to stifling.

– Here are your drugs, he said.

When he had texted, asking if he could come over, she had asked him to get her a packet of Ibuprofen on the way

He told her of the desperate act of shoplifting he had detected when buying the tablets from the supermarket. One of the packets on the shelf had been opened and two of the tablets had been taken.

– A packet only costs 50p, he added.

Now the question of money, paying for things, or offering charity, was there before them.

  Brett wondered if Bill had it in mind to try to seduce her, to indulge at least in some tender wrangling. She knew how he thought of her, of course. She was not afraid of him, was sure she could take care of him.

– How’s Cathy getting on?

– OK. We argue about writing a bit. Little else.

Brett had graduated now, while Bill and Cathy were still students. Brett continued to live in the city, as a lot of ex-students did. It was a cool place.

– I think I’ve mellowed a bit, said Bill. I don’t want books that hurt me any more. I can use a little happiness, even if it doesn’t last that long.

– I’ll take the damage, said Brett, as long as I’m learning. I want experience that adds value.

– I just don’t want stories where the bad guy wins.

– No one ever wins.

Bill got up, walked over to Brett’s desk with its closed laptop and notes on scrap paper spread around, draft letters with much crossed out and some simple calculations in the margins. He could see that two of these sums were the same, but the answers were different. He picked up the framed photograph of the young man that was on the desk. He knew now that this was Brett’s brother, Rufus. Bill had been jealous of him before he found that out, from a third party. Brett had never enlightened him. He was a handsome man, resembling Brett once you knew the connection, but he had an off-putting expression. This was partly explained by the fact that he was quite blind. Brett had once told him that Rufus had a great power of sleeping; he could sleep for thirteen hours at a stretch. Bill had wondered if Rufus could see in his dreams and was reluctant to wake to darkness.

He had come to see Brett not to ask for his money back, but to ruin her in some way, shake her complacency and self-confidence, involve her in a catastrophe. She had always belonged to the rule-breaking set, now he would show her what it was really like to cock a snook at convention. He would do something that she could not have imagined. He replaced the photograph on the desk, face down.

– Cathy’s been upset lately, actually. You know she doesn’t have a lot of confidence. She struggles with some courses. I tell her to do Jane Austen. Great writer. Leave Kathy Acker to the girls with the tattoos and the piercings.

Brett didn’t say anything.

– She doesn’t have many friends, said Bill. I don’t know what to do with her, so I thought I’d come and see you.

Almost none of the things that Bill was saying now were true.

– I left her writing an essay on Jean Rhys. I don’t suppose you miss that about being a student, writing essays?

– I miss the great cheque dropping into my bank account three times a year, that’s what I miss.

– Bills to pay.

– Always bills to pay, she smiled with what seemed a deliberate wanness.

– Show me.

This was the moment that he had anticipated. It all depended on what she did now. After some hesitation, she shrugged theatrically, took an envelope from the drawer below her computer, and dropped it into his lap.

– The tale of all my woe, she said.

He began to look through the papers in the envelope. It added up, certainly. These were her records, very little that might be described as official. He raised an eyebrow once or twice for Brett’s benefit, but nothing there really surprised him. He knew some of these names, although he didn’t, at first glance, find his own. He looked up at her as she examined her nails and noticed how shapely her arms were. If only all of this rubbish could be forgotten and they could simply be human together.

– I’ll take care of these, he said. Leave them with me.

He shoved the envelope into his trousers pocket. These were among Bill’s sayings, verbal tics he used to end discussions. He used them when speaking to Cathy, often, and he generally did what he said he would do.

– What do you mean, Bill? I think you should give that back to me.

– Look, it’s only a temporary fix. I can speak to people, call in a favour or two.

He held up both of his hands as though he were surrendering. He found himself cast in the rôle of some small-time gangster and was surprised to see himself acting up to it. This was all because he put on the occasional bet, had told a drunken teenager to get lost and had once, quite without meaning to, made Jason cry. Who on Earth were these people?

– But I want you not to worry. I will take care of it. I can’t help Cath, but this is something I can do.

Brett became distracted and looked away from Bill, through the window, across the slippery roof-tops. He could imagine her saying,

– Everything is going OK, you have nothing to complain of, you even start to think you might be happy, then you suddenly ask, What am I doing here? This is not my home.

He realised that he had been looking at the corner of her old yellow dress trapped in the wardrobe door and it seemed to him to be a past life hanging up, or a disguise she had once worn.

– Leave it to me. It’s a small thing.

– Do please stop saying that. What are you actually proposing? And it isn’t a small thing at all.

She sat down again, letting her whole weight fall with an in-considerable bump.

– I remember we argued about altruism once and didn’t we agree that there’s no such thing? I don’t see what you get out of this, she continued.

– Well, we know most relationships are based on blackmail of a sort, he smiled. Do this, or I will do that.

They were back in the academic groove now.

– But there is always room for the gratuitous gesture, the absurd, senseless, causeless, action. That’s how we know that we are free, Bill said.

Brett was turning things over. She did not know why Bill did not simply give her the money to pay the debts if he had it. Perhaps he did not trust her to do that once she had the money actually in her purse. Nasty, but not necessarily wrong. She also thought that Bill might have a way of dealing with the debts without paying them. She indulged the comforting fantasy that people like Bill, whatever that phrase might mean, had a way of taking care of things like this.

Bill was thinking that he really would like to rescue Brett, but he didn’t know how to do it. It was too difficult.

 

As Bill walked away from Brett’s place he could almost hear, perhaps also feel, the threads that connected him to the past snapping. The sound of treachery. He would certainly never come here again.

He imagined Brett’s confusion. How long would it take her to figure it out? He realised that he was already thinking about her as he might think about a character in a book, but he was creating a memory, which was better than a story. This would be something strange and irreducible to look back on. Their secret, for sure. They would neither of them forget it and it was so easy. It would remain in the backs of their minds, then something would prompt them and they would re-live it all once more.

– I am getting more out of this than she would ever have thought possible, Bill said to himself.

He had made himself a hero. She would never forgive him, but that did not matter as he had never really wanted anything from her in the end. He had hardly known her.

What a thrill to assassinate hope. The solution he had invented for Brett’s debt problem was not real, but the relief of her anxiety was, temporarily.

Bill took the envelope from his pocket and tossed it into the litter bin as he walked past the betting shop. He didn’t have the money to pay Brett’s debts, it was as simple as that. 

- - - - - - - 

Robert Stone

Robert Stone was born in Wolverhampton. He works in a press-cuttings agency in London. He has been a teacher and the foreman of a London Underground station. He has had stories in 3:AM, Stand, Panurge, The Write Launch, Confingo, Eclectica, Punt Volat, HCE, The Decadent Review, Heirlock, Lunate, Main Street Rag, Clackamas and Wraparound South. Micro-stories have been published by 5×5, Third Wednesday, The Ocotillo Review, Star 82, deathcap and Clover & White. He had three stories published in the Nightjar chapbook series. A story has been included in Salt’s Best British Stories 2020 volume.