2011 Winner

 

London by Rosa Rankin-Gee. Judges' comment: “This superb short story is both intriguing and moving. Within 900 words the reader warms to both the woman and boy. A single, powerful image, their two bodies on the bed, intimate yet detached, is more than enough to carry the story. Impressive use of dialogue."

Rosa Rankin-Gee is 25 and lives in Paris, where she edits the tri-city arts journal 'A Tale of Three Cities' (www.taleofthree.com) and organizes book swap parties for up to 300 people. Last summer, her novella The Last Kings of Sark won Shakespeare & Company's Paris Literary Prize. She is currently in a state of desperation about her first novel, which, for the moment, is about a boy called Benjamin and two people that live in a phone-box. Follow her on twitter @rosarankingee
 

LONDON
Rosa Rankin-Gee

Let us start with a bed, let us look from above. The sheet is a canvas, pulled taut in the morning. Two figures have moved it loose, but now they are still. One light, one dark, a woman, a boy.

A finger paints a line across a breast, so slowly the path cannot be kept straight. The boy’s eyes follow the finger; his. He looks hard, he always looks. He places a palm around each breast.

“Pomelo,” he says. He doesn’t know the word in English. “Son los poros... muchos, como un pomelo…”

“Oh -” she says, a shy out-breath, shutting her eyes, smiling, slightly. “Poh-mellow.”

He takes her hand and pushes the backs of her fingers flat down on the bed. Her wrist arches off the sheets. He traces dark blue veins with his thumb.

“Como arroyos… rios…” Her eyes stay shut. He goes on, “You know, ree-bers…”

“Ree-bers?”

“Ree-bers.”

“Oh, rivers -”

“Si, ree-bers. Forgive English… I am stranger. Extranjero. You say stranger?”

“Yes. Well... no. Well – yes, I suppose.”

“Ree-bers. This - ” Thumb, veins. “Wriss like ree-bers. You know, I be’ thinking - ” He props himself up and perches on one elbow. “El cuerpo – eh … body… you say body. The body is… whole world.”

That makes sense, she thinks, in his line of work. Asian, latino, black even, he must have seen the whole world in bodies.

But this isn’t what he means.

“Is like foot. Like skin on foot… I find like deserto… desert… very – dry – And here - ” his finger xylophones her knuckles, “here is hills.”

Her breathing changes when he touches her.

“Y aqui, here… cicatriz – eh - como se dice? Marca?” He runs his finger round the rim of her BCG scar, “is like moon. Is like moon, sabes? Young bodies… is all same. But when is antigua, when is old like you… is like universe.”

“In Spanish.” She shuts her eyes again and turns her head away. “Say it in Spanish again.”

“What is this look away girls do?” He touches her tiny eyelashes; they flicker as if her face was in full sun. “One girl, she tell me. In English, you say it ‘bashful.’” He says it bass-full. He lights a cigarette. “You say him ‘bashful’, no? I like this word.”

He is perched on one elbow. Smiling. Staring. Smoking. Still talking. He always talks a lot, afterwards.

“Bashful,” he says again, no ‘h’. “Is excellent name for it…”

“And your name?” she says. That’s when she opens her eyes. This boy on her bed. “What is your name?”

He leans over her, elbow, breast, and flicks his cigarette. It’s not an ashtray, it’s where she keeps her reading glasses.

“Pablo - ” He says it with a question mark. Bluffing, nothing: clear to both of them.

“Pablo,” she says, in English. “I thought it would be something like that. From your skin.” She is too scared to touch him again. “Pab-lo.” Almost two words. “It’s a beautiful name.”

“Yes, Pablo - ” he repeats, no question mark, his lips a perfect circle for the ‘blo’. Blow, he breathes it slow, low, into her neck.

Then he says he must go.

He slides off the bed and into Levis, she slides up the pillows. He pulls on a t-shirt, and she pulls the sheets up like a toga.

“Podrias - ser – mi – madre,” he tells her, kisses like commas, between each word.

“I only know ‘gracias’… - ” she says, but so quietly, and by then, he is gone.

 

It is a bright morning, and the boy hums Cielito Lindo as he walks home. He passes a Lebanese shop and buys two grapefruits for his breakfast. He checks that they are flat where they have sat in the box, because this means that they are ripe, and he pays with a fifty pound note. “I bed for red,” he rhymes in his head, as he takes the money out. In Paris, it was fifty too, but in euros. There, they called it the golden ticket. Change in his pocket, he goes up his stairs, two at a time, with a grapefruit in each hand.

Before breakfast, he will shower. His soap is unperfumed, and so is his deodorant. For ‘sensitive skin’, a quirk of the job: in case of husbands, he leaves no scent. He pushes the silver stick over his armpits four times each way, until dark hairs are weaved white. He dips and breathes deep, and smells nothing, which is good.

Back in bed, the bed we started with, there is only one person, now, in the painting. Has she been asleep since he left? Maybe, she isn’t sure. She is suddenly cold. She has not slept without clothes on for a long time. Sharp shame - where are the sheets?, she tenses her feet - then remembers she is alone again. She wonders then, as people do at the end of stories, if it were all a dream. She pulls the pillow to her face, so slowly its path cannot be kept straight. She wants to breathe him in one last time. She breathes deep and breathes the same answer, nothing.