Buch lesen: «Six Shorts 2017: The finalists for the 2017 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award»

Contents

Introduction

Reputation Management by Kathleen Alcott

Half of What Atlee Rouse Knows About Horses by Bret Anthony Johnston

The Hazel Twig and the Olive Tree by Richard Lambert

The Tenant by Victor Lodato

Every Little Thing by Celeste Ng

Mr Salary by Sally Rooney

The Sponsors

Follow the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award on Twitter @ShortStoryAward #STEFG and at the website www.shortstoryaward.co.uk

Introduction

The Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award is the world’s richest and most prestigious prize for a single short story, with £30,000 going to the winner and £1,000 to each of five other shortlisted authors.

Launched in 2010 by Matthew Evans, the former chairman of EFG Private Bank, and Cathy Galvin of The Sunday Times, the award has quickly grown to be one of the most significant literary awards in the literary calendar, with shortlisted authors including previous winners of the Pulitzer, Orange and Man Booker prizes.

The Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award is open to any fiction writer from anywhere in the world who has been published in the UK or Ireland, and whose submitted story, written in English, is 6,000 words or under. The prize’s seven previous winners – CK Stead from New Zealand (2010), Anthony Doerr from the United States (2011), Kevin Barry from Ireland (2012), Junot Diaz from the United States (2013), Adam Johnson from the United States (2014), Yiyun Li from China/United States (2015), and last year’s winner Jonathan Tel from the United Kingdom – have emphasised the prize’s international reach.

More than 1,000 authors submitted stories for the 2017 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. The judging panel – of Booker-winning novelist and short story writer Anne Enright, broadcaster and novelist Mark Lawson, Booker-shortlisted novelist Neel Mukherjee, and the Orange- and Whitbread-winning novelist and short story writer Rose Tremain, plus the Sunday Times literary editor Andrew Holgate – in February produced a longlist of 14, from which this shortlist of six is now drawn.

The judges’ winning story will be announced at a gala dinner at Stationers’ Hall in London on Thursday, April 27.

Before then, though, here is your chance to read all six stories yourself.

We hope you enjoy the stories. For more shortlisted stories from the prize’s previous years, visit www.shortstoryaward.co.uk

Reputation Management

by Kathleen Alcott

Alice Niemand had been working for the company two years when the young Hasidic man died, and it made her look at her things, the cashmere cardigans and the pebbled bathmats, and consider how she had earned the money to buy them. On a normal day, it was easy enough not to examine: she never went into a workplace, never talked to anyone who did the same job she did, never discussed aloud the clients whose reputations she had repaired, never shook their hands or heard their voices, these lawyers and dentists and PTA mothers with some angry review or mug shot to suppress. The man who was dead – 19, a boy really – had been the victim of sexual abuse by the Yeshiva teacher who had been Alice’s client. The boy had claimed to be his victim, she reminded herself, but then came another feeling, lower in her body, which seemed to ask, in the way it roiled: why would anyone claim that?

On the coast of California where the garnet had eroded to make the sand purple, and from a multi-coloured veranda in the New Orleans garden district, and in view of children pushing toy boats in the Jardin du Luxembourg, she had reviewed files summarising lives and careers and misdemeanours, had typed the stiff sentences that financed her comfortable life. Her parents were as impressed by her new place in the world as they were intimidated by the gifts she sent to their sagging split-level home in the middle of the country. What could they do with an iPad that they couldn’t do on their computer, the pauses between their thank yous said, what should they put on these asymmetrical walnut serving boards? Would she be visiting sometime? They were sorry to say they did not have the money to make it to New York. It was never mentioned that the cost of the things Alice sent could have easily covered the flights that would put the three of them in a room together.

Alice had bumped from one Craigslist apartment to the next in the years after college, making friends chiefly to learn from them, when to tilt the head in the course of flirtation, how to conduct oneself in an expensive restaurant, never telling anyone about her father’s job ringing up purchases of gas and Snickers, her mother’s meagre income selling Mary Kay cosmetics. She had visited the office, a hyper-colour portrait of Silicon Valley opulence, for three interviews and a training session. It was her last month in San Francisco and the last hiring period in which the company bothered to meet anyone in person.

A guy on a skateboard had careened down an aisle that separated two rows of desks, clipping the heels of the formal, uncomfortable shoes Alice wore, and she watched as he landed on an L-shaped couch and began to comment on a ping-pong game. To the right of a freestanding iron staircase nearby, a man jogging on a treadmill typed on a computer that hovered above it. “Casey prefers the running desk to the standing,” Alice’s tour guide explained, with a satisfied laugh that she understood she was meant to mimic. In the company kitchen, the snack foods, arranged by colour, sat up straight on transparent shelving. “There is such a thing,” she heard a departing tour leader say to a group of new IT personnel, “as a free lunch.”

All this forced irreverence aside, the company, it was quick to assert to the new writers in the all-glass conference room that day, had principles. They did not work with felons, or people found guilty of domestic abuse, or convicted sex offenders. Standing in front of a whiteboard, a tanned man in thin designer cotton spoke to Alice’s group with the wry twist of his mouth, his California upbringing apparent in every protracted syllable. “These people in general are, like, not dudes you want to be having dinner with. The good news, right, is you don’t have to. Our sales reps take care of that.” A titter unfolded in the room and the new hires leaned back in the ergonomic chairs. “You just deal with their files.” Ethan resembled some beautiful, off-limits older brother, tall and freckled, blessed with the demeanour of those who always seem just-roused from some luxurious sleep. In the afternoons, a dripping wetsuit could be seen hanging in his office. As he coached her on her first customer, Ethan brushed a light hand on her elbow. Together they giggled about the client’s sham company, which sold advertising space on magnets with the false promise of distribution in small towns. Cackling at its website’s “About Us” section, filled with dated stock photos of big-haired women before enormous computers – "Who could fall for this,” he had laughed – Ethan shot her a glance of unmetered approval. “You’re doing such a great job, by the way. It’s a little scary how fast you learn.” She was, she marvelled, mastering it quickly: all she had to do was write three hundred words, essays in miniature, that made her clients seem more impressive and decent than they were. By the surveys the customers filled out, Alice could immediately identify the people they saw themselves as being, and then she wrote that person into existence, her voice transforming accordingly. A person who listed scuba diving as a hobby was always an adventurer as well as a professional, and the individual who wrote “books, especially mysteries and crime”, an avid intellectual. She padded the pieces with SEO tags and handed them over to the web team, who situated links in places unknown to her, ultimately pushing the clients’ embarrassing or disturbing Google search results to page five or six. Gone were the variously threatening and pitiful voicemails they had left for their exes, gone the lawsuits involving unpaid child support.

There is no direct interfacing with the clients, Alice would say later, a thoughtful index finger on her cheek, when people asked about her job. This was the phrase she would use.

*

In the beginning, when the nature of the work was still novel, Alice had Googled each case assigned to her, read the Drunk in Public arrest report, the vicious Gawker article about the embezzlement or the affair with an intern. A few direct-deposit paycheques later, she ceased to do this, as it only added time to each job and diverted her thoughts as she tried to write the glib summaries of careers and personal achievements. Dedicated equally to his family as to his career, she would write, the dry introductory clauses coming to her automatically, so-and-so enjoys yachting with his two sons and traveling with his wife. After six months on the job, she could handle three cases each day, which roughly amounted to $1,600 per week and $75,000 a year, an amount that would have seemed improbable to her beforehand. One of the most admired minds in the world of litigation, she would write, Alan Nixon remains a dental health professional committed to both furthering his education and supporting his community. The balances on her student loans were vanishing, the recurrent nightmares of creditors gone from her sleep. It was the first time in her adult life that her talents had felt translatable, commodified, that she hadn’t smelled of the entrées carried three at a time on her forearm.

The Yeshiva teacher’s file had not given her much to begin with. She got those, sometimes, people who – despite having paid thousands of dollars for the service – could not be bothered to fill out the forms about their career, their hobbies, their philanthropic endowments. They provided only a birthday, a name. Dov Weberman supplied only the Yeshiva and its address. The anonymous supervisor she chatted with – the company had transferred Ethan, done away with traditional models of management, at least with regard to the freelance writers – advised Alice to write about the client’s place of work. This meant producing a great deal of filler and jamming his name into every other sentence, no matter the lingual acrobatics required. Dedicated to its students and the greater community alike, the Viznitz Yeshiva for Boys organises numerous events, the majority overseen by Dov Weberman, which enrich and educate. The Viznitz Yeshiva for Boys and Dov Weberman are known in the surrounding neighbourhood as bastions of Hasidic culture and faith.

After she read about the suicide in the paper, she could not help arranging the facts of it in the hyperbolic, humourless tone of the pieces she wrote for the company. A paedophile for more than 25 years, she thought, Dov Weberman takes intrepid measures to prevent any members of his community from exposing him. It was her mind’s way of inflicting punishment, keeping her from any moment of relief.

On a date with a man who asked the waitress too many questions about the wine, was it effervescent, was it biodynamic, she continued to compose. Particularly passionate about shy children, Dov Weberman first poses as a mentor to gain the trust of their families. “A sancerre sounds perfect,” she said. The rest of the evening felt like following another car, changing lanes and matching turn signals, but grasping nothing of the route itself. Her date was making a case against technology that afforded the user too many conveniences. He was talking about the shift in American philanthropic giving patterns, or about the term post-racial, or about his family’s summer home.

Although she could not remember much of what was said over dinner, or perhaps because of the guilt she felt about this, Alice agreed to a taxi back to his apartment and the sexual contract that entailed. It was the only respite she’d found from her obsession with the story, on her knees with her forearms flexed and hips raised as he moved behind her. These were the only minutes in which her thoughts slackened, and as she came, bucking him backwards, unrelated memories presented themselves in blithe procession: a Mexican bakery’s lights going on in the very early morning, a cat strolling through a damp Louisiana cemetery, a cutting board and washed spinach near an open window. He may as well have been faceless, but still she ran a hand across his collarbone, after, and spent six naked, unconscious hours in his company.