GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE winner 2023/24

MAX LURY

‘Santa Fe’

THE LIDO ITSELF IS FAIRLY SMALL, only three lanes. On one side is the Sports Centre, and on the other, a block of flats currently used as a sheltered housing unit for the elderly. The top two floors are abandoned, though, and a series of bulky metal fire exits allow revellers to climb up to the roof to party on the weekends. Sometimes if you arrive early enough you can still hear them playing drum and bass, dashing glass bottles against the stone.

Down here the smell of chlorine has bled into all of it, even the white plastic chairs that stand in sad stacks at the back near the lifeguard’s tower. The tower, today, is empty.

The street outside is closed off, visible only as a thin grey strip that turns red or white when a car passes. The concrete slabs are clean though, and definite. A few dead leaves clog the drain.

Two men sit at a small circular steel table. They have snuck in cans of lager and are drinking them, taking big gulps that make loud sucking sounds when they take their mouths away. There is a pack of Benson & Hedges between them. The one with a beard and tattoos reaches for it, removes one, and lights it. The movements are not self-conscious. He studies the top of his can, closing one eye and angling it, as if trying to see the colour of the liquid inside. When he exhales, he speaks.

Right, yeah. Of course.

She watches I’m a Celeb mostly.

You don’t?

Yeah if it’s on, but no. I don’t.

Right, yeah.

It’s like. Celebs, though. Not celebrities. You know what I mean?

Celebs, like—

Like that posh guy from Made in Chelsea.

I don’t know his name.

No. I don’t know his name.

He’s like—hahaha—he’s like, ah, I don’t know.

Yeah, no. I know who you mean.

Occasionally the clouds will part and a shaft of golden light will coil and uncoil on the surface of the water. They may be moderating what they say because of the girl who sits wordlessly on the other side of the pool. One of the men adjusts his hat, which says Cocaine & Caviar in large cursive lettering. He has somehow procured a tiny cocktail sausage from his Angry Birds backpack, which he eats in one, chewing thoughtfully.

They are silent then, for a little while. The shorter one scratches a spot on his shin, then speaks again.

As they continue to talk, the girl on the recliner fantasises about trapping them, like insects preserved by an entomologist. In this fantasy she uses thin silver needles to pin them to a thick white card. First through their wrists, the tip slipping through the tendons that run up their arms with little resistance, and then through the soft spot just below their ankles.

The end of the fantasy takes a turn she does not expect, and she finds she cannot help but imagine the two men impaled, vibrating frantically, like wasps or bees dying at the end of summer. She places another salted almond in her mouth, sucking the salt off, and then deposits the nut, darkened by spit, into her palm, where it sits for a moment in a small frothy pool of saliva.

She drops it to the floor and lets her left hand hang for a moment, running the thin plastic of the bag that contains the almonds under her nail. She plucks it, absent-mindedly. Once, then twice. The way the ridges hurt the tender, hidden skin is almost pleasurable.

A small gust of wind blows and she grinds her teeth. A few bits of flotsam from last night’s storm lie scattered over the water: a crumpled can of Coca-Cola; a pink plastic bag; blue surgical masks that drift, half-folded, like leaves in a Pixar film.

From the recliner, she can only see a slice of the surface of the water, some strange rhomboid, all edges and angles, trembling. Whatever has sunk to the bottom occasionally provides a dirty smear against the otherwise chlorinated blue.

She is reading Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey, conscious that the men must find her attractive, the straps of her top unhooked so they hang loose halfway down her upper arm, her legs bare and crossed and hairless, her toes painted a deep shade of purple.

One of the men leans over and spits and when he does she catches his eye. She shifts, slightly, exposing a new angle of her body. The recliner is cold against her skin. There is a small dark thread in her belly button and she picks at it, rolling it between her fingers until it becomes a tiny damp ball. Her name is Charlie.

The water grows choppy in the slight wind. Charlie is not sure if they have looked into the pool. She supposes it does not matter. They seem familiar somehow. Perhaps she saw them at the party on the roof last night, she can’t be sure. Pupils dilated, tongues white, faces ruddy and flushed. Her stomach hums.

The shorter one speaks up, and looks at Charlie.

Don’t fancy a swim then love?

Charlie bares her teeth in something that is not quite a smile. Her hair is still wet from the dip she took before they arrived. Her hands are thin and pale, and she briefly takes hold of her lower lip and pulls it down, using all ten of her fingers at once, and then shakes her head.

No, she says. I don’t.

Might liven things up, says the other man. He takes a big gulp of his beer, then fishes for another one in his bag.

Fucked if I’m getting in there.

Charlie gives a little moue and squints. She continues reading.

There is a dark purple splotch on one of her cheeks that she likes a lot. The technical term is a port-wine stain. It almost reaches the corner of her mouth but stops just short; the rest covers her right cheek and the entirety of the skin around her right eye. An ex-boyfriend of hers had once said, you know, it’s kind of like a Rorschach test, and she’d said, ok.

She stands, uses one hand to pull her bikini bottom down, and makes her way over to the two men. They are silent when she stands there, all 6’2 of her, bored, pouting, arms crossed.

Can I have a beer?

Behind her, in the pool, something flickers under the surface. A single Reebok trainer bobs, hopeful, waterlogged.

The shorter man takes one from the bag and gives it to her.

Big girl, he says, aren’t you?

She shrugs and opens the beer. She takes a drink. It is warm and disgusting. The shorter man is very ugly, she thinks, in a way that is kind of startling. She imagines getting him to open his mouth and pouring the beer onto the sulphur yellow of his teeth, down his throat, the sound like a blocked pipe unblocking.  

She says, ok, thank you.

But like, the man continues, tall. Amazonian.

She is surprised he knows what that word means.

She says, I’m surprised you know what that word means.

He says, yeah. Big. Like the Amazon.

She is chewing the inside of her lip and has just drawn blood. She tongues the cut for a while, enjoying the way the sharp, miniscule pain seems to crystallise everything, makes it all high-definition. The tiles around the pool come into focus. The dirt between them, too.

The taller man asks: do you watch football?

No, she says. She looks upward, and continues. But I support, hm. Liverpool, I think?

She looks back down, cocks her head, and says, I don’t know. They had a player I used to fancy.

The two men nod as if considering this. The wind rustles the leaves of the trees on the other side of the chain-link fence and chills the day a little. She can smell the sweet dense smell of old rubbish.

Good time to be a Liverpool fan, says the tallest.

The shorter says, so, do you watch any sports? Like, at all?

She squints. Fencing?

Really?

No, she says. Then she laughs, and shakes her head. No, not at all.

They offer her a cigarette. She politely declines. She walks back to her recliner and they both check her out, unsubtly, as if she has just given them permission to do so.

The pool feels constricted, and uneven. The water is gelatinous and moves as one thing. Something dark in the centre, breaking up the mathematical precision of the tiles. As she walks around it she does so at the very edge, occasionally stopping to dip a foot in. This disgusts her, and from the sounds of it, the men.

She sits, and crosses her legs. Pulls at a pubic hair just outside her swimsuit.

The gate makes a groan. The sound is oily and incomplete. There is a cheer—a man has arrived—and he takes a moment to give a small bow. When he lifts his head he catches Charlie’s eye, briefly. The men call him Eggsy. He looks amphibian, somehow. Wide webbed hands and the broad mouth of a toad. He is very tall, though, and well built.

Eggsy paces. His hair is dark and holds the light. 

The man with the beard says, how do you fancy Arsenal’s chances? and Eggsy just says, yeah.

Eggsy points to the bottom of the pool and says, fucked.

He looks to Charlie.

You swam?

She smiles and nods. The movement is girlish, and placid. She is looking at the tattoo on his forearm. It is of a stopwatch, photorealistic, all subtle colourings and shadow, and his blonde hairs make a kind of halo around it. She decides then that she thinks he is the one of the most beautiful men she has ever seen.

One of the men says how was last night then, and Eggsy laughs and just says, yeah yeah. You know.

He is watching Charlie. His mouth hangs open and the bottom lip droops downwards, like banana peel. She is watching him back, working the sharp corner of her book into the palm of her hand.

You swam in that?

She nods again. She is not sure if he has seen.

He says, fucked.

His movements are relaxed and easy. A kind of lazy confidence that could be taken for charisma, or something like it.

She had done an exercise once, in drama class, where they had to imagine a thread pulled through the centre of them, attached to the ceiling, to keep them upright. Afterwards, she hadn’t been able to sleep well, unable to shake the thought of it, this thing, thin as a hair, threaded through her spine and the muscles at the back of her neck. But when Eggsy looks at her, she feels that thread again, pulled tight to breaking, golden, lighting her from the inside.

When he makes a joke she laughs, loud enough for him to hear, although she knows it is not for her. Each time this happens, he looks over quickly and then back to his friends.

The vapour that comes from Eggsy’s vape drifts across the surface of the water in silver plumes. When it reaches Charlie she can smell custard and vanilla. It is not unpleasant.

Eggsy takes a closer look at the pool, and falls silent. He takes out his iPhone and starts filming. This feels like an intrusion. Charlie crosses her legs, pulls her knees up.

At that moment, the sun comes out, and the peaks of the small waves on the pool become a field of glitter. The steel table takes on a kind of purpose. Even the chain-link fence at one end becomes as it should be, dark green and knotted. But the light goes just as quickly as it came and the water becomes as it was, washed out and tired.

She’d had the same feeling in New Mexico. A tension, a doubling, and then a slow and certain movement outside herself. An extension into nothing.

She had only been once, with her family, when she was twenty-two. They’d stayed just outside of Santa Fe, visiting her aunt, who had been all white linen and eyeshadow and slim-line tonic. There, in the dappled shade of a tall cottonwood tree, she had sipped scotch and sodas through a reusable straw, a book open in her lap, unread, watching the noble swell of her cousin’s shoulders break the water as he swam lengths all afternoon.

He had stopped only once, to scoop some sort of bug from where it was struggling on the water’s surface, throwing it gracelessly to safety with one sweeping movement of his arm.

Later that day, her and her cousin had got drunk at a local bar called Cindy’s, and after several cocktails they had gone into the back of his colleague’s car to do bumps of coke off the keys for the poolhouse. It had been hot and the leather of the seats was old and sticky and had come off on her thighs in small black spots. They had done so much her chest grew tight and her mouth dry and then his colleague was gone and it was just the two of them.

You were watching me in the pool, her cousin had said.

Yes, she’d replied, I was watching the noble swell of your shoulders as you swam lengths up and down the pool all afternoon.

He’d looked at her all moony-eyed. It all felt close to breaking. In the distance there was a dog barking and someone retching against the side of the building. They waited for a little while, until the retches stopped, and the footsteps grew quieter.

She’d said, I’m not going to kiss you, and he’d said, ok.

Then there had been another pause, longer than the first, and in that she had realised that the radio was playing quietly, and that she recognised, and hated, the song. ‘I Gotta Feeling' by the Black Eyed Peas. After she’d reached into the front to turn it off, the song only halfway done, she’d brushed her cousin’s arm and he’d said, could I have a handjob, maybe, and she’d said, ok.  

And so she’d taken a hold of his penis, because he was beautiful, and desperate, and she could not decide which she liked more.

After a while he’d said, can I touch your pussy, and she hated that word—so American and crass—so she had squeezed his penis and plucked, once, at his frenulum with the long nail of her thumb. She hoped it would hurt. He twitched and sucked air through his teeth. As she started to move her wrist again he bucked his hips just a little, and in the silence, the only sound now his staggered breath, he began to hum the unfinished melody.

And everything then seemed so hungry, all this appetite for more, even her reflection who’s pale hand was becoming just a smear as her breath clouded the window, the way her cousin’s humming could not and would not find the right notes but shook, tremulous and throaty, and now and again some jangling that might have been the copper bracelets her aunt had given her or the keys in her cousins shaking hand as he shoved the largest into the tiny white bag and then straight up his nose in a series of jerky, repeated movements, and she closed her eyes and imagined she was shovelling coal into the engine of some vast, endless steam train, the metal tracks stretching on into infinity, parallel, always the same distance apart but never meeting, and she was watching this all just one beat ahead, one step outside, and in this a new and cooling clarity, her mother’s palm on her feverish forehead, a single foot in the pool, the smooth pebbles of ice she drank from the last of her aunt’s gin and tonic as the garden grew dark and evening expanded, low and dull, into the space above her. It all felt true—maybe that was the word. It all felt true because it was.

Eggsy is filming the pool. He spits and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He scratches his chest and in doing so lifts up the fabric of his shirt, exposing the coarse dark snail trail that splits him down the centre. He looks to Charlie.

Charlie raises her eyebrows and presses the tip of her tongue against the bottom of her two front teeth, so Eggsy can just see its underside and the thick blue vein that stands out against the greyish flesh.

The men have gathered at the edge of the water. They each hold things across their chests like offerings: a bag, a vape, a can of lager. One of them has started to cry. The sound is babyish, and cloying. She has been waiting for this all day. The next moment, the next movement. But they are not watching her anymore.

The Angry Birds bag they are holding is probably a child’s, she realises, and someone here is probably a father. The thought moves her. She feels closer to them now she can imagine them trying to explain what stars are made of, or how the seasons change. She wants them to see, just as much as she wants to be seen.

The shape at the bottom of the pool is rising to the surface. The four limbs do not quite make it and dangle, lifeless, beneath. Pale and bloated. Otherworldly. Hair drifts. Purple lips, choked, part slightly to reveal yellowing teeth. The sun is out now and looks as if it might stay. Charlie looks up. Her day is only just beginning. The clouds are so white, she thinks, and the sky is so blue.

MAX LURY is a British writer based in London. He received the 2022 Curtis Brown Prize whilst at UEA, and was shortlisted for the 2022 Brick Lane Short Story Prize. His work has been previously published in the Lighthouse Journal and Tar Press.