This year, with the inaugural Blackwell’s Short Story Prize, Cherwell aimed to reconnect with its roots as a literary magazine in the 1920s, when our undergraduate contributors (including Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, and W.H. Auden) showcased the best of Oxford’s creative talent. We received nearly 30 entries, and they were all of an exceptionally high standard. The judge Dr Clare Morgan, Course Director of the MSt Creative Writing at Oxford, offered the following praise to this runner-up: “The piece dealt in big themes of global significance and handled these with aplomb to construct a moving and finely balanced narrative which drew me unswervingly along with it.“
The night that my friend stopped by for his usual drink, I didn’t know that it would be the last time. The sun was halfway through setting and The Lamb & Flag had started to rise from its resting place on St. Giles’ and come alive. I watched my friend push his way through the patrons crowding the bar and take a seat on the leftmost barstool. Then he lit a cigarette—Gauloises, from his homeland Syria—and completely ignored whoever was next to him. This was routine. Sometimes he had a legal reading to get through or a jurisprudence essay to write. He stayed like that for a minute or two until I, of my own volition, went to him.
‘What will it be tonight, Taym?’ I asked him from behind the bar.
‘Barman, you ought to stop asking questions you already know the answer to,’ Taym replied sternly. Then he smiled. I never knew when he was joking and when he wasn’t.
‘Tall glass of milk coming right up, then.’
It was almost the end of Trinity term, 1967. The pianist was playing a half-familiar tune and the students looked anxious about examinations, albeit pleased, even if only for one warm evening. They complained like they always did and roared with laughter over humiliating tutorials and cheated games of cards. But Taym had his fingers splayed across a letter paper, holding it still against the wooden bar that was sticky with dried-up beer, writing feverishly in a script that ran from right to left. It wasn’t English.
‘That sure looks interesting.’ I set his milk down before him. ‘The language, I mean.’
He pushed his dark hair away from his face. Sweat gleamed on his brow.
‘Sure does,’ he muttered half-heartedly.
I leaned over the bar to get a better look at the upside-down script, but he suddenly stopped writing. I looked up to find him already glaring at me.
‘Calvin, I can’t write with you watching over me like a fairy Godmother.’
He said this humorously but it didn’t quite reach his eyes.
I tapped the letterhead. ‘Those look like numbers.’
‘Because they are numbers. English numbers are taken from these Arabic numerals.’ He rotated the paper. ‘That’s the Hijri date. It reads: 29 Safar 1387.’
‘1387?’ I repeated. ‘Have your people forgotten to flip a calendar page?’
This time it was I who said it in good humor. He didn’t so much as show teeth.
‘Not everybody wants to live on the terms of the English.’
I did not know what to say to that.
‘Well, are you writing to your father again?’ I asked tentatively.
‘Yes,’ Taym replied. Then, in the most casual regard, he added: ‘He’s going to war, now.’ He dragged from his cigarette and I stared at him as though I heard him wrong. I knew his father was an affluent General in the Syrian Armed Forces but I suppose I didn’t know what that really meant until then. ‘I got his letter this morning.’
‘But—’ I hesitated. ‘That’s not a good idea, is it?’
He looked dumbfounded. I didn’t see why.
‘We are from the Golan and my house there has just been reduced to rubble.’ He leaned forward on his elbows. ‘What do you think, Calvin?’ His gaze was startling. ‘What would you do if it had been your house and not that of some lower-order Bedouin?’
‘Taym,’ I sighed. ‘That’s not what I’m saying—’
‘Then why did you say it?’
‘Come on, you know I didn’t mean—’
A glass shattered against the counter at the other end of the bar. I flinched.
‘Hey, barman!’ A drunk student shouted, the beer from his shattered pint glass pooling. ‘Stop flirting with the milkman and get me another pint, would you?’
His friends burst out laughing.
Taym kept his head down, focused on the letter that he seemed to force himself to continue writing—determined to do anything other than look at me. It was futile to keep standing there. And it was truly an awful night to be the only bartender on call. I turned away to clean up the mess and make the student and his friends their drinks, a pack of obnoxious first years who couldn’t get enough of their newfound freedoms.
It was at this point that I couldn’t keep up with the Sisyphean drink-making and beer-tapping and so I had to abandon Taym—still working through that glass of milk and writing God knows what—at his barstool. I really started to wonder what the hell he was writing. When I finally returned to him, sometime after sundown, the pen was placed atop the papers like a makeshift paperweight and the glass of milk was empty. I couldn’t tell if he had finished writing or just taken a hiatus. I served him another glass on the house but he didn’t touch it.
‘I didn’t mean to provoke you,’ I admitted.
‘I know you didn’t.’
‘Then why the fuss?’ I asked. ‘It’s complicated. You can’t expect the born-and-raised Englishmen around you to understand it all like you do, can you?’
He stared at me like I had slapped him across the face.
‘The born-and-raised Englishmen in question are Oxford students—’ he looked around the pub emphatically. ‘—supposedly the smartest in the world. Can the smartest in the world really not understand the gravity of their own ignorance?’
‘You have been in England for some time now, Taym. Surely you’ve made do.’
‘Made do?’ Taym repeated, amazed. He was silent for a moment, as if he genuinely expected me to repeat myself. ‘Time changes nothing. I can pass fine; a foreign man in an English suit who introduces himself to be from a place you will know how to find on the map. You’ll even shake my hand. But then a certain word will come in a certain accent and this is when the white man will smile big and have his Aha! moment: Forefinger jabbed into your face—’ he copied the movement. ‘—staring at you like some kind of zoo animal and then ask what breed of ‘other’ you are, as though we are not all human.’ Fog-thick cigarette smoke curled around him. ‘It feels like I never left the house I lived in. Though I’m on English soil, thousands of miles away from the Golan, I am still there, and every time I try to leave through the front door, I am led back inside, like some sort of hat-trick. That’s what it is: Some sort of messed-up hat-trick that’s been going on too long and stopped being funny a while ago but won’t end.’ He rolled his tongue in his mouth, half-smiling with the facsimile of amusement like it really were the workings of some cold-blooded magician. ‘The blond-haired blue-eyed white man sends me home with the way he scrutinizes me and, I, too, am feverish to return. I still hear the waves of Galilee and my language, now so far away from me after my many years in English boarding schools. I smell the cardamom coffee and my grandmother’s cooking and the gunpowder. But now there is no home to return to, only the war-torn imitation of it, and I’m in some kind of there-and-here limbo from which I cannot escape. My father is at war; I am dodging conscription with this Oxford law degree that won’t get me anywhere other than at the dog owner’s feet. If it were not for my father…’ He considered the glass of milk, thought better of it, then started to put on his coat instead. ‘Some tent revival of a world we live in—’ he tucked the letter papers into his pocket as he spoke. ‘—some long-running joke it all is.’
In that moment, I did not understand a single thing about him and he appeared to me as a stranger.
‘Where are you going, Taym?’ I asked.
‘Home,’ he replied, fumbling with his pockets for a cigarette.
‘But why?’ The words felt stupid as they left my lips.
He smiled in a way that made me think he found my question endearing.
‘To finish writing my letter to my father, of course.’
There was so much I wanted to ask. He didn’t look at me as he stood but I could tell he was expecting me to say something. What I didn’t know was that this silence of mine would revisit me many years from now—pouring drinks at work, on graduation day, in the company of friends who never filled his shoes—and leave me wondering what might have been if I had only tried.
‘It all comes unstuck.’ He lit his cigarette. ‘Goodnight, Calvin.’
Taym exited through the front door of the pub. It didn’t shut quite properly and so it remained open just a crack. I watched him go, the wind from the door left ajar drifting in my face.
Winner: “The Ghosts She Felt Acutely” by Polina Kim
Runner-up: “Letter from the Orient” by Dara Mohd
Shortlisted entries:
“SPLAT!” by Sophie Lyne
“A Short Sharp Shock to the Skull” by Jim Weinstein (pseudonym)
“Rhonda May” by Matt Unwin
“Any Blue Will Do” by Kyla Murray
