Game
BY ELLIE BROUGHTON
FIRST PLACE WINNER
Ellie Broughton’s Game placed First in The Wild Hunt Short Story Competition 2021 judged by author Helen McClory. Of Ellie’s story, the judge said: It's a story with a delicious darkness that is rooted in class awareness and the stresses of modern interaction. How can we know we are safe with the strangers we meet and let into our lives? I loved the creaking open of the ending too.
At a little bookshop off a market road in Hackney, golden lights glowed against the deepening blue night. It was here that I first met her, last summer, at a book launch (where else?). She was Twitter-famous, and I had already browsed her socials once or twice. In particular I liked her Instagram Stories, every pic warm and expensive. I would lie in my hand-me-down sheets on Saturday mornings and tap, tap, tap through them until I heard the rolling boil of the kettle in the shared kitchen.
She wrote about food, but not the food I ate. She wrote long, sprawling essays that conjured smells, memories, and phrases to be savoured. Her prose simmered, her incantations of antique and unfamiliar words an ancient English too refined for me. I envied her freedom: when I wrote like that it usually came back soggy and raw in the middle, dry or burned at the edges. She had flair. She had taste.
I first spied her through the window, where she was eyeing the crowd from outside with a willowy friend. It was early summer, after the first hot day of the year, and everyone inside the shop stood cooped under the spotlights, sunburned and bloody-cheeked. She ran her eyes over us all, browsed us, until she got to my crowd. I saw her press her fingertip to the glass and mouth to the friend: that one.
∬
She got my number off our mutual after we met. We hadn't hit it off, to my mind; she'd been a little quiet and analytic, almost bland. But when we were apart, it was like the heat turned up underneath her: she shimmered and shone. After the launch, I finally hit 'follow' on her Insta and was watching every new story within the half-hour it was published; I was a parasocial passenger on her late-evening bike rides, when she foraged in the gloaming in parts of Hampstead I never recognised.
She didn't live here, of course: she had her own place somewhere in Suffolk, from what I could tell, and was supposed to be finishing a thesis (something something, appetites, something something, new Gothic...). Her portrait was often taken for business websites and newspaper sections, posed with a cleaver – poised mid-strike above a beefheart tomato, say, or pointing and glaring murderously at lemons. That much I knew, as well as I knew her family name – famous from the butchery. She dropped the odd fact about herself and I pieced the rest together with her over a coffee as we walked and talked around Broadway Market.
‘Yes,’ she admitted, ‘Mum and Dad were landed gentry, and most of us have an income from property. You have it now!’ She laughed and flung her arms open. ‘Are you satisfied?’ I nodded. We were walking along the canal, now, past Victoria Park. There was a crowd of policemen further up the towpath, and we ducked into the park to avoid them.
‘A tiny part of the family portfolio was a high-end butchery business – venison burgers, exotic steaks and eye-popping expensive dry-aged cote de boeuf, that sort of thing,' she went on. 'I’d started out as a private chef, then apprenticed, and when I’d “earned my chops”, as they say, Dad let me set up a little small-batch cured meats business.’ She eyeballed passers-by as they gorged on 99s. ‘But then meat has “gone off”, as it were,’ she said. ‘So, I joined XR – and here I am now, in the vegan charcuterie business.’ I looked at her blankly. ‘You know... Koji-cured beetroots, shaved carrot sous vide, that sort of thing. My parents were a bit disappointed, I think, but then Mummy said it would be a shame for all that education to go to waste. Anyway,’ she added, ‘I’m doing it for the family, keeping the name alive. I’m still a butcher at heart.’ She smirked to herself and looked me up and down.
‘Do you miss meat?’ I asked. She shook her head.
‘Not your shrink-wrapped beef mince, anyway. So much farmed meat is produced to no standard at all, these days, and has none of the organic muscle mass that you’d get on something wild...’ She murmured, her eyes a little glazed. ‘I prefer to get hold of something natural – the kind of animal the body really wants.’
‘Game?’ I asked. She looked at me for a second, then laughed.
‘Yes, game, of course,’ she said. ‘Rabbit,’ she added, and dinked me on the nose. I flinched.
By this point, we had looped back around to the canal. They'd found someone, now hidden in a black zipped bag, and paramedics were loading whoever it was onto a stretcher and wheeling them up the path to an ambulance waiting on the bridge.
She sighed and made a sad face, and we walked back towards Bethnal Green.
∬
While I was browsing these photos of her with the cleavers and lemons, I read a couple more of her older articles. They were mainly quite harmless, bar the odd misappropriation of suya spice in a casserole. But there was one I couldn’t quite forget. She’d written for a now-defunct Spectator-like blog, defending Brexit. No great crime – except the target of her ire turned out not to be the Junckers and haut-parliamentarians of Brussels, but the gangs of fruit-pickers on the farms near her childhood home.
Recalling her blemished memories, she had written: ‘They shat in the bushes and pissed in the ponds. They’d flick the butts of their rollies over the box hedge. From the front seat of Mum’s Range Rover, I’d watch them chain-gang up the lanes, as if this were not Southwold but Alabama. All for cash-in-hand, and a bunk in a motorhome! What these feckless wonders had done to slide down to this dismal rung, I couldn’t fathom. They make A Modest Proposal seem like a pitch for Food & Wine magazine.’ The byline read 2014.
The next weekend I met a mutual friend for a pint. We talked about his new job and a mate’s new baby, but after a couple of pints I couldn’t resist asking him about her. He was complimentary, at first; I waited him out.
‘Don't you think she's a bit...?’ He trailed off.
‘Out of my league?’ I suggested.
‘Yeah,’ he laughed, ‘but, no. I was going to say–’
‘Not my type?’ I tried.
‘No,’ he said, and kissed his teeth, ‘let me speak. Let's be real, she's a bloodsucker.’
I squirmed.
‘Not a bloodsucker, sorry,’ he said, wafting his hands in the air between us. ‘But...’ He sought the word. ‘It's just not like you,’ he said. ‘She’s posh. She’s rich. What is this, have you been watching too much of The Crown?’
We creased.
‘Seriously, seriously,’ he said. ‘Normally, you'd run a mile.’
‘Because of her politics?’ I asked.
‘She’s not a Tory. I have literally asked her.’ He laughed.
‘Politics,’ he said, ‘is not about where you mark the X on the polling card. Politics is... Is everything, isn’t it?’ We watched a couple outside climbing into an Uber.
‘Just because she’s from money, it doesn’t mean she isn’t tuned in,’ I replied. ‘I mean, she’s into XR and that, I think.’ I gazed off into the distance, avoiding catching his eye.
‘True, true,’ he nodded. ‘But after she’s listened to all the Tysky Sours and dropped £50 in the Verso sale, and when all is said and done: does she get it?’
I gazed into my pint.
‘She doesn’t actually know what it’s like to wear a pair of trainers all the way through to the pavement, does she? She never had to eat yellow-sticker sandwiches or stay in on Friday night because she can’t get a round in. I’m being facile, you know, but it’s those little indignities.’
‘The mushrooms in the shower,’ I said. (I hadn’t forgotten the houseshare he lived in when we first met). He tapped the bottom of his pint glass on the table and nodded.
‘Exactly. Walking ten miles home from work to save the bus fare,’ he said, ‘and stealing bog roll from pubs.’
‘Chain pubs,’ I chipped in.
‘Only chain pubs,’ he agreed. ‘But my point was: people like us, we’re swine to people like her.’ I laughed. I shook my head as if to say: unbelievable.
'Look,' my friend concluded, ready to drop the matter, 'I wouldn't be ragging on her like this but she's one of these "missing-stair" people, you know.'
We'd spoken before about these individuals who, while they might appear to be stalwart members of a clique or circle, had something 'missing' about them that was never addressed. Like a missing step on a staircase, everyone in the group knew not to put pressure on them, not to get stuck. But when someone new joined the group, the group has to work out how to tell them about the stair.
'One of her boyfriends disappeared.'
'Like, fully just... Disappeared?'
My friend nodded. We sat in silence for a bit.
'Was it assumed he just...'
'Did himself in, yeah,' my friend said. 'That's what was assumed.'
∬
She sent the ghosted emoji. I sent a cry-laughing emoji back.
Sorry, I texted. Work.
Against my better judgement, we made it back to our easy patter. The soft glow of her messages reappeared. We messaged most days – not like I did with friends, sharing memes of bitchslapping cats and dogs with weird barks. No, this was some real DM salon we had going on – swapping photographs we liked, listening to one another’s supposed “favourite albums”, and getting tips for films too obscure even for Mubi.
A month later, I arranged to go to hers for a night. We swam, laid on tartan blankets and picnicked with crémant. The heatwave beat on. All day, I starred in her Stories – our brown legs side by side, our fists clutching at ice cream cones, my shoulder against flint pebbles while I napped. We talked about everything – the joy of writing, the first books we loved, the trips and moments that shaped us. It was like our DMs, but different again. She was different in the flesh.
There were only one or two moments that jarred. For instance: we walked along the sea front and a boy ran past us with a freezy pop.
‘High on E numbers,’ I joked, mock-shaking my head.
‘Tell me about it,’ she groaned. ‘If you feed them shit like that, you shouldn’t have them.’
The sun sank; we drove back to her cool house. She had a little detached cottage on the edge of woods. As we pulled into the lane, she went a little quiet and at the house, got out first, snapping the heads off flowering weeds in the front garden. She began to prep dinner, still not unpacking the blue bag from her tote. Without looking at me, she opened the French doors to the sun terrace. I hovered, suddenly unfamiliar with the etiquette. After a little while, she paid me off with a handful of silverware and, still unlooking, flicked her eyes at the garden. I went out, laid the table and smoked. Shadows lay long, shapes of trees flayed against the fields behind the house.
An hour later, she emerged, presiding over the same old manner. She beamed and flourished a platter of ruby-red ice before me: a salty blood-orange granita, served in one big dish to share. It was so fresh from the freezer it smoked in the sun. We chipped away at it together. She plied me with booze – mezcal palomas, more crémant, and foamy sours that she shook viciously hard before serving. The ice-cold glasses wore condensation like sweat. The sun set, and she began to fry croquettes filled with a beetroot-dark paté.
‘What is it?’ I asked, rosy with drink.
‘What is it, what is it,’ she repeated, doing a bad mimic of my accent.
‘You're just cooking such amazing stuff,’ I apologised. She rolled her eyes and stood silent for a bit.
‘It's beetroot,’ she said eventually.
Next, a board arrived carrying what appeared at first sight to be a charcuterie: ribbons heaped and fat gleaming in the afternoon light. It was, she told me, smoked tomato flesh, sliced paper thin.
It was getting late. She blew out the tealights she’d brought out at dusk and refilled my glass (for the eleventeenth time).
‘I can't eat this with my spoon,’ I chuckled, bumbling.
‘No,’ she purred, and pinched a slice of ‘salami’ over my shoulder.
‘’Scuse fingers.’ She floated away again. None of the spread was tomato, by any stretch of the imagination. But why lie, I wondered to myself. I took bites of it to ask it again and again: what are you? Eventually the question, like lardo, melted on my tongue. I ate half the board, then, in my solitude, half of her half. I heard a fox bark.
After what felt like forty-five minutes, I got restless and drifted to the back door. I was starting to feel a little sick from the booze and went in for water. Something was frying, and it smelt terrible. The kitchen was a state, and the smell was even worse inside. It edged on bad, rotten and stinking, like anxious sweat. Bad like the Tube, like an unwashed person, like a person who's wet themselves. She wasn’t there, but down in the basement, leaning over a chest freezer. I cleared my throat, and she slammed the lid, scowling at me.
‘Sorry,’ I slurred, and waved my empty glass at her, ‘I've just come in for water. ‘
‘Riiight,’ she drawled, turning away. She was cross again. ‘Can you get it from the loo?’
I walked upstairs to the bathroom like I’d been told. A moth was twizzling round the light fitting in there, and I watched it for a while. Nausea wouldn't go. Sunstroke, heatsick. I hunted for ibuprofen.
I had had a DM from our mutual, who had spotted me in her Stories.
Hey, the DM said, clocked you! Have fun! Everything’s kosher? xx
Cupboard had co-codamol, baggies of white something, even fucking fentanyl. And gauze! So much gauze and tape. I re-read the DM, my vision glazed and deglazed as the booze swished up and down my bloodstream. Not everything, I realised, was kosher.
I heard a creak on the landing.
‘Alright?’ She barked, her sweaty face at a gap in the door. She grinned, baring teeth.
‘Jesus,’ I gasped. Nausea surged. The grin faded from her face, and her face from the gap. I jumped at a creak of the stairs, then the scream of a blender. In the cool dark of the guest room, I rang a local minicab service. No answer. My head banged like a fist on a door. I had to rest for a minute, and then I had to leave. But the bed was nearer than the door. I lay down fully clothed. Shoes still on, I reasoned. I can run out that door as soon as I wake up.
∬
Sun dazzled me when I opened my eyes again. The clock on the wall read 6am. My phone had died. I felt a sharp strike of panic as I remembered the night before – the booze, the smell, the knock-out sleep. I swung my legs out of bed and crept downstairs. She was nowhere to be seen and the kitchen was spotless. I sniffed my clothes. I could still smell, or thought I could smell, the particular scent of meat frying.
The door to the basement was shut. I noticed a keyhole but tried the handle anyway. It creaked an inch open, and I froze. Inside was darkness. I stole down the steps by the weak light from the doorway, listening at every stage for the staircase above me to echo back to me her footsteps.
The chest freezer lay in the centre of the basement and glimmered in the faint light. I reached for its near edge, hesitated, and lifted the lid. A cloud of icy air shot out and disappeared. Last night over her shoulder I had seen steaks wrapped in brown paper, frosted, knotted, piled and heaped, some kind of treasure trove. This morning, nothing. Inside her chest was an Arctic cavern, a frozen waste – a blank where the blood ought to be.
