Best British Short Stories 2020 Read online

  ‘Yes. To avoid worrying, contemplate your own death and nothing else.’

  ‘Ah.’

  3. HOW TO CONSIDER YOUTH

  ‘I have noticed that people will say, “Oh, well, you are young,” to a young person who, whilst they will be accepting of the fact that they are younger than the old and decrepit fossil who is calling them young, will nonetheless not be accepting of the fact that they themselves are young.’

  ‘Yeah, how come?’

  ‘Because the younger person will be the oldest they have ever been. And he or she will be conscious that they are one year older than they were the previous year, and that the tally is always rising. A 25-year-old, for example, who appears a mere child to a 50- or 60-year-old, and to whom the latter will feel impelled to issue a constant reminder of the former’s youth, is nonetheless older than a 21-year-old.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And owing to youth’s fickleness, the 21-year-old is also considerably younger-feeling than the 25-year-old and will be keen to remind them of their age difference.’

  ‘OK, yeah.’

  ‘But in turn the 21-year-old is a fair bit older than an 18-year-old who will consider the 21-year-old to be old and wise, even. And maddeningly an 18-year-old will feel adult responsibility and decision-making falling upon his shoulders and will himself look back on being 15 or 16 as being young and easy.’

  ‘Years counting for more when you are young because as a fraction of your total life they are big, innit?’

  ‘Indeed so. Similarly, a 15-year-old will look back on being eight as some magic time, never to be recaptured. Likewise an eight-year-old will look back on being five as a perfect childhood bubble.’

  ‘Numbers confuse us, too, though, yeah?’

  ‘Yes, we are entranced by numbers and their supposed significance. A person reaching 30 will feel they have become old partly because the number seems offensively aged to them.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Yet it is just the turn of a digit. Likewise 40, 50, 60. It hurts a person to reach these supposed “milestones” because they feel that they must be old to have reached them. But if 30 is old, then what is 60?’

  ‘Yeah, and what is 60 if you are 90?’

  ‘Young by comparison, dear boy. In experience turning 60 must necessarily come with the feeling of “old”, but in fact the key word is, and can only be, “older”.

  ‘Yeah, that’s it.’

  ‘And that applies whether at 18 or 30 or 50 or 65. Also at 76 or 89 or 91 or 111 …’

  ‘Yeah, true.’

  ‘To wit, one is never young.’

  4. HOW TO COMBAT AGEING

  ‘Common sense might have it that a person upset by turning 40 should spend more time with 60-year-olds.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Because by doing this he will feel young again, much younger than the 60-year-olds he now surrounds himself with and who keep telling him how young he is. They will flatter his ego and give him the sense that time is on his side once more.’

  ‘Indeed so.’

  ‘Similarly, anyone downcast by turning 60 should spend time with 80-year-olds, and those disheartened by turning 80 should immediately hang out with 100-year-olds. Likewise, 100-year-olds should speed into the company of any 120-year-olds still living. In such a way all those depressed by the ageing process will find new vim and vigour by associating with people older than them, who in turn will envy them their comparative youth, and remark upon it, and indeed at the mere hint or suggestion of the word “youth”, the downhearted person will come back to life again. But it is not so.’

  ‘How so is it not so?’

  ‘Because it is homogeneity which assures us vim and vigour, and not difference; it is homogeneity which emboldens us, more so than associating with those for whom we feel pity, or hope to use to get one over on for our own benefit and in such an unsightly way.’

  ‘How so is it unsightly if we get a little fillip from the misfortunes, I mean, the ageing, of others?’

  ‘Oh, but it is. Consider this: the entry of a group of six-foot men into a room immediately fills all who observe them with pleasure at their six-footedness. The inclusion of a five-foot-ten or below man amongst them spoils the impression. Similarly, a group of blondes is all the more lovely if they are indeed wholly and completely a group of blondes and there isn’t a non-blonde amongst them.’

  ‘Blondes are just so.’

  ‘In any social gathering one might expect to find several blondes. They should immediately form friendships and spend time together and people will observe them and feel happiness at their blondeness because nature loves homogeneity and a wholesome homogenous impression gives joy to those outside the group whether they care to admit it or not.’

  ‘Fantastic, so.’

  ‘At the same time, and to get to the real heart of the matter, spending time with others of the same ilk will encourage a person to match them or go beyond them and see what is possible for themselves. The “if they can do it, so can I” approach. Thus normalising their own experience of being six foot or 40 years old or blonde. Those people who are tall will maintain posture and dress appropriately in the company of similarly tall people. Those persons reaching 40 years old will share advice and wisdom appropriate for their age range and no other. And blondes will maintain their hair colour and discuss fashion advice and act in ways suitable to blonde-haired people by hanging out with their blonde friends in a blonde cohort.’

  ‘So brilliant.’

  5. HOW TO VALIDATE GROUPTHINK

  ‘People tend to think that groupthink is a universally bad thing and that we perpetually need new voices and new attitudes to stop it from happening.’

  ‘What’s that? You’ve bought a new hat or something? Let me turn this thing on.’

  ‘They suppose that groupthink is a negative concept that describes what happens when humans form a group and think for the purposes of that group and in the manner of that group.’

  ‘Yes, it certainly looks like a man.’

  ‘But there is no alternative. Either one comes in and changes the group to make everyone think like you—’

  ‘And I like you!’

  ‘—or you surrender to the group and change yourself to suit it.’

  ‘Never surrender!’

  ‘But a group would never get anything done if everyone actually thought differently, because then there would be no consensus.’

  ‘No? There’s one every ten years, I think.’

  ‘So by reaching an accord—’

  ‘Yes, lovely plane, they should never have discontinued it.’

  ‘—with regularity, you get a thinking style and a way of doing things, and even a way of behaving and speaking, that is distinctive and unanimous. And hence companies and organisations tend towards a united state.’

  ‘Have you? You know, I’ve never been.’

  ‘But it’s nothing to be frightened of. It’s completely natural.’

  ‘Really? It looks more like a wig to me.’

  ‘And so we shouldn’t rail against the human condition when these things are inherent.’

  ‘No, not a thing, old chap.’

  NICOLA FREEMAN

  HALLOWEEN

  It is a gaudy display, something I might expect to see in the window of our local high street bakery, a family business seemingly unmoved by the spirit of regeneration in this area. But they look pretty: rows of biscuits shaped as witches, skeletons and pumpkins, painted with thick icing swirls and laid out on an enormous foil party tray covered with orange tissue paper. The doorbell rings. ‘Go on then,’ I say to Jamie, smiling but not able to look him directly in the eyes.

  The smell of baking fills the kitchen, softening for once its steely decor. In the early stages of Jamie’s illness, the sharp lines of our new flat had provided a certain comfort. They had prompted me to clean more often than I would normally, which helped counter my belief that an unpleasant odour now flowed through our lives like a conta
minated river. I would continue cleaning until I felt I was stemming its course. Still, I imagined I carried the odour on me, out into the world. Some days I was sick with worry that I must fill other spaces with it: the open-plan office, friends’ houses, darkened cinemas, even pristine white gallery spaces that you would hope might be a refuge.

  But the flat today smells only of the sweet sting of sugar and when I walk through into the living room, I find that the smell has pervaded there too, making our structured sofa appear more comfortable than it is and warming the pale wood floors. It nestles among the books that line one entire wall, creating a friendlier communion between Jamie’s graphic novels and engineering manuals at one end and my photography books and contemporary fiction at the other, usually so awkwardly separated. And when I move into the bedroom to change out of my work clothes, experiencing, as always, an extra flutter of apprehension here, I discover that it has even settled between the plaintive sheets of our bed. I study the untidy folds on Jamie’s side, the impression of his body where he must have rested earlier, leading his life as he does now in small, broken periods of time. My side is carefully smoothed and tucked in to disguise my nocturnal torments. But it is here that I lie each night unable to quiet my mind while beside me Jamie falls in and out of his drugged half-life. A nebulous form lies between us – a spectral lover, rejected but undiminished. Everything had taken on its pallor. For a long time, I will lie awake, slowly tracing the cottony contours of my body until the blood thumping in my ears finally, exhausted, falls away.

  Back in the kitchen, Jamie winks at me as he returns with the tray, a good number of the biscuits now missing. I pick up a piece of broken witch biscuit. It tastes good. ‘They loved them,’ he tells me. ‘They kept saying “Aw thanks, mate”.’ He imitates their callow talk. I nod, smiling with my eyes and pressing my fingers to my mouth, making exaggerated little chewing movements as if I want to clear my mouth quickly in order to respond to him. But it is an elaborated pause. I have no idea what to say, no immediate way to comprehend this unexpected turn.

  I eat a skeleton biscuit, surprised by how much I enjoy its soft icing and buttery snap. Food for the two of us lately is no longer associated with pleasure. It is presented always as a remedy of some kind, our diets determined by the ebb and flow of Jamie’s optimism. He will spend hours in the kitchen, with me quiet but encouraging at his side: he has read that a high-potassium, low-sodium diet may cure advanced cancer, or he has allowed himself to believe a newspaper report that a woman in Japan prolonged her husband’s life through a shokuyo lifestyle that involves eating mostly natural grains and plants, and so we sit night after night faced not with what we desired but with the indigestible truth. Meanwhile, I have gained an extra layer of fat that I can feel now pushing at my waistband. Curiously, I am expanding at the same rate he is diminishing. I reach for another biscuit, and while Jamie rearranges the tray, I move behind him and stroke the back of his neck, plant a kiss there, in that place I love. He has been ill for so long I have started to forget about his soft places, to measure him instead in tablets and needles, and by that particular look he has when he thinks I am not looking, when he stares at the wall and allows his eyes to focus finally on the future.

  I will see that look again about a week later when winter has fully set in and I return from work to an unheated flat. I will find him sitting in our bruised leather armchair, where he likes to relax, looking at the wall. Only this time I will notice that he does not blink. I will wait for a while, thinking that maybe it is not necessary to blink, that I am sure I have read an article about someone who underwent cosmetic surgery on their eyes which left them unable to blink. The trouble is I cannot remember if they were blinded by the procedure that left them permanently wide-eyed, or even if it is possible to continue living in that state. Jamie will go on not blinking for a while longer, but I will not want to disturb him in case I distract him just as he is about to blink. I will stand there for a long time not wanting to disturb him.

  The doorbell rings for a second time and Jamie picks up the tray. Big laughs this time from the doorstep. Recognising the voice of a neighbour, I decide to join them. The cold hits me as I descend the stairs, so that when I reach the door, I put my arms tight around Jamie’s thin waist and press myself to him. Linda, who lives two doors down, is mid-sentence and does not acknowledge my appearance. Her full attention is on Jamie, making sure he is OK, smiling and acting up to lift his spirits in a way that would usually irritate me. My role is so all-consuming that the passing concern of others can feel like an encroachment, or in my more vulnerable moments, a criticism, as if I am not trying hard enough. But tonight, I let Linda’s words wash over me. I even allow myself to enjoy the determinedly buoyant talk. I hold Jamie close, combining our warmth against the cold, and I look over his shoulder at the tray, letting the bright colours and sweet smell take me away to simpler times, times I wonder if I will ever experience again, like trips as a kid to the bakery round the corner after swimming with my dad on a Saturday morning to buy split jam doughnuts as a treat, synthetic cream running down my chin.

  ‘Come in, Linda,’ I find myself saying. ‘I’ll make some tea.’ It will be the first time anyone on the street has crossed our threshold and tonight it feels like a space that would be welcoming. But Linda refuses, fusses about getting her dinner ready, though she carries on talking. I sense myself drifting from the talk but try not to stray too far, thinking about the day after we moved in when Linda came to introduce herself. She brought a pot of winter-flowering pansies, which I have placed here on the front step. It isn’t a flower I like, and the pot is not to my taste either, so I am proud that I have kept it here and taken care of it. I notice Linda’s eyes flick to it several times during the conversation.

  I have tried other ways to assuage all our fears, taking Linda a cutting from a plant she had admired in our front garden and promising to contribute an honesty book stall for a charity event at the community hall. But I do not know what Linda really thinks of us, a young couple whose lives started far from here, and who have moved in with no connection to this place, except that the house prices match our circumstances. Talking to Jamie now, Linda may well be thinking of the old man who used to live in our flat, wondering what we have done with the bench he used to sit on at the front of the house or why we did not bother to trim the hedge as neatly as he had. Like other recent newcomers to the street, Jamie and I remain apart, essentially a self-contained unit, despite everyone’s efforts. How self-contained will I be without him?

  A few moments later, walking back up the stairs ahead of him, I have the sense of reaching the summit of something, a giddy satisfied feeling. While wanting to cling on to this sensation, I find I cannot help myself. As Jamie sets down the half-empty tray in the kitchen and turns to face me, I look back at him and I reach behind his head for that soft place again, knowing that with this simple caress I will once again lose my grip.

  AMANTHI HARRIS

  IN THE MOUNTAINS

  Every day she walked alone on the slopes beyond the guesthouse or sat for hours on the crumbling red ochre, drawing the mountains encircling the valley. Her pencil traced ridges, followed fissures and ruptures and the sudden bursts of green thrusting thickly up along seams of hidden water. She peered down at the clusters of the houses nestled in hollows, searching their rootedness for a sign. She longed for a sign to show her the way, now that she had run away to Spain, to this endless sunlit stillness: a new calm, a new perfection. At the guesthouse, Beatriz, the owner, told her about a market the next day in the village. Anya went alone, through olive groves and a carpark, the cars seemingly abandoned before an opening to a narrow shaded street: the entrance to the labyrinth. Its walls were formed of the bodies of houses joined together as one heavy mass, chalk-white with lime. The windows were shuttered, the balconies empty. Ancient chestnut doors hid lives within, and disused chambers.

  At the centre of the labyrinth was a small round plaza with a single silver b
irch tree and a tiled fuente, water splashing from three spouts into a stone trough. Sellers had set up tables of herbs, oils, soaps, incense, olive wood sculptures, red wine, rough brown bread and cakes with wet dark berries and plums glistening inside. Anya wandered through the bodies and voices and sat at the edge to draw. She saw Beatriz in the crowd, kissing everyone who came to greet her. Beatriz, who had lived in Madrid before, had spoken of her friends from the village, who, like her, had come to the mountains to make new lives. Some had succeeded while others had been overcome by the force of that clear pure stillness: a promise, a void, a magical mirror, mesmerising and luring the unsuspecting into delusion, stilling thought, dulling desire.

  An old man in a corduroy blazer came past and stopped, leaning on his walking stick, to look down at her drawing.

  ‘Long ago, I used to come here to draw,’ he said. ‘In those days there were no roads, only tracks.’

  ‘You live here?’

  ‘For forty years. If you come to my house I’ll show you my watercolours of the village – it was very different then. People still kept animals on the ground floor. You should have seen the flies!’ He chuckled.

  She didn’t know what to say. She often didn’t. She never knew what to speak of when talking with strangers.

  ‘Well, see you,’ he said, and went slowly up a slope past the fuente.

  She returned to her drawing, but the old man had disrupted her. He had sounded English, a foreigner in the strange village that he had claimed for himself. Why had he stopped to talk with her? In England she never sketched outside; she never wanted to. Now she kept wanting to draw, everywhere she went.

  ‘Have you seen the cacti?’ The old man was back, holding out a gnarled cactus leaf covered with white encrustations. ‘It’s the cochineal bug. All the cactii in the village are infested.’