Best British Short Stories 2020

by Nicholas Royle

  You received the email yesterday or could it have been last week? In your inbox on your screen you really need to focus. You click. You open. That part is easy. You see a blank. A blank is what you’re looking at a blank is what you’ve been trying to get your head round staring at the screen hypnotised by next to nothing this is what you keep coming back to this is why you can’t leave it because even though you can’t see anything anything anything you keep repeating to yourself you know there must be something there because why would someone be sending you a blank email. Repeatedly. Over and over again. The same email. Blank.

  You remember contacting Maria about this when it started and Charles and your online crony redFox rich in stoner wisdom and @id.iot, no that’s wrong, it’s @id.iot who is contacting you. The blank emails are from @id.iot. Unknown person. How much sense does that make you think and suddenly it makes perfect sense. Blank blank blank blank blank. They’re not blank! Maria says this to you, on one of them there’s a button you can press to make them stop. This is what I’ve heard anyway, she says, and yeah I know that goes against everything you’ve ever had dinged in your head that you mustn’t click on any links cos they’ll take you to the bad place all your files corrupted your identity stolen proper rinsed and all those things you meant to clear from your cache sent to your mumdad wifehusband boygirlfriend workmateboss & anyone at all you’ve ever wanted to impress literally the end of your fucking world … But I still can’t see any button, you reply, there is no button. It has to be right there mate open it with a different browser. Or copy the whole damned thing into a program that shows you hiddentext …

  But nothing is revealed nothing is ever revealed, no hidden words, no symbols, or magic buttons, and you try the same technique on each and every new email as it arrives nothing nothing nothing. Try another trick. Search for message, sender @id.iot, select all and then delete the whole damned lot. Gone! For a split second. Who was that old king trying to hold back the tide, Canute or Knut, they changed the spelling? And then refresh. Here they come, spewing forth cascading the deluge descends and whoosh! Your inbox chokes up with the same empty messages, and your actual emails – the ones from your friends your real friends your friends and colleagues – are submerged and lost under the pressure of incoming incoming incoming. Isolation cocoon bloody mental lockdown! Think: this is spam with no purpose apart from to really mess with your head. Don’t take it personally. @id.iot is not about you. You are not special chosen. This is spam nothing else. Tell yourself this over and over. You random victim, one of very many nice kind. I like you! Send bitcoin now and I treat you good. Boom Boom. Special investment. One weird tip. Delete as inappropriate. You are not being punished. But no, no, no. If only. Instead: blank, blank, blank, no message, not a sales pitch. Nothing. Keep deleting.

  A fly crawls across the screen. What is it connecting with? Perhaps the demon familiar of @id.iot. Idiosyncratic. Private. Private. Private. Private. Open each new message one after another, without sleep, into the night the day the. This is your work now you’re not even angry any more. No movements but for the repeated tapping of your fingers on the keys, and the emails continue to arrive courtesy of an algorithm you try to tell yourself this in a bid to take back some control all blank blank blank, blink blank blank, blink blank, BLANK and on and on and on and you open each in turn trying to keep up with the flow and you gaze at each in turn, empty screen, six seconds each which is a LONG time more than enough to absorb its absence of meaning, click blink click blink click blink blank and on to the next next next next blank next. You are entranced. Your mind the same now, no content, your mind as blank as the screen and imagination fails imagine imagine that as your body slows down, weakens, becomes heavy like too much gravity pressing down. Concentrate! Put every last single pitiful scrap of effort in that one tiny movement, your index finger pressing over and over and over endlessly again as the hours pass, the seconds, the days, the weeks and then you see the content at last that single line of text against the white space, the one email you’ve been waiting for

  press here to stop all this

  and you jam and hold your finger down on the keyboard waiting wanting hoping for what? Think think think think blink. What DO you want? To be taken away somewhere new where something good or bad would be a change a release an escape from torment but the web is not a web it’s nothing but a sticky mess and now you’re stuck, trapped in your own wherever dark, and into your head pops that line from Ovid: She rose up from the ghosts of the recently dead, walking slowly because of her wound. Right? Where the snake bit her and poisoned her stone cold no pulse no breath, so how come bloody Eurydice gets another chance at life, but you but you why not you, or you might put it this way: I have risen from the ghosts of the living dead, holding my head in my hands, seeking a pathway lost. The music in my earbuds died a very long time ago. OK, listen closely: there is no magic button. There is no escape, so why not turn off your machine? Just disconnect. Power down. Why not? But remember: beyond that darkness – soothing, languorous and weirdly welcoming – there is only the further dark.

  Stand up. Walk to the window. Lift the blind and gaze out, across and down at the street. Observe the back of your hand reflected in the glass; why does it look like it belongs to somebody else? Go into the bathroom but you don’t seem to need to pee. Splash water on your face. Avoid the mirror. Decide to sprawl on the comfy couch and stick your feet on the coffee table. There’s a hole in one of your socks but no big deal. You wonder how many times the hands of your clock have gone round since you last looked. You flip through the pages of a book. Nothing makes sense. Don’t think about the screen on the desk your emails the blank messages. You could close your eyes. Is there light outside? Ticktock. It’s morning. It’s evening. And you glance at your phone over there not ringing never ringing.

  Or you could go out to the cafe just one hundred steps down the road, or the public house, maybe, just across the street. The Rose and Crown. Maria and your other friends will be there, chatting away as though nothing at all has ever happened. You take a pew. A drink appears on the table in front of you. You nod thanks. You are fine, thanks. The conversation turns away from you as you evidently don’t feel much like talking today. But all you want, all you are waiting for, really, is for just one of them to ask you: What happened, mate? When you pressed the button? Did you press the button? Will they will they will they will they will they ever ask?

  But no. They barely look at you. No one asks. You’ve got that floaty feeling. Reach for the table edge. Hold on tight. Now your friends are all laughing at a joke and you make a huge effort to join in but your laugh is mistimed. They don’t notice. So study your nails. Then your fingertips: are these loops whorls arches the same as they ever were? You’ve had enough. No point excusing yourself. Just head for the toilets where you find yourself waiting waiting waiting for the tap to stop rinsing soap off your hands. Dare the mirror at last and see your features your eyes your lips your hair start to fade to fade to fade. Blink. Then look away. No second glance. Keep on walking, touching and holding each object as you reach it. The dryer, the wall, the door jamb, Maria’s hand …

  STEPHEN THOMPSON

  SAME SAME BUT DIFFERENT

  She was staying in a part of Bangkok choked by a tangle of overhead power cables. The nearer we got to her place, the stealthier she became. She was acting like a burglar. Halfway down a deserted side-street crawling with cats and stinking of sewage, she came to an abrupt halt in front of a three-storey building that had bars on the ground-floor windows and a front door made from a combination of wood and corrugated iron. As if she were being watched, she slowly pushed the door open and we entered a gloomy, low-ceilinged hallway with a wooden staircase just about visible in the distance. She started towards it but stopped when I asked, ‘No light?’

  ‘Keep your voice down!’ she snapped. ‘It’s late. People are asleep. The bulb’s blown.’

  Earlier that evening, in the bar, she had been very attent
ive towards me, occasionally touching my knee and making sexual innuendos; now she didn’t seem bothered. There was an air of officiousness about her, she had a job to do and was keen to get on with it. At the top of the stairs she flicked a switch and one of two overhead strip bulbs flickered into life. A tiled landing ran off to our right with doors on either side. Creeping along, we passed a picture on the wall of the bespectacled king whose image seemed to adorn every public space in the city. There was even one in my room back at The Grace. The picture was hanging askew in a cheap, gold-painted frame that did nothing for the regality of the subject.

  The bulb was blown in her room too. Through a narrow, frosted window a shaft of street light fell diagonally across the floor, strong enough for me to see the room was sizeable but bare: a single mattress on the floor covered by a crumpled white sheet, an enormous rucksack leaning against the wall with several items of clothing spilling from the top and a few others in a pile on the floor. Hot and stuffy, the room could have done with an airing and the tiled floor clearly hadn’t been swept in a while, judging by the grit that crunched under our feet as we came in. Kicking off her flip-flops, she padded over to the bed and started to arrange it, even though there was nothing to arrange. I hung back. All evening I had been feeling aroused, but now sex was the last thing on my mind. I thought about Miriam and could almost hear her telling me to ‘just go for it’.

  She finished smoothing the sheet and started heading for the door.

  ‘Where’re you going?’ I asked, trying to disguise my anxiety.

  ‘Bathroom,’ she replied. ‘You gonna stand there all night?’

  I moved into the room proper and she slipped past me out the door. I dragged my feet over to the bed and crouched down, beginning to inspect the sheet. Up close, it didn’t seem as dirty as I had imagined, so I sat on the edge of the mattress and removed my trainers. Moments later I heard the unmistakable sound of someone urinating into a toilet bowl. I swung my legs up onto the mattress, rested my head and back against the flimsy partition wall, and listened for a while.

  I began to review the changes I had made to my life in the last few weeks, in the process of which I experienced the old familiar panic: had I done the right thing? Anna hadn’t thought so, and yet she hadn’t made much effort to try to stop me. If I was determined to ruin what we had, the life we were building together, she wasn’t going to stand in my way. The funny thing was, at no point had I mentioned splitting up. I had simply said that I was thinking of quitting my job to go travelling for a while, and maybe hook up with Miriam in Thailand, but for Anna that was another way of saying I wanted out. She would brook none of my attempts to make her think otherwise. ‘You’re obviously searching for something, but I don’t see why you have to smash up our lives to go looking for it.’

  She was right. I was looking for something, had been for years, but I could never put my finger on what it was or where I might find it. Be it at work or at play, nothing had ever sustained me beyond the initial burst of interest. Not that anyone could tell. I could feign it with the best of them, I could put on the face of a contented, successful careerist and pass myself off as someone to look up to and admire, but inside I felt like the only person doing backstroke in a pool full of front-crawlers. The day I cracked and spoke to Miriam about it she said, ‘Sounds like you’re having an EC.’ When I looked at her askance she said, ‘Existential crisis’ and advised therapy. I laughed. I was as likely to start seeing a shrink as I was to drink paint. When it came to such matters I was, and had always been, a confirmed sceptic, more inclined towards self-help than psychiatric, and yet a belief in my own abilities hadn’t brought me any closer to discovering the source of my angst. Perhaps I would never discover it. As I sat there in that dismal room, feeling a long way from home, waiting to have sex with a person who clearly had as much feeling for me as a dog for a fence-post, the walls seemed to be closing in.

  It was the first night of my first trip to Bangkok and, so far, the city had been a huge disappointment. I had expected the noise, the pollution and the overcrowding, but was surprised by the squalor and the crumbling buildings dotted with rusting air-conditioning machines. I’d been in a grumpy mood since landing at the airport. Needing a room for the night before heading to Koh Samui to meet up with Miriam, I had spent a long time at the hotel reservations desk in the arrival lounge leafing through glossy brochures that featured page after page of sky-scraper hotels. To my inexperienced eyes, they all looked the same. I couldn’t choose between them and regretted that I hadn’t thought to book something back in the UK. More from impatience than a desire to help me decide, the young woman at the desk had tapped her French-polished nail on the page and said, ‘Very good this one. Central, cheap, have pool,’ but for some reason she failed to mention that The Grace was also a knocking shop. Later, when I walked into its faded, high-ceilinged lobby and saw the amount of middle-aged Arab men lounging around with young Thai girls draped across their fat bellies, I was repulsed. I was no prude, and this was Thailand after all, but there was something so off-putting about the scene I almost cancelled my reservation. I only didn’t because I couldn’t face traipsing about the city in the mid-afternoon sun searching for an alternative. Not on the back of a non-stop, fourteen-hour flight from Manchester.

  Later that evening, after a revitalising sleep, I left The Grace to find something to eat. In a nearby food hall I had an extremely tasty dish of deep-fried fish in sweet chilli sauce, accompanied by a steaming-hot bowl of egg-fried rice: all for the princely sum of five pounds. Things were looking up. My fellow diners consisted almost entirely of Western men and their Thai ‘girlfriends’. One guy, wearing an England football shirt and clearly stoned, had been eyeing me from the moment I arrived. He was one of the few men sitting by himself and after a while he got up from his table and came and sat on the bench next to me. I resisted the urge to move to another table as I didn’t want to draw attention. I was feeling conspicuous enough. He introduced himself as Pete, Pete from Peckham, and within minutes was telling me, in a very loud voice, about all the countries he’d visited and what he’d got up to and where he was planning on going next. In this way I learned that he’d been on the road for almost a year, criss-crossing south-east Asia on a seemingly endless quest to, as he put it, ‘have it large’. He made me think of Miriam, who’d been travelling for a similar amount of time, in the same part of the world, making me jealous with all her Insta posts. She seemed to be having the time of her life. Travelling seemed to agree with her, but the same could not be said for Peckham Pete. Gaunt enough to be skeletal, he had dirty, broken fingernails, crusty, sun-bleached dreads and a long, wispy, unkempt beard that put me in mind of a wizard. If he had left the UK with any light in his eyes, not a trace remained. On and on he prattled. At one point, just for something to say, I told him I was off to Koh Samui first thing in the morning and he started bombarding me with tips. ‘Stay away from Lamai Beach. Boring as fuck. Fulla tofu eaters and yoga freaks. Head for Chaweng. That’s where it’s all ’appening. Cheap booze, drugs. You name it!’

  After an hour or so in the food hall I felt a headache coming on, caused by a combination of listening to Pete and the glare from the blinding strip lighting. I had to get some air, stretch my legs. As I stood up Pete said, ‘You off, then?’ I nodded and he added, ‘Nice meeting you.’ His disappointment was all too apparent. I smiled and walked over to the counter to pay my bill. While I was settling up, I could feel Pete’s lecherous eyes on me. I couldn’t wait to get away.

  I spent the next or hour or so meandering around a set of narrow, deserted back streets that put me slightly on edge. At one point I fetched up in what amounted to an African quarter. I was so surprised to find such a high concentration of black people in such an improbable location that I was momentarily confounded. My overriding feeling, however, was one of relief. No-one seemed especially interested in me. For the first time since arriving in the city I wasn’t being gawped at.

  When my fe
et began to ache – Converse trainers are not ideal for pounding pavements – I popped into a bar. A narrow hole in the wall with a few stools jammed up against a counter, the place was deserted. In the cramped area behind the counter sat two dark-skinned Thai women with long black hair and more attitude than I was prepared for. They didn’t so much as nod, let alone try to serve me. I stood at the counter and waited for one to approach, but instead they averted their eyes and started speaking in Thai. I was baffled. They had clearly seen me, and it was obvious that I was waiting to be served, so what the hell were they playing at? So much, I thought, for the famed Thai hospitality. I cleared my throat and, trying to disguise my anger, said, ‘Excuse me, would it be possible to get a bit of service, please?’ No sooner had I finished than an old white guy with a copper-tan face and a grey, walrus moustache emerged from a room behind the counter through a beaded curtain. Though quite bald on top, he was sporting a grey pony-tail and was dressed in a black sleeveless T-shirt that showed off his flabby tattooed arms, and a pair of washed-out denim shorts. I pegged him for a retired biker seeing out his days in the tropics. He came straight over and said, ‘Where you from?’ His accent was North American and, judging by the way the girls stiffened in his presence, either owned the place or ran it. When I told him I was from London, he visibly relaxed.

  ‘Well that explains a lot.’ He stared at me before continuing, ‘Listen, no offence, but as a rule we don’t usually serve your type in here. Gotta bunch o’ Nigerians round the way who were using the place to peddle dope. Had to bar ’em, see? But you’re all right. And just to show there’s no hard feelings, have a drink on me. What’s your poison?’ I couldn’t believe my ears.