Best British Short Stories 2020

by Nicholas Royle

  Over the next few weeks, I no longer had any reason to be at home. The dream-consultation software was running like a dream. The AI bots were sophisticated enough to not need manual tweaking. Zuzanna was mainly dealing with the associated problems that came with having a software platform going viral. Our joint bank account went in the red at one point as she bought more server space, more cloud hosting. We’d not considered the difficulty of scaling up. The free trial had brought people in, but was costing us a fortune. She sold some of her cryptocurrency via one of the new exchanges, and I cashed in an ISA I’d had for over a decade.

  By the end of the second week, things were stable, but Zuzanna had been asked to fly to San Francisco to meet some venture capitalists who were interested in investing. I could have gone over with her, but she didn’t need me there, and I have always hated long-haul flights.

  Our last night together we didn’t even want to make love, it was enough to just lie beside each other in a kind of mutually exclusive silence punctuated by occasional small reminiscences.

  ‘Maybe you will have dreams when I’m away,’ she said finally.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said sadly.

  Over a year earlier, several months before Zuzanna moved in with me, there were a group of us from work in the pub. It was a happy-sombre occasion. There had been a large number of redundancies. I’d somehow managed to hang on, but most of my friends had taken the money. Jack started by saying ‘I had the strangest dream last night’. Everyone groaned. ‘We don’t want to hear it,’ Lindsey said. ‘No, I do,’ I interrupted suddenly. ‘Tell me.’ I listened to what Jack had to say, and, without being asked, gave my interpretation. The others then told their dreams, so there was only me and Lindsey left. ‘Oh, go on then,’ she said, and hers was the strangest and saddest of the lot.

  ‘Now your turn,’ she said.

  My brow furrowed. I couldn’t remember what I’d dreamt last night. Nor the night before. Nor, I realised, for endless nights before that.

  ‘I don’t dream,’ I said, finally.

  ‘You must have – you just don’t remember them.’

  I went quiet, and they didn’t push me on it. A week later I put in a request for redundancy and it was accepted.

  Experiments monitoring brain activity during sleep have indicated that even non-dreamers do dream, they just don’t remember them. I recall having dreamt as a child, but at some point I must have stopped remembering them.

  That was when I’d set up the dream-consultation business. I realised it was partially vicarious, as I pored over the recollections of other people’s dreams, yet never had my own to share. Perhaps this immersion would help me; but after over a year of doing this, I still didn’t dream.

  With Zuzanna away, I was free to spend my time as I wished. I copied the memory card from the CCTV onto my computer, and watched again the footage of my last client climbing the stairs and ringing the bell, and then coming in for her consultation. I had a phone number and email address for her, but as she’d not booked another consultation I didn’t really know how to use them without worrying her.

  I had identified five regular spots where the Jehovah’s Witnesses assembled, and there were at least three there every day, usually a man and two women. That meant fifteen people in town every day, and I never saw the same ones twice at the same spot, which meant that, assuming they took Sundays off, there would need to be 4,500 over the course of a year. It couldn’t be possible that there were so many in a single town. I would just need to keep looking and eventually I would bump into Carol again, as if by accident.

  What did I want to say to her?

  I wanted to know if she’d continued to have the dream about Donald Trump after seeing me, or if I’d somehow cured her.

  The communications with Zuzanna had become more haphazard. I always knew how to find her, of course. There were a number of geek channels that she had set up for discussing the software, and then again, there were the forums devoted to cryptocurrency. But non-work communications had almost ceased. I realised I hardly knew her. I even created an account under another name with the dream-consultation bot. Without dreams of my own, I recycled some of the many that had been told to me over the year. The bot was good. The explanations were plausible. I recognised my own contributions to the algorithm, but after a few days of this, I realised the bot was responding in a way that I never could have. Whereas I would hear twenty dreams a week, this software was hearing twenty thousand. And, just as Zuzanna had predicted, genuinely new dreams were rare.

  By this point nearly everyone was having dreams about Donald Trump.

  I only intermittently checked my bank account, so it was a surprise when the ATM ate my payment card. I went online as soon as I could get to a computer.

  Zuzanna had withdrawn the last of our funds. How could I have been so stupid as to trust her?

  But there was a message from her on one of the secure channels.

  ‘I’ve had to protect our investment,’ she said, ‘and here’s the key.’

  She had sent me a link to an online wallet for her cryptocurrency. I used the credentials she had provided me with and there it was – my money had all been transformed into something virtual and, rather than stealing from me, Zuzanna had made me a multi-millionaire. But without Zuzanna around to explain how, I couldn’t easily transform this into any currency I could actually spend.

  With my need for some petty cash, and having started biking around town all day to speed up my watch of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, I signed up to be a courier for one of the new gig-economy delivery firms.

  It was a week after I started that I took the order for pizza. My bike was idling on the strip where the restaurant was, but the delivery was out of town, at the edge of our normal delivery zone. I worked out that I could make this my last of the day, and head back via a different route to where I lived. Zuzanna had asked for a face-to-face via video conference that evening. I picked up the delivery from the pizza restaurant and packed the boxes carefully before hoisting the backpack over my arms.

  Although I knew the area I wasn’t sure of the actual address, as it seemed to be a side road on a quiet estate. I had to ease up when I got onto the estate to work out which road it was on. It was called the Orchard estate and so there was an Apple Drive, a Pear Tree Avenue and, tucked away, a Blossom Close. I jumped off the bike, but I wasn’t in a particular hurry, other than to get back for Zuzanna.

  I found number five, a tidy, nondescript maisonette, with a sharp message on the glass of the porch: ‘No Flyers. No Hawkers.’

  The door was opened after a couple of rings by a boy around twelve years old.

  ‘Hi. Pizza,’ I said, smiling.

  ‘Mum!’ he shouted.

  There was a shuffling behind him and he just stood there. Given that payment was on the app I could just hand it over to him, but I thought I should wait for an adult.

  A woman came to the door. It was Carol, my last client. With my cap on, advertising the delivery firm I worked for, and her focus on the pile of pizza boxes in front of me, she didn’t notice me at first.

  ‘Hi, it’s Carol, isn’t it?’

  She looked up. There was recognition but puzzlement.

  ‘You came for a consultation. A dream consultation.’

  She smiled.

  ‘This is funny, meeting you here,’ I said, but wasn’t sure what was funny about it.

  ‘I live here,’ she said.

  ‘Of course. I gave up the business,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t working out for me.’

  ‘Oh, that’s a shame,’ she said. ‘You were very helpful.’

  ‘Was I?’ I said. ‘It’s hard to tell. Most people don’t come back, so I never got much feedback. But there’s an app now you can use any time you want and it lets you give a rating on how helpful the service was.’

  ‘An app?’

  ‘Yes, for interpreting dreams. You can download it to your phone. There’s always someone there when you want to discu
ss them.’ I didn’t want to tell her that it was a bot rather than a person. I should probably have brought a flyer. But, of course, I never expected to bump into one of my ex-clients doing this job.

  ‘Do you still dream of Donald Trump?’ I asked.

  I thought she was going to close the door on me.

  ‘Doesn’t everyone?’ she asked, genuinely surprised.

  ‘I don’t,’ I said, truthfully.

  ‘You’re lucky,’ she said.

  There was a voice from inside. A man’s voice.

  ‘It’s the pizza delivery guy,’ she shouted back.

  ‘I shouldn’t have come,’ she whispered. ‘Alan doesn’t know.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘well, I’m glad you did. You were my last client.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘The app,’ I said.

  ‘Oh yes.’

  We stood there, more awkwardly than before. I wanted to say something.

  ‘I liked your shoes,’ I said, stupidly. ‘They seemed very sensible.’

  We both looked down at her feet. She was wearing bunnyrabbit slippers.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, amused.

  The solid brogues were neatly lined up on a shoe rack just inside the porch door.

  ‘Enjoy your pizza.’

  ‘I hope it all works out for you,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, this is only temporary.’

  ‘I have to go.’

  ‘Your pizza will be getting cold.’

  ‘Yes, my pizza will be getting cold.’ She was about to close the door, then she hesitated.

  ‘They don’t stop,’ she said, ‘the dreams. Once they start, I mean. Every night. It scares me, I don’t know what to believe in any more.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said, ‘dreams don’t really mean anything. I’m sorry if I gave you the impression that they did. People want them to mean something, but they’re just …’

  ‘Random detritus?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, random detritus.’

  She closed the door behind me and I wheeled the bike off the estate.

  When I got home it was time for my call with Zuzanna. It was early afternoon in the States. The connection wasn’t that great. She kept fading in and out. At the end of it, I realised she wouldn’t be coming back. I stayed up as late as I possibly could before my tired eyes got the better of me and I lurched over to the cold, empty bed.

  In a second I had fallen asleep.

  That night I dreamt I was on Air Force One having a New York pastrami sandwich with Donald Trump.

  HELEN MORT

  WEANING

  She was losing the names of places. Every time she dropped a feed, let the milk in her breasts come then lessen, another part of the city disappeared. Someone once said Sheffield was a dirty picture in a golden frame. She was forgetting both, the town and the gritstone encircling it. One bright Sunday, she walked out past The Norfolk Arms and the black clutch of the plantation. The baby sat upright in the heather with his chubby legs splayed, shoving strawberries into his mouth and letting the juice trickle down his chin. She ate nothing, tried to count the green tower blocks in her line of vision. Gleadless. She said it out loud so she would not forget. Her husband phoned, his voice steady with concern.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘We’ve gone for a walk.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The place where I climb. The big rocks. Beside the car park.’

  Later, she learned that it was Burbage. They had a map in the house, inherited from her father-in-law and she circled it in biro, marked a neat X.

  As the weeks passed, the map became a maze of noughts and crosses. Attercliffe. Meersbrook. Norton. She pinned it to the wall of the bedroom with blu-tack and when the baby slept she could run her palm flat over it, feel the indentations of the pen, trace an inventory of her loss. Other names were stubbornly recalled. Meadowhall. Don Valley. Owlerton. When she was a teenager, she used to kill time thumbing through the records in Rare and Racy on Devonshire Green even though her parents owned no record player. On the wall was a framed map of Sheffield bomb-sites. The black circles looked like bullet holes. The map seemed to have more dots than spaces. Her grid of the city was starting to feel like that. The shop was gone now and she wondered what had happened to all the records.

  One morning, she woke up with the word Heeley on her tongue. She had been dreaming of the City Farm, the sturdy legs of the goats that crowded by the fence and lunged for scraps, alert and noisy, the smell of wet straw and new rain, the farmyard cat who stalked between the pens. By lunchtime, Heeley had gone and she was forced to find the road on the map, the place she knew the farm was. The Health Visitor called round while she was unloading bags of shopping from the car.

  ‘Is this a good time?’

  They drank lukewarm tea from mugs decorated with pictures of biscuits. The Health Visitor’s said I Know How To Party underneath a drawing of a pink frosted party ring. The Health Visitor asked her about the crying spells and how long they lasted, whether she was getting enough sleep. The Health Visitor did not ask about the place names and their slow vanishing. The Health Visitor nodded earnestly and kept her hands folded in her lap.

  ‘The way you feel is nothing to do with weaning, with breastfeeding,’ she said. ‘You’re looking for something to blame.’

  The Health Visitor left her with the address of an Australian website offering Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. A gym for moods. You had to pay. Then you had to answer a series of questions. They were called Initial Questions. She scrolled through them on her phone at night but none of them seemed relevant. The only important question now was where am I?

  She had taken to falling asleep holding her son’s snowsuit. It was maroon-coloured with a fur trim and it had only fitted him for a short time when he was newborn and his head still flopped. Now, at night, she clutched it and imagined him older in the snow, pictured him toddling through all the white-covered, quiet places of the city, the parks now nameless to her. She thought of his footprints in the woods by the side of the stream. There were crossing places, rough stones that dogs scampered over, low overhanging branches. There was a memorial to a plane that came down here decades ago, crashing into the bank. There were climbing frames and silver slides and swings where children squealed to be pushed higher. There were places for sliding, families dragging sledges obediently up the slopes. How could she keep her son safe and near if she did not know where he was walking? She took the map down and shone the light of her phone on it, haloing the script, the roads and boundaries. Endcliffe Park. Bingham Park. Whiteley Woods. She circled every one obediently.

  When he fed from the bottle, her baby was meek as a small lamb or a piglet, swallowing quietly, the formula milk running down his chin. She sat him in the crook of her arm and kissed the top of his head as she tilted the teat towards his mouth. The tablets were making her wake at 2 am, 3 am. Her heart skittered. Outside, foxes made their low, catastrophic noises, ran along the tops of fences, skirted over walls and vanished into the last secret places of suburbia.

  She read articles: ‘The Hardest Eight Weeks of My Life’ and ‘What Nobody Told Me About Oxytocin’. She scrolled through advice on stopping breastfeeding, found only support to continue. But mostly, she read the map, running her finger from left to right and from top to bottom, following the course of the A57 out through Broomhill and Crosspool, skirting Rivelin and curving towards Strines. She could remember driving out to Ladybower, misjudging the bends and taking them too quickly, watching the wire hair and rust of the moors easing into view.

  Standing before the full-length mirror, she found her breasts had disappeared altogether. For the last six months, they had been swollen with milk, pale blue veins standing out under her skin. Now, her profile had flattened. Her nipples were the colour of freckles. She dropped her t-shirt to the floor and ran a hand down from her collarbone to her navel the way she touched the map. Her body was Sheffield. She would have to learn it again.

  F
rom the top of their road she could see the south side of town. In Sheffield you could always get a view of somewhere else, always get up high enough to look across the rooftops. Still, she sought out elevated places. The Greystones pub with its tarmac, makeshift beer garden. The Brothers Arms. The high point of the General Cemetery. Each of her journeys was charted, noted on the map with a faint line lest she forget it. At home, her phone buzzed with messages.

  You should breastfeed again. He’s still so tiny.

  You should stop gradually.

  You should stop quickly if you’re going to do it. Like pulling off a plaster.

  It’s hormones.

  It’s sleep deprivation.

  It’s emotional.

  You’re grieving for your child.

  She deleted the mood gym. She stopped texting friends back. When that wasn’t enough, she drove down Abbeydale Road South, out through Totley to Owler Bar and then across to Barbrook. She left the car in the lay-by and walked the deep groove of the track out to the little reservoir. There were aimless ducks and the remnants of disposable barbecues, patches of blackened grass. A lone swimmer was making pitiful progress through the weed and peaty sludge, his face set with determination. She crouched by the side of the bank and cupped her hands around her phone and released it into the water as if she were returning a frog to the wild. It slipped easily into the darkness and was gone. On the way back, she visited the stone circle. A flattened ring of twelve squat stones, angled towards each other, their conversation long since interrupted. She consulted her map to know what surrounded her. Ramsley Moor and Big Moor. Then the unnamed things, the indifferent sky and the slow planes.