Best of British Fantasy 2018

by Jared Shurin

  Chalkbrood thinks this is bullshit.

  My parole officer’s life trajectory and mine were perpendicular, and we met at a right angle. “She tried too hard not to be condescending,” I told Chalkbrood. “Trying that hard to be uncondescending actually is condescending because it implies you can’t take any condescension, if you see what I mean.”

  Chalkbrood sometimes claims to be the marooned captain of a tramp schooner, sometimes a prison psychologist. He has many incompatible social security numbers, none of which include any Arabic numerals. His credit score is a baseball bat, his dating profile a cinder block, his World of Warcraft Best Player Ranking a tooth plectrum. His Myers-Briggs personality type is a length of rebar he found in the creek, and his TED talk was about how and why not to tame sea urchins. I’ll stop there, because I don’t want to make Chalkbrood sound more of a contrarian than he actually is.

  He says the real mistake was replacing all the human beekeepers with robots – robots are bad beekeepers because they cannot feel stings.

  12. What the hell is this supposed to be?

  I live and work within the unseen processes of nature, and how do you grade someone on that? I answer all computerised surveys with an elliptical gaze or strangled cry. You teach the wrong things, I say, but that’s okay, I make up for it by not learning them.

  Anything I draw has the wrong number of legs, lest everything end up as one of those personality quizzes where you have either to click I am like this, by a photo of a bloodletting fleam, or I am like this, by a photo of a hydraulic torque wrench, or maybe the photos are of a cisalpine meadow and a reciprocating saw, but whatever you decide to click means you didn’t get the job.

  Am I guilty or innocent of murdering my parole officer? You the jurors may not bring food or unauthorised materials into the courtroom. The improperly attired will be excluded, and all electronic devices should be left in the parking lot. Photography is forbidden at all times, and forget whatever Chalkbrood told you. After your verdict, remain quietly seated until you are dismissed, then run for the hills.

  The Woman Who

  Turned into Soap

  Harkiran Dhindsa

  Every Friday night, Daya and her sister were rounded up into the mould-specked bathroom by their mother. Steam spiralled off the hot water as it hit the bucket squatting below the tap in the old enamel bath, while Chandni scrubbed vigorously at their necks and scolded them to keep still. She removed days of grime, leaving their skin prickling raw. Often, she soaped them with food from the kitchen just as her own mother had done back in Punjab. She would take a palm-full of plain yoghurt and rub it into their hair, but Daya always whimpered when the cold dollops trickled down her bare back. When their hair was dry, Chandni massaged oil into their scalps, working it along the hair shafts until their heads had the sheen of a raven’s wings. It was a laborious task, on occasion accompanied by Chandni wondering aloud whether she had performed some misdeed in a past life for God to punish her with the burden of daughters rather than the blessing of sons.

  The oils varied – almond, mustard, olive. Chandni said almond was particularly nourishing for the brain, but when Daya went shopping with her mother along Ealing Broadway, her eyes were drawn to fragrant promises that came packaged in bottles labelled conditioner. Watching adverts on TV, Daya was fascinated by women immersed in deep bubble baths, the velvety foam cocooning their bodies. She watched an actress raise a perfect silky, long leg from the opaque water and stroke it seductively with her hands from pointed toe to knee. As Daya became older and washing became a private activity, she tried to recreate these luxurious scenes, pouring half a bottle of bubble bath into the water, even using an egg whisk once for full froth effect. Only the water level was not quite deep enough for proper submersion, as the tank warmed up barely enough for half a bathtub. The pleasure was also ruined a little by flakes of enamel paint floating up to the surface and her mother knocking on the door and shouting, “Hurry up, girl, any longer and your skin will shrink. I don’t know what you do in there.”

  Daya heard her mother’s footsteps retreat down the stairs and she lay back and flicked up the foam into swirls and watched the creamy bubbles slowly disintegrate on her developing breasts.

  A month later, Daya’s father made an announcement. It was one of the rare days when he was awake in the afternoon, taking a holiday from the nightshift of his security guard job; he was going to look at tiles. A new bathroom suite was to be installed.

  “About time, too,” Chandni said. “Every time I clean that old bath I shred my gloves, and it’s not as if anyone else round here’s going to lift a finger. It’s all very well them cleaning themselves, but clean the bath? No, leave it to me as if I’m the servant.”

  It was as if the goddess of bathing herself had smiled upon Daya and heard her longings. With the new plumbing came an electric shower. At last – spontaneous hot water, no more waiting around for tanks to heat up. No more sitting in your own soup of dirt and old skin. This was an invigorating wake-up call cascading down her teenage body first thing every morning. While her mother lit the clay lamp in the little shrine cupboard and offered up prayers, Daya sleep-stumbled into the shower cubicle before school. It became imperative – a layer of skin had to moult under the running water before she could emerge as her living self each morning.

  Chandni was pulling sheets off the beds one day to put into the washing machine and as she lifted the quilt off Daya’s bed, she croaked, “How can you let so much blood get on the sheet. You must sort yourself. This is dirty. What if somebody else saw this?” Nobody was going to see it, Daya knew, but still she felt ashamed and skulked out of the room. After that she always did her own washing.

  It wasn’t just dirt and smells that Daya tried to rid from herself. There was also the thickening hair – shafts that she ripped out with wax before she allowed her legs to be seen in her games skirt, and underarm hair razed before she pulled on a swimming costume. She began to notice the hair above the lips of her dark-haired friends, and she became envious of the light, barely visible down on the arms of blonde girls. She offered to pluck her sister’s eyebrows into shape, but Asha said she was going for the natural look. “I’ve got better things to do with my time, and do you know what a stink you leave behind every time you use one of those shaving creams?”

  People regularly remarked to Chandni, “Isn’t Asha pretty?” They never said that about Daya. When Asha had moved up to secondary school, it had been the same adoration again, but this time from Daya’s friends. “Your little sister’s so cute.” Daya sat in her bedroom and placed mirrors at various angles around herself, trying to work out what it was that made people perceive Asha as more beautiful. She stared at faces on television, passengers on buses, at girls in her classroom and tried to break down this essence of prettiness. Poring over glossy magazines for hours, she hoped to soak up beauty from the pages by osmosis. She scrutinised the models’ faces, her own eyes tracing the shapes of their eyes, lips, noses. Genes had been mixed up and in the random sifting, her sister had gained the finer features that aligned more closely with the faces in the magazines.

  Turning sixteen, Daya took a Saturday job on a beauty counter in Boots, where she was paid to sell dreams in jars. She easily spotted the insecure, hesitant customers and, in turn, they seemed drawn to her. She left school at the end of that year to train as a beauty therapist and then landed a job with a beautician named Bunty who ran a salon above a sari shop in Wembley. Bunty assured Daya, “You’ll be kept busy here. When I first started very few of our ladies cared for this sort of thing. Now these young Indian women, these solicitors, accountants and all, they spend a lot of money here. They’re even worrying about cellulite these days. Bet our mums never even noticed it.” Bunty said it as if their mothers were from the same generation. Her hair was dyed a bright copper, back-combed, sprayed and locked into position around her head like a halo, and her heavy makeup concealed a face nearer Daya’s mother’s age. Bunty was soon to be o
verheard readily confessing to customers, “I’m on the wrong side of forty but only just.” Daya realised that her boss only said this to have the customers respond, “Oh, I thought you were much younger than that.” Bunty was divorced and regularly took days off work when Ramesh, a married man who lived in Coventry, came down to London on so-called business. Of all the treatments offered in the salon, Bunty liked manicuring best, as then she could sit opposite her clients and gossip with them at eye level while she buffed their nails. She was happy to let Daya take over the trail of women who climbed the stairs for facials, back massages and torturous hair removal.

  Daya couldn’t persuade Asha to try any of the treatments. Asha went travelling with their cousin around India. Daya winced as she read the postcard – backpacking in the Himalayas. The words invoked dirt and sweat. She sensed enough of it oozing out of the pores of her clients. She tried wearing latex gloves but the molten wax clung to them, so instead, between clients she started to scrub her hands clean with more vigour than a surgeon. And her sense of smell seemed to heighten. On the bus every morning, she raised her magazine in front of her nose to block out the odours emanating from the passengers around her.

  Chandni said it was about time that her older daughter married and set up her own home. But Daya had started to recoil from men, those in the street and at bus stops and especially leering men serving behind the counter of the Indian take-away. Once she would have wanted them to admire her, these men whose gaze lingered over Asha. Now she did not want to meet their eyes at all. The only man Daya touched was Tony, her one male client, a model who regularly arrived to have his chest hairs waxed.

  Chandni arranged meetings with suitable bachelors. The first date, the man’s after-shave was so overpowering it triggered a headache in Daya. With the second man, there was the faint stink of sweat in the air, the third had stale breath, and the fourth a general whiff of onions about him. At last, Daya met one who was reassuringly soapy-smelling and she studied his face closely, saw the bristles that lay in wait under the skin of his shaven chin and wondered if she could bear to get close enough to him. It was then that she knew she didn’t want to be touched. She didn’t need a husband or a lover. Maybe a statue would do, a Michelangelo carving to look at and admire, something that didn’t perspire. She told her mother to give the match-making a rest.

  Daya moved jobs to bigger premises in an exclusive leisure centre and busied herself attending to the tense, young professional women who wanted pampering. They revealed their secrets while she waxed their legs or massaged away the stress knots in their backs. They told her of their ill-fated affairs. At lunchtimes, Daya rushed into the gym downstairs, past the heaving bodies – more body odours – and reclaimed herself under the shower. Only then could she touch other bodies again in the afternoon.

  In the evenings, she didn’t want to encounter other people, other skins, and if any of her colleagues asked her to join them for a drink, she’d make an excuse and decline. Over the years, she had squirrelled away enough money to put down a deposit on a small flat, but first it had to be redecorated and decontaminated of its previous owners. The one-bedroom apartment was tiny but with an adequate-sized bathroom, and she spent a hefty bank loan and many weeks thumbing through design magazines in pursuit of the ideal bathroom fittings. She kitted out her bathroom with shower gels, mousses and shampoos. One of Daya’s clients had told her that the word shampoo had arrived from India, something about massaging heads, and, standing back to look at her own bathroom, she recalled her mother pummelling yoghurt into her scalp. Fragrant candles and essential oils were arranged around the bath to invoke particular moods so that the room now resembled part chemist, part spa and part Body Shop. How righteous Daya had felt, years back, to discover products she could use to indulge herself without harming rabbits and perhaps also help a few village women with their wages in some faraway place. But she wasn’t loyal only to Anita Roddick. Sometime later, she’d discovered Lush, with its intense, loud fragrances and its food-hall appearance, where soaps were laid out in great slabs as if they were cheeses to be sliced and nibbled. There was always some new line of cleansing products springing up to deplete Daya’s funds and now that she had her flat to finance, there would be less to spend on stocking up the bathroom. If there were soaps containing avocados, or strawberries, or watermelon, she wondered if she could almost give up on food shopping all together.

  Coming out of her flat one morning to put her rubbish into the wheelie- bin, Daya saw tiny white worm-like creatures crawling over the black plastic. Hesitantly, she approached the lid and was hit by a putrid smell that arrowed straight to her throat. The bin was crawling with maggots. Recoiling, it was all she could do to stop herself from vomiting and she ran up to her bathroom to have another shower even though it delayed her for work. The bin men called the next day and, returning from the salon, Daya poured a whole bottle of disinfectant into the empty bin and then tipped the bin onto its side and blasted the insides with a jet of water from the neighbour’s hosepipe. She stood well back, trying to avoid the back spray as maggots slid down in a stream of water across the forecourt and into the road. She had tied a white cotton handkerchief over her face, covering her nose and mouth and yet, even through this, she could smell the fetor of decay.

  When she was sure she’d got rid of every last maggot, she went back inside and tore off her clothes and shoved them inside a bin bag before stepping into the shower. For weeks afterwards, she would find herself suddenly twitching, believing maggots were crawling over her skin and then have to wash again.

  The summer was hot, the air-conditioning inadequate in the salon that Daya had now been appointed to manage at a new spa near Holland Park. Her foundation streaked and by the end of her shift, she could no longer bear the make-up layered onto her face. Each evening, as soon as she returned home, she began to undress, leaving a trail of clothes from the front door to the bathroom where she immediately clambered into the shower and scrubbed her body clean.

  The constant bathing was drying out her skin; she had to use more and more creams and lotions to stop it flaking off. Her mother had slapped a bit of supermarket brand moisturiser onto her cheeks and a smear of Vaseline onto her lips if she went out on a frosty day, whereas Daya regularly discovered new promotional products, sent free to the spa, which she used to target previously neglected parts of her body. Now she had acquired not only lotions for her neck and hands, but also creams for her thighs, her stomach and, recently, a watermelon gel to push in between her toes. Just before retreating into her bed with its crisp, clean sheets, there would be the final soak. Alone in her flat, pleasingly devoid of men to clutter up the place or leave a shampoo bottle on the wrong side of the shelf, she could indulge herself with her latest fragrance, fingering the potion as she removed it from its packaging.

  Between work and washing herself and vacuuming the flat, there was no time for anything else. And work no longer held any pleasure; in fact, it repelled her, but there were bills to be paid. Daya thought she no longer required a plethora of luxuries – only shampoos and shower gels and a hot water supply to be maintained and the mortgage to be met on her dust-free flat. She desired never to have to step out of her front door again, never to take her body into the outside air with all its contaminants.

  Having sipped the last of her wine one evening, she perched her glass on the rim of the bath beside an emptied bottle of bath oil. As she reclined further into the hot water, she saw a creamy flake rise to the surface. She was reminded of the old peeling enamel paint in her childhood bath and she felt a deep gratitude for her pristine tub. She closed her eyes and slid back deeper into the bath so that her lips met just the surface of the water and she breathed slowly, the steam making her giddy and a little drowsy. When she opened her eyes again, she saw more flakes, they were like coconut shavings; it dawned on Daya that these were layers of skin, her own brown integument. She tried to reach out for the flakes, these floating petals, but couldn’t move her hand;
her fingers were dissolving in the bath water. She attempted to lift her leg but that too was dispersing. And now the flakes began to disintegrate, leaving only suds on the surface.

  Rising from the water, there were all the aromas that had once surfed her body – wafts of lemon, vetiver, strawberry, ginger, juniper. A hundred fragrances blending, but each one distinct to her finely tuned sense of smell. She felt no pain, only lightness, a climax to all those baths that were supposed to invoke relaxation. There was an easing in her limbs and her head, all aches fading. She sensed a washing away of awkward thoughts, a rinsing of emotions – a true cleansing. There was no more form, no vessel, just a weightless faint notion of existing. Steam rose from the bath and her mind swam upwards on the warm air, floating, swirling. No longer of body, no longer of this life – free.

  Mushroom Speed Boosts

  Ben Reynolds

  I gave up racing Logan for a while. It got boring. He is too good. He knows every shortcut, every shortcut within a shortcut, where to use the mushrooms. He set the fastest time on every track.

  But I’ve been practicing. I’m ready.

  Mario celebrates my return with a wahooooo!

  Logan races as Donkey Kong. I’m always Luigi. Luigi is Mario’s under-appreciated brother.

  First up, Mario Kart Stadium.

  Come on then, this time you’re going down.

  3… 2… 1… Go!

  I get a boost start and beat him to the first corner because Luigi has better acceleration than Donkey Kong. I stay ahead until he uses a mushroom to take a shortcut over the grass and I can’t catch him from there. He’s too good.