Best British Short Stories 2019

by Nicholas Royle

  Obviously, we had to try it. As soon as Carlos finished telling me about it, I knew it, and he knew it. We even made eye contact, for a brief moment. This is not something that Carlos and I generally like to do. He is hideously ugly – the spots don’t help at all – but his eyes are blue, the kind of clear, cold blue that can look either sparkling or wolfish, depending on the situation. When he’s excited, as he was then, it’s like another person entirely is staring out from behind it all, the greasy skin, the lank fringe, the monobrow. It’s pretty intense.

  I was like, okay, so where do we get a gram or two? And he said he didn’t know exactly, but we should have a look. And we spent the next few hours going through the weird back-alleys of the internet, sniggering at the porn pop-ups, flicking through the knife and bomb catalogues, scrolling down, down, down, through the endless reviews of substances like ‘HXM-PAL-1’ and ‘GIG-L-S’ and also a bunch of stuff in Chinese that we naturally couldn’t read or understand. We didn’t really find anything, and Carlos looked annoyed and then his mother popped her head round the door and said she had a pizza for us, so we ate that and I imagined that she was feeding me every slice by hand, and her fingernails were glossy and red, like pepperoni.

  A couple of days later, after going through all his shady online contacts trying to find this mystery substance, Carlos finally found someone who was willing to sell us some of his stash. Actually, it was the guy’s little brother’s stash, I think. The little brother was a twelve-year-old – really we should have thought of that earlier, I suppose. Carlos said he was going to go and meet with him, which meant he had to leave his room, and go outside, and get a bus. Which was a big deal. He’s sort of a remedial case, I think. But he did it. He was pretty pleased with himself when he called me that day, with the big news: we had scored.

  We decided to do it straight away, that night, but in my room this time. The reason being that, though I wouldn’t change a single perfect thing about Carlos’s mother, she does tend to burst through doorways unannounced. This is only a nice surprise if you’re sitting playing video games and getting hungry, not if you’re sitting on the floor, shovelling shit up your nose. My mother is much more respectful of my privacy. And my room is a more of a congenial environment. I have alphabetised my CD collection. I store my novels – spanning a range of interesting and diverse genres – not on the floor but in the bookcase, where they are meant to live. I fold up all my clothes and put them in the drawers. No tube socks anywhere. None.

  I didn’t have a mirrored tray, or a silver straw or any of that other paraphernalia that you see people doing drugs with, in movies, surrounded by beautiful women and leather chairs and guys with chains round their necks, and guns. So we just cut up the powder ourselves with an expired young saver card on this big book I’ve never read. An ill-judged Christmas present. Incredible modern homes. Something like that. We didn’t really have any other plans that day, so we thought we’d do it all in one sitting. Carlos put on this YouTube video that, he said, all the twelve-year-olds like to trip out to, and then got going with the snorting. It was quite a dense powder, and after four or five lines both of my nostrils were completely blocked, so then we dabbed it into our gums until the taste became unbearable, then got my mother to bring us up some tea (we hid the drug-covered book under the bed when she came in to deliver it) and sprinkled the rest in that, and drank it. Then we sat in silence, watching the video.

  As expected, I didn’t really feel any different from normal, apart from the blocked nose and the burning gums, and the soapy sensation in my mouth. The video was a collage of lots of other videos, showing clouds rolling over landscapes, a skydiver falling through the air, wind rustling leaves, ripples on water, that kind of thing. In its own way, it was beautiful, and, though we didn’t speak much, the silence between myself and Carlos felt peaceful. We watched the video intently until it was dark outside and then Carlos had to go home for dinner, which was pizza again. He asked me if I wanted to come over for a slice but I said I don’t know and he left.

  I felt fine the next day, which was a huge letdown. Maybe, I thought, we’d got the wrong thing. I called Carlos. He said he felt OK too. He wasn’t happy about it. That was that. I’d taken the morning off work, thinking I might need to sleep in and shake off the after effects. But I didn’t have anything else to do, so I went in anyway. My job is pretty easy, mostly just answering the phone. It’s the kind of job that will definitely be performed by some sort of robot or algorithm in the near future, which is why I’m glad I learned HTML, and why I worry sometimes about all the twelve-year-olds. Actually, I’m also responsible for restocking the paper on the printer, and getting the meeting rooms ready the way all the professional types there like them. So maybe it will take a while for me to become obsolete. I like the idea of sticking around, for a while at least.

  What I hadn’t thought through at this point is that the most truly evil comedowns have an incubation period of at least 24 hours. I guess the Chinese must have looked into this phenomenon and coded their wonder-dust accordingly, because it was four whole days before I began to feel a little bit down in the dumps, then another two before the headache kicked in, and then another before the vomiting and dizziness got so bad that I had to call into work and explain the situation. I felt too terrible to lie, so I told them all about the Chinese and the twelve-year-olds, and how there’s nothing we can do to stop them living like this. It’s scary, I told them, because these little guys are going to be adults some day, and they’ll be coming into the office and doing our jobs – until the robots do them – and this is what it will be like, everyone phoning in sick, having this same same conversation. Work was surprisingly sympathetic.

  But back to the comedown. It was a real masterpiece, as far as comedowns are concerned. It felt like the earth had opened up. I spent most of it in my room, not a huge change in the order of business because, let’s be honest, I spend a lot of time in my room too. But all of a sudden all the things in it, which I had previously admired and tended to throughout my life filled me with a gut-wrenching feeling of disgust and shame. Here was the bed in which my body had revolted against the ageing process, protesting the unfairness of it all with toxic farts and yellow sweat and surprise night-time emissions. Here were the walls I had painted blue, ten years ago, now faded to a dull, corpse-like grey, very upsetting. Here was a bunch of posters – all of stuff that I used to like but was now too old for – that I had always been too lazy to take down. There was the computer, already getting on, designed to be replaced, just sitting there and sucking up useless information, filling itself to bursting. The more I looked at it all, the more I was unable to focus on the individual elements. I could only see, or rather imagine, how it would all look many thousands of years in the future, a pond of gloopy grey mulch through which my bones would drift unseen, the ooze sucking at them noisily. Then I got black spots at the corners of my eyes. My tongue swelled up so I could barely breathe. I started sweating, and my joints hurt, and all over my skin, anywhere I had hair, it felt like ants crawling and rats nibbling and I couldn’t stop itching, even when all these places were red and and my fingernails were black with my ooze and sweat and blood.

  On the phone, Carlos didn’t sound so hot either.

  My mother drove me round.

  Carlos and I sat in his bedroom, shit all over the place as usual, and watched the YouTube video again, though the mountains laughed at us and the clouds and the streaming sky billowed overhead like some giant clenched fist getting ready to fly at our faces. At some point, I had an attack of vertigo and grabbed on to him, just to have something to hold on to. And then we sat with our arms around each other, glad of the warmth, and the touch, and the sound of each other’s heartbeats. It was then that he looked at me again, his forehead touched to mine, and his eyes were crazily blue, so blue that they burned, and he looked at me, too, like I was on fire, and disintegrating in front of him, and his mouth was a wide O that
kept opening and shutting and his eyes were watering. It felt a little weird to be that physically close, by which I mean that I’m not sure whether I was comforted or disgusted as I breathed in his stale Diet Coke breath and unwashed armpits, and clutched desperately at his scrawny shoulders and back, and bit my lip, and sighed. He is more than usually sweaty. There were wet patches everywhere.

  So that was quite the ride. You have to admire the Chinese for their workmanship.

  It took me a while to feel normal, but after a full week of lying in bed with the YouTube video, crying into my pillow, the vomiting had subsided and my chinos and shirts and alphabetised novels didn’t bum me out so much and ultimately I felt OK enough to go back to my regular life, to go into work and put the washing out for my mother to pick up and do and to once again imagine the possibility of a future without the slime and the doom and all that stuff. Most of the time, now, it feels like the rift in the ground has closed up, and that everything is back to what it always should have been. But then again, things keep changing, so it also doesn’t feel like that at all, and I do wonder.

  Carlos’s next thing is that he’s moving away. I don’t entirely believe him, but it seems to be happening. He says he has got himself a job, which is weird because he has never worked before – nor expressed any wish to. And, if I’m being completely honest, I’d have to say he doesn’t have any skills, aside from drinking Diet Coke, and playing computer games, badly. I wouldn’t hire him. No way. But it’s something to do with coding, he says, working with some guy he met on a chat room. They are going to pay him a lot of money, but he can’t do it from here, he has to go, somewhere else. Straight away. The whole thing is so sudden that I didn’t even feel all that sad, yesterday, as we began to pack all his crap into ugly boxes, and then gave up and sat playing video games and drinking Diet Coke. Didn’t care much when his incredible mother came up to hand me the pizza and bent down low, so low, to blow me a kiss and give me a squeeze and a hug, as if we were saying goodbye then and there, rather than in a week’s time, when he says he’s going. I wonder if I will miss him a lot. His acne seems to be clearing up. My skin is terrible.

  Also, weirdly, they have found the Chinese. Or at least, some of them. I mean, I assume they’re Chinese. They don’t all look it, entirely. It turns out they’re not running their business entirely from some crazy meth lab in the far east. Actually, they are local. All this time, they’ve been working out of one of the supposedly empty flats across the road, which I suppose explains why they were able to adapt so quickly to the market. I can actually see the flat from my room, when I roll up the blinds. It looks normal from the outside: whitewashed walls, slightly overgrown front garden, big ‘For Sale’ sign hovering above the gate. The window’s blocked out, but that’s not unusual, round here. Carlos told me they knocked through the ceiling on the ground floor, to create a giant atrium in which they could install their vats and UV lights, and cook up all kinds of horrible garbage for the local prep schools. I saw them being marched out the building, by the police into a van, smoke-blind. They could have been anyone.

  Carlos is talking to people on the internet, and keeping me updated about it. About them. He says that they were all taken to a small, grey room, not much bigger than his room, though presumably much cleaner, and subjected to intense questioning, by which he means beaten up pretty badly. While this happened every twelve-year-old in town, Carlos says, was naturally trying to flush his or her stash down the toilet, or throw it in the river, or just get rid of it any way he or she could, in case someone’s parents found out. Because of this, Carlos says, now all the shit is in the water supply, and it’s highly possible that, in a couple of weeks, the entire borough could be locked up in their rooms, watching the YouTube video, their teeth firmly clamped around their fists, their toes curled and their fingers splayed. I’m a little worried about the consequences of it all.

  But Carlos thinks the Chinese, and the twelve-year-olds, are going to get away with it. When the police went in there, he says, and emptied those vats and analysed all those thousands of tight-packed cubes of powder, lying in wait, ready to be bought and cut up and sucked viciously down tiny, perfect, pre-teen nostrils, they couldn’t find anything incriminating about it. The substance they were making had no discernable purpose. Not a stimulant, narcotic, analgesic, euphoric, psychedelic, anything. No side effects either. If someone had seen fit to use it recreationally, Carlos says, they would have experienced nothing at all. No sudden release of dopamine, no eventual crushing melancholy. It would simply enter the bloodstream without incident and gently dissipate. Like the tiny bubbles that float upwards in a glass of Diet Coke, and burst on the surface. Or like those thin white lines that planes leave zigzagging across the sky, on their way to elsewhere. Doing it would have been like snorting a haiku, getting high on a riddle. We must have taken something else.

  A Hair Clasp

  VESNA MAIN

  We went swimming, my daughter and I. She was twenty and a good swimmer. I didn’t need to keep an eye on her. I read on the beach while she went into the sea. From time to time, I lifted my eyes from my book and looked at her. She would smile and raise an arm, as if in greeting. Or perhaps she wanted to say, ‘Look at me,’ as children often do, seeking recognition even when they are past their childhood. The last time I saw her, the waves had grown and the choppy sea tossed her around playfully. One moment she was hidden under the foamy whiteness, another moment she was riding the crest of the waves, shimmering against the glistening surface of the water. I smiled and thought how much I loved her. This happy young woman. I wanted to shout how lovely she looked, but there was no point as my voice would have been lost in the crushing power of the sea. So I greeted her with my hand up in the air and went back to my reading. The next time I looked up, I couldn’t see her. I saw other swimmers, a dozen of them, enjoying the waves. I wanted to see her smiling and communicating her pleasure to me so I climbed a bridge next to where they were swimming. I still couldn’t spot her. A thought crossed my mind that she may have drowned. I have always been a worrier but sometimes your worst fears come true. I looked harder, I moved around the bridge but I still couldn’t see her. My chest tightened with fear. Was this really happening? Then I noticed a beautiful hair clasp, an antique piece that someone must have left there or, more likely, lost. The piece was lying on top of a stone pillar that formed part of the banister of the bridge. Cupping it in the palm of my hand, I caressed the pearly section held by its silver frame. The intricacy of its craft and the smoothness of the object charmed me. As I turned it around, sunshine played hide and seek on its surface. I would have loved to have it but the find was too valuable not to report. But something told me that I had the right to keep it. I clutched it firmly and walked home alone. I will be careful never to lose it.

  Reality

  JOHN LANCHESTER

  When Iona woke up in the house she knew where she was straight away, and she knew she was alone. There was none of that blurry intermediate state of semi-consciousness that people usually get when they’re in an unfamiliar place. Everything about the bed, the clean low modern furniture, the white painted walls, the angled light coming in through the edges of the blackout blinds – it was all crisp and distinct. She stretched and yawned and put her feet on the bare but warm floor. She was wearing her second-best sleeping shorts and some long-forgotten ex’s heavily faded Ramones T-shirt. It was a low bed, the kind that older people find it hard to straighten up from. But Iona was not old. Her mouth tasted fresh. She couldn’t smell her own breath, nobody can, but she could tell that if she were able to, it would smell sweet. The bathroom was en suite. She padded across to it and surveyed the unbranded but obviously fancy modern toiletries. Fine. She did what she had to do to be ready for the day. She checked herself out in the mirror. Good: as often when she’d just woken up, she had perfect bedhead. It was known to be one of her best looks.

  The next question was: how to fill the day
. What next? The others would be arriving before too long, maybe later the same day, maybe over the subsequent days, who knew? But soon. So this was her chance to have a good look around and explore the villa and mark her territory. Not literally, obviously. But a chance to get a feel for the place and to make a good impression. She was very aware of being watched the whole time – that was the entire point of this place, that you were watched the whole time, you are not just on show, you are the show – and that this was a chance to occupy all the space. For today, and maybe for today only, she was the sole and only and exclusive star. It was all about her. Well, OK then. She would be the star. Eyes to me!

  The fitted cupboard was full of her clothes, except they seemed a bit cleaner, a bit newer. It was clever how they’d managed to arrange that. She opened it and studied it and performed complex calculations about how to play this, about what the audience would want and how to give it to them while acting as if she wasn’t thinking about them and their reactions. Act natural – always a tricky one. First thing, freshly out of bed and on her own: the call was probably for sexy casual, but not too casual and the sexy part mustn’t seem calculating. Also, the clock was ticking, she realised as she stood in front of the short wall of clothes. If she spent twenty minutes here and then came out looking like she’d just thrown some stuff on, the extended deliberation would contradict the intended effect. She wasn’t stupid. OK so it was Lululemon yoga bottoms, the same T-shirt she already had on, and flip-flops.