Best British Short Stories 2019

by Nicholas Royle

You search for somebody’s name on the nights when things become worse. One name becomes a procession of names, typed into the box. The history of your browser cleared, as though they could spy on you. Small ghosts called up. Why do you keep calling them up? On the dish rack at the other side of the room, a single plate and a single fork are drying. The tap has a drip that you no longer register, spending so much time with it, but anyone else would. When J comes round he comments on it but you do not care.

  The names reveal pictures. You have seen all the pictures already, there are no new surprises here. You are forever amazed by how close you can feel to a person from such a distance and isn’t that the miracle after all, the molecules and static which conjure them but do not conjure them – and then when you are drunkest, when the nights are at the worst, you search for yourself, which always gives you the unreality feeling, because it is not your name any more, it hasn’t been for a while, but you will always turn around when somebody says Lucy, and it will always be with that same queasy mixture of dread and of hope.

  You have turned the computer off before J comes round, but when you go to get a glass of water you are alarmed to discover that it is back on somehow. The map back on the screen. This is a dangerous oversight, you tell yourself. Anyone could have seen. Not that it would matter. But it is strange that you remember turning it off. The remembrance of another evening, automatic behaviour skipping a turn. You are drunk as usual, it’s true. You turn it off and then you hold your glass with both hands as you drink your water, staring at the black screen.

  Yes, you think of yourself as a teenager, walking along the harbour wall. The bench you liked to sit on near the folly, the smoke from the refinery bleeding out against the sky. You liked to watch the tankers serene in the water, the sense of arriving and leaving and arriving and leaving. You liked to buy a half-litre of vodka from the tired-looking supermarket just back from the seafront, apple juice or cloudy lemonade to mix it with, a mouthful of alcohol and then a mouthful of the mixer and sometimes you spat it right out in an arc, usually landing on the grass but sometimes reaching the water, you thought, though you never saw it hit. It doesn’t matter. You can picture the water breaking regardless, your undeniable impact on a landscape where you felt insignificant, always. Less than a circle in the water. Less than a dream, like another kind of ghost called up. It is soothing to think about the things you like or have liked over your lifetime. To list small animals and the sensation of clean laundry and different foods. This is its own sort of topography, your own landscape of safety. It is soothing to think of the ways you can be and remain safe. You can look but you can’t touch. You can look.

  The routine settles. You get home from the office where you spend your days writing mind-numbing press releases on subjects that you do not care about, and you take a beer from the salad compartment, where no salad lives or is likely to live, and you open it carefully – cold sound of its opening a relief that makes you want to sob, almost, but you don’t – and then you settle in in front of your computer. You might look at other things first. The news, your emails. There is something that needs responding to with urgency. You have been putting it off. You put it off again. You read a story about the melting ice caps. About starving polar bears drifting into an unknown world. You are so sad for these bears, a sadness out of proportion, a sadness that makes you close the tab.

  What you do is, you open up the map and at first all you see is a non-localised grid. The green, the blue, the creased lines of roads and rivers and borders. Then you type in the postcode. It’s memorised, of course. You’ll be able to recite it like a litany, some kind of prayer, even decades after. But you don’t know this yet. The postcode zooms you in. Sometimes you do not type the postcode but just the town, or the town next to it, so that you can scroll closer to it at your own speed. Inch by inch, the cursor moving slowly. The anticipation of it. Sallow light washing over your face. You click in and close as you can get to it. You stare at basically nothing until your eyes become tired, the beer finished.

  One morning when you go downstairs, the computer is on somehow. Again, you must have been so drunk. The map is up, and zoomed-in. You go to turn it off, but you find yourself looking at it instead. Moving the cursor around it, like you’re trying to reveal something hidden, but there is nothing to be found.

  Yes, you think of yourself sometimes when you were in your early twenties in another city, a city you do not often go to but one that you could, if you wanted – if you prepared psychically in advance, if you made the arrangements – the pinwheeling dark energy of a thousand parties, of houses with damp mattresses on the floor and parks fruiting with the greenery of early spring, of walking for a long time through the streets. It seemed to belong to you. There is nostalgia and a faint dread when you think about this city, but nothing too drastic.

  And how good it felt to get the bus for an hour, two hours, outside of the city limits. And how good it felt to go to the museums and sit in front of your favourite picture, sculptures, and wait for the art to dazzle you, to be undone, to be insignificant in the only good way.

  You are being haunted by yourself, you think half-seriously, considering the mystery of the screen. You are your own worst ghost. OK. You take the computer to a place in town that runs a full diagnostic, and they tell you there is nothing wrong with it. They recommend covering the webcam as a precaution, which you do with a patterned child’s plaster that you find at the bottom of your make-up bag, and it reassures you a little, which is enough.

  You go to a new city on a trip, a neutral city. A change of scene, no computer, though it makes you anxious. Alone you stand on bridges and watch the water as it floods under, and while you do think about jumping in, you don’t. In restaurants you eat cured meats served on wooden boards. In the last restaurant, dinner, a bottle of grass-fresh white wine. The city goes to sleep early each evening. Every morning for the three days you wake up there: pearlescent light over water. Yes, you know that in a city such as this you can feel pure and good and hopeful again, though you cannot stay. Really, it’s not for you, as much as you might want it to be.

  When you arrive back at your home, dark and uninviting, the first thing you check are the rooms upstairs for intruders, the windows for signs of entry. You pause at the entrance to your living room. The screen is glowing, though you checked and checked and checked again that it was off before you left. The sickly light draws you forward. You sit down and even though you are tired from the flight, hungry and thirsty, you type in the postcode again, almost crying because you have gone some days without it, because you want to look so badly, because you are afraid of so much and to be able to look this one thing in the eye is something, something, though you can no longer tell whether it is comfort or self-flagellation or both.

  J comes over to talk about the holiday. He is the only person who really comes to your house. His hair has grown too long, almost reaching his shoulders. He fixes the tap this time and talks to you as he does it. You tell him about the cured meat and the serenity of the wide streets, the rivers. You do not tell him about the computer flickering on. In return for the act of handiwork you cut his hair in the bathroom by the light of a faltering bulb, a towel around his shoulders, flushing the hair down the toilet. You go to bed together. In the tepid moonlight from the open curtain you stare at his face but he sleeps the way adults rarely sleep, which is to say he sleeps like something has been switched off in him. You envy this idea, the radical simplicity of his body’s workings.

  In that moonlight you think that if you keep going back to the pure and good city you will ruin it, the way you ruin everything else. There will be some kind of incident. You will throw up or be violent in the street, or you will shout at someone or sleep with someone or lose your head. You will throw yourself in the river after all. A place will disappoint you like a person will. No more pearlescent lustre. No more pastel water. You will always be there in the place. The place will always
be there with you. You understand it goes both ways. You understand this, in the morning when J has gone, when you are looking at the map again. You have hoped that a new city, a broadening of your topographies, will have fixed this in you. Spreading you and your feelings around like butter on toast, diluting the intensity of your territories. It has not fixed anything in you.

  This is how it goes. A quick escalation, a decline that spirals in on itself. You start to look first thing, waking up to the screen already on – normal already – and it makes you late for work. You are not able to stop this, and in the second week your boss has a word, and you promise to try and improve, but you do not. You can’t stop looking. On the bus into work, still late, you call up the address on your phone. It is so unremarkable. You can hardly remember what the house looks like, though you know if you were inside you would be able to recognise every room even if blindfolded. You are distracted when J comes round, so he comes round less. You barely notice. The pull of the address is like a stricture, a squeezing sense of panic. After one weekend you are two hours late to the office and you are fired on the spot.

  You search for the names more often too. There is no new information. These people could be dead, for all you know. But still there is power in a name. A mother calling for her runaway child in the supermarket; you want to fall to the floor. You leave your basket. You go into another shop and you buy the apple juice and vodka of your teens as though anchoring yourself to something, some integral idea of personhood, but you had that old name then too. Nevertheless, you drink the vodka. You become very drunk and you call up the map again. You start to look at the timetables of trains, of hotels, and when you wake up in the morning you have not called anyone or sent a shameful message, but you have booked train tickets, a journey for the next day.

  You close your eyes very tightly and lie on the sofa all day trying to delay the decision. The only time you move from your position is when someone comes to the door and bangs loudly. They will see your movement through the hall if you go upstairs and hide, so instead you crouch down by the side of the fridge where nobody can see you, not even through the window of the kitchen. It is the postman or J, you know this, the only two people who have reason to visit you. And yet, and yet, and yet. You stay crouched down with legs folded, electric blood, until it is properly dark. The beam from next door’s garden light pools into yours but does not reach you. The stars are not out. You move onto your hands and knees. You decide, yes, you will go. Somewhere there is hope in it.

  And you remember, that night when you are sleepless again, about the time you thought you were dead. When you had not spoken to anyone for several days, and you were in one of the cities you do not think about, and you were alone, and you had your old name. You had not yet thought about shucking off that name and all that was stuck to it. You were dead and you were a ghost, and when you flickered to somewhere beyond sleep and waking you saw yourself back up there, back up at the folly watching the boats come in, as if you had never left. And yet, still, when you came round, the world did not feel off-limits to you. The opposite. As soon as you were well enough you packed your bags. The streets were quiet and sluiced with rainwater. Any cars were too loud in the tender silence. It was all new to you, the hated city, emerging from the thick air of your room.

  It could be that easy if you let it, you think to yourself. There is no reason it should not be. You pack your bags again. The computer will not turn off at all now, even when you put the laptop lid down and then push it up again, so you leave it. It is fixed on the map, the screen brightness turned all the way up. You leave it as it is, and you finally understand.

  Contributors’ Biographies

  Julia Armfield lives and works in London. She is a fiction writer and occasional playwright with a Master’s in Victorian Art and Literature from Royal Holloway University. Her work has been published in Lighthouse, Analog Magazine and Neon Magazine. She was commended in the Moth Short Story Prize 2017, long-listed for the Deborah Rogers Prize 2018 and was the winner of The White Review Short Story Prize 2018. Her debut collection, salt slow, was published by Picador in May 2019.

  Elizabeth Baines’ stories have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and Salt have published two collections, Balancing on the Edge of the World and Used to Be. Salt have also published her novel, Too Many Magpies, and reissued her earlier novel, The Birth Machine. She has been a prizewinning playwright for Radio 4 and has written, produced and performed her own plays for fringe theatre. Her latest novel, The Story Keeper, will be published by Salt in 2020.

  Naomi Booth was born and raised in West Yorkshire. Her novella, The Lost Art of Sinking (Penned in the Margins), was selected for New Writing North’s Read Regional campaign 2017 and won the Saboteur Award for Best Novella. Her debut novel, Sealed (Dead Ink Books), is a work of eco-horror. It was short-listed for the Not the Booker Award 2018 and Naomi was named a Fresh Voice: Fifty Writers to Read Now by the Guardian. ‘Cluster’ was long-listed for the Sunday Times Short Story Award 2018 and the Galley Beggar Short Story Prize 2018. Her new novel, Exit Management, will be published by Dead Ink Books in 2020. She lives in York and lectures on Creative Writing and Literature.

  Ruby Cowling was born in Bradford and lives in London. Her short fiction has won awards including The White Review Short Story Prize and the London Short Story Prize, and has been short-listed in competitions with Glimmer Train, Aesthetica, Short Fiction and Wasafiri. Publication credits include Lighthouse, The Lonely Crowd, the Galley Beggar Press Singles Club and numerous print anthologies. Her collection This Paradise was published by Boiler House Press in 2019.

  Kieran Devaney lives in Birmingham. His novel Deaf at Spiral Park was published by Salt in 2013.

  Vicky Grut’s short stories have appeared in new writing anthologies published by Picador, Granta, Duckworths, Serpent’s Tail and Bloomsbury. Her non-fiction essay ‘Into the Valley’ was mentioned in Best American Essays, 2013. Her short story collection, Live Show, Drink Included, was published by Holland Park Press in 2018. She is currently working on a creative non-fiction book that follows her Swedish grandmother from Paris and Stockholm in the 1920s, to Bangkok in the 1930s and Stalin’s Moscow in the winter of 1940.

  Nigel Humphreys is an Anglo-Welsh poet living in Aberystwyth. Having worked as a retailer, a computer programmer and a postmaster, he retired in 2000. He is the author of four collections of poetry, among them The Hawk’s Mewl and The Love Song of Daphnis and Chloe, with a fifth to be published in 2019. Also forthcoming, from Zagava, is a collection of ghost stories. He is a member of the Welsh Academy and Literature Wales.

  Sally Jubb received the Andrea Badenoch Award (Northern Writers’ Awards) in 2015, for a selection of short stories. Since then, her work has appeared in various anthologies, including the Bristol Short Story Prize and Bath Flash Fiction as well as Brittle Star and The London Magazine. She won the Colm Toibin Short Story Prize in 2017, and Brittle Star Short Story Award in 2018. She is currently working towards an MFA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, London. She wishes to thank New Writing North.

  John Lanchester is the author of five novels, most recently The Wall, and three works of non-fiction.

  Sophie Mackintosh was born in South Wales in 1988 and is currently based in London. Her fiction, essays and poetry have been published by Granta, The White Review, The New York Times and The Stinging Fly, among others. Her short story ‘Grace’ was the winner of the 2016 White Review Short Story Prize, and her story ‘The Running Ones’ won the Virago/Stylist Short Story competition in 2016. Her debut novel The Water Cure was published by Hamish Hamilton in the UK in 2018 and by Doubleday in the US in 2019 to critical acclaim and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Her second novel Blue Ticket will be published in 2020.

  Lucie McKnight Hardy grew up in West Wales and is a Welsh speaker. Her work has featured or is forthcoming in various places online and in print, including The Lonely Crowd, Th
e Shadow Booth, The Ghastling, and as a limited edition chapbook from Nightjar Press. Her debut novel, Water Shall Refuse Them, was short-listed for the Mslexia Novel Competition 2017, long-listed for the Caledonia Novel Award 2018 and is published by Dead Ink Books.

  Paul McQuade is a writer and translator originally from Glasgow. He is the author of Hometown Tales: Glasgow (Orion, 2018), with Kirsty Logan, and the short story collection, Between Tongues (Cōnfingō, forthcoming). His work has been short-listed for the White Review and Bridport prizes and he is the recipient of the Sceptre Prize for New Writing and the Austrian Cultural Forum Writing Prize.

  Vesna Main was born in Zagreb, Croatia. She is a graduate of comparative literature and holds a PhD from the Shakespeare Institute, Birmingham. A lecturer at universities in Nigeria and the UK, she also worked at the BBC and as a college teacher. Book-length publications include: a novel, A Woman with No Clothes On (Delancey, 2008), a collection of short stories, Temptation: A User’s Guide (Salt, 2018), and a novel in dialogue, Good Day? (Salt, 2019). Her autofiction, Only A Lodger . . . And Hardly That, is out now from Seagull Books. She lives in London.

  Robert Mason, formerly an illustrator, started writing in 2010. Other People’s Dogs (Caseroom) was published in 2013, and Reflex Fiction have published his work online and in print. He has been long- or short-listed for the Fish and Galley Beggar short story prizes, the Manchester Fiction Prize, and the Observer/Anthony Burgess Arts Journalism Prize. Currently he is writing a novel set in Kent at the end of the hippy era, Grim Down South, and a biography of his body, Wound Man.

  Ann Quin was a British writer born in Brighton in 1936. Prior to her death in 1973, she published four novels: Berg (1964), Three (1966), Passages (1969) and Tripticks (1972). During her writing career she lived between Brighton, London and the US. She was prominent among a group of British experimental writers of the 1960s, which also included BS Johnson and Christine Brooke-Rose.