Best British Short Stories 2020 by Nicholas Royle (best novels to read for students txt) 📕

the strange village that he had claimed for himself. Why had he stopped to talk with her? In England she never sketched outside; she never wanted to. Now she kept wanting to draw, everywhere she went.

‘Have you seen the cacti?’ The old man was back, holding out a gnarled cactus leaf covered with white encrustations. ‘It’s the cochineal bug. All the cactii in the village are infested.’

She had seen them on her walks, the big-lobed cactii with their broken limbs, rotting and weakened by the life gathered on them.

‘You can make dye with it,’ the old man said. ‘It’s what they used to make the red coats of the British army. And you can paint with it, but you’ll need to stop the colour fading: maybe vinegar or salt – you should try it. I have a lot of cactii in my garden, if you want to experiment.’

‘Maybe,’ she murmured, trying not to encourage the man.

Why did he keep coming to her? He clutched his stick as he leaned down to place the leaf beside her, then staggered up past the fuente again.

‘I see you’ve met David,’ Beatriz said, coming over. ‘He’s a famous artist in Spain.’

‘He’s invited me to his house to look at paintings.’

‘He must have liked your drawings.’ Beatriz studied Anya’s sketchbook. ‘You’re good! You should go. He loves to teach. I can see the two of you becoming good friends!’

But Beatriz didn’t know about Anya. Anya was not good at making friends. In the office her manager had told her to get better at teamwork, but Anya hadn’t known how. She had trusted no one at the office, feeling their pity and disdain of her, a certain wariness around her, that she had been glad to leave behind.

‘Go and see David,’ Beatriz urged.

‘Is it safe to go alone?’

‘Safe? Ah, don’t worry, it’s nothing like that, he really will just talk about painting – you won’t be able to stop him! Tell me a time and I’ll come and rescue you!’

‘There’s no need.’

She wasn’t going. Of her family, it was her brother who made friends easily. He was the generous one, her mother said. He was open-hearted and kind; Anya was hostile, her heart was hard and closed and secretive.

Musicians arrived in the plaza: a man and woman with matching golden dreadlocks began to drum. People gathered around them. Another man came pulling a cajón on a rickety trolley and joined them, sitting crouched over the mellow-gold wooden box, his fingers rippling a shuddering rising rhythm with the drums. The drumming rose up above the voices and the splashing of the fuente; it throbbed against the ring of stone houses around the plaza and reached up to the empty blue sky. People started dancing. The drumming was in Anya, it throbbed in her eyes, her ears. She couldn’t draw any more, she couldn’t breathe. She reached for the labyrinth, entering its shade and sudden cool. It curved into quiet, into a tunnel with ragged wooden roof beams and peeling blue walls. She walked towards sunlight at the far end. Stone steps climbed to a cactus, half in bloom half dying, by a gatepost.

‘Oh, so you came,’ said the old painter and opened the gate to let her in.

The painter’s house was built into the rock. The beams of the ceiling were whole chestnut trunks. The walls were painted with ochre from the mountains and hung with Berber rugs. In the kitchen he poured beer into glasses and they sat at the table before a deep hooded fireplace and he showed her his paintings: exquisite, detailed and full of a delicate precise admiration for the place he had discovered and loved. A younger man, tanned and smoking a spliff, came through from an inner room.

‘My son, Hector,’ the old painter said.

A young woman with long black hair followed.

‘This is Maria, his girlfriend.’

They both came over and kissed Anya, greeting her without hesitation, as if they were friends.

‘Would you like to stay for lunch?’ Hector asked.

‘Oh, no, it’s okay.’

‘It’s just some vegetables and couscous,’ Maria added.

‘No, I have to be going.’ Anya headed quickly for the door.

It felt unsafe to stay inside their open-hearted ease for she knew she would be revealed to them.

‘Let me give you some cochineal,’ the old painter said, coming with her.

From the dying cactus he scraped the soft clinging whiteness with a knife, and smeared it into a plastic bag.

‘It’s the females that make the dye; they never leave the plant, they just stay there laying eggs until the whole plant dies. They’re reddest when they’ve had their young.’

She took the bag.

‘How long are you staying?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘The house next door belongs to a friend, he rents it cheap if you stay a few months – you could stay and keep drawing.’

Surely something so unexpected yet longed for could not really happen? Surely it would prove a trap, a mistake?

‘That house used to be the old bread oven in the village,’ the painter said. ‘A part of the oven is still there.’

She gazed up at the square stone house up on the rock, shaded by a giant fig tree.

‘Could I look inside?’

‘Of course, go in, the guests left earlier.’

Downstairs, in the kitchen, was the raised stone ledge of the old oven, where village loaves would have risen inside a circle of fire. A ladder went up from it to a bedroom with a desk by a window and a view through the branches of the fig tree to the mountains slumbering in the sun, majestic and indifferent to the flickering of life in the hearts of people.

When Anya went outside the painter was tending to a geranium. A furry grey cat curled on a stone seat, purring.

‘Bye,’ Anya called to the painter.

‘Let me know how you get on with the cochineal, I’d like to see the results,’ he said.

He really did want to know – she saw his eagerness and the curiosity that had once brought him along mule tracks for miles