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

over the mountains to the village that was his now. She felt awkward not kissing him goodbye like a local. And she didn’t want to leave him, but she hurried back to the silence of the tunnel.

The drumming in the plaza had stopped. There was a smell of garlic and frying onions. A man stirred stew in a pot hung over a fire. A woman in a polka-dot apron laid tables outside a house. Beatriz sat with a group at a table, laughing with a man. Anya didn’t know how to join them. She stayed in the plaza watching the people still strolling around the stalls. Three figures stepped out from the crowd, the principals in an opera, about to begin their song: two women and a small girl in a blue dress. The child’s pale-brown hair fluttered against her cheek as she stood dreamy and musing. The woman holding her hand, the mother perhaps, asked a question, but the child didn’t answer, still caught in dreams. The woman asked louder but the child still didn’t hear. The woman’s voice grew sharp, then a slap cracked the air as she struck the child’s arm. As always there was no warning, no time to prepare. The child’s mouth fell open, her shock turning to shame and the horror of betrayal. Anya felt it rush back to her from a secret place of her own, deep within her.

The child started to cry, wails of misery writhing out through the voices and laughter. People turned startled. The mother looked harassed and pulled the child by the wrist to go over and join the other woman at a stall. The two women stood looking over amulets and belts and earrings of dull gold, curled into ancient coils. Behind them the child cried alone, her arms wrapped around her, two tiny probing fingers stroking where she had been struck. Her eyes were fixed on the back of the mother, disbelief dark and puzzling in the child’s gaze. Anya knew her question, knew the terror of the answer that might come. An elderly woman paused to stroke the girl’s hair. The mother spun round and the old woman drew back and hobbled away.

Inside Anya was a wavering trail of pencil lines: one line for each slap, a stroke of her own drawn inside her wardrobe, a secret snaking growth in the darkness. Her tally, her score, a belt of nails to tighten around her; she had worn it for the longest time. Now it was broken, falling open to reveal her naked; unheld she spilled from its grip, formless, unsheathed. She ran into the labyrinth’s silence searching for the way out, but the alley swirled her deeper in. A vine-shaded street unfurled down to a dark still stream, a stone slab, a bridge to cross over into a courtyard overlooked by the terraces of houses. A dog barked down at her from behind an iron railing. She turned into a passageway filled with sun. Outside a bluepainted doorway a snake lay on a step. Startled, it slid swiftly on, silver and olive-green, a line of black diamonds rippling on ahead of her and up around the stone bulges of a wall before disappearing into a hole in a rock.

Around the rock was a garden with great bushes of lavender, rosemary, marigolds, marijuana and a small square chapel with a bell-tower shaped like a minaret. Anya entered the chapel’s deep chill silence and sank onto a pew, covering her face with her hands as tears ran out from her darkness and the hard stone heart breaking open within. The door banged behind her. She wiped her eyes at once and sat up straighter, but the figures running down the aisle didn’t look at her. A man sat down at a piano. A woman cradled a violin and brought up a bow and the violin’s call soared into the emptiness. The piano eased in, dancing warm and golden, their song rising up to the saints in red gilded alcoves and marble angels reaching down their translucent pale hands to Anya. There was always someone reaching out, there was always the new and golden. It would lead her through the labyrinth to its end, to her new beginning.

When she left the chapel, the bag of cochineal had burst in her hands. Her tears had dissolved the frail white sheaths to a fierce new redness. She crushed the women and mothers, staining the walls of the labyrinth as she found her way back to the old painter and the ancient furnace next door, ready to take her place.

ANDREW HOOKTHE GIRL WITH THE HORIZONTAL WALK

The heart weighs 300 grams. The tricuspid valve measures 10 cm, the pulmonary valve 6.5 cm, mitral valve 9.5 cm and aortic valve 7 cm in circumference.

Nicholas Arden looked over the newspaper at his wife, Ellen, buttering his toast at the opposite end of the breakfast table.

‘How hard can it be, honey?’

‘You haven’t read the script. I’ll need to dumb down.’

‘I always said you were too intellectual.’

Ellen slid the toast across the table, catching the bottom of the paper. The ink was freshly printed and she imagined some of it colouring the butter. Ellen wondered how much it would take to poison someone. Not that she wanted to poison Nick. But she was easily preoccupied.

‘I need an angle,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be led by the studio on this one.’

‘Then put your foot down. Both of them, if you have to.’

She waggled the butter knife. ‘Don’t get smart, wise guy.’

‘I’m trying to catch you up.’

It was a diamond-bright spring morning. They sat on the terrace extending from their white-painted house under clear blue light. Beneath them, the swimming pool caught ripples off the sky. Somewhere in the house their two children were getting ready for school. Ellen loved them, but she was thankful of the maid. There was only so much noise she could take.

Nick folded the paper, wrung out one end with a