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

the mirror. Decide to sprawl on the comfy couch and stick your feet on the coffee table. There’s a hole in one of your socks but no big deal. You wonder how many times the hands of your clock have gone round since you last looked. You flip through the pages of a book. Nothing makes sense. Don’t think about the screen on the desk your emails the blank messages. You could close your eyes. Is there light outside? Ticktock. It’s morning. It’s evening. And you glance at your phone over there not ringing never ringing.

Or you could go out to the cafe just one hundred steps down the road, or the public house, maybe, just across the street. The Rose and Crown. Maria and your other friends will be there, chatting away as though nothing at all has ever happened. You take a pew. A drink appears on the table in front of you. You nod thanks. You are fine, thanks. The conversation turns away from you as you evidently don’t feel much like talking today. But all you want, all you are waiting for, really, is for just one of them to ask you: What happened, mate? When you pressed the button? Did you press the button? Will they will they will they will they will they ever ask?

But no. They barely look at you. No one asks. You’ve got that floaty feeling. Reach for the table edge. Hold on tight. Now your friends are all laughing at a joke and you make a huge effort to join in but your laugh is mistimed. They don’t notice. So study your nails. Then your fingertips: are these loops whorls arches the same as they ever were? You’ve had enough. No point excusing yourself. Just head for the toilets where you find yourself waiting waiting waiting for the tap to stop rinsing soap off your hands. Dare the mirror at last and see your features your eyes your lips your hair start to fade to fade to fade. Blink. Then look away. No second glance. Keep on walking, touching and holding each object as you reach it. The dryer, the wall, the door jamb, Maria’s hand …

STEPHEN THOMPSONSAME SAME BUT DIFFERENT

She was staying in a part of Bangkok choked by a tangle of overhead power cables. The nearer we got to her place, the stealthier she became. She was acting like a burglar. Halfway down a deserted side-street crawling with cats and stinking of sewage, she came to an abrupt halt in front of a three-storey building that had bars on the ground-floor windows and a front door made from a combination of wood and corrugated iron. As if she were being watched, she slowly pushed the door open and we entered a gloomy, low-ceilinged hallway with a wooden staircase just about visible in the distance. She started towards it but stopped when I asked, ‘No light?’

‘Keep your voice down!’ she snapped. ‘It’s late. People are asleep. The bulb’s blown.’

Earlier that evening, in the bar, she had been very attentive towards me, occasionally touching my knee and making sexual innuendos; now she didn’t seem bothered. There was an air of officiousness about her, she had a job to do and was keen to get on with it. At the top of the stairs she flicked a switch and one of two overhead strip bulbs flickered into life. A tiled landing ran off to our right with doors on either side. Creeping along, we passed a picture on the wall of the bespectacled king whose image seemed to adorn every public space in the city. There was even one in my room back at The Grace. The picture was hanging askew in a cheap, gold-painted frame that did nothing for the regality of the subject.

The bulb was blown in her room too. Through a narrow, frosted window a shaft of street light fell diagonally across the floor, strong enough for me to see the room was sizeable but bare: a single mattress on the floor covered by a crumpled white sheet, an enormous rucksack leaning against the wall with several items of clothing spilling from the top and a few others in a pile on the floor. Hot and stuffy, the room could have done with an airing and the tiled floor clearly hadn’t been swept in a while, judging by the grit that crunched under our feet as we came in. Kicking off her flip-flops, she padded over to the bed and started to arrange it, even though there was nothing to arrange. I hung back. All evening I had been feeling aroused, but now sex was the last thing on my mind. I thought about Miriam and could almost hear her telling me to ‘just go for it’.

She finished smoothing the sheet and started heading for the door.

‘Where’re you going?’ I asked, trying to disguise my anxiety.

‘Bathroom,’ she replied. ‘You gonna stand there all night?’

I moved into the room proper and she slipped past me out the door. I dragged my feet over to the bed and crouched down, beginning to inspect the sheet. Up close, it didn’t seem as dirty as I had imagined, so I sat on the edge of the mattress and removed my trainers. Moments later I heard the unmistakable sound of someone urinating into a toilet bowl. I swung my legs up onto the mattress, rested my head and back against the flimsy partition wall, and listened for a while.

I began to review the changes I had made to my life in the last few weeks, in the process of which I experienced the old familiar panic: had I done the right thing? Anna hadn’t thought so, and yet she hadn’t made much effort to try to stop me. If I was determined to ruin what we had, the life we were building together, she wasn’t going to stand in my way. The funny thing was, at no point had I mentioned splitting