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

blinked. I’d signed my form. I hadn’t blessed anyone. And then the anaesthetic. Six. Five. Four.

She had arrived with bags. A lot of them. These bags were plastic. Blue. She clutched them in her fists like a wild array of blue balloons. I was flat on my back, but with my head slightly raised I saw. And I heard the rustling as she took things out of them.

She had arrived with her husband – I assumed him to be. He stood and watched close by. I remember his head was – tilted to one side.

She was rustling all the time. It made me smile.

He watched and I watched as she set things out. Cloth – a length of cloth – on top of the side table. Small items – great care – on top of this. On the the … shelf, table, table-top over the bed – that swivelled over the bed – perhaps it was a basin. I don’t know. Perhaps there was a towel. The last thing she did though – she rolled out a rug. A small rug. Great care. And then she turned to the man, to her husband, asked for help. I think perhaps what she wanted was alignment – the the the the the side table, the edge of the rug, the bed …

He raised both hands. He said something to her. Perhaps he said … you know, I can’t be sure. His voice was gentle, hard to hear. I can’t be sure what it was he said.

When he’d gone – the man – and then when she’d gone – the woman – when she’d gone for the procedure, her procedure, a man in green appeared – snorted – a sound like laughter – said, You’re kidding me – cleared her things away. It took no time at all.

Having seen the effort she had gone to, I found this troubling. I felt – great concern. I had … how can I describe it? I was becoming increasingly anxious that the woman might not return.

I did not want to think of it. Watching her I’d forgotten where we were. But when they came for her she’d been upset. Nil by mouth. Weak and distressed.

Now she was gone and all her blue bags.

It was night time quiet. The lights were low. A storm was flickering in my cranium. I put one hand on top of my head to try to calm things down. Something was shifting, rising, teeming – something … microbial. My eyes were open or shut. Explosions of colour gave way to soft fur. A studio theatre with inky drapes felt familiar and benign but then it fell apart and was a vast and funnelling black hole.

Later on she was crying. I couldn’t see her. It was dark. Later still I would wonder if she was even real – I couldn’t know. When I’d seen her, had my eyes been open or shut?

Open, shut, I cried with her. Afterwards I slept.

I would think of her again much later, but at the time I had things on my mind. For one, I could not seem to get up. My hands, my arms, my legs, moved fairly freely – yes. My head up off the pillow – just a bit, not for long. For the rest, it felt like I’d been stapled lengthways through the middle and the giant staple had attached me to the bed.

The pain was tremendous.

My toes remained oddly detached. Long afterwards they seemed to try to move for the rest of me.

When a nurse showed me the mechanism that could tilt my bed, I pressed the button. My head was raised, my upper body too, the ward came more fully into view. It seemed stable.

Don’t get me wrong. When I left, I left sleek and slender and upright – a new and improved version of myself full of screws and rods and other things besides. A vague concern I might be struck by lightning. But I had backbone. I was spineless no more.

I could give you some associations of spinelessness – what it means to be without backbone at all. First up: a man attempting to crawl, flat out, face down in the dirt. This image perhaps comes from a film.

The dressings came off. There were large staples too. These had held the wounds together. The doctor used pliers. It was hard not to notice how she flinched.

The scars. The scars were livid. They ran in very straight lines beside the spine. There were rows of tiny legs where the staples had been. These tiny legs looked like they were running and running.

I’d not processed, somehow, that afterwards – after the procedure – I’d not be able to move, ever again, the way I’d moved before. I had not understood that it would seem to affect every small articulation.

I would envy the bodies of dancers, and gymnasts. It would seem not impossible, not far-fetched – another version, another me, who might have done just that … that bend, right there.

In my shoes my toes moved with longing.

Movement – it was so awkward. There was a way to get in and out of bed. No twisting. Roll. Roll to get up. Roll like a bug to get up.

Interest in the words exoskeleton, endoskeleton.

Imagine the tools – the tools they would use – the force it would take – to leave a person rigid – to leave a person full of rods and screws.

I wanted a reversal. I had a dream where I banged and banged on the door and I begged, Take it out! There is no way back, they said. The whole thing would crumble. It’s part of you now.

Time passed. Time passed. What had happened to my body was unspoken. Part of me.

So.

So time passed. It was much later. I met the translator. Everything she said was provisional. Subject to change. You might think it would be annoying – but I found that I liked it. I hadn’t expected