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

‘See, I am an animal person,’ she said. Deep red scratches covered her arms and legs. Her whole body smelt of antiseptic and sun cream.

‘Yes, you are.’

My last day in the office was uneventful. The managing director walked past my desk a few times and counted the computers, desks and chairs. I had no reason to say goodbye to Bill so I snuck out while he was at lunch and took a bus home.

There was a note on the door of the pool house: Gone away for a week. Eggs in the fridge, feel free to eat them or they’ll go bad. Clicker on the breakfast bar. Enjoy! Linda x

I wondered where she might have gone. I tried to imagine her in an airport, wheeling her suitcase through the departure hall in her denim cut-offs. Or sitting on a plane, eating a bag of nuts.

A girl who worked as cabin crew once told me they keep a special blanket on board every flight, in case someone dies. The body is covered by the blanket and left buckled in its seat, so passengers won’t be disturbed by the sight of a dead man or woman being carried down the aisle.

I hoped Linda wouldn’t die on her flight. Villa Aloha felt strange without her. I went to the kitchen and ate some eggs. Then I took one of her beers out to the pool and waited until dark to swim.

The worst of the summer temperatures were over now. The heat had started to break. As I swam, a breeze floated across the garden and the shadows of the palm tree fronds twinkled across the water, like fingers on a piano.

That’s when I saw it. Its pink sores shone under the moonlight. It had a missing eye and a missing ear too. Its white fur looked wet.

I swam towards it and let out a miaow, but it didn’t miaow back. It looked tired. The cat laid down on the grass next to the pool and seemed to fall asleep. As if it had walked for miles across the desert, to rest its legs, to swim.

TIM ETCHELLSMAXINE

In the year of Asbestos, country of Endland (sic), Maxine gets a job to read words to a blind man called Casper, what lives alone outside the peripheral ring-road, in a district beyond all forces of yuppification.

Maxine don’t know too much bout ‘geo-demographic dynamics’ etc that is talked about on TV but she knows very well that a powerful permanent hex-ring of dog shit, broke glass and partly crushed up Strongbow cans is keeping the Stasis in that neighbourhood.

On her journey that morning by olde tram she chews gum forever, her jaw a machinery, eyes bright. Kids in prams nearby look from M to their mothers what have ‘long since forgotten how to cry’ ©. Tram passes through the city (S______). Getting off at the stop right near Casper’s place M. takes the gum out + sticks it to a poster for some new Bangla movie, kneading residue deep in the pixelated faces of stars, their transfigured appearance what she hopes will be an omen for the day. Something has to change.

Casper’s place, a shithole on 33rd floor.

As a startup for reading he asks Maxine to take 3 chapters from a closed-down airport novel called A Romance of Sadie. The book is just a turgid paste of words that knots up in her brain and mouth and M. finds it boring, wishing there was something less predictable – a story about robots and consciousness, a story about a new kind of sunlight – anything but reading porn to old blokes.

When the reading is all done Casper pays her (£4.50 the hour) and she goes home.

Other jobs of Maxine involve reading to:

– hyperactive children

– persons/animals in a coma

– voice recognition software

– dying persons/animals

– prisoners

– the dead

etc

One night there is a bombing in centre of town. Front of shops are hanging all off again and main entrance of the shopping mall is a cliché debris of twisted metal, filthy trashed consumer items and limbs/body parts all motherfuckered into dust. Pundits arrive and set up to start filming segments, rearranging debris and other aspects of the carnage. All around taxis and private cars double-up as improvised ambulances, every single bystander a temporary trauma nurse, every driver an unqualified maniac of urgency, every victim screaming blood out all over upholstery and no one knows what’s on the radio.

On the pavement near the bomb scene, a spray paint graffiti makes a promise or prediction that nobody reads: the thoughts of the living replaced with those of the dead.

Rescue workers are going back and forth w the wounded, shaking their heads at the dead deceased that lie carelessly anywhere. All the while sniffer dogs and assorted looters emboldened by breakdown of lawlessness freely walk the rubble, attentive to strange vibrations from down below fallen masonry and looking for stuff to ‘purloin’.

The air in all directions is ‘alive with distant sirens’ when Maxine gets there to scene of explosion – reporting for reading duties. A Doctor on all day and all night shift sends her Immediately to the commandeered Gymnasium of a nearby school what has been turned into a temporary hospital/morgue. The whole place is stuffed with the wounded/dead pulled out and then carried from their wannabe graves under the waste-scape that used to be Primark or possibly Lidl, no one seems to remember or care.

Later, in the Hillsborough classroom with a frieze done by kids depicting the naïve evolution of quadrupeds, Maxine cleans wounds with Amateur knowledge and bulk-buy disinfectant, comforting persons in distress and isolating those in danger to others or themselves. When electric power predictably fails she wanders in the Great Hall and reads in whispers by candlelight to those wounded still capable of listening.

She reads from her favourite stories like Kick-Boxer by Andrej Rublev and Corrosive Surface of a Pessimist Malefactor by Samira Shapiro Sustenance. She reads from A History of Starvation and Advent Adventures of the Anal