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

Adventurers #5. She reads from Soil Stealers and Full Power Harry Goes Back Underwater in London & Paris. She reads from Long Tuesday and A Manual for the Strict Correction of Boys (Revised Edition).

In half-light of the hall people are dying, wounds bleeding out all about, as the poets say, and ‘ketchup all over the screen’ ©. Some of the dying have real faces, others just faces from AI. M. tries her best to focus on real ones but sometimes gets confused. Over time the AI gets easier to spot cos those figures in particular seem to lose interest in her reading the more it goes on – their composite faces a mesh of glitch inattention, eyes wandering, artefacting earnestness, then wandering again.

As the night wears down further to the bones M. finds herself with a small group of badly injured schoolgirls, their bodies hidden deep down under swaddling of bandages. She reads from All New Nature Boy, Sally Knew Best, Blunt Instrument and Peter Leper Jones. She reads from Hirashima!, Forgotten Moments and Gogolo Ultima Gogolo Poveraa. She reads and reads until the dawn light is creeping in around her unannounced and all the wounded and all the dead and all the murals what the schoolkids have drawn up there on the wall and everything is all touched by the very 1st and very fine and very golden rays of early mourning sun.

After the episode with the bombing there is a global slowdown and in accordance all around Endland (sic) things get slower and slower. Cars go slow on the roads, people shuffle slow and then slower on pavements and everyone – human and animal – takes a long time to make decisions about anything or do anything at all.

Scientists of Endland mount a huge competition to see what the cause and solution to the slowdown is, with New Universities and olden think-tanks etc competing to demonstrate they profound understanding and business acumen. But on the day comes to announce winner of the competition it is rapidly uncovered that there has been a terrible fraud and the ‘Prise Money’ stolen slowly cent by cent and siphoned/sent off to the Canary Islands in a unreachable Offshore Account.

For reasons that make no sense Maxine is selected to investigate the fraud. She has to journey to another city where she is given lodging in a squatted shop unit with some guys that speak only English and who are apparently running a startup sweatshop to assemble illegal umbrellas. Maxine takes a mattress in the disconnecting corridor but can’t sleep after work at the Fraud Squad cos the constant hammering, bending of metal and sweating of fabric. At intervals above the din come squeals of delight by the children (of the guys), who are from time to time sent outside for random testing of the umbrellas in the test-rain that falls from a hose-pipe, each test session a metaphysical whirlwind of childish unruly footwork, splashing and twirling in all directionz and all of it is watched by Maxine as she peeps out of a spy hole in her ‘living space’ while the kids, unaware of any audience, move across the concrete of the forecourt like a cut-price 3rd-rate Gene Kelly routine badly motion-captured by drunks.

Maxine’s investigation gets off badly after very shaky start. She interviews key suspects who will not let her into their apartment or apartments and only talk to her thru a keyhole. Her head is filled more and more with lies, disinformation, false information, counter-intelligence and generalised nonsense.

Months pass. Investigation founders (sic) and the globalised slowdown continues. War comes along also, long rumoured but always anyway ‘something of a surprise’ and the Agency that Maxine works for – providing ‘professional services in vicinity of reading’ – goes bust cos most of their workers in Endland are swiftly conscripted on a precarious contract and shipped off to the front line of wherever. Even that army needs people that can read.

Not wanting to be any part of the war and sacked from her incompetent investigation into the corrupt competition as already mentioned Maxine doesn’t know what to do. She loses faith in the free market, then loses faith in religion and patriarchy but not necessarily in that order. Before long she ends up down on her luck and on her knees, alienated and sleeping in a bed made with unhappy vibes down the Food Bank along with rest of the scruffs and n’er do wells of that era and area, hungry, and indeed just like totally demoralised.

There is a long complicated induction process where M. is explained the methods of checking food in and out of Food Bank, application of Compound Interest etc, system of E-Numbers and Additives and fines for overdue returns etc. After that she gets to work chatting w disgruntled other paupers and also roped into helping people w their increasingly lunatic Tax forms, Psych Assessments and curse of Pharaoh’s Nightclub. The work is hard and morale all set to general low, also not helped by the slowdown which is still substantive in effect or daily operation.

One day when she hits rock bottom eating a cold re-heated tinned soup and starving to her own bones, Maxine resolves to leave town alone, setting off w/out appropriate clothing or footwear.

Outside City Limits she pass first through a rocky wilderness, then through a green pasture, then through another rocky wilderness etc in which (i.e. the latter, second wilderness, after the pasture) she gets total lost. Without water and without a map or workable sense of direction M. becomes dehydrated and in deep trouble of her life.

Come night fall, in the thrall of her starvation delirium Maxine finds wreckage of a vehicle from a convoy that was probably burned up very long time back. On the bonnet or windscreen dirt and/or dust someone has written the words die foreign die and below it in another hand, pay attention motherfuckers. She crawls inside to shelter the night and soon listens to howl of wolves from