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

She waited ten minutes then crept down the corridor. Behind the closed door she could hear the sound of a woman crying out in pain, and she listened to that noise for a few seconds before she burst into the room. He had his headphones on and was watching—

‘What’s that?’ she said.

‘What are you doing?’ he said, startled.

‘What are you doing? Are you into women in head scarves?’

‘What?’ he said, looking back to the screen.

‘What are you watching?’

‘It’s a documentary about the occupation of the West Bank!’

He was thinking of such different things to her. What did it mean that at that moment she would have preferred him to be watching porn for men who were turned on by women in hijabs? Anything to show that living with her hadn’t put him off sex for ever. Anything to taint one of his good causes and bring him down to her level, the baby-hungry function she hated becoming, the bourgeois woman willing to let her mind and principles be rotted by her hormones.

‘I’m not just here to see David,’ she told Patrick. ‘I’m staying with my sister, taking my nieces to the theatre tomorrow, just going to wind down and walk around, see some exhibitions.’

‘Good. I was worried you might be considering getting back with him.’

‘Maybe I should. I haven’t found anyone else.’

‘You can’t have been looking hard enough. Any single man would be mad not to want you.’

He was not convincingly smooth. What she had liked most about him when they made friends was his abrasiveness, his willingness to argue against the consensus. But this was not a quality which would serve him well in his current predicament. Nor would any other qualities he possessed or didn’t.

‘Are you serious?’ she said. ‘I have my eye trained on every eligible model. It gets me into situations.’

She told him the story about the man on the train and how she had surprised him.

‘No!’ Patrick kept saying. ‘That’s brilliant. Well done, you.’

She waited to see if he would offer her the opinion that he didn’t really like porn. Casually, as an afterthought. As men had offered to her before. Sitting back in their chairs and looking her in the eye with an unnatural amount of care.

‘Do you watch porn on trains?’

‘No, I do not. I’d be worried about my data plan. Look, do you really have to meet David later? Blow him off and hang out with me.’

‘That sounds obscene.’

‘I suppose I should feel lucky you haven’t reported me to the sex police.’

‘“He said, bitterly.”’

‘I am bitter!’ he said.

‘I know you are,’ she said. ‘I know.’ 3

It was nine when she met David; she was half an hour late; each time she refused to acquit Patrick without charge another argument sparked and needed to be stamped out. He was prepared to forego his complete innocence in the abstract but not on a single specific instance of wrongdoing. Despite the rhetoric she kept hearing from men that they ‘had to learn from women’, most still had the idea that they had to be innocent to be loveable. Impeccable. When it was the contortions they made to convince everyone that they were blemishless that made them most ugly.

David, always frugal, had suggested a Pizza Express on the South Bank. It’s fine, he texted, when she told him she was late but on the way. I’ve got a book, and she could picture it, something published by Verso that he would tell her about. Full of underlinings and annotations. What was happening to her to make her understand David’s intelligence so negatively? That he read philosophy purposefully enough to summarise and argue with it and apply it to public policy should have been a seductive thing about him, so why had she once dreamed of him ejaculating dusty pencil shavings over a white conference table?

As Pizza Expresses went, David had picked a nice one; it looked out on the Thames, on the bankside tinselled with fairy lights. Perhaps, she thought, he had chosen the place to be romantic. She worried that the reason he annoyed her so much was because she still wanted something from him, still believed he was reformable. They were both thirty-eight years old and knew they could live together in something like peace; they had done so for four years in her long breaks from teaching, in amiable semi-seclusion, on a sofa together with their books or in their separate working spaces. But what had seemed civilised then was no longer the type of peace she wanted; she was ready to sacrifice peace, even though she loved the peace she no longer wanted. How unfair that he had only ever had to acquiesce to her suggestion that they tried for a baby, that it was he who had forced her to bring it up, and that the first thing he had suggested when she admitted that their relationship was floundering was that perhaps this was because it was too soon for them to have a baby. She had been thirty-five then and it was not too soon for anything.

He was sitting upstairs at a little table by the window, tapping a pencil against the book he had open. And he looked just the same as she remembered him, his hair at the longer end of the length he let it get to, his beard a bit thicker than it had been, but still tidy, and his face had not cracked up, she saw no great scars left by her absence, just the slight crows’ feet and wrinkled brow that all sentient people their age had. He was a good-looking man, another unfairness. She watched him read something that disturbed him and he squeezed his brows together, scribbled something down. And then he smiled and let out a little laugh, and she remembered his sense of humour, the pithy accuracy with which he put down their shared enemies, and how she had loved him because of who he was, and not