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

He had also noted that the animals to whom he had given names, who visited the compound most often and got talked to, were behaving differently to those wilder creatures, identified by codes if at all, who had to be captured to be brought in for measuring and tests.

Edward was afraid he was being ganged up on. His paranoia again. Jack and Denny seemed to have a stronger bond than him and Marcia, and he could no longer be sure of his wife’s loyalty. He could command these people, push them around, but he had no faith in his own superiority, less than they had probably.

He looked around him. The sky was so blue and the new heather gave a sheen to the world. Marcia’s colour, almost, he thought. This island could be an Eden were it not for Jack and Denny. Or should that be, were it not for Edward?

He reached the tarn and started to undress and fold his clothes neatly on the dry sand. He had brought his swimming trunks, the badge of his Fall, he noted, wryly. He felt a rock, smooth and hard like a large pebble, with his toes. This was not the place for pebbles. He dug at it with his toe and then his fingers, almost sure that it would be that common thing, the shallow brain pan of a sheep. But it was too round and clever for that. He pulled out the skull of a man from the reluctant sand but then weighed the lichen-stained head of an ape in his relieved palm.

He recalled a dream, one he had not recalled before. He had been cleaning the bath, spraying it with the shower attachment and the drain had been gathering hair, in a hirsute maelstrom. Hair is disgusting when you see it like that. The dirty soapy water being sucked thirstily, chokingly through all of that hair. More and more hair. Long red hair and then that metallic red which was Marcia’s in the heather light, and he had a vision of Marcia and a powerful ape in the bath together, soaping one another with cheerful erotic abandon. Marcia ran her fingers through the thick pelt of Monboddo’s muscular back and Edward knew it was not Monboddo but Denny even though he always remained an orangutan. Then he woke up.

Edward pulled up his trunks and stood with the brown water round his ankles. He could tell that the presence behind him was not a dream. For all of their caution he had detected their quiet bestial breathing. He could hear the coarse fluctuation of the cheek flaps of a large ape. He had conjured Monboddo from his dream. He did not know what to do. Perhaps he ought to face the apes, the little group that he was sure waited behind him, but he could not summon his courage. They would throw him from the cliff like Denny’s dog. He did not think that they would follow him into the water. He trod forward carefully, feeling his feet sink into the soft sand. He tried not to disturb the water as though that were the consciousness of the apes.

They did not follow him as he had supposed they would not. Nor did they begin to skirt the shore of the tarn as he had feared they would. He risked a glance behind him. The apes were picking through his clothes and draping them about themselves. His shirt was thrown into the water where it sank hopelessly.

To his left, just for a moment, he saw a figure he thought was Denny slip below the hill. He had raised a hand, but the figure was gone. Surely Denny would have helped him.

Edward walked slowly across the tarn. It was never necessary to swim, but he stroked the water aside with his arms as he waded up to his chest. Monboddo and his apes had not moved. Edward continued to look behind him, almost defiantly now, as he reached the further shore. This was why he did not see the second group of apes awaiting him there and which suddenly rose to meet his white dripping nakedness as he stepped into the air again. There were several apes here, all females. An elderly creature he did not know shuffled over to him, standing as upright as a man, and reached out her hand with its crooked wrist to touch his pale face. He dashed this away before she reached him and ran through the apes, painfully, breathlessly among the spiky heather in his silly swimming trunks. A shameful bleat might have escaped him. Again he was not followed, not even by a call.

Jack said it was Denny’s birthday. Would they like to go over for a drink and some stew? Such an invitation was not turndownable. What might they say? They were busy? They had been asked elsewhere? The promise of stew was delightful. Edward put on a dark jacket and Marcia a tight but highnecked protective jumper. She had decided to give Denny a whirlpool sketch as a birthday gift.

Obviously, Denny’s party was going to take place outside of the Nortons’ house, inside which neither Edward nor Marcia had ever been. It was a barbecue, but with stew. There was music, loud and barbaric. There were many apes, some of which were more or less always there as though they regarded Jack and Denny’s house as their own and some of which perhaps had been invited to the party. Much drink had already been taken. Also by the orangutans. Both Jack and Denny had taken off their shirts. Jack looked younger the more naked he was. Edward felt frail beside him.

The Dayaks have a story which says that the gods made the orangutan the day after they made men, but they had been celebrating and were still drunk. Some of the apes seemed to be playing with a ball. Others had umbrellas. They loved umbrellas. Denny was thrilled with his picture and