Best British Short Stories 2020 Nicholas Royle (best way to read ebooks txt) 📖

bulge. It will vibrate and the valve will hiss. The gauge arrow will melt in the moment immediately before the explosion.

And so later … much later … what do you think they will do?

Well, you have no way to tell.

But you secretly hope that they will come with their fine sieves, soft brushes and sifting trays to salvage fragments from between the ghosts of buckled corrugated walls. That they will catalogue the remnants and display them on soft velvet cushions behind glass in the city centre museum. Come see, thankful people, Come! Scraps of smutted lace, a tattered label clinging to a curved shard of wine bottle, the charred bones of a folding chair, one warped miniature cymbal … Sticky-fingered children will glance at them on their way to the gift shop, where they will pester their parents for erasers and pencils and snow globes decorated with the SelfStore4U logo. And nostalgic, misty-eyed parents will dig out their wallets.

SONIA HOPEBELLY

Vanessa couldn’t believe her luck when Reggie asked her out. I’ll treat you to a Nando’s, he said.

He drove her to the West End in a silver Volkswagen Golf GTi. Vanessa didn’t dare ask where he’d got it. They abandoned the car down a side street off Charing Cross Road and ran laughing towards Trafalgar Square.

Reggie scrambled up the nearest stone plinth, pulling Vanessa up behind him until they were sitting opposite each other on one of the monumental bronze lions. Vanessa watched Reggie pull a spliff out of his pocket. He lit it, took a drag, and passed it to her. She inhaled and then breathed out as slowly and as nonchalantly as she could. She didn’t want to cough in case Reggie laughed at her. The air around them was herby, sickly sweet.

We should get married, Reggie said.

You’d have to ask me first, said Vanessa.

How many kids should we have?

Two. A girl and a boy.

In Nando’s, Reggie told Vanessa all about himself and Vanessa listened, nodded and smiled. The taste of peri-peri chicken, greasy fries, and the fizz of ice-cold Coke in her mouth was bliss. Reggie realised he’d forgotten his wallet at home so Vanessa paid.

They caught the N29 bus home, and when they got off at the last stop Reggie said, I’ll call you. And Vanessa thought but did not say, You haven’t got my number.

Two weeks later, Vanessa was out shopping with her mum when she noticed a boy and girl walking down the opposite side of the High Street. Vanessa couldn’t help but notice the way the girl’s belly strained against her T-shirt, protruding so much that she thought it might burst through the fabric, exposing its thin skin and thready veins to the world. The boy held the girl’s hand tightly. He was almost pulling her along.

Vanessa’s mum asked, Who are you staring at? And Vanessa replied, No-one.

JEFF NOON & BRIDGET PENNEYTHE FURTHER DARK

You’ve been looking at the email for hours and hours, the same email. Or have hours joined together to create a day and in turn days added one after another to make a week, a fortnight, a month? You find it scary to think that. So look away from the screen. Turn your head and gaze around the room. Get up out of your chair. Tell yourself to get up. OK, flatten your feet on the floor under your desk. Feel the pressure in your arches, every wriggle of your toes. Concentrate and the rest will follow. Or don’t think at all and your muscles will act instinctively. Part of a chain reaction. Or perhaps not. Keep still, keep still, don’t move. You’re fuddled. Keep repeating yourself, it’s funny how quickly it all becomes true. Stay still. Concentrate.

If you start at the beginning, surely you’ll make sense of this. You will work out what is happening. You will work out why you feel this way. You can remember when the first email came. You were having coffee with … Maria? Somewhere down the road. Somewhere no more than one hundred steps from here. You’re faint and exhausted. Sweating. You don’t believe the clock in the bottom corner of your computer screen. But this is your room, your familiar room, you know everything in it, all your trinkets and non-precious objects, it’s your room, you’re repeating yourself now. Isn’t that meant to be comforting, isn’t that a way of reinforcing your sense of self in your surroundings if you just go on repeating this really isn’t, this really isn’t good for you. Keep saying it anyway. This is your room.

Are you hungry? You have food in the kitchen but you would have to stand up to access it and this you can’t seem to do even if you are telling yourself this is what you want. You can’t remember when you last ate. So you must be hungry. Repeat to yourself. You are going to eat right now. Order a pizza with free home delivery. You will choose the toppings you like: cracked pepper, artichoke, caramelised onion? At least you recognise their names though you can’t for the life of you remember how they taste. Why not include a half-price fizzy drink with your order? You will open the door when you hear the bell. But that means standing up, moving about, taking steps. Your life is right here on the screen in front of you … you can’t see anything else that’s why you can’t turn round you look at your fingers resting on the keyboard, awaiting instructions; delete or open? It’s too hard a choice, too hard too hard too hard you repeat you repeat you repeat …

You received the email yesterday or could it have been last week? In your inbox on your screen you really need to focus. You click. You open. That part is easy. You see a blank. A blank is what you’re looking at a blank is what you’ve been trying to get your head round staring at the screen hypnotised by next