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

up. I had simply said that I was thinking of quitting my job to go travelling for a while, and maybe hook up with Miriam in Thailand, but for Anna that was another way of saying I wanted out. She would brook none of my attempts to make her think otherwise. ‘You’re obviously searching for something, but I don’t see why you have to smash up our lives to go looking for it.’

She was right. I was looking for something, had been for years, but I could never put my finger on what it was or where I might find it. Be it at work or at play, nothing had ever sustained me beyond the initial burst of interest. Not that anyone could tell. I could feign it with the best of them, I could put on the face of a contented, successful careerist and pass myself off as someone to look up to and admire, but inside I felt like the only person doing backstroke in a pool full of front-crawlers. The day I cracked and spoke to Miriam about it she said, ‘Sounds like you’re having an EC.’ When I looked at her askance she said, ‘Existential crisis’ and advised therapy. I laughed. I was as likely to start seeing a shrink as I was to drink paint. When it came to such matters I was, and had always been, a confirmed sceptic, more inclined towards self-help than psychiatric, and yet a belief in my own abilities hadn’t brought me any closer to discovering the source of my angst. Perhaps I would never discover it. As I sat there in that dismal room, feeling a long way from home, waiting to have sex with a person who clearly had as much feeling for me as a dog for a fence-post, the walls seemed to be closing in.

It was the first night of my first trip to Bangkok and, so far, the city had been a huge disappointment. I had expected the noise, the pollution and the overcrowding, but was surprised by the squalor and the crumbling buildings dotted with rusting air-conditioning machines. I’d been in a grumpy mood since landing at the airport. Needing a room for the night before heading to Koh Samui to meet up with Miriam, I had spent a long time at the hotel reservations desk in the arrival lounge leafing through glossy brochures that featured page after page of sky-scraper hotels. To my inexperienced eyes, they all looked the same. I couldn’t choose between them and regretted that I hadn’t thought to book something back in the UK. More from impatience than a desire to help me decide, the young woman at the desk had tapped her French-polished nail on the page and said, ‘Very good this one. Central, cheap, have pool,’ but for some reason she failed to mention that The Grace was also a knocking shop. Later, when I walked into its faded, high-ceilinged lobby and saw the amount of middle-aged Arab men lounging around with young Thai girls draped across their fat bellies, I was repulsed. I was no prude, and this was Thailand after all, but there was something so off-putting about the scene I almost cancelled my reservation. I only didn’t because I couldn’t face traipsing about the city in the mid-afternoon sun searching for an alternative. Not on the back of a non-stop, fourteen-hour flight from Manchester.

Later that evening, after a revitalising sleep, I left The Grace to find something to eat. In a nearby food hall I had an extremely tasty dish of deep-fried fish in sweet chilli sauce, accompanied by a steaming-hot bowl of egg-fried rice: all for the princely sum of five pounds. Things were looking up. My fellow diners consisted almost entirely of Western men and their Thai ‘girlfriends’. One guy, wearing an England football shirt and clearly stoned, had been eyeing me from the moment I arrived. He was one of the few men sitting by himself and after a while he got up from his table and came and sat on the bench next to me. I resisted the urge to move to another table as I didn’t want to draw attention. I was feeling conspicuous enough. He introduced himself as Pete, Pete from Peckham, and within minutes was telling me, in a very loud voice, about all the countries he’d visited and what he’d got up to and where he was planning on going next. In this way I learned that he’d been on the road for almost a year, criss-crossing south-east Asia on a seemingly endless quest to, as he put it, ‘have it large’. He made me think of Miriam, who’d been travelling for a similar amount of time, in the same part of the world, making me jealous with all her Insta posts. She seemed to be having the time of her life. Travelling seemed to agree with her, but the same could not be said for Peckham Pete. Gaunt enough to be skeletal, he had dirty, broken fingernails, crusty, sun-bleached dreads and a long, wispy, unkempt beard that put me in mind of a wizard. If he had left the UK with any light in his eyes, not a trace remained. On and on he prattled. At one point, just for something to say, I told him I was off to Koh Samui first thing in the morning and he started bombarding me with tips. ‘Stay away from Lamai Beach. Boring as fuck. Fulla tofu eaters and yoga freaks. Head for Chaweng. That’s where it’s all ’appening. Cheap booze, drugs. You name it!’

After an hour or so in the food hall I felt a headache coming on, caused by a combination of listening to Pete and the glare from the blinding strip lighting. I had to get some air, stretch my legs. As I stood up Pete said, ‘You off, then?’ I nodded and he added, ‘Nice meeting you.’ His disappointment was all too apparent. I