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

focus on the pile of pizza boxes in front of me, she didn’t notice me at first.

‘Hi, it’s Carol, isn’t it?’

She looked up. There was recognition but puzzlement.

‘You came for a consultation. A dream consultation.’

She smiled.

‘This is funny, meeting you here,’ I said, but wasn’t sure what was funny about it.

‘I live here,’ she said.

‘Of course. I gave up the business,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t working out for me.’

‘Oh, that’s a shame,’ she said. ‘You were very helpful.’

‘Was I?’ I said. ‘It’s hard to tell. Most people don’t come back, so I never got much feedback. But there’s an app now you can use any time you want and it lets you give a rating on how helpful the service was.’

‘An app?’

‘Yes, for interpreting dreams. You can download it to your phone. There’s always someone there when you want to discuss them.’ I didn’t want to tell her that it was a bot rather than a person. I should probably have brought a flyer. But, of course, I never expected to bump into one of my ex-clients doing this job.

‘Do you still dream of Donald Trump?’ I asked.

I thought she was going to close the door on me.

‘Doesn’t everyone?’ she asked, genuinely surprised.

‘I don’t,’ I said, truthfully.

‘You’re lucky,’ she said.

There was a voice from inside. A man’s voice.

‘It’s the pizza delivery guy,’ she shouted back.

‘I shouldn’t have come,’ she whispered. ‘Alan doesn’t know.’

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘well, I’m glad you did. You were my last client.’

‘Really?’

‘The app,’ I said.

‘Oh yes.’

We stood there, more awkwardly than before. I wanted to say something.

‘I liked your shoes,’ I said, stupidly. ‘They seemed very sensible.’

We both looked down at her feet. She was wearing bunnyrabbit slippers.

‘Thank you,’ she said, amused.

The solid brogues were neatly lined up on a shoe rack just inside the porch door.

‘Enjoy your pizza.’

‘I hope it all works out for you,’ she said.

‘Oh, this is only temporary.’

‘I have to go.’

‘Your pizza will be getting cold.’

‘Yes, my pizza will be getting cold.’ She was about to close the door, then she hesitated.

‘They don’t stop,’ she said, ‘the dreams. Once they start, I mean. Every night. It scares me, I don’t know what to believe in any more.’

‘It’s all right,’ I said, ‘dreams don’t really mean anything. I’m sorry if I gave you the impression that they did. People want them to mean something, but they’re just …’

‘Random detritus?’ she said.

‘Yes, random detritus.’

She closed the door behind me and I wheeled the bike off the estate.

When I got home it was time for my call with Zuzanna. It was early afternoon in the States. The connection wasn’t that great. She kept fading in and out. At the end of it, I realised she wouldn’t be coming back. I stayed up as late as I possibly could before my tired eyes got the better of me and I lurched over to the cold, empty bed.

In a second I had fallen asleep.

That night I dreamt I was on Air Force One having a New York pastrami sandwich with Donald Trump.

HELEN MORTWEANING

She was losing the names of places. Every time she dropped a feed, let the milk in her breasts come then lessen, another part of the city disappeared. Someone once said Sheffield was a dirty picture in a golden frame. She was forgetting both, the town and the gritstone encircling it. One bright Sunday, she walked out past The Norfolk Arms and the black clutch of the plantation. The baby sat upright in the heather with his chubby legs splayed, shoving strawberries into his mouth and letting the juice trickle down his chin. She ate nothing, tried to count the green tower blocks in her line of vision. Gleadless. She said it out loud so she would not forget. Her husband phoned, his voice steady with concern.

‘Where are you?’

‘We’ve gone for a walk.’

‘Where?’

‘The place where I climb. The big rocks. Beside the car park.’

Later, she learned that it was Burbage. They had a map in the house, inherited from her father-in-law and she circled it in biro, marked a neat X.

As the weeks passed, the map became a maze of noughts and crosses. Attercliffe. Meersbrook. Norton. She pinned it to the wall of the bedroom with blu-tack and when the baby slept she could run her palm flat over it, feel the indentations of the pen, trace an inventory of her loss. Other names were stubbornly recalled. Meadowhall. Don Valley. Owlerton. When she was a teenager, she used to kill time thumbing through the records in Rare and Racy on Devonshire Green even though her parents owned no record player. On the wall was a framed map of Sheffield bomb-sites. The black circles looked like bullet holes. The map seemed to have more dots than spaces. Her grid of the city was starting to feel like that. The shop was gone now and she wondered what had happened to all the records.

One morning, she woke up with the word Heeley on her tongue. She had been dreaming of the City Farm, the sturdy legs of the goats that crowded by the fence and lunged for scraps, alert and noisy, the smell of wet straw and new rain, the farmyard cat who stalked between the pens. By lunchtime, Heeley had gone and she was forced to find the road on the map, the place she knew the farm was. The Health Visitor called round while she was unloading bags of shopping from the car.

‘Is this a good time?’

They drank lukewarm tea from mugs decorated with pictures of biscuits. The Health Visitor’s said I Know How To Party underneath a drawing of a pink frosted party ring. The Health Visitor asked her about the crying spells and how long they lasted, whether she was getting enough sleep. The Health Visitor did not ask about the place names and their slow vanishing. The Health Visitor nodded earnestly and kept her hands folded in her lap.

‘The way you feel is nothing to do with weaning, with breastfeeding,’ she said.