Ханиф Курейши - Best British Short Stories 2020

At the centre of the labyrinth was a small round plaza with a single silver birch tree and a tiled fuente , water splashing from three spouts into a stone trough. Sellers had set up tables of herbs, oils, soaps, incense, olive wood sculptures, red wine, rough brown bread and cakes with wet dark berries and plums glistening inside. Anya wandered through the bodies and voices and sat at the edge to draw. She saw Beatriz in the crowd, kissing everyone who came to greet her. Beatriz, who had lived in Madrid before, had spoken of her friends from the village, who, like her, had come to the mountains to make new lives. Some had succeeded while others had been overcome by the force of that clear pure stillness: a promise, a void, a magical mirror, mesmerising and luring the unsuspecting into delusion, stilling thought, dulling desire.

An old man in a corduroy blazer came past and stopped, leaning on his walking stick, to look down at her drawing.

‘Long ago, I used to come here to draw,’ he said. ‘In those days there were no roads, only tracks.’

‘You live here?’

‘For forty years. If you come to my house I’ll show you my watercolours of the village – it was very different then. People still kept animals on the ground floor. You should have seen the flies!’ He chuckled.

She didn’t know what to say. She often didn’t. She never knew what to speak of when talking with strangers.

‘Well, see you,’ he said, and went slowly up a slope past the fuente.

She returned to her drawing, but the old man had disrupted her. He had sounded English, a foreigner in the strange village that he had claimed for himself. Why had he stopped to talk with her? In England she never sketched outside; she never wanted to. Now she kept wanting to draw, everywhere she went.

‘Have you seen the cacti?’ The old man was back, holding out a gnarled cactus leaf covered with white encrustations. ‘It’s the cochineal bug. All the cactii in the village are infested.’

She had seen them on her walks, the big-lobed cactii with their broken limbs, rotting and weakened by the life gathered on them.

‘You can make dye with it,’ the old man said. ‘It’s what they used to make the red coats of the British army. And you can paint with it, but you’ll need to stop the colour fading: maybe vinegar or salt – you should try it. I have a lot of cactii in my garden, if you want to experiment.’

‘Maybe,’ she murmured, trying not to encourage the man.

Why did he keep coming to her? He clutched his stick as he leaned down to place the leaf beside her, then staggered up past the fuente again.

‘I see you’ve met David,’ Beatriz said, coming over. ‘He’s a famous artist in Spain.’

‘He’s invited me to his house to look at paintings.’

‘He must have liked your drawings.’ Beatriz studied Anya’s sketchbook. ‘You’re good! You should go. He loves to teach. I can see the two of you becoming good friends!’

But Beatriz didn’t know about Anya. Anya was not good at making friends. In the office her manager had told her to get better at teamwork, but Anya hadn’t known how. She had trusted no one at the office, feeling their pity and disdain of her, a certain wariness around her, that she had been glad to leave behind.

‘Go and see David,’ Beatriz urged.

‘Is it safe to go alone?’

‘Safe? Ah, don’t worry, it’s nothing like that, he really will just talk about painting – you won’t be able to stop him! Tell me a time and I’ll come and rescue you!’

‘There’s no need.’

She wasn’t going. Of her family, it was her brother who made friends easily. He was the generous one, her mother said. He was open-hearted and kind; Anya was hostile, her heart was hard and closed and secretive.

Musicians arrived in the plaza: a man and woman with matching golden dreadlocks began to drum. People gathered around them. Another man came pulling a cajón on a rickety trolley and joined them, sitting crouched over the mellow-gold wooden box, his fingers rippling a shuddering rising rhythm with the drums. The drumming rose up above the voices and the splashing of the fuente; it throbbed against the ring of stone houses around the plaza and reached up to the empty blue sky. People started dancing. The drumming was in Anya, it throbbed in her eyes, her ears. She couldn’t draw any more, she couldn’t breathe. She reached for the labyrinth, entering its shade and sudden cool. It curved into quiet, into a tunnel with ragged wooden roof beams and peeling blue walls. She walked towards sunlight at the far end. Stone steps climbed to a cactus, half in bloom half dying, by a gatepost.

‘Oh, so you came,’ said the old painter and opened the gate to let her in.

The painter’s house was built into the rock. The beams of the ceiling were whole chestnut trunks. The walls were painted with ochre from the mountains and hung with Berber rugs. In the kitchen he poured beer into glasses and they sat at the table before a deep hooded fireplace and he showed her his paintings: exquisite, detailed and full of a delicate precise admiration for the place he had discovered and loved. A younger man, tanned and smoking a spliff, came through from an inner room.

‘My son, Hector,’ the old painter said.

A young woman with long black hair followed.

‘This is Maria, his girlfriend.’

They both came over and kissed Anya, greeting her without hesitation, as if they were friends.

‘Would you like to stay for lunch?’ Hector asked.

‘Oh, no, it’s okay.’

‘It’s just some vegetables and couscous,’ Maria added.

‘No, I have to be going.’ Anya headed quickly for the door.

It felt unsafe to stay inside their open-hearted ease for she knew she would be revealed to them.

‘Let me give you some cochineal,’ the old painter said, coming with her.

From the dying cactus he scraped the soft clinging whiteness with a knife, and smeared it into a plastic bag.

‘It’s the females that make the dye; they never leave the plant, they just stay there laying eggs until the whole plant dies. They’re reddest when they’ve had their young.’

She took the bag.

‘How long are you staying?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘The house next door belongs to a friend, he rents it cheap if you stay a few months – you could stay and keep drawing.’

Surely something so unexpected yet longed for could not really happen? Surely it would prove a trap, a mistake?

‘That house used to be the old bread oven in the village,’ the painter said. ‘A part of the oven is still there.’

She gazed up at the square stone house up on the rock, shaded by a giant fig tree.

‘Could I look inside?’

‘Of course, go in, the guests left earlier.’

Downstairs, in the kitchen, was the raised stone ledge of the old oven, where village loaves would have risen inside a circle of fire. A ladder went up from it to a bedroom with a desk by a window and a view through the branches of the fig tree to the mountains slumbering in the sun, majestic and indifferent to the flickering of life in the hearts of people.

When Anya went outside the painter was tending to a geranium. A furry grey cat curled on a stone seat, purring.

‘Bye,’ Anya called to the painter.

‘Let me know how you get on with the cochineal, I’d like to see the results,’ he said.

He really did want to know – she saw his eagerness and the curiosity that had once brought him along mule tracks for miles over the mountains to the village that was his now. She felt awkward not kissing him goodbye like a local. And she didn’t want to leave him, but she hurried back to the silence of the tunnel.

The drumming in the plaza had stopped. There was a smell of garlic and frying onions. A man stirred stew in a pot hung over a fire. A woman in a polka-dot apron laid tables outside a house. Beatriz sat with a group at a table, laughing with a man. Anya didn’t know how to join them. She stayed in the plaza watching the people still strolling around the stalls. Three figures stepped out from the crowd, the principals in an opera, about to begin their song: two women and a small girl in a blue dress. The child’s pale-brown hair fluttered against her cheek as she stood dreamy and musing. The woman holding her hand, the mother perhaps, asked a question, but the child didn’t answer, still caught in dreams. The woman asked louder but the child still didn’t hear. The woman’s voice grew sharp, then a slap cracked the air as she struck the child’s arm. As always there was no warning, no time to prepare. The child’s mouth fell open, her shock turning to shame and the horror of betrayal. Anya felt it rush back to her from a secret place of her own, deep within her.