Ханиф Курейши - Best British Short Stories 2020

The child started to cry, wails of misery writhing out through the voices and laughter. People turned startled. The mother looked harassed and pulled the child by the wrist to go over and join the other woman at a stall. The two women stood looking over amulets and belts and earrings of dull gold, curled into ancient coils. Behind them the child cried alone, her arms wrapped around her, two tiny probing fingers stroking where she had been struck. Her eyes were fixed on the back of the mother, disbelief dark and puzzling in the child’s gaze. Anya knew her question, knew the terror of the answer that might come. An elderly woman paused to stroke the girl’s hair. The mother spun round and the old woman drew back and hobbled away.

Inside Anya was a wavering trail of pencil lines: one line for each slap, a stroke of her own drawn inside her wardrobe, a secret snaking growth in the darkness. Her tally, her score, a belt of nails to tighten around her; she had worn it for the longest time. Now it was broken, falling open to reveal her naked; unheld she spilled from its grip, formless, unsheathed. She ran into the labyrinth’s silence searching for the way out, but the alley swirled her deeper in. A vine-shaded street unfurled down to a dark still stream, a stone slab, a bridge to cross over into a courtyard overlooked by the terraces of houses. A dog barked down at her from behind an iron railing. She turned into a passageway filled with sun. Outside a bluepainted doorway a snake lay on a step. Startled, it slid swiftly on, silver and olive-green, a line of black diamonds rippling on ahead of her and up around the stone bulges of a wall before disappearing into a hole in a rock.

Around the rock was a garden with great bushes of lavender, rosemary, marigolds, marijuana and a small square chapel with a bell-tower shaped like a minaret. Anya entered the chapel’s deep chill silence and sank onto a pew, covering her face with her hands as tears ran out from her darkness and the hard stone heart breaking open within. The door banged behind her. She wiped her eyes at once and sat up straighter, but the figures running down the aisle didn’t look at her. A man sat down at a piano. A woman cradled a violin and brought up a bow and the violin’s call soared into the emptiness. The piano eased in, dancing warm and golden, their song rising up to the saints in red gilded alcoves and marble angels reaching down their translucent pale hands to Anya. There was always someone reaching out, there was always the new and golden. It would lead her through the labyrinth to its end, to her new beginning.

When she left the chapel, the bag of cochineal had burst in her hands. Her tears had dissolved the frail white sheaths to a fierce new redness. She crushed the women and mothers, staining the walls of the labyrinth as she found her way back to the old painter and the ancient furnace next door, ready to take her place.

The heart weighs 300 grams. The tricuspid valve measures 10 cm, the pulmonary valve 6.5 cm, mitral valve 9.5 cm and aortic valve 7 cm in circumference.

Nicholas Arden looked over the newspaper at his wife, Ellen, buttering his toast at the opposite end of the breakfast table.

‘How hard can it be, honey?’

‘You haven’t read the script. I’ll need to dumb down.’

‘I always said you were too intellectual.’

Ellen slid the toast across the table, catching the bottom of the paper. The ink was freshly printed and she imagined some of it colouring the butter. Ellen wondered how much it would take to poison someone. Not that she wanted to poison Nick. But she was easily preoccupied.

‘I need an angle,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be led by the studio on this one.’

‘Then put your foot down. Both of them, if you have to.’

She waggled the butter knife. ‘Don’t get smart, wise guy.’

‘I’m trying to catch you up.’

It was a diamond-bright spring morning. They sat on the terrace extending from their white-painted house under clear blue light. Beneath them, the swimming pool caught ripples off the sky. Somewhere in the house their two children were getting ready for school. Ellen loved them, but she was thankful of the maid. There was only so much noise she could take.

Nick folded the paper, wrung out one end with a rueful expression.

‘Go on,’ he said. ‘You’re burning to tell.’

Ellen brushed a toast crumb away from the corner of her mouth with her right-hand pinky.

‘I play a photographer, Marilyn Monroe. I get to go platinum. Preferably a wig. Marilyn doesn’t take great pictures, but she’s always in the right place at the right time. Plus she’s pretty – we know how many doors that opens, front and back. She carves out a career for herself, Life, Movieland, Modern Screen, all those covers. She gets invited to all the right parties, then some of the wrong ones. So there’s then a photo of the president, in flagrante. Before you know it, she’s killed.’

‘Sounds meaty to me.’

‘That’s just the half of it. There’s more. But the dialogue, Nick. It’s so corny. I don’t know why they’ve written her this way. It lessens the role.’

‘How?’

Ellen stood. She ran a hand through her brunette hair, placed another on her hip, pouted: ‘When you see some people you say, “Gee!” When you see other people you say, “Ugh!”’

‘I get it. But she’s right.’

‘ She doesn’t exist. That’s Schulman.’

‘The guy with the belly?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘And does she talk like that?’

‘Like what?’

‘In the breathy guttural way you delivered that line.’

Ellen sat. ‘She’s such an actress, but she isn’t one, you know what I mean? That’s how I intend to play her.’

‘You’re an actress playing a photographer as an actress?

That doesn’t sound like acting to me, honey.’

Ellen shrugged. ‘It’s all in the method, Nick. All in the method.’

The right lung weighs 465 grams and the left 420 grams. Both lungs are moderately congested with some edema.

She swept onto the lot in her pink Lincoln Capri. A few heads went up. She was running late but they’d factored that in, shooting scenes around her. She twitched her nose, sinuses blocked and hurting. Seeds pollinated the surrounding air. She waved to Cukor then ran to her trailer. Baker was there. She held up a flesh-coloured bodystocking.

‘Have you seen this?’

Ellen shook her head. ‘What is it, a fishing net?’

‘It is if you’re the fish. It’s for the pool scene.’

Ellen laughed. ‘I am not wearing that.’

Cukor entered the trailer: ‘My way or the highway, Ellen.’

She kissed his cheek. ‘Is that why you wanted me in the picture?’

He shrugged. ‘It’s a closed set. Only the necessary crew.’

‘How necessary?’

‘It’s a pivotal scene. Entrapment. Monroe has the pictures and she wants something from Kennedy. When he arrives she’s swimming nude. You don’t want to swim nude, do you, Ellen? I know you crave authenticity.’

‘I don’t remember this scene in the script.’

‘Schulman’s rewriting daily.’

‘One hand on the table, one under it.’

Cukor barked a laugh. ‘C’mon, Ellen. This picture will make you.’

‘The Girl With The Horizontal Walk? I’m already made, thank you. Now I’ll be typecast.’

Cukor touched her arm. ‘It is what it is.’ He put one foot on the trailer step. ‘They’ve agreed the wig,’ he said. ‘It’s in the box. On set in an hour.’

Ellen watched the door close. She turned to Baker. ‘Some day we’ll have equal rights.’