Ханиф Курейши - Best British Short Stories 2020

That had not been the last party of visitors, but one of the last. No tourists for a while now. No tourists and no supplies. If the food ran low there were the sheep, the rabbits, the seals, fish. Edward and Marcia would need Jack and Denny for that. No point in making enemies of them. It was not clear that they could easily leave the island. They had no seaworthy boat. Those were the arrangements.

Edward warned himself against paranoia. He had told Marcia how he had stepped out of the compound and seen two apes with their heads together and how they had pulled apart when they saw him, as though they had been talking about him. Marcia had laughed. She was too carelessly brave, Edward thought.

The four people were trapped on the island as though the subject of an experiment conducted by an unknown hand.

The summer heat was sweltering, but their thick-walled old stone house was quite cool. Edward did not think that it was necessary for Marcia to wear so little.

– What if Denny comes in? You know he never knocks. Or Jack?

– Oh, fuck Jack and Denny. I’m not living my life to suit them. It’s bad enough being trapped on this island at all.

She pulled Edward towards her by his orange tie, which he wore, loosened, despite the heat. She let it run through her hand. Grace and Charity pulled his tie too.

Once or twice, Edward and Marcia had made love outside, outside of the compound, like animals, when they had been almost certain that the Nortons were busy with their poison on the other coast of the island.

Edward’s opinion of Marcia as a scientist, as an oceanographer of a sort, was that she was bold, unpredictable and unorthodox. Sporadic in her efforts and that perhaps because she was suffering from a depression. What he most wished to speak to her about right now was sunbathing. Edward did not really know this, but he thought, indeed he feared, that Marcia was sunbathing naked or almost so, on the beach. He very much wanted to tell her not to do this.

– The Nortons might see you. Denny might, and the apes.

– What does it really matter if it is only them?

– I think it would matter very much to Denny. To the apes, not so much. Then there’s the visitors.

– I don’t sunbathe anywhere where anyone might see me. And I think you underestimate the Nortons. Even Denny.

– I don’t know how you can be so naïve.

Marcia did not answer him.

– They’ll see you, he said.

– The apes and seals are always naked.

While Marcia was out, Edward went into the bedroom and found the photograph album upset on the floor. The snaps were everywhere. He did not look very hard, but he did not see that photograph of the youthful Marcia in her bathing costume.

Marcia was by no means inclined to obey Edward, but along with her towel she took her telescope and folder. She made her way not to the beach near where the seals lay, but to the cliff-top above it. She wanted to look at the whirlpool in this tide and to sketch it. Such an old-fashioned technique, but the only way with whirlpools. Some of her watercolours were quite beautiful and they fascinated Denny. He even tore his eyes away from her chest to look at them. She might give him a sketch. It was hard to tell what was kindest: to encourage him, as Edward put it, or not. Marcia was well aware that the island was a lonely place, a place of longing and that she was the only woman on it.

Sometimes a handful of orangutans would sit on the clifftop and, apparently, watch the seals. They were not there today. She set up her equipment, which involved taking a number of light readings, a procedure which required some precision. She scanned through the seals with the telescope. She counted them. She admired the great variety of shades and leprous speckles. The animals themselves were a whole beach of colours. It was here that she had found Denny’s dog, the one that had bitten the young orangutan. It must have fallen off the cliff, the edge of which was treacherously friable, although Jack would not believe that. They were lovely. All of the animals were so beautiful. She knew that she and Edward lied to themselves all of the time and to one another now and then, but the animals were always themselves, unless they could learn to deceive.

She was distracted from the seals and from the whirlpool by three orangutans, all females, on the beach where she most usually sunbathed. That large flat stone where she luxuriated like a seal. She thought she recognised Grace and Charity, but the other ape she did not know. She watched them making their spidery progress over the rocky beach. They stirred pools with their long arms and scampered in that four-legged way from the sudden surf. It was a while before she could make up her mind that she knew what they were doing, but she could see them quite clearly through the telescope. They were gathering shellfish. They were eating as they gathered, as all gatherers do, and they also made a little pile of mussels and cockles to take away with them, Marcia supposed. She was sure that Edward had never noted this behaviour and she was pleased to have such a thing to tell him. Would they make themselves sick? Shellfish could be difficult for anyone.

Edward was wondering about the interest that the apes had in Marcia. They could become obviously sexually excited in the house, something that Denny invariably pointed out with glee. He had the mad idea that the sparring orangutan clans might compete for Marcia. He did not even know for sure that the clans were a real thing.

When Marcia told Edward what she had seen Grace and Charity doing, he clearly doubted her, even if he did not say as much. Marcia was upset and Edward did not bring up the sunbathing again. But he did notice that when she undressed, she did so in the dark so that he could not see if she had been wearing her costume, as he had intended.

Edward thought he might go for a swim. Not in the sea, which made him nervous, but in that stretch of peat-dark water they called a tarn, without really knowing what a tarn was. He wanted to walk and to have a think. He felt he had plenty to think about.

He had been watching the apes groom. He had been amused at the way Grace would graze her own forearm, nibbling at the midges and flies caught in the web of her long red hairs. The apes loved to groom one another and sometimes tried to demand this attention of Marcia and himself. Of course, Marcia gave in to them. He had watched her grooming Charity, and whenever she found a fly, a flea or a grub, she had popped it into the orangutan’s mouth, very much as it was expected she should. Then Charity groomed Marcia, running her gentle leathery fingers through the woman’s auburn hair and feeling through the folds and creases of her clothes. Charity found something and offered it to Marcia to eat and after only a moment’s hesitation, Marcia had eaten it. This had disgusted Edward and he had said so. Marcia had told him that it was only a seed, but he did not believe her. He knew that she lied.

He walked over a rise and the little group of tarpans cantered away from him. He had ambitions to ride one of them one day. He knew that Marcia and Jack did too. The people competed for expertise in these things.

He thought the apes were consciously copying the humans. He had also noted that the animals to whom he had given names, who visited the compound most often and got talked to, were behaving differently to those wilder creatures, identified by codes if at all, who had to be captured to be brought in for measuring and tests.

Edward was afraid he was being ganged up on. His paranoia again. Jack and Denny seemed to have a stronger bond than him and Marcia, and he could no longer be sure of his wife’s loyalty. He could command these people, push them around, but he had no faith in his own superiority, less than they had probably.