Ханиф Курейши - Best British Short Stories 2020

He looked around him. The sky was so blue and the new heather gave a sheen to the world. Marcia’s colour, almost, he thought. This island could be an Eden were it not for Jack and Denny. Or should that be, were it not for Edward?

He reached the tarn and started to undress and fold his clothes neatly on the dry sand. He had brought his swimming trunks, the badge of his Fall, he noted, wryly. He felt a rock, smooth and hard like a large pebble, with his toes. This was not the place for pebbles. He dug at it with his toe and then his fingers, almost sure that it would be that common thing, the shallow brain pan of a sheep. But it was too round and clever for that. He pulled out the skull of a man from the reluctant sand but then weighed the lichen-stained head of an ape in his relieved palm.

He recalled a dream, one he had not recalled before. He had been cleaning the bath, spraying it with the shower attachment and the drain had been gathering hair, in a hirsute maelstrom. Hair is disgusting when you see it like that. The dirty soapy water being sucked thirstily, chokingly through all of that hair. More and more hair. Long red hair and then that metallic red which was Marcia’s in the heather light, and he had a vision of Marcia and a powerful ape in the bath together, soaping one another with cheerful erotic abandon. Marcia ran her fingers through the thick pelt of Monboddo’s muscular back and Edward knew it was not Monboddo but Denny even though he always remained an orangutan. Then he woke up.

Edward pulled up his trunks and stood with the brown water round his ankles. He could tell that the presence behind him was not a dream. For all of their caution he had detected their quiet bestial breathing. He could hear the coarse fluctuation of the cheek flaps of a large ape. He had conjured Monboddo from his dream. He did not know what to do. Perhaps he ought to face the apes, the little group that he was sure waited behind him, but he could not summon his courage. They would throw him from the cliff like Denny’s dog. He did not think that they would follow him into the water. He trod forward carefully, feeling his feet sink into the soft sand. He tried not to disturb the water as though that were the consciousness of the apes.

They did not follow him as he had supposed they would not. Nor did they begin to skirt the shore of the tarn as he had feared they would. He risked a glance behind him. The apes were picking through his clothes and draping them about themselves. His shirt was thrown into the water where it sank hopelessly.

To his left, just for a moment, he saw a figure he thought was Denny slip below the hill. He had raised a hand, but the figure was gone. Surely Denny would have helped him.

Edward walked slowly across the tarn. It was never necessary to swim, but he stroked the water aside with his arms as he waded up to his chest. Monboddo and his apes had not moved. Edward continued to look behind him, almost defiantly now, as he reached the further shore. This was why he did not see the second group of apes awaiting him there and which suddenly rose to meet his white dripping nakedness as he stepped into the air again. There were several apes here, all females. An elderly creature he did not know shuffled over to him, standing as upright as a man, and reached out her hand with its crooked wrist to touch his pale face. He dashed this away before she reached him and ran through the apes, painfully, breathlessly among the spiky heather in his silly swimming trunks. A shameful bleat might have escaped him. Again he was not followed, not even by a call.

Jack said it was Denny’s birthday. Would they like to go over for a drink and some stew? Such an invitation was not turndownable. What might they say? They were busy? They had been asked elsewhere? The promise of stew was delightful. Edward put on a dark jacket and Marcia a tight but highnecked protective jumper. She had decided to give Denny a whirlpool sketch as a birthday gift.

Obviously, Denny’s party was going to take place outside of the Nortons’ house, inside which neither Edward nor Marcia had ever been. It was a barbecue, but with stew. There was music, loud and barbaric. There were many apes, some of which were more or less always there as though they regarded Jack and Denny’s house as their own and some of which perhaps had been invited to the party. Much drink had already been taken. Also by the orangutans. Both Jack and Denny had taken off their shirts. Jack looked younger the more naked he was. Edward felt frail beside him.

The Dayaks have a story which says that the gods made the orangutan the day after they made men, but they had been celebrating and were still drunk. Some of the apes seemed to be playing with a ball. Others had umbrellas. They loved umbrellas. Denny was thrilled with his picture and took it immediately into the house. He went in to have a look at it several times during the party. Marcia, of course, could not be flattered and had half an idea that she should regret the gift.

Denny wanted to dance with Marcia and they did dance in a manner of speaking. But the music was horrible, and Denny did not know how to dance and was already a little too drunk. He reached out his hands in the hope that Marcia would take them, but she did not. His fingers wove the air like a magician’s.

Jack and Edward looked on at them unhappily. Edward thought, for the first time, that he knew why Jack did not like him. It was because Edward was the purveyor of this useless and dangerous knowledge, this science. It was Edward’s fault what had happened to Denny and to the world, and yet for all his cleverness he could not catch a fish, gut a rabbit nor even make a fire with that miraculous ease that Denny could manage.

Denny had stopped dancing and was now showing Marcia how he was trying to teach the apes to make a fire, in which they did seem to be very interested, but at which they had evidently made no progress. The apes might have done better if they were not drunk. Jack found their drunkenness funny. Edward thought the Nortons both too intimate with the apes and too brutal towards them. Jack called them beasts , but he drank from the same cup as them.

He went over to look at Jack’s generator, powered by petrol. They had little enough of that left, but little enough use for it. Jack’s contraption was ingenious. He wondered where he had learned of such things. He didn’t really know anything about him. A young ape came over, sent by Denny, for some of the bundle of newspapers, to help light the fire. Then he became curious about the papers and began sorting through them, turning the pages and getting frustrated by how difficult it was for him to do that without tearing them. Various advertising inserts fell out promoting impossible goods and services. Among these Edward found the photograph of Marcia in the bathing costume. He gave it to the ape to put on the fire.

From his corner by the stinking machine, conscious that he was already a little tipsy himself, he had his vantage. Edward and Marcia thought the apes essentially beautiful. Jack and Denny took it for granted that they were very ugly. Looking like an ape meant being ugly. Edward told himself he must not hate people and must not say that he did to Marcia. He no longer knew what counted as normal behaviour, for apes or humans. The answer was changing.

Jack was teasing Conrad, offering him a cup and then snatching it away from him, splashing him with the hot stew and flicking at his youthful cheek flaps as though in mockery. Jack had had too much. Edward could have stepped over and distracted Conrad, or Jack, but he decided to watch. The ape must finally have lost its temper, but in a way that Edward had not seen before. He reached out for Jack’s hand and quietly crushed it, not brutally, not breaking anything, but from the new expression on Jack’s face, very painfully. Then he let him go and Jack got up and left Conrad to sip punch and stew straight from the cauldrons.