Ханиф Курейши - Best British Short Stories 2020

We can do anything here.

You are like Einstein, Kiru offers, pulling him closer. Like his equation of general relativity, mutating in the fabric of space and time.

Yes! he says, a look of wonder in his eyes at her, the surroundings, the possibilities.

I am Gpv = 8 π G (Tuv + p n g v v).

He knocks back his drink. Matthew considers himself a eunuch because of his impotency. She tells him about the shape and girth of an invisible penis he will gain by the time the night is over.

Do you know what betrayal tastes like? she asks.

There is a burden to carrying salty alphabets on my tongue.

Matthew blinks up at her, heady, tipsy, a little confused.

Three hours pass. Kiru becomes annoyed. She cannot imagine Matthew reaching for the sound of bones tumbling in water, succumbing to being realigned in the frothing white, stark against it, brightly lit, and carrying mouthfuls of seaweed with stories of their own to tell. She realises she cannot love him. His receding hairline elicits sympathy, not attraction. His snaggle-toothed breathy revelations about science had begun to grate. He would yammer on endlessly until she strangled him on the shoreline.

Catching him unaware, she sticks her fingers into his chest, melting flesh. The charred scent rising up to their nostrils as a pattern of smoke unwinds from his chest, shaped like small nudibranch. She reaches through bone, a blueprint at birth washed away by the pumping of blood. Her fingers reach further in, finding his misshapen heart. She runs a finger over the muscle, over the pumping rhythm she has already caught with the damp folds of her vagina. He is hypnotised by the gleam in her eyes, the baring of her teeth, the lightning-blue lines of light running beneath her skin as though she is a circuit.

Her fingers grab his heart, pulling it right out. A sucking sound ensues, followed by a vacuum.

He makes an aaargh noise. It is surprise. It is relief. It is tender.

A carrier pigeon hovers above, shedding a feather that tumbles into the vacuum in his chest, skimming the last conversation he had with an air stewardess once on an easyJet flight about the weight of atoms. The feather tumbling in the dark will change colour once it hits the bottom. The carrier pigeon will report this to others in its flock.

Kiru finds a quiet spot to eat his heart, beneath a tree oozing sap, enjoying the shelter under its drooping, white, palm-like leaves. She is ravenous. His heart tastes of cigarettes, red wine, tiny bits of aluminium, of small murmurs machines hadn’t detected yet. She polishes it off in four bites, licking her fingers clean. Then, she stands beneath the ghostly tree holding her arms up to the light; she sheds her skin.

with the pretty face of a young woman in Cuba who runs a stall making small art pieces from food, who has a beauty mark on her face that changes position slightly depending on the humidity.

She finds Patrice smashing a lobster’s head on a rock. He has an elaborate, cartoon-like moustache which tickles her funny bone, and a Romanian accent.

Are you enjoying the festival? Kiru asks.

Oh, yes! Very much. It’s nice to be around other men like me.

You mean other eunuchs?

Well… you know, men who understand. I’ve been celibate for five years. Now I want to break that vow.

I am understanding. I understand that people who die through sudden accidents don’t know they’re lucky because it’s quick. I understand when you destroy something you give it the opportunity to be born again.

I’ll take your word for it! What an unusual creature you are. He is drawn by the smoothness of her skin, the beauty spot he cannot take his eyes off for some reason.

I can re-enact one of your strongest memories. Would you like to see?

Surely there’s only one answer to that! He is smiling. His mind is distracted by the lobster dangling from his fingers, dripping rivulets of water onto his feet. Badly injured, the lobster is attempting to escape to the second shoreline the carrier pigeons have drawn with their beaks.

Kiru re-enacts his most indelible teenage memory: when he rescues a boy from a house fire. It was terrifying, exciting. He was driven by instinct, recklessness, adrenalin. He watches open-mouthed, astounded that she knows this. Her blue shift rides up her thighs a little as she performs.

Later, she discovers that Patrice’s wife died five years before. Of course he is saddened by his loss. She is sad about this unfortunate turn of events.

She cannot compete with his dead wife or the memories she left behind that float and duck between his organs. She wants to leave a bite mark on his collarbone that he will stroke even after they’ve faded. She wants to breathe against the pulse in his neck as though she can tame its movements with her breaths.

I’ll build a new penis for you from a current, she says. Not leave you with the old one that still carries the touch of your wife’s fingertips.

He laughs uncomfortably, replying, When I was a teenager I used to dream of Pam Grier sitting on the edge of my bed holding a rocket.

She smiles at this. It is a sincere curving of her plump lips, which are intoxicating to him. Kiru wants to apologise for the things she cannot tell him.

If only you could hit your head on rocks below shimmering surfaces of water and not be fazed by the impact or your blood momentarily blinding fish.

If only you were how I imagined you to be.

What do I do with the disappointment of this? With the gap in between?

What do I store there for cold, isolating winters you will not be a part of?

She eats half of Patrice’s heart in the early hours of the morning when the island is still asleep. She dumps the other half in the waters of the blue sea for a whale that has recently given birth in the Pacific, longing for the call of its young. She recalls the gathering of carrier pigeons swallowing patterns of nudibranch-shaped smoke from Patrice’s chest, the shed feather turning to gold in the darkened vacuum of his chest.

Small, golden triangles rise to the surface of Kiru’s skin. She glows in the hazy grey light of dawn, watching mist softening the lines of mountains for what the day will bring. The island’s creatures create a gentle din to run her fingers over.

A tear runs down Kiru’s cheek. She is lonely. She wants to fill the ache that grows inside her, that isn’t knowable no matter which corner of herself she reaches it from, no matter whose footsteps she temporarily borrows to do so. It is vast. And she is like a small chess queen loose in the sky, clutching at shapes, at possibilities which amount to nothing as she opens her hand on the crash down.

After she sheds her skin, she watches it in the water. It is like a diving suit with a face, carried away by ripples.

She does not know what it is like to have female friends. She spends two to three hours interacting with the soft-bodied women who speak as if words are foreign objects in their mouths, whose lungs she can hear shrinking while the iguanas crawl around the island without heads that have vanished.

Late in the afternoon Kiru rests in one of several boats moored on the island. She thinks of the stray items the soft-bodied women have begun to stash away: two fire extinguishers, a telescope, a high wooden chair with a dirty velvet seat, three propellers, and two cable cars. She panics with her eyes closed, as she is prone to doing occasionally. She is tired from the energy she expends prowling the island. Her tiredness results in strange visions that carve a path through the day. She dreams of a catastrophic darkness where everything falls away one by one, orbiting in a black star-studded distance above the earth with warped frequencies that result in it all falling down again in the wrong place: with the sea now a glimmering sky, the sky a weightless, cloud-filled ground, rock faces hiding in caves, mountains made of the island’s creatures leaking tree sap, trees uprooted in panicked flight, alcohol bottles filled with new weather shot through with spots of ice, eunuchs emerging from a fire charred, offering to hide bits of their lives in shed skin. When light from the black star-studded space above the earth threatens to split her head in two, Kiru sees herself sitting on top of the mountain of island creatures eating fossils one by one, but she knows this will not do. She clambers out of the boat.