Best British Short Stories 2020

there he had told her that he’d been given a free membership for being interesting. Could that be right? Patrick was only averagely interesting, after all. Perhaps he had been deemed more interesting once but had to pay now that whatever metrics they used had ascertained that he, like everyone else she knew, had become less interesting. Perhaps being averagely interesting was more than average these days, and the median was now soporific. Her mother would have had a saying refuting this sort of despair. Life’s as interesting as you make it. Only boring people get bored. But her mother’s second stroke had stopped her from witnessing the news coverage of the Brexit negotiations, or seeing the way that her mother’s feminist heroes were being vilified. Her mother had breathed oxygen in the days before the world had divided itself into so many incompatible good-and-evils.

Anyway, she had no issue with Patrick paying for a private members’ club with his own money, if he wanted to, though it was funny to remember that their friendship had been formed while fleeing the police during a protest about globalised capitalism. It was the G8 summit in Birmingham and they were reclaiming the streets. As the techno lashed and the police closed in, they had bought speed pills from a dreadlocked hippy, swallowing them in spite of their mutual distaste when the hippy produced them by reaching down inside the crotch of his cargo shorts. After the police charged, and they ran, they found themselves kissing each other in New Street station, and when they got back to Oxford they stayed up having sex until daylight, their first and only time together. It had been the first time either of them had sex on drugs; they’d been amazed at how good they were at it; they were like professionals, they could have gone on for days. That morning they had taken their first-year exam paper and she had got a first and he a 2.1, after which they didn’t speak for the rest of the summer, and after which Patrick lost all interest in political protest and illegal drugs for the rest of his degree.

She had thought about bringing drugs into her relationship with David when their sex life had become so moribund. But by that time she was trying to conceive, and what might drugs do to a foetus? Perhaps the risks would have been worth the opportunity cost, adding to the once-or-twice-a-month vaguely around ovulation, which David often contrived to leave the country for. They were not making the required effort, though she was trying to. She suspected she knew what David was doing when he retreated upstairs. She sometimes turned off the music she was listening to and listened hard for very small screams of sexual delight. She had wanted him to bring whatever he did up there into the light so they could look at it together. To stop wasting his orgasms and bring them to her. He could degrade her if he had to, if male desire could only be roleplayed now that its evil had been universally agreed upon, if it could only be defused by exaggeration, by consensual pantomine, fetish parade. He could wear a black cloak and fangs and whip her if he had to. Did he have to? She feared he had been draining himself in the study not from desire but from cunning, a desktop curator of a low potency that was neither no potency nor enough to make a baby. His libido kept cool by a fan whirring in the inside of a computer tower.

Patrick was sitting in a corner of the upstairs bar with a glass of beer in front of him. He was looking at it with great concentration, and though his face was still as unwrinkled and boyish as it had been when she met him, the expression he was pulling would begin to put some dints in it soon. When he stood to greet her he went to kiss her on both cheeks but she held on after the first kiss and felt his restraint relax as she hugged him.

‘Oh, Claire,’ he said. ‘Thanks for that. It’s nice to see a friend who’s not repulsed by me.’

Which she was only a little repulsed by. He asked what she’d like to drink and she ordered a glass of wine – ‘No,’ he said, ‘let’s have a bottle.’

She cast her eyes around for celebrities as she sat down – it was that sort of place. She didn’t recognise anyone, though she was out of touch and a lot of the old ones were probably ankle-tagged and under house arrest by now.

‘How are you? Where are we with everything?’ she asked Patrick, but he didn’t want to talk about that yet.

‘It taints everything. I want to know how you are first. What are you doing in town? You’re not here just to see David, are you?’

Patrick and David had never liked each other. Patrick knew David judged him: the centrist who lacked faith in Corbynera Labour politics, who argued during dinner one night that the diversity initiatives installed at his workplace were superficial and weren’t making things any fairer. ‘Are you an actual racist or just being provocative?’ David had asked him, before Patrick put his coat on and walked out of the restaurant. Claire had stood up for the complexity of his argument when they got home and David had lectured her on how two privately educated people could never understand the ways that structural oppression worked. ‘What does that twat know about the working class?’ he asked, before stomping up to the study and banging the door shut behind him. Earlier that morning, when they had been lying in bed together, Claire’s app had pinged to tell her she was ovulating. ‘Tonight,’ he said, leaping up. ‘I’m going to be late for work if I don’t move now.’ And then dinner with Patrick and the argument. The convenient moral outrage.