The Best British Fantasy 2013 Read online

  A pack of wild Osamas.

  There were Osama brats, half-naked, with bare, hairless cheeks, and cheeky grins, and young Osamas, student-like and studious, and militant Osamas, post-desert, with that hungry look, and cave-Osamas with that hunted look about them. No wonder the seal-men turned back. They oozed into the water, cursing wordlessly, bereft of language. We were all bereft of language, those of us who were left, I thought. I felt a little shaky. The Osamas approached me, cautiously. I could see them sniffing the air. You had to be cautious, you were an Osama in the wild. There were trappers out there, villagers, military remnants, bounty hunters like myself. It was a hostile world to be in, for an Osama.

  I didn’t know what they’d do. I had seen them tear a man apart, before. Wordlessly, they stared at me. Then the old one, the leader, keened again. There was a sense of loss and pride in that sound, but something else, too, that I did not understand at the time. A sound like victory. Then they turned away, the whole base camp of them, and left, just like that.

  I was left lying there, on the bank of the Euphrates, staring after the departing Osamas. After a while I sat up. My ribs hurt. I crawled to the water’s edge and drank, though the water was filthy.

  I plucked ‘Mike Longshott’ out of the moulding Hebrew pulp novels of the sixties and seventies. He was a composite being, a man who did not really exist. Longshott wrote soft-core pornography, tales of Nazi concentration camps where prisoners were abused, physically and sexually, by Aryan goddesses, sadistic nymphomaniacs of the Third Reich.

  He was a pen name broke young writers hid behind for cash. He was a collective, burrowing into the sexual and social taboos of his era. He wrote crap, was paid crap, and his books, sold under the counter, went from hand to hand and bathroom to bathroom, their covers featuring naked flesh and whips, guard posts and POW slaves and a plethora of large improbable breasts. He never lived, he never breathed, his prose was eminently forgettable. He was a hack, a pulpster, a paperback writer. His name was Mike Longshott and he was going to be my hero.

  I was on a boat, and my wounds have been bandaged. I was on a dhow, and the sail was pushing us, up or down river I couldn’t tell. But I could smell the wildlands, the Osama-lands, and I knew I was getting closer. I opened my eyes. A man was looking down on me. I blinked and then I knew why I felt so well, in the bandages, as if some medical professional from the days we still had those had taken care of me.

  I looked up at the man and he looked down at me without expression. His mouth was a scar. Scratch that. His whole face was a map of scars. I sat up, despite the pain. They had fed me some sort of painkiller, I thought. Not the type that came in capsules, we didn’t have those any more, pain had been allowed to flower a long time ago. Some sort of plant, making me thickheaded and woozy and strangely happy. The man was almost naked, and each and every inch of him was covered in scars. Some were old and scabbed over. Some were new and still bleeding.

  I tried to speak. My mouth was raw, as if I’d swallowed razorblades. ‘Where are you taking me?’

  He looked at me. One of his eyes was missing. He drew a knife and calmly cut himself, above the left nipple, a long slow trail, the end of the point sharp, drawing a long line of blood on his wounded skin. He sucked in his breath, like a prayer. ‘Ahhh . . .’

  ‘Wherever you want to go,’ another voice said. I turned my head. An older version of the same man sat in the front, watching the water. All but naked, deeply scarred. We were all deeply scarred, I thought, but some of us had taken it to a whole new level.

  I sank back on my mattress, there on the deck, under the stars.

  Scarrists, I thought.

  I’d been picked up by Scarrists.

  Mr. Scar was at the helm. He looked nineteen. Mr. Scar was handling the sail. He was the oldest one of them, a drawling accent and the remains of a tattered uniform still on his puckered skin.

  Mr. Scar was the chief, he ran this boat.

  Mr. Scar was the machine gunner, he was the one who never spoke.

  I had time to recover, on the boat. You never got off the boat. The Scarrists had everything they needed right there. They had their knives and their bandages and their lotus flowers, and the thick paste they made out of them. The river was thick like oil. It was sluggish like blood. The deck of the boat was covered in old stains. When I stood up at the rails I saw the landscape shifting past the boat. The sun was always setting. It was red and pussing like a sore. The mountains looked crudely drawn in the distance. Sometimes I could smell smoke. Sometimes, in a great distance, I could hear their calls, the last song of the Osamas.

  But with each passing mile they were growing closer. I could feel them coming closer.

  I could feel his nearness, too. His, most of all.

  Bin Laden, Osama.

  Born March 10, 1957 in the old count, to his father’s tenth wife. His mother divorced. He lived with her and her new husband and their four children. Inherited almost $30 million from the family’s fortunes. At university, studied economics and business administration. He wrote poetry, and was a fan of Arsenal football club. Married in 1974, again in 1983, 1985, 1987 and 2000. Fathered 20 to 26 children. Fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan, then ran a campaign against the House of Saud. Established base in Sudan. Expelled following failed assassination of Egyptian president. In 1996 declared war on the United States. Returned to Afghanistan. Has been in hiding since September 11, 2001. Located and executed at the Abbottabad Compound, in Eastern Pakistan, ten years later in 2011.

  I stared at his dossier. Old dates, old names for places we no longer had. They hurt, they felt like scars on the tongue.

  We never caught him. Abbottabad had been the source, it was where it had started. The days on the river floated by. Mr. Scar ran the boat with silent command. They weren’t bad, the Scarrists, they just had nowhere else to go. None of us had. The river ran and I remembered, I remembered Abbottabad.

  I remembered running up those stairs, the orders had been clear enough, he’d have to work pretty damn hard to get out of there alive, he was at the top of the stairs, I pushed in, he retreated into the bedroom, the women trying to protect him, screaming, I pushed them, I put the bullets in him, in his chest and head.

  A soft, popping sound . . .

  Time seemed to slow. He exploded not in blood and bones and brain but like a pillow, bursting open. It was silent. Things that were not feathers came out of him. He disintegrated as I watched, helpless. The women turned their heads.

  So pretty . . . they floated in the room, these things like feathers that were not feathers. Soft, almost weightless. So much of them. The windows had been open and they floated out, and I followed them with my eyes. One tickled my nose and I sneezed –

  Time sped-up, but still it was so silent there, I heard someone break the silence with a ‘What the fuck!’ and I turned, I don’t know why, I don’t know why even today I don’t know why I was the only one who wasn’t affected, I didn’t –

  I turned and saw M———, he was an officer, I saw the first of the – they were not feathers, they were not, they were –

  Spores, and I saw the first of the spores float through the air – so pretty! – and come to land, gently, so gently, like a whispered kiss, on M———’s forehead –

  It seemed to dissolve –

  It was absorbed into M———’s skin.

  It went inside of him.

  For a moment nothing happened. He opened his mouth, to speak, perhaps to say, ‘What the fuck!’ again, but his lips were changing and only a soft exhalation came out of his mouth and a rash began to grow on his face, on his skin, and it took me a long moment to realise it was a thick, black beard.

  I woke up screaming in the night. Hands held me down. A sickle moon looked down on the boat. Never get off the boat, only I would have to, I had no place here, no place anywhere. ‘Take it,’ a voice whispered,
close by, ‘take it.’ I stared at the knife. I took it from him. I ran it, gently, gently like a shiver, down my arm, and blood welled out.

  ‘There . . .’ the voice said. It was Mr. Scar, the old one. ‘There . . .’

  A peace came upon me. They bandaged me, and gave me poppy juice, and I slept, and woke up with a new, fresh scar.

  There are memories smudged into the brain, as if a child, clumsy with finger paints, had left sticky finger marks and traces of Guasch crammed inside the cranium, into places it is impossible to erase them from. This is Nairobi for me, the American embassy a blackened shell of a building, the soldiers surrounding it. I remember the Hilltop Hotel where we stayed alongside those hidden Al-Qaeda operatives, the dimness of the rooms, the quiet. Outside dust motes hovered in the still air, shoe shiners sat in the shade waiting for custom, they were selling scratch cards from a booth and I bought several, we walked in the dark to an Indian restaurant where we were the only customers, a hush had settled over the city, the spirits of the dead wafted upon the waters.

  The Sinai in 2004, E——— on the beach, the sun had set and it was dark, quiet, a fire was burning nearby, in the kitchen a young Bedouin was roasting a chicken, someone was smoking a joint, the smell of it rose in the air, the beating of the Red Sea against the sand –

  BOOM!

  Like a comic book explosion, exclamation marks rising from it like flying darts –

  KABOOM! POW!

  The car bomb exploded just further up the beach, in Ras-el-Shaitan, driven into a camp identical to the one E——— was staying at, reed shacks on the beach, stoned backpackers, mosquito nets and mosquitoes –

  The screams rose into the night air, E——— did not know what to do, she watched the flames, we were apart, I couldn’t phone, the news were jumbled, no one knew who had lived and who had died, a random person phoning, heard from someone who’d heard from someone who was there, E——— is all right, please phone C———, a stranger, and tell them their friend is alive, too –

  The spirits of the dead coagulated, restless, amassing now, more and more of them, and E——— passing through King’s Cross to work when the bombers struck, but she had been away that day, could not get back into the city, we spoke on the phone and watched the news on the television –

  And E———’s friend L———, who worked with her in Laos, a fellow aid worker, they would not renew her visa so she went back to Afghanistan, she had loved it there, kidnapped and then a rescue attempt, US forces storming the camp where she was held, killing her with one of their own grenades –

  KABLOOEY! BAM!

  Cartoon war with a cartoon president reading a story about a goat, and a cartoon villain muttering threats into a camera, mutual ghost-gatherers, God-botherers, and we were fodder for their hate.

  ‘We don’t go any farther,’ Mr. Scar told me. Ahead of us the river curved and I could see a village on the point, smoke rising. The sick moon, the sickle moon, hung above our heads like a scar carved into the sky.

  ‘Why?’ I said.

  He shrugged. ‘It’s hairy out there,’ he said. He pointed. ‘That’s Osama’s point.’

  ‘Osama don’t surf!’ I said, but he just shook his head at that, perhaps remembering a time we had cinemas and movies, a door into escape. One by one the doors had shut, and we who remained were trapped here, in this new Osamaworld.

  ‘This war . . .’ I began to say, but he stopped me, with a gentle smile, a smile like a scar, and a hand on my shoulder, and he said, ‘The war is already over. It was over a long time ago.’

  I watched the boat sail back. I was left alone on the bank. I had no horse. The seal-folk killed my horse and his blood ran red into the brown river. I walked. I followed the river, remembering.

  The spores rose into the air that night. They hovered over houses and rooftops and were blown far and wide by the winds.

  I saw the men – I saw my friends – I saw them change. I saw the beards creep up along their naked chins, I saw their smooth-skinned arms fill with wrinkles, and saw their eyes change, saw the look in them become a penetrating gaze, their lips thinned, they spoke in tongues, they said:

  ‘Security is an indispensable pillar of human life -’

  ‘Free men do not forfeit their security -’

  ‘Just as you lay waste to our nation. So shall we lay waste to yours -’

  ‘Does the crocodile understand a conversation that doesn’t include a weapon?’

  And so on. I saw them reach for weapons. I saw them look at me. They shot down the helicopters and the men, dying, were transformed when the spores hit them.

  I ran. Somehow I was not affected. I was not Osamaed. I ran and they followed, the first of the wild hunt, the Osama-spawn, they hunted me and each one I killed exploded in a soft cloud of spores that rose and rose and then fell, softly, drifting in through open windows, settling on the faces of sleeping women and men, transforming them.

  They hunted me through the long night and the world contracted and changed, we lost the war that day, we were lost that day, and I lost them in the mountains and hid in the deep black caves.

  I walked through the night. Nothing troubled me. The world was a quieter world nowadays. The remnants of men and their army still congregated together in what was left of the cities, places like Ninawa and Caubul and Nuyok, and hunted and kept away the wild Osamas. But out here, in the wildlands, men were few and far between. I walked and the river followed me, until I came to the place.

  They called it, simply, the base. Al-Qaeda: the base. There were low buildings and a fence, trees growing there. The river flowed nearby and it was in the shadow of the mountains. Osamas of varying shapes and sizes watched me mutely. I saw a human corpse dangling from a rope and a sign on its chest in childish white letters that said Sorry.

  My bare feet sank in the mud. My beard had grown in my days on the boat. The silent Osamas watched me. A raven screeched high above.

  I walked through the valley of the shadow of death and I felt no fear and the stars were bright overhead. I came to a hill and I walked up it and I reached him. He was sitting on a folding chair, watching me. He was very old. A jester at his feet, a man who was not Osamaed, in the remnants of a military uniform, with no insignia. He smiled a manic grin and chattered at me. ‘The poppy fields are beautiful, red like the blood of martyrs.’

  He had a high trembling voice. He said, ‘God lives in the clouds like smoke, he has a long grey beard.’

  The man sitting on the folding chair turned his gaze on him and the jester scampered down the hill.

  The man turned his gaze on me. His eyes were rheumy but still somehow sharp. Almost, I fancied that he smiled.

  ‘You have come to kill me,’ he stated.

  ‘I have come to . . .’ my voice sounded different in my ears. The man in the folding chair had a long beard turned white with age. ‘You have tried before and you have tried many times,’ he said, not unkindly, ‘but do you not see? Killing the man is not enough. A man is more than flesh and gristle and bone and blood. Kill the man and all you do is preserve the image of the man. His icon. Kill a man and a thousand spores of faith and belief, a thousand spores of idea erupt into the world. Look,’ he said. He reached his hand towards me. I took it in mine. Our hands were the same. I raised my free hand to my beard and he did likewise, to his. ‘We are not so unlike, you and I.’

  I was running up the stairs and he was at the top. He had backed into his bedroom. I burst through the door and the women were screaming, they were trying to shield him with their bodies. I pushed them away. The gun was in my hand and I used it, firing bullets at point-blank range into his chest and then his head, confirmation kill, eliminating with extreme prejudice.

  I fired into silence and a cloud of spores rose into the air, like ideas that wouldn’t die, and the world was quieted, with a sound like the hiss of escaping air.


  Osama and Osama and Osama, amen.

  JOSEPH D’LACEY

  Armageddon Fish Pie

  Everyone was so down hearted.

  You could actually see people walking down the street and crying unashamedly. And this is England we’re talking about – a country in which emotional displays, particularly public ones, were taken as a sign of mental illness as recently as the nineteen eighties.

  Gone were the times when you could lose your entire family in a freak industrial accident on the same day as filing for bankruptcy and coming down with a nasty case of cancer and a ‘nice cup of tea’ was enough to put a smile back on your face. I mean long gone.

  It would have been bad enough popping round to a mate’s house only to find him weeping into his can of Carling (which, incidentally, I did – otherwise I wouldn’t mention it. He was so upset that he couldn’t watch the West Ham match, which was the point of the whole evening.) but to actually see Joe and Jane Public lamenting outside Woolies on an otherwise unspoiled Tuesday afternoon struck me as pathetic.

  I wanted to walk right up to these people and ask them what the hell they thought they were doing lowering the tone of our proud British society. And where, I felt like demanding, was the stiff upper lip that had brought us through so many other trying times? Of course, I didn’t do it. Being British, I’m too bloody polite.

  It was worse on TV. I had to stop watching it after a while. The Americans were the ones that finally did it for me. I promised myself no more News after seeing how they were dealing with it. They weren’t just crying spontaneously and publicly, they were getting together in parks and city squares to have a good old sob in huge pitiful groups. Hordes of overfed, undernourished ‘Free’ and ‘Brave’ citizens wailing and gnashing on international television. Didn’t they have any shame at all? God; and the hugging and the conciliatory, defeatist pats on the back and the ‘I forgive yous’ and the ‘I love yous’. It made me sick.