Named as one of the authors in this year’s Granta’s Best Young British Novelists list, Camilla Grudova is a writer to watch. In her unforgettably surreal style, the short stories in this collection expose the absurdities behind contemporary ideas of work, Britishness and art-making, to conjure a singular, startling strangeness that proves the deft skill of a writer deservedly gaining plaudits. Read one of the short stories from the book below.

Extract taken from The Coiled Serpent
By Camilla Grudova
Published by Atlantic Books

White Asparagus

I have five rooms, each with a different pattern of wallpaper that seems unfitting, as if the rooms once served a different purpose. The living room has nursery paper with a design of ducks in ribbon hats pushing prams, and there are red racing cars in the kitchen. The bathroom is dark and complex, a rich forest full of parrots and tigers almost entirely obscured by mould. I cannot open the window as it has been covered by a wallpaper patterned with daisies. Only a faint light shines through, although whether this is from the sun or a lamp, I don’t know. There are small brownish-grey mushrooms growing out of the floor and walls.

My bedroom has a cheery design of tiny blue people carrying milk pails – more suitable to a kitchen, perhaps. The bedroom would be large if it wasn’t filled with wooden wardrobes, some of which are locked. It is a project of mine to work on opening them, and perhaps dismantling them altogether.

I have quite a lot of clothes – jumpers, socks, trousers, wool stockings, dresses, wire and lace bras. I have to hand-wash them in the kitchen sink, and they shrink every time. Someday they will become too small for me and I will have to cut them up and sew them into something bigger.

My rooms are part of a larger structure; my main door leads onto a hallway, which I can see through the keyhole.

Each week I am given a parcel of food which changes seasonally. I am always delighted when there is white asparagus, grapes or apricots. Yet every week there is jam, tinned fish, bouillon powder or cubes, crackers, cans of grape and orange soda, which I do not like and stack in the kitchen cupboard, various teas in small Chinese tins, wine gums, hot chocolate powder, a green cabbage, a container of snails.

I’ve started growing plants from a few of the fresh vegetables by putting their scraps in jam jars filled with water. After a few weeks thin white roots, like noodles, appear. I have a whole room filled with mulch made from my food waste. I keep it in the room that also contains a long rubber hose I do not know the purpose of. I do not know the wallpaper pattern of that room as there is no light or window.

There are a few windows in my rooms. Two are stained glass, so rich, colourful and detailed that nothing can be discerned about what is on the other side. They look too beautiful to break, and there is metal netting, as one sees in very old cathedrals to protect the glass. On bright days the netting looks like a thick spider’s web that is part of the depicted scene, of the stained-glass world where everyone has to constantly brush past spider’s webs like curtains.

The rest of the windows are, like the bathroom, covered with pictures – chocolate-box-like scenes of forests and city streets glued directly to the glass. Another one of my projects is to scrape away at them using a coin I have, as money has no other use to me.

In the living room, besides a fireplace and several nice still life paintings, I have an ancestral head on a plaque. It doesn’t speak, only moaning now and then and making painful, weary facial expressions. I feed it thin soup and jam. I don’t know where it all goes besides the bits that dribble down its chin, but it always takes pleasure in food. Its hair is coarse and sparse, its pallor very similar to the bathroom mushrooms. The ancestor on a plaque is nailed to the wall, but as the wallpaper is rotting, it became too weak to hold them anymore and the ancestor fell off. The ancestor’s nose became bruised and scabbed for some time after, but it healed eventually. Not wholly, but well enough. They now sit on the mantelpiece, and enjoy the warmth of the fire, but moan silently when it is too much.

There was one terrible day when I became curious about one of the cupboards in the hall and opened it. Inside was a tiny old man sitting in a tiny striped armchair. He held a small porcelain lidded pot with Greek patterns and he was fiddling with it, taking off the lid and putting it back on. Looking at the designs, he hardly noticed me.

The floor was littered with very old, rotting apple cores and the man smelled. I shut the door.

For months afterwards I felt an uncomfortable lurch when I walked past it and I didn’t know if I should open it again, but after a while the feeling went away.

I comfort myself with the thought that perhaps the cupboard has a little door I haven’t seen, leading to whole hidden rooms, and the man gets his own food parcels delivered. Or that he is so long dead by now that there is no point in me looking.

Not long after that, I regained a sense of harmony and stoicism when, along with my usual parcel of food, another person arrived: a short young man with a beard and long hair, wearing a baggy pinstripe suit whose sleeves were too long for him. He eyed the parcel of food with curiosity and hunger, and without asking, took a banana from it and ate it. He stuffed the peel in his jacket pocket afterwards.

I moved all my bedroom things – my jumpers, my books – into the living room, as I did not trust the other person with the ancestor; perhaps they would touch it or had knives or scissors and would cut it. I thought I could have more claim on the rest of the rooms if I gave him the largest one, and, without me needing to tell him, the other person took possession of the bedroom.

He wanders the halls and sits in the kitchen and bathroom for long periods of time.

I go to the kitchen to make myself tea and discover it is full of smoke. The other person has taken all the food from the parcel, put it into a pot and cooked it to a burnt sludge. They have thrown the tins and peelings all over the floor.

I take clippings from all of my plants and turn them into a thin soup with the addition of salt from a container in the kitchen that the other person has not yet found. The ancestor eats it obligingly, their eyes rolling around in their head.

The next morning all the mushrooms are gone from the bathroom – he has eaten them. The toilet is also clogged, his excrement larger than a whole cabbage. I have to chop it up with a spoon to make it go down, and pointedly leave the spoon unwashed beside the toilet for future use.

He wanders the halls, making odd mewing and whimpering sounds, sometimes stopping to gaze at me and the ancestor, but we make no signs of distress or hunger for him to see. I calmly read out loud from my book of ferns. I have a bunch of books, some I have brought with me and some I found in the apartment. My favourites are a Rupert Bear book, a collection of old poems, a book on fern cultivation, a cookbook that only refers to meat – which I was not given in my parcels but I am interested in nonetheless as it is full of diagrams. I am particularly worried about the new person finding this, especially in a hungry mood. The ancestor looks lamblike, and there is one diagram of a cow’s head that rather reminds me of myself.

He discovers my stacks of grape and orange fizzy soda which I have not got desperate enough to drink yet. He drinks one can after another until he throws up, then goes back to his hungry mewing when he recovers. There are foamy piles of purple and orange spittle everywhere.

As I know the precise time the parcel arrives each week, I wait by the door for it and grab three quarters of the food. I am particularly fond of a dish I call ‘Cabbage in the Garden’, where I boil the snails and cabbage together, and of course I need jam for the ancestor, but I leave a large turnip, a tin of fish and a lot of the tea for the other person.

He carries the turnip around under his arm importantly for a few days, and eats the tea straight from the tin, the leaves stuck between his teeth. He stops to ask me what to do with the turnip as I am leaving the bathroom, which makes me realise he has been carrying it around, hoping I would notice. I say it is to be eaten raw, as I do not want him taking up too much time in the kitchen.

This cures his constipation at least, and the toilet is not as clogged as previously, though he cried plenty as he went.

He sings a lot to himself, and once passing the bedroom, where the door was open, I caught him moaning and touching himself as he rubbed one of the tiny blue milkmaids on the wallpaper with the index finger of his other hand.

It occurs to me, at night as I lie awake on the fainting chair, that the old man in the cupboard, and perhaps even my ancestor, have diminished themselves since I moved in and I do not want to do the same to myself. It takes me a few days to figure out which animal he resembles in my meat cookbook, and that I should dispose of him this way.

There are no knives in the house, only forks and spoons, and I make a bad attempt to kill him by stabbing him in the cheek with a fork in the kitchen. He hides in his room whimpering afterwards, and I can hear him desperately trying to unlock the wardrobes, as if they are a way out.

It occurs to me that the food tins are very sharp, I cut myself on a lid once after opening it, and these I can use as thin knives.

A few days later, I see him emerge from his room to go to the kitchen to find food. The fork is still in place on his cheek, the skin swollen and red around it. He did not think to pull the fork out, and he can’t chew any food. All he can manage is a can of grape soda, crying as he drinks it, the fork moving up and down as he swallows.

I ignore his movements and cries until they all stop, and I find him in the bedroom, his face all disfigured and green. I pull the fork out and wash it well.

Following my cookbook and with the help of my tin lids, I turn him into ribs, sausages and pâtés – a long, smelly and arduous process. But the results look very presentable, especially with a bit of garnish from a carrot plant, but I do not want to eat them and do not believe the ancestor can digest them either. I dispose of the various dishes in the room with the mulch and the hose, and clean the crockery I have used. 

The Coiled Serpent by Camilla Grudova is published by Atlantic Books, priced £14.99.