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Kaliane Bradley's Golden Years sheds light on a young woman coming to terms with her heritage – and David Bowie's death

‘Treasure’, the theme for Bazaar’s ninth annual short-story competition, inspired hundreds of submissions exploring topics including memory, nature and the first throes of romance. The challenge of finding a winner was taken up by a team of judges comprising Bazaar’s editor-in-chief Lydia Slater, features director Helena Lee and contributing literary editor Erica Wagner, the author Monica Ali, Bloomsbury Publishing’s Alexandra Pringle, and Caroline Michel from the literary agency PFD.

After much enthusiastic debating over lunch at Claridge’s, the panel awarded the top accolade to Kaliane Bradley, for her tale about motherhood, cultural heritage and David Bowie. "Lively, surprising, and perfectly voiced, Golden Years is a story that delivers both humour and emotional depth, and does so with great elan," said Ali, while Pringle praised the writer’s "truly original voice". Bradley wins a two-night stay at Billesley Manor – a beautiful house-turned-hotel and spa where Shakespeare wrote As You Like It.

Read her brilliant story here.

On the day that David Bowie died, Sovanni texted her mother, David bowie oh no :( do you still have my vinyl records at home?

Her mother texted back, That a shame !! when SINN SISAMOUTH die d, we did not know because he dissapear !! Om Pich say to me: bang he may have fled to LAOS. Sovanni I don’t know what is your records , you must come to sort out you self. see you on SATURDAY we will have lunch together.

She put the phone to one side and stared at the ceiling.

Sovanni and her best friend Joyce went to visit the Bowie mural in Brixton. She showed Joyce her mother’s text.

“I think my favourite thing is the space between the words and the exclamation marks,” said Joyce. “She’s working up to it. Like a jump cut.”

“It’s the punctuation equivalent of bugging your eyes out,” Sovanni agreed.

Joyce’s mother, who was a transplanted Hong Konger, wrote texts with the rigid grammatical perfection of a Chinese woman educated in a former British colony. Sovanni’s mother wrote French with fewer spelling eccentricities, but her punctuation still hit the screen with rainfall randomness. Sovanni’s mother was dyslexic. People were always surprised to learn that. They assumed she wrote texts the way she did because she was an immigrant.

Sovanni, her mother texted, put in your diary 16 APRIL. We will go to the temple x

Ten minutes later, do you want cashmur coat I got from Jan? Too big for me !!

Four seconds passed. The screen blinked white.

Can you come to temple 16 APRIL ? for KHMER NEW YEAR

The screen flinched again. Two emails. One was a promotional email from Time Out, which she couldn’t bring herself to unsubscribe from even though she considered herself too iconoclastic for Time Out offers. The other was from Second Heart magazine.

Dear Sovanni Reun, Thank you for your submission to Second Heart magazine and your interest in our publication. Unfortunately this piece isn’t what we’re looking for at present…

Joyce had a theory that mid-life crises were induced by the body, like menopause or puberty. “Your body has a reasonably good idea of when your life is going to end,” she said, “because it’s got all the data, right. Allergies, substance abuse, sleep cycle, et cetera. So when you reach what it reckons is the halfway point, it triggers a flood of whatever hormone it is that reminds you that you’re mortal.”

“That’s supposed to be evolutionarily useful, is it?” Sovanni asked. They were wrapped in coats and scarves in a pub beer garden, on their second bottle of wine, and sharing a cigarette. They slumped so powerfully that their backs made only incidental contact with the chairs.

“Yeah, of course. If you haven’t done any breeding, you’ll be overcome with the powerful urge to start screwing younger, more fertile people.”

“Ah, come on,” said Sovanni. She tucked her chin and sailed her wine glass to her approximate mouth area.

“What? There are people who literally swell up and die if you give them a peanut. How is this weirder?”

Something clicked in Sovanni’s lower back, mean as a gunshot, and she threw herself upright. A burgundy disc of wine slapped onto the aluminium tabletop. She grunted.

“Wouldn’t that make David Bowie’s mid-life crisis Ziggy Stardust?” she asked, massaging her lower back. “Man seemed kind of on top of the world then.”

Joyce squinted at her fingers and counted under her breath. “No, it’d be… Thin White Duke. Which makes a lot of sense.”

“Because of the evolutionary desire to do fucking loads of coke?”

“You’re being sarcastic,” growled Joyce, swaying towards her with such momentum that two chair legs lifted from the floor, “but yes! To make him feel like he was awake enough and living fast enough for the days he had left.”

The next morning, Sovanni had a hangover. This used to mean an iron plate in the head and churning in the bowels, but since she’d turned thirty, hangovers had a terrible, emotional dimension. Her mind congealed. All day she carried her brain around in her skull like she was carting a box full of dead rats. Everything felt nasty and off-key.

She texted Joyce, So good to see you <3 was I unbearable last night? feel like I said something stupid x

Neat, tyrannical piles of things stood about the corners and walls of the flat. These were her multimedium obligations: laundry to fold, paperwork to read, books to give away, tidying to do. Ten years ago, Sovanni thought she’d have written a novel by now. Five years ago, Sovanni thought she’d have put out a collection of short stories and have a novel in the works. Every book in the give-away piles had prose she was sure she could improve on, but every book in those piles actually existed, so where did that leave her?

No bitch you were enchanting. Drink some water and say hi to your mum for me xxxxx

She took two buses to see her mother. It only required one bus but she had to get off and hork at a drain halfway through the journey. Technically, what she did was known as ‘dry-heaving’, but the experience was unpleasantly juicy.

“Sovanni!” crowed her mother when she stumped through the door. “My favourite daughter!”

“Your only daughter,” said Sovanni. She said it in a voice hammered flat by the joke’s repetition, but she couldn’t help the smile. “Your only child, in fact.”

Her mother hopped out of the kitchen to embrace her, pleased and sunny as a quail.

“I cleaned my IKEA and I found all my old records that your auntie sent me when she was still in Phnom Penh. After we eat lunch, we will listen to the Cambodian David Bowie.”

“Sinn Sisamouth,” said Sovanni, her voice now flat enough to lay on parquet.

Her mother snorted and trotted back into the kitchen. “No, Yol Aularong,” she said over her shoulder. “More cool and rock and roll. Bong Samouth is like Elvis. How can I bring you up and you don’t know this? You can’t hear music properly?”

Sovanni toed her shoes off. “Did you find my Bowie records?” she called after her mother.

Almost all the things in her mother’s home had been there for most of Sovanni’s life. The ‘IKEA’ – an enormous, grubby white wall of built-in wardrobes and cupboards, bought from IKEA in the 1990s – was doll’s-housy, with masking tape and accidentally magnolia paint repairs. The toiletries in the bathroom were thrown into neon plastic baskets and bowls that had outlasted several versions of the 99p discount stores they came from. Every bookshelf was crammed with copies of books that had gone into new editions – except the Cambodian ones, which had never been reprinted after the Khmer Rouge.

Sovanni always felt embarrassed about the cheapness of the house’s working objects. It made her life feel mass-produced. She hadn’t achieved any distinction of form that she could separate herself from the cracked rubber hose of the handheld shower head. She always thought she would have done more by now. Made her name, made some money, moved her mother into a place where the walls were smooth and painted in Seaside Retreat grey-blue. Almost every writer her age she followed on Instagram posted pictures from Aga-warmed kitchens filled with inherited oak chairs. Why hadn’t she provided her mother a life of non-IKEA furniture?

Sometimes it occurred to her that her aesthetic was less aspirational and more escapist – imagine if I were a middle-class white person – but children of immigrants were supposed to decorate better than their first-generation parents. This was a basic tenet of upward mobility and also a fantastic source for anxious personal essays about identity, tradition and sacrifice. She’d had a good run of those, but the magazines were moving on to younger, differently traumatised diasporas now.

If Joyce was right, all these thoughts were part of some deathly secretion. The void is coming! Get a grandchild fucked into you! But she didn’t feel the chasm extending beyond her, into a formless place where a child wasn’t. Instead it spread out behind her, thickening darkly every time she tried to imagine how she’d live with herself when her mother finally passed.

She bent down to knock on wood, thinking, not for years, please, and rapped the laminate flooring. Her hangover pulsed in her eyes and her stomach flipped over. She scurried back into the bathroom and threw herself over the toilet.

“I read this really sad article,” Sovanni said, over lunch. “About this Japanese American girl whose mother got dementia, and how much she struggled to reconnect with her heritage without her mother to guide her.”

“I’m not demented yet,” said her mother sharply.

“It was just really sad.”

“When I am dead,” said her mother, “then you will realise how sad.”

“Oh my God.”

Sovanni’s mother squeezed another lime quarter over the num banhchok. “You don’t have to wait until I die to ‘reconnect’ your ‘heritage’,” she said. “I’m right here.”

They pulled the records out after lunch. The Bowie LPs were there, along with some Patti Smith remasters and dozens of works by indie landfill artists.

“Who the fuck are The Pigeon Detectives?” Sovanni muttered. Her mother bashed her on the thigh, but in quite a friendly way.

Her mother’s records were all 45s, kept in a box that unfolded like an accordion’s bellows. The paper sleeves were printed in risograph-vivid colours. Sovanni, who had a thing about ephemera, handled them with excessive care.

“These are so cool,” she said.

What she meant was: these are the most beautiful things in this house. They’re love letters from another world. They’re magical too, treasure rescued from a falling city, the soul of a nation pressed into black. They made it across the world, just like you did.

She tried explaining this to her mother, who looked pleased.

“I’m glad you like Khmer music,” she said. “You used to love it when you were a little girl.”

“Yeah, but it’s also that. You know. These are unique.”

They fanned the records out along the floor, jewel-bright and clamorous. “You think they’re worth money?” asked her mother. She glanced at her daughter. “Not what you meant.”

“I guess they might be.”

“Oh look,” said her mother, pulling out a Meas Hok Seng record. “I hate this song! Very dramatic and crying. I’m going to put it on.”

The two women were sat on the floor, and Sovanni’s mother had to kneel up to put the 45 on the turntable. She was wearing a black jumper, thinly striped in ochre and mustard – or orange and yellow, as she’d put it. She smelt nicely of cooking. When she knelt back, she tucked her knees against her chest.

“You see how annoying he is,” she said comfortably.

They listened to Meas Hok Seng bewail the fate of a mated pair of doves, one of which had been shot by a hunter.

“Why do you hate this song so much?” asked Sovanni. “I think it’s very romantic.”

“Oh sure,” said her mother, “very romantic to be dead. Sovanni, you don’t have to make a big mess for love. You can just wake up and decide you want to love.”

The record crackled to a close. Sovanni knelt up to unhook the arm, producing a comedy scratch sound. It felt like there was a knuckle in her throat, which was either a new hangover symptom or a sign she was going to cry.

“I love you even if we don’t go through a big tragedy,” said her mother, watching her closely. “I have had enough of big tragedy thank you. No need to wait for me to die to remember you are Cambodian.”

Sovanni sniffed enormously. “Do you have that Ros Sereysothea song, ‘I’m Sixteen’?” she asked.

“‘Chnam oun dop pram-muy?’ No, but this one is Pen Ren sing about how she is thirty-one and doesn’t want to get married.”

Sovanni opted to spend the night in her childhood bedroom, lured by the promise of pepper beef and rice.

After dinner, she sat cross-legged at the dining-room table and opened her Notes app.

The records tremble in my hands; postcards from the past, speaking words of song

singing of words musical and emotional

“Want to watch Inspector Morse?” her mother asked hopefully.

Sovanni looked up at her mother, met her eye, and put her phone down.

“Yeah, go on,” she said.

She didn’t say it with any particular significance or symbolism. She just said it. Her mother said that she’d have to have the subtitles on because she was old and also Lewis mumbled too much, which made it hard for her to guess the criminal.

And Sovanni said that was fine, it wouldn’t bother her. Because mostly that’s what words were for: saying the obvious, but remembering to say it. I love you. Thank you. I’ll be here tomorrow. Goodnight.