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2009 FISH ANTHOLOGY
This anthology contains winners from Fish Publishing's three annual competitions - The Fish Short Story Prize, The Fish One-Page Prize and The Fish Poetry Prize, plus new work from judges Colum McCann and Peter Fallon.
Read below introductions from this anthology by Colum McCann and Peter Fallon
Listed below you will find all authors and poets published in this anthology along with the names of their works.
Read the winning story from the Fish short Story Prize - Ten Pint Ted by Ian Wild, the winning story from the Fish One-Page Prize In the Car by Bernadette M. Smyth and a poem published in the anthology - The Locksmith by Annie Atkins
Introductions by Colum McCann and Peter Fallon,
Literature is not an Olympics. It never has been and it never will be. Part of the beauty of writing is that the writer creates a world that has not existed before. We step into the new and the un-tried. And the reader then has the ability to venture into a time, a place, a geography that is not his or her own. We get new bodies and homes and minds to dwell in for a while. We are re-made. I love this process. It is the dignity of writing. It is what fills the lungs of literature. And – just as it is impossible to say which life or which country or body is the best to live in – it is also impossible to say which story is the best to read. I hate competitions in a way. It pretends that one story is better than the other. It claims that one territory has been more deeply inhabited than the other. It presumes that one character is deeper than the next. This is not the case. It never will be. Every time I judge a competition I swear I will never do it again. I am convinced that I missed a story somewhere, one that was about to break my heart. I am sure that the postman forgot to deliver that one manuscript that would have shone. I am certain that I have upset somebody by not reading their story properly. I know that somewhere along the line I fouled up. I am quite sure that someone who deserved it didn't make it to the short-list, and I didn't get the chance to read them. I am afraid that I will meet them in a dark alley, or even worse, see them at the Nobel podium somewhere down the years. But that's life. I have to accept it. I probably got it wrong. But, byGod, I hope I got some of it right. I sing those who are published here – they have done a very fine job. But I also sing those who did not get published. I know and recognise the blood, sweat and tears that have gone into the work of every single story. It is difficult to create from dust, which is what writers do. I hail everyone who entered. And I thank those who made it through to this stage. It is an honour to have read your work. And I know that the best stories are those that are still untold ... so keep writing, keep creating, keep the faith.
Colum McCann
New York
May 2009
Attention, Please?
Someone wasn’t paying attention. That someone submitted a poem to which I considered awarding first prize. Gnomic, assured, haunting, it is a poem that’s clearly aware of the tradition of recent poetry and alert to its own chances of taking its place in the great assembly of our art.
But it’s a poem that isn’t eligible for the prize because it has been published already. That’s against the rules. And this example shows the price of not paying attention. In poetry, the payment, or act, of attention is basic and crucial. Ways of seeing: ways of saying.
As I judged the competition I read hundreds and hundreds of anonymous poems. Poems of all kinds, from an uncommon range, I’d hazard, of countries and cultures. I read each at least twice. Several of those on my ‘longlist’ I read a dozen or twenty times. The ones I’ve chosen display a healthy variety. They are credible versions of lives, lives lived and lives longed for. It’s as if each of them found and channelled a force of trust that, in turn, made it trustworthy.
To the winner and four runners up I’ve added a couple for honourable mention. The strengths of these endure either in details or in the emotional embrace of unknown circumstances. The four runners up suggest something of the reach of poetry itself – from one (‘The Long Run’) that’s responsive to and fuelled by an utterly up-to-date predicament to one that achieves the quiet expression of a private aspiration. ‘I Can Move Stars’ nearly shouldn’t succeed. It’s almost too simple. But it’s persuasive ultimately because it conveys an impression that it couldn’t have been written by anybody else. Similarly ‘I Am’ (echoing John Clare) and ‘This Corolla, Mama’ (this what?!) bear distinctive signatures. Their energies move unerringly towards their endings.
I warmed to ‘The Locksmith’ for its innocence, for the purity of its lines and for the way it unfolds the drama of a relationship and its two protagonists. The integrity of its stanzas reminds us that stanza means room. And this poem’s ‘rooms’ become an attractive house of feeling and tone because, I believe, it remains fully attentive to all of its components. All of these poems, in their differing ways, stand properly for themselves. Saluting their subjects and their readers, they stand up to their responsibilities. They stand, you might say, to attention.
Peter Fallon
Loughcrew
May 2009
Contents:
Short Stories
Ten Pint Ted by Ian Wild
The Return of the Baker, Edward Tregear by Vanessa Gebbie
Painting Over Elsa by Annemarie Neary
Bridie's Birthday Party by Gerry Boland
Epistle of a Doddery Old Bastard by Kit Fletcher
Lad by Derick B. Donahoe
The Weight of Clouds by Elizabeth Kazura
Jesus on a Cross with Blu-Tack by Dolores Walshe
Chicken and Beef by Ann Ward
A Capitalist Adventure by Mair Masuda
This is the House that Horse Built by Colum McCann
One-Page Stories
In the Car by Bernadette M. Smyth
Theoretically by Tom Glover
71st Street by Theresa Barnett
View from Limbo by Colette Dartford
April Fool and the Feministas by D. K. McCutchen
The Last Bullet by Fia Kenzie
Reincarnation by Geraldine Walsh
A Simple Mathematical Equation by Annie Atkins
Plaza de Armas by R. S. Mann
Night Games by Gerry Galvin
Poetry
The Locksmith by Annie Atkins
I am by Jane Clarkee
I Can Move Stars by Mary O'Gorman
Gap Year by Helaena Nolan
The Long Run by Adam Wyeth
This Corolla Mama by Marcella Spruce
Factory Girl (Guangdong Province, China) by Marie Altzinger
Always Something by Peter Fallon
Micro Fiction
Blown Away by Jan Sanzone
Bottle by Angela Carr
Ten Pint Ted
by Ian Wild
William I were christened. Me dad said a king’s name for a collier were about right. But I never got down the pit. Maggie cut the knackers off the mining industry just as I failed me O’levels, so I ended up in a transport caff, washing plates. She did us a favour, Big Sister, because I were terrified of the dark. Dad used to go on about how bright it were down there, half a mile under.
“It’s all electric now, you big girl’s blouse,” he’d spit, “Like Blackpool illuminations right to the face.”
Aye, nowt between me and crushing almighty darkness but some dodgy fluorescent strips.
He was the toughest man alive, my old man. Five feet two up, as broad across, and not a lick of lard on him. He’d stand in the kitchen, point to his belly and say:
“Go on Billy, punch me there. Hard as you like.”
I’d puff me cheeks out and belt him one. Then come away shaking a sore hand. It were like hitting a steel girder.
“I’ve been hit harder by a bunch of daisies. Get a hammer from the toolbox.”
He made me do that once – hit him with a hammer in the belly.
“No. Harder. Like you’re whacking a nail.” He didn’t flinch. “That’s being a man Billy. You get hit in the guts by a hammer. Don’t matter how many times they do it. You don’t flinch, right.”
In the middle of the strike, when we flogged our kitchen table and chairs to pay the rent, when we ate roadkill rabbits from the lane, when mam ran off with a man with money from Halifax, Dad didn’t flinch. Hammer blow after hammer blow in the guts. He’d come back from the picket line or from shaking cash buckets in Barnsley and grab me soft white belly with a laugh. I’d squeal like an abattoir pig.
“Nay Billy. If they grab yer vitals, stand straight and spit in their eye.”
By then I were twice the size of him. Like a Shire horse towering over a pit pony. But I were powerless as a babe in that iron grip doubling me over.
Pits closed and England went to the dogs: then to the wolves.
“I’ll not sign on Billy.” Dad said, “I’ll find summat. See if I don’t.”
He got on his bike, but six months down the road he were chaining it to the benefit office railings. Hour after degrading hour:
“Being treated like scum by scum.”
Third day on plastic chairs waiting to have his nose rubbed in his own cack, Dad watched a miner in front of him beg for money, then break down and cry. Dad jumped the counter and pinned a Benefit Officer to the wall by his throat. Hung him up like he were a picture.
“You took away our living. You’re not having our self-respect.”
The benefit bloke blacked out. Dad damaged his windpipe and got nine months in Wakefield prison.
I sent a letter to Mam, but Mr Moneybags in Halifax didn’t want coal muck on his carpets, so Auntie Irene took me in. She had a smoke-blackened terrace in town. Near blind she were, with bifocals thick as the bottom of a pint glass. Her eyes seemed to peer out from the middle of two ice cubes. Tried on her goggles once. By heck, me eyes throbbed. When she baked bread, all sorts got in the dough – hair, dead flies, cardigan fluff. She made me up a bed in her attic, sharing a room with Ted.
First evening, I opened the wardrobe and there he were, sat lopsided and stiff, a big daft grin on his dropped gob. A ventriloquist’s dummy. It were a shock finding a dusty lump of a doll leering up at me, cobwebs all over his dinner jacket and dickie-bow-tie. He looked like he’d been waiting fifty years for that door to open. I took him out and propped him up on the bed.
“Who are you then?”
Right from the start I talked to him like he were real – you can’t help it with a ventriloquist’s dummy. The varnish on his yellowed face were a puzzle of cracks. He still had rosy cheeks though, as if he’d been shown up. I brushed him clean.
“You weren’t expecting a night out, I’d say?”
He just sat up against the wall, grinning like he’d won the pools, eyes big, blue and alive.
“Belonged to your Uncle Ronnie, God rest his soul.” Auntie Irene said, when I asked, “He was a ventriloquist when we met. Worked on the liners after the war. First words he spoke to me Ted said. I were sailing back from Canada. I’d gone out there as a nurse, but didn’t like it. Too big. Heard this laughing in the saloon bar and saw your Uncle on a little stage drinking a pint with Ted on his knee.
“Here’s a nice young lass,” says the dummy, winking at me, “Give us a kiss after the show.”
Your uncle always swore Ted said it, not him. ‘I were drinking that pint,’ Ronnie’d say. It weren’t Ted that kissed me though. When we married, Ronnie got a proper job. He hated being months away from me on the boats. Anyhow, people were fed up with that sort of entertainment. Thought it old fashioned. And he’d say himself, he were never that good – though he weren’t that bad neither.”
Funny what you don’t know about your own folks. What your mam and dad never let on. Boring old Uncle Ronnie, who worked in the chemists and died whilst I were still in shorts with scabs on me knees: a ventriloquist! It seemed too exotic for us. For some reason, maybe it were just the sight of Ted’s gormless grin, I had a mind to have a go at ventriloquism. On the quiet like. I had nowt else to do. Nowt else I were good at. No social life apart from a few mates I’d crack pool balls with down the pub. It sounds daft, but after a couple of weeks, I were closer to Ted than them. I got a book from the library, Ventriloquism for Dummies, andsat in me attic with a glass of water glugging:
“Gly glame glis Gled.”
When I asked Auntie Irene about borrowing Ted for a performance at the Miner’s Arms in town, she didn’t exactly cry, but them ice cubes seemed to melt around the sides.
First night, we went down like a stone in treacle. Silence for a minute or so. Then a soft chatter rose like I weren’t there. The Landlord paid me a tenner and that were kind. Auntie Irene had come along and said at least she couldn’t see me lips moving. Maybe if she’d had stronger glasses ... I went home and dumped Ted back in the wardrobe. His big eyes looked up at me, imploring like. But I were having none of it.
Three in the morning, me lids wouldn’t shut. I opened the wardrobe and hauled Ted out. Couldn’t do it to him.
“Come on you daft bugger.”
I sat him in a chair and he looked chuffed to bits.
So I kept at it. Auntie knew a retired ventriloquist friend of Uncle Ronnie’s. He showed me how to drink and talk simultaneous like, without getting too wet. I practised all me spare time. It were like me and Ted were somehow holding a part of the family together. Keeping it alive.
After a deep breath we tried more pubs. Got some titters – even a few laughs. Then one night I were supping a pint whilst Ted talked and he started going on that his best mate had a problem with the booze. I looked round at him, a bit startled. It really were like he’d come up with the idea, not me. They liked that, the audience.
“Yer cheeky sod …” I said, but slurred my voice and ordered another pint.
Funny thing is, alcohol don’t affect me – no matter how much ale I stick away. I can pour ten pints down me neck and still walk straight as a champion dart. The audience were tickled though. Watching me down pint after pint and hearing Ted howl that he had to drive us home and what a big lummox I were to carry upstairs to bed. By the time Dad came out, I had an act.
All the while he’d been inside, Dad wouldn’t have me visit. After nine long months his house were gone. He’d not live at Aunties – chalk and cheddar them two. He rented a mildewed bedsit that I visited a couple of times a week. It were easier having a conversation with Ted. Dad wouldn’t say nowt about prison. He sat on his bed, face like a slag heap – ugly, smouldering, grey. Nobody would give him a job because he’d been in the nick, so he’d had to sign on. I wondered how many times a man can get hit in the guts with a hammer, and not let it hurt.
I kept me mouth shut about the ventriloquism – if you get what I mean. Told him I were still scraping plates at the Transport Caff. I was, five days a week. But Friday and Saturday nights, me and Ted were playing the Working Men’s Clubs. By this time I were enjoying life, for the first time maybe. Every outing, Ted dreamed up funnier things to say. I even got asked back to the Miner’s Arms. And that night the act really took off. There were a big Saturday evening crowd, sloshing down pints – rowdy enough to drown a brass band. Faces seemed to loom in mine like a rugby front row. A minute into me act, gulping Tetley’s with Ted, I saw Dad standing at the back. He were a teetotaller, Dad. I were so shocked to see him in a pub and watching me, that I slurred Ted’s voice instead of me own. The audience roared. I didn’t get it at first: me drinking – Ted getting drunk? I couldn’t tell why folk chortled at that. But you don’t argue with a barrel of laughs that’s rolling towards you. You run it onto your cart and slap the reins.
“Look at him,” burped Ted as I drew on a pint of bitter, “Can’t take hish drink. Calls hisself a man. Half a shandy and his legs go bendy as pipe cleaners and he’s staggering in the ladies by mishtake, shouting at ‘em to bring a urinal. I’ll have to drive him … hic … home. Carry him up t’shtairs like a singing sack of coal …”
A few pints more and Ted were slipping off me knee.
“Ten pints is nowt for a real man like me …” he boasted, “No more affects me than a glassh of Dandelion and Bur … Bur … Burdock.”
And then Ted started getting out of hand. Almost literally. Like he were doing it all, not me. He got right loud-mouthed and rude.
“I don’t like being laughed at by a load of dummies. Think I’m drunk do yer? Right Billy, help me off with the coat. I’ll punch their lights out! Come on …”
“Ted, calm down … Sorry ladies and gents, he’s not usually like this.”
He ended up in the audience trying to start a brawl. The show went down like crackling.
Dad lurked in the shadows, just about the only one not creased up. After the applause, I went over to him, me back slapped all the way, half hoping the last slap would be his. Dad gazed at Ted like a stoat would a hare.
“What’s that?”
“It’s Auntie’s. Used to belong to …”
“I know who it belonged to. What are you doing with it?”
“I’ve learned to use it. Make money with it.”
I thought Dad were going to knock Ted’s teeth out – or mine. But he left, barging some feller and upsetting his pint. Ted were shaking afterwards.
Seemed for a couple of months, that every Working Men’s club on the circuit wanted Ten Pint Ted. With washing crocks as well, I could afford to rent our old house when it fell empty. Maybe I were trying to piece things back together, like some family heirloom needing glue – make a recognisable shape out of smashed bits still lying around. I asked dad if he wanted to come home. He said he had no fucking home and he didn’t want me hanging round his flat any more. A couple of months later, Auntie Irene told me he’d found a job: cleaning ash from crematorium furnaces. Then I got a booking at Blackpool, and plucked up the courage to invite him.
“Blackpool? Why would I want to go there?”
“The Tower have booked me and Ted, in the lounge bar. It’s a big break for me. They’re paying six hundred quid. I thought you might like the day out …”
“To see a grown man playing with a doll?”
“Eee Dad …”
I saw then that something had him by the guts. Not me. Not any one single thing. He were doubled over in agony and deaf to his own screams.
So Auntie Irene came with me. Hung on me arm. Must have been just a load of dazzle to her. Blackpool, how can yer not love it? Makes you feel grander than you really are. Them big wide promenades, the pier. Even if it’s pissing down and you’re picking cold chips from a bag, you still feel like a king. Everyone’s royalty there. And that tower: five hundred feet high – as far up as a mine goes down. Ten thousand light bulbs, shimmering, all glamorous. Before going on, me and Ted looked out over Blackpool from the top of the Tower, starstruck by electric constellations.
“Gives me the collywobbles,” said Ted, dropping his jaw.
In the dressing room afterwards I propped him against the mirror.
“You went down a treat.” I said, “A promoter came up after the show. Said he’d belly-laughed so hard, he near burst his braces and would we do Brighton.”
Ted just grinned back with that potty look on his face. But I half-expected him to jump into me arms and shout: “Anywhere but that bloody wardrobe!”
A week later, I jacked in the dishes. The Caff gave us a bit of a do. I came back from a farewell to eggy plates and gristle and there were Dad in me kitchen, sprawled on the sofa, like he’d been chucked there.
“Dad …”
“Aye.”
“Good to see yer.”
“Is it though?” he smiled a peculiar smile. I realised he were drunk. In all me life I’d never seen him touch a drop.
“You’ve had a few ‘ave yer?”
“Thought I’d celebrate a bit,” he sneered.
“Oh aye?”
“While you was gone, I went for a walk with that friend of yours …”
“Friend?”
“We went for a little hike down memory lane. Me and Ted. Climbed over t’pit fence and I thought, well me son ain’t never going down the mines, maybe his mate’ll try. I gave him a good shove down shaft number 2.”
He gave a twisted laugh. I went dumb for a moment.
“What are you talking about dad? You haven’t done that?”
“Haven’t I? Funny, I heard a splash.”
“Dad! You’re joking!”
“And why are you so fucking upset?” He snarled suddenly, “Didn’t it belong to the brother of that bitch who up and left me and left you? What do you want to be like them for eh?”
He meant it. Ted thrown down a pit shaft. The kitchen reeled. I couldn’t barely see for hate. I wanted to punch Dad through the wall and leave a hole the shape of his body. I lurched towards him and he laughed again.
“What yer going to do?” He stood up, spittle on his lips, “Stick one on me?”
His face was a blob, misshapen with drink. I realised I could smack him now and he’d go down, with guts like a wet beer mat. But I ran out instead.
Pell-mell I legged it, boots scratching gritty cobblestones to the edge of town. Silhouetted against a filthy brown sky, the mine’s headgear reared over me, a brute siege engine bearing pulley-wheels that’d never turn another spoke. The iron entrance gates were padlocked, and holes in them darned with barbed wire, but I tore my way in, staggering blindly to shaft number 2. By smashing a bottom hinge, Dad had bent up the metal door of the workings. Crawling in and striking a match, I saw where he’d ripped away safety barriers and with a scaling bar, levered the cage from the shaft’s edge to give a foot of clearance: a menacing crevice of pure black. Ted were down there, drowned. That big-hearted dummy were gone. You couldn’t ever get another like him.
“Ted!” I shouted into the dank pitshaft, “Ted!”
Echoes boomeranged back at me.
Gled … Gled …
I dropped a stone. Counted to ten before I heard a distant plunk.
“You daft bugger. Come out of there.”
Glaft … glugger … glare …
I tried to think that he weren’t flesh and blood. Not real. But I kept seeing him floating cold in that watery black shaft. I’d never find him. Never get him home. Terror skidded through me. I could hardly stand because me insides were spinning down hundreds of feet into darkness. Ted was who I was. Ted was me. I started to cry, great bucketing sobs. Couldn’t stop.
“Shut it, yer stupid girl.” I shouted, crumpling against a wall, face pressed to cold brick, “Nobody’s got hurt. He’s only a dummy, so he can’t feel anything. You could …
… hit him with a hammer and he wouldn’t feel a thing.
… hit him with a hammer and he wouldn’t feel a thing.
… hit him with a hammer and he wouldn’t feel a thing.”
In the Car
Bernadette M. Smyth
I steered through fantastic streets of boisterous traffic, past glittering buildings, and footpaths that moved with shoppers. I beeped the horn when I saw Mrs Sweeney.
“Hop in!” I shouted.
“The town’s mad today,” she said, getting into the car.
“Packed! There’s hundreds in town.”
“Thousands more like.”
“Millions even – I’d say there’s easily a million people doing their shopping today.”
Mrs Sweeney tightened her headscarf.
“Plenty of groceries there,” I said.
“Sure haven’t I ten mouths to feed, Petulia?”
“Ten kids? That’s nothing – I’ve fifteen.”
“Humph! If I only had fifteen children I’d be laughing- I’ve twenty you know.”
“You said ten!”
“No, no, Petulia, ten at the moment; John-Joe, Jimmy, Jamesy, Jemmy, Mary- Concepta, Concepta-Mary, Penelope, Agnes, Ignatius, and Alphonsus, are away on their holidays.”
I went back to the steering.
“How’s Paddy’s leg?” I enquired.
“Gone.”
“Gone?”
“Chopped off!”
“And how does he manage?”
“Sure he has to hop.”
“That’s desperate!”
“It is Petulia, especially with twenty children knocking him over.”
“Still,” I said, “isn’t it better to be missing a leg than have an extra one. There’s my Johnny and he’s awful bother with the three legs.”
“Three? That’s nothing – I’ve a brother with four.”
“Four legs Mrs Sweeney?”
“Four – he has to crawl so he does.”
“And has he a tail?”
“No …”
Mrs Sweeney’s voice collapsed as she looked towards the house. Mammy was standing at the kitchen window.
“I’ve told you two already!” she shouted, “No playing in the car! GET INSIDE NOW!”
Michelle scrambled out of the car, leaving behind Mrs Sweeney and her phantom groceries, Paddy and Johnny, and the village of characters who lived in the space between the car’s upholstery and our imaginations.
I ran after her, over the path, and into the house where our tea was waiting.
The Locksmith
by Annie Atkins
The Locksmith says God sent him here to Nashville,
How else could you end up in a town like this?
Well, I got a ride with two guys from Memphis.
He laughs; he thinks God sent me here, too.
‘Last week I wished for a girl; this week, here she is.’
Sometimes we watch the rockabillies down at Layla’s;
Sometimes we watch the fiddle players at the Station Inn.
Yes, we talk a lot about going downtown,
And then we just end up staying in.
Is this all I wanted? The warmth of someone else’s skin?
He says Nashville inspires him to write music again.
I understand.
I like to watch him play guitar with his shirt off.
One day I’m going to learn the difference between falling in love,
And meeting someone that I want to take photographs of.
Because late at night, when he’s sleeping,
I lie here very still and listen to the sound of the freight trains leaving.