The
best On this page you can read extracts from some of the stories in the 2007 Fish Anthology, including:
A Paper Heart is Beating, A Paper Boat Sets Sail - Kathleen Murray, Dublin
An amazing short story about a young boy, living in an unknown, unresolved, familiar and yet mysteriously unfamiliar culture, who can make paper (and Poetry) disappear, to the confusion of his peers. This beautiful gem explores the relationship between society and Art, but does so in a world which is both recognisable and completely unknown. A new universe sketched in a few words. Brilliant! [Read]
Dancing on Canvey - Lane Ashfeldt, London
The winner of the Short Histories Prize, this story tells the tale of the 1953 disaster, when Canvey Island, on the Thames, east of London, was swamped by a howling storm. Set firmly and evocatively in its period, this story tells us of how Gwynnie, a schoolgirl, survives the storm, both without and within. [Read]
Gilt - Orlaith O'Sullivan, Madeira
Our judges had a hard time deciding on the winners of the inaugural Fish-Knife Award for Short Crime Fiction. To understand why you need to read Orlaith O'Sullivan's compelling story, about theft, intrigue, and ultimatley a kind of murder, in the rarified stratosphere of the Art world, and compare it to the other joint winner, by Ewan Gault. [Read]
Honeysuckle and Cat's Piss - Ewan Gault, Tokyo
About as far from the world of 'Gilt' as it is possible to get (See above.) this story takes us on a journey - quite literally -from the drug-infested slums of Glasgow to a far more sinister world of crime and punishment in London. Stitch, our hero, never quite knowing what is going on and clearly lost in a world which he never chose, but which circumstances have chosen for him, waits "to be told where to go." [Read]
Words from a Glass Bubble - Vanessa Gebbie, Sussex
This story is boisterously unique, exploring the strange and strangely comforting relationship between a Postmistress and a Virgin Mary in a snow globe and an illiterate Irish Farmer who sounds like a bird; and between the woman, her husband and their dead son, lost forever in a maelstrom of quiet desperation. [Read]
Rush Of Water - Merryn Glover, Perth (Scotland)
One of a series of stories by Merryn to be set in the highlands of Nepal, this beautfully eloquent story tells us the tale of Phulmati's trip to the Abortion Clinic to sweep from her life the contamination laid in her by her first experience with the 'sophistication' of life from outside her mountain village. [Read]
Luz - Martin H. Bott, Zurich
Another one of the Crime Fiction winners, Luz explores the relationship between two retired cops, one Irish, one Spanish, as they contemplate and solve the murder of a Croation drug runner on the coast of Andalucia. More importantly of course the story indicts the society, superficially pleasant, in which these man are forced to live by the wide-spread tolerance of modern gangsterism. [Read]
Waking the Princess - Carys Davies, Lancaster, England
Carys Davies tells the romantic (Or anti-romantic!) tale of how a man's desire for the "widow of the Customs House clerk" leads to the invention of Linoleum! A beautifully observed and quirky little tale full of wry humour and detailed observation oflove and life, of triumph and defeat, of love and loss in the squalor of the back streets of Anytown, 19th Century England. Carys recently also had this story publshed in her first short-story collection Some New Ambush. ............................................................. [Read]
Rookie of the Year - Paul Byall, Savannah, Georgia
Paul Byall here tells us the story of one man, retired from the world, happily 'getting by' with his fishing and his simple life and his memories of near greatness, when suddenly a dying woman comes into his narrow orbit and, without trying to change him. makes him change. An oft told tale, beautifully observed and uniquely figured against the landscape of the bayous of Southern Georgia. [Read]
Man in Ultramarine Pajamas, Lily Mabura, Nairobi
A man posing in a once bright-yellow car that never goes anywhere. He is wearing ultramarine pajamas and is being painted, in oils, by his nighbour who doesn't yet trealise he is dead. In some ways this is a story about colour and art , but, set in the Kenyan tea plantations, this story tells us much more about death and life in the birth throes of this new Europe. [Read]
The Caravan - Janey Runci, Victoria, Australia
In his introduction to the 2007 Fish Anthology, Michael Collins mentions that a strong theme in this years Anthology "was definitely 'coming of age' ." This is one of those stories: about a young girl growing up with her single mother. They meet a new man, a visitor, a writer; and the young girl hears for the first time the echos of the sexual politics between her mother and this new man, and between herself and something she doesn't yet quite grasp. [Read]
From:
A Paper Heart Is Beating, A Paper Boat Sets Sail
by Kathleen Murray, Dublin
Fortune-telling paper squares, a cube into a pyramid, a destiny unfolds, the story ends at the beginning. To make an origami fortune teller, first you need a piece of paper that is an exact square. On one side, colour-in four squares, on the other side mark out the numbers. Bring the corners to the centre then double over long-ways to form a rectangle. Fold it back in and push up the corners. Slip four corners over thumbs and first fingers. Ask a question, pick a number, pick a colour and pick another number. Pinch your fingers to turn the paper inside out and the answer is revealed. There are only eight responses on each paper fortune teller, written carefully under the corners. They extend from ‘yes' ‘no' ‘maybe', to (depending on the personality of the creator), ‘not in this lifetime,' ‘if you are willing to sacrifice all', ‘be careful on Tuesday.' For some the experience of folding a perfect paper fortune teller was as powerful as the stories unleashed by its predictions.
As materials developed and became cheaper, the origami paper fortune teller was replaced by the cellophane fish. Mass-produced, imported from the Far East , the fish was transparent, light blue or pink with a couple of lines drawn to depict an eye, a fin and tail. Placed on the palm of the hand, a question was put to the fish. If the answer was yes, the head would begin to lift, if no the tail would rise. The force of the curl indicated the strength of the response. An emphatic yes could cause the fish to meet its eye with its tail. It fell out of favour due to the limited repertoire of responses. Also a sweaty palm had the capacity to slow down proceedings for quite a time. A variety show of childhood games: the origami fortune-teller, followed by the floating globes, preceded by the musical comb quartet.
* * *
The new teacher arrived in the town with a belief in the educational benefits of paper folding: she had written a pamphlet for other educators entitled ‘ Creasing Patterns into Children's Brains: the Place of Origami in the Classroom. ' One afternoon a week she taught her pupils basic designs and demonstrated more complex constructions. What really added fuel to their spark of interest was her collection of animals, birds and abstract shapes, built up over many years and kept in a specially constructed display cabinet mounted beside the coat hangers. Once the children had mastered the fundamental models and folds, inspired by the treasures from Japan , India and an unpronounceable place, they began to evolve designs and styles of their own.
In no time an origami craze had engulfed the town. Extra supplies of multi -coloured and textured sheets of square papers were ordered through the local shop. The children also used paper they found in their own homes - shopping lists, music sheets, bills, receipts, old calendars, love letters, cigarette cards, seed catalogues.
The fad seeped out into other aspects of town life. Just one instance: the forge fashioned square frames that could sit inside a frying pan or on a griddle. This created a perfect receptacle for pouring batter. Skilled children would then fold the square pancake into a variety of shapes to be filled with fruit and cream.
Mrs. Deere, mother of Daniel the most talented of the children in this speciality, introduced the origami pancake onto the local fountain card circuit. Fountain cards was a game requiring steady hands, a sense of proportion and three decks of cards with the sevens and jacks stripped. This game has all but completely died out, perhaps due to the arrival of a knife factory in the town and its detrimental impact on the manual dexterity of the population. Mrs. Deere was not a skilled fountain card player but Daniel's creations, shaped like flowers and towers with sweet and savoury centres added an extra dimension to her Thursday night game. As Mrs. Peyton said, washing down a pancake swan with some mint tea, “God spent a long day dreaming up talents of an inconsequential and frivolous nature to distribute to those who missed the main go-around.”
All this would have passed, perhaps not even lasted as a memory, all these frivolous and inconsequential goings-on, but for an incident involving a boy named Bishop who lived some distance outside the town, formerly a miniaturist and now the only known paper vanisher.
Constructionists and miniaturists: a split in the ranks of origami makers. For the miniaturist the challenge existed in the realm of creating something tiny and perfect, a design fit for a pencil, a match or a knitting needle. Apparently an eight-year-old girl was on the edge of a breakthrough, folding a bee's wing into her signature frog to fit on the head of a pin. For the constructionists a different challenge existed, designing larger and more complex structures using in some cases, non-paper materials. It was acknowledged that the Peytons' daughter, Casen, was head and shoulders above all others. She was perhaps the only one with the vision and skills to reunite the two schools, but was blighted by her parents' ambition for her in the realm of tapestry weaving, a proud family tradition.
Left to his own devices on a Saturday afternoon, Bishop had run out of craft paper and wished to practise a sleeping cat design. Having exhausted all other supplies in the house, he picked out an old letter that was on top of photographs and documents kept in a shoebox in his mother's wardrobe, took it to his room and began folding. If all had gone to plan he would have replaced the paper and his mother would be none the wiser. Absently, whilst warming up his fingers he folded the paper in half eight times, the maximum number of folds a square of paper could take, irrespective of size. He squeezed the tiny paper one more time, willing it to halve again and the impossible happened. The paper completely disappeared from between his thumb and first finger. It folded into nothing.
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From:
Dancing On Canvey
by Lane Ashfeldt, London
Adelsburg
Friday morning I stagger up the steep grassy bank of the sea wall on Smallgains and walk along the top, creek to my left, road to my right. The odd wave sends spray flying up, and the wind curls between my legs, snapping at the skirt of my school gabardine.
Archie and his friend Jim try to follow me. ‘Get down!' I tell them. ‘You're not allowed up here.' Nor am I, of course. Strictly speaking.
‘I'll tell Mam on you,' Archie yells, and pokes his tongue out at me before running ahead towards school until he's just a small speck down at ground level.
It's weird if you think about it, this island that's not really an island anymore with its tall grassy banks to hold it in place. Even now, with the tide not fully in, if the sea were level both sides of the wall it would lap at Archie's shoulders. Maybe his nose, even. Not that you do stop to think of it normally, it's just this thing we've been doing in art has it all fresh in my head.
Brandnburg
Double art last class. Everyone fidgets while the teacher hands out half-finished scrolls. Since Christmas we've been making a frieze of the island. Yellow Table has covered theirs with Danish and Roman remains; Red has made a grassland dotted with cotton wool sheep and a cut-out shepherd.
I'm on Green Table. Yesterday I sketched the Dutch Cottage with its thatched roof and octagonal base, like a windmill minus the arms. Today I'll colour it in.
When Mr. Frome hands out sheets of lined paper and tells us to describe what's happening in our pictures, a girl on Blue Table asks will this come up in our 11+. The answer's no.
‘But good handwriting,' Mr. Frome says firmly, ‘is a skill that will serve you well whatever your future occupation.'
That's when Johnny Deakin starts.
‘Soon as I turn fifteen I'll be a fisherman like my dad,' he says. ‘Fishermen don't need to read or write, sir. I'd leave school now if I could.'
In maths he'd get the cane for answering back like this.
‘That would be your loss,' Mr. Frome says, a tight, hard note to his voice.
‘All's I need to know is how to sail a boat, how to swim and how to catch fish. And, sir, school don't teach me none of it.'
The class goes still, waiting for the teacher's reaction. Outside, the red fin of a ship's funnel slides across the sea wall, forming a brief interruption between grass bank and grey sky. Finally Mr. Frome speaks. The hardness in his voice is still there, but all he says is that until he turns fifteen Johnny must go to school, no matter how much he wants to catch fish.
Johnny says nothing.
‘Why don't you sit on Green for a change?' Mr. Frome says. And he sets a chair next to mine and hands him a map of Canvey. ‘Here. Make a list of the roads with Dutch names.'
It's my first time sitting near Johnny Deakin. He is taller than Mr. Frome, and strong, and the faint fur on his upper lip either makes him look stupid or like a grown man, depending on the light. I try not to look at his face. Mr. Frome reads a passage about Canvey by the writer of Robinson Crusoe. I listen while I colour-in, to his put-on peasant voice that sounds like a radio actor pretending to be from the country. Johnny Deakin is not listening. He stabs at his desk with a compass, denting the wood.
‘How should I know which roads have Dutch names? ‘S all double Dutch to me,' he says, and in the margin of his page he starts to draw a Spitfire.
‘Look by Sunken Marsh,' another boy tells him. ‘Half the streets round there end in “burg”. When the Dutch got their land they built houses, a church, and everything.'
That's Simon Fairfax. Simon won't leave school at fifteen; he wants to go to the grammar and study law.
‘Course they did,' says Johnny. ‘They couldn't make dykes all day long, then sail back to Holland at night, could they?'
Mr. Frome glares at us.
I whisper road names and point them out on the map for Johnny to copy down. Spelling and Johnny don't get along. People say he failed his 11+ at his old primary, that he's twelve and should be at big school, but I reckon they just don't like being smaller than him.
‘ Strasbourg , Korndyk, Hilversum , Laars… Heeswyk, where I live.'
Bent close to the page, Johnny traces the curves of each letter. Even so, from time to time a letter waltzes out of line, so he finishes with Korndyk for Korndyk , Laarts for Laars . I like the look of his alien N 's and R 's.
‘Three minutes,' Mr. Frome warns.
Quickly I finish colouring and make some notes.
Canvey's Dutch past
In early C17, experts from Holland came to drain the land and build sea walls. The Dutch took as payment one third of the new land, the Third Acre Lands. But later they sold their land and moved away, and nobody fixed the walls properly. More floods came in 1791, in 1881, and 1897.
Simon Fairfax is watching a point behind me and above my head. A floorboard creaks – Mr. Frome.
‘Not bad, Johnny,' he says, surprised. ‘Watch that handwriting.'
I hold my breath as he examines my page.
‘Be more precise, Gwynnie. When was the contract signed?'
‘1632?'
‘I'll give you a clue: three hundred and thirty-one years ago.'
In my head I take 331 from the current year. It fits with no carrying over.
‘1622, sir.'
‘Then write it down,' he says.
When he's gone, Johnny Deakin smiles at me. I look away from his brown eyes, but in a way I'm glad I got something wrong because Johnny's told off every single day. At least today he's not the only one
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From:
Gilt
by Orlaith O'Sullivan, Madeira
He chose orpiment - King's Yellow. It was a simple matter to smuggle the crystals of arsenic trisulphide from the supply cupboard for museum displays. How appropriate on all levels: a favoured murder weapon of the Middle Ages, the poison of kings, king of poisons, discreet and potent. How apt for the setting of The Cloisters.
His invitation to Harrington had been off-hand, all staff would be consulted regarding the menu for the museum's centennial banquet. It was over one year hence, but work was underway. Monday was ideal, the museum being closed. They would dine in his offices.
There was garlic in the Tartes of flessh - he had checked. That would help mask the garlicky odour that she would notice after half an hour, along with a metallic taste, a dry mouth. She would of course be violently ill, succumb to a high fever, then her blood would slow as hypovolaemia set in. Her milk-white skin would discolour, the bluish telltale of cyanosis warning of too little oxygen in her blood. It must be like suffocating from inside. Harrington would lose all rational thought, cerebral hypoxia starving her brain. There would be internal haemorrhages as her organs failed, the cold in her extremities reaching inwards as shock set in, followed quickly by death. Then nothing could stop him.
He had three decades of sterling work with the treasures, with little apparent fanfare. He was seen as a dedicated connoisseur. His ‘Light on the Romanesque' attracted more than 420,000 visitors, earning him the status of key player. His reputation was sealed when he brought in the Sforza missal, outbidding the Louvre and the Getty. His ascension at the Met would continue. He was next in line for the Michel David-Weill Curator in Charge of Medieval Art and The Cloisters.
Raynard regretted having to let the Pucelle go, but it was necessary. He would explain that Harrington had seemed preoccupied over lunch, had then produced the stolen manuscript, confessed her terrible crime. She saw no way out. She told him she had already taken steps, her own surrender of sorts. He had tried to help her himself as the poison struck, but it was so sudden, so violent. Between the shock and his rheumatism, he brought help too late. “All too late, all too late, when the bier is at the gate…”
She would shortly be here: the gilt . He chuckled at his epithet for her: the name for a young female swine, unbred, or not bred long enough to show signs of pregnancy. Yes, today everything was most appropriate.
The food was set out on individual plates. “For our delectation, we have Tartes of flessh : we need to give them a few minutes to cool. I suggested that roast swan would be more fitting for our centenary celebrations, but between our modern sensibilities and this anxiety about bird flu…”
On entry Harrington had been nervous: her eyes darted, she spoke too quietly and too quickly. Seated, she seemed positively terrified. She knows, he thought. She knows it's poisoned.
She sat, sipped clumsily at her wine, twisted and untwisted the linen napkin.
“You are wondering if there's another reason I asked you here.”
She opened her mouth to respond but stopped, baffled.
“Am I so transparent? The other night at my little soiree…” he paused.
She waited.
“Wilcockson asked if I would be the keynote speaker at their medieval congress. I've been considering it, and I think that you could deliver the address. Your reputation is well grounded, and it would be a signal, so to speak. I will not always be in this position, and it helps to indicate who one might choose as one's successor.” He raised his wine glass, smiled at her over it. In that moment Amy was certain he meant to kill her.
The phone trilled, causing them both to start. The switchboard was holding ‘all' calls, which meant it was probably a trustee. Raynard excused himself.
Amy sat before the food. Of course he wouldn't bother with blackmail. She was a liability to him, a disgrace to The Cloisters, to more than The Cloisters…
If she were gone, debts would be settled. Her prospects had disintegrated; she had no hope of a career now. If she died, the insurance could pay for her mother's treatment. If they paid promptly. Surely it would look like murder, not suicide. Her mother would be taken care of. She would never know the depths to which her daughter had sunk; the daughter she spoke of with such pride.
Amy released her breath slowly. The suffocating weight lifted from her chest, leaving her surreally peaceful.
That was it then.
“Sorry about that - it was Geneva . Our Director of International Affairs seems to have embroiled herself in a diplomatic quagmire. The museum world is changing: if the Italian deal is the shape of things to come, one wonders if there'll be anything left.”
“But there were improprieties in our purchase; it was right to restore the antiquities to Italy .”
He shook his head, “But who draws the line, and where? Next Notre Dame De Pontaut will be banging on our door, then the cathedrals of Rouen , Strasbourg ... we shall have to dismantle this place stone by stone”.
As Amy mused on the future of museums, Raynard quickly appraised her changed manner.
She was entirely at ease.
It was too obvious.
She had swapped plates.
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From:
Honeysuckle and Cat's Piss
by Ewan Gault, Japan
Across the road Kelvingrove Park glowed in postcard light. Old ladies in white strode softly amongst the kiss of bowling balls, murmur of encouragement. A group of laughing students walked towards me, the girls tossing manes of long hair. I stepped off the pavement for fear they might trample me underfoot. They were all wearing sandals. I have always been suspicious of people who want to show off their feet. My own shoes were wet which struck me as odd as it hadn't rained for days. They crossed the road, their laughter protecting them from the world. The lock on the front door was broken but I pressed the buzzer anyway.
“Yeah.”
“Stitch.”
“Anyone know a Stitch? Right. Come on up.”
I stepped into a dark close, faces covered in footprints peering at me from the pages of free newspapers. The stairs spiralled towards a broken ceiling, a ragged patch of blue sky, like a renaissance picture uncovered beneath plaster. The flat was open and I pushed my way into a hall busy with bin bags. Music was coming from behind Dawn's door. The room smelt of fag ends spawning at the bottom of half empty beer cans. A sun tried to shine through manky curtains casting a tea-stained light.
They were playing Jefferson Airplane. The culprit, a gangly schoolgirl swinging bare legs next to the stereo. I couldn't see Dawn. The only person I recognised was a man in a hideous tie-dyed T-shirt, his face green-tinged like the crisp at the bottom of the packet that tastes bad. He raised an eyebrow and I found myself a corner.
“Dawn about?”
“Taking a disco nap,” he nodded at one of the lumps in the bed.
A man in a scary IRA style balaclava barked, “Got any skins?”
I threw him a packet. “Who's that?”
“Neil. Or it was last night. I don't know. He won't take the balaclava off.”
The schoolgirl started flapping her hand like a rattle.
“Jack. What have you got?”
Her voice chimed and lulled. Should have been used to record fairy tales for children to fall asleep to. Jack was the other lump in the bed. The schoolgirl tugged the covers from him. He curled up like a slug when you run a knife down its belly to see if it really turns inside out.
“Jack what is it?”
He shivered and a voice sluicing round clenched teeth said, “A special book.”
“Show me.”
“No. It's a book with the numbers and names of all the friends I haven't met.” Balaclava Man strode across the room and wrenched it from him.
“Fucking phonebook, ya tube.” He sat back down, balanced the book on his knees and started skinning up.
Jack rolled out of bed. He was wearing a suit, Mickey Mouse tie, loose around his neck. I wondered if he was an office worker dropped in on his lunch break. Surfaced a few days later, stubble on his chin and vomit on his shoes. He started rubbing his jaw muscles, opened a Venus flytrap mouth, then slowly, carefully, clamped it shut.
Balaclava Man flopped back in his seat, a joint squeezed between tight white lips. The phonebook fell from his knees scattering creepy crawly tobacco.
“Listen. I think I'm going to head. When Dawn wakes tell her Stitch called.”
“Dawn's awake,” shouted a voice from the bed.
Balaclava Man sniggered and passed the joint and soup bowl ashtray to the schoolgirl. She took long, exaggerated tokes. Looked at the milky smoke shimmying from the end as if she was raising the dead.
“Whatcha want?” Dawn asked, sitting up in an oversized cardigan, looking like a hoor in her granddad's clothes.
“Just thought I'd drop by and see how you're doing.”
“Naw a peep in months and you jist thought you'd drop by?” She hopped out of bed, wrapped a rug tight to her body and penguin shuffled to the toilet. I followed, pretending not to watch as she threw the rug into the corner, dropped her shorts and sat on the pan.
“So Mr. Ah've got a job, dinnae go to clubs, dinnae do drugs. What
can I do for you?”
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From:
Words From A Glass Bubble
by Vanessa Gebbie, England
The VM sniffed. “Well, can I say it now?” she said.
“Go on.”
“I told you not to take Finn Piper no letters. I said...”
“I know what you said.”
This was early Saturday, and Eva was working the morning shift. She got ready slower than usual, sat on the bed for a while and watched Connor snoring. The day seemed weighted down. And it was that day that the VM again said two things for Eva to think about.
“Life,” she said, “ain't no bowl of cherries.” Eva ignored this one; it said nothing she didn't know anyway. She picked up Declan's photo, kissed it, and the VM said, “You be enjoying yourselves, now.”
The VM wasn't looking at her any more. Her bad eye seemed to have slipped sideways and she was looking past Eva with the other eye, like there was something important on the wall behind her. Eva didn't answer with her heart or her mouth. She went to replace Declan in the niche, when something in what the VM had said came back at her like an echo and bounced around in her heart. “You be enjoying yourselves...”
Eva picked up the VM's bubble and turned it over. The glass was sealed at the base with a black plastic plug. The VM's voice was somewhat muffled, “What in the name of Paddy O'Neill are you up to?” she said. “I can't breathe upside-down.” Eva pushed Declan's photo deep into her hip pocket.
It didn't take much effort with a kitchen knife to loosen the VM's plug. “Will you be telling me what's going on?” said the VM, who, being attached to the plug with a dab of hard yellow glue, lay in Eva's hand, her fronds of green plastic foliage and bright pink flowers scattered over the lino. Her bubble lay on its side on the table, completely empty.
“This might hurt a bit, sorry,” said Eva's heart, as she slid the knife between the VM's robes (she didn't seem to have feet) and the base. The base fell away and rolled under the table.
“Ow,” said the VM.
“Wheee!” said The Infant, his face glowing.
“There.” Eva inserted them both into her breast pocket, from where the VM's face peered like a small boy's pet mouse in a blue hood.
“And me,” said The Infant, face against the inside of Eva's pocket.
“Sorry,” Eva said, folding a handkerchief and pushing it underneath the VM so that he could see out too. “Now. I've got to get to work.”
All morning, the VM grumbled. “Me, who's never travelled,” she said as Eva did her round on the estate. “What's this?” she said, as Eva put her head round the door of the corner shop on Limerick Street and put their letters on the counter. “Never been here, ugly place,” she said, as Eva sent a load of brochures and brown envelopes tumbling through the glass doors of the factory office.
“Be an angel and drop us off home?” the VM said at the end of the morning.
“I'm no angel,” Eva said.
“Please? I don't want to go near no kid's parties.”
“No,” Eva said.
It was windy at Finn Piper's farm just before two that afternoon. He was sitting on his tree stump, party invitation in one hand, the other on the neck of one of his collies. He had tied up the orange shirt - still in its cellophane packet - with blue twine, and had hung it from the pine tree, where it moved in the breeze, shining and twisting like an ill-conceived kite.
He had put on Connor's painting trousers and his legs stuck out of the ends like sticks of celery. Connor's v-necked red jumper had something indefinable down the front.
The VM sniffed. “If there's one thing I can't be doing with...”
“...it's snobbery.” Eva finished the sentence as she picked her way across the yard. Finn beamed up at her, opened his mouth wide and crowed, a long doodle-doo that sent a flight of rooks skyward. The chickens grubbing about his bare feet looked up for a second, then resumed their work.
All the way down the track, all the way along the road into town, Finn Piper sat hunched in the passenger seat of the post van, his arms round his knees, craning his neck to see what was passing, then nodding to himself. The van smelled of earth and river water. Occasionally, the shrieks of eagles split the air, nearly sending Eva off the road.
“Will you be taking more care, Eva Duffy?” said her pocket.
Finn called out the names of things as they passed. “It's the sheep alright. It's a field alright. It's horses alright. It'll be men alright. It's a house. A house.”
It was a house, but it was a poor one. The front gate swung on one hinge, and there were a few toys strewn to one side of a stained and cracked concrete path. A rusty tricycle, a ball, a plastic bucket and spade. A half-empty sand pit. A larger child's bicycle with a flat tyre lay on the grass in front of a football goal made from bean sticks and string. Hanging from the letter box was a single green balloon.
The presence of the post woman here on a Saturday afternoon was odd enough, but the sight of Finn Piper on the estate had roused a small gaggle of boys who watched Eva knock on the door. She heard the yap of a dog from inside the house, then another and another behind them on the road. She turned and two lads laughed, then fell quiet.
A small boy in a red jersey opened the door, a toddler clutching his leg. “Mam!” The bigger boy shouted back into the house. “He's here. It's Mister Finn Birdman.” Then, to Finn Piper, he said, “I wrote it, by myself, nearly. I didn't think you'd come. It's not my birthday, it's his.” He nodded at his leg, looking faintly embarrassed. “Can you show us how to make your bird noises? Please?” Finn Piper just stood, head on one side. The toddler's nose needed wiping. Eva Duffy patted Finn Piper on the back. “Go on,” she said. “I'll be back at five thirty . Enjoy yourself.”
An older boy appeared from the shadows, another toddler on his hip. Finn Piper growled, an old pigeon. He didn't move. The middle lad looked back into the house, and Eva could hear it now - the plink of a xylophone, earnest adults singing nursery rhymes, children giggling, the rattle and bell of a plastic toy - “Go on with you,” the older boy said to Finn, “They'll not eat you.” He turned to Eva, his eyes flicking to her pocket. “Would you come in too?” he asked.
Eva felt Finn Piper slide his hand into hers. She felt her other hand deep in her hip pocket, her fingers finding and curling tight round a small oval frame. She felt an intake of breath from the VM. Then Eva, whose head did not want to go in at all, stepped over the threshold.
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From:
Rush of Water
by Merryn Glover, Scotland
The bus squeals to a halt with a blasting of horn and a hiss of brakes. Chickens scatter before it, squawking, lost feathers spiraling in the dust. One bird arrives in a fluster on the front porch of the tailor's shop where Phulmati is waiting. The girl watches the chicken, keeping her head low. Beside her, Ma stands erect in a brown and purple sari, smelling of underarms and turmeric.
The young woman follows her mother through the harsh light and onto the bus. It is like stepping into the stomach of a great beast, where crushed bodies swelter in the juices of sweat and hair oil. She feels a rising nausea, but obeys Ma's prod to slide in next to an old woman. The torn vinyl seat is hot. Ma squeezes beside her, fishes in her woven bag for a wad of notes and hands fifty rupees to the conductor.
Belching back into life, the bus rumbles out of the village, tipping and heaving over the pot-holes. Phulmati rests her hand on her belly and clenches her teeth. Out the window the fields are alive with rice-planting. Sunlight flashes on the terraces of water where women work in rows, ankle deep in the carpets of green. She should be there too, bent over in the paddies, hands full of wet shoots, singing.
When the bus stops in the next village she watches a woman sitting outside a house massaging her baby. Fat and gleaming with oil, he wriggles under her warm hands and laughs, like water bubbling. At the next stop a woman is washing her toddler at the village tap, rubbing a turban of foam over his head. As the cold water courses down his body, the child screams and his mother laughs. Further on, a little girl in a ragged blouse runs to a ditch beside the road. She squats and a mustard stream of diarrhoea forms a pool between her feet. As the bus moves off, Phulmati sees a dog come to sniff and hears someone laugh. Her stomach erupts and she vomits, splattering on the old woman beside her as she lunges for the window.
“Oh you filthy girl! Look what you've done!” scolds the woman, pushing past Phulmati and Ma to get to the aisle. She pulls off her shawl and shakes the slimy chunks of yellow onto the floor. “Chha!” she spits. Phulmati huddles into the window seat, the hot metal of the frame burning her cheek. She wipes her mouth on the back of her hand and rubs it down her kurta. Ma says nothing, lips tighter.
As the bus roars into the outskirts of the city, Phulmati feels the crush of too many buildings, too much traffic, too many people. She squints at the billboards above her. A woman in a silver dress glitters large and radiant. Three tins of yellow paint jostle beside a television. The top floor of a building is crowned with a set of grinning teeth.
As she looks out, a truck puffs its brown fumes in her face, souring
her mouth. She holds up her scarf against the smells of melting tar,
rotting vegetables and open gutters, all stewing together in the heat.
The sudden shriek of a horn jolts her as a land rover swerves past.
She jerks her head round to watch it go.
He had come in a land rover from the city, with a smart clean shirt and sunglasses. Govinda, with his hair so black and oiled it shone and his teeth sparkling when he smiled. And he smiled handsomely at all the girls, but especially at her.
“Tell me, pretty sister, where is the spring that should feed this tap?” She dropped her gaze from the dark glasses to his hands, resting casually on slender hips. A gold watch with dials hung loosely from one wrist and there was a gleaming buckle at his waist. “I'm here from the water board to supervise the repairs. Can you take me up?”
The girls tittered and jostled one another, pushing Phulmati to the front. She felt her cheeks glowing and put her hand over her mouth, giggling. He was looking right at her.
“I must take this water home,” she said, gesturing to the copper gagri in the basket on her back. Then hiding her face behind her shawl, she gave way to her laughter.
“Ah, what happy girls they have in these villages,” he said, grinning, his eyes still playing over her. “Come, take me up to the source and your friends can explain to your family why you are late. The sooner we get your tap fixed, the sooner you can give up these long walks for water. Then you will have so much more time for fun, eh, girls?”
They fell into one another in gales of giggles as the man laughed with them, a liquid, moneyed laugh. Phulmati sat down at the edge of the path and released the basket.
“This way,” she said, turning on her heel and walking in a strong quick gait towards the mountain path.
“Slow down, pretty one,” he called, then coming up behind her murmured softly, “You make me chase you.”
His words sent a shock from her nipples to the pit of her stomach, but she kept her back to him, and kept walking.
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From:
Luz
by Martin H. Bott, Zurich
Over the ages, mused Brian Kelleher as he watched through his telescope, the shepherds of Andalusia had developed stone-throwing into a fine art: their technique was to wind up their arm backwards before releasing the projectile underarm in a whir of motion quite unlike the throw of, say, a fielding cricketer. Brian (a former opening bat in the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation's First – and only – Eleven) had been dismayed to see the shepherd guiding his flock toward the hollow into which he and Manolo had just observed huge, primeval-seeming griffon vultures descend. Scores of the majestic gliders had spiraled down from invisible altitudes to land on the lip of the depression and metamorphose into bald, scruffy pedestrians, cackling and mewing at each other pettily before disappearing into the hollow. The two friends had been preparing to stalk closer when they spied Emilio and his flock approaching from the other side. And now the shepherd surprised the watchers by leaving his sheep and starting to crawl towards the hollow.
‘Don't tell me this guy's a bloody twitcher too!' whispered Manolo. The charm of Brian's hobby had never been discernible to him, and it had not been perceptibly illuminated by a morning spent trudging through the thorny undergrowth of the hills, ogling warblers and pipits and shrikes.
‘He's probably going to lob a rock at them and see how many he can knock over,' said Brian, who had spent many hours in the sierra and was familiar with the shepherds' prejudices.
‘Like ten-pin, with vultures for skittles! Don't blame him: nasty, scabby buggers.' Manolo, nonchalant witness to countless police autopsies, shuddered to think of the scalpel-beaked birds doing what came naturally.
But instead of launching an assault, the shepherd lay down at the edge of the depression and quietly contemplated the scene below as though he really were another amateur ornithologist. Then, quite suddenly, he exceeded Manolo's hopes and Brian's fears by springing to his feet with a chilling cry and raining stones down upon the maelstrom of vultures as they fought one another to get airborne. Long after they had gone, though, the shepherd continued yelling, alternately covering his face with his hands and peeking through them as if in disbelief. The Irishman and the Spaniard looked at one another.
‘We'd better go and take a look,' said Brian Kelleher, and rose with the lugubrious urgency which had characterised this big man's approach to every spot of bother during his long career in the Garda. Manolo, recently and reluctantly retired from the Guardia Civil, required two paces to each of Brian's to keep up.
Crawling through the prickly, desiccated grass towards the hollow – a place he knew well, for it was bisected by an old boundary fence and concealed a gate through which he sometimes led the sheep – Emilio could hear the vicious hissing of the squabbling diners. It was the lofty insouciance of vultures' soaring silhouettes that truly enthralled him, but there was another kind of fascination in seeing the birds close to, on the ground. It made the dream which had turned into the story which had turned Emilio into El Cadáver come to life (so to speak), and he would imagine vividly the moment at which he awakened to find those serpentine necks burrowing inside him, devouring him. He, Emilio – conscious carrion! He never imagined pain, just the feeling of his physical self vanishing before his eyes, as it sometimes seemed to do, less dramatically, when he closed those eyes and slowly yielded to his fundamental drowsiness under the hot sun, intoxicated by the scent of lavender and rosemary, alone with his flock.
Reaching the edge of the depression, Emilio lay flat and peered down. The nearest bird was close enough for him to see the scaly skin of its talons, the frayed plumage of its wingtips and tail. It had torn some flesh from the dead animal and was trying to devour it before the other birds spotted its trophy and snatched it away. And then Emilio noticed something strange: a piece of fabric seemed to be caught in its claws. He jerked his gaze towards the gory focus of the feathered furore:
A fair-haired man of medium stature, dressed perhaps for tennis, is slumped over a white gate, as though attempting to touch his toes across it. And all over him vultures are fighting for access to the apertures: his eyes, his mouth and a great gaping wound in his midriff which positively writhes with avian death's-heads, just as in Emilio's dream. Just as in his dream.
Maybe that is why Emilio takes so long to react; maybe he is sensing now, in a dead man disburdened of temporal cares, that consummate complacency he cherishes in the dream of his own dismemberment. Then, however, the dream seems to relax its grip: Emilio rises in horror and finds himself overtaken instead by outraged instinct. He starts to bawl and throw anything that comes to hand.
Only when he calms down, exhausted by his rant, does he notice the cord which attaches the wrists and ankles of the corpse to the gate. He is bothered by the fact that the gate is sagging from its hinges, so that the man's posture is slightly lopsided. It recalls for him the disquiet he experienced as a boy watching the religious processions in the village, when the young men carrying the image of Christ aloft on his cross allowed their heavy load to lean precariously to one side. Emilio was never a particularly strong lad, but he liked to think that, in their place, he could have kept his Saviour vertical.
That cord ... There has been evil afoot here: perhaps his weird train of thought was a divine warning. Gratefully, Emilio completes the collection of his wits and prepares also to collect his sheep and his dogs before getting them and himself as far and as quickly away as he can.
Turning, he is appalled to see two men approaching him; one very big, wearing glasses, the other short and fat. The tall one, a pale mountain of a man, is carrying something – a machine gun perhaps? – on a tripod. Emilio screams again, and runs for his life.
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From:
Waking the Princess
by Carys Davies, Lancaster
She was the widow of the Customs House clerk and she had never liked me. I was only after one thing, she said, and I could forget about that because I repulsed her. I disgusted her. She loathed the sight of me and as long as I lived, she told me, I would never ever find the key to her heart.
I had tried to kiss her once outside her front door - a terrible, greedy, darting, desperate sort of lunge I have always regretted - and after that she took to shouting at me through the window when I came to call.
'Lizard!' she shouted. 'Toad!'
Her name was Elizabeth and she lived with her children in one of the tiny dark houses which lined the narrow streets behind the Customs House in our town at that time. Every day she appeared at her door in the same dingy, high-necked gown, her brown hair scraped back and pinned behind, a drawn look to her face. But she was tall and strong and big-boned and to me she resembled the gorgeous painted figureheads on the ships that came up the river and lay anchored outside the warehouses on the quay. I thought about her all the time.
I had brought her presents - a paper flower from the fair at Appleby, a tea canister with a design of roses on it from Atkinsons on China Street , a pair of combs for her hair - but she left everything on the doorstep for the beggars to steal. I sent her letters and poems but she screwed them up in her fist and tossed them out into the sewers; when I called she closed the door in my face and shouted at me through the window and I was left to loiter in the street outside her house with nothing to do but wait and watch for a glimpse of her. Which was how I began to observe the way she lived.
The front door was almost always open and I could see the dead clerk's shabby black coat, still hanging on its hook in the passageway. I could see her ragged children running in and out all day long. Elizabeth herself seemed to do nothing but tend the fire and clean the floor. In the early mornings, she was there crouched in the crooked doorway, a donkey-stone in her hand, whitening the edge of the step. The rest of the time I could see her through the open door, trudging around with a bucket of water, a handful of brushes and a heap of rags. Half her life, she seemed to spend on the floor, trying to scrub it clean - all the time with her dirty children charging in from the street, down the dismal passageway beyond the front door, mud and sewer-slop dropping off the flaking soles of their boots and mingling with the blown soot from the fire, and sinking into the furrowed boards and lumpy flagstones of the floor. She'd yell at them then to look at the stinking grime they'd brought in on their shoes from the filthy street and how they were trampling it into the floor.
Once a month she bought clean sand from the old man who hauled it into town from the shore on his cart. Then she'd be on her knees again, scouring her pock-marked flags and greasy, blackened floorboards with the sand and a bucket of steaming water. As far as I could tell, she owned just one carpet, a small woven thing like a tab-rug, only heavy. This she would heave out into the street every Monday morning on her back, like a stevedore, then beat it against the stone wall of the house. Vast puffs of black dust drifted up into the air, getting smaller and gradually paler until she seemed to be satisfied, and then she'd drag the carpet back into the mean, dark little room at the front of the house she called the parlour. She only seemed to rest for a few hours a week, on Sunday morning, when she'd stand at her bedroom window wrapped up in a blanket. There she would shake out her drab, solitary dress and beat it like her old carpet until it was as clean as it ever would be, and then she'd put it on again and go to church.
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From:
Rookie of The Year
by Paul Byall, Savannah, Georgia
For the next two weeks a debate raged in Josh's head over asking her to leave or letting her stay. As he saw it, the longer he put it off, the harder it would be to get rid of her. But if she was as sick as she claimed, he wouldn't have to worry about that. Come to think of it, though, she had never actually said what kind of illness she had, which you would think a person would do.
Sometimes he felt comfortable around her and was actually glad she was there, but at other times she bothered him. She joked, or half-joked, about his habits, implying that he was disposed to sloppiness. When he popped a cap on a beer and let the foam rise up and overflow down the side of the bottle, dripping suds on the floor as he moved across the kitchen, she would rush over with a paper towel and mop it up. One morning she entered the kitchen as he was frying bacon for breakfast and remarked that bacon was bad for him. “Especially at your age. That stuff'll clog up your arteries and knock you flat dead.”
“What? Now you're my doctor?” The truth was that Doctor Hinson had been cautioning him against fatty foods. He'd had a stent inserted the year before, and his cholesterol was up again. But he liked bacon, he liked it with his eggs, and for lunch he liked BLTs. He ate BLTs at least three times a week.
One morning he came out of the bathroom and found her waiting in the corridor wrapped in a powder blue, terry cloth robe. She held a small bag in one hand and a fistful of pill bottles in the other. He nodded a greeting in passing and foresaw a budding problem. The house only had one bathroom.
The problem never materialized. She kept her personal toiletries in her room and always waited for him to use the bathroom first.
One day he cut his fishing short, came home early and was surprised to find her gone. He raised the window blind and looked outside for the Plymouth , but it was gone too. There wasn't a whole lot of places to go on the island, and he knew she didn't have any money. He wandered into the kitchen and grabbed a beer from the refrigerator, then had a thought and went to her room, but yes, her clothes were still there. He went into the living room, switched on the TV and flipped through the channels looking for a movie. He settled for “Bull Durham”, a film he'd seen maybe ten times.
At four-thirty the telephone rang. It was the hospital on the mainland. She'd just had her treatment, the woman said, and needed somebody to pick her up.
In the waiting room a pale looking patient in a wheel chair, who bore only a vague resemblance to Marybelle, like a frailer, less hearty relative, gave him a weak smile. The woman at the desk handed him a form on a clipboard. “Just sign at the bottom that you're picking her up.”
He wheeled her out to the car and lifted her into the passenger seat. She felt like a small child in his arms.
“I'm sorry,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “This was my first time. I didn't know it would do this to me. I thought . . .” She paused for breath. “I thought I'd be able to drive home.”
On the way home, her hair began falling out. “I'm getting hair all over your seats,” she said, and he looked at her and realized he'd never really seen her before. He carried her to her room and laid her in the bed. He asked if she wanted him to sit with her for a while, but she said no, she thought she'd sleep a little.
In the morning she seemed better. He offered to make her breakfast, and she said fine, but not that greasy bacon he liked. He served her scrambled eggs, toast and orange juice, and that seemed to satisfy her, although she did mention she preferred wheat toast.
“That's what you should eat too,” she added. “Whole grains. And if you must have bacon, buy Canadian bacon; it's got almost no fat.”
“I'll do that,” he said.
“So what happened?” she said later, “To your baseball career?”
“I took a line drive to the head. I was never the same after that.”
“Bad break.”
“It was my own fault. I never learned to square up. Every coach I'd ever had, since Little League, had told me I had to finish up with my feet square to the plate, to be in position to field the ball. But I never could get it in my head. I just wanted to rear back and fire. They said I wasn't coachable.”
“I can see that.”
The following afternoon, he went to the supermarket and picked up the wheat bread and Canadian bacon and some other things, then drove to Carl's.
“Do me a favour, Carl?”
“Oh, oh.”
“I need to pick up Marybelle's car at the hospital.”
“On the mainland?”
“You know another hospital around here?”
“What's it doin' at the hospital?”
Josh didn't want to tell Carl about her illness; it seemed a violation of her privacy, but he didn't want to lie either. Josh rarely lied, not because of fidelity to some moral code, but because it was just too much trouble. It ascribed excessive value to the opinion of the person being lied to. Was anybody really worth all that effort? Generally it was easier just to clam up. Which was what he did, and when Carl repeated the question, Josh said, “It's complicated.” in a way that ended the inquiry.
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From:
Man in Ultramarine Pajamas
by Lily Mabura, Nairobi, Kenya
There is this man that I know.
Perhaps I should take that back and say that he is a man you can only know from what you hear, because he talks to no one. I think that he has always been at the back of my mind, pieces of him gradually coalescing into a mass of connective tissue that could be said to be a semblance of him. I have heard countless stories about him from my mother. These stories she did not really intend to tell for she is not the gossipy kind. I have also been watching him for years, from way back. My father occupied this studio then. He had it brimming with charcoal drawings and sculptures, some of which my mother has since done away with. I would sit by this window as he worked and look down into this man's yard.
I wish I could tell you his name, but I have a feeling that would spoil everything. My aim is not to embarrass him; I merely wish to paint him. The thought has often occurred to me, but never the opportune moment; not one like this.
This is the first time I am seeing him asleep with his head against the driver's seat of his car, face up, rather than slumped down onto the steering wheel. There is always something tragic and desperate about him in that pose. He reminds me of Van Gogh's Old Man with His Head in His Hands.
There is no veil of drunkenness on his face this morning, no bleary nostrils, no streak of white saliva on a gaping jaw. Plus he is in pajamas I have never seen him in before — ultramarine pajamas he probably has not worn for years. You can tell that a good tailor had taken his time on them. A good tailor is hard to find in Kericho because this is Kenya 's tea capital. It is hilly and it is green and it rains as it pleases.
Yes, he must have gotten his ultramarine pajamas elsewhere. I shift my weight from one foot to the other. He must have forfeited his ritualistic, alcohol-induced passing out last night, I tell myself. He had arrived home, I imagine, at whatever time of the night, had his supper or perhaps not, but from his clean state obviously had taken a bath, had next gotten into these ultramarine pajamas, walked out of his house, opened the door to his car, pushed back the driver's seat, and then lay there till this bright and early morning.
It's a quiet morning that gives the impression that there isn't another soul awake for miles. The sun's rays, coming from an odd angle through the sycamore trees, stand between him and me. Some leaves sparkle like green marble as the rays touch them and are then reflected away. The sun manages to filter through others, turning them into sheer, greenish yellow screens. On any other morning I would have gladly painted it for you, this expansive palette of Chrysolite with flickering cast shadows from dry, dark twigs. You'd see it as I see it, interlaced with lengths of cobweb that are only visible at this time of the day when the angling of the light has them glistening like hairline rainbows. But there he is and I worry that he might awaken, that the light might change, that there might never be such a moment again. It is as Monet said: colour, any colour, lasts a second, sometimes three or four minutes at a time.
What to do, what to paint in three or four minutes, he had asked.
His face, I finally decide; it's the best place to begin. The rest I am likely to see again, tomorrow perhaps, the day after that ... I sketch him on a canvas I have been reserving for a landscape.
I woke up with the intention of painting outside today, in the tea estates where I might find pickers doing their job in silence. But his face compels me now, and I decide to do the painting in oils even though they are hard to work with a knife and take forever to dry. They can take months. But it is the effect I am after. I like to think of a drying oil painting as a fermenting tea: the colour and the aroma all depend on it.
I start with a pale hue of raw sienna mixed with linseed oil for an under-layer. Painting under-layers always gives me time to think, reconsider my subject. To truly capture a face, my father used to say, you had to take into account what had happened to it before. You had to think time and people. Time for this man is, well, a lot; at least when you compare his age with that of the men in my family. My brother died at twenty-seven while serving on the Kenyan UN Protection Force in Bosnia . He was on foot patrol near Brezani, a commune of Srebrenica, and tripped on a step mine. My father had died two years earlier of pneumonia. My mother said it was because he liked walking in the rain and would not be bothered with carrying an umbrella or putting on a raincoat. Kericho, he used to say, has been raining every afternoon from the beginning of time. He was of the opinion that there was nothing one could do to keep from getting wet.
He is sixty, this man, like my own father would have been if he were alive. In that regard it is interesting watching him. I imagine certain parts of my father — a patch of skin maybe, some grey hairs, that slowed gait perhaps — would look like his. A stroke from a few years back has deepened and fossilized the lines in his face, and sometimes I perceive a shadow leisurely emerging from underneath. It is a stormy brown, like you would get by mixing scarlet vermilion and emerald green; stormy brown over the under layer, I think, and on that, thin glazes of terra rosa .
My mother does not like the shape of his head. It is as oblong as an African pumpkin, she asserts, and admonishes me to be wary of men with such heads. They have no luck when it comes to love, she is convinced.
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From:
The Caravan
by Janey Runci, Victoria, Australia
The kitchen in summer is like a tent, full of green light and the smell of hot blackberries. I am an Arab in my tent, a gipsy in my caravan, a glass of cordial beside me, my book on the table in front of me, in the heavy perfumed air of the green tent kitchen.
A glare comes as Mum opens the door and the yellow white heat from outside enters my tent. She says she's going down to the store and I should keep an eye on the jam. She's a black shape there in the light. ‘Did you hear me, Ali?' she says and I nod and finally the door closes. The jam plops on the stove. I read on. Storm Boy climbs onto his little raft and poles out into the lagoon. He sees smoke, he finds a camp, a tent. He goes towards the tent.
‘Look what I've got!'
I blink in the light of the open door as Mum edges in, her arms around a box of groceries. Spiky pineapple leaves poke out of the box and brush against her cheek.
‘Mangoes!' she says. ‘I can make chutney for the market. And a pineapple to make a treat for my darling, for her twelfth birthday.'
She bends and kisses me on the top of my head and I smell the sweet fruit, almost rotten, and then her face cream and then something else, her sweat perhaps, but she is gone, checking the jam and talking about how the mangoes were cheap, a whole half case of them, a bit overripe. Mango chutney is the kind of thing the people from the city want. It will sell like hot cakes at the produce market.
I prop my elbows on the table and cover my ears. Storm Boy lifts the flap of the tent. Mum's voice gets louder.
‘Good book?' she asks.
‘Yes.'
The knife clunks down on the chopping board and the pineapple falls in two halves, juice dribbling over the board between them. She starts to carve away the skin down the sides of the pineapple.
‘That man who's staying in the caravan came into the store while I was there. Did you know he's from the city and he's an author?'
I put my finger on my place in the book. I've seen the man from the caravan in the early mornings when I'm waiting for the school bus. He sits, bare-chested, on a little camping stool outside the old caravan he's parked down near the river, with his hands cupped around a mug of something, staring out over the water. Once I saw him scraping at the rusted barbecue that hasn't been used since the highway bypassed our small town. ‘This godforsaken town', Mum sometimes calls it.
‘He wanted to get away from all the smog and the pollution and the noise of the city,' she says now. She frowns. ‘He says he loves the peace and the solitude here.'
She chops the pineapple and piles it into the blue glass bowl. She sprinkles brown sugar and beats cream with a spoonful of brandy. All the time she's talking about the author, whose name is Leon , and how Leon 's interested in books, and probably films and plays and music.
‘I said to Leon to call in whenever he felt like it.'
‘But not today? Not on my birthday?'
‘I didn't exactly say today but I suppose he could. You won't mind, will you?'
As if on cue we hear car tyres on the gravel road. I hold my breath, waiting for them to go on, but they get closer as a car pulls in the drive. Mum leans forward to look at her reflection in the glass doors of the dresser. She bites her lower lip hard and pushes back her hair.
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