New Welsh Short Stories

by Author: QuarkXPress

  Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Night Start – Tyler Keevil

  Ground-nester – Stevie Davies

  Yes Kung Fu – Joâo Morais

  Mr Philip – Carys Davies

  Levitation – Jo Mazelis

  Rising-Falling – Joe Dunthorne

  Crocodile Hearts – Kate Hamer

  A Letter from Wales – Cynan Jones

  17 – Thomas Morris

  On the Inside – Trezza Azzopardi

  John Henry – Mary-Ann Constantine

  The Bare-chested Adventurer – Holly Müller

  No One is Looking at You – Deborah Kay Davies

  Liar’s Sonnet – Zillah Bethell

  Happy Fire – Rachel Trezise

  A Romance – Sarah Coles

  Learning to Say До Свидания – Maria Donovan

  Pulling Out – Eluned Gramich

  Balm-of-Gilead – Robert Minhinnick

  Biographies

  Copyright

  New Welsh Short Stories

  edited by Francesca Rhydderch and Penny Thomas

  INTRODUCTION

  In the course of the twentieth century, anthologies of short fiction from Wales accumulated something of a proud history. The first book of Welsh Short Stories was published by Faber in 1937, featuring Dorothy Edwards, Margiad Evans, Glyn Jones and Rhys Davies, among others. Since then similarly ambitious selections have continued to appear from one press or another in Wales or England, irrepressibly it seems, when the short story has been in vogue – and when it hasn’t. With a stubborn, wonderful force behind them they keep coming, short stories from Welsh writers, followed by anthologies of Welsh fiction in English. However, if Richard Ford was hesitant to claim that the short story is a national art form in the introduction to his selection of American short stories for Granta over twenty years ago, then so must we be even more reticent on our small patch of land. What we can say is that the Welsh short story continues to endure in the face of huge obstacles, both cultural and commercial. More than that, it continues to thrive.

  Our aim in publishing the nineteen stories included in this volume was to choose authors and writing whose focus on form and style is both exemplary and satisfying. We invited work from writers either born or living in Wales, but we were not seeking writing that was specifically representative of contemporary Wales, or even of the current Welsh literary scene, hence also our decision not to include translations of work published originally in Welsh. We filled out no spreadsheets with regard to geographical balance, gender equality or anything else. We simply asked writers whose fiction we love – celebrated, established and emerging – to send us their newest work.

  The result is a collection bursting with vitality. Many of the writers included are award-winning authors who write both novels and short fiction (also poetry, in the case of some), and the seriousness with which they approach their craft is very much in evidence. Several of the stories, for example, show the unique shape that can be given to a short story as opposed to a novel by clustering the narrative around one central image or symbol. In Carys Davies’ story ‘Mr Philip’ the old shoes confronting a grieving son are skilfully narrowed down to one (new) pair which symbolises all too painfully the depth of his loss. Joe Dunthorne’s ‘Rising-Falling’ boldly harnesses physics to internet dating in a story about who – caught between our real and virtual selves – we pretend to be. Trezza Azzopardi’s starfish in ‘On the Inside’ brings richness, bleakness, and a touch of otherness too, to a beautifully observed story about a difficult relationship. In Deborah Kay Davies’ ‘No One is Looking at You’, a yearned-for bikini becomes the object of the reader’s as well as the protagonist’s fascination: the ending – no spoilers – is gut-wrenching and without the easy get-out clause of any last-minute compensations. Kate Hamer’s magic realist twist in ‘Crocodile Hearts’ brings together every element of the story – voice, character, emotion and central image – to create a terrifying ending in the ‘domestic noir’ mode.

  Closely observed scenes in many of the stories collected here reveal a tightness of control without compromising the potential for open-ended epiphanies. Cynan Jones’ ‘Letter from Wales’, for example, is an artfully conceived story in which the central symbol is withheld almost until the end, resulting in an effective twist which also operates as a clever refusal to close down our interpretation until the final lines. Stevie Davies’ ‘Ground-nester’ likewise observes the minute palpitations of life under the guise of observation of the natural world: in the final instance the unusual bird in question becomes a symbol of the possibility of redemption as well as loss.

  Not all the stories opt for a twist in the tail, or even an epiphany. In ‘The Bare-chested Adventurer’ Holly Müller’s episodic approach mirrors the circular direction taken by the narrative. Eluned Gramich’s ‘Pulling Out’ is equally confident in its circularity, hovering around a mother who no longer knows how to be a mother, the increasingly absent centre in a story about siblings in retreat from the world. In the case of Maria Donovan’s ‘Learning to Say До Свидания’, the picaresque narrative delicately echoes the terrible stop-start progress of grief.

  The power of the voice is crucial to the success of any short story. The writers featured here all speak in their own accent: some shout out, while others whisper – always within earshot of the reader. The celebrated strong voices of Rachel Trezise’s fictional creations add a marvellously complex character to their number in ‘Happy Fire’. Sarah Coles also has a witty, vulnerable narrative voice, which she wraps around the form of her story ‘A Romance’ with considerable skill. A story about a film set which mercilessly explores the unglamorous goings-on off camera, this piece cuts choppily and comically between script and counter-script. Zillah Bethell’s similarly demotic, playful narration in ‘Liar’s Sonnet’, inspired by the mystery of Einstein’s daughter Lieserl, keeps the reader firmly on her toes. Mary-Ann Constantine also draws on other art forms and historical sources to shape her narrative: the scraps and fragments quoted from a traditional ballad become the guiding force of her story, ‘John Henry’.

  What is most striking about the voices in this collection is that they convince from the first line. Thomas Morris’ ‘17’ is a fresh take on a coming-of-age story, in which the adolescent voice shifts seamlessly between comedy, pathos and ennui. Tyler Keevil’s ‘Night Start’ brings a Canadian accent to a story which opens in a naturalist mode, but soon veers into supernatural territory (also very subtly and lyrically exploited in Jo Mazelis’ story, ‘Levitation’). It is the Carveresque, apparently downplayed voice which manages to knit these two strands together so successfully into a low-key yet powerful epiphany. Joâo Morais’ story, ‘Yes Kung Fu’ is a fabulous sketch of Cardiff life, with a voice featuring its own urban rhythm and dialect. This mixture of harsh street life with narrative empathy is fast becoming a hallmark of Morais’ work, and ‘Yes Kung Fu’ is a good example of what the Welsh notion of the ‘square mile’ of a writer’s imagination might mean in the twenty-first century. Robert Minhinnick, by contrast, offers two almost entirely disembodied voices in his ‘Balm-of-Gilead’, in a piece which can be seen as a renegade reworking of ‘Under Milk Wood’ for modern times. You could say that in this story, voice becomes form.

  That image of the Welsh writer’s ‘square mile’, traditionally the square mile of the childhood which made her/him a writer, remains a powerful one for anyone mapping the progress of the Welsh short story. The square miles turned over by our authors stretch from a claustrophobic flat in Tokyo to Cowbridge Road East in Cardiff, from a faceless Chinese hotel to a melancholy visit to Morovia. The reach of the author’s co
mpass is not merely north, south, east and west as we know them: it is the reach of the imagination itself, taking us out of our own world, elsewhere. That is the pleasure of reading a short story, whatever its provenance: the moment at which reader and writer, journeying together, arrive at its destination.

  Francesca Rhydderch and Penny Thomas

  NIGHT START

  Tyler Keevil

  It was late June, and hot, and I was having a hell of a time falling asleep. That was nothing new. That’s always the case, with me. Partly I’d been thinking about the bun Lowri had in the oven, and all the change that was coming at us. But mostly I’d been watching the digits on our clock creeping up, one at a time, and then cycling back to double-zero when the hour passed. Midnight came and went, then one o’clock, then two. Close to three a breeze started blowing pretty hard, causing the curtain to twist and curl, real elegantly. Like a ballroom gown, maybe. Watching the movement helped some. So did the rustling sound of the beech trees outside. I started dozing off, and then twitched awake – one of those twitches that feels like a shock, like a silent alarm clock going off inside you. They’ve got a name for this: a night start. They’ve got a name for everything, these days. It happens to me a lot, but this time felt different. I thought maybe I’d heard something, out in the backyard. I had the impression of clapping. I’d dreamed of clapping, and applause. A big occasion of some sort.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ I asked Lowri.

  But she was out. She’s like that, Lowri. She could sleep through a stampede, or a tornado. The whole house could be torn apart, and carried off, and she’d still be lying there in bed among the wreckage, practically comatose, like Sleeping Beauty. The only thing that ever wakes her, sometimes, is her dreams. But a hot spring night, or a strange noise? That’s nothing to Lowri. It’s a real gift of hers.

  I got on up and went to our window and tugged aside the curtains. It overlooks our backyard – a narrow strip of garden, stretching away from the terrace – and has views of the hills around town. The hills were dark, rounded shapes, like the backs of whales. The sky was all cloudy and heavy, weighed down with moisture, holding in the spring heat. It felt almost tropical, as if a thunderstorm was about to start. The clouds had blotted out the moon, which made it hard to see anything. But I heard, all right. I heard what had woken me up. It wasn’t clapping, but a kind of clack-clack-clack sound. Like a loose shutter banging in the breeze.

  ‘There it is,’ I said, looking back. ‘What the heck is that?’

  But Lowri just murmured at me, and rolled over. Light from the nearby streetlamp laid out a yellow rectangle on the bed, and she was in the middle of the rectangle. She was sleeping atop the covers, on account of it being so hot. Her vest had ridden up, exposing her belly, which was as round and fulsome as the hills outside. At the top was the little nub of her belly button, jutting up. That had been strange for me, when it happened. Nobody told me that belly buttons do that, when a woman gets pregnant and starts to swell. Hers had just popped out from the pressure like a valve. It still looked kind of odd to me. It didn’t look bad, but it didn’t look the way it used to.

  I told her I was heading downstairs. I told her again that I’d heard something, and was going to check it out. It seemed important I explain all that, even if she couldn’t hear me. I figured it had to register, on some level.

  *

  In the kitchen I pulled on some jeans that were draped across the drying rack, a T-shirt, and my Converse. There were four Coors, in a plastic yoke, on top of our fridge. I tugged a can out, then put it down, then picked it up again. I’d been trying to quit. Or cut back, at least. On account of the baby. It’s not as if I drink all that much. Not as much as some people, anyway. Still, fatherhood was on my mind, and responsibilities, and all of that. But I figured what the hell. The baby hadn’t arrived yet, and a beer might help me sleep.

  I cracked the tab open slowly, letting it foam and splutter. I didn’t drink any at first. I stood and held the can in my fist and listened. It seemed real quiet. I was used to the sounds of Gwilym, our neighbour on the right, puttering around, all through the night. I’d get up at some crazy hour – I’m pretty much an insomniac – and the first thing I’d do was listen out to see if he was up, too. The dark of rural Wales, the quiet lonesomeness of these small towns, can get to you. Past midnight, there’s nothing happening, and nowhere to go. No all-night diner. No cafe. No Mac’s or 7-11. No bars that stay open, and no gas stations, either. No people or light or signs of life. And so at night, when I couldn’t sleep, I didn’t have much. But I had Gwilym, and the sounds he made. The walls between these old terraces, they’re real thin. I would hear his radio, or his footsteps on the stairs, or his voice as he talked on the phone. He had a sister who lived in Alberta, where my family comes from. He could call her up late, because of the time difference. He must also have had a sliding closet door. I never saw it, but I heard it. I heard it rolling back and forth, opening and closing, as he fetched things.

  I’d always been able to detect those sounds, ever since we’d moved in. Now, nothing. I took a sip of beer, warm and metallic, and listened to that nothingness, straining against it. I kept hoping to hear something – anything – which of course made no damn sense. But then I did. I did hear something. I heard that same clack-clack-clack, coming from the backyard. I’d almost forgotten what I’d come down to do. I went out there with my beer. The breeze was still blowing – hot and blustery and sort of tempestuous. It wasn’t normal, that kind of weather. Not for Wales. Then there was that clacking. It was coming from Gwilym’s yard.

  I went around the fence, over to his side, ready to find whatever I was going to find.

  *

  Gwilym had lived on the terrace longer than anybody. In fact, he’d been born on it. He’d moved away, during his stint on the freighters, but when he’d finished with that he returned to Llanidloes, and bought his old house back, his mother’s house. Like ours, it was a two-up two-down factory worker’s cottage. He had worked in the local factory until it closed. I worked in a factory, too – up the road in Newtown – and before that, back home, I’d worked on a fishing barge. So we had that between us. We had Alberta, too, on account of his sister. He knew all the towns, with their odd names: Drumheller and Medicine Hat and Stony Plain and Black Diamond. We would talk about those places, and what the weather was like over there, and how the Flames and Oilers were doing. When we talked, we talked over the fence between our yards. Gwilym would lean on it, his arms folded across the top, and doing that pulled up the sleeves of his shirt, revealing the anchor tattoo on his forearm.

  I have a tattoo, too – but on my back, so I don’t think he ever saw it.

  Since he’d been around so long, and was retired, he’d become a kind of caretaker on the terrace. When something went wrong in our house – or anybody’s house – he could fix it. He knew those houses, had seen the work done on them over the years. He’d even done some himself: after the factory closed down, he worked as a builder, on a casual basis. He’d added some of the bathrooms, fitted the kitchens. He had boarded up all the fireplaces, when that was the thing to do, and he had opened them up again, exposing the old brickwork, after the country cottage look came back into fashion. He had helped us do that to our place, and fit our woodburner. And lay our flooring. When I tore up the carpet in our living room, I found old quarry tiles underneath. They were all damp and cracked and there were earthworms coming up between them. It turned out those tiles had been laid on bare soil. Gwilym said that had been the way, back in the day. He and I dug them all out of there, put in a layer of damp-proofing, and fitted new hardwood planking. There were other things, too. He showed me how to replace a washer on our leaky faucet, how to thaw the drainpipe when it froze up last winter, and how to re-point the brickwork on the windward side of the house. Sometimes it seemed as if our house would have damn near fallen apart if it wasn’t for Gwilym.

  When we went on vacation, for weeks or months at a time – ga
llivanting around Europe, or heading back home to see my family – he would cut our lawn, and tend our garden, without us asking him. Some people, they might say we were taking advantage of the old guy, and maybe that’s true. I’ll admit that. But if you tried to stop him, or thank him, he would wave it off. He wouldn’t even really acknowledge it. He was like the shoemaker’s elves, in that story. You’d look away, or go away, and something would get done. The yard always looked better when we came back from holiday than when we’d left. But never as good as his. His lawn had always been real tidy, damn near immaculate: the edges neat, the flower beds rich and fertile and free from weeds, the grass cropped short as a putting green. Now, though, it was becoming overgrown. It had only been a week since he’d died, but he hadn’t been able to do any yard work awhile before that. And in the spring, in this kind of weather, nature is positively explosive. The grass was already a few inches high, sticking up in thick patches, and dandelions had sprung up around the edges. Moss was creeping across the paving stones, which were dotted with garden snails and big brown banana slugs. I had to be careful, picking my way between them. I hate stepping on the damn things in the dark.

  All the gardens on the terrace are narrow – only six feet across – but they go a ways back. At the end of his, Gwilym had built a shed. The shed light was on, the door open. It was fanning in the breeze. That was what was making the clacking. Gwilym had never left his shed open. At first, I figured it must have been local kids. They sometimes come up from the football pitch below our terrace, after drinking in the stands. I thought maybe they’d snuck in, to see if the old guy had anything worth taking. They wouldn’t have done it while he was alive – it’s a real nice town, in that way – but maybe now that he was gone, they figured it would be okay.

  I stepped in there. The workbench was clear, the drawers all shut, the tools hanging from hooks on the wall, his lawnmower propped upright in the corner. The shed was as tidy as always, as tidy as he’d left it. Nothing seemed to be amiss, or out of place. I figured the door must have been left open by the surveyor, or appraisal agent, or whatever you call them. I’d seen him earlier that day, poking around: a beefy guy in a grey suit, one size too small. He’d had a pen and a clipboard with him, taking stock and making notes. Reckoning what they could get for the place. Gwilym’s sister – the one over in Canada – was going to sell it, furniture and all, at a low price for a quick turnover. He didn’t have any other relatives left, and nobody in Wales.