Must’ve been the ghost, she said, pressing the plaster on the wound with more force than necessary.
I hope you haven’t spoiled your appetite, he said, ’cos we’ve got a real treat. But you’ll have to prep ’em.
Beryl tried not to look at the bag in the sink. One or two of the starfish had poked their fingers through the mesh and seemed to be waving to her.
You have to be careful, he said, Here, I’ll tell yer what to do.
He unhooked a starfish from the bag and laid it belly-up on the chopping block. He intended for her to butcher it.
I’m not eating them, she said.
Of course you’re not eating them, he said, his voice normal and caustic, You’ll no doubt have some crap from your stash. Pot noodle I expect. But could you at least do something for me for once?
And Beryl nodded and remained silent and felt the heat raging up her neck and into her face as he talked her through the prep:
You know, they’re actually called sea stars, they’re not fish per se, he said, losing his cadence and then finding it again.
Here are the arms – not fingers, hen, arms – and you spread them out and remove that wee sac in the middle.
She positioned the point of the knife into the centre of the body and pressed on the handle. The starfish buckled – a quick spasm – and then was still. The opening revealed a small wet orange bulb. To Beryl, it looked like an egg. To Beryl, Kenny’s finger, pointing at the egg, was as fat as the fingers of the starfish. He was still talking, about the benefits of deep-frying over boiling, how beggars couldn’t be choosers, how they probably needed more salt and he’d been told they could find a salt-bed nearby, and Beryl heard drone drone drone, blah blah blah, y’ken. And then he was instructing her to remove the central sac from each one which he would really have loved to do himself but for his hand.
Listen Bee, this is really important, y’ken, that wee sac is toxic, that wee sac causes paralysis. So, you know, be careful, eh?
When he went to take his boots off, Beryl was very careful. She chose the fattest of the starfish, extracted it from the bag – apologising, commiserating, pulling her mouth down at the corners in a little grimace – and dropped it whole into the saucepan. She was barely able to look as it twisted and wheeled in the boiling water; you had to feel sorry for the poor thing.
JOHN HENRY
‘Hammer gonna be the death of me’
Mary-Ann Constantine
He sees only the lines of the tracks stretched out ahead, through a reddish scrubland, with pines and a huge sky; tracks stretching cinematically towards a burning horizon through the red sandstone dotted with stunted prickly shrubs. The smell of metal in the heat of the sun.
And because this is the second time, he wakes a few minutes before the alarm, disturbed. It clings to his inner vision; he tries to peel it away. He showers his big body, shakes his head like a dog, and shaves, looking into his own sharp eyes in the mirror to see if there is any detectable trace. It leaves him gradually, like a thin film of oil or a headache breaking up and dissolving. He gets into the dark suit. Then he goes down to the kitchen, makes a small, strong espresso on the hob and sits at the table to stem the flow of emails and do an hour’s preparation before setting out for work. He walks across the city to his office through a soft grey drizzle.
It is possible, though extremely difficult to ascertain, that the weather, at some scarcely acknowledged level, might make a difference; that he might be aware without knowing it that the city’s trees are sometimes cold and naked, sometimes full of white flowers. Possible that in ways too subtle to calculate he does see passing faces and react to them with warmth or amusement or curiosity. Even buildings might matter, though again, short of persuading the gods to vaporise a bank or a Starbucks one morning merely to test his responses, it would be very hard to tell. Mostly he just carries himself along inside his mind, which is vast and cultured and perpetually busy with strategies. Although he is not a politician, and is no admirer of most he has encountered, he has the politician’s gift for tipping the balance of power, for persuading, for manoeuvring, for making things happen. He can work eighteen or nineteen hours a day; sleep blots him out completely. And he rarely dreams.
He calls in at the Italian café, places his order and stands by the counter, texting a reply to a frazzled query from the head office in Nigeria, where the convoys have not been getting through. There is indistinct music, battling the mighty noise of the coffee machine, grinding and steaming. He half catches a bluesy tune.
The woman behind the counter calls out his order and hands the coffee across. He smiles and thanks her warmly, because however much goes on inside his head he does like people, especially working people, and is concerned for them. He has learned over the years how to express that concern, as one might learn a foreign language. By now he is very fluent, and most people cannot tell the difference.
He comes in here a lot, out of loyalty to an Italian grandmother he never knew and an objection to multinationals, and yet this woman is not familiar. She has thick blonde hair piled up a little frowsily, and blue nail varnish, and blue eyes that meet his.
Here, she says. His big hands, docker’s hands, navvy’s hands, wrap firmly round the cardboard cup.
Thank you.
She looks at him very directly. Is there anything else?
Ah, no. I don’t think so. This is great.
She looks sceptical.
You’re sure? she says, and he smiles because he thinks she’s teasing.
Quite sure, he says. She sighs, and turns away.
He leaves, faintly concerned that he might have misread something, with a shred of song from the radio clinging inside his head, about a hammer, he picked up a hammer and a little piece of steel, and then he is crossing a road and a cyclist whips by too close, too close altogether. And he crosses the road and heads down towards the underpass, his work bag slung diagonally across his body, coffee in one hand, phone in the other, four more messages since he last looked.
But here he slows down. Here the outside world does break in, a strumming guitar and a harsh voice singing, and a separate high call, like a market-trader or a bird, BigIssue-BigIssue! BigIssue-BigIssue! He thinks of them as Scylla and Charybdis, and though he faces this dilemma almost every morning he has not resolved it yet, it still catches him unprepared. Sometimes he has to clamp the phone to his ear and stride on past, absorbed, guilty, no eye contact. Other days his pockets yield enough for one but not the other; which halves the guilt. Today as he puts the phone away he finds enough change for both of them, and he negotiates the transaction for the magazine, clumsily, with his coffee in one hand. The chords behind him stir a recognition. But he does not recognise the woman selling the paper, who has a thin face and blue eyes and dark blonde hair.
Thanks, he says. Would you mind rolling it up and just slipping into the top of the bag? I can’t, with the coffee, I’m sorry…
She nods, and does so, and then looks at him with some concern.
Is there anything else I can do? Her accent is unidentifiable, and her hand, with its dirty nails, rests briefly, gently, on his arm.
No, no. Thank you. This time he is quite taken aback.
You’re sure? she says, very intently.
Yes. Thank you. He backs rapidly away, turns to throw the remaining coins into the busker’s guitar case, and walks on through the underpass much faster than usual, with the words of the song amplified and echoing after him, so that he cannot help but hear the Captain say to John Henry,
I’m gonna bring that steam drill around
I’m gonna bring that drill out on these tracks
I’m gonna hammer that steel on down, lord lord.
Hammer that steel on down.
He has no idea what a steam drill is, nor why the song sounds so familiar. And as he climbs the steps out onto the busy street he doesn’t quite catch John Henry’s response, but he gets the feeling that it is pure defiance.
The
re are so many meetings scheduled for today he does not have time to eat and nobody thinks to ask him. It doesn’t matter. When he works like this his own conviction drives him. He makes do with tea and coffee and a couple of the shortbread biscuits that are conjured up for the most important meeting in the afternoon, and gives everything he has to each encounter, wholly intent. He is possessed of a dark energy, which is not at all restless or demonstrative: more like the force of gravity, say, than electricity. He can be roused and articulate when necessary; patient and contemplative when not. The most difficult meeting of the week goes brilliantly his way: there will be funding for the South American project after all. In the lift going down he allows himself a moment of victory, and thinks with satisfaction that lives will be saved because of words exchanged in a cramped meeting room in a nondescript tower block in a city a thousand miles away from South America. He finds he is shaking, and realises how hungry he is. But he has a train to catch, and his taxi is waiting.
The song gusts out of the radio at him as he folds himself into the back of the cab. It is the Captain again, and he is asking John Henry
What is that storm I hear?
John Henry says That ain’t no storm, Captain,
That’s just my hammer in the air.
Where to? asks the driver, turning the sound down and adjusting her rear-view mirror.
Train station please, he says, checking over seven new messages on his phone.
You sure about that?
He looks up sharply and meets blue eyes in the mirror. Blonde curls tucked under a navy-blue cap.
Quite sure, he says, almost sternly. Station.
She shrugs, and as she starts up the engine there is another burst of song.
John Henry said to his shaker
Shaker why don’t you sing?
Cos I’m swingin thirty pounds from my hips on down
Lord listen to my cold steel ring, lord lord.
Listen to my cold steel ring
He closes his eyes briefly. He doesn’t know what a shaker is, either. But he sees the powerful arms, and feels a kind of thrill, a kind of fear. A crackling voice breaks across the music, and the driver leans into the microphone and tells her boss where she’s headed.
He pays her more than she asks, hoping to make her smile. But she just takes the money with a quiet nod and gives him a look of such tender pity that he is suddenly furious, and turns and pushes through the crowds to the shop, and grabs sandwiches and bottled water and a Guardian. He makes quite sure, this time, to choose a check-out with a young man serving. Then, cutting it fine, he picks up another coffee and hurries for his train, and finds to his surprise that he has a table and plenty of room to himself. He will be able to work.
The relief he feels as the train shakes itself to life and pulls away from the platform is so profound, so powerfully distilled, it has the quality of a blessing. He eats, gratefully. Ignores the paper. Takes his phone out of his breast-pocket and turns it off without looking at it. Then he pushes himself back into the corner of the seat by the window and stretches his big legs as best he can under the table, and looks out with curiosity at the warehouses and the scrapyards and the canal and the wasteland that turns to fields and willows, and then fields of crops in a reddening soil that, emptying itself gradually of houses and shacks and sheds and piles of rubble, gives way to a kind of scrubland with twisted shrubs and pines. An unfamiliar sun breaks through the mist to glare down on the metal tracks, that stretch away, way up ahead, further than he can see, to where a man shining with sweat lifts and drives a massive hammer down, again, and again, and again, in a race against a machine.
THE BARE-CHESTED ADVENTURER
Holly Müller
In the valley bottom was a large, low house lived in by one family for three generations. Its roof was moss-clogged and sagging, the garden fenceless, wall-less, trees leaning above the lawn as if searching for the softest place to fall, shedding leaves to soften it further with rotten brown mulch. If the owner had been ambitious, he could have absorbed land, needing only to reach out and take.
In the living room Seth sat with his cello between his legs but didn’t play. His arm hung limply, the tip of the bow resting on the threadbare carpet. He looked out at the lawn, not seeing. His dad, Keith, slept upstairs and would stay dozing for at least another hour. Then they’d smoke a joint in the chilly kitchen and talk about whether to make banana fritters. Keith would stroke the hunched backs of the bananas in the fruit bowl, eyes half-closed, as if soothing them for slaughter.
‘Perhaps,’ he’d say. Inhale; hiccough; exhale. The yellow skins were darkening; they might soon be lost to him.
‘We had them yesterday,’ Seth would say as his dad fished for the spatula in a chockablock drawer. But it was the only thing Keith knew how to make, fussing lovingly as they sizzled on the Rayburn, the sugar and fat a glut of comfort and nourishment.
‘You’ll have one though, won’t you, Sethy?’ He found the spatula, gave his beige-toothed smile. ‘They’re the best in the world, my fritters.’
Seth wondered if eating banana fritters was good enough reason for living.
‘Got to be done!’ Keith’s clap, deafening, decisive, reverberated in Seth’s skull.
Seth was a virgin – he’d fumbled with a girl at a barn dance but they hadn’t gone all the way. He was in love with Laura, who already had a boyfriend. She was depressed like him but showed it in different ways. She could never sleep and stripped her nails off with her teeth until there was only flesh. Her friends said Seth was obsessed, to be careful, that she shouldn’t lead him on, and she knew these things were true but his adoration was important: it poured into the spaces, the parts of her that were missing, so that they were filled, just briefly.
‘Look at your nose,’ he’d say, touching it with the tip of one of his long fingers, a smile of wonder parting his lips. ‘It’s so small.’ But his breath got stuck in his chest because being with her was like being in a room underwater and he knew it would never go right between them. He wished he could have more grit; he wondered if he should clean his clothes more often.
Keith had once been a longhaired, bare-chested adventurer. He’d hoped to ‘find himself’ on one of those humid nights in India but instead came back to live with his parents in the family home and lost himself thoroughly; something about the place made him wholly disinclined to strike out again.
He married in 1978 and his wife, Andrea, moved in. Andrea had been to a private school where they still taught Latin and Greek. She was a fierce rider, red-brown hair scraped into a netted bun that cut cleanly through the air. Keith was bewitched by her rosebud lips and flinty eyes. She’d been a bully in her harshly ordered school and knew how to stare at someone until they cried.
Over the next decade Keith dreamed up many madcap business ideas then lost conviction and abandoned them before they began. Seth was born and Keith’s father died; Gillian, Keith’s mother, remained – she was as crazy as can be.
‘I can’t exist like this any more,’ said Andrea one day to Keith, twisting her mouth, which was thinner now, drier; a rosebud pressed for years between the pages of an unsatisfactory book. ‘What’s your future? Hmm? You sit around and imagine one day you’re going to make it. But you’re just imagining. You’re practically imaginary, full stop. I’m sorry, but I’m finished here.’ And she went to live with a driving instructor in Brighton.
Keith was dimly aware that things were not how he’d meant them to be: scrounging pot off his son and getting high when Seth was at college, powder too if there was any; once Seth had come home to find Keith curled in a ball on the living-room floor.
‘I feel the size of a teacup,’ Keith had breathed with an expression of paralysed disbelief, fingers kneading his scalp. Bored, he’d snorted a gram of something unidentifiable stashed in Seth’s ‘secret’ shoebox.
Seth often stayed home and wasted a day. He and Keith smoked and watched daytime TV. Then Seth helped Keith decide what to eat f
or lunch and dinner and sometimes drove the car to town (though he didn’t have a licence) to get provisions, including plenty of bananas, as requested by Keith.
Andrea visited occasionally. ‘Don’t try and say you’re not on smack,’ she’d hiss at her son just before setting off back to Brighton. She’d seen Seth’s death in a dream – slumped in the gutter with vomit on his face – and had woken up wet with sweat. ‘I know that look – those black eyes.’ And she’d glance bitterly at Keith, who’d used heroin for the first five years of their marriage.
Seth and Laura went out into the garden late one afternoon.
‘I’m worried about you,’ she said, as they sat on the millstone beneath the trees. Seth smiled; his eyes in their shadowed sockets were sad even when he smiled, with long lashes like horses and Jersey cows. ‘You’ve got to get out of here. There’s an atmosphere. It’s sick. Whenever I walk in the door I feel it.’
‘I know,’ he said. But his head hung low, elbows on knees, and Laura felt impatient and angry. He was cowardly and hopeless and part of it all. I won’t come any more, she vowed. But she did, several times.
For a period, Seth shared the house with both his grandmothers, Gillian and Edith. Edith, Andrea’s mother, moved in because Andrea couldn’t bear to put her in a state-funded home where she’d ‘sit for hours in piss-soaked pants before some little foreign bitch nurse will bother to come and change her’. Keith didn’t ask why Andrea couldn’t take her mother to live with her in Brighton. Andrea ruled his heart even now, like a pitiless schoolmistress.
Gillian was unaware of Edith and Edith was mostly unaware of Gillian unless Gillian grabbed Edith’s arm, twisting loose skin with a vicious bony hand, demanding her name. Edith couldn’t remember her name so the conversation died there. Edith suffered from hallucinations and would ask Seth why there was a tiny Red Indian on the sill of her casement window. He once pretended to be the voice of God outside her bedroom door. He affected a deep and resonant tone.
New Welsh Short Stories Page 12
