by Haddon, Mark
The scent was, yes, of roses, and look, four new buds round this opened flower had appeared too, I’d not noticed them till now and they looked as if they were really ready to open, about to any minute.
Yes, I said into the phone. Sorry. Hello.
Urgency, update, condition? the voice said.
Fine, I said. Life’s fine. Life has definitely improved.
Yes, but. Results, hospital, inconclusive, the voice said. Urgent, immediate, straightaway.
The voice had become implacable.
Surgery policy, the voice said.
Then it softened.
Here, it said. Help.
Well, I said, for now I’m okay though at some point soon I might need a bit of a hand with some trellissing.
With – ? the voice said.
I’m so sorry, I said, but I’m on a train and we may lose reception any mo –
I pressed the End Call button then switched my phone off because all four of those new buds had opened right before my eyes and I was annoyed that because I had been talking on a phone I had not seen a single one of them do it.
I have never yet managed to see the moment of the petals of a bud unfurling. I might dedicate the rest of my life to it and might still never see it. No, not might, will: I will dedicate the rest of my life, in which I walk forward into this blossoming. When there’s no blossom I will dead-head and wait. It’ll be back. That’s the nature of things.
As it is, I am careful when kissing, or when taking anyone in my arms. I warn them about the thorns. I treat myself with care. I guard against pests and frost-damage. I am careful with my roots. I know they need depth and darkness, and any shit that comes my way I know exactly what to do with. I’m composed when it comes to compost.
Here’s my father, a week before he died. He’s in the hospital bed, hardly conscious. Don’t wake me, he says, whatever you do. He turns over away from us, his back to us. Then he reaches down into the bed as if he’s adjusting one of the tubes that go in and out of him and, as if there’s nobody here but him – can he really be – the only word for it isn’t an easeful word, it’s the word wanking. Whatever he’s doing under the covers for those few seconds he takes, it makes the word wank beautiful. He’s dying. Death can wait.
A branch breaks into flower at the right hand side of my forehead with a vigour that makes me proud.
Here we all are, small, on the back seat, our father driving, we’re on holiday. There’s a cassette playing: The Spinners; they’re a folk band from tv, they do songs from all over the world. They do a song about a mongoose and a song about the aeroplane that crashed with the Manchester United team on board the time a lot of them died. That’s a modern ballad, our father has told us, and there’s a more traditional ballad on that same cassette too, about two lovers who die young and tragically and are buried next to each other in the same graveyard, that’s the song playing right now in the car in the July dark as we drive back to the caravan site, the man from The Spinners singing the words and from her heart grew a red red rose. And from his heart grew a briar. They grew and they grew on the old church wall. Till they could grow no higher. When we get back to the caravan and get into our beds in the smell of toothpaste and soap-bags, when the breathing of all the others regulates and becomes rhythmic, I will be wide awake thinking about the dead lovers, they are wearing football strips, bright red, and their hearts are a tangle of briars and thorns, and one of my brothers shifts in his sleep and turns to me in the makeshift bed and says from somewhere near sleep, are you having a bad dream? and then though I don’t say anything at all he takes me and turns me round, puts one arm under me so my head is on his shoulder and his other arm across my front, and that’s how he holds me, sleeping himself, until I fall asleep too.
Every flower open on me nods its heavy head.
I lie in my bed in a home I’m learning to let go of and I listen to my neighbour playing the drums through the wall in the middle of the night. He’s not bad. He’s getting better, getting the hang of it.
Every rose opens into a layering of itself, a dense-packed grandeur that holds until it spills. On days that are still I can trace, if I want, exactly where I’ve been just by doubling back on myself and following the trail I’ve left.
But I prefer the windy days, the days that strip me back, blasted, tossed, who knows where, imagine them, purple-red, silver-pink, natural confetti, thin, fragile, easily crushed and blackened, fading already wherever the air’s taken them across the city, the car parks, the streets, the ragged grass verges, dog-ear and adrift on the surfaces of the puddles, flat to the gutter stones, mixing with the litter, their shards of colour circling in the leaf-grimy corners of yards.
Ali Smith was born in Inverness, studied at Aberdeen and Cambridge universities and lives in Cambridge. She’s been writing novels, stories, plays and occasional journalism since 1995. Her most recent books are Artful (2012), a work of melded fiction and essay based on a series of talks she gave at St Anne’s College, Oxford in 2012 as Weidenfeld Visiting Professor of Comparative European Literature, and There But For The (2011), which won the Hawthornden Prize and SMIT Best Scottish Fiction Award.
EFG Private Bank
EFG International is a global private banking group with a record of dynamic growth, courtesy of offering clients a service they expect and deserve. We are active in over 30 locations worldwide, located where our clients need us.
We are a proud co-founder (under the name of our UK business) of the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, which has quickly become the pre-eminent award for this genre since its inception in 2009. More generally, we have a strong commitment to literature, and also lend our support to the Charleston Festival; Small Wonder, Charleston’s short story festival; and the Chipping Norton Literary Festival.
For more information on us, visit www.efginternational.com. EFG Private Bank, our business in the UK, can be found at www.efgl.com.
This year’s judges
MATTHEW EVANS (non-voting Chair of Judges). Lord Evans CBE is currently Chairman of EFG Private Bank. Prior to joining EFG, Lord Evans was a junior government minister in the House of Lords, Chairman of Faber & Faber and Vice Chairman of the British Film Institute.
ANDREW HOLGATE has been the Literary Editor of The Sunday Times since 2008. Amongst many other prizes and awards, he has previously been a judge for the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Orwell Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and the Betty Trask Award.
ANDREW O’HAGAN was born in Glasgow in 1968. His first book, The Missing, was published in 1995 and shortlisted for the Esquire/Waterstone’s/Apple Non-Fiction Award. Our Fathers, his debut novel, was shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize. His second novel, Personality, was published in 2003 and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. In January of that year Granta named him one of the ’Best of Young British Novelists’ and in April he received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. O’Hagan’s prize-winning books were joined in 2010 by The Atlantic Ocean, an acclaimed book of essays. He has written for the stage, is a contributing editor to The London Review of Books and a Fellow of King’s College.
LIONEL SHRIVER is the author of ten novels. She is best known for the New York Times bestsellers So Much for That (a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award and the Wellcome Trust Book Prize) and The Post-Birthday World (Entertainment Weekly’s Book of the Year and one of Time’s top ten for 2007), as well as the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin. The 2005 Orange Prize winner, We Need to Talk About Kevin passed the million-copies-sold mark several years ago, and was adapted for an award-winning feature film by Lynne Ramsay in 2011. Both Kevin and So Much for That have been dramatized for BBC Radio 4. Shriver’s work has been translated into 28 languages. Currently a columnist for Standpoint, she is a widely published journalist who writes for The Guardian, The New York Times, The Sunday Times, The Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal, among many other publications. Her eleventh novel,
Big Brother, is published this spring.
JOANNA TROLLOPE has written several highly-acclaimed contemporary novels: The Choir, A Village Affair, A Passionate Man, The Rector’s Wife, The Men and the Girls, A Spanish Lover, The Best of Friends, Next of Kin, Other People’s Children, Marrying the Mistress, Girl from the South, Friday Nights, The Other Family, Daughters-in-Law, and The Soldier’s Wife, published last this year by Doubleday. Other People’s Children has been broadcast on BBC television as a major drama serial. Under the name of Caroline Harvey she writes romantic historical novels. She has also written a study of women in the British Empire, Britannia’s Daughters. Joanna Trollope was born in Gloucestershire and lives in London. She was appointed OBE in the 1996 Queen’s Birthday Honours List for services to literature.
SARAH WATERS was born in Wales in 1966 and now lives in London. She won the Betty Trask Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, was shortlisted twice for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Award and won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 2000. Fingersmith, her third novel, was shortlisted for both the Orange Prize and the Man Booker Prize, and won the CWA Ellis Peters Dagger Award for Historical Crime Fiction and The South Bank Show Award for Literature. She was chosen as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2003 and her fourth novel, The Night Watch, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize in 2006. Her most recent novel, The Little Stranger, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2009. Fingersmith, Tipping the Velvet, Affinity and The Night Watch have all been adapted for television. Sarah is currently working on a new novel.
Short story events
Organised by Wordtheatre
Readers can savour all six stories shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award 2013 at two special events at Foyles, in London’s Charing Cross Road, on Wednesday 20 March and Thursday 21 March, organised by short story performance specialists Wordtheatre. Three stories will be read each night, by a stellar line-up of acting talent, including Helen McCrory, Olivia Williams and James D’Arcy.
Full details of the events, which cost £5 each (concessions £3), can be found at www.foyles.co.uk/events, where you will also find final confirmation of the actors and the running order. Both evenings will run from 7-9.30pm, and a complimentary glass of wine or soft drink will be available during each event (drinks served from 6.30pm).
Dates: Wednesday, March 20 and Thursday, March 21
Venue: the Gallery at Foyles, 113 - 119 Charing Cross Road, London WC2H 0EB
Tickets: £5, concessions £3. Please note, no physical tickets will be issued, the email confirmation you will receive is proof of your reservation.
WordTheatre is a nonprofit organisation dedicated to inspiring a love of language and literature by presenting live performances of contemporary short stories. It features renowned actors who bring to life exquisitely crafted stories penned by the finest authors working today. Authors engage the audience in a post-performance discussion and book signings. All WordTheatre events are digitally recorded and the organisation is currently preparing to release its library of over 600 readings and interviews. www.wordtheatre.com
Your chance to vote
The winner of the 2013 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award, chosen by a panel of expert judges that includes novelists Andrew O’Hagan, Lionel Shriver, Joanna Trollope and Sarah Waters, will be announced at a special dinner on Friday, March 22 at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival.
Readers, though, can nominate their own choice of favourite story by going to a special public page on the Sunday Times website, thesundaytimes.co.uk/stefgvoting, and registering their choice.
You’ll find more details about the prize, including videos and the winning stories from previous years, at thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/Magazine/stefg/. And you can follow the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award on Twitter @ShortStoryAward #stefg13
