Once Upon a Time There Was a Traveller

by Kate Pullinger

  ‘Jonathon,’ she said, ‘you must carry Victoria.’

  He considered this, holding a special parcel of his own.

  ‘I would rather carry the model I am working on, in case it gets injured,’ he said reasonably. She realised there was no use arguing with him.

  ‘I’ll carry her, then, and we’ll get a porter.’

  Victoria was a great, heavy lump of a child and Melanie’s arms cracked under the weight of her. Buffeted helplessly by the crowd, Melanie peered around the platform. There were no porters to be had. And where was Uncle Philip?

  Then her attention was caught by two young men who leant against a hoarding, drinking tea from cardboard cups with unhurried, slow, rustic movements. Their stillness attracted her. They created their own environment around them. Although behind them was a six-foot-high beer-bottle, with the red-lettered statement ‘A Man’s Drink!’ across it, they superimposed upon it a silent and rocky country where there was always a wind blowing with a touch of rain on it and few birds sang. They were hard but gentle men. They were country people in a sense that Melanie was not, although she had just come from the green fields and they might have lived in London all their lives. They were brothers.

  Obviously brothers, although startlingly dissimilar – two different garments cut, at one time, from the same cloth. The younger was nineteen or so, just a few inches taller than Melanie, with longish, bright red hair hanging over the collar of a dark blue, rather military looking jacket with shoulder flaps and brass buttons. He wore washed-out, balding corduroy trousers wrinkled with their own tightness. His clothes had the look of strays from a parish poor-box. His face was that of Simple Ivan in a folk-tale, high cheek-bones, slanting eyes. There was a slight cast in the right eye, so that his glance was disturbing and oblique. He breathed through his slack-lipped mouth, which was a flower for rosiness. He grinned at nothing or a secret joke. He moved with a supple and extraordinary grace, raising his cup to his mouth with a flashing, poetic gesture.

  His companion was the same man grown older and turned to stone. Taller, wider in the shoulder, clumsily assembled, with a craggy, impassive face. A bruising-looking man in a navy-blue, pin-striped suit with trousers frayed at the turn-ups and a beige and brown shirt of the sort that is supposed not to show the dirt. His brown and blue tie was speared with a tie-pin in the shape of a harp. He had a half-smoked, stubbed-out, hand-rolled cigarette, disintegrating into rags of paper and shreds of tobacco, stuck behind his ear.

  They drank their tea and did not talk to each other. They kept quite still, although all the commotion of the station swirled around them. They inhabited their silence and gave nothing away.

  When the younger one finished his tea, he tossed the cup over the hoarding with a lyrical, curving, discus-thrower swing and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He seemed to be inspecting the train, raking the length of it with a slow, sweeping, lop-sided gaze. His eyes were a curious grey green. His Atlantic-coloured regard went over Melanie like a wave; she submerged in it. She would have been soaked if it had been water. He touched the other man’s arm; at once he dropped his cup and they came towards her. And if one moved like the wind in branches, the other’s motion was a tower falling, a frightening, uncoordinated progression in which he seemed to crash forward uncontrollably at each stride, jerking himself stiffly upright and swaying for a moment on his heels before the next toppling step. The boy smiled and stretched out hands of welcome; the other did not smile. Melanie knew they were coming for her and started.

  She was dismayed to see these strangers accosting her when she expected to see an old man in a cowboy hat with a black and white photograph face. Half-remembered Sunday newspaper stories about men who haunted main-line London railway stations to procure young girls for immoral purposes ran through her mind. But the boy said: ‘You’ll be Melanie.’

  So they knew her name and it was all right. She saw his mouth moving; he was still talking but a train was blowing its whistle and drowned his voice, which was extremely soft.

  ‘I’m Melanie,’ she said. ‘Yes.’

  Author Biographies

  The Elephant in the Suitcase

  Deepa Anappara is a graduate of the City University’s year-long Certificate in Novel Writing course. Her novel in progress was short-listed for the 2012 Yeovil Literary Prize. Her short story Easy to Forget, Easy to Remember won first prize in the Asian Writer Short Story competition and was published in the anthology Five Degrees. Deepa grew up in Kerala, India, and currently lives in Essex.

  Documentary at Clareville Lodge

  Susie Boyt was educated at Oxford and London Universities and is the author of five novels and a much-loved memoir, My Judy Garland Life, which will be staged at the Nottingham Playhouse in 2014. Her latest novel, The Small Hours, a psychoanalytic black comedy about the best and worst of how we treat each other, was published by Virago in 2012 to great acclaim. Susie has been writing a weekly column in the Financial Times Life and Arts section since 2002 and has contributed to publications ranging from the London Review of Books to Brides. She has given talks on Henry James, music in fiction and the poet John Berryman among other subjects. She also works occasionally as a bereavement counsellor. She lives in London with her family.

  The Magic Toyshop: an extract

  Angela Carter (1940–92) was born in Eastbourne and brought up in south Yorkshire. One of Britain’s most original and disturbing writers, she read English at Bristol University and wrote her first novel, Shadow Dance, in 1965. The Magic Toyshop won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1969 and Several Perceptions won the Somerset Maugham Prize in 1968. More novels followed and in 1974 her translation of the fairy tales of Charles Perrault was published, and in the early nineties she edited the Virago Book of Fairy Tales (2 vols). Her journalism appeared in almost every major publication; a collection of the best of these was published by Virago in Nothing Special (1982). She also wrote poetry and a film script together with Neil Jordan of her story ‘The Company of Wolves’. Her last novel, Wise Children, was published to widespread acclaim in 1991. Angela Carter’s death at age fifty-one in February 1992 ‘robbed the English literary scene of one of its most vivacious and compelling voices’ – Independent.

  Duty-Free

  Helen Dunmore is a poet, novelist, short story and children’s writer. She was inaugural winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction with A Spell of Winter. Among other awards, her work has received the McKitterick Prize, the Signal Award for Poetry and first prize in the National Poetry Competition. Her most recent novel is The Betrayal and her latest poetry collection is The Malarkey. She has also published a novella The Greatcot and three collections of short stories – Short Days, Long Nights; Ice Cream and Rose 1944. Her work is translated into more than thirty languages and she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

  The Journey to the Brothers’ Farm

  Pippa Gough was born in England and spent most of her childhood in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Swaziland and finally Cape Town, South Africa. After leaving school Pippa trained as a nurse in Cape Town and then returned to England where she trained as a midwife and health visitor, and she has carried on working in and with the NHS in a variety of positions. In 2005 Pippa undertook an MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has the support of a fantastic writing group, which provides endless encouragement. In between times, she works as a freelance in organisational and leadership development with public services.

  Departure Time

  Tessa Green divides her time between writing, painting and part-time work in employment law, and between Newcastle and the Greek island of Hydra. As well as short stories she is currently working on a novel.

  Legs

  Lynn Kramer was born in Cape Town. She studied music and law and worked as a family law solicitor for ten years. Her story Legs is adapted from her recently completed novel Body Language. Other stories have been published in New Welsh Review, Slow Dancer, Jewish Quarterly, Pretext 6 and Ephe
mera. Lynn lives in London and has begun her next novel, provisionally entitled Domestic Violence.

  A Sense of Perspective

  Penelope Macdonald completed a Diploma in Creative Writing at Oxford in 2002, followed by an MA at Warwick in 2004. She says she then ‘came to a standstill’ until her son started school, when she began writing again – poetry and short stories. She has recently begun a novel for young adults. This is her first story to be published.

  School Run

  Kate Marsh lives in Brighton and works as a book-keeper. She wrote short stories when she was younger, then stopped and wrote nothing for about ten years. Reading about the Asham Award gave her the impetus to write her first short story for over a decade. The ‘journey’ theme reminded her of family car journeys as a child – and the school run in particular.

  Pay Day

  Dawn Nicholson started writing seriously around ten years ago and completed a part-time degree in creative writing at Hull University in 2011. She wrote most of her first novel in the final year, while teaching English at a residential school for children with emotional and behavioural difficulties. She is currently working on her second book and looking for an agent and publisher. She lives in Lincoln with her husband.

  Where Life Takes You

  Dolores Pinto started to write four years ago after attending a weekend ‘taster course’ at an adult education college. Her tutor was a poet, and extremely generous with her time and advice and gave her the confidence to continue with her studies at Birkbeck University and the City Lit. She is in the final stages of editing a novel.

  Birds Without Wings

  Angela Readman completed her creative writing MA at the University of Northumbria. Her poetry has won the Essex Poetry Competition, the Biscuit Poetry Competition, Ragged Raven, and been commended in the Arron International Poetry Competition. In recent years, she began submitting her short stories. Her stories have since been shortlisted in the Costa Short Story Award, the Bristol Short Story Prize, the Short Story Competition and won The National Flash Fiction Day Competition. She is currently working on a collection.

  Level and Nearly Unaffected

  Carol Rowntree Jones started to write standing up on a busy London train. She lives in Nottinghamshire and works in media relations for The National Forest and, freelance, for MIEL books. A poet and writer of short fiction, essays and non-fiction, her work has been published by Leaf Books, and in the journals Assent, Staple, The North and 1110. She is a graduate of the University of Nottingham’s BA in Professional and Creative Writing.

  Hwyl

  Emily Russell started writing stories in her head fifteen years ago and then on paper ten years later when she ran out of room. She has a degree in journalism from the University of Sheffield. She lives in Sussex and is currently working on her first novel.

  Leaving Her

  Diana Swennes Smith was raised in a remote northern Canadian logging town. She attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop as a teaching-writing fellow, where she earned a graduation fellowship to lead a summer fiction workshop at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Her fiction has appeared in New Zealand’s online zine, Turbine, and Canada’s oldest literary magazine, The Fiddlehead. As a PhD candidate in creative-critical writing at the University of East Anglia, her peer-reviewed journal article on writing about character desire was published in Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture. Opening chapters of her debut novel, The End of Steel, were runner up for the Summer Literary Seminar’s Graywolf Press Prize. She took advantage of the tuition award to attend a two-week fiction workshop in lovely old Vilnius, Lithuania. Diana is currently researching a second novel and seeking a publisher for her first.

  Acknowledgements

  Departure Time Copyright © Tessa Green 2013

  Leaving Her Copyright © Diana Swennes Smith 2013

  School Run Copyright © Kate Marsh 2013

  A Sense of Perspective Copyright © Penelope Macdonald 2013

  Birds Without Wings Copyright © Angela Readman 2013

  Duty Free Copyright © Helen Dunmore 2013

  Hwyl Copyright © Emily Russell 2013

  The Journey to the Brothers’ Farm Copyright © Pippa Gough 2013

  Pay Day Copyright © Dawn Nicholson 2013

  Documentary at Clareville Lodge Copyright © Susie Boyt 2013

  Where Life Takes You Copyright © Dolores Pinto 2013

  Legs Copyright © Lynn Kramer 2013

  The Elephant in the Suitcase Copyright © Deepa Anappara 2013

  The Magic Toyshop extract Copyright © Angela Carter 1967

  Level and Nearly Unaffected Copyright © Carol Rowntree Jones © 2013