New Welsh Short Stories (28 page)
Tell me something I don't know.
Some of them only big as dragonflies. But black. One came down on the beach, last week. Soon there'll be nothing they don't seeâ¦
We got to try. With the film. Because that's our storyâ¦
Funny. Isn't it?
What?
The old man had been all over. Okay, a lot of it was made up. Lifted it out of books, didn't he? Off the net. But he'd been about. And I've been nowhere.
Took it all, didn't they? Used it up.
Wellâ¦
And there used to be enough. Wasn't there?
For us as well, I mean? More than enough. And what do we have?
Not much, no. Well, I got an oyster shell for crushed herbs. So maybe I can look like a woman.
Good luck with that. Time to get back in the sleeping bags.
'Nother hour?
Look at those clouds massing.
What did you say it was called? Those branches where we sleep? The bushes?
I used to know. But it's just another thing the old man told us⦠Another answer on the tip of my tongueâ¦
Maybe Slowboat would have knownâ¦
Old Slowbo? Wellâ¦
Come on. He wasn't that slowâ¦
No, Slowboat was great. I'll give him that. Especially towards the end. Remember he came up with that jerrycan of diesel? Christ, the Range Rover is going up that dune and he says to the old man, you positive this is in four
-
wheel? And the old man says, sure is⦠But it turns out no, it wasn't. The old man didn't even know how to put it in gear. He'd been driving round in the wrong gear all that time. So Slowboat says, shift over then, and the old man has to oblige. Slowboat didn't even have a licence. Old school. He had that engine running for years after it should have died.
Yeah, Slowboat was good. Kept us going at the end, filling all the bags of jerusalems we were living off.
True. Slowboat made a difference.
Yes, he could hammer a nail in straight. Repair the roof. It was Slowboat who kept the farm going when you know who was too busy with another bloody project.
Think he'sâ¦
Alive? Slowboat? Dunno. If he's anywhere he's in The Works. Brought up there, wasn't he? A million places to hide. Those tunnels in the sinter? Remember that kid who bricked himself up in the hearth? Crept out at night through the false walls. It's possible. No one knows who the hell's in there. Could be hundreds, easy.
That's why the cormorants do so wellâ¦
The farm was Slowboat's home. 'Course it was.
And that's right about nails. Slowboat always talked about nails. He loved them, didn't he? Slowbo's bloody nails.
There was dog spikeâ¦
Square shankâ¦
Rosbudâ¦
No, rosehead he called it.
Know what a bear is? he asked me once. And I had to say, no. So what's a bear, then, Slowboat?
Another bear?
Fair enough, he said. I'll tell you. With that lopsided grin of his. Always that grin.
Happy, wasn't he?
Happy? Suppose so. Didn't seem to care about what was happening. Just accepted it. He loved Mam, though.
Oh yes. He loved Mam. It was her farm. The old man scared him sometimes. Especially when he was on the homebrew. Not that Slowboat was averse. It was him who said make it with scurvygrass. Slowbo's bloody scurvy ale. Christ.
Yeah, lore, that's what Slowboat had. Bit of a doctor, too. Knew what to do with us when the old man was baffled⦠And firelighting? Slowboat was brilliant at that. The old skillsâ¦
Yes, Slowbo would have died for Mam. Fair enough, like he always said. Fair enough.
But remember Mam's last fire? The old man lit it. Or was it Slowbo? We were there together. Was that the last time?
One match, he said, and that's all it took. I held the box, one long match from Bryant and May's âSummer Collection'. Ideal for barbecues and chimineas. I'll never forget that. We'd collected branches and pallets. But first it was the right kindling. Crumbling the drift bamboo over the other wood. Sucked dry by the sea, that wood. Salt
-
soaked in its tides.
That was Mam's last fire?
Might have been. By then she was just an effigy of herself. I remember the paper tickled into flame, the crackle of the kindling, then the flames catching. Her skin was like that paper we used. You know, like some of the old man's manuscripts? Dry and white, ripped out of a ringbinder. I ask you!
The attic was packed with that stuff.
What happened to it?
We built the fire first with spokes and spills. Some splinters of spars. Then the spars themselves. The flames sounded like a swan going over in the dark, the fire whoompering on the beach ⦠sucking and drawingâ¦
Yes, I can hear itâ¦
That fire moaning as Mam spoke⦠But quietly, by then. Barely a breath⦠The old man was on his knees blowing into the heart of it. Making himself useful. I know he was cryingâ¦
Yeah. As he should have been.
The sticks were thinner than her wrist, that wrist I always urged her to use. Grip, I'd say, grip my hand. And she tried, she tried with those incredible blue veins, the bruises her stroke had caused.
She wanted to be outside⦠But it was difficult. By then. Sometimes I think we just tossed her aside. Like all mothers are tossed asideâ¦
I saw her own parents dead, you know. Nana and Dada, laid out.
Can't remember thatâ¦
Made of wax, they seemed. Melting into their stiff clothesâ¦
No. I can't remember thatâ¦
Look, they all understood what was coming. But in their different ways. Even Slowbo. And there was Mam at the end, dry as driftwood. Queen of the moraineâ¦
I remember the sun..
The beach shone in firelight⦠Even the rock pools were on fire. And the sky in the north was full of sunset. Like something had exploded. There was ash on Mam's cheekâ¦
Yes, well..
Then not long afterwards that beach was stripped to the bedrock. To the blue clay. Remember those bronze cannons? Been buried two hundred years. Not a grain of sand, you'd think, left after that blow. But the next storm brought it back. Conjured the sand out of the sea so it's lying in quilts. Over and over again, that sand disappearing, that sand coming back. Yeah, sand. Every grain a siege engine. Devious, like the old man claimed. Nothing slyer than sand. We can trust him on that at least. And no, I don't understand it⦠Only that it's going to get worseâ¦
So�
So get ready.
Now?
Pack up. We can't stay hereâ¦
Butâ¦
Need to go⦠there'll be other places like this. Bound to beâ¦
BIOGRAPHIES
The Authors
Trezza Azzopardi
was born and grew up in Cardiff. She has an MA in Film Studies from the University of Derby, and in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. She taught at South East Derbyshire College for ten years before becoming a writer, and has since returned to UEA as a lecturer in Creative Writing. She has written four novels: her first,
The Hiding Place
, won the 2001 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize;
Remember Me
(2004) and
Winterton Blue
, (2007) were both listed for the Wales Book of the Year. Her latest novel,
The Song House
, has been serialised on BBC Radio 4. Her novella
The Tip of My Tongue
, based on one of the tales from
The Mabinogion
, was published in October 2013.
She also writes short stories, which have been widely anthologised, essays, and occasional pieces for radio. Her work has been translated into twenty languages.
She lives in Norwich.
Zillah Bethell
lives in Maesteg and has two novels published by Seren,
Seahorses are Real
and
Le Temps des Cerises
. The current quote on Zillah's pinboard is:
With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world
(Max Ehrmann). She is starting to work on a new book,
King Of Infinite Space
.
Sarah Coles
tries her best not to write anything at all. She has a job in a primary school and has even had three children to use as an excuse not to write. Occasionally, when she is off her guard, a piece of work emerges against her will. Her poetry collection,
Here and The Water
(Gomer, 2012) is an example. She has also written reviews for literary magazines and has found her writing placed in many anthologies of poetry and short stories. She lives in Swansea where she is currently trying not to study for a PhD in Short Fiction.
Mary-Ann Constantine
is a university research fellow specialising in Romantic
-
period literature from Wales. She lives in Ceredigion with her husband and four children. She has published two collections of stories,
The Breathing
(Planet, 2008) and
All The Souls
(Seren, 2013); a short novel,
Star-Shot
, is due out with Seren later in 2015.
Carys Davies
is the author of two collections of short stories,
Some New Ambush
(Salt 2007) and
The
Redemption of Galen Pike
(Salt 2014)
.
She has won the Royal Society of Literature's V. S. Pritchett Memorial Prize and the Society of Authors' Olive Cook Short Story Award, and been shortlisted or longlisted for many other prizes including the Roland Mathias Prize, the
Sunday Times
EFG Short Story Award, the Wales Book of the Year and the William Trevor/Elizabeth Bowen Prize. Born in Llangollen, she grew up in South Wales and in the Midlands, and now lives in Lancaster.
One of
Deborah Kay Davies'
main concerns has been to explore the possibilities of the short story. Her first work of fiction,
Grace, Tamar, and Laszlo the Beautiful
(Parthian)
was a connected sequence of stories that won Wales Book of the Year 2009. Her first novel,
True Things About Me
, (2010) was developed from a short story, and led to Davies being chosen as one of the 12 best new British novelists by the BBC Culture Show. Her most recent novel,
Reasons She Goes to the Woods,
is a montage of single
-
page flash fictions which was one of only four British novels long
-
listed for the 2014 Bailey's Prize for Women's Fiction.
Stevie Davies
, who comes from Morriston, is Professor of Creative Writing at Swansea University. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Welsh Academy. Stevie has published widely in the fields of fiction, literary criticism, biography and popular history.
The Web of Belonging
(1997) was adapted by Alan Plater as a Channel 4 television film.
The Element of Water
, long
-
listed for the Booker and Orange Prizes, won the Arts Council of
Wales Book of the Year prize (2002). Stevie's twelfth novel is
Awakening
(Parthian, 2010).
Maria Donovan
came to Wales as a student and stayed on as a lecturer in Creative Writing at the place formerly known as the University of Glamorgan. With her now late husband she lived for some years on a smallholding in Ceredigion. Her stories appear regularly in magazines and anthologies and her first collection,
Pumping Up Napoleon
, is published by Seren. Maria has recently completed a crime novel with a ten
-
year
-
old protagonist, and is showing an interest in the Durotriges, the Celtic people whose culture and language was dominant in her homeland of Dorset before the Roman invasion.
Joe Dunthorne
was born and brought up in Swansea. His debut novel,
Submarine
, was translated into fifteen languages and adapted for film by Richard Ayoade. His second novel,
Wild Abandon
, won the Encore Award. His debut poetry pamphlet was published by Faber and Faber. He lives in London.
Eluned Gramich
was born in Haverfordwest. Eluned studied English at Oxford and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, before moving to live and work in Japan on a Daiwa scholarship. She has recently translated a collection of German short stories into English, and is currently working on her first novel.
Kate Hamer
grew up in Pembrokeshire and after studying Art worked in television for over ten years, mainly on documentaries. She studied for an MA in Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University and also joined the Curtis Brown Creative programme. Her debut novel
The Girl in The Red Coat
is published by Faber & Faber in March 2015 and has sold in five other territories including Germany and Holland. Kate also won the Rhys Davies short story prize in 2011 and her winning story âOne Summer' was broadcast on Radio 4. She lives in Cardiff with her husband.