The Travellers and Other Stories
Read The Travellers and Other Stories Online
Authors: Carys Davies
PRAISE FOR
CARYS DAVIES
âThese stories are so unexpected and compelling it's difficult to find one single word to praise them. Carys Davies deserves every accolade she has received.'
ELIZABETH HARROWER
âShe can do what it is essential to do in this form, create a micro-world, which has reverberations beyond its size and scope, which is metaphysical.'
SARAH HALL
âDarkly funny and unsettlingâ¦The half-hidden passions of “Ugly Sister” could be a lost slice of Dylan Thomas, while the ousted Latin teacher of “Historia Calamatitum Mearum” has an Atwoodesque prickly wit that surfaces elsewhere.'
BOYD TONKIN,
INDEPENDENT
âCarys Davies is a gifted writer. A true original. Her magical yet weirdly believable stories transport you in a breath into other lives and worlds, without a word wasted. Full of surprises.'
MAGGIE GEE
âAs if Mark Twain and Annie Proulx had sat down at a desk togetherâ¦I shall be looking out for more.'
PIERS PLOWRIGHT
Carys Davies is the author of two collections of short stories,
Some New Ambush
and
The Redemption of Galen Pike
. She is the winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize, the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize, the Royal Society of Literature's V. S. Pritchett Prize and the Society of Authors' Olive Cook Short Story Award. Born in Wales, she now lives in Lancaster in the north-west of England.
The Text Publishing Company
Swann House
22 William Street
Melbourne Victoria 3000
Australia
© Carys Davies, 2007 and 2014
The moral right of Carys Davies to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and publisher of this book.
Some New Ambush
first published in the UK in 2007 by Salt Publishing
The Redemption of Galen Pike
first published in the UK in 2014 by Salt Publishing
This combined edition first published in Australia by The Text Publishing Company, 2015
Text design by Salt Publishing
Cover design by Imogen Stubbs
Extracts from
Latin for Even More Occasions
in âHistoria Calamitatum Mearum' reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd © Henry Beard, 1991
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Creator:
Davies, Carys, author.
Title:
The travellers and other stories / by Carys Davies.
ISBN:
9781925240764 (paperback)
ISBN:
9781922253422 (ebook)
Subjects:
Short stories, English.
Dewey Number: 823.92
for Michael
CONTENTS
FOR THE PAST
three-quarters of an hour, I have been sitting here in the coffee shop of the Barnes & Noble bookstore on Diversey Avenue with Ellen, as I do every Tuesday morning between ten forty-five and eleven thirty. Inevitably, we have been talking about Hwang.
I first met Hwang on a Monday afternoon five years ago, the spring Francis and I arrived here from Cleveland. He was living then, as he does now, with his old mother and his beautiful daughter in a tiny apartment on the corner of Diversey and Clark, a short distance from our house.
He is a small, lean man of indeterminate age. He could be forty, he could be sixty, I don't know. Every day he is dressed the same: the same pair of black felt carpet slippers, the same loose wool trousers suspended from a crumbling leather belt, the same threadbare khaki shirt with short limp sleeves and one breast pocket. He never smiles. His fingers are scaly and curled like a cockerel's toes, he has the quick, searching neck of a lizard, the watchful face of a cruel emperor, a ruthless bandit; the face of a person you might go to for the execution of some stealthy but vicious crime.
Hwang is my dry cleanerâmine and Ellen'sâand I have been going to him now for the best part of five years, usually twice a week. Once on a Monday afternoon to drop off Francis's shirts, once on a Friday morning to collect them. Other itemsâFrancis's suits and ties, my blouses, dresses and skirtsâI usually take in with the shirts unless there's some emergency on another day, something that's been forgotten or that needs doing in a hurry. In which case I make a special trip in the middle of the week, maybe two. Mostly, I would say, I am at Hwang's at least three times a week.
A few people in the neighbourhood prefer not to use him. They think he is scary and rude, which is true. He is probably the most frightening and offensive person I have ever met.
Generally you go in, your arms laden with the week's cleaning, and stand there for a full two minutes while he ignores you, his face wearing its permanent mask of furious scorn, carrying on as if you weren't there, shuffling back and forth in his tattered carpet slippers, sorting piles of laundry on the counter, throwing shirts into the giant wheeled hamper behind, dry cleaning items into a mountain on the floor; other items needing repair he hurls in the direction of his ancient mother, who sits in the corner, dressed entirely in grey, crouched over a dressmaker's sewing machine and an enormous rack of at least a hundred spools of different coloured thread.
When he is ready, you are allowed to put your dirty laundry on the counter. His system is no different from any other dry cleaner in the neighbourhood, no different from any other dry cleaner anywhere, really: one ticket for you, a copy for him to keep with your laundry to identify it when it is ready to collect. Hwang's tickets are pink and he keeps a pad of them on the counter, next to a dish of wrapped boiled sweets which I think he puts there for the childrenâthough, as Ellen says, show me the child that would dare reach up under Hwang's assassin's glare and take one!
When he has checked your things into the appropriate piles, he fills out your pink tickets (separate ones for laundry and dry cleaning) in his jagged scrawl, tears each one from the pad with a sharp, brutal twist of his bony wrist, and thrusts them in your face. In my case he usually barks
Flyday
at this point.
When I return on Fridays for Francis's shirts, or in the middle of the week for any other oddments that are ready, I hand Hwang my pink ticket, or tickets if I have more than one, and he shuffles off into the back, muttering and truculent, under the racks and racks of cellophane-wrapped garments, each one labelled with one of his duplicate tickets. When he has located your things, he brings them to you without a smile, and impales your old ticket on the sharp spike he keeps next to the bowl of boiled sweets. I have often pictured him, as he does this, in the stony yard of some village, wringing the necks on a row of shabby chickens, though I have come to realise I might be wrong about that.
The worst thing about Hwangâmuch worse than the not-smiling and the grumpy shuffling about in the felt slippersâthe thing that most appalls people, the thing that frightens some of them away completely, is what happens if you lose the pink ticket he has given you.
âNo Ticky
,' he says then with vicious finality and something like triumph.
âNo Shirty
.' Clamps his little mouth shut, folds his ropy arms across his limp khaki shirt, and glares at you. A proud, challenging, disdainful glare it is impossible to ignore. It has happened to me before now, and it has happened to Ellen. In fact when it happened to Ellen, a couple of years back, Hwang practically reduced her to tears. He stood there repeating that hideous rhyming couplet of his while she balanced her purse on her knee and hunted through it for her ticket, which wasn't there. When she begged him to try and find her things without the help of a numbered ticket Hwang just stabbed the air with his cockerel's claw, indicating the row upon row upon row of garments hanging from the ceiling awaiting collection, as if inviting Ellen to dream up a more impossible task. Eventually, that time, he did give way, puffing and sighing and making a huge fuss of rustling all the clothes in their cellophane covers as he looked through.
These days, he is less obliging. He has become much worse about this business of the tickets.
What brings people back to Hwang in spite of his rudeness, is that he is cheapâat 99 cents a shirt he is cheaper than anyone else in the neighbourhoodâand his work is excellent. Also his old mother, sitting wordlessly all day in her little corner, carries out repairs and alterations of the highest quality; invisible mends like healed skin.
And then there is Moon. Hwang's beautiful daughter.
It is worth going to Hwang's just to gaze for a few minutes at Moon. She is now, I would say, about sixteen years old. She has a broad, exquisite face, hair the colour of a raven's wing, cut to her chin. I've said to Ellen many times that if Francis and I were ever to change places, if I were to go downtown every morning and spend the day behind his gleaming desk at First Boston and he were to collect his shirts from Hwang's on a Friday afternoon when Moon was in there doing her schoolwork, he would never come home again.
Moon wears the navy and forest green uniform of one of the private Catholic schools in the city: pleated plaid skirt, green wool blazer, white blouse with a piped Peter Pan collar which always looks as if it has been starched and pressed that very morning by Hwang himself.
There are a handful of such schools in the city, where the discipline is strict, the education narrow but reliable, where uniforms are worn and the fees are relatively modest. Still, you can see what a struggle it is for Hwang. How he glares at that laundry hamper with its 99 cent shirts inside. Hwang looks as though he will die in his slippers paying those fees so that Moon won't have to run the shop after he's gone.