New work…and things

So I have been making broccoli soup and thinking, just for a change, of my brother. I thought, here Steve, I’m looking after myself. Ta da! That was nice. I miss going to the Morrisons cafe and talking about how you might make light shine in paintings. I miss eating food and marveling about the meaning of this little life (which is love according to some and also a much grander thing, the legacy that this can bring) in the face of – well, certain death. My sister in law wonders if she talks too much about Steven, but what else can you do? Put it in your pocket and look at it next time you’re ready, or whenever you wear those jeans again? Maybe so. Today I got some blood test results back which say there are things I need to fix – hence the broccoli soup. I think of Steven and doctors and all of that – how things started, with his anaemia and the shrugging of busy, perplexed shoulders. I think of all the people I haven’t heard from, dissolving connections that were never all that robust. But mostly of all the people that I have loved, in my own potentially rubbish way, but who I owe such a debt to. For those moments that glitter when you look back over your life and how you do, quite honestly, just wish for happiness for such people. I write into the things I think about, so here are some of those. Old stories in new journals, new stories in forthcoming journals, emerging stories jotted down in my gmail. You know you all do it. I don’t normally talk about the why behind the work, it’s maybe polluting, but here is some smog for those who don’t mind that.

Yellow Flames in the Easter Sun

(This story I wrote when I worked at Edge Hill and was endeavouring at least to (maybe over)use motif in my writing. And yes about the stability of one woman’s connection to her brother, when all other relationships come and go. It was quite nice that this got published given it was written Way Back When)

The Village, Annie’s father used to say, was home to the physicians of Mydffai. Herbalists of the twentieth century. Healers. Their family cottage was lodged in the thick, green quiet of this village. It was the place she and her brother Neal realised their mother was broken. The place where their father’s gentleness finally hurt too much.

In Lakeview International Journal – http://issuu.com/lijla/docs/lijlafeb2014vol2no1

 

The Imaginary Wife

(A tale of a fictitious affair, must make that clear… This was about pondering over the life of someone you have loved before, and maybe still do, about what could happen, but probably never would)

There’s a certain time for an affair. It is when the world is looking

the other way. When you feel you could hear brittle leaves twitch,

scarab-like, over dormant concrete and convince yourself that no one

will know. As the light turns up, you feel the stirrings of that clammy

disappointment in yourself, as if you’ve come too soon. But you

haven’t even fucked. An affair will never work in the full light of day.

– This isn’t us, she says.

You watch her fingers flex, she turns one palm over as if checking

tarot cards. You mirror each other on the bed, knees up, a bubble of

space between you like the ones in the alcohol spirit levels. You

remember when you were each other’s and when this would have

been okay. How this is staining that.

 

Out 2016 – Unthank – available to preorder

Burning the Ants

(Note: this was written in collaboration with Nicholas Rushton’s artworks and forms part of The End: Fifteen Endings to Fifteen Paintings collection. My brother once burned a bible with a magnifying glass, decrying the evils of religion at the age of 8 or so. I remember looking on, non-plussed, though the act was quite distinct. I liked Sindy dolls and roller skates and how to do inverse French plaits. I left the hard work to my brother and then soaked it all up a decade on while he was figuring out quantum fucking mechanics or something. I wrote this story about a twin whose sister has had a motorcycle crash and now has locked in syndrome, about living after that loss, and debating about quality of life and how/if/should people take matters into their own hands. You can fill in the gaps how you’d like)

The girl rolls a half-empty lemonade bottle between her palms, staring at the continents of white this creates and uncreates.

Outside the café it’s summer-bright. There’s been a shower, the pavements lightly steam. An oil spill of foreign language, maybe Turkish. ‘Ah!’ a waitress says. ‘I’ll change it, no bother.’

It’s a school day – one of the dregs left before summer – but she can’t think about how to do it at home.

The swish of cars. Texts to reply to, homework, homework.

RU Coming?

Don wanna go w/out u. Lol!

Oi! Moody!

The last one hurt. Her best friend since primary who, when she told her, said: I know, it’s like me, Granny Ann’s in hospital. Mam was gonna keep me from school but I was like nae, I can miss the last week, woman!

Boots escalating upwards from the cellar. A thready 80s disco song tish-tishes in time with whoever’s feet are pending.

Joanie sips her drink, stinging her tongue with lemon, and thinks of how to kill her sister.

Out  2016 – Unthank – available to preorder

 

As Linda was Buying the Flowers

(The one story I’ve written that doesn’t converge on any particular themes that converge on life. I was struck by an article about an American painter, who found it hard to get away from his dancer mother’s beauty, the thrall other people had for her – I wondered what that would be like. It was really enjoyable to write, very freeing, very different. Must do more of that then.)

My mother twitched with sex. It’s the only way to describe it. She’d drift by a man and he would crackle with static. Women feigned oblivion. No one thinks about that, for your only closeness to be of the body. Her career, friends; all a result of an external self. Or so she’d tell me the nights I waited for her step, a tapped percussion on concrete. ‘Homework, my boy?’ Her fingers would comb my hair, nails creating shivers on my scalp. She would close her eyes and murmur to Joni Mitchell, commas of Merlot-stained dry skin prickling her bottom lip. Music. The hiss and warmth of vinyl like cashmere over the city’s brute roar, a scabbed roasting tin and stained mugs in our sink absorbing and reflecting the afterglow of her night.
​I have painted my mother for more hours than I have masturbated.
​She didn’t come to my wedding.
​’So we’re here, huh? Genital Stage. Better late than never,’ she’d said, in skewed South African vowels people sparkled at. She stood in the moon’s spotlight, angling in from our apartment window. The same way a cat will find all the warm spots.
​’What?’ She looked like Jane Greer.
​A laugh. The creak of a page turning in a laminated album.

Out 2016 – Unthank

 

Drafts 

(When you have limited time. About wanting everyone who has ever meant anything to you – good or bad – to know just quite what they meant. From that guy who felt you up on the beach in Seaham, that bastard jobsworth, the thing you can’t talk about and the thorough romantic love of your life. That sort of stuff.)

On my gmail – to be continued…