Stories from BBC, etc.
- "The Ally Ally O" - A mother drives supposedly at random with her 3 daughters in the back to get out of the house - not to the Ice Bowl this time because there are rats in the ball pit feeding off spilled Slush Puppies. The narrator (oldest sister, 2nd person PoV) likes reading about disasters. When they stop at a viewing point their mother says that she came from Manchester to the city they were looking at - Belfast. She's told her kids before to grow up and get away. At the end as they're driving home, the narrator rubs away a patch of condensation only to see headlights, tail lights, and the rain.
- "Thirteen" - The girl narrator, 12, has no friends now that her best friend who she's known since nursery has gone away. The people in her class thought the 2 of them were lesbains, though the narrator liked her friend's brother. When Jacqueline tries to befriend her, she feels she has no choice. They go to the park and get offered booze by boys. She's taken to the bushes. While she's being non-violently raped, she vomits and gets away. Jacqueline, with another boy, vomits too. The 2 girls go to Jacqueline's house for the night. The narrator cleans Jacqueline up and misses her old friend.
- "Poison" - In a hotel bar the narrator sees a 60 y.o. man she knew about 20 years before. He's with a very much younger woman. Maybe it's Melissa? There's a flashback to when she was 14 and fancied her teacher of Spanish, Mr Knox. He'd divorced his wife 9 years before to marry an ex-pupil. The narrator when a schoolgirl read about the scandal in old newspapers. She and some friends visited his house. They found his wife with a baby, Melissa. The narrator stole perfume and a condom. She wore the perfume at Spanish lessons and got a lift from Mr Knox. She lied to friends that they had sex. News reached her mother. In the end innocent Mr Know had to resign and his wife left him. Back in the present day, the narrator (feeling guilty) wonders whether she should at least offer to pay for Mr Knox's drinks. Then she realises that the women may not be his daughter after all.
- "Escape Routes" - The 10 year old narrator (female) likes babysitter Christopher, a student. He lets her play adventure games on the computer. She talks to him about his girlfriend who has left him. He helps her more than ever with her game, showing her escape routes. Then he disappears without trace.
- "Killing Time" - The 13 y.o. female narrator decides to kill herself. There are only 8 paracetamols in the house but it's worth a try. Nothing much happens. She buys more at a newsagents. The man behind the counter scares her with an O.D. anecdote. Back home she suddenly wants to play with her little brother and the dog. The dog dies a few months later, making her think about mortality again.
- "Through the Wardrobe" - A 6 y.o. boy with older sisters wants to wear a sparkley princess fancy dress. Reaching puberty with his sisters out of the house he tries on their gold lamé dresses. Later, he goes to England for hormone tretment. The first weak story of the book.
- "Here We Are" - Angie, 2 years older than the female narrator (a flautist), is the school's star musician. Her mother died in a drunken hit-and-run. They duet together. The narrator's excited when Angie invites her home. Her father's strongly religious. After, the narrator thought she'd embarrassed Angie, and tearfully avoids her at school. Then Angie kisses her. Two weeks later they make love. They have a blissful summer until Angie's dad catches them. We learn that years later Angie married a man for her father's sake, and the narrator's engaged, thinking about the times when she wanted to come out to the whole world.
- "Chasing" - The narrator returns home in Belfast from Art College in London. Something's gone wrong. Her mother's pleased when she starts wanting to paint again. Her younger sister, specialising in sciences, is doing an art project that impresses the narrator. We learn that the narrator had tried heroin in a bong at an end-of-term party, which scared her enough to leave the course.
- "Inextinguishable" - It starts with "Three days before my daughter died she comes running into the kitchen, Mummy, Mummy, you have to listen to this piece of music". Later "I'm not going to talk about how she died". The daughter had worked to get money to buy a car. The car radio was stuck on a classical music station. The CD she'd suggested arrived 3 days after she died - a 20th century symphony that mother and sons ended up liking. This is the 2nd disappointing story of the book.
- "Cyprus Avenue" - 2nd person PoV. A person waiting for a pre-Xmas plane (to Belfast and his parents) gets into conversation with a man (Indian extraction) who knew his late sister. The narrator doesn't return often. The fellow traveller, whose father (a doctor) died young, does. The narrator invites tha man and his mother over for drinks. The mothers know each other. The narator resolves to return more often. One of the weak stories.
- "Multitudes" - A mother's with her 9 day old, critically ill baby son in hospital. It's 50/50. She learns the medical vocabulary and acronyms. "Maybe the hope is that if we learn this new language, if we abide by the rules of this foreign land ... then one day we will be allowed to go home". To comfort her, her husband reads her a poem about a lifeguard father - "It moves from concrete memories to abstract musings, from the people saved and lost that day to the sky above and the ceaselessly moving waves. Read it again, I say". After 7 days they return home. Whenever he cries, she thinks he's recalling his ordeal.
I find it hard to evaluate such pieces - restrained and heartfelt, they're quite common and easily assumed to be based on the author's experiences. Here the distancing is achieved by having titled subsections, some rather factual.
The narrators like going into other people's rooms while they're away. High achieving, role-model girls in school and underage smoking feature, as do babysitters and music lessons. More generally, the young narrators seek older people whose lives they can learn something from. I enjoyed most of the stories. It's a page-turner. That said, I'm surprised that "Escape Routes" and "Killing Time" were the pieces which did well in big competitions (BBC and Commonwealth respectively).
Other reviews
- Jane Housham (Caldwell often uses the second person in her stories, addressing an unnamed “you”. It’s a stylistic choice that can take some getting used to. Where one might have expected a first-person narrator, it sometimes feels as though she’s telling herself a story, comforting herself in the face of a multitude of hurts.)
- Carrie O'Grady (10 of the 11 stories are about mothers and babies or children. ... Caldwell specialises in this exposure of vulnerability: not the gradual peeling away of a character’s emotional onion-skin layers, but the heart-stopping second when a whole potential future gapes before them. )
- Colin Barrett (Bad decisions, and occasionally genuinely tragic behaviour, abound)
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