"Collected stories" by Janice Galloway (Vintage, 2009)

The stories come from 2 books, one of which (where you find it) I've already read. So this is really a write-up of the "Blood" book

• Blood - Lots of dualing of exterior with interior. While a schoolgirl has a big tooth extracted, she looks into the dentist's mouth. She's given a sanitary pad for her mouth until the bleeding stops. She returns to school. The toilets have drawings of private parts. Her period starts. While she's playing a piano, she puts her (ivory) tooth that she's saved onto the piano. A boy student who never talks to girls suddenly talks to her. Blood pours from her mouth onto the (ivory) keys.
• Scenes from the Life No. 23: Paternal Advice - Like a play script, or a cartoon script -

  SAMMY's eyes mist with sudden tears as the object of his sentimental contemplation appears in an oval clearing above the mans head. A thinks balloon. Inside, a small boy of about five or six years ... SAMMY clenches his eyes and the balloon vision pops. POP. Little lines radiate into the air to demonstrate with the word GONE in the middle, hazily. Then it melts too.

• Love in a changing environment - A couple move into a room above a bakery shop. Their actions and emotions are dominated by the rhythm of the smells and noises from below. Then the bakery is replaced by a butchers and things go wrong. She moves out. The piece does quite a lot in 3 pages.
• Frostbite - A female music student helps a drunk old man get on a late bus. He seems ok, but suddenly tirades against women and lashes out at her.
• Scenes from the Life No. 29: Dianne - An overheard discussion about a holiday from working on the rigs. 2 pages.
• it was - An old woman starts following Uncle George for a cup of tea though she knows he's dead
• David - a tipsy girl is taken advantage of in a place (and by a boy) that she thought was safe, unthreatening. She was enthusiastic at the time.
• two fragments - alernative anecdotes to explain family disfigurements
• Scenes from the Life No. 26: The communist and the senior citizen - An old lady is visted by a health worker using a play script format and some Robbe-Grillet technique. The old lady overdoses at the end?
• Into the roots - A woman's life is described by reference to her hair - thick, dyed, styled, etc - with a nostalgia for past styles.
• Breaking through - Janet, 6, visits 2 ladies. Blackie is their dog. The old lady throws herself into the open fire
• Fair Ellen and the Wanderer Returned - A woman sees a man approach from a long way off. He tells her he's back. She tells him it's too late. 10 years. She waited but now she's married. The weakest piece so far
• Scenes from the Life No. 24: Bikers - Some description of 3 people in a chip shop, then "It is hard to know where to break in: they seem so self-sufficient and give so few clues. It may as well be now". We then get some fragments of conversation about car mechanics, then "They chant in minimalist verses, machine-shop precise ... A ritual by heart: components of tea-ceremony delicacy for Zen brothers in black leather robes" then chat about a woman who killed herself because a man who got her pregnant would marry her. Then back to engine chit-chat.
• Need for restraint - A woman sees a fight on the way to meeting her husband to do shopping. She wants to talk to him about it. She thinks the two of them might argue. She wonders what kinds of disagreements should happen in public, and which should be interrrupted by passers-by.
• Plastering the Cracks - When a woman peels off wallpaper, plaster comes off too. She gets builders in who speaking incoherently and offer a quote too good to be true. She takes them on. They seem to be overdoing things, then playing a trick on her, so she dismisses them. Actually they've done a fine job. I don't get the story.
• later he would open his eyes in a strange place, wondering where she - A couple commit suicide.
• The meat - I don't get this short piece. A carcass hung in a shop is abandoned.
• Fearless - A cranky man confronts people who look at him - and sometimes people who don't. The locals are used to him, even respect him for being a character. They pretend to each other that they find him amusing. The 2nd half of the story describes the narrator's turn to be confronted by him, when she was a little girl walking with her mother. It's clearer now that the man symbolises threatening behaviour - the sort that lone women face and laugh off after. She kicked his shin though the women, her mother included, said she should have ignored him. She's kicked shins ever since
• Scenes from the Life No. 27: Living In - Another script. A man wakes, prepares, leaves, returns, goes to bed. "THE EXPRESSION ON HIS FACE NEVER ALTERS". When he's asleep a naked woman gets out of his bed. She's been there all the time.
• Nightdriving - 3 episodes of night-driving.
• things he said - No
• A Week with Uncle Felix - Much the longest piece - c.50 pages. The beginning is

  'Clementine.' The buzzing came clearer by degrees. Duncan humming through the engine noise, the same bit over and over. Grace was muttering at the same time, paper crackling under her thumbs

  Things don't clarify for a while. Senga is a girl who lives in Scotland, sharing a double bed with her mother. She has been driven for 8 hours by Duncan and Grace to her father's brother, Uncle Felix (a widower), who was a young man in 1944. Her father (who died in hospital) was called Jock. They're staying for a week to give her mother a break. Senga is given a fair bit of freedom. She's given a pound and allowed to go into town alone. When she's left alone in the house she finds uncle Felix's porn mags - he'll see that she disturbed them. She overhears her mother, Greta, being described as bitter and twisted. How old is Senga? It's unclear. Men joke that she and Grace could be sisters. After 30+ pages we've given the hint that she has pubic hair. She's aware of Grace's moods when Duncan obsesses with cars. On the last day Felix tells Senga she can ask about her father. She doesn't know what to ask. Her mother says he was a drunk. He gives her the pearls of his late wife, something to remember him by. He touches her breast, asks for a kiss. At the end, Grace is photographed with "her brother" - who? Duncan starts whistling "Clementine".
  My favourite story of the book. A standard style, with passages of near stream-of-consciousness. I didn't know that "greet" means "cry" in Scotland.

Old ladies, rectangles of light, women killing themselves. Contrast between observer and participant - observer/narrator becoming participant.

Other reviews

• James Holden (By and large, though, Galloway’s stories run along on alternative rules, primarily for paragraph indention and ways of marking speech, that are consistently deployed across both collections of stories reprinted in this book. The overall impact of this is to inject realism and intimacy into her writing. ... Her short stories are like a master class in finding small details that render a realistic setting or momentum ... They also tend to be set during quite tight time frames ... ‘Love in a changing environment’ is just one of a number of truly outstanding pieces in this collection, sitting alongside ‘Blood’, ‘valentine’, ‘the proposal’ and ‘last thing’ as short stories that ought to be recognised as classics (‘last thing’ was included in Penguin’s recent Best British Short Stories curated by Philip Hensher). Most of the highlights here were first published in Where You Find It, whose stories appear to be a little better controlled, a touch more variety in the characters, plots that are a smidgeon more compelling.)
• Kirkus Reviews (Many of the pieces are little more than brief sketches of a mood, place, or character; others resemble scenes from a play ... Powerful images and ideas in stories often too elliptical and fragmentary to engage fully. An interesting but uneven debut.)

"Where you find it" by Janice Galloway (Jonathan Cape, 1996)

Stories from BBC, Edinburgh Review, etc.

• valentine - A woman reads the card from her husband, and at work compares valentine experiences. She's worried about offending him. Not a bad start.
• where you find it - a women admires her boyfriend's tonguey kissing. No.
• sonata form - the pregnant partner of a concert pianist attends the post-concern buffet. She deals with female admirers and a cynical director-general. Good.
• a night in - 2 pages. A couple break into building site. Good.
• test - Mhairi's alone - her boyfriend's away doing a gig. She shops for 3 Xmas presents - all she'll need. She thinks/worries that she's pregnant.
• after the rains - After a slow start, strange things happen - the florist turns into flowers, the supermarket worker into a trolley, etc. At the end the narrator looks at her hands - "very pale and whitening still. Thinning."
• waiting for marilyn - waiting at the hairdresser's. No.
• hope - Hope writes poems and gives the narrator hope.
• bisex - S/he phones their boyfriend. No answer. S/he imagines him being picked up by a boy. No.
• peeping tom - Her partner comes home after work and dashes out again. She does Yoga. A policemen knocking, coming in to tell her that there's a peeping tom around (maybe based in her flat?!). She flirts with him. When her partner comes home he's too tired to have sex. She'd like more attention.
• babysitting - Tommy looks after little Allan. Later we learn that they're brothers. When they go out and get chips again, the chipshop owner's suspicious. Later we learn that the father's dead body has been on the settee for days.
• had to - a monologue by a grandfather whose punishment of a baby (for staring) increases.
• a proper respect - I'm puzzled by the plot. A schoolgirl's pregnant. She'll need her mother's permission to have an abortion. She and her mother live (lived?) above a doctors.
• the bridge - Newly into a relationship with serious artist Charlie, Fiona (her PoV) worries that their discussion about the importance of "Place" (and whether Art or Life matters most) is really about their future together. Is he volatile or just being an artist? OK, but no surprises.
• tourists from the south arrive in the independent state - On holiday they wait with the Islanders for their luggage at the airport. It's 2am. An old minivan with tartan interior takes them over the Clyde to the New Independence Hotel. They struggle to get into their hotel room - the key's not working. That's it really. 5 pages.
• he dreams of pleasing his mother - he watches his mother approach. I'm puzzled.
• last thing - stream of consciousness, ending with a page that's blank except for the word "still" near the centre. 3 pages, the first-person woman being strangled? She thinks that staring into the eyes of the assaulter will help.
• not flu - Rachel's jealous when Marc, her Dutch partner Peter's Dutch friend, stays for a fortnight. They seem more than friends. Peter gets feverish in the nights. She changes the sheets but feels ignored.
• proposal - Irene and excitable Callum (22) are about to leave on holiday in his MG. They stop at his parents' for a Sunday roast. Entertaining/revealing banter. After they leave, Irene argues with Callum for 2 pages about why he hadn't told his parents that they were going to Belfast, then catch a ferry. She doesn't like how he's economical with the truth. She guesses that he's joined The Orange Lodge. He says he doesn't go on about her faults - her affair etc. He thinks marriage would help. She doesn't say yes.
• six horses - About 3 pages long. 6 fragments - the 6th alludes to some of the earlier parts.

Vivid dialogue and lots of interiority. Quite a variety of characters, story-types and lengths. Lots about uncertain, fragile love.

Other reviews

• Kirkus reviews
• James Holden (It is this decision to ignore the forms and conventions which traditionally govern writing that is initially the most striking thing about Galloway’s writing. ... On the whole, though, these stories are grounded in a low-key reality. They also tend to be set during quite tight time frames)

"Jellyfish" by Janice Galloway (Freight Books, 2015)

I think Granta has published a slightly extended version of this because Freight Books has gone (ironic that in the acknowledgments she bemoans the lack of short story outlets). There are 13 (previously unpublished?) stories - about 150 pages.

• Jellyfish - Divorced mother takes 4 y.o. son on a trip to boost his confidence before he starts school. She needs her confidence boosted too. Will he cope?

  Green man, he said. Look. She had barely registered the fact before he was way head, striding onto the crossing without a second glance. That everyone would obey the rules, that nothing would happen if he did too, he took for granted. His whole world rested on a terrifying level of trust that shocked and moved her in equal measure. Wait for mum, she called, knowing he was already out of earshot. Wait for me. (p.14)

  In two places, the word choice seemed a bit off -
  • "Monica pointed out ... the gulls hovering over the stern, then fished his sunglasses out of her pocket" (p.15) ("fished" in this watery context is an unfortunate choice)
  • "they played I-Spy ... They managed two games straight, then he started kicking over the game's unwritten traces" (p.16)
  She gives him room to succeed.

  Putting the straw in was a fine art by now, one he took pride in. She stood back, giving him time. First, he scratched the plastic cover over the little hole with one nail, then carefully scrambled the straw out of its sheath on the back of the carton. It took both hands, but he didn't drop the box. He poked the straw in, knowing from experience to stand back, avoid the spit-back of juice that was likely to result. This time, it didn't. He smiled, lipped the straw into his mouth and sucked, them stretched his boxless arm at forty-five degrees, hand balled into a fist. Superman. (p.18)

• looking at you - too minor
• and drugs and rock and roll - a large cast of women in a psychiatric ward. Alma's looking for Michelle (15, on suicide watch). She finds Rhonda, drinking alone. She's the clear thinker - "there are different kinds of people end up in these places. There's people who who [sic] don't get better and keep coming back because they can't see how not to, and there's people who push themselves to get out and stay out because they're smart". Rhonda's 25 with 7 terminated pregnancies. In the night Victor calms Alma, gets her to swallow her meds.
• that was then, this is now (1) - too minor
• almost 1948 - Eric Blair's on Jura. He has a little motorcycling accident when no-one's watching. Too minor.
• that was then, this is now (2) - Less than 2 pages. I like this one.
• fine day - A husband calmly leaves his wife and child, creating a tone where expressing emotion would be a sign of failure. "Let's be reasonable", he says. The wife watches the opera "Madam Butterfly" and decides to change the locks.
• greek - On its second page there's "We'd been holed up in Ike's flat, drinking and having too much sex and laughing at nothing to think straight", which sounds tangled. On the last page there's "the knowledge I have not had a period for months now coils like a worm beneath my abdomen ... My stomach butterflies. Is it mine? Or that of another, smaller creature?" which has rather confused imagery
• turned - In a different style. The narrator is perhaps half-awake, with her mother working in the garden below her window. "Fishing up from the safety of sleep is never pleasant" confuses me on its first page. On its second, party balloons on the ceiling are "nosing the pale plaster up there like fish kissing the surface of a tank, needing to feed", which is better. The language heats up -

  • Look, she said. I could cut of my fingers and you'd think it was your due. Her hands are red with beetroot. Yes, he said. His face was one picture, not shifting. I could cut off all my fingers, she said, and pile them on a plate. Her knuckles dripped on the lino, audible. She had lipstick on her teeth (p.99)

  • The curtains are open, showing grainy clouds, an edge of a full moon shedding light like a faulty shower. It sprinkles the little room finely, leaves nothing untouched. Moonlight. Light from the Moon. From so far away, it's cold by the time it reaches. (p.100)

• burning love - collecting then burning the possessions of a gone/dead lover/mother. Mostly a list, but a good list.
• fittest - My favourite. Set by Loch Ness.
• opera - I like this too. First we meet Lola singing opera in the bath, then Michaela, a 15 year old who's sharing her flat for free, having just come off a boat. Lola tells fortunes.
• romantic - Short, dense description of bar meal chat.
• distance - A woman whose mother killed herself realises she's over-protective to her son, and distant from her husband, so she divorces him - a kind of self-sacrifice. She becomes detached from her son. At about 40, after a health scare she goes to live on Jura. One night, driving perhaps too fast she hits a stag. Probably doesn't do quite enough given its length.

I wasn't convinced by the earlier pieces but by the end I was nearly won over. There are far more mothers than fathers.

Typos - "people who who don't get better" (p.45), "puled up" (p.54), "hauled out cushions out by the ears" (p.109), "and and turned" (p.110), "it needed less people" (p.118), "Michael" (should be "Michaela"), (p.129), "Godknew" (p.166).

Other reviews

• bookmunch (she uses her allotted pages to carefully consider an instant in time or a state of being, to dig down, rather than wide, meaning that the satisfaction derived from these stories is less that of situations resolved and more that of situations recognised. For all her exactitude of imagery, her work lingers as an impression of a mood. ... One of the stand-out pieces is ‘and drugs and rock and roll’ ... Galloway’s true gift isn’t the clever assemblage of simile, but the ability to find the truth – the best possible truth – in the most tired of scenarios.)
• Jabberwocky
• Stuart Kelly (This new collection revisits many of the themes found in the novels, and to an extent rewrites and reworks her interest in them. ... One of the key techniques of "The Trick Is to Keep Breathing" and "Foreign Parts" was to chart how various texts – women’s magazines, guide books – constrict rather than liberate their readers. Curiously, it is the men in this collection whose mouths are full of hand-me-down phrases ... The parent-child relationship runs through this collection ... Although in terms of design, Freight have improved markedly (there are still a few irksome typos), this book is short but not slight, though inflated by wide margins and a full page grab-quote preceding each story.)
• Allan Massie (She is adept at entering the minds of her female characters, and also children’s. Her men are portrayed from outside, as seen by women. When she attempts more than this – a story about Orwell on Jura, for instance, she is less persuasive. ... Inevitably, not everything succeeds. Galloway takes chances. Her way of writing is hit or miss. [‘Almost 1948’] is ... Miss, not hit, pretentious miss, and the story never recovers. At her best, Galloway lets you see the world in a different light, from an unusual angle, making familiar things strange. This is her special talent, and it is a rare one. She has sympathy for women whose lives have taken the wrong turn, and persuades the reader to share the feeling. She speaks up for damaged lives. Her weakness is common to gifted phrase-makers – a tendency to over-write, to lose focus in a blur of words. It’s the obverse of her rare ability to illuminate the everyday.)
• David Hebblethwaite
• Scots Whay Hae! ("Jellyfish" is, in places, reminiscent of Kelman, and of [Agnes] Owens, in that there is a mild surrealism on show that can catch you unaware ... The final story, ‘Distance’, is perhaps the most memorable of them all)