Stories from the Bristol, Bath, and Brick Lane prize anthologies, etc.
- My girl - The narrator is the boxer's mother and cutman. While watching her daughter lose, she recalls challenges in her daughter's life and how her ex-husband used to hit her.
- Tombstoning - Tomboy narrator recalls bad-boy from school. Manages to pack a lot into 7.5 pages. I like it (it won the Bristol Prize and was on BBC Radio 4)
- Pig lady - the narrator was a chip-shop worker. A co-worker and his brother were trouble-makers. The "pig lady" is a pig farmer who collects scraps. She tried to get the brothers convicted, and failed. The brothers plan a trick on her, making the narrator join in. The narrator sees the pig lady defend a policeman who's getting attacked, and knows how her son died. At the last moment he interrupts their stunt. He later joins the army. Another decent piece, though the register (it's first person) is a surprise
- Zoom - From his window a boy takes movies of the neighbouring family - mostly of the separated wife delivering the 2 boys for weekend stays. One night the father shoots the 2 boys dead
- Dinner dance - About a page long. The book's first weak piece.
- Freshwater - A father plus 4 teenage kids stay in a chalet, drinking and smoking. I like the details - how the other half lives. The "twist" at the end is ok too.
- Human terrain - A lecturer teaching about war uses keepsakes of her daughter (who died on duty in Baghdad) as teaching material
- We want it out - A mother's driven her car into her swimming pool. The neighbours want it out. She leaves it there days before calling workmen, when she recalls doctors saying "The problem isn't that the cancer is there, the problem is that we can't get it out". Doesn't work for me.
- Things we did when we were children - A group of girls as young as 14 fly away to be brides for fundamentalists. No.
- On Broadway - A one-page portrait of a hobo. No.
- They were the only ones dancing - the narrator visits his neighbour, a widower, in hospital after a stroke. The neighbour tells him about a couple who stylishly ball-danced in his local just before his stroke, and about the fight that nearly started. The neighbour dies. The narrator keeps passing the pub hoping that the episode will be repeated. ok
- Back issues - first-person senile widower on a parkbench uses "Exchange and Mart" as an aide-memoire. ok-ish
- A glimmer of melting ice - Ivy, a widow for 2 years, looks out of her bedroom window at the farm while her offspring party below. She has an iced drink. She remembers meeting her husband-to-be in London, going underground to see clear ice imported from Canada, seeing a blue jay, and planning to go to Canada with him. She drops the drink. She recalls the ocean crossing, seeing an iceberg emerge from darkness. As she dies she recalls 1952 in Canada, the 2 of them collecting ice - a noise stirred blue jays and the ponies, which caused an accident killing her husband. Not for me.
- Fences - "Fence-men" is a neighbour of a young couple who've newly moved in. They had a bad experience in their previous flat. He potters in the derilict back garden, trying to bodge a fence from scrap. His DIY noise disturbs their BBQs. We learn that the bad experience was a surprise threesome with a female neighbour. As joke they build a fence for the man in the night. The man soon dies. The family's BBQ sets fire to the fence. The couple separate. No.
- Open house - Freddie's PoV, third-person - he's childless, retired, 5 months a widower. Through a misunderstanding he visits the for-sale London flat where he grew up. He recalls the moment when his father (who barely spoke English) picked up the phone to hear that he'd become a widower. Freddie locks himself into the flat. He wants to be held by his mother, by his late wife. He sees a plane leave a trail. The final paragraph is "Life has a way of flying away, leaving you dispersed, insubstantial as vapour trail, and there isn't any way to gather all those tiny particle pieces together again", which is, I suppose, Freddie's thought expressed in words he wouldn't use, though "a way ...away ... way" and "particle pieces" sound clumsy.
- Shoots and weeds - PoV (third-person) of a male park-keeper, separated from a wife who kept the kids. He likes being a gardener. People get in the way. At the end a snacking woman talks to him. The final sentence is "And really it's what he's always hoped for: that come the end of the season, someone recognises him as a shoot, not a weed". No.
- The jam trap - A man returns most nights to the Ryde Cafe where he started working at 18 when he was dreaming to start life on the mainland soon, have a family. One of his jobs was to fill a jamjar with jam to catch the wasps. The male of the couple who owned the place ran a card circle when his wife was away - him and 2 mates, none of whom was active sexually. The narrator learned from these men that jobs, marriages and kids could be disappointing. Seeing a sunset he has a breakdown/revelation and lost all ambition. The ending is - "there's no reason for me to leave this spot. No need for me to go looking for something that doesn't exist. This is where I belong"
- Somebody said - 2 15 year-old girls, the narrator and Kat, find grass and drink at Hyde Park having sneaked away from a school trip. The narrator wakes alone in the dark, abandoned. Kat's never seen again. But the narrator doesn't recall the details well. She starts the story again, back to when Kat, 9 invited her for a sleep-over. Kat's dad kissed her. The story becomes a bit meta - "Somebody said, the middle of the story
is the story, but sometimes in the middle things just go on as they always have". "I run now too ... It's the acceptable face of self-harm". "I tried telling the policewoman. I tried telling the family. Now I'm telling you". She doesn't feel guilty about Kat going. She understands.
A return to form. - A match - About half a page. Either it's minor or I don't get it.
- Beginnings and endings - "This is a story with many beginnings but only one ending. There is only ever one ending, ever". It's in a different style from the others. More literary. About Jack the Ripper's victims. "London sits with her arms open but her lap full. This city isn't to blame or praise for anything to come. Stone and brick and mud run through it; the blood is all ours. As the gulls cry, circling overhead - Good luck to you all, is what Mary Jane Kelly longs to sing". Another interesting piece.
The pieces are pacy, crammed. I began to think that this book was a find, but after the first few stories, my enthusiasm waned until a final revival, because
- The voice/vocabulary of the first-person narrators is sometimes rather out of character - guessing their age/education would be hard if one merely had their diction to go by. Some similes/comparisons sound rather forced - e.g. "far enough away from the fruit machine that the rattle of silver wouldn't remind him of the sound his settling dentures made when dropped into the tumbler at night".
- Too few templates - e.g. "A glimmer of melting ice" and "Open house" share the same template - the foreground story is punctuated by about 3 memory-joggers (ice, cracked floorboard or phone) which trigger past events. At the end the character wants to meet up with their lost one.
- Many widowers.
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