"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.)