"Connective tissue" by Jane Fraser (Salt, 2022)

Stories/Flash from TSS, BBC Radio 4, London Magazine etc.

• "The sausage maker's daughter" - The 16 y.o. narrator wakes above the family's butcher's. Her mother's having one of her days and doesn't get up. She helps her father get the shop ready. Then her mother walks through, taking money from the till to go shopping. As usual there are few customers. Her father puts on a brave face about the business and his wife. [The setting and characterisation are convincing. Little development - I guess that's the point]
• "Blackberries" - On days like this when everything feels perfect (beautiful summer countryside, new husband), she recalls Evans, who had it all but fell from a tree at 15 and died. There's a storm. A bird-boy (angel?) falls. Unearthly beauty. She helps him from his harness and he walks away. He says his name is Evans. After, the doctor tells her husband that hallucinations and total collapse are typical in such hot weather. But what about his blood that was on her hands? By the time she goes out again, the blackberries have come and gone. [I like this. Hints of self-sabotage - she couldn't believe her luck]
• "Connective tissue" - Jenny's having her weekly massage with a young woman who refers to Jenny as "we" - "are we comfortable?" etc. Jenny hasn't been "we" for 20 years. There's a medical skeleton in the corner of the room. The woman starts working on Jenny's ligaments - "there's more to it than bones". She had a car accident in which her husband died. She still has minor damage - not surprising after "what we went through". "He was the last person she's actually touched; been touched by". [Bones/connective-tissue; I/we; young/old]
• "After a certain age you can either have good shoes or good feet" - He sits beside his dead wife, recalling how much she cared about shoes and her feet. Finally he goes to bed. He wakes to 78s playing under a full moon. He goes outside and sees her there. He knows about the tricks that grief plays. He returns to bed. Next morning he notices that her shoes have grass stains.
• "Anticlockwise on the Circle line" - An autumn morning. London. Somebody has got Cassie ready and has given her a parcel. She's 50. She goes round the circle line. Passengers might suspect that the parcel's a bomb. Her father had been a butcher. A scalpel had stolen Cassie's future before she's met the person who'd helped her. Her womb has gone ("but at least we've got it early and at least you had your children young"). The parcel's bleeding. She leaves it on the train. [it's unclear to me whether the parcel's real (or symbolic of a memory she's finally discarding) and who the other person is]
• "Words" - Since childhood a 51 y.o. linguistics teacher has made a note of favourite words. She has grandchildren. She's an alcoholic. Her husband has threatened her throughout their marriage. She sees a younger version of her daughter in a mirror, from a moment in the past when she realised how bad things were. She replays the moment, improving on what she did before, and is ready to start life afresh
• "Crow" - Her daughter (who lives 100s of miles away) is having her 12 week scan. Her previous pregnancies have gone wrong. There's a crow on her bedroom windowsill, tapping. She closes the curtain. Half asleep she can hear what it says. Ominous. She dreams. She decides to scare it off, opening the curtain. The baby is ok.
• "It is what it is" - Xmas day, Florida. He's walking along the beach taking photos with his partner. She was there 33 years ago with her ex husband and little kids. She and her ex have not seen each other for 20 years (she'd had 18 bad years with him) but he's still a presence. They go to the fenced-off ruins of a Holiday Inn. Vultures. Hurricane damage. She had stayed there. She identifies the room where they'd stayed. Later they look through the photos he's taken. She says that you can't change the past. She deletes all the photos.
• "Controlled explosions" - 4 men are in an old coastguard Jeep in Wales, investigating a report of unexploded bombs. They're dealt with. Paul, the driver, comes from New Zealand. He's married. His estranged son has recently died in NZ (dangerous driving). One of the men asks how he is, but men are men so the topic isn't mentioned again. The jeep breaks down (Paul blames himself) and has to be towed by a tractor.
• "Too far up and too far down" - Beth/Lizzie, a grandmother with both parents active, is walking by the sea with a male friend she met at Art club. They have a tent. It's windy. She'd come here early in her marriage and had made love. A ewe bleating pitifully is stuck half way down a cliff. How did it get there? It can't be saved. The man says "It's not just the ewe, is it .... It doesn't matter. You just don't belong here; with me". When she gets home her husband will help her get sand from her eye. "It could have been a lot worse" he'll say.
• "Roasting leather" - The narrator, divorced, is angry about having to retire at 66. She'll make a habit of gross indecency. She'll vandalise the car of someone rich - her ex-husband's wife? She prefers prison to a care home. [Not one of the best]
• "Plenty of time, Jane" - Mrs Tucker, a grandmother, is lying in her drive having been run over accidentally by her husband. An Air Ambulance is on its way, attracting a little crowd. She's calm, worrying about the washing, etc. She thinks she's dying. The helicopter takes her away, a little too late - "not being able to share it with Mr Tucker, but leaving him there watching as she took flight" [I like the tone of this]
• "Soft boiled eggs" - Gordon Pritchard, an old farmer, is married to Megan. The AI man arrived for their 10 cows. Decades before, they'd discussed AI and surrogacy for themselves. He hadn't been keen. He works on the farm, meeting his sad wife at mealtimes. At the end of the day "the sky the colour of a placenta ... He's looking forward to the spring lamb they'll be sharing this evening. It's one of theirs." [the symbolism's more heavy handed than in earlier pieces]
• "The real thing" - Liz Richards, 50, is in a massage chair having her feet done by Samantha. Her husband used to love her feet. His young mistress might be one of the other clients. She has the free champagne - her first for years. She's interested in what Samantha's doing. She's warned about ingrown toe nails. She's "well-aware" of the anger that can poison your insides". At the Samantha says "You've got lovely feet. Take you anywhere, those feet, you know"
• "Gingerbread men" - Florida. Melissa, a grandmother widow who's sold her restaurant business, makes gingerbread men for her visiting offspring. She's 58 and has had a breast removed. She meets Greg by chance after years. After Xmas she moves into his condo and brings lots of her stuff in with her. He fishes all day. One evening they host his children and grandkids. She learns that they still see Greg's ex, but he doesn't. He goes away for a night. When he returns, she and all her possessions have gone. She's left some fresh gingerbread men.
• "Asking for it" - 1st-person PoV of a tick on the savannah. It bites a carelessly unprotected man who gets typhus.
• "Imitation daisies" - A widower for a month, he sits on an armchair abandoned in driftwood at 5am each day. He sees a swimmer who he thinks might be his wife. His friends have told him that the phase of "magical thinking and disconnection will pass. One day she comes out of the water and talks to him, says she's been watching him. He dries her. He leaves her swim-cap with imitation daisies behind [too much like some earlier pieces]
• "Torn ligaments" - The female first-person, (67 with 3 grandchildren), is phoned by her father to say don't worry, but her mother, 92, has fallen done the stairs. She's ok. The relationship between the 2 women has been fractious. Her father, once a butcher, frequently said "don't go upsetting your mother". The daughter tries to be nice. She recalls when she was 4 and her brother was born how her mother preferred him to her. She recalled how at 13 her mother's step mother killed herself, and her mother started drinking. She drives her mother to the beach. They never mention how she nearly died on her own drive. At the end it begins to rain. "I knew we were in for a change" her mother says. She recalls being 4 again, her mother gesturing her to the bed where her mother and her new brother were. "I reach for that same hand now, clinging onto the tiny fingers, longing to feel just the slightest squeeze in return. Some kind of connection."

Dead-end lives. Other states of mind - dream, hallucination. People who distrust what they see then discover evidence to support their hallucination (blood, a grass-stain, a swim-cap). Believable settings and characters. More sadness than happiness. Husbands off-stage or inexpressive. Characters re-appear (I think). There's often some central symbolism - the bombs, a goat - which is alluded to in the title or, tangentally, at the end of the story.

I found all the stories a good read. "Asking for it" (PoV of a tic) and "Plenty of time, Jane" (the narrator amazingly calm) provide variation to the usual narrative style. Some stories share a plot/shape as if trying out the same idea. I think 3 stories end using the future or conditional tense. Stories like "Blackberries" (maybe my favourite), "Anticlockwise on the Circle line" and "Words" provide variety.

Other reviews

• Jo Lloyd (The language is clean and considered ... Most of them are solidly realist. Most take place almost in real time, and cover a single incident, usually a mundane, everyday incident ... several featuring the Williams family, who also appeared in Fraser’s first collection, The South Westerlies. The daughter is called Jane, and quite possibly some of the detail is autobiographical ... Gower stories are the backbone and the heart of it. Here are Gower’s rainy villages, its long beaches, its honeysuckle breeze and tall hedges.)