An audio book of stories.
- Touchy Subjects - Sarah, 38, flies from Seattle to a Dublin hotel to meet her friend's husband Paudrig. He's donating semen as a favour. He struggles to produce the goods, succeeding eventually. She's interrupted by room service when she tried to insemenate, ending up squirting semen on the carpet instead. She calls him back. This time he has to phone his wife to get excited.
- Expecting - When she starts chatting to an old man who's getting something for his pregnant daughter, she says she's pregnant too. Unable to admit she lied to him, she continues the story for months when they cross paths weekly. His daughter loses her baby. She avoids him. 5 years later she still has a prepared story in case she meets him, about having some children.
- The man who wrote on beaches - He wrote rude words in the sand as a kid. At 43 he suddenly becomes religious. He gets his partner of 10 years to marry him, then says he wants a child. She gets pregnant for him, miscarriaging 3 times.
- Oops - gay James thought that his tampering with his friends' birth control device caused the woman to have a daughter. James helps with the daughter's upbringing. When she's 18 he admits to the mother that it was his fault. She says that actually they'd been trying to have a child.
- Through the night - Ontario. Una is sleep-deprived, with a 2 month old baby Moira. Her mother looks after the baby for a night, so that Una can have a good night's sleep. It works well. The mother doesn't say that she laced the baby's feed with cognac.
- Do they know it's Christmas - Trevor and partner, both academics, treat their 3 dogs (Gide, Mallarmé, Proust) like kids. Trevor's sister has 3 kids - her family is welcomed by their parents whereas they discourage dog visits. Trevor thinks this is unfair.
- Domesticity - Lavender's Blue - LeRoy and Sheryl before marriage said they wanted a house painted Lavender blue. They have a child. They struggle to agree on the precise colour they meant - "Distant Haze"?
- The cost of things - Liz and Sophie started their relationship when they found Cleo, a cat. They argue about the vet bills and who cares most about the cat. They split a few months after a big argument that sorted itself out.
- Pluck - After 7 years together Rosheen and Joseph have a child. He stays at home to care for it. Joseph becomes obsessed by a hair on his wife's chin. He tries in vain to pluck it out with tweezers while she's asleep. He mentions it to her casually, hoping she won't be offended, and she plucks it out without any fuss.
- Strangers - good deed - Sam in Toronto passes a street-person who's bleeding. He wraps the street-person in his expensive coat and calls an ambulance, thinking he'd better go in the ambulance. Later the street-person self-releases. Sam doesn't expect the coat back but the hospital delivers it.
- The sanctuary of hands - She escapes to the Pyrenees, joins a cave tour. A group of handicapped people are there - she thinks of them as "specials". The tour-guide talks about apes, evolution and cave-men. She has to help a scared "special", holding his hand. The tour-guide points out ancient handprints, some with missing/incomplete fingers. The "special" tries to touch the prints (signs of old individualism)
- WritOr - A published writer gets a university job, hoping to use his time to write a novel. The budding writers who he has 1-to-1s with make standard beginners' errors. One of these presents an unbelievable child-abuse piece that turns out to be autobiographical. A girl presents a poem he'd have loved to have written. She's not impressed by it and isn't interested in being published, so she gifts him the poem. He wonders whether he's deluding himself the way the students do.
- Desire - Team men - Saul (who fluffed an important save when he was a goalie years before in a big match) coaches his son Jon's soccer team. A new boy, Davey, moves in, and plays centre-forward instead of Jon. Jon and Davey (both about 16) start having sex. When Davey says he's going to come out to his parents, Jon panics. But Davey doesn't mention his name when he come out. They'll be separated when they go to university anyway.
- Speaking in tongues - 2 alternating, overlapping PoVs. Lee, 17, a student at Cork has a reputation in her home town in Ireland - openly gay. Sylvia, 34, a poet living in Dublin, comes from the same town and keeps her lesbianism a secret. At a Galway conference they meet for the first time. Sylvia reads a poem written in Gaelic. They sleep together in the back of Sylvia's van, parking in a field. Both think they're too good for the other. Both think it could be love. When they kiss their tongues are slippery.
- The welcome - A woman's co-op in Manchester (9 woman living together) advertise for a new resident. Lucy criticises the ad's grammar. She moved in after she came out at 15. She's 18 and still a virgin - she's picky about partners as well as punctuation. JJ is chosen from the candidates. Lucy fancies her. JJ doesn't say if she's gay. She's evicted. Years later Lucy has a wife. She's kept a letter JJ sent her after she moved out that said she was born a man. Lucy re-reads the letter whenever she feels she understands life.
- Death - The dormition of the virgin - Student George is in Firenze for 4 days, looking at art. When he leaves the tiny hotel he realises that the landlady's been dead 3 days. He realises he can leave without paying.
- Enchantment - Peetr runs boat-trips in american swamps. He has competition. To attract custom he hires a portaloo, trains a Caiman, tells scarier stories. He's thinking of giving in when his competitor suggests a partnership.
- Baggage - Ninnyann flies from Shannon to LA - her brother Arthur was there and is still paying for storage area. Her luggage is lost. He's disappeared. She realised rather late that he's "not the marrying type". She tours the sites then flies home, her luggage waiting for her at the airport.
- Necessary Noise - May (20) and Marti (17) collect their brother Maz (15) from a party. Their mother left about 12 years before. Maz has taken something. They rush him to hospital. He's ok, but it was close.
Quite a few duds. I liked "The sanctuary of hands", and "The welcome" had enough jokes to keep me interested.
Other reviews
- Stevie Davies (Her touch is so light and exuberantly inventive, her insight at once so forensic and intimate, her people so ordinary even in their oddities, that she is able to exhibit the small shames, shortcomings, prevarications and betrayals that we hope to keep in the dark. ... a major theme in the collection, concerning privileged folk (of whom the reader is likely to be one) who think they're in a bad way, but find themselves bereft of human decency when they come into squirming contact with the truly afflicted.)
- Anna Scott
