Departures E-Book

• Herausgeber: Arachne Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 133

Beschreibung

Stories and poems about leaving, and being left behind; or that take an unexpected turn, going completely off piste. From authors featured at The Story Sessions, the South London live literature evening. Stories from Emily Bullock, David Steward, Helen Morris, Nic Ridley, Barbara Renel, Carolyn Eden, Cherry Potts, VG Lee, Liam Hogan, Becky Ros, Joan Taylor-Rowan, David Mathews, Sarah Lawson, Oscar Windsor-Smith and Zoe Brigley. Poems from Kate Foley, Gloria Sanders, Nancy Charley, Joy Howard, Math Jones and Elinor Brooks.

Leseprobe

Intimate, salon-like. As if I’d stumbled into an invitation only séance peopled by the spirits of Victorian hucksters and exotic beasts.

(Audience feedback The Story Sessions)

Contents

Introduction

Cherry Potts

Stories

The Change

Helen Morris

The Departures Board

David Steward

What a Performance!

Emily Bullock

This England

Oscar Windsor-Smith

My Daddy

Carolyn Eden

Departures

Liam Hogan

Alpaca Moonlight

VG Lee

Cloud Island

Cherry Potts

The Reigning Miss Morocco

Nicolas Ridley

Animal with Moon

Barbara Renel

Through Security

Sarah Lawson

Midday Bus

David Mathews

Walderman’s

Becky Ros

Three Sisters on the Edge

Joan Taylor-Rowan

Trail

Zoe Brigley

Poems

The Flight of the B52s

Elinor Brooks

Learning to Tell the Time

Elinor Brooks

Flying Ants Day

Elinor Brooks

Running

Nancy Charley

Bear Mother

Math Jones

Tonight, I Leave This Town

Math Jones

Him of the Sea

Math Jones

On Leaving London

Gloria Sanders

Physio

Gloria Sanders

Laundry/Camino

Gloria Sanders

Terminal

Joy Howard

Over

Joy Howard

Air Traffic Controller

Joy Howard

Dorothy Parker Goes on a Day Trip to Criccieth

Joy Howard

Homing

Kate Foley

Airport

Kate Foley

Green Lanes

Kate Foley

Introduction

Cherry Potts

The Story Sessions: The live literature event that thinks it’s a folk club

The Sessions started in much the same way as Arachne Press, in a fit of irritation. On this occasion the annoyance was at the difficulty of finding a literature event in South London to showcase our writers.

Following our mantra of if no one is doing what you are looking for, do it yourself, I decided to trial a series of monthly themed events, and go for what I really wanted for a night like this. Taking a lead from folk clubs, we had headliners, support acts and floor spots – and Flash from the Floor was born. That was a lot of fun – the audience wrote 100 word flash fiction or poetry on the theme of the evening in the interval, and read them out before we got on with the main event.

Another initiative was the ‘test bed’ session where any writer could book the slot immediately before the interval and read a work in progress, and be given feedback written by the audience in the interval – never has an interval been so industrious!

Finding ‘acts’ was never a problem, and the themes came thick and fast, sometimes honed to showcase our headliner, sometimes tied to a significant date, some funny, some serious, but the quality was always impressive. We even got funding for one year to cover the readers’ expenses and to have an artist in residence, the wonderful Annalie Wilson, who gave us an on-theme song each time and read for writers too far away to contribute in person.

There have been some real highlights over the course of the seventeen sessions: the moving stories at one of our earliest events: Armistice Tales, Barbara Renel and Carrie Cohen duetting parts of Rio for Helen Morris’s Simon Le Bon Will Save Us (later published in Five by Five), the audience wearing multiple hats for Bartle Sawbridge’s A Date for Maureen, a choral-speaking Flash from the Floor, Math Jones’s electrifying rendition of Four Failures, which led to me offering him a publishing contract on the spot and subsequently to the publication of The Knotsman.

Thanks to The Ivy House, Café of Good Hope and Brockley Deli for having us, but we never found quite the right balance of access, transport links and most importantly, quiet, (oh the dog fight in the front bar...) so reluctantly, after four years, we stopped.

However, having encountered so many new writers, I thought we might be able to make a permanent record of all the talent we met during the life of the Sessions, and that, in keeping with the traditions of the Story Sessions, it should have a theme. I contacted everyone who had read for us and asked them to make suggestions. Departures grew out of that as something broad enough to cover as many of their ideas as possible.

Many of the writers included in this anthology we have, of course, already published. This is what I set up the Sessions for, that, and to find new writers to publish – which worked. Nancy Charley, Emily Bullock and Barbara Renel I first met at the Sessions, and likewise Oscar Windsor-Smith. Zoe Brigley and Becky Ros I first discovered when they were read by others at the Sessions, being too far from us to read themselves. Gloria Sanders was initially reading other people’s work as part of one of our Brockley Max sessions, and then revealed she was a poet herself. I’ve known VG Lee for years, and persuaded her to read for us at our LGBT History Month event.

The Story Sessions was an invigorating, sweet experiment, and I’m proud to be able to produce a permanent record on paper – you can watch a lot of the videos at arachnepress.com/the-story-sessions/ if that takes your fancy – or read on!

Stories

The Change

Helen Morris

I had read, of course, about the symptoms of ‘the change.’ That time in a woman’s life when she moves from being able to produce children, to not. Not that I ever had produced children, but the monthly wax and wane of my cycle had been as much a rhythm to my life as my own heartbeat. The rhythm that had set the tides of my life for four decades.

I had read, of course, about the hot flushes, the mood changes, the loss of bone density. I had waited as my clock ticked downwards for the time I too would begin ‘the change.’ I thought I was ready. I thought I knew all there was to know. Ah my friends, I did not.

I found, when the time came, that my own personal ‘symptoms’ were not in the literature. They were not on Google. Nor in the ‘older mums’ posts on Mumsnet. They were not even whispered over large glinting glasses of Sauvignon blanc in velvet dark wine bars.

Hot flushes? Yes. I’d read about that. I was ready for that. I had read up diligently on the choices before me. I was prepared to stand in a suitably Shakespearean pose in some cluttered doctor’s surgery and movingly enact: ‘to HRT, or not to HRT – that is the question’. I was ready for that.

But I was certainly not ready for having a spanning pair of red and gold leathery wings erupt suddenly through my back. No. No, I had not been ready for that. I had not been ready, standing in the back garden that evening, holding my dusk pirate’s rum and black. Watching the setting sun and feeling a cool spring breeze blow – and suddenly having the power of flight.

No.

I am not a panicker by nature. I have walked a path alone and relied upon my own self too long to panic. Panic is for those who are used to company. However, I am a swearer of some accomplishment. And I am pleased to say I did myself proud. Had anyone been watching I am not sure which they would have been more shocked to witness erupt from the middle-aged woman before them: glorious red and gold wings or the stream of luminous swear words. I may have even created a few new ones.

My mind and mouth were ablaze as I turned to study a rather spectacular profile in the French window glass. I am tall and strongly built. A product of a long line of blacksmiths, from times when trades were passed down from father to son and from mother to daughter. I have to say I looked magnificent. I turned from side to side to admire my resplendent reflection. The wings were heavy. I felt the muscles in my back tense and hold. When I spread the wings – my wings – wide, it hurt. I was going to need to start working out if they were staying. ‘Bingo: wings’, I mused. I stretched my left hand above my shoulder and felt my left wing, turning my head to look at the pliant surface. It felt warm and I could feel the touch of my fingers upon it. Like a bat’s wing. ‘Yo, bats,’ I whispered, stroking my wing tip, ‘no longer the only flighted mammal...’

And then as quickly as they had come I felt them retract and disappear. I caught my breath and the suddenness and the momentum pushed me forward onto the balls of my feet. These were not imaginary, they were large and physically real. I had felt them retract into me and I was physically as before, but yet not as before. I knew they hadn’t entirely gone. They were waiting. Waiting for what?

‘Bloody hell.’ I thought seriously about what I should do in the circumstances. Then, decisively, I went in for another drink. I was shaking now, but exhilarated. I poured a suitably generous rum and swigged it. And as I did so I remembered Aunt Cherry. She would have appreciated the timing.

Aunt Cherry had always been the naughty aunt. Determinedly single, extravagantly bohemian and gloriously bisexual. She burned a bright path. A path that was then easy for me to follow. Her real name was Elsie. But she had taken to wearing cherry velvet as a girl and so, in the grand traditions of family nicknames, she had always been Aunt Cherry. I wrote to her at random intervals – holidays, birthdays and on the rare occasion I did something cultured. And I saw her at Christmas and once or twice in the summer when I visited my mother. She lived in the village next to the one in which I had grown up. A trio of sisters spread across Wootton, Cumnor, Appleton. I remembered her now because of that wedding.

It must have been a decade ago. My cousin’s wedding. Not Cherry’s child. She, like me, was childless. The fourteenth of February and a bride dressed in scarlet silk and oxblood red Doc Martens. Unseasonably warm. Me, waiting for the interminable photos to be over, and escape to be at hand.

I stood outside the Register office vaguely smiling at relatives in a way that I hoped was sufficiently off-putting to stop anyone coming up and making conversation. It had worked well enough. But it was not enough to stop Aunt Cherry. ‘Hello dear,’ she said crisply. ‘Fucked anyone interesting recently?’

‘Hello Cherry,’ I said. ‘Not since the Belgian mixed doubles badminton team last October sadly.’ She smiled. She looked at me sideways.

‘This will seem a strange thing for me to say, dear, but one day you’ll understand why – when the change comes, you must come to me. You’ll know when. I won’t say any more now.’ She turned and looked at me, and I, who can read people well, could not read her expression. She was like a jar that had lost its label and I could not see the contents inside through the opaque glass. ‘Come to me. It’s a family thing. I’ll explain then.’

And she nodded once and strode away. She must have been seventy, but she walked tall and upright, not wearied by the boredom of a wedding, not bowed by gravity’s pull. I assumed that she was going to pass down some old family herbal remedy to me. I hoped it involved alcohol. A menopause cocktail.

The long slow hot flush maybe? The osteoporosis buster? The invisible woman?

That’s what I’d thought at the time. It wasn’t what I thought now.

And so I found myself back in the next village to the one where I had grown up. Immediately I felt the teetering uncertainty of fifteen again. I paused with my hand on the rounded top of Cherry’s green and silver lichened front gate. I hadn’t rung to say I was coming. Aunt Cherry was eighty-two now. Where would she be?

The answer, it seemed, was waiting for me in the front garden. She smiled as I approached although it was not a smile of greeting or joy. It was a smile of recognition. The smile you give your siblings at a funeral.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a Lagavulin ready. What colour are your wings?’

And so we sat in her living room next to the wood-burner that pushed a dry heat rhythmically into the spring-chilled air. She told me the stories of a trade handed down from woman to woman for generations.

The Noctivagator.

I am a Noctivagator. I am a Fiur Fury. As is she, as was her aunt before her and so on and so on. Handed down through the female line for eons. Across nations. Across continents. The powers emergent at menopause and only in those without children. Legend says this is as a means of protection. What we fight has no mercy. It smells line descendants and slaughters them. Now I’ve fought them, I understand that.

So I sat with Cherry as her words became a tide that crept in and through me and changed my life. At my age you think you know yourself. You don’t. I crossed her threshold one woman, and left another.

It takes a while to adjust. That’s one bit of advice that is true. Control takes time. In the early days the crepuscular times are the most difficult. One Thursday my wings nearly launched in the snacks aisle in Aldi. I stood backed up against the twiglets clutching a family pack of Wotsits to my chest while I fought their urge to unfurl. Many a sweary half hour came and went in pub toilets attempting to re-fold them while they fought back like a poltergeist-possessed pop-up tent. Staggering around in a tiny cubicle alternately head butting the walls and muttering ‘Get the fuck in’. No one stayed long in the next cubicle. ‘The Change’, I muttered to waiting friends when I emerged flushed. Entirely accurate – wholly misleading.

Slowly you adapt. You learn control. You discover your powers. You use them. Follow your dreams they say. Although I did once dream that I jumped out of a plane with just a pair of paper knickers as a parachute. So maybe not. But everyone dreams of being a superhero.

I’ve been a Noctivagator for five years now. Our powers are based on our individual human strengths. So we’re essentially a powered up version of ourselves. Some women get huge physical strength, others phenomenal intelligence or speed. My friend Sheila, a fantastic cook, and an Erthe Fury Noctivagator can bake scones that turn into lava on impact. I always carry a few. If you don’t need to use them in battle you can always eat one if you get a bit hungry. Her Noctivagant battle weapon is a cake tin. It’s one of the ones with a detachable base. She calls it her loose bottom. I’ve seen her slice apart a momentous horde with it. It’s also dishwasher safe so you don’t have to scrub the sinewy bits off afterwards.

My power is based on my sharp tongue. Well it would be, wouldn’t it. I have the power of death by sarcasm. An arch comment can stop a charging angel in their tracks and start them smouldering. Irony can fell them unconscious on the spot. Full sarcasm incinerates them on impact. I kill with words. Sarcasm is my weapon.

Angels? Yes. That’s what we fight, us Noctivagators. In the best traditions of patriarchy, everything you think you know about good and evil is wrong.

I fight angels.

Please lay aside any of this golden host bollocks from your childhood. Please do believe in a set of enormously powerful extremely vicious supernatural beings who are looking for corporeal bodies to colonise. That means you. Nice, soft, warm human flesh. Consumed from the inside out. They don’t colonise worlds. They colonise people. Like a big old parasite. Think of angels as being like huge voracious merciless tapeworms, but with a good publicist. I’ve been badly savaged by a cherub – before I managed to behead it with a sarcastic comment about dimpled buttocks. They have basalt teeth.

So, directly contradicting every school report ever, being mouthy has proved useful after all.