Solstice Shorts E-Book

David Mathews

• Herausgeber: Arachne Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 171

Beschreibung

Sixteen short stories that chart the meaning of time, and explore what it can do to us, and for us. Broken hearts, lives lived on fastforward, missed chances, and catastrophic meetings on the road. Time stolen, time wasted, time captured and time lost. A warning from the past, a second that changes a life, a failed glimpse into the future and a study of funeral rites. Ready-made families, weekly liaisons, and an all-night radio show. From the First ever Solstice Shorts Festival originally read live in 2014 on the Greenwich Meridian, on the shortest day of the year, from sunrise to sunset.

Leseprobe

SOLSTICE SHORTS

16 Stories About Time

Edited by

Alison Moore, Cherry Potts, Imogen Robertson, Anita Sethi, and Robert Shearman

Arachne Press

CONTENTS

Introduction: Solstice Shorts – Cherry Potts

The Largest Sundial in the World – Anita Sethi

Time Man – Dizz Tate

Stars – Emma Timpany

Measuring Time – Jayne Pickering

Grange Lodge – Imogen Robertson

With You Through the Night – Cindy George

Death and Other Rituals – Tannith Perry

Simultaneous – Robert Shearman

Wednesday Afternoon – David Mathews

Duration (4) – Andrew Gepp

A Few Minutes of Your Time – David Turnbull

A Month of Sundays – Alison Moore

I Thought I Had Time – Helen Morris

Stone Baby – Sarah Evans

If You Were a Train – William Davidson

Winter’s Evening in Békéscsaba – Pippa Gladhill

About the Authors

More from Arachne Press

Introduction: Solstice Shorts

Cherry Potts

The idea for the Solstice Shorts festival, came from my realisation in December 2013 (too late to do anything) that the shortest day of the year had been designated as Short Story Day.

I’ve celebrated the winter solstice for years (known as Wintermiddle in our house, in reference to a poem by Michael Rosen) and I love a hook on which to hang a book. My first thought was darn, the second was oh well, next year, and over the course of the Christmas festivities this mad idea took form – why not have an event on the solstice reading short stories? And then, because it is the shortest day, why not an all-day event, and why not start at sunrise and finish at sunset? And if that’s the case, why not on the Prime Meridian in Greenwich, just down the road? Why not indeed? Which (obviously!) meant that the theme had to be Time.

I tested the idea on a few people, all of whom shrieked with enthusiasm, and we started exploring what kind of event we could manage, and what kind of event it could be if it was funded.

Months passed in research, form filling, asking favours, software wrangling, serendipity, crowdfunding and finally we had a fully-formed, funded festival of short stories and folk music.

Of course, Arachne Press is a publishing house, not an events management company, so part of the deal was that there would be a book, and since we needed to find the stories to be read on the day, we decided to have a competition. Judges were surprisingly easy to find – not because they are two a penny as they are emphatically not – but because everyone I approached said yes or, if they were busy, suggested someone else. I actually had too many at one point. Having found such brilliant authors to judge the competition it seemed an unnmissable opportunity to invite them to contribute, which meant that the backbone of the book was already there.

We had 106 entries to the competition. These were whittled down to 31 by the whittling team, during a fevered day of argument and cross-referencing, and passed on to the judges for their final decisions. A two-hour conference call got us down to our final twelve.

I would like to say we settled on twelve in order to have one for each month of the year, or one for each hour on the clock, but it wouldn’t be true; it was entirely fortuitous that a story every half hour on the shortest day of the year (08:04 to 15:53), worked out to sixteen, and with four judges that left us twelve to find, but it pleased me to have such an appropriate number nonetheless.

Never having been on this side of the competition process before, I have learnt a great deal and read a lot of stories in a very short space of time. I hope we will do it again. I have been introduced to some very talented writers and found some delightful stories, and what better way to spend the dark days of winter than to curl up with a really satisfying book?

The Largest Sundial in the World

Anita Sethi

The car stopped as we became stuck in a football match traffic jam and I watched a red and white Manchester United scarf fluttering out of the window of the car beside me, flapping in the rain which started to plummet down, rapidly making the colours fade as if they were trickling out of the scarf, not really a permanent part of the scarf but liable to be lost in a downpour, as if the whole world might melt away at any moment. Dad’s voice tugged at me suddenly: ‘Roshni are you still there? Rosh, have you vanished?’ he teased.

A long time later, after waiting in the traffic jam until day turned into darkness, we arrived at our Grandmother Mamee’s house, which curved around a corner of Stretford, near to the Lancashire Cricket Ground and not far from the football stadium. Mamee lived above a corner shop, which she worked in every day, a corner shop with a small, wild overgrown garden behind it and a deep cellar full of ghosts and wine bottles beneath it and a patch of sky often thundering and crying above it.

The shop shared its patch of pavement with a chippy, a newsagent and an old man who sat on the bench all day, deep in a perpetual monologue. The shop was stacked thick with tins of food, sacks of potatoes that I often helped to weigh out into smaller bags, and best of all, sweets. Our necks were forever draped with love-heart necklaces with slogans like BITE ME, LOVE YOU, YOU ARE SWEET, our heads exploding with the Space Crackle sweets which fizzed as soon as they touched the tongue. I devoured the sweetness, as if it might counteract the bitterness which had begun to seep into our lives like a poison.

The living room directly above the shop had a thick, woolly, chocolate-brown carpet covering the whole room, thick like the fur of an animal so that bits of food, penny pieces, spiders, were forever being lost in there.

Mamee doesn’t know anything about what has happened. She doesn’t know that Mum has vanished into the hungry air of Manchester. I don’t know whether or not to tell her, because Dad said it was a secret that must never be told. Never, he said. Don’t breathe a word. So many things that happened to us we were sworn to secrecy about. So many things were sealed away, separated from the external narrative. Don’t breathe a word.

Ashish the astrologer is visiting from Jaipur and we gather in the lounge above the shop, which is now shut for the evening. Ashish has known Dad for almost half their lives. Mamee is draped in a white sari, with a jumper pouring slowly, painfully, thread by thread from her fingers, until she suddenly gives up and lays the half-made sweater and the knitting needles to one side and sinks back into herself. The gas fire is lit and roaring and the television flickers away furiously in the corner of the room, Mamee’s glittering eyes fixed on it, laughing at the sad bits of Coronation Street since she doesn’t understand much English. I watch the TV through watching Mamee’s eyes, wondering where mum is, where Mum is, where Mum is. The phrase thuds in my heartbeat, where is mum, where is mum, where is Mum. Soon enough, though, it becomes part and parcel of myself. It becomes the ghost making my heart tick.

‘Right, everybody. Enough of gazing at the box,’ the Astrologer announces, clapping his hands together, his white moustache twitching against his brown face. ‘Let’s gaze at the stars.’ I peer through the window but can’t see any stars lurking in the muggy black sky. There is a sliver of a moon but not so much of it that you can see its full face.

Dr Ashish Kumar teaches astronomy in Jaipur as well as working as an astrologer selling readings to punters.

‘The largest sundial in the world sits in Jaipur, a city in India known as the ‘pink city’ due to the huge buildings built out of pink stone or painted pink,’ says Ashish. ‘The sundial is larger than each of you, larger than this house, and is a thing of great beauty. It has been measuring time for hundreds of years.’

Ashish tells us how he still visits sundials every single morning at sunrise when he is in India, watching the changing shapes of the shadows on the earth, potential lives and paths stretching themselves out, or shrinking and shrivelling up. He translates the patterns of light and dark into astrological readings, which he gives to his clients who pay him to see their lives mapped out before them, feeling comforted that they can at least see a shape in the great nothingness which they can then fill in; like number colouring for those fearful of the future.

‘The lines on the palm have already settled, you know, beti,’ he says to Sohni. ‘Even on a little girl like you, even on a baby still in the womb.’

Sohni stretches out her arm to him fearfully, part of her hand covered in ink smudges. I wonder if that is the part showing the path to where mum is, when she will be coming back. The heart line?

‘Hmmm – let’s see. When were you born?’

‘July,’ says my sister.

‘No, no, precise times, child, we need to know the exact precise time.’

‘24th July,’ she beams, proud that she has remembered the date, which she was always forgetting.

‘Hare Ram, child, we need to know the exact second the clock struck, to be able to trace the way the sun was falling, what planets were colliding, exactly where the light and darkness was and where the darkness and the light will be. Accha? How will we know that unless we have that time at our fingertips? Prem! Don’t worry, Sohni, your dad will know. Prem.’

He beckons to dad who is sitting with his new girlfriend Juana on the sofa. I can see their fingers touching, their eyes deep into each other. Mamee seems totally oblivious to it though, as if she has purposely switched off her sight to them, blocking out the scene as easily as switching off a television.

‘Prem, I need your help. We need this child’s birth details. I’m plotting her astrological chart.’

Dad removes his head from Juana’s shoulder and looks over to us.

‘What time was she born?’ asks Ashish the Astrologer.

‘Well, let’s see,’ says Dad, ‘sometime in the morning, I think. Or was that Roshni?’

‘What time in the morning, Prem?’

‘Just let me think …’

There is a long pause in which Ashish holds his breath.

Juana laughs. ‘Hey, Prem, just tell them the truth, you weren’t even there,’ she giggles. ‘Let me guess where you were, playing cricket?’

Dad chuckles too.

‘No, no. Sushanti had gallstones at the time. She was so fat, you see.’

He starts laughing and Juana is laughing too, their laughter falling into each other.

‘No wonder she had gallstones when she was fat as a balloon. Stuffing herself with so much food all the time. Eating and making herself sick and eating again. Crazy woman she was.’

Why was he talking about my Mum in the past tense and was it really her he was talking about? She wasn’t fat at all, the mum I knew. And what were gull stones? I imagine a flock of gulls with precious stones in their beaks, delivering them to Mum. I wonder if she ate them all by accident and it is that which made her fat and heavy.

‘Anyway, yar, she had gallstones so was in hospital for weeks,’ continues Dad. ‘Roshni might never have been born as it was touch and go for much of time. We didn’t know if she’d pull through. The stones were shifting the baby out of place. So anyway, I couldn’t be there all the time, not all the time. Someone had to work and make the money. It doesn’t make itself. Not money. Not time. But you have some of the story.’

Ashish the Astrologer shakes his head looking very perplexed.

‘You should know, Prem, what a travesty that is in India, not to know the exact time of your child’s birth. How is she ever going to be able to plan her life now?’ he asks, voice rising to near hysteria. ‘Hare Ram, how is she going to be able to live?’

‘Look, I’ve told you what I know of the story,’ says Dad. ‘You must be able to give her something to go on from that.’

Next it is time for me to have my palm read and I tell Ashish the Astrologer my birth date as we gaze down at my palm. It is the first time I have ever inspected my palm in such detail and I am shocked to see such an intricacy of paths overlapping and colliding and forking out, and crisscrossing. Along with the little lines and the great swerving lines, there are concentric circles, like the bark of a tree and the veins of a leaf. Could the course of my whole life really lie in these strange etchings?

‘Hmmm, let’s see. Oh, the lifeline starts off very, very strong, but then, Hare Ram, there is a great rupture in it just here,’ he crinkles up his brow, tutting. ‘Some accident or misfortune.’

‘Well, let’s see, what else? You know you are on the cusp of birth signs? Fire and Water. Whatever you do, just be careful not to burn yourself out, yar? Balance the water and the fire.’

How could a person burn themselves out? I was not allowed to play with fire and the only water I knew was from the tap.

‘If there is any way to delay that great rupture, listen carefully to the stories your grandmother is telling you. Learn from the lessons of the Ramayana,’ he says, holding up a copy of the book which has been lying on the sofa’s edge. ‘Think of the golden deer that tempted Sita away from a place of safety and into the trap of a monster – if there is something that looks nice, leaping like a golden deer, tempting you away, resist temptation. Remember that a lot of things in life are illusions that only seem to look like reality.’

A golden deer? I did remember the golden deer in the Ramayana story but I couldn’t imagine a golden deer bounding through the streets of Manchester.

‘Also, count to one hundred before making an important decision,’ he continued. ‘Hold your breath deeply and pause and think. Remember to think and remember to remember. Your memories are very important. You should write down the important memories and store them carefully. The creature on this earth who has the longest memory is the elephant … In Jaipur where I come from, there are many, many great elephants …’

I imagine a real live elephant strolling down the street amidst the Manchester United football traffic and swishing his huge trunk, tap-tapping on the door of the Corner Shop with his trunk, and sitting down to have his great palm read – though it would have to be the sole of one of his feet instead.

What I really want to ask is if he can predict anything about my unpredictable mother.

‘Can you tell me if the sundial knows when Mum will be coming back and how she is?’ I ask Ashish the Astrologer. ‘Is she still hurting?’ Could the sundial or the palm of the hand measure human pain and when it might stop?

At the mention of Mum, Dad starts from the sofa and in a nervous voice tries to drown out mine.

‘And one more story you should know about elephants,’ pipes up Dad, ‘is the story of the Blind Men and the Elephant. The blind-folded men each touched a different part of the elephant and reported a very different creature – some touched its trunk and described it as thick and firm; some touched its tail and described how it swished. Truth comes in different shapes and sizes and textures depending on where you are standing …’

‘Hare Ram, Prem, I am trying to read this girl’s palm. Enough of your stories …’

Next he examined my brother’s palm, but for each of us he ran against the same, lineless blank wall in his calculations, for the time of our births were all unknown.

‘Now Prem, surely you know when you yourself were born? Hey, Shanti,’ he calls to Mamee, whose eyes have glazed over as she painfully resumes trying to knit a jumper with her arthritic fingers. ‘When was this rascal born? I bet your memory is better than his.’

In the end, our astrological charts were left unmapped. Instead of being guided by the light and shadow cast by the great sundial of Jaipur, there was just a huge mist. There was just empty, unmapped, blank and patternless space. Dad had a pattern, as firm as Mamee’s knitting pattern. And Mamee had a pattern. All they did was colour it in. But with roots reaching into mist, we had nothing to go on and thereafter began to freefall.

That night, it was dreams of the sundial that rocked me to sleep. Sleep finally came and with it, feverish dreams haunted with absences. Pocked with holes. The young mind starting its desperate search for something to fill in the gaps. There was a sense of soaring freedom, too, that the future might be mine to make.

Time Man

Dizz Tate

‘Look!’ Joey calls. ‘Look at the Time Man!’

Alice pushes her lips together with some disdain. She does not like it when the little girl sounds sentimental. She wants them to be equals, fast-talking partners, like sisters on TV shows. They are not sisters. Alice is Joey’s nannie. She has been for a year. They like each other fine, though Alice is irritated by Joey’s insistence on cuteness, and Joey does not like Alice’s frequent long silences and bad-smelling smoking habit.

‘The what?’ asks Alice. Joey doubles back and pulls on Alice’s sleeve. Alice wriggles her arm away, shaking her large sweater loose so it falls over her hands. It is cold, and the cold seems to pick at the skin under her nails, which she has left unprotected through a chronic addiction to biting.

Joey points up the hill that rises beside them, like a bubble someone has chosen to blow in the middle of the park. Their boots crunch over the frozen grass. Alice peers along the line of Joey’s finger. Her eyesight is lazy. She can only make out a hunched shadow on the crest of the hill.

Alice shrugs. Joey looks at her with an eagerness that Alice finds both flattering and distasteful.

‘Don’t you want to know who he is?’ asks Joey. She cocks her head, so sure in her victory that Alice feels sorry for her.

Don’t you know not to ask that kind of question? Alice wants to ask her. Don’t you know how easy it is for people to hurt you when you do?

‘Who?’ she asks, finally, lazily. They are almost at the school. Alice is thinking about Jack, her husband. The word husband still feels funny in her head. When she says it aloud, her tongue swells up, and she trips over the sound of it.

He did not come back to their shared flat last night. Alice sat around, making cups of tea that she did not drink. She curled her hands around their heat. She looked out of the window at the night buses flying past. The living-room window matched up exactly with the top deck of each bus. She liked examining the slumped and raucous bodies from her space in the dark. After a while she had turned on the light, lay on the floor and kicked her legs in the air. She had taken off her shirt and sauntered around the flat with her breasts bright. The people slept on the bus. Jack did not come home. At seven, she put her shirt on and walked to Joey’s house. Joey had run out and head-butted her.