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  SCÉALTA

  SHORT STORIES BY IRISH WOMEN

  Edited by

  Rebecca O’Connor

  TELEGRAM

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Judy Kravis, Dearest Everyone

  Claire Keegan, Men and Women

  Caitriona O’Reilly, Amour Propre

  Eithne McGuinness, Feather Bed

  Julia O’Faolain, Pop Goes the Weasel

  Anne Haverty, Fusion

  Mary O’Donnell, A Genuine Woman

  Cherry Smyth, Walkmans, Watches and Chains

  Catherine Dunne, Moving On

  Judith Mok, Pirates

  Christine Dwyer Hickey, Esther’s House

  Vona Groarke, Cubs

  Rebecca O’Connor, St John of the Miraculous Lake

  Molly McCloskey, Here, Now

  Elaine Garvey, Hammer On

  Biographical Notes

  Acknowledgements

  ‘Hammer On’ and ‘Here, Now’ were first published in the Dublin Review; and ‘Men and Women’ was first published in Antarctica (Faber & Faber, 1999). I would like to thank Shirley Stewart and Brendan Barrington for their invaluable advice and support in putting this collection together. And thank you to Matthew Hollis for helping me to say what I mean.

  Introduction

  Some people have the gift of the gab. They can transform the mundane into something magical. It’s not the local newspaper or the radio we turn to for this kind of entertainment – for the colourful turn of phrase, the unique take on things that changes subtly with each new telling – it’s to the storyteller.

  The stories collected here make you sit on the edge of your chair, crane to listen. Here are women unabashedly making themselves heard above the din, with sometimes bawdy, always intricately rendered tales of lives and loves; tales as fantastical or as true as you like. This is not a chorus of voices singing harmoniously; it is more akin to a group of session musicians, each taking a turn with the tune, and making it their own.

  Most of the people in these stories are ordinary; they do ordinary things – wash the dishes, fall out of love. Where these stories are extraordinary is in the telling, in the minutiae – the cotton weave, the dust motes – of daily living. Ordinariness, of course, is not always good, as in Cherry Smyth’s story, in which a child is swept up in a romance with a paedophile, or Eithne McGuinness’s ‘Feather Bed’, where the young protagonist’s mother induces her to do unspeakable things.

  That there are so many children’s voices here is interesting. Childhood is where life takes its darkest turns, at the hands of irresponsible or cruel men and women. It is as if, now at liberty to say what they please, these writers seek to uncover the same suffering that their mothers, and their mother’s mothers, experienced behind closed doors. This attention to the domestic scene does not come from a lack of engagement with the grander political or global arena. The broader issues, such as gender and race politics, are literally brought home to us. Of course it’s not a new phenomenon, but it is noteworthy here.

  As well as children’s narratives, there are men’s – several of them. Abusive husbands and fathers remain, but men are as vulnerable to these aggressors as women. They are also as susceptible to feelings of loss, alienation and guilt, as with Rashid in ‘Pirates’, living far from his native Iran to be close to his alienated girlfriend and only child; or Tom, in Julia O’Faolain’s story, dealing with his own complicated feelings about his sexuality.

  Then there are those characters that seem so far removed from what we know to be ‘ordinary’ but that somehow bring us closer to an understanding of ourselves – Judy Kravis’s solitary figure in ‘Dearest Everyone’, waiting in the Hotel Furkablick for the snow to rise above his window; or the woman in Anne Haverty’s ‘Fusion’, watching a man, his girlfriend and their dog gradually merge into one. The terrible anxiety of life, its awful absurdity, is exquisitely expressed through their prismatic view.

  Among the contributors are one actor, one soprano, teachers, poets, novelists – as various in their experience as the characters in these stories. And the themes they explore – violence, dysfunctional family life, love, grief, exile – are treated with such indefatigable humanity that it’s impossible not to be moved.

  I could go on. There is so much here to enthuse about. But, rather, I leave you to listen for yourself – to bold new voices alongside those who have been long fine-tuned, and to those that whisper conspiratorially, urging you to come close.

  Lean in.

  Rebecca O’Connor

  JUDY KRAVIS

  Dearest Everyone

  I’m writing from my old room in the Hotel Furkablick. I’d like to say they still keep it for me, but it would be truer to say that I keep it for them. The eye meets the sky, the sky clings to the ground, and the ground to the snow till there are no more inventions, no fresh people, in fact no people at all. I see to the place as much as I’m able. I like to have a programme of work. I stoke the boiler, open and close the shutters, clear the snow in front of the door, watch the snow fall again and the drifts rise. I scarcely go down to the village any more, let alone the town. I’ve forgotten, would you believe, the colours of traffic lights, whether the green before the red or vice versa. There are deliveries once a week from the village, except when there’s a blizzard, which has been the case for the last two days. This may be the storm that empties the food cupboard, opens the shutters, and lets me out into the real Alps. I tuck my scarf into my jumper. What will the snow wind bring this time? You can smell the chill coming over the ridge, in January as in May. We addicts of the frozen world, we quicken.

  As I pause, my room comes forward in its light Furka presence. Down to this, I say to myself, or up. This long, slow performance, this old age, so much dust displaced for so much longer than I could have imagined. I have been retired for as long as I worked. Add to that the twenty years of growing, getting my schooling, six years of having my war, and there you have me, layered and labelled like a bottle of coloured sand from the Holy Land.

  And, Dearest Everyone, there I have you, a warm tribe on the move in whose midst I may one day be carried, some of us puppets, some of us human, some of us dead. Will you come and pluck me from the Hotel Furkablick as you cross Europe? Sometimes I sense you at the window, framed by snow, in your caps, hoods and scarves, all of you, peering in to see if I am there, if I am ready to go.

  In the many years I was a father, I did not understand what freight was on it, what fell off along the way, when, or why, or which trucks were cruising on empty. I grew a family, yes, but I don’t see their faces at the window. I don’t see their photographs, though I took them, though I filed them chronologically on a shelf. I liked the idea of being a father. I sat at the top of the table, I asked for the salt. I look back and that’s what I see. Too much salt. I sat there ringed with avoidance, like an ad for toothpaste; after supper I go out to my shed, a scarf tucked into my jumper, and make and mend like a boy with homework. Every day I thought: these children are passing through, they do not meet my eye, they pull in their breath and their attention as I pass by, they wait for nothing as ardently as the day they leave, and then they’re gone.

  In the vast middle years of family life it appeared that I was not speaking to the rest of the family, or they were not speaking to me, none of us knew why any longer. Impossible to know who had started it. No one would give in. We survived on the belief it would exhaust itself one day. Then after the children have gone there’s another kind of silence at the dinner table: you retire and retire again from what you took to be your life.

  My wife took a slow and specific leave of life; she forgot food and then the outside world, time and then place. I came to enjoy looking after he
r, taking her pulse, reminding her to take her pills. I came into my own as she went out of hers. More than half a century it took. Something took. You can be with someone all those years and not know what’s taking. Then one day you’re putting pills on a saucer at three-hourly intervals and taking her pulse, and then you know.

  The Hotel Furkablick has ripened and reduced in concert with my life. I have as many new parts as the hotel, perhaps more. The rooms here have stayed bare and wooden, the plumbing fitful and slow. The wrought-iron balconies are still there, and the faded two-tone paint on the shutters, but it’s more a hütte than a hotel, by now, a platform to the high peaks. There’s a spring-release you don’t notice when you first arrive. Slow-release, like certain pills. I like hotels, don’t you? As tidy a concept as you could wish. All the solidity you need to be temporary. In this world.

  The Furkas understood. They wanted to stand a thousand thousand times on the same mountain; the less they could see of what lay below, the better they liked it. Their hospitality was plain, verging on austere. The guests dwindled, then the maid left, and the cook, Frau Furka died and then there was just Herr Furka and the cats, then the cats, then me.

  Herr Furka had a good style in smoking jackets and containment; he wrote a page or two every night and then burnt it in the sitting room fire. Zen and the art of novel writing up in smoke. That made him laugh. If it was a novel. He walked, he chopped wood. He cleaned. He read. Some evenings I saw him listening to Schubert lieder in their sitting room, stroking the cat and gazing at the fire. Then one day he went out for his walk and didn’t come back. About three years ago now.

  I came here for my usual fortnight the year after my wife died, and I won’t go back now. The nieces and nephews are in dispute about Herr Furka’s will. I’ll stay on until the courts below or the courts above settle one or another. I may not have made my peace but I’ve signed the treaty. You can laugh if you like, but I always wanted to give people the world, every time. To feel that warmth come back. Who doesn’t want to be adored? I heard someone say on the radio this morning, and I had to sigh. I have two views on adoration: first you feel as if you can breathe, and then, outside, the world is a chilly place. I speak of my mother now, when I speak of adoration. I could do no wrong in her eyes. A mother is a kind of addiction I suppose, a mess of little strokes, a sine qua non for the puny boy within.

  Do you know how I hate saying this? Some of you do. One empty buffet after another. A gale in a cul de sac.

  It’s easy to see defences when they’ve fallen, when the darkness has overrun, and the snow is piling halfway up the window, gathering moonlight. I have worn some disguising prose in my day. I will wear some more. Here it is, Dearest Everyone, the current costume, a little lederhosen of a letter. Guten abend, come in, sit down. Look at the fire. Sei mir gegrüsst. Choose a book. Settle in. These days I want my reading to take me home, I make sure of that, into the land beyond the absentees, men without qualities, inside lost time, out on a limb. I’ve had enough of stories. Can you hear the ice crack, the lichen crumble?

  You came round to dinner, Dearest Everyone. You stayed the weekend. We talked, we argued. We drank coffee. I read the Russians then, and Thomas Mann. I unearthed the condition of man, I belonged to CND, went on their marches and helped at their jumble sales. I learned Marxism and Woodcraft and I met you, some of you. We were already massing back then, harbouring decent thoughts and a measure of loneliness. Touching the optimism as we touched the tragedy.

  With the years, I moved from a cup of tea after work to a gin and tonic, and my stories began to ripen. Stories were free. They were voluminous. You could work them up. No arguments here. You captured your audience, you won. What a rush I had, holding my own over – please allow me a rather good burgundy. Never a story that I couldn’t cap. Allow me that too. We’re eating and drinking, and the truth is, I panic. You have told your story and I must tell mine. I sit up straight, I throw my head back, my hands are on the table, my head is trawling the history of the world. I want the moment shiny, the wine warmed and the buzz rising; I want to overcome the sorrow and the seediness, collect everyone up in the choice of my wines, the comfort of my house now opened and filled. I’ll bring you with me, but we’ll not look each other in the eye. There will be such gulps of admiration I’ll be spluttering too, and then, by a miracle, I’ll carry on.

  Why is this night different from all other nights? This story? Why?

  I’m sure you’ve all seen me seize the air and then, shoulders slightly off-balance and head to one side, retreating almost, anticipating the void I’ll hit when you all go home and there are the dishes and glasses to clear up, as well as the fear that you were not entertained after all. Always a huge, a significant story I had to tell, the best, uncappable, triumphant. The silence when you’d gone was cracky and dark.

  For Esme With Love and Squalor has lurked at the back of my mind since I first read it here in the Hotel Furkablick. There they are together, love and squalor, the life with the soul at the party, my mother with my father, my wife with my own abject terror. Oh yes, if we’re talking of underbellies, we’re talking terror, we’re fighting squalor from one direction and love from another, a seediness that has lurked about the house, in the kitchen, the bathroom, the practical places, the intimate. There was shame to be overcome from the beginning; there was prosperity to ease into slowly, and then came the era when the sorriest tale was a legitimate fiction.

  My mother would have been proud that I could keep an audience of educated people hanging on my words. Listen to him, mine son. She had the art of sighing and shouting, thin swathes of relief language, you know, like the roads that avoid towns but are always full, a kind of Yiddish-with-English-and-Russian rustle of complaint and fury. She had worked hard on my behalf. She would marry me as far upstream as she could, as she had my sister. She would get her son his just desserts, and hers. She waited on her boy, she found me the oysters on a chicken’s hips, she watched me eat and willed the puny boy to grow.

  My wife in her turn squeezed the oranges and grated the carrots, she chopped the garlic. Healthfulness gathered in the steam. The times I saw my face in my soup, took in my nutrients with my pride, and ached. My mother and then my wife. All those family meals I ate in silence. I have my own silence now, a pleasant downwardness as I seek out the inner morsel the way my mother taught me. And still I prepare my plate, eat the centre, leave a frame of debris, as if weariness overtook me, or distaste.

  I’m fidgety, if there were anyone else here I’d probably take a photograph. Always had an itchy clicky finger. I keep getting up and sitting down again. No, let’s not squirm out of this one.

  I started this letter to all of you, Dearest Everyone, with the intention of coming clean. None of my usual hysterical eloquence, not a joke, hardly a quote from higher sources. No, I’m looking for the name on the closed door, and what do I see? My mother on the road out of Russia, raising her head higher and higher till a princess arrived in London for her day of marriage, which followed on fast. I see my sister, older than me by a couple of years, who went forth beribboned amid her clothes, waiting to be seen and then seized. I do not see my father, yet. I see myself in army uniform, a handsome fella now, my mother thrilled. It was a strange relief, slightly shameful.

  I’m enclosing the picture of the hotel taken by that young photographer who came in the early nineties. He captured the isolation, the floating quality of a closed building high in the Alps, without land, without sky. I like the way the roof of the old shed points up towards the hotel, and together they launch into snow lift. Snow is the face of the world here. You learn to read it as you learned to read a mother’s face. A suavity, a long saddle of whiteness such as you ride in dreams. You could go deaf, poking your ears into that whiteness. And under the whiteness the strangeness, under the strangeness the centre of the world.

  Let us form a void and be happy there.

  We used to discuss mountains, Herr Furka and I, the attractions of their
shapes, whether it was grandeur or comeliness we admired most, whether they were for scaling or for being there, the mountain and the human, the unutterable distance and then the oneness, which was why you wanted to be that high up and alone. Monte Rosa my favourite. Mountains were such a relief, such a satisfaction that your dreams, your aspirations should stand so solid and graceful. And then you could climb up, uncomprehending, out of breath, the thinness of the air a relief, as ever.

  The great advantage of being a stranger in a strange land – apart from the lovely tones of those words – is that you can feel observed and ignored in quick succession. Whatever you say, whoever you are, everything goes out with a change of tablecloth. A hotel is a forgiving place. Our combined savours over the years mingle into anonymity.

  Every day I wrap up the cutlery in napkins. Only mine now. There’s a pile of them on the sideboard still, gathering dust, that I wrapped the morning of the day Frau Furka met her end in the kitchen. She was standing at the sink, looking out of the window, one hand in the water, the other on the way to a pocket, who knows. I saw her fall forward towards the window, her face registering absolute surprise, snow shock, as if this were a new ending to a book she’d barely begun.

  Sometimes I think there is no further clarification to be had, and then more of it eases into my brain and I feel drunk, swirling with revelation that I have found just by sitting here, in Frau Furka’s favourite armchair by the kitchen stove. Undifferentiated revelation. She was a kindly woman. I think she saw through me straight away. Where she stood, where she sat, none should enter. She was complete. When you come in from skiing, indoors is like the first room you ever saw. You have the gleam off the snow in your eyes still and then there’s a figure moving about the kitchen, into the dining room, or sitting in her chair, in a dimness and a warmth that are irreproachable. She pulled calm into the spot where she was, and you gravitated there.