Clown's Shoes E-Book

Rebecca F. John

• Herausgeber: Parthian Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 217

Beschreibung

Winner of the PEN International/New Voices Award 2015 Shortlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award 2015 Onstage again, you stare down at your feet, imagining you see the bright, painted curves of a pair of Clown's Shoes... It helps to pretend you are a clown, hidden inside baggy trousers, your true face invisible behind splashes of red lipstick and pale powder... A dazzling, ambitious debut collection from a young talent, these critically acclaimed stories dip into the shadows and spotlights of life. From the pale waking hours to the darkling places, Clown's Shoes introduces a cast of lost characters trying to find their way, and asking whether everyone really does come salting home in the end? Since the Devil visited the glove maker, she has found herself in the asylum counting out days instead of stitches. At the dog track, hidden amongst the rowdy punters, a woman bets on underdogs, life, and love. Onstage, a desperate mother performs a nightly striptease, whilst, in a small Welsh town, a young Korean immigrant tells her secrets to the sway of the sea. The people who populate the exciting and intriguing world of Clown's Shoes have stories that enthrall the imagination.

Leseprobe

Contents

About Rebecca F. JohnTitle PageDedicationEnglish LessonsThe Glove Maker’s NumbersSalting HomeBullet CatchThe Dog TrackHer Last ShowClown’s ShoesMoon DogPaper BirdsThe Saddest JazzRunning for BernieMatchstick GirlsLive Like WolvesHunting ShisheThe Dancing ManAcknowledgementsCopyrightAdvertisement

Rebecca F. John is from Pwll, a village on the South Wales coast. She studiedEnglish and Creative Writing at Swansea University. Her stories have shortlisted for a number of awards. She works as a ski instructor.

 @Rebecca_Writer

www.rebeccafjohn.com

Clown’s Shoes

Rebecca F. John

For my parents, who never denied me a book

English Lessons

December 27th

The lighthouse casts a long wedge of deep, syrupy darkness down the stretch of the jetty and into the sea. The rest of the harbour is washed in a silvery glaze. Scarf pulled up over her nose, Eunkyung steps secretly around the widest curve of the lighthouse’s circumference. From Narae’s house it is only a small cylindrical lump at the water’s edge, but here, near its base, it is so vast and solid that it seems possible the whole world might extend outwards from this one fixed point. Eunkyung tips her head back and traces its thrust into the sky. Lit by a moon which lounges low over the village, the red and white stripes are two different shades of grey.

Keeping to the shadows, she finds a place to sit on the harbour wall. High above the tilting line where the stone gives way to the water, she swings her legs in the empty black air. Below, the waves bubble against the rocks before retreating with cheerful popping sounds, and Eunkyung practises her smile.

Everyone wants her to smile here.

As she grins and relaxes, grins and relaxes, she inhales the rich, hideous smell of the sea and considers the urge to jump in on a scale, from one to ten, as Narae has taught her to. Whenever she feels sad or homesick or confused, Narae has explained, she is to picture in her mind a big ruler, and assign the strength of that feeling a number. Only once that is decided will she be able to find a way to move it down towards the ‘one’ end. One – not much of a feeling at all, but more like the tickle an insect makes when it lands on your skin then takes immediately off again – is the aim. And there must be an aim, Narae has insisted, because that is the way Eunkyung will learn to feel at home here – by trying hard at it.

Tonight, though, sitting in the snow with the misty tentacles that rise towards the shore winding around her, sucking her in, Eunkyung is hovering between an eight and a nine. The date and the hour are making her feel more lost than she has in months and, though she knows it is not possible, right now it seems that if she could just find the courage to slip below the water’s surface, she could swim all the way back to Seoul.

September 21st

The plane descended as smoothly as liquid. Eunkyung pressed her forehead to the window, straining to see around the long white nose of the fuselage. Since the seatbelt sign had blinked on, she had been expecting the city to emerge from below, bright and chaotic as a circus ring and sprawling forever outwards. London, she knew, was one of the most famous cities in the world. As the wheels touched down and the plane shuddered along the runway, though, there were only the lights of the airport, sparking sadly against the wet sky, as small and insignificant and similar as specks of rain caught under lamplight.

She looked down the rows of seats. A hundred dark-haired domes showed over the grey headrests. Specks of rain, Eunkyung thought: all of them. She couldn’t imagine how Narae would know her.

Stepping towards the plane door, she tried to dream up something big and silent enough to cloak London, but she could not distract herself from the idea that she was on the wrong flight, that Narae would not appear to collect her. She glanced at her in-flight nanny. She would not ask this small, leathery woman, who meant business and spoke in clipped, formal Korean. Eunkyung, immediately frightened of her, had chanced only one sentence since they’d met. ‘How will we find my auntie?’

In response, her nanny had simply tutted and returned to her reading, which had made Eunkyung think she did not know.

As they filed past the stewardess, Eunkyung thought of asking her. She was blue-eyed and red-lipped and had perhaps the friendliest face Eunkyung had ever seen. ‘Where am I?’ she wanted to say. ‘This can’t be London.’ But her grasp of English was poor. She was only truly confident withhello, andthank you, andmy name is…

‘Hello,’ she said to the stewardess, but instantly she could see she had it wrong this time. It wasn’t the same, arriving and leaving.

The stewardess frowned. ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘It’s nothellonow. It’sgoodbye.’ She lifted her hand and waved it, inches from Eunkyung’s face. ‘Goodbye,’ she sung.

Eunkyung copied the sounds. ‘Goodbye.’ They sounded sticky on her tongue.

‘Yes,’ the stewardess said, clapping her tiny hands together. ‘Goodbye.’

Eunkyung ducked through the oval door onto the clanky steps and stuck out her tongue to taste the damp air. It was both warm and cold, and seemed to be settling in little orbs all over her skin. She gripped the handrail and descended the steps. Funny, she thought, that goodbye was the first thing this country had taught her.

But Eunkyung did not have time to grow gloomy about it, because from the second her feet met the ground it was as though she’d dropped out of the sky and into a film in fast forward. The nanny steered her through the airport like a race-car driver; they whipped her luggage, one bag each, off the rotating belt; they left a distorted blur in the darkened shop windows. And less than thirty minutes later they were standing in the empty, bleached belly of the airport building, positioned opposite a couple Eunkyung did not recognise.

‘This is Narae,’ said the nanny. ‘And this is David, your auntie’s husband.’

Narae was a round-faced, round-bellied character, whose smile gaped like a letterbox. She strode forward and put her hands on Eunkyung’s shoulders. ‘I’m really glad to meet you,’ she said, in English, and Eunkyung wondered whether she had forgotten how to speak Korean. She’d been gone such a long time – since before Eunkyung was born. As David lifted the bags and they turned towards the sliding exit doors, though, she heard Narae exchange a few rushed words with the nanny. She still had her Korean. She just wasn’t going to share it with her niece.

Walking into the night, Eunkyung tried to think of a reason why. The only one that came to mind was that her auntie didn’t want her. After all, Narae had inherited Eunkyung. She didn’t come with any money, or property, or promises. She wasn’t the brightest girl in her class, or a talented sportswoman. She didn’t even excel at music, as her mother had in childhood. She was simply something Chanmi had left behind, which could not be abandoned.

She might as well have been her mother’s antique piano.

In the car, Narae twisted around in her seat and crinkled her eyes as though she was smiling. ‘Why don’t you sleep for a while?’

Eunkyung did not want to explain that she couldn’t understand; why she couldn’t understand. She was tired. Instead she fastened her seatbelt and stared out through the window as the car swooped away from the airport. It was not raining now, but it ought to be: the sky was flabby and heavy and looked full enough to burst. Rolling minutes had passed before Eunkyung realised that those elusive, hulking shapes she’d identified as clouds were actually mountains. She hadn’t known whether there would be mountains or not. The whole country was a mystery to her: how big it was; what it would look like.

Almost as much of a mystery as the two people in the front of the car.

As David spoke his long chains of flat words, Eunkyung considered the back of his head. From behind, his narrow shoulders made him look childlike, or ill. His face though was an affable one, made kind by its plainness. His voice, too, was nice. Her eyes closed to it. And as soon as Eunkyung had settled into the easy rhythm of the car on the motorway, they were slowing down, curling around and around corkscrew roads, and stopping on the smallest street she had ever visited. She counted the houses as she got out –yeol dul. A light remained on in only one: a faint, yellow blush on the night’s face. A shadow moved across the window, then shrunk to nothing.

A path laid with thousands of little stones led from the car to the front door. Narae and David picked over them quietly and Eunkyung, following, stole one last long look around. She could see nothing beyond the end of the street but skinny trees, reaching into the clumpy grey clouds like finger bones. Her auntie must not live anywhere near London.

‘You’ll go there all the time,’ Chanmi had said, shoving Eunkyung with a shoulder and smiling. ‘Narae lives very close. And it’s the most exciting place in the entire world, London. Isn’t it, in all the films and the songs?’ Chanmi rolled back her head and, shutting her eyes, took a long, wistful breath. Eunkyung could tell she was pretending at it. ‘Oh, if I could have visited that city when I was twelve years old…’

But this was not London. Chanmi’s stories about Narae had been wrong, then. Or untrue.

As Eunkyung stepped towards the strange black rectangle Narae’s door had opened into, she pushed that suspicion far away, and decided instead that Chanmi must have been mistaken. It was her decision to make now that her mother was gone. And her decisions were all bent around thinking only good things; around forgetting that empty block of time in which she had learned, pre-emptively, what it was to be motherless.

December 27th

When she grows so cold she can no longer bear it, Eunkyung stands and walks footprints into the snow. It is crispy underfoot. With each step it spills over the fronts of her boots, shining like the starry sea. She makes patterns in the snow, placing one foot carefully in front of the other, heel to toe. She begins with the number nine, but her promise to Narae weighs on her and she turns it into the wing of a bird. When she has finished, she climbs up onto the wall she had been sitting on, to view it from above, then throws her arms out and flaps them, faster and faster, until she feels laughter uncoiling in her stomach.

November 8th

Narae drove faster than her husband. They dipped down between two walls of thick trees onto the motorway and swerved into the lines of traffic like a spooked horse, and Eunkyung had to grip the sides of her seat to stay upright.

‘Don’t look so scared,’ Narae said. ‘I’m a very good driver. I’ve only ever had three crashes.’ Eunkyung nodded. ‘Very small ones,’ she added. ‘Just bumps, really. Anyway, everyone drives like this in Cardiff, you’ll see.’

They’d left just after lunch, David waving them off through the kitchen window, his arm sudsy and cartoonish with washing-up liquid. Eunkyung had waved back from the passenger seat, grinning until Narae had reversed off the drive and eased away from the house. She’d been right to like David. He brought Narae cups of tea while she sat in bed some mornings. He made her laugh until her belly hurt. Eunkyung had never seen anyone do either of those things for Chanmi.

‘Do you know what Cardiff is?’ Narae asked.

‘The capital city,’ Eunkyung said, in Korean. She knew now, where she was, where the border between the two countries lay.

‘Yes. Good,’ Narae answered.

This was how they had come to converse, Narae saying the English words in a tender monotone, and Eunkyung answering in her swift Korean to show that she understood, even if she couldn’t yet fully respond. It was obvious Narae loved English. She never slipped up and broke into Korean.

‘When did you last speak Korean, Auntie?’ Eunkyung asked.

‘Twenty years ago, nearly,’ Narae replied. The answer made Eunkyung sad. She didn’t want to stop speaking Korean – not ever. Korean was the only language her mother knew. ‘And what happened to your English lessons anyway?’ Narae continued. ‘You should have had two or three years by now.’

Eunkyung was quiet. She knew Chanmi would have lied to her sister about how often she sent her daughter to school. When middle school started, Chanmi had said, it was going to be different, then she would have to attend every day, but all through elementary school, Eunkyung’s mother had hidden her away in their apartment; sometimes for days at a time.

‘Let’s pretend we’re sisters,’ she’d say, ‘and that we’ve run away from home, and we can make up all our own rules!’ Or, ‘Let’s imagine we’re spies, and that our neighbours are our targets. Let’s see what we can find out about them.’ And they would play their games, then. They would make-believe that they had found work as fashion designers or magazine editors, and discuss their ideas over coffee. They would swap clothes and saunter up and down the hallway outside the flat, pretending that Chanmi was the child and Eunkyung the mother. They would stay up all night together and watch the city lights grow brighter and brighter until the entire sky shone as brilliantly as the moon.

At night, the sky was always the same dense dark over Narae’s house. When Eunkyung looked up at it, she felt like she was gazing into the deepest of waters.

‘Now, tell me, in English, what colour you want to dye your hair,’ Narae ordered.

Eunkyung had been able to sit on her hair once, but she’d had to cut it in sixth grade, ready for middle school, and now it swung just beneath her ears. She still missed the weight of it hanging down her back, heavy and warm as wool. She’d never even started middle school.

‘Pink,’ she said.

Narae laughed. ‘No, not pink. You have it wrong. Put it into your translator.’

Eunkyung knew the individual letters well; she had learned them on the flight over and practised them at breakfast each morning since. She also knew that ‘pink’ was the word she wanted. As soon as she’d seen the girl at school with pink hair, she’d stopped Katie in the corridor and typed a question into her translator.

‘You can dye it if you want,’ Katie told her. ‘Course you can.’ And because she was nodding as she spoke, Eunkyung knew she was confirming her wish. A nod of the head was enough. Already, though, she had discovered that there were so many words for ‘yes’. A teacher had explained, slowly and with many stops and frowns, that this was because some people spoke Welsh as well as English.

Eunkyung held up her translator to Narae and nodded. ‘Pink.’

Narae shook her head. ‘Blonde,’ she said. ‘That’s as much as I’ll allow.’ When Eunkyung tried to type in ‘blonde’ for a translation, she couldn’t find the right letters. Perhaps it was another Welsh word. She pushed the translator into her bag.

‘Will I have to learn two languages?’ she asked, after a pause.

‘Two?’

‘EnglishandWelsh.’

‘No,’ Narae answered. ‘Just one will be enough.’

After that, though, Narae took her hand off the steering wheel each time they flew past a big, blue sign and pointed out how the Welsh word sat above its English translation. Thinking that perhaps, deep down, Narae really did want her to learn this new language, Eunkyung studied the signs all the way to Cardiff. Cardiff came under Caerdydd. Caerdydd, then, was the Welsh. But she said nothing of this to Narae. If the Welsh and the English had been switched, she wouldn’t have known. She couldn’t see the difference.

Cardiff was smaller than Eunkyung had imagined: the streets were short; the buildings stubby. Compared to Seoul, it looked like a toddling child. All afternoon, Eunkyung watched people stop and gather in rings to talk, or pat each other’s shoulders as they crossed paths. And when she sat down at the hairdressers, the woman who draped the towel over her shoulders smiled so easily that Eunkyung thought she must be a friend of Narae’s.

She tried to persuade the woman into pink, but Narae corrected her with laughs and confidence, and it was only when she ended up with the ‘blonde’ that Eunkyung understood it was another word for ‘yellow’. She liked it, though. As they walked back to the car in the evening dark, she held her head high and straight, not wanting to ruffle her newly sleeked bob.

They passed a bar where people were dribbling out onto the street, their drinks sloshing over the tops of their glasses and splattering the pavement. Eunkyung gawped, twizzling her head around to get a better view. At her side, Narae whispered, ‘Don’t stare,’ but she couldn’t help it. The mounds of white flesh that drooped over the tops of skirts or pressed their way between shirt buttons were mesmerising.

Soon, they turned onto a quieter street, and Eunkyung finally felt bold enough to voice the question she had been storing these past weeks.

‘Why didn’t you and Chanmi talk anymore?’ she asked, her brisk Korean stumbling slightly.

Narae started to walk faster, her miniature feet taking little-girl steps. ‘It was difficult,’ she said.

‘Difficult.’ Eunkyung knew that word. It came up all the time at school. She used the English. ‘Difficult, why?’

‘Because she didn’t like my choice of husband, and I didn’t like her –’

‘Auntie. Please?’

‘Okay, okay.’ Narae took a deep breath before she moved into the Korean. Her voice seemed to snap out a different sound then; a higher pitch. ‘Because she didn’t like my choice of husband,’ she said slowly, ‘and I didn’t like her choice of life.’

‘What do you mean her “choice of life”?’

‘She lived badly,’ Narae answered. ‘You must know that.’

‘She didn’t,’ Eunkyung countered, taking a careful breath of her own. Chanmi had warned her about these conversations, about saying too much and exposing their most recent ‘game’. She had insisted on calling it their game, though Eunkyung had not seen any fun in it, not once. She still didn’t.

‘I’m sorry, but she did. I watched her do it. She had a bad mind, your mother, and I’m not afraid to say so, because it’s true.’ Narae let out a loud huff, but did not look at her niece. ‘It was her bad mind that led her to bad men.’

‘She didn’t do that,’ Eunkyung said again. ‘I never once saw her do that. It was just us. Just me and her, and she liked it… she liked it that way.’

Narae said nothing. As they walked quicker, her breath smoked out of her nose and mouth like an angry dragon’s. Her heels stabbed the pavement with sharp clicks.

‘She didn’t do that,’ Eunkyung said again. But Narae didn’t say anything. She just kept walking.

December 27th

In her pocket, Eunkyung feels the phone Narae bought her for Christmas buzz again. She will not answer it. The screen-light shines greenly through her pocket and she clamps her hand over it, in case it gives her away. She is not ready to be found yet. She ducks down behind the little stone wall that runs the length of the harbour and presses her back to the cold. It is only then, looking back towards the village, that she sees them – the lights. Above the rows of yellow-headed streetlamps, the long, shifting beams of torches pierce the sky like bands of tiny lighthouses.

Soon after, she hears the voices. They call her name, over and over, chiming out the three soft syllables in tandem, and she pulls into herself, resting her chin on her knees.

That she knows the truth does not make her feel better. That’s why she is here, sitting in the snow with feelings that measure a nine on her imaginary ruler: because she cannot reveal her mother’s secret, and because she does not know how long it will be before Chanmi appears to reclaim her. Though Eunkyung had begged, Chanmi had not told her where she was going. She had said only that an opportunity had come up, a one-off chance to make them rich and to do something good, and that she had to take it, but that for it to work she had to be dead – in Narae’s mind, anyway.

‘Why?’

‘Because Narae would never allow it,’ Chanmi explained, pulling at the ends of Eunkyung’s hair, the way she did when she wanted to see her daughter laugh. ‘Because Narae would find a way to put a stop to it, if she found out. And I need her to look after you for a while.’

Eunkyung had been too afraid to ask then if her mother was unwell. She had noticed Chanmi rubbing at her stomach lately, though, as if she was in pain. She had noticed, too, that she seemed to be swelling up – around her stomach, her wrists, her ankles. Eunkyung’s greatest fear – the one she had voiced the last time she saw her mother, and which has grown with each passing week since – is that something bad will happen; that Chanmi will not come back, one Christmas, as she had promised, and that Eunkyung will never find out why.

The voices are nearing now. Their calls sound at longer intervals. She sees moonlit figures approaching and clustering together. She identifies Narae and David amongst them, then the lady who lives next door. There are other voices she does not know, though, and as her search party runs short of village and converges onto the jetty, she gauges their dark bulks against the squat figure of Narae, who leads them forward like some ragged army.

One by one, their calls drop away, until there is only the dull march of their feet and the salty susurration of the sea.

Narae halts before her and, frowning slightly, opens her mouth to say any one of a hundred unpleasant things. Eunkyung recognises the expression – Chanmi showed it to her often enough – and she knows that good words never follow it. She wonders if Narae realises she shares these shifts of facial muscle with her sister. She wonders, too, if she is glad to share the care of her child.

Eunkyung lifts her head to speak. ‘Is it so cold for always?’ she asks and, almost right away, Narae smiles and claps her hands together.

‘Ah, you used the English,’ she says, moving forward and looping her hand under Eunkyung’s arm to coax her to stand. ‘And no,’ she continues. ‘Soon enough it will be summer. Warm. Soon enough. Just wait.’

‘Yes,’ Eunkyung answers. ‘I’ll wait.’ And though she does not understand why, this makes the people nearby laugh, their breath bursting palely on the black air. So she smiles and laughs back at them. ‘I’ll wait,’ she says again. ‘I’ll wait.’

The Glove Maker’s Numbers

‘No, Christina,’ the woman says. ‘Please don’t read.’

But already Christina has weighed the book between careful palms and, recognising its solid width, flipped open the covers. She is impatient to find the first words. She knows what they will say, of course, but she wants to see them for herself. To make sure. If they feel right, she thinks, she will know that she is well again.

The pages emit their little whisper as she turns them and she wills them, for once, to shout.In the beginning. In the beginning.It seems such an unremarkable way to go about Creation that it is difficult, now, to trust.

‘You handed me a Bible,’ Christina replies slowly, closing the covers again.

‘Oh, she’s a funny one today, is she?’ The woman raises her brows. ‘Just hold it and sit still, please.’

‘For how long?’

‘Only ten minutes or so.’

Christina begins calculating how many stitches she could sew in ten long minutes, but she can’t fit the figures together properly, in the columns they must be stacked into to make a total, and she gives up. It must be tens of thousands. She glances about, looking for shapes that might make numbers reflected in the scrubbed floorboards and the few weak clouds visible through the closed windows. In one particular cloud she finds an enormous figure of five and she pictures herself perched in its rising tail, then, a moment later, balanced on the flat top ledge of a pure white seven. She pictures herself floating away.

This is what she does now with the words she would once have said – she translates them into numbers and lets them linger silently in her mind. That way, no one can tell her they are wrong.