The Not-Dead and the Saved E-Book

Kate Clanchy

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 229

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

'Literary hand grenades, raising difficult questions about the world in which we live' - Guardian In the sixteen stories of The Not-Dead and The Saved, Kate Clanchy turns her clear gaze and remarkable honesty on what it means to be a mother or a child; to struggle alone; to seek comfort in love; to be present; to be sane. Lithe prose and crackling wit carry us from comedy to tragedy and back again, and create a bold cast of characters that includes even a few delightfully famous names. The much-lauded title story won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2009, and the collection as a whole more than delivers on that promise. It celebrates Kate Clanchy's gift for clarity, empathy and surprise, and confirms her as one of the finest writers of our time.

Leseprobe

‘Clanchy’s tales possess a raw, unsettled urgency, as if she were gripping the reader by the collar. These are not, it should be noted, stories for the faint of heart. They are literary hand grenades, raising difficult questions about the world in which we live – which is exactly what we need right now’

Joanna Rakoff, Guardian

‘Here are female relationships in all their envy, jealousy, anger, ambition and fear . . . mitigated by wit and energy’

Independent

‘The real joy is the startling images that pop off the page like firecrackers’

Sunday Express

‘Stories of admirable scope and ambition . . . This new volume strikes a charming balance between focus on character and the controlled, potent use of language’

Literary Review

‘Subtle, sensitive, keenly observed’

Independent on Sunday

The Not-Dead and The Saved and Other Stories

KATE CLANCHY is a writer, teacher and journalist. Her poetry collection Slattern won a Forward Prize. Her short story ‘The Not-Dead and the Saved’ won both the 2009 BBC National Short Story Award and the V. S. Pritchett Memorial Prize. Her novel Meeting the English was shortlisted for the Costa Prize. Her BBC Radio 3 programme about her work with students was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Prize. In 2018 she was appointed MBE for services to literature, and an anthology of her students’ work, England: Poems from a School, was published to great acclaim. In 2019, she published Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, a book about her experiences as a teacher; it won the Orwell Book Prize for Political Writing 2020.

She tweets as @KateClanchy1.

ALSO BY KATE CLANCHY

NOVELS

Meeting the English

POEMS

Slattern

Samarkand

Newborn

Selected Poems

The Picador Book of Birth Poems (ed.)

England: Poems from a School (ed.)

NON-FICTION

Antigona and Me

Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me

KATE CLANCHY

The Not-Dead and The Saved and Other Stories

SWIFT PRESS

This edition published in Great Britain by Swift Press 2022

First published by Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan 2015

Copyright © Kate Clanchy 2015

The right of Kate Clanchy to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-80075-184-2

eISBN: 978-1-80075-183-5

In memory of my beloved aunt,

Glenna Satterthwaite,

1935–2014.

Contents

Aunt Mirrie and the Child

Bride Hill

Irene

Black Bun

The Invention of Scotland

Brunty Country

My Grandmother Meets Katherine Mansfield on the Packet from New Zealand in 1919

The Book Instead

This Problem Is For You

The Show

Alas, the Tents Collapsed on the Green Field of the Mind

The Girls

Shoes

Animal, Vegetable

The Not-Dead and The Saved

Tunnelling to Mother

Acknowledgements

The Not-Dead and The Saved and Other Stories

Aunt Mirrie and the Child

There is nothing wrong with the child. She says, thank you for coming, and goes to get her swimming kit. David appears from a doorway, nodding his approval.

Yes, he says. Thank you, Aunt Mirrie.

How odd to have a nephew of forty, even by marriage, and odder still to have him look it, holes in his jumper, ears furring up like a hobbit. Mirrie gives him a hug, knocking her large glasses on his chest.

David, she says, you smell of trouble.

Aunt Mirrie, he replies. What do you expect?

His red hair has faded, as it were overnight: all of him pale as if it were he who had been embalmed.

First you have to be a vicar, says Mirrie. Now this.

Oh, now, says David. The whole parish brought food.

He sits down on the stairs, gesturing at the hallway, the accretions of coats and mail and presents. There are dirty casserole dishes beside him, and an untouched quiche in foil. He picks it up and looks at it sorrowfully. Dusty, he says.

Not everyone can be practical in a crisis, says Aunt Mirrie. Tins you can buy. Time is the precious thing.

Every Saturday since Ruth got ill Mirrie has taken the child to the pool, and she does not see why this week should be different. They travel by small electric car, both in the front because there is no back, crammed up against the window. Aunt Mirrie has slidey wooden bead seats tied onto the real seats, and the child likes to roll the beads between her fingers on their taut white strings. She can’t imagine what they are for.

It’s March: a cold day. The child watches the battery gauge. The charge will get them the 3 miles from the house to Aunt Mirrie’s club, and back again. Then the car has to be plugged into David’s socket for 40 minutes while Mirrie has coffee, in order to get Mirrie the 10 miles home. Each week, when they get to the club, the child says, Aunt Mirrie, can’t we plug it in here? And each week Mirrie says, no, darling, they make a silly fuss here, about their bill.

But, says the child now, her eyes on the gauge, 74%, Mummy always got cross when you plugged in the G-Wiz, too.

Yes, says Aunt Mirrie, but that wasn’t because of the bill.

The child looks at Aunt Mirrie. Her arms come up high on the steering wheel and her thin hands grasp it: her little black eyes and pointy chin nod at the road. The child has long been sure she is an enchanted mouse. Why was it? she asks. Why was she so cross?

Because, says Aunt Mirrie, I was going to live and she was going to die. And look at me, a silly old lady, no one to care for, not even a cat. It makes me cross too.

She should have let you plug it in, said the child. All the same. You use the electricity to take me swimming. And you could get a cat if you wanted.

Child, said Aunt Mirrie. But it was only when she was ill. Chemo talking. We won’t dwell on it.

The child can’t remember when the chemo wasn’t talking to Aunt Mirrie. But now they are at the club, and one must not talk to Aunt Mirrie during her parking which always takes a long, long, nudging time, like a Pekinese waddling round to make its bed. The car park is perched on the edge of a cliff. A ravine, says the child, gazing down the rhododendron- and paper-strewn descent to the sly brown river winking below.

Mirrie’s pool is her treat. She worked all her life as a boring old secretary and had no one to spend money on, not like Daddy, so she can afford it. It was built a hundred years ago as a Turkish bath out of red granite and green tiles. It has the old notices still carved above the doors: Hot Room, Cold Plunge. But inside, now, it is mostly just a pool.

Another speciality is: the changing rooms don’t have lockers, just pegs. This is because no one would steal anything here, they’ve all paid subscriptions. So you can just undress in a little cubicle with a curtain, then come out in your costume and hang everything up. Aunt Mirrie has also explained that it is safe to make two journeys: to hang up your dress, and go back for instance for your shoes; but the child is deeply conditioned by public pools and every time comes staggering out of her cubicle with all her clothes in a bundle, trainers on the top, tumbles it to the hot, tiled floor, and then spends five minutes hanging the lot up.

Mirrie lets her. She has placed her own coat on a peg, already, and now she is edging off her slip and inserting herself into her spotty costume, tugging the elastic panel over her tummy, tucking her breasts, little unbaked rolls, into the wired and padded cups. Her lucky breasts. She has perfect faith in them: she is sixty-eight and nothing has gone wrong yet, but she will take the test, as David asks.

When she comes out of the cubicle, the child is sitting sleek as a seal in her shining navy costume. Her ponytail is twisted up under a Lycra cap and on her lap is the black rubber brick she asked Mirrie to give her for her birthday, and which Mirrie went all the way to Lilly-whites for. It is very heavy: exactly one kilo. A diving brick. Mirrie’s pool is deep, deep as no modern pool is ever built, fifteen foot at the far end: you can dive.

I’m going to do lengths underwater, says the child. First.

Good, says Mirrie. There’s plenty of room. For, look, they are so early that there is only old Mr Jesbaum in the water, tugging his fat body end to end with his tiny, tyrannosaurus arms.

Aunt Mirrie swims on the surface, nose and pink cap and big round goggles out, long arms sweeping the meniscus, thin legs low and vague behind. Her lucky breasts point downwards, cradled in the water. Her sister Jessica got the unlucky breasts, though you wouldn’t have known when they were first issued to both of them and Mirrie got the small parcel. Jessica thought hers were her fortune. She would pop them in a push-up bra and whizz them round a party like cupcakes on a tray.

In the green depths, pressed flat as a frog, swims the child. There are 11 tiles between Aunt Mirrie and the child at the shallow end, and 29 at the deep end. The child knows that when she swims down the pool she is also swimming down the cliff, because that is how the pool is built, cunningly into the side of the ravine. There is a stripe of blue tiles 9 tiles down. It starts at the bottom of the shallow end and laps the green pool like a ribbon. You can keep your goggled eye on it to mark your way to the depths. Egyptian blue. Malachite. Archaeology.

Mirrie remembers Jessica: snapping black eyes and cashmere sweaters, breasts purposeful as gun turrets. Not for long. Divorced, divorced, was Jessica, and chop, chop gone, her pretty breasts, and Jessica dead at thirty-three. That was how it was, then. But at least Jessica’s breasts had fun. Ruthie had scowled resentfully over the great shelf of her chest as if it were a shop counter, and she the cross Saturday girl, too clever for the job. No parties and push-up bras for Ruth’s breasts, no lace and décolletage: they were draped in long tunics like furniture under dust sheets; they went to meetings and protests in heavy disguise until the day they too were cut off.

The child has swum 6 lengths under water. Now she starts her diving. Over and again she ducks from the surface, swims down, pulls the black brick from the bottom, paddles it to the air, lifts it out in a victory salute, then lets it drop again, heavy and slow. Sometimes, when she dives down, Aunt Mirrie is above her, akimbo as an angel: sometimes, when she comes up, Aunt Mirrie is there, waving a little mouse wave.

Mirrie is thinking about Ruthie. It is easier to do so now she is finally dead. Now she is out of the maelstrom of new drug names and different dates; out of the maze of hospital corridors and visiting hours gone wrong. Now she will never shout at Mirrie again.

Now one can think, for example, that it was always difficult to say the right thing to her, not just at the end. That even when she was a little child she was never smiling and complaisant like this child; you could never so much as take her shopping or compliment her school work without a scowl; and that this was not perhaps her fault, or Mirrie’s in fact, but Jessica’s, who was not a good parent because she always had to be the child herself.

The child is doing something new: she drops the brick, then swims underneath it as it flip flops down, and catches it before it lands. She lies kicking on the bottom with it clutched to her chest and counts, 1, 2, 3 . . . Her blood is strong in her ears. 8 is not enough. She must get to 10. The child does not think she will grow to have a flat bum like Aunt Mirrie’s, or wide hips, or a gap between her thighs. She does not plan on having breasts like her mother’s, hefty as pillows, then gone. She will stay lithe as a snake at the bottom of the pond.

There must, thinks Mirrie, rowing the boat of herself over the sunk shape of the child, have been another Ruthie, one she could never know because who could Mirrie ever be to Ruth but Jessica’s sister, with all that meant? Mirrie turns at the shallow end, breathes, swims on. And this other Ruth was a wife to David who is a nice, nice man, a treasure for all the religious freakery, and also mother to this child, so compact and tranquil and good. This unseen Ruthie must have talked of things other than global apocalypse and plastic bags. She must have smiled because her child smiles.

At the bottom of the pool the child, brick to chest, stiff as a tomb figure, listens to the pistons of her heart and counts. The sun comes out behind a high window and sends a shaft of light into the pool, lighting the water, gold, green, and at that moment Aunt Mirrie swims above the child and between them appears a shadow shape and for both of them it is the shape of Ruth in her zip-up bag, ready to be moved to the mortuary.

The child bursts to the surface, and clutches the green edge of the deep end, breathing. Mirrie joins her. Mr Jesbaum gets out at the other end and waddles to the changing room and they are alone.

Aunt Mirrie says: Your mum was angry with me because of her mum, my sister.

She died, says the child. Before I was born.

Yes, says Aunt Mirrie. And she ought not to have done that. She ought not.

She couldn’t help it, says the child. It’s a gene.

Yes, says Aunt Mirrie. No. But she should still have said sorry.

Didn’t she? asks the child.

No, says Aunt Mirrie. They are both holding on to the green edge of the pool, white knuckled. The water laps their shoulders. Mirrie says: When Jessica was dying, she sent Ruthie away. Your mum. With her dad and his new wife.

Mummy’s step-mother, says the child. She didn’t like her.

No, says Aunt Mirrie. She wasn’t a nice woman. He wasn’t a nice man.

Was it for a long time? asks the child.

All the time Jessica was ill, says Aunt Mirrie. All that time Jessica didn’t see Ruthie. And then she died.

Why didn’t you stop her? asks the child. Grandma?

Aunt Mirrie doesn’t know. Because it was a hard thing to say and she was ill? Because Jessica was her little sister and she’d always babied her? Because it was different, then?

Maybe, said the child, you thought Grandma would get better? I thought Mummy would get better, all the way till she died. I couldn’t help it.

Yes, said Aunt Mirrie. That’s right. Child. There was that.

The child puts her arms above her head and sinks herself to the bottom of the pool. She crosses her legs and sits briefly on the bottom. She has solved a mystery. She shoots to the surface. Aunt Mirrie is still clinging to the edge.

I knew the G-Wiz didn’t need charging, really, says the child.

No, says Aunt Mirrie.

Could you have had Mummy to stay with you? asks the child. When she was little. When Grandma died?

Yes, says Aunt Mirrie, I could. I could, for all she didn’t like me.

Didn’t she ever like you? asks the child.

No, says Aunt Mirrie. But really, what of that? I was the adult. I knew how it all was. I could have done better. Your mother had every right to be angry with me.

The child says: Don’t cry.

Oh, says Aunt Mirrie. But it’s good to cry. And a swimming pool is a good place. No one will ask you about your red eyes.

But in the changing room, their eyes are not so red. The child’s freckles stick out as they always do after swimming: a frequency graph; cells on a Petri dish, swarming. She pulls off her rubber cap, and Aunt Mirrie combs out her hair, which is very long and dark red, she gets it from her father. Mirrie says it is very good hair, very strong, and will do her a long time. She should not let anyone say it is coarse or twit her on its colour. It will take all kinds of dyes, it will take fifty years of fashionable cuts, even the very difficult directional bob (the child does not know what this is), and when it greys, she can make herself over as a convincing blonde because she has the green eyes for it. Look.

In the mirror, Jessie smiles.

Bride Hill

My husband has Alzheimer’s disease and my daughter does not believe me.

If I ring her and say, he went out for ham and milk and he came back with an empty bag, she will say, oh, I do that all the time.

Or if I say, for example, he took the bus into town and then he walked back, she will say, that’s the healthy option, and if I say no, it was because he couldn’t remember where the bus stop was, she will laugh and say: he’s a philosopher, what do you expect?

I say, today he bought the Guardian twice, and there are six reels of twine in the shed when we only need one, and she says, Mum, you have to take into account that you’re both retired, now. You’re in the house together, now, all the time. You’re just noticing stuff. Normal stuff. Why don’t you come here for a week, help out with the kids, give yourself some space? But, as she predicts, I do not do this.

Ordinary, says my daughter, over and over, normal. And of course it is ordinary for him to walk past the bus stop, normal for him to carry several full paper bags, or one empty one, and, yes, he has always liked shopping at the ironmonger’s. I am a materialist, after all, he will say to the neighbours, or their too-young children, and then he will explain at length what this means, philosophically. In the shed, everything is in order, to look at. Everything is normal. It would take me, the nagging, fault-finding wife, to notice the extra twine, or that he has twice left the shovel in the compost, and once on top of the car.

I think my daughter thinks we are too young for such a problem. I think that because Jeff is sixty-eight and I am sixty-five; because we are thin, brown, white-haired people with gold-framed glasses; because we are the active retired and favour a practical style of dress in modern fabrics such as fleece, and colourful lace-up shoes and walking trousers which we buy from a German catalogue; because we often undertake long walks using Scandinavian metal poles: my daughter thinks our brains are equally wiry, equally up to the long coast-walks of the mind.

Or, she thinks I am making it up. My daughter has always thought I grudge her. It’s not the war, my daughter says. There isn’t rationing. My daughter’s business, from the day she could get out the front gate on her own, the moment she got her fat hand on the hot tap, has been to defy me, to run the deep bath, to get first the Parma violets and then the cheap clothes and the boyfriends and now the four-by-four and the wide-screen telly for herself, despite me. I believe she discusses my phone calls with her friends, among whom it is well known that wives bear grudges, wives like me, who gave everything up, unlike the wives of Jennifer’s generation who apparently have it all.

But if jobs are so important, qualifications, careers, then at least my daughter should respect my scientific training, when she has none herself. She often rolls her eyes at the antiquity of my degree, says times have moved on since sixty-five Mum, but in fact I have read about the new thinking in the area of Alzheimer’s and looked things up on the computer at which I am a dab hand. I have tried to bring my daughter up to date with my research. I rang and said, Jennifer, do you know what the hippocampus is? And she sighed and guessed, horse field, Latin was one of her O levels, and when I said no, hippocampus meant sea horse, she said: and you say Dad’s senile?

Well. This sort of banter is part of our relationship. Many mothers and daughters behave like this. There is no point in taking offence or in writing a letter with a diagram enclosed because my daughter does not do letters. She calls them snail mail. She is incapable of buying a stamp.

So, after a day or two, I ring again, but this time I tell her, without preamble: Jennifer, the hippocampus is part of the brain. It is the shape of a sea horse, the size of a sea horse, has the very shine of that primitive marine creature, particularly when pickled, imagine a sea horse coiled underneath the cerebral cortex – and Jennifer says, OK, Mum, I’m imagining the sea horse. And?

Well, I say, the hippocampus is old, like the sea horse. Primitive, like the sea horse. All mammals have one.

In the brain? says Jennifer.

In the brain, I say, in the bottom of the brain.

What does it do? says Jennifer, sounding marginally interested.

Well, I say, the cells there have Neural Plasticity, that means they can make patterns. They have Long-Term Potentiation. LTP. The patterns can go into your long-term memory.

That’s nice, says Jennifer. And?

Well, I say, in Alzheimer’s, the hippocampus often goes first. The neurons become weighed down by plaques. They shrink. Their proteins tangle. Sclerotic, is the word.

Right, says Jennifer. The sea horse is sclerotic. Shrunk. Like the dried kind. You brought me one of those once, from Italy.

And then, I say, when the hippocampus is sclerotic, when it can’t light up its neurons, there is a traffic jam in the brain. A blockage.

An outage, says Jennifer, and there is a scratching noise at her end. I imagine her jotting down a shopping list, thinking of something else, not listening.

And so, I say, because there isn’t a pathway, you can’t process new experiences through to your long-term memory. You can’t lay down new memories.

Umph, says Jennifer.

Your father, Jennifer, I say. The ham, Jennifer, I say. The milk. The bus stop. The empty bag.

And Jennifer makes a scoffing noise like the paper bag punched and says, Wikipedia is a terrible thing.

But the next day, she calls back. She says does he do Sudoku it’s good for the brain and I say, of course not, his subject is philosophy. And then she says: Look, the kids are back at school next week. I’ll come over on Monday, and we’ll take Dad to Bride Hill. And of course that is a lovely idea.

But over the five days before Monday, I think about Jennifer’s choice of picnic location, and review the available web-literature on the subject of the hippocampus, and realize that the picnic, like for example my grandchildren’s extravagant christening parties, is nothing but a trap designed by my daughter to make me look dry, over-analytical, wrong. For Bride Hill is more than a nearby Ancient Monument appropriate to family outings: it is a maze, a ritual maze cut in the chalk. Jennifer, I am certain, has been reading of the performances of rats in mazes, and about the map-forming functions of the hippocampus thus discovered, and in her usual, hazy, unscientific manner has concluded that if her father, Jeff, who indeed has grown whiskery and long-nosed with the years, is placed in the maze and succeeds in finding the path to the centre, she, Jennifer, will have successfully demonstrated to me, her stupid mother with the out-dated science degree, that there is nothing sclerotic about his hippocampus and that he does not have Alzheimer’s Disease.

Once I have realized this intention, I strongly consider, over a period of three days, the possibility of telephoning my daughter and telling her that I have rumbled her. Also, that her test is based on a false principle. The hippocampus does form maps in our heads, but as a tool, like a compass or a sextant. The hippocampus is not a plan-chest of maps. That plan-chest lives in our long-term memories, and lots of Jeff’s maps are still fine, which is why he can walk to the ironmonger’s. There is a map of Bride Hill there too, I should think, for we have been there so often. The bus stop, on the other hand, which moved this year, is beyond him because he cannot make a new map of it because his hippocampus is sclerotic. So the bus stop is the fair test, not the maze: but how can I ring and tell Jennifer that? She will simply deny the whole thing. On Sunday, I find the lawnmower out, abandoned on the half-cut lawn, but still, I do not call.

And so it is that on the Monday I put on the table several things which are in Jeff’s long-term memory, already, things that do not need to go through the hippocampus and its LTP cells to be recognized and loved: the tartan thermos flask, the sandwiches, in grease-proof paper and elastic bands, his red cagoule, the picnic mat. Then his daughter comes, fat and forty, freckled and smiling, and she is safely in Long Term too, mine and his. And if Jeff seems astonished, if he has forgotten the short-term arrangements for the picnic which I have gone over and over with him, well, we do not notice. Aren’t we all surprised by joy? Isn’t that what joy is?

So, Jennifer drives the car, Jeff sits in the front with his sun hat on, and I am in the back beside the baby-seat. Jennifer is wearing sunglasses and peers often to the left, checking the satnav. I thought you’d know the way, I say, and she says, no, now I have my TomTom, I can’t remember anything, and Jeff, who really is on top form, says it’s all marvellous and there is an argument to be made for smart machinery actually being part of our brain, that we are all semi-cyborgs and perhaps have been ever since we invented the pocket watch or indeed the hand-axe.

Jennifer is smiling, tapping the indicator with a polished nail, and I can tell she is thinking, not much wrong there, and I want to tell her: your dad does this. His chat-track about semi-cyborgs was processed in the hippocampus years ago, and now it lives in his long-term memory and he can get it out and use it, on cue. It’s now that can’t go through there, down through the pipes to Long Term. Ask him where we’re going Jennifer, he’ll make a joke, because he won’t remember what you told him an hour ago. The now