Visits E-Book

Sharon Gerber-Crawford

• Herausgeber: INSCICO, Institute for Science and Innovation Communication GmbH
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 101

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

More than a quarter of a century living away from the country she grew up in, the author finds she is constantly revisiting her native land, when often only inside her head. It is a journey which never seems to end. This collection of poems and short stories about visits, real or imaginary, to or within Northern Ireland spans an “ex-Paddy’s” lifetime from childhood, through troubled times and on into middle age.

Leseprobe

Dieses Buch erscheint als Band 1 der Belletristik-Edition poetis im Verlag des Institute for Science and Innovation Communication (inscico)

This book appears as Volume One of the Edition poetis published by inscico Institute for Science and Innovation Communication

1. Auflage 2017 / 1st Edition 2017

Das Buch ist unter der ISBN 978-3-9814811-9-8 im Handel erhältlich.

This book is available for sale under ISBN 978-3-9814811-9-8.

Alle Rechte vorbehalten

Die Weitergabe dieses Buches als Ganzes oder in Teilen ist nicht gestattet.

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced.

Copyright © 2017 by inscico GmbH, Kleve / Germany

www.inscico.eu/verlag

Cover-Foto: Robert Bräutigam

(Taken in a Ruin Bar in Budapest / Hungary)

For Eva, Maggie and Lila – my true inheritance.

Your feet will bring you where your heart is

An áit a bhuil do chroí is ann a thabharfas do chosa thú

Irish Proverb

Thanks

To all those who offered practical help and encouragement. In particular:

My husband Alexander Gerber for formatting and production and for pushing me out through the door to my first writing group.

The Creative Writing Group in Berlin.

The Schreibgruppe, Culucu in Kleve, Niederrhein.

Erwin Kraut for editorial comment, proofreading and mentoring.

Louise Churcher for proofreading.

Vanessa Gneisinger and Fiona Kahlau for editorial comment.

To my son Dylan, my family and my friends for helping me stay on track.

Contents

Foreword   

Visits   

Marching Orders   

Visiting Gran   

Visiting the Past   

The meaning of it all   

Me, aged six   

Memory Tricks   

Exposure   

The Journey Home   

The Playground   

The Big Brown Car   

Up Yours and Definitely No Surrender   

Inheritance   

A collection of rather banal memories   

A Safe Distance   

Making Small Talk in a Troubled Country   

Tour Of Duty   

Secrets   

Green   

She was invited to a wedding   

After Noelle   

A Walk In The Dark   

Into the Light – Dia non Dul   

Wishing Well   

The last time I visited   

In May   

About the Author   

Illustrations   

Endnotes   

Foreword

Whilst many of the pieces in this collection are based on real events, this is creative writing and not autobiographical. Names, characters, places and incidents are used fictitiously.

Therefore, whereas, for example, my son really did ask me about Bloody Sunday in an airport bookshop (Up Yours and Definitely No Surrender), my brother and I were never turned into thorn bushes (The Playground) and there was no insurance man called Raymond (The Big Brown Car).

Although I left Northern Ireland for good in 1990, somehow I am always visiting it inside my head. Always looking for that piece of myself I left behind. This is why I say I left Northern Ireland a long time ago, but Northern Ireland has never left me.

Sharon on the dunes looking out across The Channel to the UK.

Visits

Rattling down a road of my own making

still alone, chasing ghosts

from Berlin morning windows

March sunshine seeks me out

but I’m not playing

I can‘t

We stop

„Bitte entschuldigen Sie die Störung. Wegen einer technischen Defekt können wir die Fahrt voraussichtlich nicht weiter...“ i

But I can’t

Stop

Mourning

from Berlin morning windows

still alone, chasing ghosts

rattling down a road of my own making

Marching Orders

last orders

real women don’t drink pints

and swear at real men

or forget to comb the curls

at the back of their hair

so there

and anyhow I’m not good for you

and you’re certainly not for me

but I know this

so who cares

My head is full of words, and worries and other people’s questions. Cycling home through the woods, in deep and earnest conversation with myself I suddenly realize it’s The Twelfth of July.ii Fancy that, and I can still remember that one warm 12th thirty years ago, nineteen years of age, home for the first summer break from university. I fancied myself in love. With Rodney. A bad guy, not even a very clever one. But a beautiful one. Warm grass and kisses, grown-up drinks and blushes. In a hurry. Always in a hurry. The cows strung out along the foot of the hill, going home for milking. Sheep feeding and bleating on the blue-green Sperrin Mountains deep into the night.

In those days you could still cycle down the main road and survive. In the evening traffic was minimal, cycling to the cawing of the late evening crows, retracing the tracks of my first secret Catholic friendship. Calling in on my gran, playing cards with one of her slightly crazy sisters or my other gran sitting in front of a turned-off telly watching for signs of life outside the window. How often did I push my bike to the subway entry, turn round and wave at my gran still standing there anxiously waiting? And how I would love to do it now, then turn round, for one last wave. Before I am swallowed up by that subway entry.

View from my childhood bedroom of the Sperrin Mountains

Visiting Gran

Granny clacks her cameo rings, gnarled knuckles gripping scored and burn-marked surfaces. She’s dealing cards onto her coffee table.

„Can I maybe open the window?“ Me, small-child conscious, tries to prise, unpermitted, the window latch open. But it is stuck with years and years of smoked-out Silk Cut. The china dog guarding the plastic fireplace seems to be mocking me as I sit back down in resignation and am promptly swallowed up by a too-big mock leather sofa. It farts me out again just in time to stop my son from hitting his head against a chipped edge. He is trying to pick up cards, which have tumbled out of his hands, uncoordinated in anticipation, onto a deep-pile carpet which needs a good shampoo and conditioning.

„You’ve dropped your cards. Be careful.” Granny admonishes. „And there’s still one there!“

„Where?“

„There. By the poof. A Queen of Spades.“ she snaps. And I had been told that she was almost blind.

“Here. Let me.“ The card is greasy, smudges my fingers. I try to wipe it on my trousers before putting it back into the nervous grasp of my son.

„Mind ye don’t bend it. I’ve had those cards for ages.“ Granny sticks a Silk Cut in her mouth and squints over a lighter.

We’re going to play Blackjack. Granny goes first, looking for all the world like a dragon with a perm, she slaps a card down on the table.

„But I don’t remember the rules!“ I protest.

„Aye.“ she replies.

„No! I mean how does it go again?“ I glance quickly at her ears. She’s not put her hearing aid in again.

„THE RULES! HOW DO YOU PLAY IT?“

„Sure ah taught ye.“ she says.

Thirty years ago I think, but don’t say it.

„I’ve forgotten, Granny. Just tell me again, please!“

„Och!“ Her eyebrows snap at each other in annoyance. „Them aul things.“ she mutters under breath. Then louder:

„Yer aim is to get a hand of twenty one. Two to nine at face value. Ten, Jack, Queen and King are all worth ten. An Ace can be one or eleven. Blackjack is when you get twenty one with just two cards. That’ll be of course an ace and a ten.” She hacks up some phlegm.

„Er, ok.“

„Was will diese alte Frau, Mama?“ iii

„Dylan, das ist unhöflich. Die ist deine Ur-Oma!“

„Ja, aber ich weiß nicht was sie will!“

„Die Regeln erklären, natürlich.“

„What‘s that? What does he want?“

„For me to explain the rules, Granny.“

„Eh? A biccie. Does he want a biccie?“

„Oh Mama, darf ich eins haben?“iv

„No Dylan you had enough earlier!“

„Aber Mama, nur eins, bitte.“ v

„No, Dy-“

„Och let the wee cub have a biccie! Would you like a wee biccie?“ She slaps her cards down in delight. She gets up before I can stop her and shuffles over the shag pile onto the dirty carpet and out into the kitchen.

My son’s face is glowing with victory.

„Don’t get too excited.“ I say and feeling mean, add „They’ll be stale and soft and nibbled at the edges by mice.“

„Eeeh, Mama!“

„Oh shut up and look here. The aim of the game is to score twenty one. These cards here are worth......“

Visiting the Past

And so, I am lying in bed. In almost darkness. In between. I let them come. Images and whispers, snatches of thoughts and associations, just as suddenly snatched away again. I am tense. So tense that my right arm begins to go numb. I move, flinging my arm at some silly angle above my head. Free, blood assaults my veins. It hurts. A swollen sack of pain. Concentrate. I must concentrate. Images and whispers, snatches of thoughts.

It´s you – my namesake. Twenty nine years ago. July 1983. The second time we took up our friendship. In the mess of your parents’ house. Too much furniture, a pile of tyres, bin bags full of God knows what. The family dog, a young Alsatian, pisses in the hall against the telephone table.

„Shall I get a cloth?“ I offer, me, the good girl, the nice visitor.

„Och leave it be. ‘s good for the carpet.“ Your father says and pets the dog as if in praise. If he registers my surprise he doesn’t let on.

„Maggie!“ he roars „Wud ye put the kettle on!“ and goes into the living room to put the telly on. Maggie, a big woman spilling out of shapeless clothes, appears through a doorless doorway, sniffs the air, then seeing me, tries to flatten down her toilet brush shock of hair. Behind her, her spitting image, her eldest son Ian, smirks.

„Och it’s Craferd, aul’ Craferd.“

I stick out my tongue at him.

„Never mind him!“ shouts Maggie and pushes him back into the living room. „Go mik us a cup o’ tay, ye cheeky hallion, ye.“ And then to me „Sharn’s in the back bedroom tryin’ tae get wee Adele tae sleep.”

„Oh“

„Och sure ye’ll be alright. Go aun in. She´ll be pleased tae see ye.“

In the dim, curtains badly drawn, Sharon is bent over a cot singing softly. I make a big show of closing the door carefully, and am rewarded with a smile and a whispered invitation to come and look. An impossibly tiny baby, with big liquid eyes and jet back curls, is sucking on a dummy and staring riveted at her mother.

„She’s lovely.“ I whisper in awe. And indeed she is. Up until now I could never really see what all the fuss was about as regards babies. All this cooing and geeing and soppification. And then I stare too at her mother. Can this be the same girl who had tried to engage me in a conversation about my sex life at the toothpaste counter less than a year and a half ago? While I had blushed and stammered in my supermarket overalls, and tidied up rows of mouthwashes behind my weekend counter, she had looked at me knowingly.

„There are things you can use, you know.“

And while she was giving birth and learning to nurse I was drinking my way through my first year at university, learning little in the way of academic knowledge, but a lot about life. And politics, philosophy, unrequited love. And deeper meanings. Or so I thought. But now, perched here on the edge of a bed in a dusty cluttered room, I realize I know nothing. Nothing at all.

The meaning of it all

What is

love?

Frogs or

Aubergines bursting

at their purple seams

or me pushed gamely up against a small town wall

wanting it all

fuck hesitate!

fucking it up

in true film fashion

slipperless

pretending not

to believe in the myth

losing myself to learning lessons?

so then

what the fuck

is?

Me, aged six

The family garden in the 1970’s

Hair

Still there, still fair

pretty as the picture

I am looking out of

with my brother, and

a row of dolls, lined up

legs kicking the technicolour air

of the bright 60’s sunshine.

The family garden

still made of grass

stretching away behind us into the blue

Sperrin Mountains.

Idyllic you may think

but we are already old and worried,

discontent

posing for pictures

on a Sunday afternoon

The Protestant family album

Oh! How cute! Is that your brother?

Did he really have such white hair?

And weren’t you pretty, then!

Then.

And then we turned to play

upset the dolls

fists and legs flying in the air

For Gawd’s sake! Can’t a body

have a bit o’ peace around here!

Peace?

No!

Like the hair

It’s not there

Memory Tricks

Long legs hold me

I cannot breathe

sacks of flour in a dusty storeroom

we are hiding, but how?

Surely we are being missed