Words from a Glass Bubble E-Book

Vanessa Gebbie

• Herausgeber: Salt
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

This passionate new book gathers together for the first time many of Vanessa Gebbie's award-winning stories. Described by Maggie Gee as 'a prodigiously gifted new writer', this is a natural storyteller; her narratives unfold with a deceptively light touch, exploring with compassion what it is to be human and flawed. 'Words From a Glass Bubble' is about coming to terms with the cards we are dealt. The stories pivot around the recognition that those who seem powerless can prove to be the strongest catalysts for change, both in themselves and in others. Vanessa Gebbie never shies away from difficult subjects, creating an intensely emotional and at times distressing world, but it is never totally dark or despairing. Sparks of the unexpected and flashes of humour light the whole collection with an indefatigable optimism. This is a writer with a boundless imagination, who breathes life into the most unlikely characters and events. Batty Annie fishes for her son's soul in a disused railway tunnel. Tom's grandmother flies on a circus trapeze. Spike relates to cacti better than people. Eva Duffy befriends a statuette of the Virgin Mary. Pepito pretends he is a priest and suffers the consequences. Shelly has a colonic irrigation to rid herself of the past. Billy hears stones when he shakes his head. Dodie from The General Stores falls for a man who teaches her 'to think', and Mikey mourns his wife through graffiti. From Ireland to Czechoslovakia to Wales to Alaska to Ibiza, from contemporary New York to a clinic in the future, this collection will take you on a journey. And Harry? He just goes fishing.

Leseprobe

Words from a Glass Bubble

This passionate new book gathers together for the first time many of Vanessa Gebbie’s award-winning stories. Described by Maggie Gee as ‘a prodigiously gifted new writer’, this is a natural storyteller; her narratives unfold with a deceptively light touch, exploring with compassion what it is to be human and flawed. ‘Words From a Glass Bubble’ is about coming to terms with the cards we are dealt. The stories pivot around the recognition that those who seem powerless can prove to be the strongest catalysts for change, both in themselves and in others. Vanessa Gebbie never shies away from difficult subjects, creating an intensely emotional and at times distressing world, but it is never totally dark or despairing. Sparks of the unexpected and flashes of humour light the whole collection with an indefatigable optimism.

This is a writer with a boundless imagination, who breathes life into the most unlikely characters and events. Batty Annie fishes for her son’s soul in a disused railway tunnel. Tom’s grandmother flies on a circus trapeze. Spike relates to cacti better than people. Eva Duffy befriends a statuette of the Virgin Mary. Pepito pretends he is a priest and suffers the consequences. Shelly has a colonic irrigation to rid herself of the past. Billy hears stones when he shakes his head. Dodie from The General Stores falls for a man who teaches her ‘to think’, and Mikey mourns his wife through graffiti.

From Ireland to Czechoslovakia to Wales to Alaska to Ibiza, from contemporary New York to a clinic in the future, this collection will take you on a journey. And Harry? He just goes fishing.

PRAISE FOR THIS BOOK

‘A strikingly fresh voice, sharp, shocking and original.’ —Peter James

‘Vanessa Gebbie explores with extraordinary lyricism and beauty the human lives that connect, interweave and turn around often tragic incidents. These narratives unfold before us with the deftness and assurance of the truly gifted writer. A remarkable book.’ —Jacob Ross FRSL

‘Original, compassionate and illuminated by humour, these stories by a prodigiously gifted new writer dare to mine the faultline between rage and love.’ —Maggie Gee

REVIEWS OF THIS BOOK

‘Dodie’s Gift is a beautiful piece ... a real achievement.’ —Zadie Smith

‘Vanessa Gebbie ... has a feel for language’s natural cadences’ —James Topham

‘Vanessa has heart, the soul of a writer.’ —Alex Keegan

‘A rare talent.’ —Waterstone’s Booksellers

‘Riveting… a blithe and energetic narrative drive.’ —Mslexia

‘A beautifully crafted collection.’ —Pulp.net

‘Exactly what a short story collection should be: vivid, varied, moving, lyrical, disturbing, entertaining, thought provoking, original. A wonderful read.’ —The Short Review

Words from a Glass Bubble

VANESSA GEBBIE is the daughter of a student nurse and a travelling salesman and was given up for adoption at birth. She spent much of her childhood in Wales and can still sing hymns and swear in Welsh. Her short fiction has won many awards including Fish and Bridport prizes and has been published in the UK, USA, New Zealand, Canada and India, translated into Vietnamese and Italian and broadcast by the BBC. Her teaching and facilitating has led to the publishing of anthologies of work by both the homeless and refugees in her home city of Brighton and Hove, Sussex, UK. Her novel in progress won a first prize in the 2007 Daily Telegraph Novel Competition.

Also by Vanessa Gebbie

SHORT STORIES

Storm Warning

NOVELS

The Coward’s Tale

EDITED VOLUMES

Short Circuit: A Guide to the Art of the Short Story

Published by Salt Publishing Ltd

12 Norwich Road, Cromer, Norfolk NR27 0AX

All rights reserved

Copyright © Vanessa Gebbie, 2009,2016

The right ofVanessa Gebbieto be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Salt Publishing.

Salt Publishing 2016

Created by Salt Publishing Ltd

This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out,or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 978-1-88471-869-6 electronic

In memory of a good friend, Jan Newton.

Words From a Glass Bubble

THE VIRGIN MARY spoke to Eva Duffy from a glass bubble in a niche halfway up the stairs. Eva, the post woman, heard the Virgin’s words in her stomach more than in her ears, and she called her the VM. The VM didn’t seem to mind. She was plastic, six inches high, hand painted, and appeared to be growing out of a mass of very green foliage and very pink flowers, more suited to a fish tank. She held a naked Infant Jesus who stretched his arms out to Eva and mouthed, every so often, ‘Carry?’

The VM’s words were unfailingly meaningful, but often ungrammatical.

‘It will be the porcelain and silver effigies that speak properly,’ Eva said. And anyway, this VM had to speak out of the corner of her mouth where her pink lipstick had smudged.

She also appeared to have a wall eye. That would be the sloppy painting in the VM factory according to Connor, Eva’s bricklayer husband, who never stopped on the stairs to find out if she spoke to him, too. ‘No one’s perfect,’ Eva said.

Connor had a port wine stain on his left cheek in the shape of Cyprus with a few undiscovered islands under his ear. He had the habit of turning sideways when he spoke. He turned sideways on the stairs too, didn’t look at the niche. Eva mumbled enough Hail Marys for the two of them every time she went up or down; she always picked up a small oval photo frame from the shelf, said, ‘How’s Little Declan keeping?’ and kissed it. More gilt than silver after twenty-four years of kissing.

That particular day, standing at the turn of the stairs, holding her only baby’s photo, Eva heard a dog bark twice somewhere on the estate. That was a good sign. She replaced the photo with the VM’s bubble to one side and, on the other, the phial of Holy Water from Lourdes brought by Mrs Flynn after Declan was taken with the asthma.

Also, instead of saying one thing for Eva to think about on her post round, the VM said two: ‘. . . but we live in cavernous times,’ she said. That was the usual meaningful bit. At least, Eva supposed it was so. She patted Declan, made to go on down the stairs. But the VM spoke again in Eva’s stomach. ‘Don’t you go delivering no letters to that Finn Piper,’ she said.

‘Why ever not?’ Eva’s mouth said. There was no reply from the VM. Eva’s heart said, ‘I can’t be promising that. It’s not up to me who gets their letters.’ What was a post woman after all said and done but a carrier of people’s questions and answers? It would not do to short-circuit the process.

Ah, but it may have been a safe thing to be promising what the VM wanted. In all those years of being post woman, there’d not been so much as a weekly cut-price promotion leaflet from the Stores to take up the four mile track to Finn Piper’s farm. ‘Mad as a box of frogs,’ said those with opinions, and the kids from the estate cycled up there on fine evenings, threw stones at what was left of the windows to make Finn angry, and no one said not.

Finn Piper would rumble deep in his throat and screech like a night owl, throwing his voice round about the pine trees. He would ack ack like the blackest of the crows and honk like the oldest ravens in the crags. His black-bearded face would appear in first this window then that, as he flapped his hands and screeched, and the estate boys would set up a howling and a barking back. But none of them could make the sound of the birds like Finn Piper, and they never stayed up there when dusk fell to hear the thin cry of the buzzard rising from the old chimneys into the night sky.

But that was the day that Eva Duffy did have a letter to take to Finn Piper.

It was a Wednesday. The writing on the envelope was a child’s, the stamp was askew, and it had been posted locally a week before. Must have got caught up. Eva kept that letter until last, and drove the van as far as she could up a muddy track, parking by a tubular metal gate, padlocked and tied to its post with blue string. There were gorse bushes on either side. Eva hoiked her skirt up and stood on the second bar of the gate, swung a leg over the top and dropped onto the mud. One foot slid into a brown puddle.

That was the VM reminding her not to give Finn Piper any letters. ‘What do you know about being a post woman?’ Eva muttered, rubbing her shoe with spit and a finger. She had two miles further to go, stepping round cowpats and sheep droppings, scattering knots of dirty-bummed ewes, before she reached Finn Piper’s farm.

The front door was open. Chickens were scratching in the mud, both inside and outside the house. There was no letter box. Eva put her head round the door. It was very dark. No convenient hall table on which to place the post.

‘Mr Piper?’ Eva called, but the dampness ate her words.

She fetched a flat stone from the wall and put it on the ground just inside the door, placing the letter addressed to Mister Finn Birdman on the stone where he would not miss it. Then she shouted his real name once more before retracing her steps. But only a short way. It was the twittering of a flock of sparrows approaching that stopped her, and she ducked behind the stone wall, to hide rather than to spy.

But she did spy. The bearded figure of Finn Piper came loping and twittering across the meadow swinging an old green enamel saucepan, naked as the day he was delivered. Two collies followed, low to the ground. He crossed the yard to his house, and the twittering stopped as he put the saucepan down, slopping water onto the mud. He looked round, and Eva ducked again. She counted twenty. When she peered over the wall, he was sitting on a tree stump with his back to her, holding the letter, and as she watched he raised it to his face, sniffed at it, and carefully bit one corner as though he was testing for gold.

Later, Eva talked to the VM. ‘It was the back of his neck,’ she said.

‘What was?’

‘Ah. Like a little boy’s. Vulnerable.’

‘Needing a wash, more like.’ The VM’s mouth seemed a little pinched tonight. She hefted the Infant Jesus, who was out of proportion with his Mother — big enough for a three year old — higher on her arm. ‘I were watching.’

‘I thought so,’ said Eva. ‘I could feel something like your breath on my own neck.’

Eva, in bed, couldn’t talk to Connor about little boy’s necks. So she said, ‘Took a letter to that Finn Piper today. Been in this job twenty years, give or take. First one.’

Connor chuckled into his pillow, facing the other way. ‘Mad as a box of frogs.’

‘They all say that.’ Eva watched the streetlight striping the Artex through the curtain rings. She sighed. ‘I wonder . . .’

‘Wonder what, then?’

‘If Finn Piper can read.’

Connor sat up and turned on the light. His hair was sticking up. Cyprus was looking redder, it always did that when he was tired. ‘Now don’t you go interfering . . .’

‘I can’t take you seriously with your hair like that,’ she said. ‘Put the light out and go to sleep.’ ‘And,’ Eva could have said, ‘you are beginning to sound like the VM.’ But she didn’t.

The next day Eva had no spare time, but on the Friday she took an extra bag in the post van. Connor’s old painting trousers. A few jumpers, patched but fine. A new orange shirt that Connor hadn’t liked, still in its cellophane. She’d carried the bag downstairs, holding it to her left side so the VM would miss it.

She didn’t. ‘Taking them someplace nice then?’ she said.

‘None of your business,’ Eva’s heart said, as her mouth said, ‘The needy.’ And she’d paused in the kitchen and added half a chocolate sponge wrapped in foil.

Finn Piper, barefoot but dressed this time in old jeans and a grey plastic raincoat, was tying a long length of blue twine round and round the trunk of a half-dead pine tree. He must have seen Eva sidestepping the chickens but he didn’t look up or say a word.

‘Mr Piper?’ Eva said, staying twenty feet or so back.

‘Ah.’ Finn Piper curled the twine over and under itself into a complicated knot and let it hang like a tassel from the tree. He stood back.

‘It’s a tree alright,’ he said.

‘It is that.’ Eva said. ‘And very handsome it looks too.’

He smiled, made a noise deep in his throat, a soft rumble, the cooing of a pigeon.

‘I wondered,’ Eva said. And the VM’s voice came from nowhere as always, ‘I’d say you got thirty seconds to change your mind, love.’

Eva took a deep breath. ‘I wondered,’ she said firmly, ‘if you’d read the letter from the other day, or whether . . .’

‘Ah,’ Finn Piper said, pulling the crumpled envelope from his mac pocket, handing it to her. It was torn. Through the tear she could see enough of the contents to know what it was.

There was a pause.

‘Lucky thing,’ Eva said.

‘Lord love us,’ said the VM. ‘Will you leave it, Eva Duffy?’

Later, back home on the stairs, the VM didn’t say anything. ‘Go on,’ Eva said, after a few breathless Hail Marys. ‘Tell me you told me so.’

The VM didn’t reply. Her wall eye seemed to be looking over Eva’s shoulder, the plastic chin was more tilted than usual, the mouth even more pinched. But the Infant waved his arms and blew a spit-bubble.

In bed that night, Eva rubbed Connor’s back.

‘So how did it go?’ he said.

‘How did what go?’

‘Get on with you, woman,’ said Connor. ‘You had chicken shit all over your work shoes.’

Eva sighed. ‘He couldn’t read,’ she said.

‘And?’

‘He’s never been to a kid’s party, either.’

Connor didn’t move. But Eva felt something unsteady creeping under the muscles of his back.

Later, hours later, Eva lay there, eyes closed. Connor was awake, she could feel it through the mattress. A tautness. Sleep would not come to her, held away by memories as insistent as a flock of starlings on new grass seed.

Nursery rhymes. Earnest adult voices over the plinking of a xylophone.

‘Girls and boys come out to play

The moon doth shine as bright as day . . . ‘

The smell of food. Sandwiches, crisps, little sausages, bright jellies in paper cups. Giggles. Kids laughing. Adults talking. The rattle and bell of some plastic toy. Declan coughing. Declan coughing. Declan . . .

‘Wee Willie Winkie runs through the town,

Upstairs and downstairs in his night gown . . .’

Every sound and smell a shard of pain. Eva couldn’t focus on what Declan’s face looked like. Every time she tries, she just sees balloons. Hears the xylophone, then a click. How still everything went, suddenly, and the wail of an ambulance cutting through the quiet.

Mothers sliding away with their toddlers.

Connor climbing down from a dirty white pick-up still wearing his hard hat, following the ambulance men in through the glass door.

‘What?’

A half-eaten yellow jelly baby trodden into the hall carpet.

Eva, in bed, waited. Sleep came to Connor in the end, just before dawn, but not to Eva. She slipped out of bed and went half way down the stairs, didn’t say anything with her mouth, but sat, head in hands, while her heart said things about memories rising up, about a squished jelly baby.

The VM sniffed. ‘Well, can I say it now?’ she said.

‘Go on.’

‘I told you not to take Finn Piper no letters. I said . . .’

‘I know what you said.’

This was early Saturday, and Eva was working the morning shift. She got ready slower than usual, sat on the bed for a while and watched Connor snoring. The day seemed weighted down. And it was that day that the VM again said two things for Eva to think about.

‘Life,’ she said, ‘ain’t no bowl of cherries.’ Eva ignored this one; it said nothing she didn’t know anyway. She picked up Declan’s photo, kissed it, and the VM said, ‘You be enjoying yourselves, now.’

The VM wasn’t looking at her any more. Her bad eye seemed to have slipped sideways and she was looking past Eva with the other eye, like there was something important on the wall behind her. Eva didn’t answer with her heart or her mouth. She went to replace Declan in the niche, when something in what the VM had said came back at her like an echo and bounced around in her heart. ‘You be enjoying yourselves . . .’