Arditti The Mellow Madam and Other Stories

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-78463-298-4
Verlag: Salt
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 16, 320 Seiten

Reihe: Salt Modern Stories

From the septuagenarian prostitute exposed in a tabloid sting to the Queen Bee of a local dramatic society upstaged by her cleaner; from the nine-year-old girl caught in the crossfire of her parents' divorce to the widow stranded on an Antarctic cruise during the COVID pandemic; from the doctor's wife confronting the enormity of her husband's online dealings to the forgotten musical comedy star yearning to return to the spotlight; these twelve captivating and compelling stories explore a diverse range of female experience. By turn humorous and poignant, whimsical and provocative, they make for richly rewarding reading.

Michael Arditti is an acclaimed novelist, short story writer and critic. His novels are The Celibate (1993), Pagan and her Parents (1996), Easter (2000), Unity (2005), A Sea Change (2006) The Enemy of the Good (2009), Jubilate (2011), The Breath of Night (2013), Widows and Orphans (2015), Of Men and Angels (2018), The Anointed (2020), The Young Pretender (2022) and The Choice (2023). He was awarded an Honorary D Litt from the University of Chester and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Arditti, Michael

Leseproben

Jean led the repairman to the door. She dreaded his visits even more than those of the district nurse and Social Services. He always told her the same thing: the set was fifteen years old, and a new one would save her money in the long run as well as providing her with a better picture. Last time, he’d left a leaflet on the settee about ‘the next generation of televisions’: LEDs, LCDs and plasma screens, but she made it a rule never to buy anything with initials, while plasma put her in mind of hospitals. He called them smart sets, which made her laugh since hers was a smarter set than he would ever know. It was a super-smart set; she thought of it as the Mavis Trimble of televisions, Mavis having been the first girl from her school to go to university. It was a set in which the people on screen didn’t just talk to one another, they talked to her.

The repairman wasn’t the only person to leave leaflets. Taisha, her case manager, had brought several about the activities the council ran for super adults: super, to Jean’s surprise, meant old. Taisha made pronouncements like ‘No one should be lonely in Lewisham’ and ‘Seventy is the new fifty’, which was all well and good, but Jean was eighty-nine and, however Taisha might twist the figures, she couldn’t imagine taking part in Boogie Nights, Drag Bingo or Low Impact Aerobics. Besides, keeping to herself didn’t mean that she was on her own. Over the years, she had befriended the casts of many TV serials. She’d shared their births and bereavements, loves and adulteries, windfalls and bankruptcies, promotions, redundancies, illnesses and prison sentences and, latterly, even their abortions and same-sex affairs, of which she didn’t approve. But like Marcia, the matriarch of Waverley Square, who’d weathered storms ranging from her husband’s conviction for fraud to her daughter’s heroin addiction, while never succumbing to self-pity or wearing the same dress twice, she was of the opinion that ‘It takes all sorts to make a world.’

Jean had known tragedy, albeit not on the scale of Marcia’s. Her father had been killed in the Blitz, along with her Aunty Rose, when a bomb hit the house in Spicer Street. Her mother claimed that he’d gone there to do some odd jobs while Uncle Bill was in the desert fighting Rommel, but Olive, Jean’s older sister, told her that the fire-watchers found them in each other’s arms, neither of them wearing a stitch. Desolate, her mother took to her bed, where she remained for the next twenty years. Olive and Jean, who was nine at the time, had run the house between them, until Olive moved away to train as a nurse (‘After all, I’ve had enough bleeding practice!’), leaving Jean to take care of Mother.

On quitting school, Jean worked at the Robertson’s jam factory until it closed in 1970, when she started charring. Olive married and had two sons: grown men now, most likely married with children and even grandchildren of their own, but Jean had never met them. Olive, Bernie and the boys had emigrated to Australia. Over time, communication had dwindled to an annual Christmas card. Then Olive died of throat cancer (Mother blamed the climate) and the cards stopped. After more than sixty years, Jean had to look at a photograph to picture her face. The last time she’d seen her was when she waved her off at Tilbury in 1958. She remembered because it was the year that they rented their first television.

It sat on the chest of drawers in Mother’s room. Uncle Mark and Cousin Geoff hauled an armchair up the stairs, so that Jean could watch in comfort. She worried aloud that moving it would make it harder to invite the family round on a Sunday afternoon, at which Mother looked at her blankly, before they both burst out laughing. They took to eating their teas on trays in front of the early evening programmes. Even Saturday night’s Six-Five Special was better than sitting in silence since, with Mother confined to the house all day and Jean busy on the shop floor bottling Golden Shred, conversation was limited.

There’d been nothing smart about that set and Jean rarely chatted to it, knowing that Mother disapproved. ‘You’re as daft as a brush and not half as useful,’ she would say, when she was watching The Grove Family or Emergency Ward 10. ‘Carry on like that and men in white coats will come and take you away.’

Mother died in 1963, the winter of the big freeze. Having scarcely left her bedroom in months, she’d taken herself downstairs and built a snowman in the yard. The mystery of it consumed Jean more than the grief. The funeral was delayed for five weeks because the gravediggers were unable to break up the ground. It was a small affair, with only Uncle Mark and his family, Uncle Bill and his new wife, Mrs Thurston who’d worked with Mother at the dairy during the War, and Mrs Bridgewater from Number 23, who went to every local funeral, counting the mourners as eagerly as a programme controller monitoring the ratings.

It made sense for Jean to move into Mother’s room, rather than risk carrying the set into her own or, more perilously, down the stairs. At the suggestion of the man from Radio Rentals, who called her his favourite customer, she upgraded to colour in time for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. Then when Mrs Henshaw, for whom she’d cleaned for fourteen years, died in 1985 and left her £500, she bought a set of her own. The salesman pointed out its unique features, but it wasn’t until it was installed that she discovered quite how unique it was. In the past, no matter what she said to them, her on-screen friends acknowledged her only on special occasions, like when the Ogdens in Coronation Street won a second honeymoon at the Savoy Hotel and raised their champagne glasses to her as well as to each other (she’d grabbed her tooth mug to join in the toast). Now she found that she could talk to anyone she wished at the end of a programme and they would reply. So she was heartbroken when the set was damaged during her move to Marcus Garvey House. Miraculously, the replacement enabled her to conduct the private conversations as before. But there was no guarantee that a third set would do the same, which was why, whatever Taisha and the repairman might say, she was determined to stick with the one she had.

Several of Jean’s neighbours had protested against the Council’s decision to redevelop Leveret Terrace. Miss Parkin, who’d never given any of them the time of day, posted flyers condemning the destruction of the community, and Jill Lewis, who was studying politics at night school, alleged that it was gerrymandering, which put Jean in mind of the Blitz. The upheaval apart, she hadn’t been overly exercised by the move. While most of the residents of Marcus Garvey House were not her sort (although she didn’t like to say so in case she sounded prejudiced), they were perfectly friendly. Her flat was airy and snug, and Taisha assured her that the black mould above the bath was harmless. Number 16 was on the third floor, and she was still steady enough on her pins to use the stairs when the lift was broken, but most weeks she only went out on pension day to do her shopping. Mr Jampa, who ran the Mandala Market, always had a few words for her, even when he had a queue of customers.

Although the heavy work had become too much for her, she carried on charring until she was seventy-four. She gave up after a stay in hospital for what the surgeon, who wore a polka dot bow tie, called a ‘minor procedure to tidy up your bits and bobs.’ Mrs Wentworth (Monday and Thursday mornings) tried to arrange a retirement party with her other ladies, but it proved to be impossible to find a date to suit them all. Instead, they gave her some lovely presents: an electric foot massager, a bottle of scent, a quilted housecoat and a Wedgwood vase exactly like the one she’d broken.

It was during her two-month recuperation that she started keeping the television on all day. She overheard complaints in the post office and the Mandela Market that there was ‘nothing to watch’, or else that there were too many quiz or property shows, but that was nonsense. The range of choice, even in the early afternoons, was one reason that she didn’t want any extra channels (the other was the fiddly remote control). The questions on quiz shows were an education in themselves, and property shows provided a glimpse into other people’s lives, not just their houses. She found something of interest in everything, apart from the wildlife programmes, which used Nature as an excuse for cruelty. But what she most enjoyed were the dramas: not the single plays or even the mini-series which ended before she’d had a chance to get to know the characters, but the long-running serials. She never called them soaps, which made them sound frothy, and they were far too important for that.

The characters were her friends. Over time – she wouldn’t say how long, because people on television were touchy about their ages – they’d all shared their secrets with her. She took care not to pry and they, in turn, valued her discretion. Although her own life was even less eventful than that of Beryl Flanagan, the eighty-year-old lollipop...