Burns Mrs Pulaska and Other Stories

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-78463-316-5
Verlag: Salt
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 11, 144 Seiten

Reihe: Salt Modern Stories

With this new collection the acclaimed novelist Christopher Burns proves his mastery of the short story form. His intelligent but conflicted characters face their decisive moments across wide ranges of time and place, each action reshaping their futures and redefining their pasts. Interplaying with these choices are locations that underpin and define each story, such as a repository of unstable nitrate film, a desert outcrop where a daughter vanished, a winter barn in which a silent refugee works without explanation, and a Parisian suicide that echoes down far more than a century. In these stories, landscape itself can be a determinant, as essential to the narrative as the characters that walk into a draining reservoir, a Neolithic cave, or a remote Greek church. For these are driven people - haunted or determined, alert or unaware, lovers or doubters, saviours or perpetrators. Several of these stories have previously appeared in publications as diverse as Les Temps Modernes, Granta Shorts, Best British Short Stories, The Time Out Book of New York Stories and Prospect. Christopher Burns' work has been praised by Kazuo Ishiguro, Melvyn Bragg, Margaret Drabble, Hilary Mantel and others. He is the author of six novels, including The Flint Bed (shortlisted for the Whitbread award), The Condition if Ice, A Division of the Light, and an earlier collection of short stories, About The Body. He lives in Cumbria. This is a wholly distinctive, ambitious and challenging collection that can be read again and again.

Christopher Burns is the author of six novels - Snakewrist, The Flint Bed, In the Houses of the West, The Condition of Ice, Dust Raising and A Division of the Light - and a short story collection, About the Body. He lives in Whitehaven, West Cumbria.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Burns, Christopher

Leseproben

Nitrate

Old film is perishable and mutable, able to transform itself into liquid or powder or even to ignite spontaneously. The safety film archive is housed in air-conditioned vaults, but nitrate films are stored in refrigerated bunkers beneath water tanks that will empty and flood the racking if fire breaks out.

I have worked for the institute for twenty years and I am known across the world. Film historians, archivists and restorers seek my experience and advice. My name appears on the end credits of more than two dozen documentary compilations and in the acknowledgements of over thirty publications on the birth of cinema. I am a success, but I seldom talk about my work to my wife.

She knows, of course, that I spend my working life salvaging ancient images and writing the occasional scholarly monograph about subjects in which she has scant interest. In the early days, when I restored footage of the 1898 Boat Race and the 1900 Lord Mayor’s Show, she could see the point in what I was doing. Suzie appreciates pageantry, history, ritual; they offset her sense of fiscal prudence. Latterly, however, I have specialised in the work of pioneers who shot amateur dramas in their back gardens and developed the film in their kitchens. I have preserved short reels by Cecil Hepworth, R W Paul and other film makers whose identities will always remain unclear to us.

My wife regards such films as flippant and expendable, and she believes that preserving them is a waste of resources. For about two years I have not asked Suzie a serious question about her own work, and she has not asked one about mine. The smoothness of cliché is currency enough for us – several tax clients phoned, or it was a quiet day today, or a comment about driving conditions or the weather or what we each ate for lunch.

Perhaps that awareness of drifting apart also makes us keep our physical distance. Or perhaps it was mere familiarity, and its attendant twin of boredom, that led us into a separation from each other.

Suzie is still an attractive woman: I can see that plainly. On film, expertly lit and on a big screen, her good looks would be even more evident. But I no longer have any physical interest in her and we have not shared the same bed for three years. It is even longer than that since we made love.

Letters and bundles of accounts arrive with Suzie’s name on them. She picks them up from behind the door as I am about to leave. She looks through them and I see a change in her stance when she notices particular envelopes. As the image is important to me so is the written word to Suzie. Every day she gets mail, but I get very little. Only at the archives am I sought after.

Without asking any questions I close the door behind me. I do not know what time I will return. If I am working on a particular tricky or interesting section of film, I often stay at my bench until the security officers tell me they must lock up.

Before we married, Suzie and I worked in cities a hundred miles apart and wrote to each other every few days. Although we phoned as often as we could, there was something especially intimate about writing, and in particular handwriting. In those days I said things that must have been over-ardent and hyperbolic and that Suzie insisted were paralleled in the very shaping of my script. Although I did not suspect it at the time, many of those things turned out not to have been true.

She has kept my letters somewhere. I don’t know where; but probably at the bottom of the upright metal cabinet in the room she uses as an office. Certainly her other personal files are locked away in there. I do not have access to her records, but I once stole a look at her keyring and made a note of the lock number. At the archive there are several cabinets from the same manufacturer. It was not difficult for me to obtain a key with an identical number to Suzie’s.

And her letters to me?

Why, I burned them years ago.

When I reach the archives I check the morning’s messages, answer some queries, and then visit the nitrate vaults. A particular stack of cans, recovered from the attic of an Edwardian house that was demolished two years ago, has interested me since it was donated to the institute. I have already restored several reels from the cans.

To modern sensibilities these recovered works are extremely naïve. There is no sense of the structure or ambition of Porter’s The Great Train Robbery of 1903, and no awareness of the tracking camera that Nonguet and Hatot introduced into post-Meliès productions. Instead the films only last a few minutes, and almost inevitably the camera is fixed in position five feet from the ground and twenty feet from the subject. There are no close-ups, no pans, and no sense of montage; such arts were all being developed elsewhere.

Perhaps even more notably the narratives belong to a vanished age. Tales of loyal dogs, thieving vagabonds and ludicrous villains, and resourceful infants were the unquestioned storylines of popular newspapers and music hall sketches of the time. But the historical value and strange poignancy of the footage, with the performers long dead and the gardens vanished, become more potent with each passing year.

That evening Suzie asks what kind of film I’m working on.

I am taken aback and instantly suspicious. Why such a question now, after all this time?

When I demur she asks if I’m not pleased by her interest.

Her direct stare is a form of challenge. She has recently had her hair tinted so that when she turns I can see shining gradations of blonde, as if she has been professionally backlit.

I reply that I’m not quite sure what kind of film it is, because the can has not been labelled and there’s nothing on the feed. I suggest it could be a sporting event or the record of a celebration or a festival, rather like the material that Mitchell and Kenyon filmed in the early 1900s. But I concede that the likelihood is that it will be a pleasant little drama from the days when seeing images move was novelty enough for any audience.

I do not tell Suzie the truth. I have already taken a magnifying glass to several frames and found a man spying on a woman standing in an Edwardian bathing costume outside a beach hut. A large towel is spread on the ground. The film is evidently a piece of titillation for gentlemen’s clubs, a kind of What The Butler Saw which to modern tastes will seem either relatively or entirely innocuous, but still not the sort of find that my wife will consider viewing, let along salvaging.

‘Why don’t you know?’ she asks. ‘I mean, why don’t you just project it and see?’

I have been through this before. I’m sure she has not forgotten. More likely she is deliberately making conversation. I do not know why.

‘Because the heat from a projector bulb can make nitrate film burst into flames,’ I tell her. ‘The stock is dangerous; a kind of cousin to nitroglycerine. That’s why we have to transfer nitrate to safety before anything can be properly shown. Originally projectors had a scissoring device to isolate a strip if it suddenly ignited. If it did flare up then the fire couldn’t be stopped and that section of film was completely destroyed. All its images disappeared forever. If there had only been one copy, no one would ever find out what had been on it.’

Suzie nods as if she is only pretending to be concerned. I can tell that she feels she has done her duty, or possibly indulged me in a manner she thought I would appreciate.

‘I’m invited to lunch next week,’ she suddenly announces.

But Suzie is often invited out to lunch or dinner. She is a freelance tax adviser whose clients are sometimes grateful enough to buy her meals. Six or seven years ago I sometimes accompanied her. Not anymore. I had little in common with the people I was required to socialise with.

‘That’s good,’ I reply, uninterested.

I am thinking of my work and its dangers. Sometimes there are small nitrate fires when reels are being examined at the workbenches. Combustion continues even when the strip is submerged. Noxious yellow smoke streams from the water surface; breathe in those fumes and they turn to acid in your lungs. Those outside the profession never think of an archivist as leading a potentially hazardous life.

‘Why did you make a special point of telling me about a lunch invitation?’ I ask after a short while.

‘I did it because it could be important. Maybe I’ll be offered a job. It’s for an old friend, Steve Tiplady. Remember him?

Suzie is so eager for me to acknowledge that she is being open and honest that I immediately suspect there are things she is not telling me.

‘Tiplady? Didn’t you once work with him?’

‘Six or more years ago, yes. I reported to him, and sometimes we went to conferences together. Back in those days we did presentations on VAT returns for small businesses.’

‘I remember the name....