Lane The Lost District

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-910312-19-3
Verlag: Influx Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 336 Seiten

'Joel Lane's imagination is bleak. But it is also the imagination of a poet.' - M John Harrison, author of The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY CONRAD WILLIAMS Set in a post-industrial landscape of the present, the near future, and the imagined, Joel Lane's seminal collection The Lost District explores human encounters with the unknown: sexual discovery, drug-inspired visions, the lonely paths of madness, and the shadow realms on the other side of death. A neighbourhood fades into corrupt echoes of itself; a porn actor's scars reveal the forces controlling his life; a musician is haunted by the madness of a deceased singer; and a man literally follows his ex-lover to the end of the world. Ranging from grim urban horror to strange erotic fantasies to bitter allegories of loss and exploitation, the stories in The Lost District link the hidden places in the urban and small-town landscapes to the secret spaces inside all of us. First published in the USA in 2006, and long out-of-print, The Lost District has never been published in the UK until now, further enforcing Joel Lane's reputation as one of the most significant and distinctive British writers of the weird.

Joel Lane was the author of two novels, From Blue to Black and The Blue Mask; several short story collections, The Earth Wire, The Lost District, The Terrible Changes, Do Not Pass Go, Where Furnaces Burn, The Anniversary of Never and Scar City; a novella, The Witnesses Are Gone; and four volumes of poetry, The Edge of the Screen, Trouble in the Heartland, The Autumn Myth and Instinct. He edited three anthologies of short stories, Birmingham Noir (with Steve Bishop), Beneath the Ground and Never Again (with Allyson Bird). He won an Eric Gregory Award, two British Fantasy Awards and a World Fantasy Award. Born in Exeter in 1963, he lived most of his life in Birmingham, where he died in 2013.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Lane, Joel

Leseproben

The Lost District

These lost streets are decaying only very slowly. The impacted lives of their inhabitants, the meaninglessness of news, the dead black of the chimney breasts, the conviction that the wind itself comes only from the next street, all wedge together to keep destruction out; to deflect the eye of the developer.

– Roy Fisher

Quite recently, I heard some kid on the TV saying ‘Nothing ever changes.’ It made me think about Nicola. Are we really blind to what happened before our own lives? This was just after the general election, the first change of government in eighteen years. There’d been this joke going round that all the parties had trouble canvassing in the Black Country, because none of the local people would go outside the street they lived in. Which again reminded me of her, and made me want to go back to Clayheath and see what, if anything, had changed.

Back in 1979, I was in the fifth year at secondary school. It was an odd time for me. People think ‘teenage culture’ is just one thing that everybody gets into. But it wasn’t that simple. In our school there were punks, second-generation Mods, long-haired heavy metal kids and fledgling Rastas. Each crowd had its own language, politics and drugs. The rebels had gone by then, disappeared into casual work or streetlife or youth custody. Those who remained were only playing with fire, not living in it. Like the girl who was sent home for wearing a slashed blazer. We were too obsessed with our needs and resentments to communicate. None of us knew what to say, what to feel, what to believe in. It didn’t matter: nothing was going to change.

After school, at a loose end, I often walked or ran through the long strip of parkland along the Hagley Road. The first half was neatly laid out, with flower beds and bowling greens. The second half was nearer woodland, an overgrown and sometimes marshy surface flowing around huge trees. Now that I no longer had to do Games, I missed the exhausting cross-country runs that had made me feel connected to places like this. It had been my only chance to look good in front of the heavy lads who could fillet me on the rugby pitch. Out here, I could leave them panting and clumping while I raced against the heartbeat of an invisible partner, on into a mist of adrenaline and sweat. But at sixteen, I was too lazy and self-conscious to race against anyone.

One chilly, bright day in April, I was strolling along the boundary between the halves of the park: a ragged line of birches, their silvery trunks slashed with rust. Phrases from my German homework were flickering through my head, alongside The Jam’s ‘Going Underground’. A pale-faced girl was sitting on a bench in front of a cedar tree, not far away. I walked past her, noting her short, dark hair, white blouse and black skirt. In the thin afternoon light it was like a scene from an old film. Her eyes followed me impassively.

Driven by a sudden impulse to try and impress her, I ran up to the cedar tree. It was as wide as it was tall. I clasped my hands around the lowest branch and pulled myself up, kicking to gain height. A momentary shiver of sexual excitement passed through me. Using the rough trunk for leverage, I climbed another three or four branches. I felt a cold breeze shake the leaves around me, and didn’t dare climb any higher. Below me, the girl was standing. I could see her upturned face, almost featureless at this height. A sudden vertigo snapped my eyes out of focus and I could see two of her, no less alone for it.

When I’d succeeded in climbing down, we stood awkwardly for a while. ‘Which way are you going?’ I said.

‘Don’t mind.’ She smiled; her teeth were strong and very white. ‘You just come from school?’ I nodded. ‘I’m from Clayheath. Y’know, out past Quinton. Came here on the bus.’ Her accent was Black Country with a touch of something else, perhaps Irish. It was an old person’s voice. We walked along towards the road, where the traffic was beginning to thicken.

‘Why are you here?’ I asked.

‘I have to get out sometimes. Just anywhere. It’s bad at home.’ I knew what she meant. I was in no hurry to get back to our narrow house in Smethwick: my tired parents bickering and shouting, my brother turning up the sport on TV to drown out everything, chores undone, dinner a communal stare. ‘You don’t know where Clayheath is, do you?’

I’d never heard of it. ‘Never been there. Is it far?’

‘Not really. It’s just nobody goes there. Or leaves.’ Along the Hagley Road, the lampposts were hung with election placards: mostly blue, a few red. Traffic punctuated our conversation. Her name was Nicola; she worked part-time in a garage. I guessed she was the same age as me. She looked unhappy even when she smiled; it was something in her eyes, always trying to run away. Her skin was stretched tight over her cheekbones, as pale as a Chinese paper lantern. I wanted to make her blush.

When we reached her bus stop, Nicola said, ‘What are you doing on Sunday?’ I shrugged. ‘D’you want to come to Clayheath?’ She gave me directions that involved catching a local train to Netherton, then taking the number 147 bus as far as the swimming baths. She’d wait for me there. ‘Promise you won’t let me down.’ I promised. We stared at each other nervously until the Quinton bus arrived. Then Nicola leaned forward and kissed me, her eyes shut. Her lips were so soft I could hardly feel them, just her teeth and a whisper of breath. When the bus drove away, I turned round and walked back into Bearwood. After a while, I realised I’d passed my stop and was in a street I didn’t recognise. All the shops had closed.

The train to Netherton stopped at Sandwell, Blackheath, Cradley Heath and some other towns or districts I’d never heard of. The gaps between towns were a mixture of rural and industrial features: forests, wasteground, factories, scrap yards, canals. Parts of the line ran close to the back yards of terraced houses, where clothes jittered on washing lines and blurred figures moved behind windows. I pictured Nicola in such a room, brushing her hair. The only other people in the train carriage were three teenagers, not much older than me, who’d got on at Blackheath. The two girls sat behind me, whispering to each other. The boy sat in front of me, on the other side. He was wearing a brown jacket which he’d pulled up so it covered his head. After a few minutes of sitting like this, leaning sharply forwards, he twisted his face around and snarled, ‘A wooden vote for th’Layba.’ The girls didn’t respond. His pale, staring face rose above the seat like a mask. ‘Ah said, a wooden vote for th’Layba BARSTAD.’ Then he relapsed into his leaning posture, forehead pressed against the back of his seat, jacket pulled over his ears.

The bus stop was in a narrow, old-fashioned high street with half-timbered buildings and wooden pub signs. The approaching streets were the usual Black Country mixture of small factories, houses and less easily identified buildings. Nothing was derelict, but everything had been patched up and reallocated many times over. Most of the buildings had the soft, grimy look of long-ingrained pollution. A faint sunlight filtered through the streets without catching any surface. Opposite a grey churchyard, there was a tall Victorian building with stone steps: the swimming baths. As I got off the bus, I saw Nicola step out from the shadow of the wall. She was wearing a pale grey jacket and black jeans. I walked towards her, wondering if I should kiss her or wait for a better opportunity. Her pale hand gripped my arm; her lips brushed my cheek. ‘Glad you made it here,’ she said. We walked together through the centre of Clayheath, if a place so marginal could be said to have a centre. All around us were raw traces of industry a hundred years old: canals just below road level, a brickworks wearing a loose scarf of smoke, black cast-iron railings and crudely worked flowers, walls studded with blue-green pieces of clinker from glass manufacture. By contrast, the houses themselves were coldly uniform: narrow grey terraces arranged in regular grids like the lines on a chessboard. The district seemed overcast, though the sky was dead white.

Nobody much was around. I remember a white dog pissing on a lamppost; a young woman pushing a pram; a few nondescript grocery and hardware shops with figures moving behind the window displays. ‘It’s dead here,’ Nicola said quietly. ‘Nobody comes here, nobody goes away. It’s always the same. Nothing ever changes.’ She was shivering; I put my arm cautiously round her shoulders. A faint smile ghosted her mouth, nervousness mixed with resignation. She took my hand and curled it into a fist.

‘Where do you live?’ I asked.

‘We’ve just passed it,’ she said. I remembered a street of narrow terraces, unlit basement windows behind iron railings like display cases in a museum. ‘Don’t matter. We can’t go there.’ The houses at the end of the street were derelict: windows smashed, doors...