Ross Tell No-One About This

Collected Short Stories 1975-2017
1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-1-84523-420-1
Verlag: Peepal Tree Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 360 Seiten

This substantial collection brings together short stories written over a span of forty years, including those first published in the highly-rated Song for Simone (1986) and A Way to Catch the Dust (1999) and more than a dozen new stories. The previously published pieces have been extensively revised. They range from stories set in Grenada at different periods from the 1970s onwards, to several set in the UK. These are stories that have a narrative drive, a meticulousness of construction, an exactness of image and a rigorous economy in the prose. They are inventive in their explorations of a variety of narrative voices - from children to adults, male and female, Caribbean and British - that establish a persona and capture the reader from the first sentence.

Jacob Ross is a novelist, short story writer, editor and creative writing tutor. His latest book, Black Rain Falling, was published by Sphere in March 2020. His previous crime novel, The Bone Readers, won the inaugural Jhalak Prize in 2017. His literary novel Pynter Bender was shortlisted for the 2009 Commonwealth Writers Regional Prize and chosen as one of the British Authors Club's top three Best First Novels. Jacob is also the author of two short story collections and editor of Closure, Contemporary Black British short stories. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ross, Jacob

Leseproben

COLD HOLE

Somebody was chopping wood on the other side of the valley. Sunlight dripped through the holes of the old board house and settled on his stomach. From the yard outside, there came the smells of wood-smoke and early morning breakfast.

The boy’s feet propelled him from the floor through the open door and into the yard.

He was thirteen today and nobody remembered, not even his mother. But the sun and the wind and the trees knew it because they had given him a special Sunday. A day for the river.

The house was too quiet. He did not trust the silence. His mother was not singing.

If she caught him running off this early, when there were the rabbits to feed, the goat to tie out, well… water more than flour.

Still, nothing was going to stop him going fishing today, still burning as he was with a week-old memory that hadn’t left him, even in his sleep – that afternoon after school when his two cousins and his little brother, Ken, were admiring him as he told them his latest river story.

‘Cold Hole was deep! I dive in. I dive down, down, deep-deep down, and guess what I see? A guaje! De biggest crayfish in de world… I spend one whole hour underwater, tryin to catch it, so when…’

‘You lie!’ Two voices had boomed behind him: Ashton and Mandy. They smelt like men, walked and talked like men. Even the teachers stepped out of their way.

Ashton, a big grin spread across his slab of a face, was standing over him. Mandy the taller of the two, his hands pushed down his pockets, was throwing him a nasty sideways glare.

He felt his mouth go dry. ‘Who say I lie?’

Ken, flimsy and defiant, stood at his side, ‘Is true. My brodder never lie.’

The young men laughed and the child flinched at their loudness.

‘Who ‘fraid of Cold Hole more than yuh chupid brother here? Me an Mandy tired lift him up to cross deep water or climb river bank.’

‘I not ‘fraid now!’ he’d shot back.

‘Since when?’

He’d rested his hand on his brother’s shoulder, balancing on the balls of his feet. Everything had become still. Vehicles droned in the far-off distance. Leaves fell and made clicking sounds on the road.

‘Since I know I’z me and not nobody shadow,’ he said.

Ashton stuck two fingers in the air. ‘Talk sense, likkle boy!’

Swallowing on the shame, he’d stood on the grass verge and stared at their shifting shoulders until they disappeared.

He ducked beneath the house, gathered his line, the bait, a rusted piece of machete and – still doubled at the waist – tiptoed toward the stool of bananas fringing the house. The trick was to disappear when no one was looking.

‘Hold it, Mister Man!’ His mother carried her heavy body easily over the stony yard, her hands stripping a whip from the bowlie tree that hung over the house.

A couple of months ago, she caught him trying to chop down that bowlie tree with a blunt machete. She’d complimented him on his efforts, assuring him that the smaller branches would all be kept for warming him up. He would, of course, have to dig a coalpit, and make bags of charcoal with the rest of the wood.

‘What day today is?’ Her voice was almost caressing.

He searched his head for a way out, ‘You see, Ma, today is my birthday. You – everybody – forget.’ He sensed her hesitation. ‘And I thought that, well… I goin go an fish for my birthday.’

‘Come!’ She drew him out into the yard.

The windows of the surrounding houses swung open and spilled the upper halves of full-breasted women.

The other children were quiet. Even the fowls in the yard ceased scratching.

‘Is a naaasty habit you have! Every Sunday so, you leaving tea behind, tying the goat any old place to starve, and you gone and dreeve-way whole day in the river. Suppose you drown? Suppose you drop down an’ dead!’

She was piling up his sins – her war dance.

‘Last Sunday, I hear that Gordon cow nearly butt you and break yuh likkle arse. You so farse. You been jookin the man cow wid stick.’

The yard shook with laughter.

‘And yesterday, you been voonging stone at Ayhie mango tree. You nearly bus’ the old lady head in she own garden.’ She shook him violently when he denied this.

‘The other-day, you tell me you goin and help Nen pick peas. You end up quite in the sea with Ashton and Mandy. Which part of the sea you does pick peas eh? And where you learn all them bad-words that you could cuss Missa Joe-Joe, who worth yuh gran’faddah, and tell im how he born ‘n where he come from? You get too damn mannish now!’

The whip curled around his shoulders. Pain snaked down his back. He twisted like a mad worm. Subdued, the children counted. Fifteen.

It was then that Dada’s voice cut in. ‘Stop! You want to spoil the blasted child skin, or what!’ It checked his mother, as though a hand had pulled her back.

Pain-crazy, he ripped himself loose and bolted through the bushes beyond the house.

He sat there for a long time and fought his tears while his mother regained her voice. It rose and fell in the near distance, then broke into song.

Ken came fumbling through the black sage and borbook, trouserless as usual. ‘I bring yuh fishin rod an’ t’ing for you.’

His brother handed him a rumpled paper-bag. It contained home-made bread with a spread of guava jam. It was his greataunt’s way of saying that she felt for him.

He gathered his rod and bait and began marching down the hill.

‘I want come wit you,’ Ken called.

‘Nuh!’

‘I carry the bait and crayfish for you.’

‘Nuh!’

‘I cominnn!’

He looked back at his brother. ‘You not wearin no pants. Ants go bite yuh ki-kiss. Today, I goin all de way down to Cold Hole. It have a mermaid down there that like nice-lookin boys wid pretty face like you. I bring a mango, piece-a-cane and a red-tail crayfish for you, okay?’

‘‘Kay.’

He took the mud track for the river, said ‘G’morning’ to some of the elders he passed, ignoring those who brought complaints to his mother. He met Elaine, tall and big-breasted, balancing a basin of river-washed clothes on her head. She was grinning wickedly. ‘It damn good yuh modder cut yuh arse!’

Elaine’s laughter bounced down the hill behind him and did not stop until he reached the river.

His hook was a needle he’d held over a burning candle, then bent and attached to a fine string which he tied to a slender stick. Baited with earthworm, it became a living thing in his hand. He flipped beating crayfish out of the water and skewered them on the spine of a coconut leaf as he moved steadily downriver.

He would have to go past Concrete Basin where the mullets were. They liked the smoky-blue pools surrounded by tall, black rocks. It took a quick hook and rapid hand to catch them. Then Dragon Place where the water-grass and crestles made a pale green carpet, and the stones surfaced like heads from the water. River crabs and zandomeh lived in Long Water and Young Sea. A couple of miles further down he would come to Cold Hole.

From there the river deepened and darkened, its banks reduced to slippery humps riddled with crab-holes. Branches drooped and brushed the earth, hiding my-bone nests and serpents. Dada said there were other kinds of water creatures in the darkness of Cold Hole. Come nighttime, she added, Dealer-men met on its banks to barter the souls of children with the devil. And it was true that sometimes he thought he heard them joining the chorus of crickets and bullfrogs that sang all night to the moon. Besides, the old woman had told him, Cold Hole was waiting to swallow any boychile who left his work at home and went off fishing.

Halfway there, four coconut flexes bristled with crayfish in his hands. Boys working their way up-river whistled at his catch. He’d passed men kneeling over pools with machetes, slashing at mullets as they ghosted past. A mad man’s game, Ashton always said, because a cutlass swung through water became a crazy thing that flashed back at its owner’s legs. Others, pushing their bare hands under rocks, dragged out river crabs, water snakes and bull frogs. If they chanced to pull out a ling, its claws crunched down on their fingers, and he would watch them dance the shuddering dance of agony.

He tossed some of the sun-yellow guavas and water-lemons he’d gathered to some women labouring over multicoloured mounds of clothes. A mango or two, if he knew them well. He’d hidden the sapodillas and sugar-apples in his shirt. The gru-grus were for sale in school tomorrow. His mouth was white, his stomach tight from chewing sugar cane.

The sun was melting over the Kalivini hills when he arrived. From where he stood, he could not see Cold Hole, roofed as it was by the interlocked branches of kakoli trees and thick-hanging lianas. But already he felt the chill. He halted outside the wall of vegetation, took a breath, parted the weave of vines and entered the smell of fermenting leaves, heard the hollow hum of the river further down, the shift and groan of branches overhead.

The pool glinted like a giant reptilian eye. A wall of mosscovered rock buried its feet in the...