Wild Rarebit

1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-909844-16-2
Verlag: Parthian Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 250 Seiten

Celebrating Parthian's twenty-first birthday in 2014, this beautiful limited edition anthology of twenty one contemporary stories offers a kaleidoscope of identities, perspectives and settings which encapsulate much that is vibrant and exciting about modern Welsh short fiction. The stories examine cultural and combative conflict, the action moving from a Cardiff Black Friday to video stores, hotel rooms, restaurants, traveller sites, parks, gardens, amusement arcades, festivals and forests at home and abroad. Original artwork has been created for each story by John Abell, winner of the Print Prize and overall runner-up at Welsh Artist of the Year 2013. Writers in the collection include Wales Book of the Year winners Deborah Kay Davies and Rhian Edwards, the EFG Sunday Times short story prize shortlisted Roshi Fernando, Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction nominee Robert Lewis, Dylan Thomas Prize winner Rachel Trezise, Terry Hetherington Young Writer's Award winner Joâo Morais, Media Wales People's Prize winner Tyler Keevil, National Eisteddfod Literature Medal winner Siân Melangell Dafydd. Plus: Lane Ashfeldt, Craig Hawes, Dan Tyte, Eluned Gramich, Susmita Bhattacharya, Georgia Carys Williams, Robert Lewis, Sarah Coles, Holly Müller, Rebbecca Ray, Richard Owain Roberts and Carly Holmes, and with translated work by Peter Kristúfek and Monique Schwitter.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wild, Susie

Leseproben

The Battle of St Mary Street

Robert Lewis

Somewhere a little up ahead came the sound of a small, wet explosion, and, not long after, Smithy bent double, clutching his stomach, and slid to the ground. Their unit had been advancing up the street, keeping close to the buildings, stepping over the bodies, hugging cover. When Smithy fell, they ducked instinctively into the nearest doorway and crouched there, out of the line of sight.

Around them the once-friendly city was a glade of shadows, shrouded in smoke and darkness and screams. Silhouettes slipped stumbling through the fog like spectres, in loose groups or in haunting solitude; they appeared briefly and were gone, collateral damage, you could call it, the walking wounded of an unwinnable war. What they had lost, what they were searching for, could only be guessed at. Somewhere behind them came the rumble of a fast-moving convoy, hurtling unseen towards some urgent destination. Up ahead a warning siren Dopplered in and out and ever more slowly away.

Simmons, on his hands and knees, craned his neck around the doorway as near to street level as he could.

‘Looks like his guts are shot,’ he said.

None of them made any move to help him. When your guts went like that, there was nothing you could do. And anyway, it was Smithy who was the first-aider. For what good it did any of them. Three days’ residential training at headquarters in Basingstoke was what it amounted to. Coffee and Bourbons and a few goes trying to resuscitate a plastic torso with your fists. It was a joke. It was all a joke.

A moment’s silent reverence fell upon them and Shenkins called out back down the street.

‘Tina? Davey? Tina?’

There was no answer.

‘Stop it ducks,’ said the oldest of them. ‘You’ll draw attention to us.’

In between Simmons and Shenkins, Gabby Pritchard sat cross-legged rolling a cigarette, her back pressed up against the glass. Single, late thirties, a data-entry supervisor unprepossessing in looks and attitude, nobody had ever given much thought to plain Jane Pritchard in more peaceful times. But now you could see something solid about her, something that if not exactly reassuring was at least resigned.

The mouse had become a rock. She had never spoken about it, but her two young colleagues looked at her and saw just from the lines of her face that she had been here before. Here was what you called veterancy: experience survived.

In the darkness between them a lighter flashed, and was followed by the slow pulsing glow of a cigarette.

‘I don’t even know where we’re supposed to be going,’ said Simmons, still on his hands and knees, his voice cracking.

‘I think Debs said it was Revolution,’ said Shenkins.

Pritchard laughed, a deep tarry sound, at some private joke.

‘Revolution,’ she repeated. ‘It’s not Revolution. It’s the same every year.’

Shenkins pulled the Nokia out of her jacket and keyed in a couple of numbers. The phone shook in her hand.

‘She’s not answering.’

‘Try Tanya.’

‘None of them are answering. Nobody.’

‘Do you think they made it?’ asked Simmons.

‘Who knows.’

‘Maybe we’re the last ones left,’ said Simmons, that crack in his voice still there, and widening. ‘I don’t even know where we are.’

Shenkins put her phone back into her jacket pocket, after dropping it a few times, and squinted at the dark wooden board high-up above them.

‘I think it used to be a Hard Rock Cafe,’ she said. ‘I wonder where Jones-Cavendish is?’

‘You know bloody well where he is,’ coughed Gabby Pritchard. ‘In the front room of some five-bedroomed house in the Vale with his family, spread on a leather three-piece, watching the flat screen. Wife in the kitchen. Children playing on the rug. Bowl of peanuts on one side of him and a glass of cab sav on the other. Two cars in the driveway. Somewhere nice and quiet and warm. Miles away from here.’

Jones-Cavendish had got them all in the meeting room that afternoon and handed out the staff gift parcels. Shenkins had got a ten pound Tesco voucher and a bottle of Fructis shampoo. She didn’t know what everyone else got. Then he had told them to knock-off half an hour early, to have a few for him, to enjoy themselves, ‘to do us proud’.

‘See you next year,’ he’d said, and it was the last they’d seen of him.

She wondered where her Fructis shampoo was now. Somewhere under the seats in the Prince of Wales with her scarf and her gloves and her coat. With everything and everyone else they had already lost and left behind. So much, so many, already gone. Some hadn’t been able to cope with the pressure, and had sacrificed themselves the first chance they’d got.

Shenkins remembered Gavin Bowen, a gentle alternative-looking type who wore stringy ties and had thick-framed glasses, one of the young team leaders they’d brought in at the end of November. She had stood behind him and watched him spend that Friday morning sending emails of love and apology to friends and family. When they had piled out of the taxis by Walkabout he had been part of the first wave, had hit the crowd running and made the bar, had got a round of fourteen tequilas in but then drank them all himself. He never made it out. It was as if he had wanted to die.

Shenkins drew her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around herself. Although she couldn’t feel it, she knew she was very, very cold. Through the frosted mist she could see could see the traffic lights at Wood Street turning from red to green. No traffic passed. Wood Street. Christ. They were still at the bottom of St Mary Street. They had advanced about sixty or seventy yards, and it had cost them – what had it cost them? She opened her purse. The better part of two days, at four ninety three an hour.

Simmons descended into a coughing fit that sent him sprawling onto his side. When it ended his mouth continued to spasm open and shut, his face creased with some unknown emotion.

‘I don’t even know what we’re doing here,’ he sobbed. Or maybe it was laughter. It was impossible to tell.

Gabby Pritchard sucked deep on her cigarette, stubbed it out onto the tiles, and stood up. She was remarkably steady.

‘We’re here because it’s Christmas,’ she said. ‘Somewhere. Now only two kinds of people are going to stay on this street. Those who have passed out on it, and those who are going to pass out. Get on your feet.’

With one hand on the door frame for support, Jane Shenkins climbed to the top of her four-inch heels. Neil Simmons was still unable to get up from all fours, so they lifted him, slowly, like you would with an old dog whose back legs had gone. Once he was upright he could more or less stand on his own.

‘It’s up from down, is what it is,’ he explained. ‘How I remember is that down hurts and up just sort of strains.’

Up ahead they caught up with Smithy, curled in a foetal position near an impressive pool, no, a reservoir, of his own vomit, like a quotation mark around a speech bubble.

‘We can’t leave him here,’ said Shenkins.

Gabby Pritchard was unmoved.

‘Well we can’t carry him. Put him up against the wall there and we’ll put something on top of him, keep him warm.’

In the end they covered him in bulging black bin bags from outside of the Spar and cordoned him off with four traffic cones. Shenkins didn’t feel bad about it. She had looked into his eyes, cold and glassy and distant, like coins at the bottom of some well, and seen he was at peace.

For the living there was only this – this – what could you call it, Jane Shenkins wondered? A party? No, it was nothing as coherent as that. A celebration? Certainly not. There was nothing being honoured here, nothing kept. What were they doing? Spending money they didn’t really have with people that weren’t really friends.

They weren’t rebelling, no way, they were doing exactly what was expected of them, really. And did any of them even want the same thing, did it occur to them that maybe they even wanted anything? No, they weren’t rebels. They would come out, clog up the bars and the streets and the emergency wards, and then they would disappear again, and nothing would change. They were insurgents. Like in Iraq.

The possibility stopped her in her tracks. She tugged at Gabby’s sleeve with an expression of awestruck wonderment.

‘This is an insurgency,’ she said. Gabby, too, stopped. The features of her face grew concerned.

‘Do you need a piss love? We can go in The Borough.’

‘No!’ she screamed, but no one heard. Maybe she never said it out loud. That was more her style, after all, to scream inside.

‘Come on,’ said Gabby, an arm around her shoulder, steering her towards another densely packed crowd, another beery throng that would suck them up and contain them the way aspic does with meat chunks. And it might hold them trapped like that forever, or at least until somebody rang the bell and the whole thing...