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Openings

E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
192 Seiten
Englisch
Faber & Fabererschienen am30.04.2024Main
'One of the finest short-storywriters at work today. These stories are honest, finely nuanced and indelible in their impact.' WENDY ERSKINE 'One of our best short story writers.' THE TIMES 'You'll lose yourself in this collection and, most likely, find yourself too. Each story is a masterclass in attentiveness.' JAN CARSON The much-anticipated new collection from the BBC National Short Story Award-winning author of Multitudes and Intimacies. I still sometimes wonder if one could draw a window in the wall, or in the air, and step through it together. To somewhere else, entirely new. From a passionate affair in Blitz-era London, to a highly charged Christmas party in Belfast, to a trip to Marrakech which could form a new family, the thirteen striking stories of Openings pulse with possibility and illuminate those fleeting but recognisable moments of heartbreak and hope that can change the course of a life. 'It takes a writer as subtle, compassionate and clear-eyed as Caldwell to track the hidden forces that work upon us, to illuminate our secret selves. This is prose that liberates.' CLAIRE KILROY 'Caldwell has a glorious skill for creating narratives in which every element works in perfect tandem.' SUNDAY TIMES

Lucy Caldwell was born in Belfast in 1981. She is the author of four novels, several stage plays and radio dramas, and two collections of short stories: Multitudes and Intimacies. She won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2021 for 'All the People Were Mean and Bad'. Other awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the George Devine Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize and a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018 and in 2019 she was the editor of Being Various - New Irish Short Stories.mehr
Verfügbare Formate
TaschenbuchKartoniert, Paperback
EUR19,50
E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
EUR13,99

Produkt

Klappentext'One of the finest short-storywriters at work today. These stories are honest, finely nuanced and indelible in their impact.' WENDY ERSKINE 'One of our best short story writers.' THE TIMES 'You'll lose yourself in this collection and, most likely, find yourself too. Each story is a masterclass in attentiveness.' JAN CARSON The much-anticipated new collection from the BBC National Short Story Award-winning author of Multitudes and Intimacies. I still sometimes wonder if one could draw a window in the wall, or in the air, and step through it together. To somewhere else, entirely new. From a passionate affair in Blitz-era London, to a highly charged Christmas party in Belfast, to a trip to Marrakech which could form a new family, the thirteen striking stories of Openings pulse with possibility and illuminate those fleeting but recognisable moments of heartbreak and hope that can change the course of a life. 'It takes a writer as subtle, compassionate and clear-eyed as Caldwell to track the hidden forces that work upon us, to illuminate our secret selves. This is prose that liberates.' CLAIRE KILROY 'Caldwell has a glorious skill for creating narratives in which every element works in perfect tandem.' SUNDAY TIMES

Lucy Caldwell was born in Belfast in 1981. She is the author of four novels, several stage plays and radio dramas, and two collections of short stories: Multitudes and Intimacies. She won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2021 for 'All the People Were Mean and Bad'. Other awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the George Devine Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize and a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018 and in 2019 she was the editor of Being Various - New Irish Short Stories.
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9780571382774
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
FormatE101
Erscheinungsjahr2024
Erscheinungsdatum30.04.2024
AuflageMain
Seiten192 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse771 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.14565213
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe



If You Lived Here You´d Be Home By Now


My mother was dying, so I got a kitten. Logistically, it made no sense: it would just make everything harder, when or if I was able to travel to see her. It was a sort of helplessness, I suppose - she was so far away. Also, she hated cats. She always said she hated the way you could feel their bones moving under their skin. It felt worth it even just to revive that joke on the family group - to have something else to say.

The kitten was our neighbour´s cat´s, from a few doors down. During the first weeks of lockdown, working from the back bedroom, I´d watch her make her daily rounds along the walls and fences of our terrace´s back gardens. In the afternoons she´d sunbathe, moving from one shed or rooftop to another as the sun swung round, coming to my kitchen roof in the late afternoon, when it had its turn in the pouring westerly light. The back bedroom got very stuffy: often when I opened the window she´d jump up and come in, delicately, a paw at a time over the windowsill, green eyes bold. We suspected the tenants before us had fed her, she was so at home in our house. She´d inspect each room, tail twitching, then settle down on the landing at the top of the stairs, purring like an engine when the girls stroked her. It became part of the rhythm of those days, and when our neighbours said Bella would be having a litter soon, and were we interested, to the girls´ delight I said yes straight away, despite the fact that we´d never had a pet before, despite the clause in our tenancy agreement forbidding it - despite everything.

We collected the kitten - a black-and-white male - on the day it turned eight weeks. Our neighbour scooped it into our new cat-carrier and handed it over, and that was that, we suddenly had a cat. I took a picture of the girls beaming, holding up the carrier, and sent it to my family group, which was me, my sister, my sister´s husband and our mum. It was lunchtime with me which meant bedtime in Sydney - there wouldn´t be a response for hours, unless my mum was up in the night. The drugs she was on made sleep unpredictable - but the sleeping pills she took in the hope of countering that meant the midnight messages she sent were often unintelligible. There´d be a garbled string of capital letters, autocorrected words and arbitrary emojis, and I´d have to wait until my sister woke and chimed in to be sure they hadn´t been my mum´s last words. To caption the photo, I wrote Another reason to be grateful you can´t visit! It horrified my sister´s husband, the way we talked to each other: he just didn´t get it. For his sake, or maybe for the opposite reason, because I still half-resented him being in our family group, I added the emoji of the laughing-crying cat.


 


Mum had always wanted to move back to Australia - she said they talked about Coogee, with its wide sandy beaches, its salt-water pools cut into the headland. Its snorkelling trails, its surfing - the laid-back teenage years she wanted us to have, and all just a short ride into Sydney. But when my father died, everyone told her not to make any major life decisions for a year, and when the year was up I was sitting the eleven-plus and starting secondary school, and then my sister was, and we didn´t want to emigrate. At least, she says we didn´t: I don´t remember being asked. I think I would have liked it. I sometimes still wonder who I might have been, this surfer version of myself.

In the end it was my sister who went back - or, from her point of view, went. She and her English boyfriend, first of all on working-holiday visas, and then when they settled there, got full citizenship, had the twins, Mum went out to visit more and more frequently, the only family - the only child-care - they had, and they convinced her to make it permanent. Coogee, in fact most of the coastal suburbs of Sydney, were too expensive by then, and so they´d all settled in a town called Coffs Harbour, a few hours north of Sydney on the Pacific Highway, where they had condos in the same low-rise building. When my mum was a child, there had been a big banana statue in Coffs Harbour, and little else. Now there was a whole Big Banana Fun Park, with water slides, laser tag, mini-golf - even an opal centre where you could watch geodes being split and rough-cut, and buy opal jewellery.

I hadn´t yet been to visit them. Pregnancy complications, the terror of something happening to my daughter´s lungs at 35,000 feet - there´d always been some reason to put off going until a better time, and now I couldn´t. It was a strange, vertiginous feeling, that you were on the other side of the world: as if the map, instead of announcing You are here, had an arrow saying They are there.


 


We took the cat-carrier into the kitchen, set it down on the floor and carefully unzipped it. The kitten was cowering at the very back, pressed as small as it could make itself, a cloudy ball of paws and tail. The advice we´d read online was to let it come out in its own time, and to confine it to one room for the first few days. My younger daughter jumped around describing all its new things - its food and water bowls, its litter tray, cat tree and scratching post, cushioned basket. My elder daughter dangled a catnip mouse and a fishing-rod toy at it, but the kitten didn´t move. They laid a trail of cat treats leading out from the carrier, but it wasn´t interested in those either. After a while, they got bored and went off to do something else.

I stayed crouched down on my hunkers, trying to talk to it in a soothing voice. Then Bella appeared on the fence, mewing.

Bella´s here!´ the girls yelled, and ran to the back door to let her in.

No, wait!´ I guldered back.

We couldn´t keep letting her in now that we had her kitten, I explained to them: this had to become his territory, not hers.

They stopped, frowned. But she always comes in.´

She can´t,´ I said. Not any more.´

On the fence, Bella miaowed. She could see us through the window - she knew we could see her. I pulled the blind down, switched on the radio - but the kitten had already heard her too. It was sitting upright, quivering, as if a current was running right from its ears to its tail. Bella miaowed again, louder. The kitten mewled, the most piteous sound - then darted out of the carrier, bolted in a panic around the kitchen, this way and that, hissing as we yelped and tried not to step on it, and finally squeezed through a tiny gap in the kickboard behind the kitchen units and the sink.

I´d had a pest control man tell me that a mouse can get through a gap no bigger than a biro - but I wouldn´t have believed a kitten could fit through a space the size of a mousehole.

Topsy!´ my youngest daughter shrieked.

He´s not called Topsy,´ barked the elder. Topsy was if we got a girl kitten, he´s a boy. Shadow,´ she shouted. Shadow!´

Shadow was if we got the black one. It´s not fair if you get to choose the name. Mummy, it´s not fair!´

Both of you, please.´

Is the kitten stuck in there?´

Of course not,´ I said, with more confidence than I felt.

But how are you going to get him out, Mummy?´

Shall we phone the fire brigade?´

Not yet,´ I said. Let´s just see what happens.´

Bella was miaowing, plaintive, insistent, and under the kickboard her kitten had started to cry back to her, a desperate wail.

Please can we let her in,´ my eldest said, looking on the verge of tears now herself. The kitten wants her.´

The kitten has to learn he´s our kitten now,´ I said.


 


For two awful hours, Bella and her kitten called to each other, before eventually he went silent, and she left.

She was probably just singing him a lullaby,´ I said to the girls. But the pitch of the animals´ distress had been so evident they both just looked at me. Their faces were blotchy with their own distress and tears.

I don´t like having a kitten,´ the youngest said, burrowing her face into me, and the elder said, I don´t want to, Mummy, but I think maybe we should give him back.´

Look,´ I said, the first night was always going to be tricky. I promise it will be better in the morning.´

The kitten hid all afternoon, all evening. It was almost ten o´clock before I finally got the girls to sleep, cuddled up in the same bunk bed, and went downstairs to see if there was any sign of him yet.

There wasn´t. Not a single treat, not a scrap of food had gone. Online, I found a thread on a pet...

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Autor

Lucy Caldwell was born in Belfast in 1981. She is the author of four novels, several stage plays and radio dramas, and two previous collections of short stories: Multitudes and Intimacies. She won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2021 for 'All the People Were Mean and Bad'. Other awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the George Devine Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize - for her novel The Meeting Point - and a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. She is the winner of the 2022 E. M. Forster Award. Lucy was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018 and in 2019 she was the editor of Being Various: New Irish Short Stories.