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Troubador Publishing Ltd - Sandra Wallman

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53 pages

English

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Listening for Water is a fascinating collection of short stories which introduce a range of people mis-placed by migration or circumstance. Over the course of the nineteen tales, Sandra Wallman explores those moments of decision and encounter that make all the difference between salvation and disaster. The title piece describes a good man's life blighted by memories of a single failure. In others a group of Sunday strollers witness the leap of a girl from the Golden Gate Bridge; a Ugandan in France brings her own way of honouring the death of a neighbour; a woman discovers the limits of motherly love when tending to a very different kind of infant... These stories are as varied in their style and themes as they are in their setting. Some have no geography, four are set in Africa, two in France, others span as wide as Germany, London, Amsterdam and San Francisco... Listening for Water is fiction lit by its author's ethnographic skill. In stories threaded with delicacy and humour, the edginess of life everywhere is richly observed.

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Short story

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Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	04 janvier 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781788038287
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	2 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Listening for Water

Sandra Wallman
Copyright © 2016 Sandra Wallman

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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ISBN 9781788038287

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Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
…for kith and kin…
Contents
Hitchhiker
The Golden Gate
Molefi’s Moment
Walking By
Breadwinner
Elephant in the Room
Listening for Water
Pa’s Chair
Redemption
The Healer
Peggy’s Choices
Protected
English Spaghetti (Basutoland, 1963)
Scandal
Mothering
Red Carpet
War Torn
The Shirt Collar
Square Dance
Acknowledgements
Hitchhiker
Soon as I asked, they let me out at the next slip road. Probably stupid to get into a car with three hefty G.I.s in the first place. Soon clear too that they were drinking, showing off the Chevy’s mini-bar, celebrating forty-eight hours’ R&R away from the American base. Friendly as puppy dogs. A bit slobbery too – and close up, even bigger than before. I felt a punch of anxiety when the freckled one made a tentative lurch. But then the dark one on the other side of me shoved at him with “Hey man. This here’s a nice girl”, and they all subsided, nodding into their bourbon and ginger ale, remembering their girls back home.
Proper danger came when the blond one driving got tearful and his steering began to wobble. That’s when I asked to get out. Anyway, I never meant to go the whole way to Berlin on the autobahn. I wanted to see the real Germany. In fact I had left the others in Frankfurt only because they didn’t. Quite rude about my Berlin-and-the-countryside-around-it proposal. We’ll meet up later…
It is good to be alone. The motorway has faded and I hear only summer silence and birdsong. A sign points eight kilometres to the next village; there’s bound to be a small gasthof and gentle rural people sipping something cool at the end of a morning’s work in their fields. But now, nearly noon, it is getting hot. How long is a kilometre anyway?
As I remember it, round about then the chug-chug of the milk van approached. As it got closer a second layer of sound came into earshot; now there was a heavy hum and a steady rattling under the chugging. The bottles settled and the rattling stopped as the van pulled up beside me. Its idling was quieter but still loud enough to smother the voice of the old man sitting high and alone in the open cabin. Lip and gesture reading wasn’t hard.
“ Grüß Gott, ” he mouthed. I mouthed it back. He flashed a whiskery smile. Then a much longer communication – no doubt involving more German than I would have understood if it were audible – with arm–waving and pointing up the road: Would I like a lift to the village? I nodded, yes and thanks, and heaved my rucksack on to the steep step of the driver’s cabin.
The old man leaned across to pull the bag in, then extended his hand to help me up. Dry and rough-skinned but strong; he looked too old to have that kind of strength. Closer up his face was weathered with deep lines, dark-etched by the dust of the road. Friendly.
We nod and smile at each other across the heavy gearbox. My host now faces the road, his neck extended, tortoise-like, and we lumber off. Chitchat is not possible. I relax into the rhythm of the van, leaning out my side to catch some breeze. There is no windowpane in the door; too much noise to hear birds, but I can smell the fields. Is it wheat? So calm and tidy. Proper countryside, this. Better than those joyriding Yanks on the stinking autobahn.

I must’ve dozed off. There’s a scuffling kind of movement next to me, more a draught of air than a sound. The old man, still craning forward, now has only one hand on the wheel. With the other, he is lowering his trousers. Already the right leg is almost free. Shit. He’s aware of me looking, and turns to look back, still struggling with the trousers. The once-sweet old-man face is now sweaty red. He is nodding at me, with his eyebrows raised and his eyes wide in a question. Good God – he’s flirting! This is not scary; this is sick. The leg angling toward me is draped in loose folds of greyish flannel. Looks like that Shar-Pei dog in the advert. But this is long johns. And filthy. And it’s summer…
I shake my head against his nodding question. I signal that I want to get out. Really? say his eyebrows. He shrugs sadly, draws the grotesque leg back to his side and manoeuvres the van to a deafening halt. I wrestle the door open and shove my rucksack over the side.
“Thank you,” I say, before following it. “ Danke schön .”
He can’t hear me but reads my mouthing, says, “ Bitte sehr ” in reply. We are cordial, formal, ludicrous… The van rattles and chugs away, fading towards the village.
Not a good day, this. I’ll sit here in the shade for a while. There’s bound to be a sane and safe and beautiful lift around the corner.
The Golden Gate

Strolling over the lovely bridge to walk off Sunday lunch. Early autumn but no mist. Wind of course, but not a mean one – rather the sort that makes you wish for a kite. Six of us straggling in ones and twos, talking rubbish and life. Or not talking. Smiling at each other, at the perfect day. Half a mile in I dawdle to lean on the railing. The dark blue of the Bay and the ruddy red of the girders set each other off in the sun. Even the giddy drop from bridge to water, red to blue, has no menace in it: there’s a ledge outside the barrier that stops you looking straight down. Not wide, only a foot or so – made for a repainting person to stand on; for me to feel safe when I look over the edge.
So for a minute I’m not alarmed to see a woman walking purposefully along it towards me. No reason why she shouldn’t be there, out walking like the rest of us; neat in Sunday-clean jeans and zip-up windbreaker, pale yellow, with a small rucksack over her inside shoulder. Only when she has passed – I have stepped back from the barrier to cancel the small overhang of my hands across her path – only then the wrongness of it rises in front of me like a clearing Polaroid: she is not old but her face is grey; she holds her eyes wide and fixed forward, paying no attention to her footing on the narrow ledge; there’s not been a flicker of response to me or my “Hi!”. And – sweet Jesus! – there is nothing between her and hard water 220 feet below.
I run to catch up with the others. They and I and the woman, reach the centre of the bridge at the same time. The woman sits down carefully on the ledge, the rucksack neat beside her, her feet hanging over nothing. Now she stares outward to the horizon, enclosed, apparently unaware of people silting up on the bridge behind her.
For two beats the weird calm of her holds us in thrall. Then someone passing asks “You guys OK?” and the spell is broken. The six of us begin to dart about, useless in panic – “Do something! Do something!” – until someone – whose voice was it? – changes the key. “It’s OK! It’ll be alright! It’s OK! It’s alright.”
It isn’t of course, but the liturgy response pulls us back into pattern – a dance-like sequence in which the men hold their places and the women peel away at speed. There is no plan; on automatic, each of us does what they do. The three men stand close, backs to the water, protecting the ledge-person from the gawping crowd. We women divide: Cinda, trained in Samaritan calls, passes behind the men and squats by the railing to talk to the woman on the ledge. Marion, always practical and quick, runs to the right along the bridge to find someone who will fix this. And I run to the left, keen to be helpful but with no idea what to do. An onlooker says this kind of thing happens all the time: twenty-four damn jumpers last year.
The city does seem to be ready for this kind of thing. Every so many yards along the bridge railing there’s a telephone bright with the words Emergency Services in big letters, and smaller, direct, free connection . My operator is unexcited. She thanks me for the call and asks which number telephone I’m at. She says a specialist will be with us right away. She says be careful not to scare the lady. She says we shouldn’t worry. Marion, on the next telephone along, has had the same exchange with a similar person. We have done our job, is the message. Now let the experts do theirs.
Cinda squats on the ground, level with the ledge-woman, talking to her through a gap between struts in the red iron railing. She has her hands gripped on the struts and her face pressed up against them. In this position her mouth is a handspan from the woman’s ear but she makes no move to touch her. I can’t hear what Cinda says, but I see that the woman is inclined toward her, attentiv