Snap Shots , livre ebook

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd - Alan Blackwood

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65 pages

English

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In his novel Writer''s Cramp, and Pot Shots, hisfirst collection of short stories, Alan Blackwoodalready displayed a great gift for brevity andeconomy of words. In Snap Shots , he hashoned this gift to perfection. These are notshort stories as such but sketches of characters,places and situations, brought vividly to life bya microscopic eye for what is just enough andnot a single word more. The fact that nearlyall are based on the author''s own experiencesbrings them into even sharper focus. Suchgem-like pieces, funny or sad or somewhere inbetween, are something quite new in the realmof the written word.''Alan Blackwood''s short stories arelike novels condensed to a single page,tantalising, evocative, poignant.''John Carey, Emeritus Professor ofEnglish Literature, Oxford University.

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Short story

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Publié par	Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd
Date de parution	29 novembre 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781528968560
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0175€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

About the Author
Alan Blackwood was in the book publishing business for most of his working life. He is also the author of many books and features on music, including a biography of the famous conductor Sir Thomas Beecham. More recently he has turned to fiction, with a novel, Writer’s Cramp and Pot Shots , a collection of short stories. Snap Shots is his second essay in this medium.

Alan Blackwood
Snap Shots

Copyright Information
C opyright © Alan Blackwood (2019)
The right of Alan Blackwood to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781528920346 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781528968560 (ePub e-book)
www.austinmacauley.com
First Published (2019)
Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd
25 Canada Square
Canary Wharf
London
E14 5LQ

Two’s Company
‘M ay I?’ She sat down across the table with a silken kiss of her legs and raised her glass. ‘Cheers!’
The ship began to roll with the open sea. ‘I love going places, don’t you?’
‘Not at night,’ I said. Water and darkness. Like crossing the river Lethe.
The mascara, the false eyelashes, gave her the wide-eyed gaze of a doll. ‘Are you a writer, or something?’
‘Sort of.’
‘It must be wonderful to write.’ She watched the lights of the ferry going the other way. ‘Ships that pass in the night,’ she added dreamily.
A distant beam of light swung in a lazy arc. The French coast. ‘Hasn’t the time gone quickly!?’ She smiled over my shoulder. ‘Alright, darling?’ Bill had to take his seasick pill and lie down.
On the car deck the names Bill and Sandra were stuck over the top of their windscreen. Then we were off in a blue haze of exhaust.
Ships that pass in the night.

Cat Flap
L ike waiting for a pot to boil, the phone will never ring as long as you wait. The front door answerphone buzzed instead.
A woman asked if she could leave a notice with us about a missing cat. She waited downstairs, wrapped up against the wind under a sky as hard and grey as pumice. Lost, said her sad notice, above a colour photograph of a furry little face, startled perhaps by the flash of the camera. Her name was Biscuit.
‘Poor little Biscuit,’ I said. But the woman had already gone, too cold to hang about.
A change in the weather brought clouds and rain, or tears to trickle down all those other pictures of the same furry little face, stuck on fences and around lampposts.
‘Any luck?’ On the way to the shops I’m sure it was the same woman, looking a lot better in plastic mac and wellies. ‘Biscuit,’ I reminded her. She frowned and hurried on.
Too wet to hang about.

Sea Fever
O n Ocean Beach, fugitive rainbows danced about the tumbling surf, legions of tiny birds ran comically up and down the gleaming wet apron of the sea with each wave, and something on the sand had attracted a small crowd.
The downward slit of the mouth, the tail fin shaped like a cutlass, they’d found a young shark stranded on the beach which they were daring to touch and prod.
‘Amazing creatures,’ I said, ‘no real bone just muscle to give them more strength, skin not scales for extra speed through the water, and fins that could turn them on a dime.’
So saying I boldly picked up the shark in both hands, strode into the waves, never mind my trousers, and cast him back into the sea. My good turn for the day, for as long as it lasted. Returning on my walk he was washed up again, too weak or too sick to swim against the tide.
Voracious predator he’d never grow up to be. Amen.

Still Life
‘I dreamt of those sparrows,’ Carol said, the flush of last night’s wine still on her. She’d had a tough time of late and this was her first holiday in years.
They’d be the ones flitting about the nave at Vezelay. We didn’t expect to find birds in a church in our squeaky clean age, but what could be more natural, the commonplace and the numinous, made one. Like the pilgrims who gathered there a thousand years ago, a scruffy noisy crowd one moment, awestruck, the next. By the bells and by the image of the Risen Christ at the entrance to that wonderful nave.
‘We’ve lost our sense of wonder,’ I said, just as the line of grey-blue hills parted to reveal our first vineyard, the young shoots of vines calling down the sun.
Carol sat up. We turned a corner and sprawled across the road was the mangled body of a fox or hare. ‘Oh God!’ She buried her face in her hands.
Sometimes you just can’t win.

Chilled Out
W ith a gust of steam and Brussels sprouts, Adam burst out of the kitchen and out of the house, slamming the front door behind him.
Christmas made no difference. Roberta and Adam, mother and son, didn’t get on, and that was that. I gave it another couple of minutes, drained my sherry glass, wished Roberta a happy one, and departed with a little less fuss.
The deepening murk of afternoon threw into relief other brightly lit rooms and scenes of seasonal fun and games. And one that was more like a tableau. A large dining table was abandoned to the detritus of a festive meal, spent crackers, paper streamers, orange peel, nut shells, and old Granddad, fallen forward in his chair with his paper hat still on, fast asleep face down in his plum pudding and custard.
Someone else, hands thrust deep into his trouser pockets for warmth, had just joined me.
I turned to Adam. ‘Says it all, really.’

Punch Drunk
R ita sat Mr Punch in a chair, red pugnacious face and hump at one end, spindly legs at the other, and not much in between till someone shoved a hand up his backside.
Sam’s, that is. With his pitch in Covent Garden he’d been a big help with the book I was writing about Punch and Judy, letting me in on the secret of his swazzle, the item he stuck in his mouth to get the funny voice (‘That’s the way to do it!’). A shame he had to leave town in such a rush, asking me to let Rita have his puppets.
She next picked up the Hangman holding his little wooden gibbet, and with a practised twist and a tug, pulled off his head. Stuffed into the neck was a wad of banknotes. She raised her glass. ‘Here’s to old Sam!’
‘Sam,’ I echoed, spilling gin on the sofa.
At her front door she tucked a banknote inside my shirt. ‘For services rendered,’ she whispered, daylight exposing the grey roots of her hair.

Killing Time
W hoever said it was better to travel hopefully than to arrive, was bang on. After six hours on the road, across blistering desert and down eight-lane highways, we pulled up by a grubby fringe of sand and a trash can.
First things first. Emily rushed off to find a loo while I cooled my feet in the sea and let nature take its course that way.
An aircraft caught the declining sun as it climbed over the ocean, turned and headed back towards the land. Others had done the same, but there was something about that one.
Emily thought so too. ‘I knew we should have checked straight in.’ She stepped back as the next little wave licked a few more inches up the sand. ‘“Time to kill,” you said. Well, I reckon we’ve got about twenty-four hours of it now.’
Lights began to twinkle up the hill towards Sunset Boulevard. ‘Are you going to stay out there all night?’
Just now, we had all this time to kill.

Solo Turn