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155 pages

English

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A collection that ducks and dives through time and space with the speed of a social network site browser. The opening story, 'Reading Tolstoy in Barcelona' by Peter Deadman, presents a young merchant sailor getting to grips with the world via some extraordinary midnight shore-leave encounters. It sets the scene perfectly for a series of tales of immigrants and migrants, of misfits and visitors, from every corner of the world. Opening time at a shop in India, and nemesis arrives in the shape of a genial stray. In Britain, sons and daughters of immigrants seek ways of being British, whilst the indigenous Brits find the familiar - from office party to lighthouse beam - is not what it ought to be. Taking in letters from Africa, from the Solomon Islands and from previous centuries; witnessing potentially murderous mountaintop encounters with goats and even trolls; navigating a European tunnel and an English bell tower, the mind of the reader must twist and turn, encompassing many miles and many moods, before coming home with a view from another planet as to what it might mean to be human.

Informations

Publié par	Earlyworks Press
Date de parution	20 mai 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781906451592
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0240€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Barcelona to Bihar
Stories that travel with you
Edited by Kay Green
Earlyworks Press
www.earlyworkspress.co.uk

Introduction
This marvellous collection of stories ducks and dives through time and space with the speed of a social network site browser. Here are the winners and shortlist favourites from the entries to the 2011 Earlyworks Press Short Story competition, along with one or two from our own club stable. The competition-winning story, ‘Reading Tolstoy in Barcelona’, presents us with a young merchant sailor getting to grips with the world via some extraordinary midnight shore-leave encounters. It sets the scene perfectly for a series of tales of immigrants and migrants, of misfits and visitors, from every corner of the world.
Opening time at a shop in India, and nemesis arrives in the shape of a genial stray. In Britain, sons and daughters of immigrants seek ways of being British, whilst the indigenous Brits find the familiar – from office party to lighthouse beam – is not what it ought to be.
Taking in letters from Africa, from the Solomon Islands and from previous centuries; witnessing potentially murderous mountaintop encounters with goats and even trolls; navigating a European tunnel and an English bell tower, the mind of the reader must twist and turn, encompassing many miles and many moods, before coming home with a view from another planet as to what it might mean to be human.
Congratulations and many thanks to all the writers featured here and, if you are a newcomer to Earlyworks Press books and would like to be included in our future anthologies, please visit the Competitions Page at www.earlyworkspress.co.uk to find out how. In the meantime, enjoy the stories – I guarantee they will leave you feeling very well travelled.

Contents
Introduction
Reading Tolstoy in Barcelona by Peter Deadman
Quiston Avenue by Joanna Campbell
Salt Stain by Zoe F Gilbert
Leaving Present by Karen Tobias-Green
The Map of Bihar by Janet H Swinney
Language Class by Sarah Evans
Final Delivery by Ruby Speechley
Raven by R. J. Allison
The Memory System by David Frankel
Letters At Christmas by William Wood
Inheritance by Sarah Evans
Tunnel Vision by Mike Berlin
Ring the Bells Backwards by Joanne Fox
Last Tango in Douglas by Martin Tyrrell
The Land of Grey and Grey by Brendan Murphy
Five Pounds Short by Emily Benet
Roar by Susan O’Connor
Private Passions by Janet H Swinney
Scavenger by Stephen Atkinson
loss.doc by L F Roth
Outback by Eve Vamvas
Those Walls by Therese Whitelock
Troll Steps by Su Bristow
Wood by Sue Hoffmann
Copyright Information
Colophon

Reading Tolstoy in Barcelona
by Peter Deadman
We clattered down the gangplank, over the black waters slapping between the wharf and the ship, and into the hot Barcelona night. It had rained earlier and I followed Louis, Hank and Emilio as they clomped through puddles iridescent with diesel slick, past rusty stacked containers and warehouses lit by dim bulkhead lights.
Showered, talced and aftershaved, pockets full of wages, loud and cocky for the night, they swept along the inner docks road towards the city, only slowing, shuffling into silence as we neared the gates where the Guardia Civil loitered smoking Ducados.
It was my maiden voyage – on a jobbing merchant ship seven weeks out from Southampton. We’d hugged the French and Portuguese coasts, passed the Punta de Tarifa where you can almost reach out and touch Africa, and turned back up the East coast of Spain, dropping off and loading containers along the way. I’d survived seasickness and homesickness, the throb of engines and men, the banter and the threats and this was my first real shore leave.
They didn’t venture far from the port gates – just along a couple of streets to a dark bar full of barrels and lacquered hams hanging from brown oak beams. Louis slammed a whiskey down in front of me and they crowded round and jostled me till I drank it and then another.
‘Leave him, el pobre,’ the girl behind the bar said, looking at me with dark eyes. She was the first female I’d seen for weeks and I blushed.
‘Look, he’s in love now,’ said Louis.
Finally they lost interest in me and turned, business-like, to their own drinking.
When they set off for the brothel they dragged me with them. But though I was seventeen and had never been with a woman, that wasn’t how I wanted the first time to be. And I was afraid of these grown men with their barely contained violence. I slipped down an alley, saying I had to take a slash, calling that I’d catch them up, and stood in the dark amidst the dustbins – swaying a bit from the whiskey – as their footsteps and laughter faded into the distance. Then I found my way back to the bar.
It was still early and I settled at a quiet table and plunged back into my book. I was in the middle of Anna Karenina amidst the drawing rooms and balls, perfumed countesses, leather harnesses and horse sweat. I’d got to where the pull between Anna and Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky was unbearable but nothing had yet happened. I was in love with Anna myself and afraid of what would happen to her if she surrendered to the self-obsessed Vronsky.
‘Hey kid, what’s the book?’
When I was older, I would slide invisibly through strangers’ lives like a ghost, but when you’re young – boy or girl – it seems everyone wants you for some reason or another.
The man coming towards me wasn’t easy to ignore. He was big and wide, with a massive, food-stained belly, long greasy hair and grey stubble. He bore down on me like a train and I held up my book to ward him off.
‘Ah, Leo Nikolayevich,’ he said. ‘ Anna Karenina ; the only one. War and Peace drags on forever. Resurrection is dull enough to kill you. But Anna Karenina ,’ and he smacked his fingers with wet lips. ‘He was still a man when he wrote that – before he stopped drinking and lived on nuts and God.’
‘I can read in Russian, Turkish, English and Armenian,’ he said. ‘I can speak fifteen languages and fuck in twenty more.’
He rocked to and fro on his heels.
‘I used to read them all,’ he said. ‘Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Kemal, James, Conrad, Cafavy. Then one day I simply stopped. I sold every last book and I’ve not opened one since. Living is better than reading. And when my own story bores me, I can listen to somebody else’s. You can drown in stories if you keep your ears open. They call me the Turk. Let’s have a drink,’ and as he turned to the bar and shouted for a bottle I slipped my book into the side pocket of my pea jacket.
‘So come on, tell me your story kid,’ he said.
‘My name’s Tom,’ I started.
He slapped his hand flat on the table and people looked round.
‘That’s no name for a boy like you – out to make his fortune. I swear that by the end of tonight you’ll be washed clean as a lamb, reborn and renamed.’
The girl came over from the bar with a bottle of red wine. He put his arm around her waist and pulled her towards his lap but she was looking at me.
‘Lucitta,’ he said. ‘Meet my young English friend. You should hear him speak. The language of Milton, Shakespeare, Defoe drips from his tongue. But he is very much in need of a new name. What do you think?’
‘I think you should never listen to a word the Turk speaks,’ she said and pushed away from him. ‘He is full of merda.’
‘You pay her,’ the Turk said to me and I fumbled in my pocket. When I handed her the money, she smiled.
The Turk had lost interest in my story. I didn’t mind; it was full of bad luck and nothing to be proud of. My mother had died long ago and my father and I had suffered in silence punctuated by thunderous rows until he died in his turn last year. I moved in with my uncle who drank even more than my father. I was thrown out of school, I read a lot and I ran away to sea. I was proud of the last bit but the rest was all other people’s stories. Mine didn’t seem to have begun yet.
The Turk didn’t need me anyway – he talked enough for both of us.
He’d worked in the gold and diamond trades, been a tour guide in Istanbul and Madrid, run a bar in Antwerp. He was Turkish Armenian Jewish, ‘a mongrel; an outsider; a citizen of the world.’
‘And now?’ I said. ‘What do you do now?’
‘Ah, now I’m retired. I eat, I drink, I shit, I talk shit. What else is there?’
A pack of Greek sailors in crisp whites came in and suddenly the bar was full and hot and noisy. A woman appeared behind the Turk and whispered something in his ear. She wore a red dress and red lipstick and hair pulled back tight from a lined face. She stood like a dancer with one hand resting on her hip, her dress pulled taut against her haunch, the other foot tapping restlessly on the floor.
The Turk took her hand and turned to me.
‘This is Almunda, the most beautiful whore in Barcelona. And this,’ and he flourished his hand towards me in an elegant gesture, ‘this… ah I forgot, we still have not found your name.’
‘Your new friend?’ Almunda said to the Turk. ‘He won’t be needing me then.’
There was a lot of drink going round the table now, tequila, rum and red wine. I stuck to the wine but I was getting hot and everything was taking on a dreamy, slippery quality.
A woman flopped down next to me. She looked like she’d been weeping. Her dress was cut so low that one breast fell out when she leant towards me, the nipple hanging over the top, and she sat like that trying to make me understand something until Almunda slapped her arm and fired a torrent of Spanish at her.
The woman pulled up the top of her dress and tried to drag me to dance with her but when I wouldn’t she started shouting and calling me bastardo until Almunda told her to get lost. I saw her later with one of the Greeks. He was hoisting her back up as she slid down his belly towards the floor.
The Turk was dancing in tight circles with his hands in the air. His shirt had come loose fr