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Troubador Publishing Ltd - Maggie Ling

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131 pages

English

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Description

A solitary woman, her life changed by an afternoon of 'wanting, wanting, wanting', becomes obsessed with a writer at his desk by the window below.A nameless, middle-aged narrator, his sexuality awakened by the manipulative mother of a classmate, looks back to thathot summer in the 'Garden of Eden', where young lives were changed and ruined.And Lennie-girl's father, craving the warmth of his birthplace, forsakes his daughter and vulnerable son.Three stories from a nineteen-story collection in which themes of love and loss, break up and renewal, pleasures andregrets, weave in and out of the lives of protagonists whose ages range from thirteen to sixty-something.

Sujets

Short story

Contemporary romance

Informations

Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	28 octobre 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781838596859
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 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

Maggie Ling was previously published as an illustrator and cartoonist before choosing to work with words alone. Her stories have been placed in numerous international short story competitions, including a shortlisting for the Br idport Prize, Cold Snap, her only ghost story, winning an Asham Award. Her work has been published in Unthology 1 (Unthank Books, 2010), Something Was There , the Asham Award-winning ghost story collection (Virago, 2011), Unthology 5 (Unthank Books, 2014), and online by Seren Books (2017) and Fairlight Books (2019). She lives in Norwich, a UNESCO City of Literature.

Copyright © 2019 Maggie Ling

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 978 1838596 859

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

Death and the Maiden was first published in the short story anthology Unthology 1 (Unthank Books, 2010). Bird Brains (2014 and 2015), Reflections (2010), A Life (2016), Body Language (2017), Black and White (2013), Red Fox Morning (2011), One Slip (2014), Porkies (2012), Running Away (2012, 2013 and 2016), That Day (2010) and Another Time (2014) were all listed in international short story competitions. Dick’s Life first appeared in Unthology 1 (Unthank Books, 2010). Online, Let Her Go was Seren Books’ Short Story of the Month (October 2017, serenbooks.com), and Bird Brains and Running Away were published by Fairlight Books (May 2019, fairlightbooks.co.uk)
Contents
Death and the Maiden
Bird Brains
A Blonde Woman
Reflections
Body Language
A Life
Black and White
Red Fox Morning
The Homecoming
The Summer of the Trueloves
Let Her Go
One Slip
Porkies
Running Away
Dick’s Life
That Day
Another Time
A Woman Walks Into a Bar…
Appetites

A well-governed appetite is the greater part of liberty.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Death and the Maiden
W atching him had become a comforting pastime, a part of her life. Something she did when washing the dishes. She seldom used the dishwasher now. He was someone to look down on as she hand-washed her ‘delicates’ – delicates previously tossed into the washing machine without a thought. These so-called delicates now extending to barely worn sweaters and shirts, all clearly labelled ‘machine washable’, yet all lovingly immersed in soapy bubbles in the kitchen sink.
She had not gone out of her way to observe him. No. She was just going about her daily routine. It was he who had placed himself in her line of vision. He, two floors below, who had given her – looking down from her top-floor casement on the other side of the square – an ‘open-curtained’ view of his life. And the most comforting thing of all was, he was always alone. Had been alone for weeks. Or was it months? Yes. He had been alone since early November – though he had gone away for Christmas. Home, she supposed. Wherever that might be. This had saddened her at first. But then, late Boxing Day afternoon, she had seen slits of light filtering through the Venetian blind, and, come the morning, there he was, back at his desk again. She even found herself able to enjoy a film that afternoon, curling up on the sofa, quite relaxed, halfway through going to the kitchen for refreshments, looking down, and seeing him still sitting there. Had he, she wondered, moved his desk to that position purely out of consideration for her? She had not seen him move it. It had been there when she returned from work, two weeks after he’d moved in.
She had gone to the sink to fill the kettle, expecting to see only the glow of a hall light leeching through a half-open door, to be met by the sight of him, sitting at his computer, the desk lamp’s glow highlighting his face. And instead of putting a teabag in a mug, as she might have done, as she had always done, found herself searching for an unopened packet of loose Darjeeling she thought she still had, setting the tea to brew in her large, largely unused, teapot, pulling out a stool to drink it there in the kitchen.
It was at breakfast time the next morning that she noticed a large filing cabinet had replaced the exercise bike previously visible in the corner of the room. So he would no longer expose his half-naked torso to her gaze, no longer lie there stretching, lifting weights, doing energetic push-ups, before, half-disappearing behind the half-drawn curtains, she would see his feet pedalling to nowhere on the bike.
Now he barely disappeared from view, the blind was always up and he, more often than not, was always there. Though not there in the mornings: not before she went to work. And seldom there on Saturday mornings. But almost always on Sundays. Another considerate move on his part. Sundays had always been difficult. Although, shuffling into the kitchen like that, seeing him there, she had felt quite slovenly. Had made a New Year’s resolution: vowing never again to spend most of Sunday in her dressing gown, going out the following day to buy three pairs of pull-on lounging trousers with matching tops, bargain price, in the sale.

I’ve seen her up there, up at that window, looking down. Saw her soon after I moved in here: those first few days when I used this room as my exercise space. I know the park’s only ten minutes up the road, but, at the beginning of something, I barely go out. Like to keep my head down, keep concentrated – even when there’s nothing much to concentrate on. ‘For fuck’s sake!’ my wife used to say. ‘How the hell can you write about life if you never live it?’
I remember once countering this much-used insult of hers by quoting a much-quoted bit of Socratic wisdom: ‘Well,’ I said, with all the irony I could muster, ‘the unexamined life and all that…’
‘Words! Words! Words!’ she said, slamming the door.
I had put my desk under the window in the living room. But this block being right on the T-junction, I found looking out on the wide, busy street leading straight north to the park quite distracting. Especially since, even in early November, the Christmas lights were already twink-twinkling from dawn to bloody dusk. No way was I ready for such jollity. Not this year. Sorry. Not last year. Is it really already mid-January? How is it that time can drag, yet, at the same time, speed by in a flash?
Anyway, as soon as I’d pulled down those dreary curtains, put up a cheap blind (which, since the room’s too dark when it’s down, I needn’t have bothered buying) and dragged the desk here under the window, I felt the slightest tug-tugging of something: an upturned thought, bordering on a vague idea, beginning to surface in the dishevelled bunch of nervous ganglia that constitutes my brain. Felt this the right space to be in – work-wise, that is.
There’s something sombre, something punitive about sitting here, looking out from this tall sash window (Georgian; in itself quite elegant) into the dingy funnel of buildings out there, all looking in on themselves. Such a contrast to the living room. The other side of the block all glittering lights, all spend-spend-spend neon, while this side smacks of Grub Street. Or worse. Don’t know if anyone really uses that dark square down there. Occasionally an echoing cough splutters up to me. Every once in a while I hear what sounds like a rubbish bin, the old-fashioned galvanised sort, being scraped across the ground; hear the shuffle of feet. Picture a chained-together ring of prisoners circling the square; an animated Doré etching, straight out of Newgate.
Becky used to tell me I was chained to my desk. Ironic, really. Though I didn’t think I was then, I most certainly am now. Thanks a bunch, Becky.
I thought she might stop looking down at me – the woman on the top floor, not Becky; don’t think Becky’ll ever stop looking down on me. Thought the woman up there might be a bit of a middle-aged perv; one who, for some unfathomable reason, got off on my OK torso. Figured when she saw me tap-tapping away down here – or, most likely, not tap-tapping away – she might stop looking. I mean, that woman spends half her life in that damn kitchen. Surely there’s more to her flat than one room. I can just about make her out – the woman up there, not my wife. Thought I’d made Becky out a long time ago. My mistake.
Some might think it a good thing, feeling you have some understanding of another human being, believing they have some understanding of you, and finding a degree of contentment in that. I imagined Becky and me to be in that mythical place. But, truth is, my wife, for all she says now, was never really into contentment. No. Becky has some mistaken notion about women and mystery. Has a need to hold on to it, hold a part of