Exclusive story from Neil Gaiman in the Guardian

The Thames is a filthy beast: it winds through London like a snake, or a sea serpent. All the rivers flow into it, the Fleet and the Tyburn and the Neckinger, carrying all the filth and scum and waste, the bodies of cats and dogs and the bones of sheep and pigs down into the brown water of the Thames, which carries them east into the estuary and from there into the North Sea and oblivion.

It is raining in London. The rain washes the dirt into the gutters, and it swells streams into rivers, rivers into powerful things. The rain is a noisy thing, splashing and pattering and rattling the rooftops. If it is clean water as it falls from the skies it only needs to touch London to become dirt, to stir dust and make it mud.

Nobody drinks it, neither the rain water nor the river water. They make jokes about Thames water killing you instantly, and it is not true. There are mudlarks who will dive deep for thrown pennies then come up again, spout the river water, shiver and hold up their coins. They do not die, of course, or not of that, although there are no mudlarks over fifteen years of age.

The woman does not appear to care about the rain.

She walks the Rotherhithe docks, as she has done for years, for decades: nobody knows how many years, because nobody cares. She walks the docks, or she stares out to sea. She examines the ships, as they bob at anchor. She must do something, to keep body and soul from dissolving their partnership, but none of the folk of the dock have the foggiest idea what this could be.

You take refuge from the deluge beneath a canvas awning put up by a sailmaker. You believe yourself to be alone under there, at first, for she is statue-still and staring out across the water, even though there is nothing to be seen through the curtain of rain. The far side of the Thames has vanished.

And then she sees you. She sees you and she begins to talk, not to you, oh no, but to the grey water that falls from the grey sky into the grey river. She says, “My son wanted to be a sailor,” and you do not know what to reply, or how to reply. You would have to shout to make yourself heard over the roar of the rain, but she talks, and you listen. You discover yourself craning and straining to catch her words.

“My son wanted to be a sailor.

“I told him not to go to sea. I’m your mother, I said. The sea won’t love you like I love you, she’s cruel. But he said, Oh Mother, I need to see the world. I need to see the sun rise in the tropics, and watch the Northern Lights dance in the Arctic sky, and most of all I need to make my fortune and then, when it’s made I will come back to you, and build you a house, and you will have servants, and we will dance, mother, oh how we will dance…

“And what would I do in a fancy house? I told him. You’re a fool with your fine talk. I told him of his father, who never came back from the sea – some said he was dead and lost overboard, while some swore blind they’d seen him running a whore-house in Amsterdam.

“It’s all the same. The sea took him.

“When he was twelve years old, my boy ran away, down to the docks, and he shipped on the first ship he found, to Flores in the Azores, they told me.

“There’s ships of ill-omen. Bad ships. They give them a lick of paint after each disaster, and a new name, to fool the unwary.

“Sailors are superstitious. The word gets around. This ship was run aground by its captain, on orders of the owners, to defraud the insurers; and then, all mended and as good as new, it gets taken by pirates; and then it takes shipment of blankets and becomes a plague ship crewed by the dead, and only three men bring it into port in Harwich…

“My son had shipped on a stormcrow ship. It was on the homeward leg of the journey, with him bringing me his wages – for he was too young to have spent them on women and on grog, like his father – that the storm hit.

“He was the smallest one in the lifeboat.

“They said they drew lots fairly, but I do not believe it. He was smaller than them. After eight days adrift in the boat, they were so hungry. And if they did draw lots, they cheated.

“They gnawed his bones clean, one by one, and they gave them to his new mother, the sea. She shed no tears and took them without a word. She’s cruel.

“Some nights I wish he had not told me the truth. He could have lied.

“They gave my boy’s bones to the sea, but the ship’s mate – who had known my husband, and known me too, better than my husband thought he did, if truth were told – he kept a bone, as a keepsake.

“When they got back to land, all of them swearing my boy was lost in the storm that sank the ship, he came in the night, and he told me the truth of it, and he gave me the bone, for the love there had once been between us.

“I said, you’ve done a bad thing, Jack. That was your son that you’ve eaten.

“The sea took him too, that night. He walked into her, with his pockets filled with stones, and he kept walking. He’d never learned to swim.

“And I put the bone on a chain to remember them both by, late at night, when the wind crashes the ocean waves and tumbles them on to the sand, when the wind howls around the houses like a baby crying.”

The rain is easing, and you think she is done, but now, for the first time, she looks at you, and appears to be about to say something. She has pulled something from around her neck, and now she is reaching it out to you.

“Here,” she says. Her eyes, when they meet yours, are as brown as the Thames. “Would you like to touch it?”

You want to pull it from her neck, to toss it into the river for the mudlarks to find or to lose. But instead you stumble out from under the canvas awning, and the water of the rain runs down your face like someone else’s tears.

 

 

• Supported by the national lottery through Arts Council England

Reprinted in full from The Guardian

What We’re Reading This Week… Mother America

On June 7th, Nuala Ní Chonchúir launched her fourth short story collection, Mother America, in the Winding Stair Bookshop in Dublin. As soon as I got the book, I avidly read all 19 stories — which jump between historical fiction and contemporary realism with ease — and had a very informative interview with the lovely Nuala herself, posted in full here.

The first story in the collection, ‘Peach’, was nominated for a 2012 Pushcart Prize and won the Jane Geske Award, and rightly so. The precision of detail in this story is wonderful. Ní Chonchúir has a penchant for description, and her opening lines are always perfect introductions to the story itself: “There was a pregnant woman getting drunk in the back lounge; I could see her through the hatch, from where I sat at the bar.” The narrator, Dominic, soon becomes involved with the frail woman, Maud, whom the reader learns has recently had a miscarriage. What astounded me about this story was the way in which the descriptions of the characters’ actions and surroundings so precisely outlined their own personalities:

At Maud’s front door a smoke-coloured cat with white feet brushed around my legs and pushed its torso into my shins. I half-kicked it away, being careful not to hurt it.
‘Your cat?’ I asked, while Maud unlocked the door.
‘No, that’s Chicago; he belongs to the neighbour.’ She shook her foot at him. ‘Psst, Chicago, psst. Get lost.’ Chicago ran through Maud’s legs into the hall; he looked up at us.
[…]
There was a Kahlo-bright oilcloth on her table: it was yellow with cerise hibiscus flowers. An orchid, propped in a milk bottle, spilled orange dust from its stamen onto the tablecloth; the orchid seemed to spray its hot smell into the room. A birdcage on a stand was parked in one corner. I looked in at a budgie; he was a startling, fake-looking blue.
[…]
Maud’s house had a stillness that I found almost unbearable, a sense of time being immoveable; I needed noise.

The themes of loneliness and consolation reemerge in many of the stories in the collection, none more so than “When the Hearse Goes By”, a powerful examination of grief and succour. Another male narrator, Fergus, goes to Paris after the funeral of his brother, and meets his sister-in-law, Ivy, “a stumpy woman with a man’s haircut.” The two attempt to downplay the loss of their mutual friend, but inevitably find it’s the only thing that can connect them. At a restaurant in the eighth arrondissement, Fergus says, “You miss him, I suppose.” “Like air,” Ivy answered. The two discuss the odd dreams they have had recently — Fergus dreaming about insects and waking up to a loud chorus of birds, Ivy dreaming that her husband is still sitting in the chair in their bedroom. The conclusion of their relationship is both understandable and shocking, and all the while I couldn’t help but feel that the ominous end was hinted at from the beginning: “it was safely in the past that Ivy most wanted to be.”

Complex familial relations are a regular concern in Mother America and in the final story, “Queen of Tattoo”, a mother, Lydia, is confronted by her son, Clyde, who does not realise that raping another woman in the town is any cause for concern. After spending time in jail for his crime, he returns to Cherry Street to ask his mother to tattoo him in order to hide from any jailmates who might be looking for him.

‘Clyde’, she says, ‘the first thing we need to give you is a heart.’

She tattoos a heart on his chest with two daggers in it, then a wolf on his back, then serpents from his wrists to his armpits. Clyde complains that she’s hurting him, that he never meant that girl Rosary any harm, that they have an understanding. He produces a bundle of letters signed ‘Rosarie’ that profess her undying love for him, but,

Lydia knows the child’s way Clyde uses language; she recognises the particular slant of his vowels, the back and forth mess of all his words. She also knows how Rosary spells her name.

The tensions built up in this story between love and delusion made me wish it was a novel, and not a short story, just so I could keep reading. On a less selfish note, the skill with which Ní Chonchúir writes attests to her proficiency as a storyteller and her talent as a poet.

I have been trying to focus on a less fanatical point of critique for Mother America, but everything that I could find to criticise is merely my own subjective pet peeves, which are neither constructive or important. This has led me to question if I would rate this book as highly as classics such as Katherine Mansfield’s Bliss and Other Stories or Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard To Find and Other Stories, and I have to admit, I would. This collection is a neat and rigorous examination of character, and while it may not be as overwhelmingly groundbreaking as Mansfield or O’Connor, the detail and skill evident in each story merits as much acclaim.

If I have convinced you that this collection is worth a read, then pop over to Nuala’s blog here, read her story ‘Poisson d’Avril’ here or buy it in any good bookshop!