Exeter Writers

Short Story Competition 2012

2011-11-20T14:00:00.000-08:00

Exeter Writers Short Story Competition 2012 has been launched. The main prizes are £250, £100 and £50, with an extra prize this year of £50 for Devon writers. Entries are invited from all writers; the closing date is 31 March 2012. See our Competition page for full details.

RNA Winter Party

2011-11-20T13:27:00.001-08:00

Exeter Writers Margaret James, Sophie Duffy and Cathie Hartigan went the Romantic Novelists' Association Winter Party in London last week. It was a very sparkly occasion held in the library of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Birdcage Walk. Much smiling, nodding and important networking took place, wine was drunk and unsuitable shoes put up with for the duration.

Katie Fforde, President of the RNA, couldn't have been more delighted to meet Sophie. Katie had judged Sophie's novel The Generation Game to be a worthy winner of the Yeovil Novel Prize and she was thrilled to hear that the novel had been published to such acclaim.

See also Creative Writing Matters.

The Generation Game: regional launch

2011-07-26T18:06:00.000-07:00

Monday saw the regional launch of Sophie Duffy's novel The Generation Game at The Torbay Bookshop in Paignton.

As reported earlier - see Sophie Duffy wins Luke Bitmead Bursary - the novel was published by independent publisher Legend Press as the 2011 winner of the Luke Bitmead Bursary. There was a good turnout of fellow Exeter Writers members, and 65 copies were sold.

See the Legend Press site ('The Generation Game' by Sophie Duffy) - and Sophie's own site (A Tale of Two Book Launches) for more details and photos of the event.

Winners: short story competition 2010/11

2011-06-06T12:48:00.000-07:00

Our thanks to all who sent entries for the Exeter Writers Short Story Competition. The judging is complete and the following are the winners – our congratulations to them all. The winning stories are online; follow the links.

First prize:
Until planets slip their tracks by Joanna Campbell

Second prize:
The precious things of Imogen’s library by Douglas Bruton

Third prize:
Looking for Michael by Sarah Hegarty

Runners-up: (not in order of preference)
A library full of of murder by Simon Whaley
My name is George by Veronica Bright
The cubbyhole by Linda Mitchelmore
Letter to follow by Norma Murray
Into each life by John Morley
Looking for Iago by Bruce Harris
Moving backwards by Sarah Evans

wordcentral

2011-06-06T11:00:00.000-07:00

wordcentral just contacted us with updated information. As Exeter Writers is currently full and not accepting new members, this is a possibility if you are looking for another writers' group that meets in Exeter.

What is wordcentral?
wordcentral is a friendly, informal group who meet to read and discuss our work and share information, contacts and news.

Who can attend?
Writers of all genres are welcome – fiction, poetry, non-fiction – come along and find out what we're like. We're a self running group with writers from all genres who have some experience.

When do we meet?
First and Third Thursday of the month from 5:30pm to 7pm.

Where do we meet?
The IT Suite at Exeter Central Library, Castle Street, Exeter, EX4 3PQ

How much does it cost to attend?
There is no charge for attending the group.

For more information please email word.central.exeter@gmail.com or visit our blog: http://word-central-exeter.blogspot.com/

Please note this is not a class but a self running group for writers with some experience. Contact Exeter College for information on creative writing classes.

We've added a permanent link to our affiliated links section (right-hand sidebar)

Until planets slip their tracks / 1st in 2010/11 Competition

2011-06-06T10:46:00.000-07:00

Until planets slip their tracks
by Joanna Campbell

Nate knew how to hypnotise a chicken. But he knew next to nothing about me. Didn't matter none when we were growing up in Stone Gap. Still had the same old dirt in our dungarees nigh on every day. Long dusty summers never ended. But only I knew how I loved the bones of that boy.

Our classmates whooped when Nate laid the chick in the dirt, holding its thin feet firm in one hand. Mouths wide, they watched his finger trace a line in the earth, straight from the beak. The bird's beady eye followed the course of Nate's line like it was leading him to Heaven. Twenty full seconds it was down there in a trance.

All I recall is how tender Nate held it, his fingers curved around the frail wings before he let it free.

Me and Nate had a baby, but we didn't know a thing about that. Just saw I was looking bonny and kind of ripe in the months after the rains.

"Have to shelter us in the cow-shed, is all," Nate had said. And I swear he had no notion in his head but keeping our hides dry. Our clothes steamed in the straw while our bodies took charge of one another.

He didn't know he was in my head all the time. When we were playing out together or running errands to Hardwick's Mercantile, he didn't know I was thanking God in Heaven for my friend Nate. When he found the tender side of his self one June day by the lake, making may-apple flower chains to lace round my neck, I paid no heed to the twisting ways of my heart. It would always feel that way. And I just prayed Nate would feel it when we were grown.

Nate could swim in winter waters. He stripped and dove in, long white body scoring through the blank lake. Used to cut right in there with him when I was a little child.

But when we were fifteen and the baby inside began to show, my shame grew right along there with it. My swaying belly weren't fit to be seen naked.

"Get in that water, girl," Nate said. "I like it."

He held out his hand and I went in. The cold lake lapped over the little mound. Nate wrapped his fingers round it. He was the first of us to feel the baby squirm.

Never swam after the birthing. I missed the quickening of new life in my soul. And the love burning through the shame. And I was lost after the baby was buried. Fit for nothing. If I'd stepped into that water, I'd have kept right on walking in deeper and deeper to the middle, until my head was under and my memories soaked through.

Nate knew the stars. He had a connection with them, like he was in a book, a magic-boy with a string binding him to the Milky Way.

Some nights we lay on the wet grass by the lake and drifted up there. The sky came right down low above our eyes. The more we stared with no blinking, the more stars we could see. Like they were fire-spiders pulling us up inside their web, weaving us into their blue nets full of light. I was less off-course on those nights with Nate. I felt found again.

On our last day of school, we roamed our best places until dark, feet bare and holding hands. Nate rolled up his certificate like a telescope.

"I can see for freakin' miles," he said. His voice was rasping with hopes. And I could feel a tremble in his thigh against mine. Starred nights were Nate's favourite time.

"I can think straight. See a path."

That's what he always said. His destiny wouldn't be at the coal-face always. He knew it and so did I.

Never wanted nothing more than to walk that path with Nate. Never did say it though. Had no right to push myself on someone with a brain and a dream and a path.

And that's why Nate knew nothing about me. He could read the stars. He could bewitch a chicken. But shutters were latched on my thoughts. No folk allowed there. Not even Nate.

All the lake days and waist-high cornfield days and blue-star nights went away when school finished.

"Get that broom sweeping, Carrie. Don't pay you for thinking, do I?"

That's what Aunt Lawrence always says. She thinks I'm lucky to have work. Lucky my folk didn't kill me when they saw my little baby, blue in the bedclothes. She puts the mop in my hand before I'm up her steps. Before I'm level with the stone lion by her door. Thrusts it at me like I'm wild boar rampaging on her dandy lawn.

That's my life. A circle, it is. Day begins in the old chicken-house in back of Aunt Lawrence's. Round to her door, my head hanging low in gratitude. The two mile track up to my old school to boil dinners. Down the other side of the valley to Hardwick's to bruise my knees wiping the butchery floor at the tail-end of a day's slaughter.

Hardwick likes me using rags, watches from behind while I'm down there, backside in the air. Sassy Clements works on confectionary by the window. Other end from me. You need clean pig-tails and white petticoats for that. Hardwick gave her a straw hat with silk ribbons. 'Hershey's Milk Chocolate Kisses' is what's printed in pink on the brim.

She gives me a hard smile when she finishes for the day. Bites off the head of a sugar mouse. Pitches the hat on a hook behind her counter. I watch it swing after she skips out the door, the shop bell jangling long after she's gone.

Now we're grown, I strive to get a glimpse of Nate. When I stand up to rinse the bloodied cloths, I see him pass by. A flash of his moon-lit yellow hair on winter nights as he strides home from the coal-face. A dark blur of wide woollen shoulders when the fog comes down.

In summer I see more. The air is sweeter. Coal dust like black powdered sugar frosts the hedge-rows. And he looks in and waves. Sassy spins round and waves back. Looks at me with triumph blaring from her pebbly eyes. But, sure as slow-worms, that wave of his is meant for me.

One day he goes by clean. His face is peach-skin, like when we were kids. Sassy rustles her Baby Ruth candy bars and nestles them in a box. She turns to blow him a kiss. And he smiles at her. Then at me. It's a sorry smile.

I never had a sorry from no one before. And it means he knows. He must have cranked open those shutters of mine without me realising. One of those times by the lake where skunk-cabbage and squirrel-corn brawl over the moist earth, leaves lolloping all over. One of those times when we looked into each other and Stone Gap all but disappeared. Alls I knew was how deep I loved him. And he must have known it too. I can tell now by his sad smile and by his eyes travelling in sorrow over Sassy's white apron.

Sitting in my coop that night, I heard the overgrown grass whisper. Still knew his tread. He came in there and smoothed the hair from where it fixed wet to my cheeks. He kissed both my eyelids. His lips left a print only I can ever feel. Then he took my hand and we went out together for the last time.

"We can have us a marriage ceremony right here. One that the good Lord won't see, sorry to tell. Private for just you and me," he told me.

So down we went to the edge of the lake and let the sky be our witness and the screech-owl our preacher. This was just how the first wedding in the world must have been. Nate said he'd love me even when the planets slipped their tracks.

And he fashioned a bit of old metal into a circle that fitted my finger fine as any ring from Fancy Goods. And we looked way out over the glass surface of the water that was begging to be broken by our bare bodies.

"That sure as God is perfect," Nate said, eyes on me.

I began to pull off my dress. He stopped me with his hand, gentle on mine.

"Best keep it that way," he said, looking to the horizon that marked the endless beginning of his journey. A firm faraway line separating the smooth water and the endless reach of the sky.

And that was where our marriage had to end.

His wedding to Sassy took place next day in a cloud of rice. Day after that, he became Teller in her Pa's bank. The baby was coming by Christmas. He had his path laid out neat, did Nate.

And I stayed under his spell. Always will. Said 'I do' and meant it. Just the same as Sassy meant it when she spoke the same words in her lace gown and orange blossoms.

Cleaning, boiling, toiling, kneeling. Round in a circle like a chicken in the yard and back to the coop every day. Sundays tending our baby's little spot under the lime trees, shady side of Stone Gap church-yard. Thinking how my Nate out there in the city knew me all the time. Wearing my wedding ring 'til the planets slip their tracks.

© Joanna Campbell, 2011

The precious things of Imogen’s library / 2nd in 2010/11 Competition

2011-06-06T10:44:00.000-07:00

The precious things of Imogen’s library
by Douglas Bruton

Imogen makes paper from the wood of mulberry trees. It is sometimes called ‘rice paper’, though it is not the kind that sticks to the bottom of currant buns in the baker’s shop, brittle and melt-on-the-tongue paper. No, mulberry paper, used once to make packets for rice, is something beautiful and strong, and all the words written there will last beyond her life and his.
            Imogen writes him letters, always has. That’s what it feels like, at least. She writes him letters on paper she makes from the stripped bark and the white inner fibres of mulberry trees, and the deckle-edged paper is as white as snow can be, or clouds, or swan feathers. White as white, until she writes, his name first and then all her words, all the words she has to tell him she loves him. And each letter is drafted and drafted until it is right, and all the not-quite letters she writes are folded and tucked into the leaves of books in her library, a surprise to the reader when the page is turned and falls out a sheet of mulberry paper and the words written there are almost perfect, the shape of them, the straightness of the lines, and the shiny black of the dried ink, shiny like it is still wet, still new.
            The pen she uses was a gift from her grandfather, a nib of chased gold and the handle carved with flowers and butterflies, so that she thinks of summer when she holds it. At first she did, when love was new, and every day was a little brighter because Imogen loved. And the letters she wrote then, were all dancing ink and skip-skipping words, to tell him what he was to her.
            Imogen, alone now in her library, sits at her writing desk, bent over her writing, and the light of greyer days falls on her paper. The scratch scratch of her pen is sometimes the only sound, each word written in her held breath, so she is dizzy a little at the end of each line, and she lifts her head to see what she has written, and she breathes then.
            Black is the ink, and never fading, for she makes the ink-sticks, too. Imogen follows an ancient recipe, written in a book, a Chinese recipe. ‘Words written with ink made this way, will be forever-words,’ her grandfather had said. ‘So take care that what you write is true, for it can never be erased and will be true for all time.’
            In a small wood-burning stove she once set to flame selected pieces of pine and the smoke carried soot to settle on the surfaces of inverted bowls she had placed high in the flue – the finer soot travels furthest. And the soot, feather-soft and light as breath, she mixed with glue made from the boiled horns of young deer, the spit-bubbles breaking on the surface of the pot and hot as fire on her skin, making black blister tattoos if she was not careful. Then the mixture was slow-cooled into moulds, shaped into sticks that she keeps in a velvet-lined wooden box. She added a musk scent before, to the glue, so that the letters she wrote then smelled of flowers and all the words she wrote were made sweet in their reading. Now she adds spat-bile and sometimes the ground bodies of dead spiders or the stings of wasps.
            He wrote to her, this Imogen-loved-man, once he did. A letter a day he wrote. Lost days now, except she has the letters still. One letter for every day of their first year, and only. Imogen remembers the rattle of her letterbox and the rush to see, and all her world, in those moments before opening, before reading, made fragile as ice flexing on the skin of shallow water, and she held the unopened letter in her hand, as if she could measure its contents by the weight of it. And all those one-a-day letters are laid out on the floor in one corner of her library now, each letter open and weighted down with a fork or a spoon or a knife. And the folds and creases in his letters almost tear the paper, and the ink is fading and fading so that his words are disappearing, thinning to nothing, like hot breath hanging in cold air. Lucky it is that Imogen has each of his letters learned by heart and can see the words on the page even when she closes her eyes.
            Dear Imogen, dear dear Imogen, and dearest Imogen, and darling and sweetheart, and back to dear, and then just Imogen. Those letters are a map of his love for her, fuller and fuller at the start, and then lighter and lighter, until the lightest of all and his last: ‘Imogen, stop’.
            But she has written a letter for every day since, thousands and thousands, all the drafts tucked into the books of her library, sometimes two in the same book. And her folded mulberry paper letters, years of them now, are as crisp and new as the day she wrote them, and the black-ink-words seem new-scratched.
            Imogen grinds the ink-stick over the wetted surface of the ink-stone. Wet with clearest, coldest water once. Wet now with her tears, and they are cold too. The ink-stone was handed down to her, like the pen, and the secret of ink, and the recipe for making paper. A dragon’s tail stone it is, from Wuyuan, dark and smooth, and carved over with skulls, their mouths open and grinning. And Imogen works the ink-stick over the flat surface, grinding, grinding, and the soot mixing with her tears makes the black ink for her pen.
            He came to her, years back, dissolving years. He came to her some nights when the moon was sleeping and the night was inky dark, though never as black as the ink she makes. He stood below her window and called her name, and wrote poetry on the air with what he said, and those words have thinned to nothing too, for they were only breath. And on those sweet-breath nights Imogen lowered a key tied to a ribbon, so he could come inside.
            There is a letter hidden somewhere, in one of the books, on one of the shelves, and in it Imogen describes just the sound of his feet on the stairs, on the first and second and third, on all thirteen of the steps that brought him to her bedroom. Each step was a different sound in her head and is still. In another letter she describes his undressing and in another the noise of his clothes falling to the floor as he danced out of them and danced into her bed.
            Some nights now, in the shuttered dark, and the shuttered silence, she listens, and thinks again she hears the soft step step step of him, and the dancing, and the shush shush of his clothes falling from him.
            Another letter and another, so many letters, tell of his love-making, the touch of his hand, on her, of his fingers, in her, like he was playing music into existence, or like he was drawing breathless fish to the surface of still water. And the music rising and falling, and the water playing through his fingers, and Imogen’s breath coming short, and that was like dancing too, the wreckless rush of dancing, towards something. And then the weight of him on her, pressing her, flat as paper, and grinding and grinding, and hard as stone it might be, and hurting her, burning, like the spat blisters of breaking glue-bubbles. And she calls out his name, still she does, her mouth making the shape, but no sound coming, only gasping, for air, like a tickled fish when it is snatched out of water, and cannot breathe.
            And afterwards, as he slept, Imogen wrote her love into the creases of his skin, behind his ears, buried in the hair under his arms, out of reach high on his shoulders, and beneath the dark curls at the back of his neck. A small brush she had beside the bed and a well of soot-black ink. Then, when he had gone, she imagined another woman, discovering the messages she had written on him, and every word would be a wound in that wife-woman’s heart.
            ‘Imogen, stop’. That was his last letter. She ran her fingers over and over the page as if there might be more he had written, and the maybe-words were merely invisible, penned in lemon-juice or tears. ‘Imogen, stop,’ was all he wrote, and sting enough there was in that. But Imogen could not stop. For weeks afterwards she sent letters to his home, protesting her love, and replaying all he did with her, in the dark of no-moon nights, and calling his name, and calling calling, till he came again, one last time. Not in dark this time, or in night; not sneaking in with her ribbon-hung key, but come knocking, at her door, knocking hard enough she hears it yet, like an echo sounding down the years in all the rooms of her house. And the tap of his shoes made a different sound on the steps to her bedroom that day, and he did not undress, not like before, though she begged him to.
            There is a letter she never sent, the first not-sent letter, given over to describing the roughness of his coat on her bare skin that not-night visit, the coat he kept on, and the shut-buttons of his trousers pressed into her thighs, leaving bruises there like small coins, small change; and the dirt from his boots writing scribbled messages she could not read on her clean sheets; and he kissed her, at least in her memory he did, not like before, but if she closes her eyes, it is something the same, she thinks.
            ‘Imogen, stop,’ he said, like in the letter, and his tears fell onto her cheek, or maybe not his tears, but the spittle of his spat words. And he tried to push her from him. ‘Imogen stop,’ the words of his last letter and the last he spoke, the last he would ever speak.
            The letter-opening knife she used, to write her name into his forever-heart, was once her grandfather’s knife, and now sits on a shelf in her library, with the paper she makes, and the ink-sticks, and the pen, and the Wuyuan ink-stone. And his dried blood is a deepening blackness on the blade of that knife.
            And the blackest ink of all - and here‘s a secret that is her own - the ink of all Imogen’s last-years letters to him is made from the soot of his burned heart, burned black and brittle as coal, and that soot is the finest of all.
            Imogen sits at her desk. Long hours she sits, grey on her now, her hair thinning to something like smoke, and her hand shakes between the words she writes, her breath held as before, and she hears a different rattle, sometimes she does, not her letterbox but something in her, and then she is wracked with a hacking cough afterwards. Still she writes, and writes, and all her black words are full of spite and hate and curses, against his leaving, against him cold now in a secret-garden grave, heartless, just bone maybe, and all the rest made to ash or dust. And the letters she writes to him, all her letters, are also full of love, not easily deciphered perhaps, but there between the lines and the words, and every slow-writ word is both a beautiful and wicked thing. And the brief and briefer letters she writes, these her last, she tucks into envelopes, same as before, his name scratched on the front and the letter slipped between the pages of the books in Imogen‘s library.

© Douglas Bruton, 2011

Looking for Michael / 3rd in 2010/11 Competition

2011-06-06T10:42:00.000-07:00

Looking for Michael
by Sarah Hegarty

‘What brings you to Africa, Jill?’ Dana’s voice rises and falls behind me in the afternoon heat.
            She appeared at my door ten minutes ago, opening it as she knocked. I was sitting at my desk, thinking about Michael. Now I can tell she’s scanning the small room, searching for photographs of grandchildren; maybe an airmail letter; proof that someone cares.
            I keep my back to her. ‘Oh, you know – to do my bit for humanity.’
            At least I’m conforming to type: the stuck-up Brit, cold-shouldering the friendly Aussie. Since we arrived, a week ago, I’ve watched her working her way round the other volunteers, extracting their stories with a cheery smile and a pat on the arm.
            I hear the bed squeak. I turn round. She’s parked herself on the thin bedcover, her thighs spilling out of her shorts. I imagine her sweat on the sheet.
            She looks up at me, her wide, freckled face innocent as a child’s. ‘Do you have a medical background, then?’
            ‘Yes.’ A long time ago, but that’s none of your business.
            Beside me on the desk lies Morag’s farewell present, in its worthy recycled paper; a flat, square parcel, ticking like a time bomb in my heart. I was about to open it when Dana burst in. I presume it’s a book: my daughter-in-law has a book for every occasion. She pressed the package on me as we kissed the wrong cheeks on what feels like the other side of the world. My grand-daughter hugged my knees. I was glad when the taxi beeped at the gate. I walked down the path without looking back.
            Dana’s foot, in its pink flip-flop, lands on my copy of Out of Africa. She picks it up. ‘What’s this about?’
            ‘Haven’t you read it?’
            ‘I don’t think so?’ She shakes her head and her mousy hair, in two ridiculous bunches, swishes at her jaw. ‘Is it good?’
            ‘I used to think so. It’s – poignant. Love and loss in colonial Africa.’
            Her face closes down. ‘Not exactly relevant to us, then.’
            Maybe not to you, I want to say. It’s certainly a different world from Good Hope Clinic, with its endless stream of enthusiastic volunteers, applying a sticking plaster to the continent’s gaping wound.
            I turn back to my desk and take out my notepad and biro. I had half-thought of keeping a journal here, although I don’t know who would read it.
            The bed sighs as Dana stands up. ‘Time for my shift. I’ll let you get on.’
            ‘Okay.’ I turn round and smile a thin smile.
            She opens the door. Cooler air drifts in from the corridor. ‘Well, you take care, now, Jill. If you ever feel like a beer, just give me a call. Tutaonana!’
            ‘What?’
            ‘It means, see you later.’ She looks exasperated.
            ‘I thought it was kwa heri.’
            ‘That’s goodbye.’
            ‘Oh. Tutaonana, then.’

I intended to learn Swahili before I got here, but I’m not a natural linguist. I envy those who can tune into different tongues. I would rather people who spoke to me in broken English said nothing. But then, I’ve never been a talker. Not like Michael.
            They didn’t stress, at the introductory session, that we had to learn Swahili. My age didn’t matter, either. I was interested, and I had the funds. When they found out I used to work in paediatrics – even though my qualifications were out of date – they were keen to sign me up.
            I didn’t mention Michael on all the forms I filled in; just said I had no dependants. My reasons for volunteering? I lingered over that one. To understand what my son found in Africa. In the end I wrote, To give something back. But then I wanted to scratch it out. Haven’t I given enough?
            On the way from the airport, as our minibus lurched and crawled through the Nairobi streets, I searched the gaudy billboards for a picture of Michael, or his name. That sounds stupid, I know. And there was nothing: just ads for mobile phones and Coca-Cola, and warnings about Aids. He wasn’t news. And how could he be? It was months ago.
            There were five of us on the journey: me, Dana and a Swedish girl were coming here; two young French guys were being dropped off on the way. While they tried to talk to each other I stared at the city through the open windows. The smell of heat, fried food and diesel fumes drifted in. I wanted someone to look me in the eye. I wanted to ask them, What do you want from us? But everyone was preoccupied. Women in brightly-coloured dresses weaved through the traffic, loaded baskets on their heads; others bent over stalls piled with vegetables and fruit. Skinny dogs hunted, nose down, in the gutters. Was this what Michael saw? Cars and trucks came at us like images in a computer game. I suddenly remembered him, as a child, sitting cross-legged in front of the screen, playing his favourite Super Mario game; lost in a parallel world. I was always glad when he was occupied. I squeezed my eyes hard against the picture. I put my jacket behind my head and tried to sleep, jolting in and out of disjointed dreams.
            Five hours later, we pulled up in front of the clinic. Its squat, white buildings sat in a strangely familiar landscape of grassland and flat-topped trees. I recognised Dr Mboto, the medical director, from his blurry picture on the photocopied letter. ‘Welcome to Africa!’ he shouted, as we stepped down onto the worn grass. He offered each of us a crunching handshake. His eyes were tiny behind milk-bottle glasses; his round, shiny face split by a smile.
            We trailed behind him, dragging our luggage, as he led us through the clinic grounds to the accommodation block. ‘We are very pleased you come here,’ he called over his shoulder.
            It was late afternoon, but still hot. I thought of Morag and Lily at home with the central heating on, windows and doors shut against the cold, and my heart tripped.

Just walking from my room to the main block makes me sweat. I’m glad to reach the cool of the dispensary. Tumi, one of the medical assistants, is standing under the ceiling fan, laying out tubes of eye cream and antiseptic ointment on a battered tin tray. She smiles, and looks me up and down. Under her worn white coat she always seems to wear her Sunday best; I’m sure she despairs of my drab outfit of t-shirt and loose trousers.
            When I reach for a pile of leaflets on how to prevent HIV, she puts her hand on my arm. ‘Good girl! You leave your rings behind.’ They advised us not to bring anything valuable.
            ‘I don’t have any rings.’ My eyes start to sting.
            She puts down the tray and stands, hands on hips. ‘No husband?’
            Through the open window we can hear the women chattering, kids calling and shrieking.
            ‘No. Just a son.’ I open the door to let her through.
            ‘I hope somebody care about you.’ She swings through the door to the clinic.

Our patients understand the meaning of the word. They walk miles to get here. Then they wait, immobile in the boiling shade, chewing thick black lumps of molasses or stalks of sugar cane. Their children run in the dust, kicking up tiny sandstorms. The older ones look at me with serious eyes when I check their pulse, or take their temperature. They don’t speak.
            It’s a long afternoon: eye infections, diarrhoea, fever, racking coughs, complications from poor nutrition. We do what we can, with what we have. The contrast between the supplies we ration and the contents of the medical bag in my room strikes me again. I’ve got tubes of antiseptic and antihistamine cream; stuff for diarrhoea; alcohol swabs for scratches and bites. I’ve had all my jabs. Even though malaria isn’t rife here I’ve taken my anti-malaria pills, just in case. A line from Out of Africa comes back to me: something about white men trying ‘to insure themselves against the unknown and the assaults of fate’. But that’s not true. Michael didn’t.

It’s early evening by the time we finish. I’m stacking chairs in the waiting room, so I can mop the concrete floor, when an old lady shuffles in. She puts a rolled-up bundle on the table by the door, on top of the pamphlets on hygiene and how to use condoms.
            ‘Salama, daktari,’ she starts, through stumps of teeth. ‘Tafadhali, naomba msaada?’
            ‘Salama. Sisemi Kiswahili.’ I stumble over the unfamiliar words. I repeat it in English. ‘I don’t speak Swahili.’ But I can guess what she’s asking. I put down the chair and walk over to her.
            The bundle is a threadbare blanket. She opens it slowly. In the folds, curled like a fossil, lies a small boy. She strokes his arm. ‘Mother dead.’
            The child’s closed eyelids flicker. His skin is hot and dry. ‘How old?’
            ‘Mbili.’ She holds up two crooked fingers. He looks less than one. She picks him up and holds him out to me. He doesn’t cry.
            Without thinking I take him. He weighs almost nothing. I feel his bones against my chest. He smells of vomit.
            The old lady prods my arm, and signals that the child’s bowels keep emptying.
            He’s dehydrated, and feverish; he should be on a drip, but I doubt his body would take it. Our supplies are very basic. I stand, holding this new burden. I wonder how many times Michael stood in a room like this, and looked into an old face, or a young face, and said – what? Did – what?
            The old lady picks up the blanket and drapes it over her shoulder. She looks at the floor; at the door; anywhere but at me. And now I see. This is her grandson. She’s a grandmother, too.
            ‘Okay.’ I touch her arm. ‘Okay.’

I get a clean towel and wrap the child in it, and carry him to the dispensary.
            Tumi’s checking the contents of a cupboard against a list. She looks up when I come in.
            ‘Can you give me some rehydration salts? He’s had vomiting and diarrhoea.’
            She comes over, takes his hand and checks his pulse. She shakes her head. ‘No good.’ She touches my shoulder.
            I shake her off. ‘Look. I’ll do it.’ I can see the boxes, behind the glass. ‘I won’t need much.’
            She shrugs, then passes me a box.
            Still holding him, I tip the salts into a tin jug and measure in the water. It takes longer, with him on my hip; strange, to be doing things one-handed again, after all this time.

At the back of the clinic is a room with a couple of empty beds, a small table, and a chair. I put the jug on the table and sit on the chair, the child propped in the crook of my arm. He feels like a husk. I dip a spoon in the jug, and touch the tip of the spoon to his mouth. A trickle of water slides in. I do it again; keep giving him tiny sips. Some of it goes into his mouth, some onto his skin. He barely moves.
            Tumi peers in, and gives me a look that says I’m wasting my time, but she comes back with a bowl and a cloth, and I touch the cloth to his hot forehead. I give him more sips of water; slowly, slowly. They stay down. He seems to be cooler. I knew it would work. Common sense: that was all. His breathing is shallow, but regular. I keep putting the spoon to his lips, dripping water into him, willing him to survive.
            The room darkens around us. I switch on the lamp. Then I remember what I used to do when Michael was ill.
            Closing my eyes, I can see the first line: ‘I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills…’ I tell the child about the trees, the flowers, the problems of growing coffee. I give him more sips of water. He seems more willing to take it. I lay him down on the bed, and put a thin sheet over him. I remember the story about ‘the big chief Kinanjui’, and start to tell him how the chief held court, smoking cigars; and wore a cloak of monkey-skins. It feels odd to say that. ‘Things were different then,’ I whisper.
            In the shadows I suddenly see Michael, his face creased in disbelief. Look around you, Mum. Here’s the legacy of those days. Can’t you see?
            Yes, Michael. I see. But look, I’m doing something. I’m trying to do what you did.
            I’m proud of myself, sitting in the gloom with this little boy: sliding water into his mouth; gently swabbing his limbs with the wet cloth; watching the thin skin on his ribcage rise and fall.
            Fever’s unpredictable, you see. It always spikes up, in the small hours of the morning. But the child is calm. He lies still, curled under the sheet.
            I’m flying over the Ngong Hills, to collect Michael and bring him home, but the plane is old and slow. There are no lights, anywhere. I look to my right, and through the window see a vulture. It comes in close, its head touching the windowpane. I look into its eye. The socket is empty. If I can get the plane to go faster, I’ll get to Michael before the vulture does. Then we’ll talk: the words that burn in my chest, day and night. But the plane is so slow I’m drifting through the air, sinking. And the medicine in the hold, that will make Michael better, is sliding out. I look through the cockpit as I fall down. I open my mouth to scream but no sound comes out. The engine stutters and shudders. The ground is coming up fast.
            ‘Jill!’ Someone’s shaking me. I look up, into a freckled face. ‘Go to bed! You’re bushed.’
            I don’t remember where I am. My heart’s racing. Slowly the panic of my dream settles into the familiar dull weight in my chest. I look at the bed. It’s empty. The sheet is soiled.
            ‘He’s gone. His grandmother’s taken him.’ Dana moves between me and the bed, as if to break the spell. ‘You need to sleep. Come on.’ She reaches to help me out of the chair. I take her hand and get up stiffly, my legs as spindly as a puppet’s.
            We walk like two old people back to my room. The sky is lightening, birds starting to chatter and call; soon the relentless heat will be back, bringing a new day.
            ‘This bloody country.’ I want to scream. ‘Do you ever get used to it?’ I feel stupid, as if I’ve been in a waking dream that everyone has tried to tell me would end this way.
            ‘I don’t know.’ Dana is weary. ‘You know about hospitals. It’s just worse here.’
            ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have come.’
            ‘That depends.’ She stops by my door.
            ‘What do you mean?’ I look down at the wall. A small black spider is inching towards a crack. My eyes and throat are burning.
            ‘Depends what you came for. But we’ve all got our reasons.’
            ‘Yes.’ Suddenly I see Michael, for the last time, on my doorstep in the grey rain: Don’t try to stop me. You don’t understand. A thick, hot bubble rises in my throat. I push the door hard, stumble into my room and lock the door. I fall onto my bed and howl, stuffing the pillow into my mouth so no one can hear. I sob myself into a feverish sleep.
            I dream of nothing.

When I wake, still in my clothes, the room is hot and bright. My eyes sting and my throat’s sore. I sit at my desk and drink the remains of a bottle of lukewarm water. Morag’s present is still there. I’m sure it’s a paperback: an eco-friendly guide to sight-seeing in Africa, or something practical about bereavement.
            Why do my hands shake as I rip the paper? But it’s not a book: it’s a photograph album, with a dark blue cover. On the first page is a picture of Lily and me, at Christmas, Lily wearing the red cardigan I knitted her; then there’s a photo of her and Morag. Clumsily I separate the stiff pages, but the rest are blank – no doubt for my adventures here. Where’s Michael? I’m about to fling the album across the room when I see an envelope, under the plastic on the last page. I imagine Morag’s rounded, childish writing. What’s she going to say? My heart knocks as I tear the flap. But there’s no letter. I pull out a photograph. I’ve never seen it before: it takes a while to work out. It shows a group of people, some wearing white coats, standing outside a low-rise building, like the ones here. There’s a big, empty sky, and trees at the edge. I search the faces. Then my heart thuds. There he is: my son, with his colleagues, on his last project. He’s laughing in the sunlight. Perhaps he’s just made a joke – everyone else is laughing, too. I flip the picture over. There’s a date on the back – August 12, 2010 – six months ago.
            I stare at the wall. I picture Morag and Lily, wrapped up against the cold, hurrying to playgroup in the dank Edinburgh morning. I think of Michael, who had to come back, just one last time.
            Kwa heri, my son.
            Now I can’t stop the tears and I stare at the picture, stare at his eyes, at his smile, until his features blur into the face of the person next to him, and behind him, until I can’t see him any more.

© Sarah Hegarty, 2011

The Golden Chain

2011-05-07T09:20:00.000-07:00

Exeter Writers member Margaret James will be at Waterstone's Roman Gate store in Exeter between 2pm and 5pm on Saturday, May 14, to sign copies of her new novel The Golden Chain.

The Golden Chain follows The Silver Locket as the second book in a trilogy of wartime romance. As it's published by commercial women's fiction publisher Choc Lit, there will be samples from the chocolatiers Montezuma's.

Sophie Duffy wins Luke Bitmead Bursary

2011-03-04T16:30:00.000-08:00

Scan and text reproduced by
permission of Express & Echo.

From the Exeter Express & Echo, news of a success for one of our members:

Sophie celebrates top writing award

AUTHOR and mother-of-three Sophie Duffy has won the third Luke Bitmead Writer's Bursary.

Mrs Duffy, from Teignmouth, has received £2,500 and a publishing contract with Legend Press for her novel The Generation Game.

The novel, which is primarily set in Torquay, will be published this summer.

The 42-year-old, who is a member of the Exeter Writers Group, said she was delighted as she has been writing seriously for ten years.

She said: "I'm really relieved the hard work is paying off. I'm very grateful and I'm going to use the money to buy a new laptop.

"I'm now really looking forward to working with Legend Press and seeing my book published."

The bursary was set up by Luke Bitmead's family in association with Legend Press, after Luke's tragic death at the age of just 34. The bursary aims to encourage and support the work of struggling, talented writers whose work is yet to be published.

The judging panel included best-selling authors Sam Mills and Zoe Jenny, Luke Bitmead's mother and sister, and Legend Press representatives.

Tom Chalmers, the managing director of the Legend Press, said: "The judges were impressed and charmed by Sophie's witty and refreshing style of writing.

"The theme running throughout is original and ties in exceptionally well with the plot.

"The balance between the two shows Sophie's true writing talent, and delivers a humorous depiction of the challenges we face, in a sensitive and enthralling way."

Mrs Duffy, whose writing has been compared to that of Kate Atkinson and David Nicholls, said: "The Generation Game is a novel about a girl who grows up with a strange family and comes to realise that family means people who love you.

"It's a bit funny and a bit sad. It's set against the backdrop of national events such as the royal wedding and the miners' strike."

She finished the novel around four years ago, and has since written another, This Holey Life, which was runner-up in the Harry Bowling Prize in 2008. Mrs Duffy, who has had a number of short stories published, has just started work on a third novel. Her children are now aged 12 to 15, but when they were small, Mrs Duffy started an evening class in creative writing. This led to her doing an MA in the subject.

"I've always loved English and read a lot," she said. "Once you start writing, it becomes addictive."

She volunteers as a youth worker but finds a few hours during the day to write. For 14 years, Mrs Duffy was a teacher. She said that one day, perhaps, she would teach creative writing.

- Express & Echo, January 27, 2011

See also the Legend Press website, which has a report on the presentation ceremony - see Bitmead Bursary evening.

In memoriam: Marjorie Stiling

2011-02-02T10:49:00.000-08:00

"Some sow, others reap"

We are sorry to announce the death of Marjorie Stiling on 18th January at the age of 93. Her funeral took place on 31st January at the Devon and Exeter Crematorium.

Marjorie was one of the first eight members of Exeter Writers when the group was launched in 1950, and, as far as we know, the last survivor of those founders. She kept up her interest in the group until the late 80s, and her report of its history (originally as "Exeter Writers´ Circle", later amended to "Club") can be found by clicking on History. Her self-published crime novels, Whisper Murder (2000) and Murder by Proxy (2007), and a short non-fiction work, Famous Brand Names, Emblems and Trademarks (1980), are available through Amazon.uk.

Marjorie never achieved major success with her writing, but she left a lasting legacy in Exeter Writers, still going very strong sixty years later. We like to think she would be proud of us.

- cg

Writing Your Novel

2011-01-03T04:35:00.000-08:00

One of our members, Margaret James (author of The Silver Locket and Elegy for Queen) is running a workshop, Writing Your Novel, at Exeter Central Library on Saturday 8th January.

The event, one of a series held by CreativeWritingMatters in Exeter, is from 10am-3pm.

For information and booking, see www.creativewritingmatters.co.uk.

Anthology launch photos: November 13th

2010-11-19T12:14:00.000-08:00

Dancing with the Birdman display, Exeter Central Library

The launch event at Exeter Library was successful and enjoyed by all. We sold 86 copies of Dancing with the Birdman. Afterward, members dropped by the Roman Gate Waterstone's to chat to Margaret James - see below - at her own launch of The Silver Locket (and get a free chocolate Hero).

Members and guests, Exeter Central Library

Margaret James at Waterstone's signing of The Silver Locket

Anthology launch: Dancing with the Birdman

2010-10-27T06:27:00.000-07:00

Dancing with the Birdman was launched on Saturday 13th November at Exeter Central Library and included short readings by each of the writers.

From our official press release:

Creativity thrives in Exeter – new collection of city writing is published

The perils of piano lessons in later life, an allergy to blue and white plates and vengeful ghosts – just some of the surprising, entertaining and thought-provoking storylines examined in a new book which is a celebration of Exeter’s creativity.

The collection is entitled Dancing with the Birdman, chosen from the submission by American screenplay writer Pete Simpson who now lives in Devon. Twenty eight writers aged from their 20’s to 90’s are represented in this book of stories, poems, plays and sketches.

The collection marks the 60th anniversary of the Exeter Writers, a group which meets fortnightly with the aim of encouraging creative writing in all forms.

Amongst the contributors are historical novelist Margaret James, whose 14th book The Silver Locket is also being published this month. There is also a story from teenagers’ writer Ellen Renner, author of Castle of Shadows, which received rave reviews in The Times. David Evans, author of the children’s book Thistledown Farm: Farmer John's Boots and other stories, has written a Farmer John story especially for the collection. Other contributors include Exeter University Writer in Residence Clare George, Yeovil Novel competition winner Sophie Duffy, and multiple short story and playwriting competition winner Clare Girvan.

Cathie Hartigan, who teaches creative writing at Exeter College and helped put the anthology together, said: “We certainly have some star writers who’ve achieved critical acclaim. But the book contains pieces of exceptional quality by everyone.

“The contributors come from a wide variety of backgrounds and occupations. What they have in common is that they all love writing and sharing what they’ve written.

“This is the second Anthology and it fittingly celebrates our diamond anniversary. The last one, published in 2007, won the David St John Thomas Charitable Trust's annual Writers' Circles Anthology Trophy, so we are hoping for good things for this one.”

2010/11 Short Story Competition

2010-10-27T06:25:00.000-07:00

Exeter Writers is delighted to announce the opening of its 2010/11 Short Story Competition. For this third annual competition, the first prize has been increased to £250. Entries are invited from all writers, and the closing date is 31 March 2011. For more information and entry details, see the Competition page.

Cyprus Well

2010-10-25T15:55:00.000-07:00

We just added an affiliated link to Cyprus Well. Going under the banner "Literature for everyone in the South West", it's a Lottery-funded registered charity that aims to be a central focus and contact point for all literature-related activities in South-West England.

Cyprus Well is the literature development agency for the South West. As a charity our role is to work with our partners to raise funds to ensure that everyone in the South West can have access to the benefits of reading, writing and enjoying literature.

Features of its website include a Community page, an awards programme, a book of the month feature, a user-submitted events calendar, and more.

Looks interesting.

- RG

City of Thieves

2010-08-05T08:20:00.000-07:00

From the Exeter Express & Echo, August 4th 2010, City author Ellen releases sequel:

DEVON children's author Ellen Renner who wowed the literary scene with her debut book is in line for further recognition — this time for the sequel.

Her second adventure thriller City of Thieves follows her compelling first novel Castle of Shadows, which won the Cornerstones WOW Factor Award for New Writers.

See Ellen's website for more about City of Thieves, which was released today. The author will be appearing at the Paignton Green Festival and giving a reading from the book on the afternoon of Tuesday, August 17, 2010.

Farmer John's Boots: book signing

2010-07-26T12:58:00.000-07:00

David Evans will be signing copies of his book Thistledown Farm: Farmer John's Boots at its official launch on 7th August 2010: 11am-3pm at Waterstone's (48-49 High Street, Exeter). The signing will be in the Cathedral Yard end of the shop.

The Exeter Express & Echo for Saturday 24th July carried a feature about David and his book: 'Farmer John has been with me for a very long time'.

Winners: short story competition 2009/10

2010-06-14T04:47:00.000-07:00

We are pleased to announce the winners of the Exeter Writers Short Story Competition 2009/10. The stories are online: follow the links.

First – Rowena Macdonald - The Silent Isle
Second – Sarah Evans - Us
Third – Amanda Bartlett - Where the Devil Lost his Poncho

Shortlisted:

Alison Bacon - Mouse Years. Sarah England - The Madness Within. Annette Keen - The Self-Preservation Society. Norman Kitching - A Matter of Time. Daniel Knibb - Daughter’s Song. Jenny Knight - I’d Do Anything. Michele McGrath Edwin - Don’t Mess with Meadowside and Five Lamps. Tony Oswick - The Writing Group. Ann Stevens - The Golden Goose.

Thanks to all our entrants.

Membership

2010-06-14T04:46:00.000-07:00

We're sorry, but we have recently had so many new applicants to join the group that we are not able to accept any more at present.

The Silent Isle / 1st in 2009/10 Competition

2010-06-13T13:26:00.000-07:00

THE SILENT ISLE

by Rowena Macdonald

‘"I am half sick of shadows," said
The Lady of Shalott.’
- Tennyson

On either side of the Whitechapel Road chaos is in full flood. Market stall-holders hammer out their patter: “bowl for pound tomato pepper onion bowl for pound”, “seventy pee coriander parsley parsley coriander seventy pee”. An African woman stalks through the customers shouting about God through a megaphone. Behind her is another African woman with a banner that reads ‘Christ is Risen’. A white woman spits at a Chinese woman who is selling pirate DVDs on her patch. A fight breaks out and a bottleneck of people forms around it. The police are called. An air ambulance lands on top of the Royal London Hospital. The noise of its blades obliterates all other sounds. A police car carves a swathe through the traffic and halts between the stalls with a brief whoop of its siren. Even the car’s blue lights seem loud. In Fresh Eatz next to the station the Turkish boy behind the counter cranks the Gaggia and blasts hot steam through the hundredth coffee of the morning.
          Halfway down the Whitechapel Road, overlooking this anarchic carnival, is a cool, lily-scented, dimly-lit island: the Shalothi Beauty Salon. Embowered in this island, languidly waiting for the tinkle of the bell which signals a customer, Shruti reclines on a treatment chair that she has pushed back to the most horizontal position and thinks about the Turkish boy. He is the most handsome boy she has ever seen with his coal-black curls, his broad clear brow, his dark liquid eyes. So much more handsome than the men her family keeps making her meet. Every day, passing Fresh Eatz on the way to and from work, she glimpses him through the window and he always smiles at her.
          Any moment now, Ramesh will put his head around the screen and tell her to wipe the spotless mirrors or sweep the shiny floor. The screen is patterned with peacocks and tigers and divides the main salon from the reception area where Ramesh sits behind a desk reading the Inqilab. Ostensibly the screen is there to protect the customers’ modesty from the eyes of the street – although the truly intimate operations, the Hollywood, Bollywood and Brazilian waxes, occur in a back room – but sometimes Shruti wonders if it is also supposed to stop the beauticians from being distracted by the excitement of life beyond the tinted salon window.
          The only customer is a white girl with dreadlocks whose upper lip Anjali is threading. She keeps waving her arms to make Anjali stop, then sitting upright and dabbing her watering eyes. They both laugh and the girl says something that contains the phrases “oh my God” and “pain”. “Next time…better…not so pain,” says Anjali in English and then, turning to Shruti, she says in Sylheti, “These English girls make so much fuss, eh? So much fuss over a little bit of threading. Though it is true she did practically have a full moustache when she came in.”
          Shruti smirks and Ramesh says loudly from the other side of the screen, “Stop talking about the customers in front of them. One of these days one of them will understand Sylheti and you’ll end up ruining my business.”
          A surprising number of white girls come into the salon. They are attracted by the low prices and the efficacy of the treatments – Ramesh’s beauticians are, under his strict regime, skilful at their jobs. Shruti also suspects they feel adventurous and liberal coming to the Shalothi. She is as interested in them as they are in her. She wishes she could answer the questions they ask when she is divesting their nether regions of pubic hair. But her English is limited to the basics necessary for her job: “Sit here”… “Head back”… “Open legs”… “Sorry for hurt”… “Finished”… “Good?”…On arriving in England a year ago she was given a job in the Shalothi as Ramesh is her father’s cousin. No one has considered that she could go back to school. Every time she suggests it to her father, he changes the subject or says “yes, yes…we’ll think about it…maybe when we’ve got more time and money…” But there never seems to be time or money and so she has gradually started teaching herself English using books borrowed from the Idea Store further down Whitechapel Road. She is definitely getting better at it but there is rarely any chance to practice, except with the white girl customers and, unless she is the back room with them, Ramesh filters their questions, relaying them to her in Sylheti, so Shruti is never sure if Ramesh is giving her the full translation or a mangled paraphrase.
          She supposes she should feel lucky that she isn’t stuck at home and that she has a job she generally enjoys. As she is trying to hang onto this positive thought, the doorbell tinkles, and behind the screen she hears an English voice making an inquiry. “Shruti,” Ramesh announces, “Girl here wants a mehendi. Come out, please.”
          The girl is white and wearing a tiny skirt. It is mid-June and very hot but Shruti can’t believe the girl has actually walked down Whitechapel Road in a garment that barely covers her private parts. Actually, she can believe it, since she sees girls like this every day though the window but, even so, it amazes her. Still, the girl is smiley and full of appreciation as Shruti takes out a fresh foil sachet of henna, snips off the pointed end and begins drawing a swirling spray of leaves and flowers down her left arm, which she plans to extend over her hand and down to her ring-less ring finger. Shruti is the best mehendi artist in the salon and she particularly enjoys decorating white girls because they are impressed by whatever you do, so you can lose yourself in the pattern and not stick to the designs in the template book that Asian girls tend to choose.
          It takes her half an hour to produce an intricate design that rests on the girl’s skin like a mud-caked spider’s web. The girl asks her a question which Ramesh immediately answers.
          “She wants to know how long you’ve been doing this; whether it’s taken you a long time to learn,” he explains. “I told her my wife taught you everything you know.”
          Shruti says nothing but this isn’t true. She has been doing mehendi since she was very young. She and her friends used to practice on each other during the breaks at school. She remembers her best friend, Samhita, lounging against the schoolyard wall, impatiently picking off the curlicues of dried henna before it had even had a chance to properly imprint her skin.
          The girl asks another question and again Ramesh replies before Shruti can find out what it was. His answer makes the girl gaze in beatific wonder at the pattern being created on her.
          “What did she want to know?”
          “She wanted to know whether this mehendi you’re doing means anything. I told her it meant Allah’s love was shining down on her.”
          He and Shruti snigger.
          “Why does she want a mehendi anyway?” Shruti asks, “Is she going to a wedding?”
          Ramesh and the girl exchange a few sentences in English, of which the only words Shruti catches are “party’ and “Bollywood”.
          “She’s going to a Bollywood theme fancy dress party.”
          It bemuses Shruti that the English have suddenly caught onto Bollywood. Her bemusement is mixed with something else, something she can’t quite pinpoint – irritation, perhaps; irritation that they never get it right. She imagines this girl and her friends turning up to this party in lengths of cheap shiny cloth fashioned into ill-tied saris, lipstick bindis on their foreheads.
          “Tell her the darker the colour turns out, the more her husband will love her.”
          Ramesh translates the old proverb into English and, after some frowns and demands for Ramesh to repeat himself more clearly, the girl beams at Shruti. She obviously has no husband but Shruti is curious to know if she has a lover.
          “She says she isn’t married but she hopes the colour will show that her boyfriend loves her very much.” Ramesh relays the sounds that come out of the girl’s mouth in reply. Shruti conceals her envy with her most decorous smile.
          The girl leaves the shop in a flurry of delighted gratitude. Shruti watches her disappear into the sunlight with her bare legs and her confident strut and feels a silent sob swell up inside. For half an hour she had been happily lost in her talent for making pretty patterns, but it is not enough. She is sick of the shadowy salon, sick of her hidden away life. She looks at the gold mirrored wall clock. Suddenly she feels brave enough to come out with what she has been daring herself to say for days.
          “Ramesh, can I go out for lunch today?”
          “What?”
          “I want to go out for lunch today.”
          “Haven’t you brought something from home?” Usually Shruti brings in last night’s leftovers.
          “No.”
          “Well.” Ramesh peers behind the screen to see what Anjali makes of this extraordinary request but she is performing further depilations on the dreadlocked girl in the backroom. “You can have some of my lunch. Or I could go and buy something from the corner shop for you.”
          “I want to go out for lunch.” Though she is wobbly inside, Shruti is determined. “I was reading about English employment law and, by law, if I work for more than four and a half hours I am allowed a half hour break spent away from the place where I work if I want.”
          “Where did you read this?”          “A Government leaflet in the Banglatown Women’s Centre.” Helpfully the leaflet had been translated into Sylheti.
          “Well, if that is what the Government says and that is the law…” Ramesh trails off, completely thrown by Shruti’s boldness and the threat of higher authority. “But if any customers come in and Anjali is busy then you must come back. I will ring you on your mobile. Don’t go far. Where are you going?”
          Shruti smiles mysteriously.
          Out in the market, the blue unclouded sky beats down and the bustle, heat and noise slaps her in the face. Without her usual scarf, Shruti feels exposed and noticeable in the pure white shalwar kameez that Ramesh insists all his beauticians wear. She feels foolishly clean as she weaves through the grubby confusion of the market. She heads to Fresh Eatz. Yes, he is there, the Turkish boy behind the counter, his smile as charming as usual, his dark eyes welcoming her as she points to a pastry then to the word on the menu which she knows means coffee. She is too nervous to attempt any English. Her heart is thumping. Here she is, alone, standing opposite the boy she loves.
          He asks her something complicated of which the only word she understands is “milk” so she simply nods. She sits at a table in the window so he can see her and she can glance at him surreptitiously as he works. This is the first time she has ever sat alone in a café. She feels even more out of place and self conscious than she did on the street. Her white outfit seems to glow.
          The fact he must be Muslim will work in her favour; she clings onto a crumb of hope that eventually she will be able to persuade her father, even though she knows Turkey is irredeemably Westernised in his eyes. She yearns for the boy to come over and speak to her but customers keep crowding up to the counter. He is friendly to everyone and she realises with a hollow drop in her stomach that his beautiful smile, the one she thought was for her alone, is given to all. Beyond the window she sees, with a flutter at the coincidence, the girl with the mini-skirt entering the shop, holding her left arm out so as not to smudge the drying henna. Shruti is about to say hello when the most terrible thing happens. The girl doesn’t notice her at all and instead walks straight up to the counter, where the Turkish boy is pouring hot milk into someone’s coffee. In front of everyone, she kisses him full on his red lips and he kisses her back. Shruti’s heart cracks from side to side.

© Rowena Macdonald, 2010

back to competition results

Us / 2nd in 2009/10 Competition

2010-06-13T13:24:00.000-07:00

US

by Sarah Evans

We gather up along the way to school.
          Gemma’s first. Then me, watching for her at the bottom of our road. She’s never when she should be; I always wait. Next is Jess, a few more roads along. Sometimes she walks back to meet us. Last is Trish. It’s off the straight way there. We twist along her narrow street with houses tightly packed, right up to her door. The window is on the road, and the paint blisters and flakes on the sill, and you can’t see in through the grime and net curtains. She opens the door just as we get there, her hair straight and dark, cut to points around her ears – four sets of studs – her jumper tied round her waist, no matter that it’s April and cold.
          Then we’re four.
          Quadruplets.
          Trish is always at the centre.
          We shuffle, jostle and josh our way along. We talk and have a gag. It’s hard to explain just what it feels like, being us. How we’re like bigger, stronger, filled-up and warm on quick-fire laughter. Wicked!
          Close to school we see her: Simone.
          You can tell from her name she’s dead posh.
          Trish has a way of saying it. Si-moan. Miss Moan. She tried to tell us once, Simone did, that that’s not how you pronounce it.
          But what Trish says, goes.
          Simone has ginger hair. It’s not just about the colour though. It frizzes out on top, like a bird’s nest, a bird that isn’t very good at nests, Trish says. Like frigging candyfloss. And then – here’s the really good bit – it goes twisting round in ringlets.
          Ring-lets.
          Who’s ever heard of them?
          They look like copper piping, or rolled brandy-snaps, or the cardboard applicators for tampons for them’s so posh they don’t like to use their fingers.
          Tampax tubes, Trish calls them.
          Simone never laughs. Though you’ve got to admit, it’s funny.
          Tampax tubes. Simone’s face goes red when you say that. It starts like a rash on her neck and creeps upwards. She has freckles too.
          Perhaps she’s too posh to use tampons at all. She might use panty liners that smell of lavender. Or perhaps she’s too bleeding posh to bleed at all. Or she bleeds blue blood, like them adverts on telly.
          Trish has us all in fits of giggles.
          The problem with Simone is, she has no sense of humour.
          That’s what Trish says.

Today Simone’s just ahead of us. Her head is all hunched down into her neck, like she’s a hedgehog. We hurry up to catch up on her.
          ‘Hello!’ Trish says, and you should hear the way she says it, like the Queen. Simone’s eyes don’t hardly leave the pavement. Not exactly friendly like. She just keeps on walking.
          ‘He-llo!’ Trish says it again with a rise on lo, demanding an answer.
          ‘Hello,’ Simone says.
          You’d think she’d learn, wouldn’t you? Only the clever bit is, there isn’t really a way out. Trish is good at that. No reply means Simone’s a stuck-up bitch. But anything she does say provides Trish with ammunition.
          ‘Hiya,’ Trish says back. And then she’s back to posh: ‘So how are you this morning?’
          Simone’s face is turning beetroot. She half trips over the curb into the road, and that’s because Trish is slowly crowding her that way. The rest of us huddle close behind, our faces hot too, from all that holding in of laughter. We’re waiting. For the good bit.
          ‘OK,’ Simone mutters. ‘You?’
          ‘Me? I’m very well thank-you.’ Trish pauses. We wait. ‘Tell me is it true?’
          ‘Is what true?’
          ‘That you bleed blue?’
          It’s almost like a poem.

It’s Gemma and me together in class, with Trish and Jess behind. Us four. Simone’s in front, by herself.
          It’s English. Dead boring.
          Miss Lavender hands our poems back. Trish has come out tops, the way she always does. A big round zero marked up in red. She shows us what she wrote. The pussy. Sat on the hussy. Half-rhyme. Clever like.
          Simone is told to come to the front and read hers. Some complete bollocks about her Siamese cat. Does she ever learn?
          We look out for her in the break, spot her in the corner on her own. Sally used to hang out with her till Trish started on her too. Mostly everyone ignores her. Not us though. We’re dead friendly.
          ‘I liked your poem,’ Trish starts.
          Simone doesn’t answer; she tries to walk away. Only we’re four and crowd in around her.
          ‘All about your pussy,’ Trish continues, and that red colour is rising in blotches up Simone’s neck and clashing with her hair.
          ‘Your grey furry pussy.’ Trish keeps on.
          ‘My cat.’ Finally Simone snaps back.
          ‘Your pussy,’ Trish says. ‘Why don’t you show us her. I never seen a grey one. Does that curl in tampax tubes too?’
          I catch the wildcat look in Simone’s eyes, along with the scent of talcum powder and sweat. And just for a moment the April wind razors through me. Then we run off, laughing.

We look out for her on the way home. Only she isn’t there. Running on ahead or left cowering in the loos, we don’t know.
          Not like we care. We huddle together against the wind as we light a single fag and pass it round.
          ‘Show us yours then,’ a group of lads shout over.
          ‘We’d never find yours,’ Trish shouts back.
          One by one we split off.
          Then I’m home. And it’s just me.

We don’t see Simone the next morning either. Something is wrong when we get to school. We feel it soon as we walk into the class. Mrs Buxton is at the front and the whole class is quiet and still, and her face is like she’s eaten a lemon.
          ‘As I was saying,’ she says, glaring at us, and normally that would be a cue for Trish to mimic it back the minute she looks away. Only today she doesn’t. ‘The police are conducting a series of interviews. The school day will carry on as normal. You will all be called one by one.’
          The police? Interviews?
          We look at one another and shrug. Has to be better than double maths. In front of us, Simone’s chair is empty. But then so’s Kieran’s and Sally’s.
          Then the door opens and Sally comes back. ‘The next one Miss,’ Sally says. ‘They said to send the next one along.’
          She sits down looking smug. Like she’s in on something. She looks over at us, then down at her desk.
          It’s an hour later and no one has even whispered what it’s all about. It’s unnaturally quiet. I’m doodling hearts and flowers, but Mrs Buxton doesn’t seem to notice.
          ‘Katherine,’ Mrs Buxton says. Like she doesn’t know that everyone calls me Kat. ‘You next.’
          I have to wait outside the headmaster’s room on a hard plastic chair. I try not to pick my spots. I fidget and think how if Trish was here she’d turn it into the biggest laugh. The door opens and hands are beckoning me in and Rachel, who was before me, flashes me a look.
          There’s two of them, a man and woman. He’s grey haired and in uniform; she isn’t. He sits behind the headmaster’s desk. She’s perched, one leg half resting on the desk, her skirt stretched tight over her thighs. Like this is dead informal.
          Her lips are glossy red and her hair is black and sleek, and she smells of citrus scent. She smiles. Not friendly though.
          ‘Well Katherine,’ she says. ‘We just have a few questions. Perhaps you could tell me who your friends are.’ Like she’s interested. I stare at her. ‘Your friends,’ she repeats. ‘You do have friends?’
          I feel like it’s a trap, only I can’t find a reason not to mutter ‘TrishGemmaJess’ under my breath. I get a feel of cold, though actually it’s hot in here. My arms are goose-bump tight, but my face is burning up, and I’m sweating. Bloody rashers. I think how Trish would say it. Rashers, bacon, pigs. It’s clever like.
          ‘Trish?’ the woman pig repeats. ‘Patricia Parkinson?’ I look down at my hands, partly because that name doesn’t sound right and partly because something in her look, hard and frozen, tells me I’ve said the wrong thing. I nod.
          ‘And how well do you know Simone Hindmarch?’
          ‘Simone?’ and I say it like she does, without the moan. ‘Not very well.’ Well I don’t.
          ‘Do you talk to her?’
          ‘Sometimes.’ Except usually it’s Trish who does the talking.
          ‘What do you talk about?’
          I shrug. A classic Trish shrug, only instead of making me feel don’t-care, I feel small and tight.
          Pig-woman keeps going on and on. When did I last speak to her? What did I say? What did she say back? Did I talk to her on my own? What did Patricia say?
          I keep saying I dunno, I can’t remember. Only in between other stuff keeps creeping out. Everything I say feels wrong.
          ‘You congratulated her on her poem?’ The woman’s voice is sarcy, almost like Trish’s.
          ‘Yeah.’
          The room is very quiet. A radiator clanks. I hear voices outside. Must be break-time. I shuffle my bum, even though the seat’s a posh one with tapestry padding.
          ‘You see,’ the woman says. She’s talking dead slow like I’m a learning difficulties case, and her teeth are brilliant white against that red lippy. ‘The picture I’m beginning to get. What people are telling me. Is that Simone has been subjected to systematic bullying. And that there are four main perpetrators.’
          Bullying? The bloody little snitch. I try to hear the words in Trish’s voice. Only I can only hear my own.

I’m not allowed back in class. I get sat in a classroom on my own with Miss Davies, the soppy games teacher, who comes to school on Mondays with high necked jumpers, which fail to cover up the chewies on her neck. She gives me a maths book and tells me to work through it, only the book’s too far ahead and the pencil she hands me is broken. Only she doesn’t seem to care. Her eyes never once meet mine. The headmaster comes in and he doesn’t look at me either. He says something to Miss then leaves. His face is grey and grim. Grimshaw. Grimjaw. Grimy-paw.
          ‘You’re being sent home,’ Miss Davies says. ‘Your mother’s coming to collect you.’
          That can’t be right. She has her shift in Asda and she doesn’t get off till late. Only I don’t say anything.
          Just like Mum doesn’t say anything to me, not as we walk to the car, not for all the ten minutes it takes to drive back. Ten minutes takes longer than seems possible. It’s not my fault they sent me home, I want to say. They’ve not even said why.
          The house is colder in than out. Inside, Mum takes hold of both my arms and looks right at me. She’s borrowed that frozen-hard look that everyone is wearing today. She’s looking at me like she’s never seen me before.
          ‘Is it true?’ she asks.
          ‘Is what true?’
          ‘Don’t play games with me.’ She shakes me. ‘Is it true that you’ve been bullying that poor girl? Simone.’
          That poor girl?
          I want to explain. How she’s dead posh and how she asked for it with all her airs and graces and ringlets and putting her hand up in class and writing poems. We were just having a laugh.
          ‘Up to your room,’ she says, like I’m a five year old. ‘I can’t bear looking at you.’
          I’ve not had lunch, and I’m hungry, but I daren’t say anything. I curl up on my bed. Just me.

It’s six when Mum comes up again.
          ‘It’s on the news,’ she says. ‘You should come and watch.’
          What? Only the word doesn’t make it out.
          There’s a picture of our school and Grimjaw looking into the camera and I catch the tail end, ‘…serious incident. We are co-operating fully with the police.’ The camera switches to the hospital and a regimented row of flowers. A man and woman stand there wearing smartly tailored clothes, but looking crumpled. The woman has ginger hair and red eyes. Their lawyer makes a statement. Simone has lost a lot of blood. Her condition is still serious but stable. It’s lucky her mother found her when she did.
          My Mum still won’t look at me, but Simone’s Mum’s eyes seem to be razoring right through mine.
          And it’s just me, and I feel small and sick and hollow.

© Sarah Evans, 2010

back to competition results

Where the Devil lost his poncho / 3rd in 2009/10 Competition

2010-06-13T13:22:00.000-07:00

WHERE THE DEVIL LOST HIS PONCHO

by Amanda Bartlett

She was Spanish and a little bit crazy. He was English and a little bit dull. Her name was Mariaje, a contraction of Maria Jesus. In the first weeks of their relationship, she coached him without cease or mercy on the correct pronunciation. It was the Spanish jota, the ‘j’ in the middle of Mariaje, that he found so difficult to manage.
          "List-en," she said, as they lay in bed together, her syllabic, sing-song English and habitual tone of command ensuring that he did indeed listen, ensuring also a certain ripple of unrest deep in the pit of his stomach. “It is Mariaje. Mariaje, with a jota. Like the ‘ch’ in you-er Scottish lochs.” But David had always pronounced ‘loch’ as ‘lock’ and though he could, with effort, produce the required sound, or an approximation of it, an effect he achieved by imagining he had a hair stuck at the back of his throat, he could do so only in isolation. However much he practiced his jotas before the mirror in the morning, he could never find a way to slide that awkward, hawked-up sound into the folds of her name. For a while he called her Marica, which was easier for him to say and still had a Spanish ring to it, a charming compromise he thought, until one day she threw a plate at his head and informed him that ‘marica’ was an insult. He looked it up in his new Spanish dictionary; the entry read: marica [1] NF magpie. [2] NM sissy. That didn’t seem such a terrible insult to him, certainly no reason to break half the plates in his cupboard. (He only had two, so technically this was no exaggeration).
          “You think I don’t know my own language?” she spat. “My mother tong.” She pronounced it tong. “Mi idioma. That I have been es-speakin’ all-my-life?”
          The real meaning, she maintained, was closer to the English ‘gay-boy’ and though she had put up with his ignorance in private, he had pushed her too far by using the nickname in front of her friends, her Spanish friends, who were laughing at her now behind their faces. Did he still think this was nothing, she demanded, nothing to break plates over. Meekly, David shook his head. He dare not tell her that in England people did not laugh behind their faces, they laughed behind their hands.
          “Abortion is a horrible, horrible es-sin.” Those were the first words she ever spoke to him. He had been a little drunk when he met her and later could not remember, or even imagine, what he must have said to set her off. Probably nothing. She was always coming out with such statements, iconoclastic in the right-on confines of the college, where being pro-choice was the only choice, unless you wanted to become a social leper.
          It was one of the things he liked about her, the way she flung her opinions around with no regard for where they might land or who they might squash. That and her eyes which seemed to flash like those of a pirate in one of his mother’s romantic novels. She was piratical altogether — at least, in his imagination — with her low, almost gruff, voice, her dark skin, and wide, swash-buckling gestures. She made the other girls, with their pronounceable names and manageable tempers, seem suddenly flat and sort of colourless.
          ‘Horrible’: that was her word, a word she made her own not just by the frequency with which she reached for it, but by the pronunciation she forced upon it, the initial ‘h’ being transformed into a jota like the one in the middle of her name, the one he couldn’t pronounce, and the ‘r’s ferociously trilled. Hhhorrrible. The weather was horrible. The food was horrible. The music, the beer, the ambience: all horrible. For the wine, she must break into Spanish to do justice to her feelings of repugnance. The English, themselves, were horrible, with their horrible marmite and their cups of tea. Maybe her words should have worried him more, worried or offended him, but just by virtue of his relationship with her, he felt himself shorn of Englishness, the woolly fleece of mumbled excuses and muddling through being lifted off to reveal a new, lithe, dynamic David, ready to take the leap into a wider, more cosmopolitan world. Besides, marmite had never been his cup of tea.
          She was longing to get away, from the moment he met her. She talked of nothing else, considering in turn every country under the sun, though strangely she never mentioned Spain. David hadn’t been planning on a year out, but he rang UCL and they agreed to defer his entry to the MA programme.
          “After finals,” she said, with accustomed finality, “we go to France. Not Paris. Paris, it will be atiborrado with the English. And Americans.” She had a particular horror of Americans, would reel back if she met one in a bar, grabbing hold of her friend Enrique and growling, “Vaya. Hombre. Que dientes!” It was her assertion that American teeth scared her, that they were too big and brick-like, that they made their owners look like horses. She invented a new brand of toothpaste called Antinamel for slimming down oversize molars. Sometimes, on a night out, she would pretend to be doing market research on behalf of this new product, would seek out the JYAs in the bar and ask them if they wouldn’t jump at the chance to achieve ‘a more European dentition’, smiling up into the faces of big, bluff guys called Chip and Stet, who responded with baffled grins, vaguely aware they were being mocked, not minding all that much.
          “We will go for three months,” she decided. She had a way of pronouncing ‘months’ with such a pure round vowel that he would have agreed, without demur, to go to the ends of the earth and not come back until she said so.
          “Yeah, great, France,” he said. “We’ll cycle. Live off chocolate and baguettes and drink coffee out of bowls —”
          But here he was interrupted by the trill of the phone. They were in bed, Mariaje’s bed, and she had to reach across him to get the receiver.
          “Papi!” Her voice gave a swoop of delight, something it only did when she was speaking to her father, and she nudged at David with her hip, edging him out of bed so she could snuggle up with the phone.
          The next day, before his calculus lecture, he stopped off at the Student Union bookshop and purchased both the Rough and Lonely Planet guides, as well as a copy of Bill Bryson’s Neither Here Nor There, but before he could read them, or even show them to Mariaje, the plan had changed. France was horrible. Even in four-star hotels, the chambermaids didn’t do their jobs. Her Papi had been to Lyon on business and there was ‘e-somethin’ horrible’ in the shower. They would go to Italy, instead. Her Italian was better than her French, so it made more sense. But then it turned out that Papi had been to Italy, too — to Rome — and found it not at all simpatico. She proposed one country after another and David began to fear that the volunteers in the bookshop were laughing at him. Behind their faces, so to speak. But Papi put an end to them all. They were horrible, horrible, horrible.
          “How about Canada?” he said, one day in the library, hoping that Papi had yet to reach that snowy country. Across the table, a crop-headed girl in dungarees looked up from her book and shushed them. David gave a compressed smile of apology and lowered his head, but Mariaje was not about to be silenced by someone who dressed — as she later put it — like a lesbian carpenter.
          “No. Vaya. We get right away. We visit Argentina. Or Chile. Chile is good. We go to ‘Donde el Diablo Perdio el Poncho’.”
          And this time the plan seemed to stick. David held off on the purchase of a guidebook to Chile — already, he had half the world up there on his little shelf crowding out the Schaum’s guides and the spiral-bound notebooks — but after a week, when she was still insisting that they must visit ‘Donde el Diablo Perdio el Poncho’, he relented and made another trip to the bookshop. He couldn’t find any reference in the index, but his knowledge of the Spanish was still virtually nil, so he asked her to write it down. He wanted to check he had the spelling correct. She looked a little puzzled by the request, but lots of things he said or did produced that crinkle of puzzlement between her brows. She scribbled the words on a fluorescent pink post-it and pasted it onto his sweatshirt, smoothing it flat with the palm of her hand. He went back to the book, but still couldn’t find it. The words appeared neither in the index nor in the body of the text, but this did not worry him unduly. Mariaje had said they would be getting right away, far from the beaten track, far from the backpacker track, so it wasn’t surprising that the name was obscure.
          He took the pink post-it with him when he went to buy the tickets, open return, non-refundable, flying to Santiago with a layover in Miami. He handed it to the travel agent and she tucked a lock of hair behind her ear, pursed her lips, and turned to the computer. As she tapped away at the keyboard, drew squiggles with the mouse, clicked on this and that, David saw the confidence, the projected expertise, begin to fade from her face. Nothing: no place names, no hotels, not even a backpacker’s hostel. But David did not let this setback perturb him. Mariaje knew what she was doing. He paid for the tickets in cash. He’d had to sell his car to raise the money, and though they rarely went out in it, since his timidity behind the wheel drove Mariaje into a fury and her habit of leaning over to thump the horn both alarmed and embarrassed him, he still had a hard time explaining its sudden absence from the parking lot outside his halls and an even harder time explaining the absence of a corresponding rise in his bank balance. He could have told her the truth and spared himself an unpleasant and rather thrilling interrogation, but he wanted the tickets to be a surprise. He was aware that some people — Mariaje’s friends in particular — thought him a little bit dull. He wanted to show her that he could be audacious, that he wasn’t afraid to take chances.
          Apart from the tickets, he bought: two rucksacks, two sleeping bags, two aluminium water bottles, a map, a compass, a package of water purifying tablets, fly repellent, all sort of first aid supplies, a set of stackable, lightweight cookware and a camping stove. He also bought a simple diamond solitaire in a velvet-lined box. Actually, the ring was a little more simple than he would have liked, but he had to hold some money back for expenses.
          They had reached the last month of their revision, slogging out sixteen hour days, taking breaks only for Ramen noodles and moonlit strolls around the quad. One evening, at bedtime, it occurred to David that he’d forgotten to shower. He tried to think if he’d showered the day before, but couldn’t remember. “When did I last have a wash?” he asked Mariaje, but she was deep into Beowulf and only murmured that cleanliness was overrated. As if on cue, his skin broke out in a rash of hard white pimples, spreading across his cheeks like the wings of a butterfly. It was not just the lack hygiene, he decided, but the poor diet and all the late nights. He filled page after page with his neat black symbols, kept a bin-bag by his desk to hold all the screwed up sheets of paper. He wrote till his hand cramped, then read till his eyes felt stiff and grainy and sore. His back hurt him. He fell into bed exhausted, yet as soon as he tried to sleep, cruel numbers began to dance before his eyes. Nonsense mathematics filled his dreams and Mariaje complained that he talked in his sleep. One night, he sat bolt upright in bed and shouted out in panic, “That can’t be right. The matrices are all messed up.” Mariaje was angry; he had woken her up.
          “Las’ night,” she said. “I dream a whole Shakespeare play about a mouse that went to live in Genoa. And I do not feel the need to wake you up.” She refused to believe this was something outside his control. He could stop if he wanted, she said.
          At times like these, David would sneak next door to see Gunter, a taciturn German with alarming blonde eyelashes that always put David in mind of a camel. It was Gunter who was hiding all the travel gear, and David needed only the briefest glimpse of it piled up in the bottom of the wardrobe for all the friction and the fractious bickering to melt away. It seemed a little mean to continue with his secret, for Mariaje could also have done with something to hang on to, some emblem of a life beyond exams, but he was wedded, now, to the idea of surprising her.
          Their flight departed two days after his last exam, a paper he jokingly called the final final, because her exams were over a full week before his. It was hard to watch her steal in at one or two in the morning, smelling of summer, sweet liquor, cigarettes, fun. But then, at last, he was finished too. They went out to celebrate, sat in a rooftop beer garden in the sinking heat of evening and drank from a bottle of jerez, smuggled past the bar-staff in the handbag that Mariaje had bought herself as a reward. They walked home arm-in-arm, singing a song that to David was gibberish: eye, yie, yie, yie — went the words — can tanyo your-ays, poorkay cantando say allie gran.
          When the porter phoned up from the lodge, it was barely dawn: Mariaje had a visitor. They went down together wondering who it could be and found a piratical, pot-bellied man with grizzled black hair combed back from his face in crisp corrugations.
          “Papi!” Her hand was gone from his before her voice had finished its familiar swoop. David watched as Papi took his daughter by the shoulders and planted a kiss on either cheek.
          Later, outside a pub where they had meant to eat, but now could not, because Papi found the lack of tablecloths uncouth and unhygienic, the two men found themselves alone.
          “So you will miss my daughter, yong man, when she comes home to Es-spain.”
          David gave a smug smile. He didn’t think Mariaje would ever go back, not without him.
          “Actually,” he said, “that might not be for a while. We’re going on a trip.”
          “A trip!” Papi waved his hand in what seemed to David a gesture of derision. “What trip? When?”
          “Tomorrow, actually.” David’s voice was already a little tight.
          Papi reared back, regarded him coldly. “It is a surprise,” he said, “to me.” He laid a hand on his chest. “I do not say it does not happen, I just say I am not informed.”
          “It’s a surprise for her too,” David said, feeling suddenly, unaccountably, foolish.
          “So!” Papi leaned back in his chair. “That is the essplanation. My daughter is not tellin’ me, because my daughter does not know. But, yong man, how did you choose the destination? It is a dangerous thin’ to make a choice for a woman. You might get a slap when you esspect a kiss.”
          “She chose it.” David was defiant. “She’s been saying for months she wanted to go. So I…I just bought the tickets, for a surprise. We’re going to Chile.”
          “Chile?” Papi arched his eyebrows in salty surprise. “Vaya. My daughter is a remarkable woman. Remarkable and surprising. In what part of Chile do you intend makin’ you-er trip, if a father may be permitted to ask?”
          David had heard Mariaje repeat the words a hundred times, they had become a kind of refrain for her in the last few weeks of her studies, now he must screw up all his powers of mimicry in order to be understood. He framed his lips and opened his mouth:
          “Donde el diablo perdio el poncho.”
          For two full seconds, Papi’s face remained completely blank. David’s heart sank: his Spanish was pathetic. Then Papi let out a bellow of laughter. He leaned over to place a hand on the younger man’s shoulder and would not let him shrug it off.
          “But don’t you know what this means?” he asked, looking into David’s face and laughing, genuinely tickled. “It is not a place, but a phrase. A very amusin’ phrase. South American. Quaint. Vaya. What will be the correct translation? It is like your ‘boondocks’ or your ‘back of beyond’. Literally, where the devil lost his poncho.” He interlaced his hands behind his head, leaned back. “Mariaje is a good girl. Her studies are over; her mother wants her home. An’ I —” he freed a hand to place it on his chest — “I do not say who is right, who is wrong. I only say that my wife is a remarkable woman, a woman who gets what she wants.”
          Mariaje came out of the bar and into the sun. She shaded her eyes. The two men in her life were sitting in silence. She walked towards them, greeting their smiles with a smile of her own.

© Amanda Bartlett, 2010

Site update

2010-03-19T02:58:00.000-07:00

March 19th: Today we migrated all of our site to Blogger, which integrates the weblog and other group pages in one location. We hope you find the site easier to use.
- Site maintainer

Loves Me, Loves Me Not

2010-02-14T09:14:00.000-08:00

Margaret James reports on her recent visit to the Torbay Bookshop in Paignton, where she was among the contributors signing this Romantic Novelists' Association golden anniversary anthology of short stories. The anthology, which also has a story by another of our members, Geoffrey Harfield, has received good reviews including one in the 13th-19th February edition of Heat magazine. The RNA's own blog for the anthology has more background on the contributors.

Castle of Shadows launched

2010-02-05T12:09:00.000-08:00

Ellen Renner

We're pleased to announce the official launch of Castle of Shadows, a children's novel by Exeter Writers member Ellen Renner.

Ellen Renner signing copies of Castle of Shadows.

The book was given a positive review in The Times ...

Adventure stories involving brave boys and girls, a dash of magic and a lot of suspense were once commonplace in children's fiction, thanks to writers such as Joan Aiken, Susan Cooper, Alan Garner and even the much-maligned Enid Blyton. All these have stood the test of time; but where are their heirs? For lovers of Aiken, Ellen Renner's debut, Castle of Shadows, is not to be missed. Set in a country very much like Victorian England, its king is mad and its loved queen has been missing for most of Princess Charlie's life. Charlie has roamed the Castle of Quale for years, learning its secret hideaways and being bullied by servants while her crazy father suspends himself from the ceiling to build a towering castle of cards instead of running the kingdom.

Any adventure that begins with a country 'going down the plinker', revolution brewing and a heroine as spirited as Charlie is going to grab readers aged eight and older by the neck and not let go. Renner's story bristles with talent and brio, craft and polish. Whether Charlie is running through the castle's maze of rooms or out to the gardens where Toby, the gardener's boy, teases her, you know that you're in the hands of a proper storyteller whose characters speak, scold and lie convincingly, and whose plot is full of unpredictable twists.

If Charlie is the usual feisty upper-class brat, she is lippy enough to delight. Once she discovers an unfinished letter from her missing mother, expressing love for her daughter and a fear of what her scientific inventions have led to, the prime minister becomes strangely eager to take up Charlie. But what or who did the queen fear so much? The ending leaves you panting for the sequel, City of Thieves, out this summer.
- Brave boys and girls in children’s fiction, Amanda Craig, The Times, January 30, 2010.

... as well a nice feature in the Western Morning News on Saturday February 6th: Fame is on the cards for Ellen (PDF © WMN, reproduced by kind permission). Luisa at Chicklish liked it too (thanks!).

Castle of Shadows (ISBN-10 1408304457) is published by Orchard at £5.99, and is available direct from the Times Online bookshop.

Members of Exeter Writers gather for the launch of Castle of Shadows by Ellen Renner on Saturday 30th January at Exeter Library.

Thistledown Farm: Farmer John's Boots

2009-12-12T13:26:00.000-08:00

Ahead of the official launch, David Evans' illustrated children's book Thistledown Farm: Farmer John's Boots will be on sale at David's stall this weekend at the Topsham Christmas Craft Fair run by Clare Girvan.

The Fair is at Matthews Hall, Topsham, 11am-4pm on Sunday 13th December.

Book news

2009-09-30T17:11:00.000-07:00

Member David Charles Evans' illustrated children's book Thistledown Farm: Farmer John's Boots and other stories will be in print shortly. Its support website is now live at www.farmerjohnsboots.co.uk.

Exeter Writers' 2008 anthology Exposure has finally made it into the Google Books index at preview level. See here.

Short Story Competition 2009/10

2009-08-13T13:16:00.000-07:00

We are now accepting entries for our 2009/2010 competition.

The closing date is March 31 2010, so you have plenty of time to hone your offering, but please read the rules carefully before sending your entry as failure to comply with them will mean disqualification.

The three winning stories will be announced in July 2010 and published on our website. Good luck to you all.

See our Competition page for rules and an entry form.

Membership at full capacity

2009-08-10T06:32:00.000-07:00

We're very sorry, but we have recently had so many new applicants to join the group that we are not able to accept any more at present.

Competition 2008/9 winners

2009-06-25T06:31:00.000-07:00

The final judging is complete. Exeter Writers would like to thank all those who entered the competition and wrote such a fascinating and varied selection of short stories. We hope you enjoy reading the winning stories. The final line-up is:

First prize:

Learning to Swim by Anne Summerfield

Second prize:

Honour thy Father by Tony Matthews

Third prize:

Swimming Away by Clare Reddaway

Runners-up:
(not in order of preference)

Marigolds in Winter by Linda Mitchelmore

Life Class by Anne M Watts

The Scapedog by Anne Goodwin

Rosie's Kiss by Joan Moules

The Dog in the Pram by Maggie Knutson

Gaudy by Martin Sorrell

Straight A's by Ian Burton

Matoose Rowsay by Jenny Knight

Flight of the Worm by Janet Edwards

Ready to Explode by Catherine Scott

Swimming Away / 3rd in 2009/9 Competition

2009-06-25T06:22:00.000-07:00

SWIMMING AWAY

© Clare Reddaway

She is sitting on the beach, alone. Her legs are curled under her, and her hands are feeling the pebbles at her side. They are smooth, like ducks’ eggs. They fit snugly into her palm. The kind of pebble David used to kill Goliath, she thinks. She looks out over the sea. It is pewter, it is lead. The waves are bloated and sullen. They clutch at the shore and rasp as they retreat, surly as a kicked cur. The wet shore shines with the slug trail residue of the waves. The cliffs, honey and butter in sunshine, are the grey of gravestones and loneliness.

She turns the pebbles over and over, rhythmically, rocking. The wind has turned her long hair into whips which lash her cheeks red and raw. She does not tuck it behind her ears. She does not look at the bag that squats beside her. She thinks back, to the time before. She can’t help it. Then, the sun was shining and the beach was innocent.

* * * * *

“Mum!” The child’s voice is high and excited. “Look!”
      Rosie is holding up a strand of bladder wrack as long as her whole body. It is wrapping itself around her legs and slapping against her plump little tummy encased in its white, poppy-splattered costume.
      “Great!” says Rosie’s Mum. “The mermaid’s tail.” She is busy fashioning the stones into a face and body: dried seaweed for hair, razor bills for earrings, limbs a line of carefully chosen white pebbles. Together they place the bladder wrack under the limpet- shell belt and curve the tip towards the sea.
      “She’s taller than me,” says Rosie, and she lies flat on her back, arms outstretched, to demonstrate the exceptional height of the mermaid with her weedy tail.
      “When the waves come in, will she swim away?”
      “Maybe,” says her Mum, “Maybe she will.”

* * * * *

She starts to dig. At first, she is careful. She lifts the pebbles out, one by one, and piles them to one side. They form a cairn. As she gets down below the first layer, the stones are smaller, spikier, wetter, with more sand in the mixture. She scrabbles at them but as she scrapes, the sides cave in on top of her hands. The hole remains shallow. The fingernail on the middle finger of her left hand jangles with pain as a flint drives under the nail. Pleased, she presses down on the stone. A drop of blood falls into the mix. It is deep enough. She begins to widen, lengthen and shape the trench.

* * * * *

Hand in hand they skip down the beach. The waves are big today, topped by white horses whipped up by a summer breeze, but they are clear and clean as they slap on the shingle. The sea has left a sandy strip which snakes the length of the pebbly beach. Rosie and her Mum want to see their footprints: two big, two small. The sand sucks at their feet as they leap.
      “Look how far I can jump, Mum!” cries Rosie, and leaps so high and so far that her Mum thinks she will reach the sun.
      “Look how far Mum can jump!” cries Mum, and it is not so very far, really, but she laughs and hugs Rosie and the sun catches her daughter’s hair and turns it into mermaid gold.

* * * * *

She has finished. There is a shape gouged out of the pebbles. A human figure. A head, two arms, a torso, legs, no tail. Recognisable. Carefully she selects a pebble, white, round, a duck’s egg, and places it on the edge of the shoulder. She finds a second, pure white, and lays it next to the first, not quite touching. She is drawing an outline. Like a murder victim at an American crime scene, she thinks, but the bubble of laughter does not rise in her throat. She does not know why she glances up, at that moment. A man is standing on the edge of the cliff. To her, he is the size of the middle finger of her left hand. Panic sweeps over her like sweat. He is too far away to hear her when she screams, to far to feel the stone she throws, David at Goliath.

* * * * *

“When’s Daddy coming back?” says Rosie.
      “In a while,” says her Mum, but she’s been wondering too. He’s gone for ice-creams and a stroll. He doesn’t like the beach. He says the cliffs make him claustrophobic. That the stones dig into his feet.
      “I want to paddle,” says Rosie and she grabs at her beach shoes. They are at the bottom of the basket, under the picnic. As she pulls the shoes out, the Tupperware box with the sandwiches in it breaks open and the ham and the cheese and the wholemeal bread slices fall into the sand, butter side down.
      “Rosie! Watch what you’re doing!” Her Mum is sharp, harsh. Rosie shrinks, crouching to pull on her shoes, head bowed, face concealed. Her Mum sighs.
      “Never mind. We’ll be mermaids when we eat it. I bet they’re used to sand in their sandwiches.”
      Rosie lifts her head and grins. “D’you think mermaids’ bread gets soggy underwater, Mum? D’you think they have Weetabix for breakfast? Can I stick seaweed on my legs to make a tail?” Rosie chatters as her Mum picks up the food, carefully brushing the sand from each piece to make it clean.

* * * * *

The man has gone. She is alone again. Alone with her shape, white-rimmed, bleached. She smoothes the body, strokes the face. Arms and legs splayed, it is like the sand angel a child makes when she throws herself spread-eagled on to the first beach of the summer. She wonders whether it is a comfortable shape. Should she have formed a curled figure, foetal, protected, warm? Is the sand angel too exposed? Or does it feel wild and free?

* * * * *

The mobile trills. Rosie’s Mum scrabbles through the beach bag. I can c u, the text reads. Her heart thuds as if they were still new lovers and she looks up and around, smiling. There are families on the beach, throwing balls, eating, lying in the sun. She can’t see him. She looks further up. She shades her eyes against the sun with her hand. There is a man, the size of the middle finger of her left hand, standing on the top of the cliff. He is waving. She laughs, and stands up, waving back. He is still waving. Now, he is waving with both arms. She waves back, with both arms, amused. His arms are flailing, urgent. She is puzzled. Is he pointing? She turns around.
      On the top of the nearest wave bobs a white swimming costume splattered with poppies. It disappears from sight.

* * * * *

She reaches into her bag, lifts out the tin canister and stands it on the pebbles. She hesitates before she unscrews the lid and her hand trembles as she reaches inside. There is not much in there, considering. She takes a handful of ash. The flakes are large and sticky. She starts with the head. She trickles the cinders into her outline, filling it in, turning it pale grey.

* * * * *

Running in slow motion. She must go faster, her legs are rocks, she is dragging them and then she is in the water, diving, gasping, down, under, eyes open, arms out stretching, searching, empty, up for air, screaming ‘Help!’, swallowing and choking, then under again, into the swirl of the waves, the water thick, roaring in her ears, blocking her but clear and clean and she sees floating down a flash of white and thrusts towards it, grabbing and pulling, bubbles coming from a tiny mouth, hair weed flowing from a tiny head and out of the water bursting, gasping, holding her daughter in her arms and crying and hugging and struggling to the shore, she puts the little body flat on the sand and wipes the hair from the face.
      Rosie’s eyes open and she smiles. “I was a mermaid, Mum, swimming like a mermaid!”
      She is laughing and crying and hugging and kissing the beloved cheeks, still shiny salty wet. Rosie has held her breath. No water in her mouth, no water in her lungs, no damage, the smile wide and warm. Alive.
      Her breathing slows and her heart calms. She remembers. She looks up, expectant, to the cliff edge, a wave and a smile hovering. There is no-one there. At the bottom of the cliff there is a huddle of people, their backs to the sea, bending over something, staring. A woman is running away from the group, towards the café at the end of the beach. All the families on the beach are staring at the group at the bottom of the cliff.
      As if it belongs to someone else, she hears her heart begin to pound and the blood rush into her ears.

* * * * *

The shape is coloured in. The ash covers the body in a thin layer from the top of its head to the tips of its fingers and down to the heel, instep and toes. She pats it down into a thin paste layer. She had wanted to lie down beside the body, to close her eyes and feel the length once more, but her creation chills her. It is lifeless, flat, colourless. No muscles, no skin, no sinews. No blood. She takes a step back.

* * * * *

Holding her child clasped close to her body, Rosie’s Mum runs up the beach. She screams, demanding to know what has happened, has someone fallen, but she doesn’t need to ask. As they turn towards her, their faces greyed by shock, she knows. They part to let her through. They try to take her child but she clings on even as she falls to her knees beside a body, limbs awkward and misshapen, head broken like a duck’s egg.

* * * * *

She sits at the base of the cliff, watching the waves. They are coming closer now. Licking and biting at the shore, they have almost reached the body. It lies, a grey, cold smudge. The waves are nibbling at the fingers. Soon they will swallow the whole shape, and the ash will be absorbed by the water and swept out into the ocean, a thousand particles floating apart and away, dissolved. All that will be left tomorrow will be some of the outline in white stones. A mother will come to the beach and show her daughter. They will copy, laughing as they lie like angels and draw their outlines in the sand. Next week, next month the white stones will have gone, scattered back into the thousands already on the beach.
      Her mobile rings.
      “Mummy? When will you be back?”
      “Not long now, Rosie. I’ll be home soon.” And she stretches her legs, stiff with cold, as she waits for the waves to take away her love.

Honour Thy Father / 2nd in 2008/9 Competition

2009-06-25T06:20:00.000-07:00

HONOUR THY FATHER

© Tony Matthews

The Reverend Theodore Makepeace first got wind of his father’s alleged misdemeanours at the Ivydene Home for the Elderly when he received a letter from the local branch of the Social Services. The letter, signed by the Head of Elderly Services, invited him to a meeting to discuss complaints from female residents and staff ‘relating to your father’s behaviour at Ivydene over recent weeks’.

On the hour-long railway journey to Bluntwell-on-Sea, the quiet East Anglian location of Ivydene, Theodore had time to reflect, with some unease, on his father’s sexual history. Maurice Makepeace was about to celebrate his 85th birthday. Theodore recalled that his father, a former leading actor noted for his rumbustious rendering of Shakespeare’s Falstaff, had also enjoyed a number of mistresses off stage, and that his provincial tours had produced pregnancies all over the country. In theatre green rooms everywhere he was known as ‘the goat’.

Theodore’s life with his father had never been dull. During his childhood he had spent his holidays accompanying the Great Actor on his provincial tours and helping him to learn his words for the next play. Together they would gaily enact Shakespearean dialogues for their own amusement, a habit they had continued whenever they met.

Theodore himself had not followed his father onto the stage. After a lacklustre career in insurance, he felt called to enter the church. He was a childless widower, his wife having died in a road accident soon after their marriage. He now lived alone in a gloomy Victorian manse next door to the United Reform church of which he was the Minister.

As the eldest son of the Makepeace family, and nearing retirement age, Theo, as he preferred to be called, had made himself responsible for his father’s welfare. He loved the old man, despite what he saw as the latter’s libidinous habits. When Maurice had a stroke a year ago, impairing his speech and destroying the use of an arm and a leg, he clearly needed care. Theo had discovered that his father had very little capital apart from his small flat, which had to be sold to finance his move to the Council home at Ivydene. The old man had not been displeased to find that he was the only man in the home.

At County Hall, a brutal concrete and smoked glass edifice built in the 1980s, Theo was greeted by the person who had written to him, a rather bony fifty-something woman called Nancy Flitwick. She wore an identity tag on a ribbon round her neck and spoke very precisely as though addressing someone who did not speak her language. After issuing a brisk order for coffee, she reached for a buff folder and took out some papers.
“Your father seems to be something of a Casanova,” she said, looking up at Theo with a thin smile.
“You say in your letter that you have received a complaint,” he said, not smiling.
“More than one, I fear. Your father has upset a number of the residents and some of the female staff.”
“I thought they were glad to have a man in the home.”
“They were at first, but of late he has taken to groping the ladies.”
“That depends what you mean by groping.”
“Wandering hands, Mr Makepeace.
“Or in my father’s case, hand,” corrected Theo.
“Oh yes, of course. Well, you know what I mean. He also writes odd notes to the residents and female members of staff, asking them to have sex with him.”
“Well, if this is true,” said Theo, “it may be the result of his stroke.”
“How do you mean?”
“He can’t speak all the words he wants to say so he has to resort to other ways of communicating his affections.”
“I hear what you say Mr Makepeace, but things have become serious. We have had to hire someone to follow your father around to prevent him from molesting people.”
“That seems a bit excessive. Look, I will go and see him and find out what’s going on.”
“We would all be glad if you would. I am sure we do not want to move him out from Ivydene.” Mrs Flitwick stood up and went to the window. She turned to face Theo, her features now dark against the daylight behind her. “There is a related issue,” she said, pulling the two sides of her cardigan together across her chest. “Your father has requested our help in hiring a prostitute.”

When Theo arrived at Bluntwell on the single track railway line that had somehow escaped Dr Beeching’s attentions in the sixties, he set off, as was his habit when visiting Ivydene, to walk there along the sandy beach. He chuckled to himself at the thought of the bureaucracy of local government trying to respond to his father’s mischievous request. The idea that his father’s request might be serious never entered his mind. According to Mrs Flitwick it had, however, been passed up the social services’ chain of command and discussed at the highest level. In the end the council, decided to refuse Maurice’s request. It deemed that the satisfaction of sexual needs should be seen as a form of therapy. Therapy was Health. The case should therefore be referred to the NHS.

“Adam, dear boy, what news from the …er..”
“Rialto, Dad. And my name is Theo. How are you?”
“ ‘I have more flesh than other men and therefore more frailty’.”
Theo sat down opposite his father and said: “You look as though you’ve been out in the sun.”
“Yes. I have a son called Theo. A golden boy”
“That’s me, Dad. Look – I’ve brought you a present.”

Theo watched his father unwrap the new shirt he had bought for him. He found it mildly ironic that he was continuing to be his father’s prompter. Communication was still a problem, at times vexatious, at times hilarious. The old man had been steadily regaining his powers of speech since the stroke, but he still had difficulties finding his words, and those he did find were frequently malapropisms. By some neurological quirk, he was more fluent as Falstaff than he was as himself .
“They say you’ve been upsetting the ladies here, Dad. Is it true?”
“ ‘A foutra for the world and wordlings base!’ ” said his father.
“Now come on, Dad. Stop being Falstaff for a bit. This is serious. Is it true that you’ve asked the social services to help you hire a prostitute?”
His father suddenly burst into tears. Theo reached out and held his hand.
“Take it easy now, Dad.”
“They dejected my bequest,” mumbled his father, crestfallen.
“They rejected your request,” corrected Theo. “Were you really serious?”
“Oh yes. It’s my birthweek next day, and I want to cerebrate with a shady lady.”
“Well it’s no surprise they turned you down. Is that why you’ve been harassing the women here?”
“I’m making a road test against the perusal of my human rights.”

On his return journey Theo debated the issues raised by his visit to Ivydene. His father had made an unusual, immoral but legal request for his 85th birthday. If it was not met he would go on being a nuisance at the home and would have to move out. This could plunge him into a depression from which he might very likely die.

Theo had no doubt that the NHS would reject the ‘therapy’ application referred to it by the social services. So the question for him was whether he could bring himself to solicit immoral services for his father. He was aware that the role was demeaning for him and exploitative of women, and of course found this hard to reconcile with his Christian conscience. He had his own position in the Church to consider, which would be untenable if word got out that he was seeking a prostitute. He was reluctant to bother God with a prayer for guidance. So, after further reflection on the risks, he decided that his father’s wishes were paramount. “Honour thy father,” he said to himself.

Theo had just one week to meet his father’s wish. At home he pondered the practical problems he would have to overcome. Just when he had started to wonder if he should go to London and collect some of the cards that regularly festoon the phone booths round Kings Cross, Theo remembered that he had recently seen a television programme in which one of the speakers was from the National Union of Sex Workers. He dialled Directory Enquiries where an impassive female with an Indian accent supplied the number. He rang it.
“Union of Sex Workers,” answered a brisk female voice.
“Oh hello, may I speak to your Information Officer?”
“Sorry, we don’t have one. Can I help?”
“I’m ringing on behalf of my father. I’m looking for someone who would…er.. be willing to offer her services to him.”
“We are a trade union, not an employment agency.”
“I know, but can you recommend someone I could contact?”
“Hang on a minute.” Theo heard her shout for someone called Gina. After some muffled discussion a new voice came on the phone.
“’Ello, what’s this all about then?”
Theo tried as best he could to explain.
“What’s your name?”
“Sorry, I can’t say.”
“Typical. Your old man – ‘ow old is ‘e?
“Eighty five.”
“You’re joking. Won’t ‘e pop ‘is clogs on the job?
“I think he’ll pop his clogs if the job doesn’t happen.”
“So this is a sort of emergency, right?”
“Right.”
“It’ll cost you. We ain’t the NHS. Our members charge premium rates for this sort of thing.”
“Fair enough.”
“‘Old on. I’ll just get me little address book.”
She came back and gave him two contacts.
“Tell ‘em you spoke to Gina. Alright mate? Aren’t you’re a good boy for your old Dad!”

On the Sunday after this conversation Theo took as the text for his sermon John 8 verses 3 to 11 about Christ and the woman taken in adultery. When he came to the words “Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone” he looked into the faces of his congregation and paused as if waiting for someone to let fly at him. When no such response was forthcoming he felt his qualms about what he was doing for his father somewhat soothed.

The first candidate met him in a suburban coffee bar. Seeing the red umbrella Theo had said he would have with him, she headed to his table. “Mister Roberts?” she asked in a husky voice. He nodded, feeling as false as his name. “I am Svetlana.” She was a tall peroxide blonde, rather plain, her heavy features thickened with makeup. He guessed she was in her late thirties. She was wearing boots, a short denim skirt and a crop top which revealed a tanned midriff with a silver stud in the navel. She had the longest fingernails he had even seen, as red as blood. She was from Ukraine and spoke English with a strong Russian accent. “I luff old men,” she told Theo. “I make your father ver’ happy. I charge hundred fifty pound one hour straight sex. Plus expenses.”

Dolly was quite different. She had arranged to meet Theo for lunch in a greasy roadside café where everything was with chips. She was late, and he was beginning to think that she was not going to show up. There was a roar outside and he saw someone arrive on a monster motorbike, a highly chromed Harley Davidson. A stocky figure wearing the full rig of helmet, black leather and steel capped boots entered the café. The apparition removed the helmet, revealing a mass of red hair tied up in a topknot. She was a plump and rosy woman in her late forties who seemed to bulge out of her squeaky leather gear in a way that resembled a figure in a Beryl Cook painting.
“’Ello, dear,” she greeted him, recognising him from the red umbrella. “I’m Dolly. Sorry I’m a bit late. I ‘ad to do some shopping for me old Mum. She’s got bad arthritis. ‘Elp me off with this blinkin’ jacket, there’s a good boy. Don’t worry about the trousers. Coo, ain’t it chilly out there? Order me some fish and chips and mushy peas, there’s a love. Must go to the Ladies. Back in a jiff.” Taken aback by this onrush of speech, Theo felt as though he was not meeting a prostitute but an eccentric and garrulous aunt.

“‘Ow’s your old Dad then?” said Dolly with a smile when she came back to the table. “Sounds like ‘e’s a bit of a goer.” Her perfume reached Theo through the smell of cooking oil. He did his best to tell her about his father. “Cor, I never done an old folks ‘ome before,” she said as the fish and chips were served. “Still, I might give it a go. But before we get down to business, like, could I meet your old man first to see if we’d get on? If we do, we could make a date. I don’t like to rush jobs at my age. I could pretend to be an old girlfriend making a visit, OK? Pass the ketchup, dear.”

Theo was impressed by Dolly’s grasp of practicalities, and so sure his father would take to her that he decided she was the one.

Theo and Dolly arrived at Ivydene when most of the residents were taking their afternoon nap. Dolly, now wearing a bosomy floral dress and red high heels, waited in the lobby as Theo went to fetch the old man. They came down in the lift, and when the doors opened Dolly crouched down and kissed Maurice on both cheeks, displaying as she did so a generous cleavage right under his nose. Then she propelled the wheelchair out into the sunshine, singing “Oh I do like to be beside the seaside” as she went.

This first encounter passed off as well as Theo had hoped.
“She reminds me of Marie Floyd”, his father said as Theo took him back to his room.
“Marie Lloyd, yes I suppose she has got a touch of the old Cockney music halls about her,” said Theo. “So you’d like to go ahead with this crazy idea?”
“Can’t wait. My flood is up,” said Maurice, looking bright-eyed and rather flushed.
“Don’t get too excited. You’ll have to wait till tomorrow.”

“I like your Dad,” Dolly told him as he saw her to the hotel. “Quite the gent, really.”

Next morning Theo phoned his father:
“Happy birthday Dad!”
“Birthday?”
“You’re eighty five today.”
“Good dog! So I am.”
“Your birthday present will arrive this afternoon at 2.30.”
“Ah.”
“Are you ready for it – I mean her?
“ ‘I am old, I am old’!”
“ ‘But she will love thee better than a scurvy young boy’. I’ve given her a bottle of champagne to bring with her.”
“Thank you, my boy.”
“Good luck.”

Theo’s hope that the day would go as planned was upset by the well-meaning intervention of the NHS. Dolly had arrived at Ivydene in time to see a dazed Maurice being loaded into an ambulance in his wheelchair. Dolly, thinking that he had fallen ill, insisted on accompanying Maurice in the ambulance as ‘a close family friend’. Maurice told Dolly that he had no idea why he was being taken to hospital. At the hospital Maurice was wheeled by a leering porter to a private room off the geriatric ward where who should be waiting for him but the formidable Svetlana. “Happy birthday Mister Maurice,” she said. Evidently the NHS had decided to provide him with the therapeutic birthday present he had originally requested from the Social Services. Moreover, in the best tradition of the NHS, the service would be free at the point of delivery.

Summoned to the hospital by an urgent phone call from Dolly, Theo arrived to find his father in the hospital’s WRVS café playing Falstaff to a puzzled Svetlana. Dolly, having been enlightened by a friendly nurse, told a bewildered Theo what had happened. Svetlana came over and whispered in Theo’s ear. “Sex no good. Sorry.”

Back at Ivydene an exhausted Maurice was put to bed while Theo and Dolly sat drinking tea in the visitors’ room.
“Sex on the NHS, eh?” said Dolly.
“Trouble was he didn’t get any,” said Theo.
“No wonder, who’d feel sexy in a gerry ward!”said Dolly with a giggle.
“Svetlana’s not his type, anyway,” sighed Theo.
“Theo, we can still give ‘im an ‘appy birthday.” And she told him her idea.

After leaving Maurice to rest for a few hours, Theo went to his room and found him looking pale but refreshed, with a glass of whisky in his hand.
“Dolly’s waiting for you downstairs, Dad.”
“Ah, Doll Tearsheet. She’d better be good after that hospital conkerbine”

Dolly was waiting for them, clad from the neck down in her biking gear.
“Fancy a free ride, dear?” she said to Maurice, kissing him. “It’s your present from me.”

They dressed the amused old man in leather gear and helmet, and escorted him out to Dolly’s Harley Davidson. Theo helped him on to the pillion seat, and made him cling with his good arm to Dolly, who, helmet-less, was revving up the engine. Maurice flipped back his visor. ‘“Is’t not passing brave to be a king’,” he declared to Theo above the roar, ‘“and ride in triumph through Persepolis’!”

Theo watched as they bowled along the promenade and down a slipway onto the beach. The tide was low and the evening sun was inking-in the shadows over a vast expanse of firm golden sand. Dolly accelerated, her red hair streaming back over Maurice, and they tore along the strand, scattering the gulls and sending up rainbows of spray as they sped through the shallows of the outgoing tide.

Learning to Swim / 1st in 2008/9 Competition

2009-06-25T06:13:00.000-07:00

LEARNING TO SWIM

© Anne Summerfield

Shanthi is teaching us to swim.
      ‘Now,’ she says, ‘show me your best push and glide. Let’s see who can get the furthest. Yes?’
      Here in the shallow end, the pool reflects cloudless blue. There’s a ridge of tiles, a bar that we claw with our hands, our arms stretched taut behind us. We put our best chests forward, feet against tile glaze.
      ‘Ready? Go!’
      We push hard with our thighs, move our arms forward so the fingers become points, flat palms together. My face is down, so that all I see is the bottom of the pool, the rush of water. The motion is strong. I travel well. When I stop, stand, I find I am almost at the other side. The rest are dotted like fishermen, each in her leggings, t-shirt, goggles over her eyes. We are all smiling. Shanthi is pleased, claps her hands.
      ‘You have done well,’ she calls, ‘you swimmers.’

Everyone says swimming is a skill best learned in childhood. Most of us had children of our own. Pushpa and Chandrika both had grandchildren, my son and daughter were close to full grown. Shanthi is hardly more than a girl. She makes her leggings merge into the tail of a dolphin when she demonstrates for us.
      ‘Now, on your backs,’ she says.
      Many of us resisted backstroke at first. Pushpa complained about being forced, told me afterwards how she felt a need to see, was terrified of what might be behind her head – a wall, a limb – something she might hit, unprepared.
      ‘You must learn to float,’ Shanthi had said. So Pushpa learned along with the rest, learned to let the chambers of her ears fill with water and to force her belly up. She would lie, biting her lips till they frayed like unedged silk, but she would persist. As she does today. Shanthi no longer insists on us relaxing.

It was my husband who saw the notice pinned to a telegraph pole in the street. Women’s Swimming. Before, he never would have suggested anything like this. Before, he was more concerned about propriety than anyone I knew.
      ‘But,’ he said, ‘suppose it happened again? What if I was to lose you too?’ Then he said, ‘I order you to learn to swim.’ But his eyes were smiling. He’s never ordered me in his life. Romesh is a good man. I am blessed.
      I said I’d think about the swimming, but I tried to forget. At the market I got the sort of rice he likes best, the first for a very long time. We had good meals. I massaged his feet with oil. He kissed me in our bed at night and asked gently if I was ready for love, but I was not, I was afraid. He held me close and didn’t complain.

Two weeks after he’d seen the notice he mentioned the swimming again.
      ‘Shall I sign you up? Let me arrange this for you.’ And he did, though I don’t remember saying yes.
      ‘This is what you are to wear. ’ He handed me a slip of paper. ‘It is all very discreet.’
      I have seen pictures of women in books, women from other lands and long ago dressed for bathing. In the changing room at the pool we looked more covered and far stranger.
      I was sick to my stomach at the thought of getting into water. I leaned to the basin just in time. I felt a warm press of flesh and fabric across my shoulder, a reassuring arm.
      ‘I was the same last week,’ the woman said. ‘You will be fine.’
      As I straightened, rinsed my mouth she announced, ‘I am Pushpa.’ And she smiled as much as any of us could in those days. She was a little older than me, hair white instead of grey.
      ‘It is important to learn,’ Pushpa said and I thought for a moment she was the teacher. But she wasn’t, she was the same as me, another beginner. We walked round to the pool.

There was a smell, nothing like the sea. All water must be the same, rolling together like beads of mercury, combining seamlessly, malevolently. I would have to part the water with my skin, break it.
      We stood on the side, Pushpa next to me in her dark blue leggings, her t-shirt down to her knees. The other women smelled of cooking oil, of sweat and fear. One was fat with child, dipping her toes.
      The instructor, Shanthi, greeted us with a bow. Pushpa and the others sat down, water lapped their ankles and calves. The pregnant girl held the side of her belly, the baby must have been kicking, the unborn protesting. But its mother turned, eased herself into the pool.
      ‘Sit down,’ Pushpa said. So I did, keeping my knees bent, my feet from the damp.
      ‘Now wet your ankles,’ she said. ‘I dare you.’
      I placed the sole of my left foot on the water’s surface as if I planned to step on it. But the water was choppy, disturbed by the others. Its surface was uncertain, did not hold. My foot slipped through and into the current. Cool and sensuous.
      ‘Nice?’ said Pushpa, and I had to agree.
      ‘Time to get in,’ Shanthi said, but she too was kind. I slid into the water, and again it surprised me. I couldn’t resist it. It felt good. Shanthi grinned, just at me. ‘Well done.’ Then more loudly she said, ‘Now ladies, it is time to put your faces in.’

When the world changed, I thought I would never feel any sort of pleasure again. Then, after only a few weeks, I found I wanted Romesh all the time, needed his flesh to remind me that I was alive. He seemed the same. We were locked in a dark honeymoon, greedy with passion. But desire left me as suddenly as it came. I pushed him away. I should have told him I loved him more than ever. I’ll never know if he understood.
      But the swimming seems to release me. Six weeks after I start the lessons, Romesh and I make love and it is tender and intense. Afterwards he smiles through his tears, keeps saying, ‘my love, my love.’ I do not tell Pushpa or the others, but they too are smiling more, seem more at ease in their skins. Perhaps there is a cure in this water, in this flow that surrounds us.
      ‘Front crawl,’ Shanthi says. ‘Shall we race?’
      Pushpa is the first to agree. Once she is off her back she is the most eager of us all. She was the first to master the breathing, to learn to snort out and not swallow down.
      ‘Imagine your nostrils are two upturned glasses,’ Shanthi told us. ‘You can see the liquid at the rim, but there is still air at the top. Unless you suck it up, the water will stay below the air. You must learn not to gasp when you feel it.’
      We line up on the side, ready to race, adjust our goggles. If men could see us now, but of course they cannot, they would understand how pure this is. Only an insane man could find us arousing, here with our leggings sagging over our knees, our eyes rimmed with thick plastic and rubber. Everyone’s hair is straggling and tangled. We get into our places, wait for the word from Shanthi, then we are off.
      We tear at the water, savage it, curling our hands over as Shanthi has taught us, blading the surface. We kick fast and deep, try to produce motion instead of spray. On alternate right strokes, we breathe. No one is afraid. We are all desperate to win.
      This time it is Pushpa. We cheer her, laughing and whooping. Shanthi is jubilant on the bank though we have soaked her yellow Instructor t-shirt.
      ‘Free time,’ Shanthi says. ‘Practice what you like.’
      Some of the women gambol in the water. Pushpa swims conscientiously, seriously, back and forth across the pool. She told me last week, ‘If I can be good enough, I can learn how to rescue others, perhaps even teach classes myself.’ She is restless with the need to be useful, to do more.
      I float on my back, look at the new ceiling of frosted glass, the way it softens the yellow sunlight to palest grey. I try to relax, to trust the water. More and more I do. Like a contrite adulterer, it is wooing me back. I am permitting intimacies again.

Pool water isn’t the same as the ocean. It smells of bleach, tastes of chemical blends. Sanitary water, the microbes gone, traces of life and death taken away. The ocean is awash with emotion, sucking and spitting like a new swimmer trying not to drown.
      Shanthi says it is time to get changed. Pushpa smiles at me as she finishes her lengths. She would be soaked with sweat if the water had not washed it away.
      It takes a while to dress, long hair, layers of garments, but Pushpa and I leave together, as we often do, make our way outside. The pool was one of the first buildings to be repaired. The street shows the damage – trees yet to be cleared, spaces where buildings used to be. The road itself is coated with dried mud that never seems to get brushed away. The gutters, full of branches and leaves, still give off that smell of rot.
      ‘Will you be back next week?’ Pushpa asks, as she does each time.
      ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘But now I will go and look at the ocean.’
      She bows her head in parting.

It is a long walk but I know it well. I travel steadily. There is no reason to rush. From the beach, I look out at the water, think of my son, my daughter, the wave that took them with its fury. Today, the sea is blue as lapis lazuli. Calm. I breathe in the scent of salt and fish, hold it in my lungs without tears or retching, then I take my wet leggings and towel home, hang them to dry in the sun.

Competition

2009-04-02T12:51:00.000-07:00

31st March 2009: our competition is now closed, and entries are being read and judged. The winners will be announced on our Competition page by July.

New - National Competitions listing

2008-09-26T11:13:00.000-07:00

For anyone interested in entering national writing competitions, we now maintain a list, which can be reached through the National Competitions link in the top menu.

ULoveBooks

2008-08-27T18:15:00.000-07:00

At our stall in Topsham on Town Fayre Day, we had a very nice chat with Andy Bush of ULoveBooks ("the book lover's home), the Cullmpton-based Internet bookshop. He's kindly hosted a link for our competition, and we'll gladly return the favour; his site is worth visiting for its very evident love of book topics. See The Bookseller's Blog and ...And another thing for a variety of interesting posts on bookselling, books, illustration and more.

Anthology wins joint first prize

2008-05-06T03:01:00.000-07:00

The outcome of the competition for the David St John Thomas Charitable Trust's annual Writers' Circles Anthology Trophy:

Joint first prize! Exposure won £100 for the Group.

The other winning anthologies were: Pot Hooks for Ladles from the Salford-based Words in Edgeways, Along the Lines from Ross-Shire Writers Group, and And Having Writ... from the Carmarthenshire-based ScribesRus.

The overall winner was Along the Lines, which received the trophy, but joint first prize is the official designation. We're delighted with the result, and our thanks go to all who participated in the creation of Exposure.

Background for those interested: David St John Thomas was one of the co-founders of the Devon-based publisher David & Charles, since 2000 an imprint of F+W Publications. The Trust, founded to foster good writing, was established with the proceeds of the sale.

Anthology

2008-04-22T11:29:00.000-07:00

In 2008 Exeter Writers launched Exposure, an anthology of members' work, which is now available at www.lulu.com/content/1939581 or Amazon.

Meet a concubine who is buried alive with her lord; a girl in Rio who longs to dance the samba; a writer who seeks his muse in an Italian piazza; a farmer who invites the Queen to muck out his pig pen; a pantomime dame; a highly dysfunctional family; a film star who drinks blood - we could go on. But no: see for yourselves in this entertaining collection of stories, novel extracts, poems and flash fiction from Exeter Writers' Group.

Earlier this year, we entered the anthology in the David St John Thomas Anthology Competition, and it is currently on a short list of four. The final result will be known at the prizegiving in London on Wednesday 30th April, for which four selected members are looking out their best suits and frocks while keeping their fingers crossed.