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Family Featuring Laura McKenna Jesmyn Ward Rebecca Swirsky David Ford Theresa Coulter Holly Corfield Carr Matt Haig Mystery Issue, March 2013 | 44

Book now

Australia 21 September – 8 December 2013 www.royalacademy.org.uk Friends of the RA go free Sidney Nolan, Ned Kelly (detail), 1946.

Enamel on composition board, 90.8 x 121.5 cm.

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

Gift of Sunday Reed 1977.

Organised with

“OUR 1984”

Buy It. Read It. Before THEY Ban It!

131

Litro Magazine Family

EDITORIAL Dear Reader, The festive season is upon us again: a month of tinsel, baubles, fake Santa beards and contrived TV specials. Whatever you’re celebrating this year—Christmas, Hanukkah or Thanksgiving—the winter is a time to turn back to our hearths, to gather our loved ones about us and remember the bonds of family. If that also involves consuming uncomfortable quantities of food and drink, then all the better. They say that blood is thicker than water—as winter pulls its shroud around us, our blood runs thicker than ever.

In this month’s submissions, the focus is firmly on the bloodier side of family ties. Family isn’t always a comforting safety net to fall back on—it can be an unwelcome duty too, even a doorway to neglect. As the year draws to a close there’s an aura of loss that surrounds many of these stories. This is a collection of familial failures and tearful farewells. That it also contains nuggets of warmth and affection shows just how tangled the family bond can be.

In Laura McKenna’s Cable the narrator is forced to reconsider her mental image of her younger brother, when he springs a surprise on her during a walking holiday. Jesmyn Ward’s Baby Love takes a darker path, allowing us a glimpse into the impoverished rural areas of America, and the harsh realities of the families that live there. Ward is a previous National Book Award winner, and her story is a study in economy and atmosphere. Rebecca Swirsky’s Hotline to Almighty is similarly bleak, but leavened with humour and insight, as it examines the fractured familial relationships in the wake of a child’s death.

In Last Great Blizzard, David Ford traces the lines of damage and regret between a mother and daughter, as two winter storms grip New York during the early Sixties and the Nineties. Theresa Coulter’s Safe Keeping is a short literary prayer for her brother’s health, a plea that’s as earnest and heartbreaking as it is funny.

Then Holly Corfield Carr explores the helplessness surrounding parental illness in and one last time, from the heart, a story that

finds its own unique poetry in the “scribbles of wire filaments” that keep their mother alive. Finally, we chat to Matt Haig, author of The Radleys and The Humans, about the importance of family in his work and in his life.

Personally, I’ll be spending this winter surrounded by a new family. This is my first issue as Magazine Editor, and I thank Andrew Lloyd-Jones for his wonderful work in the role over the last few years. As the nights draw in and the temperature drops, I sit around the fire with my new Litro brothers and sisters, and we raise a glass to your good health. May the festive season bring everything that you want. We’ll see you in 2014.

Dan Coxon Editor December 2013

CONTENTS Events

05

Laura McKenna

08

CABLE

Jesmyn Ward

14

Rebecca Swirsky

16

David Ford

23

Theresa Coulter

30

BABY LOVE

HOTLINE TO ALMIGHTY

LAST GREAT BLIZZARD

SAFE KEEPING

Holly Corfield Carr and one last time, from the heart

Matt Haig AUTHOR Q&A

32 38

COVER ARTIST Ann Gee Chan

www.screameditions.com www.tintypegallery.com

Ann Gee studied printmaking MA at the Royal College of Art, previously completing a BA in Illustration and Animation at Kingston University. Jealous was drawn to her brightly coloured monoprints, composed of awkward and darkly humorous figures depicted in a gestural style with brash, gaudy colour and her paper cut murals which decorated the hoardings of the RCA buildings.

EVENTS THIS MONTH ART Beyond El Dorado: Power and Gold in Ancient Colombia British Museum, Great Russell St, London WC1B 3DG Nov - Sun Mar 23 2014, Free A display of some 250 masterworks borrowed from the Gold Museum in Bogota, Colombia, alongside objects drawn from the British Museum's own collection. The exhibition looks at the myth of El Dorado and the 'Lost City of Gold' and presents technically sophisticated.

Only in England: Photographs by Tony Ray-Jones & Martin Parr Science Museum, Gloucester Road, Exhibition Rd, London SW7 2DD November – March 17 2014, Free This exhibition (intriguingly hosted by the Science Museum in its new Media Space on the second floor) shows work by two photographers fascinated by the eccentricities of English social customs.

The late Tony Ray-Jones spent the 1950s and ’60s traveling.

Mira Schendel Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG November - January 8 2014, Free A rare chance to see the work of one of Latin America's foremost female artists, who provided a serious antidote to the exotic abandon of Brazil's Topicalia movement of the 1960s.

Images of Nature: The Art of India Natural History Museum, Cromwell Rd, London SW7 5BD November - February 28 2014, Free This year's theme for the annual temporary exhibition in the Images of Nature gallery showcases Indian botanical and zoological watercolours of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, featuring the local widlife and plantlife as depicted by Indian artists.

Family Issue, December 2013 | 05

THEATRE 'Brand New Ancients' Battersea Arts Centre, Lavender Hill, SW11 5TN November—April 20 2014, £12 - £15 South London performance poet and rapper Kate Tempest won the prestigious Ted Hughes poetry award for this show, which focuses on the fortunes of two South London families. Tempest's arresting mix of spoken word and live music performance is generally spine tingling so keep an eye out for a performance near you.

Gastronauts The Royal Court, 50-51 Sloane Square, London SW1W 8AS November 21- December 21, £30 Okay, we don’t exactly know what ‘Gastronauts’ is, but it’s an intriguing bit of programming for the Royal Court. This ‘theatrical dining experience’ is led by playwright April de Angelis and will offer an exploration of the nation’s current obsession with food, eating and gastronomy. And yes, you do get dinner.

From Morning to Midnight The National Theatre, Lyttelton, South Bank, London SE1 9PX November - January 15, 2014 £12- £50 Dennis Kelly has had quite the year: his ultra-violent TV show ‘Utopia’ was a smash, his family musical ‘Matilda’ conquered Broadway and he had a very wilful show on at the Royal Court in ‘The Ritual Slaughter of Gorge Mastromas’. Now he caps it with an adaptation of German writer Georg Kaiser’s play about a man who decides to go crazy for the day.

Beauty and the Beast Young Vic, 66 The Cut, SE1 8LZ Until December 21, £10-£19.50 Internationally acclaimed and award-winning duo Mat Fraser, British disabled actor/writer, and Julie Atlas Muz, American burlesque star/Miss Coney Island, bring you an adult fairytale like no other.

Created with Phelim McDermott, artistic director of Improbable, Beauty and the Beast explores the naked truths and half-truths told in the name of love.

06 | Litro Magazine

MUSIC Winter Festival Spitalfields 6 – 17 December 2013 Enjoy a magical winter in Spitalfields as we revel in the season, with sounds old and new. In the area’s iconic and hidden spaces, discover early masterpieces, contemporary music, intimate performances and events for all ages.

Freeze Festival Clapham Common £9- £66 London’s ski, music and snowboard festival. Get to Clapham Common and find yourself on London’s only mountainside and dance the cold away. www.freezefestival.com

Doomsday Festival Antwerp 21 December, £35 The Antwerp exhibition hall is transformed into a four-room superclub for Doomsday Festival, a one-day dance extravaganza held on 21st December. www.festicket.com

Family Issue, December 2013 | 07

CABLE An unexpected reminder that siblings have a life of their own

by Laura McKenna Her gaze rests on his white calves, strangely insubstantial given the expanse of khaki shorts above. The fabric strains a little with each upward movement. He doesn’t seem to notice, just keeps marching up the track, walking pole swinging and dipping in his hand. She can feel a catch in her chest. She is having trouble keeping up.

“Nigel, please…”

He smiles down at her, his face pinkly moist under the brim of his Tilley hat.

“Come on Val, just this last bit, then it’s downhill all the way.”

She sucks in through her teeth and carries on. The sun is warm, or so it seems as sweat blooms under her arms and down her back.

Around her, the fields are strung out like a botched crochet. Shades of green are interrupted by a thread of grey stone wall, which tacks up and down hills and dips. A farmhouse or two break the pattern, dropped stitches. None of those awful bungalows here she thinks. Not like the West. Not like round Galway and Connemara.

No, this time she has to admit that Nigel has picked a good spot.

Val’s something of an expert on Ireland now. Been coming for years.

Along with Nigel, of course. They have found some of the most delightful little places: Places that most Irish people have never heard of. Not the Burren or Killarney or other likely tourist spots, but undiscovered gems along the Shannon, round Lough Erne and down here on the Beara Way. *** Nigel had phoned in February. Wanted to know if she had anything doing over Easter. Not for the first time, she was tempted to say, yes, she did. She was going to the Mosaicists festival in St Ives or perhaps Reiki Week in Glastonbury. But she held back. Hadn’t she an obligation, really, to do it for Nigel? So, she went along with his plans thinking that maybe, this year, it might not be as bad. *** They reach the brow of the hill. The view opens up in front of them, a present. And in the water below, Dursey Island hunkers, black on grey. Val can just make out the top of a pylon.

08 | Litro Magazine

BABY LOVE Absence and neglect in rural America

by Jesmyn Ward “Mama,” Jacob says, and it sounds like he’s said more. Like I want. Like I need. I lay still enough he’ll think I’m asleep. The heat already rising from the floor like burning from a baking pan.

His baby sister shrieks to a growl, and he leaves. When Jacob was born, my water broke and he was breech; when the doctor cut me open and went in there to get him, she say he’d crawled all the way up inside me, was balled up underneath my ribs like he ain’t want to come out.

When I wake up again, they outside with Pop; he’s wrestling the tiller through the garden, his rows of corn and snap beans and squash, and Jacob is sitting on the front steps, the baby in his lap.

From the back, Jacob could be grown; not just his build but the way he curl around the baby, lean down to her, talk so low I can hardly hear. She glows in his lap, bright to his dark. He asks her, “You see Pop, Mayla? You see Pop?” His daddy Michael the one want to name him Jacob. Said it was his granddaddy’s name. Said his granddaddy was extra salty when me and Michael hooked up, said: We don’t bring they kind home, Michael. “It’ll piss him off good if we name his half-black grandson after him,” Michael said. I had only picked out a girl name —Michaela Marie—so I went with it.

Sometimes I wonder if it was a bad thing, naming him after his white grandpa. Maybe I should’ve named him after Pop. Maybe then Jacob wouldn’t judge me so harsh every time I come home from working a double at the bar, every time I stay out and do something that make me forget Michael in jail, make me forget my kids. Maybe then he wouldn’t glare at me. Like now.

“I made her two bottles today,” Jacob says. He looks down when he says it, sucks his lips in over his teeth like he shamed they crooked.

Got his teeth from his daddy. I shake the bottle I’m making.

“She hungry again,” I say.

“She wouldn’t sleep with you gone.”

“Make it thicker at night,” I tell him.

“She scream herself to sleep.”

“Babies cry.” The baby kicks one peach foot. “Give her,” I say, and 14 | Litro Magazine

HOTLINE TO ALMIGHTY One man stands alone in the wake of a disaster.

by Rebecca Swirsky Ten years, Mac's been hauling them up, up and away. Below, waves are flexing muscles. He listens to their prowling shapes.

A moment, then—hair on Mac’s neck. A tern cries needy and human. Using his feet as guide, Mac inches along narrow cliff, pieces crumbling into the Atlantic. Nightly he patrols, as familiar with each gulley and wind-honed incline as his own salt-streaked palms. Today it's quiet.

Mac likes checking the dial-tone. Putting the phone down, he slots a thumb into his crown’s shallow indentation. No deeper than a finger-tip width, he was born with that groove. As a boy, his mama said the Almighty was sizing him up for the world. Poking him like he was a cinnamon bun, warm from the oven. Later, Mac suspected that dime-sized dip meant something was missing.

Every life’s wrong turn pinpointed to when something was poked in, something else pushed out. At night, Mac sees this lone speck of brain floating around the universe. Unclaimed, like a meteorite crumb. Hard to say whether believing this has been a comfort or a curse.

Moving his lips, Mac tells himself the sky is dark. Dark-dark with lighter-dark at its edges. Important to be specific. Otherwise there was potential to be crushed. Taken Mac nearly sixty-one years to understand that if he'd thought, been more specific, history could have swerved. He wouldn’t have crossed that stateline, an action sequence singing at his life's heart. His wife slamming the door, gunning the once-smart Honda. He, Mac, ploughing nose-to-tail for three hours down the airport freeway. Having the foresight (or bad luck) to take his passport. Threatening at the departure desk. Phoning the kids on his cell, phoning next door to keep an eye on the kids. Handing his Visa to the checkin girl, noting through his haze her lips painted the solid colour of optimism.

The air-hostess gave them looks during the flight. When she’d said Cool It, his wife's eyes had lightened, turned metallic and shiny as new pennies. Arriving in California, they'd checked in somewhere, nowhere, slumping by a turquoise kidney-shaped pool, him with a Pabst Blue Ribbon, her with a bucket-scale piña colada. As if they were thirty years younger, as if they were on vacation, everything in between erased on an Etch-A-Sketch.

Chlorine fumes had vied with gas, a memory-smell that today 16 | Litro Magazine

Cold warm heart by Leona Beth Pearson 22 | hands Litro Magazine

LAST GREAT BLIZZARD What would you be willing to sacrifice in order to survive?

by David Ford I look back. “What are those red marks mummy? Those red marks on the snow?”

My mother does not look down. She grips my hand tighter and pulls me forward staggering through the blizzard. “They are nothing darling. Try not to look. There’s a good girl.” She is not wearing her gloves and her long frozen fingers squeeze mine as though she is frightened that if she were to let go our hands will be lost to each other forever.

It is the middle of the night and the streets are deserted. Even the taxi drivers have given up because of the weather. All of the buildings are in darkness and the city is smothered in a deep soft silence.

Snow streams into our faces making us cry.

I look back. The drops of red are following us, falling between the marks left by our shoes, turning black under the streetlights.

I think of how, in that fairy tale, the children leave a trail of stones so they can find their way home.

We arrive at a brownstone house on 39th Street. The lights are on. “This is my friend’s house—Georgia Benton. She is very kind and we are going to be staying here for a while.” My mother falls against the bell and rings it urgently.

The door opens letting a flood of light onto the steps. Mrs Benton hugs my mother without saying a word. They stand like two ruins that have collapsed together.

Mrs Benton gathers herself. “My dear come in, come in. What has that brute done to you?” She turns and shouts up the stairs.

“Oscar, it’s Joan. She has made it. Thank God she made it.” Then she looks down at me. “And you must be Jessica my dear.”

Mrs Benton takes my mother into the kitchen and gives her some tablets. “The taxi is on its way,” she says. “It’s been a devil getting one tonight it truly has. They say this is the worst blizzard in the past twenty years and the roads are a nightmare. Anyhow it’s on its way now so you will be fine.”

Mrs Benton is small and nervous but she exudes both warmth and efficiency. “Now we must do something about this poor little thing.” She smiles at me and opens out her arms. “If you come

Family Issue, December 2013 | 23

SAFE KEEPING A heartfelt plea to the universe

by Theresa Coulter If they would let me, I would go back in time, wrap my brother up in swaddling and place him in a basket to float him down the Nile for protection—not protection from Ramses but from his own choices. I would become the red blood cells forming his heart in utero. I would boss around the other cells, telling them to patch up that hole they’d carelessly left there. The one that would later weaken his already tired heart. Or I’d organize and get a union going. Those cells would feel protected and listened to and they’d do a better job.

If they would let me, I would sit on my brother’s shoulder and whisper the answers to all life’s questions. That is, if I knew them, which I most likely would not. I would dress as a ninja and follow him through his high school days, throwing a star or pulling a samurai sword on anyone who dare tease him.

I would become a thug and enter the drugstore where he worked and abduct and knock out the teeth of the cashier that would later break his heart.

If they would let me, I would sit by my brother’s side and monitor the caloric intake of each bite he lifted to his mouth. I would will the strained muscle of his heart to keep on keeping on. I would whisper, “You can do it.” I would become the serotonin he lacked, I would circulate through his brain making him feel that life was worthwhile, beautiful even.

If they would let me, I would melt away the selfish sister of myself, the rotten heart who cut off his rat tail against his will. Who cried and told on him when he ate my new lip gloss or when he accidentally pinged me with his BB gun.

If they would let me, I would keep him safe inside my shirt pocket, or I would let him keep me. We could keep each other so long as it kept the other alive for as long as the other had to be here.

Down to the day.

But the trouble is—the governing powers of the universe, the bastards, wouldn’t let me. And whispering the worthless phrases flashing in the back of my mind, phrases like, “I’m sorry,” and “I love you,” won’t change anything.

30 | Litro Magazine

Untitled by Nobuko Otake

Theresa Coulter works as a freelance writer in New York City and has written scripts for Tina Fey and UN Secretary General Ban Kimoon, only one of whom remarked, “This girl is funny.� She has been a Ledig House International Fellow and a Helene Wurlitzer grantee. She has been a resident at Hedgebrook, MacDowell, UCROSS, Millay and the Atlantic Center for the Arts.

Family Issue, December 2013 | 31

and one last time, from the heart Adult siblings grant experimental access to their mother’s heart

by Holly Corfield Carr Tho' we said goodbye When the moon was high Does your heart beat for me?

Patsy Cline, 1963

When they brought her back they explained that her heart had been fitted with a transistor to help her body thrive on such small reserves of life.

It was, they implied, an untested implant.

It was, they admitted, an experimental approach.

They had taken old vacuum tubes out of the skip, dumped there when the in-house hospital radio was outsourced to Hospedia.

The studio had been gutted to make room for more beds, each fitted with a touch screen interface at shoulder height. After half a century, the deep roll of radio waves in the corridors had stuttered into a lighthouse’s binary pulse.

Beep—(one)—beep—(zero).

I imagined the old thermionic valves out in the car park, awash with crushed glass, grit and the shadow of the skip, glistening like the jellied eggs of an octopus.

When the junior cardiologist dived in and lifted them out, scribbles of wire filaments had jangled tunefully. He brought in a damaged unit as an example and he held out the heavy glass for us to look at.

As I watched Glen take the vacuum tube to his chest, weighing it in his hands, I thought of the female octopus who guards her eggs to the point of exhaustion. The first thing an octopus must see is the deflated body of its mother, her translucent skin like a plastic bag snagged in the net.

32 | Litro Magazine

AUTHOR Q&A Author of The Humans discusses the importance of family

with Matt Haig Litro: Tell us about your latest book, The Humans. It features an alien narrator, sent to Earth in the disguise of mathematics professor Andrew Martin. Why was this a story that you felt compelled to tell?

Matt: It was a story I had in my mind since way before I was a published author. It just never let go. I just thought it was the best way of looking at our species, and to look at all that is good about us.

Litro: Families and family relationships often feature heavily in your novels, and this is no exception. What appeals to you about the family dynamic?

Matt: I honestly don't know. I try and write with as much power as I can muster, and somehow this always sends me back to family stories. I suppose we all have family, family defines us. It is the first and most crucial thing we ever know. Plus it's that thing of people being related but not necessarily having that much in common. All those tensions. And the strange and powerful nature of family love.

Litro: You also seem to like telling these stories from unusual perspectives: an alien visitor, a dog...what appeals to you about assuming this outsider status?

Matt: We live our lives too up-close to our own existence, and kind of miss the wood for the trees. I think, well, we're only here once, so let's look at this thing called life, called us, called humanity, and what's the best way to look at something big? To take a big step back. These strange perspectives give me the biggest step back I can think of.

Litro: What can you tell us about your own upbringing, and your own family. Do you have siblings? How important is family in your own life?

Matt: I have a younger sister Phoebe. We were—and are—very close. My mum was adopted, and I think she's passed down to me some of that anxiety about identity and where I fit in in the world.

I now have a family of my own. Two kids, Lucas and Pearl. So I'm always wondering what it means to be a good father, and how 38 | Litro Magazine

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LITRO | 131 Family The idea was that they’d fit a transistor to our mother’s heart to amplify what was left of her, to help her, they suggested, power on. At the end of each sentence Glen and I nodded, as if we were initialling each page. As she spoke and as we nodded, the surgeon’s hands floated further apart. They stood there as two fishermen, chest deep in water, convincing us of their greatest catch.

Your love for your mother is this big, they seemed to say.

From and one last time, from the heart

by Holly Corfield Carr Ann Gee Chan Cover Art: Family

by Ann Gee Chan www.litro.co.uk

ISBN 978-0-9554245-5-7

43 | Litro Magazine