Litro #97 East London Teaser

STORIES TRANSPORT YOU

97

Louise Stern Sammy Wright Si창n Melangell Dafydd Jackson Martin Clare Wigfall

WELCOME TO ISSUE 97 OF LITRO From the Editor It’s all too rare that the talent and originality of our new crop of short fiction writers is celebrated (apart from in the pages of Litro, that is) – so this month we thought we’d do something about that.

There’s a whiff of East London about this issue too – rather appropriately, as we’re showcasing award-winning authors who we reckon are the next big thing. Louise Stern, whose story Rio opens this issue, lives in Dalston, our author portraits were all shot at the magnificent Dalston Boys’ Club, and two of the pieces (from new authors Sammy Wright and Jackson Martin) are set, respectively, on a Clapton bus and in the hidden, graffitiscrawled byways of Old Street and Shoreditch.

Of course it’s great to see that the short story scene in the UK is undeniably undergoing a renaissance, even a mini-boom, but there’s a long way to go yet before writers of shorter work are accorded the same respect and rewards as they are in America, where Annie Proulx, Miranda July, Jhumpa Lahiri and Lorrie Moore are names to conjure with.

There are a number of well-established competitions with big jackpots for a single story – but once you’ve cashed the cheque and basked in the glory, where do you go to get your collection published? In a market in which the received wisdom is that books of short stories are, at best, prestigious loss-leaders, it’s several degrees of magnitude harder to launch your debut collection, or even novella, than your debut novel – but we are proud to feature prizewinning authors including Louise Stern, Siân Melangell Dafydd and Clare Wigfall (recently awarded the National Short Story Prize) who have done just that.

The question sceptics sometimes ask is: Why bother? Who reads short stories, anyway? And the answer we give is: We do.

Katy Darby Editor LITRO IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY EDITOR IN CHIEF AND PUBLISHER – ERIC AKOTO EDITOR – KATY DARBY CONTRIBUTING EDITOR – SOPHIE LEWIS ONLINE EDITOR – LAURA HUXLEY EVENTS EDITOR – ALEX JAMES DESIGN/PRODUCTION – EMILY ATKINS LITRO HAS BEEN DISTRIBUTED FOR FREE NEAR TO LONDON UNDERGROUND STATIONS AND IN GALLERIES, SHOPS, ETC. SINCE APRIL 2006. IT IS PRINTED ON 100% RECYCLED PAPER. PLEASE EITHER KEEP YOUR COPY, PASS IT ON FOR SOMEONE ELSE TO ENJOY, OR RECYCLE IT – WE LIKE TO THINK OF IT AS A SMALL FREE BOOK.

Contents Rio Louise Stern ............................................ 5 Old Sammy Wright ....................................... 13 Treat them like your own Siân Melangell Dafydd .......................... 19 Novel extract: This is a Canvas Jackson Martin ..................................... 22 The Party’s Just Getting Started Clare Wigfall .......................................... 29 LITRO Events Listings Alex James ............................. .............. 42

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AUTHORS’CLUB

Undergoing

a major ref urbishment

do pop in for a tour

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STORIES

Rio LOUISE STERN

I

n Rio the velvety air felt easy and comfortable. We slept on Copacabana beach and our sandals were stolen by one of the bony, dark-skinned group in rags who had set up camp under the nearby palm trees ringed by bits of rubbish. In the night, after we felt in the sand by our heads for the rubber sandals and discovered them gone, Eva strode over, pointed at some of the boys and then pointed at her foot.

—Give me back, she gestured. You give me back. She banged her fist against one hand.

—Me fight you. Come on. Give me back. Me fight you.

One of the ragged, wily ones gave her our sandals. Her back seemed very straight next to theirs.

One night we were drunk on the main boardwalk on lemony cold caipirinhas in plastic cups when a man walking by gave us some shells with the date and Copacabana scrawled on them in black Sharpie marker.

He was white and had shrivelled calves covered with sunspots. Pale strands of hair hung off them. His eyes were like a rodent’s – hungry and lusty and unashamed that he would eat whatever he could find, but they were not malicious. He handed over the broken shells as if they were rosaries.

I was sitting on the wall between the beach and the street watching Eva. Unusually, she was drunker than I was. Some of the Brazilian law students we had met a few nights before were there that night.

—You crazy, she signed to them, pointing to them.

One finger was going in circles beside her head.

She laughed.

We always wondered at her laughter, how people invariably looked at us, startled, when she laughed.

Some childhood friends of hers had told her that her laugh sounded like a horse’s neigh, and she had been self -conscious about it since then. I could hear more than she could and told her that it didn’t sound like a horse, but I couldn’t hear well enough to know exactly what it did sound like, and nobody else would give a satisfying 5

Old SAMMY WRIGHT

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93 – Clapton - Four minutes. Not bad.

Billy stepped back to his favoured spot behind the bin. He plunged his hands in his pockets. It was by far the best way of dealing with wearing a blazer, but you had to make sure the blazer bunched forward and was tight around your back, otherwise it stuck out behind and revealed your belly at the front and made you look stupid.

Under the shelter the girls were already there. Two from the private school, who looked a bit alike only one of them was probably fit and the other one definitely wasn’t, and one from the Catholic school who always came to the bus stop with her nan. The girl and her nan were the main reason he never stood under the shelter, not even when it was raining. He hated them. Well, not hated, but he couldn’t be near them. The girl was a weirdo. The uniform for that school was rank anyway, but she was a bit fat and she always wore stockings that only went up to her knees and you could see the tops of them where they bit into her fat knees, and it made her legs look like sausages.

The nan was the worst, though. She made his skin crawl. She was just like the girl, only old, and sagged, and just disgusting. She walked like she was a zombie, not a proper zombie, but from those rubbish old films where they couldn’t run.

Two minutes. He held on to his oyster pass in his pocket.

He hoped it was just Ryan on the bus. If that other lot were there, Carl, and Joe, and Reece, he’d have to sit with them, but it was quite nice just sitting with Ryan and talking about homework and stuff. And he hoped the Homerton boys weren’t there. They once spent a whole journey calling him gay, and he had to just ignore it, and pretend it wasn’t happening, because once it happened to Ryan and he said something and they waited until they got off the bus and threw a milkshake at him.

He looked at his watch. 7.33. The Stokie boys were normally on the later one.

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For full information about the benefits of membership and how to join: Telephone 0207 845 4677 Email rachel@rslit.org Website www.rslit.org

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Treat them like your own SIÂN MELANGELL DAFYDD

T

he woman was antsy. A relatively new thing for her, and alien, but she identified it as a certain sort of worry which was like new skin, making her fidget.

Sometimes, she walks about her flat as though something was to be seen in one of the rooms, if she’d just keep searching for it. She’d lift something and put it back down: a post card, dictionary, mug. It was sunny out there; with the windows wide open, heat and the sound of swallows like shuttlecocks blew in once in a while. But she was wearing her socks thin by pacing. So, she’d sit to read a good book but then got up to make tea after not finding what she wanted there on the same page three times, then she’d leave the tea to go cold while she stared at a felt-tip stain on the wall. Something needed baking, new pants were needed for her son, or she needed to go for a jog.

Yesterday, she was walking the underground corridors of the Metro on the way to work, nearing the last corner of her daily route in the rabbit warren and heard a voice.

‘Will you call mommy? Will you call mommy?’

Countless times, she’d rounded this corner, thinking of nothing but a shopping list and meeting agendas and how pretty those shoes are on the feet of the woman in front.

But this day, no, she thought of her son. Him, sitting at his desk, putting bite marks on his felt-tip-top, and she listened to that voice shivering above the noise of feet.

And there, in the tunnel’s mouth, right at the very end, there was a man. A man in his forties, she’d say, parting the crowd with his question, standing with his hand out in an island of white tiles. And people feared that, feared he’d sing at them, that strange could be dangerous.

‘Could you call mommy, please?’

The woman was the only one who didn’t suddenly develop a huge interest in film posters. She stopped, called that number on his scrap of paper even. There was 19

NOVEL EXTRACT

Novel extract:

This is a Canvas JACKSON MARTIN CHAPTER ONE

T

he first time you saw her, in person, was from the top of a red brick office block. You’d climbed the scaffolding that had gone up all around it, knowing the roof was just about the tallest spot in the area. Site is electronically protected. A cartoon portrait of a falcon or eagle. Where Provost Street met City Road. London Borough of Hackney.

N1. New, light-reflective road signs everywhere.

You were sat smoking a roll-up, hot tip of it curled into your palm, forearms on knees, back pressed against the chimneystack. The low parapet hiding all but the top of your head from street level as you watched hi-vis vested workers, gripped in the fist of a cherry picker, wrestling with huge posters above the Old Street roundabout. The glowing hoardings cradled between dark arches, the structure like a huge beetle. Dried and wind hollowed to sparse skeleton but somehow still alive. Liteyed. Crouched and guarding the intersection between where you’d come to live and the rest of the city.

Then there was a flicker, some not quite right movement on the pavement below. Where, leaning onto one knee, stubbing the cigarette out against cracked mortar, you found someone walking, casually, under the eye shaped clock. ROYAL LONDON OPTHALMIC HOSPITAL inch-deep in the granite lintel, (MOORFIELDS EYE HOSPITAL) a goldleafed afterthought underneath. There must have been twenty or thirty others on the same pavement but you latched onto that one capped and hooded head. 1898.

1805. The ground floor window boxes she’d just passed spilling ivy tears. Knowing, somehow, it was a girl, a young woman, rather than a teenage boy. A name or message scrawled where the window boxes stopped.

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The Party’s Just Getting Started CLARE WIGFALL

I

t was at a film producer’s rooftop garden party, talking with two maraschino cherries, that Adam learnt his ex-wife had moved into town. The cherries were maybe twins, he wasn’t sure. Their stalks were bobbing, their lips artificially glossed and reddened. He’d met one of them before. She was a performance artist.

‘I heard Guggenheim,’ she was saying.

‘Nothing’s been decided,’ he replied, looking about for his wife.

‘Yeah, but like –’ there was the faintest cruel glisten of an upcurl to her lip, ‘the director loves her.’

‘He’s gay,’ said Adam.

‘Course he’s gay, honey,’ she returned inconsequentially.

‘Blushed-salmon blini?’ asked a waiter.

‘Sweetie-honey, you need sunblock,’ said the other cherry to Adam, ignoring the hors d’oeuvres. ‘Your shoulders are burning up.’

A guy in chain mail joined them and nodded at Adam’s crotch. ‘Love the costume.’

Adam felt their three pairs of eyes skimming his body and wished he was wearing more than a pair of handpainted underpants. ‘Eve’s idea,’ he shrugged in reply.

‘She’s so ironic,’ said one of the cherries nasally.

‘What I wanna know is how she keeps that figure after five kids.’

‘What I wanna know is how she’s getting shows at the Guggenheim after five kids.’

Adam was used to people discussing his wife as if he weren’t present.

‘Hey,’ said the chain-mail guy, turning to him, ‘so your ex-wife’s moved into my apartment block.’

Shaken from his reverie, Adam almost choked on his blushed-salmon hors d’oeuvre. ‘What?’ he spluttered.

‘Lili? You mean Lili?’

‘Did you just say ex-wife?’ one of the cherries 29

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LITRO EVENTS LISTINGS – SUMMER 2010 Films and festivals make up the long run of events that’ll take you through summer to the season of mellow fruitfulness. Think of moments to make you laugh, help you start that novel, and celluloid that’ll make you laugh and cry, in this season’s events, edited by Alexander James.

29th July to 8th August, Film 4 Summer Screen, Somerset House. Film 4’s Summer Screen has become a major summer attraction in London for anyone looking for some relaxed al fresco entertainment. This summer, the stunning backdrop of Somerset House is transformed into an open-air cinema.

Food and drink is available and picnics are also allowed. The rest of the diverse programme includes recent box-office hits, talks, classic films and Saturday night double bills. See: www. somersethouse.org.uk/ 4th August – 11th September, Into the Woods, Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park. Into the Woods takes the stories of the Brothers Grimm and gives them a dark and humorous twist. The popular tales of Red Riding Hood and Jack (of Beanstalk fame) are interwoven with Cinderella and Rapunzel. However, this retelling goes beyond ‘happily ever after’ as the familiar characters find themselves in unfamiliar circumstances and hopes and dreams are questioned and revisited. For more information visit www.openairtheatre.com All of August, Syon Park Cinema, Syon Park House, Brentford.

Get your film fix in the gardens of historic Syon Park House – the London home of the Duke of Northumberland – there’s more films with an eighties twist at the ‘cinema under the stars’. Bring a picnic, your friends, and your best Eighties gear. See: www. syonpark.co.uk 10th August, Liars’ League, The Phoenix, 37 Cavendish Square, W1G 0PP The only live fiction event where actors read the stories, now in its third year, presents a clutch of fresh, fantastic tales based around the theme Here & Now. Book quiz at the interval and special offers on wine all night. See: www. liarsleague.com 13th – 15th August, Canary Wharf Jazz Festival, Canada Square. Following the resounding success of 2009’s festival, this ever popular celebration of jazz, now in its 4th year, returns to Canada Square Park with a powerful line-up. Whether you’re new to jazz or a committed aficionado, Canada Square Park offers an unforgettable three days of traditional and modern jazz, jazz-funk, Latin rhythms, soul, and instrumental. See: www.mycanarywharf.com

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13th – 15th August, Faber Academy: Begin Writing Your First Novel, The Grove, Hertfordshire. Over three days, in the historic and atmospheric surroundings of The Grove, and in association with the UK’s leading independent publisher, Faber and Faber, Sarah Hall and co-tutor Adam Foulds will host a fiction course open to aspiring writers of all levels, but with particular emphasis on how to begin writing a novel. Award-winning authors will be on hand to offer insight and an invigorating approach towards harnessing inspiration, drafting the words, and editing them.

See: www.thegrove.co.uk/www.faber.co.uk/academy 20th August, Glyndebourne Opera: Billy Budd, Somerset House. Billy Budd is a 1951 all-male opera set to music by Benjamin Britten, with a libretto co-written by E. M. Forster.

Based on Herman Melville’s allegorical tale about the battle between pure good and blind evil, the opera takes place amidships on a British man-o’-war. Michael Grandage, the Artistic Director of the Donmar Warehouse in London, directs the production, whilst Sir Mark Elder returns to conduct the London Philharmonic Orchestra and The Glyndebourne Chorus. See: www.somersethouse.org.uk/ 27th – 28th August, Dance Festival, Victoria Park. Three giants of live music, Cream, Goldenvoice and Loudsound, have joined forces to create what is destined to become one of London’s most exciting outdoor electronic dance festivals.

Pooling their collective resources they have secured exclusive London performances from the mighty David Guetta, and legendary pioneers of electronica Leftfield as well as an array of special guest appearances from a phenomenally diverse range of dance music’s most exciting acts. For more information visit www.ledfestival.net 6th – 12th September, Greenwich Comedy Festival, Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich. This September London’s biggestever comedy festival returns with another bumper crop of the best names in comedy and cabaret. The 2010 festival is set to top its triumphant first year as the beautiful grounds of the Old Royal Naval College make way for three fantastic venues including a world-famous Spiegel Tent and the spectacular, illuminated Fountain Bar, a stage constructed around one of the venue’s magnificent fountains. Hilarious headliners, hot new talents, the Silent Disco and more. See: www.greenwichcomedyfestival. co.uk 9th – 12th September, Bestival, Robin Hood Park, Isle of Wight.

Londoners hungry to prolong the red hot summer will descend on the Isle of Wight for a line-up that sees The Prodigy, Dizzee Rascal, Flaming Lips, Roxy Music, Hot Chip, LCD Soundsystem and Fever Ray. Our eyes are on the Comedy Tent; this year it’s packed with the best in verbal wordplay. See: www.bestival.net.

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