Oh, Freedom by Andrew McCallum Crawford - published in B O D Y

I do all of my writing in the local cafeneio. I call it the Caff, athough no one else does, not as far as I know. It's strange how stories come at you. You might be reading a newspaper, or walking down the street, or doing one of a million other things. But when inspiration comes calling, you grab it. That is the first rule. After that, it is entirely up to you, the writer, to make something of it.


Oh, Freedom

She gave me money, just like every Friday. She did it without a word, as if it was – what do you call it – a transaction, as if she was buying something. It had nothing to do with pity, or love. She wanted me out of the house so her friends could come round, eyeliner this time, they were bringing samples. Eleftheria was in a buying mood. She called Fridays ‘Ladies’ Night’, arranged over the internet, the kids had already been packed off to their granny’s. I said nothing. Things had been tight since I got laid off. Two weeks notice, no compensation. And now that my stamps had run out there was no dole. We were living off the pension her father got.

You can read the complete story in B O D Y

Strip The Willow

I want to watch. I want to watch you dance with me, and we are the perfect couple. Synchronised. Fiddles and accordions. We know all the steps. We know them so well we can add flourishes. Constantly improvising. The surprises are welcome. Nothing can throw us, not even when you laugh and twirl with others. It is the nature of this Scottish dance. I am watching us now, as I sit in the corner of this Greek café. I catch the reflection of my smile in the window. Klarino and daouli. The rhythm was strange, once, but I’ve grown used to it. It isn’t music we could dance to. Not together. Too many surprises. We would be a couple less than perfect. Timing is a difficult thing. Especially at this distance.

3 Stories By Andrew McCallum Crawford on McStorytellers

Here's something of mine just up on McStorytellers - three stories about a writer who is obsessed with his Muse. Do have a look.

Many thanks to Brendan Gisby, who's been working tirelessly over the last three years to help Scottish-connected writers. McStorytellers has just published its 400th story - I am proud to be part of the celebrations.

Cheers

Ax


http://www.mcstorytellers.com/2/post/2013/10/unhappy-endings.html

A Man's Hands - Short Story by Andrew McCallum Crawford

CLIO

A Man's Hands

You talk of things, you dear, sweet man, of things that mean nothing, because you talk of the past. Please stop. It is something I have forgotten. Don’t ask me why. Don’t insist.

   You reach across the table and take my hands in your hands. Your skin is so white, so smooth. And your fingers. Your hands. They are not a man’s hands. They are not the kind of hands I want touching me, holding me here, but I indulge you. Your hands. They are not what I am used to. You have the hands of a musician. A female pianist, perhaps. Not a man’s hands. I move slightly, trying to get away, but you smile and grip me more tightly. Despite myself, I press into the soft flesh. Something happens. The part of your hands, the part of your hands that I am pressing, disappears. I look at your face, but all you do is talk. You continue to talk of the past, of things I don’t want to hear. I give all my attention to your hands. My fingers. I make small, circular movements which grow larger. Soon there is nothing left. Your hands have vanished.

   I stifle a laugh. The other customers laugh out loud, but not at this spectacle. They sip their coffee, cups poised, elbows on tables, lost in their own worlds. The Virgin’s little horses have all paired off.

   I reach for your face. You continue to talk, you persist, even as I stroke your brow. Your forehead is gone. Then your eyes, that piercing blue is no more. I caress your cheeks and touch your neck.

   I run a thumb across your mouth.

   Silence at last.

   You sit there, mute, faceless and handless. I think of the words tabula rasa, but this has nothing to do with the future. I have already forgotten what you look like, although I remember your hands, like a woman’s. Not a man’s hands.

    I have to go. I bid you farewell, but you say nothing. How could you? Outside, I glance at you through the window. No one in the café has noticed you there. The sun bursts through the clouds, like a flashbulb, and the glass becomes a mirror, or a photographic plate. A snapshot of a street scene, with me in the bottom left hand corner. My face almost – but not quite – as expressionless as…as what? It is hard to recall. Something about a voice. A piano. Hands. I see myself, reflected and framed, the moment captured like a definition.

*     *     *

This story was first published in Spilling Ink Review

From Oh, Freedom

She gave me money, just like every Friday. She did it without a word, as if it was - what do you call it - a transaction, as if she was buying something. It had nothing to do with pity, or love. She wanted me out of the house so her friends could come round, eyeliner this time, they were bringing samples. Eleftheria was in a buying mood. She called Fridays "Ladies' Night", arranged over the internet, the kids had already been packed off to their granny's. I said nothing. Things had been tight since I got laid off. The factory closed with two weeks notice, no redundancy. And now that my stamps had run out there was no dole. We were living off the pension her father got. I couldn't complain about her spending money on makeup, not when she'd just subbed me.

from They Made The Effort

Ski bags and suitcases. It was that time of year. She went to the toilet to change liner. The cramps were starting. She popped two Nurofen out of their blisters and scooped water from the tap. She wasn't going to let this spoil her day out, her jolly.

They frisked her thoroughly, but she didn't have to take her boots off. The gate was quiet. She sat down next to the window. It was still dark outside, all she could see was her reflection and the emptiness behind her. The flight wouldn't be busy. She was glad. She thought about the day ahead, about how they would spend it. She needed this. She wanted to see him. Just this once. It wouldn't come to anything. It couldn't.

from Jammed

'There's straws in the kitchen drawer,' he said.

'Eh?' I said.

'Straws,' he said. 'I need a straw. And put some water in that tea, there's steam coming off it.'

I took the tea back into the kitchen and emptied half of it down the sink. I let the tap run till it was cold.

'There you go,' I said.

He looked at the cup. The straw moved then bobbed out onto the table. 'You'll need to do it,' he said.

'Oh, right,' I said. I looked at my watch. I wanted to get to the chippy before the queue started. The kids were on a promise.

'Did you put water in it?' he said.

'Aye, I did,' I said.

He just sat there, looking at me. 'You'll need to bring it to me, Yvonne,' he said.

It was even worse than when we lived together. I was lucky I left when I did. This wasn't what I wanted to be doing with my life. He moved his head back when he'd had enough, at least I think that's what he meant. I put the cup on the table and sat on the couch.

'The nurse was here this morning,' he said. 'She'll be back on Friday.'

from Oh, Freedom

The hand finished. Kostas noted the score on a pad and started shuffling the pack. Bruno looked at his friends, the ones I didn't know, then turned to me with a perfect grin all over his mouth. 'Funny seeing you in here,' he said. 'And a Friday at that.'

Kostas started dealing the cards. 'Shut it,' he said.

'What?' said Bruno. 'I'm just wondering why he hasn't been in recently. Maybe he's been working the back shift. Eh, Tommy, have you been working the back shift?'

His friends found this funny. Fair enough, Bruno, you're an arsehole, best of luck. I should have left, but I couldn't move, not when there was beer sitting, especially as it was being paid for by someone else. It's easy to be smart when there's money in your pocket, and there was plenty in Bruno's, the International Chancer. I looked round the shop. The only other customer was seated at the table near the window. I did a double take. It was that American guy, the writer, tap tap tapping on his wee computer. He was quite famous in the town, there had been a story in the local rag, he'd won an award. I couldn't see what he was writing. I wouldn't have understood, anyway, I only did English for a couple of years at school, and I didn't pay much attention. The kids, right enough, if I'd helped them with their homework I might have learned something, but that was Eleftheria's department. In English, her name is 'Freedom', that was as much as I knew. She did an exam. It was really expensive, but she passed. She was thinking about applying for a teaching job as soon as things picked up.

Making Sense by Jim Murdoch - A Review

I don’t read as much new writing as I should. I’m currently rereading some Kelman and Irvine Welsh, tried and trusted, although they make strange bedfellows. There is so much new writing out there that sometimes it’s difficult to make a choice. A couple of years ago I was introduced to Jim Murdoch's work, and have subsequently published some of his poetry here and here on Wee Fictions, so it was with anticipation that I received a review copy of ‘Making Sense’, his new collection of short stories. The stories Murdoch has included are, in the main, first person narratives – monologues, if you like. Indeed, one of them, ‘Funny Strange’, one of four stories written in a variety of dialects, was originally performed on stage. This, I find, gives a certain form to the collection, in that the reader soon gets into a rhythm. As I read further into the book, I began to wonder how Murdoch managed to create nineteen distinct voices for the nineteen stories gathered here.

Murdoch is best known for his poetry and novels, but it’s clear from the outset that he knows what he is doing with the short story form. The flow of ideas in the characters’ heads manages to keep the reader engaged. The first story, ‘√-1’, is about a man who is obsessed with numbers. He is regarded as the ‘local eccentric’ and wants to tell us why he ended up visiting his doctor. The first line of the story is

It was not a nervous breakdown.

which immediately grabbed my attention. A nervous breakdown? Denial? It is followed by

Those were the six words he used but that was not what he meant…Often we say things we do not mean or say one thing and mean something else entirely…As a doctor his words would carry weight…We trust them because we have to trust someone or we would all go crazy.

The main character, Thomas, relates everything to numbers. They are the crutch he leans on:

Mathematics is the language of the universe. Numbers never lie. They never let you down. So many things in this life disappoint.

After some digression, he gets round to telling us about the visit to his doctor:

I was not taken on time. The wall clock in the waiting room was wrong but even taking that into account he was still four minutes late and seven minutes late by my watch which I had checked with the BBC only that morning. It would be too much to believe that the BBC had the wrong time.

There is so much in this story, but there has to be. Thomas is an obsessive. As in all of the stories in this collection, Murdoch makes some excellent observations:

He frowned and tapped his pen on the desk. It was an old Parker 61 fountain pen in burgundy…it must have been the first bars of a tune because in Morse code it was nonsense…You cannot attribute old-fashioned values to someone simply because they write with an old-fashioned pen.

and

I have found that there is an order to things and there is never anything left after the point if you do your sums right.

That last part is the crux of the story. ‘…there is never anything left after the point if you do your sums right’. This is Thomas’s problem. He needs numbers to make sense of his life, and he knows that if he tweaks them in just the right way then everything will make sense. Don’t we all do that to some extent? I well remember studying undergraduate chemistry – it seemed that the whole laboratory were fudging our titration results because, having boned up on the theory, we knew what the answer was supposed to be. But life isn’t lived under laboratory conditions, and there is no textbook to crib from. Why would someone feel the need to fudge their results, to make things come out the way they, for want of a better word, should? Is it to avoid the truth that we are all just winging it?

Thomas eventually has a rather public nervous breakdown – he has a vision of an angel who speaks the language of numbers. Is this the divine personification of √-1? That’s the way I choose to read it.

One can’t help but notice the variety of voices and themes in the stories. In ‘Poise’, the unnamed narrator has a reverie about a woman on the bus. The narrator harbours feelings for the woman, but can’t approach her. Murdoch strings the reader along nicely here (I won’t give away the ending) but again he touches on themes which are much deeper than you might assume on a first reading. Interestingly, the woman appears later in the book – in the story ‘Islands’ (a number of stories have female narrators) – and so we get to see things from the other side:

Sometimes, on the bus to work, I get the feeling I'm not alone. Of course I'm not on my own—I 'm surrounded by thirty or forty people—but none of them are with me. Only sometimes I get an inkling that feeling might be wrong. I look for Billy but he's never there.

In ‘Objects of Affection and Intention’, a young woman, Eve, finds out, quite graphically, that her boyfriend is gay. Sexuality features in quite a few of these stories and Murdoch is good at writing about it – one of the reasons he’s good at it is because he knows how to make it funny. Better than Irvine Welsh, I would say, who lays it all on rather too thickly for my 47-year-old sensibilities (although I thought he was the bee’s knees when I was 27). Eve tells her mother that she has broken up with her boyfriend and immediately gets grief:

…she knew I needed to be out of the house for something to happen with my life.

Getting over David wasn’t the problem. I was the problem.

She decides to take art classes and, after a few weeks, poses nude when the model doesn’t show up. She becomes an object for the other students in the class:

When the class was painting, it wasn’t painting me, it was painting my body and that was fine. I didn’t mind being a body for them. I minded being a body for David. I thought I didn’t but I guess it turns out I did.

Her teacher asks her about her painting:

‘What’s the subject?’… ‘A skull and some pears?’… ‘No, no, no. They’re the objects. You are the subject of everything you paint. It’s through these objects that you get to understand yourself.’

Murdoch, of course, isn’t just talking about painting.

‘Jewelweed’ – for me, the highlight of ‘Making Sense’ – features a man talking about how he met his schoolteacher wife. I think Murdoch should have placed this as the last story in the collection. There is humour in all of the stories, as well as depth, as I’ve already mentioned, but some parts of this story are absolutely hilarious. The theme here is different from elsewhere, in that a man is trying to make sense of his partner. This is in contrast to most of the other stories, where the protagonists try to make sense solely of their own existence.

Have you ever caught a glimpse of yourself in a mirror and seen yourself for what you are, seen beyond the façade? Vivienne had. I still catch her looking from time to time staring at herself with a kind of question mark hanging over her head. I asked her once what exactly she was looking for but she said she didn’t know because every time she looked it wasn’t there. She wanted to be more than the sum of her parts, not less.

Vivienne’s favourite plant is a Jewelweed:

The jewelweed…its common name is ‘touch-me-not’ and it’s called that because, like other varieties of Impatiens, its seedpods, when ripe, will burst open at the slightest touch.

I like the subtle sexual undertones of that. No undertones in the next part, which almost had me falling out of my seat laughing:

…if you’d said to me within six weeks she would’ve given up her forty-year-old virginity to me across her creaky kitchen table one rainy Saturday afternoon—accompanied by a recording of the BBC Philharmonic performing the final movement of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony at the Proms on Radio 3—I might’ve been shocked, but a part of me would also have been intrigued at the prospect…Afterwards – to be frank it didn’t take too long—we gathered ourselves together but when she took one look at me with my hands on my knees and my trousers still at half-mast, wheezing like an old bull, she burst out laughing. You know, that kind of infectious laugh that makes you giddy. I looked back at her hanging out of her dress—I’ll never forget the look on her face and I can only imagine the look on mine – and I was off too. I’m sure the rapturous applause of the Albert Hall’s audience helped.

What I most liked about this story is the way the narrator is made to analyse his wife as a means of analysing himself:

Nowadays, when I look at Vivienne I know I’m judging myself. I’m pretty sure many think I’ve settled whereas she’s dug her claws in and hung on for dear life in case her last chance slips away but it wasn’t like that.

This is a nice twist at the end of the book. When it comes down to it, this is what we all do when we are involved in relationships. We try to work each other out. Sometimes we are successful, but you can never really understand someone else completely. The main point of Murdoch’s stories is that we can never really understand ourselves completely, either, despite the internal monologue each and every one of us is privy to.

I realise that I’ve quoted heavily from the book, perhaps too heavily for a review of this length. However, I wanted to give you a flavour of Jim Murdoch’s writing as I believe you can only really appreciate stories as good as these by reading them. With ‘Making Sense’, Murdoch shows us what an accomplished writer he is. You can get a copy here:

Making Sense by Jim Murdoch
Fandango Virtual (4 May 2013)
ISBN 978-1-908815-01-9 
Paperback: 156 pages 
12.8 x 19.8cm

from Oh, Freedom

Despite the cold, I was sweating when I got there. A card game was in progress up the back. Immediate silence when I walked in. Someone muttered something. It sounded like 'performance', but I let it go and sat down next to Big Kostas. It wasn't him who made the remark, it was his brother-in-law, Bruno, the male model, all brushed hair and lightning teeth. I didn't know the other two players. Kostas skidded the cards across the baize. He tipped the wink to the waiter and a bottle of beer and a glass were placed at my elbow. I watched the game in silence. Biriba. It was a matter of time before someone started shouting, that was half the fun, especially if you were just watching; heated team disputes were what it was all about.

The hand finished. Kostas noted the score on a pad then started shuffling the pack. Bruno looked at his friends, the ones I didn't know, then turned to me with a perfect grin all over his mouth. 'Funny seeing you in here,' he said. 'And a Friday at that.'

Kostas started dealing the cards. 'Shut it,' he said.

'What?' said Bruno. 'I'm just wondering why he hasn't been in recently. Maybe he's been working the back shift. Eh, Tommy, have you been working the back shift?'