She tickled me again, but in a different way.
*
Floryan gave me some stories he’d translated from Russian to German.
‘You could put these into English,’ he said. ‘ A good way to learn a language, translating is good.’
‘Well, yes. But I’d rather write my own stories.’
My own stories. I sat and wrote for two hours in the mornings, at the desk overlooking the nasturtium wall. A lot of the time, I looked out the window, at the orange flowers, the huge leaves on which the morning dewdrops slid around, disconcertingly dry-looking, like beads of mercury. The flowers bowed and moved, looked as if they were alive. If I stared for long enough I could see pictures in among the leaves: the party we’d held when I was a child, in our lovely garden on Tinakori Road, our summer house at the cove, where my friend Edith and I played on the sand, swam far out into the warm sea. Sometimes I would stop looking at the pictures on the wall and then words poured out of me. I could work away like a little black spider. But I felt I was producing cobwebs, hanging like woolly broken threads from the ceiling. The perfect web had as yet failed to materialise. I was a bad little spider.
I could talk to Floryan about this and he could listen attentively and with understanding, for up to three minutes at a time. After that his eyes would glaze over and we’d talk about what really mattered. His writing. The work which he knew would be great, just as he knew mine couldn’t be. You’re wrong there, Mister, was what I thought. Floryan preached equality – he believed in the suffragettes’ cause, for which I’d no time at all. Who wants to vote? Such a bore. But he couldn’t allow a woman to get the better of him. He negotiated a fine line between encouraging and debasing me, all the time. I forgave him; he was one of those men who had to be best, at everything.
‘Have you heard from The New Magazine?’
I shook my head.
I’d heard from nobody.
Not from The New Magazine or The Old Magazine, or The Blue Magazine or The Pink Magazine, or The London Magazine, or the New York Magazine. Not even from The New Zealand Magazine, where I’d only want to be published as a last resort, anyway.
Nobody cared enough about my stories to even answer my letters.
‘They do not read them even,’ said Floryan, consolingly. ‘Your name, not know it, so they say, she is nobody, waste no time. Poosh! Down the basket.’
He knew everything there was to know about the mysterious habits of publishers, but it didn’t seem to help him much. Nothing was getting published, although many important editors were considering his submissions, and he expected to receive offers and commissions from Berlin, Paris, Moscow and Warsaw, among others, at any moment. I hoped he got a bite from at least one of them. If somebody took one of my stories, it would be as if I won a doll at the funfair. It would be fun, a luxury. Whereas for Floryan getting published seemed to be a matter of life and death. (Daddy’s banker still sent me a cheque every month; there was that.)
‘So, translate. This fellow, he is good, learn something from him will you.’
‘Such as?’
He had to think for a while, as people often do when they praise some writer’s work. What is so good about it?
‘Atmosphere. Mood.’
We were walking along the prom. Floryan had dressed up, in his striped blazer and white trousers, his straw boater. Oh he could look like a beautiful boy doll when he tried!
‘I’m good at atmosphere and mood.’
Actually my stories were more atmosphere than story. That’s what was wrong with them. One of the things.
Floryan screwed up his eyes.
‘He is . . . suggestive,’ he said, and thought again. We stopped and looked at the old men playing their never-ending game of chess. He had to explain what that meant. Suggestive. ‘The stories, they are like poems. More than one meaning, can you say? Hints, nuances, something.’
‘Like the impressionist painters?’
‘Perhaps.’
I twirled my parasol and we walked on, slowly, towards our destination. His shack. A girl on a tricycle whizzed past and there were white sails like seagulls out on the sea. It was a perfect day for a walk. I was in love with him, after all, and wanted to be with him from morning till night.
But he was busy at his job in the baths most of the time. So I went on writing, at the desk by the nasturtium window. I kept my head down. I translated the story.
It was about a children’s nurse, who’s really just a child herself. Her working conditions are terrible; her master is your typical Russian villain, big and ugly as a bear, always drinking vodka and beating everyone in sight. The baby cries constantly so this poor girl can never get enough sleep. She starts having hallucinations, brought on by exhaustion. She sees pictures on the wall, images from her past – which was ghastly, of course, all gloom and doom, illness and death and hunger. (Goodness, who’d be a Russian?) Eventually, tired out, driven to madness, she strangles the baby whose cries keep her awake.
It was basically a murder story, with a few grisly subplots tossed in for good measure. More melodrama than nuance, if you ask me.
But it had something. It was gripping. And full of understanding for the plight of the nursemaid, disgust at the brutality of her boss. Really it was an angry story above all, angry about the plight of the powerless, the poor. Convincing too in its description of the little girl’s mental breakdown, and the weird visions she saw on the walls of the house, her prison.
I found that I worked on my translation with much more concentration than I had on my own stories. I got lost in the story, finding the right words in English for the German version absorbed me more than finding the right words in English for my own thoughts. When I was writing my own stories I got distracted and spent hours staring at the flowers, mistaking daydreams for inspiration. But with the translation, I’d start writing at nine o’clock, after breakfast, and when I’d look up it would be almost one. Frau Holle would be getting ready to leave, Rosaleen would be coming in to clean, and the pleasant activities of the afternoon all about to begin.
Floryan admired my attempt.
‘It flows,’ he said. We were sitting in his shack, on his bed. Naked. How he could pleasure me! That was his real gift, maybe his only one. ‘Such flow. A pity he is not known, in Europe.’
‘Maybe he will be,’ I said. ‘If I published this translation in London, for instance?’
Floryan shook his head. A few collections had come out in German, maybe in Italian, but nobody paid much attention to them. Anyone could see that this writer wasn’t as good as Tolstoy, or Gogol, or Turgenev. He’d written short stories, a few plays. Not much else.
‘In Russia, much admired,’ Floryan said. ‘But a local writer he is, essentially local.’
And he’d been dead for five years. It was unlikely that his international reputation would grow now, if it hadn’t when he was alive.
‘Was he old?’
‘Forty-four.’ He was always precise as to dates and numbers.
Old enough. But I shook my head, pretending to be sad . . . as you do, stupidly, even about people you’ve never heard of.
‘He might have made it if he’d lived longer?’ I said.
‘Who can tell?’ said Floryan, and he tickled me with his long thin fingers. ‘Like two fat button mushrooms, down here, did I tell you that before?’
‘Two ripe peaches was the simile employed, I seem to recall.’
‘That too.’
‘Two ripe turnips?’
Later, he suggested something else, about the story, I mean. Since I liked it so much, why not write a version of it? I could transfer it, from Russia, to a place I knew. New Zealand, or England, or even here? Germany?
Frau Holle as the employer. Rosenhaus as the setting.
‘Frau Holle, give unto her a child.’
‘Yes.’
‘Friedrich.’
‘Friedrich the Great. A fat sodden lump of a child, who screams all the time. I can gi
ve her a few more children for good measure. Snotty-nosed brats.’
‘Why not?’
‘She should have five or six. Keep her out of that inn of hers.’
‘Keep her off the beer.’
I did it. An exercise. Oh, it’s as easy as cheese to write a story when somebody hands you the plot.
Floryan told me I should send it to one of the editors I’d been pestering. Just to see how he’d react. Mr New Age. What fun! I could tell him about the source later – if it came to that.
I sent it off, along with two other stories, and crossed my fingers.
There’s a feeling I get when I put a story in the post, which is not quite like any other feeling. It’s a bit like the mixture of hope and anxiety you can have when you meet a man you like, and wonder if you’ll meet again, and what will come of it all? (Which can range from anything, love, marriage, babies, to absolutely nothing, and everything in between, and all of these seem possible, on that first day or two, the waiting day.) The sense of having finished something, of having taken the risk, the sense that you’ve done your bit and now it’s in the lap of the gods (or the hand of some man, really, but one who is used to taking risks, who can weigh up words, the way the grocer weighs a pound of sugar, and know, more or less, how much money the customer will hand over for same, in a brown paper wrapper).
A week later the reply came.
A reply came! A cause for celebration in itself!
It came in the afternoon post, this reply. Frau Holle was at the café, Rosaleen had come, smoked her cigarettes, and gone. Rosenhaus was empty. I had no plans for that day.
Dear Miss Mansfield
Thank you for your submissions . . . would like to publish all three stories in due course . . . can you call in to our office when you return to London . . .
We are particularly impressed with ‘The Child Who Was Tired.’
I read the letter again and again. I was in my bedroom under the thatch, lying against a heap of white lace pillows. A vase of pink roses Frau Holle had placed on the desk filled the room with oh such an intoxicating fragrance, and the afternoon sun filtered through the curtains, dappling the room. It was all gold reflections, flickering dark shadows, dancing around me like the ghosts of my past and the promises of my future. Joy and sorrow, light and shade, such a mysterious combination of feelings, I couldn’t articulate them, I couldn’t contain them, the light and dark were for once almost one and the same.
My stomach fluttered.
A butterfly fluttered in my stomach. Then leaped, then thumped.
The butterfly started kicking, actually, like a cross little pony.
I got up and walked to the window. And there I saw this thing. On the nasturtium wall among all the sly winking flowers. The baby. Cradled on the most enormous flat leaf of all. I could see him quite clearly. He was perfectly formed as if from grey silk, with a round head and a fat little slug body. And in the baby’s little fishy hand was a little shadow book.
This baby of mine had got hold of my stories. He had them all, in his fin fingers. This baby of mine could read, already, before he was born? What was he doing with my book?
Not reading it. They don’t read, do they? Babies?
In his cradle of green nasturtium leaves the baby raised my book to his mouth. And now I could see that he had an enormous mouth. In among the yellow flowers and the orange flowers, his mushroom body, his waving fish hands, disappeared, and he became an enormous mouth, with big sharp teeth like a shark’s.
He started to eat the book. My stories.
That’s what babies do. Eat.
I stared, and the happiness sank down, down through my stomach into my legs and down to my feet and out on the floor, the fountain soaked down into the earth leaving just a splotch of filthy mud behind.
It came to me in a flash. What I could do. I’d go cycling. I’d cycle for hours, I needed to see the whole island, every village, every farm, every beach, every lane. Then I’d come back to my room and write about what I’d seen.
But first, the desk would have to face the inside wall. I could no longer stand the sight of those nasturtiums, of that irritating sun dancing through the curtains. I could not risk seeing that baby who had invaded the flowers, who had moved in to the garden wall. He’d drive me insane.
From now on I would face into the room, not out. It’s better for a writer to face a blank wall, everyone knows that. I would focus on what was inside my head. I would concentrate, then, on my writing, without the distraction of all those evil flowers.
The desk was oh so heavy. But I had shifted furniture before and I knew how to do it. Well, the secret is the secret to almost every kind of work, which is simply this: little by little. You don’t try to yank the whole thing around at once. You go to one corner, and you shove. It doesn’t budge. I know this too. At first, nothing will budge. Nil desperandum. Shove a little harder. And on the third shove, the thing inches across the floor, just fractionally.
I knew I could keep doing this until the desk turned the way I wanted it to.
When I woke up, two days later, the desk was back in its place by the window. But I knew before Frau Holle and the doctor told me, it didn’t matter.
The baby was no longer there. In the nasturtiums.
Or anywhere.
*
I didn’t see Floryan for a fortnight, because I had to stay in the house. I didn’t see Rosaleen either. Where was she, now that I needed her, to fetch things for me, from town, to bring me news of Floryan, to bring Floryan news of me?
‘She’s gone,’ Frau Holle pressed her lips together.
Frau Zimmerman had given her the sack.
‘She was lazy as sin, the Rosaleen. She never did a tap of work here, or at Zimmerman’s. Always smoking those cigarettes and gallivanting around, drinking beer and up to God knows what. She was bad news, that one.’
Later she told me that the bicycle had been stolen.
A new girl came to clean Rosenhaus, one of the locals, aged about twelve, with the flat pale face and the flat fair hair.
So in the mornings I slept – I was very tired – and in the afternoons I sat in the garden, reading the Russian stories again. They really had something, and it was surprising that the author was not more known, but such is the way of the world. I believed I could use some of his tricks – description, which I was good at, I was like a painter more than a writer, I sometimes thought. I saw how he used description, of the sea and the sky, even of houses and streets, to represent emotions. Well, nothing new there, every child does that. Sun means joy, rain means sadness, wind means anger. He just did more of it, more subtly. More suggestively, as Floryan said. And the other thing he did, so I thought, was write about poor people, and about children, and about women, and about small shifts of feeling as if they were big important events.
‘I should tell the editor,’ I said to Floryan. We were sitting in a café under a white umbrella, celebrating my success. Floryan, he knew nothing about Rosaleen, cared less – ‘Gone home, maybe?’ – was still waiting to hear from the most important newspaper in Paris about an article he’d submitted, but he was sure they’d take it. I was eating an Eskimo becker, a plain ice without any cream or berries, since I didn’t have such an appetite any more. (I had got quite thin; I tied a wide red sash around my smock, to show off my new waist, and I’d cut my hair short, like a black helmet around my face. Everyone stared at me, when I walked along the seafront.) The sea was very flat today, dark blue, and the sky over it pale with wisps of clouds like wedding veils. The seagulls glided about languidly, looking for scraps, and the children played quietly in the sands, making neat sandcastles that looked indestructible.
‘Why?’ he said. ‘That will make complications.’
They mightn’t publish the story about the baby. They might be suspicious about all of my stories.
The band started to play.
‘It is yours now. Your own, your story, you made it new,’ he sounded immensely kno
wledgeable, wise, canny.
The tune gained momentum, like a storm gathering, or a wave swelling. But it was far far away, a whisper on the horizon, and for now the notes floated on the air like fat silver doves.
‘Nobody in London heard him, never, never,’ said Floryan. ‘Not to be worried, my dear little mushroom!’
The Clancy Kid
Colin Barrett
My town is nowhere you have been, but you know its ilk. A roundabout off a national road, an industrial estate, a five-screen Cineplex, a century of pubs packed inside the square mile of the town’s limits. The Atlantic is near; the gnarled jawbone of the coastline with its gull-infested promontories is near. Summer evenings, and in the manure-scented pastures of the satellite parishes the Zen bovines lift their heads to contemplate the V8 howls of the boy racers tearing through the back lanes.
I am young, and the young do not number many here, but it is fair to say we have the run of the place.
It is Sunday. The weekend, that three-day festival of attrition, is done. Sunday is the day of purgation and redress; of tenderised brain cases and see-sawing stomachs and hollow pledges to never, ever get that twisted again. A day you are happy to see slip by before it ever really gets going.
It’s well after 7 p.m., though still bright out, the warm light infused with that happy kind of melancholy that attends a July evening in the West. I am sitting with Tug Cuniffe at a table in the alfresco smoking area of Dockery’s pub. The smoking area is a narrow concrete courtyard to the building’s rear, overlooking the town river. Midges tickle our scalps. A candy-stripe canvas awning extends on cantilevers, and now and then the awning ripples, sail-like, in the breeze.
Ours is the table nearest to the river, and it is soothing to listen to the radio static bristle of the rushing water. There are a dozen other people out here. We know most of them, at least to see, and they all know us. Tug is one many prefer to keep a tidy berth of. He’s called Manchild behind his back. He is big and he is unpredictable, prone to fits of rage and temper tantrums. There are the pills he takes to keep himself on an even keel, but now and then, in a fit of contrariness or out of a sense of misguided self-confidence, he will abandon the medication. Sometimes he’ll admit to the abandonment and sell me on his surplus of pills, but other times he’ll say nothing.