Litro: The Memory issue #184

Contents

Issue 184 Summer 2023

Editor’s Letter Eric Akoto

Contributors

Fiction

“Gorgeous” by Matthew Perkins

Essay

“In Pursuit of Family” by Rukmini Girish

Fiction

“We Are Near the End Now” by Terry Dubow

Fiction

“Baby Clean” by Hannah Thorpe

Flash

“Other Poetry” by N/A Oparah

Essay

“The Smell of Home” by Farzana A Ghani

Flash

“René Magritte’s The Banquet” by Dorothy Lune

Fiction

“Tuscany! Tuscany!” by GC Perry

Essay

Eric Akoto eric.akoto@litro.co.uk | Oindrila Gupta Oindrila@litro.co.uk | Catherine McNamara Flash@litro.co.uk | Zadie Loft Zadie@litro.co.uk | Serene Allen media@litro.co.uk | Javeria Hasnain javeria@litro.co.uk | Monica Cardenas | Kik Lodge kik@litro.co.uk | Siyona Lal Siyona@litro.co.uk | Sara Prasad sara@litro.co.uk | Bobby Wilson bobby@litro.co.uk | Cover Image by Javeir Rey [Mirages #10] ©Javier Rey. Courtesy [Javier Rey] | Contents Page Image by Eric Akoto | General Enquiries +44 207 917 2887 | Subscription Enquiries subscriptions@litro.co.uk | All other enquiries

info@litro.co.uk | Address 180 Piccadilly, St James'sLondon, W1J 9HF © Litro Magazine LTD 2023 | ISBN number: 977268735001

“Finding Flow” by Samantha Pyrah

Flash

“Maps to Lost Futures” by Carella Keil

Essay

“I Don’t Have a Very Good Memory” by Gavin Baird

EDITOR'S LETTER

Memory isn’t necessarily the first thing that comes to mind when you think of summer. Sun tans, ice creams, beaches: sure. Holidays, relaxation, parties: hopefully! But memory, nostalgia, meditations on the past: no.

Yet, in our open call for submissions, it was memory that bubbled to the surface as an overarching theme. There was memory of past relationships, of families, of people we used to be; memories of past summers, childhoods, and the C-who-shall-not-benamed pandemic of 2020 to 2022.

Reading through all these reminiscent stories and essays caused us at Litro to pause and reflect. To remember all the events and occasions of the summer as we worked on bringing this issue together. There’s been Just Stop Oil protests at major events, with orange confetti and glue. Cinema successes for Barbie and Oppenheimer, and massive strikes from our teachers, doctors, and train drivers. Partygate, inflation, blazing riots and wildfires in France and Greece, and heatwave after heatwave after heatwave. Remember all that? It’s funny just how quickly memory can drift away.

So as the world heated up, and summer brought its fair share of news stories and turmoil, we’ve opted for a slower version of summer. A summer after the heat has died down. A summer that simmers, not boils. As August draws to a close, we invite you to take a dip into the pool of stories and essays we’ve curated, and allow yourself to reflect on the summer just gone.

Opening our issue, Matthew Perkins brings you a story of love, the beach, bodies, and the fluidity of gender identity in “Gorgeous.” Rukmini Girish’s essay, “In Pursuit of Family,” takes us to India on a summer holiday, and meditates on the meaning of family. As a change of pace, Terry Dubow’s “We Are Near the End Now” and Hannah Thorpe’s “Baby Clean” narrate the lives of young women navigating the realms of dating, mothers, and employment in America’s busiest cities. Our flash pieces from N/A Oparah, Dorothy Lune and Carella Keil give insight into a mother-daughter relationship, the voice behind a painting, and the way grief and memory intertwine. Farzana A Ghani takes all the memories of family and childhood and gathers them into an essay on food as she attempts to cook her first solo Eid as a second-generation immigrant. As the issue heads towards its end, GC Perry’s “Tuscany! Tuscany!” details the violent breakdown of a marriage, and Samantha Pyrah tries to reconnect with nature in the face of the pandemic and climate crisis in “Finding Flow.”

And rounding off this issue, we have a very special essay by Gavin Baird. A powerful, honest piece from a survivor of the 1996 Dunblane massacre, “I Don’t Have a Very Good Memory” gives us the theme of our issue. Our earlier news round-up didn’t account for the 470 mass shootings that have occurred across the US so far this year, and we hope this essay can serve as yet another reminder of the long way we have to go for the victims and survivors. So, whether you’re dipping a toe in, or submerging yourself all in one go, we hope you enjoy Litro’s summer issue, and we’ll see you again in the fall.

Eric Akoto

Javier Rey

ERIC AKOTO

Mirages #10

Javier Rey

About the Cover Art: Mirages. The idea of the monumental, utopian, and modern city is constantly debated due to its own fragility. The idealization of the city is weak and vulnerable, threatened by the rudeness of its inhabitants. Mirages is a project that interprets this unrealizable idea of the city, creating a route of buildings that seem to float unpolluted, breaking the uniformity of the sky and integrating into it like castles of glass, where contemporary society deposits the idea of unattainable perfection. These crystalline masses reflect the sky as if they were above all things, camouflaging themselves, creating a bridge between the natural and the artificial.

CONTRIBUTORS

Carella Keil

Carella is a writer and digital artist who lives in Toronto, Canada. Her work has appeared in Columbia Journal, Free Verse Revolution Best of 2022 Truthtellers, and won awards from Superlative Literary Journal and Open Minds Quarterly.

Dorothy Lune

Dorothy is a Yorta Yorta poet, born in Australia. Her work has appeared in Pinhole Poetry & more. She is looking to publish her manuscript.

Farzana A Ghani

A diasporic writer preoccupied with destabilising dominant narratives, Farzana is a PhD candidate at the University of York. Her writing has appeared in Dear Damsels and Overtly Lit, and won a TLC Free Reads Award.

Gavin Baird

Gavin is from Dunblane, Scotland, and now lives in Bristol. He has had stories published by Scottish PEN, Gutter Mag, Broken Sleep Books and Epoch Press, and poetry published by Speculative Books.

GC Perry

GC’s work has appeared in Litro, Strix, Prole, Open Pen, Shooter, Liars’ League and elsewhere.

Hannah Thorpe

Hannah is a fiction writer from Topanga Canyon, CA. She holds a degree in The Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University and is currently pursuing an MFA at the University of Illinois.

Matthew Perkins

Matthew is a writer and editor from the UK. His work has appeared in The White Review, Klang Magazine, Condé Nast Traveller and World Literature Today, among others. He was recently shortlisted for The Berlin Writing Prize.

CONTRIBUTOR S

Ngozi is a queer, first-generation Nigerian-American writer, researcher, and artist. Her other work has appeared in Fictional International, Madwomen in the Attic, Five:2:One, ANMLY, A Velvet Giant, Foglifter, and others.

Rukmini Girish

Rukmini is a writer, performer and arts administrator. She has received fellowships from Lambda Literary and the Luminarts Cultural Foundation, and her writing has appeared in Essay Daily, Punctuate and Chaleur Maga-

Sam Pyrah

Sam lives in the southeast of England and has a passion for spending time in nature. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, BBC Countryfile and Runner’s World. She is researching ecological grief for her masters degree.

Terry Dubow

Terry has published over 20 stories, most recently Clockhouse, The New Ohio Review, The Sierra Nevada Review, Salamander, and Painted Bride Quarterly. He’s had five Pushcart Prize nominations in total and one Special Mention.

Javier is a Colombian artist & photographer. His work has been shown in many collective exhibitions and international art fairs, as well as several publications in Colombia, the USA, Mexico, Germany, Spain, Denmark and other countries.

Peter covered his chest, shoulders and legs with spray-on sun cream. A fly settled on his knee. It padded across his leg, brushing through the hairs, until, and he didn’t know why he did this, he sprayed it with the sun cream. One of its legs was stuck, glued to a hair on his knee. It finally made its escape from the sticky area, crawling up a hair just below his shorts that was longer and thicker than the others. When it got to the end of the hair, it realised that it couldn’t go any further and was forced to turn around, to head back towards the root. Peter flicked it away. He opened a can of beer and looked out at the lake and tried to let his thoughts run and run, as he had been looking forward to doing all day, letting them settle on whatever they settled on.

He wasn’t alone by the lake. Couples sat, two by two, rubbing sun cream on one another, reading their books, lying top to tail or side by side, one arm around the body next to theirs, the other flung above their heads, touching each other’s hair or holding each other’s hands so that their arms looked like the antennae of a single insect being.

Those who weren’t paired up were, like Peter, mainly young men who looked like they had stopped off at the lake on their way home from work. One guy, his blonde hair wild and matted, threw his bike into the sand, took off his cotton shirt and, as Peter watched, dropped his khaki shorts and his underwear. Naked, the man walked into the water until the water covered his thighs and obscured the tattoo on his leg. A dragon? A single tentacle?

Peter imagined himself and the man lying next to each oth

GORGEOUS

Matthew Perkins

er, the man’s tanned, tentacled leg wrapping around his own. There was something macho and unthoughtful about how the man let himself slap into the water, so unselfconsciously un-deft and handsome. With that slap he was gone, swimming away, out into the lake.

Peter had brought along a copy of Women in Love. He had just read the chapter in which a young man, a bookish type with a little beard and spectacles, sits beside a lake and watches his handsome friend, a tall Nietzsche-reading industrialist, swan-dive into a lake from a wooden jetty. The bookish man watches as his handsome friend glistens, moving across the jetty like a beam of light, and when he dives, the man shimmers like the surface of the water, before he hits it and vanishes.

Peter’s English teacher at school had once taught D.H. Lawrence at an American university but had ended up at Peter’s school in England because he hadn’t liked the idea of teaching the work of one man for the duration of his career.

At times, Peter’s English teacher had seemed desperately sad. One November day, Peter had come into the classroom to find his teacher looking out at the drizzle over the school fields. His teacher had said: “See that? That’s how I feel all the time.”

Peter’s teacher had also told him, another time, when Peter had been packing away his books after a lesson, “If I wrote a book on Lawrence, I would call it, Landscape and Memory.”

But Peter came to understand that his teacher had close to a contempt for Lawrence, the kind of contempt that people only feel after years

in a doomed and painful marriage, where neither person understands the other, not really.

“For someone whose novels were banned, were censored, by the British courts for being so explicit, what a conventional view of the sexes Lawrence has, boys. The sky is the sky. The earth is the earth. The men and the women till the fields below the great expanse of sky.” There was something about the scene before him now, as he sat beside the lake, which reminded Peter of what his English teacher had said. Men and women sprawled half-naked, or completely naked, by the shore. The bodies of the men, hard, muscular, glistening like the surface of the water. The women wearing serious expressions and floral dresses, which they pulled off and left in piles on the shore as they stepped, cautiously, across the stones and through the reeds to get into the lake to swim. They thought of themselves as manly men and womanly women. There was something old-fashioned, kitsch, and a little frightening about all of it.

One day, he had asked his teacher about the scenes in the novel in which men did have, what seemed to him at least, pretty racy encounters with other men.

“Don’t you see that there’s something dishonest about these scenes?” Peter wasn’t sure.

“Remember, his male characters fall in love with the women,” his teacher explained, “not with the men. Don’t make the mistake of seeing him as too revolutionary or too queer. I made that mistake myself.”

As a teenager, Peter’s wellthumbed copy of Women in Love, would fall open by itself so that he had to put heavy books on it, bibles and atlases, to make sure it didn’t spring open on a particularly telling passage, a passage about a nude wrestling match between the bookish man and the handsome industrialist, their hot flushed limbs intertwining in the living room of an Edwardian country house.

“Don’t you see, they’re not in love. It’s unruly. Destructive. Rough. A little quaint. But ultimately doomed. Neither queer, nor revolutionary, is it? For Lawrence, homosexuality is an escape. Because it doesn’t fit into his schema. His men, his women. His water. His earth. His sky.”

Peter spread the hair-removal cream liberally up his shin and his thigh towards his groin, until his whole right leg was covered. He wondered how the chemicals worked. Did they dissolve the hair, roots and all? Did the cream destroy certain kinds of proteins? He put a finger to his lips. The cream tasted dangerous and strange. Like an unripe, unwashed supermarket cherry tomato.

When Ruth arrived home, she found Peter wearing a dress he had bought online. He hadn’t told her that he had been planning to dress-up. There was, she thought, something of an implicit challenge, the way he was standing there in the middle of the room, like he’d been waiting for her to come home, to pass judgement, and she didn’t like being put in this position. But the dress – the tophalf like a sleeveless white

blouse, the bottom-half like a pleated black skirt – was much too formal.

“Maybe a belt would help?” she said. “And you’re wearing quite a lot of foundation.”

“Does it look bad?” he asked. He could tell she was trying not to laugh.

“No, it’s just your skin is lovely already.”

“But your eyes …” Ruth said, covering her smile with her hand, but she felt she could, and should, be honest with him.

Peter felt like a child who had made a total mess of things. But he knew she was right.

“What’s wrong?”

“I just wanted to surprise you, that’s all,” Peter said.

“Did I ask to be surprised?”

Ruth said.

For a moment, Peter thought he could see tears in her eyes, but she blinked and they were gone. Ruth wiped off his makeup in the bathroom. She put the used cotton pads into the plastic bag hanging on the bathroom door: some of the pads were pink, rouged from the blusher on Peter’s face; others were covered in black marks where she wiped his eyes, leaving streaks on the pads that looked like fossils, like the spindly legs of a daddy-long-legs trapped in amber. When she started over, he sat on the corner of the bath so she could get a better angle. She told him to close his eyes and relax his face. She used his forehead as a kind of fulcrum to steady her hand as she reapplied his eyeliner.

“Oops,” she said, “sorry.” “Didn’t you ever do this with other girls at school?” Peter asked. “Not really,” she said. Ruth erased her first attempt with the corner of a cotton pad. After she’d finished one eye, Peter said he was very impressed with how thin she could get her line, which she had given an artful little flick at the end.

“I like it,” he said, admiring her work in the mirror when both eyes were done.

“I bet you do,” Ruth said, putting her arms around him.

“Maybe I’ll dress like this for work.”

Ruth said that maybe he should sleep on it.

He tried to quote something he half remembered from Judith Butler about “gender” being a “doing.”

“Peter imagined himself and the man lying next to each other, the man’s tanned, tentacled leg wrapping around his own.”

Matthew Perkins

Ruth told him that that didn’t mean he shouldn’t think about what he did. She didn’t like it when he didn’t think, when he just “did,” because that was when he could be reckless or thoughtless: when he didn’t think carefully or kindly enough about himself or carefully or kindly enough about her.

“I just want to have fun with it,” he said grumpily.

“I’d like to have fun with it too,” she said. “I’d like to have fun with you,” and she kissed him.

*

The bouncer pushed his dark glasses to the end of his nose to peer inside Ruth’s

Matthew Perkins

Ruth felt like she could go a little mad when she danced with Peter. She pumped her fists up and down like she was pulling herself up into the sky. She started to stamp her feet. She thought about what they must look like as a pair-her in her navy-blue jumpsuit, him in the dress. She put her hands on Peter’s shoulders and they both jumped up and down until they were both out of breath and Ruth could feel the sweat down the back of her jumpsuit.

and he wondered, for a moment, whether the drunk guy realised that Peter wasn’t a woman and felt strangely flattered. Then he realised the man was probably about to hurt him or make fun of him. The man didn’t grab or touch Peter, but he stepped closer and lent forwards to say right into Peter’s ear: “Hey gorgeous, fancy some sexy time.”

bag. He looked at Peter and gave Ruth a knowing look. What did he think he knew?

“Ladies,” the bouncer said, closing Ruth’s bag, glasses perched at the end of his nose, holding out a mock-gallant hand to let them through. She felt Peter tense - up beside her and, when they were inside, she squeezed his hand.

The dance floor was behind a door at the back of the pub disguised as a bookcase to the left of the bar. A couple of girls in silver wigs took their money and stamped their hands. Ruth and Peter finished their drinks, went in and danced to Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own.”

A girl approached Peter and said, loudly into his ear, “I love what you’ve done with your eyes.” Peter said that Ruth had done them. The girl swung around heavily with what could be a glint of jealousy in her eyes. But then Ruth saw that the girl was totally out of it, chewing with her jaw like she was chewing on something, even though she had nothing in her mouth.

“You guys are so beautiful,” the girl said.

She hugged them both. They hugged her back. When the girl released them, she kissed Ruth roughly, crossly, near her mouth.

*

On the way home, Ruth knew before Peter did that the drunk man was standing behind them at the crossing. Peter only noticed him when the drunk man came to stand directly behind him. He knew the man was about to do something

Ruth grabbed Peter’s arm and pulled him away from the man. “Leave him alone.”

The man held up his hands. “Okay, baby, okay baby.” Ruth held Peter’s hand as they crossed the road through a gap in the passing cars. When they were safely across, she turned back to beam indignant fury at the drunk man. On the opposite side of the road, the man still had his arms aloft in that universal gesture of wounded innocence, as if to say: “don’t shoot.”

When Ruth arrived at the lake, she put her bike on top of Peter’s in the long grass. After she had locked her bike to his, she came over and kissed him. He tried to hold her, but she wriggled free and said she was too warm to be held.

“I’m going straight in,” she said. “I need to pee.”

She took off her dress and her black bra and pants. She stepped gingerly over the stones towards the lake, and then stepped into the water. The other bodies on the beach and in the water blurred and hummed in the background now Ruth had come, and Peter felt his attention pulled towards her. But he did feel envious at how easy she found it to get naked in front of so many strangers. He wouldn’t, couldn’t, take off his clothes to swim.

“When Ruth arrived home, she found Peter wearing a dress he had bought online.”

They had talked, not long after they’d left England, about Peter experimenting with more “feminine” clothes again. Ruth had asked him if that was something he still wanted to do.

He had said, a little hurriedly, that whatever he had needed to express back then felt less urgent now.

“I think I just needed to let off some steam,” he said, laughing.

Ruth had asked if he was being truly honest with her.

They had been outside on the balcony, on their apartment on K. Strasse. Her face had been hard and handsome, the light from her cigarette hazy, like he was seeing her through a gauze.

Peter had looked away, down into the courtyard and said that he still, sometimes, found it difficult to be totally honest with her.

“What do you think is going to happen if you are honest with me?”

“You’ll leave me,” he had said.

She shrugged. “We’d break up,” she said. “It would be hard. But you’d be fine. We’d both be fine.”

Ruth could see Peter still staring down at the courtyard, but she couldn’t tell what he was staring at: the neighbours’ kids’ tricycles outside scattered across the lawn? His stare had softened into something that might have been acceptance, but it was an acceptance, or an acquiescence, Ruth didn’t wholly trust.

Somewhere across the lake, a bird was a singing as it flew, a cry which got faster and faster, like it was accelerating, shooting through the air as it flutter-tongued its way through that urgent cry.

Peter went back to reading his book. He had only started reading the book again because he had got a Face-

Fiction

Matthew Perkins

book message from his old teacher which said “died in an accident” with a link. He didn’t click on the link, but he googled the text of the message and found, as he suspected, that it had been a kind of scam. He googled his teacher’s name and couldn’t find anything to suggest there had been an accident. He felt that what his English teacher in Lawrence had been missing was the urgency and the rhythm, the breath and the movement behind the words themselves. This is what it meant to be alive and in love. There was something like syncopation in the way Lawrence wrote, knowing that his descriptions couldn’t catch up with the real thing, but where the light of the world outside and the joy inside your own mind raced each other, frustratingly, but deli

ciously out of time, trying to hold onto something you could never describe again. Lawrence was able to tune into the live current, the electric sexiness of being alive in the world, and in that place which buzzes and flows and crackles like a current, you could end up falling for anyone. But he hadn’t fallen for just anyone, he had fallen for Ruth. He supposed that made him whatever his English teacher had thought Lawrence was. What that was exactly he wasn’t sure. He also wasn’t sure if, or when, his feelings about other people, other men and women, were supposed to go away. Peter looked up from the book. He watched her floating naked in the lake, staring back at him with something like defiance, letting go of a warm cloud of pee, before swimming away from him.

Courtsey Janosch Lino

IN PURSUIT OF FAMILY

Rukmini Girish

I have been to this flat in Ashok Nagar only once before, in 2017, when I visited Raghav Maama and Parvati Maami before my parents arrived in India. That time, we sat and drank filter coffee (they don’t make tea and twenty-four is too old for hot milk) and ate homemade mixture and thattai and looked at photo albums of their son’s engagement and a poojai they had done recently. It’s been almost two years and I know I wouldn’t have been able to navigate the courtyard in the dark if I was alone. But Maya Chithi has been to this apartment many times, and she walks us around corners and through passages until finally, we take a lift up to the third floor, take off our shoes and knock on a gleaming wooden door.

“Vaango, vaango.” My mother’s uncle ushers us in after sticking his head around the door. Raghav Maama’s neat little mustache has been growing whiter over the years, and his hair is now almost entirely white. His wife, Parvati Maami, has gone significantly greyer as well, and she’s limping a little as she comes out of a room off the main hall. Since my mother and I are only in Chennai for a week, they’re hosting a potluck dinner with most of my mother’s cousins, the part of the family I spent the most time with growing up. When everyone arrives, the living room fills with laughter, conversation and familiar jokes. Dinner is brilliant, as I was expecting it to be. They have remembered that my mother likes the tamarind

tang of vathakuzhambu and I love potato roast and appalam. So dinner is rice with those and a massive assortment of other accompaniments - ghee, karuveppilai podi (which I never buy in the US because curry leaves lose their potency after a few days in the fridge, let alone when powdered and shipped across continents), tomato rasam tangier than my mother’s because it probably contains tamarind too, a coconut-based aviyal studded with vegetables, tomato thokku and kalanda thayir chaadam with bits of ginger, green chili and koththamalli. As we’re serving ourselves second helpings, I ask my favorite of my mother’s cousins how her children are doing. She tells me about their schoolwork and what the older one is planning to study in college, and I marvel for a moment at how my most enduring memory of that child-who-is-nearly-anadult is how she once bit me so hard I saw the marks of her teeth in my skin for the next half hour. We laugh about that. And then she says, “You know, they were saying konjam bore adikkarathu after this latest wedding. No more family functions until Ruki’s wedding; that has to be next, no?” She looks at me. I look at her. And I laugh and raise my eyebrows in what I hope is a mysterious fashion, and then retreat to the sofa and sit down next to Maya Chithi. I was expecting questions about boyfriends and marriage too, and I was never planning to come out to my family on this visit, but something begins to niggle at me. I no longer understand the distinction between what is communal and what must remain unsaid. Rather, it makes no sense to me. My weight, my prematurely

greying hair (less the hair than the fact that I choose not to dye it), earrings, weddings - everyone will talk about those. But not eating disorders, not periods, not sex and relationships, not the messiness. Never that. That is to be hidden away in silence, under cover of darkness.

A time when things were simple: playing cricket with Vasu, my mother’s youngest cousin on the terrace of my great-grandparents’ apartment building. He is almost caught between generations, fifteen years younger than everyone else, only seven or eight years older than me. His bat was too heavy for me, and the terrace was crisscrossed with pipes and clotheslines and probably a few stray bricks. We played carefully, he aware of my youth, I that hitting hard would mean going down five flights of stairs to retrieve the ball. My great-grandparents’ apartment contained rules and regulations I couldn’t always fathom. On the terrace, knocking a ball around carefully, we were free. He is sitting on a sofa opposite me and to the right, in the same room for the first time in eleven years. He has just got a new job, he told us, at Sodexo, and is starting the next day. He is still tall, his front teeth slightly crooked. His hair still grows straight out from his head. But to see him is to see double, a partially mythical figure superimposed on top of the self - effacing boy I knew. I realise that I have never heard him state an opinion. I knew him as the obedient son, who ate what his mother served him. He is the only son of an only son. He is the one who is supposed to carry on his grandfather’s name and legacy. Lately, I have begun to wonder what that pressure does to a person. We have heard very little about his struggles with addiction since the initial shock of

the news several years ago. Once in a while, Maya Chithi would mention rehab or a relapse or a broken engagement, and then suddenly, he was married. I feel as if I am watching this gathering from inside and outside my body at once. I see myself, the small smile on my face as I look away from Vasu to Govind Anna on my left. He is telling a story about something at work, but I am listening more to his tone and watching the way his hands move - quickly, sharply, as if to match his voice. His phone rings in the middle of the story, but it is his mother, my grandmother’s sister, so he answers and swings it around to show us all gathered. He speaks to her and his brother, and then passes the phone around so everyone can say hello. When it is my turn, I look at the way Balu Anna’s hair falls over his forehead and though his face is wider than I remember it being, that lock of hair takes me back to my childhood. I watch myself fumble, however, when he asks what I am doing these days.

Rukmini Girish

Though everyone in this living room was duly impressed by my recent promotion to supervisor, I don’t know how to explain working in a theatre, let alone running a theatre’s box office. And then there is the fact that I haven’t seen Balu Anna since before we moved to the US; he is in the Indian Army and was always being posted to far corners of the country and that was a time when the idea of video-calling was still partly science fiction. It was easy to lose touch. I say hello to his wife, who I have never met in person, and see his two children running around in the background, and the weight of how our lives have moved on settles over me so that I can hardly pass the phone to Maya Chithi. Govind Anna returns to telling his story when the call ends, but as everyone laughs at the right moments, I suddenly feel unwieldy, as if I alone am straining against the thin, shiny veneer blanketing the room.

By now, the conversation has turned to memories of my mother and her cousins’ youth: stealing into my great-grandmother’s cupboard during summer vacations to sneak the sweets and snacks she only doled out occasionally; the gardener who chose to take his afternoon nap under the stairs and emerged suddenly, scaring anyone who happened to be passing; emerged suddenly, scaring anyone who happened to be passing; a videotape I dimly

remember watching of another family gathering like this, when my mother’s generation were children and everybody sang songs. The conversation is peppered with jokes and Vasu is the butt of most of them, perpetually the picked - on little cousin. He is good-natured about it as usual. But for the first time, these jokes and stories, which are dragged out at every family gathering, feel insubstantial instead of comforting. The laughter seems too loud, the script already written. Perhaps we tell the same anecdotes over and over not only because they are pleasant memories but because it is comforting to place everybody in the same roles as earlier, as before. Too much simplicity conceals the hollows where what is unspoken lurks in the darkness. What remains unspoken: his addiction, my queerness, my mother’s work as a grief coach, the fact that several people at the gathering support Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu fundamentalism, the fact that Modi is using “protecting the rights of Hindus” as an excuse to discriminate against Muslims. I have begun to doubt whether anything was ever simple. I think it more likely that, when I was young, I was only unaware of what wasn’t being said.

In the car on the way back to our Airbnb, Maya Chithi starts to laugh. “What happened?” my mother asks.

“You just went and hugged Parvati,” she says.

“So what? I know she’s not the most huggy person, but when am I going to see her again?”

“No no, but first you hugged Vasu’s wife.”

“What?”

“She had her period! You weren’t

“Too much simplicity conceals the hollows where what is unspoken lurks in the darkness.”

supposed to touch her, silly girl. And you went and gave her a big hug, and then you went and gave Parvati a big hug and she wouldn’t have known what to do.”

I repress a sigh. This belief in a person’s “uncleanliness” at that time of the month has annoyed me for over a decade and caused more grief than any “contamination” ever would. And while my mother explained to me long ago, in very practical terms, how her parents had to be less and less strict about “uncleanliness” in a household with four people who menstruated, my grandmother’s more conservative siblings continue to insist that people on their periods don’t go near the kitchen or the shrine. So, my mother and I once had to wait outside a relative’s house until everyone who cared about contamination left before we could go in for a visit, my mother missed some of her mother’s last rites, and we’ve all spent countless hours worrying about the arrival or departure of blood and how it will coincide with various festivals.

“How was I supposed to know she has her period? How do you know?” my mother says.

“Didn’t you see? She didn’t serve herself; Vasu brought her food. And she was sitting in that corner, far away from everybody else. Ruki, you must have noticed.”

“I saw him serve her, but I just thought, ‘Wow, nice to see a man serving his wife food instead of the other way around.’”

Maya Chithi laughs again and shakes her head. “You both, you’ve not been here for too long,” she says. “We notice all these things.”

After my mother protests that

Essay Rukmini Girish

Parvati Maami could have refused to hug her if she was so worried, we move on to other subjects, but in bed later that night, I can’t help but be mildly grateful that, although I am now painfully aware of so much that is unsaid, there are some things I have stopped noticing. *

I can tell by the height of the trees sprouting from inside the compound on Rukmani Road that the apartment building is old. There are vines trailing from a few balcony gardens and, as the gate creaks open, a ginger cat vanishes under a car. My mother and I take the lift upstairs, and I let out a long breath as we walk into Sharon’s living room. It reminds me of my parents’ living rooms when I was growing up - the floor cool marble (ours was tiled), the furniture in aged wood and cane, the balcony door thrown wide open to beckon in a breeze, a wall of greenery outside. I imagine sitting here during the monsoon, listening to the rain in the trees, reading in the glow of one of these soft yellow lamps. Sharon herself is a small woman with short, slightly tousled black hair, my mother’s Airbnb host from before I arrived in India and we moved to a bigger one. She had excellent reviews, and my mother has already heaped more praise on the room she stayed in (with a small balcony looking out on nothing but greenery), the breakfast (different every day, but consistently delicious) and Sharon herself. They’ve become fast friends, and I had already been invited for tea before I left Chicago. Sharon hugs my mother and insists on hugging me too, and her delicate frame and air of vibrant absentmindedness reminds me of my favourite English professor from

college who radiated the same warmth. When Maya Chithi arrives, Sharon hugs her warmly too (Maya Chithi spent enough afternoons with my mother here that they met and grew to like each other) and we have settled down on the cane furniture and arranged the cushions to our liking when a door opens and a taller woman comes out. She is dressed simply, in a loose white top and black leggings, her long hair pulled back into a flowing ponytail streaked with grey. She could be anywhere from early thirties to mid-forties, and I am intrigued. My mother said something about Sharon having a daughter living with her, but they’d barely met, so I wasn’t expecting her to join us. But Sharon introduces her and tells us her name is Roshni. She greets us quietly and observes the conversation for a while, before asking me a few questions about working at a theatre. Like everyone I meet in India, she is surprised that I have nothing to do with making the work onstage. I tell her I understand this; it’s practically impossible to make a living in theatre in India, so any group or troupe is run on passion alone, with everyone pitching in to do everything. She is a graphic designer, she says, and tells us a little about her work in return. “Shall we eat?” Sharon asks eventually.

“Aunty, my mother has told me so much about your cooking that I’ve been looking forward to this since you scheduled it,” I say as we sit down.

“Oh, nothing grand. We eat very simply here,” she says, looking pleased. “And actually, Roshni made most of the food for today.”

There are cucumber sandwiches spread with pudina chutney (Roshni’s grandmother’s recipe), the silkiest quiche I have ever eaten, filled with masala potatoes, and banana cake made with nendran pazhams, the plantains from Kerala that my mother would steam for me as a child. It is simple food, but so delicious that it’s obvious every ingredient has been measured perfectly and added at exactly the right time. Sharon pours a red - brown tea she tells us is grown in Kotagiri and passes around a milk jug and sugar bowl. We linger over the meal, Sharon urging us to take seconds and thirds, in between stories about her time as one of Air India’s first cohort of female cabin crew. Roshni seems to relax into the conversation as well, revealing flashes of gentle humour and a smile that makes her kind, slightly tired eyes glow. She and Sharon seem inseparable, settling seamlessly into a comfortable routine.

“You must tell them the story about the man on the bike, Ma,” Roshni says, after we refuse fourth helpings and return to our last half-cups of tea. That smile creases the corners of her eyes as Sharon tries to protest. “No no, you were just saying how you wouldn’t know what do without me. Tell them why.”

“Oh god it’s so embarrassing,” Sharon says, but finally, she agrees. “I gave up driving a while back, so Roshni has to drive me if I need to go almost anywhere. But I used to walk to this Nilgiri’s shop, just here, to get a few provisions every once in a while. So one day, Roshni is out, and I needed to go and buy a loaf of bread or something, and I was walking here, just a few hundred metres down the road, when this man and woman on a motorbike pass close to me. So close. And I just react, you know, I just react

Essay Rukmini

Girish

without thinking, I scream a little bit and I must have done something with my hands,” she throws them out to her sides to demonstrate. “The next thing I hear is this big crash in front of me, and the bike has fallen. I must have pushed them over. They were okay, thankfully, they were both wearing helmets and they actually weren’t going very fast, but I have a feeling I might have ruined a date.”

“I come home to find her here, shaking like a leaf, and she tells me this story,” Roshni says, her eyes crinkling again, “so now she’s forbidden from going anywhere without company. For her own safety and for everyone else’s.”

We all laugh, and my mother begins to sympathise. “These people do ride so close,” she says, shuddering. “I can’t walk on the road too much either with all this traffic.”

“But you jump out of your skin a little too easily, Ma,” I say. “You scream when I just come into a room.”

Everyone laughs again. This is familiar, this energy. It swells with ease and comfort and fullness, a feeling of plenitude that brings satisfaction, making the sky brighter,

the jokes funnier, time a little meaningless. I felt it at some of my parents’ get-togethers when I was a child, and on some nights my senior year in college, when my roommates and I would sit around our kitchen table late into the night, talking and joking and sometimes drinking. I felt it again this summer in a close friend’s living room in Chicago, when a small group gathered to celebrate her birthday with cake and

wine. It is the closest I have ever come to understanding the word bonhomie. Chosen family is a “very American” concept, one that even my father scoffs at. You’re born into your family, and though it might be hard sometimes, you always have a duty to them. Duty or not, I haven’t particularly enjoyed my time with most of my family on this trip, and an evening like this only makes the contrast starker. Sharon and Roshni don’t know our foibles and secrets and we don’t know theirs. We might never see each other again. But this camaraderie is what I think of when I think of the word family, and I don’t

“Perhaps we tell the same anecdotes over and over not only because they are pleasant memories but because it is comforting to place everybody in the same roles as earlier, as before.”

Courtsey Fabio Lamanna

quite know how to understand the fact that I have found it here, in this living room I might never have known about if my mother had chosen a different Airbnb. I don’t know how to understand the fact that I feel so warmly towards the lines around Roshni’s eyes and the way Sharon pushes up her glasses and the

way we can just relax into this evening. Before I can sink further into reflection, my mother is saying we should get going since it’s closer to dinnertime than tea and all I have time to do is thank Sharon for her hospitality, and compliment Roshni a few more times on the food, and then we are putting on

our shoes and getting into the lift and walking onto the side of Rukmani Road, checking for traffic a little more carefully than usual.

I remind myself that it isn’t really fair to compare the evening we’ve just had with our family potluck. We might have had such a lovely time precisely because our relationship with Sharon and Roshni is so temporary it has no room to change. I remind myself that it’s a lot easier to preserve a few hours in amber than it is to unspool and examine a lifelong connection. But then, I find myself wondering whether it matters. As my family has changed and fragmented, I have begun to find more importance in moments, hours, days, than in years. No matter how uncomfortable I have felt around most of my family on this trip, I will always carry other beloved hours and days, afternoons and evenings we’ve spent together. Why not let this evening join them? It is a lesson I am still learning: that since I became an immigrant, I have found home around tables and in living rooms, in theatres and coffee shops, in spaces temporary and transient, as often as I have found it in houses, apartments, cities and countries. As we wait for some traffic to go by before crossing another road, I close my eyes for a couple of seconds (hands firmly by my side).

I focus on the hours we have just spent and add Sharon and Roshni to the catalogue of people who have taught me the distinction between home and at home.

WE ARE NEAR THE END NOW

Terry Dubow

I write poetry inside of my blog posts, and none of the higher-ups seem to mind as long as the search engines sniff the keywords.

Golden khakis with melancholy. A mid - length skirt the colour of vinegar with vigour in the hem.

I’m a single lady living alone in a one-room sad-dad apartment near the Richmond Bridge. Two blocks away, the San Francisco Bay does nothing all day but rest like bathwater and wait for night or a freighter to disrupt it.

I don’t call my folks. They just ask or they don’t ask about my writing and their voices pinch.

A set of knuckles on the door. I stare at the portal.

I am twenty-four, which incidentally equals one-quarter of the principal I owe to the Wells Fargo machine, the Biden Administration, and my hefty uncle in San Diego. All that money for a Masters in Poetry. I can never get that top number down.

My one professor wept for me and my class and then vomited into a wastebasket. She was having a bad day. Her own top number was choking her like a cock in the throat as she gazed out at us little lambs, accruing numbers on servers in the distance, and she couldn’t take it one second longer.

We all got passes in that class. Poetry in Late-Stage Capitalism the class was called. Back to the knock on the door.

I lift my eye to the concave lens. I see the screen of a phone open to the vaccination app. Whoever is on the other side of the door is clean.

I’ve been vaxxed twice and boosted, but the vapor trail of this Armageddon has not lifted. We are near the end now.

On the other side of the door, I find my landlord, Jason. A portly man, maybe forty, with fashion-model eyelashes and a pencil thin mustache and a Stitch Fix subscription. He’s trying.

“Did you hear about the zebras?” he asks through the cracked door. I keep the chain attached, and he doesn’t seem to mind. Behind him, sunlight.

“What zebras?”

“From the zoo. A pack of them escaped. They’re wandering.” Big as he is, he’s out of breath.

“Which zoo?”

“San Francisco.”

I am new to the coast but not that new. “That’s a bit far, right?” He begins to nod. “Oh yeah. You’re in no danger.”

I bob my chin but don’t speak.

“Just thought I’d tell you, Em.” The slight grin on my lips is forced. My dad called me Em and him alone until Walt who used it like a shiv. “Jesus, Em. Take a breath,” Walt would say. “Well, thank you for letting me know,” I tell Jason.

“I’ll keep you posted,” he says and then doffs an imaginary cap like he is my chauffeur.

*

What I’ve learned about search engines is that they’re an awful lot like people. They scan the horizon for evidence. Digital blips that in isolation mean nothing, but, in aggregate and context, they can signal meaning. One zebra in a zoo is a display. A dozen in a Trader Joe’s parking lot is a happening. I turn my light off when I write. I need to be in a Chernobyl-type clean room - otherwise, the enormity of the waste overwhelms me. When it’s me and my notebook, I pretend that I’m writing a novel or a chapbook.

“I am twenty-four, which incidentally equals one-quarter of the principal I owe to the Wells Fargo machine, the Biden Administration, and my hefty uncle in San Diego.”

Fiction

Indigo illuminates the room as the sunlight slices through the solid cherry blinds handbound by artisans in Malaysia.

Walt left in a huff, and I’ve filled the void with ice cream and bagels. I am larger now, but when I stare at myself, I see muscle where other people see fat. I wonder what I should lose and what I should keep if I ever get out of this apartment and into the Poetry of the Living World - if that even exists anymore.

Another knock on the door.

My life is becoming a sitcom. The structure is making itself known. There will be three knocks, I think. The last one will be the punchline.

I return to the door. It’s Jason again.

“Now it’s not just zebras,” he tells me. He’s excited. There are pearls of perspiration on the ends of his moustache. “The orangutans are out now, too. No one knows what’s happening.” He tries to look past me into the apartment. “It’s all over the news. Aren’t you on the internet? Isn’t that what you do?”

“I don’t do the internet. That is not my job. I’m a writer.”

Jason nods. “I bet you’re good at it,” he tells me. He’s blushing.

In my head, I say I will not sleep with this man. That is not the structure of the story. I am not required to have an arc that leads me to take my clothes off in front of this odd duck.

“Are they close to our apartment complex?” I ask.

Jason shakes his head. “Nope. Still safe.”

I thank him and close the door in a way that I’m sure reads as rude to him but to me feels like empowerment.

What am I to do with this one life? That is all I think about all day long. This world I inhabit now is

vacant. For previous twenty-four year olds, the world may have been threaded with possibility, but now it’s a gaping abyss, a hand-crafted blade to the throat. I write copy. The machine scans the shapes, squiggles, spaces and then the company pays me feebly. Chinos as soft as the silt at the bottom of the first pond you skinny-dipped in. On cue: another

knock. The third knock. I go to the door. I open it. There’s Jason, and he looks distraught. He’s weeping. “The zookeeper,” he manages. “He hanged himself. He unlocked the doors and then hanged himself. There’s death in the zoo and there’s life on the streets.” I understand somehow. “Would you like a cup of tea?” I ask him, and he nods and steps in.

Terry Dubow

“What am I to do with this one life? That is all I think about all day long.”

BABY CLEAN

Hannah Thorpe

You’ve been replacing most meals of the week with lemon juice and cayenne and you tell anyone who will listen that they just have to try it. When you next see your mother and she comments on your physique, you tell her the same thing. Tell her it’s good for circulation, for the heart (probably). Tell her breakfast is overrated. A puritanical scam, a Kellogg marketing scheme. A bit sexist, if she really wants to know. A bit authoritarian. Ultimately, just an old wives tale, and who needs those when for a few hours you can feel like Kate Moss, that flat belly kind of happy, that euphoric eat - you - from - the - inside - out kind of high that is superiority. When Emily Myer asks what your secret is, you use the word cleanse. It’s buzzy but righteous. It gives sainthood, gives seeking your bliss. And for a few hours that is what it’ll feel like. Bliss, absolution, calm. It feels as healthy as the right people say it is. Not just good for your kidneys, or liver, but good for something more. Good for your mind, your self - control, your wallet (if you don’t buy organic). Good for your selfworth if you don’t think too much about it. You mix kosher salt into filtered water and let yourself feel good.

On the weekend, you go out for drinks with a man you met online and try hard not to tell him your astrology sign. That’s date three material. Instead, you tell him you were raised Catholic (a lie), but save the question of belief for pillow talk. It’s

better that way. You focus instead on aesthetic, the prayer candles, the rosary beads, the Virgin Mary holy card you’ve taped to your bathroom mirror for comfort, for edge, because you got the idea from Mapplethorpe, Catholicism for its accoutrements, or so said Patti Smith. You won’t go on a second date if he doesn’t know Patti Smith. When he goes to the bathroom, you ask the bartender for a shot of something clear and knock it back fast like you did in college. It burns the same way. Hold your fingers to your lips and say something smart. If you can’t think of something smart because the liquor is making a molotov cocktail of the lemon cayenne in your stomach, just smile. Most likely, the shot will be complimentary. In the morning, with the gentle kind of hangover that inspires indulgence, you light some candles and look out the window and drink coffee until your heart feels like it’s simmering in it. Eat nothing else until one in the afternoon when the marine layer finally recedes back to the West Side where it belongs. Don’t think about the night before. Don’t think about the way your mouth feels too wide when you laugh or the way you wave your hands. The best trick of your twenties is to eschew self - reflection. Practise this. It will make you seem bold. Accept your grandmother’s invitation to brunch. Now that you’re again living close to home (advisability tbd), she will expect to see you weekly. That’s untenable but you can manage once a month. You will manage, or else the flippant way your mother threatens to disown you will turn frank. You ask your grandmother what to wear

and she says floral. Wear black. You don’t own a sundress anyway. Think, maybe you should. On the way to the restaurant, stop at a boutique that is overpriced yet understated and spend a week’s worth of your paycheck on a formless, white dress that is meant to be chic. Your grandmother will call it a mumu. She will hate it more than the colour black. With your physique, you could wear anything, but waifs don’t wear bodycons. Your grandmother will order a mimosa easy on the orange and this will make you smile, this will make you relax into the art nouveau booth seat, and when you’re halfway through a second drink of your own, you will start to be candid. Tell her you’ve been dating. Tell her he’s an accountant but not boring. You’re not sure if that’s true but say it anyway. Say you’ve been cleansing but you’re cheating for this eggs florentine. Hum when you taste the hollandaise. You’ll regret all of this the next day, but in the moment you feel unfettered. Use the English muffin to sop up all the sauce. When you get home and feel too full to move, assume the foetal position around your phone and trust the algorithm. It knows what you want even if it’s not what you need. The rabbit hole is deep. Spousal inspo à la Birkin, vacation inspo à la Rohmer, ideation inspo à la Ophelia. Simone Weil’s food diary (offensive), Sylvia Plath’s (inspirational). Imagine all her cups of tea, the extra finger of amber brandy, strawberries from the garden, a bottle of pink champagne. Imagine too the custard and dough, the expensive meat, the stuffed peppers and shish kebabs, the roast beef, the apple cakes cooling on the windowsill. It’s masochistic,

not motivational. Stop scrolling. Start dating the accountant but keep your options open. You never know when you’ll turn a corner into a man who wants to take you to Nobu. At a house party, your friend will overhear the accountant pretending you’re exclusive. This will make you angrier than you expect. Ignore him for the rest of the night. You’re not responsible for the emotions of presumptuous men. You will soon notice that presumption is not his only crime. His favorite drink is a Mai Tai. He likes dressing you up in his tracksuits. His preferred activity is trolling Trader Joes for snacks he’s never tried. He convinces you to wear his Aviator Nation set on one of these excursions. The pants pool around the ankles of your boots and the only redemption is that the fit makes you feel small. You push the cart while he scours the aisles. He keeps his sunglasses on. He pulls you in for a kiss in front of the frozen shrimp scampi display and says that people probably think you’re famous. He thinks he looks like a blonde James Franco. At his apartment, he dips his fingers into a tub of chocolate hummus and tries to make you lick it off. You don’t have to. But if you do, gargle apple cider vinegar in the kitchen right after.

When fall descends on the city like an imperceptible scent, go to a bonfire at the beach. Bundled like you rarely have to be, you will crave the decadence of a good coat swimming around you. You will crave it only as long as you are not really cold. The sand at night is clammy and clings in a single layer to the calves of your jeans. You brush off the grains with your pointer finger, inch by inch. It’s an action to commit to while you stare at the fire and sip whiskey from a water bottle a man you don’t know has been passing around. When you think about

Fiction

Hannah Thorpe

it, you know so few people around this fire and your desire to listen to where they’re from is beyond slight. A girl from Hungary tells you anyway. She tells you she misses the fröccs most, and last calls later than 2am. This is her canned response, but you’ve never been one to draw people out. She has unbrushed hair and a habit of saying wow. She wants to sound like the movies. She keeps asking you to correct her accent, but you have no clue how. Like, how would Cher Horowitz say it? Like, how would you? Like everyone the accountant is friends with, she thinks she’ll make it big. This is not only the plight of his circle, but it counts as another demerit. Your mom calls and asks, who’s the guy? She wants a photo but you say you don’t have any. She says, sure you don’t. You text her a photo of him in a bar that you took when you were drunk. It’s a habit you’re trying to break, documentation of things you don’t want logged. In it, he’s wearing a turtleneck and the light is red and his hand is slightly blurred. You notice his drink has a small umbrella in it. You don’t want this photo, but you won’t delete it. Interesting, your mom says. You say, what, what does that mean? She says, I thought you didn’t like blondes. Redouble the efforts of your cleanse. At least this you are sure of, despite the way it fogs your mind and makes it unsafe to drive. Make your friends come to you instead. They will sit on the rug around your coffee table and trade advice that is probably sound. Emily Myer will find it hard to take her eyes off her phone but you understand. There’s always some man. Before she leaves, she will cry with her hands folded in her lap, prim as cotillion. She will blame it on the Vyvanse but really she thinks it’s normal, crying twice

a day. If she doesn’t, she says, she feels fat, full up of sodium, like something that needs to be drained. You get the sentiment, but the cause feels tired. In reality, you don’t understand her at all. Her affinity for long skirts, her feathered hair. She looks good but you don’t know how. There are a lot of things you don’t know at this stage in life, like how to register your car or cook a turkey or fold a bottom sheet or make your mother proud. You don’t know the perfect ratio of music to silence, or insistence to acquiescence, or butter to toasted bread. You don’t know why you always end up following trends. At some point, you’ll decide there are things you will never know, even if others do, even if you give it the old college try. You’ll never know which pivot was right. You’ll never pinpoint yourself, unalloyed. The fractals go deep. Because she’s nursing a broken heart, Emily treats you to a weekend in the desert. She rents a mid-century bungalow nestled amid the cacti and brings mezcal and a two-pound bag of limes. The desert cities are dusky but for the occasional red pear that bursts bulbous from the opuntia. You want to split one open and milk it for your margheritas, but you don’t have any gloves. You’ve made this mistake before, as a child, petting a cactus with spikes downy as fuzz that could only be removed from your palm by a thick coat of Elmer’s glue. You tell this story to Emily but she’s mostly confused. She doesn’t understand why you’d touch it in the first place. You were seven, you remind her,

“The best trick of your twenties is to eschew self-reflection. Practise this. It will make you seem bold.”

but you still get it, the necessary disconnect, the suspension of reason. The brevity of that moment is long enough for impulse. You could reach out right now.

You read somewhere that humans can smell the rain better than a shark can smell a drop of blood in the ocean. This feels truest in the desert, at the foot of hills that rise in the distance like painted backdrops. Here, where the glacial blue of a curved pool feels like the ultimate luxury. Even the buildings preference the sun, composed of asymmetric edges that draw your eye up like Icarus. You go out to eat at a highway diner of this ilk. It aspires to be retro but sells pear and truffle crepes, buckwheat honeycomb hotcakes, and they poach all their eggs. Emily orders from the bright and healthy section of the menu and you make a point to not. It’s performative consumption but what isn’t.

Besides, Emily is a performative kind of friend. She likes you for your collection of patent leather purses and niche knowledge of health trends, because you’re a far cry from the girls she knew in Miami. Girls whose knowledge of reality television rivaled their love of EDM. Girls who smoked Camel No. 9s for the fuchsia label and weren’t phased by handsy men, as long as they came complete with bottle service and sushi. Girls who wore bodycons. You understand how easily you could have been one of them. You wonder if they think the same about you. If they clock your curtain bangs and Glossier and grimace.

You’re back in town by Sunday night in time for dinner with your grandmother in the marina. You’re wearing the jeans you drove back in. They curve low off your hip bones and your stomach peaks out like unrisen dough. According to the

Hannah Thorpe

accountant, you never dress accordingly. But you know there’s nowhere in LA that you can’t show skin.The hostess leads you to the table and you find your mother perched next to hers. What’s this, you ask, an intervention? Your mother raises her eyebrows and you can see she’s had more work done. How is the good doctor? You scrunch your forehead the way she hates, then regret it. You don’t mean to be combative, you’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop.

When it does, you aren’t surprised. They want to know what you’re doing with your life. They think you’re running out of time. Time for what? You beg, but they can’t say really. They just know life is short, love is hard, and it’s time you got a move on. The conversation makes you nauseous. You leave without eating. If you don’t know what to give a man for Christmas, break up with him. Some things should come easy and that’s one of them. You end things with the accountant one night for this reason. You do it over text, a sentence or two keeping with the me-not-you playbook that feels fair to resort to in the face of his particular personality. He will grovel. He will suggest a more casual arrangement. He will remind you that he too is not looking for anything serious, but the three bouquets of flowers he presented on your second date have always said otherwise. You didn’t have enough vases then, and if anything you have less now. Respond courteously, reiterate your resolve, and

stop responding. When he texts made me think of you with a picture of the Trader Joe’s Shakshuka starter, you’ll feel justified in your cold shoulder. This is not how you want to be remembered. You don’t miss him because you never really liked him. For a week, this realisation makes you unstable, like one bad choice is a culmination, symbolic of something more. You talk to Emily about symbols and choices and she says life is too hard when you’re looking for answers. But you dated a man you quietly hated, that must say something about your self - esteem. And you’re finding it hard to sleep. Instead, you frequent the Korean spa. It’s open all hours but better at night, empty as the inside of a shell. Instead of chattering women prone for their exfoliations, there’s the soaking tub’s gurgle, the drip of the steam room where you watch muted K - Dramas through the mist, where you try, each night, to make yourself stay a minute more, the steam thick in your throat and expanding your pores. Tonight, you’re lightheaded as lysol when conditioned air riots into the room on the heels of an old woman whose skin sags low as her pubic hair. She stops short in front of you, her towel a sash over her shoulder. You manage a smile. Look at you, she says. You tilt your head. She thinks you look like an angel, a baby, cherubic yet svelte. She wants to know your age, if you eat meat, if you’re here now then when do you sleep. You’re finding it hard to find answers beyond yes, beyond smiles and nods and laughs that are stifled by the density of the air that is getting harder to see through. So young, she says, an angel, an angel for smiling at old women. And you think, yes, you think, she’s right. You’ve sweat your toxins onto the tile at your feet, you’ve lost enough sleep. Tomorrow you’ll be clean.

“If you don’t know what to give a man for Christmas, break up with him.”

OTHER POETRY

N/A Oparah

My mother has been texting me full chapters of the bible. Her mornings, my evenings. I can tell that she is doing it from memory and while freshly conscious, because there are a lot of mistakes. Not so much typos and extra spaces, though there are, of course, those too; but altered emphases - parables taking on different plot twists and morals. There are more women in the hungry crowds, more prodigal children. Jesus’s words, instead of their usual red, are in all caps. This Christ is long-winded and less poetic. He seems angrier or maybe just more sure of what is right and how he’d like the world to live like him. Her Jesus is more generous, though. Somehow. Giving not only his body and blood, but providing small, day-to-day conveniences, like cooking and cleaning. Her Christ notices and talks about things like the dust collecting in corners - he finds a way to relate this dirtiness to regret, to neglect, to needing attention. My mother has been waking up earlier and earlier to send these texts. 5 a.m., then 4 a.m.; once, 3:17. They come six, seven at a time, vibrating pseudo-silently against my work desk. I called her once to ask her why she was awake, but all she wanted to talk about was what she just sent and if I already knew their story. “Matthew One,” she kept repeating. I could hear the sleep in her voice, how in need of water her body was.

“Go back to sleep,” I said, like a warning. I had to promise to read the texts once I hung up before she would get off the phone.

Mary and Joseph were recast - bigger roles, more lines and clearer backstories. They seemed more the point than their mysterious and magical child. There were more flashbacks, both structurally and in Jesus’s long speeches, to their lives - how Mary grew up, why she and Joe were chosen as creators of the ultimate creator, how their lives did and didn’t change when their young son left them. I did enjoy this particular shift in focus; it was a strange fanfiction.

My mother used to want to be a pastor. But she lived enough of and quit that dream by the time its utterance ended. As if the sentence were proof and practice enough. As if life could be reduced to what is said and recorded - that living doesn’t necessarily need to happen, that being is just a matter of agreement and faith. She knows too much about following her own desires. Too much about early deaths and the necessary, predetermined sacrifices of the select few. She understands that to speak of oneself as anything other than “a means to an end,” is to waste words. Those desires, those parts of us always get edited out.

Really, I think all she wanted was to create something, anything that could live outside her and matter in the ways she wanted them to matter. I think she wanted proof she had something to offer, that her opinions, beliefs, ways of seeing and hearing, when trusted and applied, would make things better.

Now, we’re past the psalms. She tried translating all those painful songs into prose. But without a clear plot or grounding characters, she didn’t really know where to go. It would just become other poetry. She must’ve realised this, because I only got a few translated chapters from the whole book of Psalm before she quit and switched to Job.

Instead of ignoring them, I started thumbs-upping all the texts she sent after skimming them. This confused her. Especially if I liked a text about evil or pain or giving into desires.

“WHY WOULD YOU LIKE THIS,” she’d ask, in all caps like a God.

“It just means that I saw that particular text message,” I’d reply.

“Oh,” she’d say. “GOOD,” she’d add.

The next day, after turning Job into a single mother of three, who lost all her children to the other sides of the world (she called this “geographical deaths”), she sent a text that said “ONLY LIKE THIS IF YOU HAVE READ AND TRULY UNDERSTOOD HIS SUFFERING.”

I didn’t like this text. I called her instead. Taught her how to hold the phone the perfect distance to frame her whole face while using video. She didn’t mention Job. She asked about my day and tried to remember what city I was in. She asked if it was late or sunny or cold or safe where I was. She interrupted my answer to say she misses me, misses being close and knowing those answers before I have to tell her. She said that it was nice to see my face. She said it’d been too long, that she’d forgotten how beautiful I was. I agreed, then reminded her that I came from her. That all she was seeing was a slightly altered, otherworldly, version of herself.

THE SMELL OF HOME

Farzana A Ghani

My past is a diet of rice and roti. Fluffy round discs sat with most meals and large pots of rice and meat cooked on weekends and Eid. Daily, steaming curries, ladled out by my mother at the table while we waited, mopped up, sometimes reluctantly, with roti, which came wrapped in a cloth sitting in a changair, a relic from my mother’s bridal trousseau. The handwoven flat basket, along with other kitchen goods, made the journey with her overseas, leaving her own widowed mother behind to watch for Airmail letters she would never be able to read. I did not pay enough attention to my mother’s story about how she made her own, a bridal rite of passage. I knew it was a different changair that sat royally atop our kitchen table, concave and smiling, run through with flecks of gold, pink and beige, draped lovingly with a neatly woven cloth. The curries my mother made were varied and flavoursome but to us were never as good as the fish fingers and chips we longed for. Children of immigrants, we hungrily ingest the Western word, “curry,” displacing the traditional word “salan.” Language is curious: it sneaks up like milk froth, when you least expect it, and just like that, it spills over and a word is misplaced because the English you were born into has coated your tongue, thick and gelatinous. I know in my bones that English is not my additional language, I know it has surpassed the tongue of my mother and etched itself onto me, the tattooing process slow and painful over the years, but the ink has dried irrepressible, inerasable. Now the

tongue of my mother round and alien in my mouth. For raw ingredients, I always find the words of my mother resurfacing, having never learned their English equivalents until adulthood; jeera, thaniya, haldi and marcha all sear up, spitting and hissing in ghee when I consider my cooking. No matter what, no matter how hard I try to recreate it, my cooking pales in comparison to the matriarchs around me: my mother, my mother-in-law, my older sisters. The

tastelessness of my green chatni, the never-quite-thick-enough curries sitting in puddles, the very-nearly dry chicken, all point to one thing: I will never be them.

Good cooking takes time and sacrifice; good Pakistani cooking takes much, much more. Afternoons of resentment resurface: my brothers lounge on sofas, draped like jacquard covers,

or brazenly wash cars in the blaze of summer, whilst we stand, burning hour upon hour in the kitchen, washing, chopping, learning, watching. I remember the anger I felt about the expectation that we would remain upright for so long, learning complicated steps, the unquestioning expectation we would embrace mundane tasks: the piling of vegetables while onions singed eyes, always standing, throughout the day to keep the family fed. There was a hierarchy in the kitchen: I washed dishes whilst my older sisters carried weightier burdens. I cared little for learning to cook and did so sullenly because standing vigil in the kitchen took me away from books and towards convoluted methods of stirring, of scraping down stainless steel with wooden spoons to avoid masala sticking to sides. In adulthood, I still crave to be elsewhere, adding recriminating blocks of frozen ginger and garlic to the electric pressure cooker to reduce my sacrifice at the culinary altar of the kitchen. I want anything other than slicing, sizzling, stirring, spattering myself with foodstuffs, always smelling faintly of onions and meat juices. Teenage resentments echo through the ages and now, in my forties, I look at my feet, ankles thick and inflexible and see my mother, always standing, sometimes leaning on a chair, sitting to slice, standing to stir. I survey my ageing body and I see my mother, her painful back, her waterlogged legs. I am now her, with my own family, sacrificing and standing, pressing knife to board, grease on my face, all

“You do not have to learn to cook because you are girls; you have to learn to cook because you need to eat, and you need to eat well.”

willingly. When the pain in my back courses like fire, I stand and chop regardless.

Cuisines from around the world have always peppered our palates. Marriage began with Pakistani dishes, and whenever I made “English” food, it came with an undernote of Pakistan. Born in England, raised by Pakistani-Mirpuri parents, I cooked bastardised dishes: pasta with a smattering of garam masala and luscious green coriander; lamb casseroles hybridised with turmeric, chilli and paprika; lasagnes cut through with biting flavours and currified mince, progenies of my mother’s homemade basaar. Almost daily, I pull out an ice-cream tub of frozen coriander to sprinkle over everything, remembering wryly how many times in childhood my mother’s freezer tubs of thaniya and saag disappointed our freezer raids for frozen delights. Running my own freezer, away from my mother, I continue the tradition, refilling sturdy icecream tubs over and over until lids eventually shatter and have to be replaced.

The fusion food phenomenon is not new; “English” food is a blend of invasions inward and outward, conquering, importing, looting. Plucked from one place, displaced to another, taking only what could be carried, colonised and conquered, forced together like ground wheat and water, we are rolled out and stretched into new dishes, mongrels on globalised diets. Settling into displacement, yet still immigrant children, we codeswitch, pluralising words from our mother tongues with the English “s,” as we pluralise the nominal roots of dishes with the affix or suffix of another language.

Now here we are in a land

Essay

Farzana A Ghani

that threatens to chew us up and spit us out for foreignness, where curry is more “English” than pie and chips. struggle to explain the strangeness of yellow-brown sauce served at the chippy as “curry sauce” to my indignant mother. It’s not salan, it’s an English form: a specific, watery version, reserved only for fish and chip shops. She sniffs and turns away at the ajeebness of English food: anyone can call anything salan these days. She adds thaniya to the boneless chicken she’ll roll into shop-bought tortillas later, spread with hummus, serving it to my dad with oven-baked garlic bread and boiled green beans and sweetcorn. The secret ingredient is irony.

Motherhood changed my relationship with food irrevocably. Weaning brought with it the violent sacrifice of sugar and I began tirelessly making everything from scratch, standing sentinel at the counter, watching ketchups, whisking eggs, pressing myself into biscuits and doughs, endlessly stirring. Anything that could be bought could also be made, if one was motivated to remain vertical long enough. Spices relegated themselves to the back of the cupboard - though my mother-in-law would say they never really left in the first place. She playfully mocks my English tongue not accustomed to the heat of her Karachi upbringing where biryani is more than just a dish. I once tried to learn the intricacies of the biryani experience but lost myself in the winding streets of complex spice mixes, not only region-specific but ones that varied from street to street,

family to family, my under-exercised tongue on my hard palate to appreciate the complexity of a dish so fiercely beloved. If biryani was a letter, it would be the elusive , a character my Anglophone tongue struggled to reach in childhood Urdu lessons, never stretching beyond the more acceptable, more English “r.” My mother tried for a few years, paying for lessons after school, but we never spoke Urdu. It was a language reserved for reading, for TV dramas, for those more middle-class. Instead, our home rang with loud Pahari, a mountainous, unwritten language we could never climb over to feel comfortable speaking the quieter, more refined Urdu of flatter plains. Our tongues were born abroad and with time, naturalisation became complete as the

dropped out of our pakoray, dooming them to always be pale, bland, mis-pronounced imitations of themselves. With the arrival of newly formed, sensitive palates, rich flavours took a back seat, though roti never lost its pride of place at the table. I imagined my children slurping up ancestry with roti clenched in baby fists, keeping heritage alive at the dining table. They ate it plain, screwed up, rolled, slick with butter, dipped in daal, touched briefly with haldi and a chilli-less tarka. But cooking less vibrant, less exuberant on the tongue left us bland, our bellies full but undernourished, tongues

“Good cooking takes time and sacrifice; good Pakistani cooking takes much, much more.”

thick with the viscosity of English, underwhelmed and hankering.

Nourishment is now more fervently wrapped in the folds of my mother’s past. I have since nudged the spice cupboard back into our diet, tossing kalonji into keto naan, grinding green chatni for kebab that, for the children, sit with yoghurt or ketchup. Habitually reaching for the ice-cream tub of frozen coriander, I note the absence of my mother’s expertise but only with a vague desperation, too tired to reach into the past and pull more dishes from her never-ending mental repertoire. Never written down, but somehow never forgotten.

Mantles thrust upon me unduly have changed my attitude to food irrevocably. In 2020, in the midst of a global pandemic, we found ourselves in an unprecedented lockdown facing the unthinkable: Eid without our families. Religious celebrations always play out around a table, but post-Eid prayer brunch and family dinners were cancelled. Lockdown Eid meant not spending the day in the aroma of family, gorging on delectable carb-heavy delights, succulent sweet treats, not waking up the next day to drive to another table with my parents. Plastic tubs of food, brimming with pilau, curries, minty yoghurts and not-quite-crisp salads would not follow us home. Not this time. Lockdown Eid was unprecedented, unparalleled, an over-worked cliché, now history. Then it was a catastrophic event; social media adverts targeted Muslim households: “Celebrate at Home.”

A massive event in the Muslim food calendar, some families start Eid food preparations weeks before, folding fillings into pastry blankets,

Farzana A Ghani

rolling things into transparent spring rolls, lying them to sleep neatly in bags in the freezer, waiting patiently for the special day. A whole day in the making and gone as an appetizer, barely looked at before being chomped down in three bites. My younger self often watched the guzzling of these finger foods first with amazement and then, when I was old enough to be drafted in, with bitter envy. Not knowing the labour-intensive ritual of Eid food preparation was a privilege only afforded to the men of the family. Panic set in as I stood facing the mountainous possibility I would be making my first solo Eid meal. Unable to decide between pilau, biryani, chicken, tandoori or fried, I scrambled for lists. The cacophony of choice usually taken on by the family matriarch, was heightened by the fact that my British-born, twice-removed from their Pakistani-Mirpuri heritage children had not yet tried many dishes associated with South Asian Eid. Guilt-ridden over my privilege, I over-bought, filling the fridge with the possibility of a different dish for every meal for three days. Kheer, mango kulfi, sickly-sweet gulab jamun and various yoghurt accompaniments slowly and deliberately annexed shelves normally occupied by vegetables and cottage cheese. Marinated joints, chicken wings and balls of pink-rolled koftay, all put away with the silent prayers of a mother who hungers for her children to enjoy the warm scents of lavish food, lovingly prepared. Two days of non-stop food preparations alongside regular meals brought on a mutiny of limbs forcing me to sit. Why had I driven myself to do so much? My children were too young to demand foods and did not expect three

days of three-course meals. As the hot water bottle quieted the screaming in my back, I realised, the pull of home, the yearning to feel a physical closeness to those so unnaturally isolated, drove me, unconsciously, to behave like my mother. In her absence, in the absence of my mother-in-law, I recreated the smell of home, the smell of childhood Eids, to fashion a tangible nearness with more than just a Zoom call. I sliced and chopped, fried and stood, reaching for closeness; to feel closer to the lives that bore me, the selfless mother who raised me and the self-sacrificing matriarch who, in adulthood, accepted me. Filling the house with the pungent aroma of exhaustion, I worked feverishly, fearing that Eid would not be Eid without the backbreaking labour of women in the searing heat of a kitchen. Recalling the pain on my mother’s face, I tried to recreate it: the sheen of woman-sweat on a cheek, tinged with grease and love; the pulsating throb of legs as they move sluggishly from countertop to sink, from board to bin, from cooker to the bowels of the oven, all the while feeling the heaviness of a back salivating with the need to be sated with love.

Stepping into my mother’s swollen feet that Eid was fuelled by the void of life in lockdown, but also the real night-time fear that I lack the skills to pass on my mother’s legacy to my daughters. I lie awake, counting the dishes I know how to cook properly, not ones I have bastardised, and inadequacy rises, hissing and spitting steam, damning and judgemental. How will I keep my moth er’s heritage alive? A reminder of my age in relation to my mother floats to the surface like the skins of daal we discard

when soaking. My mother’s method of a “pinch of this” and a “handful of that” has given way to a precision of recipe found on the internet and some nights, I seek solace in this, knowing that my children can hunt wirelessly for dishes I never bothered to learn. I know if they feel inclined, they can turn to the internet, learning how to make dishes I’ve allowed to drop off our table: long fingered pindiya, bitter gourds, chopped up greenery, roti made from ancient, stoneground, temperamental flours, now blended in mills and sold in plastic bags. Other nights are not so forgiving and I reprimand myself because internet recipes are a poor substitute for passing on ancient wisdom. Every family executes dishes differently: saag three ways, pindhiya without slime, combinations of daal and what they can sit with are all family-specific preferences, passed down, adopted, blended. Is it true that if you don’t know the food of your ancestors, you don’t know who you are? Will they know who they are without beingan and pindiya, without the acrimonious flavour of kerele and the abundance of sabzi they will never have the language to name? The anxiety of passing on culture will propel me to teach my daughters to learn to cook. However, I sit differently, feeling the pull of my mother’s ancestry, the touch of her mother, a link to a land I have visited less than a handful of times. My daughters feel no such affinity for a country unfamiliar to them. How can I pass on something that was never really mine? Transform it, cook it meaningfully, simmer it and present it to my children, bewildered by their own difference? If they don’t know the food of their ancestors, will they know who they are?

I regret the resentment I sprinkled over

Farzana A Ghani

dinner last night, made not with love but with pain, spilling feelings of hurt over the children. Remorse floods my mouth after savouring the bitter taste of thanklessness, spattering it over my family who eat most of what I make without complaint. Cooking is an all-consuming, unpaid labour needed for nourishment. We all need to eat, so we all need to cook, or try to learn, something I instill with every morsel: you do not have to learn to cook because you are girls; you have to learn to cook because you need to eat, and you need to eat well. Guilt sits on me like skin on hot milk, cooling rapidly. Others willingly embrace cooking as part of their love-language. Where my mother and mother-in-law cook from love rather than duty, pouring it into plates with every spoon, I force food on my loved ones, watchful they consume what the scream in my back and the ache in my legs made for them. Eat, I shout. I made it for you, so eat. Not like that. Savour it. It took me hours.

*

Sometimes, I take pleasure in plying them with dishes they covet; baking that leaves them numb with sugar, lips coated in love as they smack them appreciatively. On those days, I stand without resentment, but now know when to stop, to listen to the ache of limbs begging for mercy. I know when to show my daughters that self-sacrifice in a searing hot pan is not the lot of a woman; it is not the seasoning in every dish and I pray they learn where I did not. Now I cook not

only for sustenance, but to keep smouldering the fire of my heritage. The used, baby-sized changair my mother gave me after marriage, flown over when her own mother visited thirty years ago, is now dusted with flour on one side but a vibrant beige-pink underneath, a reminder of the constant concave moon centerpiece of my childhood. The roti sits in it, cocooned protectively, and we all dip from the same pot of history. My hips and belly pay the price, but without daal and pilau, without pakoray missing a , there is a tastelessness to life leaving me desperately craving that yeasty tug of the past, that strong pull of home. Resentment gives way to the slow simmering of history, just beneath the surface of every dish, so I know, I will cook and continue to cook, reaching into the past, hopeful that one day, I will pull from my ancestry what I never learned and feed it, lovingly, back aching, legs screaming, to my family, waiting patiently at the table.

“Is it true that if you don’t know the food of your ancestors, you don’t know who you are?”

Courtsey Taylor Kiser

RENE MAGRITTE'S THE BANQUET

Dorothy Lune

Oil on canvas, June 21 1958

Pink:

I watch the sky fold into origami ducks for me, it sensed that I’m held in grass like supple sprigs. My head bangs brick every few seconds, so a single knuckle found a joint to latch to.

Vermilion:

Mass of tree hide behind the boldening bauble, I convict each tree of cowardice, I instruct them to watch how I bleed out from off folds now, & every so often I disregard it when I visit his unmarked grave.

Chartreuse:

the coffin as makeshift as his teeth were, I prefer justice over court - speak of the devil, I played tennis in a viser, I can’t bring myself to set an arbitrary goal - I can’t bring myself to freshen up & arrive.

i. Pink

ii. Vermilion

iii. Chartreuse—

TUSCANY! TUSCANY!

GC Perry

I saw it out of the corner of my eye. The knife. Cartwheeling through the air. A breadknife. I had cut my finger on it earlier that week. It takes a while to get used to the knives in these rental properties. These upmarket villas’ knives tend to be sharper, more keen, than our ones at home. It always makes me think that I should get ours sharpened. One day I may get around to it.

I was clearing the breakfast plates when Julia threw the knife. Instinctively I turned my head away and raised an arm. The blade struck my forearm - blunt side, mercifully - and clattered to the tiles. Julia, hair awry and eyes still puffy with sleep, screamed. No words, just an inchoate, primal noise. She picked up a plate, still smeary with strawberry jam, and hurled that too. It thudded into the wall behind me then shattered on contact with the hard floor. I retreated to the safety of the downstairs bathroom, sat on the toilet and listened to the avalanche of breaking crockery and guttural expletives drowning out the chorusing cicadas from the nearby olive grove and the screech of the swifts overhead. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror: sunburned, balding, paunchy. Depleted. From the other side of the door, the sound of metal and crockery raining down on terracotta continued. I tried not to think about the deposit or the inevitably awkward checkout conversation with the hosts. I had not seen Julia like this before. She was usually so house proud and fastidious even in holiday rentals where she would get up early before checkout to clean and tidy while I packed the bags.

The summer in Tuscany. A rented stone villa dripping with intensely pink-purple flowers - bougainvillea, maybe? Gently undulating gardens artfully landscaped with a meandering pebble path leading to a generous pool. Adjoining the main building, a vine-strewn pergola in the eaves of which a family of house martins have built their nest. The drive through the ancient olive grove to access the property; the trunks impossibly twisted and knuckle-barked. The view from the veranda looking out over the lushness of the Tuscan landscape. Nothing but dense green punctuated by terracotta-coloured hilltop towns; in the far distance, San Gimignano boasting its dozen towers signalling heavenward. It had been a mistake to have come here.

Not more than a couple of days in, insipid routine had settled upon us. Silent breakfasts. Long mornings of reading. The occasional swim. Desultory conversations about what trip to include in our day. A lunch in one of the hilltop towns. The piazzas soon indistinguishable from one another. The food unremarkable, or worse. A gelato, the outing’s predictable highlight. A silent drive back to the villa. Glasses of wine and a light meal beneath the pergola to the accompaniment of the cicadas and the scent of citronella candle smoke. Then to our separate bedrooms: her idea, she says she sleeps better and she needs this holiday to relax. To be honest, I prefer it too: sleeping together seems an absurd and unnecessary intimacy these days. A custom more honoured in its breach than observance.

I ponder the inevitability of our situation. Certainly, as I gaze around the piazzas, I see couples just like Julia and myself. Affluent, ageing, mute. Mutely antagonistic? Occasionally, I see couples in animated conversation, interested in each other’s talk, sometimes even laughing together. They are the exceptions, I think. Are they just lucky? Perhaps they are drunk?

Mornings and evenings, I sit in the shade of the pergola, a book in my lap and watch the house martins as Julia works through her Puzzler. Two weeks in to our month away, their trips to and from the nest are more frequent. I see them arriving at their lumpy, wattled nest with beaks a mess of insects. The nest erupts in the high-pitched keening of their young. They are attentive parents.

Of course, Julia and I have been happy. Very happy. Just not for some time. No parent should bury a son and it took a toll on both of us. I do blame myself, to an extent. So does Julia. I was emotionally distant - is that what it’s called? - and perhaps if that had not been the case Mark might not have felt so hopeless and alone. But maybe I overstate my influence on him. Is it odd of me to still think about the train driver? To wonder if he saw Mark’s face before the impact? Despite the desperate violence of his passing, it gives me satisfaction to know that his suffering is at end. What a terrible thing it was; it is over now. We have a daughter, Louisa, but she lives on the other side of the world. I always wonder if that was

a choice. Of course, it was a choice. But I mean was she choosing to get as far away from her home as she could?

I cannot blame her. I suspect that Julia does. I love Louisa but I dread the Zoom calls. Always at the wrong time for either her or us. Both. Always lacking the warmth and ease we all crave. Disappointment and frustration the prevailing emotions as we bid our farewells.

I remember the day I felt her first slipping away from me. She questioned my ornithological expertise. I have always had an interest in birds. It is more than a passing interest although I am no obsessive. I was never one of the network of men - it is mostly men, I think - who would descend on some quarry in Suffolk on the rumoured sighting of a bee-eater. But I have a good knowledge of the major British bird species, know something of their habits and take small, passing pleasures in seeing specimens I recognise, and will look up those I encounter that are outside my sphere. I made sure that Mark and Louisa were schooled in the basics:

Fiction

GC Perry

identifying robins, blackbirds and the various tits and finches in the garden; spotting mallards, coots and moorhens in the park lake. Louisa must have been twelve or thirteen when, as we watched a large raptor – a buzzard was my best guess – wheeling effortlessly on the coastal thermals of the Pembrokeshire coast, she questioned whether I really knew very much at all. She asked the family to consider how they all deferred to my supposed knowledge, when really the only thing that was indisputable was the rest of the family’s utter ignorance – and, she inferred, disinterest – in birdlife. My showy pretence of outrage at her suggestion was intended to mask the nagging fear that perhaps she was correct; I am a dilettante, at best. Although I admit that birds of prey have never been my strongest suit, I still think the silhouetted fingers at its wingtips make a buzzard the most likely suspect. *

On the second day of the holiday, after oversized gin and tonics and a shared bottle of wine, Julia and I swam together. We had thought only to bring one towel down to the pool and, in the unexpected intimacy of the sharing of it, we found ourselves on the sun lounger together. For a short time, the closeness felt freeing. Empowering. But we soon succumbed to feelings of awkwardness: of feeling

we had exposed too much of our selves; of believing that there was something inappropriate about our actions; that we were engaged in something ultimately shameful. Our bodies felt heavy and clammy to the touch in the cooling evening air. We were no longer young. Afterwards, I rose and felt ashamed of my paunch and the thinness of my now-hairless legs. Julia’s breasts were splayed and white against the angry pink of her nascent suntan. Her stomach had the look of a flaccid party balloon. We have been physically distant since.

The anger and the violence are quite new. It is the menopause, I think. Or perhaps she has already been through that? The morning she threw the knife, we had been having breakfast under the pergola. I was watching the house martins. Intermittently, I would see one of the fledglings popping its head through the hole its nest, impatiently awaiting the arrival of food. I supposed they would soon fledge. Julia looked up from her Puzzler and angrily confronted me about an incident from fully fifteen years previously. She was apoplectic. It was as though she had just discovered the indiscretion. I tried to placate her. I tried to reason with her. She was out of control. It was as I tried to clear some of the breakfast things – tried to move the situation on – that she really lost it. That is when she came at me with the breadknife.

Aside from my failings as a father, I have not always been a good husband. I worked a lot. I was away a lot. Julia worked too but the responsibility of making a home and bringing up the children fell to her. We didn’t discuss it. I think that was how things were back then, for most.

The affair was one of those things that seemed to happen to me almost without my realising it. Or that is how I remember it. She worked for me. She was pretty although no prettier than Julia at the time in question, I think. It seemed a matter of circumstance and convenience at the time. What surprises me most about it, looking back, is how I had the vigour and drive – the appetite –in the first place. On reflection, these last few years have aged me considerably. I seem to feel perpetually tired these days.

Of course, when it all came out Julia was angry and upset. I wonder why she didn’t kick me out? It would have seemed reasonable to me. It took a while for both of us to get back to something like normal. Clearly, Julia has not forgiven me. I do not blame her. *

I rose early this morning, made a cup of tea and, still in my pyjamas, went to sit under the pergola. The sky was cloudless and, while the terracotta tiles retained the sharp chill of night, I felt a rising dread of another long, hot day in prospect. I am not good with the heat.

Yesterday’s attack had passed unmentioned. After Julia’s rain of destruction was over, I caught the sound of her bare feet padding softly away and up the stairs. Her bedroom door closed with a quiet click and I heard the trickle of her shower water piping into the drains.

GC Perry

I cleared the wreckage; mopped down the floors. I wondered if there was a credible story I could provide to the owners? After a couple of hours, Julia joined me under the pergola with her Puzzler and we later drove out to lunch where there was talk of taking the train to Florence or Sienna in the coming days. We ate a gelato before the car journey back to the villa. I shifted my feet across the tiles and sipped my tea. It was then I saw them. All three. The fledglings’ stiff dead bodies on the cold terracotta. One was spread flat to the floor, its wings extended as if in flight; another lay hunched, head tucked into its chest; the third was on its back with its thin feet tightly curled. Placing my teacup in its saucer, I ran my hand over my face and dug my fingers into my eyes. What was the reason for this? Clearly, no predator was to blame. Had they heedlessly followed one another out of the nest before their time? It seemed inexplicable to me. I decided to make a small grave for the corpses. After some ineffectual searching, I concluded there was no spade. The presence of the tiny, stiff bodies had become unbearable; I used a plastic dust pan and brush to scoop them up and manoeuvered them into the flip-top bin in the kitchen. I glimpsed them strewn across the shards of broken crockery, like innocent victims of some senseless atrocity, and regretted it all. The bin’s lid flipped shut again. I saw the knife block next to the hob. It seemed so obvious, so clear to me: I took the carving knife – more suited to our purposes than a bread

knife – and headed upstairs. I pushed open Julia’s bedroom door. She was lying on her side. My movements awoke her and she started up, pulling off her eye mask in irritation. Her eyes blazed. I perched on the edge of the bed. Julia hauled herself up on her pillows. In the space between us, I placed the carving knife. It looked strange there on the white cotton sheets: incongruous obviously but also somehow elegant and filled with magnificent potential. I looked at Julia, at the knife, and then back to her. A spark of understanding passed between us. It’s been so long.

“Our bodies felt heavy and clammy to the touch in the cooling evening air. We were no longer young.”

FINDING FLOW

MAY 2021

I am sulking. Arms folded, and despite the cloudless sky, a face like thunder.

“I don’t know why you’re angry with me,” Jeff says, the map hanging uselessly in his hand. “It isn’t my fault.”

We’re looking over a five-bar gate into a valley just south of the village of Rotherfield in south-east England. “PRIVATE LAND” shouts a sign on the gate. “TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.” Somewhere below us, the map indicates, the Rother rises.

“I’m not angry at you,” I snap.

But I am, a bit. Not just because he’s taken charge of the map, as I knew he would if I invited him along, but because he’s a law-abiding citizen. I want someone to egg me on to climb over the gate or duck through the fence, because I lack the brazenness to do it alone. This, of course, is the real reason I’m annoyed.

“…I find you in the reeds, a trickle coming out of a bank, a foal of a river,” writes Alice Oswald’s walker in Dart. That’s how I envisioned my river journey beginning. I would stride across the undulant hills and wooded ghylls of the High Weald – a lone enraptured female – to find the Rother bubbling out of the primordial clay. From there, I would follow the valley it has carved over millennia to the sea, 35 miles east. In going with the flow of the river, perhaps I would rediscover my own.

But we can’t get to the source,

so the whole plan is doomed. When Jeff suggests we start the journey further along, I refuse, and we drive instead to a staggeringly posh country pub and drink white wine in the brittle sunshine. I wasn’t myself then. I was emerging from a deep and dark depression that had begun a year earlier and although the darkness was lifting, I was still fragile. My light, like that of a flickering candle, could go out with the slightest blow. But the idea of walking the Rother persisted. There’s something comforting in the linearity of rivers. As Olivia Laing puts it: “A river has a certainty with which it travels that makes it very soothing, particularly for those who’ve lost faith with where they’re headed.” Perhaps that is what drew me to the river in the first place. It was the spring of 2020 and, buckling under the weight of the pandemic and the climate crisis, I felt as if the world was falling apart. And yet, each day, the sun rose, the birds sang, and the trees burst into bud. Everything carried on as usual. I tried to do the same until one day, I couldn’t.

MAY 2020

I am running by the Rother, taking my “daily exercise.” Running has always kept me sane and given me focus, but on this day, with no warning, I run out of purpose. It is like hitting the wall in a marathon. I slow to a walk, my legs shaky, my breathing ragged. There’s a gap in the rushes where the riverbank drops down to a grassy apron. It’s meant for anglers, but there’s no one there so I sit, drawing my knees up to my chest and staring out at the water. The thick-stemmed yellow water lilies boast sturdiness, anchored

by roots spiralling down into the darkness of the water. I feel insubstantial, as if I could just drift away like pollen. A cuckoo calls from the stand of trees on the far bank. Warblers flit and dart among the whispering reeds and insects shimmer in a shaft of light penetrating the shade of a weeping willow. The sweat dries on my back. My breathing slows. Eventually I feel calm and walk home. I return to the river almost every day after that, getting to know my “patch” as thoroughly as my own back garden. It becomes my sanctuary and solace. Sometimes I run or walk alongside it, sometimes I kayak or swim. Other times I just sit and watch or spill tears into its poor-to-moderate-quality-rated water. There’s a term: topophilia. It describes the emotional, affective bond a person can feel for a place, a bond that grows with familiarity. It might be farfetched to suggest that the feeling is mutual, but the more I immerse myself in the life of the river, the more it seems to reveal itself to me. Moorhen chicks scuttling after mum in the shallows like clockwork toys. Dragonflies mating mid-air. Two jackdaws sitting side by side, like a pair of polished shoes. “Every time you notice something,” Kathleen Dean Moore writes, “every time something strikes you as important enough to store away in your mind, you create another piece of who you are.”

The first time I see the iridescent blue streak of a kingfisher, I can scarcely believe my luck. But then I see another, and another, until sightings become commonplace. I’ve lived a mile from the Rother for almost a decade, but all this time, it seems, I’ve been looking but not seeing, listening but not hearing.

Samantha Pyrah

With the help of apps and guidebooks, I start to learn how to read my environment, teasing apart the tangled mass of bankside vegetation into its constituent parts. Vetch, purple loosestrife, meadowsweet, wild carrot, yarrow. I get to know the trees along the banks – tall poplars whispering in the back row, alder and willow with their feet in the water, hawthorn shedding blossom like confetti. I learn to distinguish between the song of a reed and a Cetti’s warbler by the latter’s operatic opening phrase. It always makes me want to conduct.

There’s plenty I don’t see. A rural waterway like this should be home to water voles, water shrews and otters. It used to be. The collected notes and drawings of a local naturalist, Ted Catt, were recently published. The book includes Catt’s observations over six decades, spanning the late 19th century to post-World War Two, and features not just otters and water voles, but red squirrels, lesser woodpeckers, corncrakes and wrynecks. The book is a wonderful record of local natural history, but it’s also a reminder of what we’ve lost. What we’re still losing.

At least the ecological crisis –and the value of nature – are being talked about more widely now. But the discussion still puts us – humans – at the centre of things; it’s always about how we have a responsibility to make things better for the next generation of humans, rather than for all species. And when the benefits of “reconnecting to nature” are extolled, you can be sure the benefits will be for us, not for the planet as a whole.

The misguided belief that we can plunder and shape nature to our heart’s desire is what got us into

Essay

Samantha Pyrah

the planetary mess we’re in. It also plays a role in the story of the Rother. This river has been shaped by human history, quite literally. Old maps of the river’s route show that “my” stretch of the river didn’t even exist until the early 17th century. When I stand over the Rother on New Bridge, facing north, I look out across a low-lying, flat landscape to the curved mound of the Isle of Oxney. The name seems an oddity for a landlocked cluster of villages, but this really was an island once, and the waters that lapped against its shores were the tidal reaches of the Rother, which extended as far inland as Bodiam – more than 10 miles west of here. These waters were navigable, carrying goods and people to and from ports along its length.

By the 11th century, though, the practice of inning – land reclamation – had grown apace. Clay, carried from the High Weald by the river, had gradually accumulated along the Rother’s marshy delta, slowing the flow of water. Ditches and dykes were dug to drain land for farming and sluice gates were installed to control tidal flow. The area – known as the Rother Levels – was considered so fertile it was protected by law. But nature struck back. In 1287, a huge storm hit the south-east, wrecking the harbour at Romney and blocking the Rother’s outflow to the sea. The river forged a new route to the sea at Rye, to the southeast. The Rother was to undergo one further change of course. In 1635,

the river, which had always flowed north of the Isle of Oxney, was rerouted to the south in response to landowners on the Levels complaining about the hefty price they were paying for land that was “drowned” half the year. For the first time, it flowed through my parish, Iden. It still does. So when I revive my plan to walk the Rother, I decide to start closer to home.

OCTOBER 2021

Jeff drops me off in Salehurst. I feel buoyant as I set off from the church, following a shaded sliver of a footpath, slippery with leaves, downhill. Rosettes of hart’s tongue fern spring from mossy beds on a crumbling wall and a

rotting tree stump leaning against it has become a vertical community of tiny inkcaps – like a shanty town on a steep hillside. Spindle berries glow lipstick pink in the almost-bare hedge on the other side. At the foot of the hill, I meet the river. A small weir sends the water hurrying east between banks crowded with trees and scrub that thin further from the banks, giving way to fields. These linear strips of woodland, called shaws, are common on the High Weald, edging streams and steep hillsides – landscape features that saved them from the plough. I must cross, rather than follow, the river here and head south, squelching across flooded grassland to regain the bank.

“Buckling under the weight of the pandemic and the climate crisis, I felt as if the world was falling apart.”

Barely a mile further on, I’m faced with a hip-high red and white barrier to which signs are attached with cable ties: “Path Unavailable.” “Footpath closed.” My skin prickles with injustice. Why is it so difficult to walk along a river? I haven’t seen a soul since I left Salehurst - so, after a shifty glance around, I climb over the barrier. The path is narrow and overgrown with brambles that catch on my jacket and tug at my boots. It divides the river, on my left, from a broad ditch on my right, and climbs steeply under the cover of trees. You move differently when you’re trespassing. A strange self-conscious mix of furtiveness and nonchalance. One moment, your brain is concocting an excuse as to what you’re doing there in case you get caught, the next you’re defiant - how dare someone claim own

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Pyrah

ership of the earth beneath our collective feet? There’s an upside to stealthier movement - you get to see more: a nuthatch scurrying down the fissured bark of an old oak, a rabbit disappearing into the brambles with a flick of white tail. Just as I’m congratulating myself on sticking to my planned route, I come to a veritable cliff. The land beyond it is a good three metres away, and below me lies the footbridge in a broken heap, as if it had jumped. I am not turning back. I clamber and slide down into a muddy channel between the river and ditch, smearing the seat of my trousers in wet clay. Before using the handily exposed tree roots to pull myself up the other side, I take a look at the river - and wish I hadn’t. It trails muddily and listlessly between high banks where the pale stalks of reeds blacken towards the waterline like hair roots that need retouching. I can’t imagine

how it will ever make it to the sea. The path resumes beyond the broken bridge; small, twisted oaks tunnel overhead, closing out the light so that I don’t notice the river twisting away. When I reach the next red-and-white barrier, I climb over and emerge onto a shorn field, pheasant feeders spaced around its perimeter, with woodland beyond. Not all the leaves are brown. The oaks are rusted, but the hornbeams and hazel wear lemon and lime, the field maples, custard and flame. My boots crunch over stubble as I follow the field border to where the tops of cars whizzing past beyond the hedge reveal the road. I can hear the chuck-achuck-a-chuck of fieldfares and the distant duet of pheasant bark and gunshot. When I rejoin the river, its character has changed again. Business-like, contained, between broad, grassy banks mown short and lined with

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caged saplings. I have a habit of anthropomorphising, or at least communicating with non-human living things that (allegedly) can’t understand. I apologise to trees if I accidentally snap their twigs. I wish swallows luck as they gather on telegraph wires to fly south. But I reprimand myself for attributing the ebb and flow of the river to capriciousness. The amount of water in it, the strength of its flow, the depth of its banks - its very directionare all firmly under human control. I understand perfectly what Olivia Laing meant when, looking out at the Ouse she wrote: “For the last ten years, I’d laboured under the impression that this view was almost natural, and now I felt a fool.”

At Bodiam, a beautiful stone arched eyebrow of a bridge carries the road over the river. It is clogged with traffic - human and motor - for the fairytale castle. The smell of woodsmoke mingles with car fumes and, having encountered no one else on foot all day, I feel strangely uncomfortable with this brush with civilisation and continue.

Looking at the Rother flowing passively through the broad, flat valley bottom, it’s hard to imagine that it once held such power over the land. Nor, when I reach the next road crossing at the small village of Newenden, that this was once a busy port, complete with a market and 16 taverns.

I don’t make it all the way to Iden. As the light drains out of the day, it seems to take my strength with it, and I call Jeff for a lift. There’s a warm, orange glow in the window of the one

Samantha Pyrah

remaining pub but I wait by the river and let the dusk swallow me up. *

When you walk somewhere you’ve been before, it’s not just your steps you retrace but your memories, as if they are trodden into the very soil. Memories of encounters and experiences - this is where we got in the river in our underwear and swam, that hot July day - here’s where a barn owl floated over as I was dragging my kayak up the bank in the fading light. But there are memories of feelings and thoughts, too.

“We all have these inner atlases,” writes Richard Mabey in Nature Cure, “irrational and hopelessly outof-scale charts of landmarks, benchmarks and reference points.” We “superimpose” these onto real maps. I can never pass the bend in the river where I sat down that May afternoon without remembering the anguish I felt. But mental maps are never static - layer upon layer of encounters - sensory, cognitive, physical— build up, deepening our relationship with the landscape and imparting new meaning to it. For almost a decade, I’d known the river as a place on a map. Now I knew it as a place in my heart.

NOVEMBER 2021

It isn’t a great day for walking. The sky is a grimy pad of cotton wool, pressing down on water the colour of builder’s tea and the washed-out landscape beyond. Swans sail on fields that have become lakes. Jeff is with me, and the plan

is to go the whole hog - the sea or bust.

A memory surfaces as we set off along the riverbank from Newenden. A birthday outing in a hired wooden rowing boat that it turned out we were both equally inept at rowing. We bickered about whose fault it was as we tried to extricate ourselves from the rushes and steer a straight course. It strikes me that most of our arguments are about who’s in charge, and I slip my hand into my pocket to give the map a pat. We swing right with the river, into the wind, crossing the Kent and East Sussex railway, along which steam trains still run between Bodiam and Tenterden. Then we must leave the riverbank to skirt the grounds of a farmhouse and find ourselves alongside another waterway. It’s called Potman Heath Channel on the OS map, but now that I know more of the river’s history, I can see that it traces the old course of the Rother, to the north of Oxney. The whole landscape feels fluid, impermanent. A wetland has been created between the high bank of the channel and the river. Six cormorants are hanging out to dry on the branches of a fallen tree and there are wigeon, shelduck and Canada geese paddling and preening among the rushes. We pause for a while on the bank, drinking coffee. A flock of lapwings passes over, compact and silent, and there’s the hoot and plume of smoke from the steam train in the distance.

As we approach the next road crossing, it takes me a moment to re

“When you walk somewhere you’ve been before, it’s not just your steps you retrace but your memories, as if they are trodden into the very soil.”

alise where I am because I’ve never come from this direction before. This is Blackwall bridge, the westernmost point of my usual run along the river.

There were house martins here in the summer, nesting under the bridge. They would dip and wheel, trilling, as I passed underneath on my kayak. I saw more of the river’s wildlife from the kayak than I did from the banks. More when I sat than when I walked. More when I walked than when I ran. But I still enjoy all these different ways of moving through the landscape.

As we walk along this familiar stretch of the river, I realise that there is one thing (other than sentiment) that distinguishes it from what’s gone before. After miles of treeless, featureless banks, the riverside here is replete with vegetation - trees, brambles, dog rose, rushes and reeds. The ruby hips are the only splash of colour now, but in summer, it’s a riot.

If the Rother still met the sea at

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Rye, we’d be nearly there now. But Rye is three miles further inland than it once was. There’s a sluice, which keeps salt water from travelling upriver. Beyond it, the river slips into something more comfortable, broadening between slopes of estuarine mud where oystercatchers take off at our approach, piping like penny whistles. We – and the river - are going to make it.

The slip of land between the path and the river is carpeted with greygreen sea purslane, littered with driftwood, plastic and fishing debris. It’s low tide and the silty ground is firm, so we walk there, looking for treasures and keeping out of the wind. When the path returns us to the river’s edge, now 15ft below us, two slick heads appear in the water. One is facing our way and, through binoculars, appears to be staring directly at us. The seal’s eyes are huge and dark, like pools, the muzzle is long and straight - a grey seal, not the

Alice Oswald, Dart (London: Faber and Faber, 2002) p29.

A relation to Kathleen Jamie’s “Lone Enraptured Male”. Kathleen Jamie, review of The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane, London Review of Books 6 (March 2008), vol 30 no 5.

Olivia Laing, To the River (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2011) p29.

Kathleen Dean Moore, Riverwalking (New York: Lyons & Burford, 1995) p36.

Richard Mabey, Nature Cure (London: Vintage, 2005) p80.

less common “common” seal. We’ve seen them here before, but not often. In fact, we once stood on the bridge that we’ve just crossed for some minutes, pointing out the seal frolicking in the water below to a growing audience of passers-by before realising it was a lump of driftwood. There’s no one to point out these two beauties to, so we keep walking until the metalled track gives way to sand. The tide is out but we can still hear the relentless roar of the sea. A gaggle of gulls stand at the shoreline, all facing the same way. I read somewhere once that a water molecule can remain in a river for anywhere between a couple of weeks and several months, so I have cause to believe that at least some of the molecules flowing into the waters of the English Channel have accompanied me on my river journey. I can’t decide whether what we are now sharing is an ending, or a new beginning.

Courtsey Atstock Productions

MAPS TO LOST FUTURES

MAPS TO LOST

Carella Keil

When there is no one left to call at 2am, and I can’t handle being alone, I imagine what you’re doing on the other side of the world. Are you getting your children ready for school, or kissing your wife awake between sips of coffee? Who is your wife? How many children do you have? What are their names, and do any of them have your pale blue eyes, or write left-handed? Are you running off to a job, and what job, do you like it? Or are you still a student at the university? Is it mathematics or medicine or philosophy, or something else entirely now?

At 2am on the other side of the planet, are you riding your bicycle from mountain slope to desert-edge? Are you gallivanting off on a wilderness adventure? Or are you visiting my mother and debating science with my father, cavorting around the park with my nieces on your back and our siblings in tow? Am I still the bad one, the odd-one-out, the only happy-family-puzzle-piece that doesn’t fit? Do you have a smile on your face, or are those tears in your eyes? Are you happy? Are you still cancer’s captive child, or an adult grown and free? Did she set you free?

The adventure idea works best for a while; it’s the easiest one to imagine, independent of time and change. Like me, you are always alone. Dissatisfied with what you find, questing for more. The ribcage doesn’t like it when you inhale too deep. Don’t you know, the heart gets lost in so much empty space?

When I try calling you at 2am on the other side (surely there must be reception somewhere), you can’t describe the foreign vistas, or what you see when you climb the tallest trees. You can’t tell me the time of morning the stars fade out, or whisper of sleeping beneath the Milky Way’s tentacles. You will never draw another map for me, or tell me stories of your adventures.

There is no daughter with pale blue eyes, and no son, no philosophical queries solved or parking lots with your bicy cle’s fresh tire-

Maps to Lost Futures

Tell me the time of morning

The stars fade out

Whisper to me

Of sleeping beneath

The Milky Way’s tentacles.

tracks. There is no wife or girlfriend to kiss. There is no uncle, no brother, no twin.

2am fills up with all the empty space of you. To it I’ve added all the empty space of me. In my loneliness, I hold my breath for a long time, afraid of imagination, afraid of change. Night after night, I dream of the smiling-happy-family puzzle, before I broke it. Before I scattered all the pieces, pushed you all away. I’m in between, my beginning and your end. Before you broke it. Before you scattered all the pieces, pushed us all away. I’d draw a map, but there’s no one to find it now.

1Poem first published in Paddler Press Vol. 6 “Changes” (October 2022)

I DON'T HAVE A VERY GOOD MEMORY

Gavin Baird

I don’t have a very good memory.

I often wish I was like Knausgaard with his full, granular recollections. I read the first volume of his opus on the tube to work. One morning commute was ten pages about a breakfast he’d eaten a decade ago. He’d had two fried eggs on lightly buttered toast, and he’d eaten them slowly. I went down to the work canteen and got myself two fried eggs on lightly buttered toast, sat round the far corner away from the thoroughfare, and ate them slowly.

When I think of him, I think of those eggs, and I remember a run.

I was home for the weekend and my mum was well, which always makes a difference. I ran down past my old school, out through the fields and onto the farm road and then further, beyond the sphere of my childhood, onto unfamiliar paths and over new streams.

The sun was glistening off every conceivable surface including at one point, I swear, a cow. I was listening to a New Yorker podcast where Knausgaard reads a short story by Naipul. He had chosen it because it bore close relation to his own work; such precision in its meandering recollection of a cottage in Middle England that Naipul had visited after university. The story went nowhere, other than further and further into the details of the memory. Knausgaard read it in his gruff, beautifully accented English at a bucolic pace, only marginally slower than I was moving as I tried to outrun the length of the story. I remember it because I was so fully content.

There’s birdsong in the memory, but I don’t know how I could have heard that with my headphones in. *

I don’t have a very good memory.

Photos help.

I’ve got a friend who has aphantasia, which sounds far more exciting than it is. It’s a life without pictures in your head. Her mind can’t conjure them. I asked her what’s in her brain and she said “words and thoughts.”

This friend takes lots of photos so her memory is on her phone and, more distantly, in photo

albums that her mum curates for her. I wish someone had curated my life into photo albums. It would have helped with this memory problem of mine.

When I go home, my mum will try desperately to sit me down and go through her old family albums, trying to introduce me to aunts and cousins, uncles and great grandparents, all long dead. I was born into the aftermath of all of that; I find it hard to care. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t be able to remember the names, although occasionally one sticks when it is served alongside an interesting story. Like Mum’s Uncle Billy, who met a girl on the harbour in Dunoon, asked her to wait for him, went to America, got a job, made enough to buy a ring and sail back, found the girl working in the café on the high street, took her back to the harbour, proposed and made her my mum’s Auntie Jean. Them I remember. Mum, I suspect, wants me to remember for the same reasons I put photos on Instagram. It makes her feel significant, something that will remain beyond her, a life’s residue, but only if it’s passed on. I keep telling her to write it all down, but she won’t for some reason.

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I was in Washington a couple of years ago, and my mum insisted on putting me in touch with Billy and Jean’s daughter. They’d moved straight back to America after the wedding and Helen was born. They’d returned to Scotland often enough that the family remained close. Helen was an old woman by the time I met her, in her 80s. We arranged

to meet by email. She picked me up in a taxi outside my hostel and introduced me to her Brazilian taxi driver as if they’d known each other for years. We went to a lovely old restaurant in Georgetown, with photos of American politicians and sports stars on the wall, famous enough to be framed but who meant nothing to me. I had meatloaf, she had fish and chips as if trying to make me feel at home. She insisted that I have a beer, but didn’t have one herself. As I poured her water, she told me she was worried about her upcoming shoulder surgery, and about Trump, in pretty much equal measure.

When we finished eating, she produced a stack of photos and passed them to me one by one, telling me who these people were, and how they related to my mum. She told me stories about my mum that seemed unbelievable to me. Her running away from home when she was 15 (albeit returning a few weeks later), her 16-year-old desperation to stay single forever, her youthful dalliance with a man who would go on to be a prominent politician. I was enthralled.

One of the middle-aged couple sitting next to us touched my shoulder as they left and said “This is so beautiful. We’ve been enjoying you both for the past half hour.”

I ordered another beer, and tried to take as much of it in as I could.

The thing about the stories Helen told me was that they were full of joy and dancing and happiness, as if she had chosen to remember through a lens that filtered out the bad. My mum, I think, must have been left with the opposing lens. Her stories are full of bad luck and unfairness, and maybe that’s why I am impatient with them. I wish so much that I’d written

Gavin Baird

the stories down as Helen told them. They have floated away over the last two years. Helen died during the pandemic, and I find myself wrestling my brain to try and pull back the detail of the glorious technicolour stories she built around the sepia images she passed to me. During lockdown, I was looking forward to being able to go home and sit with my mum and listen to her stories, and promised myself I would write them down and keep them somewhere safe. I have not yet done so. *

I don’t have a very good memory. I sometimes wonder if that’s because I don’t really have to remember anything. It’s all, now, available at the click of a button or two. Thank you, Wikipedia.

My memories are mostly those that exist on social media. In dull moments I’ll flick through my Instagram photos and embed those moments further into my psyche. They become totemic, the moments that define me, even if they are only there because they happened to look good with a filter.

So I remember the cheeseburger in Hoi An, before we entwined ourselves in the humid cheap hotel room. But I don’t remember the breakfast on Arran the morning we broke up.

I remember the wet gleam of the dolphins as they surfed to New Zealand’s shore with us. But I don’t remember where I stayed that night.

I remember the fisherman on Inle Lake, balanced like on the front page of the Lonely Planet. But I can’t recall the face of the guide who steered our boat.

I’m sure our minds do the same thing, grabbing hold of some memories and letting go of others, and there must be a reason for that.

I don’t have a very good memory. Maybe that’s not Wikipedia’s fault, though. Maybe it’s self-inflicted, or self-imposed.

My biggest memory, one that looms so large in my brain that it feels almost suffocating, is one that feels like it was forced on me. I was told to write it down, to get it out on a page. I trusted – I was 10 years old – and it became sacrosanct, this one clear memory that stands above all others because a memory like that has to, or perhaps just because I wrote it down.

This I remember.

I remember there was snow on the ground that morning. Not enough to fully cover the hopeful shoots of snowdrops or the green of the grass or the brown of the frozen earth, but enough that I was forced to wear wellies. Cumbering, dank things that meant I couldn’t play football or run properly in the playground. Which was, at that point, the worst thing imaginable. I remember we fought about it, my mum and I, which has played on my mind ever since. What a stupid and futile thing to fall out about. I left the house in a mood, trying to punish her act of betrayal, and I don’t remem

“The terrible truth of that day revealed itself in time. Sixteen children, all aged five or six. Hopeful snowdrops.”

ber her waving goodbye from the window. But I know for certain that she has done every time I’ve left the house since, and I’m sure will do so forever more.

I remember that I had a dentist appointment at 10 that morning. I can’t now think why my mum would send me to school for 9 o’clock only to come and collect me almost immediately. And I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t, so I must have my timings wrong. Maybe the appointment was later and she was going to come and pick me up at 10. That would make more sense. I’m sure she could put me right, but it seems like such a small thing to bring up.

I remember the playground before the bell went. It was a dark morning with a threatening sky. I’d met Smid at the lollipop lady and walked to school with him, as normal, the fresh snow already turning into a dreich slush that started to justify my mum’s insistence. Smid was wearing the Adidas jacket I wanted, and it got ripped that morning playing cross-the-line. He was close to tears. I was silently ecstatic. John I remember from later that day, and he was always first in the playground because his parents worked further away than any others so he must have been there.

I don’t remember when Waldo arrived. What must have been the next hour or so is a blur, and I’ve never replaced that blur with any form of clarity, real or imagined.

I remember the assistant headteacher coming into the classroom. Mr M. was a scary man, who in years to come I found to be a kind man as well. Short, moustachioed, sleeves-rolled-upwith-tie-undone type of guy, who had

Gavin Baird

once bellowed at me for saying “hiya” instead of “Good morning Mr M.” in the corridor. He must have walked across the playground between our hut and the main building, where the blinds were by then pulled across to cover the windows. He was wearing no tie, and there was blood patterned across his white shirt. This now is impossible to comprehend. That a teacher, a grown-up, would think it a good idea to walk into a classroom of 9 and 10 year olds

befuddlement that followed. What sort of accident required us to leave school? Why were our parents here? mum come to the classroom? Obviously Dad wouldn’t because he was at work. What about my wellies? Should I put them on before I go? No, that would be embarrassing to have them on inside. I just put them in my bag ready to go, awkwardly folding the thick rubber downwards to make them fit.

with

blood

on his shirt. I can see it in my mind’s eye, as clear as my fingers in front of me. He stood there silently for a minute or five, a captive audience hanging on every second. When eventually he did speak, all he told us was that there had been an accident, and that our parents would be here to collect us so we should be ready to go when they arrived. I remember clearly the total

I was among the first to go. How much time passed I’ve no idea. I’ve always assumed I was out quickly because my mum was already at the school, to collect me for my dentist appointment, but that can’t be right because Dad was waiting for me too, having travelled back from work. I’ll forever avoid dwelling on what that drive must have been like for him. My teacher told me it was my turn and to come with her. She grabbed me by the hand, apologising for the embarrassment of holding a teacher’s hand but telling me that this was really important. We got to the door of the hut and she said to run, so with my big warm coat and my backpack on I ran alongside her, clutched by her, and by fear, to the main building. Adults were crushed into a small corridor and we dived into the melee, dozens, hundreds of faces and bodies bigger than mine, confused, lost, engulfed, still clutched, before emerging at the other side and seeing Mum and Dad. My brother was there already with them. No words exchanged between the adults, the teacher let go and went straight back into the mass. My classmates, I thought, had been left alone.

“Braver than the bravest, and kinder than the kindest. A monument to humanity.”

For some reason we found ourselves, my family, the four of us, walking down the hill towards the back entrance of the school. It wasn’t my usual way out. The row of houses that continued to the back of the huts were quiet, as usual. It all seemed so normal. I asked Dad what had happened. Someone broke into the school. Was anyone killed, I asked, for a reason I still can’t understand. Yes, he said. We turned a corner and out the gate, and were engulfed by a wave of journalists. The woman from the BBC I remember, with blonde hair, high heels, dressed all in black, microphone with the name of her employer on it and a camera behind her, pushing forward through the crowd of assembled technology and aggressively asking how I felt. What did that matter, I wondered? My dad was there, ask him, he’s an adult. He knew more than me. Dad safeguarded us past a determined reporter from The Scotsman and towards the car, parked along away from the TV vans and lorries. I turned and looked back at them all, still dazed by their flashes. How dare they, I now think.

The terrible truth of that day revealed itself in time. Sixteen children, all aged five or six. Hopeful snowdrops. My teacher from four years previous, Mrs Mayor, who had shielded the children with her body and her last breath. Braver than the bravest, and kinder than the kindest. A monument to humanity. Others maimed, injured, irreversibly damaged by that March morning. Even at that age I wanted all the facts, searching for them, trying to find reason in, and for, my grief that wasn’t quite what I thought it should be. The facts took me deeper, and I held

Gavin Baird

on, sinking to the place I wanted to be. But still, after, having grasped for and then holding all the facts, it made no sense at all. It couldn’t, I now realise. It was too big for me, too terrible for anyone, and this was real life. I saw the front pages the next day, with the black and white picture of the class, posing proudly, resplendent in their glorious innocence. I saw the news, and heard the phone’s incessant ringing as friends and family near and far checked on us. I didn’t know what to do, or what to feel, and may not ever have known what to do or feel, if it hadn’t been for the stairs the next afternoon. My dad, sitting on the bottom step, my brother cuddled into him on his knee, both sobbing and sobbing in grief. And that was it; that was all I could understand at that point. Horrible, unassailable grief in the face of this unknown evil, so great that it had even touched my big stoic dad. I realise now that I needed to witness that sadness. His usual firmness and certainty, gone, allowing me to feel the ripples and tears in the fabric of normality that would never be stilled and never be fixed. This really must be different if it could make my dad cry. We went to the florist on the high street a few days after and took the flowers to the back gate where we’d been accosted by the blonde woman with the microphone. My brother and I laid them together, just a small drop in the wave of outpouring. I wanted to cry, to make sure everyone could see how I felt inside, to show how grown up I was and to make them think that I felt this as they did, but I couldn’t. It was beautiful in a way, the thousands of bouquets covering gate and

pavement and wall; pink, red, blue, green, messages of love attached with little elastic bands, washing away the stains of the media circus that had trampled all over our immediate grief. Beautiful, but they didn’t heal or return us. What could these flowers do? We were so utterly helpless. As we walked away, I noticed a small patch of grass I’d never seen before, with a clasp of snowdrops at its edge. They looked so lonely. Everyone visited, incumbent and opposition, blue and red, united in a display of sorrow. The Queen as well, I think, but it didn’t matter, these visits were as irrelevant as they were necessary. And then, eventually, back to school. I want to remember more, but I only remember the cuddly toys. We were walked down the road to the Victoria Halls, by the train station. We walked in pairs, holding hands, one class at a time. I’d been to ceilidhs and coffee mornings there, but this was a different place altogether, in space and in time and in purpose. This was the world’s outpouring, their equivalent of our flowers. Through the narrow entrance we walked, and waiting for us a sight we never imagined nor forgot. As our bouquets covered the pavement at the back gate of the school, covering stones and the dirt, so the cuddly toys gloriously brightened and flooded this rickety wooden hall. From all over the world, we were told, from children and from adults, from Australia, America and Africa. To make us feel better. We were to choose one and name it, and keep it, and remember. And this wasn’t insignificant, not at all. I chose Deano the Bulldog, sent from a far-flung cor

Gavin Baird

ner of the world by a person I’ll never know, to try and make a child from Dunblane feel just a little bit better.

I don’t have a very good memory. Smid does. Smid, who I met at the lollipop lady that day and whose Adidas jacket got ripped. He remembers everything. He remembers details of school football games that have blurred into one amorphous cold, muddy singularity in my mind. He’ll tell me about goals I’ve forgotten scoring, about fights I’ve forgotten losing, about changing rooms I’ve forgotten wrecking. He could write like Knausgaard.

It was pre-pandemic, just, and we were driving back from Arbroath after a day that seemed great at the time but now feels as close to perfect as is possible. We’d crowded with hundreds of other fans into the safety of a covered terracing, three sheets of corrugated iron protecting us from the wind sweeping off the North Sea. We’d eaten greasy pies and oily chippie, and warmed up in the tight maroon surroundings of a friend’s local.

I was four-pint tipsy. Smid was sober and trying to stay alert on the dark roads. It felt like he’d wanted to ask for a while.

“What do you remember about that day?”

I told him I’d written about it, that the psychiatrist had said it would be a good way to process. I found it in my emails and started reading it to him.

“I wasn’t there that day,” he interrupted.

Eh?

“I wasn’t there. We didn’t meet at the lollipop lady. I was at the hospital that morning. I didn’t arrive until after all the reporters and cameras got there, and I got out the car and met your mum. She told me to get back in the car and leave because it wasn’t safe.”

We sat in unusual silence for a few minutes.

“I always thought you were there,” I said after a while as the country dancing music started up on Radio Scotland. “Nope,” he said. Our headlights led us deeper into the darkness. After Smid dropped me off I messaged another school friend to tell him about this revelation.

“Would love to read what you wrote, pal,” he replied, so I sent him what I’d written.

“I found this really helpful,” he said, days later. “But Mr M. didn’t come in with blood on his shirt. I remember him coming in, just had a white shirt on.”

I believe him, totally. And I wonder where the blood came from.

I don’t have a very good memory. Still, there are some things I want to be certain about.

I called my mum, a couple of weeks after Arbroath. I asked her if she had a box of my old cuddly toys. Instead of a yes or no, she asked me why.

“Just wondering,” I said.

“I’ll have to get your dad to check the loft.”

“Any luck with that box yet?” I messaged them both a couple of days later.

“Why is it important?” Mum replied.

“I was wondering about Deano, that toy I got from the Victoria Hall after the shooting.” My phone buzzed into life a second later, and I almost didn’t pick up. “I don’t remember that at all,” she said. “I wouldn’t get your hopes up. Our minds invent things after trauma.” She makes pronouncements like that a lot. Until then, none of us had ever talked about the day. Me and my mum, me and my dad, me and my friends. It sits as a thing between us, binding us yet holding us ever so slightly at a distance. It has always felt impenetrable, too difficult. This memory, which I’d written, told myself, and which had somehow become my touchstone, started to slip away like grains of sand through an open palm. *

I don’t have a very good memory. It does, however, work at least some of the time.

Open WhatsApp.

Open message from mum. Open image.

Just as I remember him. Deano the Bulldog. Sent from a far-flung corner of the world by a person I’ll never know, to try and make a child from Dunblane feel just a little bit better. I smile: relief, gratitude, sadness.

This memory started to slip away like grains of sand through an open palm.

I don’t have a very good memory. Maybe that’s because the memory of that day has become a bit of a sinkhole, into which all other memories fall and disappear. I am so overwhelmed, sometimes, by it. It affects the way I enter rooms; it affects the way I think of my childhood; it affects the way I think of myself. I wonder whether there is, buried deep in an archive somewhere, a reel of film of me and my family walking out the back gate of the school that day. That film, if it exists, contains a memory of that day more real than what I carry around inside my head. Yet, like all records of memory, it will be

Essay

Gavin Baird

incomplete. It won’t have my before and after.

I suppose that’s the thing with memory. It’s never complete. We join our own memories up into a complex collage, and then join that up with stories from others. Those memories are fallible, filtered, false, fleeting, but as much as anything they are us. I often wish I hadn’t written down my memory of that day, because it feels so big. But then I think about it more, and I realise it’s important that I did. I curated a memory that I could live with, and that could live with me. It doesn’t end with the mass of media, or the bloodstains, or the

memorial. It ends with Deano the Bulldog, and kindness.

I suppose the same is true of my mum’s stories, and Helen’s stories, and even Knausgaard’s stories. And it’s definitely true of Instagram, and photo albums. We place a lens on our lives, a filter, that we can live with. If we do it well, we let the happy memories flourish in bursts of primary colours, and we curate the difficult memories into manageable fragments. It’s probably good that I can’t remember like Knausgaard can; I think the weight of it would be too much. I don’t have a very good memory. And that seems to work for me.

Courtsey Gitusik