Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer > Books: 2022‎ (193)

‘Some kind of ridiculous,’ Stevi says, and looks around like casting judgement on all but unseen fragments of dust. Those statements, piped out at regular intervals, make nonsense for our ears, fatherly condescension. A kind of love, perhaps, perhaps that’s it, Stevi is here, grazed, looking rough and in love after all. ‘By the time those words reach my patch, they’ll be mixed up, and some words swapped out for other words. The statement will make another sense, or another nonsense by then,’ he says.

Ottessa runs through the week: ‘You don’t want to be disturbed, I know, but a reminder.’ She’s standing up, voice full and assertive. ‘Morning meeting tomorrow, 9 a.m., over at Tullow’s offices, good luck, I’ve emailed you the briefing notes, car booked for 8.40 car back to the office, let me know, car home car booked afternoon lunch pre-ordered then we have them coming in, I know, there was no other day table across the road booked for dinner, breakfast, I thought that you would be hungry, let me know, safe trip, your flight for Wednesday booked for 9 p.m. as you asked need your sign-off on those expenses at some point and those and those, lunch meeting with the lawyers when you’re back please let me know … good luck, safe trip, next time.’

I try to say something true. I don’t have the vocabulary to say it. ‘I am the way, the truth,’ we would say sitting in rows can you hear it? A clash of memories, the only truth I can get at. And to love each memory without falling apart, to love is the hardest thing. My voice rebounds. Memory slips and is split, I disappear inside and everything else is lost because my brother, the good man is dead.

I photographed the site, on film, objects and edges blurry. But it wasn’t precision I was after, not the faint details of the ground, but the mood.

They spoke in sentences broken between three mouths, like a ball being batted between them and kept from touching the ground.

There was nothing to my fingers, no weight, no force on the pads of my feet, no cold draught wafting past the hairs of my skin, no sound, no sight. I couldn’t set my watch to nothing. I waited, couldn’t scream, unaware of mouth or lungs to do so not breathing, not dead, not alive. No fear. Not yet. Eyes wide open into dark and no sense. Unsayable.

I plough I plough, the old man says, I plough acros

I plough I plough, the old man says, I plough across this stony earth. The sun does not set in a sunless sky and so it is to man himself to know what he has done and to know his soul. The ground cleaves before him. I plough I plough, he tells the clutch, he tells the gears. Pain rings through his shoulders, looking behind him as he must, a glinting current, an internal melody. He breathes in dust and vibrates in his seat. When they break him in two they’ll find he has no bones, no blood. That he is a dust-packed shell, hardened and hollow. The soil turns behind him. I plough I plough, he tells the grease gun in the corner. To the end of the field. He bounces in the seat. Is shook, jostles. The vulgar ground. If all ground was honey it would not ache so to plough it. Honey, he yells at the dashboard. He raises the front mouldboard and lowers it again setting it back to task, to peeling away the skin of the world to reveal the scowling bones beneath. He strips the field of the fallow grass one furrow at a time. Each pass leaves four rows of heaped resolve, compass straight, the next pass four more. The field a letter to the world. He knows the violence of the land of the heaving tractor because he knows the violence inside himself. Him shaking in the seat, body turned to nothing is him tussling with the open field before him and being numbed and being lifted. Lifted up, above the seat, above the valley plane, so that he is a man between land and sky, belonging to neither, a transition, a flicker of an image of a man. I plough I plough, the old man says.

Child, listen to me now, he says. We are the Mulgannons. We stand on what is ours. Let it tear itself from our feet before men take it from us. We do not move. We do not yield. O’Grady paces back and forth, his fingers spread over his face, whispering oh, and when he changes direction he starts to curse and then stops and says, oh, oh. He takes a step towards the old man and then throws up his arms and starts pacing again. It’s the milking and the feeding and the fieldwork, the old man knows. The throb of the milkers, in the pipes. In the shed. And the milk falling to the tank. The scrape of the fork against the bunks and the long draw of water a cow takes in gulps. His feet colliding against the inside of his wellies. The wild swing of a calf’s tail when it’s on the teat. And the ache of it all, of all of it. It’s the rhythms of these things that fill him, the move of it in his bones, that drown himself inside his skin. He has worn himself into everything here. How is it that he must give up that which is his? That which is the all of him.

Since the publication of Anna Karenina, or perhaps even before, it has become customary for humanity to believe that happy people have no stories to tell, something I now know to be false, for if there are any stories really worth recounting, it’s those of people who have known happiness. And that is exactly what I was next to Mar: a happy person. Those moments, despite their stillness, are far from dead: they are silent when I want, voluble when I choose, rising up in me as seemingly profitless fragments of memory united by pain or converging in joy to challenge my belief that the youth I’d regained thanks to Mar, was lost forever.

Subordinate clauses always sound good at night. But in narrative terms, the kaleidoscope and its harmonised images shattering just as they take shape is far more alluring. In the daytime, subordinate clauses shatter all by themselves. In the daytime, the world demands simple sentences, subject-verb-object, full stop, new paragraph, while adjectives are to be austere, precise and to efficiently complement the verb. As the terse prose of day takes over, nocturnal rhetoric begins to feel inhibited and awkward. At night, anyone who dreams can be a poet but during the day only a few are writers who write. Prose, then, admits no excuses: this is not about an old man not yet tired enough to die but a bad literature teacher spying on schoolgirls as they get undressed. The precise adjective is ‘ridiculous’.

I will tell you the story from the beginning. Not from its beginning but from its roots, for

I will tell you the story from the beginning. Not from its beginning but from its roots, for pain and stories are like trees. They have roots that nourish and sustain them, granting them the power to endure and to last.

I wanted to write about a woman who is complicated and flawed. Frida is a Chinese-American mom, her husband has left her, she’s angry and selfish. The question about whether Frida should be more sympathetic was raised. I mean, I could have had her leave her kid in the back seat for 30 seconds, a total accident that was much more benign. But that’s too easy; I wanted the story to exist in a more morally ambiguous place. I wanted her to wrestle with guilt for really making a bad mistake

Time to clamp his defences back down before the flotsam and jetsam of his own life is washed up by the tidal wave of Aberfan’s grief; his father’s

Time to clamp his defences back down before the flotsam and jetsam of his own life is washed up by the tidal wave of Aberfan’s grief; his father’s death, the abrupt end to his chorister days, the rift with his mother, with Martin. And now, Gloria. The cold hardens around him and the weight of the white sky seems to push down on the hillside. He can tell by the rise and fall of their voices that the villagers are singing ‘Jesu, Lover of My Soul’

William makes himself look at his old friend. ‘I’m a head case. Lots of things do funny things to me, including choral music and in particular, you won’t be surprised to hear, the “Miserere”. I’m estranged from my mother, I haven’t spoken to you, my best friend, since I left here, and I won’t have children. Some days I’m fine, others not. I get palpitations, tunnel vision and flashbacks; awake or asleep, they get me any which way.’

I’m damned if I’m going to look for songs that aren’t about love and life and loss and pain and joy. This is being human.

A Terrible Kindness was inspired by conversations I had with two embalmers, by then in their 70’s, who as young men had gone in 1966 as volunteers to the Aberfan disaster, when a mining waste tip, loosened by rain had careered down the Welsh mountainside and onto a small village primary school.

The story is about William Lavery, a young, newly qualified embalmer who answers the call to help. The book begins and ends in Aberfan, but in between are 17 years of William’s life, as a boy chorister in Cambridge, in London training to be an embalmer, and after Aberfan, with post-traumatic stress disorder, and his marriage in trouble, William returns to Cambridge and helps with a choir for the homeless, reconnecting with his musical roots and ultimately a return to Aberfan, to try and mend the fractured relationships in his life.

Miserere mei, Deus: secundum magnam misericordiam tuam.
Et secundum multitudinem miserationum tuarum, dele iniquitatem meam.
Amplius lava me ab iniquitate mea: et a peccato meo munda me.
Quoniam iniquitatem meam ego cognosco: et peccatum meum contra me est semper.
Tibi soli peccavi, et malum coram te feci: ut justificeris in sermonibus tuis, et vincas cum judicaris.

What if he’d chosen differently? What if all that had happened could have made him a bigger person? If each disaster had been a crossroads at which he could have taken a better path? It’s too painful to dwell on.

What a terrible mess we can make of our lives. There should be angel police to stop us at these dangerous moments, but there don’t seem to be. So all we’re left with, my precious son, is whether we can forgive, be forgiven and keep trying our best.

I wake up gaping like a forced fed duck when they strip out its live to make foie-gras. My body is here, my mind over there and outside something t

I wake up gaping like a forced fed duck when they strip out its live to make foie-gras. My body is here, my mind over there and outside something thuds like a dry heave. It’s still dark and two birds flap violently out if my tree, collide in mid-air and fall dead.

It says in the book, Robert said, that the Nazis were distributing posters with his picture on them and the words Not Yet Hanged underneath. And he was in Belgium and someone told him the Nazis knew where he was and were coming for him. So he took up an offer of a hut on this heath from an upper class English guy in politics who’d started off being very right wing and thinking Hitler was a good thing, then changed his mind and invited Einstein to stay with him and live in a hut on the heath. So Einstein did, for, like, a month, and gamekeepers guarded him, and he spent the time in solitude and worked on theories, and then a month or two later he went to America. And that month when he was living here he used to go to the post office in the village and buy sweets. Can we go to that post office? They got back in the car. They drove to where the satnav told them Roughton Post Office was. They peered at it through the car windows. Do you think it’s the same one as it was in 1933? Robert said. Hard to say, Charlotte said. They drove up the road a little further and stopped next to a shut pub.

Near the shut front door of the New Inn there was a circular plaque, like a blue plaque. It had Einstein’s name on it. She got out of the car. Robert did too. They both left the doors a little open so as not to wake Sacha. ALBERT EINSTEIN fleeing Nazi persecution stopped off en route for America to live in a hut on Roughton Heath, September 1933