A Kind of Compass Read online

  A KIND OF COMPASS

  STORIES ON DISTANCE

  edited by Belinda McKeon

  Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  INTRODUCTION

  Belinda McKeon

  TERRAFORMING

  Elske Rahill

  THE NATURALS

  Sam Lipsyte

  SIX DAYS IN GLORIOUS VIENNA

  Yoko Ogawa

  THE UNINTENDED

  Gina Apostol

  EXTREMADURA (UNTIL NIGHT FALLS)

  Kevin Barry

  HOLY ISLAND

  Ross Raisin

  THE PLACE FOR ME

  E.C. Osondu

  THE RAPE ESSAY (OR MUTILATED PAGES)

  Suzanne Scanlon

  FINISHING LINES

  Sara Baume

  ANIMAL HEART

  Niven Govinden

  DISTANT SONG

  Kristín Ómarsdóttir

  BIG ISLAND, SMALL ISLAND

  Francesca Marciano

  MADE

  David Hayden

  PALOMINO

  Mark Doten

  CITY INSIDE

  Porochista Khakpour

  NEW ZEALAND FLAX

  Éilís Ní Dhuibhne

  TRANSITION

  Maria Takolander

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  COPYRIGHT

  INTRODUCTION

  Belinda McKeon

  Distance is inherent to the short story.

  Or, the short story is made out of distance, out of the problem of it. A story must be ‘the depth of a novel, the breadth of a poem,’ Amy Bloom writes, and it must be these things within the space allowed by a clutch of pages, or maybe even a single page; space which eats itself up greedily, like a life. And yet the short story is a form which contains within itself acres, ‘a faraway deep inside,’ to borrow a second phrase from Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, the book from which this anthology takes its title. The distance from here to there is never what it seems. The difference between those two places – those two illusions? – is always more than a country mile.

  I asked these seventeen writers to think about distance because I am obsessed with it, and because I wanted to outsource that obsession for a while, or maybe to exorcise it. This did not work. I read the stories as they arrived from down the road and across the oceans, from Ireland and England and Italy and France and Iceland and Australia and Japan, and from America, where I live now, and from writers who live now in America but were born in Nigeria and the Philippines and Iran; I read these stories as they showed up in my inbox, and I became even more obsessed. With the faraway deep inside; with the faraway glancing off every surface. With the spaces – the acres – between people, between places, between the parts and versions of the self. With the stuff of feeling at home, and how that never produces interesting fiction, and with the stuff of feeling at sea, and how that so often produces fiction that will not leave you alone.

  Short stories, Richard Ford writes, are ‘daring little instruments’. I always read ‘daring’, there, as ‘darling’ at first – and if that’s not an attempt to take the pinch of fear, of anxiety, of seasickness or jetlag or compass-needle-spinning out of the business of writing a story, I don’t know what is. Because they’re not darling, short stories – or at least, they should not be; they’re daring. They go places. They leave for places, and their creators had damn well better go along. And those places, if a story is doing what it needs to do, are hardly ever comfortable – for the writer or the reader. This idea of a story allowing its readers to go to places they’d otherwise never have had the chance to experience; this idea gets trundled out a lot, on the jacket copy of books for instance, and actually, didn’t I trundle that idea out myself, writing the jacket copy for this book? Yes, I did. Because it is such a jacket copy way of talking about what stories do; it is the kind of description you pull, unthinkingly, out of your jacket pocket.

  Well, forget I said that, will you please? Or consider me a liar, a lazy jacket-copy-writer, whatever works for you, because I don’t really believe in that idea. It casts the story in too much of a do-gooder, humanitarian sort of role; a sort of Make-a-Wish Foundation for readers. But readers looking for good stories don’t want to make a wish. Readers like this want to take a plunge, make a wrong turn, find themselves lost and feel their hearts thumping as they scrabble around for a field guide. As they look at the cracked glass of an unlikely compass. ‘Art,’ Deborah Eisenberg has said, ‘is destabilizing. It undermines, rather than reinforces, what you already know and what you already think. It ventures into distant ambiguities, it dismantles the received in your brain and expands and refines what you can experience.’

  A good story takes its readers to places to which they didn’t particularly want to go. It takes its readers to those places and it says, look; see. I’ve never particularly wanted to go into space, for instance; given that it is usually quite an undertaking for me to get out of the house and go to yoga, Mars or even (I may be googling the phrase ‘map of outer space’ right now, by the way) the earth’s outer atmosphere are a bit of a stretch for me. But I went there; I was taken to those places, or to the possibility of those places by two stories in this anthology – two stories the shared resonances of which struck me at first as uncanny and then as quite devastating. Elske Rahill and Maria Takolander both thought about distance and came up with women drawn to the idea of splitting off from everything, to the opportunity to leave everything behind, everything known, everything thought worthy of treasuring or losing; there is something, I think, so very telling in that.

  And there is maybe, too, something very telling in the fact that I think of space as a place to which a person might go, the way they might go to a country or a continent; the way Sara Baume’s troubled protagonist, for instance, might fly to London to do a favour for a relative, or the way that the eager tourist in Yoko Ogawa’s story might treat herself to a holiday in Vienna. That’s the thing about distance, or rather about the way we conceive of it; we always place ourselves at the origin-point of the far-away-ness, think of ourselves as the ‘here’ to the ‘there’. But we are both at once, really, and more than both; we are not looking at space, from our solid rock, but caught in it, part of it, changing it. ‘Ever the more so as I walk I take on the colours and the feelings of the places through which I walk and I am no longer a surprise to these places,’ says the self-vanished man of Kevin Barry’s story. It works both ways.

  People travel in some of these stories, but they are in exile in all of them. Any story that digs into the human is a story about exile, in a sense; we are all at a remove from one another, sometimes trying to reach one another, sometimes trying to do the opposite. Porochista Khakpour’s Henry comes to a ‘famous city’ with the apparent intent of avoiding other people, but the glass that keeps us separate is a mirror as much as is a window; Francesca Marciano’s Stella flies to a small island in the Indian Ocean, half-hoping to step onto the sands of something she lost long ago, but the roads are made of packed dirt and a harsh tower looms over everything. The homecoming of Sam Lipsyte’s Caperton may be mostly a shambles, and may be hilarious, but it is also surprisingly painful; it is also surprisingly sad. And for E.C. Osondu’s Tochi, meanwhile, a distance crossed becomes a door that refuses to open, and a night which looks different to other, darker nights but is actually the same.

  Part of what makes these stories so moving is the tenacity with which their characters insist on holding onto hope, or onto some battered version of it, even as they tell themselves they have let hope go. Is it bound up with the experience of distance, that human tendency? Kristín Ómarsdóttir’s young characters seem at first foolish with hope, almost drugged with it, but the s
trange dance of her story shows how madly they have had to battle to sustain it. Éilís Ní Dhuibhne gives us a character who knows what has happened, who knows what has changed, what has been lost – she knows that a distance deep as a ravine has opened up in her life – and yet her character makes out of that knowledge, and out of her continuing desire to look away from it, something extraordinary. On the Northumberland island from which Ross Raisin’s story takes its name, a girl does her work and keeps her watch – over the sea, over the dunes, over the young man who has appeared just at the time an older man has vanished; even a ripple of change feels to her like a swell of boiling sea. David Hayden’s character, adrift in New York, tries hard to find a compass, looking for it in reminiscence, in art, even in guilt – don’t we so often use guilt as a compass? – but the needle will not move. It is only, after all, a kind of needle.

  Formally, the short story allows for the enactment of distance as well as for its interrogation; here, the stories of Gina Apostol and Suzanne Scanlon find their shape, their manifestation, in the shape and manifestations of their character’s estrangements from each other, and from their pasts. Communication is fractured, at the level of the sentence – how an utterance looks on the page, how it is placed, which mouth it seems to fall from – and at the level of evidence handed down on other pages, other gathered artefacts. And because the shrinking, the snatching-away of distance can be even starker than its expanse, Mark Doten and Niven Govinden have given themselves only the space of a page, only the space of a realisation and of a shock and of a reality, newly dawned, within which to create their imagined worlds. Are these worlds to which we want to pay a visit? The force and the vividness of these stories leaves us with little choice.

  So find your compass. Or your kind-of-compass; that vagueness, that sense of the improvised are both so fundamental to the nature of the thing. Because the needle always points in the same direction, and yet it hardly ever looks like the same direction; almost always, sitting there in your hand, this magnet to the pull of the world, it looks like a direction you’ve never taken before. And you don’t have to go there. You don’t have to take the path at which the needle nudges. Knowing that path is there, you can veer off course. Knowing it’s there, you can go anywhere. The needle will still know what it knows.

  Kind of.

  A KIND OF COMPASS

  STORIES ON DISTANCE

  TERRAFORMING

  Elske Rahill

  Agroup of men applauds the landing, their claps and whistles drowning the grumble of the earth as it passes beneath. Caitriona lifts her face out of the cup of her palm. Wet. There is drool down her neck, drying to a tight crust along her jaw. Beyond the window, only a syrupy yellow mist. She wipes her hand on her leggings and uses the end of her sleeve to rub at her neck and face. She knows there must be marks on her; chalky tide lines mapping the shapes where the saliva has dried.

  The plane sighs to a halt, but over the speaker comes an announcement that the doors can’t be opened yet and phones are to be kept off. Some of the passengers come out into the aisles, removing bags from the overhead lockers, pulling coats out from under haunches and feet.

  It’s been years since she was in London. What she remembers are the dark veins of the underground, deceptive landmarks made by café chains, brisk men who did not offer to help with bags. She stayed a night – no, two – with her sister, before either of them were married. They shopped for clothes and Boots cosmetics, saw a musical, ate chocolate cereal in their hotel room and talked a lot in a way they hadn’t done since.

  The man next to her leans into the aisle, trying to tug something out of the overhead locker. In the twist and stretch of the effort, his t-shirt rises over the khaki canvas belt. Billow of flesh; oblong navel; neat thatch of hair that cleaves the belly in two as it runs from umbilicus down to the neon blue band of his trunks.

  Caitriona looks away. She does not want to glimpse the knot where this man was once tied to his beginnings. While she dozed on the flight, she was thinking about her son: the delicious creases at the back of his neck, his incongruence with the adult world of airport lounges and foreign currency.

  ‘Sir, please remain in your seat until the seatbelt light goes off!’ It is the air hostess who tore their boarding passes at the gate. She has turquoise eyelids and big, crunchy hair. When they boarded she was calm and smiling, but now a dangerous shade of red is rising from beneath her powdered complexion.

  The man produces a long rucksack with many straps and flaps. He turns to the air hostess.

  ‘There now,’ he says.

  She snatches the bag from him with two hands and pushes it back into the overhead locker. ‘Wait for the seatbelt light to go off!’

  The man sits down, muttering. He shakes his head, turning towards Caitriona, his palm flat on the empty seat between them, but Caitriona keeps her face towards the window. Her hand luggage is at her feet, and she has the directions written out clearly on a piece of paper. A bus, one tube stop and a three-minute walk. She will find a bathroom and remove the signs of dried drool from her face. Then she will go straight to the hotel and check in. She has packed a sandwich. There will be no need to leave the room until morning.

  It was after her father’s death that the dreams began. They arched up like a nest of waking cats, all purr and acid hiss. They licked at her ears, tongues at once gentle and scouring, and with their claws they tore deep stars into her night.

  She has followed them here to this compact hotel room, clean and cool with a bed hemmed by a wall at the head and foot. There is a flat television screwed onto the wall, a row of green and red lights glowering up its side. The screen shows a picture of stones on a beach and a bubble with the words, ‘Welcome Ms C. Dawson. We hope you enjoy your stay,’ moving about the parameters of the screen like a wandering buoy. She should have used a different name. There is a small desk with a block of Post-its, a pen, a phone and a card with the numbers for Reception and Emergency and Room Service. Caitriona has never been in a room like this before.

  She sits on the side of the bed, takes her mobile from her handbag, and squeezes the power button until it blinks to life. She has to wait through a series of texts as the phone acclimatises to the new location. Then it settles down and she can call. As the ringing begins she can feel her eyelids twitch; a kick of panic when she hears his voice.

  ‘You made it?’

  She smiles and nods as she speaks, because she read once that people can hear the expression on your face. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Eleanor picked me up. Flight was fine, you know, as you’d expect. Get what you pay for … But anyway there you go. Is my little man all right? We’re going for a bite to eat now … God, yeah – so good to see her … A girly night, yeah. But listen babe, I’m on my mobile … they don’t have a landline, no. No don’t upset him … I’ll be back before he notices. Don’t forget the eczema cream when you’re getting him into his jammies. Yeah. K. I’ll phone you tomorrow …’

  Afterwards she takes a shower. Then she sits at the desk and unwraps her ham sandwich. Not hungry.

  She wakes in a gaspful of sand to the low whirr of churning air. Red and green prickle the dark. She couldn’t turn off the air conditioning. It has dried her skin taut to the bone, and her lips taste of blood. There is an en suite, but on the mirror a sticker says not to drink the tap water. She knows there is Coke and mineral water in the little lobby at the end of the hall. She saw the vending machine on her way to the room, but she was too keen to get in and shut the door. She will nip out quickly. A cardigan over her pyjama top. Remember the key card.

  Round white sensor lights click on one by one overhead. The hallway is painted a clean shade of grey. There is a charcoal carpet underfoot, and along the walls, tall sprigs of straw in slate-black, pyramid-shaped vases. Her feet are bare. No slippers, and no clean socks for tomorrow either.

  There they are. Too late to turn around. Two of them right there, sitting on a black wicker couch beside the machine. Deep in conve
rsation, they dip their heads together like a pair of swans. Caitriona recognises the girl from the cover of the bright magazine that comes in the Sunday paper – an oval face set in a perfect bob. In the picture she wore a red jumpsuit, metallic powder shimmering on her cheekbones, a space helmet under her arm. Her hair looked set in plastic, peroxide white and mortis stiff. In real life she is smaller, her colouring mute. A haze of frizz and a stubborn cow’s lick kink her hair to life. Her feet are folded up beneath her, and one of the couch’s silver cushions is nestled on her lap. Caitriona doesn’t recognise the girl’s companion – a narrow-chested man with a vague beard – but he is one too. She knows from the t-shirt, red with black letters: MISSION MARS – Let’s Get This Future Started.

  The two lift their eyes as she passes. Fat sag of pyjama bottoms. Naked feet. She crosses her arms over her nipples and makes for the vending machine. It’s a big old beast with lots of empty metal swirls where packets of sweets and chocolate bars once were. It lows softly, illuminating its stock. There is a lot of water and only a few bottles of Coke.

  She reaches into her cardigan pocket. No money. Key card and no money. She presses a selection all the same. The two candidates resume their conversation. ‘The training will be hard,’ says the girl, her speech quiet and moist, the confident, winding vowels of fluent second-language English. ‘We can remember it is ten years away. There is much that can be learned in ten years. We will not be sent unless we are capable. We will not be chosen unless we are right.’

  ‘The radiation,’ says the man. He is English. ‘I want to be sure there’s medicine with us up there – painkillers. I don’t mind dying up there, but it’s being without access to the right medicine. Euthanasia, even. If it comes to it. I mean, it’ll be new laws there, won’t it? Or space law?’

  ‘Space code,’ says the girl, ‘strict space code.’