THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

David Robinson found a lot to love and admire in reading Melanie Reid’s memoir of coming to terms with disability after her life-changing accident.

 

The World I Fell Out Of
By Melanie Reid
Published by 4th Estate

 

Everyone liked Mel. That’s the way I remember it, half a lifetime ago. Everyone liked Mel, because how could you not?  She was warm and funny and bright and far more than halfway beautiful. Tall, of course: that, along with a full-beam smile, was her defining physical characteristic. And though I didn’t know her as well as I would have liked, back in our pre-kids, partying yesterdays, she seemed the very embodiment of joie de vivre. Even in a newspaper features department full of golden, flowering talent, her own writing stood out for its intelligence and panache. It still does.

On Good Friday 2010, Melanie Reid became tetraplegic after breaking her neck and back in a riding accident. For those of us who knew her a small bit, and for hundreds of thousands who don’t, the column she subsequently began writing in the Times has become required reading. Every Saturday, amid the magazine’s lifestyle features and high-end travel adverts, her dispatches from Planet Disability mix the blackest, bleakest humour with insight and wisdom from a world now lived at wheelchair height. Deservedly, it has won her awards both from Buckingham Palace (for services to journalism and disability) and from her fellow hacks. And good as they are, her new book, The World I Fell Out Of, is even better. So good, in fact, that I’ve even found myself doing something I’ve never done before: reading out whole chunks of it to my family.

Why? There are so many reasons and, before you ask, not a single one of them is to do with log-rolling, loyalty or friendship. The main one is honesty. These days, I mainly work as a ghostwriter, and when you are helping someone to describe their life, they usually want to talk about achievements, awards won, and how they made a mark on the world. This is understandable, but deluded: most readers just don’t care.

What they want from a memoir instead is a book which tells them what it is like to be somebody very different from themselves, adding width to their minds and understanding to their lives. Think of the very best Scottish memoirs of the last ten years – Richard Holloway’s Leaving Alexandria, for example, or Sally Magnusson’s Where Memories Go – and what sticks in the mind is the sharpness of their focus on lost love (divine in one case, maternal in another) and the clarity with which they describe struggles, sorrows, and rare but beautiful moments of redemptive joy. I will never be an  Anglican monk or archbishop no more than I will (because my mother and father both died young) ever know about what it is like to lose a much-loved parent to dementia, but both those books told me that, and more.

The World I Fell Out Of belongs in this premier league: moving, honest, but – just in case you think it’s going to reek of worthiness – darkly droll too.  Take this moment when Daz, the handsome RAF helicopter winchman who hauled up her shattered body from the grounds of a Perthshire riding school turned up almost a year later at her Glasgow hospital’s spinal unit gym to see her. He arrived just as Mel was trying and failing to shuffle her body from a wheelchair into a cut-in-half car.

 

‘“I’m really sorry I’m crying,” I sobbed, desperately trying to find a dry bit on my forearm to catch the mucus. “It’s just that I’ve been trying to get into a Fiat Punto.”

“Oh don’t worry,” said Daz, who routinely dangled on a cable over mountainous seas and cliffs to rescue people. “Getting into a Fiat Punto would make me want to cry too.”’

 

But look behind that anecdote, and there’s a different story. It is indeed one of mucus, and tears, and determination and yes, she admits in hindsight, a kind of madness that pushed her further than almost anyone with as bad injuries in the unit had gone. Walking again, however jerkily and mechanically assisted, became an obsession, as did forcing her body’s recovery beyond the plateau at which intensive physiotherapy would be withdrawn. Every twinge in her paralysed body, every willed wiggle of a toe, became a moment of hope. Miracles were possible, weren’t they?

All this time, she had avoided facing up to the physical reality of her wrecked body. So when the Times wanted a photo of her walking with the help of a Lokomat machine (“the supercar of the neuropathy world”), she turned them down. How about a picture of her MRI scan of her wrecked neck? Not even that.  Because if her body had endured radical surgery, so too had her psyche. And time wasn’t particularly good at healing that either, what with all the feelings of guilt for what she was inadvertently putting her husband and son through, the psychological impact of double incontinence, the onset of depression, tearful rages at her inability to do the simplest of things, and the sudden slippage of any sense of self-worth.

Writing to a reader who had also broken his neck in a riding accident and was contemplating suicide, she writes that she had similar thoughts but was “in a trap of my own making, writing ‘inspirational columns’”. Reid is ridiculously hard on herself here, yet there is indeed a difference between the book, where she can admit such a thing, and her journalism, where she can’t. The book is similarly more honest about the nature of her second fall, which finally ended her lifelong love affair with horse riding. Unexplained in her column because she was too embarrassed to admit it, this was actually a freak accident at a supervised session of riding for the disabled.

Yet it’s important not to downplay the journalism too, because the real underlying strength of this book is in the quality of its cliche-free, unsentimental reportage from this occasionally brave new world in which Mel finds herself. Want to know what life is like among the half-neglected geriatrics awaiting hip replacements or find out what wide cross-section of humanity finds itself being intensively coaxed in the neurophysiotherapy classes? What kind of people are they, these harried nurses, loving auxiliaries (with some exceptions) handsome RAF winchmen, wise consultants, readers whose generosity might make you weep (that was you, Judith from Twickenham), and fellow non-walking wounded in the wards?  How do her husband and son cope with such a loss? All of this is written up with the same kind of affection and intelligence and wisdom which Melanie Reid seems to bring to everything her mind touches, from describing her lifelong love of horses to her rage against teenage girls’ obsession with ideal body image.

The book ends, if not in acceptance of her paralysed body then at least in the realisation that the world still contains joys she can share, the quieter ones of nature around about what sounds very much like an idyllic cottage in the Trossachs and a sturdy enough marriage to her likeable, no-nonsense husband Dave. And even though tormenting memories will always linger from the  world she fell out of, with its newspapers to run, mountains to be skied, trails to be hiked, stairs to be raced up, horses to ride and quick twirls to be made in front of the mirror before heading out for the night, as I finished this moving, mind-changing and well-written book, I couldn’t help but hope she finds all the happiness she possibly can in the world she fell into too.

 

The World I Fell Out Of by Melanie Reid is published by 4th Estate, priced £16.99.

Melanie will be at the Aye Write! Book Festival at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow on Saturday 30 March and at the Ullapool Book Festival on Saturday 11 May.

Floris Books have, yet again, produced a beautiful picture book telling the story of the many adventures of the animals to be found in our seas an oceans. This lovely trailer gives you a small taste of the wonder inside.

 

Trailer for The Whale, the Sea and the Stars
By Adrián Macho
Published by Floris Books

Follow your heart, discover the world.

When Gerda the blue whale was very small, her mother would sing a beautiful song telling her that if she were ever lost she should look to the stars and they would guide her.

When it’s time for the little whale to leave home, her adventures take her from the warm waters of the equator to the freezing poles. Along the way she meets clever killer whales, playful penguins, a friendly polar bear and the ancient narwhale.

Then one day, the little whale realises she wants to find somewhere to stay forever. How will she know when she’s found the right sea for her? With her mother’s song in her heart, Gerda follows the stars to a place she knows she can call home.

Dive straight in to Adrián Macho’s beautiful artwork and discover Gerda’s song with this trailer for The Whale, the Sea and the Stars.

 

The Whale, the Sea and the Stars by Adrián Macho is published by Floris Books, priced £12.99

Alan Brown is some adventurer! In his new book, Overlander, he shares his story of one man and his bike, and a whole lot of stunning – if tricky to navigate – scenery.

 

Extract taken from Overlander
By Alan Brown
Published by Saraband

 

It’s only a short distance up the glen to the planned stop for the night – a bothy three kilometres away. The track up is loose but easy to ride, closely hemmed in by the trees at the start but opening out with a great view up the glen in the evening sunshine.

Bothies come in all shapes and sizes and all states of repair, and what little I’ve found online gives only a vague picture of the state of the building. When we reach the location, it is not that easy to spot as it’s set back some way from the track and nestled in among some mature broadleaved woods that run down from the steep crag above. The crag is cut in two by the gorge of the Allt Narrachan in a way that reminds me of Chinese silk painting, with the strong diagonal of the stream flicking from side to side before leaping off into a waterfall with trees perched either side on crazy ledges, the whole thing draped in half-formed or half-dispersed clouds. It is utterly bewitching.

There’s a long-forgotten field of rough, tussocky grass between the track and the bothy itself, and the kidney-swilling lurch across it, with the suspension squeaking and groaning in the perfectly still Highland evening, is a lovely end to the first day’s cycling. The thing with bothies is that you never quite know what you’re going to find. It may be that the bothy burnt down the day before or got trashed, but what you usually find is a rough shelter in perfect order, and sometimes there will be a couple of candles, some packet food or even a can of beer.

The outside aspect of the building is in harmony with the surroundings. It’s a traditional cruck-framed cottage, likely from the era of the iron foundry. The cruck-frame design allowed people with timber but no cement to build cottages where the roof beams sat straight on the ground, and the stone walls were built to fill the gaps in the timber structure rather than to bear any weight. The lack of pointing or rendering makes the whole construction look like something talented children have put together on a dry riverbed, and it has an organic feel to it. As I move to open the door, a mouse, disturbed in the long grass, shoots into the space between two boulders in the wall. Anyone squeamish about sharing with mice or spiders might be best advised to avoid bothies altogether, but they’d be missing out on one of the great pleasures of the Highlands.

Because bothies are open to any traveller to use, you never know who’s in residence. It’s polite to knock, so I do and wait for a reply that doesn’t come. It feels like we are completely alone here, apart from the mice. I duck under the projecting edge of the roof and step in and down onto the floor, which is what the French would call terre battue if it was beaten a bit more. It’s actually fine, dry earth. My first instinct on entering a bothy is to have a good sniff. This place smells clean and dry. It’s dim but there are a couple of neatly fitted windows made from corrugated PVC sheet. The interior décor is sparse but functional – three benches made from a pair of logs and a plank each, a couple of coffee tables of the same design, a rustic fireplace and a couple of branches that have been taken inside to dry. The inside surface of the walls has been neatly pointed with cement and the whole place is wind- and watertight. Some bothies have wooden floors, interior walls even, and furniture. This is the real thing, just a dry shelter open to any passing traveller.

***

Later that evening, Nathalie and I set out up the glen for a short stroll. It is simply beautiful. Not in the slap-in-the-face picture postcard way that Glencoe is, but there’s a verdant intimacy about the flat ground either side of the river, with the rugged foothills of Ben Starav to the north and the gentler hills to the south. The floor of the glen is carpeted in lush, green grass that comes up to our knees and in which each wave of the breeze is visible as it rolls down the glen and into the scrubby oaks and alders, their leaves flashing their silvery undersides in ripples.

There’s an effortless joy in just standing still and letting the landscape – weird and familiar at the same time – seep into us. Wandering slowly through the tussock grass, we come across the clear impression of a deer that’s been resting there, quite possibly until just a few minutes ago, out of sight and out of the wind. We could curl up together in the green saucer and see nothing but the clouds ambling across a blue sky now tinged with pink as the sun goes down.

 

Overlander – Bikepacking coast to coast across the heart of the Highland by Alan Brown is published by Saraband on 21 March 2019, £9.99

Leila Aboulela gives readers a unique take on the road trip novel, as Kristian Kerr discovers in reading her latest novel Bird Summons.

 

Bird Summons
By Leila Aboulela
Published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson

 

Is there a Great Scottish Road Trip? The North Coast 500 claims that crown and, in its wake, new routes are opening up Scotland’s landscape and beckoning travellers to all corners of the land. The South West Coastal 300 and the North East 250 seem especially designed to lure tourists to forgotten corners. Drove roads, Roman roads, roads to the isles have crisscrossed the country since the earliest times bringing trade and connection. Not a road but a path, the Fife Pilgrim Way opens in 2019, reminding us that spiritual journeys were the earliest form of tourism. Into the midst of this feverish waymarking comes Bird Summons, Leila Aboulela’s new novel, and it brings us an illuminating, fantastical, contemporary Scottish road trip filled with humour, humanity and the unexpected.

Three women set out from Dundee on a journey conceived as an official excursion of the Arabic Speaking Muslim Women’s Group. Salma, their leader, had devised it with a lofty purpose, as an educational exercise that would foster integration through a better understanding of the history of Islam in Britain. They are to visit the grave of Lady Evelyn Cobbold at Glencarron in Wester Ross. Cobbold, whose Arabic name was Zainab, was a daughter of an Earl of Dunmore brought up in Cairo and Algiers in the late nineteenth century. She declared herself a Muslim during, of all things, a private audience with the Pope and, in 1933, she became the first British woman to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. At her burial in 1963, a piper played a lament and an Imam from Woking officiated because there were none close at hand.

While Zainab’s story will come to mean something to Aboulela’s characters, there is a fatal flaw in Salma’s scheme. The grave with its Arabic inscription has been defaced, and the women in the group chalk it up as yet another example of hostility and drop out. Salma adheres stubbornly to her plan, turning it into a holiday for her friends Moni and Iman. Her didactic impulses never fully subside, though, and the idea of pilgrimage as a spiritual quest and a time for reflection underpins the book.

The first third of their pilgrimage, which takes place primarily in the confined space of Salma’s car, is a brilliant reel of three, weaving between the women’s minds. They talk, sing, and inadvertently ruffle each other’s feathers. Each is preoccupied: Moni with the worry of leaving her son Adam for the first time; Iman with a dream of disappearing; and Salma with the giddy heat of a clandestine online correspondence with Amir, a former boyfriend in Egypt. Aboulela captures these conflicting moods deftly, with pathos and humour. Fired with naughtiness, Salma attempts to instigate a parlour game, asking everyone to name the sin they would choose to commit in a world with no consequences drops like a stone because both consequences and the desire to sin seem all too close.

As immigrants, each woman has a ‘before’ life and identity that hasn’t fully translated into the ‘now’ version of herself. Moni had been a business woman, bold and successful before becoming mother to her disabled son. Her life has been subsumed by her love for him and the perpetual work of being his carer, and her relationship with her husband has broken down. Salma had trained as a doctor in Cairo but, finding her qualifications useless in Britain, works as a masseuse at the hospital. She has four children with her Scottish husband but worries that they see her foremost as a funny foreigner rather than their mother. In both the before and after, Iman’s beauty defines her life, both a blessing and a curse. In war torn Syria it was her way out and in Britain it earns her keep, but it has never fulfilled its promise by bringing her a child in any of her three marriages.

Their journey exists as a pause from life, a chance to reflect on the struggle for self, to answer a summons that comes from within and from the world. As the trio travels further from their everyday lives and moves into a cottage in the grounds of a converted monastery, the women begin individual adventures, moving into a new reality fuelled by magical thinking. The Highland retreat is suffused with magical possibility, especially in the wild earthiness of the forest and in the thick atmosphere of the religious site. In abandoning the realism of the early chapters for a realm of myth, Aboulela opens a world of possibility and freedom.

Wild, wonderful, and terrifying things happen in the forest. The wisest of birds, the hoopoe, appears to Iman, to tell her stories about suffering, sacrifice, and redemption. A bird with a range across Europe and Africa, hoopoes are extremely rare in Scotland, though they have been spotted when their migration has strayed off course. They carry a large amount of mythical baggage from the cultures of the places that make up their territory. The hoopoe occupies a privileged place in the Qu’ran posing a question to Solomon; it is the leader of the eponymous conference of the birds in Attar’s Sufi masterpiece; its jazzy black, white, and orange be-quiffed shape is taken by a king in Aristophanes’s Birds. Aboulela plays with the hoopoe’s wisdom by adding a wealth of Scottish tales to his repertoire.

These stories, which are the bird’s summons, are allegories, beast fables, tales with morals or warnings that can guide or challenge. One of the messages of the book is that a landscape and a nation accommodates a plurality of stories, the story of the selkie wife or the life of Zainab Cobbold for instance, that makes a common cultural inheritance. Salma, Moni and Iman are not on a blink-and-you-miss-it road trip of instagrammable highlights, although mobile phones and a commemorative selfie are still part of this quest novel’s contemporary fabric. The connections here are real, and Aboulela has brilliantly shown the performative power of storytelling. This journey, her great Scottish road trip, fulfils the desire expressed in Iman’s song, “A yearning for a home that would be more than a physical space.”

 

Bird Summons by Leila Aboulela is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, priced £16.99

The award-winning Little Door Books are carrying on their amazing publishing this Spring with gorgeous picture books delving into the lives of a whole range of critters! Keep an eye on their website too to download songs that will accompany the books on publication!

 

 

Monsters Unite
Written by Sara and Molly Sheridan
Illustrated by Iain Carroll

 

Best-selling author Sara Sheridan teams up with her daughter Molly to tell this fantastic and topical adventure about friendship and teamwork, and why discarding plastics and our waste in lochs, lakes and waterways is not good for us, the planet AND for all the monsters trying to visit their friends. Based on one of the stories Sara made up for Molly when she was a little girl, it also includes darkly quirky and fun illustrations by first-time picture book illustrator Iain Carroll.

When Nessie finds an ancient map showing a network of Monster tunnels, she decides to leave her high-profile life in Loch Ness and sets off on an adventure. She doesn’t know if there are other monsters out there or what the trip might hold, but she needn’t worry – from Tay Tay in Ireland to Pez in Spain – she discovers lots of new friends. The only trouble is that the tunnels are getting blocked with waste , so Nessie has to come up with a plan . . .

 

 

Crime Squirrel Investigators: The Naughty Nut Thief
Written by Emily Dodd
Illustrated by Giulia Cregut

 

Bestselling children’s author Emily Dodd brings her scientific background to this quirky, fun investigative tale that will encourage readers to play detective too! With brilliant illustrations by Giulia Cregut, you’ll learn too about the eating habits of all our woodland creatures.

Rosie’s secret hazelnut store has been ransacked and her best friend Charlie agrees to help her to find the naughty nut thief. The crime squirrel investigators only have left-over nutshells as a
clue, so they watch the different ways the three main suspects eat hazelnuts to try to solve the crime.

 

 

Daddy Frog and the Moon
Written by Pippa Goodhart
Illustrated by Augusta Kirkwood

 

Award-winning author Pippa Goodhart comes together with an exciting new illustrator Augusta Kirkwood to produce this gentle and heartwarming tale about the growing relationship between a father who wants to give his child the moon, and the child who just wants to spend time with her daddy.

When Frog becomes Daddy Frog he longs to show his little Baby Frog just how much he loves her. As he searches for a present that will express his love, he misses out on special time shared with Baby Frog as she grows into a little frog … until his great leap to try to catch her the moon launches Baby Frog into the leaping she longs to do with her Daddy.

 

Find Little Door’s full collection of books on their website.

Today is International Women’s Day and Books from Scotland couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate than to share with you poems from Nadine Aisha Jassat’s debut poetry collection, Let Me Tell You This. It is a brilliant, vital and inspiring collection, and we are excited to watch Nadine and her work flourish.

 

Extract taken from Let Me Tell You This
by Nadine Aisha Jassat
published by 404 Ink

 

Third Generation

After Langston Hughes’ ‘Cross’

 My old man’s a brown old man,
and my old mother’s white.
When they ask if he’s from Pakistan,
I’m told to be polite.
When they say she’s not my Mother,
I say to me we look the same,
and when they tell me to be ashamed of them,
I say I have two worlds to gain.
My Bali wants a suburban house
to prove himself to you,
and if my Ma ever left that house
you’d condemn him for that too.
I grew myself from both of them
each bone, each nail, each tooth.
I wonder how my children will grow,
under the shadow of this roof?

 

*

 

Inheritance

She calls it having a word with herself.
My mother, looking at me,

saying all the things she needs
and doesn’t.

Fear does what it is supposed to,
to hold you tight,

until a word with yourself is the only way
you can try to pause the descending,

spiralling, tapping, trapping
paralysis but for the beating fist;

What if? But then? If I don’t? If I do?
Anxiety. 4 syllables given to this ceaseless, connecting string.

This genetic-chemical-taught-inherited
threaded parallel between

My mother and me.

My mother and me.

Threaded parallel between
this genetic-chemical-taught-inherited

Anxiety. 4 syllables given to this ceaseless, connecting string.
What if? But then? If I don’t? If I do?

 Paralysis but for the beating fist
spiralling, tapping, trapping.

You can try to pause the descending,
until a word with yourself is the only way

to hold you tight.
Fear does what it is supposed to,

and doesn’t.
Saying all the things she needs,

My mother. Looking at me.
She calls it having a word with herself.

 

*

 

Coin Toss

In response to a One Penny Coin, branded with ‘Votes for
Women’ on the head of the King, held at Glasgow
Women’s Library’s Suffragette archive.

 1. Heads
12th November, 1910

I say, you think you can tax so much of my wage
but then won’t give me a say on how it gets paid?
I say, it’s not my law
which makes the roof over my head
more my husband’s than mine;
nor that disavows me from quitting the swine
at a time of my own choosing.
A penny from my thoughts
meets a penny in my fist.
Friday next, me and my Sis
will make our mark,
not just on money but in minds:
Deeds Not Words, till the end of my days.
Votes for Women. That’s what I say.

2. Tails
6th February, 2018

I saw it online; women fighting head to tail for their rights.
Retweet: #votesforwomen #metoo
#timeforchange #changestartswithyou.
The thing is, there’s still so much to do:
women face violence every day,
are taxed on tampons, denied equal pay, even get scoffed at
if we save our own names for our children.
When you tell me we’ve won equality,
I’ll tell you at least two of my sisters are murdered a week
by men. We’re at a coin toss in history,
spinning in the air between how far we’ve come,
and where we need to be. I’ve heard the tales,
I’ll take them with me, as I use my words in protest.
As I forge ahead. As we forge ahead.

 

*

 

29

Congratulating me on turning twenty nine,
my friend tells me it’s a number in its prime,
and I ask her what she means.

‘It’s only divisible by itself,’
she replies, and I nod,
and say, its about time,
my age finally reflected
who I am inside.

 

Let Me Tell You This, by Nadine Aisha Jassat is published by 404 Ink, priced £8.99

Linda Cracknell is a writer of fiction, non-fiction and radio drama as well as a self-employed teacher and facilitator of creative writing in various settings. Landscape, place and memory are key themes in her work. Here is an extract from her current work-in-progress, When Tumblers Turn, which tells the story of Lucy, a young archaeology graduate who lost her mother in a mountain accident when she was a young child.

 

When Lucy put a mug of tea in front of her dad, the face he turned up to her was darkened, yet flamed with something feverish.

‘What?’ She’d been a step ahead of herself, mentally shuffling back along the corridor with her tea and oatcake. But he tipped her off course now, halting her on the far side of the kitchen table.

He looked down again and one hand swiped over the top of his balding head. ‘The thing is, Lucy.’ He took a deep breath. She saw his throat convulse when he swallowed. ‘They …’ One of his hands now fluttered towards the door and her eyes followed it as if an answer hung there.

She’d heard the doorbell earlier, a mutter of voices in the kitchen, the door clicking after goodbyes, and then her dad on the phone for a while. After that, no radio on, no chair scraping on the floor tiles, so she thought he’d gone to the pub. She’d crawled out from under her duvet then and come down the corridor from her childhood bedroom.

She paused, waiting.

A hand twisted across his forehead.

She put her tea down. ‘Are you ill?’

The silence was punctured by swifts screeching as they wove their evening net of flight-paths above the suburban midsummer gardens, revelling in the sultry air.

‘The police have been here,’ he said.

It felled her to sitting right where she was, opposite him at the table. Blood drained from her face, replaced by an icy certainty that this was news for her. She closed her eyes, ambushed by the scent of scorched rosemary, of burning oranges. Wanting, and yet not wanting to know something she had not faced, she held her breath.

‘It’s going to seem …’ He kept his eyes down. ‘After 23 years, it’s a bit of a shock.’ He looked up.

She met his gaze. What was he talking about? ‘I’m nearly 26,’ she said.

‘I know.’

So it wasn’t even about her. She slumped back, wiped moisture from her forehead with her T-shirt.

‘They found the passport. And of course the address hasn’t changed in all that time.’

‘Who? What passport?’

‘The British Embassy in Paris.’

This seemed to be something completely new.

He got up and blundered to her side of the table, stood just behind her, as if wanting to touch her but not quite daring to. She smelt the fox-scent of his underarm sweat, saw from the corner of her eye the rough black hair curling on one arm. His darkness and physical solidity had always seemed alien to her own small frame and her fairness. She’d loved to snuggle against her grandpa, breathing in tweed and peppermint, but how long it was since she’d been this physically close to her dad.

‘It’s about your mother,’ he said.

She turned to look up at him then but he didn’t meet her gaze.

‘She’s been found.’

The hands of a clock within her panicked backwards. As a child she’d anticipated this moment. Other people fantasised about discovering they were adopted, and that a foreign king was really their father. She’d instead invented a mother who came back mysterious and beautiful. Alive. But this homecoming was way too late. The idea of a mother was as vague now as a stain on the floor of Neolithic burial chamber where a body had once lain.

She listened to details that hardly made sense. The name of the glacier on Mont Blanc where her mother had fallen into a crevasse: ‘Bossons’.

‘A whole kilometre she’s moved from start to finish,’ he said. ‘In that 23 years the glacier has …’ He pushed a hand towards the floor. ‘You know, with melting …’

‘“Retreated?”’ she offered. Here she knew what she was talking about. Knew the right word. But she noticed he’d avoided saying ‘climate change’.

‘So the Embassy woman said. A lot.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘There was a huge international conference about it recently. Because the retreat’s so dramatic on some of the Mont Blanc glaciers.’

He frowned. ‘That right?’

He sat down opposite her again, eyes down, hands clenched in front of him. She remembered the sensation of running her small fingers along the string of calluses under each of his finger joints raised by the run of hemp and nylon rope; his work as a lock-keeper on the Caledonian Canal.

‘Thirty years ago you could step out of your cable car straight onto the Mer de Glace,’ she said. These facts were easily retrievable for her even though she had no idea how a glacier would look or feel or move. She’d read the reports, studied the diagrams. ‘Now you have to go down 370 steps.’

He breathed out noisily. Perhaps she’d provoked again the seismic growling which had finally erupted between them after her grandpa’s funeral back in February when he’d dug up a store of rage about sacrifices made for her. It was that spitting, blazing version of her dad who had driven her directly to Spain, securing them each in their own silent quarter. Perhaps their cautious settlement was again at risk.

A scent of expectation hung in the room, an assumption that she should care or feel something after all this time for someone she never seemed to have known.

He opened his mouth to speak but she was quicker: ‘I never knew it was Mont Blanc. Or have I just forgotten?’ She folded her arms, drew in a quick breath. Here it was again – the desire she felt to needle, to put him in the wrong. But he’d barely whispered of her mother before. Family photos were hidden away in the loft along with old camping gear and endless pairs of boots. It required a ladder and a lot of muscle to get up there, leaving the archive to hover above them; an unexplored land.

‘It was quite a long time ago,’ he said, not answering the question. ‘The thing is…’.

She watched his face closely, noticed the map of lines that had spread across it sometime in the last years.

He laid the words down slowly; counters in a steady game: ‘They’re recovering the body. Soon. In a day or two. She’s a little way off the main climbing routes apparently. Discovered by chance. But they’re going to drill the ice around to release her. She can come back then, be flown back.’

So what? she wanted to say.

‘We can have a funeral.’ He took a ragged breath. ‘Or,’ he said slowly, carefully, looking up at her. ‘It’s possible to go there.’

‘To the Alps?’

Lucy heard the siren for the road-bridge, which meant it was lifting to allow boats to chug out of the canal for the freedom of the Beauly Firth and the wide-open arms of the North Sea beyond.

‘To meet her halfway,’ he said.

She imagined her dad going to one of those cold-slab mortuary rooms you saw on TV thrillers, to find a heap of remains in a bag. A foul image came to her of a tuber fermented within its skin after being underground for too long. Her mouth flooded and she gripped her hand on the table, ready to rise.

He looked up. ‘You see, they said… it’s a bit remarkable. How she’s been. Preserved.’

A shock thudded across the table.

‘It sometimes happens if there’s a lot of moisture, apparently. No oxygen. It’s like the body’s been in a sealed casket.’

She pictured a carved wooden box with a brass fastening.

‘It turns to a kind of wax. The body,’ he said. ‘You probably know about it from, you know, archaeology stuff.’

‘Not heard of anything quite that crazy.’

He pushed across the table some printed-out pages from a climbing website. It wasn’t the smooth Christmas-cake icing she might have imagined. Crevasses carved across a glacier at tormented angles; corrugated, wildly disordered.

‘The Grand Mulets hut is … perched there.’ A rock speared up in a steep dark triangle on a schematic map. ‘She fell somewhere above it, on the Bossons Glacier. The steepest in the Alps, apparently.’ He pointed to where a small cross had been marked in red below the hut, some GPS coordinates next to it. ‘That’s where she’s been found. On La Jonction. A kilometre below where she fell.’

‘Yes, you said.’ It was as if he was proud of her spectral mini-marathon.

Lucy couldn’t locate this story amidst the sludgy sediment of their history. Did she even want to engage with this long-delayed narrative? A dormant sense of injustice began to boil within her.

‘Did I ever know about this? I just remember that it was an accident on a mountain.’ She felt her mouth wrench into an unruly shape. A part of her wanted to leave the table with her cup of tea, stay on the course she’d determined, turn away from the intrusion. So much else was at stake.

‘Don’t do that,’ he said, taking from her hand a fork she’d been raking into the grain of the wooden table.

She threw herself back in her seat.

‘You don’t remember?’ he said.

She shook her head, arms folded, eyes down. A chasm had been revealed where a bridge should have been.

 

The photograph was taken by Rick Worrell.

There’s the saying that if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life. This dictum could easily apply to Bill Innes, who tells us about his life in aviation in his memoir, Flight from the Croft. BooksfromScotland caught up with him to ask him about his career.

 

Flight from the Croft
By Bill Innes
Published by Whittles Publishing

 

You’ve written an entertaining memoir on your love affair with all things aviation. Tell us what it was about flying that enraptured you as a boy.

As the book explains, it was the sight of a Spitfire flying low through Glencoe at the time of the Battle of Britain that captured my imagination and fired an unlikely ambition.

 

How have you enjoyed the experience of writing and publishing your memoir?

This is my sixth book but the one which took longest to complete. I abandoned the project for some years and it took the encouragement of friends who had heard my aviation talks to give me the belief that the story was worth telling. The challenge was to alleviate technical detail with anecdote and humour.

 

You have many great memories of a vast array of flying experiences. What are your favourite moments of your flying career?

I have been fortunate to have been able to fly a wide variety of aircraft – with differing challenges and differing levels of enjoyment. Aerobatics in vintage open-cockpit biplanes are a more immediate experience than in modern military jets – or even in a WW2 Mustang. It has been my privilege to be part of the launch team for the Boeing 757 in BA and have the satisfaction of introducing it to four different airlines. The joy of being paid for a pursuit that was essentially my hobby meant it was always a pleasure to go to work.

To be able to bring your passengers safely to their destination regardless of all the weather gods can throw at you is the greatest job satisfaction for a pilot

 

Love (and flying!) can have its downs as well as its ups. What were your scariest moments on an airplane?

As the book explains, I had no right to survive a crash in an air race. I have had engine failures and an engine fire – but professional airline pilots are trained to deal with such.

 

You have been mentored and been a mentor yourself. What do you think are the key attributes in passing on wisdom?

Having suffered from mentors who could only criticise rather than teach, my generation determined that we would teach before we assessed. There is no point in telling an experienced pilot he/she is doing something wrong unless you can diagnose the problem and suggest what needs to be done to resolve it. Pilots need self-confidence. Good performance must be recognised by praise while unqualified negative criticism can cause serious damage.

 

Many people don’t feel the same enthusiasm you do about being up in the air. What would you say to nervous flyers to put them at ease?

There is a chapter on this towards the end of the book. While it is no help to sufferers to be told their fears are often irrational, we found that more information on aircraft noises and movements could alleviate some misconceptions.  For example, I would tell passengers that, while turbulence was uncomfortable for them, the aircraft was perfectly comfortable with it.

It is also helpful for the anxious to know that they are not alone – with up to 20% of passengers believed to suffer from some degree of fear. Above all – do not be afraid to confess fears to crew. Cabin attendants are familiar with the problem and will offer sympathetic reassurance.

 

How do you keep your passion for flying going now that you’ve retired?

After 45 years in various fields in a golden era of aviation, I felt that box had been ticked and concentrated on other interests. Since retirement I have written six books on a variety of subjects, been a presenter and actor on TV and radio, lectured on Gaelic traditional poetry at several universities here and abroad and done numerous presentations connected with my books.

For my 70th birthday I did treat myself to a new aviation experience and had a short lesson in a helicopter.  Although that was fun, increasing aviation bureaucracy makes it difficult to maintain the currency of a pilot licence. I am content to try and keep up with developments in the field at long distance.

 

Flight from the Croft by Bill Innes is published by Whittles Publishing, priced £18.99

Fictionalising the love lives of great artists is having a bit of a moment in publishing. We’ve had novels on Ernest Hemingway and Zelda Fitzgerald, and now Lynn Bushell is tackling the life and loves of Pierre Bonnard. Here she talks to BooksfromScotland about the real life story that inspired her book.

 

Painted Ladies
By Lynn Bushell
Published by Sandstone Press

 

Bonnard is almost unique amongst artists in that he was not a philanderer and although he had two mistresses, one of them was his common law wife Marthe, who remained with him for half a century. In 1917 when ‘Painted Ladies’ opens, she and Bonnard had already been together twenty-five years. He had met her on her way to the funeral parlour where she worked sewing artificial flowers onto wreaths. Recognising perhaps that Bonnard was a class above her she told him her name was Marthe de Méligny and that she was sixteen. It wasn’t until he married her in 1925 and she signed the register ‘Maria Boursin’ that he realised she had lied not just about her name, but her age. She had in fact been twenty-four at the time.

By then, however, the artist had other things on his mind.  His affair with his model, the captivating eighteen year old Renée Montchaty, had been going on for five years and Bonnard had finally reached a decision. He told Marthe he was taking Renée to Rome and intended marrying her on their return. One can only imagine Marthe’s despair – approaching fifty, no longer beautiful and with a skin complaint that necessitated spending hours in the bath each day, she had been relying on Bonnard’s obsessive insistence on everything in his life remaining constant, to keep her in place until the affair had run its course.

We don’t know what happened in Rome. The one painting to come out of it shows two women in the Piazza del Popolo; one is holding up a set of scales. The pair returned to Paris prematurely and Bonnard went straight back to the house he shared with Marthe in St Germain-en-Laye and proposed to her instead.  Three weeks after the marriage, Renée was dead. She was just twenty-four.

You could say Bonnard was unlucky. In trying to do right by one woman he had destroyed them both. He and Marthe fled to the south of France where they remained for the rest of their lives. Always reclusive, Marthe now made a career of being ill and developed a paranoid reluctance to see anyone. With an eye on posterity she insisted that any remaining images of Renée be destroyed. By the time of her death in 1942 the scandal had been forgotten, Bonnard was the ‘Grand Old Man’ of painting and Marthe was his acknowledged muse – ‘the woman in the bath’. She had even managed to turn her psoriasis to good use.

However, there was a curious post-script to the affair. In the last year of his life Bonnard returned to a painting he’d abandoned twenty-five years earlier and which Marthe must have overlooked in her war of attrition. In ‘The Women in the Garden’ we have virtually the only surviving image of Renée. Bonnard places her centre stage – young, beautiful and very much alive. He gilds the background so the painting resembles an icon. It’s only because the title is ‘The Women in  the Garden’ that one’s eye looks for a second woman and there in the bottom right hand corner, buried in shadow and staring grimly at her rival, is Marthe.

It’s enough to cast doubt on the idea that Marthe was Bonnard’s muse and Renée was just a blip in his artistic career. The young woman who died so tragically and who’d been whited out of history, survived to tease historians a century later. In ‘The Colour of Memory’ Tate Modern’s Bonnard exhibition, ‘The Women in the Garden’ has pride of place. One can’t help thinking that poor Marthe would be turning in her grave.

 

Painted Ladies by Lynn Bushell is published by Sandstone Press, priced £7.99

Love of a place can inspire callbacks to favourite memories and spark off inspirations and connections. Charlotte Runcie’s Salt on my Tongue is a fascinating exploration on our relationship with sea, and on how she herself is inspired and drawn to its salty depths.

 

Extract taken from Salt on your Tongue: Women and the Sea
By Charlotte Runcie
Published by Canongate

 

I loved Edinburgh again as soon as I saw it with fresh adult eyes. It was the place my sister and parents had lived before, though I’d only visited for holidays, and heard about it wistfully in stories, until my parents finally decided to move back when I turned eighteen. Then, when I carelessly betrayed it by studying in England, it became my refuge during university holidays.

In Edinburgh I fell in love with the heat that builds encouragingly in your calves when you find yourself walking breathlessly up the hills and over the bridges in the Old Town, late to meet a friend. My lungs love the sensation of Edinburgh’s atmosphere, the biting freshness of it, never still but always thrilled with a shock of salted air, and sometimes the yeasty smell from the brewery on thick evenings. And the way the city is always almost entirely at the mercy of the spooky mystique of the haar, the rolling sea fog that comes on quick with its smoky white haze on a chilly evening and blinds you, if you don’t see it coming first, as it rounds the corner and somersaults its way towards you through the Cowgate.

On a clear day, I love that you can see right the way over the bright blue water towards the green and mauve hills of Fife. You can see the islands nestling there. Inchcolm, with its twelfth-century monastery. Inchkeith, where in 1493, King James IV is said to have performed a strange and entirely unethical language experiment, leaving two babies on the island to be looked after by a deaf and mute nurse in order to determine which language they eventually learned to speak, and which he could therefore conclude was the natural language of mankind as given by God. According to sixteenth-century historian Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie’s The Historie and Cronicles of Scotland, ‘Some say they could speak Hebrew, but for my part I know not.’ Walter Scott was unconvinced (in The History of Scotland): ‘It is more likely they would scream like their dumb nurse, or bleat like the goats and sheep on the island.’ Maybe, of course, it never happened at all, and is just a legend attributed to a king who was known to be a polyglot, an eager amateur scientist, and an oddball.

Then Fidra, another nature reserve with its own automated lighthouse, and the Isle of May, a boat trip away from Anstruther in the East Neuk on a boat called the May Princess, and St Baldred’s Boat, the rock formation off Seacliff Beach in East Lothian, where the medieval monk and hermit St Baldred is said to have retreated for contemplation. Go up high enough and look past the islands and over to the right of the three broad, spiked bridges that bind Fife to the Lothians, the Forth Rail Bridge, the old Forth Road Bridge and the new Queensferry Crossing, one red, one silver, one white, with the water stretching across towards the little white dots of the coastal towns, winking in the sun as they bend right around towards the East Neuk. The three bridges, each constructed in a different century, binding the land and the sea. The estuary is the only place we can do that, with the sea at its narrowest point that we can still just about build across, the last point at which it’s not yet so inscrutably large.

*

There is no easily exact difference between the river and the sea; no invisible line where the freshwater ends and saltwater begins. The sea is a gradual process of becoming, of widening and ageing and growing into more. There’s a human scale to an estuary. Settlements cluster around them, growing into industrial heartlands over the centuries because they’re so useful for transport and trade and connection to the world. Even before industry, though, people were drawn to them to build their homes. They are poised on the edge, but still connected to home, to land, and to life-giving fresh drinking water as it turns to the salt of the sea.

In salmon you see the difference that a saltwater environment makes to living creatures. Salmon are small mud-brown creatures when young and just-hatched in the freshwater. By the time they have made the journey from the river into the sea as adults they are transformed: big, shimmering rainbow-streaked blue dashes of light, ready to return home to their origins upstream to lay their eggs and begin the process of life over again. The river is where they begin, but the sea is where they become brightest and strongest.

Estuaries are where we can control the tide a little. At the Thames Barrier at Woolwich, London is kept safe from flood, the sea a little tamer because of a human presence. At Cramond, the village on the beach to the west of Edinburgh, there is a causeway path out to the tidal Cramond Island, the concrete on the route cracked into rockpools by thousands of days of tide washing in and out. In Cramond itself – where the River Almond drains into the Firth – there’s a decent pub (which means that dogs are allowed in the bar, with biscuits provided for them), a café with a good line in Cullen skink and hot chocolate, and generally an ice cream van parked out beside the small harbour, hard by the sign warning about tide times and instructing walkers to make sure to time their journeys out to the island so as not to get cut off.

If the tide is far enough out to be safe, two hours either side of its lowest point, you can walk right out along the causeway towards the little grassy islet with a few stony ruins on the top. As you walk, you’re flanked always to your right by a line of tall, imposing, triangular anti-boat pylons, put there during the Second World War. Once you get to the island you can look at the Firth from its middle, the water all around you and Edinburgh settled and finite before you, with Arthur’s Seat and the southern hills in the far distance. You are standing in the middle of the estuary, the river behind you, and the wide sea beyond, out into the myth and unknown. As you hurry back to the mainland – which you will want to do, for the cold of the coast winds will have by this time stirred within you a violent appetite for soup from the café or a pint of beer in the warmth of the decent pub with the dogs – if you’ve timed your trip right, the water will only just be beginning to fill in either side of the causeway, lapping around the bases of the anti-boat pylons, bringing more seaweed and fish to leave in the rockpools it cracked open on its last visit. If you feel the sea anywhere close to your feet, walk faster, because soon it will be several feet above your head, and you’ll be left to swim with the seals, and the legends of others caught out by the tides before you.

 

Salt on your Tongue: Women and the Sea by Charlotte Runcie is published by Canongate, priced £14.99

Catastrophe can sometimes bring the best out of people, and in Ricky Monaghan Brown’s memoir about his stroke – which he suffered aged just 38 – he writes with honesty, emotion, and a fair few laughs, on his recovery and how love helped him through. He talks to BooksfromScotland about his writing and his continuing recovery.

 

Stroke: A 5% Chance of Survival
By Ricky Monaghan Brown
Published by Sandstone Press

 

Firstly, could you tell us a bit about the book?

It kicks off with me suffering a catastrophic stroke – the day after I lost my job! I was wheeled into hospital with a one-in-twenty chance of achieving what the doctors delicately called ‘a good outcome’. What follows is the story of a miraculous recovery. It’s a lot funnier than that sounds, I think. I’ve heard many survivors’ supporters say that it was the laughs that they shared at absurd moments that helped them get through, and that was certainly the case for us.

 

This is a story of survival and recovery, but at its core it’s also a love story – could you tell us a bit about how those strands work together?

I feel it’s important to tread carefully here – if love on its own was enough to save us from health crises, then there would be a lot more healthy and happy people around. There’s a huge dollop of luck involved, too. But if I’m the protagonist of Stroke, then Beth (who acts as my partner, lover, carer and friend in the book) is the hero. She started the process of saving my life from what it might otherwise have become long before the stroke hit, and she still does it every day. The survival story can’t be separated from that.

 

How did you start getting into writing after having the stroke?

When the lights first went back on in my head, Beth brought me my phone, and I started tweeting out some of the silly little things that would happen each day. When people responded, I felt like I was re-establishing my connection to the world outside the hospital. Soon, I realised that I had stories to tell. Like many victims of brain injuries, I wanted to make sense of what I had lost and find a version of my story that made sense to me. I found out that I had been lucky enough to gain things, as well. Hopefully people in similar situations, and their loved ones, will be able to read Stroke and find some potential for optimism, too.

 

This is a deeply personal and emotional story – were there bits that were particularly hard to write? Were there bits that you enjoyed revisiting?

The writing wasn’t so bad. I think that I was focused on the story and finding the best way to tell it. Reading back through the final proof, though, I found I was crying tears of laughter as well as sympathy for the Ricky who is often so very scared in the book. I still think that the scene where I try to remember any of the details of our home that I’m working so hard to get back to – and can’t – is absolutely heart-breaking. Many of the laughs come from the antics of the supporting characters: my hospital roommate, the doctors, the nurses and the therapists. It was lovely to reacquaint myself with them again.

 

One of the things readers comment on is the humour in your memoir when dealing with something scary and painful. Could you tell us a bit about making people laugh with a story about a haemorrhagic stroke?

Well, that’s part of it, isn’t it? The ridiculousness of there being anything funny coming out of this. It’s absurd, and you can’t help but laugh! Like the time I ordered a nurse to get me some ice chips – I’m a very important man, I told him. I’m going to be the vice president! ‘Of  what?’ he asked. Of the country, man! What do you think? I’ve no idea what I was thinking, but it made sense to me at the time.

Beth would sometime feel guilty about laughing at the things that would happen, but then she would see me enjoying them, too. Hopefully, readers will feel that I’ve given them permission to join in. Spoiler alert: I survived!

 

Stroke: A 5% Chance of Survival by Ricky Monaghan Brown is published by Sandstone Press, priced £7.99

Catherine Simpson’s memoir, When I Had a Little Sister, is already gaining many plaudits, with The Times calling it ‘an incredible achievement’. She writes with unflinching honesty about her family life, on her relationship with her sister and her sister’s death. It’s a brave and forgiving book, and we’re delighted to share an audio taster for you below.

 

When I Had a Little Sister: The Story of a Farming Family That Never Spoke
By Catherine Simpson
Published by 4th Estate

 

 

When I Had a Little Sister: The Story of a Farming Family That Never Spoke by Catherine Simpson is published by 4th Estate, priced £14.99.

We Were Always Here is a brilliant, vital anthology, championing writing from the LGBTI+ community. The stories and poems gathered in the collection look at living and loving in the 21st century, and as author Garry Mac instructs us in the Foreword: ‘Read it and recognise that we were always here, and you are here, now, and so are they, and we are all in this, here, together.’ It’s good advice. Here we share Christina Neuwirth’s story, ‘Sequins’.

 

‘Sequins’, by Christina Neuwirth is taken from We Were Always Here
Edited by Ryan Vance & Michael Lee Richardson
Published by 404 Ink

 

The first time Robyn invited me round I must have been about twelve or thirteen. I distinctly remember it because she normally asked a group of us to come over, but this particular time she only asked me. She said, ‘What are you doing after swimming on Thursday?’

‘My Mum is picking me up.’

‘You could come home with me and we could pick out summer camps in the brochure my dad got.’

‘Okay,’ I said. I didn’t want to ask further questions because I was worried it might scare Robyn off.

That night it was hard to get to sleep after dinner. I couldn’t stop thinking about the next day.

After school, Robyn and I walked to swimming together. Heather was there too, and Robyn was talking to her. She hadn’t really looked at me all day, not since I’d told her that I was allowed to come over — she’d said ‘Fun!’ and then proceeded to ignore me. I was used to it, but it still tied my stomach into knots.

Heather and Robyn giggled and splashed around the shallow end of the pool while the rest of us did our warm-up laps. Miss Feever told them off, but then concentrated more on timing the rest of us on our butterfly laps.

Robyn didn’t even look at me.

I had brought a change of clothes but Robyn always left quickly after training so I knew better than to try and get completely cleaned up and changed now. She was wrapped in a towel and smiling when I came out of the changing rooms with my bag and my dripping hair.

‘Quick, let’s get to mine,’ she said.

‘Yes.’ I wasn’t sure if we were back to being friendly so I figured I’d better stay quiet for another little while. In the car, her mum asked us a few questions but Robyn was always quicker to answer. It was only a ten-minute drive. At the end of it I felt suddenly cold in my stomach. I checked the time. It was three. I was meant to be home by seven.

When we arrived, Robyn ran to the bathroom and I could hear the shower through the closed door. Robyn’s mum kept asking me questions in the front room. I sat on the edge of the sofa.

When Robyn was done she came out wrapped in a number of big towels. Steam drifted from the open door of the bathroom into the hallway.

‘What are you waiting for?’ asked Robyn and called me to her room. ‘Are you not going to shower?’ she said without looking at me.

‘Um.’ I didn’t know what the right thing was.

‘You know you need to shower every day now. Leave it any longer than that and you’ll start to smell, like Gary.’

‘Of course. I’m going to shower,’ I said. ‘Can I shower here?’

‘Of course, silly! That’s why I asked. Ask mum for a towel, we’ve got loads — they’re so soft. Much softer than the ones at your house, I bet!’ said Robyn. She’d never even been to mine.

Their bathroom was huge. It had a shower and a tub, separate, and a warming towel rack. I put the towel Robyn’s mum had given me on the rack. It was turquoise and extremely fluffy. I took my clothes off, folded them, and put them on a little wicker stool by the sink. Then I got into the shower and turned the tap on. There were several big bottles of shampoo and shower gel in there, and I used small amounts and took care to put them back facing the right way. I tried to do everything as quickly as possible. I didn’t want to take too long, but I also didn’t want Robyn to think I wasn’t showering properly. I wiped the floor of the shower with my feet to get rid of any hairs I might have left behind, and dried myself off, then put on my clothes again.

I felt better.

Robyn met me outside the bathroom and said, ‘That took forever. What makes you think you can use up all our hot water?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What?’ She came closer.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Maggie, darling?’ Robyn’s mum interrupted. ‘Are you staying for dinner?’

I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to leave. I wanted, desperately, to not be rude.

‘Of course she’s staying!’ said Robyn, her face suddenly kind again, throwing her arm around my shoulder and pulling my head closer until it touched the side of hers. She didn’t mind that my hair was wet, or that I had used a lot of hot water to get clean. Her arm around my shoulder felt warm and soft.

Robyn grabbed my hand and we went to her room. When we were there I asked if I could phone home to let my Mum know I was staying for dinner. She said I didn’t need to do that, and that using the phone would cost money. Then she said we should both cut our hair.

‘It would be so cool! We could both have the same haircut. My mum cuts my hair all the time. It’s easy.’

She said the best way to cut hair was to tie it into two pigtails and then snip them off. She tied up her hair first: it was long and ginger and still damp. It smelled lovely. I wondered if she could smell her shampoo on me. She brushed my hair very carefully with a large-toothed comb. It was long and bushy, and normally my Mum and I would detangle it as quickly as possible, which always resulted in tears and shouting. When Robyn did it, it didn’t hurt at all. She was very careful. Then she tied it into pigtails. We looked cute already, and the same, which made me feel warm and gooey. She stood me up and we looked at ourselves and each other in her full-length mirror.

‘I’ll get the scissors. This is going to be so fun!’ she said. She arrived back with the pointy hairdressing scissors, which were packed in a plastic case that said they were indeed made for that purpose.

‘Shall I go first? Or do you want to?’ she asked. She unzipped the case, took out the scissors, opened them and held them to her pigtails.

‘Um,’ I said.

‘I can go first if you’re scared!’ she said, and gripped her own pigtails.

‘No, it’s ok, I’m not scared.’

I cut off my pigtails.

She didn’t cut off hers.

That was the first time I was round at Robyn’s.

 

I arrive at the venue and I know she’ll be here. It would’ve been weird if Jenni hadn’t invited her. We are all each other’s friends, after all. I try not to crane my head in case it’s too obvious, but I want to see her before she sees me. There aren’t many people here — it’s still early. I know Jenni wouldn’t have put me and Robyn at the same table, but I check the chart just in case. At least we won’t have to watch each other eat. We won’t have to make conversation over a plate of food. We won’t have to clink glasses.

I still have a small hope that I will be asked to stay overnight at the hotel, even though I helped Jenni with the booking and she mentioned that those rooms are for family and out of town visitors, and that I, living 45 minutes away, can just sleep at home. I don’t mind, right? I don’t mind.

Robyn has a room at the hotel. So she’s out of town, now.

My stomach is flipping.

I see Jenni has seated me next to Thomas who is recently single, so maybe I can flirt with him and that’ll distract me.

Weddings have sort of stopped being exciting after I’ve been to so many, of colleagues and friends and cousins, but Jenni’s is different, because we’ve known each other for fifteen years. And because I can tell she is so happy, and Tabby is happy. They got married in the back garden this morning at 8am when the sun was still pale and the dew was still on the grass, and other romantic things like that.

‘Jesus Christ, what a day,’ says Jenni, rushing out of a side door and nearly running me over.

‘Is everything okay?’ I say.

‘Yes, yes, it’s fine. It’s just non-stop.’ She waves off my offers of help, points me to a corner where others have already left their bags and coats, and leaves me to look for my seat.

‘Maggie! Hi!’ says a familiar voice. I turn around and I feel my face get hot. Not her. Not yet. I scramble for the right name.

‘Danielle!’ I say.

We stand for a few minutes talking, but the hallway is starting to stress me out — the confined space, how exposed I am, the big poofy shoulders on my dress, so I ask her where the bathroom is.

The bathroom is cooler than the rest of the hotel. It’s also surprisingly quiet. Except, there she is: Robyn.

‘Oh, hi!’ she says. Her hair is bobbed and more auburn than ginger now. It suits her, makes her neck look slender and elegant, swan-like. Her dress is blue, and shiny all over, and the pleats running down the side of it will look lovely when she dances.

She shows me her teeth.

Is she smiling? I can’t tell.

Yes.

It’s a friendly, Oh hi.

‘Hi, Robyn! Fancy bumping into you here!’ I say. It is a really weird thing to say but it is what comes out of my mouth.

‘So,’ she begins.

‘Listen, I’m sorry, I’m bursting. Lots of tea this morning. I’ll just see you in there, yeah?’ I add a little laugh at the end, and she indulges me and laughs too. I push past her and into the first cubicle I can find. I sit down, but can’t even start peeing until after I hear the door shut.

I try to remember whether she is angry with me, or am I angry with her? It was all such a long time ago. A searing memory of a kiss — one-sided, sloppy — comes back to me, but I push it aside.

Not now.

 

I remember the first time I chose my own outfit without consulting Robyn. Normally Robyn and I would be on the phone to make sure we didn’t match, or to make sure that we did, but for some reason at this particular party, we hadn’t. We were sixteen. I was wearing a loose-fitting black dress, with casual flare and pleating at the skirt. The top bit was covered in black sequins that were arranged to form small roses. My Mum had bought it for me and I thought I looked very casual goth.

I’d put eyeliner on and pinned back my black hair.

Robyn was already at the party when I arrived. It wasn’t anything fancy, just at someone’s house on a Saturday, with three Bacardi Breezers to last a room full of people for the night. She was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, and I instantly realised that I was wearing the wrong thing. Some other girls were in dresses, and some of them looked more dressed up than others, but seeing Robyn there in what she was wearing, and the way she looked at me, I knew I was in trouble.

She said Hi like normal, and we went and got a drink and stood in a corner to assess the party situation together, and when she’d been nice to me for long enough it started.

‘You’re shiny today,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said. I didn’t even try to defend myself. I was wrong. I looked stupid.

‘Did you think it was fancy dress?’ she said.

‘No,’ I said. She was looking me full in the face, and I was looking down at my cup.

‘Because we could’ve both dressed up as old ladies if that was the idea,’ she said.

There was no use trying. I just let it wash over me.

‘Listen. I can help. I have a scarf. If you wear it over your front like this, maybe — oh, shit, is it on the back too?’

I nodded as she walked around me looking at the intricate sequin roses.

‘There’s nothing for it. They’ll have to come off.’

I looked down at my stomach, at the floral pattern.

‘Come on,’ she said, like we were co-conspirators. She took my hand and led me to the bathroom, where we found, after rummaging in our friend’s parents’ medicine cabinet, some nail scissors. They were bent to follow the curve of a fingernail.

‘It’ll be tricky but it’ll have to do,’ she said. Before she made the first cut, she tipped my face up by poking my chin with her finger. ‘You’re okay with this, right? I mean, you didn’t want to be a shiny granny all night, did you?’

I nodded. I tried not to think about how excited both Mum and I had been when she’d bought the dress.

‘Okay,’ said Robyn. She giggled. She came really close to me, pulled on one of the sequins, and cut the tiny thread of stitching that connected it to the fabric of the bodice. It took a long time.

There were a lot of sequin roses on that dress.

Robyn’s seamstress work wasn’t very accurate because the scissors were bent, so in the end I had lots of small holes all over the dress. The fabric was loose enough so they didn’t show up flat against my body but I could still see them, and, standing in a circle of sequins on the bathroom tiles, I felt like she’d clipped my wings instead.

After the operation was over, Robyn and I knelt on the cold tiles together and cupped our hands to sweep up the sequins that were all over the floor. We put them in the bathroom bin, downed our sickly sweet drinks, and went back to the party.

Robyn was laughing again, rubbing my back, reassuring me that the dress was great now and I looked amazing. I laughed, too.

When Mum picked me up I told her Robyn didn’t like the sequins. She gave me a row, saying it didn’t matter, that I should only care what I liked, but I tuned it out. I’d heard it too many times before. She didn’t know anything.

 

I check my face, wipe the inevitable mascara smudge from the side of my eyes, and rearrange the poofy top bit of my wedding reception dress. I remind myself again that this is the dress Jenni wanted me to wear, and this day is about her. Not about impressing Robyn, or about anyone else.

I reach the hall again, which has filled with more people, so I go to my table and take a swig of water.

A couple of people are sitting here already, so I say Hi, and we giggle about how excited we are for Jenni and how she always used to say she would never ever get married.

I look around the room and find the table Robyn is sitting at. She is facing away from me. Her bare shoulders look soft and there are freckles on them. I can see a bobby pin in her hair.

There is a commotion near the door when the newly married couple come in. The band plays the wedding march, and Jenni sticks out her tongue towards us. Both her and Tabby are wearing a little veil on a hair clip. They hold two bouquets and throw them across the room, not backwards and coy, but front-facing, like a javelin. One lands on one of the cousins I am sitting with, who picks it up gingerly and keeps it in his lap. The other one gets caught mid-flight by one of Tabby’s co-workers. Then they walk up to the top table, both grinning from ear to ear. Jenni is looking straight ahead in a daze, Tabby’s eyes fixed on her. I think she might cry. Robyn is watching them too.

 

Much, much later, outside the hall, I queue for the taxi. Robyn stands outside too, hugging her arms to her chest against the night chill. She is talking to someone else, but hovering near me, and I know she has a room at the hotel so she isn’t here waiting for a taxi.

Finally, in a vacuum of chatter, she turns to me and says, ‘We didn’t get a chance to talk all night!’ in a tone that is all cream and strawberries. It’s the way our mothers used to speak to each other when we were little. I smile and touch my finger to my mouth. I worry my lipstick has bled.

‘Are you heading back into town or sticking around?’ she says, because I still haven’t answered. I look up at the wall of the hotel, where a few of the windows are illuminated.

‘Just grabbing a taxi, yeah,’ I say. I want to kick myself.

‘Ah, right.’ She is still lingering. I can see she wants to talk, but I don’t know what about. Suddenly I worry I might cry.

‘So, did you have a nice wedding?’ I ask.

‘I’d say. One of my favourites.’

‘Yeah, it was really good, as weddings go!’ I feel self-conscious saying that, as though I was asking her to marry me; I also worry Jenni is nearby and will overhear, although the last I saw of her, she was playing the grand piano in the lobby with her dress bunched up around her knees.

There is a silence and I fiddle with my phone.

‘I like your hair,’ I say. It looks soft.

‘I like your hair.’

‘Hey, it’s not a competition,’ I say.

She looks at me like a door has closed behind her eyes, but she blinks and then the expression is gone. ‘So, how have you been?’

‘Pretty good, you know. Can’t complain.’

I want her to tell me what she’s been up to so I can make a face like I don’t already know, even though I’ve been watching along, on and off, on Facebook. She has a child. The child is two years old. She shows me a picture on her phone.

I don’t know what to tell her about my life. There is too much.

 I start talking about an event I hosted a few weeks ago and I realise that every single person there is someone who has come into my life after Robyn and I broke up. Everything that matters in my life has crystallised afterwards. It felt like I was suddenly free to be someone without her, I remember.

My taxi arrives, and she says goodbye. We hug, and, probably due to the copious amounts of wine I’ve had, I say that we should catch up properly sometime. I know that everything speaks against this, but I can’t take it back. She agrees, but I can’t read her eyes. She takes my phone and puts her number in it.

When she hands it back to me, our fingers touch briefly; the sequins on her dress reflect in the darkness of the screen.

 

‘Sequins’ by Christina Neuwirth is taken from We Were Always Here, edited by Ryan Vance and Michael Lee Richardson, and is published by 404 Ink, priced £8.99

Married life is not always easy, especially when you’re navigating the necessary hum drums of mortgages, chores, parenting and work stresses. Luckily, Katharine Hill has written a guide to getting the best out of coupledom, and here is a little taster.

 

Extract taken from If You Forget Everything Else, Remember This: Tips and Reminders for a Happy Marriage
By Katharine Hill
Published by Muddy Pearl

 

Five Ways to Say, ‘I Love You’

In his book The 5 Love Languages, psychologist Gary Chapman writes about his theory that just as we have a native or first language, we also have a primary ‘love’ language – the way we most naturally communicate and understand love. When we learnt about this, my husband Richard and I discovered that, like many couples, our love languages are very different. So despite our best intentions, we hadn’t been communicating our love in a way we both understood. My affectionate notes meant little to him, and I didn’t notice when he’d spent hours demonstrating his love for me by cleaning the kitchen!

The good news is that learning our partner’s love language has the potential to transform our relationship. So what are the five love languages?

 

Words of affirmation

If words are important to us, encouragement from our partner can have an incredibly positively impact on our marriage. I love it that Richard often says kind and encouraging things to and about me. But not always …

On my birthday my friends gave me a card in which they’d written a list of wonderful things about me. Admittedly, it was over the top, but it made me feel incredible. Then Richard leaned over to read it.  ‘Guys, it’s only Katharine!’, he said. He meant it as a joke, but my balloon burst immediately. At home later we sorted it out (ha!), but it was a valuable lesson about the power of words to build up … or to tear down. If our partner’s love language is words, we’ll need to take extra care with what we may think are funny comments about cooking, driving, dress size, etc. They will feel them deeply. Be imaginative about showing them your love: send them by text, put a note on the dashboard, say them – ‘You look great tonight’, ‘Your lasagne is the best’, ‘I’m proud of you’, ‘I love you …’

 

Quality time

When Carol and Duncan bought a new house, Duncan set about redecorating it completely. Weekends and evenings passed in a blur as he worked to get everything finished. The problem was that Carol’s love language was ‘time’ and she became distant. She was grateful for Duncan’s hard work, but they hadn’t had any quality time together for months and she ended up feeling unloved.

If our partner’s primary love language is quality time, they’ll feel loved simply when we spend time with them. Going for a walk or chatting round the kitchen table – the activity itself is incidental. What matters is finding time when you can simply be together.

Acts of service

One of Richard’s main ways of feeling loved is acts of service. So when I do something practical for him like sorting out the washing, it says to him: ‘I love you.’ If our partner’s primary love language is acts of service, here’s a word of warning: if we forget to do something they’ve asked us to do it will have an especially negative impact on them.

Showing love in practical ways is not about being a doormat; it’s about spotting things we know our partner would love us to do. For them, actions really do speak louder than words.

 

Gifts

Gifts can communicate love strongly on an emotional level – it’s my other love language. The first Christmas after we married, I carefully planned what present to give Richard and wrapped it beautifully. I felt so disappointed when he ripped the paper off, said a quick thank you, and put it to one side. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the gift – it simply didn’t carry the same significance for him as it did for me.

This love language is about the thought behind the gift rather than how expensive it is. So forgetting their birthday or an anniversary will be especially disappointing for our partner. Whether it’s a magazine or a packet of wine gums, giving a present of some kind – and not just on special occasions – speaks volumes to a partner whose love language is gifts.

 

Touch

For some people, touch communicates love more powerfully than words. The love language of touch covers everything from a hand on the knee, a kiss, a hug, through to sexual foreplay and making love. When withheld, it can communicate rejection, so if this is our partner’s love language it will be important to find opportunities to express love in this way – not just as a prelude to making love. For them, a touch makes all the difference.

It’s easy to express our love in the same way we want it to be shown to us, but when we do that we risk our partner not feeling loved. Take time to discover each other’s love language today … it can revolutionise your relationship.

 

If You Forget Everything Else, Remember This: Tips and Reminders for a Happy Marriage by Katharine Hill is published by Muddy Pearl, priced £9.99

There are many ways to tell a story, and Clare Hunter’s Threads of Life is a fascinating exploration how history has been shaped by the needle as well as the pen. David Robinson appreciates this introduction to these forgotten stories.

 

Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle
By Clare Hunter
Published by Sceptre

 

ME, I’ve got a soft spot for Mies Boussevain-van Lennop. Why? First of all, because she was a Dutch resistance fighter who helped Jewish refugees fleeing from Nazi Germany. Secondly, because she founded a feminist political party, the Dutch Women’s Movement. And third, because  of the way she wanted its members to dress.

They should make, she said, a liberation skirt. It would be a symbol of what women in the  resistance had done and would do to help rebuild the country.  To make it, every bit of fabric would remind them of something or somebody: a piece from a child’s coat, a dead son’s shirt, a Jewish yellow star, some parachute silk, a badge from a uniform. Whatever they used, it had to mean something. Often they worked together on those liberation skirts in quiet, companionable  comradeship; later they would wear them with pride, stitched together like the new country they were also refashioning. In the five years from 1945, 4,000 liberation skirts were made.

Clare Hunter’s book Threads of Life is full of stories like that, which many of us might never have known (or at least I didn’t)  but which show very clearly how what we sew chronicles who we are. Why, I wondered, has that idea of honouring of loved ones’ through patchwork never caught on? If we like to celebrate individualism through fashion, wouldn’t that be the ultimate way of doing so?

Read Hunter’s book, though, and you know what would happen next. Those liberation skirts would be end up being mass-produced, like the quilted, embroidered traditional kanthas of Bangladesh – no longer made (as they used to be) from dead relatives’ clothes but simplified and impersonal and sold as tourist souvenirs. Hand-stitched embroidered symbols of place and genealogy, where each village had different patterns, would be replaced by symbols of obvious national identity, as happened  in Palestine. National dress in  modified became blander, less threaded through with meaning, as happened in Ukraine under Soviet rule.

For all that, sewing can sometimes capture the quiddity, the  vividness, the occasional oddness of the death-dulled past better than anything. Hunter provides plenty of examples. A Great Yarmouth woman locked up in a Victorian workhouse rages in wildly stitched capitals against her abandonment. A piece of embroidery turns up at a jumble sale in Bristol in which British women prisoners of war recorded their first sight of the infamous Changi jail after the fall of Singapore in 1942.  In the archives of the London Foundling Hospital, as she gently touches the cloth tokens that eighteenth century women left behind with their abandoned babies, Hunter meditates movingly on that moment of choosing, ‘of mothers deciding what remnant of themselves to leave, how best to communicate love, regret, hope, a small explanation to the child they will never see again.’

Threads of Life isn’t always about marginalised people. You could, for example, very easily tell much of the life story of Mary Queen of Scots through her clothing, embroidery, and dresses, and indeed Hunter does. This was, she points out,  a time when embroidery was ‘one of the most potent forms of Renaissance communication, when it was valued as a transmitter of intellect and emotion, when it was a conversation between people and they God. Back then, sewing mattered’.

For most historians, though, it hasn’t and doesn’t. Go to Bayeux, listen to the audio guide, and there won’t be a single mention of the women (probably captured English noblewomen) who made its world-famous tapestry. Go to the National Museum of Scotland, and you won’t find a single banner made by women suffragettes on display (although, oddly enough, there is one for the Federation of Male Suffrage).  Go to the Glasgow Style Gallery in Kelvingrove Museum and there’s not a stitch of the new style of needlework pioneered in the city in the early 20th century. When she visited the Willow Tea Rooms, Hunter was even more outraged to find no mention of her ‘chosen muse’ Margaret Macdonald, even though that project was as much her creation as of her husband, Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

But Hunter’s book is a lot more than a necessary feminist correction for such oversights. Through its wide ambitions are spelled out in its subheading – ‘A History of the World Through the Eye of the Needle’, and though it is indeed quite fascinating about a whole range of sewing women, from the  Miao of south-west China to the mothers (and grandmothers) of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina who embroidered their headscarves with the names of their ‘disappeared’ loved ones, it is the personalised chapters which linger longest in the memory.

Oddly, perhaps, Threads of Life doesn’t begin with any explanation of how embroidery first got hold of Hunter’s imagination. Instead, it steps straight into history, and a heavily-structured narrative that breaks down the subject into categories such as Protest, Loss, Art, Captivity and Identity. Given the width of its ambition, this is undoubtedly necessary.

But there’s another book hiding beneath this objective overlay – smaller scale, Scottish, and personal – and fascinating though I found the rest, it was the stories based on her own experience as a banner-maker, community textile artist and textile curator that drew me in the most. This is, I must admit, a world about which I know nothing. In the past, if I came across exhibitions of work done by community sewing groups, while  I would have been glad someone was putting them on, I would probably have mentally filed them away under the ‘well-meaning but worthy’ category and not bothered to have a look myself.

Threads of Life has made me change my mind and realise what I, in my condescension, have missed. To explain why, I must go back to a comment Hunter overheard while looking at the Great Tapestry of Scotland. ‘The standard of work is so uneven,’ a woman complained. And maybe it is, but so what? We’re all uneven, and the great tapestry of Scotland is great because it involved so many people; as near as could be managed, it is by us as well as about us.

The shellshocked soldiers returning from the First World War, who couldn’t do much with their lives, but who could gather –  officers and men together – to stitch on the altar cloth for the Service of Thanksgiving at St Paul’s Cathedral in 1919, they were uneven too. The grieving mothers and lovers of AIDS victims who made such heart-warmingly colourful quilts to challenge the anonymity of the dead, they were also uneven. The banners made in the Eighties by the striking miners or the Greenham common women or the residents in the Buchanan Street Housing Association in Leith  (Hunter’s first community textile project in 1985) might have been uneven too, but they were about causes bigger than their makers – and that, ultimately, is what matters.

It is one of the glories of Hunter’s book that it takes you into so many lives, many of which have been marginalised by the history books, just as sewing has been. Bewitchingly, it stitched together a past I knew little about. It has only one glaring fault, its publisher’s not its author’s. The press release comes with half a dozen pictures, from the NAMES Memorial Quilt filling the entirety of the Mall in Washington DC in 1996 (when it was seen by 14 million people), to the sumptuously coloured sewn story cloths of south-western China. Sadly, the book doesn’t have a single one.

Clare Hunter will be appearing along with Kassia St Clair at Aye Write! in Glasgow on 23 March at 4:45pm.

 

Threads of Life by Clare Hunter is published by Sceptre, price £20.

Dylan and Tristan have escaped death and conquered destiny. Finally, there is nothing to stop them from being together. But their actions have caused an imbalance. The afterlife is owed two souls ­– and it wants them back. Outcasts is the stunning finale to the Ferryman series from multi-award-winning author Claire McFall, which has sold more than 3 million copies and been translated into 18 languages.

 

Extract taken from Outcasts
By Claire McFall
Published by Kelpies Edge

 

Tristan was already parked on Dylan’s bed. He held a large pad of paper, the blue front cover decorated with intricate black swirls. His drawing book, the one he’d never, ever let her peek at.

It had driven Dylan near-demented wondering what he was sketching when he’d disappear off to a corner with the thing tucked tight in his grasp, but he’d been shy about her seeing it and, although she’d had a few horribly tempting opportunities, she’d never looked. She wanted to; she really, really wanted to. But she hadn’t.

Tristan had never had anything that was his before, had never had any privacy. It was a small gift, but it was something that Dylan could offer him.

But ohh, how it had niggled at her. The pad sitting on her top bookshelf (the one she’d given over to Tristan because she couldn’t reach it without standing on a chair anyway), waving at her day after day. Taunting her, tempting her.

Art was a recent discovery for Tristan. Dylan didn’t take it at school – she couldn’t draw. Or paint. And she’d dropped it as soon as she could – but Tristan had expressed an interest so Dylan had bought him some basic art equipment for Christmas. He’d taken to it like a duck to water… or so it seemed. As she’d never seen any of his drawings, Dylan had no idea if he was any good, but he enjoyed it, and that was all that mattered.

She was curious, though.

He tapped his fingers once, twice against the spiral binding running down the spine, before holding it out to her. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Your reward.’

‘Seriously?’ Dylan raised her eyebrows in mock astonishment, but in truth she was surprised. ‘You’re going to let me see?’

‘I am.’

Not giving him an opportunity to change his mind, Dylan sat down on the bed beside him. Taking the pad carefully, she flipped the cover over to reveal the first drawing.

Her own face stared back up at her. Her eyes dominated the image, looking out from the page beneath sweeping eyebrows. Her lips were quirked up in a half-smile that made her look teasing, secretive. And pretty. In the picture, she looked pretty.

Glancing up, she saw Tristan was watching her carefully. It was hard to keep her face impassive but she tried, working to keep her embarrassment in check and off her cheeks.

Slightly clumsy fingers swept the picture away to reveal the next sketch. This one was charcoal, a side-on view of her standing staring at something off the page. Her hair was blowing out behind her in long, sinuous waves.

Another page. Another picture. Dylan in the wheelchair, her face clouded over with frustration as she fumbled with her cast.

The lines of the wheelchair were slightly off, the perspective not quite right, but the mulish look on her face Dylan certainly recognised.

The next sketch wasn’t a picture as such, but six rough pencil sketches of—

‘Is that my ear?’ Dylan asked, tilting her head in confusion. She didn’t necessarily recognise it as her ear, per se – an ear was an ear, wasn’t it – but that was her little daisy earring.

‘Uhm, yeah.’ Tristan reached over to take the pad back from her, but Dylan twisted to keep it out of his reach.

‘Hold on,’ she said. ‘I haven’t finished.’

She flicked another page over and saw herself, laughing. Her eyes were scrunched up and her chin was tucked in a way that wasn’t all that attractive, but Dylan smiled anyway. There was joy in the picture, it radiated out at her.

‘Tristan, these are really good,’ she said quietly, realising that she hadn’t said anything bar the ear comment. If it had been her in Tristan’s place, she’d be wriggling like she had ants in her pants, wondering what he thought. ‘I mean, they’re really, really good.’ The next page was blank, the start of drawings still to come, so she flicked back through the ones she’d seen. ‘How did you get the details so accurate? You can’t have seen any of these for more than a moment!’

‘I don’t know.’ Tristan shrugged. He reached again for the pad and this time she let him take it. ‘I just saw something I liked and then, later, when I was drawing, sketched out what I remembered.’

‘You’re very observant, then,’ Dylan commented.

‘I had a lot of practice,’ he reminded her. ‘At night, in the wasteland, there wasn’t a lot to do but sit and stare.’

‘True,’ Dylan said softly. She didn’t like thinking about the long years Tristan had spent ferrying soul after soul, trapped in a never-ending cycle. No, not never-ending, she told herself. He was here now, with her. He’d escaped that life.

She watched as he flipped back to the first picture. The one of just her face, gazing up at them both.

‘Why now?’ she asked quietly. ‘Why show me today?’

Tristan shrugged. ‘I just…’ He flicked to another page, the picture of Dylan in the wheelchair. ‘In the wasteland, it was just the two of us. But here, there are so many people, so many distractions.’ He closed the pad and set it aside, fixing his full attention on Dylan. ‘I want you to know that I still see you. This life, this world, it’s amazing, but only because I’m living it with you.’

Dylan opened her mouth, but nothing came out. How was she supposed to respond to a declaration like that? She’d never been good with words.

‘I love you,’ she managed to blurt.

Tristan grinned, reaching up to tuck a lock of hair back behind her ear. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I love you, too.’

Then he kissed her, his mouth hot against hers as his arms wrapped around her. Dylan closed her eyes and allowed herself to melt into his embrace. They were safe, and together. Nothing could change that.

 

Outcasts by Claire McFall is published by Kelpies Edge, priced at £7.99

Matt Hopwood goes for long walks. And on those long walks he meets people who tell them their stories of love, which he gathers and presents in beautiful books. His second book, Mother: A Human Love Story focusses on stories of parenting.

 

Extract taken from Mother: A Human Love Story
By Matt Hopwood
Published by Birlinn

 

Matt Hopwood: We sit by the fire in the evening. Warm hospitality and gentleness. You both share as one corded together through the pain of experi­ence. Outside, the wind blurs the sounds, and time seems to fluctuate.  In the morning,  you both walk me out along the paths north to the borders and leave me wandering onwards with your voices and memories still rolling around in my head amongst the silence of the hills. I want to cry, but no tears come.

 

S:  My eldest son died about four years ago, four years tomorrow actually. It’s the  anniversary  tomorrow. And we were  in Australia when it happened. When the notice came through, Eddy was the one who got told to go to the police station to get some news, because my son was in America at the time. And Eddy had to come back and tell me that he had died, and I’d never seen him cry like that. From that moment  and over the next few weeks and months, I didn’t eat very much and I wasn’t sleeping very well. And he completely took over functioning in every sense, getting us to America from Australia and dealing with everything that needed doing. And he completely took over everything and dealt with it and assumed that role and I just handed it over. He took over everything, even though he was grieving. He looked after and he cared for me and I’d never felt so vulnerable or as needy, and that’s quite scary, because I don’t  think I’ve ever felt so vulnerable before. Needing someone in such a raw way and for him to be there and do it without any complaint. And, as the first couple of years passed, when I found it wasn’t just about grieving, it was about dealing with not having joy in myself, and how to function for the rest of my life and me feeling quite low, he just quietly got on and looked after me but didn’t make a big deal of it and didn’t expect anything in return.

I think that’s when I realised how much I love you and how much you love me, and that there could be a vulnera­bility in loving each other, rather than coming at it both with strength. And that’s been a huge learning curve for me, to have such implicit trust, and it’s made me love you even more.

 

E:  For me, you were this kind of crumpled person.  I so remember going to this Australian police station. And they came out and told me and I completely broke down. All I could  think of was you  and I thought,  ‘This is going to destroy her! I remember saying to the policeman, ‘God, why did it have to be Patrick, of all the people in the world?’ I said, ‘It’s going to destroy her.’ I said,’I’d put myself in his place a hundred times.’ I remember  saying all this to the coppers and they must have thought I was mad. But I remember thinking, ‘How is she ever going to get over this? How are we ever going to move forward from this point? It’s just a complete disaster.’ I suppose that is my love for you, because it was probably two, three years of you really struggling but I never thought, ‘For frick’s sake, I can’t be with her any more’, I just thought, ‘Well, this is where we’re at and I’m just going to be with you, just be with you. Do what I can and just be there for you!

 

S:  I think I never imagined I could feel love like that for someone who wasn’t my child. I panicked a few times about whether you could still love me. It felt much like it was for any of the children. In fact, in some ways, almost greater because the need for you to love me and be there uncondi­tionally was so strong. I needed it. I couldn’t have functioned without it. And I think particularly with Patrick’s death. He was my son but I had him when I was very young. I was seventeen and I was a single mother. So all my adult life, I’d been with Patrick – he was my one constant. From being a very silly, giddy little teenage girl doing too many drugs and drinking too much to suddenly realising and understanding a purpose in the world, which was love for this child. And then loss, but maybe then discovering my love for you. I mean, I knew it was there, without a shadow of a doubt, but it deepened or solidified from that implicit trust and faith in you.

 

E:  ‘Cause I didn’t know you thought that really.

 

S:  Didn’t you?

 

E:  Not like you’ve just said it.We just managed to do it, didn’t we really.

 

S:  We did, you did and you took me with you. I was committed to loving you but I never let myself feel vulnerable in that love. I always felt I could function completely well on my own because that was how I felt strong. So, to discover I could feel vulnerable in love and that it was safe was a huge learning lesson for me.

 

Mother: A Human Love Story by Matt Hopwood is published by Birlinn, priced £9.99

Family secrets have a way of reverbating through the generations. Sue Lawrence’s latest novel, Down by the Sea, is an intriguing historical mystery steeped in secrets and lies. Read with the light on!

 

Extract taken from Down by the Sea
By Sue Lawrence
Published by Contraband

 

1898

The girl walked up the cobbles of Laverockbank Road, then stopped to look back down the street and out to sea. The low, grey clouds reflected on the water, which was swirling up into frothy, foam-crested waves. ‘A guid day for the fishin’,’ her mother had said before handing her a ragged bag of belongings and pushing her out the door. Her home, in the long row of tiny fishermen’s cottages on the shore, was only a ten-minute walk, yet she felt she was miles away, so alien did it seem coming up the hill towards these big stone houses where the rich folk lived.

She had never been up this way. She’d never even been to Leith and certainly not to Edinburgh. But she had been to Granton one day in the summer for the gala day when she was allowed to sing in the choir. The Newhaven Fisherlassies, they were called. Aged thirteen, she had sat in the front row, cross-legged, wearing the uniform of all the Newhaven girls and women: a red-and-white-striped petticoat and yellow-and-white-striped apron with its deep pouch. And around her head, she wore a paisley shawl. Her mother had scraped all her thick, dark hair back off her face before tying the shawl round the back of her neck. She could still feel the skelp her mother had given her when she complained she was tying the shawl too tight.

Her big sister Dorrie, one of the older girls, had stood at the back of the choir of twenty or so and she and Ruby Gray had started off the singing. ‘Caller Herrin’, ‘Caller Ou’’ and ‘The Boatie Rows’ were the only songs she could remember off by heart. What a day that was! People clapped and told them what good voices they had, what a fine choir they were. Granton didn’t have one and they wanted to hear Newhaven’s girls’ choir to see if it was worth starting one. Newhaven had a school and Granton was having one built; the nearby village wanted to copy everything. Only one mile along the shore, Granton seemed like a foreign land. Only once in all her fourteen years had she ventured out of Newhaven.

The girl gazed out at the water, looking beyond the harbour where a flock of herring gulls soared and dived. Though it was an estuary, the locals always called it the sea, it was so vast. She looked over the broad span of the Firth of Forth where she could just make out the hills of Fife.

Her father had said there was a king who lived in Fife, but Pa was always joking, so she didn’t know if that was true. Her father used to smile all the time and was always cheery, even, according to her brother, when he was out in gale-force winds on the sea. When she thought of him she felt tears prick her eyes but then she bit her lip hard, to stop them. She just had to accept that Pa and her big brother Johnnie were gone now. All ten of the men and boys who’d gone to sea that day were dead, drowned. The fishwives said it was all the girl’s fault. That she was cursed. The girl was devastated when even her own mother, in her grief, agreed.

The girl turned back round and looked up at the trees with their orange leaves rustling in the autumn breeze. She headed left and walked along the pathway towards the big house. Her stomach tightened at the sight of the imposing building ahead.

The girl stepped onto the doorstep and put down her bag. She bit her lower lip, distracted, as she tried to remember who she was meant to ask for. She gazed up at the great stone house then reached up to the door and pulled the bell. She looked down at her tatty dress and pulled at the hem. It was her older sister’s and was far too baggy on her. Well, she had nothing else to wear. At least she had shoes on, black shoes that she’d only ever worn on Sundays and gala days, shoes that were now too small but her sister’s shoes were still too large. She was more comfortable in bare feet but Ma had insisted she squeeze into these for the walk up the hill.

There was a grating noise as a key turned in the lock and then the huge wooden door creaked open. In the gloom, the girl could make out a plump figure with an angry scowl on her face. She was about to say her piece when the woman hissed, ‘What’s an urchin like you doing at this door?’

‘I’m Jessie Mack, Ma said I’d to come and …’

‘Aye, to come round the back door. The front door isn’t for the likes of you.’ The woman jangled the keys on a large metal ring in her hands, picking out a smaller one. ‘I’ll unlock it just now.’ She pointed round the corner of the house and slammed the door in Jessie’s face.

Jessie picked up her bag and trudged round the back, her shoes pinching her toes. She bit her lip once more. Hard.

 

Down to the Sea, by Sue Lawrence, is published by Contraband, priced £8.99

In perfume there are three scent notes: top note, heart note and base note, so discovering that P M Freestone’s YA fantasy thriller, Shadowscent, uses the language of scent at the heart of its story meant it was a shoo-in to feature in this month’s BooksfromScotland. We spoke to Peta about writing her debut.

 

Shadowscent: The Darkest Bloom
By P M Freestone
Published by Scholastic

 

Shadowscent is your debut YA novel. Tell us about your writing journey leading up to publication.

I’ve written on and off for years, and had a handful of short stories published, but it wasn’t until I received a Scottish Book Trust New Writer’s Award in 2016 that I gained the confidence to seriously pursue writing a novel. That novel was Shadowscent. For me, what’s most important to note is that so many generous people helped with advice and encouragement at key junctures along the way. There’s a reason the acknowledgments in Shadowscent are three pages long!

 

Did you read a lot of fantasy when you were younger? What are your main influences?

I did! These days, I love Leigh Bardugo, Sabaa Tahir, Roshani Chokshi, Samantha Shannon and others, but I grew up on the likes of Feist, Eddings and George R. R. Martin (yes, prior to the HBO series, I’m one of those), before YA as a category really took off. In many ways, Shadowscent is an homage to those epic books I loved most as a teen, but hopefully with a broader range of identities, perspectives and experiences than I often saw in those stories. I sometimes wonder, for example, what it would have been like if I’d more regularly read positive portrayals of queer characters while I was growing up – I imagine life would have been way less confusing!

 

Scent plays a big part in your novel. Tell us what fascinates you about all things olfactory.

I’ve long been intrigued by how we think about perfumes and stenches. At many points in history, people took extraordinary measures to make themselves smell nice. It wasn’t just fashion. It could determine whether you were worthy of trust, like in Ancient Rome, where your aroma was believed to reflect your morals. But it was more than that, too. Pleasant smells were associated with the divine. In many ancient civilisations, animal sacrifices were burned with fragrant herbs and oils to seek the favour of the gods. Medicine and scent were also entwined, with some scents believed to hold the power to protect or heal. And, neurologically, our sense of smell is linked to memory. Merely thinking of a scent you’ve previously experienced likely conjures up all kinds of associations. So, I thought, what better way to transport a reader than to build a fantasy world around fragrance?

 

Your academic background is amazing! What drew you to such subjects as disparate as archaeology, religion and infectious diseases?

Curiosity. And you know what they say: curiosity kills the bank account! But seriously, I studied archaeology because I was a history nerd as a kid, fascinated with everyone from Akhenaten to Boudicca, and every place from Copán to Delphi. Adding in religion was because I wanted a deeper understanding of where belief originates, how it changes, and how it can be co-opted, and there’s a vein of that running through Shadowscent. Infectious diseases was later, after I’d been working in universities for some years. I knew I wanted to do a PhD in how science and technology are not separate (as many would like to argue) from our social, political and economic values. After one of my best friends contracted tuberculosis, I focused on the state of play in science for TB management, because the drugs we currently have for treatment are losing efficacy and the mycobacterium is becoming resistant again. There’s no coincidence, then, that there’s a prevalent disease – the Rot – in Shadowscent.

 

Shadowscent is the first book in a series. Can you give us some hints as to what to expect from further books?

Sure! Shadowscent is a fantasy quest caper embedded in a world where a much larger struggle for power has been brewing for centuries. Book 2 will reveal more about the vying factions hurtling towards that confrontation, and the roles Ash, Rakel, their friends, allies and enemies, will take. Because with what’s coming, there can be no bystanders. Prince or servant, everyone must make their choice.

 

What else are you looking forward to in your publication year?

Everyone tells me that getting your first fan mail is pretty special! But I’m also looking forward to connecting with readers at various events – a particular highlight will be appearing at Cymera, Scotland’s first festival of science fiction, fantasy and horror writing. It’s in June, and I can’t wait. See you there?

 

Shadowscent: The Darkest Bloom by P M Freestone is published by Scholastic, priced £7.99

BooksfromScotland love a bit of noir, and it’s usually the femme-fatale or the care-worn detective that most noir stories revolve around. Spare a thought for the ‘Muscle’ – they’ll maybe get a throwaway line but, generally, they’re in the background looking tough. Alan Trotter’s debut novel gives these hard men a voice, an inner life, and they might just break your heart as well as your bones. We hope you enjoy this extract.

 

Extract taken from Muscle
By Alan Trotter
Published by Faber

 

_____ tried to find us work but he had no plan for going about it. We would set out from _____’s apartment, pursue a circuit, and as we went we’d see a key-cutter or a florist and _____ would make an approach. This didn’t come easily to him. Violence was all we had to offer, and there must have been those who wanted it, but it was too obvious in _____’s pitch, too close. Instead we got no work, and left a trail behind us of confused and intimidated key-cutters and florists and road sweepers, which we’d add to until one or other of us grew tired of the parade. At which point we’d take ourselves to a bar, where _____ would drink beer while I dwelt on what exactly I’d expected from him, and from us.

We repeated this like a circuit on a ghost train where every ghost was an intimidated sweep, key-cutter, spotwelder or meter reader, and repeated it for days, until we hit on what seemed to be some good luck.

First thing that morning we passed a woman on the street, who was not much older than twenty and standing alongside a van maybe twice her age. She was turning a handle that fit into the vehicle’s chest—the whole side of it was open to copper ribs, a device for the production of coffee, and the handle, we found out, was fixed to a grinder.

We bought coffee from her and it was dark and thick in tall mugs. As we drank it, _____ asked the woman if she had any work that needed doing, and maybe because _____ was occupied with his coffee and this altered the impression he made, she didn’t recoil from him, but asked what kind of thing he meant. _____ suggested maybe she was owed some money, or there could be someone who had taken advantage of her one way or another, or perhaps an ex-lover. She said she’d think it over. We drank the hot, heavy coffee.

She said the longer she thought about it the more she realised she knew some kind, decent people, and she should be grateful for that. Because honestly if you asked her would she like to see any of these people have their teeth punched out of them or be made earnestly to fear for their life, then the answer was no. We finished our coffee, gave her back the cups and she reached into the guts of the van to rinse them.

We went on with a feeling, maybe from the coffee, which was good, together with the outlook of the woman, which seemed good too, that we should stick to our circuit and we’d be rewarded. And before two hours had passed we were in the back room of a clockmaker’s, and he was telling us that there was a customer who owed him money and maybe we could get it back for him.

 

Muscle by Alan Trotter is published by Faber, priced £10.00