Duncan Midfield Dynamo

1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-1-84351-812-9
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 152 Seiten

From award-winning author Adrian Duncan comes his first collection of astonishing short stories. These modern stories have been written over the past decade, half having been previously published in The Moth, The Stinging Fly, Dublin Review and elsewhere, half completely new. Patterning and happenstance make up the rich quotidian lives of the characters portrayed in these strange, energetic tales. The loose figures of young artists, footballers and artisan engineers act out against diverse backgrounds from Dublin's northside to Hamburg, Abu Dhabi and Accra, lives tethered yet adrift in a random universe of hard scrabble and occasional illumination. The prose is spare, precise and imagistic, the humour dark and absurdist, shot through with an underlying humanity that has become the trademark of this remarkable writer. Taking inspiration from his childhood fascination with football team formations, Duncan arranges this collection with an eye to how each piece interacts with the others: 'While looking at a starting eleven and imagining the team's possible patterns of movement on the field of play, one question always prevails: What is behind all of this?' With two novels and one short story collection published in the same number of years, the Lilliput Press is proud to present this new collection as Adrian Duncan quickly gains international attention. Recently winning the inaugural John McGahern Annual Book Prize and being shortlisted for the inaugural Dalkey Literary Award for Emerging Writer, Duncan's prowess grows with each work. Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2021 Longlist.

Adrian Duncan, born in County Longford, is a Berlin-based visual artist who originally trained as an engineer. His short fiction has appeared in literary journals both in Ireland and the USA. His acclaimed debut novel, Love Notes from a German Building Site, was published by The Lilliput Press and Head of Zeus in 2019, was shortlisted for the Dalkey Literary Emerging Writer Award and won the inaugural John McGahern Annual Book Prize. His second novel, A Sabbatical in Leipzig, was published by the Lilliput Press in 2020.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Duncan, Adrian

Leseproben

2. Houses by the Sea

My brother owns a second home by the sea. When I go there, I run most mornings along the beach; it curves for a mile or so until it comes to a small peninsula of black sea-slick crags.

One morning it was grey, misty and still. The waves broke and ran listlessly. It had not been raining, but the whole place was wet, as if a low-flying cloud had grazed along the coast and forgotten a piece of itself before it was pushed up over the mountains. On my way back I saw a piebald cow stuck knee-deep in the surf. It was struggling and looked as if it might topple at any moment. I chased over and tried to lead it out of the water, but it didn’t want to go. I stood looking at it for a while, it looking calmly back at me. When its breathing eased I tried once more. I urged it back up the strand to the dunes, then onto some grass where the other cows were grazing.

As I walked back to the house, I looked over my shoulder and saw the cow again, shitting and lumbering back down towards the sea. I continued on a few steps, then turned and ran back. I stood in front of the cow, cajoling it back up the strand. We slowly zigzagged our way across the beach, back down once more towards the surf – me shooing, the cow changing direction – until I found myself stomach-deep in water and leaning against this animal’s dark heaving chest. Then it pushed me over; I was submerged and sea-deafened. By the time I scrambled back to my feet, it was past me and almost up to its neck in water. I stood there shivering, with the waves breaking across me, and watched it disappear.

My brother’s place, that he almost never uses, is on a hill outside a small coastal town. I come here to get away from my bedsit in the city. I left my wife a few years back for another woman. She and I then split soon after and she went back to her husband and two sons. I now find this part of the country hospitable. On the ragged strip of road that leads up to the house there are a number of other decrepit black-windowed bungalows, plopped hodge-podge down the hill.

In the town, which is probably more a village, there are two big hotels, a harbour, a shop and no pubs, so when I come here I call around to a guy called Leonard for a drink. He was once a priest, well educated, theology, history, that sort of thing – a PhD and a Master’s degree from the Sorbonne and Leiden, he told me. He’s a decent guy, but he has completely given up. His wife passed away three years ago in their holiday home after she had been sick for a while. And he can’t leave. First time I met him was by his front hedge; I was out for a walk and we began talking. He asked me in for a cup of coffee, six times. We ended up drinking whiskey and conversing all day.

It has been a few months since I’ve been here; so after I get back to the house and take a shower, I call up to him with a paper-bagged bottle of Jameson under my arm.

When he comes to the door, he looks at me for a moment and says, ‘Finn.’ It’s almost a question.

‘Leonard.’

He looks awful. His white hair has thinned, and his narrow face looks longer and somehow more drawn – as if, since I’ve last seen him, he has been hanging tiny weights from his skin.

‘Come in,’ he says.

The house is on the cusp of being left to waste. It certainly hasn’t been cleaned, maybe since I last saw him. The corridor is poorly lit. The rooms off it are dark too. The pale carpet is worn and there is a smell of animal about the place.

We sit in his fluorescently lit kitchen and he makes us coffee.

‘Good to see you,’ he says, ‘I was hoping you’d call up.’

I sit back into my chair and look around the kitchen listening to the thrum of the electrics, and the whoop of the sea wind outside.

‘I wonder could you look at the house?’ he says.

‘Sure,’ I say. ‘Why?’

‘Structurally,’ he says, ‘my solicitor tells me, to sell this place I need a certificate of compliance; I thought you wouldn’t mind.’

‘I can do that.’

He stirs his coffee gently, before taking another mouthful. Then he pushes the cup to one side and we open the whiskey and start to drink.

I tell him about the cow.

Many hours later, I wake up on the sofa in Leonard’s sitting room. He has passed out and is breathing clumsily on the chair across from me. That glowing blue darkness you get just before dawn is everywhere, suggesting the shape of everything. We, glasses in hands, look like a couple of narcoleptics who dropped off mid-sentence. I lie back and close my eyes.

When I was much younger, twenty-two or so, I lived in the north of England for a number of years. I met a woman one night – she would have been over forty. We got drunk and went back to her place. She was rich, in that her parents were. In her bedroom she had a JD Fergusson portrait, depicting a dark-haired woman in a Parisian café. I loved that pink painting. This woman and I fucked each other all night. Next afternoon I hobbled home, empty. Every Friday night after that I’d get a call from her. She’d be drunk and ask me over. I’d always say I had no money – which was mostly true – and couldn’t get across town. She’d say that she would take care of it. So when I’d roll up at her house in a taxi, she’d come out and pay, like she was my mother, then I’d go inside and fuck her in a cold way. She is the only woman I can say with certainty that I have ever satisfied.

Around this time I was drinking every weekend, to the point where I would black out on large chunks of the night. It was as if, when I was drinking, I would not ground myself. I would allow nothing to adhere.

I am awake again. It is morning and Leonard is standing over me.

‘Finn,’ he says, ‘Finn.’

I rise and follow Leonard to the kitchen where we have a cup of tea and some toast. He reminds me of the survey. We finish our breakfast and, as we walk around the bungalow documenting cracks, I assure him there is no subsidence serious enough to compromise the sale. We enter the room where his wife spent her last few months. A neatly made single bed sits along the gable wall and the curtains are pulled. Around the room images of Catholic icons and rosary beads dangle from timber ledges holding various discoloured bottles of holy water. I scan the room for defects, make some notes and we leave.

In the hallway he pulls a folding stairs down from the attic and we clamber up to look at the trusses. The space is cold but dry, and the fibrewool between the trusses shines under the glow of a single bulb. From somewhere behind Leonard I can hear the gurgle of a water tank. As we hunker in among the criss-crossing roof struts, I feel like we are part of an intimate guild of joiners. I ask him why he is selling the place so suddenly.

‘There’s nothing sudden,’ he says, ‘I need the money is all. I’m six years from retirement, and I’ve nothing to get me there.’

‘Where will you live?’ I ask.

‘I have a sister.’

‘Where does she live?’ I ask.

‘Inland from here,’ he replies.

The following weekend, the weather is bright and breezy and the smell of seaweed drifts almost visibly around the shoreline. I call up to Leonard. He meets me at the door – his wavy white hair standing on end, like a static charge has entered him. He is stone drunk and falling around the place, as if he has not stopped drinking since I left. I imagine the sadness; it opens before me like a Burren fissure, full of wild and rare flowers. The house is turned upside down, the kitchen has been destroyed and the windows in the sitting room smashed. He slumps at the kitchen table and offers me a can of cheap beer. I put the cert down, and tell him it’s good to send to his solicitor. I understand, as he looks at me, that he has forgotten about the cert and that he has forgotten he wants to sell his house.

‘Have you a cigarette?’ he slurs. ‘I couldn’t find any fucking cigarettes.’

‘Can we get some cigarettes?’ he continues.

He can barely keep his head upright.

‘I’ll get them,’ I say. ‘You stay there.’

‘Let me come,’ he says, ‘I need some air.’

I look at him and measure the difficulty in carrying him to the village. He peers at me through a hundred yards of mist.

‘C’mon,’ I say, and I get him to his feet.

On our way down to the village, after stumbling countless times, he falls on his face. His nose cracks. As I lift him blood pours from his mouth. His septum has shifted across a nostril. We sway on the side of the road about two hundred metres from the village harbour. It is windy, the sea froths behind us, and I picture how this could look. He begins to moan. His eyelids open, so I drag him back to his house and put him to bed.

Next morning I call up. He is sitting at his kitchen table with an open bottle of perfume in front of him. He’s been sipping from it for I don’t know how long. He begins to mumble something. It may be a psalm.

‘I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world,’ and he looks up, waves and says, with whatever finality he can muster, ‘John, sixteen thirty-three …’

He takes a sip from the bottle.

‘I dreamt last night that I was bit by a dog,’ he says, ‘ferocious dream, must have been near the morning. The bite was so deep I woke up rubbing my arm. I jolted right off the bed, and fell. Then I felt my face, and wondered where it happened. So I searched the house for bloodstains, but found none. My face is in a terrible state.’

He rubs his chest, ‘You...