Graham A City Burning

1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-78172-592-4
Verlag: Seren
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

Set in Ulster, south Wales and Italy, many of the stories in A City Burning concern a point of choice and decision. Characters reach a turning point at which their lives can become fuller and more meaningful, but at a cost to themselves. In others they bear witness to an event must decide whether to become involved or pass by. They could be ordinary people in Belfast during the Troubles or their aftermath, or during the Covid-19 pandemic, or priests facing a new religious reality in their ministries, or family members in a domestic situation in south Wales. Characters are forced to look into themselves; each must make a choice of how to live their future lives.These stories are vividly written and authentically realised, with Graham's eye for a telling detail and instinct for a loaded silence drawing in the reader. She has created memorable characters and situations which linger in the mind long after the story has ended.'In this powerful collection, Angela Graham shows herself master of the angle of vision: her tales capture the mercurial moment when a person's world is changed forever, in a road or room, against a landscape, seascape or starscape, at the graveside or (as in the towering story, 'Life-Task') at a forsaken railway station in the aftermath of war.' - Stevie Davies'Angela Graham is a brilliant new voice. This is literature that deserves to last.' - Kate Hamer 'A debut collection of tales remarkable for its verve, depth and range, taking us from backstage at the theatre through priestly adventures in Rome to the dark tragedies of troubled Belfast streets. All conjured up in bright words and sentences that consistently illuminate. Twenty-six stories, one singular voice.' - Jon Gower

Angela Graham is a tv producer of over 100 documentaries and factual programmes for BBC, ITV, S4C and Channel 4, including The Story of Wales. She produced and co-wrote the Oscar entrant cinema feature Branwen (6 BAFTA Cymru nominations and Best Film at the Celtic Media Festival), and was a screenwriter on drama projects set in Italy, Romania and Ireland. She began her career in ITV, and spent eight years as a producer at one of Britain's rare production co-operatives, Teliesyn.Graham's stories have been widely published and several have been shortlisted in competitions. She was born in Belfast, and has lived and worked for many years in south Wales.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Graham, Angela

Leseproben

ABOVE IT ALL

A little red car darted forward from a junction. It shot into a stream of traffic jetting across a piazza and sped along a boulevard but, approaching the next crossroads it was seen to hesitate, signal left, then right, then, on the brink of commitment, it lurched forward, just escaping collision with a tourist bus to the side and a van in front. Horns and a klaxon and protesting, screeching brakes clam-oured in the car’s wake as it disappeared into the melée of Rome’s summer morning traffic. In it were three priests: two of them young.

“Are you a stupid man, Liam?” asked O’Reilly, the old one, from the front passenger seat. “Are you a man, now, who makes bad decisions under pressure, would you say?” Liam gripped the steering-wheel even tighter and even more tightly gritted his teeth, telling himself not to answer, not to rise to the bait. He hated O’Reilly. He wanted to swat him out of existence with the back of his hand like the whining irritant he was. “I always heard you were a great man for the technicalities of life,” O’Reilly went on. “Isn’t that so, Donal?” he added, tilting his chin towards the back-seat passenger but keeping his eyes on the road ahead.

Liam glanced into the mirror. Donal’s dark eyes met his there sympathetically, as he replied, deflecting their superior’s attention, “More the technologies in Liam’s case, Father. As for the technicalities, you yourself are known as being a stickler for them in your own work.”

“Yes, in texts, yes. But when it comes to machinery….” He sniffed. “I dare say it’s a talent. One about which I must needs be modest.”

He expected, and was provided with, a contradictory murmur from Donal. Liam flashed an angry look via the mirror and received an apologetic, good-humoured wink in return. Donal was hunched forward because the back seat was cramped and he was a burly man, broad-shouldered, with big country-man’s hands. His knees were pressed against the seats in front.

“Have you heard from the publishers?” Donal asked O’Reilly. “Have they a date yet?”

“They have. I’m to choose between three dates. They’re being very obliging, I must say. ‘Totally at your convenience, Monsignor O’Reilly,’ they said.” His complacent smile stretched his spare, pasty skin more tautly over his skull.

No doubt, Liam thought, O’Reilly considered his appearance appropriately ascetic. He could glimpse the old man’s hands, clasping a briefcase on his lap. They were swollen. Arthritis. Liam felt no sympathy. As O’Reilly talked on, Liam concentrated on getting them to the Vatican, grateful for Donal’s deliberate absorption of his tittle-tattle. Donal had the patience for it.

With the car stowed and security clearances done, they followed O’Reilly along a pillared portico. Why couldn’t the man just get a taxi, Liam fumed. What were he and Donal doing, trailing in his wake, like ducklings? No, like pages – bridesmaids, even, in their full-length habits! That’s all it was: vanity. O’Reilly wouldn’t do even a small commission like this one without a little retinue, making a point: “Look how healthy the Order is. We have men to spare for the smallest tasks.” That was their function today: walking billboards.

Liam saw, beyond the pillars, up above the balconies and the roof tiles, the sky. It was sharply blue. Someone opened a high window and a pane flashed like a semaphore. He felt himself respond: What? Up there? Come up there? Above it all! Yes! He felt a touch on his arm and turned to see Donal looking concerned. Had he groaned aloud? He sighed. “Donal, I don’t know what I’d do without you,” he muttered. “You’re the only sane one of them all.”

Ahead of them, O’Reilly announced his business to one of the Swiss Guards at an entrance. Out in the courtyard a troop of his colleagues marched past. Powerfully slender, on their way to some formal occasion, they wore the distinctive, conquistador-style, striped and slashed uniform – blue, orange and yellow – with a scarlet plume waving from their glinting, pointed helmets. How strange, Liam reflected: three men in funereal black – in skirts, basically – and others dressed like peacocks: the flamboyant, martial males. Truly there was a place for everyone in the Roman Catholic Church. The full spectrum.

The tall young man inspecting their credentials was wearing the plain, blue duty uniform and black beret. Liam saw a look pass between the Guard and Donal. Did they know each other? Neither spoke. Did Donal know everyone? Liam sometimes thought so. Donal: so quiet, so observant, given to good deeds without fuss. Who knew what he’d done for this man? Liam wouldn’t ask because Donal prized discretion. If questioned, his pleasant features would crimson to the roots of his black peasant hair and… ‘peasant’? Liam caught the word, displeased with himself. It was true, he knew, that that’s how he saw his friend: a big, Irish labouring man, white-skinned and curly-haired, needing to stoop through doorways and manage his great strength in narrow confines when his body might have been easier digging, lifting, striding… But Liam didn’t see himself as a labeller; he prided himself on seeing people as individuals. He tossed the peasant-thought from him.

But a holiday memory returned to him: Donal, in a cliff-edge field overlooking the Donegal Atlantic, tossing stones to his brothers from a broken wall, the steady pressure of the sea-wind preventing words; the same wind provoking white wave-caps on the dark, glittering ocean. A glittering day. That’s what Liam remembered. Now it occurred to him that that had been Donal in his element.

As the Guard let them pass through the doorway Liam wondered how Donal had disciplined himself to years of study. Perhaps his mind was hungry too? Not as hungry as mine, Liam thought, confident of his own keen intelligence. They had spent part of their novitiate together, then Liam had been loaned to a different province and within the last year they had both been assigned to Rome. Liam felt they got on well. Donal was a good listener.

On that same holiday, he’d been in a rowing-boat with Donal, on a calm day. The boat rocked a little as they let it float, just enough movement to be soothing. Liam lay under the sun, under the blue sky, opening himself to the heat. Sprinklings of light he allowed through his lashes: scintillae. He felt a little spark of pleasure at the exactitude of the word. He had sung, without effort, “Volare… oh ho; Cantare… oh woh oho; Nel blu dipinto di blu; Felice di stare lassù…” On he sang, repeating himself at random. To sing, to fly, in the blue painted blue, happy to stay there on high. When he’d opened his eyes, Donal was gazing at him in the frankest admiration. Sea-birds glided overhead with masterly ease. Liam had closed his eyes and continued humming, smiling, singing: “E volavo, volavo felice più in alto del sole… and higher again, while the world bit by bit disappeared far away down below.” He soared.

On the way back to shore he’d had the oars. Donal had fussed: it was too far, let him take over; no trouble and so on, and Liam, struggling, had persisted, irked that he should be thought incapable. Singing wasn’t all he could do!

And now, here they were, years later, fully trained, professed, fledged. Dry feathers, he thought resentfully. Dusty birds.

Voices reached him now from ahead, murmuring in Italian. O’Reilly stopped at an open office door, was greeted from inside and went in, closing the door behind him, abandoning them without explanation. Liam turned to Donal indignantly. Donal raised a hand signalling patience, walked along to the next office and spoke to its occupant. A smart young woman came to the threshold, smiling. She beckoned to Liam as she ushered Donal around a corner, chatting animatedly. Donal did know everyone!

“I never saw her before,” Donal insisted simply as they sat at the formica-topped table in a modest kitchen-cum-dining room. The woman had done her best to make them comfortable with coffee and dry little biscuits. Liam was at the head of the table, Donal at its broad side, on a metal chair whose spindly legs squeaked on the terrazzo floor at any movement. Time crawled past. Liam employed it in telling Donal what he thought of O’Reilly and his ilk, and all he stood for: the life-denying, status-seeking, petty-minded, cerebral…. “I hate him!” he said. He felt the pleasure of inserting the scalpel exactly on the puncture point. “His nit-picking, old-womanish ways and his rudeness, and his insinuations. Why doesn’t he just say things?”

Donal sat in silence, his discomfort evident in his hunched shoulders, his furrowed brow, his eyes that, Liam could swear, had grown even darker. But Liam ignored these signs. Never a bad word about anyone from Donal, he thought irritably, so he said a good few more to compensate. He didn’t notice himself leaning forward on his elbows, letting his clenched fist fall heavily onto the table, time and again, in an unconscious act of obliteration. Liam’s frustration and grievance absorbed him, exalted him and Donal’s very distress excited him. At least it was a reaction!

Suddenly there was a scrape of metal on stone and Liam, startled, felt his descending fist engulfed and arrested between Donal’s great hands. “Liam!” Donal said gruffly, urgently; and again, “Liam”. Liam felt his fist squeezed tightly and shaken a little. “This,” said Donal, “is your heart.” As though in a dream, he watched Donal gently prise open his fingers, bend his dark head over Liam’s palm and place a kiss right at its core. When Donal looked up at...