Robinson Foreigners, Drunks and Babies

11 Stories
1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-1-909747-01-2
Verlag: Two Rivers Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 150 Seiten

The stories brought together in Foreigners, Drunks and Babies cast the slanting light of a poet's sensibility on the Imperial Academy of an ancient Eastern empire; detail the musical education of a northern realist parish priest and his sons; travel through the West of Ireland with a couple facing various extinctions; spy on the shadowy private life of a Cold War warrior; engage in hand-to-hand fighting with a classroom full of Soviet teachers; follow the adventures of an Italian girl visiting her sick boyfriend in hospital; discover how hard it can be to get a passport for your first-born; find out why everyone pretends you're not there; investigate a seemingly victimless crime; reveal reasons for a Japanese girl's committing suicide; and realize that there's no need to be forgiven for things you didn't know you hadn't done. In this first collection of his imaginative fiction, Peter Robinson, winner of the Cheltenham Prize, the John Florio Prize, and two Poetry Book Society Recommendations for his poems and translations, brings a characteristic perceptiveness, rhythmical accuracy, and vividness of evocation to these eleven examples of what he's been doing in the gaps between his other writings. His new and returning readers may be both surprised and entertained.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Robinson, Peter

Leseproben

Music Lessons

Mr King would soon blow full time. You can see the whistle gleaming in his hand. He puts it to his lips. Mr King’s face is gaunt and wrinkled, permanently yellowed from jaundice. He was a fighter pilot in the war. At the far end of a cindery field stretching down one side of a raised canal bank, your team is mounting its final attack. Your side’s a goal down, but there’s still time. You’re the goalie. Sometimes you play on the wing. It’s cold standing in the goalmouth. Your clogged soles suck and squelch as they lift out of the ill-drained pitch. Inflating his cheeks, Mr King blows a single, high-pitched note and he shoos the boys off with his arms. Your stomach feels as heavy as your feet. The metal rugby boot studs clatter on flaked, subsiding flags. It’ll take a bare twelve minutes to get back home. You cross the vicarage’s oval front lawn and ring its blue front door bell. Mum welcomes you back, but you’ve scurried right past her in the porch, and make down the hallway for the dining room. There the upright piano silently takes up its corner. You’ve got just half an hour. First, the theory: taking a tram-lined exercise book from the scuffed leather case with its metal bar fastener hooked over the handles, you sit down at the dining table. The book of questions and the clean pages of staves lie cushioned on the thick brown felt, covered by a tablecloth at meal times. The felt is to save the wood from further heat rings, spills and scratches. It will take you fifteen minutes to finish the exercises if you keep concentrated on the job. Some stewing steak, browning in the pressure-cooker, loudly sizzles. It’s going to be hotpot, and you can’t wait. Counting the lines and spaces, you transpose phrases from one key to another; calculate major and minor intervals; guess the time-signatures for a few groups of notes, scratching in the bar lines, double ones at the end of each example. With no time to play over the passages, you complete the tunes by writing in resolving scales, mechanically arriving at runs of notes that dip under or hover over the tonic, sliding through a dominant seventh below, or a tone above, rising or toppling on to each final chord. You check the agreements with key and time signatures, then put the top back on the fountain pen and blot the page with a soft sheet that sustains yet another bluish ghosting of notes and other marks. Slumping back in the chair, you snatch a moment to survey your handiwork. There are the lines of crotchets, quavers, semi-breves and minims, the clefs, rests and signatures, with here and there a crossing out or smudge. But you can’t help regretting that the tails and strokes, the filled-in ovals sitting on or straddling the lines, never look so sure or evenly spaced as in the printed scores. If only they could look right too! Closing the manuscript book and questions and returning them to the scuffed music bag brings a further sinking to the heart. Will you ever learn? But there’s no time like the present, so you sit down at the piano and lift the keyboard lid. The maroon hard cover of Hymns Ancient and Modern, the detail from Piero della Francesca’s ‘Nativity’ on The Penguin Book of English Madrigals, assorted dingy piano tutors, a bowl of fruit, and a white table lamp (which shivers distinctly at each note struck) top the dark wood box of the instrument. Now the most likely piece lies open on the stand, the brass hooks restraining its pages. For the first time this week you study the score. Initially Miss Austin had given you Edith Horne’s exercises, scales that are to familiarize fingers with the keys: the yellowed and dirt-ingrained ivory of the white notes, the more remote and less frequently visited black ones. The C above middle-C makes only a light, high, almost inaudible tinkling sound. The G below it stays down when you press it, and has to be deftly flicked level with its neighbours by a fingernail after the note has been struck. When the scales and exercises don’t produce the slightest improvement in your application, you’re tempted with books of tunes a boy might be expected to like: popular lyrics, light classics, film themes … Now you’re groping your way through The Sound of Music. This Wednesday, as your eyes attempt to decipher the thick black towers of bass-clef chords, to co-ordinate them with the slopes and ranges of the melody, you’re trying to make out through a cacophony of forgotten incidentals, unsyncopated hands, and halting rhythm, ‘Doe, a deer, a female deer’ – its catchy lilt and cadence; later, Herb Alpert’s ‘Spanish Flea’; and, with only a few minutes still to spare, ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’. But it’s too late to hope for better now. You race out through the kitchen and, for Mum, let fall a loud ‘Goodbye.’ She’ll have responded with a ‘Goodbye, dear’ – but too slowly for the words to reach you before you slam the back door, their sound hanging as if unwanted in the all but empty vicarage, like a cough between movements in some hushed concert hall.



You leap down the stone steps of the back door porch and feel the small cobbles of the yard through the soles of your shoes, cobbles that had rung to the hooves and wheels of the minister’s horse and trap. The grille-like fodder baskets are still there in the stables where Dad parks the family’s grey-green Morris Oxford. The upper floor was really once a hayloft. You’d seen the trapdoors in the ceiling above the fodder baskets where they used to push the hay. The place is strictly out of bounds. ‘The floorboards aren’t safe,’ Dad said, ‘and there’s an end of it.’ The great blue double doors to the yard stand open and you walk on round the oval path of the vicarage garden. It’s like a tiny racetrack made of red shale. There you and your brother would go for spins on bikes and crash, scraping your knees, which would be streaked with two kinds of red, the blood and the grit. St Catherine’s Street is unadopted, its cobbles reaching past the church gate as far as the vicarage drive, but no further, petering out into cinders, rocks, and mud. At the bottom of the street, with Mr Hill’s corner shop still open for everything, you can see where the brew falls sharply to lock-ups and allotments: ramshackle planking and tarpaulin with smashed fences and overgrown plots, places for playing war with friends from school. Rathbone’s bread factory is more distant, beside the flights of locks in the canal; on the other bank, beyond its tow path, there rise the Wigan Alps, a high plateau of pale grey slag, the peaks giving this landmark its wry local name. Across these ashen tracts towards the railway lines are red brick ruins of abandoned workings, dilapidated pit-heads; their cable wheels and conveyors, corrugated iron roofs, and steel winding gear all dismantled for scrap. Only the walls of former outbuildings, stores, baths, and the offices have been left to the gangs of the surroundings, the Mount Pleasant district. When Mum and Dad invited you boys into their bedroom one morning and told you the family was moving to a new parish in a town called Wigan where the coal mines were, you didn’t want to go. It was frightening to think of living in a place covered with bottomless holes in the ground. But they’d said not to be silly: it was quite safe. Now you’d seen the curious circular walls, three times your height, with the sharp glass of bottles cemented on their tops, and had been told by Hawthorne, one of the boys at school, that these were the old pits. Not even the bravest or stupidest in the gang would climb those walls. It would be worse than falling into the canal, being sucked down, dragged under by the water rushing through the vents in the slimy green lock gates, or trapped in the mud at the bottom where brass beds and mattresses, bike frames and prams, even old pianos, all brown with rust and mud, would catch a boy’s heavy feet and hold him under until, as it said in the Bible, he woke up dead. The steps lead through a crack in the terrace next to Hawthorne’s house. There are three long flights, and two main roads to cross. You always want to walk slowly, be as late as you dare, since every moment will lessen the harrowing; but gravity, which you’d done in science with Mr King, makes it hard not to go down those steps without breaking into a scamper. Dropping, as tardily as possible, you recite the terms you expect to be quizzed on. Some you’d already learned from the theory book. They were in Italian: allegro, prestissimo, andante, vivace, con brio, molto lento, poco a poco, da capo al fine. But there were always more of these mysterious expressions to repeat once more to the end. With a regular beat, the soles of your shoes strike the worn stone steps, sometimes splashing in the shallow remnants of recent breaks in the weather the south Lancashire plain’s been enjoying. How many times have you descended into Hell? That’s what your brother Andrew calls it. And how many times will you have to rise again? A memory catches you unawares as you trip down a further flight of steps. You’re about the height of a bedside table. There are grey-carpeted stairs leading to the right and a bedroom door near the top of them. It opens into a small room filled with a vast double bed. The bed has a curved utility-style veneered headboard. Lying under the covers is your dad, his head down at eye level. Someone must have told you he is ill. ...