Trezise Fresh Apples

1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-1-913640-27-9
Verlag: Parthian Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 214 Seiten

Sarah's not abnormal or ugly, just a little bit fat, and she's got cerebral palsy. 'No way was it rape or even molestation... she's fourteen, not a child. I'm not a paedophile.' Gemma's mother had shagged Tom Jones. Nobody knew who her father was, least of all her mother. Spiderman doesn't want to inflict his petty-thief persona on self contained Caitlin, but he finds himself getting off at her stop. When chickens that belong to 'Chelle's grand-dad start to peck each other, sounding like death warming up, she wrings one of their necks and ends up doing worse. Johnny Mental was sitting on his porch wearing sunglasses, drinking lager, his teeth orange and ugly. Someone was painting their front door a few yards away, with a portable radio playing soul music; Diana Ross or some shit. A big burgundy Vauxhall Cavalier came around the corner, real slow like an old man on a hill. Eleven wry and defiant stories on the power and beautiful transience of youth.

Rachel Trezise is a novelist and playwright from the Rhondda Valley, south Wales. Her work has won the Orange Futures award and International Dylan Thomas Prize. Her most recent play Cotton Fingers toured Ireland and Wales and won the Summerhall Lustrum Award at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2019. Her debut novel In and Out of the Goldfish Bowl won a place on the Orange Futures List in 2002. In 2006 her first short fiction collection Fresh Apples won the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her second short fiction collection Cosmic Latte won the Edge Hill Prize Readers Award in 2014. Her first play Tonypandemonium was produced by National Theatre Wales in 2013 and won the Theatre Critics of Wales Award for best production. Her second play for National Theatre Wales, We're Still Here, premiered in September 2017. Her latest play, Cotton Fingers, also for National Theatre Wales, has recently toured Ireland and Wales. At the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2019 it was chosen by The Stage as one of the best shows in the festival and received a Summerhall Lustrum Award. Her debut novel has recently been reissued in the Library of Wales series, a project re-publishing classic Welsh literature in English.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Trezise, Rachel

Leseproben

Fresh Apples

When you get oil from a locomotive engine all over the arse of your best blue jeans, it looks like shit: black and sticky. I can see it’s black, even in the dark. I stand on the sty and try to brush it away with the back of my hand, bent awkward over the fence, but it sticks to my skin, and then there’s nowhere to wipe my hands. Laugh, they would – Rhys Davies and Kristian – if they could see me now. Don’t know why I wore my best stuff. ‘Wear clean knickers,’ my mother’d say, ‘in case you have an accident.’ She’d say knickers even when she meant pants. She’s a feminist, see. But it’s not like anyone would notice if I was wearing pants or not. Johnny Mental from up the street, he said when he was at school the police would pay him at the end of the day to look for bits of fingers and bits of intestines here, before he went home for tea. If it can do that, if it can slice your tubes like green beans, who’s going to notice if you had skid marks in your kecks? I can still hear the train chugging away, or perhaps it’s my imagination. Over in the town I can hear drunk people singing but closer, I can hear cicadas – that noise you think only exists in American films to show you that something horrific is about to happen – it’s real. It’s hot too. Even in the night it’s still hot and I’m panting like a dog. I’m sure it’s this weather that’s making me fucking nuts. I’m alive anyway; I can feel my blood pumping so it’s all been a waste of time. Forget it now, that’s the thing to do. Oh, you want to know about it, of course you do. Nosy bastard you are. Well I’ll tell you and then I’ll forget it, and you can forget it too. And just remember this: I’m not proud of it. Let’s get that straight from the outset. The whole thing is a bloody encumbrance. (New word that, encumbrance. I found it in my father’s things this morning.)

Thursday night it started, but the summer has been going on forever, for years it seems like, the sun visors down on the café and fruiterer’s in town, the smell of barbecued food wafting on the air, and never going away. And the smell of mountain fires, of timber crumbling and being swallowed by a rolling wave of orange flames. On the Bwlch we were, at the entrance of the forestry. There used to be a climbing frame and a set of swings made from the logs from the trees. It’s gone now but we still go there, us and the car and van shaggers. Sitting on a picnic table with my legs hanging over the edge so I could see down Holly’s top when she leaned forward on the bench, her coffee colour skin going into two perfect, hard spheres, like snooker balls, or drawer knobs, poking the cartoon on her T-shirt out at either side. She was drinking blackcurrant, the plastic bottle to her mouth, the purple liquid inside it swishing back and fore. I asked her for some. I wouldn’t normally – I’m shy, I’d lose my tongue, but my mouth was dry and scratchy from the sun. Yes, she said, but when I gave the bottle back she wiped the rim on the hem of her skirt like I had AIDs. Kristian and Rhys Davies John Davies, they had handfuls of stone chippings, throwing them at Escorts when they went past, their techno music jumping. Jealous they are, of the cars and the stereos but fuck that dance music, it’s Metallica for me. (Don’t tell them that.) It’s his real name by the way, Rhys Davies John Davies: the first part after some gay Welsh poet, the second after his armed-robber father, shacked up in Swansea prison.

Every time something passed us, a lorry or a motorbike, it grated on the cattle grid in the road. That’s how Kristian came up with the cow tipping idea. Only we couldn’t go cow tipping because you can only tip cows when they’re sleeping, in the middle of the night and it’d take ten of us to move one, so Holly had to go one better.

‘Let’s go and start a fire!’ she said.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said. ‘We should be proud of this mountain, Hol. They haven’t got mountains like this in England. And you’ll kill all the nature.’

‘Nature!?’ she said. She rolled her eyes at Jaime and Angharad. ‘It’s not the fuckin’ Amazonian rain forest, Matt,’ she said. She can be a cow when she wants, see. ‘C’mon girls,’ she said and she flicked her curly hair out of her face. ‘When there’s a fire, what else is there?’

‘A fire engine?’ Jaime said.

‘Exactly. Firemen. Proper men!’ And she started up off into the trees, shaking her tiny denim arse at us. The girls followed her and then the boys followed the girls. So that just left me. And Sarah.

Sarah, Jaime’s cerebral palsy kid sister. She’s not abnormal or ugly, just a little bit fat, and she rocks back and fore slightly, and she has a spasm in her hand that makes her look like she’s doing something sexual to herself all the time. But she’s brighter than Jaime gives her credit for, even when she’s got that big, green chewing gum bubble coming out of her mouth and hiding her whole face. I just never knew what to say to her – how to start a conversation. I smiled at her clumsily and tried to giggle at the silence. We stayed like that, her sitting on her hands, chewing her gum loudly so I could hear her saliva swish around in her mouth, until a fireman came with thick, black stubble over his face, fanning the burning ferns out with a giant fly squat because he couldn’t get his engine up onto the mountain.

‘Come and get me you sexy fucker,’ Holly was shouting at him, hiding her face behind a tree. That’s when I went home.

On Friday morning, on the portable TV in the kitchen there was an appeal from Rhymney Valley Fire Service for kids to stop setting fire to the mountains. ‘Nine times out of ten it’s arson,’ the man’s voice boomed. ‘It’s children with matches.’ The volume’s broke, see, either it has to be on full, or it has to be on mute.

‘That’s kids, is it?’ my mother said, hanging over the draining board, a red gingham cloth stuffed into a tall, transparent cylinder. ‘I always thought it was bits of glass left in the ground starting it. It can happen like that when it’s hot can’t it?’ My father ignored her, standing at arm’s length from the frying pan, turning sausages over with his chef’s tongs. She gave up pushing the cloth down into the glass and washed the bubbles out under the cold tap. I watched the rest of the announcement, spooning Coco Pops into my mouth, the milk around them yellowy and sweet.

‘The mountains are tinder dry,’ the man said, ‘so please don’t go near them with matches. While we’re attending to an arson attack there could be a serious house fire in the town.’ I remembered the look of helplessness on the fireman’s face while he sweated over the ferns, Holly asking him to fuck her. He knew that as soon as he’d gone we’d start it again so he’d have to come back, sweating again. I opened one of the blue cover English exercise books my father was marking at the kitchen table before he got up to cook breakfast, and I read some kid’s modern version of Hamlet. Crap it was, but I found two new words, psychodrama and necromancy.

Later, at Rhys Davies’ house, his mother was still cleaning spew off plastic beer-garden tables, and his father was still in jail, so Kristian and Rhys, they were drinking a box of cheap red wine.

‘Matt,’ Kristian said, dropping the Playstation pad on the carpet. ‘Holly got her tits out last night.’

‘No she fuckin’ didn’t,’ I said.

‘She fuckin’ did and you missed it,’ he said.

‘No she didn’t,’ Rhys said.

They offered me the wine but I didn’t want it. I went to the kitchen and scoured it for Mrs Davies’ chocolate. She had a shit load hidden from Rhys’ sister in Mr Davies’ old lunch box, under the basket-weave cutlery tray.

‘I wouldn’t poke ’er anyway,’ Kristian was saying when I went back. ‘She’s a snobby bitch. She’s the only form five girl I haven’t poked and I don’t want to poke ’er. She’s frigid, inshee?’

I didn’t know what frigid meant but I made a note in my head to find out and another one to remember to poke some girl before people started to think I was gay.

‘Imagine all the new girls when we start tech!’ Kristian said. We were starting tech in a month. Kristian wanted to be a plumber. His father told him, with some prison guard standing nearby, that he’d always have money if he was a plumber. Strange, because Mr Davies was a plumber but he tried to rob an all-night garage with a stick in a black bag. Kristian and me, we were doing a bricklaying NVQ because the careers teacher said it was a good course.

‘The girls from the church school’ll be starting the same time and none of them ’ave got pinhole pussies,’ Kristian said. ‘Johnny Mental told me, they’re all slags.’

I was leaning out of the window watching the elderly woman next door feeding lettuce to her tortoise. It was still really hot but she was wearing a cream colour Aran cardigan. I was wondering if there was a job somewhere which involved collecting words to put into a dictionary or something, or a course which taught you to play drums like Tommy Lee so I could throw sticks into the air after a roll and catch them in my teeth because I didn’t find bricks and...