by Clio Gray
She had puzzled over the old battered travelling case when she unearthed it from her pile of rubbish, scrutinising its rusting edges, its balding leather, wondering why it seemed so familiar. It took her several minutes to realise it had belonged to the man they’d called the Bean Counter, on account of his habit of tramping up and down the coast, visiting villages and towns, ticking off who went to this church, who went to that, how many and how often, scribbling down any other, older beliefs any of them might still hold to, the tales the old women had of ghosts, of the huldufolk, who supposedly lived beneath certain stones, guardian spirits who took the forms of birds or bulls.
Counting beans, was what they’d said of him then, that man who went around their island country counting souls, adding everything up for some purpose they didn’t know. But he’d been a nice old stick, she remembered, and she pondered about this bag and what to do with it, remembered what the old Bean Counter had said when he’d told her he was finally leaving.
‘Where will you go next?’ she’d asked him, and he had sighed deep and low, shoulders sagging, looking as tired as if he had just dragged his own cross to Rifstangi from the Holy Land itself.
‘Home,’ he had said, and she remembered that the deep crease between his eyes had softened as if he was about to smile, though he did not.
‘Home,’ he’d said again. ‘If home will still have me.’
It struck her back then as such a very sad and lonely thing to say, and now, five years on, it seemed all the worse because she knew he had never even got out of the harbour, that he had never gone home, that he had gone down with Anders and all the rest on the boats that had been boiled into the river when Hekla had done her worst. And she felt for him, for this stranger, for this man she had hardly known, and for the family at the home he had never managed to reach. And so she took hold of his case that had been dragged from the Shallows, wedging it awkwardly against her bad shoulder so she could get at the rusty clasp with her one good hand, managed to snap it open from its rust without much fuss.
‘Well now, Mr Bean Counter,’ she murmured as she opened it up. ‘Let’s take a look. See if there’s anything left of you inside.’
Clio was born in Yorkshire, spent her later childhood in Devon before returning to Yorkshire to go to university. For the last twenty-five years she has lived in the Scottish Highlands where she intends to remain. She eschewed the usual route of marriage, mortgage, children, and instead spent her working life in libraries, filling her home with books and sharing that home with dogs. She began writing for personal amusement in the late nineties, then began entering short story competitions, getting short listed and then winning, which led directly to a publication deal with Headline. Her latest book, The Anatomist’s Dream, was nominated for the Man Booker 2015 and long listed for the Bailey’s Prize in 2016.
‘Surprisingly,’ Gray says, ‘The Anatomist’s Dream - although my eighth published novel - was amongst the first few stabs I made at writing a book. Pretty appalling in its first incarnation (not that I thought it at the time!) it was only when I brushed the dust off it a few years ago that I realised there really was something interesting and unusual at its core that I could now, as a more experienced writer, work with. The moral being: don’t give up. The more you write, the more self-critical you become and the better your writing will be because of it.’
Clio has always been encouraging towards emergent writers, and founded HISSAC (The Highlands and Islands Short Story Association) in 2004 precisely to further that aim, providing feedback on short listed stories and mentoring first time novelists, not a few of whom have gone on to be published themselves.
‘It’s been a great privilege to work with aspiring writers, to see them develop and flourish,’ Gray says. ‘There can never be too many books in the world, and the better the books the better place the world will be.’
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