by Lucy Durneen
We’re four storeys up in a fin-de-siècle café in the Old Town, eating cake and talking about bad sex scenes, because we’re writers and we feel that gives us the... well, you know the rest. It’s -10º Celcius outside and we’re keeping warm thinking of those authors who get their literary kicks from bulbous salutations and barrel-rolling breasts, but here’s what we’re learning: not one of these heavyweights can hold a candle, or a stray rocket, to Peter’s back catalogue.
Peter’s not from here. Like Auden says, you need to move your mouth both ways at once to pronounce the name of his hometown. Even the weather in that place is romantic. Even the wind is poetry. But there’s nothing poetic in the story he’s telling us about some librarian he hooked up with a couple of years back, although it’s rhythmic, I’ll give him that, the tinny pfft pfft pfft of his spoon hitting the teacup, the occasional word semibreved for impact.
‘She wants it in the ass,’ he’s saying. ‘She wants it the way Brando does Maria Schneider in Last Tango in Paris. But we don’t have butter. There’s olive oil, she’s shouting from the bedroom, but it’s dark, and I’m naked in her kitchen and I know her kid’s asleep right across the hall. So I just grab a bottle and run, and I’m slapping it over us, I’m seven layers deep in her before it hits me. Zeta. Those motherfuckers don’t just make oil.’ He pauses. ‘They make vinegar too.’
‘Seven layers deep?’ Tomas interrupts. ‘Seriously.’
‘Who ordered this coffee?’ I ask.
‘Silvie Szczepaniak,’ Peter says. ‘She’ll be here in a minute.’
‘Silvie Szczepaniak?’
He checks his phone. ‘Any minute now.’
I’ve never heard of this girl, and truthfully, I’m a little upset. This isn’t how our lunches work. It’s a special dynamic, the power of three, ancient and elemental. It’s a kind of pact. But even before I’ve figured out how to object with some dignity a brunette in leggings and an outsized t-shirt walks in, and the way their faces change, I know it’s her.
Silvie Szczepaniak is Polish and delightful. Her eyes are watery green like a Bengal tiger, but she has this crazy mess of dark hair that makes me think of the selkies my grandmother said stole men from the fishing villages up in the far North. The giant t-shirt just adds to the feeling of someone ready to leave behind their own skin.
‘We’re talking bad sex,’ Peter says, by way of introduction. ‘Not rockets in the night, the fucking worst experiences you’ve had. Coffee?’ He nudges forward the glass, now starred with lacy beads of condensation.
Silvie Szczepaniak sits down. There’s a dry, mineral smell about her like she’s made of snow, lössnö they call it here, the kind that looks pretty but can all of a sudden be dangerous.
‘Is it decaf?’ she says. ‘I only drink decaf.’
It isn’t. I want to feel sorry for Silvie Szczepaniak, but it’s hard. I can’t imagine it possible she’s ever known anything less than heaven. Still, it seems as though she’s putting genuine effort into mustering up something to share, although how can I say for sure when for me what’s coming to mind is the guy who told me to ‘go easy on the testes’ and I’m wondering if that even counts as a sexual experience. It was barely an experience. It really was the limit of what happened between us. I didn’t so much as breathe on his cock. The closest I got was my hands passing above, making a couple of promising sweeps like a magician about to pull a scarf away to reveal a rabbit.
Silvie Szczepaniak twists her hair around her finger. Shakes her head as if she’s trying to dislodge something inside. If she finds this whole situation weird she doesn’t show it. ‘The fucking worst or the worst fucking?’ she asks. Her eyes close. ‘Max Lindher. From… I forget where. He liked me to jam carrots up his arse while I… you know.’
‘Another arse story?’ Tomas says, but Silvie Szczepaniak gives him the look of a leopard seal advancing down on a fairy penguin and he shuts right up.
‘Or he’d tell me to get my finger up there,’ she continues, ‘and look for this little bump. The prostate? It’s there somewhere, he’d say. Higher. You’ve got to reach. And you know what?’ Silvie Szczepaniak says, ‘I couldn’t ever find it. There was just nowhere left to reach. Is that the measure of a shitty relationship, when you’re rummaging in a guy’s arsehole and there isn’t anywhere else to go?’
There’s a moment where it seems like any one of us might be about to laugh, but none of us does. It’s as if at exactly the same second we’ve all realised there is nothing to be said out loud to that. Not in the faded elegance of this place. There are velvet curtains. There’s a whole table of superior leaf tea. The kitchen staff clink the silverware and outside the snow just presses right on down to the street four storeys below. It’s as if we’ve all fallen clean out of the known universe into a moonlit place where Silvie Szczepaniak’s hands stretch up and up in forensic supplication and we’re floating past like we’re pages someone just ripped out of a book, and the real world is just a faraway picture, an old polaroid in a box, the yrsnö whipping my hair around like I’m some kind of luminous comet, and I’m bucking my hips like those women who dance taranta to drive out the poison of the wolf spider. I tear my blouse open. I’m shaking as if I have a fever. My breasts are hard as little onions and I’m rubbing them until they’re blood-red, I’m crying, Praise my face, damn it, praise it! My mouth is overflowing marzipan and cream. And I realise I’m looking straight at Silvie Szczepaniak, backlit and gilded from the winter sun at the window, all that dark selkie beauty crammed inside her spilling out like a whole river from a tiny glass, the soft plum flesh of her cunt its starfish taste her thighs my God I want to say pearlescent, and that’s the moment I stop falling. My chair hits the table and the coffee glass floods clots of hot foam onto my lap, and the sound I make is sharp and feral, like something wounded out in the woods.
No-one says anything. No-one moves even when the waitress comes to clean up the coffee. We are stilled by those human sounds all around us. It’s as if we really have nowhere to go. I’m not even sure if we are thinking of Silvie Szczepaniak’s elegant fingers inside this man Max Lindher or if we are imagining something new now. We’ve entered a different world and all I can think of is that it’s my turn coming up and I have never known enough of anybody to have a story, even a bad one, to tell.
About the author
Lucy Durneen lectures in English and Creative Writing in Plymouth, England, and is Assistant Editor of the literary journal Short Fiction.
Her short stories, poetry and non-fiction have appeared in World Literature Today, The Manchester Review, The Letters Page, The Lightship Anthology and Litro, amongst other places. She has been shortlisted four times for the Bridport Prize, Highly Commended in the 2014 Manchester Fiction Prize, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Angela Smith, whose trust in, and patience with, my writing allowed this book to come into being. For their support, offered in various, unswerving ways, thank you to all my colleagues at Plymouth University, particularly Anthony Caleshu, Rachel Christofides, Gerard Donovan, whose advice is always bang on the money, and Miriam Darlington, for the lentils and the listening ear. Martin Goodman, Paul Lawley, Tony Lopez; thank you too.
One event shaped this collection more than any other—the 13th International Conference on the Short Story in English, held in Vienna in 2014. For their various roles in getting me there, and in doing so changing everything, enormous thanks to Mary Joannou, Maurice Lee, Susan Lohafer, Farah Mendlesohn, and Sylvia Petter, and to the inimitable Vienna Crew itself—especially Rebekah Clarkson, Lauren B. Davis, Nancy Freund Fraser, Rhoda Greaves, Sandra Jensen, Cate Kennedy, Paul McVeigh, Jeremy Osborne, and Cameron Raynes for their feedback, support, belief, and impeccable deployment of music/poetry when required. For explaining manifest yearning, thank you Robert Olen Butler. These stories yearn harder because of one workshop.
With deep love to my Alpha Sisters, Inês Lampreia, Maria McManus, and
Mel Perry, and to the Coracle/ Kultivera team who provided an early audience for some of these pieces, and Scandinavian hygge in which to repair them; Colm Ó Ciarnáin, Magnus Grehn, Peter Nyberg, Ulrika Sätervik, and Dominic Williams, thank you. For cheering this project on, often child care, often cake, thank you Lisa Coyte and Hannah Lees. Inspiration and encouragement comes from so many places; thank you Eleanor Birkett, James Churchill, Stu Connor, Harry Dell, Philip Webb Gregg, Sarah Haider, Keeley Middleton, Leonardo Valladares Pacheco de Oliveira, Gürkan Özturan, Lindsey Parry, Mike Sloman, Uppahar Subba, Shaista Tayabali, Julia Trahair, Rose Waheed, Hugh Warwick, Sarah Whateley, Tory Young. Thank you for giving these desiderio manifesto an Italian voice, Greta Galimberti. For solving the riddle of the title, Tom Vowler. For giving me a piggery of one’s own, and a laptop to steer by, David and Michéle Lambert. John Andrews and Jude Summers—it began with you. To all the editors who first published individual stories from the collection—thank you for taking a chance on them, and for your continued support; Dan Coxon, Tomek Dzido, Pippa Goldschmidt & Tania Hershman, Sam Jordison, Christopher James, and Jon McGregor, you are especially wonderful in this regard.
To the Muses: for your unparalleled appreciation of limerence—thank you, Friðrik Solnés Jónsson. And Adnan Mahmutovic, beta-reader and story-prompter extraordinaire; hvala will have to cut it this time.
My soul sister Caterina. Grazie mille. Tu mi ispiri.
Thank you, Louise Ells, for telling me to emerge. Caron Freeborn, who kept me fed in soup and poems, and my longsuffering family, Alan and Angela Dawes, Kate and Anton Mezzone, Karen Dennison, Ted and Margaret Dennison; you all got me here in ways varied and vital. To my grandmother, thank you for telling me to set sail from the safe harbour; one reason this book exists.
The MidnightSun team, Peter Cassidy, Allan Taylor, Lynette Washington, Kim Lock and Zena Shapter you are quite amazing. And Anna Solding, master publisher, life coach, inspiration, without whom this simply would never have happened, for saying ‘We can do whatever we want.’ We can. We are.
To those who cannot hear my thanks; to Mary, to Chris. You are present in these words.
My boys. My girl. Thank you always.
And Vincent. He knows why.
Stories
‘Time is a river without banks’ was first published as a Galley Beggar Single in April 2016, and reprinted in Two Thirds North in May 2016.
‘Noli me tangere’ was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize 2014, the Storgy Short Story Prize in 2015 and first published in Storgy, (March 2015.)
‘Everything beautiful is far away’ was shortlisted for the Bridport Prize 2010 and the Cinnamon Press Short Story Prize 2011. An earlier draft of this story was first published in In Terra Pax and Other Stories, (Cinnamon Press, 2012)
‘The smallest of things’ (with the title ‘The Way Things Are Done’) was given an Honourable Mention in Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Award, May 2014, shortlisted for the Bridport Prize 2014, and published by The Jellyfish Review in November 2016.
‘The old madness and the sea’ was first published in Short Fiction, September 2012
‘Countdown’ was first published online with Tube-Flash in October 2014
‘Let it out’ was shortlisted for the Lightship Short Story Prize 2011 and first published in The Lightship Anthology 1, (Alma Books, 2011.)
‘In response to your call’ was first published in The Letters Page, October 2014, with the title ‘No-one to turn to and ask.’
‘They dedicated the mass for the soul of Paolo Alonso’ was a Top 25 Honourable Mention in Glimmer Train’s Open Fiction Award, September 2010.
‘All the things’ was first published in Hotel Amerika in August, 2016.
‘It wasn’t Stockhausen’s’ was a Top 25 Honourable Mention in Glimmer Train’s Open Fiction Award September 2009, longlisted for the Short Fiction Short Story Prize 2010 and first published in The Manchester Review, 2011.
‘The path of least resistance’ was a Top 25 Honourable Mention in Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Award July 2013 and first published in I Am Because You Are, (Freight Books, 2015.)
‘And what if it isn’t’ was Highly Commended in the Manchester Fiction Prize 2014 and first published in Litro as ‘Wild Gestures’, (December 2014), reprinted under the title, ‘And what if it isn’t’ in Two Thirds North, April 2015, and translated into Italian for La Tigre di Carta, July 2016.
‘To the men I have tried to seduce with prose–’ was shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award, October 2015.
‘What we talk about when we talk about rockets in the night’ was first published in The Jellyfish Review, July 2016, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Lucy Durneen’s collection of stories brings one deep into the terrain of the yearning heart. Hearts that have not loved, or hearts that love unevenly, fretfully. There are bodies that betray, health that oscillates; the decrescendo of existence. And characters who are ‘too alive’, or ‘always in the wrong story’, captured between the exquisite sharpness of reality and the dark dance of the mind.
Catherine McNamara, author of Pelt and other stories
This is an intriguing collection of short stories where things are seldom what they seem and characters are preoccupied by their past actions. Shaped less by plot than by precise and evocative imagery, they are psychologically acute portraits of people dealing with grief or change. With titles such as ‘The Old Madness and the Sea’ and ‘Everything Beautiful is Far Away’, the ocean is a recurrent image, the ebb and flow of its tides mirroring the undertow of suppressed emotions. The stories can be bleakly funny; when one character’s heart freezes over, she compares the spread of ice with the spread of cancer, coolly remarking that both seem inevitable if you don’t heed the standard warnings. They can be unexpectedly chilling, too. In ‘Noli Me Tangere’, a young girl’s apparently spontaneous response to a local boy’s invitation while holidaying in Italy turns out to have a much more selfserving and sinister purpose. There is something vicious at the heart of these stories, something dark which unfurls and unsettles. In UK writer Lucy Durneen, MidnightSun has found someone who revels in the imaginative possibilities of language while simultaneously exploring its inability to adequately express what people mean. Distinguished by its measured yet speculative style, these stories will appeal to readers of Cate Kennedy and Mary Gaitskill.
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