by Tim Pears
Stella waded to the head of the lilo, where Bobby had been, and pushed it further out. Her father and Jif stayed with it for a stride or two, as the water came up their thighs, then let go. Stella carried on into the deepening water. It came up to her waist, her breast, then she kicked up and pushed her mother, afloat herself. ‘How far do you want to go, Mummy?’ she asked.
‘Is that you?’ her mother asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Let’s swim out to the wreck. That’ll show them.’
The girl floated slowly, lazily. She swam on her side and looked back. Sol was on the beach with Bobby, lighting candles which they stuck in the sand. Her father stood motionless, his big torso and head a silhouette against the setting sun, a statue in the water. Her aunt was on her knees in the shallows, her head in her hands.
Stella turned back and pushed the lilo away from the shore. The girl was a strong swimmer. She came from a long line of strong swimmers. She pushed her mother further out on the open sea.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Short stories are written between the long bouts of labour involved in writing novels and are more sharply focused snapshots of the times one has lived through.
‘How to Tell a Short Story’ (2019) was written for my friend Jane Pugh, storyteller, performer, teacher.
‘Blue’ (1995) is an out-take from my first novel, In the Place of Fallen Leaves, set in the small Devon village in which I grew up. Having finished the novel, I was still caught up in the lives of various characters and wrote a number of further stories about them, of which I kept this one.
In 2003 I was perplexed – along with millions of others – by my government’s rush to war, by our Prime Minister’s tireless jet-setting efforts to rally a coalition for the invasion of Iraq, justified by ‘intelligence’ that any reader of the broadsheet press could see was questionable. My wife and I attended demonstrations with our small children on our shoulders. For six angry months writing seemed futile. My wife had a friend married to an army officer sent to Iraq. Thinking about them, ‘Harvest’ (2003) emerged.
‘Fidelity’ (2005) came out of tutoring on creative writing courses, and fretting about the role of the imagination in creative endeavour, and life in general.
I wrote a good deal about rave culture. ‘Invisible Children’ (2008) came later, after a doomed attempt to recapture that magical moment.
‘Chemistry’ (2008) is about families and migration. I married a half-Polish woman, and was greatly admiring of her Polish father. He had come to the UK at the end of the Second World War, and with the wave of EU immigration after 2004 he became an unofficial employment agent, putting young migrants in touch with Oxford residents who needed their cars fixing, walls plastering, houses cleaning. I was fascinated by the way in which, whatever anyone’s views pro- or anti-immigration, individuals get on with life: making friends, love, money; making a new world.
The episode recounted in ‘Hunters in the Forest’ (2009) is entirely made-up, yet this story is probably the most autobiographical piece of fiction I’ve written.
I do not have a brother, but rather two sisters and one half-sister (plus three stepsisters and a lovely stepbrother), yet conflicts between brothers recur in my novels and stories, I can’t explain it. ‘Brothers at the Beach’ (2011) is one such. I guess it’s one of the variations of relationships within families, and a relief from the more usual dance between men and women, and between parents and children.
‘Rapture’ (2015) is a simple story about the strange combination of tedium and joy experienced in the early years of parenthood.
I wrote ‘Generation to Generation’ (2018) at a time when loved ones were ill or dying, while others were trying to make a child, and I wrote it for them, really.
Watching the Me Too movement explode was chastening for a man. Having lived through the radical feminism of the 1970s – women ran self-defence classes, reclaimed the night – I guess I had assumed that while there were still men out there capable of violent rape, young women no longer suffered routine sexual assault. How wrong I was. Our daughter was sixteen, and a keen sportswoman, who trained, on field or in gym, pretty much every day. Watching her and her team play football was to watch twenty-two powerful young women. In a way ‘Blood Moon’ (2018) was my homage to them.
‘Cinema’ (2018) was a memory that twisted into a brief narrative.
Martin Amis once said that half of our urge to write comes from our encounter with the world, the other half from our encounter with literature. I read ‘Through the Tunnel’ (2019, my version) by Doris Lessing, and images and snatches of conversation started falling into my mind. Where from? From lived experience, from imagination, from misremembered moments.
I can see the clear debt certain stories owe to particular writers, and to these (John Cheever, James Salter, Helen Simpson, Lucia Berlin, Doris Lessing) and countless others, I offer humble thanks.
From 2017–19 I was employed by the Royal Literary Fund to run a Reading Round group in Littlemore, Oxford. This entailed selecting two or more pieces of work (customarily a story and a poem, with occasional non-fiction) to read aloud to the group. They had a photocopy to follow as I read aloud, or they could close their eyes and listen, as they wished.
I would like to thank the RLF for my inclusion in this enlightened scheme, in particular Steve Cook, Katharine McMahon, Martina Evans and Marina Benjamin.
And warmest regards too to Mel Horwood, Jennet Batten, Pippa Gwilliam, Peter Agulnik, Maggie Campbell, Alice Daglish, Bridget Jennings, Rita Bevan, Marina Heeley, Lizzie Jamison, Anna Thomas and Brigit de Waal, core members of the group with whom this rewarding experience was shared.
Many thanks to Victoria Hobbs and all at AM Heath; and all at Bloomsbury, especially Alexandra Pringle, Allegra LeFanu, Lauren Whybrow and Sarah-Jane Forder.
And to Hania, my love, may the long story continue.
About the Author
Tim Pears is the author of eleven novels, including In the Place of Fallen Leaves (winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Ruth Hadden Memorial Award), In a Land of Plenty (made into a ten-part BBC series), Landed (shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, winner of the MJA Open Book Awards) and most recently the critically acclaimed West Country Trilogy. He has been Writer in Residence at Cheltenham Festival of Literature and a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. He has taught creative writing for Arvon, the University of Oxford, First Story and Ruskin College, among others, and mentored for Gold Dust. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has been the recipient of a Lannan Award. He and his wife live in Oxford. They have two children.
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First published in Great Britain 2021
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