Authors: Jacob Ross
Closure
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This anthology would simply not exist had it not been for the administrative and coordinating work of Kadija Sesay, Inscribe Series Editor, and the meticulous editorial overview and support of Managing Editor, Jeremy Poynting. And of course Hannah Bannister, Operations Manager â the very paradigm of efficiency and sanity.
Thanks also to the placements and volunteers and staff whose assistance throughout was critical in bringing
Closure
together: Dorothea Smartt for her encouragement and support of the Inscribe writers included in the anthology, Grace Allen, (internship with University of Leicester), Jade Neilson, Matthew Bourton and Rebecca Patenton.
CLOSURE
EDITED BY JACOB ROSS
SERIES EDITOR KADIJA SESAY
First published in Great Britain in 2015
by Inscribe an imprint of
Peepal Tree Press Ltd
17 King's Avenue
Leeds LS6 1QS
UK
© Contributors 2015
Jacob Ross
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form
without permission
ISBN 13 (PBK): 9781845232887
ISBN 13 (Epub): 9781845233297
ISBN 13 (Mobi): 9781845233204
CONTENTS
Fred D'Aguiar: “A Bad Day for a Good Man”
Karen Onojaife: “Here Be Monsters”
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi: “Malik's Door”
Chantal Oakes: “The Weight of Four Tigers”
Michelle Inniss: “Whatever Lola Wants”
Lynne E. Blackwood: “Clickety-Click”
Pete Kalu: “Getting Home: A Black Urban Myth”
Leone Ross: “The Müllerian Eminence”
Gaylene Gould: “Chocolate Tea”
Valda Jackson: “An Age of Reason (Coming Here)”
Dinesh Allirajah: “Easy on the Rose's”
Sylvia Dickinson: “Amber Light”
Nanna-Essi Casely-Hayford: “From Where I Come”
Akila Richards: “Secret Chamber”
Louisa Adjoa Parker: “Breaking Glass”
Ayesha Siddiqi: “The Typewriter”
Jacqueline Crooks: “Skinning Up”
Hana Riaz: “A Cartography of All the Names”
Seni Seneviratne: “Hoover Junior”
Patrice Lawrence: “My Grandmother Died with Perfect Teeth”
Mahsuda Snaith: “Confetti for the Pigeons”
Koye Oyedeji: “Six Saturdays and Some Version of the Truth”
Judith Bryan: “Randall & Sons”
Remembering Kahlil âKahls' Lewis.
Walk good, young fella. You were loved.
A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
Make up a story⦠tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe⦠show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fearâ¦
â Toni Morrison, The Nobel Lecture, 1993
The two-year process of selecting and editing submissions for
Closure
presented an opportunity to give some thought to the modern short story, the way it is evolving and the tendency towards increasingly rigid (some may say constricting) definitions placed on the form. It seems to me that over the past few decades much effort has been dedicated to taking the short story from the domain of being a basic human reflex and need for narrative, and relocating it somewhere that is increasingly esoteric. Writers themselves â in interviews and discussions about their art â have at times contributed to this idea of the short story as a kind of visitation experienced only by the lucky or the anointed, whilst contemporary “narratologists” have devoted serious intellectual effort to come up with authoritative taxonomies of the different types of short stories â of which I've counted seven so far.
I contend that the short story is simply the
de facto
narrative mode across human cultures and time: from the oral “folktale”, myths of origin, parables designed to caution, instruct or merely stimulate insight, through to the contemporary written narratives of encounter, trauma, self-exploration and discovery that we find in an anthology such as this. I dare say that, notwithstanding Vladimir Propp's meticulous contribution to our awareness of the universal mechanics of “story” in
Morphology of the Folktale
(1928), humans have always understood and valued its role as a way of making sense of the world, and their place in it.
Closure
is essentially about human striving.
The last anthology that featured short stories by Black British writers appeared fifteen years ago. At the time,
IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain
highlighted what
Closure
still confirms: that there is no shortage of Black and minority ethnic writers engaged with the short story â writers capable of bringing a distinctive and striking fluency to the form. The current spate of short story competitions, prizes and online publishing opportunities is uncovering an undeniably rich seam of short stories by Black British writers. In fact, several of our contributors have been winners of, or shortlisted for, major international, national and regional short story prizes. Interestingly, many of these writers refer to themselves more readily as novelists, poets or playwrights, partly due, one suspects, to the fact that the short story is still perceived as not offering the same career-enhancing opportunities as the other forms of fictional output, in particular the novel.
But perhaps, with dedicated and notable collections of short stories emerging in Africa and the Caribbean by writers such as A. Igoni Barrett, Mohammed Naseehu Ali, Sefi Atta and Doreen Baingana (Africa) Barbara Jenkins and Sharon Millar (Caribbean), the same will begin to happen here.
What stood out during the selection process and the editing of
Closure
was its richness: of form and voice and tone; of stylistic and thematic range; of the diversity of subject matter, and the varying stances of the writers â ranging from the fantastical, the other-worldly, the speculative and oblique, through to the raw representation of reality.
I was interested in selecting narratives that offered something additional to good writing. I was on the lookout for pieces which, while offering the concentrated intensity expected of the short story, also gave a sense of writers setting themselves challenging places to get to, and wrestling with language or the very form of the short story in order to do it, so that the writing became an adventure. I think there are a good few stories in the anthology that fit this description, but I will leave it to the reader to decide which ones they are.
The writing has moved on from the
IC3
anthology, which appeared in 2000. There is less of an attempt by writers â overtly or through their characters â to self-define. “Black Britishness” is what it is â a lived reality that is like air or breath or blood: important, but hardly at the forefront of one's consciousness except in moments of confrontation or self-assertion, and even then, it is not always recognised as such, as we see in several of the stories.
Here, like the music instructor deciding who she wants to be, are characters more concerned with the treacherous business of confronting their own demons in 21st century Britain than in the injustices levelled against their forebears. They are recognisably contemporary: a successful female stockbroker who finds herself at an abortion clinic with a pop star and an avid churchgoer, each handling her personal crisis; a young Londoner â accosted by a local abductor and potential rapist after a late night rave â attempting to save herself by “stylin” her way out of the danger, Ananse-fashion; a male cleaner collecting abandoned hymens and through this activity learning to empathise with the many oppressions of women; a narcissistic young man who refuses to accept that the time has arrived in his life when the partying must stop and his true self be examined; ghosts who are themselves haunted by their memories of the awful tyranny they suffered in the house they occupy; a young man who cannot find the strength to break from the woman who abuses him.
And there is more â a great deal more â all intensely wrought narratives about humans engaged with the fractious business of life, some of whom are marginally better equipped than others to deal with it. None of them is completely at ease in the world.
Why the title,
Closure
? We chose it precisely because it undermines itself. Literary fiction is rarely â if ever â about closure. Rather, it is concerned with the opening up of possibilities. At best we are taken to a point of rest rather than a neatly tied-up ending. So, we were interested in the prospect of subversion that a theme/title such as “closure” might trigger in the more rebellious contributor who, we hoped, might say “To hell with all this closure bizness” and dare to offer something different and quite startling. And yes, in this anthology we have stories that were submitted in that spirit!
Good stories are unforgettable precisely because their meanings are not fixed; the pleasures, even the lessons we derive from them gain fresh significance over time. We'd like to believe that the short stories in
Closure
possess this quality. We hope you think so too.
Jacob Ross
FRED D'AGUIAR
A BAD DAY FOR A GOOD MAN IN A HARD JOB
Are not the sane and the insane equal at night as the sane lie a dreaming? Are not all of us outside this hospital, who dream, more or less in the condition of those inside it, every night of our lives?
â Charles Dickens,
Selected Journalism
(1850â1870).
My 250cc Yamaha zigzags through bumper-to-bumper traffic for three city miles of two-finger signs, horns and indecipherable shouts from taxis and buses â the sonic equivalent of a scalpel applied without anaesthetic. Close shave at one junction as a few of us bikers edge to the front of the queue at the lights and accelerate from the pack on the change to green, nearly encountering a car crossing our path. All of it caught on the speed camera. Spooked by this I go slow all the rest of the way to my hospital shift for a 7:30AM start at 7:40AM.
I find Ward Three and try to blend into its routine â well underway without me. Sorry, traffic. Sorry, bike played up. Sorry, accident delay. The nurses from the night shift hand over to the day shift in the stuffy little office. The report comprises mostly of who slept and who did not and who required an extra dose of some cognitive muffler or other to invite sleep, and no news of any new arrivals in the night. The usual routine.
I suppress a yawn. I hear from the night nurses that James slept fine; Cheryl slept fine. That's it for them. My two charges for my shift both off to a good start after a good night's sleep. Keep that good luck bouncing my way for the rest of my day. Only hiccup that the night nurses report concerns another ward. One of their patients has gone awol and when the police find him they will bring him kicking, back to where he does not want to be â my ward, since he left the hospital without permission and must upon his return be retained on a locked ward. Maybe the police will take the seven hours of my shift to locate him and by the time they appear with him I'll be biking out of the hospital parking lot. Keep that good luck bouncing, please.
I walk with another nurse, Katie, as she checks off a name and we dispense, making sure the tablets or liquid match the name and the dose matches the doctor's prescription. Each patient takes the small plastic cup, throws his or her head back with a thank you or nod or nothing, until we make small talk to hear them talk back â a way of making sure they swallowed. James is perky today. Wants to go and play tennis, asks me if I could accompany him the short walk through the park and across the bridge over the train tracks to the tennis courts. I tell him I will find out from the doctor if that is an okay thing to do. He knows and I know that he cannot leave the locked ward and the constant supervision of nursing staff, because he was assessed as an acute danger to himself after a botched overdose. (He took a bunch of pills and made a call that was traced so that he was found in time to have his stomach pumped and get compulsorily committed to psychiatric treatment.) He took a shine to me; told me as much â that my forehead shone with my keenness as a nurse, which I took as a compliment. He has an ironic charm for a broken human, glimpses of which suggest a will to live rather than give up or opt out or whatever it was Timothy Leary advocated.
James stood there as if I should call the doctor that second. “It'll have to wait until the doctor does his rounds, James.”
“Okey-dokey,” he says.
Cheryl wears her dressing gown. She knows that when the day shift arrives she should rise and dress and be ready for breakfast. I will have to put that down in her notes and it will be read as a minor setback in her day. In nursing parlance, for a patient to get out of bed and get dressed means a declaration to engage with routine, however humdrum. What seems like one small step for a patient leads to one giant assumption on the part of us nurses, who are on the lookout for any such signs.
“How are you today, Cheryl?”
She says she is fine and opens her mouth lion-yawn-wide to show me that she swallowed the pills.
“I'll be back for a chat as soon as I finish with the trolley.”
“Suit yourself,” she quips. Oh-oh, what is up with her, I wonder, but I say nothing.
It is always best to say nothing in a profession where words can never be taken back. I look at Cheryl quizzically and glance at her feet and hands for any sign of a disruption in her composure, any dishevelled look to denote a struggle waged against herself in the form of an excessively repeated act, such as washing her hands or doing-up and undoing a cuff button until she tears her sleeve in frustration.
Katie, who stands on the other side of the drugs cart, raises her eyebrow at me and we press on with dispensing. We make small talk between the double checks of names and doses.
“Didn't I see you at the bar last night?” she asks.
“Maybe.”
“It was you with the Redhead, wasn't it?”
“Maybe.”
“Did you score then?”
“None of your business, Katie Murphy.”
“You scored, didn't you?”
“Maybe.”
Another fifteen minutes slips by before I get back to the office with the trolley, and Katie and I secure it in the drugs room. We head off to find our respective charges for a chat, which we will both record.
The nurse in charge heads me off in the corridor and steers me into the stuffy main office.
“Zack, you have to do something about your lateness. Last warning.”
“Yes, Zoe. Promise. You doing okay?”
“I'm fine, except for you being late on my ward all the time.”
“You want me to make up the time?”
“No, I want you to be on time.”
“Will do.”
“Hope so. Keep your ears open and your eyes peeled. We don't want anyone escaping like that chap from the other ward. I don't need to remind you that your patients are on suicide watch.”
“No, you don't.”
“And more details in your notes, please. You're still too elliptical. I know you've just qualified. You almost need to be boring in what you report to get it right. Got it?”
“Yes, Commandant. No, seriously, thanks. I appreciate it.”
“Okay, now get lost.”
“Yes, Commandant.”
“Zoe, wiseass! Unless you prefer Nurse Ratchet.”
She means the totally old school nurse who runs Ward Two just across the corridor (the one from which the patient escaped last night). That nurse would have hauled my ass on report long ago. Old school is jackboots nursing care by numbers, bingo healthcare, fog of drugs; new school is all talk-therapy and a delicate cocktail of pharmaceuticals.
A bell rings. I walk fast to the main office. Zoe answers the phone and orders me â her moon-eyes urgent and clear â to make my way to Emergency Admissions. I run, I walk â like in the Olympics. What is the nature of the emergency this time? They ask for a male nurse to be sent from each of the three open wards. I am not the most senior male nurse on duty on my ward, but Zoe specifically sends me. That can only mean one thing. But I quell my suspicion. Before I reach Emergency Admissions I hear a lone voice shouting what to the untrained ear might sound like unadulterated aggravation, but to my culturally attuned tympanic membrane is none other than that unique mix of adrenaline and scattergun unreason identified with a full blown psychotic episode. A Jamaican accent.
The banging might be feet kicking out or someone falling against corrugated zinc.
I rush into a room whose doors to the street are blocked by a police van, parking lights flashing.
The van's back doors fling open; a policeman holds them in place as it spills its contents. A black man with a goatee and a tight tangle of waist-length dreads speckled grey, curses very loudly. His cockney herders in uniform shout at him to stop hitting and kicking and they pin him to a wall. He is a big man and solid with it. He pushes from the wall and they all move like a giant spider into a table, and chairs scatter.
He is shouting as he struggles. “I-an-I man free to walk earth as I-man please and nobody can stop I-an-I dread from wandering through Jah creation. For I born free. No chains can hold I-man. I-an-I man walk in peace and wisdom flow from I-an-I pores and Jah power behind everything I-man do. Jah-Jah protection cover I-man back and walk before I-an-I.”
Two other male nurses arrive at the same time as me. I know one, Rollins; the other I've seen enough times to nod to him. His name is Smyth. He tells me that this is the patient who escaped last night.
“Does he have a name?”
“Rodney Samuels.”
“There goes my luck.”
The police try to hold the man still across the top of a table and he sputters against a forearm that pins his neck. Remarkably, the man wears handcuffs. With his arms behind his back he still presents a huge problem. The police look at us. Rollins and Smyth look at me. I step forward.
“Mr Rodney Samuels, I'm Staff Nurse Zack Prior.”
I pause to allow for an answer, for a general air of calm to prevail. Nothing.
“Call me Zack. You're safe now. Do you know where you are?”
I pause again, taking in the man. “Mr Samuels, may I call you Rodney? I will ask the police to release you but you must sit and talk to me or this won't work. Do you understand?”
He nods. The police ease their grip. They straighten their clothes and remove his handcuffs. One of them stipulates that they will go straight back on if he shows any misconduct. Mr Samuels shakes his arms and massages each wrist. He twists his neck as if righting an untidy stack of vertebrae. He stares at me, his eyes bloodshot and rheumy.
Just as the doctor walks into the room, Mr Samuels shakes his dreads, inhales deeply and resumes, “I walk without fear and only my enemy should be afraid as I-an-I bring down the walls of Jericho and Babylon fall before I-an-I. See the lamb flock to I-an-I. And when I call, my sheep hear my voice and they come to I-an-I. I-man walk in righteousness. I-an-I come to Babylon and I chant with the power of Jah in I-an-I and Babylon fall. So I will reach the kingdom of the most high and rest in His chambers.”
The four police officers suppress smiles and keep their hands on truncheons, pepper spray, handcuffs. They chat among themselves, and with the doctor and nurses as we stand around waiting for the doctor to tell us what the next move should be.
The doctor decides on a course of action that is astonishingly conciliatory towards a man the size and hostility of Mr Samuels. The doctor's approach piques the nurses' interest, mine included. We glance at each other and they must wonder, like me, how this will turn out. The doctor is earnest and clear.
“Thank you for everything, Officers. Mr Samuels, my name is Dr Woolicotts. You've met Nurse Prior. And you know Nurse Smyth and Nurse Rollins. They're here for your safety. Do you remember leaving the hospital last night?”
Nothing. Rodney Samuels resumes his invective. “Any man who stand in I-an-I way must fall before my sword and eat the chaff of a whirlwind harvest for I-an-I wield the mighty sword of Zion.”
The doc speaks over him.
“You're in an agitated state, Mr Samuels. I could prescribe something to help calm you down. Would you be agreeable to that? As you're aware, you must stay here for 72 hours under our observation. If you try to leave, the police will arrest you and throw you in jail and bring you before a magistrate. You heard the officer. Your best option is to cooperate with us, and together we can get to the bottom of what troubles you. Does that sound good to you, Mr Samuels?”
Perhaps, I, or one of the other nurses, or all of us, should have moved in earlier. The signs were obvious to us, but the teaching hospital we're in gets these trainee doctors from the world-renowned Institute next door. They turn up and behave like walking textbooks. We chat about it in the pub all the time â the way you can almost see the cogs of their latest untried and untested theory turning as they respond to a crisis.
Rodney Samuels appears to listen to Doctor Woolicotts but he makes a fist. He stares at the doctor but remains worryingly silent. Dr Woolicotts stands with a bit of a smile etched on his face, while he poses questions, pausing between each for a possible answer. For a while the two of them look like they're in a transaction. The doctor seems not to notice the closeness of his body to that of the agitated man in front of him. My colleagues and I take a small step forward. Mr Samuels glances over at us and the doctor follows his gaze. The doctor actually waves us away. Rollins, Smyth and I take two steps back. I glance at them and they both shrug.
Mr Samuels opens his hands in slow motion and the sight of his bright palms makes Dr Woolicotts, Smyth, Rollins and I relax a little. Mr Samuels raises his arms to chest-level and Rollins, Smyth and I are tense again. Dr Woolicotts maintains his smile and even begins to offer his right hand in a handshake of agreement of some sort.
He's light years from here, I think. Why should he want to shake your hand?
Mr Samuels leaps high in the air and, with a growl, lands on Dr Woolicotts. The two of them swing and fall and we lunge at them. Mr Samuels lowers his face to Dr Woolicotts and closes his teeth on his right ear. The doctor screams for us to help him. He struggles to shake off Mr Samuels. I hold Samuels' head in place and the doctor is smart enough, even in his distress, not to pull his head away from the vice of Samuels' teeth.
Smyth and Rollins each grab one of Samuels' arms and peel them off the head and neck of Dr Woolicotts. I push my face close to Samuels' and I shout at him in my most trained voice to let go. I repeat myself. His red eyes meet mine but do not seem to register my presence. This time I add, please. My fingers brush against a steel trap of teeth and saliva. Smyth hugs Samuels' arm, which brings him up against Samuels' body and he starts hammering his fist on Samuels' face while shouting at him to fucking release the doctor. Rollins attaches himself to the other of Samuels' arms while he uses his free fist to pound the ribs of Samuels. I pull my hand away and a lot of blood spurts from the head of the screaming doctor. I make a fist and am about to land it on Samuels' mouth when he pulls away from Dr Woolicotts, turns his head to one side and spits a small bloody mass to the floor. Dr Woolicotts rolls away from Samuels, clasps his left ear, stumbles to his feet and slumps to the ground. More nurses pour in and all of us pile on Samuels, holding his limbs and head and sitting on his midriff. He is a strong man. He tries to speak but Rollins punches him in the mouth and he falls silent. A nurse brandishes a restraining jacket and we hitch Samuels into it. Smyth injects the sedative and antipsychotic drug straight into the man's thigh, I mean right through his trouser leg. Samuels jolts but says nothing. We hoist him onto a gurney, strap him in and two nurses wheel him to the locked ward.
