Jay Merill

Biographical note:  Jay Merill was born in Warwickshire and now lives in London. She attended the University of London and works as a freelance editor. Her short stories have been published in a wide number of literary magazines in the UK and USA.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844713189
ISBN-13:  9781844713189
Author:  Jay Merill
Title:  Astral Bodies
Series:  Salt Modern Fiction
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  FNB
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Jun-07
Extent:  140pp
Height:  203 mm
Width:  127 mm
Thickness:  8 mm
Weight:  210 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  In this long-awaited debut volume, Jay Merill brings together her poignant stories of everyday life. Merill’s narratives are charged with restless energy, her characters seek to come to terms with disappointment, ambivalence and compulsion. Merill’s stories explore themes of transcendence, change and escape, often at odds with a fast-changing, indifferent world. In ‘Beacon’ Tilly lights candles on her dead plant to show the way to a better future. In ‘WatchTower’, Clara copes with her life by imagining she is a character in a play. Jay Merill’s distinctive writing captures every nuance of the the tiny moments that transform us.

Meet the author

Table of contents:
Beacon
TimeShare
Yellow Plastic Shoe
The Other Side of Diane
Red Cat
Blue Movie
The Outsider
Salamander
Tango
Chicken eye
Billie Ricky
Deni & Is
WatchTower
The Girl Can't Help It
Mezzanine
Tailbacks
The Sadness Story
Astral Bodies
Lady of the Spin
Waving with Rabbit
Monkey Face
The Gold-road

Excerpt from book:  

Watch Tower

Clara says that in one life you can get bound up in many lives. She says she’d once got mixed up with two men who behaved as if they thought they were starring in a movie and she herself had almost begun seeing things that way as well. It felt as if everything they did was being performed for the benefit of an audience, even if whoever was watching was quite invisible. Clara wants to talk about how it was with her then. One of the men was her husband, Bill, the other, the best friend of the husband. The three of them were experimenting with friendship. Since, she has become an isolate, but then she was into sharing, by which she meant, being shared. It was flattering, she felt bigger than she felt reduced.

The more so because these men imagined themselves larger than life, saying and believing they were special players with the gift of knowledge about the truth of everything. And they hammered home how things should be and railed against the load of crap things tended to be and they were fond of blaming all the shortcomings on the petit bourgeoisie and they sat rolling spliffs and scoffing about the petit bourgeoisie which they themselves were not, it went without saying, they were not.

There was no friendship or experiment really going on, Clara says and at one level she understood that. Instead there was rivalry which was pleasing. She hadn’t realised it to start with but she came to see she was the object of both men, she herself. She was the object of desire whereas before she’d been unwanted by anybody. She used to feel plain now suddenly she felt giddily gaudily on top.
On top of the world. On top of the men, her thin breasts, formerly unwanted, jiggling. On top of history; starring in a movie or a play. Yes, she Clara, was also starting to get sucked somehow into the idea that this was the true state of things, and to feel as if they were all in a film or a play together which would be replayed forever. The talking proselytising men would be famous and she too would be famous. She would be a seductress worth remembering.
All the energy led up to one special moment which she promises she’ll be coming to by and by. Not yet, because first she wants to give a few details about where they lived then and what life was like. She and Bill had two boys. They were a family living in Basingstoke. The children were not yet in school, the husband was training to be a doctor. He had to give that up eventually though, because he could not overcome the problem of whether he should give water to a dying man, if there was only one cup of water left. If they were all on an island, say. He and the wife and children and Francis the friend, possibly Francis too. So should he?
If a doctor, shouldn’t the answer be yes? Always and irrevocably yes.
But Bill could not decide. It was all extremely difficult, because as well as being a man who thought he knew everything, he was also a man who said he thought he knew nothing. He said the world was full of hypocrisy one way or the other and over the matter of the water he did not appear to know which was the one way and which was the other, did not know the right road to travel. He didn’t know if he should care if they all died because there wasn’t enough water to go around.
Supposing no rain came, no more rain? Being a small island – Basingstoke, he couldn’t travel very far. The road was shorter than it might have been if he’d fetched up somewhere else. But could one choose such a thing, he had the feeling one could not, and didn’t this show that after all, one was restricted, there was no such thing as freedom or if there was it was only the freedom to move about inside the confines of a box.

The family lived in a council flat. The husband and the friend sat and deliberated, they rolled their rollies on two fleabag chairs facing the one couch. A couch greasy and spartan. They had found it in a skip and it had always had one cushion missing which was gratifying at the time to the men. Now Clara does not know what they would think, she has not seen either of the men for years. At the time she for one had wished for something better – they said she was petit bourgeois, but there you are she was a woman. At least though she believed in the play, and believed the three of them had the main parts, and this to them was the most important thing and it redeemed her in their eyes to some extent. Also she had ambition ——— her name had started off as Clare but she herself put the a in, it was more noisy. She felt like a loud musical instrument. Twang. She had strings and a belly and a mouthpiece. She played the part of a woman. They could all agree what this part meant and that equalled harmony.

But what the men liked best, what both of them really enjoyed was when the Jehovah’s Witnesses came on a Saturday. Jehovah’s Witnesses trudging slowly up the steep hill of the street, being rejected from door to door but not here. Here of a Saturday afternoon they were most welcome. There was an avid staring out for first sight of them at the bottom of the hill and if they were spotted it was a thing worth celebrating. Bill and Francis opened their beer cans, cheering in a sarcastic way, looking angry but sounding happy. The Jehovah’s Witnesses were dots far below, at first indistinct, then just visible as they separated off from shadow. They started to take on form. Dots climbing the hill staunchly turning into individuals who could be seen going into doorways and coming out again. At last they turned into figures passing the window, figures clear and well defined.