Carys Davies

Search for a word or phrase in this book …

Biographical note:  Carys Davies won second prize in the inaugural 2002 Orange Harpers & Queen Short Story Competition, second prize in the 2005 Asham Award, and runner-up prizes in the 2005 Bridport Prize and the 2006 Fish Short Histories Prize. Her stories have appeared in prize anthologies, in The London Magazine, and in a variety of U.S. literary magazines, including New Letters, Kestrel and G.W. Review. Some New Ambush is her first story collection.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844713417
ISBN:  9781844713417
Author:  Carys Davies
Title:  Some New Ambush
Series:  Salt Modern Fiction
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  FNB
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Sep-07
Extent:  120pp
Height:  203 mm
Width:  127 mm
Thickness:  7 mm
Weight:  180 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 14.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Some New Ambush is the first collection of short stories from award-winning writer Carys Davies. Love, loss, birth, death, betrayal, madness – they all lie in wait for Davies’s characters in their startlingly different worlds: a dry cleaner’s shop in contemporary Chicago, a mining town in South Wales in the sixties, a lunatic asylum in nineteenth century northern England.

Shot through with wit and aching emotional poignancy, these stories tell of how we attempt to confront the things life throws in our path – often when we least expect them, and in places where we never thought to look. They tell of the mistakes we make along the way, and of how we try to deal with the whole difficult, unpredictable business.

There is the boy who steps into his best friend’s clothes in a desperate bid to fulfill his dreams, the man who comes up with an amazing new invention to win the heart of the woman he loves, the bored young wife doomed to live on an island where everything is red, the middle-aged woman who finds a baby in the sand and passes it off as her own.

Table of contents:
Hwang
Waking the Princess
Monday Diary
Gingerbread Boy
Rose Red
The Captain’s Daughter
Pied Piper
Boot
Scouting for Boys
Homecoming, 1909
Historia Calamitatum Mearum
Metamorphosis
In Skokie
The Visitors
Ugly Sister

View excerpt as PDF:

Click here to view a sample ( KB)

Excerpt from book:  

Gingerbread Boy

I always hoped it wasn't someone old who took Bobby. He was afraid of old people. He'd look at the yellow whites of their eyes and their ugly teeth and the shiny brown skin on their hands and then he'd push his face into Lily's skirts and hide. He was afraid of old people and dogs and witches, though he was very fond indeed of fairy tales and I always thought it likely that he was lured away, not with the offer of sweets or a drive in a nice car, but with the promise of a story. He was like Lily that way – you have to hold onto Lily when you come out of the cinema so she doesn't fall under a pram or a bus. You have to hold onto her until she comes back to herself, until you're sure she's not still dreaming about the fading characters in the film.

We should have called the police immediately of course, but when you open the back door and you can't see your four-year-old where he was five minutes ago, playing on the flagstones with his blue metal car, you don't think, ‘He's gone. Someone has taken him and he's gone.’ You experience a little jolt, yes, your face goes hot, there's the icy, shrinking feeling in your chest you get whenever they give you some kind of scare, but you don't think, ‘This is it. This is the end of our life as we know it.’ You hunt around for a little while. The garden, the house. Under his bed and in the wardrobe where he liked to sit and play sometimes. Then down the street. Sick with dread now. You knock on doors. Then you call the police, but by this time he's been gone half an hour and the trail is already cold.

There's a photograph of him my wife Lily and I have kept – it has been our favourite photograph of him, the one which shows him at the age of nine, the one which seemed to us to prove that he was still alive somewhere.

The eyes are mine, the serious mouth belongs to Lily, the pointed chin to my brother Jack. I don't know how they decided on the hair: curly hair that falls over to the left from a small widow's peak. My father is the only one of us who ever had curly hair. His hair was very curly when he was a little boy.

They did the photo when Bobby had been missing for just over five years. We had, I think, all but given up hope when one day, out of the blue, the police rang us and said there was something new they wanted to try.
We thought they’d forgotten all about us, that they had closed Bobby’s case, but the next day they came to the house and took away a shoebox full of photos Lily put together for them – photos of Bobby himself along with photos of me, of her, of our parents, of my brother Jack and her sister Carol. All the photos she could lay her hands on of any of us growing up. They studied all the eyes and all the noses; they looked at the thick eyebrows on Lily's side of the family, at the funny widow's peak on mine. They looked at Bobby's four-year-old hairline, at his small round face and our long bony ones, and picked the things they wanted and scanned them into a computer. Then they put everything on a grid and manipulated all the different pieces and stretched Bobby's face until they came up with how he would look if he was nine years old and still alive.
They made leaflets and posters with the new picture on them and, gradually, a few calls started to come in reporting possible sightings, and they began to follow them up.

They cautioned us, though, not to get our hopes up too much; they admitted they couldn’t really hold out a great deal of hope. They’d had some success with the photos, but those were cases where the children had been taken by a parent – a mother or a father in a messy divorce. In those kinds of cases putting the new photos out sometimes got a result.

I knew what they were saying. It was what I knew already. It was what Lily knew. That children abducted by strangers are very rarely found alive.

‘But,’ they said, gently, trying to be kind, ‘in our experience the photos can be a great comfort. They can give people something to hold onto.’

When they showed us Bobby’s new picture for the first time, we held the precious image in our trembling hands and whispered to each other, ‘This could hold us forever.’ I watched as Lily touched his curly fringe, very lightly, with the back of her little finger, as if she thought it might be getting in his eyes and annoying him.

‘Hello there my darling,’ she said, her face breaking into a wondering smile.

We had two large 10”x 8” copies made and framed, one for our bedroom, one for the dining room, an 8” x 5” for my desk at work, some passport-sized ones for my wallet and Lily’s purse, so we could take them out and look at them wherever we were, whenever we felt the need – in restaurants, in the car, walking down the street.
Lily began talking to him quite often, telling him all her news. At first this made me uneasy, but after a while I found myself doing it too. Within a few weeks we had both fallen completely under the spell of the new photograph. On his tenth birthday Lily made him a vanilla cake and in front of his framed picture in the dining room, we blew out his candles and made our wish. We forgot the cautious words of the police: for us, the photograph had fixed Bobby in our minds and in the world and made it impossible for us ever to give up hope; it was like a prophecy, a promise that he would come back to us one day and we clung to it – this amazing thing, this beautiful collage they had conjured for us out of our own history, our own flesh and blood.

It is hard for us, now, to know what to do for the best.
He fought them when they found him and took him away from Terri and Shaun Glaister. He bit them and kicked them and clung sobbing to Terri Glaister, his arms around her neck, his fingers locked together so tightly they had to pry them apart one by one.

They found him just over a year after they did the photo and sometimes I wonder how it is they took so long to locate him, because in my opinion his resemblance to the photograph is really quite good, and although the Glaisters did not send him to school, they seem to have taken him out quite a lot.

The chin is wrong, it’s true, and the hair – his hair hasn't turned curly in the end the way my father's did at that age; it has remained as soft and thin as it was the day he vanished. But other than that, I think if you ever saw Bobby, if you ever had the chance to compare him with the photograph, you would agree that it is not a bad likeness.

He remembers his blue metal car.

He remembers his blue metal car but he does not remember us.

It is five months now, since he came home, and he still cries for Terri and Shaun Glaister. We have told him, of course, that he can never go back to them. We have explained everything to him, but he says he doesn’t care what we say because he hates us.

He is frightened of us too, you can tell. I think we seem very old to him, being as we are so much older than the Glaister couple.

Yesterday he drew himself a picture of them – of Terri Glaister with her short black hair and her narrow face; Shaun with his big hands and big feet, his short red beard. It is not a good drawing, it doesn’t much resemble the young elfin-featured woman we saw in the courtroom, nor the bulky man who stood beside her, but it is all Bobby has and it seems to be a comfort to him.

This evening he came downstairs, the picture trailing from his hand, and asked Lily, could he please have a frame.

Unpublished endorsement :  Carys Davies is a gifted writer. A true original. Her magical yet weirdly believable stories transport you in a breath into other lives and worlds, without a word wasted. Full of surprises.

Maggie Gee

Unpublished endorsement :  On “Hwang”: A perfectly judged moment of comedy … I laughed out loud at the same point every time I read it.

Lynne Truss