Biographical note: Elizabeth Baines was born in South Wales and lives in Manchester. She has been a teacher and is an occasional actor as well as the prize-winning author of plays for radio and stage, and of two novels, The Birth Machine and Body Cuts. Her award-winning short stories have been published widely in magazines and anthologies. This is her first collection.
BIC Basic
EAN13: 9781844713943 ISBN: 9781844713943 Author: Elizabeth Baines Title: Balancing on the Edge of the World Series: Salt Modern Fiction Product class: BC Language: eng Audience: General/trade BIC subject category: FNB Publisher: Salt Publishing Pub date: 01-Oct-07 Extent: 108pp Height: 203 mm Width: 127 mm Thickness: 7 mm Weight: 162 gms Supplier:Gardners Books Supplier:Ingram Book Group Supplier:Inbooks (James Bennett) Availability: NP Price: GBP 8.99 Price: USD 14.99 Rights: World
Short
description/annotation: These are stories about power: children without it adults vying to get or keep it — the boy caught between divorced parents, the arts worker conman, the avenging wife. Sometimes funny, sometimes moving, and always surprising: for it’s a slippery thing, power, and nothing is ever quite want it seems …
Main description: These are stories about power: children without it and adults vying to get or keep it. A small boy is struggles with his parents’ divorce, a doctor fails to understand the limits of his medical power, a wronged wife finds a uniquely powerful way to wreak revenge. Sometimes satirical, sometimes innovative and lyrical, the stories home in on those moments when power can spill into powerlessness: the split-second when a self-satisfied teenager is held at knifepoint by muggers, the trip to the woods with the ‘poor kids’ which teaches a small girl she’s no better than them. They chart the opposite moments when people wrest back power: a daughter rebels against her violent father, a struggling writer decides to expose a con man arts worker, a little girl who wishes her lost father would come back finds she has magic powers.
But it’s a slippery thing, power, and these vivid, wry stories spring surprises: for nothing, in the end, is ever quite what it seems.
Meet the author:
Table of contents: Condensed Metaphysics The Shooting Script Daniel Smith Disappears off the Face of the Earth Power Holding Hands Compass and Torch Star Things Leaf Memory A Glossary of Bread Going Back Into the Night Conundrum The Way to Behave Who’s Singing? Acknowledgements
The road ends at a gate. The boy waits in the car while the man gets out. Beyond the gate is the open moor, pale in the early evening with bleached end-of-summer grass, bruised here and there with heather and age-old spills of purple granite. The boy, though, is not looking that way, ahead. He is watching the man: the way he strides to the gate, bouncing slightly in his boots, his calf-muscles flexing beneath the wide knee-length shorts, the flop of hair at the front and the close-shaved neck as he bends for the catch.
The boy is intent. Watching Dad. Watching what Dad is. Drinking it in: the essence of Dadness.
The man pushes the gate with one arm, abruptly, too hard - the boy misses a breath - and sure enough, the gate swings violently, bounces off the stone wall and begins to swing back again while the man is already returning to the car. But then it slows, keels out once more, and comes to rest, wide open, against the wall: the man judged correctly after all. The boy is relieved. And, as the man drops into the driving seat something in the boy’s chest gives a little hop of joy and he cries excitedly, ‘Oh, I brought my torch!’
Coming downstairs after finding his torch, he overheard his mother say what she thought of the expedition.
Mad, she was calling it, as he knew she would. ‘Mad! The first time in four months he has his eight-year-old son and what does he plan to do? Take him camping up a mountain! Talk about macho avoidance activity!’ Her voice was low, and light and mocking, but he heard it catch, and he could also hear Jim, his mother’s boyfriend who lived with them now, shifting at the kitchen table with an unhappy kind of rustle. His mother said: ‘Well, what do you expect?’ There was a choke in her voice now, and suddenly a kind of snarl: ‘You wouldn’t expect him to start now, would you - accommodating his child into his life?’
When the boy stepped into the kitchen he saw her start with alarm and shame. He said, ‘I found my torch.’
‘Oh good!’ she said quickly, wrenching a look of bright enthusiasm onto her face.
The light seeping through her fuzzy hair made the bones of his shoulders ache.
Jim asked kindly, ‘Is it all in working order?’
The boy forced himself to put the torch into Jim’s big outstretched hand, to stand still and attentive while Jim gently twisted the barrel to make the bulb come on.
‘It’s a good one,’ said Jim, pointedly approving, handing it back.
‘Yes,’ said the boy, forcing himself to acknowledge Jim’s kindness and affirmation.
But Jim is not his dad.
***
‘It’s a red one,’ he tells his dad now. ‘It’s in my rucksack.’
‘Oh,’ says his Dad, ‘good, good,’ a little distractedly, driving the car quickly, efficiently through the gate. His dad parks the car neatly, gets out smartly and shuts the gate.
Some yards off on the tufted moor a scattered group of wild ponies lift their heads and sniff the air. One, dappled grey, moves with interest towards the car, man and boy.
The boy is still in the car, tugging at his rucksack, fighting with stiff straps to get at the torch. As the man comes back and puts his head into the open door, he holds it up: ‘Here it is!’
‘Great!’ cries the man. He isn’t looking at the torch.
He is looking away, seared by the glitter of anxiety in his little boy’s eyes.
The horse comes up to the car. She nudges up, puts her nose over the edge of the door. The man bats her away.
It’s OK, the boy decides, that his dad hasn’t looked at the torch, hasn’t studied or handled it like Jim. It’s better: the torch is not for looking at now. It’s better to have for it a proper purpose, to put it away, to carry it carelessly but with meaning, as a warrior might carry his sword. A torch is for lighting when the time comes, for lighting up the expedition of father and son.
‘Come on!’ says the man, all briskness now, and holds the door back for the boy to get out of the car.
Neither man nor boy takes much notice of the horse. The man steps back, and she swings her head out of the way. They go to the boot, and after a moment she slowly follows.
The boy is chattering: ‘Have you brought one too, have you brought a torch?’
‘Oh, yes!’
Is this a problem? the boy suddenly wonders. Does this make one of the torches redundant? For a brief moment he is uncertain, potentially dismayed, a mood which the man, for all his distraction, catches.
‘We can use both of them, can’t we, Dad?
‘Oh, yes! Yes, of course!’
Then a swoop of delight: ‘We can light up more with both, can’t we?’
‘Oh yes, certainly!’ The man too is gratefully caught on a wave of triumph. ‘Oh, yes, two are definitely better! Back-up, for a start.’
Two torches are for lighting a bigger space in the wilderness, for lighting it together. Two torches are for father and son to back each other up.
The man has swung up the car-boot door. The horse, softly curious, is standing behind.
‘What colour is your torch, Dad?’
‘Er…’ The man is peering into the boot, preoccupied once more now, turning his attention to the bags. ‘Er … it’s green.’
Unseen by the man and boy, clouds sweep like opening curtains above the brow of the hill and the grass lights up, bright yellow. Ancient rocks glint like heaving carcasses asleep.
Man and boy both peer intently into the boot. Behind them, the horse looks in too, through dark, deep-fringed eyes.
The man lifts up the tent in its smart holdall-style bag.
The boy still chatters. ‘Is that the tent? What colour is it? Is it that round kind? Does it have a little porch?’
The man says with robust authority: ‘It’s an all-weather mountain tent. Two-man.’
The boy is thrilled. A tent to weather all conditions. In which he and his father will be two men.
The man looks up - for the first time - at the path they will take, which runs from the gate to the brow of the hill. Then he groans: ‘I didn’t bring a compass.’
The boy’s eyes are suddenly wide with fear and dismay: not with the notion that they’ll get lost, but because of the way the man’s shoulders slumped and the tent in his hand dropped back onto the boot floor.
But then the man says quickly, almost brightly, ‘Never mind!’ and swings the tent out.
The boy breathes with relief. ‘I’ve got a compass,’ he cries, ‘and guess what, I forgot mine too!’
Unpublished endorsement : A terrific collection — luminous, witty and wise.
Livi Michael
Previous review quote: For ‘Star Things’: Almost ethereal in its strangeness and has great energy at its heart
Brendan O’Keefe Literary Review
Previous review quote: For ‘Star Things’: Integral, readable and stylish
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