Padrika Tarrant

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Biographical note:  Padrika Tarrant was born in 1974, and has lived in Norwich for 14 years. She studied sculpture at Norwich School of Art, where she developed an unhealthy fixation with scissors and the work of Jan Svankmajer. Broken Things is her first full-length work, reflecting both an interest in surrealism and her own experience of psychosis. She shares her home with a three year old daughter, an ill-mannered cockatiel and far too many animal skulls.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844718399
ISBN:  9781844718399
Author:  Padrika Tarrant
Title:  Broken Things
Series:  Salt Modern Fiction (Electronic)
Product class:  DG
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  FNB
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  16-Sep-10
Extent:  144pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  16 mm
Weight:  216 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 6.5
Price:  USD 9.99
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  Broken Things encompasses a world of fractured realities and urban magic. Here are voices lost inside themselves, where the world is lopsided and nothing may be trusted. A kitchen knife crawls after a little girl to keep her safe and an old lady hears her mother calling from a cupboard.

Main description:  “In fact, the higher I climbed, the more I felt the crawling horror of knowledge. At the foot of the stairs, all of truth lay torn open, flayed; with me above it, omniscient and shaking, not looking down.”

Broken Things encompasses a world of fractured realities and magic. Here are voices lost inside themselves, where the world is not as it should be and nothing may be trusted. These are the lives that are eked out at the very edges of the city, where God might be found in a bonfire or a bag lady can burst into a flock of pigeons and wild laughter.

This book picks at the familiar parts of the everyday and frays them, very slightly, reminding us of the beauty and fear of dreams, of things just glimpsed through the corner of the eye. A woman becomes a gas explosion, or witness to the death of a nameless man in a library. A kitchen knife crawls after a little girl to keep her safe and an old lady hears her mother calling from a cupboard.

Broken Things is a book for those who have not outgrown fairytales; for those who like to feel just a little disturbed; for those who remember the ancient creeping of childhood darkness and the exquisite glory of snow.

Table of contents:
Coffinwood
Ascension
Darling
Anatomy
Birds
Blade
Bride
Counting
Cutpurse
Demon
Epiphany
Collapse
Waiting
Gas
God
Gone
High
Listen
Loud
Love
Mending
Music
Nightmare
Nightswimming
Passing
Procession
Scream
Shopping
Silver
Scream
Sleeper
Sunset
Underpass
Vanity
Voice
Witness

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Excerpt from book:  

Darling

Until today, I always pushed a pram, just in case I find a baby. People lose them all the time, don’t they, so the chances are some day I’ll get lucky and pick one up. I’m kind, and ever so patient; a baby wouldn’t be badly off with me, I don’t think.

I save stuff, keep safe what nobody else cares for, whatever Jesus sends my way. My heart is full of darkness, otherwise I would be an angel, but still he does let me have things, little things like chewed gum and broken bottles, and words. I wrap them in tissue paper to keep them safe, except the words, which are fragile and have to be learned by heart.

So, it wasn’t a big shock when I found the dog; I was overjoyed, and sent little thankyous to heaven by the thousand, because a dog is very nearly a baby. He was black and white, and wet with blood, and when I found him he was so vulnerable and wounded that I simply cried. I called him Darling, because that is a good name for someone you love.

When I lifted my Darling from the roadside, the utter looseness of his body shocked me so much that I all but dropped him. His head lolled at a sick angle; he seemed boneless, just a floppy mass of joints. No wonder he needed me so badly. I lowered him into my pram, and as if at some secret sign from God, it began to rain.

I wheeled him right indoors; my bedsit’s on the ground floor, which is lucky. The landlady is godless and dyes her hair; she hates me because I pain her conscience. I save things from being ruined, and I keep them in my room; she’s envious of my vocation.

When I lit the gas fire and turned on the light, I looked down at my Darling. He was wrong, all flat across the ribs where the car’s wheel had squashed him, and sort of funny, as if his arms and legs had been attached backwards.

I hunted around the room for plastic bags, and with them I propped him into a better shape, around the sides and under his chin, until his muzzle was resting on his front paws. He had big ears shaped like triangles and a little short tail.

I stroked his poor chest and tried to make it better with my fingers, but in the end I had to pad it out with a Sainsbury’s bag, which I fed inside through a slit I made in his skin. I was terrified I’d hurt him, but Darling was so brave, he didn’t complain once, just lay quite still and let me help him.

It was after three when I finished, and I was worried, because it’s binmen day on a Friday, and I usually go from house to house, making sure only bad things are left for the dust truck. Generally, I start my rounds at five, but in the end, I was simply too tired. My soul was swimming with love, and that just couldn’t be a sin.

I slept until nine, but my dreams were odd. I heard Darling in my sleep; he was dreaming too, of headlamps and screechy brakes, and he whimpered for hours. I was trying to find him in my room, but somehow I couldn’t; all that I could get my hands on were clumps and clumps of dog hair.

When I said Good morning to my Darling the next day, I was shocked at the state of him. His fur was clotty with blood, and it wouldn’t clean up, not with shampoo, not even with bleach. Eventually, an idea struck me, and I tore up newspaper and made him a brand new skin, layered with glue. He was stiff inside his fur already, and so he didn’t mind at all, having a paper shell. The dents on his surface smoothed out beneath it, and I made him sculpted flanks and the muscular haunches of a prophet dog. He needed a more dignified tail, so I carried on where his left off, and made it curl like a whip along his side.

Darling took ages to dry, even with both halves of the fire on full, and during the night he whined. I began to worry about the landlady, but the noise didn’t seem to bother anyone. By the next day his carapace was almost hard, but poor Darling had begun to seep and stain it, and at any rate he didn’t like being all covered with bad news writing from the paper, so I looked among my piles and boxes for paint. I gave him a lovely black enamelled coat, and I varnished his eyes, which I had left uncovered so he would be able to see.

All that night I worried about Darling’s eyes. What kind of mother would I be, I thought, if I did the wrong thing? God would never trust me again. Perhaps he would be better off with new ones, now he was becoming so beautiful? In my dreams I tried to catch him, but his flesh was soft and loose as wet cotton wool and my fingers went right through.

In the end, I got up before my window grew light. Darling’s eyes were going brown and caving in. I rushed about in a panic, piling up milk bottle tops and buttons and five pence pieces, but none were right. Then a thought came to me from somewhere perfect, and I snapped the thread of my necklace. Darling gazed at me with his golden amber eyeballs, and I was so happy I could have flown to heaven.

That day was like Christmas lights; I found a bit of gold leaf to gild his eartips and I dabbed in a blue scrolled nose with a tiny paintbrush. I stuck tinfoil in strips to give my Darling claws for his feet, and made a clever, latticework design over his spine with picture wire. I left the fire on high to help him dry, and went to bed exhausted.

But to my horror, Darling howled all night and the air in my bedsit grew fat with stink. In my sleep I gagged on it; I coughed and retched myself awake a dozen times. When I woke in the morning, I jammed cushions along the gap beneath the door to stop the smell of Darling crawling down the hallway, and I poured a bottle of violet scent over him.

I wracked my brains for things to make my Darling nice; I glued little paper stars along his front paws and sang him songs to cheer him up. I let him wear my charm bracelet around his proud dog neck, and I decorated the pram like a bier with toilet paper roses. I cut out happy faces from magazines and stuck them over the places where my Darling’s body was oozing.

He was so unhappy; he barked and yelped that night, fit to break your heart. I still tried to catch hold of him as I slept, but all my hands could close upon were bones. He yammered louder than the radio on full volume, and so loud I didn’t hear the landlady come to the door. The neighbours had phoned the police; I got a note, but it went underneath the cushions so I didn’t see.

n the darkness, my Darling spoke. With a voice like wet leaves; he told me that he hated me. I couldn’t believe it, I just couldn’t, but then a godly wisdom came upon me and I knew what I had to do. I forced myself to be happy, for my Darling’s sake, and before five I left the house, with him staring out from the pram like a prince dog.

I stopped along the roadside, wherever there was something beautiful, and I filled the space at Darling’s feet with flowers from gardens and crisp packets and handfuls of fresh green grass, until he looked like a holy effigy from Walsingham, processing down the street on a feast day.

We watched the sun come up, Darling and I, as we stood on the kerb at the spot where I had found him first. Although I’d loved him, my Darling had not loved me back, and I knew that it was only kind to return him to the place where I had found him. Even so, I could not quite find it in my heart to strip him of all his glory, for surely love is a perfect thing, even if futile?

We waited there for an hour, in a morning that was horrible with bird song, until a car came past, and then I pushed my Darling out in front of it.

Unpublished endorsement :  Padrika Tarrant's stories occupy a dark and gothic landscape. Her writing combines the spirits of Jan Svankmajer, Angela Carter, and Maurice Sendak but with a pure and true originality. The reader will be spellbound, horrified, and entertained all at the same time.

Kate Pullinger

Unpublished endorsement :  There really isn’t really a writer like Padrika Tarrant. Her antecedents are the Comte de Lautréamont and Bruno Schultz, and the animator Jan Svankmajer. She is not a programmatic surrealist of any kind but an instinctive wanderer down knife-edges. Her writing is superbly precise, her intensity of vision luminous, her perception deeply humane, tender yet terrifying. It is the nature of her understanding that is perhaps the most remarkable, yet it would be nothing without the other gifts. Her poor, crazy stuffed houses are overflowing with life, rich with spirits, miracles and creatures who, like the writing itself, shine and darken, jostle, sing and die. They are tangible furnished visions, wonderful and humbling.

George Szirtes

Unpublished endorsement :  Arresting and unsettling, earthy and unearthly, Tarrant’s brilliant miniatures invite comparison with the fictions of Angela Carter and the picture-stories of Edward Gorey or Neil Gaiman. Ultimately all comparisons fall flat, however. For all their dark echoes, Tarrant's work is inimitably her own.

Tobias Hill