“Listen to this,” Pierre said to his brother-in-law. He was reading from Rousseau. “Watch a little girl spend a day with her doll, changing its clothes, dressing and undressing it … hours go by, even meals are forgotten … she cannot do anything for herself, she has neither the training, nor the talent, nor the strength … she is engrossed in her doll and in due time SHE WILL BE HER OWN DOLL. See? See what I mean?” He slumped as if he’d been hit by an invisible mugger.
“You mean too many dolls?” Frank asked.
“Too many dolls and not enough fighting.” Pierre stuffed the book back on the Childrearing shelf.
Mum and I live in an old woodcutter’s cottage at the end of a long muddy lane. It’s the kind of place where men arrive in the trees in the middle of the night to dig out a badger sett. Last week they gassed and spaded a whole family. In the moonlight I saw the animals' bleeding, bloated corpses laid out in our garden before they were loaded in a van and taken away.
It’s 2a.m. and freezing cold. Five minutes since I heard the phone ring in my Mum’s room. It can only mean one thing, and sure enough, here she is tapping on my bedroom door.
‘Roy, your father will be here in two hours. Quick, come down and help me light the fire.’
We were fifteen years old and we didn't have enough grey matter between us to form one small but sensible idea. We were dumber than the day was long, and this was high summer, 1975. Standing at the edge of the field we did our best to conceal the lingering stupidity in a blue haze of cigarette smoke. We didn't want Tom Kavanagh to look into our eyes and see the accumulated nothing.
"Opium is just like turnips or spuds," he said in his Bogman accent. "You weed it, you water it and you walk away from it. There isn't going to be any funny business, because funny business would land the pair of you in reform school …"
“I'm forgetting something.” His eyes were closed; his fingertips pressed into his temples. His hands quivered as if straining to hold the skull together.
“It couldn't be that important. You never forget anything,” observed his wife as she diced peppers for a salad. The kitchen opened over a bar to the dining room table where he sat. She glanced up at intervals to regard his lone figure, elbows driving divots into the pea-green placemat.
Click the link above to hear the MP3 of the reading by Katy Darby
“You know, I'm actually getting used to this.” Kathy leant back in the passenger seat, her bare feet resting on the dashboard.
“Those poor movie stars,” said Harvey, steering with his knees and rolling a joint in his free hands. “What if Mel Gibson's place burnt down?”
Kathy laughed. “With Mel Gibson in it.”
For two days they'd driven around the Hollywood hills and Malibu beach-homes, past the smouldering peaks and TV news crews. In downtown LA they watched clouds of smoke rear like doomsday thunder above the shiny towers.
Longtime contributors Niall Boyce, Jonathan Pinnock & Richard Smyth all have books out which you'd be well advised to buy, then read, then buy for others. All genres are catered for, from novels (Niall's Veronica Britton) and short stories (Jonathan's Dot Dash) to nonfiction (Richard's Bumfodder)
KATY LIAR'S DEBUT NOVEL
Liar Katy Darby's debut novel, a Victorian drama called The Unpierced Heart (previously titled The Whores' Asylum) is now out in Penguin paperback. It's had nice reviews in The Independent on Sunday, Sunday Times & Metro (4*).
OUR INTERVIEW WITH ANNEXE MAG!
They came, they saw, they asked us a bunch of interesting questions. Interview by Nick of Annexe Magazine with Katy of LL: here
