HOME IS ELSEWHERE: An Anthology

Published by The Reader Berlin

Text copyright © individual authors 2018

Cover images adapted from artwork by Michael Salu, © Michael Salu 2018

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

www.thereaderberlin.com

The Reader Berlin

PRESENTS

HOME IS ELSEWHERE:

AN ANTHOLOGY

COMPILED BY

Victoria Gosling & Rachel Margetts

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

The Wooden Box by Dolores Walshe

Elsewhere, OK by Alissa Jones Nelson

Thirty-Six Times by Jodie Noel Vinson

Unsettled by Pippa Goldschmidt

Sylvia by Daisy Johnson

Head like a Hole by Amy Lee Lillard

Holiday with T by Sophie Mackintosh

The Sunshine State by Lizzie Roberts

Whatever Trevor by Sharlene Teo

FLYING LESSONS by Lei Wang

CONTRIBUTORS

EDITORS & JUDGES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank everyone at epubli for all their help and support in creating this anthology. Furthermore, this book would not exist were it not for the valiant efforts of Reader Berliners Emily Roach Osbourne, Callie Payne and Rachel Margetts, the munificence of our judges Florian Duijsens, Paul Scraton, Michael Salu, Irenosen Okojie and Katrin Schönig, and the help of the SAND team readers, Lieke Kessels, Matthew Deery and Sara Bellini. An extra thank you is due to Michael Salu for allowing us to use his wonderful artwork. Finally, much gratitude is owed to our sponsors RSVP Berlin, The British Council Germany and – last but by no means least – the amazingly generous Circus Hotel.

FOREWORD

As a child, my home was a farm in the south west of England. Now, I cannot think of a better place to grow up, but at the time I longed for the elsewheres I read about in books, and as soon as I could, I set off to find them. Elsewheres are rather moreish, and it’s all too easy to imagine the next will be the one for you. Eventually, I came to Berlin where I founded The Reader. By some strange magic, the best part of a decade later, Berlin is home too. Writing this brings to mind the moment when you look at someone you love and remember when they were still a stranger, wondering at which point the balance tipped, and how easily it might have tipped the other way.

Berlin is home, but like the lover who keeps surprising you, the city has too many faces to ever entirely lose its elsewhere-quality, so the theme ‘Home is Elsewhere’ - chosen for the 2017 Berlin Writing Prize - is an apt one. It’s a doubly fitting choice since this year’s prize is a month’s residency in the Circus Hotel, a thrilling and gorgeous location for an author to feel not quite at home, to enjoy elsewhere at its most seductive. I’m certain our prize winner Dolores Walshe, whose entry The Wooden Box so impressed our judges, will write great things there.

Seductive is a good word to describe this anthology. Poised, unnerving, moving, daring and everything imbetween, the ten winning submissions showcased here were selected from hundreds of entries by our panel of judges. Reading them is a pleasure, publishing them an honour. Each author has taken the theme and interpreted it in an entirely singular way – from Sophie Mackintosh’s raw and wringing Holiday with T, to the mysterious journey hinted at in Daisy Johnson’s Sylvia; from the disintegrating home in Head like a Hole by Amy Lee Lillard, to Lei Wang’s elegant meditation on the meaning of home in FLYING LESSONS.

I hope that you enjoy reading them and discovering these wonderful writers.Of course, as I write this, it occurs to me that reading is an activity that allows you to be at home and elsewhere at the same time …

Victoria Gosling

Berlin, 2018

The Wooden Box

Dolores Walshe

And you expecting a woman, wanting a woman, someone private like yourself, but instead you get a man, small, olive-skinned with serpentine eyes, standing at your door, Sally spilling around him nervous-grinned talking about him now having refugee status, him and his shabby cloth bag holding life tighter than his loose arm skin. Aw, Jesus. What are you in for here?

Her eyes beseeching, trying to convince you this wizened creature was meant to be a woman, the office got their files confused, didn’t they now, six o’clock of a Friday and her skedaddling to Paris for the weekend, with no place to put him except into the bed you’ve got ready for what you’re now wild suspicious might’ve all along been him.

He doesn’t seem to notice the state of your face or Sally’s gabbling excuses. You mutter that you’re pleased to meet him. His hand is otherworldly for lack of flesh, all phalanges and metacarpals, and instantly you crave banishing the death in him, crave a good run-in with the grim fella, since you couldn’t do it for Manny. It’s a roadside conversion, despite it happening in your hall.

He’s hounded. Eyes deep to bottomless, unfathomable. Winter brows like your own, but jutting in an overhang that’ll stop rain. His grey roof is the surprise, the look of a tsunami in motion, thatched thicker than an old cottage. Even after death, hair keeps growing, he’s testament to this. Nails too, digging into you with the handshake. Abandon your phantom, woman, this is a being you can save.

And what does he see looking from under the brows? Your mind is as empty of the answer as your life.

Searching the kitchen-floor tiles with total dedication as Sally bubbles. Hasn’t she to get to the airport for the romantic weekend? In the hall she whispers how she’s surprised there’s no visible marks showing on the poor devil, no sign of what they’ve done to him. You want to ask her if she’s blind. But she’s down the garden path eager as a swallow heading home.

Hardly a word of English, she chose not to mention that, the kitchen shrinking to what neither of you can say, even if you wanted to say it, the hall clock ticking desolation while the two of you sit shackled in your skins, staring from the tea ageing in your cups to the walls beyond each other’s shoulders.

First time a man’s been in the house since Peter. Can’t count the handyman, the randy aul git.

Outside, the garden’s awake: branches waltzing, shrubs alight, casting his statuary nature into sharp relief. Oh, you’re going to be some company for each other.

You rise, to lift the pot from the stove again. A smell of stale sweat. Could be coming off you, tighten the arms to the sides just in case.

You’re just his halfway house so make the most of it, hot sups of tea with the apple tart by his plate while you talk slow and loud, saying there’s a Kandahar Street in this city, though you don’t say it’s spelled with a C. Afghan though he is, he’s blank at the mention of his own hometown. He lets you stagger on while he demolishes your Eve’s pudding with apple and cream, and you give the finger to the grim fella in your mind.

While he’s showering, you discover you’re the one sweating. You take your sister Manny’s old pink sheets off the bed and put on white ones, then change them back again; the white’s too like a shroud. You forget to tell him the catch is faulty on the bathroom door and through the open crack you sight him stepping from the shower with his kaleidoscope of scars, the map of his country scored on his back.

You sweat even more and make a bolt for your room, spending the night planning English lessons, drafting them out.

But he shows himself a match for you in resolve, the Saturday dragging by with you stuttering and him silent. Finally you shut up. And as if he’s been waiting for a gap, he begins to mumble the odd word, pointing to objects about the house, question marks floating in his eyes. Allah be praised, you want to tell him, as you struggle with frowns, careful smiles, actions, drawings, gestures, mimes. By Sunday evening, you get the feeling both of you might be enjoying yourselves.

He sleeps with his door open, drinks his tea black, wolfs down your stew with some word for it in Pashto, but you can’t get him to say vegetable. Is it stubbornness or his lack of teeth?

He doesn’t ask where you go Monday through Wednesday and you don’t explain how the charity you work for bypassed the grim reaper and brought him to you.

At the market, he’s a hotshot searching out sweet cabbages, the freshest fruit, produce he sold in Kandahar.

Browsing the freebie box outside the bookshop on the way home, you find a poetry book, shove it into your bag. He looks at you askance. You laugh, pointing out the word free. He brightens, sifts through the box, withdraws a gossip magazine. You’re bemused. But it’s either that or tattooed bodybuilders.

Back home, he skips the garden, sitting instead in the conservatory, studying the magazine. Attacks it with your scissors, cutting out pictures, snipping forever, careful and precise.

You give up on interesting him in a game of cards, turn off the TV, rinse the supper dishes. Is this what he learnt to do in the camps, passing time like you playing Solitaire? When he’s in bed, you gawk at the leftovers from what he’s been snipping: headless film stars, celebrities, severed torsos and trunks, a horror hotchpotch of cuttings scattered on an editing-room floor.

You recycle these but still he roots in the box when you pass it. The bodybuilders he ignores. He takes a boating magazine along with some cookery ones, but later discards the rich on their yachts.

The smell of his socks on the landing threatens to gas you and he hangs his washed clothes so badly you sneak out into the garden to rehang them while he’s busy cutting.

He spins the globe in the dining room every night before bed, tracing his thumb from Ireland to Afghanistan, and in the mornings he prays in the pointy corner of your garden. On his knees, doubled over, a sort of Pilates pose. Seems like the fuchsia, all red and purple-faced, might be facing Mecca. What inner compass lets him know?

Sometimes, still sleepless at dawn, you peek out at him prostrate on the dew-laden grass. Brings you back in time to you and Manny spying on Sister Immaculata, flat-out under an apple tree in the convent orchard, arguing with an imagined serpent, shouting her prayers from fleshy lips, the rest of her jailed in her long black habit. The least amount of body exposed, lest God or man, or, God forbid, woman, take pleasure.

You get him to pronounce his name and what he says is You-sef. You repeat it after him, saying it must be Joseph in English. He doesn’t understand when you tease him about using the Angelus bell as one of his calls to prayer. Would his own holy honchos think it heretical, blasphemous, or what? You no longer have this problem yourself since God and you let go of each other.

Sally calls in, romance plumping her, all rosy. Now Yousef’s settled, there’s no hurry finding him a permanent home, is there? You’re delighted, but after her tricking you, you’re parsimonious with your smile.

He discovers Peter’s old tools in the shed, fixes the catch on the bathroom door, then sharpens the shears and fits a strip of wood under the back door to stop the woodlice, his grooved face taking on an air of purpose. It gives the air that you breathe purpose too, as if it really is there to buoy you, save you from yourself.

He eases the lawnmower out of your hands one evening, taking over the grass. Later, when you bring him out tea, he’s lingering at the rosebush Manny planted before she died. Drinking its scent, slightly stooped, green eyes shuttered under the jutting brows, his lids dark as his arms, from times of lifting his face to the sun. Times of peace for him, long gone. The thought scalds.

You drag the iron seat across the grass, gouging tracks into the lines of his mowing. Peter would have a fit, but Peter isn’t here to frown at this lawn he nursed for thirty years, its army of green blades more dear to him than you proved to be.

You set the seat beside the biggest rose, bowed, velvety, petals of blood drifting down. He reaches out a hand, catches one, strokes it with his thumb.

He drinks his breakfast cup out there while the weather lasts, leaning back, absorbing the sun. You watch him while you re-wash his plate at the sink, getting the grease off.

You grow hungry for his footsteps about the house, his cough at night, the creak of Manny’s old bed when he turns. You’re catapulted out of sleep when he shouts from his dreams, once you even had to wake him, afraid whatever it was would break him altogether.

One day while he’s in the garden, you go into his room, set down fresh sheets upon his bed. You’re just leaving when you glimpse something under his pillow. You struggle for a bit, but your conscience legs it. Your own plump fingers lift the pillowcase’s corner; such a small effort to see what’s underneath cannot be a transgression.

Moments pass while you stare at what he’s hidden: the sum of his saved cuttings, the faces he’s snipped from magazines, young, old, and in between, including children, a newborn infant. A dog, for Christ’s sake. All of them, gazing back up at you, arranged and pasted with care, this grouping, dark-haired, olive-skinned as himself, all of them smiling into the void of his life. You stare for a long time, piecing together his family, the searched-out likenesses of strangers to his own loved ones, filling him up, taken with him into sleep to counteract his dreams.

What makes for pain is that it wasn’t always like this. You replace the pillow, your heart knocking against your ribs.

The photographs you once had of Peter. Strange how you can be ambushed, the way it sneaks up. But the truth is your future was never fixed or assured either.

Next time you’ll just hand Yousef the sheets.

One evening you come home to him pacing the hall.

“What,” you say, alarmed, “Yousef, what’s the matter?”

Is he annoyed you’re not home on time to heat dinner? There’s enough stew from last night to feed a battalion; you’ve told him to go ahead if you’re delayed but so far he’s balked, won’t eat till you’re at the table together. Almost as if you two have a life like others.

There’s seduction in that, though you try not to be seduced.

He mutters now in his own language, taking your arm, urging you upstairs. You pause on the landing, panting from the climb.

“God Almighty!”

Still winded when you notice it; the closet at the far end of the landing barren as your life, its light illuminating the slatted wooden shelves. Stripped of duvet covers, sheets, even nightdresses, now piled across the bannisters.

And him ushering you along the passage to the open door, kicking the toolbox out of the way as he pulls you inwards to look. You’re resistant. You’ve never seen these shelves bare since Peter built them, since you lined them with hope, the bedlinen of wedding presents.

And now he’s pointing it out: woodworm. The rot of your life.

He lifts the crowbar, a question in those ridiculous eyes, but you grab his hammer, bring it down repeatedly on a shelf, till the wood splinters with deafening satisfaction. Then you toss it. The light bulb smashes and you race into your room, slamming the door as he begins hacking away at the little that is left.

At least you haven’t blinded him. The hacking takes forever, injecting you with a torpor that curls you into bed fully clothed. The light’s gone out of the sky when the noise finally stops. You sleep then, long, fitfully, wading through dreams of wreckage and abandonment.

In the morning, sunshine. A crackling in the garden, the smell of woodsmoke through the bedroom window. And Yousef with his grey thatched head and serpentine eyes tending the fire diligently in the corner opposite Mecca. You take advantage, run downstairs, grab a cup of tea, return to bed, glad to avoid those eyes. Doze fitfully, vaguely aware of the hammer again in the distance, maybe you even hear the saw?

It’s late when you wake, the air clear, a sense of warmth in the room. Footsteps maybe? Outside the door? Your phone says noon. So does the birdsong through the window. Otherwise, silence. It’s over at last. What’ll you say? Sorry I acted like a madwoman.

But when you open the door your heart rears up. He’s sitting near the gouged-out closet, his crooked little back to the bannisters, hugging something. How long has he been here?

“Yousef, I’m sorry,” you begin, but he’s grimacing with stiffness, hauling himself from the floor, handing you a small wooden box made, he signs to you, from what he’s salvaged.

Inside, the astonishment of your name, carved alongside some Arabic.

“Yousef—” you manage. But already he’s descending the stairs. Somehow you get back into your room before the sobs start, hard and punishing.

You’re gritty-eyed and worn out coming downstairs later, needing to thank him properly, offer some vague excuse for last night.

But he won’t let you, he’s poring over the photos on the sideboard, mesmerised. This has to be a pretence, given he’s looked at them all before.

You let him take your arm now, in atonement. He makes you point to yourself when small, examining your sepia curls, laughing warmly, as at a well-loved child. Your heart speeds up. He points at you and Manny in your teens, arm-in-arm, standing in this very house where you grew up together, then out at the rosebush.

“Yes.” You nod. “That’s Manny.” Dead before the first flower bloomed, before her twenty-first birthday, though you don’t air the words.

He touches the blocky young hand and arm around you at your other side, though you’ve sawn it off at the shoulder. You look away. You’ve managed to hack most of Peter out of your life, your photo albums.

Yousef then leans into your face and raises his brows. You turn back to the photograph again and shake your head. But he senses something.

Shame makes you avoid his eyes. Cutting’s also what you do when you’re walked out on after a lifetime by a man you’ve loved beyond all else, one who’s not seen fit to tell you he’s going, one you’ve gone to the police for, sent out search parties for, only to discover him living with a woman in Canada, a woman heavy with his child.

No. You can’t tell Yousef about your soap-opera life, this man whose entire family has been wiped out by war. And so you walk away from his mystified eyes.

*

Early morning, arriving at the office to missed calls from Sally, a message on your mobile phone.

Though you knew to expect this, it’s a shock. Somehow, you’ve managed to lull yourself into forgetting why he’s come to you in the first place, that he’s forever lost his home. You don’t answer Sally either, when she rings again, you don’t want to hear the words.

On your way home, you buy him a holdall the green of his eyes, but avoid looking at the bookshop as you pass.

They’re in the kitchen, waiting on you, excited, his eyes over-bright, Sally fizzing with the finding of his cousin in London, her belief in serendipity, how everything always falls into place.

To have all torn from you, something given back. Your heart, too, sings for him, in spite of what it longs for itself. Caught up in his joy, you say this calls for a celebration, you’ll make tea. But he’s all packed, there’s a plane to be caught.

So soon? You sit heavily, trying to hide your desolation. Sally, sensing the shift, stuffs his bag into the new holdall, heads out to the car.

For a moment longer you sit together as you did the first day, but now the air is thrumming between you. Then you’re both on your feet, hands clasped, his warm and rough, encasing yours like clamshells. And you, you’re afraid to breathe or think.

Finally, Sally’s back, shattering the air, hustling him too quickly out down the garden path.

You follow them to the hall door, stricken. Manage to wave, holding the rictus of your smile till they’re gone, a short blast on the horn.

He’ll catch sight of his home again when he reaches his cousin.

You stand there, gripping the empty air he’s vacated, holding on to his image.

Presently you’ll go inside, past the clock in the hall, moving through the house, absorbing the silence. Then, into the back garden, to his chair, beside the roses.

You will not succumb.

Sally will give you his address. You’ll send a postcard. He’ll send one back. Because he’s courteous, because he has a warm heart still able to beat over what was done to him.

In the meantime, he’s made you the box, carved his name and yours, in a circle, the circle of the world.

It’s home to you now, and in it you’ll place him, bending to sniff Manny’s rose.