I am sure all you readers have already read and appreciated Amanda’s first short story, and I am thrilled to publish a short-short story of hers, accompanied by a fittingly short-short podcast interview. As always, you can listen to the entire interview, to this segment, download either to your mp3 player, read the transcript and of course, read the story! So, without further ado, after this short-short intro, here are the interview and story:

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Ilaria: So let’s talk about the other short piece. Because that one, you sent it to me without telling me anything about it, and so I don’t know what it was for. But I understand that it too came from something that had a limit of words, right? It was only 250 words. Is that possible?
Amanda: Yeah, that was just a 250-word story.
Ilaria: Was that part of a competition also?
Amanda: No, that was actually written purely as sort of a discipline piece, taking a sort of an idea and then having to create a story in a complete round in a very tight – within a very tight discipline. So it was purely for my own pleasure. And also it was kind of a lesson in disciplined writing.
Ilaria: What made you decide that you needed to do this experiment in discipline?
Amanda: Well, some of it was – I don’t know if you remember, going back to our school days, but we had an absolutely fantastic English teacher called David Day, who would occasionally make us do précis work. And it took me a while to actually get the hang of doing that, where you would pare and pare and pare something down, without losing the sense of it, into something concise and clear, but still, you know, something that possessed a sort of a creative edge. And I think in terms of my other writing, which is purely something that I absolutely enjoy doing, in terms of just practicing writing, I think it’s very interesting for me to do that. And it’s something that I do practice, is the taking of an idea and boiling it down into something which is sort of sharp and spare. And that’s the reason I do it, really. It teaches me. I learn when I do it. And I quite like the process of going back, back, back and seeing where it was wrong and where I can make it better, but without becoming overly wordy. That’s why I do it.

250-Word Story Number Two

She flashes him the Monroe smile balcony to balcony across long drop and metallic city air. In her twenties he guesses, white teeth, neat nose and giggly eyes, with a chuckle like Betty Boop. She works in the centre as a warden for the old folks.
He beams back and gives her his air force salute, pulling himself tall, feeling his waistband slip a little as he drags in and up.
At night, lying awake, he wonders how her body might feel sliding across the satin sheets which, some days, slink weightily on her retractable line and thinks about running his hand up the unfeasible curve at the back of her waist, her nipples hard and bright as red liquorice torpedoes, her breath warm and puttery like a pony.
By day, he is drawn toward the window, ashamed and pained by this obsessive and desperate checking. He has filled pots with geraniums allowing for prolonged bouts of watering and compulsive dead heading, his mind and eyes never fully on the job.
Does he stand a chance? She looks over often enough and there is definitely invitation in her backward glance as she turns to go inside and once, three years ago she had, at the centre, held his hand, nuzzled her lips against his cheek and whispered, “Happy birthday” as she revealed the cake into which she had, with skilled fingers and faultless symmetry, inserted through the smooth fondant and deep into the yielding sponge, his eighty five candles.

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When I was young I lived alternately in Florence, Italy and New York City on the Upper West Side. At the age of 9 I settled with my family in Florence, but for two years, from 1976 to 1978 I alone left Florence and went off to England to boarding school. How we settled on the particular school I went to is a long and interesting story that I will save for another day. Suffice to say that we settled on a Quaker school (in large part because it was coeducational) in West Yorkshire, outside a small town called Pontefract (from the Latin, “broken bridge”).The school was called Ackworth (and still is, though now I understand things have changed quite a bit from the way they were back then).

At Ackworth I made a small group of lifelong friends, three fellow students and two teachers. Amanda was one of my fellow students, in my same year. We were part of a group of four girls who did pretty much everything together. We used to sing in the hallways, and it was wonderful because the acoustics of the stone walls and cavernous halls were quite marvelous.

About 10 years ago we were back in touch briefly on the occasion of a reunion at Ackworth that I was sadly unable to attend. And then, as these things often go, we lost touch again. Then in November, one morning I receive an email saying, “I’m coming to New York on business, I’m arriving today. Can we get together?” Well, it was wonderful. It felt like no time had passed and at the same time it felt as if a lifetime had passed. The affection and connection between us was, if anything, strengthened and made more mature by the intervening years. This is what I mean by lifelong friends. Whether or not we see each other physically is immaterial. We can pick up where we left off and fill in the blanks as we go. And that is what we proceeded to do in the four or five days she was here. It was glorious!

Below you can listen to the podcast of the entire interview, of this first segment, or download either to your MP3 player. You will also find the transcript of the first segment of our interview and then…. Amanda’s short story The New Scarlet Dress, a retelling in contemporary style of a Canterbury Tale, one of the 7 winning selections out of 17,000 submissions to a competition sponsored by the BBC.

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Ilaria:   Hello, everybody. I’m here with my friend Amanda, and I’ll just give you a very quick background. Amanda and I went to boarding school together 30 years ago in West Yorkshire, in England, and she is from Yorkshire… right, Amanda, you’re from Yorkshire?
Amanda: Yeah, I was brought up in London, actually. I was living in London at the time—or just North of, when we were at school together.
Ilaria: Oh, okay. But you live in Yorkshire now, right?
Amanda: I do, yeah, and have done for a long time.
Ilaria: Okay. So, we were out of touch with each other for 30 years – well, we did get briefly in touch a few years ago, didn’t we?
Amanda: We did, yeah.
Ilaria: Oh, there was supposed to be a reunion, right?
Amanda: Yes.
Ilaria: Right. But then we lost track of each other again. But anyway, we never saw each other for 30 years, until just recently, when – was it in December that you came? [2008]
Amanda: No, just before Thanksgiving, in November.
Ilaria: In November, just before Thanksgiving and for just a few days, we got to spend a little time together, and we could not talk quite fast enough to summarize 30 years of living in those four days or however many days it was. But at least we got to see each other again, rekindle our friendship. You got to visit my home, meet my children, and I got to find out all about your wonderful husband.
Amanda: Yeah.
Ilaria: Okay, so you have been so kind as to send me three wonderful pieces of your writing, and I would just like to introduce my readers to you as a writer and to have a little background on these three stories. Let’s start for the piece that you wrote for the BBC, and just tell me first what kind of a competition it was that you participated in and how it all unfolded.
Amanda: Well, this was probably, I don’t know, five or six years ago now. And the BBC were running a series of Canterbury Tales, dramatizations of Canterbury Tales, but done in a contemporary style. And at the time they had a fairly major project running to look – it was to encourage new writing. And they put a call out for people to write short stories which followed the lines of a Canterbury Tale. And it’s so old now that I can’t even remember which Canterbury Tale I followed. But I wrote The New Scarlet Dress, which is what I sent to you. Can you hear me?
Ilaria: Yes, yes.
Amanda: And that was basically the competition. So I wrote the story and sent it in, and it was selected as one of the winning entries, which was fantastic. Out of 17,000, I think.
Ilaria: Wow! Out of 17,000 how many did they select?
Amanda: I think they selected seven stories. And out of that selection I think they broadcast three. Unfortunately mine wasn’t one of the ones they broadcast.
Ilaria: I can’t imagine why they would not broadcast it.
Amanda: No, it was very strange. And I did sort of follow it up and try and chase down why they wouldn’t have done that. And they did send me a pen, a cheap biro, which I was completely stunned by. But when I sort of tried to find out why… You know, my feeling was that if they were going to select three and broadcast three, then that’s what they should have done. But to select seven and only broadcast three seemed like a very bizarre way of working things. But I couldn’t seem to open any dialogue with them about why that was.
Ilaria: Was there a money reward involved, or not?
Amanda: No, there was no financial reward at all. And I think the BBC are quite famous for this. It’s that they pay lip service to the idea of encouraging new writing, but when it actually comes down to it they’re really not that interested. And I have to say, given my experience… I’ve got a telephone ringing in the background here.
Ilaria: That’s okay, unless you want to answer it.
Amanda: No, I’m going to cut it off. Given my experience on that occasion with the BBC I would never take part in anything that they…
Ilaria: Sponsored, again.
Amanda: Yeah. Never again.
Ilaria: I don’t blame you. So anyway, so you can’t remember which Canterbury story you were adapting, as it were, or rewriting.
Amanda: No.
Ilaria: That’s very interesting.
Amanda: Well, it’s slightly shaming, I think.
Ilaria: I found the story a little bit frightening.
Amanda: Did you?
Ilaria: I found it very well written and compelling, and I couldn’t put it down, the same as all your other writing, but I was a little scared by the intensity of the feelings. Obviously the situation in the story would lead to that, would lead to very intense feelings. But I was nonetheless a little frightened by them.
Amanda: Well, I think in terms of the story, what I wanted to get over was the bleakness of life in the Yorkshire Dales. Especially in a Dale like Swaledale. The Dales in Yorkshire are named for the rivers. So the River Swale runs through Swaledale and the River Wharfe runs through Wharfedale, and Swaledale is one of the most bleak and cheerless Dales, certainly in the winter when it becomes very snowy and you can see a long distance down this valley. It’s very inhospitable. And to be farming in somewhere like Swaledale would have been, and still probably is… You’re working on land at the end of its tether, really. And this in a way was what I wanted to portray, was life at the end of its tether. This is the story of a woman who married for all the right reasons a man whom she believed she could make something of. That between them they could create some warmth. But actually he was brutal and cold and singular. He didn’t want to share his life. And it’s really quite a sad story, about a woman who is completely deprived of any joy or affection or warmth. And that plays out in the whole atmosphere of the farm and her life. And her ultimate revenge. And so, whilst it’s kind of bleak and brutal and paints a very stark description of a sad life, there is also a wonderful justice at the end.
Ilaria: Definitely. I agree.
Amanda: It sort of pleased me. It’s almost a joke. She almost has the final laugh.
Ilaria: The last laugh, yes. She definitely does. Although she’s been deprived of so much – I mean, the last laugh can’t quite make up for all those years of suffering, but… Still, it’s a new beginning for her.
Amanda: It’s a new beginning. And I don’t define, I don’t think, how old she is, and so, you know, she could have 30 years of new life.
Ilaria: And I hope she does.
Amanda: Me too! Me too.
Ilaria: I really hope she does. I think that you showed great talent in that story and I’m not surprised that it was selected. But it’s still very nice to know that it was selected among 17,000 entries. I mean, that’s pretty amazing.
Amanda: It was a fairly significant thing. I think the interesting thing about writing that, as well, there was I think a 1,200 word count. And to tell a complete story from beginning to end in 1,200 words takes a lot of polishing.
Ilaria: A lot of chiseling.
Amanda: Yeah, and discipline. And when you’ve got three words over and you’ve polished so much you don’t know where you’re going to lose those three words from, it’s quite interesting. But I really enjoyed writing that.
Ilaria: Well, it’s very good and I’m very pleased that you’re allowing me to publish it.

The New Scarlet Dress

Standing in the kitchen window, she watches him with interest.  She looks him right in the eye, staring him down with blend of curiosity and encouragement in her face and continues with the washing up.

She watches with fascinated pleasure as he clutches at his ropy brown neck and drags at the buttons of his work shirt, clawing at his chest, his mouth opening and closing like a crooked barn door. Throughout his monstrous stumble across the yard, he keeps his eyes on hers, disgust, hatred and frustrated rage still presenting through the fear, which flashes and glistens in his watering eyes. She knows that he is imploring her with gurgling ratchety gasps, but she cannot hear him now that she has closed the window. She gives him a final sunny smile and turns away, quickly drying her hands and lifts her bag and the keys to the old Land Rover from the hook by the door.

She steps over him in the yard, he has fallen now and one outstretched, sinewy hand is weakly flexing and grasping toward her sturdy ankle. She hears him whisper, “Please” and feels gratified that his final word to her is one, which he hasn’t spoken in forty years of marriage.

Bouncing down the farm track, tooting a jaunty good-bye on the horn she clicks on the dusty car radio, – The Archers, was this how she had imagined farming life would be when she had married him?  Harsh years have blotted out any memory of youthful hope, but now on this unexpectedly joyful morning, she can feel the long forgotten but familiar and beautiful rush as a plume of adrenaline rises up and tickles excitedly at her soaring heart.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

He had made her life an unrelenting hell of spite and emotional deprivation, with the occasional end of a blunt rolling pin jammed hard into the soft of her waist or a push in the face thrown in for good measure.  Absorbing the crushing force of his verbal and physical assaults, she never answered back, but she refused to cower in the face of his hateful disregard.

When she met him he had been quiet and stern, traits she had misread as shy and measured. He had barely left the remote farm, the benefit of schooling limited by the seasons of lambing, haymaking and inclement weather. Now she knew that he would have had neither the time nor personality for playmates or play.

In common, they shared no siblings and older parents, hers brittle, his joyless and mean in their isolation. She had been twenty-eight, old for those days to be unmarried. He had been her one boyfriend and she had believed in her inexperience that she could soften him, make him shine, that together they could make something warm and wholesome of their lives, like good bread.

They had married on the second Saturday in January.  Just six of them and the Minister shivering in the inhospitable Methodist chapel, his father refusing to pay extra to have the lights switched on, the date chosen because it wouldn’t interfere with farm work.  They had spent one fumbling night in a Bed & Breakfast further up Swale dale and then had moved on the Sunday morning into the farmhouse, a coffin of damp and silence, which she was to endure alongside his chilling parents.

Grudgingly, he shared his boyhood bedroom, cold and shabby with twin beds and sad wallpaper. One mean chest of drawers, a narrow wardrobe and a strip of scrim on the linoleum floor furnished their loveless nest.  She recalled her new mother-in-law snorting with astonished derision when she requested more hangers for her clothes.  “You won’t be needing dresses round here. I should stack your fine stuff at the bottom of the trunk in the box room.”  She had not lied.  In forty years, she had never been further than a village dance, the last time thirty-five years ago.  She had never danced. Not ever.

His parents had lived on for twenty unkind years and then both died within six months; his mother quickly of cancer and his father she had found folded and cold in the chair by the pale, used ashes of the fire on Valentines day.  Her heart had soared a little on that February morning, it had been the best and only Valentine gift of her life.

Once she had tried to leave, to despondently re-insinuate herself into her parents dispirited home, but they traditionally believed that you made your bed, and jeered in disbelief when she had tried to tell them how her life was.  “Don’t be ridiculous Margaret,” her father had said dipping another plain biscuit into his tea and turning back to the Sunday evening church programme.

She had trudged her way through forty years of misery, every hideous second marked by the mocking metronome of the kitchen clock ticking the bleak rhythm of their existence, while she imagined a life that she saw only through other peoples windows. He had made for her a plateau of grey, punctuated by black pits of sadness and mountains of bleak despair.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

She parks in the market square and goes shopping for the things that she will need over the next few days while it will be unseemly to be seen out and about. Simulated grieving won’t be necessary, she doesn’t really know anybody and those who might observe, once the news of his death gets around, will read her calm as quiet dignity. As for the funeral, she is sure that she will be the only person in church. She’ll need a new dress. Not black, it will have to be something she can wear again.

She drives slowly back to the farm, rippled ice cream, pasta and Belgian chocolate biscuits, three things she has never bought before, brightening the basics in her bag.  He lies where she left him, his arms and fingers stretched toward the house.  A piece of straw has lodged in the corner of his sticky, contorted mouth and a few blades of grass mingle in his wispy hair. A fly sips at one corner of his drying eye, which stares opaquely at her brown sandals.  She looks down at him for a few moments and nudges him with her foot, the fly circles and settles again.  She contemplates a sharp kick in the kidneys but then thinks better of it, instead, humming, she unlocks the house, puts her shopping on the kitchen table and phones the doctor’s surgery.

The doctor arrives ten minutes later followed by an ambulance; its blue lights make a strange stuttering strobe against the stone farm buildings. The doctor, realising there is nothing to be done looks into her face with pity and puts his arm around her shoulder, she adopts an attitude of resigned blankness.  Inside, he makes tea whilst she stands at the window watching the men lift him onto the stretcher and cover him with a blanket, feeling contempt for the tenderness with which they handled his vile, wiry body.

The doctor asks if she has someone who could come and sit with her.  She says no.  He stays an interminable hour, sympathising with the horror of finding him dead, insisting that her lack of tears indicates delayed shock and leaves three sleeping tablets, telling her to call the surgery if there is anything she needs.  She stands in the doorway, arms folded until certain that he has gone, then goes upstairs and lays her dead husband’s only suit on the bed ready for the undertakers.  Everything else she stuffs into bin liners, handling his spent possessions between pinched fingers, her lips curled in disgust.

Moving from room to room, she throws wide windows and curtains, thinking of his mother who had kept them closed, insisting that it faded the wallpaper. The same dark discipline was maintained even after the poisonous old bitch had died.  She revels in the pure smoothness of her forty year old, but still new, cotton wedding sheets as she makes up the big bed in the best room.

Picking Chrysanthemums from the garden, she arranges them in a crystal vase from his mother’s cabinet and places them on the best linen cloth now spread defiantly on the scarred kitchen table.  She gets out the silver and the fine china, throwing the plain stuff in the bin and tunes the radio to a music station.

The kettle whistles on the battered cream Aga and a clean breeze filters through the kitchen as she places six chocolate biscuits on a plate, determined to eat every one as she remembers the time he had hawked and spat into the leftovers of a rice pudding.  “Fat cow,” he had muttered, sneering as he had closed the door behind him.

Pushing the last of the biscuits into her mouth and releasing a sigh of delicious satisfaction, she makes her way to the boot room and retrieves the key he had artfully hidden, but not artfully enough, from a groove in the top of the doorjamb. She drags the blanket box into the light, its scraping across the flags a now familiar sound.  This same scraping, years before, had drawn her from her bed one night and she had walked in on him, bent over the open trunk and rifling through the pile of rough blankets like a nesting rat. He had stood quickly the tin which he held fell to the floor and opened, spilling tight rolls of pink and green.  He had grabbed her, squashing her compliant cheek hard against the wall, pinching with vicious fingers “It’s mine,” he hissed and foamed, “You will have none of it. This goes with me. Do you understand you hateful silent bitch? Or I’ll haunt you to your grave.”

Just once when he had been out for the day at a county fair she had looked, running her hand across the bumpy ridges of the neat rolls of notes. It had felt like freedom. She had been scared then that he would know what she had done, until she heard the scraping of the trunk several nights later and suffered no retribution.

She tips the tin with a flourish onto the kitchen table, rolls of money running onto the floor and finds a note, written in his coarse hand, which reads.  ‘This money belongs to Jack Barker and its total value will be buried with him. This is my final and solemn wish.’  She opens the Aga door and throws the note into the flames.

The inquest showed that he had died of a heart attack, the undertakers had collected his suit and he had been spruced up for display at the chapel of rest.

He looks as foul in death as he had in life although they have straightened his face.  She leans over the coffin beaming at him and taps his hard cold cheek. “Just thought I’d pop in. Let you know, I’m going to sell the lot, the farm, the furniture, all of it.  Should see me right for the rest of my days.  The money in the tin, I counted it last night, sixty three thousand four hundred and twenty seven pounds. And I found your note. Although I hate you with every last morsel of my being, out of respect, I agree with your final wish. It’s only right and fair.”

She reaches into her new handbag and draws out a folded piece of paper. With one hand she prises open his right eye, peeling it apart like a dry wound. With the other she unfolds the cheque and holds it close before his captive stare. “See now. Sixty three thousand, four hundred and twenty three pounds exactly.”  She folds it again and tucks it into his inside breast pocket, pats the outside of his jacket and then flicks the end of his nose hard.  “There you go Jack.” She says smiling as she smoothes down her new scarlet dress.

Can you tell which of the Canterbury Tales inspired this excellent story of Amanda’s? I will go back to my copy and see if I can figure it out. Meanwhile, stay tuned for more inspired and inspiring surprises from this highly talented new author!

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