Postcard stories, p.1
Postcard Stories, page 1
Postcard Stories
OTHER TITLES FROM THE EMMA PRESS
PROSE PAMPHLETS
First fox, by Leanne Radojkovich
Me and My Camera, by Malachi O’Doherty (Nov ’17)
The Secret Box, by Daina Tabūna (Nov ’17)
POETRY PAMPHLETS
Dragonish, by Emma Simon
Pisanki, by Zosia Kuczyńska
Who Seemed Alive & Altogether Real, by Padraig Regan
Paisley, by Rakhshan Rizwan
POETRY ANTHOLOGIES
Urban Myths and Legends: Poems about Transformations
The Emma Press Anthology of the Sea
This Is Not Your Final Form: Poems about Birmingham
The Emma Press Anthology of Aunts
POETRY BOOKS FOR CHILDREN
Falling Out of the Sky: Poems about Myths and Monsters
Watcher of the Skies: Poems about Space and Aliens
Moon Juice, by Kate Wakeling
The Noisy Classroom, by Ieva Flamingo
THE EMMA PRESS PICKS
Malkin, by Camille Ralphs
DISSOLVE to: L.A., by James Trevelyan
The Dragon and The Bomb, by Andrew Wynn Owen
Meat Songs, by Jack Nicholls
Bezdelki, by Carol Rumens
For Margaret and Diane, my two favourite readers
THE EMMA PRESS
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by the Emma Press Ltd
Text copyright © Jan Carson 2017
Illustrations copyright © Benjamin Phillips 2017
All rights reserved.
The right of Jan Carson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
ISBN 978-1-910139-68-4
A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.
Printed and bound in Great Britain
by TJ International, Padstow.
The Emma Press
theemmapress.com
queries@theemmapress.com
Birmingham, UK
‘Your life, so full of people you can hardly
believe it will ever end.’
From ‘One Hundred Characters’, a story by Sam Allingham from his collection The Great American Songbook (A Strange Object, 2016)
Contents
WEEK 1 – Portballintrae Harbour
WEEK 2 – Albert Bridge, Belfast
WEEK 3 – Botanic Avenue, Belfast
WEEK 4 – Belfast International Airport
WEEK 5 – Lower Newtownards Road, Belfast
WEEK 6 – Cathedral Quarter, Belfast
WEEK 7 – Ulster Hall, Belfast
WEEK 8 – Armagh
WEEK 9 – Whiteabbey
WEEK 10 – Bedford Street, Belfast
WEEK 11 – Queen’s Film Theatre, Belfast
WEEK 12 – The Sunflower Bar, Belfast
WEEK 13 – East Belfast
WEEK 14 – Botanic Avenue, Belfast
WEEK 15 – Albertbridge Road, Belfast
WEEK 16 – Belmont Road, East Belfast
WEEK 17 – Newtownards Road, East Belfast
WEEK 18 – Holywood Road, East Belfast
WEEK 19 – Queen’s Film Theatre, Belfast
WEEK 20 – Dunadry
WEEK 21 – Belmont Road, East Belfast
WEEK 22 – Donegal Square, Belfast
WEEK 23 – Botanic Avenue, Belfast
WEEK 24 – Botanic Avenue, Belfast
WEEK 25 – Ulster Hall, Belfast
WEEK 26 – Catalyst Arts, Belfast
WEEK 27 – Albertbridge Road, Belfast
WEEK 28 – Belmont Road, East Belfast
WEEK 29 – Linenhall Street, Belfast
WEEK 30 – Botanic Avenue, Belfast
WEEK 31 – Ikea, Belfast
WEEK 32 – Dublin Road, Belfast
WEEK 33 – Salt Island, Strangford Lough
WEEK 34 – Ulster Hall, Belfast
WEEK 35 – Ballymena
WEEK 36 – Knocknagoney, East Belfast
WEEK 37 – Donegal Square, Belfast
WEEK 38 – Cathedral Quarter, Belfast
WEEK 39 – Holywood
WEEK 40 – Ulster Hall, Belfast
WEEK 41 – Sydenham Drive, East Belfast
WEEK 42 – Bedford Street, Belfast
WEEK 43 – Belmont Road, East Belfast
WEEK 44 – Belmont Tower, East Belfast
WEEK 45 – Victoria Square, Belfast
WEEK 46 – Botanic Avenue, Belfast
WEEK 47 – Ulster Hall, Belfast
WEEK 48 – Ulster Museum, Belfast
WEEK 49 – Donegal Square, Belfast
WEEK 50 – Linenhall Street, Belfast
WEEK 51 – Ormeau Road, Belfast
WEEK 52 – St George’s Market, Belfast
Acknowledgements
About the author
About the illustrator
About the Emma Press
Other Emma Press pamphlets
Postcard Stories
Week 1 – January 1st 2015
PORTBALLINTRAE HARBOUR
Susan Fetherston
Every New Year’s at midday we meet at the harbour and cast our ghosted bodies into the sea. We are no longer seventeen and, over the years, have progressed from last night’s underwear to trunks and t-shirts and, finally, oil-sleek wetsuits, straining to contain our spreading guts. Like soldiers returning from the Front we are fewer with each passing year. This morning we are two – and a handful of bemused children sheltering beneath their anorak hoods.
Afterwards, shivering, we say ‘Same time, next year?’ and mean, as our fathers must once have meant, ‘All good things must come to an end, even the sea.’
Week 2 – January 9th 2015
ALBERT BRIDGE, BELFAST
Tiffany Sahib
January 9th and every third person over the Albert Bridge is running. The marathon looms like the hope of Heaven or Judgement Day. Some are slick as river fish, in all their proper gear. Others make do with tracksuit bottoms and shirts occasionally slept in. The worst lack all conviction. They move from one mile to two, flat-footed in Converse hi-tops, their feet flip-flopping past the station and the market. From a distance they are pedestrian-slow. Up close they have the look of women who return library books half-finished. The noise of them running is the last hand of the applause parting as it cups the silence.
Week 3 – January 18th 2015
BOTANIC AVENUE, BELFAST
Helen Crawford
In the window of Oxfam a volunteer is undressing a red-haired mannequin. Embarrassed, or perhaps complicit, the mannequin looks upwards and to the right, her eyes painted aquarium blue. Her mouth is beginning to peel.
A volunteer lifts her dress gently and slips it over the place where the leg section slots into the torso. A gap the width of an HB pencil circles her hips like a low-slung belt. The volunteer is careful not to upset her further. Upwards then, over a navel-less belly, breasts set and coloured like two pale brown eggs.
‘Easy does it,’ he says, as he begins to negotiate her neck.
Even through the glass you can see the volunteer is enjoying every awkward second of this until her arms unlock, coming away in his hands like a semi-detached hug.
Week 4 – January 22nd 2015
BELFAST INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, ALDERGROVE
Hannah McPhillimy
A man in the line for Edinburgh has three inflatable worlds in a plastic bag. He is stopped at the departure gate by an easyJet representative.
‘What have you got in the bag?’ she asks. It is seven a.m., too early for lipstick, but she is wearing a thick gash of it: bloody red.
‘Three worlds,’ he replies, and removes them one at a time, clamping them between his feet, because the world is shaped like a soccer ball and inclined to roll if permitted to do so.
‘One item of hand luggage only,’ she states mechanically, already eyeing up the next offender.
The man proceeds to demonstrate how, with great determination and a little pressure, the world (and all those back-up worlds to come) can be deflated and contained within an overhead luggage locker.
Week 5 – February 1st 2015
LOWER NEWTOWNARDS ROAD, BELFAST
Kelly McCaughrain
On the Lower Newtownards Road there are gingerbread men scattered across the pavement like the corpse outlines of gunshot victims. Some are crushed; others shattered. A few remain whole and grinning whilst their comrades lie, mere inches away, decapitated by the local dogs. The trail of the dead begins outside Iceland, extending with grim determination past the bus shelter to the ever-open doors of the Bethany chip shop. One loose gingerbread man might be ignored; two dozen or more grate against the proper order of pavements. In these parts it is almost impossible to tell the difference between a funeral and a protest.
Week 6 – February 5th 2015
CATHEDRAL QUARTER, BELFAST
Claire Buswell
When you were seven years old you threw a dart at a black-haired girl, running away in the garden. The dart lodged and stuck just below her shoulder blade. She fell forwards in the grass. The flight on the dart was red and black and white. These were also the colours of the duvet cover in your parents’ bedroom. This was the 80s. Afterwards the dart came away clean as needles. No harm done. You did not tell and neither did she.
You are still wondering if it was ordinary rage which raised your hand to your chin and flung, or something skinnier: the desire for black hair, an older sibling, or a mother waiting by the school gates in a red sports car. Each time you unbend your arm to give blood or turn your ear towards the piercing gun you recall this black-haired girl running away in the garden and hope you have left a mark she can still see.
Week 7 – February 18th 2015
ULSTER HALL, BELFAST
Emma Must
Up from Downpatrick they came to Belfast on the bus. He, in an anorak. She, in a slightly more feminine version of the same anorak. ‘Waterproofs’, they called them, when the need for a noun arose.
They stopped in Costa for a pair of cloud-topped cappuccinos and split a caramel slice with the dull edge of a teaspoon. Then they trundled on to the lunchtime concert at the Ulster Hall, twenty minutes early for a balcony seat. He, with his ticket printed on the back of an old email. She, with a crossword puzzle printed on the back of hers. It was possible, upon looking closely, to tell his hand from hers, filling in the crossword clues in faint pencil as the bus bumbled its way northwards from Downpatrick.
Week 8 – February 24th 2015
ARMAGH
Sinéad Morrissey
A provincial Northern Irish library, early evening, and the usual suspects have gathered for a creative writing workshop: two amateur poets, a sci-fi guy in a black t-shirt, a lady who writes letters to her sister in Australia, and that one elderly gentleman who’s working on a biography of someone you’ve never heard of.
You read the Richard Brautigan story about replacing American plumbing with poetry.
‘Well,’ you say, ‘what did we think about that?’
‘You’ve a right nerve on you, wee lassie,’ says the elderly gentleman, ‘coming down here from Belfast and reading us that sort of stuff. It’s not even proper writing.’
It is impossible to tell if he’s winding, or genuinely offended.
Week 9 – March 3rd 2015
WHITEABBEY
Ruth Ford
Three writers and a much more useful person gathered for a dinner party. They ate aubergines and couscous impregnated with tequila. Like Jesus, they kept the good wine for pudding. Later, they ended their evening with Bob Dylan and cheese so ripe it might have been shoes. Of course there were anecdotes enough to fill four hours; mostly humorous, occasionally grim. The three writers could not keep themselves from filing away the best of these stories.
‘For later use,’ they thought, ‘in poems and slim novellas.’ They were, in this instance only, rivals dashing to be first pen over the finishing line.
‘There should be a word,’ said the useful person, ‘for calling dibs on a good idea. But then again, there are so many ways to write a good idea down: poetry, prose, theatre plays.’
He thought of writing the entire evening into a sonnet but he did not know where to begin, and there were dishes to be done and, afterwards, the coffee.
Week 10 – March 9th 2015
BEDFORD STREET, BELFAST
Claire Spiers
After her children had grown and left home with the express intention of acquiring children all of their own, the old lady began to find the shoe a little empty. Where she’d once loved the novelty of living inside a house shaped like an old-fashioned brogue, she now felt foolish and overly aware of the neighbours staring each time she unlaced her windows.
At the ripe old age of seventy-two, she put her shoe up for sale and moved into a two-bedroom semi on the edge of town. This new home smelt of dishwasher and double-glazed windows. The old woman missed the fleshy stench of damp leather and the floor, which had sprung underfoot like an air-cushioned sole.
When the children came to visit, dragging with them their own reluctant children, there was nowhere to put them all. The old woman complained about the nuisance and secretly relished the familiar pleasure of so many children and not knowing what to do.
Week 11 – March 16th 2015
QUEEN’S FILM THEATRE, BELFAST
Paul Kane
We were not a dog family. We kept chickens for the eggs and, from time to time, a goldfish or two in a cheap plastic bowl. Nor were we close to any families who did dogs. Consequently, all my assumptions about dogs were drawn from Disney movies and Enid Blyton and those individual dogs – mostly Jack Russells – I’d occasionally encounter, anchored to the Belfast Telegraph sign outside the VG. Therefore, when the yellow dog approached me in the park with its gums pinking like cooked ham slices, also its teeth bared, I assumed this dog’s mouth to be smiling in a peculiarly doggish fashion and extended a friendly hand, which I still miss and, in missing, regret the fact that we were not a dog family.
Week 12 – March 19th 2015
THE SUNFLOWER BAR, BELFAST
Paul Maddern
The twinkle-eyed folk musician Liam Clancy died in 2009. His Aran jumper was made of sterner stuff and persisted well into the next decade. Entering the charity shop circuit in Cork, it migrated north via Limerick and Roscommon, arriving in a Save the Children shop on Belfast’s Botanic Avenue just before Christmas 2014.
A young writer, hoping to look more poetic in cable-knit cream, purchased the jumper, wore it to a reading of no real consequence in a local library and, though it itched like a prison blanket, refused to take it off. He imagined that the right kind of girls would take him more seriously in such a sweater. Besides, there was something of Clancy haunting every stitch of his pullover and, charmed by the grip of songs he was too late to remember, the writer found that his stories now came easier when sung loudly in low-roofed rooms.
Week 13 – March 27th 2015
EAST BELFAST
Dan Bolger
I saw on Facebook that you spent the weekend in Bournemouth. It is too early in the season for British seaside resorts and I cannot help but love you for choosing Bournemouth over other, more continental, cities. The snow has barely melted and there are only locals in the street, their skin tanned potato-tough from that biting wind. The shops, which sell candy rock and novelty hats, have yet to raise their summer shutters. There is no ice cream to be had for love nor money.
In the pictures you are wearing a hat and scarf, two coats (blanketed one on top of the other), and the mittens I gave you for Christmas last year. I hope they are joined together still, with string; the length of them snaking up one sleeve and down the other, circling your back where my arms used to meet.
Week 14 – April 3rd 2015
BOTANIC AVENUE, BELFAST
Tom Stutzmann
This is not quite Ireland proper/is not the Mainland/is certainly not Europe in the Continental sense. This is particularly true on the Friday before Easter when alcohol may only be purchased (legally) between the evening hours of five and eleven.
‘Good Friday,’ the hard-drinking men and women of Belfast are heard to exclaim around about last orders, ‘tell me what’s so bloody good about it?’ (They say this every year as if they’ve only just thought of it.) The average Ulsterman is a stoic breed. Hardened by rain and other damp sorrows he has come to view life’s limits as a challenge.
Good Friday will only be good if he puts the effort in. He begins drinking at five and, when the taps tighten against him, takes his resolve outside to a bus shelter where he consumes six cans of Coors Light in less than an hour, pausing only to piss it out against a lamppost. By closing time he is a ghost of himself. It is no longer Good Friday and he cannot remember the word for resurrection.
Week 15 – April 13th 2015
ALBERTBRIDGE ROAD, BELFAST
Hannah Mill
At the junction where the Ravenhill Road meets the edge of the Albert Bridge, a well-dressed gentleman falls into step beside her. Heel to toe, heel to toe, lunch bags swinging like metronomes, they shoulder each other across the bridge and past the station. They do not speak but she glances sideways from time to time, anxious not to fall behind his proud nose.
