Scottish author Galloway’s work veers between matter-of-fact and surreal, and her ability to disrupt her own story in a way which brings the reader further into the world is a marvel; her introductory sentences are often startled, as if you’ve caught them midway through an ongoing conversation.
“suddenly
they were both on the ground clutching up
gouging and hacking with hands pulling at cloth and
snatches of hair wound on fingers the flat of flesh slapping
dull on tile”
Inside a shopping centre, narrator Alice observes men beating an unnamed victim up—though she tries to break the fight up herself, it’s the intervention of another passerby which finally finishes the incident. Alarmed by what she’s seen. Alice scours her memory, struggling to remember who she is and why she’s there in the first place. Information arrives in staccato drips, punctuated by strange, capitalised screams over the tannoy system warning her to stay out of other people’s business, and the reader begins to realise that Alice’s marriage to her husband Charles is perhaps as violent in its own way as the scene she’s just witnessed.
First published in the collection Blood, Minerva, 1991
A Personal Anthology 