Kit returns to her dead brother’s house to tidy up his literary estate. He got around a bit in his day: extracts from his diaries pastiche Patrick Leigh Fermor’s pre-war adventures in eastern Europe wonderfully well. But it’s not her brother’s memoirs that haunt Kit so much as his attitude. There’s something solvent about it. Something corrosive. Kit’s brother seems capable of plucking despair out of thin air, though given his air was gritted with the smoke from Theresianstadt, he may not have had much of a choice. “We shouldn’t have to live our lives unless we can live in them, thoughtlessly, like the animals,” Kit wrote to him once, and by the story’s latter stages we are inclined to agree.
Right up until the last line, ‘Small Heirlooms’ reads as a complex meditation on the relationship between writing and memory.
“In bed she decided over and over again, ‘He poisoned his own memories, too.’”
This being an M. John Harrison story, you know some fiendishness is brewing. The story holds its insights floating in plain sight, all to be unlocked by that killer last line.
I read this story, which is really two stories held in some sort of stereoscopic suspension, again and again, and I said to myself, “I’m going to learn how to do that.”
Well. Nope. But still I travel hopefully.
First published in Other Edens, edited by Christopher Evans and Robert Holdstock, Unwin Paperbacks, 1987, and collected in Travel Arrangements: short stories, Gollancz, London, 2000
A Personal Anthology 