“We were coming coming back from the pictures with half a packet of sweeties still coming round the corner at the Meadowside with Mary saying she was feart to go up the road herself…” is the first gasping line of this searingly sad and harrowing story spun in a child’s voice. In just five short pages with no full stops, we bear witness to two little kids attempting the journey home after a trip to the cinema, with abject danger on the approach from behind. It makes me genuinely sad reading this, like poring over the details of a news story about a missing woman, or watching a disturbing documentary. The lack of grammar intensifies the tension; the unbearable innocence of a child who’s ‘not quite right’ in the head (perhaps?) and then the last two pages, where words take on a tormenting typography in poetic form. Galloway is a genius at realistic (and phonetic) voices, the ones that are underrepresented in literature, i.e. working class invectives. Her first collection of stories platforming these unfamiliar pitches was published in 1990, a year before Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments and three years before Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. For me she’s the forerunner of the power of slangerature; flinging voice unashamedly onto the page as lived and as it sounds. You’ll be hard pushed to find pointless ‘nodding’ Victoriana in her effortless sentences. Just brilliant.
First published in Where You Find It, Jonathan Cape, 1996, also in Collected Stories, Vintage, 2009
A Personal Anthology 