‘The Man Who Walked Through Walls’ by Marcel Aymé, trans. Sophie Lewis

Marcel Aymé was born in France in 1902. ‘The Man Who Walked Through Walls’ is part of a series of absurdist fictions he wrote during the Nazi occupation of France. Written in dead-pan style it concerns a man, Duttilleul, who works in the Ministry of Records. At the age of 43, he discovers he has the power to walk through walls. Aymé has given his character superhuman capabilities, which also happens in other stories in this wonderfully inventive collection.

At first, Duttilleul is disturbed by this ability, and visits a doctor, who diagnoses an ailment of the thyroid, for which he prescribes a bizarre treatment that includes centaur hormones. Aymé’s descriptions are delivered po-faced with a hint of irony, which heightens the sense of absurdism, but allows the reader to suspend belief. (I note that the tilleul, or linden tree, is associated with medical benefits and with truth and liberty. I do not know if this was an intentional reference of the writer.)

What follows is a comedic romp of a story. Dutilleul clashes with his officious new boss who has a “nailbrush moustache” and objects to Dutilleul’s old-fashioned pince-nez and goatee, Moreover, the new man wishes to reform office procedures, and objects to his subordinate’s use of a traditionalist long-winded language in his correspondence. He relocates Dutilleul’s desk to a broom cupboard adjacent to his own office. Dutilleul torments his bullying boss by manifesting his head and upper body through the wall of the man’s office. The outcome of this is that the boss ends up in a mental asylum and Dutilleul is free to return to his usual modus operandi. However, M Dutilleul wonders what good use he could make of his transmural capabilities. He embarks upon a series of robberies, amassing a decent stash of cash and a famous diamond. His calling card is the name ‘Werewolf’ left behind in red chalk. He quickly becomes newsworthy and a folk hero for outsmarting the police. His ever more ambitious thefts undermine the authority of government officials who are forced to resign. Dutilleul becomes a wealthy man. He delights in hearing his colleagues deliver encomiums about his achievements but wishes to become known as the man who is the heroic ‘Werewolf’. This vanity leads him to more spectacular exploits, during which he is arrested and sent to prison, where his abilities allow him to move about the prison and play tricks on the guards. Ultimately, he escapes and changes his appearance, living incognito until he is recognised by the French painter Gen Paul, who had the ability to detect the “least physiological change” in a person. Dutilleul decides to go to Egypt but is stopped in his tracks when he meets an attractive woman. His subsequent amorous adventures weaken his wall-walking abilities, and he develops headaches, for which he takes what he thinks is an aspirin. Of course, it is one of the pills originally prescribed by the doctor. The combined outcome of “over-exertion” and the pill is that he becomes fixed within a wall, where he remains until this day. Herein is the moral! Wonderful stuff and part of a collection of deliciously subversive fiction. There is a sculpture of Aymé portrayed ‘passe-muraille’ in Paris.

First published in French as ‘Le Passe Muraille’ in 1943. Published in English in the collection The Man Who Walked Through Walls, Pushkin Press, 2012

‘Junction’ by Christopher Burns

Christopher Burns has published short fiction and several acclaimed novels. ‘Junction’ is one of his most recent short stories and is included in his new collection of short fiction – Mrs Pulaska and Other Stories, from Salt Publishing.

What would you say to your younger self if you could meet them? In this case you are already dead.

An old man arranges to meet his younger self in a park, just before the young man is killed in a road accident outside the gates. “This can’t happen, can it?” his younger self asks. He is surprised at how he has aged, losing his hair and wearing glasses. The older man has memories of things he believes he did, in the intervening period. It is an awkward conversation. He cannot tell his younger self that he is about to die. There are musings and questions, disagreements and regrets. What can we know? Who are we without memory and can memory define us? What is left behind when we die? The story haunts us with possibilities. One doesn’t expect resolution or answers, but the reading is a meditation.

First published in Mrs Pulaska and Other Stories, from Salt Modern Stories, 2024

‘Recording Angel’ by Helen Garner

There is an epigraph, which is a quote from Rilke: “Every angel is terrible.” This short story, set in Sydney/Melbourne in the late 20th Century is the first in a sequence of linked fiction contained within a single volume – Cosmo Cosmolino. Another short story, ‘The Vigil’, and a novella – ‘Cosmo Cosmolino’ follow on. ‘Cosmo Cosmolino’ translates into ‘small world, big world’. It seems a metaphor for Garner’s work here, she incorporates the small human details and the process of living (and dying) into the of the world at large into her often poetic accounts. What I love about Garner’s fiction is her ability to incorporate the inner lives of her characters, sometimes idiosyncratic and bizarre, into her narratives. Strange things appear to happen.

‘Recording Angel’ is an unsettling and uncanny story of a woman and her memories. Told in the first person, it has a resonance with Burns’s ‘The Junction’. What is memory, and what matters about a memory of one’s life? In this story a woman engages with an old friend, Patrick, who has known her all her life. Patrick “had mapped out the story of my life, and the lives of everyone we knew, into a grid-like framework and nailed it down; and everything done, witnessed, dreamed, heard of or read he had lined up under cast iron headings, those terrifyingly simple categories of his.” She is disturbed by the notion that her history will transcend her life via Patrick’s memory. But Patrick is shortly to have an operation to remove a brain tumour and the implications for his legacy of her life are disturbing.

First published in Cosmo Cosmolino, McPhee Gribble/Bloomsbury, 1993

‘Reality’ by John Lanchester

The ‘reality’ of our selfhood and place in the exterior world has become hard to define in the context of how we fabricate an idea of ourselves on social media. Here, John Lanchester dives into the world of ‘reality TV’. Told via the interior monologue of Iona, an “actress slash model slash influencer”, which her agent describes as “a triple threat” to the other participants, we encounter six young people in a beautiful villa in the Balearic Islands. They wait for the ‘tasks’ to begin, but that doesn’t seem to be happening.

They are being watched… What will the viewers think of Iona? Communications are coded; “Allegiances and alliances were covertly forming. Iona couldn’t say anything explicitly, of course, but she knew she could do a lot with body language and eye talk, grunts and nods and even silences”. She is jealously alert to Nousche, a skilful player of this psychology, and possibly more attractive to the handsome “ripped” guys of the group than Iona. We gain the sense that Iona is not as clever as she thinks, perhaps more a derivative of the world she is attempting to create. Iona remembers her poker player father’s advice about determining whether someone is telling the truth by listening to the echo of their voice. The villa is full of echoes, mocking and derisory. It seems a metaphor for Iona’s world. An ocean of the echoes of others. Like the island she is named for, Iona is surrounded by it. Lanchester is skilful in his use of sound as part of the narrative, and the naturalistic language of the contenders, like the woman Laz’s distinctive “Oi oi”, and Nousche’s French expressions, which give her an exotic edge. The story coalesces after Nousche makes them porridge for breakfast. Misunderstandings, nuanced remarks, and Iona’s comment “I wish I hadn’t had that porridge… Bloat City”. Allegiances turn, and Iona finds herself alone in an echoing sound of laughter. “the sound of souls screaming in pain grew louder and louder”. The scene breaks when one of the men, puts his arm around her. He reassures her; “…the tasks and evictions, they’ll begin soon. It’s not as if this will go on for ever”.

First published in the London Review of Books, 2018 as ‘Love Island’, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Reality and Other Stories, Faber, 2020

‘Three Weddings’ by Sonya Moor

Sonya Moor is a French and British writer living in Paris. I first encountered her work in Confingo Magazine, which published the title short story of her collection The Comet and Other Stories in its Spring 2021 issue. Confingo Press is noted, inter alia, for its list of stylish and unusual arts-linked non-fiction and fiction. Sonya Moor’s platform here is of ekphrasis – writing descriptive of art. As the author says in her introduction, the inspiration derives “from visual to musical, to comedic and criminal”. The stories “present female protagonists inspired by representations of females”.

‘Three Weddings’ is inspired by the film My Fair Lady, which is itself a modern take on the story of Pygmalion. Here, a father’s obsession with his beautiful daughter, Galatea, is visited over a number of years from the perspective of an older cousin, at three family weddings. “Caz and I stare at the baby: a great cream puff of a thing.” “Dressed like that, anyone would think it was the baby getting married, not her brother”. Moor artfully presents uncomfortable family dynamics giving us glimpses into the life of a girl growing up as an ‘ideal’.

First published in The Comet and Other Stories, Confingo Publishing, 2023

‘Margate Sands’ by Uschi Gatward

From Uschi Gatward’s short story collection English Magic. Published by the independent Galley Beggar, in another fine volume from their list. ‘Margate Sands’ is a story of memory and a disjuncture with reality. Two female students, Angela and Lisa, go to Margate in the 1980s, where Angela wishes to return to the ‘shell house’ she saw with her family as a child. She has detailed memories of the visit, even of an old lady and a little shell owl she bought. Tourist information brochures talk of a shell grotto, which the girls visit, but this is not the ‘shell house’ Angela remembers, and she is upset to the point of anger and tears. No one can corroborate the memory. Was it real or manufactured? Years later (2012) Lisa returns to Margate to visit a Tracy Emin exhibition in the newly built Turner Contemporary art gallery. On the way she drops into the tourist information office and reaffirms that the shell house of Angela’s memory does not exist.

As the story ends, there is an ‘ekphrastic element’ in storytelling. Outside the Turner Contemporary, Lisa finds a new Mark Wallinger installation – Sinema Amnesia – overlooking the sea, located in an old shipping container designated – The Waste Land – which shows visitors recordings of a view of the sea from the ‘window’, which is a projection of the view but from the previous day. Lisa observes that “It looks exactly the same as today.” The attendant responds “Doesn’t always”.

Shortlisted for the London Short Story Prize, 2013. Published in English Magic, Galley Beggar, 2021

‘The China Factory’ by Mary Costello

‘The China Factory’ is the title story of the debut collection of short stories by Irish writer Mary Costello.

Costello’s narrative is woven from the social architecture of working-class rural Ireland, where life pivots around the church. Costello’s worlds are very real, allowing us to enter the lives of her characters. A woman reflects on her past, casting her mind back to when she was 17. The teenager, shortly to leave for college, takes a job for the summer as a “sponger” in a china factory. Her mother drives her unwilling daughter to ask a neighbour, Gus Meehan, for a lift to the city every day for work.

“That’s an awful way to live” her mother says when they get into the car to leave. “The people who went before him would be ashamed.” But it happens that Gus is a distant relative. Gus’s life was ruined by a harsh upbringing, and, later, excessive drinking. His story is told indirectly as the story progresses.

The woman recounts: “I could smell the previous night’s alcohol seeping from his pores. I could smell other smells too and I tried not to think of his body. When he spoke, he hung his head a little and lowered his voice. I knew he was trying to deflect from his body and in the effort his words came out full of apology and shame.”

The story unfolds as the girl integrates herself into the life in the factory, knowing that it was temporary for her, but not for those who will work there permanently, including Gus. The other girls are appalled that she shares a car with Gus. “How d’you stick it – the BO?” She denies being related to him. “They’re a bit strange from your part of the country, aren’t they?”

She has told no one that she is leaving for college in the autumn, and dreams about her future. The china they make forms a metaphor for a more gracious life, the factory Visitor Centre selling gilded plates to wealthy American tourists.

Gus’s deeper character is revealed to the young woman through her daily interactions with him. He talks about the factory brochure, “Earth, water, air and fire – that’s what goes into the china. Who’d have thought it? …The same stuff as we’re all made of…”

A dramatic event occurs where Gus intervenes to stop a gunman – a mentally ill relative of one of the other girls. The men exchange quiet words. Later, the woman reflects: “I wonder if it was to the man or to his madness he spoke?”

First published in The China Factory, The Stinging Fly/Canongate, 2012

‘The Red Suitcase’ by Hilaire

Published by the independent Nightjar Press as one of a sequence of single-author chapbooks. Hilaire is an Australian writer of prose and poetry who now lives in London. This is an elegantly written story set in Australia concerning a life, or lives, not lived to their full. As with Helen Garner’s writing, the small details of life bring out the world of the characters. However, here, there is much that we are left to wonder about.

Dougie Blake is a retired signalman who lives with his elderly mother in her two-bedroomed bungalow situated in a small coastal Australian town. Here, the highlight of the week is a night out at the Constitutional Club. The arrival of a stranger, in this case a woman who calls herself ‘B’, on a day in late autumn sets up a tension in Dougie’s world. “B is there and not-there, and it made Dougie uneasy.” “an acquaintance… a friend…” had told B that she could get a room “at the Blake widow’s cottage”. She is not known to Dougie’s mother who lets out her own room to paying guests. Curtains twitch when B approaches the bungalow with her red suitcase and badly fitting coat, a visitor out of place and out of season.

Dougie’s mother happily gives up her bedroom to B for the week. She is pleased to have the “extra pennies”. Dougie isn’t so sure; the stranger isn’t like the “hardy young women” with “tanned calves and sunny dispositions” who travel with rucksacks in the summer. He can’t imagine taking her along to the Club as he did with the others. B is shy, and awkward, taking solitary walks along the shore in the cold wind. Dougie is unsettled by her presence, how she and his mother get along so well. He looks forward to B leaving. By the end of the week Dougie is perplexed that he finds himself worrying about her. At night, he hears strange sounds through the shared wall between his bedroom and hers. The story progresses with Dougie finding himself unwittingly drawn to this unwanted guest.

First published by Nightjar Press, 2020. Subsequently in Best British Short Stories 2021 from Salt Publishing

‘Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom’ by Sylvia Plath

A strange short fiction written in 1952 when Plath was a student at Smith College. I read this in the Faber Stories edition, which was the first publication of the story in its original form. Plath steps outside the ordinary world in this story with Mary Ventura – who in her red coat is bundled unwillingly onto a train by her apparently loving parents for a journey to the far away and mysterious ‘ninth kingdom’. “You know how trains are” says her father. “They don’t wait.” The station clock “clipped off another minute”.

Plath gives details of the train interior, with reference to “red plush seats, the color of wine” and “the seams of the car, rivetted with bright brass nails”. Mary sits by the window, behind a pair of argumentative boys, whose mother is engrossed in a magazine, ignoring them. Mary is joined by an older woman out of breath from rushing to make the train. It seems fortuitous that there was a spare seat next to Mary’s. The train departs in clouds of smoke and cinders. The woman takes out her knitting. Mary admires the “leaf-green” wool. It turns out that the woman is knitting a dress “For a girl just about your size…”

Plath described the story as ‘a vague symbolic tale’. We can identify many ‘symbolic elements’ and make our own sense of it. The tone of the story, the sounds and rhythm of the text is compelling. We hear the train moving as machine and metaphor for something implacable. Unease and apprehension rise. The irrevocable passing of stops. Long, dark tunnels. Children crying, a mother with a baby in a soiled blanket. Men complaining about a crying baby. But the train will not stop until it arrives in the ninth kingdom. Outside, the terrain is gloomy and smoky. “It’s the forest fires” the woman explains. The scenery becomes post-apocalyptic in appearance. There is a scarecrow “crossed staves propped aslant and the corn husks rotting under it.” “Night comes on quickly.”

It seems that the strange has made this journey often, although no one else takes this journey more than once. There is no return. Mary asks questions about the journey and the ninth kingdom. “The last station, …Are you sure?” the woman asks.

Mary protests “It’s not my fault I took this train. It was my parents. They wanted me to go.” But the woman chides her for her lack of rebellion. Mary decides to pull the emergency cord. There are various ways we might interpret the story, which ends mystically. The publisher describes it as “a strange dark tale of independence over infanticide”.

First published by Faber Stories, 2019

‘The Family Whistle’ by Gerard Woodward

This story was longlisted for The Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award. It is a powerful story of lives re-written. The story is set on Germany some years after the end of WWII. Florian, a German housewife, is becoming comfortable after the exigencies of World War II. Luxuries have appeared in the shops again. She delightedly takes her morning’s purchases, including silk stockings and coffee to show her husband, Wilhelm, at the bar where he works. He seems as pleased as she is and promises to bring home “something good” from leftovers.

At home, she makes them into a pleasing display. “The tin of coffee formed the centrepiece. The silk stockings, still folded, shimmered beside. A packet of eggs. A handful of cherries. A block of butter. Everything was so perfect, beautiful, promising.”

Then comes a knock at the door. Surely her husband isn’t home so soon? Has he forgotten the key? The story changes direction abruptly. Outside is a man “tall but desperately thin” wearing filthy clothing. She recalls the returning soldiers of a few years ago, and wonders if she should offer him a piece of cake. She soon discovers that her obligations go much deeper. The man claims to be her husband, only now released from a Russian prison. She slams the door in his face.

“Can you hear me, Florian? Why won’t you let me in?” He speaks through a crack in the door. She tells him that her husband has already returned from the war. The man informs her that her ‘husband’ is an imposter. Perhaps she had been too willing to accept his claim; some things were awry, but she had ignored them.

The man outside reminds Florian of the ‘family whistle’ – a coded sound that only she would recognise. They had used it for their assignations when they were courting. She hears him on the other side of the door “his mouth was right up to the crack, she heard him wet his lips, she heard the inrush of breath as he prepared, and when the whistle came, it was moist, breathy, and beautiful.”

First published in Legoland, Picador, 2016

Introduction

I love short stories, have done since childhood and I’ve spent loads of time over the last five decades bingeing on the likes of Daphne Du Maurier, John Wyndham, Katherine Mansfield, Raymond Carver, Maeve Binchy and Lydia Davies, to name a tiny few of my favs. But none of these writers are included in the twelve stories I’ve chosen for this most personal of anthologies and here’s why. Ten years ago, at the age of 50, I took up storytelling doing the MA in Creative Writing at the Open University where I learned to read with an eye to the craft of how short stories are created. Since then, these ‘writer’s’ eyes have guided me through many, many new and contemporary short stories that I’ve either studied to learn from as I honed my skills, or that I’ve provided feedback for when they were in that magical and transient state of being created. Each story in this collection is a positive co-ordinate on my writer’s learning curve and is scribed by either one of my writing heroes or one of my writing feedback buddies, or both.

‘The Art of Foot-binding’ by Danielle McLaughlin

I read this brilliant story at the very start of my writing journey and have studied and dissected it ever since, trying to work out its magic, so I might struggle to keep this brief, but as it’s taught me so very much about creating resonance and tension in my own writing I might have to bang on a wee bit. ‘The Art of Foot-binding’ tells the tale of Janice as she tries to hold onto a fractured marriage by tacitly accepting her husband’s infidelity, hoping that what remains unspoken will eventually blow over.

Her fourteen-year-old daughter intuits part of this and becomes increasingly contemptuous of her mother. The narrative is told in two voices. The primary voice tells Janice’s story in the present tense, from a third-person limited point-of-view, showing the reader everything Janice sees as if it were a camera sitting on her shoulder; but it also has access to what she’s thinking, knows what happened to her yesterday and is able to make insightful expositional reflections about her life.

This voice is contemporary, clear and to-the-point, but it is the secondary voice that readers first encounter, a voice that reads like an extract from an ancient Chinese instruction manual teaching the practise of foot-binding. This voice frames the story as well as running between scenes described by the primary voice, and is always presented in italics, implying that it is a quotation. It opens with:

“Begin on the feast day of the goddess Guanyin, that she may grant mercy. Or on the cusp of winter when the cold will numb bones splintered like ice on a broken lake. Begin when she is young, when the bones are closer to water, and a foot may be altered like the course of a mountain stream.”

The culturally alien similes and metaphors (to contemporary western ears) create a mystical tone that implies the torture it heralds is something artistic and spiritual. Straightaway, the reader feels a dissonance between the lyrical beauty and horrific subject matter, and starts asking questions: what is the significance of this distinct voice that assumes an allusive compliance with the reader? Is this a quote from a real text? Who is the assumed addressee? That this addressee was more appalled than in agreement with the voice’s culturally embedded assumptions, created a strong narrative jar that coloured everything that follows, imbuing the story with a sense of unsettling dread.

The two narrative voices do not speak to one another explicitly, so when the primary narrative voice places the reader into a starkly juxtaposed dramatic present, it does so without explanation, leaving the reader to make their own connections, to start actively wondering what the interplay between these voices might mean, and what might link the modern-day protagonist to the horrors described by the lyrically exquisite secondary voice. The narrative atmosphere this creates prickles with darkly foreshadowed unknowns that resonate through the story, creating a mesmerising tension. Seriously if you haven’t read this story, do.

First published in Dinosaurs on Other Planets, The Stinging Fly, 2015; you can listen to a radio version of the story on RTE here

‘The Mistletoe Bride’ by Kate Mosse

Reet, enough of overly detailed writerly descriptions of craft because I love this story too much to attempt to burst the bubble of its apparent simplicity. The first-person narrator quietly tells us her history in clear, girlish language that unpacks hundreds of years of longing and understated melancholy in a way that is both touching and haunting. The story also presents a subtle subtext of modern-day feminism as readers perceive the scant regard the protagonist was held in, in a world where she had no agency at all. It reads so smoothly and sadly – like a half-remembered childhood fairy story, which despite its strange, unsettling tragedy, ends on a surprisingly upbeat note.

First published in The Mistletoe Bride and other Haunting Tales, Orion, 2013

‘Flamingos’ by Ali McGrane

Ali and I did the OU MA together and were in the same tutor group. When she emailed the first version of this story for feedback, it made me cry. In the finished version, her mastery of literary brevity immediately drops the reader inside the story which starts with a mum taking her kids to the zoo. “The children trail after her through the turnstiles. A cloudless sky like an insult, clusters of wooden pointing signs, a peacock dragging finery in the dirt,” and boom – there you are in place, time and mood. The heartbreak of what has happened to this fractured family and their relationships with each other, reveal themselves through deliciously insightful writing, helped along by the prosaic signs that detail information about the animals, signs that are laden with subtext.

First published in The Weight of Feathers, Retreat West Books, 2021