‘A Little Like Light’ by A. L. Kennedy

For about a year I’ve had a line stuck in my head that I knew must come from an A.L. Kennedy story because it’s so painful and so wry, so unmistakably her; including one of her stories here was a given, and as I was going through various candidates, I stumbled on the source of it. ‘A Little Like Light’ is the story of John Edward, a (this is quintessential Kennedy) sexually frustrated school janitor and self-taught close-up magician navigating what could be, might become, may never turn into an affair with one of the schoolteachers. Kennedy never judges her protagonists – John is self-flagellating enough – but simply relates, an empath wielding a scalpel, every minute shift in the non-couple’s relationship and the progress of John’s own self-loathing. Towards the end, as he realises the affair will never come to anything, almost relishing the understanding, we get his wonderful, gutting revelation: “This is love. This terrible feeling. This knowing I would rather see her than be content.” No wonder it stuck with me. It takes the top off my head, every time.

Collected in Indelible Acts, Jonathan Cape, 2002

‘Words’ by A.L. Kennedy

I could have included any number of Kennedy’s short stories on this list but instead I am choosing to bend the remit a bit and mention Words: A One-Person Show, her solo comedy performance about language and love that I was lucky enough to see as a student. Kennedy is great onstage—as warm and witty and wise as the show itself—and it was an experience that helped me stay determined to keep working across the dual worlds of (fiction) writing and live performance. Give words the respect they are due and They. Will. Make. You. Shine.

First performed in 2009 and touring to various places across the UK and elsewhere with its final performance in Humboldt University, Berlin. The full text is reprinted in On Writing, Jonathan Cape, 2013

‘Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains’ by AL Kennedy

There is a kind of mania in this story. The narrator’s voice appears on one level calm and reasonable, but as the story unfolds it seems a control mechanism for appearance’s sake, and a smokescreen for her loss of agency. The narrator lightly details her husband’s infidelities in a way that becomes increasingly uncomfortable for the reader, but for our masochistic central character life appears to be a series of preordained patterns, and everything seems as important as everything else. Never more so than in her strange obsession about how the trains terminate at Garscadden, the stop before hers, despite how few people ever get off there. She comes to blame the trains for the failure of her marriage, and for almost killing her husband, a kind of chaos theory of relationships.

“I went down, as usual, to stand on the westbound platform, this time in a hard, grey wind, the black twigs and branches over the line, oily and dismal with the damp.”

And she finally drags that oily and dismal world back to her cheating spouse.

First published in Beloit Fiction Journal Vol 5, No. 1, and collected in Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains, Polygon, 1990

‘Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains’ by AL Kennedy

The One with The Devastating Ending:

Everyone knows that, line for line, AL Kennedy is the best prose writer in the English language (including non-fiction; read her book ‘On Bullfighting’). This story was the first thing I ever read of hers, and ever since I’ve carried around the phrase “the good weight of him” as an example of how to get things perfectly, exactly right.

It all felt very pleasant. The good weight of him, snuggled down there, the smell of his hair when I kissed the top of his head. I did that. I told him I could never do enough, or be enough, or give enough back and I kissed the top of his head. I told him I belonged to him. I think he was asleep.

Kennedy deals with small, specific things. With the important details – of relationships, and train timetables, and the way couples arrange themselves together in bed. She’s the opposite of flashy, of show-offy writing, of fireworks. This story is about the importance of small lives, of the everyday, and of the awful, awful fragility of it all.

(in Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains, Polygon 1990)