Tag: Anna Metcalfe

‘Blind Water Pass’ by Anna Metcalfe

Granny Bud lives alone in a mountainous region, one assumes in some part of China. She is visited each summer by her city-dwelling granddaughter Lily, who loves her and who lost her mother when young. Granny Bud was once a farmhand, then a mother, and is now a herbalist and spirit guide. Hers has become a liminal existence, veering between the mundane and the etheric, increasingly the latter. Her more worldly granddaughter spends her summer days on the nearby Blind Water Pass, the higher of two mountain treks frequented by tourists on pilgrimage. Here she earns a small amount of money collecting and recycling bottles they discard, and a larger amount from tips earned by feeding them bogus aphorisms, ostensibly ancient, but actually made up by herself. She passes her tip money to Granny Bud, pretending it is the legitimately earned part of her wages. She is attentive to her grandmother and, despite her youth and otherness, deeply attuned to her way of life.

The lower trek, formerly existing above a peaceful river, was damaged irretrievably, then closed, when the river was dammed into a reservoir. Blind Water Pass is itself threatened by the construction of a funicular railway. Granny Bud’s spirits, long in retreat at these industrial goings-on, are finally disturbed into extinction, and at this point the story ends.

Metcalfe’s prose is artfully simple. The apparent plainness of her description belies the metaphors beneath. The juxtaposition of guile and gullibility, the erosion of tradition by commerce, and the modern mind in search of things lost, are all drawn sparingly and unemphatically by a master storyteller who, one suspects, conveys exactly what she means to.

Published in the collection of that title by JM Originals, an imprint of John Murray publishers, 2016

‘Old Ghost’ by Anna Metcalfe

Fiction that happens in part in an unnamed place is tempting to write, and hard to pull off. The narrator of ‘Old Ghost’ is driving a taxi, and living in a shared flat in Paris with Rina, a fellow immigrant or refugee. Old Ghost, the character of the title, is a friend – originally a friend of her brother’s. “Actually he was not my brother’s friend; he was trying to become my brother’s friend.” Instead, it is the narrator who befriends Old Ghost, playing cards with him. The story, written in short sections, is full of corrections and elision:

“Did you always know you would leave him?”
“No,” I say. I don’t like this. She knows. 
“So tell me about the maps.”
I tell her about the maps.

Sometimes fiction that elides details – names, places, years – reads to me as though the writer is (understandably) dodging a problem. But in this story the elisions moved me. Something is said but much is not, and in that a space is held, tender, for what was lost.

First published in the first issue of The Lonely Crowd in April 2015, and collected in Blind Water Pass, John Murray, 2016