‘Big Milk’ by Jackie Kay

I first read ‘Big Milk’ when I was deep in the early years of first-time motherhood – a weird time that nothing had quite prepared me for. I loved (and still love) how this story captures some of that weirdness and how it’s effortlessly breezy and, at the same time, as tightly-woven and meaty as a fairy tale.

As the story opens, we meet a mother, her breastfed two-year-old daughter, and the mother’s breasts, which the daughter has named ‘Big Milk’ and ‘Tiny Milk’ and with whom the daughter has charming conversations. However, the story’s protagonist is none of these characters, but the mother’s lover, who is quietly nursing her resentment at being excluded from this cosy, milky world. This jealousy sparks the protagonist to set off on a slightly manic quest to address her other unresolved issues about mothering. The reader is swept along on this compulsive journey towards an ending which seems a perfect example of Flannery O’Connor’s maxim that an ideal story should be at once surprising and inevitable, or as she put it, “both totally right and totally unexpected”.

First published in Why Don’t You Stop Talking?, Picador, 2002

‘Physics and Chemistry’ by Jackie Kay

We come to the final story in our anthology, the bookend which circles back to Ernestine and Kit, those older ladies who seemed so respectable when we started reading, a dozen stories ago. ‘Physics and Chemistry’ is about two women who are referred to by the subjects they teach, but are entirely individual characters. Physics, particularly, may appear stern, but their relationship proves the depths of her emotions.

The lives of most LGBT+ people in the past had to be habitually secretive and repressed.

“Sometimes they had two teachers from Lenzie High School round – Rosemary and Nancy, PE and music, who also, like them, lived together and bought each other comfortable slippers for Christmas. Neither Rosemary and Nancy nor Physics and Chemistry, ever, ever mentioned the nature of their relationship to each other.”

‘Physics and Chemistry’ centres around one day when everything changes for them. It is not a long story, but Kay manages to sketch out the two women’s histories, their daily normality, what happens to change that, and what the results are, without it ever feeling rushed.

So this anthology ends. The reader looks up, feeling in a particular way because of the final paragraphs of that last story, and the end sentence: “It could always change colour.”.

Then, I hope, you sit back and take a moment, thinking about your journeys in time and place through all twelve stories, about their common themes and their contradictions, and all you have been told about human experiences. And I hope that you will be glad to have read them.

Collected in Why Don’t You Stop Talking,Picador, 2002, and published in The Barcelona Review, issue 29: March – April 2002, available here. I read it in The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story, selected and introduced by Philip Hensher, 2018

‘The White Cot’ by Jackie Kay

Selected by Dyani Sheppard

I love Jackie Kay’s short story collection Why Don’t You Stop Talking – the stories are witty, sharp and perceptive, largely focusing on the lives of women. We meet the protagonists in their everyday realities and their emotional interiorities are used to take speculative turns with the narrative. I was excited to come across ‘The White Cot’ to see what Kay does with the ghost story, and I think her narrative structure lends itself perfectly to the genre. The story centres on Dionne, who needs a relaxing weekend away with her partner, after feeling down and ‘going through the change’. As they enter the house they have rented for the weekend, they instantly feel unsettled, an atmosphere intensified by the creepy white cot that stands in the bedroom. At night, Dionne struggles to sleep in the unfamiliar room and in the blurriness between sleep and wakefulness meets the presence haunting her. Dionne drifts further from her partner and from sanity and a real trepidation is built as the ghostly activity intensifies. The story primes us to expect the paranormal, establishing a creepy setting and an unreliable narrator who carries an unresolved sorrow. The use of these classic tropes alongside a modern storyline creates a truly unsettling story that feels more sinister in its relatability.

Published in Reality, Reality, Pan Macmillan, 2012