‘justice for one’ by James Kelman

Discombobulation, awkwardness, the throng of the crowd, and a terminally annoying interloper. There’s a random guy on a march no-one wants to talk to. He streams in from nowhere (possibly drunk) and doesn’t know what’s going on or why he’s there. He’s the embodiment of the universal asshole asking stupid questions and contributing nothing. “On all sides folk were walking past. They moved quickly. Some were coming so close I felt a draught from their body, going to bang into me. Somebody said, The army are there and they are waiting for us. I shouted, I beg yer pardon! Take yer hand off my arm, cried a man.” He likes to annoy women taking part too. He can’t stop butting in. He’s creepy and ineffectual, hassling people, pulling at elbows. “I could see another couple of people looking at me; they too were suspicious. I shook my head at them, as if I was just seeing them for the first time.” In the end he does what all goons do and follows the tribe into whatever strange hell looms.

First published in The Stinging Fly, Issue 12, Volume 2 and also collected in The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story, ed. Philip Hensher, Penguin, 2019

‘Acid’ by James Kelman

Yes, here it is again. This little uppercut of a story has, I notice, appeared on several of these Personal Anthologies, but I could not omit. It’s, what, 500 words or so? A paragraph? Two minutes to read and a lifetime to get over. Kelman’s mastery of the short form is truly astonishing.

First published in Not Not While the Giro, Polygon, 1983

‘Acid’ by James Kelman

“Sorry Hughie, he said. And then ducked the young man below the surface.”

So-called “flash-fiction” is a very popular form at the moment. The problem is, most people writing it don’t really have the skill to do it well. If you’re a writer and you want to learn, there’s only one author you have to look to and that’s James Kelman. He is the master of telling the story of a life, or a dozen lives, in a single breath. ‘Acid’ is a prime example.

The story depicts an industrial accident, a young man falling in a vat of acid in a factory. The other men stand around him, horrified, but one of the braver of them, the young man’s father in fact, pushes him down under the surface with a pole. This act of apparent cruelty is explained neatly as Kelman tells us what we already know deep down; that the acid has eaten the boy’s body away and that he is, in fact, already dead.

The symbolism of manual work eating away at the bodies here is clear, especially from an author like Kelman who has spent so much of his life campaigning for the rights of those harmed and killed by asbestos, but so is the strangely touching moment of a father helping his son pass in dignity. I’ve read the story dozens of times and it amazes me every time I do.

First published in Not Not While the Giro, Polygon, 1983

‘Acid’ by James Kelman

‘Acid’ is an extremely short story – just one paragraph peppered with Kelman’s trademark sharp observations. ‘Acid’ is one of the most visceral, visually shocking stories I’ve ever come across and I will boldly claim it is the best short story I’ve ever read. Kelman wields such a fierce power, sharpening his writers’ tools, in his bold, colloquial Glaswegian voice. The ending sees a man in a factory – “who was also the young man’s father” – dispose of his son in an utterly horrifying act of love. This is a brutal and exceptional story. if you’ve never read it, I strongly urge you to do so!

First published in Not Not While the Giro, Polygon, 1983, and available in Tales of Here and Then, thi wurd, 2020

‘Events in Yer Life’ by James Kelman

Thirtysomethings…

He was thirty one and he didn’t feel like was making a good job of his life…

Derek, the thirty-one year old protagonist of James Kelman’s (relatively) long short story is back home in Glasgow to assist in matters following the death of his mother. Effectively orphaned (his father died when Derek was a child) Derek suddenly feels adrift in his own life: unwilling to fully commit in his relationship, still smarting over an incident at art school which saw him leave the course prematurely, still grieving and reeling over his “first adult experience of death”:

He kept getting tearful. But that was alright, that was alright. It was alright. It was just

What follows is a very Kelmanesque long dark night of the soul: Derek meets up with his old friend from his student days and they go to the pub, Derek hoping that the drinking session will help him “get the other thing out of his system. What other thing? His fucking life.” So, they get drunk. They reminisce. They eye up girls at the bar. They argue about Derek’s apparent “Englishness” after being away from Glasgow for so long; discuss old friends and acquaintances; Derek look enviously at his friend’s married status and compares it to his own uncommitted relationship:

He had been too long on his own. Maybe if he had settled down and was rearing a family.

As tends to be the case in such things, nothing gets resolved. Kelman’s instincts regarding where to begin and end his stories – or rather, where to join and leave his untidy narratives – is as impeccable as ever. And the reader is left with a sense of Derek’s life going on, like all our lives, in their own haphazard fashion, far beyond the final full stop.

Published in The Burn, Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd 1991

‘Acid’ by James Kelman

James Kelman has, without doubt, a claim to be Britain’s greatest living writer (see, for example, two International Man Booker Prize nominations when it was awarded for a writer’s body of work) so it seems perverse to choose a story which is less than half a page long as representative of his skill. And yet ‘Acid’ has such power, told, as always, in a colloquial voice (which is not to say Glaswegian), the fragment of an overheard conversation, and with the seemingly throwaway phrase “who was also the young man’s father” deftly unparenthetical. A story to be read in single intake of breath. (And if that wasn’t enough, the story also appears in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, in the Index of Plagiarisms in reference to a non-existent chapter 47).

First published in Not Not While the Giro, Polygon, 1983, and available in Tales of Here and Then, thi wurd, 2020

‘The Christmas Shopping’ by James Kelman

Like much of Kelman’s fiction ‘The Christmas Shopping’ (written in the demotic Glaswegian dialect of the author’s hometown) begins in medias res, plunging the reader if not so much into the heart of the action, then at least somewhere towards the fag-end of a rambling, apparently inconsequential anecdote:

That obelisk thing I was talking about, it was lying stranded down the back of Argyle Street.

As observed by the story’s unnamed narrator, the obelisk thing (its description is later refined to “more like a Celtic Cross”) causes minor waves of interest in the steady stream of Christmas shoppers. A couple of men from one of the local bars give it a cursory glance before moving on (“one of them was fucking pished anyway”); a group of teenagers laugh at the object, possibly contemplating mischief (“Teenagers, you’re never quite sure,”); a businessman (“a posh cunt with bowler and brolly”) seems less annoyed at an obstacle in his path, more at the unexpected disturbance in the natural order of things; while an elderly lady is so intrigued that she decides to take a closer look, free from any hint of embarrassment (“You notice that a lot about old folk; seen it and done it”). Finally, a young woman in a red hat approaches the obelisk. Up until now the narrator has been a largely unknown quantity (though the reader will have been able to glean a pretty decent thumbnail sketch of his character from his attitude towards the various passers-by). But the arrival of the woman in the red hat moves the narrator to action, bringing the story to a close which, at first glance, is as innocuous as its beginning:

I felt like asking her if she fancied going for a coffee or a cup of tea or something but then I noticed something in her face when she sees me so I says to myself, Fuck that for a game, and I just crosses ower into Ingram Street and I carried along the way I was going. Some women are funny, I wisni taking any chances.

At just over two pages in length, ‘The Christmas Shopping’ a beautifully succinct example of Kelman’s talent for capturing transient scraps of the quotidian; holding them up to the light for us to marvel at for a fleeing moment; before the world moves on and they’re gone forever. And while it may be tempting to read allegorical meaning into it (the fallen cross, the lone bystander, the yearning for companionship/shelter during the festive season, etc) to me it is simply, and more affectingly, a snapshot of a lonely man in a crowd; the bland irony of the title only adding to the story’s poignancy and its underlying sense of frustration and pathos.

First published in The Burn, Secker & Warburg, 1991

Chosen by W.B. Gooderham. Gooderham is a freelance writer. He blogs at http://livesinlit.com and http://bookdedications.co.uk/

‘A Walk in the Park’ by James Kelman

Nadine Gordimer says short stories are about the present moment, like the brief flash of a number of fireflies here and there in the dark.

I recently wrote a story in which a man in his sixties easily locates a book he hasn’t read since university, because his shelves are so well organized. Pure fantasy, of course: the set of books I’ve read is much larger than the set of those I can currently lay my hands on. I’ve chosen ‘A Walk in the Park’ from The Burn partly for its brutally ambiguous title, and partly, if I’m honest, because I simply could not find my copies of his earlier collections Greyhound for Breakfast and Not, not while the giro. If you’re only familiar with the novels – or not familiar with Kelman at all – these are a treat. Pure slivers of working class Glaswegian life, with all the poverty and alcohol and love and rage that the late 80s had to offer, but all rendered with minute attention to the detail of language and dialect. It’s prose you have to read at talking speed – which suits me fine: I’m a slow reader – tuning in to the demotic speech and thought-patterns of his frequently broken, but always human, characters. Some people found Kelman difficult to read – just as, more recently, some inexplicably declared Anna Burns’ Milkman difficult to read – but if you can’t hear Kelman’s people talking in your head, it’s because you’re not listening. Slow down.

‘A Walk in the Park’ maintains a perfect balance between banality and tragedy in the story of a man and woman, both weighed down by failed relationships; they meet and wonder what to do of an afternoon:

They stood staring at each other for several moments. Then she said: The library?
Nah.
A walk in the park?
Uch naw.

But a walk in the park it is. They even hold hands. She tries, she teases, and he tries, too, but all the while he’s keeping the lid on a boiling rage born of frustration, of an awareness of his own inability to cope.

A brief flash, indeed, if fireflies lived for thirty years.

First published in The Burn, Secker and Warburg, 1991; Minerva paperback 1992; currently available from Polygon, 2009