‘Last Thing’ by Janice Galloway

“We were coming coming back from the pictures with half a packet of sweeties still coming round the corner at the Meadowside with Mary saying she was feart to go up the road herself…” is the first gasping line of this searingly sad and harrowing story spun in a child’s voice. In just five short pages with no full stops, we bear witness to two little kids attempting the journey home after a trip to the cinema, with abject danger on the approach from behind. It makes me genuinely sad reading this, like poring over the details of a news story about a missing woman, or watching a disturbing documentary. The lack of grammar intensifies the tension; the unbearable innocence of a child who’s ‘not quite right’ in the head (perhaps?) and then the last two pages, where words take on a tormenting typography in poetic form. Galloway is a genius at realistic (and phonetic) voices, the ones that are underrepresented in literature, i.e. working class invectives. Her first collection of stories platforming these unfamiliar pitches was published in 1990, a year before Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments and three years before Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. For me she’s the forerunner of the power of slangerature; flinging voice unashamedly onto the page as lived and as it sounds. You’ll be hard pushed to find pointless ‘nodding’ Victoriana in her effortless sentences. Just brilliant.

First published in Where You Find It, Jonathan Cape, 1996, also in Collected Stories, Vintage, 2009

‘Need for Restraint’ by Janice Galloway

Scottish author Galloway’s work veers between matter-of-fact and surreal, and her ability to disrupt her own story in a way which brings the reader further into the world is a marvel; her introductory sentences are often startled, as if you’ve caught them midway through an ongoing conversation.

         “suddenly
         they were both on the ground clutching up
         gouging and hacking with hands pulling at cloth and
         snatches of hair wound on fingers the flat of flesh slapping
         dull on tile”

Inside a shopping centre, narrator Alice observes men beating an unnamed victim up—though she tries to break the fight up herself, it’s the intervention of another passerby which finally finishes the incident. Alarmed by what she’s seen. Alice scours her memory, struggling to remember who she is and why she’s there in the first place. Information arrives in staccato drips, punctuated by strange, capitalised screams over the tannoy system warning her to stay out of other people’s business, and the reader begins to realise that Alice’s marriage to her husband Charles is perhaps as violent in its own way as the scene she’s just witnessed.

First published in the collection Blood, Minerva, 1991

‘Plastering the Cracks’ by Janice Galloway

I’m sure I first heard about Janice Galloway via James Kelman. I went along to an event where she was reading from her first novel The Trick is To Keep Breathing at the Harbour Arts Centre in Irvine in 1991 or thereabouts. I regularly call her the queen, as she is without a doubt up there with my absolute favourites. Her writing is visceral, unnerving, and fierce. (She’s also from Ayrshire!)

‘Plastering the Cracks’ is a tense, noir-esque piece, where a young woman employs some builders but, later, eavesdropping through the wall, becomes worried about their intentions. Janice Galloway writes with a looming sense of danger and her landscape is filled with brutal men, often drunks, and women living in fear of their actions. I love her use of dialect and the directness of her dialogue – no speech marks, immersing you into her words and her world.

First published in Blood, Secker and Warburg/Random House, 1991

‘Blood’ by Janice Galloway

I once wrote in a short story of mine – “a woman is fluent in the language of blood”. Never was it more evident than in this visceral, almost carnal, story about a schoolgirl who starts her day having a sanitary towel jammed into her mouth to stem the bleed from a tooth extraction at the dentist and ends with her, at school, stuffing toilet paper in her underwear to stop a heavy, unexpected, period. She seeks solace in a music rehearsal room with a rosewood piano and Mozart playing, but the door won’t lock, and she hears the approaching footfall in the corridor of the students as the ‘unstoppable redness’ seeps from her, unable to stanch the bleed.

The story is sinewy, compressed, with not one ounce of flab. Truthfully, I could have picked any of her stories. Janice Galloway is not Scotland’s best writer, she is simply the best writer, full stop.

From Blood, Vintage, 1991, and also The Picador Book of the New Gothic, Picador, 1991

‘jellyfish’ by Janice Galloway

Alice Munro says that every short story is at least two short stories.

We’re back in Scotland, where I wrote much of this. Galloway’s stories are brutally funny: like Saunders’, they also trust the reader to work stuff out. “This was what happened: you thought you had problems till you found a whole new set in whatever ward they put you in.” (from ‘and drugs and rock and roll’)

In ‘jellyfish’, a divorced mother treats her son to a trip to the seaside the day before he’s due to start school. Being the parent of a four year-old can be funny and boring and full of love, and Galloway gives us all of that. It is also scary. His whole world rested on a terrifying level of trust that shocked and moved her in equal measure. And when they find jellyfish stranded on the beach, a story about a mother worried about how her son will cope without her gradually becomes – at one and the same time – a story about how a mother will cope without her son:

soft, transparent animals, open as wounds, lying where the tide settled them to simply wait.

jellyfish’ was commissioned for Headshook, ed. Stuart Kelly, Hachette, Scotland, and included in jellyfish, first published in 2015 by Freight Books, Glasgow. Republished with additional stories by Granta Books, 2019

‘Blood’ by Janice Galloway

A used tampon at the bottom of a toilet, slowly seeping its blood like a miniature Rothko, can be a beautiful little sight. In Janice Galloway’s story however, a sanitary towel is jammed in a girl’s mouth to stop the flow of blood from her recently removed tooth. This is body gothic, corporeal horror: “the gum parting with a sound like uprooting potatoes”; “the roots were huge, matt like suede… Hard to accept her body had grown this thing.” As “the unstoppable redness” pools in her mouth she seeks out the white sanctuary of a school music rehearsal room and the clean sound of Mozart. But the door can’t be locked, nor the blood staunched.

From Blood, Vintage, 1991, and also The Picador Book of the New Gothic, Picador, 1991

‘Scenes from the Life No. 23: Parental Advice’, by Janice Galloway

Galloway’s novel The Trick is to Keep Breathing was the single most important book that I ever read. It was the novel that made me want to be a writer, and it was the novel that showed me the possibilities of the form beyond the rather staid 19th Century French stuff we were made to read in class. Les Rougon-Macquart and La Comédie Humaine, which I may appreciate now more than I ever did then, seemed outdated, indicative of a reality that was no longer. Galloway’s broken text and wild mix of literary (and non-literary) genres felt more real to me than anything I had ever read.

I immediately set out to read everything she’d written, and found a copy of her short story collection ‘Blood’ at the WH Smith’s on the Rue du Rivoli. Except, rather than finding it on the ‘literature’ shelf between Gaddis and Gass, the book was on a shelf labelled ‘women’s fiction’. Having spent years reading horror and only gradually making my way into the macho lit that was popular at the end of the 90s (your American Psychos and Fight Clubs) I was confused by the fact that the author I found more emotionally devastating than anything I’d read, was relegated to stand beside pulpy romance novels.

The story I remember most vividly is this short piece, written as a play, like the other “scenes from the life” that are scattered across the collection. Here, a (single) father named Sammy feels that he needs to make sure that his son, Wee Sammy, can stand up for himself, as he is about to start school. He makes the son sit on a mantelpiece, and tells him to jump off, that the father will catch him, and keeps telling him “would I let you fall?”, “don’t be feart, this is your da talking to you”. But of course, when the boy jumps, Sammy steps aside, letting the boy hurt himself.

“Let that be a lesson to you son: trust nae cunt,” is the story’s final line.

But what really stays with you is the detail that comes just before that: the father choking back a sob.

Included in Blood, Secker and Warburg, 1991

‘Love in a Changing Environment’ by Janice Galloway

from Blood.

When I was studying for my A Levels (1994-6), Channel 4 broadcast a three-part series on three contemporary Scottish writers: James Kelman, Irvine Welsh and Janice Galloway. I recorded the late-night program and watched it the following day. I knew who Welsh was, Trainspotting had not long since been published, but it was the other two writers who were to have the bigger impact on me.

It’s the setting that stood out to me in ‘Love in a Changing Environment’; the couple in the story move into a flat above a bakery. Their relationship plays out to the smell of crumpets, cobs and Danish pastries. That is until the bakers leave and the butcher moves in.