‘Margate Sands’ by Uschi Gatward

From Uschi Gatward’s short story collection English Magic. Published by the independent Galley Beggar, in another fine volume from their list. ‘Margate Sands’ is a story of memory and a disjuncture with reality. Two female students, Angela and Lisa, go to Margate in the 1980s, where Angela wishes to return to the ‘shell house’ she saw with her family as a child. She has detailed memories of the visit, even of an old lady and a little shell owl she bought. Tourist information brochures talk of a shell grotto, which the girls visit, but this is not the ‘shell house’ Angela remembers, and she is upset to the point of anger and tears. No one can corroborate the memory. Was it real or manufactured? Years later (2012) Lisa returns to Margate to visit a Tracy Emin exhibition in the newly built Turner Contemporary art gallery. On the way she drops into the tourist information office and reaffirms that the shell house of Angela’s memory does not exist.

As the story ends, there is an ‘ekphrastic element’ in storytelling. Outside the Turner Contemporary, Lisa finds a new Mark Wallinger installation – Sinema Amnesia – overlooking the sea, located in an old shipping container designated – The Waste Land – which shows visitors recordings of a view of the sea from the ‘window’, which is a projection of the view but from the previous day. Lisa observes that “It looks exactly the same as today.” The attendant responds “Doesn’t always”.

Shortlisted for the London Short Story Prize, 2013. Published in English Magic, Galley Beggar, 2021

‘Samhaim’ by Uschi Gatward

There something pure autumn about this one, I just love the atmosphere—the menacing creeping witchiness, the merest hint of a hint of a hint that something is off among all the pumpkins and toffee apples and golden sun and bonfire smoke.

Gatward very sadly died in 2021 and this is a collection to be thankful for.

First published in English Magic by Galley Beggar Press, 2021. You can read it online here

‘Birth Plan’ by Uschi Gatward

Gatward’s debut collection English Magic, published only a few months before her tragically premature death at the age of 49, has generated a couple of other mentions, but since Liars’ League had the privilege to publish ‘Birth Plan’ first, it’s my pick. The story is narrated by a pregnant mother and told in the beguilingly novel form of a hospital birth plan: I read it when I was a week overdue with my first baby, and at the end I just completely dissolved. It has that wonderful mixture (which I also love in ‘Elephant in the Tower’) of humour and pathos: there are some superbly acid laugh-out-loud moments, and yet it ultimately, inevitably transmutes into something so tender, so tentative, so hopeful, so fearful, that anyone who’s had a child, or been one, can’t fail (I hope) on some level to identify with it.

First published on Liars’ League “Beginning & End” May 2014 and available to read here. Reprinted by Arachne Press in We/She, 2018 (ed. Cherry Potts & Katy Darby) – buy it here

‘The Bird’ by Uschi Gatward

This is the story with the clearest arc in Uschi Gatward’s stunningly unusual collection. A newlywed couple return from honeymoon and open their wedding gifts in their new house. The woman’s nerves are already frayed when her husband wakes her to complain about a noise; “she feels like digging her nails into his arm, giving him a Chinese burn”. The persistent TAP TAP TAP turns out to be a bird trapped in the fireplace and they can’t escape from its suffering – “from its dark prison it can see the chinks of electric light”. An escalating anxiety slips into a surreal sense of wonder as the couple rescue their shiny new life from the smothering presence of the dying bird.

First published in English Magic, Galley Beggar Press, 2021

‘The Clinic’ by Uschi Gatward

It’s always a delight to discover a new talent and prize -winning short story writer Uschi Gatward’s first collection contains twelve delicately paced, coolly sinister concoctions. Her liminal territory occupies the gap between mundane present and dystopian future, with a dash of folk horror thrown in; every story feeling spookily prescient for these times. ‘The Clinic’ begins with a familiar scene and characters: doctor, parents and a clever baby but soon spirals into unnerving and desperate flight, from surveillance into the unknown.

Published in English Magic, Galley Beggar Press, 2021. You can read the story here