MICAELA MAFTEI WHERE THINGS ARE HAPPENING
ILLUSTRATION BY LIZZY STEWART
F or three long years, there was summer in Guthrie, where it was very hot, and winter in Aberdeen, where it was very cold. The weather was very bad. It rained much more than it ought to, she thought every day as she hunched her shoulders against the wind and tried in vain to shield her shins from the splashing of cars.
Annabel lived in a three room flat with a hotplate at one end and a toilet at the other. The bed was in the middle. She drank endless cups of tea and sat surrounded by books in an ancient pea green plastic-covered armchair that had come with the flat. The plastic was cold until her body warmed it and then it became sweaty and sticky. Apart from the hotplate, there was one other source of warmth, a gas heater made of leaping orange bars of flame that ate 50p pieces at an alarming rate and scorched the two feet directly in front of it without warming anything else. Until about November, she wore socks to bed and put on a third sweater when she got home from school. But when the winter truly started she would take her duvet off her bed and wear it like a cape. She would sit in the armchair in silence for hours, reading, thinking, once in a while crying. Whenever she got up to go to the bathroom she would fold the duvet over itself so that when she returned she could slide back in it like a potato in its jacket, pulling in her legs and letting only her wide, sad face out of the white cotton confines.
Unless she went out, she would go to bed early; changing into her pajamas under the covers. Every morning there was a warm Annabel-sized island stranded in an ocean of freezing damp air. Her family sent her an electric blanket, a package that Annabel could see had cost almost as much as an entire weekly bread delivery, and in her excitement she mixed up the transformers and adaptors and exploded the thing so it sparked and puffed smoke and fell out of her hands dead.
Going out meant she didn’t need to feed coins into the heater but it also meant she had to buy something usually more expensive. She would sit in the pub with her classmates and sip orange juice that tasted like old grapefruits. Invariably, one or more of them would buy packets of crisps and gut them open on the sticky tables, sweeping a fingertip over the greasy crumbs in the creases of the bag and licking them off after demolishing the rest of the bag. Many of them were from Glasgow and acted like this was a personality trait. Some were from Aberdeen and didn’t notice the tone they adopted whenever they talked about the place. One night one of the boys asked if she felt like a shag and called her a cunty one when she said she didn’t. His scrawny neck, hideously white and knobby like a bone, stuck out of the gaping, stretched collar of his t- shirt and bobbed up and down angrily when she refused him. Near the base it was dotted with pimples. Sometimes one of their professors, Leonard, would come to the pub with them. He was from London, which everyone else seemed to know instinctively. She made the mistake of assuming
IMMACULATE COLLECTION The Year of Open Doors is a short story collection with a mission to revive Scotland’s independent literary tradition. Three of the best entries appear here, exclusive to The List, but first author and editor Rodge Glass explains how the book came together
There’s no point pretending: these are pretty grim times for books. Just walk into your local bookshop (if it’s still there) and the picture is clear: economic fear makes the mainstream even more conservative than usual. When in doubt, most publishers and retailers trim off anything experimental, risky or ambitious, leaving readers with thousands of copies of the new Dan Brown and little else. When money is scarce, you have to be a very particular kind of crazy to attempt anything but another rehashing of the same old crap, but those crazies are the kind of people I like to work with. And thankfully, Scotland has plenty of them.
As a teenager I read Children of Albion Rovers (1996), the seminal short story collection featuring early work by Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner and Laura Hird. Published by Rebel Inc, this grew out of the Edinburgh writing community, especially Duncan McLean’s Clocktower Press, a tiny independent which kick-started the careers of many great writers. Tracing Scottish publishing history, I found an inspiring, art-before-money, independent tradition in the likes of Lean Tales (1985), a collection featuring Alasdair Gray, James Kelman and Agnes Owens, also many pamphleteers and small publishers who nurtured talent here when it needed it most. That sounded like a good model to me, particularly now. So when Mark Buckland, the 23-year-old boss of Cargo (a new Glasgow independent) told me he wanted to ‘put a rocket up the arse of Scottish publishing’, I told him I had an idea.
At Cargo, I found young, smart people who were passionate about quality literature. I told them I wanted to design a book that would be part of Scotland’s independent tradition, but also one that would show how Scotland has evolved. I wanted to showcase a new generation of writers whose talents might otherwise be lost between all those Dan Browns. Happily, that’s what they wanted as well. And others want it too. In association with Chemikal Underground, Scotland’s celebrated independent record label, we’ve produced an audio book that gives these stories another life, being performed by the authors as they will sound during our Open Doors tour this summer. Why bother? Because, as author Alan Bissett says, ‘If it’s dead in your mouth, it’s dead on the page.’ So here’s The Year of Open Doors, a collection which attempts to draw together some of the best new talent in Scotland, from the critically acclaimed to the unpublished. We hope you like the tasters, and don’t feel quite so grim about our literary future after reading them. ■ The Year of Open Doors is published on Tue 27 Jul, and features writing by Alan Bissett, Nora Chassler, Sophie Cooke, Suhayl Saadi, Kirstin Innes, Doug Johnstone, Kevin MacNeil, Duncan McLean and Colette Paul. The Year of Open Doors has two showcases at the Edinburgh International Book Festival: Sat 21 Aug, 2.30pm & Sun 22 Aug, 9pm, and the Chemikal Underground audiobook will be launched at the EIBF Unbound: Music Event, Mon 30 Aug, 7–11pm. www.cargopublishing.com
22 THE LIST 22 Jul–5 Aug 2010
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