New Welsh Short Stories (8 page)

‘Mr Philip, sorry.

‘Mistake.

‘Shoes stuffed in box with kettle. I am work now with car but OK, sister take train. She have shoes.
Vlad
e
ˇ
na, yes. She very hurry, ask me call you. Tell you stay there please.

‘One half
-
hour only, Mr Philip.
Vlad
e
ˇ
na promise, she with you.'

LEVITATION, 1969

Jo Mazelis

Rising up in the air, the dead girl feels … dead. Her eyes are closed; for a moment she has forgotten everything. She is dead.

Then alive again. They have set her down on the concrete wall and the ceremony is over. They do not misuse the levitation game – weeks and even months go by and they don't do it or even think of doing it – as if it's a dream that occasionally reoccurs, but is forgotten when the sleeper awakens. Then at some point in time it stops. They never perform the act of levitation again.

The game arrived in their lives after the circle games of ‘The Farmer's in His Den' and ‘Oranges and Lemons' had fallen away, but before the long passage of no
-
games
-
at
-
all enveloped them forever.

The reign of levitation is also that of puberty. Is it not said that pubescent girls and boys, those on the cusp of change, are the most vulnerable and attractive to the spirit world? That in homes where poltergeists are active there is usually in residence a child in their early teens?

The dead girl (who is not really dead) lives in a home with such a poltergeist. Objects are broken; china smashed into many pieces, the old black Bakelite telephone – the one whose weight and heft suggested unalienable permanence – is suddenly and mysteriously transformed. It catches her eye when she comes home from school. It is in its usual place by the front door, but something is different about it. She looks closely, sees an intricate pattern of lines and cracks all over it and, in places, evidence of glue. The phone has somehow been broken into a hundred jagged shards and then someone (she knows who) has painstakingly, with his Araldite and magnifier, tweezers and spent matches, put it back together again.

Such an event should come up in conversation in a small family like theirs, but no one says a word. The destruction was the work of an angry spirit; the reconstruction was performed by her father, who is often to be found with a soldering iron in his hand, or a pair of needle
-
nose pliers, an axe or hammer.

One autumn day years before, she came across him in the garden, tending a fire of fallen leaves. Such a fire is always an event for a child of eight or nine, so she stands at a safe distance to watch how he rakes and prods it, how the flames change colour from red to blue to white to yellow.

He stirs his pyre of smoking leaves and suddenly the centre gives way and something hidden is revealed: first, brown paper that flares away to black tissuey fragments, then white fabric pads, some folded in upon themselves, others that boldly show their faces with their Rorschach
-
test ink blots of red and rust
-
coloured blood. Her mother's blood, her mother's sanitary towels – which belong to the secret places of locked bathrooms – are out here being burned by her father in the front garden of their home where any neighbour or passer
-
by might see.

Behind her father is the oak tree and behind that the ivy
-
covered low stone wall, and in the earth just in front is a bamboo pole that she has topped with a bird's skull – a totem she had made to ward off danger.

This was long ago, before the poltergeist and the angry words that echo through the house late at night to infiltrate her dreams, turning them into nightmares.

One day her mother came home from the shops and announced she had found a lucky charm. She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a tiny little hand made from cheap nickel
-
plated metal. The thumb was tucked into the palm and so were the two middle fingers, leaving just the index and little finger standing proudly erect.

‘Aren't those meant to represent the Devil's horns?' the girl said, not knowing where such knowledge came from.

Her mother's eyes widened in horror and she threw the charm from her hand into the empty sink. Later she took it into the garden and was gone for some time. When she came back into the house she looked tired and frightened.

‘I tried to smash it,' she told her daughter. ‘Then I tried to burn it. It's indestructible; it must have been made by the Devil.'

Now the girl is eleven years old and goes to big school where as the littlest, lightest one among her friends she always plays the dead girl.

‘This is the law of levitation…'

There is no greater pleasure than the moment when the other girls lift her high into the air. Her body remains absolutely straight; at no place, either at one leg or at her head, does a weaker girl fail to do the magic, and she seems to almost float upward. No one laughs and the dead girl's eyes remain closed. She believes. All of them believe.

Her body is still that of a child while all around her the other girls are changing or have already changed into women. After sports they are meant to strip and go into the communal shower, all of them naked together, sixteen or seventeen girls, most of whom have never done such a thing before. None of them are muddy or even sweaty; a half
-
hour of netball is hardly an exertion, especially after the enforced stillness of sitting at a desk listening to an array of voices droning on about Pythagoras and the tributaries of the Nile and flying buttresses and Beowulf and blanket stitch and the creaming method for making cakes. She and a few other girls run to the showers with their towels wrapped carefully around themselves, then after splashing a little water over their heads and feet they run back to the changing area again.

The poltergeist at home is getting worse. Last night after she had gone to bed he tore the television set from the stand and jumped on it. She doesn't know if he was careful to switch it off and take out the plug first. Probably, as he's always telling them all to do just that.

She has dark circles under her eyes. She is thin and (though no one knows this) anaemic. She does not do her homework. Every time her parents ask if she has any she says ‘no' or claims that she did it on the bus.

She is like a fallen leaf caught up in a strong gust of wind. She has no locomotion. In biology Mr Thomas has taught them that as seeds have no locomotion they must find other means of dispersal, hence the helicopter wings of sycamore seeds.

In the playground, from behind her, something hard and knobbly is laid upon her head. This may be the start of another interesting game, but when she turns, she sees that the hand belongs to a girl she does not really know, a girl who gives her a smile that is glittering with malice. She has only just understood that the object on the top of her head is a curled fist when its partner arrives to smash it down. It is meant to be like a raw egg breaking on her head, but it is far more painful than that. It hurts as much as if the girl had just straightforwardly punched her. It is instead a complex violence that is nearly impossible to react to. It is delivered in the guise of a joke, but the message is menace.

She grimaces with pain and her eyes water.

Don't cry, whatever you do, don't cry.

Weakly she smiles, then grimaces again, this time comically, exaggerating her expression in the hope they will appreciate her humour. This is a tactic that usually works, but not now, not with this girl and her silent, sneering sidekick.

Instead they point right at her, index fingers dangerously close to poking out an eye and laugh jeeringly, artificially. WHA HA HA!

Then, as quickly as they had arrived they are gone, and whatever
that
was is over.

At around two in the afternoon it grows unnaturally dark, nearly as black as night. The teacher has switched on the overhead lights, and attempts to keep their attention on the lesson, but beyond the big plate
-
glass window the distant hills and far
-
off steelworks are the dramatic backdrop to a spectacular performance by the weather. Grey
-
black clouds fill the sky and the air is charged with electricity. The children can barely keep their eyes from the window; the teacher raps the wooden board
-
duster sharply on her desk, creating a cloud of chalk dust, but their attention is snagged by a greater primordial force.

‘Never mind the storm, we have work to do. Now, look at your books. What is the meaning of…'

A flash of lightning draws a collective gasp from the children, loud enough to cut the teacher off in mid
-
sentence. Seconds later, distantly, there is the rumble of thunder.

‘Woah!' one boy cries and abandons his chair to run to the window, and then nearly all of the children are by the window staring outside, their eyes wide with wonder. Lightning zigzags down again and again on the black shrouded hills; magnesium
-
white veins that burn onto the retina, while the tin
-
tray thunderclaps grow louder and more insistent.

Unlike the others, the dead girl stays in her seat. She can see just as well from there as from the scrum of elbows and sharp knees and bony heads that are ducking and dancing and roaring by the window. She is no less moved than the others, no more obedient than they, but she has withdrawn into herself. She is a pair of green eyes looking out at the turning world as the leaf of her body is taken there, or battered by that, or torn by this.

Seconds pass and finally she no longer wants to remain in her seat; she wants to belong, to be like the other children, to break the rules like them, to press her face against the cold glass by the window and feel the thrum in her cheekbones as the sound waves batter and shake it.

‘Children!' the teacher is saying. ‘Calm down at once!'

The dead girl pushes back her chair. She wears a beatific smile as she stands and begins to take the few steps which will bring her to the window. She seems to glide forward, focusing her gaze on the distant hills. She does not see the teacher bearing down on her. She hears the tirade of words coming from the teacher's mouth, but they are as generalised as the thunder.

‘I will not have this! I will not tolerate such insubordination in my classroom. Sit down! Sit down at once! YOU!'

The teacher catches her arm, wrenching it sideways, forcing her to turn. The older woman's face up close is terrifying, her expression almost insane with fury.

‘How dare you!' she roars, then slaps the dead girl's left cheek. ‘Stop grinning child!' she adds, but the girl's smile has already gone and her face is blank once more.

She closes her eyes.

‘She is dead,' the girl standing at her head says, and the voices travel around her prone body, echoes of what has been, of what is to come. Then they are lifting her, higher and higher, to waist level, then shoulder level, then above their heads, to the furthest reach of their upstretched arms and fingers. Then higher still and higher again until she is floating far overhead. Then finally, although the other girls shade their eyes and search the sky they can no longer see her. She's gone.

RISING-FALLING

Joe Dunthorne

Her name was Zhang Lì but, for the ease of English speakers, she called herself Elizabeth. In one profile picture she played the grand piano in front of floor
-
to
-
ceiling windows overlooking the Huangpu river. When we chatted online, she was always modest about her looks.

– Women do not have body like mine in England?

– No. If only…

– In China we are slim but full
-
chested.

– You're beautiful.

– :
-
)) So sweet.

It may be clear to you from just this short exchange that I was not communicating with a real woman. If I had this thought, I decided to ignore it.
You may say I was duped but I chose to be naive. In science, there are two types of people. Those who see a beautiful, rich woman offering to fly a sixty
-
eight
-
year
-
old square
-
headed particle physics professor halfway round the world to make love and assume the woman does not exist. And those – I among them – who see in the same equation an outside probability that could make the dream real.

When my office was still lit at 3 am, any passing students of mine may have presumed their tutor was busy exploring the limits of the observable universe. This wasn't far from the truth – Elizabeth and I chatted until dawn. She lived alone, working as a coordinator for a shipping corporation. She was twenty
-
seven, which was not so young. I told her about my work, that it was my job to make a fool of Einstein. I have met Nobel prizewinners and can confirm they are often quite boring. She was never dull, even in a language not her own. I have rarely felt such delight as when reading the words
Elizabeth is typing
.