Whirlwind Romance

Sam Thompson

Description

"Twelve years ago he had met Fern and the things had arrived, nameless then, crooning and sniggering as they swarmed around her, scrabbling at the catches of what was real."The walls of our world are thin, and in places they start to break down. A new love affair awakens a host of malignant things on the fringes of a young man's vision. An academic uncovers an ancient song with the power to change reality. A violent computer game turns into an obsession, bleeding into the waking world.This debut collection from Sam Thompson (Communion Town, longlisted for the Booker Prize) explores the cracks in the fabric of our existence, the hinterlands where the mundane meets the strange. Drawing upon writers like Robert Aickman and Thomas Ligotti, Whirlwind Romance creates a landscape all its own - a place where a single moment can be the catalyst to turn the very nature of reality upside down. Breathtaking, poetic, and yet shot through with an unsettling darkness, it confirms Thompson's place as a major talent.

Sujets

• amour
• Short story

Informations

• Publié par: Distributed by eBookpartnership
• Date de parution: 21 avril 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781912658213
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Also available from Unsung Stories
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The Arrival of Missives by Aliya Whiteley
Metronome by Oliver Langmead
Pseudotooth by Verity Holloway
You Will Grow Into Them by Malcolm Devlin
2084 edited by George Sandison
This Dreaming Isle edited by Dan Coxon
The Willow By Your Side by Peter Haynes
The Loosening Skin by Aliya Whiteley
Always North by Vicki Jarrett
Dark River by Rym Kechacha
Threading the Labyrinth by Tiffani Angus
Greensmith by Aliya Whiteley
Out of the Darkness edited by Dan Coxon
Gigantic by Ashley Stokes
Unexpected Places to Fall From by Malcolm Devlin

Published by Unsung Stories
3 Rosslyn Road London E17 9EU, United Kingdom
www.unsungstories.co.uk
First edition published in 2022 First impression © 2022 Sam Thompson
Sam Thompson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of their Work.
This book is a work of fiction. All the events and characters portrayed in this book are fictional and any similarities to persons, alive or deceased, is coincidental.
Paperback ISBN: 978-1912658206 ePub ISBN: 978-1912658213
Edited by Dan Coxon Proofreading by Jonathan Oliver Cover artwork by Guenter Zimmermann Cover design by Vince Haig Text design by Cox Design Limited Typesetting by Vince Haig
Printed in the UK by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
Contents
Where You Are
Whirlwind Romance
The Red Song
In Phases
Pilgrim: Hinterlands
Eurydice Box
The Monstrosity in Love
We Have Been to a Marvellous Party
Seafront Gothic
Dangerous House
Bloodybones Jones
Listen
Cassettepunk
The Other Side of the Shadows
The Walker
The Heights of Sleep
Isaac
You Must Leave All Your Belongings Behind
One-Eyed Jack and the Suicide Queen
Silent Valley
Acknowledgements
Publication History
About the Author
For Sadhbh, Odhrán, Oisín and Caoileann
Where You Are

I don’t know. It is only seconds since you were here, maybe half a minute. We are in that gap of moments where this will no doubt turn out fine. Something I’ll tell your mother about, the story of a passing fright and not the point on which our lives all turn. I run ten strides along the pavement and twenty back the other way. Teenage gaggle, slow old couple, fundraiser grinning, ponderous backpackers, slender neck and nice brown hair, drunk man, all beside the point. You’re not here.
We came into town for some errands – your hair wanted cutting, and I thought we would visit the bookshop to see if I could coax you to a new bedtime story – but my plans went wrong almost at once. You were so distressed by the barber touching your head that I paid and carried you out of the shop with the job half done. I maintained a rigid calm as you struggled and screamed. You’re too big to lift nowadays, and I could feel I had wrenched my back.
Out on the pavement I crouched in close, held your hands and asked you to breathe. You twisted away from me, rolling your eyes, pretending I was not there. Was it really too much to expect, I wanted to ask you, an outing to the shops like normal people? By now you were limp, sliding to the pavement with a false, insolent grin on your face.
You were three years old when you stopped making eye contact. When we came into your room in the morning, you would no longer hug us or say hello. You flinched when we touched you, and rubbed our kisses out. For a few months we pushed it, demanding you look at us and answer when spoken to, but it could not be done without giving you pain. Soon enough we adapted. We chose to love you for this above all. We told one another that it made you yourself, this difficulty: that you would go far because you were yourself and would not be swayed. We decided we had seen it in the first moments of your life, when you lay in your mother’s arms and gave me a long stare before you cried.
I only took a few steps along the street. I didn’t mean to leave you. I was going to have a word with myself and turn around, calm and capable. At the same time what I wanted was to make you feel how I felt.
I shut my eyes, took a breath, and turned to find you gone.
As I began to run, I tripped on a paving slab and nearly went headlong. What a clown. When I was younger I thought growing up would mean finding my balance. And then you came, which meant I must be grown up, but I am more unbalanced than ever, I find. As I ran I was back in the first weeks of your life, when the things I learned from you were very big and simple and strange. When I held you and felt how your flesh was fitted so neat and close on your soul. Even now, sometimes, when you’re tired or sad or thoughtful and your face is unguarded, I can glimpse your first self, still there and still true. Each time I make a promise that I am never going to forget it.
I’m back on the spot where I had you last. My lungs are raw, and I think we’re past the stage when running around will do much good. Attention is catching here. Claims will be laid. I’m not clear on what comes next. I project a future in which we never see you or hear of you again, in which your life unfolds in circumstances that we never know and you have to become a different person from the person you were going to be.
When you were five years old, your teacher called us in for a meeting. She was tactful. She avoided the formal language, and it took us some time to work out what she was trying to say. Later we would learn that this is one of the classic routes to a diagnosis. Traits unremarked at home become obvious at school. You had trouble dealing with new environments and changes in routine; your motor skills were a concern; you found it hard to read social situations and empathise with other children, and you did not make friends. It was a minor issue in the scheme of things, she said. We knew she was right, and on the way home we agreed to keep it in perspective.
To start announcing that I’ve lost you seems crassly dramatic. I do not want to give that much ground. As I take out my phone, I glance between these shopfronts, down an alleyway blocked by bins. A kind of alcove is formed by a chained-over side entrance, and a small wretched figure is standing there. It’s you.
Your face is covered in tears and snot and you’re still crying. When I reach you I go down on one knee and hug you hard, and surely this should be enough to bring us round, to dissolve all our bad feelings and bad behaviour in the sheer fact that we’re together again. But that’s not how it works. You are stiff in my arms, as if you do not know how to be held, and you are not getting any less upset. Your agitation feeds on itself. Now you are shaking, trying to pull away from me and cling on at the same time, flapping an arm. A family has stopped at the corner to watch us. Young parents with a girl your age and a toddler in a pushchair. The parents are uneasy, not quite sure what’s going on. I could not give a fuck what these people think of us, but they matter anyway because they stand for something, some shame in me I cannot root out.
I said that we choose to love you for the difficult things most of all, but that’s not true, is it? It’s a lie I was telling to make myself feel better. Let me try again. Here is how I love you. Kneeling on the hard ground, scared and angry, fighting to hold on. I am holding myself at seven years old, as if by squeezing tight enough I could mould him into someone new.
I get up and pull you past the watchers, along the street. We must look mad, and I wonder if being mad means not caring whether you look it. I am holding your hand harder than I need to, squeezing the small bones together. I make you go faster than you are able and jerk your arm when you stumble. You are sobbing and panicking. I cannot see how you are ever going to forgive me.
Your mother and I made a promise. You were going to live in a world that would not make sense and where the others would know rules that for you were kept hidden. You were going to fail with people and not know why. Seeing this, we made a promise that here, in the space between the three of us, you would always be understood. We would recognise you for the boy that you are.
I do not keep my promises. As I pull you along I am talking to you and over you, explaining why you are wrong to be upset and why it is unacceptable for you to behave in this way. I seem to think that if I keep insisting you will snap out of it, snap out of being as you are. My tone is one of immense forbearance but the edge of each word is vicious. There are two people in the world I dare speak to like this: you and me.
I stop hauling us through the crowd and find a recess between some bike stands and a railing. I sit down on wet pavement with my back against the wall and hold you on my lap. You are too upset to keep still, you cannot hear me, but I hold you, pinning your arms to your sides as we did when you were a week old and we swaddled you to soothe your cries. You stop fighting. I pull you closer. I feel the heat of your scalp through your hair.
In the first weeks of your life I put my cheek against your face and spoke to you, and the words did not matter. Language was going to happen to you but it had not happened yet, which meant I could say anything at all. I wonder now if those were the truest conversations we are ever going to have.
When I relax my embrace you stay where you are, exhausted, and your weight settles into me. You hitch and sniffle. Soon you are asleep. Your head lolls and for an instant your eyes open and seek me out. Your gaze is big and dark and placid. Eyes close.
I am mumbling words in your ear but I do not know what I am saying. This is how it is. I speak in the hope that one day I will start to listen. I say what I do not yet know.
Your body is heavy and hot. Even in sleep you