Quicksand Tales

Keggie Carew

Description

Keggie Carew has an unerring instinct for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, of putting her foot in it and making a hash of things. From the repercussions of a missing purse, to boiling a frog, or the holiday when the last thing you could possibly imagine happens, Keggie has been there. She also has an enviable talent for recycling awfulness and turning embarrassment into gold. In prose that will make you laugh, wince and curl your toes, Keggie Carew shares her most humiliating, awkward, uncomfortable, funny, true, terrible and all-too-relatable moments.

Sujets

• Lettres et linguistique

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 31 janvier 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786894090
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Keggie Carew has lived in West Cork, Barcelona, Texas, Auckland and London. Before writing, her career was in contemporary art. Keggie lives in Wiltshire with her husband Jonathan. She is the author of Dadland , which won the 2016 COSTA biography award. keggiecarew.co.uk
Also by Keggie Carew
Dadland


The paperback edition published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2020by Canongate Books
This digital edition first published in 2019 by Canongate Books
First published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2019 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West and in Canada by Publishers Group Canada
canongate.co.uk
Copyright © Keggie Carew, 2019
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.
The right of Keggie Carew to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 408 3 eISBN 978 1 78689 409 0
For Jonathan
CONTENTS
Preface
The Late Visitor
The Amateur Waitress
The Tidy House
The Exciting Invitation
The Camel Raid
The Arrogant Poem
The Invisible Story
The Constant Murderer
The Bad Matchmaker
The Anticipated Celebration
The Black Purse
The Good Uncle
The Last Thing
Acknowledgements
PREFACE
I have had my fair share of awkward predicaments and the toe-curling mortification of the aftermath. Something irresistible attracts mishap and misadventure to me, or me to it. I effortlessly put my foot in it. Say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing. Yet for someone with few qualms about not conforming, why, oh why, is my internal discomfort so deep? If fate is not conspiring against me, then it must be something to do with me.
I feel an affinity with people who have excruciating things happen to them. Obviously they make me feel better, but there is something beautifully levelling about it too. Picasso said a picture hung crookedly on a wall tells you a lot more about the owner than a straight one ever could; he preferred crooked pictures. He knew, of course, we are all crooked pictures, busy in the lifelong pursuit of straightening ourselves, yet it is the straight picture we strive to portray.
The crack that yawns open to swallow us is the place that interests me. Making a hash of it. Being human. The tripwires of our hasty conclusions, our fixed ideas, our contradictions in thinking, our tribal prejudices, our base selves. As witness to my own prosecution I am forced to inspect the soft underbelly of my unruly, conflicted self. Not for absolution, but to embrace the human drama. To let the air out.
In the years of working away in the quiet anonymity of my shed I have often been encouraged by writers’ aphorisms, by their tips and guidance, by their bons mots . Muriel Spark’s advice: ‘You are writing a letter to a friend . . . Write privately, not publicly; without fear or timidity, right to the end of the letter, as if it was never going to be published’. Or as the poet Liz Lochhead said, ‘You are stuck with something until the point where you go, “To hell with it, I’ll tell the truth.”’
The stories in this book are true. Some contain privacy-protection mechanisms, but they are all strictly faithful to my experience of what occurred. I am obsessively superstitious about it. Tamper with the evidence and the human reaction and outcome will be altered, the truth lost or perverted. And truth has to take priority over finer feelings. It is rarely comfortable. But that is life. I laughed when Colm Tóibín on Desert Island Discs refuted the idea of waiting until someone had died to tell a story. His solution was to ring them up and say, ‘You know that awful story you told me last week with all those personal details in it, well, I’ve written it up and it’s being published next week!’
Any good story, for me, has disaster in there somewhere. So I began to collect mine. In some I am the witless protagonist, in others a reluctant witness or victim of circumstance, but I am always there – in the silent groan. Alarmingly, the pile on my desk is still growing. The earliest story in this collection happened on the eve of my twentieth birthday, yet every detail remains as chilling as if it happened yesterday; the most recent is too recent for comfort. These are not banana-skin tales, but more my mother’s medicine – gallows humour. Human fuck-ups. Mostly mine, but not always . . . Perfect storms, incompetence, paranoia, insecurity, clumsiness, privileged lives and over-fed white middle-class anxieties, dark deeds or pure bad luck at being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some are just terrible. Some are not terrible at all, just excruciating. Anything that makes me shudder gets an airing. When the mirror throws back that bright, bitter shame; when good intentions fall short in our unequal world. I am recycling awfulness.
Flawed creatures that we are, I hope these voyages into quicksand might lessen our shared fragility.
Keggie Carew, 2019

‘Fail again. Fail better.’
SB
‘Fail again. Fail worse.’
KC
THE LATE VISITOR
It is 1976. The year of the Entebbe hijack, of the IRA bombings in London, of the first commercial Concorde flight, of Taxi Driver and M*A*S*H . Liberal party leader Jeremy Thorpe is accused of hiring a hitman to murder his homosexual lover. Jimmy Carter moves into the White House. It has been a scorching summer. I’m nineteen, and life at home has been terrible; Dad has left, Mum is ill, my sister, Nicky, and I have gone feral living off jam sandwiches. I’ve bunked off school, done badly in my A levels, my boyfriend has gone to university but I know I have no chance with my lousy grades. I have been working as a barmaid and making clay necklaces, and have saved enough money to buy a one-way ticket to Toronto. The only reason I have chosen Toronto is because I met some Canadians in the pub I was working in, so I have an address where I can stay for a few days, which makes the leap a little less daunting.
So off I go on my beginning-to-regret-I-ever-mentioned-it adventure, wearing my Doc Marten boots, with everything I think I need in my dad’s WW2 army backpack with its ridiculously uncomfortable metal waistband and heavy leather straps.
When I arrive in Toronto at the end of October it is already bitterly cold. I have never felt cold like it, a whistling-through-you cold that my thin brown coat and gappy knitted jumper do nothing to allay. After a week of trudging around on my own – for my Canadian friends are busy at work – I catch a bus south to Hamilton to meet an English friend, Ian. I cannot remember what he was doing in Hamilton, but we decide to head south into the United States, and because we have very little money we hitch-hike. We take a route through the backwater states of Ohio, Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, and it is quite eventful, but miraculously we survive, and get rides all the way to Texas. In Texas I notice a large billboard on the side of the freeway advertising horse-riding trips with pictures of cowboys lassoing cattle, and on a whim we decide to check it out because I have always wanted to ride western style like a cowboy, so we ask our ride to drop us off the interstate at the next junction, which is a place called Sweetwater. Sweetwater is right in the heart of Texas, almost dead centre in fact; it is a flattish town with wide streets and low houses, and while we can’t find any cowboys lassoing cattle, it is big on cotton, oil and rattlesnakes. Which is exotic enough to make us stay and try to find jobs. We are conspicuous with our packs and because we are the only two people who go around town on foot. There are no pavements on these wide streets which seem to be made only for big cars with big noses that sort of bound and glide everywhere, even in and out of the take-away. For me it is like being in an American movie. We ask around if there is any work and are directed to the local cotton gin (where raw cotton is processed); and there we are hired by a bemused Texan foreman wearing a cream Stetson hat to work with the Mexican ‘wetbacks’ – illegal workers (of whom we were two) – so called after the migrants who had to swim the Rio Grande to get across the US border. Our job is to shift and stack massive 600lb bales of cotton with a large cotton bale hook called a gaucho – there’s a knack. Not the best at this, I graduate to driving the forklift in the warehouse, where I shine and show off as the fastest driver and most accurate cotton-bale stacker in the whole gin – an accolade bemusedly conceded by cowboys and Mexicans alike. We are earning $2 an hour with time-and-a-half overtime, and working 90 hours a week, give or take an hour, so our take-home pay is around $230 a week (the equivalent of more than a thousand dollars today), which for a nineteen-year-old in 1976 is a whopping amount. I’m certainly earning more than my dad is back in Britain, where an average wage for a man is less than £70 a week (£45 for a woman). What’s more, at night I double it with a preposterous streak of beginner’s luck at pool in a pool hall downtown called The Green Room, where there is an endless supply of cowboys ready to put their money down on the table and take me on.
We work, play pool and save money. We buy a black VW Beetle and call it Horace – you give names to cars when you’re nineteen. The plan is to drive to South America, so we convert it into a camping Beetle that we can sleep in. We take the back seats out – this is in the days when the seats were on runners which you could just undo and pull the seats