Remember Me The Bees – Button Maker

Button Maker cr Louise BoulterOh my goodness, can you believe that it’s barely a month till the launch of my short story collection Remember Me To The Bees? Monday 31st March  – put it in your diary – you’re invited!

The seventh story in my  collection is Button Maker, a bittersweet tale of a fleeting romance.

The artwork is by Louise Boulter.

I wrote this short story after interviewing a woman who made buttons for a living – her craft really intrigued me and made me think of that moment in small talk at parties when someone asks what you do. Wouldn’t it be fab to say something as unusual as button maker? Once I imagined that beginning, the rest fell into place, with the created character become as elusive and alluring as the idea of her profession.

A short excerpt from Button Maker

She comes to a halt over something shining on the pebbles – large and flattish. It gives off a faint stink like earwax and cod liver oil and vomit. The sky-facing eye has been pecked away, consumed.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” She’s nudging at the fish corpse with a twig. Part of me recoils. What if she asks me to help her carry it back up the cliff, through the forest?

“Fish scales, they’d make pretty buttons, wouldn’t they?”

“What about the smell?”

She pauses, like she hasn’t noticed it till now, then wrinkles her nose, shakes her head. “I’ll remember what they look like, make some from silver. And a series of little dead fish buttons, cavities where the eyes should be! People will buy them thinking they’re cute and never even realise the truth of what they’re wearing.”

She drops the twig, turns and hugs me, whispers hot and loud in my ear: “If it wasn’t for the pebbles I’d like to fuck you on this beach. Right now.”

I hold her close but can’t help shivering at the thought of baring my skin to the elements. The heat of passion is locked away deep inside me, far from the wind that is sawing away at my face. In the city it never gets this cold. The buildings give off heat like I imagine stabled cattle do.

I bury my face in her hair, inhale the green apple smell of her. “Can we go back to your house?” I ask, thinking of her room full of buttons, the warm, blanket-laden bed where we cocooned ourselves till daybreak.

Remember Me The Bees – Rabbit Hunt

Rabbit Hunt cr Louise BoulterThe sixth story in my short story collection Remember Me To The Bees is Rabbit Hunt, which tells the tale of schoolyard bullying, from the bully’s point of view.

The artwork is by Louise Boulter.

I originally wrote these scenes as part of a novel, but lifted them out to create this short story. I often find that doing this – taking scenes from a novel-in-progress and revising them to suit the short story form – tightens and strengthens them, ready to be reinserted into the longer storytelling form.

In this story, I wanted to explore the feelings of the bully faced with a new potential victim, in this case a progressive mute, and how the bully’s emotions might become confused through their interaction.

A short excerpt from Rabbit Hunt

Sue and Abi loiter nearby – ready to grab Rabbit if she tries to break away.

“Why d’you do that, Rabbit?” Letty asks, trying to sound reasonable. “Why get us in trouble like that? Didn’t I try to be your mate? Why turn on me when all I’ve been is nice?”

Letty widens her eyes reproachfully and the girl shrugs her shoulders ever so slightly. The movement shifts Letty’s palm from her arm and Letty scowls, slapping both hands onto her shoulders and knocking her backwards against the trunk of an old oak.

“Why couldn’t you just take the blame for us?” she snarls, fury crackling through her. “What harm would that have done? Worst you’d have had is a telling off. Me, I’ve got a letter for my mum that’s going to ruin her week, and Sue and Abi have the same. What’d you rat on us for? We’re in deep shit, and all because you weren’t mate enough to take the blame.”

“Smack her one, Letty,” Abi says, edging closer. “Whack her in the face and give her a nosebleed. It’s not like she’s going to tell on us, is it?”“I could do that.” Letty narrows her eyes in a way that she hopes makes the rabbit feel like she’s being sized up by a hungry cat. “Or I could do something a bit more lasting.”

She lets go of one of Rabbit’s shoulders and takes a cheap lighter from her pocket. Still eyeing the girl, she fingers the lighter, stroking her thumb over the red plastic and trying to look menacing.

Abi nods eagerly. “Oh, yes! We haven’t done a branding in ages!”
That does the trick. The girl gasps for air, body twitching as fear spikes through her.

Remember Me The Bees – Condensation

Condensation cr Louise BoulterThe fifth story in my debut short story collection Remember Me To the Bees is Condensation. The artwork is by Louise Boulter.

This story went through a variety of versions before it appeared in this form. I knew I wanted to write about the influences of the past on the present and how you might attempt to reconcile the two, and I knew I needed letting go to be a big part of that. So it seemed natural to give the main character, Yolanda, a beloved mother who was dying from cancer, and a young daughter who had grown up in a different culture to her own.

A short excerpt from Condensation

Their first months in the village had been hard. Beatriz insisted they speak only English at home, to help them along, but there was far more to learn than the words. Yolanda found herself picking the vocabulary up faster than her mother, as well as learning new ways to behave, to dress, to eat. Even years after their relocation, when Yolanda had shed almost every trace of her Mexican identity, Beatriz continued to seem foreign, different.

When her mother came back from the village grocery shop, having failed in her search for fresh avocados, Yolanda’s teenage self cringed as Beatriz complained in her thick Mexican accent about the woman behind the cash register. “She was so condensation to me!” Beatriz exclaimed.

“Condescending, Ma, not condensation!” Yolanda shrunk into herself with embarrassment.

Now, Yolanda’s own daughter, deliberately named Ellen rather than Elena, had begun asking questions about her heritage. Yolanda was reluctant to talk about the country they’d left behind. At just the thought of it alarming sensations stabbed through her – desire, trepidation, and bitter, brutal heartbreak. She would swiftly change the subject, avoiding Ellen’s questioning gaze, and bury the emotions as deeply as the animal bones in the garden.

Remember Me The Bees – The Taste of Tayberries

The Taste of Tayberries cr Louise BoulterThe official launch of my short story collection, Remember Me To The Bees is on Monday 31 March. Here’s a sneak preview of story four in the collection.

The Taste of Tayberries tells the story of a little girl, Deena, trying to understand the world of grown ups and make the right choice on what to do about something she’s overheard. At the beginning of the tale, her older sister’s boyfriend, Jan, gives her a pair of love birds, and  this gift, what she does with the birds, and the tragedy that follows as a result, all affect her judgement when it comes to a far bigger issue.

As with all the stories in the collection, the artwork for this story is by Louise Boulter.

A short excerpt from The Taste of Tayberries

Jan puts the cage on top of the chest of drawers in Deena’s room. He shows her how to spoon seeds and small grey pellets into the food dish each day, and how to take the water bottle from the side of the cage so she can refill it from bathroom tap. When she goes to bed she covers the cage with the fabric so the lovebirds will know it’s time for sleep.

But they don’t sleep.

Snuggled up under her blanket Deena hears their murmurings, the occasional rustle and flutter. Deena can’t sleep either. What if the birds have a clutch of chicks somewhere, or some eggs that are growing gradually colder without anyone to warm them? She lies there in the darkness with worry gnawing away at her insides.

Just before dawn she climbs out of bed and goes to the cage, slips off the cover. The birds stare at her.

“It’s all right,” she whispers. “I’m going to rescue you.”

The bedroom window is stuck fast. Deena struggles with the latch, using all her strength. The birds tweet softly in alarm. At last the latch creaks back and the glass rushes up so fast Deena nearly topples out onto the inky-shadowy flagstones far below.

She hangs onto the windowframe and sucks in the dawn air, feeling her heart pound in her chest, wilder than next-door’s cat.

The sky is just beginning to turn gold where it meets the city roofs. Here and there a windowpane flares like it’s on fire.

“Look,” Deena says to the lovebirds, hauling their cage over to the windowsill. “See all that sky? It’s all for you.”

She pops open the little gilt door and waits.

Remember Me To The Bees – Singing For Seals

Singing For Seals cr Louise BoulterThe third story in my short story collection Remember Me To The Bees is Singing For Seals. I wrote it to explore how a child might react to a traumatic experience. After a few re-writes the point of view shifted from the daughter to the father, Damien, who is trying to fix his family after a miscarriage has torn it apart.

By focusing on the father’s promise to his daughter and his determination to win back her trust, this becomes a far more hopeful and less bleak story than it might have been.

The artwork is by Louise Boulter.

A short excerpt from Singing for Seals

It roared before us, the colour of slate with streaks of violent green, waves like huge animals leaping to smash themselves against the glassy black rocks. The air rang with pellets of water and the storm whipped around us, pulling at Carrie’s skirt and dragging Aylene’s tired curls free from her tur- quoise headscarf.
“Where are the seals?” Carrie asked, “I can’t see them.”

“Maybe they’re sheltering in a cave.” I wished I hadn’t made yet another stupid promise.

“But you said! You told me I would see them!” Carrie scowled. The disappointment was as vivid on her face as it had been after the night of bloodied sheets, when I’d sat her down and explained that the baby was no longer coming. She’d wanted to know what had gone wrong, why she wasn’t going to be a big sister after all. There was nothing I could say to that; I just hugged her and promised that everything would be better soon.

But I’d lied. Months passed and Aylene was still the frozen stranger she’d become when the baby died inside her.

“You said the seals would be here!”

“We have to sing to them,” I said desperately. “They’ll like that, they’ll swim to shore to listen. Let’s sing ‘All Things Bright And Beautiful’ good and loud. I know you learnt it at school.”

We shouted the words into the churning air, and after a few moments even Aylene joined in with the chorus.

Then I heard it: a frail, screeching cry that cut through the storm like a distress signal.
“Hush a moment. What’s that sound?”

Aylene’s hands closed tightly over Carrie’s shoulders, and I looked at her pinched face, eyes half-closed against the rain as she listened.

“Is it seals?” Carrie asked, excitement bringing her to the tips of her welly boots.

“I’m not sure.” I glanced down the rocks to a dark hole; a cave. “It came from over there. Stay here with your mum, I’m going to see.”

Seals cr Judy Darley

Remember Me The Bees – The Big Clean

The Big Clean cr Louise Boulter

The second story in my debut short story collection Remember Me To the Bees is The Big Clean. An earlier version was published by The View From Here literary magazine. The artwork is by Louise Boulter.

I’ve always been interested in the way different people’s minds work, and at what point those differences become defined as madness. This story takes the point of view of a small boy who is witnessing his mother’s latest ‘episode’ and worrying about how his dad will react when he gets home.

In an homage to earlier tales of women’s madness, such as the outstanding The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the story also contains echoes of the understated sexism of yesteryear.

A short excerpt from The Big Clean

Mum’s gone mad again. That’s why I’m sitting in the tree house. It’s just a few planks of wood nailed together, but it feels safe up here. When the wind blows the branches creak and I imagine I’m on a boat sailing far away. We had an astronomy lesson at Scouts today, so I can use my telescope to navigate by the stars.

Dad’s not home yet, but when he gets back from work I know he’s going to go mad too, not in a crazy way, like Mum, but in a shouty, angry way.

He hates it when Mum gets like this. I wouldn’t mind her madness so much if it wasn’t for the way it makes Dad so cross. Sometimes when she’s mad Mum’s magic to be around. The usual rules disappear and life becomes a game. I never quite know what to expect. Right now though, she’s busy digging up the garden and filling the house with soil. She’s doing it ever so thoroughly, sprinkling a fine layer of earth over every single thing and making the whole house smells damp and dusky, like a cellar. She calls it “the big clean”.

When I walked into the kitchen earlier, she told me to be careful not to get dirty footprints on her nice clean floor, so I tiptoed across the soil to the counter and tried to open the biscuit tin without tipping any of the chocolate-brown mud off. I couldn’t do it though, and half of it fell on the floor in a heap, but Mum just smiled brightly, passed me a custard cream and layered the earth back on top of the tin.

Photo illustration of short story The Big Clean

Remember Me The Bees – Never Seen The Sea

Never Seen The Sea cr Louise BoulterEver wondered where a writer gets their ideas from? It’s something I’m often asked about, so over the next 20 weeks I thought I’d offer you a bit of an insight.

As you may know, the official launch of my short story collection, Remember Me To The Bees, is going to happen in March, and over the coming weeks, I’ll introduce each of the 20 short stories in turn, let you know the inspiration behind them and share a short extract to hopefully whet your appetite.

The first story in the collection is Never Seen The Sea, which tells the story of Sally, who, funnily enough, has never seen the sea. The original seed of it was me trying to imagine how the sea would look to someone who’d never laid eyes on it before, and then I started thinking of the reasons someone might never have had the opportunity to see it for themselves. Living on a tiny island like Britain, it’s a difficult thing to grasp!

I also wanted to think about how not having experienced a thing most people take for granted might colour an individual’s personality – how it might set them apart.

An earlier version of Never Seen The Sea was published in The Love of Looking, an anthology from Scopophilia Publishing, and led directly to me being offered the chance to have my debut collection published.

In case you were wondering, the artwork is by Louise Boulter.

A short excerpt from Never Seen The Sea

Gusts of air buffeted the Fiat as they raced along the motorway. Sally fought the urge to open the window and hang her head out, mouth agape. She’d never felt anything like it before, this sense of wild abandon. No one knew where she was, not even her mother, no one but this man, Paul, this almost stranger, driving the car and her towards the sea.

“So, you’ve never been there?” He’d been disbelieving at first, half watching the road and half gazing at her in what she supposed was amazement. “Not even as a small child?”

“Never,” she said defiantly, for the first time feeling the power in that statement. Rather than flushing with shame, as she usually did when the topic came up, she felt the novelty of her innocence, saw the way he stared into her, a girl who needed educating. She saw the yearning in his cloudy blue eyes when he contemplated being the one to reveal it to her, as though he was showing her the world.

Tintagel beach1

Remember Me To The Bees update

Remember Me To The Bees coverA few of you have been asking for updates on my debut short story collection Remember Me To The Bees. Thanks for your interest!

Well, the book exists, which is really exciting! The official launch (more details to follow) will be in March this year, and it will be widely available from that point.

The book contains twenty of my short stories, each accompanied by artwork from the talented Louise Boulter, who also designed the gorgeous cover.

Author Tania Hershman has written a lovely foreword for the book, which made me quite blush! Rather marvellously, she says : “The title is, in fact, very apt: bees may be diminutive (relative to us, at least) but they possess power not only to inflict pain but also to give us the gift of intense sweetness. To my mind, as a reader, painful sweetness is a wonderful way to define the best of short stories, a honeyed sting that this excellent collection most certainly delivers.”

Yeeps! No wonder I blushed.

The back cover copy states:

“The twenty stories in Judy Darley’s debut collection cover the moments that make us the people we are, where actions are taken and sights seen that will change the protagonists’ lives forever – with sometimes startling consequences.

From the small boy grappling with fears both real and imaginary to the married woman being ardently pursued by a man who seems able to read her deepest thoughts, we catch our breath as Judy’s characters make emotional as well as physical journeys, twisting and turning to the very end.”

Over the next few weeks you will see copies of Remember Me To The Bees popping up in independent bookshops and art galleries across Bristol and beyond as well as appearing on sites such as Tangent Books’ online bookshop. Go on, buy a copy, and make a writer very happy!

Happy New Year!

Simpang Mengayau Borneo cr Judy DarleyI always feel such excitement (once the hangover subsides) on January 1st. The excesses of Christmas are over and a pristine shiny new year awaits – 12 whole months of possibilities!

2013 was a pretty impressive beast, all things considered. Short story queen Alice Munro received the Nobel Prize in Literature, helping to ensure the form receives the respect it deserves. Eleanor Catton became the youngest ever Man Booker Prize winner for her novel The Luminaries – a vast book with what feels like a cast of thousands.

Tea cr Judy DarleyIn art, the Turner Prize was won by Laure Prouvost for ‘Wantee’, a film about the powers of tea drinking, art and family, featuring a fictional grandfather and ideas about artist Kurt Schwitters. Laure, who lives in the UK but is utterly French, says the award made her feel adopted by her host nation. Aww.

And my own debut short story collection Remember Me To The Bees came out – which was a great note for me personally to finish the year on.

So storytelling has been top of the agenda in creative circles – and aren’t we all glad about that? Who knows what 2014 will bring?

Stories of social media

FriendFollowText coverEarlier this year I had an idea for a story that was prompted by something I saw on Pinterest. Like most writers I know, I spend an inordinate amount of time dabbling on social media sites, giving my brain a rest while trying to untangle that next thorny sentence, plotline or conundrum.

What I saw was a photograph of an owl. Except it wasn’t an owl. It was a cup of milky coffee that someone had dropped two Hula Hoops into. The salt in the crisps and the crisp potato rings created the illusion of an owl’s face.

I loved it, and thought about who I should share it with.

Weirdly enough, a fictional, half-formed character I’d been carrying around for a while, came to mind as the person who would be most glad to see this.

And so the character consolidated, and the story began.

Shortly afterwards I saw a call for submissions from a anthology seeking tales inspired by social media. Editor and writer Shawn Syms was inviting submissions of stories inspired and about all kinds of social media channels for Friend. Follow. Text. #StoriesFromLivingOnline. It seemed too good a chance to miss.

I sent over my tale, called Coffee Owl, and it was selected for inclusion. Very exciting, but even more pleasing, it was being published by prestigious Canadian literary imprint Enfield & Wizenty. My story was only one of two by British writers published in the anthology, and only one of three by none Canadians.

Proud? Me? Just a little. #understatement!

So now Friend. Follow. Text. #StoriesFromLivingOnline is finally out, and is a thing of beauty. You can buy it on Amazon and find out more on the FriendFollowText website.