Hard to believe that the official launch of my debut short story collection Remember Me To the Bees is this coming Monday. Don’t forget, you’re invited to the party!

The eleventh story in the collection is Girls in Windows.

For four unseasonably hot and very happy days in October 2011 my hubla and I visited Amsterdam for a travel piece I was writing for easyJet. We had a wonderful time in this city of extremes, and several of the sights and experiences stamped themselves indelibly on my consciousness, providing the backdrop of this story, which I wrote for and had published in Litro magazine’s Dutch edition. Now all I needed was a plot, which came in the form of a young man apparently stalking the protagonist and knowing her to the core. But how?

The artwork is by Louise Boulter.

A short excerpt from Girls in Windows

In the park we ambled along the paths, pausing to hear the skin-shivering strains of a violin echoing beneath a bridge. You grasped my hand, ejecting me abruptly from my reverie. Forcing me to conceal my annoyance, tell myself you’d meant it to be romantic, had meant well.

Deeper into the park, we walked through a fragrant avenue of hedges starred with white flowers where bees stumbled in drunken bliss. “What a wonderful smell!” I exclaimed. “It reminds me of something…”

As always, you were ready with an answer, sniffing hard then declaring: “Honey.”

I breathed in, catching a note of something richer, almost buttery. Honey wasn’t right – it was caramel that caught in my throat. Despite everything, I wanted to be kind to you on our anniversary, so I just smiled.

We reached a lake besides which bikes lounged in the grass like heat-hungry metallic lizards. Small birds shot overhead from tree to tree, silhouetted against the brightness, flickers of colour showing through.

“Parrots?” I asked disbelievingly. You thumbed through the guidebook, finding no answer between its pages.

Our meandering took us back to the bridge, but the violinist had gone, replaced by a group of kids in their late teens, early twenties; bearing handwritten signs offering free hugs. The sight intrigued me, drew me to them, but you pulled me closer to yourself, proclaiming: “We have all the free hugs we need!”

I forced a laugh, pulled away, and the boy must have seen his chance. His warmth enveloped me, along with a faint smell of perspiration that wasn’t entirely unpleasant.

The tenth story in my debut short story collection Remember Me To the Bees is The Scent of Summer. This tale began life in a short story workshop, when we were each presented with a postcard and invited to write a story about it.

Mine showed a family of four standing awkwardly in a back garden. They looked so very ill-at-ease it made me wonder whose garden it was, and why they were there. This made me think about how one misfortune can lead to another, and the strains this can put on an family. As the character of the younger daughter, Jo, grew in my mind, I knew I wanted to give her the mission of bringing the family back together.

An earlier version of the story was highly commended by the Frome Festival Short Story Competition committee. The version of the tale in Remember Me To the Bees resulted in me being invited to read it out at the Penzance Literary Festival 2013 – a fabulous experience!

The artwork is by Louise Boulter. If you read to the end of the story, you’ll understand why I chose to post the photo of poppies too.

A short excerpt from The Scent of Summer

Dad had been a postie for as long as I could remember, rising early each weekday to walk to the sorting office and collect his load. I’d go with him sometimes, strolling through the streets of south Bristol and listening to him greeting everyone he saw.

But a week after we moved in with Aunt Maura he got himself fired for stealing letters. It felt like a big mystery, big enough to hold the answers to all our troubles.

Dad’s bosses at the Royal Mail thought he was trying to rob money, taking the fat envelopes that might contain cash, but I couldn’t believe that. I found a few tucked into his jacket pocket, reeking of patchouli oil, and while he and Mum edged around each other in frosty silence I carried one away with me. Later, I slid the sheet of paper out of its envelope, inhaling the exotic fragrance.

“Kath, what does it say?”

“Where did you get this?”

“It was in the bin,” I lied. “Will you read it to me?”

“It’s a love note,” she said, surprised, then read aloud: “My angel, you keep my world in orbit. Yeurgh! Oh god, this could be one of the letters Dad nicked. Don’t tell Mum – they have enough problems right now.”

I remembered how Dad woke us at sunrise on his and Mum’s anniversary last year and dragged us down to the lawn outside our old house. Dad had rescued Mum’s bridal veil from the attic and she wore it with her nightdress – Kath said she looked like an angel in white glimmering against the shadowy garden.

The ninth story in my debut short story collection Remember Me To the Bees is Broken Circle. The idea for the story began with me thinking about the way our various selves overlap. If you’re not sure what I mean, just think about how it feels when you return to your childhood home or spend time with a sibling – don’t you feel your childhood self bubbling up beneath your adult shell?

I wanted to examine the way all these different, often contradictory, versions of our selves drift in and out of each other, and how these can conflict with the self we’re busily trying to portray to the world. As a diabetic I also wanted to look at how low blood sugar levels plays with perception, so that reality ebbs and flows in much the same way.

Presenting all this within the heady, surreal environment of a fairground visited by the main character Bex and her niece Kayleigh seemed utterly ideal for emphasising the transience of each of the states experienced by Bex, while introducing a note of peril.

The artwork is by Louise Boulter.

A short excerpt from Broken Circle

The playing fields throb with screams and laughter, growing louder as we near the blur of the chair-o-planes and glittering waltzers. I gaze at the teenagers kissing, running, cavorting all over the carnival, and feel a faint, deep-buried churn of envy. I used to have that exuberance, didn’t I? Before I got so old. I hear Mum’s tut in my ear: If you’re old what does that make me? But I’m roughly the age now that she was when she died, closer to my forties than my teens.

Kayleigh tugs on my hand, Mum’s old handbag hanging heavy from her shoulder. She looks very small suddenly with her stick-insect limbs and pale cap of blonde hair.

I kneel beside her on the yellowing grass. “If you don’t want to go on the rides we can just watch, Kayls. What do you reckon?”

She shrugs, faking nonchalance, and lets me lead her into the throng, past the swooping turns and spinning lights of the scarier rides to the relative calm of the Big Wheel. “How are you with heights?”

“Not scared if you’re not.” She grins at me and clambers into the seat. The metal bar swings across us, pinning me down but barely touching Kayleigh.

“Hold on tight,” I shriek as we begin to move and I envision Kayleigh sliding out into the popcorn-scented air. I remember being on a similar wheel twenty years or more ago, sitting beside my little sister Melinda and waving at Mum, tiny below us. It seems like yesterday. Part of me wishes I could go back to that time.

As we rise upwards, telltale lights spark at the corners of my eyes and the world turns concave, then convex against the lens of my eye; slippery as oil.

Kayleigh’s chattering about everything she sees, and I try to pay attention, but the air is big and fat around us, and I want to eat it, eat something. I’m eight years old with Melinda beside me, her blonde hair gleaming in the sunlight like spun caramel. That’s what I need – something sugary. My bag is at my feet, emergency jellybabies far out of reach. “Mel…” I say imploringly. “Mel, I need…”

“You called me Mel!” Kayleigh giggles.

“Did I?” I pant, pinching the skin on the back of my hand, trying to regain a sense of myself.

The eighth story in my debut short story collection Remember Me To the Bees is Stalagmite. This atmospheric artwork by Louise Boulter is one of my favourites in the collection.

The initial prompt for this tale was reading some myths connected with the Scottish island of Jura, where it was once an honour for young girls to have their hair selected to be used as ropes for the fishing boats. Mixing that in with a hint of sacrifice, I thought about how a modern day family might be damaged if the father became so obsessed by the myths that he grew to believe them. Oh, and I added a dragon for good measure.

At the heart of my story, however, is the idea of reconcilliation – how might it feel to reconnect with your father after twenty years apart?

A short excerpt from Stalagmite

“What would you like to do first?” Dad asks as he takes me to a battered Morris Minor and swings my case into a trunk strewn with shells, rocks and battered tin cans. “Are you hungry? Tired?”

“Neither,” I say. “Can we dump my stuff at the house then go for a hike into the hills? The old trail?” I’m desperate to see the island – I have an uneasy feeling I’ve romanticised it beyond all recognition.

“The Wolf Walk,” he says softly, eyes flashing with surprise. “You remember that? All right, let’s do it. But first you should know that after you and your mother… I rather downsized.” Downsized turns out to mean a small rusting caravan that lists slightly to one side on a strip of balding, cow-trampled ground.

“It’s not much, but it’s home.” He leads me inside, swinging my bag onto a narrow kitchen table. A sleepy bumblebee fusses in the thin curtains – out from hibernation a touch too early. Dad unlatches a window, ushers it outside, watches it disappear into the sky.

“Is there a bedroom?” I wonder what I’ll do if he says no. Insist on staying at the island’s one hotel? Mum had wanted me to do that anyway, her doe-eyes dilated with concern as she watched me pack.

“Of course there is, silly!” Suddenly he resembles the dad I’d known, laughter rushing out of his mouth in a howl. I grin, simultaneously unnerved and reassured. “You can have it. I’ll sleep in here.”

“On the table?”

“It turns into a bed. Have you never stayed in a caravan before?”

I try to think back, but our family holidays are snarled up amongst his retellings of the island myths. Did we stay in a cave at some point? It seems unlikely, but not impossible. “If we take the long route into the hills we won’t be back by nightfall anyway,” he says. “How do you feel about camping out? I have a couple of sleeping bags.”

A couple? I look at him and he shrugs. “I always hoped, you know, that you…”

He opens a cupboard, drags out two neatly parcelled Four Season bags. I inhale their faint mustiness but stop myself commenting on it. He’s been waiting for this far longer than I’d realised.

The 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.

The 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.

The 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.”