Worlds from the Word's End Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  Vertigo

  ‘Beautifully simple and unembellished… most captivating in its ability to unnerve.’

  Claire Hazelton, The Guardian

  ‘A psychological landscape lightly spooked by loneliness, jealousy and alienation.’

  Heidi Julavits, The New York Times

  ‘Vertigo is artful, intelligent… Walsh is a sublimely elegant writer.’

  Sarah Ditum, New Statesman

  ‘This collection makes the familiar alien, breaking down and remaking quotidian situations, and in the process turning them into gripping literature.’

  Vol. 1 Brooklyn

  ‘Walsh handles the seismic events of life… with a sort of alien bluntness and mania for category that forces her language into bizarre, thrilling new shapes.’

  Left Bank Books, Staff Pick

  ‘Simple but stunning in its precision.’

  Music and Literature

  ‘With wry humour and profound sensitivity, Walsh takes what is mundane and transforms it into something otherworldly with sentences that can make your heart stop. A feat of language.’

  Kirkus, Starred Review

  ‘Inventive, honest… a compelling pitch into the inner life.’

  Publishers Weekly

  ‘Splendidly wry and offbeat… both intellectual and aware. Stories to be digested slowly, and savoured.’

  Lesley McDowell, Sunday Herald

  ‌

  PRAISE FOR

  HOTEL

  ‘Joanna Walsh is fast becoming one of our most important writers. Hotel is a dazzling tour de force of embodied ideas.’

  Deborah Levy, author of Black Vodka

  ‘Subtle and intriguing, this small book is an adventure in form. Part meditation on hotels, it mingles autobiography and reflections on home, secrets, and partings. Freud, Dora, Heidegger, and the Marx Brothers all have their moments on its small, intensely evocative stage.’

  Lisa Appignanesi, author of Trials of Passion

  ‘It’s a knockout. Completely engaging, juicy and dry – such a great book.’

  Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick

  ‘Walsh’s writing has intellectual rigour and bags of formal bravery… a boldly intellectual work that repays careful reading.’

  Melissa Harrison, Financial Times

  ‘[A] slyly humorous and clever little book ... [Walsh moves] effortlessly and imaginatively from one thing to the next… with utter conviction in each step.’

  Marina Benjamin, New Statesman

  ‘A slim, sharp meditation on hotels and desire.’

  The Paris Review

  ‘Evocative… Walsh’s strange, probing book is all the more affecting for eschewing easy resolution.’

  Publishers Weekly

  ‘Underneath [her] clever wit and wordplay is a vein of melancholy… Walsh mixes travel writing, pop culture, and personal narrative to great effect.’

  San Diego City Beat

  First published in 2017 by And Other Stories

  Great Britain – United States of America

  www.andotherstories.org

  Copyright © Joanna Walsh 2017

  Stories from this collection have appeared in different forms in: The Berlin Quarterly (‘Two’, 2016), Narrative Magazine (‘Bookselves’, 2014), Catapult.co (‘Postcards from Two Hotels’, 2015), Best European Fiction (‘Worlds from the Word’s End’, 2015), The Stinging Fly (‘Like a Fish Needs a…’, 2015), Fractals (‘Exes’, ‘Femme Maison’, ‘Blue’, ‘Reading Habits’ and ‘Hauptbahnhof’, 2013), The Letters Page (‘Travelling Light’, 2015), Visual Verse (‘Dunnet’, 2015), #ShortStoryAnthology 1 (‘Two Secretaries’, 2015), Granta (‘Enzo Ponza’, 2015), Hearing Voices (‘The Story of Our Nation’, 2015), Grow a Pair (‘Simple Hans’, 2015), and I Am Because You Are (‘Me and the Fat Woman – Joanna Walsh’, 2015). ‘The Suitcase Dog’ was first published as an audio edition on vinyl by Visual Editions and Ace Hotels, 2015.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher. The right of Joanna Walsh to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Material from The Rediscovery of the Mind by John R. Searle is used by permission of the publisher, The MIT Press.

  ISBN: 978-1-911508-10-6

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-911508-11-3

  Typesetting and eBook: Tetragon, London; Cover Painting and Design: Roman Muradov.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  And Other Stories is supported by public funding from Arts Council England.

  ‌

  Contents

  Two

  Bookselves

  Postcards from Two Hotels

  Worlds from the Word’s End

  Like a Fish Needs a…

  Exes

  Travelling Light

  Femme Maison

  Dunnet

  Two Secretaries

  Enzo Ponza

  The Suitcase Dog

  The Story of Our Nation

  Blue

  Simple Hans

  Me and the Fat Woman – Joanna Walsh

  Reading Habits

  Hauptbahnhof

  ‌

  ‌Two

  It’s time.

  I have lined them up, the two of them, holding hands. Not that they need to be lined up as they are already pressed side by side in a way I have never been able to do anything about but it seems, at this moment, as if I have arranged them in this way quite deliberately, and that they stand here, exactly as I would wish they would, through some act of volition. They’re spruced up and looking their best, as they should be, today of all days. They have never been out before, not like this, though I have to admit they have been out a couple of times before. Or more.

  So, here they are. I have brought them here myself. They are not heavy but they are cumbersome. I have exhibited them here for many years unsure now what my arms, stretched from encircling them so long, will to do without them. I have kept them polished, but never like today. Today they are gleaming. They gleam so hard that sometimes it seems almost as if they wink at me – if it isn’t sentimental to call them ‘they’ for ‘they’ are not what they seem. They only look like they; they are ‘it’. Yes, to think of them otherwise would be sentimental. And I know very well it is not for their sake that I come here day after day. And it is not for their sake that I am giving them away.

  Moreover, if I were to be honest, this sprucing up has happened not only on this day but on many. Nevertheless it makes me proud to see them standing here, hand in hand, the smaller one having begun so quickly and unexpectedly, while the bigger I already had by heart. The larger holds the other by the hand. They seem as if about to cross the road. I have spent years standing by the side of this road presenting what I have to no one, or only to the few cars that go by. It’s my fault, I suppose, for having chosen such a road. There’s no pavement, and all passers-by are in cars. Still it is the only road there is, to my knowledge, and I am perhaps lucky to be here at all. On the other hand there’s nowhere to park and the traffic laws, expressed in solid lines painted by the kerbside, mean that drivers, even if they want to stop, must keep going. I’m not the only person here of course. There are vendors – of fruit and cold drinks, I think – who seem to make a living at it, though their stalls are located in lay-bys a little way off, while here I am standing on a narrow grass verge that backs onto a steep wall of rock, nowhere even for vehicles to turn. I did not think of these things early enough, the lay-bys I mean. When I passed the first time they were all occupied and, since then,
all the times I have been here, I have had to keep on meekly offering them up from the place you see me now, which is not what I’d have chosen, had I been given any choice in the matter. My prospects may still be better elsewhere but it would take so much time to research and relocate that I might miss a chance, and I need only one chance. Even if I moved, knowing little of the area besides my own stretch of road, I would have no guarantee of a better venue. Perhaps it would be worse.

  When I started it was spring, not this spring. I’m not sure which. It is not spring now. The weather has changed. It is still bright though the time of year is colder, and I must be careful describing the seasons as they may always also be mistaken for metaphor, and I would not like to lay down some kind of mood setting I didn’t at all mean. My time here has not been a bad time though the weather sometimes has been. I even find myself wishing I had endured some harder times, rather than standing by the side of the road all year with my two polished and uncomplaining companions. Hard times would have given me something to think about while waiting, could even have given me the impetus to leave and go on to something better like the vendors of fruit and bottled water, who come and go as I do not. I have forbidden myself to think about their hard times because they are not my hard times. I am paralysed outside their hard times and with no way to go on towards them, or, rather, back. I am somewhere better than them already, though it is not so very good, not so good as I might have wished. Perhaps when another of them has gone, I may take over one of their positions.

  But all that does not matter now, because on this day someone is coming for them, someone to whom I have wanted to give them away for a long while. ‘To whom’? Who am I kidding? It is the wanting to give them away that has gone on for so long, but so few people have wanted them, if any. Yet now someone does. And I must give them up gratefully and with no fuss, so here they are.

  I got the phone call yesterday evening. Someone said, they had seen me in passing, from their car. Someone said, they’re just the thing I’m looking for. I was a little worried by the word ‘thing’, but they assured me they would treat them with care. Someone said they would meet me here, right on my usual spot, about this time. Someone described their car.

  As someone is coming for them, I have made sure they are absolutely clean: their shiny cheeks, which are, perhaps, more shiny than ever before, their shiny clothes, which should not really be shiny, but there you are. Cleanliness, oh that matters too. No matter that they are both somewhat worn out and more so than ever with the shining that makes their limbs threadbare, almost through to the bone, which glistens in its own way, underneath.

  Sometimes I have thought of getting rid of them by other means. Who wouldn’t? So poised to move, yet so immobile, so lifelike and at the same time something that only looks like life, they are a burden. I have thought of destroying them, of pushing them into the road under the wheels of a car, or better, a juggernaut. I am angry with them as they do not move, but, if I hit them, I know that splinters will fly, nothing more. And then they will be damaged goods. I cannot present them damaged. I have learnt skills in order to polish and maintain them, and that would be a waste of all the time I spent learning, as well as the hard work. Still, sometimes I am angry, angry enough to push them under a car, or to wait for a truck, and I have imagined the air filled with tiny shards so small that they float like hay. But of course I have not done it, and I should not blame myself: everyone has these thoughts, or something like them. I have also thought of crossing the road – though this is dangerous because of the traffic at my corner – pitching them into the ditch on the far side, leaving them to rot. But I’m afraid they would continue to call for me, and I couldn’t bear that for however long – the months, or longer – it took them to decompose. So I have thought these things, but I have not done them. I have lived with these thoughts for years. I comfort myself by saying that these thoughts are necessary to their survival, and perhaps to mine. Still, such violence! Even if unacted. Instead I wait, only a little tense, trying not to show it, whistling a tune or walking up and down my patch of grass, knowing how far to go, beyond which borders not to stray.

  Despite my years standing here I still quietly believe that I cannot be seen, that no one will stop. I do not like to believe that people see me and do not stop, because I know they are good people. It is better to believe that I am insignificant, which perhaps I am. In truth I’ve no one to blame but myself.

  I can’t say nobody warned me, when I started on this one.

  I hear two voices in my head: my mother who, finding herself in such a landscape, would surely exhibit delight, or something that looked like it; my father, who would be full of scorn. My mother would brush their cheeks, and exclaim, how nice they look! She would glance at the scrub growing on the cliff face and say, What pretty flowers! My father would grunt and turn away, as though to notice were itself disgusting. My parents made a big fuss the first time I took them out, so big that my mother’s emotions cancelled out my father’s, though not the noise they made in having them. At that time it was not usual for me to go out so I made a big fuss too, no doubt drew attention to myself, but how else could I have dealt with exiting? I don’t know what my parents said about it. I didn’t go back.

  Well, that’s all over now. But, when I am rid of them, then what?

  It is a long time since I left my parents’ house and preparing to die in a quite practical way is something I will have to think about for the new year. It is, I believe, the first time I will have had to think about it so practically, the first time it has seemed so practical a possibility. Of course it may happen before the new year, though I am not planning on that. The likelihood of death is something I will allow only after the year has flipped over and the dates begun again. I will not permit anything else so untidy. Of course this will mean that I will not be able to come here, every day, to offer them, not for them, not for just anyone who might want them. But that’s OK because finally it’s time.

  For what – ‘goodbye’? There is no what.

  A car pulls in to the side of the road. It is the car that was described to me, an old car with a dent and a roof rack tied on with rope, which causes me a little worry but, having got this far without mishap, it is surely adequate. The car lists slightly as it takes the camber. I cannot see who is at the wheel. It slows, is about to stop, then something in it changes. It begins to speed up and disappears round the corner. I run a few steps (as though I could ever catch it), begin to wave (as though they could ever see me), then I look after it for seconds, for minutes (as though my gaze could pull it back!). It does not come back. I listen. I cannot hear it turning, returning. The thing is, I don’t know if that was the right car. The thing is, I have to keep on looking. The thing is, we had an agreement, on the phone, so, though it looked like the car, it cannot have been. When I look back from the corner, there they are, not moving, just the same as they always were.

  They cannot love me.

  (I mean, it cannot love me.)

  But looking into their little wooden eyes, I must believe it can.

  ‌

  ‌Bookselves

  On your parents’ bookshelves little comes and goes. Few books are added; old books are rarely taken down or away.

  The relics of a more intense age of reading – of school, of university – their books are castaways, washed up on a beech of elegant shelves, evidence that your mother and father can still do it, or that they did it when they were young in the sixties when – suddenly – everyone was doing it but, being older now, it’s understandable they don’t do it so much any more.

  You too once thought accumulation was achievement. But your shelves have no stability: books come and go with the frequency of phone calls, or of the phone calls we don’t make nowadays.

  Your parents still use the phone, as do their friends of that generation. When the phone rings your father shouts, not at your mother but at the space around her, ‘Phone! Phone! Quick! Get the phone!’ And your moth
er runs backwards and forwards from room to room looking, though the phone is in the same place it always is, then your father gets up and runs backwards and forwards looking and eventually, before either of them are able to answer it, the phone stops ringing.

  Your phone travels with you in your pocket and, when your significant other gets in touch, it makes a buzzing sound. You never misplace it but you do misplace books, though when you want to lay your hands on one you do not shout, or have a wife to shout at or a husband to do the shouting at you, and the whole process is slower because you only have one phone but – books – you have so many.

  They spill from your shelves. They sprawl by your bed, luxurious, splayed sometimes and discarded at an early page, broken by your attentions. On your shelf more books you would like to read are waiting, books you have ordered, their white bodies fat with potential. They are not the only books to oppress you. There are the books you would still like to buy – bookshops full of them – opening themselves into distant pale horizons that slide back endlessly into their gutters’ slits, where they meet a barrier of card and paper. However deep the perspective, you can make only a needle’s-width of entry, the width of a spine. It hardly seems worth the trouble; there are so many to conquer. Still they do not accuse you urgently enough. Nor do the books you take home from the bookshop but neglect, though you have many times imagined – so vividly – sitting down with one of them at your table (situated conveniently adjacent to your bookshelf) that it is scarcely worth the bother of enacting the scene. Your books lie primed to spring, ever solicitous of your attention.

  Something you never thought might happen: after a certain number of years the being who has read all these neglected books will step from your bookshelves, will sit down at your table (conveniently adjacent), will make a cup of coffee at the machine, having seen you use it so many times, especially when about to tackle a book, and will light a cigarette, insubstantial as steam, the odour of which will affect neither your carpets nor curtains. It will be the opposite of you, your inverse.