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Chalklands
by Richard Smyth
EXCERPT
… My father was quiet, at first. He was a Catholic, of course, a Corkman’s son raised in south Liverpool, and had a Catholic’s qualms about the practice of cremation. But then, too, there was a Celtic pagan streak in him as wide as the River Lee.
I think my mother, my mad mother from the Yorkshire chalklands, brought that out in him — and when Theresa died, he found himself thinking of my mother.
‘It’ll be a cremation,’ he said, at last, interrupting our bickering. ‘Father Gillen will say the Mass. You, Mary, will gather the flowers, from wherever you please. It’ll be beautiful, I promise you.’
I had to bite my lip to keep from crying. I looked at my father and thought I could see flames dancing in his dark eyes. I wondered if in those flames he saw my mother’s flame-red hair.
I don’t remember my mother. Theresa did. I asked her once what she was like, when the two of us were out walking in the hills above Wintringham.
‘She was a crackpot,’ Theresa said. ‘She was always singing. Even when she was angry. Especially when she was angry. The angrier she was, the louder she sang.’ Theresa kicked at a clump of dandelions. For a minute I thought she was going to cry. ‘She cooked horrible food. Liver and tripe and black pudding. And she dressed like a mad woman and never combed her hair. When she took me to school, everyone laughed at her.’
‘What did she do?’
‘She just laughed back.’
We walked for miles that day. We walked east, into the sunrise. We walked so far that when I breathed in I thought I could smell salt and seaweed. I was ten; Theresa was fifteen.
I’m not ten any more, but Theresa will always be fifteen. …
… The complete story appears as a standalone book in our Little Uncertainties series.
Richard Smyth
Richard Smyth’s books include An Indifference of Birds, The Jay, the Beech and the Limpetshell, and the novel The Woodcock.
