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    The Fish Woman And Other Stories
    The Fish Woman And Other Stories
    The Fish Woman And Other Stories
    Ebook108 pages1 hour

    The Fish Woman And Other Stories

    By Liz Price

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    About this ebook

    In The Fish Woman, Liz Price chronicles the loves of ordinary people, to present a picture of the extraordinary spirit and resilience needed to survive everyday challenges. One woman is disillusioned by her experience of community education, one struggles to accept her role as carer while another tries to share in her pregnant daughter-in-law's life.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLimerick Writers Centre
    Release dateJan 11, 2018
    ISBN9781999861421
    The Fish Woman And Other Stories
    Author

    Liz Price

    Liz Price is a short story writer, originally from Dublin but living in Clare for the past twenty years. She is a member of Inis Creative Writing Group. She has had stories published in two anthologies - River People, and Over the Bridge. The Fish Woman is her first collection of shortstories. Liz is married with three adult children and onegranddaughter.

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      Book preview

      The Fish Woman And Other Stories - Liz Price

      PREFACE

      The Fish Woman and Other Stories is a poignant and evocative collection. Liz Price’s style is clear and simple and because of this her stories take you by surprise when they pack their inevitable emotional punch. Her warmly depicted characters are living low-key lives in everyday communities and settings. More precisely and more unusually most of her protagonists are all women and most of them are women living in working class communities without much of what is usually referred to as ‘social capital’. These are not characters with social status, and they are not people who are living outwardly remarkable or notable lives – their concerns are local, personal and utterly and completely human. Liz bravely jumps in and writes about everything from grieving and dementia, to book clubs and bores on tour buses, to sexuality and abortion, to domestic violence and exile and family jealousies. She writes about leaving home and coming back, she tells the age old Irish story of adults who have left so much unresolved or unspoken that they never really managed to leave home at all.

      She tells us stories of the parts of women’s lives that they might usually keep quiet about and she does it without preaching or condescending. Liz has positioned her female characters so that their stories are central and that it is their experience of events which we are reading. This collection honours the resourcefulness and resilience that women have and have always had to deal with whatever comes at them. Despite the fact that Liz is unafraid to delve into dark corners of her character’s lives reading this collection is at heart a hopeful experience and it’s not the foolish optimistic type of hope that imagines everything will be fine- Liz’s stories are about women who cope and they made me as a reader feel that I might too. In the times we are living in this can be no bad thing. The Fish Woman and Other Stories is a book for our supposedly post truth times; amidst everything that blares and glares and flashes at us- it feels like something solid and true.

      Sarah Clancy, 2018

      CONTENTS

      Summer on the Green 9

      The Fish Woman 14

      Don’t Turn Left 18

      Pip 21

      A Sense of Community 25

      Noirín’s Song 31

      Memory and Memories 35

      The River 40

      Condolences 42

      Invisibility 47

      Waiting 51

      The Highest Mountain 56

      Small Town 61

      In Charge 65

      Vicious Cycle 70

      An Appetite for Books 75

      Anonymous 81

      Note on the Limerick Writers’ Centre 85

      SUMMER ON THE GREEN

      I still remember the joy I felt, the summer I was nine. For a short time, I shone in the glow of popularity on the road where I lived. I know it was the year I was nine because that was the number I insisted was displayed on my new cart. A big red nine to distance me from the younger kids. I argued about which way up it should be painted so it wouldn’t be mistaken for the number six. The pungent smell of paint which was probably past its best – the mechanic in the garage had given it to us – lingered for ages in our shed afterwards.

      That was the year the new baker joined the frenzy of commerce on our street. The clatter of his bread delivery van could be heard every day after the milkman and before the paper boy. Bin men and rag and bone men called weekly, and Mr Sherlock drove his donkey and cart through the streets once in a while, giving out balloons in exchange for vegetable peelings for his pigs. Inside the houses, buried in back kitchens, women in Marigold gloves with pinched faces slogged away hoping to break the curse of their poverty. Although that summer, when you could see the heat rise from the road for weeks on end, the women came outside too.

      It was the job of older children to dish out part-payments and excuses to the delivery men who called with their hand-written bills. Sometimes, in the hope of a few coppers reward, feral kids would dash around the streets, posting the evening newspapers through the letter boxes, or collecting empty milk bottles. The streets would sing with the clanging of front gates. I loved the feel of the bronze pennies and the metallic smell ripening in my small fist so I would hang around, skipping restlessly from foot to foot hoping to be asked for help. But more than greed attracted me to the delivery men. Even then I felt the lack in my own family.

      The baker was different. He sometimes gave me small sixpence coins. They were my favourites, not just because they were worth more than the pennies; there was something about their size and colour that made them feel like real money. But looking back, perhaps it was more to do with my mother’s reaction when she spotted the nickel coin displayed on my palm. Maybe she was able to judge her worth to the baker by the coins he gave me. I know her face lit up the day he gave me the old bread palette.

      Don’t be asking for things from strangers she pretended to be cross with me, but I heard her singing in the kitchen later and when she mixed the warm milk and bread for my bedtime Goodie, she added an extra teaspoon of sugar to the cup.

      We dragged the wooden palette bouncing and scraping noisily over the gravelly path to the shed in my backyard. It joined my other treasures; the pair of old roller skates I had found in the field behind the house. The kids in the neighbourhood smelled the excitement and elbowed their way into the crammed shed. With our heads lowered in a huddle of expectation, we made plans and I felt my currency increase a hundredfold as I used my treasures to barter for their friendship.

      Most days that summer the women streamed out their doors to sit in the gardens, watching us play on the green in front of the houses, shouting lazily to one another

      Howaya, great weather and after a few days This heat would kill you when they were assured the good weather would last, and they were no longer afraid to tempt fate with their grumbling. When they spotted our scalded red arms, they would try to make us stand still for suncream, or call us home for hats when we became prickly in the heat of jaded afternoons, getting cross when we trailed summer dust into the kitchen on our sandals. The weariness that marked their faces most of the year showed less that summer and there was less slapping and Don’t you dare answer me back reprimands.

      In other houses men came home at six for their dinner and although I had no appetite for food and there was no man in our house I was called home as the Angelus bells tolled. It was as though the neighbours mightn’t notice our difference if we complied with this convention. My mother didn’t cry herself to sleep that summer.

      Sometimes, a faint smell of paint drags me back to those days, to the shouts of excitement that filled our garden shed and brought the cart into existence. Without any real plan or skill, it was cobbled together with some rope, the roller skates and the newly painted breadboard. Occasionally, when the magic infected our mothers, we were handed thick cuts of bread and jam and they would watch our hunched shapes while the long summer days turned to evening. That summer, it seemed like the cul de sac had carelessly shrugged off its poverty.

      Our recklessness should have ended in serious accidents, but in the enchantment of that summer, it didn’t. We wore splashes of iodine and small plasters with pride after minor mishaps. But none of our cuts went septic as the sunny days rolled endlessly on. With the cart, I tested my new power, generously responding to requests of Giz a go and feeling like a film star, sharing the Macaroon bars and bags of Dolly Mixtures, which had never appeared in our house before the baker started

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