BEST known for their beautifully packaged poetry collections Salt Publishingearlier this year branched out to include slender volumes of short stories by both emerging and established writers.
Contained within neat covers in unassuming hues of ochre and grey André Mangeot’s seven stories explore the richness of human emotion and experience. He delves expertly into his characters’ pasts, exposing the scars life has left on them.
In Rain Lucas, after years of resistance, decides to follow his father into the family business. It means trips to Eastern Europe. On one such visit to Romania he meets Katya. He intervenes when he witnesses an argument with her boyfriend which is threatening to get out of hand. They go to a club, drinking and dancing the night away. When they emerge in the early hours it’s raining heavily and the city is under water. His hotel being closer than Katya’s apartment Lucas offers her shelter there. Sex follows, but instead of gaining a new friend after helping her out of difficulties, he wakes next morning to find himself tied to the bed, his belonging ransacked and his money and passport stolen.
Monkey Knife Fight: Two keen golfing buddies, Sky and Strike, are playing a round one night. While looking for a lost ball Stripe hears a moan, then the sound of someone vomiting in the bushes. Stripe assumed it’s a drunk and practically carries him back to the club house to sleep it off. As he sets the man down on the ground outside he feels something sticky on his hands. Blood. Hurrying away, afraid of becoming a crime suspect, he practically bumps into Sky. He says nothing about what he’s just seen and they finish their game. One morning, at the end of that summer, two cops appear at his door. Their questions tell him they already know more than is possible in the time that’s passed. There is only one guy who could have told them; the friend he didn’t know at all.
Tajine with Madonna finds Eve, an American journalist, arriving in Algeria to interview a well-known author about his latest book. As the story unfolds we learn that Eve believes Harry Larcum is her father, who after a brief affair with her mother left before she was born. All her life Eve has felt bitter about how he apparently treated her mother. She does her best to contain her anger during the interview leaving Larcum to suspect no ulterior motive to her visit. He invites Eve to join him on a trip the following day to see the ruins of a twelfth century fortress in the desert. It is during this journey that she confronts Larcum who appears completely taken aback by her accusation and denies having known her mother. Eve is thrown into a state of confusion, questioning all that she has been told. Is it possible her mother lied to her, that she made the whole thing up to give herself a more colourful past? When Larcum is bitten by a poisonous scorpion she tries to drive him out of the desert, but the jeep gets stuck in a sandbank. Arming herself with the one spare bottle of water she finds in the car she walks to the highway alone, leaving the author to his inevitable fate.
Borderline is not only an appropriate title because one of the story’s two characters is a border customs officer, but it also describes the situation of what almost happens when two guys meet and one of them invites the other to stay with him in his bedsit. Emotions are momentarily in flux, but in the end morality and common sense win over temptation.
The narrator in The Wood Yard brings his new girlfriend to his French holiday home for the first time since the death of his son. All too soon he finds his grief resurfacing as Karen questions him why he hasn’t told her of his past. Their incompatibility becomes clearer by the day. Nevertheless he tries to build bridges. Karen, being a keen cyclist, they hire a couple of bicycles, load them into his car and drive to a favourite wood he remembers. She becomes increasingly impatient to get pedalling and as she starts off ahead of him her passion strikes a sudden nerve. He changes gear and accelerates the car down the hill.
In The Never-Still and the Stars two young boys in Jakarta explore the city. They’re poor, making only a little money by selling chewing gum and sweets to motorists stuck in traffic jams. They buy cheap food from a street vendor, a change from their usual routine of lunching with a mutual friend. Something is different today, something between the two friends has changed, but young Suhari realises he still has the dreams he grew up with and that makes him rich. God ultimately controls what happens.
True North, the title story of this collection, is probably my favourite. With great skill the author combines the real and the fabricated. It is the fictional account of a close friendship between the narrator and a talented, obsessive pianist. His full identity is only disclosed at the very end when a final, unexpected twist reveals he’d once had a relationship with an artist that his friend neither knew about nor suspected.
Often dark and sometimes disturbing these tales, like a vivid dream, stay with the reader long after the last word has been digested. That Mangeot is also a poet with two volumes of poetry behind him comes as no surprise in light of such expressive, yet uncluttered, language as he uses here. The lesson all these stories teaches us is that we can never really trust anyone, even when we think we know them very well.
REF. True North, by André Mangeot
Publisher: Salt Publishing (8 Oct 2010), 176 pages, pb
21/11/10
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