Natalie Nera

Inner Spaces 

 

Illustration by India Hibbs

You sit. You look. It is a quiet place. It is not your place. Screaming faces in the paintings on the walls replicate the scream you hear inside you, the rage that runs through you every time someone suggests that being a writer is your own selfishness, self-indulgence, that equates to being a bad mother and a wife. I know that is not what Francis Bacon meant when he created his images but that is how I feel. 

Homer was a poet and a story-teller. For it, he was worshipped as deity, so were his successors. Across centuries, folk story-tellers meant that the memory of the peoples remained preserved.  

Stories, words are so much more than self-indulgence, they are the beginning and the end of everything, the ideas we need to formulate in our heads, news on TV, soap operas, articles that we read and make us go ‘Agh!’, or ‘Oh, no!’; adverts that sell products through a story, sometimes only loosely associated with the subject, but it makes us salivate, makes us want more. Who can resist a bank card that can ensure your family’s happiness? How can a woman say ‘no’ to a lipstick that makes her as beautiful as Aphrodite?  

Imagine if the world as we know it, finished today. What would you do? What would become of all the ‘useful’ IT managers and business graduates, overpaid high-fliers with vague job descriptions? You would make a fire, you would build a shelter, you would prepare your meal and then lie down in darkness, listening to rain drumming on the roof of leaves and twigs. You need stories. You also need music, dance around the camp fire. You need to laugh, you need to find a cave to paint a picture. There would be no need for shareholders, capital gains or bonuses. It is who we are, it is our soul, the essence of our existence? For if you forbid people from telling stories, they lose their sanity. They lose their history if their stories are not passed on. And with it, their ability to comprehend the world they live in wanes. The meaning of our being will be gone. 

One can only take a look at the people who suffer from mental health issues, people traumatised by war experiences, and how they respond, how they get better through taking up a ballet class or life painting class, through being encouraged to write a journal, think of a verse that expresses their pain. Shrouded in mystery of who we are as entities, as animals, what is our brain, why does it need to be creative, why does it suffer when it is not? The healing begins. 

Recently, I have watched one of the TEDx talks on You Tube. Sir Ken Robinson asked if schools kill creativity. I was shocked but not entirely surprised to hear that a five-year-old is forty-nine times more creative than an eighteen-year-old. So the question is not how do we learn creativity but how do we stop unlearning it? Based on this evidence, it appears that we are already born with creative brains but the educational system perceives it as threatening, squeezes it out of us, sidelines creativity in favour of memorizing timetables. You draw a person in uneven lines, the grass is purple and the sun green. You are told that this is not how the world looks like. You feel guilty and ashamed of not conforming to the idea of the world.  This explains why a six-year old will start telling their parents why they cannot draw any more although they were perfectly able to express themselves in that way only several months previously. Eliminating the creative self thus equals an institutionalised act of self-harm. 

Creating is breathing, it is being but when practised well, it also becomes craft. We are craftspeople. The technical skill behind any successful creative act cannot be underestimated. It is not an easy job for it takes a daily practice to master.  

We accept that it takes many years of training for a gifted athlete to win Wimbledon; we accept that a bright person has to study and work hard to become a heart surgeon, so why is it so difficult to accept that the same is true for poets, writers, painters or other artists? Why do we think that there is some magical device, like a sort of Nuremberg Funnel that enables art to happen? You somehow conjure the results out of thin air, without any effort or time? 

Maybe we can blame the ByronsBaudelairs and Rimbauds of this world, absinthe drinking van Gogh and Manet, the pop stars in the infamous 27 Club, meteorites with wild ways and insane talent that shone briefly before crash-landing with fatal consequences. We can blame even the likes of Katie Price who is credited for writing several books although it is known that her ghost writer pens the stories, she lands the brand name of a TV personality to shift the copies.  

Creative people need to spend hours and days in solitude, working on their pieces, chiselling every word, every stroke of their brush. But that’s not what general public sees, or perhaps even wants. They notice a self-promoting media star who spends days fashion shopping and self-pampering whilst somehow also remotely and telepathically creating all these bestselling books. How difficult can writing be, right? Because anyone can write. If it so easy, why should anyone be paid for it? 

The myth of an artist. No one wants to hear of a married woman with a house, a husband and two children, who does not drink, does not smoke and does not take drugs, who is, in fact very boring and ordinary, who however sits at her desk, works relentlessly on her stories, in constant search for the right words and expressions. She gets up at five in the morning to iron her kids’ school uniforms and her husband’s shirt. She makes porridge. She makes sandwiches for lunch. She puts a washing machine on. She hoovers. After school run, she sits and writes until it is time to think of cooking the evening meal and pick up the kids again. By eight the kids are in bed. By eight thirty she is falling asleep on the sofa. She has not stopped for thirteen hours. She is not glamorous. Or beautiful. Or seductive. Or hedonistic. She lives in her head, with her stories, obsessing about getting the words right. But that is not the portrait of an artist the public want to see. 

Why do you need to be attracted to the perceived personality of an artist? Shouldn’t the artist’s work be enough? Surely, if I thought I am such an interesting person, I would have written an autobiography. Instead, I collect stories of other people, like a magpie, picking the best and most shining jewels I can see. I display them but I am not one of them. I am the greedy bird, I am the observer in the corner. 

I retreat in my inner space, scream inside my head and splay myself across the pages. Is this self-indulgent? Why do people have the need to judge it, label it, dismiss it, put me down for who I am? Why do they take the time and energy to make me feel guilty? Would my story-telling be justified if I also worked in the local Co-op or cleaned toilets for living? Would I be seen as more deserving, a martyr of art, whose self-sacrifice has earned her the right to write? What do they know about the life I have lived, things I have done, jobs I have held? Time to accept that is who I am. And time for the others to accept me for who I am. 

 

 

 Natalie Nera is a pen name of Natalie Dunn, a Northumberland based Czech writer. She is the author of two published novels and editor and co-author of a poetry anthology in her mother tongue.  She writes in Czech, English and occasionally translates. Her written work has appeared in Czech, Russian, German, English and Romanian. She has had her work featured in various anthologies, Mslexia and BBC Radio Gloucestershire. She is a co-founder and former editor of the literary blog Bridgesat the Newcastle University. She has recently launched a small press Fragmented Voices, with her friend and fellow student Natalie Crick. More information may be found at https://natalienera.com, and https://fragmentedvoices.wordpress.com/. 

Sue Pearson

The Gardener

Illustration by India Hibbs

You push your finger against the grubby bell and are not surprised that it’s broken. The grey front door has no window, no knocker, only a spy hole and a slit of a letter box. You hear music from inside. You knock. First, sharp with knuckles, then pounding, with your fist.  Still nothing.  You fiddle with your lanyard and glance back to your car, parked up onto the pavement behind you. It’s been a long day.

Gingerly, you push at the rusted metal flap and call through the letter box.

“Hello? It’s Sam. From Children’s Services? Mrs Phillips are you there? Hello!”

You can hear someone singing along at the back of the house, a deep voice.

“All I wanna, Be no Other, Be together…” Beyonce.

Mr Phillips.

Funny you were listening to that song on the way here.

“Mr Phillips? It’s Sam…”

Suddenly footsteps running down stairs and someone is behind the door.

“Dad, it’s the social, dad, can I open the door?” and you hear the child fumbling with the door catch  and behind her someone coming.

“Out of my way, April!” His voice demands immediate response.

The door opens and he is in front of you. You can hear children’s cartoons in the background.

You hold your ID card on its lanyard out towards him, but he ignores it and looks you up and down. You assess him too. He is slightly taller than you, wiry with a ‘Peaky Blinders’ haircut and an indigo dot, high on his right cheek.

“Mr Phillips, Hi. I’m Sam, we met at the Initial Child Protection Conference. Do you remember me saying we had an appointment today so that I could chat to April and Jordan, at home?”

He looks at you, his head at a slight angle as if he was deciphering what you just said.

“Nah, I’d forgotten that like.”

“Oh well, I’m here now, can I come in? Hi April!”

April, still wearing her school sweat shirt, is balancing on one leg, on the second step of the uncarpeted stairs. She holds the bannister and leans out from it, watching her father. She smiles shyly at you and glances back to her dad.

You say, “I’ve seen April and Jordan at school over the last couple of weeks to introduce myself, Mr Phillips, and I’ve brought some colouring in to do with them today, if that’s ok?”

Mr Phillips steps back from the door.

“You’d better come in, then. The missus is out but I’ll put the kettle on if you want.”

You edge into the narrow hallway past a row of coats on pegs and a neat line of shoes. Smiling at April you reach out to touch the girls arm, giving it a quick, friendly rub.

The hallway is painted a tired beige and marked randomly with what appears to be splashes of old tea or maybe juice, lower down, scuff marks from shoes. The door shuts behind you and the stains are less distinct. There are no pictures or photographs, although you spot two nails knocked into the wall at head height.

Mr Phillips leads the way into the living room.

“Jordan, switch off the telly, social’s here.”

A large screen TV mounted to the wall dominates the room along with two sofas, one pushed back, against the wall opposite and the other in front of the window. Jordan is curled up there, thumb in his mouth and attention fixed on the noisy cartoon.

“Jordan!” his father barks and grabs the remote, switching off the screen.

Jordan begins to whine.

You step in front of the boy and squat down.

“Hi Jordan, remember me. I’ve come with that colouring in I promised.”

Jordan’s frown twists to a sleepy smile, his thumb still in his mouth.

The living room is immaculately tidy. You feel concerned. Had the children not been present, there would be little to suggest their existence at all.

“Can we colour in here, Mr Phillips. We can use the coffee table.”

“Aye, but divn’t make a mess, she’s obsessed with keeping the place clean, their mam. I’m starting the kids’ tea, so I’ll be in the kitchen. “

You kneel on the floor and begin to take pictures and colouring pencils out of your bag.

“Great. Thanks, Mr Phillips… actually, is it ok if I call you Dave?”

“Aye”

“Will Ruth be home soon?”

“Nah, she’s gone to see her sister.”

You turn to him and notice April loitering in the doorway looking uncertain.

“Come on love”, you encourage the girl.” Come and sit with me.”

“Is Ruth ok?” you ask Dave above the child’s head.

Dave looks towards the kitchen.

“Aye, her sister’s poorly. She’s gone to make their tea. She’ll be late home.”

You settle down with the children. As you each chose pictures, you ask questions about their day at school and about their friends and teachers mentioned at your last meeting with them. They discuss their picture choices and share coloured pencils.

You enjoy these ‘getting to know you’ sessions, the easiest component of your Family Assessment. The children have begun to relax with you and now, April leans against your arm, busy colouring in a picture of a fairground. She has kept within the lines meticulously and is colouring each balloon in a bunch held by a showman she had already dressed in a black top hat and red coat.

Still perturbed at the sparseness of the room you ask them about their favourite toys.

Jordan says that he likes “Fortnite” which he plays on his dad’s phone. April twists her finger through her hair and puts down her pencil.

“Do you want to see our bedroom, Sam? Mummy painted my bit with flowers and Jordan’s bit with stars.  And then I can show you all my pictures I’ve drawn. We stuck them on the wall. We keep our toys there too, if you want to see them.”

You want to whoop.

“Let’s just make sure that your dad is ok with that,” you caution. You don’t want to be accused of snooping.

“I’m tired of colouring. I want a drink,” Jordan announces jumping to his feet and scattering pencils.

An old transistor beside the cooker plays music quietly. You see that although worn, the kitchen is, as the living room, absolutely spotless. Dave fries sausages in the pan and nods his agreement to April taking you upstairs.  As you turn to leave the kitchen, you notice a cracked pane of glass in the kitchen door.

“I’ll get that kettle on for you coming down again”, he says, watching you leave.

You follow April up the stairs and into a bright single room. Your feet sink into carpet, dark blue and shot through with yellow, red and white streaks. Windows, overlooking the back garden, are framed with rainbow patterned curtains. April guides you to admire her pictures stuck to the wall and other pieces of craft that she has made. As she chatters you notice, with relief, board games, cars and lorries and other toys in boxes under the children’s bunk bed.

April tells you to cover your eyes and turns you to stand in front of the bunk bed.  At first you don’t notice, but then gasp as you look at the wall the bed is pushed against. On the top half, a hand painted picture of Jordan, his face a concentration of joy. He straddles a space rocket which soars up into the darkness of the universe, past planets with rings and translucent mists and stars, some shooting their luminous trails through space.  You imagine how this looks to the little boy at night.

You bend down, to where April sleeps. There, a garden, beautiful with lilies, violets, crocuses and daffodils growing up between blades of grass. On a swing, attached to the strong bough of an apple tree, April. High in the sky, legs outstretched before her, her face focussed and her hand extended to grasp a rosy apple as she swings.

“April, did your mummy paint this?”

April looks delighted at the impact the wall has had on you.

“It’s so beautiful, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it.”

You picture Ruth at the Child Protection Conference. Her pale face strained. Her thin arms wrapped about her body as she pleaded with the gathered professionals. How she’d wept, begging them to believe that she was well and that she did not need the medication her doctor had prescribed. The drugs that numbed her mind.

You will take photographs of this mural once you have permission from Dave and Ruth. You feel that this is something that must not be ignored in your assessment.

“Is yours a picture of your garden?” you ask.

You move towards the window and immediately regret the question as you look out on patchy uneven grass, a withered tree in the middle of it, black bin bags piled against the back fence and an abandoned spade.

Someone had been digging.

“Is dad making a veg patch, or a flower bed for your mum? That will be fun for you to help with.”

You feel the air shift in the room and turn to April. The crocheted square she had lifted to show you, hangs forgotten in her hand.

“April… what’s the matter?”

You kneel down to the child. Her face, so animated seconds before, is pale and distant. She glances at you and looks away. She wraps her arms around her thin frame and looks at you again. The look of her mother.

“Dad dug it. I watched him do it and when she… when mum, came out and saw, she ran back in but he caught her. I saw him pull her and she screamed but he put his hand over her mouth…It’s my secret. They don’t know what I saw… daddy and Jordan, they don’t.”

“April, where’s your mum?”

You feel cold and sick. April’s face is shell shocked and you know, absolutely, that this little girl has witnessed something terrible. You glance back into the garden at the dug earth.

April’s breath comes in bursts. She shakes her head, you think, trying to lose those images and you pull her to you. April pushes away to continue.

“Daddy put the soil on her. I saw him. With his spade. The light outside was on and when he went inside the light went off and I watched the dark. I waited but he didn’t come back.”

She drops her voice to a whisper and submits to your arms.

“Then the light came back on and her hands were moving, like they were growing up from the soil. And then she was pushing it all off her head. And coughing. And she climbed out. And she was wiping it out of her eyes and coughing more. It was falling out of her hair and I saw it in the light and I was scared. I wanted her to go away because I thought daddy would see her again and push her back. “

The voice in your ear is urgent, she can hardly catch her breath such is the need to pour all of this from her. Your head spins with your responsibility. Nothing could have prepared you for this. From somewhere inside you hear yourself make soothing noises against this barrage.

April begins to shake. “Mummy got out of the ground and then she went to the back door. I couldn’t see anymore but I could hear her crying, trying to get in. Banging on the glass. Daddy came and he shouted because it was broke. And he let her in. I heard them in the hall and the picture of me and Jordan crashed off the wall. Then daddy came up and made a bath. I jumped into bed and pretended I was asleep.”

“April, your tea’s ready!” Dave’s voice comes from the bottom of the stairs.

April’s eyes round.” It’s my secret,” she says her eyes boring into yours.

“Sam, I have a cuppa for you too.”

~

She sits on the stool at the end of the table while the kids eat. She is small, looks like she thinks she’s too good for us. I give her a mug of tea. She thanks me but doesn’t look at me. She talks to Jordan but looks at April. I lift my mug to drink. Jordan is talking to her about seeing the moon through his uncle’s telescope and she is only half listening. She should be taking notes about that, or something.  I’m not having that.

“Everything ok then, Sam?” I ask. “Did you see what you needed to, upstairs? Our Jordan has always loved his rockets and space and that. Haven’t you, son?”

Jordan smiles mushed sausage at me. His mam would’ve telt him to keep his mouth closed.

Sam doesn’t look like she’s left school, never mind being qualified enough to come in and break up a decent family.  I watch her struggling to meet my eyes, but she does it.

“Sounds like it.  You know ever so much Jordan”, she smiles at him.

There is something else in her eyes, something I didn’t see when she arrived.

“April and Jordan’s bedroom is just lovely too. I can’t get over the mural…”

‘Ever so much’, ‘Just lovely’, ‘mural’…fuckin’ poncy witch.

“It’s great that you and Ruth were able to do it up for them. Are you hoping to redecorate the rest of the house?”

She sounds so fake I could laugh in her face.

“Oh aye, bit by bit. You kna how it is. We wanted to get the kids sorted first. Would that be something you can help us with, like. Maybe some money for the stair carpet.”

As I’m talking she’s looking between me and the back door. She’s seen the broken glass. I know she wants to ask me about it. I can see her cogs turning, whirring, whipping up some huge fuckin’ conspiracy theory. Aye, she’ll sharp have that down on paper.

I tell the kids to hurry up. Jordan asks if mummy is coming home tonight and April drops her fork on the floor. Sam jumps up and they both scrabble under the table for it. Sam rubs April’s back. Will she leave off pawing at me bairn. They climb back up but the air starts to crack around me.

I stare at the kids. She stares at the broken pane. She gulps her tea, I sip mine. Jordan asks for more water. I take their plates and tell them they can have just half an hour of telly. It sounds good, not too much. I can tell that Sam wants to go with them. I offer her more tea. She says she has had enough.  I brush past her, to pick up the plates. Too close. She flinches and tries to cover it up.  She slips off the stool and I am in front of her.

“Do you need to ask me anything?” I say.  Her eyes are fear. I could eat them.

“About the door?” I say.

She recovers herself and hands me her empty mug. She is watching our hands.

“Well, I did wonder how it got broken, and… is it safe?” she mumbles, her voice breaking a little.

“Yeah, me and Ruth, we had a bit of an …accident”

I could laugh again, I’m baiting her. She’s breathing fast now and I imagine how it would feel to put my fist around her neck, watch her squawk like a fuckin’ pigeon. I could go with that, after all the hole is dug outside and me kids is glued to the telly, but then I hear the door open and Ruth cries “I’m back!”

The kids yell “Mam”, and April wails “Mam, mam” and she’s sobbing and Sam’s wide eyes and open mouth tell me the lot.

 

 

Sue Pearson is a current MA Creative writing student having stepped away from a career in law. She began writing 2 years ago and enjoys creating short stories.Through the MA she has also had the opportunity to explore writing for Children and Young Adults and creating poetry. She is currently working on a Young Adult novel, a collection of Short Stories and some poems. She lives in Newcastle with her husband and two children. This is her first publication and her ambition is to have more

 

Izzy Wauchope

Speak Easy 

                                                              – illustration by India Hibbs

A grate slides across to nothing but a pair of eyes,
and with that lilt, which sometimes catches me
off guard, you say the word, you squeeze my hand,
we laugh nervously as the door swings open.

Maybe we could hear the music before, it’s hard
to remember; the sound is silky and I want to reach
out my hands to feel the fabric, like I do in expensive
shops, knowing it can never be mine.

A man is playing the saxophone in the corner; a liquid
noise cascading amongst the hushed voices –
as though everyone is whispering secrets
or admitting terrible things.

A man in a brown suit is sitting at the bar with
a small trumpet in his hands, but he never plays.
The barman moves precisely, ruling the world –
I imagine that he knows everything and is a god.

We take a seat on red velvet under red lights,
scarlet tones brushed on our cheeks. I speak:
We always end up in bars with red lights,
but it never feels seedy and always feels nice. 

We are in a place where it feels like words
can never leave and will stay contained forever
amongst the red glow, flowing easily, prettily,
from mind to mouth, we speak freely.

We speak about our parents, the pieces of them we’d like to keep,
to live by when we’re older, better, all grown up.
We speak about people who are gone and won’t be coming back,
and how that makes life feel.

We are just the two in the corner:
crying,
laughing,
drinking drinks we can’t afford.

 

 

Izzy Wauchope finished her English Literature BA last year and is currently studying on the Creative Writing MA at Newcastle University. She has had her poetry published in two anthologies, ‘Ten of the Best’ and ‘Teen Poets: Immersed in Verse’.  

 

 

Ji Lee

Enigma with a Blackbird

                                                      image by Amy McCartney

 

 

Grief. It has come silently, I did not know
it had perched, like a bird, ominous,
the black figure, that sits in my chest,
piecing itself a home,
twig by twig, scrap by scrap,
my heart: her barn, her roof top, her part of the tree to claim,
how she settles there, uninvited,
shedding feathers, the blackness
of her body seeps into mine,
till her beak claws away at the pink tender flesh
tearing me apart,
she spreads her wings,  a muster of hope –
Alas! her talons have cut so deep,
already left her mark.

 

 

Jiye completed her bachelor’s degree in English Literature and Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, and is currently doing her MA in Creative Writing at Newcastle University. She has conducted creative writing workshops for schools in the North East for the Lit & Phil Young Writer’s competition, and also worked as an English teacher for five years in South Korea. She enjoys travelling, photography and exploring quirky cafes in her spare time.