Short Stories: The mood of Scottish poet and novelist Jackie Kay's second collection of short stories is so immediately engaging that it reads as though she is speaking to you at a bus stop, writes Kate Bateman
All the stories have been previously published or commissioned, so the wonder is: what makes them a collection? A prevailing sense of puzzled loss and a theme of breaking up are threads that bind. Also, although the characters have different names, some of the traumas described could have happened to a single character.
Several stories have a cargo revealing how the story is made; all have a burden of facts and feeling; and at least two experiment deftly with the form - skills honed in the service of poetry.
The title story, Wish I Was Here, engages us in that recognisable but terrible fantasy of planning the successful social embarrassment of an ex-lover. For 14 pages Paula plots Claudette and Jan's ghastly surprise. True to the short story, as she ambushes them in their five-star resort hotel as they are ensconced on bar stools, legs "intermeshed with each other's", we are left to imagine the denouement following the words, "'Hellooooo,' I say, 'Look who's-a-here'."
In the opening story, You Go When You Can No Longer Stay, Kay, with neither irony nor sentimentality, successfully depicts both the palpable irritation experienced by a lover prior to initiating her departure and the dogged incomprehensibility of the left-behind person.
In How to Get Away with Suicide Malcolm's wife, Jamie, has a new lover and has dispatched him out of the marriage. In a seamless blend of narrative voice and thoughts in Malcolm's head we learn a few facts about their marriage and his feelings of inadequacy and despondency, but mostly we learn that he is preoccupied by whether his un-vacuumed place will reveal too much of his character and habits.
So, suicide deferred, " . . . Malcolm Henry Jobson makes up his mind to straighten himself up before he takes himself out".
What is Left Behind is a refreshed tale of the motel-bedroom affair - two married women with no names have been meeting this way for ages. However, on the particular evening of the story the narrator is left to count previous room numbers - presumably instead of sheep - before sleeping alone.
Sonata, the longest story of the collection, is a lyrical reminiscence of a train journey. It's written in smooth but tense alternating time-memory sequences. It stands alone in style and it touches on many of the issues in this well-written collection.
Kate Bateman is a tutor in the school of English and drama in UCD
Wish I Was Here. By Jackie Kay, Picador, 168pp. £16.99