The Travellers and Other Stories Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  CARYS DAVIES

  ‘These stories are so unexpected and compelling it’s difficult to find one single word to praise them. Carys Davies deserves every accolade she has received.’

  ELIZABETH HARROWER

  ‘She can do what it is essential to do in this form, create a micro-world, which has reverberations beyond its size and scope, which is metaphysical.’

  SARAH HALL

  ‘Darkly funny and unsettling…The half-hidden passions of “Ugly Sister” could be a lost slice of Dylan Thomas, while the ousted Latin teacher of “Historia Calamatitum Mearum” has an Atwoodesque prickly wit that surfaces elsewhere.’

  BOYD TONKIN, INDEPENDENT

  ‘Carys Davies is a gifted writer. A true original. Her magical yet weirdly believable stories transport you in a breath into other lives and worlds, without a word wasted. Full of surprises.’

  MAGGIE GEE

  ‘As if Mark Twain and Annie Proulx had sat down at a desk together…I shall be looking out for more.’

  PIERS PLOWRIGHT

  Carys Davies is the author of two collections of short stories, Some New Ambush and The Redemption of Galen Pike. She is the winner of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize, the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize, the Royal Society of Literature’s V. S. Pritchett Prize and the Society of Authors’ Olive Cook Short Story Award. Born in Wales, she now lives in Lancaster in the north-west of England.

  carys-davies.co.uk

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  © Carys Davies, 2007 and 2014

  The moral right of Carys Davies to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and publisher of this book.

  Some New Ambush first published in the UK in 2007 by Salt Publishing

  The Redemption of Galen Pike first published in the UK in 2014 by Salt Publishing

  This combined edition first published in Australia by The Text Publishing Company, 2015

  Text design by Salt Publishing

  Cover design by Imogen Stubbs

  Extracts from Latin for Even More Occasions in ‘Historia Calamitatum Mearum’ reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd © Henry Beard, 1991

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Creator: Davies, Carys, author.

  Title: The travellers and other stories / by Carys Davies.

  ISBN: 9781925240764 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9781922253422 (ebook)

  Subjects: Short stories, English.

  Dewey Number: 823.92

  for Michael

  CONTENTS

  SOME NEW AMBUSH

  Hwang

  Waking the Princess

  Monday Diary

  Gingerbread Boy

  Rose Red

  The Captain’s Daughter

  Pied Piper

  Boot

  Scouting for Boys

  Homecoming, 1909

  Historia Calamitatum Mearum

  Metamorphosis

  In Skokie

  The Visitors

  Ugly Sister

  THE REDEMPTION OF GALEN PIKE

  The Quiet

  On Commercial Hill

  Jubilee

  The Travellers

  Myth

  Bonnet

  First Journeyman

  Precious

  The Taking of Bunny Clay

  Miracle at Hawk’s Bay

  In the Cabin in the Woods

  The Coat

  The Redemption of Galen Pike

  Wicked Fairy

  Creed

  Nothing Like My Nightmare

  Sibyl

  NOTE ON ‘BONNET’

  NOTES & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  SOME NEW AMBUSH

  HWANG

  FOR THE PAST three-quarters of an hour, I have been sitting here in the coffee shop of the Barnes & Noble bookstore on Diversey Avenue with Ellen, as I do every Tuesday morning between ten forty-five and eleven thirty. Inevitably, we have been talking about Hwang.

  I first met Hwang on a Monday afternoon five years ago, the spring Francis and I arrived here from Cleveland. He was living then, as he does now, with his old mother and his beautiful daughter in a tiny apartment on the corner of Diversey and Clark, a short distance from our house.

  He is a small, lean man of indeterminate age. He could be forty, he could be sixty, I don’t know. Every day he is dressed the same: the same pair of black felt carpet slippers, the same loose wool trousers suspended from a crumbling leather belt, the same threadbare khaki shirt with short limp sleeves and one breast pocket. He never smiles. His fingers are scaly and curled like a cockerel’s toes, he has the quick, searching neck of a lizard, the watchful face of a cruel emperor, a ruthless bandit; the face of a person you might go to for the execution of some stealthy but vicious crime.

  Hwang is my dry cleaner—mine and Ellen’s—and I have been going to him now for the best part of five years, usually twice a week. Once on a Monday afternoon to drop off Francis’s shirts, once on a Friday morning to collect them. Other items—Francis’s suits and ties, my blouses, dresses and skirts—I usually take in with the shirts unless there’s some emergency on another day, something that’s been forgotten or that needs doing in a hurry. In which case I make a special trip in the middle of the week, maybe two. Mostly, I would say, I am at Hwang’s at least three times a week.

  A few people in the neighbourhood prefer not to use him. They think he is scary and rude, which is true. He is probably the most frightening and offensive person I have ever met.

  Generally you go in, your arms laden with the week’s cleaning, and stand there for a full two minutes while he ignores you, his face wearing its permanent mask of furious scorn, carrying on as if you weren’t there, shuffling back and forth in his tattered carpet slippers, sorting piles of laundry on the counter, throwing shirts into the giant wheeled hamper behind, dry cleaning items into a mountain on the floor; other items needing repair he hurls in the direction of his ancient mother, who sits in the corner, dressed entirely in grey, crouched over a dressmaker’s sewing machine and an enormous rack of at least a hundred spools of different coloured thread.

  When he is ready, you are allowed to put your dirty laundry on the counter. His system is no different from any other dry cleaner in the neighbourhood, no different from any other dry cleaner anywhere, really: one ticket for you, a copy for him to keep with your laundry to identify it when it is ready to collect. Hwang’s tickets are pink and he keeps a pad of them on the counter, next to a dish of wrapped boiled sweets which I think he puts there for the children—though, as Ellen says, show me the child that would dare reach up under Hwang’s assassin’s glare and take one!

  When he has checked your things into the appropriate piles, he fills out your pink tickets (separate ones for laundry and dry cleaning) in his jagged scrawl, tears each one from the pad with a sharp, brutal twist of his bony wrist, and thrusts them in your face. In my case he usually barks Flyday at this point.

  When I return on Fridays for Francis’s shirts, or in the middle of the week for any other oddments that are ready, I hand Hwang my pink ticket, or tickets if I have more than one, and he shuffles off into the ba
ck, muttering and truculent, under the racks and racks of cellophane-wrapped garments, each one labelled with one of his duplicate tickets. When he has located your things, he brings them to you without a smile, and impales your old ticket on the sharp spike he keeps next to the bowl of boiled sweets. I have often pictured him, as he does this, in the stony yard of some village, wringing the necks on a row of shabby chickens, though I have come to realise I might be wrong about that.

  The worst thing about Hwang—much worse than the not-smiling and the grumpy shuffling about in the felt slippers—the thing that most appalls people, the thing that frightens some of them away completely, is what happens if you lose the pink ticket he has given you.

  ‘No Ticky,’ he says then with vicious finality and something like triumph. ‘No Shirty.’ Clamps his little mouth shut, folds his ropy arms across his limp khaki shirt, and glares at you. A proud, challenging, disdainful glare it is impossible to ignore. It has happened to me before now, and it has happened to Ellen. In fact when it happened to Ellen, a couple of years back, Hwang practically reduced her to tears. He stood there repeating that hideous rhyming couplet of his while she balanced her purse on her knee and hunted through it for her ticket, which wasn’t there. When she begged him to try and find her things without the help of a numbered ticket Hwang just stabbed the air with his cockerel’s claw, indicating the row upon row upon row of garments hanging from the ceiling awaiting collection, as if inviting Ellen to dream up a more impossible task. Eventually, that time, he did give way, puffing and sighing and making a huge fuss of rustling all the clothes in their cellophane covers as he looked through.

  These days, he is less obliging. He has become much worse about this business of the tickets.

  What brings people back to Hwang in spite of his rudeness, is that he is cheap—at 99 cents a shirt he is cheaper than anyone else in the neighbourhood—and his work is excellent. Also his old mother, sitting wordlessly all day in her little corner, carries out repairs and alterations of the highest quality; invisible mends like healed skin.

  And then there is Moon. Hwang’s beautiful daughter.

  It is worth going to Hwang’s just to gaze for a few minutes at Moon. She is now, I would say, about sixteen years old. She has a broad, exquisite face, hair the colour of a raven’s wing, cut to her chin. I’ve said to Ellen many times that if Francis and I were ever to change places, if I were to go downtown every morning and spend the day behind his gleaming desk at First Boston and he were to collect his shirts from Hwang’s on a Friday afternoon when Moon was in there doing her schoolwork, he would never come home again.

  Moon wears the navy and forest green uniform of one of the private Catholic schools in the city: pleated plaid skirt, green wool blazer, white blouse with a piped Peter Pan collar which always looks as if it has been starched and pressed that very morning by Hwang himself.

  There are a handful of such schools in the city, where the discipline is strict, the education narrow but reliable, where uniforms are worn and the fees are relatively modest. Still, you can see what a struggle it is for Hwang. How he glares at that laundry hamper with its 99 cent shirts inside. Hwang looks as though he will die in his slippers paying those fees so that Moon won’t have to run the shop after he’s gone.

  We have been talking about Hwang and Moon, this morning, Ellen and I.

  We have both noticed them lately, arguing in the shop. Moon looking sullen and rebellious and not sitting down at the table in the corner next to her grandmother where she is supposed to do her homework. Hwang pointing a curled finger at her books and making himself look even uglier than usual with all this shouting at Moon. Looking as if he is telling his daughter that he hasn’t crammed his soul into his threadbare khaki shirt, his crumbling leather belt, so that she can grow up to become a dry cleaner. One terrible scene I witnessed ended with Hwang throwing the bowl of boiled sweets up into the air, along with a whole pile of pink tickets snatched up off the spike on the counter. The sweets bounced across the floor and out across the sidewalk into the gutter, the tickets floated about in the steamy shop like butterflies and even the old woman looked up for a moment from her work in the corner to see what was going on. Then Moon ran off in tears through the curtain in the back, up into the tiny apartment above.

  Ellen and I discuss Hwang’s ambitions for his daughter, and end up agreeing that with her grave, exquisite face, her raven-wing hair, she looks so much like a fairy-tale princess that ambition and hard work may not matter for her, because someone is surely bound to come along one day, and whisk her away from the chemical smells and the drone of her grandmother’s sewing machine and the damp kiss and sigh of her father’s steam press.

  Ellen is my friend.

  She has been my friend ever since the day Francis and I arrived here five years ago, ever since the spring afternoon she came across the street from her house to ours, bearing a tray of iced-tea and three white saucers of Pepperidge Farm cheddar cheese Goldfish, one saucer for each of us. She has lived all her life in the neighbourhood, grew up here and lived here with her husband Norm until he died of cancer nine years ago. The day after we moved in, she came back over and took my arm and walked me around our little area here, where I have come to feel so much at home: the small but adequate A&P; the two good hairdressers; our dentist, Dr. Sandusky. The Barnes & Noble bookstore with its coffee shop, where I have coffee with Ellen every Tuesday morning, where I am having coffee with her at this very moment. The Ann Sather café where Francis and I go for a pancake breakfast on Saturdays. There is the Swedish butcher; a chiropodist; a medium-sized Walgreens; four small but thriving theatres the three of us attend whenever there is something showing which appeals. The hospital and medical centre are only four blocks from our house. There is Hwang too of course, less than three minutes’ walk away, and the branch library where I attend a book group every third Wednesday in the month and Ellen comes across to cook Francis his supper and keep him company.

  Francis has promised me we will never have to move again; we’ve moved so much over the years with First Boston, and I have found that as I’ve grown older, settling into a new place is something I do increasingly badly. I did it worse in Cleveland than in Atlanta, worse in Atlanta than in Philadelphia and everywhere worse since the children left.

  It has been different here. I have found I have everything I want; all my needs seem to be looked after in this half square mile with all its now familiar places. I have Francis, and I have Ellen, and I have always felt that there is nothing else here I could possibly ask for.

  Much of my conversation with Ellen revolves, inevitably, around the neighbourhood. Speculation about whether the new extension to the Ann Sather café will be ready by the end of the summer. How much longer it takes to find what you want in the A&P since they changed everything around. I tell Ellen which book has been chosen for the next meeting of my Wednesday library group and from time to time I try to persuade her to come along with me, at which she laughs and throws up her hands so her silver bangles slip and clatter along her arms, and says, ‘What! And have Francis starve?’

  We wonder about the funny smell from the roadworks at the intersection of Clark and Lincoln where they have dug up part of the sidewalk in front of the dental surgery, about how the new young man with the red hair at the Swedish butcher’s might have lost his thumb; and at some point on these Tuesday mornings, sooner or later, we end up talking about Hwang or his old mother or Moon.

  The other week I said to Ellen that Hwang reminded me, with his baggy wool pants and his ruthless lack of mercy, of a ninja. A ninja about to pounce.

  Ellen hooted at this, threw up her hands. Her silver bangles clanked. ‘A ninja! Hardly, Sal! Ninjas are Japanese. You can’t think Hwang is Japanese!’

  Ellen was almost choking with laughter, fanning her hand in front of her mouth so her bangles started clanking again.

  ‘Korean. He’s from Korea. All the dry cleaners here are Korean now.’

  She said tha
t when her mother was a girl here they were all Jewish owned; now it’s the Koreans; one day, she said, it will be another lot.

  Ellen was a schoolteacher once and very occasionally she can still sound a little like one; she can sound ever so slightly lecturing.

  ‘No,’ she repeated, still chuckling, ‘not Japanese.’

  I shrugged. ‘I know that, Ellen.’

  For a moment we were silent, Ellen took a bite out of whatever kind of cookie she was having that day, a sip of coffee.

  ‘He still makes me think of a ninja,’ I said.

  In fact, I had always thought Hwang was from China. Or rather, I’d never really thought much about exactly where he was from. I’d wondered why he is the way he is, so bitter and angry and haughty. I’d wondered if there was a Mrs. Hwang, if perhaps she had been too frightened to come here with him and start a new life in America, if she might still be over there somewhere, if Hwang was still trying to send for her. I’d wondered, also, if he had perhaps once occupied some position of rank, if that accounted for his brutal disdain, his bullying rudeness, the impression he gives of so much swallowed pride. Of bitterness, maybe, at the way life has betrayed him, or been so hard.

  Perhaps his difficulties with Moon are getting him down. I don’t know.

  What is certain is that over the years that I’ve known him he has grown angrier, more frightening, meaner to his ticket-less patrons. Where once he would eventually shuffle off, with a lot of bad-tempered mumbling, to search through all the hanging clothes for the items in question, these days he will not budge. He just stands there behind the counter, shaking his head and looking mean; obdurate as a stone.

  I have always liked Barnes & Noble for coffee. The green paint and brown wood are soothing, the plush carpet is soft underfoot, there is an atmosphere of quiet repose, and the cakes are good. Today I am having a tall latte and a slice of cherry crumb cake, Ellen a lemon cookie and a decaf espresso.

  She is wearing a fawn linen pantsuit and a cream cotton blouse cut square across her collarbones. A print scarf around her throat—she doesn’t like her throat, she says no one our age should go out with her throat uncovered. She looks wellgroomed, rested, at peace. She looks exactly like herself.