Fresh from ditching an engineering career in the early 1980s, Gus Gresham found his road guru and lifelong friend Laurie lying stoned and unconscious at the edge of a vineyard in the afternoon sun, an empty Beaujolais bottle in the grass and a Jack Kerouac novel spread-eagled on his chest …
They picked grapes in the same picturesque French villages; laboured in olive groves on Crete and pumpkin paddocks in New South Wales; sought enlightenment in India and did the Auf Wiedersehen Pet bit on building sites in Germany. They followed seasonal work doing pretty much everything from thousand-acre wheat harvests to beachcombing. They slept in cornfields and woke up at dawn to wash their faces in the morning dew and start hitchhiking …
Alongside hard travelling, Gus always had a passion for writing, and somehow in between it all he has been a mechanical engineer, environmental activist, English tutor, audio-book producer, interpersonal-skills facilitator, and mature student (MA in Creative Writing; MSc in Building Surveying). Currently, he juggles a building-surveying career with being a husband, father and writer.
His short stories have appeared in literary magazines and online. He is author of the novel Kyiv Trance and author of the young adult novels Earthrise and Marmalade Skies. Angel Reach collects his short stories from across 30 years; some are from those intervening decades, others are fresh off the press.
Angel Reach explores the human condition through flawed characters whose vital, often strange journeys may bring them happiness or ruin.
A young man who lives in a Manhattan attic may be a prophet or lunatic. In parallel, a young woman takes on social injustice wherever she encounters it. While neither have much regard for their own safety, they inevitably affect the lives of others. What will become of Tabbie and Finn? And what will happen when their paths cross?
On the west coast of Ireland, a bully finds personal and perhaps universal truth.
Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the stories.
From Angel Reach
One Last Look
I wander the moonlit grounds with a bullet in my chest. No pain, just the bullet. How did that happen?
Has she got snipers on the roof now?
I watch the blood pumping out of the hole in clotted gobs that rhyme with my heartbeat. And even at this juncture, I think about some of the rare, good moments I’ve had with Charlie.
Go, I tell myself. Just go. She’ll be all right.
But I turn back to the house. There’s a light on in the dining-room and Charlie’s sitting alone at the table. I press my face to the glass.
She looks up. For a second, her expression is cold. Then she smiles. Crosses to the window. Opens it. She laughs as I jump through and land on the bare boards.
"You can’t do it," she says. "We belong."
She raises a crooked finger, pokes it in the hole in my chest and wiggles it about. It feels … okay. I put my hands round her waist. With her body against mine, the old chemistry pops and fizzes. In my peripheral vision, shadowy figures pass by outside.
"Don’t worry about them," she says. "Glass of wine?"
We sit across from each other at the mirror-top table. Our faces are distorted and ugly in the reflection. Charlie’s eyes are soot-black as she pours black wine from a black bottle into black glasses.
"I can’t stay long," I say.
She shrugs, and traces patterns on the table with a fingernail. My eyes begin to water, and my nostrils feel harsh. Uncontrollable laughter warbles out of me.
"What?" she says.
"Laughing at myself," I say. "Sitting here with a bullet in my chest and I was just worrying that I might be coming down with a cold."
"Another one?" she says. "Don’t give it to me."
I hear a dull, erratic thumping. I think it’s my heart giving out, but it’s noises from upstairs. Military boots? The butts of automatic weapons striking the floor? And something big is being dragged into position. Furniture? Torture equipment? From a crack in the ceiling, a ribbon of pale dust comes powdering down through the air.
No comments:
Post a Comment