Elizabeth Baines is the author of the novels The Birth Machine, Too Many Magpies and Astral Travel, and the story collections Balancing on the Edge of the World and Used to Be. She is also a prizewinning playwright for radio and stage, and an audiobook of her comedy radio series The Circle is published by Audible.
Elizabeth's website is here.
A ghost story, a love story, crime, science fiction and a postmodern story: here are the different experiences and attitudes of five linked characters, all affected by the same thing in the past. This is a slyly subversive experiment in genre, exploring the legacy of generational trauma.
You can read more about Five Different Stories About One Thing on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from one of the stories.
From Five Different Stories About One Thing
Extract from "Home," a ghost story
As she opens the garden gate, something flicks, a crack in the light. A black bird flying up from the hedge.
"Male blackbird," says her twelve-year-old nephew, Sam. He has come up behind her with one of the boxes out of the van.
Her sister Sarah follows, carrying another. "Emma, it’s so quaint!"
They stand and survey the tiny terraced cottage, the place where she’ll be now, a single woman once more, beginning again. The stone walls, the deep-set little windows, their paint flaking, the uneven-looking slates on the roof. The unkempt garden, which Sarah says she’ll get in shape in no time, pale primroses half-hidden in the long grass. A cherry tree, its basket of still-bare branches glinting in the afternoon light.
Sam, mad on birds, mad on nature and science, peers into the hedge. "I bet there’s a nest."
Sarah’s husband and his mate lug in the bed and struggle with it on the angle of the narrow stone stairs.
Sarah spins in the little add-on kitchen. "You’ll be OK here." Big sister protector. Leaning back into the role she had in their childhood, their troubled childhood. It’s way in the past now, their father long dead and gone, yet here she is still playing the little sister-mother. "Lick of paint, new units, maybe, in time."
"Cool," says Sam, opening the iron door beside the fireplace in the one downstairs room, the old oven.
She would like them to go now. She wants to be alone with her new independence, and to savour the house for herself.
At last, in a tangle of voices and banging van doors, they’re off, Sarah and her family away back to their impenetrable domestic life.
The atmosphere of the house sifts around her. Smells of wood and stone, a slight whiff of mould that, now the house is occupied, should soon be banished. A soft pressure of history. A new history for her to belong to, she thinks.
Something shifts in the room above, a sound like a shove, and for a split-second she thinks someone’s still there ...
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