Colette Paul was born in Glasgow. She is the author of Whoever you Choose to Love (Weidenfeld & Nicolson/ Phoenix) , a collection of stories which were serialized on Radio 4, and shortlisted for The Spirit of Scotland Writer Award. Colette’s work has appeared in several anthologies and magazines, including Mslexia, Edinburgh Review, Stand, and Litro. Colette’s story ‘O Tell me the Truth About Love!’ won the Tom Gallon / Royal Society of Authors Prize, and three of her stories were included in Victoria Hislop’s edited anthology, The Story: 100 Great Short Stories by Women. Her second collection of stories, A Complete Success, is due to be published this Autumn. Colette lives in Cambridge, where she teaches Creative Writing at Anglia Ruskin University.
About A Complete Success, by Colette Paul
This is a sharply observed collection which finds comedy and sadness in the ordinary lives of ordinary characters—teenage girls, middle-aged divorcees, a man facing his last night alone in hospital. The stories are linked by a sense of lives in transition, with the attendant fear, exhilaration, and sense of loss those moments can bring. Time after time, characters struggle to understand and communicate their feelings, to their loved ones and to themselves. Despite the melancholy theme, the stories are shot through with humour and lightness, a sense of life in all its complicated messiness.
You can read more about A Complete Success on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the opening story of the collection.
From A Complete Success
From 'Rats'
Before my boyfriend leaves for work he says, ‘I saw another rat last night. You better talk to that neighbour today about feeding the birds.’
‘You talk to her,’ I say.
‘You’re the one who’s lumbering around the house all day,’ he says. ‘I’ve not got a minute to myself from the moment I get into the lab.’
‘Lumbering,’ I say, ‘that’s very nice!’
‘You were still in your dressing gown when I came home last night.’
‘Because I didn’t feel well!’
He stops fiddling with his bike helmet and says quietly, ‘Why are you crying?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Why do you think I’m crying?’
He lets out a sigh of frustration. ‘It’s really annoying how you answer a question with another question.’ He sits down next to me with a look of defeat. ‘Do you think you might be depressed?’
‘Oh,’ I say, ‘is that a question? I thought we weren’t allowed to answer a question with another question.’
Since we moved here six months ago, we argue all the time. I blame my boyfriend for bringing me here, where I have no job and no friends. It doesn’t matter that I’d just got made redundant, or that my best friend had moved to Spain, or that I was actually excited to move somewhere new—I still blame him. It’s not fair, I know, but that is one of the downsides of being such a decisive and definite person, like my boyfriend.
*
I get dressed and put on some makeup and knock on my next-door neighbour’s door. She is a tiny, stooped old woman, with bright eyes like Mrs Tiggy-Winkle. From our bedroom window we have witnessed her throwing bird seed around her garden with surprising energy.
‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ I say, ‘but we live next door, and we’ve been getting a lot of rats in our garden. The internet says it might be because you’re feeding the birds—the rats are attracted to anywhere they can find food.’
‘Oh dear,’ she says, ‘have you got them as well?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Loads of them. They seem to be coming from your garden.’
‘I hear them scurrying around, scratch-scratch-scratch, all hours of the day.’
‘In your house?’ I say, horrified.
‘I don’t know,’ she chuckles. ‘The council’s been round a few times, but they can’t see where they’re coming from either.’
‘Well maybe you could try stopping feeding the birds,’ I say. ‘That’s the biggest way to get rid of them, the internet says.’
‘Oh I love my birds,’ she says. ‘I sit and watch them all day. They’re the only thing that keeps me going since my husband died.’
