Agnes Owens Read online

  Praise for Agnes Owens

  ‘Agnes Owens’ hallmarks have been a frank irony, a deadpan gothic quality and a down-to-earth insistence on the surreality of most people’s normality.’

  ALI SMITH

  ‘I think of another literary hero, Agnes Owens. What if Agnes had been “granted” a proper chance to write when she was fighting to rear her family? . . . When she saw the squeak of a chance she grabbed it and produced those great stories we know. How much more could it have been?’

  JAMES KELMAN

  ‘Agnes Owens is the most unfairly neglected of all living Scottish authors. I don’t know why.’

  ALASDAIR GRAY

  ‘Agnes Owens stuns her readers, as usual, with her good, blunt-weaponed clarity in Bad Attitudes.’

  THE GUARDIAN

  ‘Owens pulls no punches. her understated prose finds acerbic humour in the lives of characters hovering between farce and tragedy . . . Owens is a gift to the Scots urban world.’

  OBSERVER

  ‘Owens is a gentle writer with a slicing wit . . . honest and unaffected.’

  SUNDAY TIMES

  ‘Agnes Owens has a canny eye for tragi-comedy, a compassionate heart for the unfortunate, an acute ear for dialogue and a mind that clamps her characters like a steeltrap in the predicaments of passion, poverty and the patterns of their lives.’

  FINANCIAL TIMES

  ‘Like all Owens’ fiction Bad Attitudes is as terse and grimly, comically deadpan as the best of Evelyn Waugh and Beryl Bainbridge.’

  DAILY TELEGRAPH

  ‘Agnes Owens has an appealingly wicked eye for familial love on the dole . . . reminiscent of Muriel Spark.’

  SUNDAY HERALD

  ‘These stories leave an echo. Their compassion lies in their honesty. Owens will not let us look away.’

  THE HERALD on People Like That

  ‘A remarkable book . . . funny and sinister’

  BERYL BAINBRIDGE on A Working Mother

  ‘Something in common with early Billy Connolly . . . in the sense that its observation and timing bring humour to a sad reality.’

  NME on Like Birds in the Wilderness

  ‘The best things in Lean Tales are the stories of Agnes Owens . . . she creates little dramas – rich gobbets of life.’

  FINANCIAL TIMES

  ‘Owens’s reliance on the rhythm of ordinary speech is aggressively non-literary.’

  LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS on Lean Tales

  ‘Strong, realistic and thoughtful’

  MOIRA BURGESS

  ‘A remarkable and idiosyncratic voice’

  THE HERALD

  ‘Accomplished and resonant and . . . always informed with a comic astringency’

  THE SCOTSMAN on Gentlemen of the West

  Agnes Owens

  THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES

  Agnes Owens

  This ebook edition published in 2011 by

  Birlinn Limited

  West Newington House

  Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.birlinn.co.uk

  This collection first published in Great Britain in 2008 by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

  Gentlemen of the West was first published by Polygon Books, 1984, copyright © Agnes Owens, 1984; Postscript copyright © Alasdair Gray, 1986; Lean Tales was first published by Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1985, copyright © Agnes Owens, 1985; People Like That was first published by Bloomsbury Publishing plc, 1996, copyright © Agnes Owens, 1996; The Dark Side was first published by Polygon, 2008, copyright © Agnes Owens, 2008; Introduction copyright © Liz Lochhead, 2008

  The moral right of Agnes Owens to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  ebook ISBN: 978-0-85790-140-8

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  To all those who are interested

  Contents

  Introduction by Liz Lochhead

  Arabella (1978)

  This story is first because earliest written, though eventually published in Agnes Owens’ second book, Lean Tales.

  GENTLEMEN OF THE WEST (1984)

  Thirteen stories. These were seperately written, but being episodes in one man’s life were published as chapters in a novel.

  McDonald’s Dug

  McDonald’s Mass

  Grievous Bodily Harm

  Tolworth McGee

  The Auld Wife’s Fancy Man

  Up Country

  The Group

  Paid Aff

  McCluskie’s Oot

  Christmas Day in the Paxton

  The Aftermath

  The Ghost Seeker

  Goodbye Everybody

  Postscript by Alasdair Gray

  LEAN TALES with Alasdair Gray and James Kelman (1985)

  Eight stories, without Arabella.

  Bus Queue

  Getting Sent For

  Commemoration Day

  The Silver Cup

  Fellow Travellers

  McIntyre

  We Don’t Shoot Prisoners on a Sunday

  A Change of Face

  PEOPLE LIKE THAT (1996)

  Twelve stories.

  The Lighthouse

  The Collectors

  The Warehouse

  When Shankland Comes

  A Bad Influence

  People Like That

  The Marigold Field

  Intruders

  Léonie

  The Hut

  The Castle

  Marching to the Highlands and into the Unknown 297

  THE DARK SIDE (2008)

  Fourteen stories in a book (this one) for the first time.

  Hannah Sweeny

  The Writing Group

  Roses

  Meet the Author

  Confessions of a Serial Killer

  The Moneylender

  The Phantom Rapist

  Annie Rogerson

  Visiting the Elderly

  Chairles Will Pay

  Don’t Call Me

  Mayflies

  Neighbours

  The Dysfunctional Family

  A Note on the Author

  Introduction

  I’ve just read ‘Arabella’ again. And it had exactly the same effect on me as it did the first time I read it all those years ago. From the shift in the second sentence when it had me doing a double take, it began its work of filling me with a mounting, irresistible and exhilarating black glee. It shocked, amazed and delighted me. As it has every time I’ve read it – which is quite a few times, for I have never tired of it since I encountered it on the very same night I first met its author. In, oh, 1976 or maybe 1977? Here’s how I remember that – which might not be exactly accurate, but is true to my memory at least.

  ‘Get in, get out, don’t linger’ is Raymond Carver’s famous good advice to the writer of short stories. This dictum would apply also to the tutor of the creative writing workshop – anything in general about writing one has to say that’s of any value at all can be said in one or two classes. I don’t know why Alasdair Gray and Jim Kelman and I were getting in, getting out, and sharing the job of tutoring that short course of evening classes in the late 1970s for beginning writers in Alexandria; was it run by the libraries, or, as I seem to remember, the extramural department of Glasgow University? I suspect, though we were certainly doing it for the money (we were all three more or less broke at the time), we still couldn’t bear to commit to a full twelve wintry weeks of 45 m
inutes-plus there and 45 minutes back, going down every Tuesday or Wednesday or whatever night it was by blue train from Central to this wee back room in the exotically named Alexandria. (Vale of Leven, the place next door, sounded like something out of the Psalms and Para -phrases!) Anyway, far from being Egyptian, Alexandria was actually a pretty dreich and miserable wee rain-and-windswept town in the West, so we agreed to four weeks each. Maybe the local writers had various skills to hone and had asked to have a poet and a short story writer and a novelist? At any rate, I did the first stint. At the end of the first evening, frankly, with the usual sinking feeling, I took away the wee pile of writings eagerly pressed upon me by most of the dozen or so men and women who had attended the class.

  Among these was a single neatly typed piece of prose by Agnes Owens called ‘Arabella’. (Agnes was working as a typist in a local factory at the time.) It began with what I’d soon know as her typical deadpan aplomb:

  Arabella pushed the pram up the steep path to her cottage. It was hard going since the four dogs inside were a considerable weight.

  The four dogs. I sat up. The blue train rattled through the darkness, I read on and it was only a swift paragraph later when, taking in how Arabella had given her mother what she’d clearly meant to be a daughterly pat on the head, I learned that ‘the response was a spittle which slid down her coat like a fast-moving snail’.

  In case you’ve not read it yet – it opens this collection – I’m not about to spoil your fun by giving away what happens to Daddy, or with Murgatroyd or to the Sanitary Inspector, but Flannery O’Connor herself would, I think, have approved. (You know, the great Flannery O’Connor who deplores how ‘most people seem to know what a story is till they sit down to write one’, and is keen to remind us that what they forget is that it ‘must be a complete dramatic action’.) That night on the train with ‘Arabella’, taken aback, I tried to put this terrifying, terribly funny story, so anarchic and archetypal, so short and so complete, together with the class I’d just left and that middle-aged lady in the neat coat and woolly hat with the fringe of dark blonde hair sticking out and the full mouth that turned so decisively down at the corners. A mouth she’d hardly opened except to say a couple of laconic and sensible things. (Creative writing workshops are generally very short of either sensible or brief remarks.)

  I’d like to say I recognised Agnes’s genius straight away but it’s not quite true. In those days I didn’t have very much confidence in my judgements (nowadays I have too much and tend to be far too dogmatic about what I do not like) and I remember a couple of days later showing ‘Arabella’ to Alasdair Gray, saying something like, ‘Have I lost it altogether, or is this . . . I mean it’s wild . . . but isn’t it really rather good?’ I remember him reading, very quickly and sitting very still, till he’d finished, and the gleam in his eye and the wee wince around his mouth when he looked up and said very quietly: ‘Oh, yes.’

  Alasdair and, a few weeks later, Jim really were the ones to help Agnes. (I remember her saying with not quite resentment but a baleful mock consternation, ‘Jim has made me take out all my adverbs.’ But I knew she knew he was right, otherwise she’d not have altered a word of it.) At the time, she was writing the stories that would eventually be published as Gentlemen of the West. Actually, I believe it was the class – she said later she only came to it because she was fed up – that made her start writing the stories about Mac and his cronies (although cronies is far too sentimental a way of putting it).

  Gentlemen of the West is a kind of novel, because there is an overall progression of narrative towards a hopeful ending, the only hopeful ending – escape. I like though to enjoy these not as chapters but as discrete stories, particularly as the later ones, ‘McCluskie’s Oot’, for instance, seem to take a quantum leap and show her coming into her own, refusing to be cute anymore. They are tough and realistic in the way all her mature work is, making you open your mouth and shut it again.

  At the time, I think I read these stories, the early ones at least, as a kind of downbeat and depressed West of Scotland Damon Runyon, without the dollars or the dolls. (If you read Alasdair Gray’s postscript, which is reprinted here on page 111, you’ll see I was underestimating them.) I just found them very, very funny. Bleakly, blackly funny, my favourite kind. What I greatly admired was Agnes’s nerve in ignoring the feminist imperative of the day to redress balances and dutifully record from the inside-out the female experience. Utterly convincingly, to my ears at least, she wrote with a throwaway bravura in the persona and from the point of view of a young male and it was thrilling you could do that. (Well, it wasn’t as if Mac’s voice had had much of a shot in fiction so far either.)

  By the time of the publication of her first book I knew Agnes was a great and quirky original. Her sisters, if she had any at all, were . . . oh, Beryl Bainbridge, Molly Keane and Shena Mackay. But by the time I was reading ‘Bus Queue’, ‘People Like That’, ‘When Shankland Comes’, I was thinking Chekhov and Isaac Babel.

  Every time I see Agnes – not often, not often enough – she seems utterly unchanged from my memory of the first time I saw her. She has had a hard life – see her rare autobiographical story (it’ll take your breath away) ‘Marching to the Highlands and into the Unknown’ – and, like the not particularly sympathetically drawn Isobel Anderson in ‘Meet the Author’ (who ‘can only write about failures’), publication for Agnes never led to her being transmuted to the ease of Artist Class. But she still looks middle-aged, not old, and her mouth still turns down humorously at the corners. Any of the quiet wee deadpan things she says are more than well worth listening to. One-to-one she is especially good company. She’d crack you up.

  It is a great thing to have, at last, The Complete Short Stories. Opening with ‘Arabella’, including, hurrah, fourteen new ones in print for the first time and ending with the delicious ‘The Dysfunctional Family’. Another one. But it strikes me that if Agnes Owens has a theme it’s the functioning of families. It’s never easy . . .

  Liz Lochhead

  February 2008

  Arabella

  Arabella pushed the pram up the steep path to her cottage. It was hard going since the four dogs inside were a considerable weight. She admonished one of them which was about to jump out. The dog thought better of it and sat down again. The others were sleeping, covered with her best coat, which was a mass of dog hairs; the children, as she preferred to call them, always came first with her. Most of her Social Security and the little extra she earned was spent on them. She was quite satisfied with her diet of black sweet tea and cold sliced porridge kept handy while her children dined on mince, liver and chops.

  The recent call on her parents had been depressing. Loyal though she was, she had to admit they were poor company nowadays. Her bedridden father had pulled the sheet over his face when she had entered. Her mother had sat bent and tight-lipped over the fire, occasionally throwing on a lump of coal, while she tried to interest them in the latest gossip; but they never uttered a word except for the terse question ‘When are you leaving?’ – and the bunch of dandelions she had gathered was straightaway flung into the fire. Arabella had tried to make the best of things, giving her father a kiss on his lips before she left, but he was so cold he could have been dead. She had patted her mother on the head, but the response was a spittle which slid down her coat like a fast-moving snail.

  Back inside her cottage she hung her hat on a peg and looked around with a certain amount of distaste. She had to admit the place was a mess compared to her mother’s bare boards, but then her mother had no children to deal with. Attempting to tidy it up she swept a pile of bones and bits of porridge lying on the floor into a pail. Then she flung the contents on to a jungle of weeds outside her door. Good manure, she thought, and didn’t she have the loveliest dandelions for miles.

  ‘Children,’ she called. ‘Come and get your supper.’

  The dogs jumped out of the pram, stretching and yawning nervously. One dragged itself arou
nd. It was the youngest and never felt well. Arabella’s training methods were rigorous. This had been a difficult one at first, but the disobedience was soon curbed – though now it was always weak and had no appetite. The other three ate smartly with stealthy looks at Arabella. Her moods were unpredictable and often violent. However, she was tired out now from her chores and decided to rest. She lay down on top of a pile of coats on the bed, arranging her long black dress carefully – the dogs had a habit of sniffing up her clothes if given half a chance. Three dogs jumped up beside her and began to lick her face and whine. The one with no appetite abandoned its mince and crawled under the bed.

  Arabella awoke with a start. Her freshened mind realised there was some matter hanging over it, to which she must give some thought. It was the letter she had received two days previously, which she could not read. Her parents had never seen the necessity for schooling and so far Arabella had managed quite well without it. Her reputation as a healer was undisputed and undiminished by the lack of education. In fact, she had a regular clientele of respectable gentlemen who called upon her from time to time to have their bodies relaxed by a special potion of cow dung, mashed snails or frogs, or whatever dead creature was handy. Strangely enough, she never had female callers. (Though once Nellie Watkins, desperate to get rid of the warts on her neck, had called on her to ask for a cure. Whatever transpired was hearsay, but the immediate outcome of it was that Nellie had poured the potion over Arabella, threatening to have her jailed. But she never did. Arabella’s power was too strong.)

  The councillor’s son, who had been the caller on the evening after she received the letter, explained that it was from the Sanitary Inspector and more or less stated that if she didn’t get rid of her animals and clean her place up she would be put out of her home. Then he changed the subject since he knew it would be out of the question for Arabella to clean anything, that was one thing beyond her powers, saying, ‘Now we have had our fun get me some water – that is if you use such a commodity. I know soap is not possible.’ And while Arabella fetched the water lying handy in an empty soup tin on the sink, he took a swallow from a small bottle in his jacket pocket to pull himself together. Arabella did not like the tone of the letter. Plaintively she asked, ‘What will I do, Murgatroyd?’