Jane Rogers’ Judgement

Black Milk is really well structured, and the voice and language are pitch perfect, it is economical and effective – I can’t fault it! The world of the story is entirely convincing, and the narrator’s revelations consistently surprise and engage the reader.

I love the dialogue in Paddy and Agatha and the way the story gradually lets us deeper into each of the 3 characters, the movement is skilfully handled. The humour was also very enjoyable.

A Brief Period of Rejoicing is very moving, well-structured, strongly atmospheric, with echoes of Katherine Mansfield. I like the slow build of unease over the opening pages, and the surprising detail; the quarry tiles ‘ruddied over in a wash of muddy red’; the ‘anti-aircraft guns nestling in a bed of remnant geraniums like monstrous cuckoos.’

Truth Window is the most ambitious story here, handling the narrative through alternating first and third person voices, ranging back and forth in time. It’s a strong story with well-realised characters, and may well benefit from being developed at a longer length. Its complexity feels a little rushed by the 3000 word limit.

The Real Thing is a clever take on anorexia, letting the reader into the sufferer’s mind, and taking us through the journey she makes as she forms a relationship with a man who battens onto sick girls and draws a perverted satisfaction from their deterioration. It was skilfully structured, and I could not predict the ending. I particularly liked the sly introduction to Melissa’s illness, through the dialogue on the opening page.

I read 16 longlisted stories, and although many were individually impressive, I did become a little weary of the theme of insanity; there seemed to be a lot of mad/obsessed/weird perspectives among the protagonists. It is great to develop an individual voice and a specific point of view, but in some cases these were pushed to extremes, where behaviour and outcome of story seemed either implausible or rather predictable. I am not saying avoid the first person, or avoid drama and conflict – the winning story is first person, and amongst the three placed stories there is a fight, a rape accusation, and a character annihilated by a bomb – but I am urging writers to make the world of their story convincing.

Overall, the standard of writing was high, but I would put in a plea for less melodramatic subject matter. Often the best short story writers – Chekov, Mansfield, Raymond Carver – craft brilliant stories out of very ordinary events.

Extracts from the winning stories:

Paddy and Agatha

Toby Litt

‘God,’ said Agatha, as soon as she was sure May was far enough from the front door.

Paddy laughed. ‘Now that was unexpected.’

They went back down the hall and into the kitchen, Agatha leading the way, still chucking. Paddy finished loading the dishwasher and Agatha, once seated, finished the Rioja.

‘The food really was delicious,’ said Paddy.

‘She must be so incredibly unhappy,’ Agatha said. ‘To fall for something like that. She’s intelligent. It’s the only…’

‘Is it in her family?’ Paddy asked.

‘Not that I know of, no.’

‘Some people it just gets, suddenly – The Spirit.’

‘But surely she knows. She’s getting divorced. Her life is in bits. A week, two weeks ago, she’d never have said all that. Wouldn’t you be embarrassed?’

‘They wait,’ said Paddy. ‘They wait until people are weak, and then they make their little suggestion.’

‘She had the thing,’ said Agatha, ‘in the eyes. It was a bit scary. And saying that she was happy for what had happened – because of what it had done for her. Terrible things – ’

‘And the children,’ said Paddy, pushing the button to run the cycle. ‘They’re got, too.’

‘At least she says it’s stopped her playing that computer game. She was completely addicted. Hours a day.’

‘Is it better? Isn’t this just another – ’

‘Prop. Yes,’ Agatha said, rising.

They went through into the front room and lay down one on each of their sofas.

‘He’ll be…’ said Agatha.

‘Oh, he’ll piss himself,’ said Paddy. ‘He will absolutely, I mean – Jesus. No mere human replacement for Henry, but Christ our Lord.’

‘It might help her, now, and then she can ditch it later, when she’s stronger.’

‘But they’ll keep her weak. That’s what they do, that kind of church. Once you’re in, you’re in.’

‘If I said anything she wouldn’t listen.’

‘No, she’s beyond that.’

For a while they didn’t speak.

A BRIEF PERIOD OF REJOICING

Jacky Taylor

Mrs. Wilson puts on her hat and coat, quietly turns the latch and waddles her way to work.   She could get there with her eyes shut, her feet feeling every familiar crack of paving slab through the very thin soles of her shoes.  She must have walked this way a thousand times, her legs so pulled towards the magnet of their destination she could have slept on the way.   And sometimes she feels as if parts of herself have flaked off on the journey, a sliver or two dropped on Greenwich High Road, a crumb on Maze Hill.  She tries not to dwell on it, pulling herself together as she always does and just gets on with it. ‘Whatever next’ she says.  But today…. today feels different.

The buses rattle past on their way to Woolwich Arsenal, and city men frogmarch themselves to the station, rolled umbrellas clutched like colonels’ batons.   She thinks those bowler hats make the tall ones look like matchsticks, their pale faces pinched and squinting as if the sun was throwing them a blinder.  Mr. Leveson-Brown wears one of those – he works at The Bank of England – she usually passes him on the corner of his road, just before she reaches the house.  Sometimes he gives her a polite nod, mostly she is invisible to him.

There’s a mist over the heath this morning, hovering in mid-air like it has half a mind to be somewhere else.   She can see the tip of the church poking out of the top of it, the spire a little beacon.  Can angels walk on clouds, she wonders?  And fancies she wouldn’t mind a walk on them herself, the downy softness mercifully releasing her from the ache of unyielding stone.  As she crosses the road and passes the neat rows of Nissen huts, she feels another part of her shedding itself, flaking onto the grass.  She pauses for a moment to see if she can locate herself there, some fragment of her poking its way up between the dandelion heads.  She thinks she must be going daft to think such a thing, but feels it just the same.  There’s something she can’t put her finger on, worrying away inside; she can feel it tugging at her like a needy child.

Truth Window

By Carol Barker

I imagine my sister dead.

It comforts me, the scene at the funeral after the committal. I’m bending to read the cards on the wreaths – ‘With all our love’; ‘Rest Now’ – when someone touches my arm. I turn to see a dark-suited man extracting a letter from his inside breast pocket.

‘Miss Natalie Greene?’

I confirm with a nod and he places the letter into my hand.

‘Your sister left instructions,’ he starts to explain, but I already know what it contains, this thick, white envelope, rigid as board.

He’s still telling me ‘…in the event of her death…’ even as I’m walking away; walking away clutching my treasure as though it’s made out of thistledown; walking away thinking:

‘At last.’

A week ago, I read a name. Steven Otto. An exhibition of his window paintings was opening in the Turtle Gallery in Cornwall. The artist, The Times stated, would be in residence there. I tore out the details – surreptitiously, because it was the customer copy in Starbucks.

Once upon a time Steven Otto was my mother’s student. He came every Thursday and often we still heard him whistling in the studio as our mother, smelling of paint, tucked us into our beds.

I know it was Thursday because it was the same day I had extra maths after school. My tutor, Miss Lane, told me there was no such thing as an eight-year-old who couldn’t add and subtract. ‘Which,’ she advised, ‘I suggest you treat as a truth not a dare.’

I know it was Thursday because on a May afternoon, between 3.45 and 4.30, the length of my lesson, my sister stopped speaking to me. Stopped and never started again.

And I still don’t know why.

The Real Thing

Ann Oakley

Melissa put a dollop of creamed mushroom in its pastry socket and curled a nude prawn on top.  She stood back to study her workmanship, spread over two baking trays on the granite counter.  Beside the pastries sat meringue nests full of gleaming berries.  She was shaky with fatigue, but the grey sky beyond the kitchen window reminded her it was nearly time for her afternoon walk, the long way down to the village.  All she had to do first was snip out angelica leaves to adorn the meringues.

Footsteps rang on the terra cotta tiles and Melissa turned to see, with irritation, her mother swooping on one of the unfinished meringues.

‘Mmm, these are scrumptious,’ said her mother, clenching her fingers to stop the filling seeping through.  ‘Why don’t you have one? There’ll be plenty left for the hordes.’

‘Don’t, Mum,’ said Melissa, letting a spoon clang against the metal tray.

‘Don’t what?’ said her mother, eyes wide.

‘You know.  As if it did any good.’

‘But it seems such a shame not to have one, when you’ve slaved over them all day.’

‘So why not show a bit of gratitude for all my hard work, instead of nagging me.’

Her mother hesitated.  ‘Darling, you are going to cope tonight, aren’t you?’

‘Why, what do you think I’m going to do?  Stick my finger down my throat and heave over the canapés?’ snapped Melissa.

Melissa’s brother came into the kitchen and made for the laden counter.  ‘Are you two arguing about food again?’ said the fourteen-year-old, scavenging a pastry.  ‘Let her starve if she wants, Mum.  She only does it to wind you up,’ he added, as if his sister’s problems were a dull book he couldn’t be bothered to read to the end.

His mother surged forward, all but clapping her hand over his mouth.  ‘Matt, that’s cruel.  Your sister is ill.’

Melissa left them to it, and went up to her room to find trainers for her walk.  She opened her wardrobe to caress the shimmering tulle dress, waiting on its hanger for the party.