Rusticles

By Rebecca Gransden

In Hilligoss, a tired man searches for a son, a flamingo enthrals the night, and fireworks light up the lost. In these stories and more, Rusticles offers a meandering tour through backroads bathed in half light, where shadows play along the verges and whispers of the past assault daydreams of the present. Walk the worn pathways of Hilligoss.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cardboard Wall Empire
• Release date: Jul 8, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386317821

Rebecca Gransden

Rebecca Gransden has always lived by the sea. She tends to write about the edges of things so if you inhabit the fringes you may find something to like. Please consider leaving a review of her books anywhere. It really helps indie authors.

Book preview

The Neon Black

Out of the blue and into the black neon night, along a street made of pulse shaking off its dreams. She looked straight up to the dead stars. All those miles with nothing between her and that light. She could shoot at it, ride on her will in space, travel with nothing in her way.

Her shoes were old, brown sturdy lace-ups. She moved her head to look at them and they appeared to melt into the concrete. A sharp intake of breath cleared her mind and the street around her came into view, populated by late evening people out in force. Shafts of sound faded together laughter and engine, bassline and young scatterbrained voices. A progression of optimistic disco chords gave way to a sense of endless possibility, and an inward smile took hold. She wrapped her jacket around her vulnerable body. Her posture could fob off the world.

The pavement reflected a bitter light like vomit. She followed a slightly different path than was her usual, peacefully weaving past people as she imagined their prejudices and laughed as if no one could see.

When the main street was nearly coming to its end, with the bars behind her and music on her back, she stepped into the opening of a sharp alley. Strong light from the street carried almost halfway down into it, throwing stark shadows, with the alleyway dressed in black into its distance. She felt the insides of her pockets and pulled out a packet of cola cubes. Settling by one of those pipes you always find in alleyways she began to wait.

Her older brother, Tony, turned up after ten minutes, dressed in a large blue pig costume. He’d just come from his job helping their uncle, who owned a small cafe and had decided that a blue pig was central to his new promotional strategy for the place. Tony could have changed into his regular clothes but he knew she liked the costume. Besides, he didn’t mind walking home as a pig, just like he didn’t mind making his sister smile. The undercurrent of the simply surreal was quite amusing to them both, and locked in this mutual understanding they left the alley and the busiest street and walked the gradual gradient up the tree-lined, traffic-fuelled stretch of road.

Beyond a concrete footbridge and a dark bushy path lay a quiet, fenced park. For two years she had avoided the place. Tony knew what had happened there: the closest a human can come to being pasteurised.

She was seven years old when something went wrong and her blood burned for just under a year. Then she had been okay, and okay ever since. When he had found her that day he thought he’d seen movement in the bushes, sensing something animalistic had taken place, perpetrated by a beast. She had been unconscious and unable to recall events.

He led her to the park gates and she scrambled over them, like they used to do when she was seven. He took a little longer, even allowing for the pig suit.

The park was as she remembered it, only gangs had claimed it as theirs. Seats had wooden slats broken or missing and primal tags marked every direction. The climbing frame still had its old paint but it was peeled and rusting, dented and unused. It was getting late, the air flat and mild. Tony sat on the old tortoise. Splintered concrete craters appeared where its features once were. The girl felt a pang as she saw this, like a fundamental imprint on her memory had been destroyed, a violent shredding of once permanent connectors. The tortoise had always had such a friendly expression.

He was silent and so was she. It had an unfamiliar history, this place. She approached the decrepit climbing frame and reached for a bar level to her head, shaking it to test its strength. It was as strong as she remembered. She let go, her hands covered with flecks of cracked paint and rusty metallic dust. Tony sat quietly as she drew her hands to her face and blew away the speckled fragments. Something about this act initiated an anxious feeling that moved around her, evading her attempts to get hold of it. As soon as it came it faded and she turned to him and they spoke at length about nothing.

It was near midnight. The moon shone clearly from above, its light telling them how out of place they were. People were asleep. Hilligoss sat darkly beneath them, the dim lamps of essential streetlights visible through the park’s ragged bushy end. Babies dozed and woke crying, married couples slept back to back, lovers were together, children were forming through dream; and she and Tony were here, where the past meets the present. The stench of that primitive thing hit the air, an echo of long ago; before the working week, before conditioning, before community, and society. A time when man answered to himself, the scavenger, when the anarchic flavour of the land infected his soul.

As their talk exhausted the stars began to twinkle overhead and the smell of moist earth permeated the air. The girl filled her lungs several times, blinking as blood rushed her skull. A bird called in the distance. An hour ago it would’ve seemed eerie, but now it infused them both with the expectation of the dawn. Tony made sporadic fidgety movements, slowly rousing his body underneath the pig costume. He recounted a tale of his schooldays, when he had tried to break into Miss Jackson’s shed with his girlfriend, Jackie: there was a rumour that the teacher had kept her dead husband’s skull boxed up in there. The girl tried to listen but they both knew that he was changing the subject. She suggested that they leave and Tony, resigned and deflated, agreed.

It was only as they left in the bright grey light of morning that both silently acknowledged what had occurred that night. A vigil, a quiet watch, on the place that had scarred the girl, and confused them all. A return to look for answers.

As they walked away, shy of looking at each other but mimicking each other’s rhythm, they became aware that they would not return to that place, at least not for a long time. And that they could probably never discover what had truly happened so many years before.

Did any of that matter? The sun shone; the world went on, as it does. The air was fresh.

Dried Peas on a Wall

Here is where they stop on the way back from school and collect good conkers and stamp on the bad ones, looking at the fresh green and smelling that smell of unripe fruit. On the opposite side of the road to her house they walk slowly past, pretending to pause for their conkers, looking across the road and up the old woman’s driveway, feeling the chill as they glance at the ever still net curtains, convinced that she isn’t real or staring back at them. They walk in pairs and groups under the trees, their voices conversing with freedom and release from the school day, unseen in the half light until they move away and off to their houses and are quiet past the house with dried peas on the wall.

She’d be in there. Her house. It’s a shabby old bungalow with maroon brick and a front door that can’t be seen from the road out front. You have to walk up the light concrete driveway to see the doorway, past the grasping thick grass and spindly black twigged thorny plants that reach up to your head, and further if you are a kid. These living things have grown to point their lonely growths away from each other, the endless sky swallowing them up. The door, when you get to it—if you are one of the ones who dares—is set away from the drive, the brick porch receding into the fabric of the building so that to ring the doorbell you feel as if you have