Rhys Davies Short Story Competition 2007

Penny Simpson - 1st Prize-winner

Penny Simpson trained as a journalist before winning the Barclays/TMA Theatre Critic of the Year in 1991. Her short stories have appeared in anthologies from Bloomsbury, Tindal Street Press, Honno and Virago. Dogdays (Gomer, 2003) was her debut collection of short fiction and The Banquet of Esther Rosenbaum (Alcemi, 2008) will be her first novel. She currently works as Head of Press at Welsh National Opera.

An extract from:

Eagle in the Maze

Lily wants to be an angel, maybe an eagle. She’s still mulling over her choices.

“There’s only one chance to get this right,” she points out. “It’s not like I’ll have two go’s, is it?”

That’s true enough, because Lily is dying. Jim shuffles through the rough sketches laid out on top of his workbench. He’s pretending to look for a particular drawing of an eagle’s wing, but is in fact hiding his embarrassment. He should be used to this kind of dialogue by now. He’s a stonemason and his chief source of income since leaving college has been the carving of tombstones. He loves sculpting the letters of the alphabet; he can lose himself for hours when he creates the curve of a “g,” or the spiral of an “s,” because that is his focus and not the sad narratives unfolding in the lines of a funereal text. Lily is forty-two, which is far too young a numeral to chip out of stone. Jim is thirty-nine. They are close in both age and in geography. His studio is a converted garage rented from a builder off Monmouth High Street. Clive has also thrown in a caravan with the rent, one of three kept in the overgrown apple orchard next to the garage.

“It will only get vandalised otherwise,” he had said. “Oh, and you’ve got a neighbour. Name’s Lily.”

That was all he had known about her until she showed up a fortnight later, peering round the garage door, a wing of dark hair nearly obscuring her pale face.

“Clive says you do tombstones,” she had said with no preamble. “Can you do mine?” 

Lily isn’t tall, but gives the appearance of height because she’s thin and supple, like a newly grown tree branch. Her hair drops over her eyes periodically, forcing her to swing her head back to free her gaze. Jim wonders why she doesn’t wear a headband, or a clip. He remembers his grandmother’s head bristling with little wire grips, which dug into her scalp and left dents on its pale pink surface, visible below her few strands of hair. Lily hasn’t lost her hair and she’s proud of that fact. She reveals that she has refused chemotheraphy and is taking potluck instead.

“That used to mean something very different a few years ago,” she says, with a wry smile.

She traces her fingers round the letters of the alphabet, which he has carved on to a totem pole. The tall rectangle of stone is his calling card, but a bugger to fit in the Citroen. She laughs when she says this, a surprisingly deep throaty laugh for someone whose neck is thin as a bottle’s stem. The fragility of her neck startles him, because it looks wrong set against the thick wing of her hair, which she scoops back from her eyes the better to peer at a tombstone that stands next to the totem pole. She checks the names and the dates inscribed on it.

“Twins?”

He nods.

“They never lived to see their first birthday?”

“No. They died a few weeks after birth.”

“I like it that they died together,” she says, surprisingly emphatic.

Jim is nonplussed all over again. He doesn’t like expanding on the stories behind his work, not when it involves deaths that can’t be absolved with a comforting line, the sort that always seem to borrow from sports jargon. His grandmother had lived to see her centenary; at her funeral, people had cheerfully acknowledged the fact that “she had a good innings,” although she had never watched, or played a game of cricket in her life. The absurdity of such a remark; the absurdity of carving memorials marking everything from one hundred years to one hundred days of a life. He moves away from the workbench rather clumsily and knocks his cup of tea over the drawings. Lily tries to rescue them, dabbing at the spoilt ink with the hem of her skirt. She pulls it up almost to her waist and Jim sees her skinny thighs. He’s embarrassed, but she’s oblivious. The drawings were made on holiday in Andalucia where he had witnessed an eagle taking flight in the mountains. He thought they might be a good point of reference for Lily’s angel wings and his hunch has worked. The drawings are the deciding factor: she will become an eagle when she dies, rather than something celestial.

“I’m not even religious,” she points out. “I mean, I was a star in a Nativity play once, but other than that I’m a heathen, or whatever else you call the damned these days.”

“If you’re not going to heaven, then you can’t go to hell. You can’t believe in one and not the other,” he offers, trying to sound helpful.

He isn’t used to visitors yet, because this is still a relatively new working space and he hasn’t organised a daily routine. In addition to the garage space, lined with workbenches, there is a lean-to made out of plastic sheeting, which has proved ideal for carving in natural daylight. It’s a temporary refuge only, because when the sun is overhead it’s impossible to work after mid-morning. An unexpected heatwave half-way through July has made matters worse. Jim would like to carve naked in the lean-to, but he’s nervous Clive might drop in for his rent at the wrong moment.

“A graveyard in the making,” he had joked when he first came to inspect the workshop.

“I do one-off sculptures too,” Jim had reassured him. “You know, things for the garden.”

“Gnomes an’ that? I likes a good gnome, me.”

Four months on, with all his hammers, chisels and mallets neatly spaced out ready for the commissions to flow in, Jim wonders about the risk he’s taken giving up his old job with a restoration firm. He’s nearly broke, but he’s not yet convinced it won’t all work out, even if he has just spoilt the drawings for his first private commission. Lily smoothes the damaged papers out on the floor, her actions slow and careful, because the tumour has grown inside her in such a way it makes certain movements painful and difficult. But Lily is one for practicalities, not recriminations. Jim’s eagle drawings – even with the tea stains – are a winner.

“I’ve not drawn anything important in my life, but I don’t see why I can’t make my death important,” she argues.

Lily likes Victorian funereal monuments, particularly those featuring life-size angels with wreaths of laurel draped rakishly over their blanked out eyes. Jim wonders where on earth she will put such an elaborate tombstone. Lily isn’t remotely concerned about such practicalities, largely because someone called Digby is going to do the honours, or so she claims. He has a garden the size of a small country and is keen to commission an original artwork for its maze.

“And that sculpture will be of you?”

Jim is curious. Lily doesn’t expand on her relationship with Digby, nor why he might want her naked with eagle’s wings on display inside his maze. He just does what he always does when confronted with some inexplicable emotion: he draws. Lily pores over the shoebox where he keeps lumps of different stones ready for clients to inspect so they get an idea of what they are ordering.

“I’ve got my engagement rings in a shoebox,” she confides, her fingers grey with stone dust.

“How many rings do you have?” he asks, startled into asking a personal question, which isn’t really his way with a stranger.

“I think it’s six,” she replies, frowning at her dirty fingers. “No, tell a lie, it’s seven, because Dennis proposed too. I nearly forgot about Dennis, can you believe that?”

As he has no idea who Dennis is, he doesn’t know what to believe. He notices Lily has stone dust stuck on her lips.

“They’re my pension,” she says defiantly, as if he’s just challenged her over the morality of hoarding the rings of her rejected suitors.

The number worries him. How can you get engaged seven times, or rather how do you get un-engaged? Jim has never proposed to anyone. He’s been close a couple of times, but the words were never said. That’s why he lost Hattie and Rose, because they had both wanted commitment and both had tired of waiting for him. He thought he had loved Hattie, but then Rose had muddled up his certainties, moving into his world before Hattie had completely resigned herself to leaving it. There had been an ugly confrontation in his old workshop, culminating in Rose throwing a file and cutting Hattie’s cheek. Poor Hattie. There again, she wouldn’t have liked Lily. He decides that, as he brews up a fresh pot of tea. Hattie would never have had time for a woman who rattled shoeboxes full of engagement rings.

“Digby thinks it’s a magnificent idea,” Lily says, as if that qualifies the whole project without further debate…

Eagle in the Maze will be published in full as part of an anthology of the Rhys Davies 2007 winning stories. The anthology including all of  the winning stories will be published by Cinnamon Press in May 2008 and launched by Academi and the Rhys Davies Trust at the Guardian Hay Festival on the Literature in Wales stand.

For information on how to pre-order your copy
contact Academi on
029 2047 2266 / post@academi.org