#joanna walsh

Imagine prose with a kind of precision haze to it. Opaque and crisp at once. A breath of rich perfumed air hanging over a city built and long inhabited only by women. Or else imagine a spell, an incantation, that goes through numerous iterations and leaves the listener rapt, but gives no answers as to what was being powered through enchantment – only the certainty that enchantment is occurring. I am being vague, I know - but it is hard to speak of Walsh’s collection of short stories without grappling with the delightful contradictions wrought by each story. And, looking back, I’ve used images traditionally associated with women to describe her work – perfume, mysteriousness, a hint at witchery. I hope in doing so I am not doing the work down – so often women’s writing is made smaller by such similes – but to attest to its feminine qualities – that is, its dry, precise, enchanting, recalcitrant focus on experiences of women.

The first story of the collection, ‘Let it be Autumn,’ is a litany of a piece, rhythmic and melancholy:

LET IT BE Autumn

Let it be another town. Let the houses be lowrise, undistinguished, a mix of old and new. Let the doctor’s surgery in a terraced sidestreet be new sandbrick with a porthole window and double doors, and thick brightly-coloured metal bars at waist height to steady the entering infirm.

Let the branches of chain stores in the high street be too small to carry the full range. Let their sales be undermined by charity shops selling just as good as new. Let there be other shops stocking nothing useful: handicrafts; overpriced children’s clothes; holidays on window cards, faded; homemade homewares. Let these shops be unvisited and kept by old women still peering from doorways expecting their ideal customer. Let fashion be something heard of somewhere else.

The opening, inspired by an Emily Dickenson poem, is kin to poetry, in its chiming repetition, settling on a landscape that a kinder-hearted Larkin would have described. With this, and many of Walsh’s stories, there is an intense observation going on, either by a character or a presumed but unnamed indirect character (as in ‘Let it be Autumn’).  Story, too, emerges slowly, often through a stacking of detail, a catalogue of failures, distraction, indecision, focussing too much on the wrong thing, the immediate thing, in order to look indirectly at what hurts, or define, by negative spacing, what is achingly absent.

In one of my favourite stories in the collection ‘Femme Maison,’ there is an absence, or even abscess, at the heart of the house – a clever title that holds within it a feminine house, a female space, a space that expresses a particular identity, and expresses the limits and failings of the woman within:

It’s question of systems. go upstairs and you’ll notice a tea towel that should be in the kitchen. Bring it down and there are the books that should be by your bed. How did they change places? Why didn’t you notice the books before you went upstairs for the tea towel? Then you could have taken them up and put them by the bed and picked up the tea towel and taken it down. Except it wasn’t the tea towel you went to look for, was it? It was something else, but exactly what you can’t remember.

Sewing machine needles.

You should have established some kind of process.

Thereis a process to the day. You eat at established times though it’s such a bother to make. Always afterwards you find a wrapper without a name snaking across the kitchen surface. What is it from? If it is vacant, why was it not cleared? How did you miss it? On tables small things migrate according to the season: the seals from plastic milk cartons, beer bottle lids (though it was He who drank beer whereas you drink wine). How did they get there? Why were they not removed? There must be a way to get rid of them.

We have a ‘He’ – capitalised, as if godlike - who is not there any longer. We have clutter and misplacement, process that has to fight against the chaos of loss, deliberate or otherwise. This story reminds me, even though it has a human character to populate it, of ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ by Ray Bradbury. If you haven’t read it, it’s a post-nuclear apocalypse story, centred upon a mechanised house still trying to feed and comfort owners who are now nothing but scorch marks on the walls outside, as the house itself slowly loses control and winds down into the silence. A strange comparison, perhaps, yet I keep coming back to it in my mind. Where the woman becomes machine-like without being numb – operating on a circular track, trying to complete tasks that don’t need doing, but are somehow, mournfully essential.

This pattern of performance is repeated in its strangest iteration in the haunting ‘Hauptbahnhof.’

I know what you are thinking.

But it is possible to sleep on the station.

If you don’t look like a tramp, if you change your clothes with reasonable regularity, above all if you look like you are waiting for someone.

I have perfected the waiting look.

After all, even if I am no longer sure whether I am waiting, or whether I only wish to appear to be waiting, it is my responsibility not to cause a ‘situation’, an incident. It is my responsibility to protect the people who pass through the station from the sight of a woman alone who is not waiting for anyone. Although, of course, I am.

And there is no better place to wait than the Hauptbahnhof. It is large enough for me to change platforms regularly. It is clean.

As matter-of-fact as can be, a woman waits, or merely exists, at a train station in Berlin, the site of where she was to meet ‘you’, and instead was met by no one, and found the ‘you’ to be beyond contact. Undiscouraged, she stays, waits, keeping up an appearance of solidity by visiting the train station’s hair salon and trying on new makeup in the chemist’s, as well as learning German, reading the ‘signs’ around her, like a priestess officiating her rites. Not lonely, somewhere out beyond loneliness. Cool, still, but – and here I pause. Here I look for the word that escapes. The charm of the stories of Fractals is the sense of the gulf, that each story contains a step out into the void, but that the character about to make the step, or about to stand at it forever, is woman and a human, however little they have of names or reason or place. This narrow ledge allows sufficient dwelling place; a marginal, liminal existence, but heightened too. An edge is always sharp, precisely marked, and it is where many women have made or been forced to make a home.

In case you don’t know, Joanna Walsh is spearheading a project to draw attention to women writers – she is an artist as well as a writer, and has created a series of bookmarks, illustrated with prominent novelists and with a long list on each of women you can go out there to read.

If you need any further reasons to buy Fractals I’d nudge you towards this: towards the bright blue cover with its white delineating stars. I’d urge you to place it in your handbag, for when you are alone in the city, feeling out the way over your shadow across the plaza.

Review by Helen McClory.