Tasha HainesTwo Girls in a Boat, by Emma Martin (Victoria University Press, 2013), 197 pp. $30.
Twenty or so years ago, I took the default position that short stories are to fiction what carrot sticks and a glass of water are to a fun night in—until the week of violent weather that precluded any form of outdoor venture, and I was coerced by circumstances to finally consider the dusty tower of short stories that loomed before me. I cleared the dishes off and pulled out an odd assortment of short Dahl, Oates, Kipling, Chekov, Joyce, W.C. Williams, O’Connor, and Frame… And found that a short story can be a tiny revolution, a miracle in 5000 words. I read my way happily through that storm – and then on through the decades, until I reached Emma Martin’s collection of eleven ‘tiny revolutions’ Two Girls in a Boat.
The first story, the eponymous Two Girls in a Boat, was the winner of the prestigious Commonwealth Short Story prize in 2012. ‘A Wellington mum has won an international short story competition…’ reported the Dominion Post, not trying to be funny. This story is about replacing the past with the present, and the question arises: can that happen? And more than once you want to say ‘hang on…’, but the erratic rhythm of it neatly reflects the turmoil of protagonist Hannah’s thinking, and her reliance on action rather than thought.
The first thing to impress me with each of these stories was the quietly unfolding suspense: names are sometimes withheld, while the third person ‘you’ is used in reference to an illusive self or ‘everywoman’. Issues commence robustly mid-action but are tantalisingly vague, and then fleshed out and revealed by degrees. It is this potent, slow-boil ‘baiting’ of the reader that I found ultimately makes these stories so compelling.
Next I was impressed by the terrific humour and affection in depicting character and plight, as in this example from In the Below:
‘Don’t itch them!’ her mother always says, flicking Agnes’s ear, a habit Agnes hates – she practised it herself on her doll Leanne Morris, you make a circle with your finger against your thumb, then pow. ‘It’s you own fault for letting that blasted cat in your bed.’
Every hair on every head, and every fleabite too, is exactly as it should be; every cup of tea is plausible, and every word a well-set jewel. Domestic dramas big and small simply tantalise with their relatability: Everything in the house was covered in an ectoplasm of femaleness, says Alan, the father of four daughters, in The Nest.
The themes of Two Girls in a Boat are meaty yet commonplace. There is the ephemeral nature of childhood innocence, the fallible ivory tower of marital harmony, isolation and dislocation within the familiar, the parent-versus-child battleground, pregnancies wanted and not-so-wanted, the power of the past in the present, and the tyranny of social graces. These themes are given a rich array of perspectives, including that of a placard-bearing anti-abortionist. Here is an excerpt from the lightly-written but heavily-loaded Victor:
Victor lifted the placard from its position propped against the table leg.
Under the slogan was a photograph of a baby in utero, floating in its amniotic sea. The baby’s head was haloed by white light.
‘ This is a child eight weeks after conception. Only eight weeks – and look at it. Its heart’s beating, it’s got ten fingers, ten toes. Fingernails even. Its fingerprints are already forming.’
For real?’ said Soraya, her eyes widening.
Victor nodded. ‘You know, by the time its ten weeks old, it can suck its thumb.’
The idea of ‘place’ is the scaffolding from which everything else is suspended. In Victor, the place is Wellington and the street outside an abortion clinic. Everything is being blown by the wind: ‘But Victor didn’t flinch’. The fact that he didn’t flinch is more pertinent in a Wellington setting, where much is ‘flinched’, of course, by the wind.
The stories depict leaving from, arriving at, belonging to, hovering in, or journeying between places – even the womb. And collectively much is evoked about how ‘place’ frames the human psyche. If I had lived in the UK ‘for a third of my adult life’ as Emma Martin has, I would have carried New Zealand with me and measured the world by this formative place that blew the cold, the wind, the extraordinary natural environment, and a fair dollop of colonial angst through me; and in at least that much, Emma Martin, who grew up in Dunedin, is a ‘Kiwi writer’. But in other ways she is a writer without borders. The following passage from Visiting Edie is one example of how landmarks and other nouns can sparkle in the right hands. This passage is not only a good way of describing bleakest small town New Zealand, but it snugly encapsulates the unease that the story requires, and says spades about the narrator:
This wasn’t how she’d imagined it. She had flown down from Auckland that morning and picked up a rental car from Greymouth airport; Barrytown was to the north, marked on her map with a black dot. Fearful of being late, she had allowed plenty of time for the drive, planning to sit in a café while she waited. But it turned out there was no café, no shops, no town to speak of, just an occasional letterbox at the roadside suggesting a house somewhere out of view, and a squat, brown roofed pub, its doors closed and its windows dark.
A majority of the stories are given a New Zealand location, but these would certainly transfer to an international readership, taking on an exotic appeal from the rich descriptive passages about ‘here’. But where the stories are set in the UK or the then ‘Yugoslavia’ for example, the author shows that her voice, her humour, and certainly her themes are transportable: connected to, but standing apart from kiwi-ness. Vukovar exemplifies the internationality of Ms Martin’s voice. The guard is holding the young woman’s passport and suddenly she has no nationality, the only thing that matters is that she is a female in the presence of two bored guards who are enjoying a little power play:
He studied the photograph, then the girl.
‘This is not you.’
The girl looked at the photo.
‘I cut my hair,’ she said.
The guard said something to a colleague, who was sitting on a swivel chair in the corner of the booth, playing a video game to a soundtrack of cascading bleeps and occasional mild explosions. He put the game down and the two of them scrutinised the passport. The girl waited. Leaning against the wall of the booth, she could feel the vibration of a truck idling outside. The guard made a phone call. He had a packet of potato chips stashed under the counter, on which he was munching furtively. He read out what sounded like the girl’s passport number, mispronouncing her name and place of birth. Finally he called her back to the counter.
‘Reason for visit?’
‘I’m travelling,’ she said. ‘I’m going to –‘
‘Tourist,’ he said.
He stamped her passport.
‘This is not you.’
The girl looked at the photo.
‘I cut my hair,’ she said.
The guard said something to a colleague, who was sitting on a swivel chair in the corner of the booth, playing a video game to a soundtrack of cascading bleeps and occasional mild explosions. He put the game down and the two of them scrutinised the passport. The girl waited. Leaning against the wall of the booth, she could feel the vibration of a truck idling outside. The guard made a phone call. He had a packet of potato chips stashed under the counter, on which he was munching furtively. He read out what sounded like the girl’s passport number, mispronouncing her name and place of birth. Finally he called her back to the counter.
‘Reason for visit?’
‘I’m travelling,’ she said. ‘I’m going to –‘
‘Tourist,’ he said.
He stamped her passport.
I felt mildly disappointed at the end of the marvellous Six Grey Arches. It travels along with such resonance and grace, making me ‘fly a flag’ for the girl who suffers the shame and vitriol that is thrust upon her for getting pregnant, only to then have her baby taken away at birth. I wanted the acidic, orange-lipstick-wearing mother who orchestrated the bitter expunging, to put things right, but of course she cannot, and the whole event is simply brushed under the carpet in the final scene. And I know that this ending reflects ‘real life’, and the fact that forty or fifty-plus years ago girls and women were public property in matters of extramarital pregnancy, and all that could be done then was to sweep it under the carpet. But I so wanted to know what would happen… But at the end of Six Grey Arches the girl, numbly sitting in the back of the car, is simply willingif not glad, to be going home. Perhaps this outcome is understandable. Maybe I simply wasn’t ready for the story to end. My reaction probably illustrates how much one invests, as a reader, into worthy stories. This is the beautiful reciprocity between good fiction and its audience.
Te Marama, the last story, seemed to me as brilliant as a shooting star. It is a fabulous potpourri of multiple lives that intersect—or nearly intersect. It is a great way to end the book because it is so vital and to the point, and reads, in its context, like a bullet-pointed summary of Martin’s themes. The story highlights embedded injustices, and the unlockable interconnectedness we all share. It is both a story of New Zealand today and a story that could happen anywhere.
Emma Martin’s first book is a compendium of warm, intelligent, and approachable stories, each infused with a tender humour as well as an attractive empathy for human frailty and some ‘predicament at the moral crossroads’. What is left out lingers in the mind as much as what is put in: a good short story will imply back-stories and future consequences to make the reader’s experience resonate long beyond the time spent reading. As Emma Martin herself puts it in an online statement: Well-crafted fiction presents itself with a kind of inevitability. It answers its own questions. It paints over its own steps. It pulls its ladder up behind itself, folds its arms tightly across its chest and deflects our tiny arrows.
TASHA HAINES is a writer with a background in fine arts and education
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