Wendy Erskine, whose first novel will be appearing soon, is perhaps the most remarkable short story writer working in or to have emerged from Northern Ireland. In this post, I take a look at her first collection, Sweet Home.

Sorry this post is late. I’d have posted it on time but I’ve been without an internet connection since Saturday afternoon.

As I mentioned before, Talk about books has now been running for just over 4 years. I’ve made a list of the 12 authors I’ve been writing about most frequently, with links to all the posts about those authors, both in Talk about books and on my personal site.

Wendy Erskine’s first novel, The Benefactors, is due out this year. She already has an enviable reputation as a short story writer, having published two collections, Sweet Home (2018) and Dance Move (2022). I’ve already briefly mentioned one of her stories, “Mikey Mulholland”, which doesn’t appear in either volume but is included in the Faber anthology, Being Various. I’m going to focus in this post on the first collection, having read most of those in Dance Move only once so far. Dance Move is excellent like its predecessor but I’ll need to read those stories again and live with them a bit longer before I’m ready to discuss them.

Sweet Home opens with “To All Their Dues”, at 34 pages the longest story in the book. It’s made up of the accounts of three different point-of-view characters, each character being apparently unaware of the connection between the other two. Mo has recently opened a beauty salon, using a loan from InvestNI and the money she has saved from her previous job in a call centre, giving people improvised horoscopes over the phone. She had intended the salon to have a Caribbean theme, but had to replace the sand and shells in bowls with boiled sweets, ending up with a “[w]eird little box of a place” (p. 34). Mo is under pressure to pay protection money to a menacing thug named Kyle.

Kyle has apparently been left to run the protection racket on his own, following the sudden death of his older brother, David. Kyle is depressed and very angry. He’s angry at the coroner, who declared that Davy’s death was caused by a “heart attack brought on by steroid abuse” (p. 15) and at the attacks on Davy’s grave and headstone; he’s angry too at the spark of defiance briefly shown by Mo, who has questioned his use of the word “community”:

And your woman, lippy fuck, going on about community the other day, oh I know about community, should’ve firebombed the place. Might still. (p. 15)

Kyle goes to see a hypnotherapist but won’t tell him what he wants, or how he thinks the therapist can help. When the therapist gets him to think about a time when he experienced contentment, when he felt in control, Kyle remembers their father, helpless on the floor, “half on, half off the rug, and the blood from his mouth pooling on the floor” (p. 19). The two brothers had realized that if they acted together they could fight back against their father’s drunken violence. Not knowing what image Kyle has in his mind, but having been told by Kyle that it makes him feel better, the therapist tells him to “hold that in your mind as a motif of happiness that you can refer to” (p. 20).

Kyle is married to Grace, the third of the point-of-view characters.

Basically, the enemy was everywhere and there wasn’t anybody left to trust except Grace who he did trust even though she probably disapproved of everything. Once, when there was a situation, she had been taken in for questioning for a day and a half and she had said nothing. In fact, one of them had said to him, you’re punching above with that one, Kyle. (p. 15)

Grace’s story is probably the most surprising of the three. Each of her parents experienced “some kind of epiphany” (p. 26) when they went separately to hear an American evangelist in a huge white tent. After that, they took Grace street-preaching in Cornmarket each Saturday. Grace was a well behaved, studious and intelligent child who realized at an early age that, unlike her parents and most of the people she came into contact with, she didn’t believe in God or any of the main tenets of her parents’ religion.

Grace is now a regular customer of Mo’s salon.

She had been there practically every other week since it opened. She had never thought before that she was high maintenance, but now it turned out that she was. (p. 34)

Remembering a tantalizing, inconclusive encounter with Kerri, a girl who had been in the short term foster-care of a couple of her parents’ coreligionists, Grace fantasizes about kissing Mo as the beautician works on her.

The girl’s face was sometimes only a couple of inches away from you: you could run your finger along that frown of concentration. That ponytail, you could wrap it round and round your fist, pull it tight. She always looked preoccupied. Grace thought about her all the time. (p. 34–5)

But it doesn’t lead to anything, and it doesn’t seem that Grace wants it to. She just enjoys the fantasy, up to a point. She already knows that she doesn’t want to leave Kyle.

It was a disappointment every time when the woman said, well that’s it. I’ll leave you to get ready and I’ll see you outside. The dull thud of the well this is all there is. (p. 35)

So, the contrasting stories of three quite different characters fit together into the satisfactorily complete unit of a short story. It’s tempting to see Grace, Kyle and Mo as, among other things, the microcosm of a fragile, unstable economy: Mo’s struggling little enterprise partly supports Kyle’s racket, which in turn provides the wherewithal for Grace to contribute to keeping Mo’s salon in business.

The title story features a couple whose child died when she was 6 years old. The wife, Susan, is an architect working for a London-based practice, who has designed a new people’s centre in Belfast. The building is designated a “people’s centre” because the more obvious “community centre” “was thought to be pejorative in its suggestion of entrenched cultural and political ideologies” (p. 89). “Community” has become a dirty word, suggesting division and irresolvable conflict. When used in the singular, it’s usually to distinguish one community from another.

Susan’s husband, Gavin, came from Belfast and, seeing that Susan was spending so much time there, suggested that they move back, and Susan agreed that she didn’t need to be based in London.

Their new house on a grand, tree-lined avenue they considered a little too dark, so Susan drew up plans for a glass extension, two stories high, which added considerable extra space and light. Glass met 1890s brick. (p. 91)

The men who work on the garden (which needs to be repositioned) agree that the glass extension is a disimprovement. It has “no style” (p. 91).

While Susan has coped with the loss of their daughter by throwing herself into her work, Gavin has in effect thrown himself out of his. He employs one of the gardeners, Bucky, to come once a week to do the garden. Soon, he’s spending much of his time drinking cans of lager and smoking weed with Bucky. Before long, Bucky’s partner, Emma, has been taken on to clean the house.

Bucky and Emma have a young child, Carl, whom Gavin takes to, apparently seeing him as in part a substitute for his own dead daughter. Gavin gets children’s books from the library and reads them to Carl, takes the boy for walks and buys him a coat. “No massive largesse, didn’t want to embarrass anyone, it was just a plastic mac” (p. 109).

Carl is seriously injured while Gavin is taking him for a walk, not bothering with the buggy. Carl runs into the road as a car was passing. The driver had seen the child and was moving slowly but was still taken by surprise. In his relief and gratitude that the boy’s injuries are not life-threatening, Bucky makes light of them:

The week after, Bucky called round to say that Carl was on the mend. He had a broken leg and a broken hip; he would have blurred vision for a while but he would be alright. (p. 114)

Emma and Bucky break up decisively, Susan and Gavin more gradually. Susan has a big project in Dubai and is needed more often in London.

Gav continued for a while in the new house, sitting in the glass box in the mornings, waiting for the day to turn right. But with Susan hardly ever there the place was too big for one person, and so they bought up and bought a flat in a new development down by the Lagan. On the rare occasion that Susan stayed there, Gavin fell asleep on the sofa. (pp. 114–5)

The people’s centre draws a certain amount of muted attention, including a small picture of Susan in a national newspaper, before becoming “part of the backdrop just like everything else” (p. 115).

“Locksmiths” is the first-person narrative of a young woman who has inherited her grandmother’s house while her mother is serving a prison sentence. The crime of which the mother was convicted isn’t specified but from the narrator’s account of the circumstances would appear to be murder. The victim had been paid compensation for a serious workplace accident and the mother, having borrowed substantial sums from him, had beaten him with an unidentified blunt instrument when he asked her to pay it back.

The grandmother smoked constantly and spent her evenings watching television. On inheriting the house the narrator redecorated, getting rid of the smell of stale smoke, and disposed of the television.

When her mother is released from prison, the narrator drives there to pick her up. It’s the first time she’s been to the prison since her grandmother died. The grandmother used to visit once a month and the narrator would come with her twice a year, taking a bus, a train and then a second bus. In preparation for the homecoming, the narrator has repainted her mother’s childhood bedroom a plain white. The mother tells her that the window doesn’t open. As a teenager, she used to escape through that window at night, having to exit head first. The narrator has had a key cut for her mother.

The narrator could be seen as something of a prig: she’s a vegetarian non-smoker with an ascetic taste in interior decor who doesn’t drink alcohol and doesn’t own a television, and she has no intention of allowing her mother to disrupt her fairly newly established lifestyle. The mother, in contrast, is none of the above. She is surprised that there’s no surprise party to welcome her home, and is keen to go out to the pub, which is no longer called The Troubadour but otherwise doesn’t seem to have changed much, to reconnect with some of her old friends. In contrast to her daughter, she’s fun-loving, sociable and ready to make up for lost time. True, she’s a killer but, as the sayings go, she has served her time, paid her debt to society.

When the mother hasn’t come home after her night’s carousing, the narrator packs up her things, takes them downstairs, and seems to be getting ready to change the front door lock. I’m surprised to find that my sympathies lie much more with the strict and apparently quite boring daughter than with her pleasure-seeking mother, and I’m not sure why that should be so. Anyway, it seems that the daughter is making the right decision, even if for selfish reasons: the two women would probably make each other miserable if they lived together in the house for long.

Barry, the central character in the final story, “The soul has no skin”, is someone whose living conditions, not to mention his working conditions, might well be expected to make him miserable. He has worked in what seems to be a hardware and electrical goods store for many years. As the opening paragraph tells us:

Guys who’ve messed up and gone off track, they’ll work in the place for a while, but once the boredom seeps in, they’ll get themselves sorted out with something else. Years later, a guy like Phil will call in to buy something, a car seat for the baby say, and it’ll be, Barry, you still here mate? (p. 199)

Barry is still there all right, a fact that suggests that he never got himself sorted out; he didn’t get back on track. He lives in a flat that is “pretty spartan” where the walls are “wafer thin”. “Not much to see at his place.” When his former boss, Annie, visits for the first time, she said “well, Barry, you haven’t exactly embraced the concept of interior decor. Grand Designs, this ain’t” (all quotations in this paragraph are from page 201).

As a boss, Annie had been “unusually well liked” (p. 101) but she has a husband with “one of those illnesses where basically everything shuts down slowly over time” (p. 202) and a drinking problem that’s obvious to all. Annie and Barry have had sex a few times but not very often as she needs to get home to look after her husband. Phil has nicknamed her “rock hen”, a sobriquet she doesn’t seen to find insulting. She tells Barry that she’s “not really babe material.”

There’s nothing wrong with you, he said.

Course there is, she said. (p. 203)

Where Barry went off-track was in becoming, during his teens, the sole suspect in the disappearance of an eight-year-old girl. He was interviewed by the police in the presence of his father and not under arrest, and he made some admissions that the police considered suspicious. They searched his bedroom with a warrant and were seen by the neighbours removing “some stuff” (p. 216) from his parents’ house. The neighbours naturally thought that there was no smoke without fire.

The little girl, Megan Nichols, had been accidentally locked into the school building over the weekend, where she had staved off hunger by eating stale biscuits she had found in the staffroom cupboard. When asked why she didn’t use the phone in the staffroom to call for help, she said “I was liking the peace and quiet” (p. 217).

Barry’s parents remained in their house but Barry went to live with his father’s uncle on the other side of town. He stayed with the uncle for a year before moving first into a damp shared house and then into the flat where he remained throughout the years he worked in “this place” (p. 218). There’s an unmistakable sense that Barry’s life has been stunted, circumscribed but there’s a suggestion at the end that is hasn’t all been entirely a waste.

One of the strongest stories in a notably strong collection is “Lady and Dog”, which features Olga McClure, a primary school teacher in her early 60s. She’s very strict with her pupils and rather set in her ways. She has lost the password to her computer and the principal is perturbed at the fact that Olga’s computer hasn’t been booted up in two weeks. Olga is perfectly happy to teach without the computer and is sharpening pencils for use in a test when the story opens. She is upset, though, to be told that the school is introducing Gaelic football training.

Olga had taken it upon herself to bring the Gaelic issue to the attention of George Shields, a mass of muscle and tattoo thought by her when he was nine and skinny. (p. 165)

But George Shields, she discovers, has no objections.

It was only the school assembly hall, a bit of exercise. People needed to chill, for Christ’s sake. It was 2018. (p. 166)

Years earlier, when she was 17, Olga had an affair with a slightly older married man, Eddie, who had just signed up as an RUC reservist (and thus a target for “political” assassination). When Eddie was killed Olga was heartbroken, all the more so as she couldn’t let her feelings be seen.

She saw his wife again in the town and she despised her and the way she was allowed to have her hair all hanging lank as she went around with the sad old face. The wife didn’t know who she was, even though what they felt must have been the equal. (pp. 171–2)

In the present day, Olga becomes somewhat fixated on Cormac, the Gaelic football trainer. Hearing that Cormac goes training in a nearby park, she decides to acquire a dog.

Olga hadn’t cared what sort of dog she got. She’d just wanted a dog to take for walks because no one is loitering with a dog. (p. 164)

She hasn’t even given the dog a name, and tells the children who pet it that she has no idea what breed it is. On the evenings when Cormac is training, she and the dog take a slightly longer route for their walk, past the playing fields.

I think that Olga is acting like a stalker because she’s attracted to the much younger Cormac, but I’m not absolutely sure that she isn’t planning to kill him, as a long-delayed reprisal for Eddie’s murder forty-five years earlier. Anyway, Cormac soon stops turning up at the school. The training there was voluntary work, and he has now been offered a job in Holland or Germany. In any case, the principal’s Gaelic football “project” will be ending in three weeks, to be replaced by street dance.

Ms McClure’s reaction to this news is really quite chilling.

Erskine has said in interviews that for each short story she first writes 20,000 to 25,000 words, then edits and condenses it down to about 6,000 words. It’s a time-consuming and laborious process. On the evidence of her two collections so far, it’s a technique that produces remarkable results, but (as she says herself), she’ll probably have to take a different approach to writing novels.

Edition: Stinging Fly paperback (first edition), 2018.