Old Babes in the Wood: Stories (Random House Large Print) - Softcover

Atwood, Margaret

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593677943 ISBN 13: 9780593677940

Verlag: Diversified Publishing, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

A dazzling collection of fifteen short stories from Margaret Atwood, the internationally acclaimed, award-winning author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments.

Margaret Atwood has established herself as a beloved cultural icon and one of the most visionary and canonical authors of her generation. In this collection comprised of fifteen extraordinary stories—some of which have appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine—Atwood speaks to our times with her characteristic wit and intellect. 

Of special significance are the seven works revolving around the long-term married couple Tig and Nell. Acting as bookends for the collection, these stories look deeply in the heart of what it means to spend a life together, with the four stories in Part I relating tales from their married life, and the three stories at the end showing Nell’s reality in the aftermath of Tig’s death. 

In other works, two sisters grapple with loss and memory in ”Old Babes in the Wood”; “Impatient Griselda” reprises the folkloric role of Griselda in Bocaccio’s The Decameron, exploring alienation and miscommunication; and “Evil Mother” touching on the fantastical, examining a mother-daughter relationship in which the mother purports to be a witch. 

Returning to short fiction for the first time since her 2014 collection, Stone Mattress, Atwood’s storytelling gifts and unmistakable style are on full display.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MARGARET ATWOOD, whose work has been published in more than forty-five countries, is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. In addition to The Handmaid’s Tale, now an award-winning TV series, her novels include Cat’s Eye, short-listed for the 1989 Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; Oryx and Crake, short-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize; The Year of the Flood, MaddAddam; and Hag-Seed. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award. In 2019, she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature.

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Chapter 1

i

TIG & NELL

first aid

Nell came home one day just before dinnertime and found the front door open. The car was gone. There was a trail of blood splotches on the steps, and once she was inside the house, she followed it along the hall carpet and into the kitchen. There was a knife on the cutting board, one of Tig’s favourites, Japanese steel, very sharp—and beside it, a bloodstained carrot, one end severed. Their daughter, nine at the time, was nowhere to be found.

What were the possible scenarios? Desperadoes had broken in. Tig had tried to defend himself against them, using the knife (though how to explain the carrot?), and had been wounded. The desperadoes had made off with him, their daughter, and their car. Nell should call the police.

Or else Tig had been cooking, had sliced himself with the knife, had judged that he needed stitches, and had driven himself to the hospital, taking their daughter with him to avoid leaving her by herself. This was more likely. He must have been in too much of a hurry to leave a note.

Nell got out the bottle of carpet cleaner and sprayed the blood spots: they would be much harder to get out once they’d dried. Then she wiped the blood off the kitchen floor and, after a pause, off the carrot. It was a perfectly good carrot; no need for it to go to waste.

Time passed. Suspense built. She was at the point of phoning all the hospitals in the vicinity to see if Tig was there when he came back, hand bandaged. He was in a jovial mood, as was their daughter. What an adventure they’d had! The blood was just pouring out, they reported. The tea towel Tig had used for wrapping the cut had been soaked! Yes, driving had been a challenge, said Tig—he didn’t say dangerous—but who could wait for a taxi, and he’d managed all right with basically just one hand since he’d needed to keep the other one raised, and the blood was trickling off his elbow, and they’d sewn him up quickly at the hospital because he was dripping all over everything, and anyway, here they were! Luckily not an artery, or it would be a different story. (It was indeed a different story when Tig told it a little later, to Nell: his bravado had been an act—he hadn’t wanted to frighten their daughter—and he’d been worried that he would pass out if the blood loss got out of control, and then what?)

“I need a drink,” said Tig.

“So do I,” said Nell. “We can have scrambled eggs.” Whatever Tig had been planning to do with the carrot was no longer on the agenda.

The tea towel had been brought back in a plastic bag. It was bright red but beginning to brown at the edges. Nell put it to soak in cold water, which was the best way to deal with bloodstained fabrics.

But what would I have done if I’d been here? she wondered. Not a Band-Aid: insufficient. A tourniquet? She’d had perfunctory instruction in those at Girl Guides. They’d done wrist sprains too. Minor emergencies were her domain, but not major ones. Major ones were Tig’s.



That was some time ago. Early autumn, as she recalls, a year in the later 1980s. There were personal computers then, of a lumbering kind. And printers: the paper for them came with the pages joined together at top and bottom, and had holes along the sides, in perforated strips that you had to tear off. No cellphones though, which was why Nell hadn’t been able to text or call Tig and ask him where he was, and also what had caused the blood?

How much waiting we used to do, she thinks. Waiting without knowing. So many blanks we couldn’t fill in, so many mysteries. So little information. Now it’s the first decade of the twenty-first century, space-time is denser, it’s crowded, you can barely move because the air is so packed with this and that. You can’t get away from people: they’re in touch, they’re touching, they’re only a touch away. Is that better, or worse?

She switches her attention to the room the two of them are in right at this moment. It’s in a nondescript high-rise on Bloor Street, near the viaduct. She and Tig are sitting in chairs that are something like schoolroom chairs—there is in fact a whiteboard at the front—and a man called Mr. Foote is talking. The people in the other chairs, who are also listening to Mr. Foote, are at least thirty years younger than Tig and Nell; some of them perhaps forty years younger. Just kids.

“If it’s a motorcycle crash,” says Mr. Foote, “you don’t want to take off the helmet, do ya. Because you don’t know what’s gonna be in there, eh?” He moves his hand in front of him, circularly, as if cleaning a window.

Good point, thinks Nell. She imagines the glass of a helmet, smeared. Inside, a face that is no longer a face. A face of mush.

Mr. Foote has a talent for conjuring up such images. He has a graphic way of speaking, being from Newfoundland. He doesn’t tiptoe around. He’s built on a square plan: wide torso, thick legs, a short distance between ear and shoulder. It’s a balanced shape, with a low centre of gravity. Mr. Foote would not be easy to upend. Nell expects that’s been tried, in bars—he looks as if he’d know his way around a bar fight, but also as if he wouldn’t get into any of those he couldn’t win. If pushed too hard he’d throw the challenger through a window, calmly—“You needs to keep calm,” he has already said twice—then check to make sure there were no bones broken. If there were, he’d splint them, and treat the victim for cuts and abrasions. Mr. Foote is an all-in-one package. In fact, he’s a paramedic, but that does not come out until later in the day.

He’s carrying a black leather binder and wearing a long-sleeved zip-fronted sweatshirt with the St. John Ambulance logo on it, as if he’s a team coach, which in a way he is: he’s teaching them first aid. At the end of the day there will be a test and they will each get a certificate. All of them are in this room because they need this certificate: their companies have sent them. Nell and Tig are the same. Thanks to a family connection of Tig’s, they’re giving talks on a nature-tour cruise ship, birds for him, butterflies for her: their hobbies. So they are technically staff, and all staff on this ship have to get the certificate. It’s mandatory, their ship contact has told them.

What hasn’t been said is that the majority of the passengers—the guests—the clientele—will not be young, to put it mildly. Some of them will be older than Nell and Tig. Truly ancient. Such people can be expected to topple over at any minute, and then it will be certificates to the rescue.

Nell and Tig are unlikely to be doing any actual rescuing: younger people will leap in, Nell’s counting on that. In a pinch, Nell will dither and claim she’s forgotten what to do, which will be true. What will Tig do? He will say, Stand back, give them room. Something like that.

It’s known—it’s been rumoured—that these ships have extra freezers on them, just in case. Nell pictures the distress of a server who opens the wrong freezer by mistake, to be confronted by the appalled, congealed stare of some unlucky passenger for whom the certificate has not proved sufficient.

Mr. Foote stands at the front of the room, running his gaze over today’s crop of students. His expression is possibly neutral, or faintly amused. Bunch of know-nothing softies, he’s most likely thinking. City people. “There’s what to do, and there’s what not to do,” he...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Diversified Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593677943
• ISBN 13: 9780593677940
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Harder; https://www.edel.com; ; Neum�hlen 17; Hamburg; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland