Thicker Than Blood: A Story from the collection, I Am Heathcliff. Erin Kelly

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

       Foreword by Kate Mosse

       Thicker Than Blood

      Note on the Author

      A Note on Emily Brontë

       About the Publisher

       FOREWORD BY KATE MOSSE

      SO, WHAT MAKES Wuthering Heights – published the year before Emily Brontë’s own death – the powerful, enduring, exceptional novel it is? Is it a matter of character and sense of place? Depth of emotion or the beauty of her language? Epic and Gothic? Yes, but also because it is ambitious and uncompromising. Like many others, I have gone back to it in each decade of my life and found it subtly different each time. In my teens, I was swept away by the promise of a love story, though the anger and the violence and the pain were troubling to me. In my twenties, it was the history and the snapshot of social expectations that interested me. In my thirties, when I was starting to write fiction myself, I was gripped by the architecture of the novel – two narrators, two distinct periods of history and storytelling, the complicated switching of voice. In my forties, it was the colour and the texture, the Gothic spirit of place, the characterisation of Nature itself as sentient, violent, to be feared. Now, in my fifties, as well as all this, it is also the understanding of how utterly EB changed the rules of what was acceptable for a woman to write, and how we are all in her debt. This is monumental work, not domestic. This is about the nature of life, love, and the universe, not the details of how women and men live their lives. And Wuthering Heights is exceptional amongst the novels of the period for the absence of any explicit condemnation of Heathcliff’s conduct, or any suggestion that evil might bring its own punishment.

      This collection is published to celebrate the bicentenary of Emily Brontë’s birth in 1818. What each story has in common is that, despite their shared moment of inspiration, they are themselves, and their quality stands testament both to our contemporary writers’ skills, and the timelessness of Wuthering Heights. For, though mores and expectations and opportunities alter, wherever we live and whoever we are, the human heart does not change very much. We understand love and hate, jealousy and peace, grief and injustice, because we experience these things too – as writers, as readers, as our individual selves.

       THICKER THAN BLOOD

       ERIN KELLY

       August

      ‘IS THAT THE BRAND-NEW iPad?’ Heath was up to his shoulders in the hot tub, one dry arm resting on the side, finger on a screen that was tiled with images of Cat. He had his back to Izzy, but could tell by her tone that she would be twisting the hem of whatever ridiculous garment she was wearing. ‘It’s just, if you drop it in the water, that’s the third one this year.’

      ‘I paid for it,’ he said through a rigid jaw, ‘and if I do drop it, which I won’t, I’ll pay for a new one.’

      ‘It’s just, it’s the waste?’

      Heath reached for another bottle, the eye tattoo winking with the flex of his bicep, and uncapped it with his teeth. Four beers down and it was still too early to tell whether drinking would make him relax around Izzy or stoke his irritation with her. Either way, he was too busy to be interrupted: on the Instagram phase of his nightly cycle through Cat’s social media accounts. He’d already done Twitter and Facebook, and after Instagram, would have to work his way through what he thought of as the associated accounts, the people she called her friends, and the ‘man’ she called her husband. The associated accounts were in some ways more revealing than Cat’s own, as a friend might catch her dropping her guard, exposing the misery behind her heavily filtered life. When it happened, he could go to her. She could only pretend for so long, even to herself, to be totally jazzed about this life Ed had given her, this life of farmers’ markets, group holidays in Provençal gîtes, charity fundraisers, and strawberries and cream at Centre Court, and fucking golfing holidays.

      It was a low-activity evening: Cat had liked a couple of things but hadn’t posted herself. If he was lucky he’d only have to go through the cycle once and he’d be done in under two hours.

      ‘Oh, why d’you have to—’ began Izzy, but the tablet pinged with a notification, and this time Heath snatched it away from her outstretched hand. A new post, a touching attempt at an arty selfie. She was in the garden, aureole around silhouette on the back wall of the Grange, the tumbling violet moor an invitation, an unmade bed laid out behind her. Heath felt the usual sick stirring deep under his belly. He shifted position, hiding himself under the bubbles in case Izzy thought it was for her, then returned to his study of Cat. Why had she kept her face in shadow? Had she been crying? Tears made most women ugly, but when Cat cried her face bloomed pink and white.