Five Sites, Five Stages: A Story from the collection, I Am Heathcliff. Lisa McInerney

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

       Foreword by Kate Mosse

       Five Sites, Five Stages

      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.

       FIVE SITES, FIVE STAGES

       LISA MCINERNEY

       Market stall

      ‘ARE YOU SURE NOW?’ Cass’s brother asked. ‘Is that the lot, like? Is that the lot?’

      ‘Yes, that’s the lot,’ Heidi said down the phone. ‘To my knowledge.’ She did not want it assumed that she had control over Cass, or that she might know exactly what Cass was doing and when, given a specific time or scenario, given a mood or a string of evocative words. The street was throbbing, but she looked at her fingernails, the middle one now bald of the lemonade-coloured gel they’d chosen together – Heidi had been picking at it; they were, the pair of them, fiddlers and fidgeters – she brought her fist closer to her face as if needing to examine some new defect. ‘The second you know, let me know how she’s doing,’ she said to Cass’s brother, but he’d hung up. She wasn’t sure whether he had heard her begin to speak.

      Around her there was much going on. There was a market at one end of the street, stalls selling crêpes or flat caps or posh cheese, people jammed up together, parting with their money in one way or another. There was a busker not far from her, forcing a folk version of a nightclub song. There were teenagers chirruping. It was an average day, and Heidi was chastised by it. Nothing catastrophic happened on days like this. Catastrophe would have the day bend for it, catastrophe would be insistently perceptible. The manner of catastrophe was this: it would not be trivialised by the paths walked by others or the air breathed by the oblivious. Those oblivious people would have looked to her like fiends or mutants, or at least the lines of their bodies would have shivered and warped. All objects would have seemed darker, even given that the sky was dark for July, heavy and close. Her knees would have buckled, she would have involuntarily howled.

      As it was, she walked down to the market.

      ‘What do we have here?’ she murmured. She picked up a clunky pendant on a leather cord and was set upon by the stall-keeper.

      ‘It’s lovely, isn’t it?’ the stall-keeper said. ‘That one.’

      ‘Aren’t they all?’ she replied – dulled derision and downcast eyes.

      She was not searching for a get-well gift here. Here, there was just tat and lavish tuck, neither of which Cass appreciated, having a neat mind and a modest appetite. But she appreciated derision, especially of the subtle kind – their own language of little ironies and aversions. ‘How tacky,’ Heidi would say of people holding hands. ‘I’m in love with love.’ ‘It’s morbid,’ Heidi would say of a bright print or a carousel. ‘We’re clawing away from the