Susan Rendell has got the disease. She's got Writing. She's pathological. She can't stop herself from spewing syllables, testing text, knitting notes and for all we know when she's holed up in bed she's fucking fonts.
Susan Rendell is the author of In the Chambers of the Sea, a collection of short fiction released as an audio edition by Rattling Books in 2004. The fourteen stories in the collection are narrated by Anita Best, Deirdre Gillard-Rowlings, Joel Hynes, Susan Rendell, Janet Russell, Janis Spence, Francesca Swann and Agnes Walsh. This coming week two of those narrators (Agnes Walsh and Anita Best) are performing in Iceland and among other things will read from In the Chambers of the Sea.
Here is an excerpt from one of the substances Susan Rendell is excreting lately. She says it's an historical novel (but given her other condition, wit, it may also be an hysterical novel).
Adelaide Taylor Godfrey
When Sandy came back from the War he brought pictures of himself with whip-thin Italian orphans hanging off his shoulders like monkeys. Twenty-five, he was; three years out of medical school and all of them spent at the War, trying to put the broken soldiers back together.
One time at the Dalhousie medical school a staff man threw a woman’s leg at him after an operation. He caught it the way he used to catch his sisters jumping down from the hay loft, and bringing his face close to the gangrenous toes, he asked it to be his bride. “But she wouldn’t have me, Mother, no sir; she said I was too big for my britches. Or maybe she said she was too big for my britches, I can’t remember exactly.”
Beside the silver-circled wedding picture over the big sleigh bed, there’s a picture of Sandy in an oak frame with a crack in it; the crack is beside his right ear, the one that got frostbitten so bad the winter he was ten they thought it was going to drop off. He and six other doctors are standing around a roadster in front of the Victoria General wearing white coats. Stethoscopes curl around their necks like tame garter snakes; perhaps the car needs a check-up.
On the mahogany sideboard haughty with Wedgwood plates and Limoges demitasse cups so delicate you can almost see the light from the bow window shivering through them, Sandy and his mother are standing on the platform of the train station a mile from the shaggy old house, inside an ivory oval. He’s wearing an officer’s uniform and holding his walking stick in the air, pretending it’s a baton, that he’s conducting the people coming off the train so they won’t bump into one another. His mother’s head comes up to his shoulder; the long feather stuck in her flat black cow pie hat reaches up to tickle his ear. She’s holding onto his arm with both her hands and smiling as if he’s a prize she has just won in the church raffle.
Two weeks after Sandy got home the coughing started. She sat up with him until dawn the first night. He hung onto her arm and spit up gobs of yellow saliva with red veins into a chamber pot with asters on it. He once told her they put asters on the graves of the French soldiers. For regret, not remembrance, he said.
“Never mind,” she said, tugging on his thick hair. She used to have hair like that, hair the colour of a gold finch and coarse as rope. On her wedding night Sandy’s father wrapped it around his throat before he went to sleep. Watch you don’t get a rash from that, she said. It’s pricklier than a stinger nettle. She always considered this her first utterance as a wife; there was such an ordinariness in the way she said it, as if a man going to sleep in her bed with her hair around his throat was the most natural thing in the world.
“We’ll send you to the San; it’s only bad food and working around the clock that’s got you like this. But you’re young and strong—I nursed you for nearly a year, did you know that? Yes, I did, the girls only got six months of me between them, but I let you go on as long as you pleased. Anyway, no Godfrey ever died before his eightieth birthday.”
They buried him nine months later, in an oak casket with a Union Jack spread across it. She started to go back to the house, to get the crazy quilt off his spool bed, to take the flag off and tuck him up in the quilt, with its blood stains sunk into the border roses. You couldn’t tell it was blood unless you’d been there watching it leak out into those silk roses night after night, wishing it was your blood. But her husband had hold of two of her black-gloved fingers as if they were the teats of a stubborn cow.
It hadn’t been tuberculosis after all. The mustard gas creeping from the pockets of the uniforms of his patients had killed her son. The dirty Hun gas, leaching into her son’s lungs out of the rags wrapped around the ruined young men plucked out of the French mud like half-dead flowers. The flower of a generation they said, and so they were. And her Sandy had been the pick of the Queen’s County crop. Dr. Miller’s daughter never married, never even walked out with another man afterwards.
Their eyes, he said to his mother one night between spasms – a real bad night, he’d been tearing at the quilt like a woman in labour - were as blind as the eyes of the dead calves Father and I used to butcher. Blind and blistered and dying, suffocating and fighting it, desperate to make their lungs work, only they were nothing more than tattered bellows. There was a certain sound. . .you knew when you heard it the chap was a goner. We had to strap most of them to their beds in the end. One night I pushed a pillow down over a fellow’s face. What was left of it. Do you think that was murder? No, said his mother, winding the fine hairs at the back of his neck around her finger. I think it was mercy.
When he was little, she used to make him big veal sandwiches with mustard pickles from the root cellar, and they would hitch Black Prince to the buggy and go to the sea, the two girls and her husband and Alexander, her only son, born a year to the day after Doctor Miller told her she was past having any more children. On the cherry wood table beneath the Currier and Ives of Havana Harbour one of Cousin Margaret’s lovers gave her, there’s a photograph of him at eight years, standing up to his knees in the sand at Eagle Head. Sandy Sandy she wrote on the back of it, using her father’s goose quill pen and the last packet of powdered ink in the house.
Now when she makes sandwiches for her husband and he says, Addie, where are the mustard pickles, she tells him the cucumbers didn’t come up this year. That they stayed in the ground. That she doesn’t expect to see them again until the Resurrection Day.
