In Words for Things, one of 11 neatly crafted short stories comprising Lucy Caldwell’s Intimacies, two mothers reminisce about a party they attended when they were young. One of them points out: “There’ll soon be less distance . . . between our babies and us-then, than us-then and us-now.”
The narrator looks back on her carefree early 20s, which she spent “putting the world to rights over cocktails of Zubrówka and apple juice”; a life of “big cities with bright lights, flatshares and failed love affairs and flea markets on Sundays”. The protagonist of another story, Lady Moon, recalls drinking Irish cream as a teenager: “Baileys and Sambuca, a Slippery Nipple. A Screaming Orgasm had amaretto and Kahlúa in it too. It was the height of sophistication, at the Wolsey or the Boom Boom Room.”
These brief, melancholic evocations of lost youth are served up in a spirit of something like disbelief: Caldwell’s characters are, for the most part, living grown-up lives of relatively settled domesticity, and are not quite sure how they got there. Invariably a destabilising life event – a bereavement, pregnancy or health scare – prompts the narrator to reflect on her life trajectory.
One woman is bemused at having “graduated, almost without noticing, from novelty shot glasses and wine glasses nicked from pubs” to “Riedel wine glasses and Dartington Crystal champagne flutes . . . and Japanese knives with a proper knife-sharpener, and sometimes even peonies in vases. . . Where has it all come from?”
Several stories feature mothers driven to the edge by sleeplessness and anxiety. Rational worries – fears of child abduction (Like This), or of violent intruders (Night Waking) – lapse into a catastrophising paranoia that is well served by Caldwell’s vaguely self-berating second-person narration. The protagonist of The Children has nightmares: “I dream that I’ve left my daughter in a left luggage unit and there are hundreds of dully gleaming lockers and I don’t have a key.”
The narrator of All the People Were Mean and Bad is running on empty: “the hollow feeling at your centre, the ache in your solar plexus, voids all hunger, and it feels somehow right to be at a light-headed remove from the world, this sense of being vague, and insubstantial, as if you could just drift on, indefinitely; as if you don’t really exist, or need to.”
Some of the tales are overtly political. Words for Things revisits the cruel tabloid coverage of celebrities such as Anna Nicole Smith, Jade Goody and Monica Lewinsky in the 1990s and early 2000s. The narrator reads up on Lewinsky online, and laments society’s complicity in her unfair vilification: “I remembered discussing it with friends in the sixth-form common room. The stupid wee bitch, we’d call her. The silly wee slag.”
The Children juxtaposes the story of the 19th-century English social reformer Caroline Norton, whose abusive husband abducted their sons after she left him, with snatches of news stories about the Trump administration’s forced separation of children from their mothers in migrant detention centres.
In Jars of Clay a posse of American anti-abortion activists try to influence Irish voters ahead of the 2018 referendum. One member of the group preposterously claims his distant Irish heritage gives him a right to meddle. It’s not the only time questions of identity crop up.
Unlike Caldwell’s first short story collection, Multitudes (2016), which was set largely in her native Belfast, a number of the protagonists here are Irish migrants living in London’s East End. One narrator acknowledges her “inner millie” when a colleague observes that her accent gets stronger whenever she talks of home. In the acknowledgments, Caldwell, who has lived in London for much of her adult life, dedicates this book to the city’s Irish diaspora.
A low-key spiritual didacticism pervades these stories. Maya Angelou’s oft-quoted dictum, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time”, appears twice – once in quotation, and once in paraphrase: “People... tell you everything... All you need to know. Right away... you just need to choose to hear it.” A narrator remarks, echoing Larkin, that love is “the only thing, in the end, that counts for anything; the only thing we can take with us”; a man opines that “people change... but only ever become, essentially, more themselves”.
These are commonplace sentiments – relatable, but somewhat platitudinous. The real strength of this collection lies in the author’s careful and tender attention to the bric-a-brac of ordinary life – municipal swimming pools, oatmeal biscuits, chocolate coins, hot-water bottles. An astute observer of the mundane, Caldwell finds poetry – and even a kind of religiosity – in the quotidian rituals of domesticity:
“These offerings, these devotions, banal and endless, our days going round and rushing from under us; the measure of our love.”
