Michèle Roberts, poet, essayist and author of fourteen works of fiction, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999 and was awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2000. Her memoir, Paper Houses, was published to great acclaim in 2007. She lives in London.

‘Mud offers not only the poetry of Roberts’s exquisite sensibilities but a saturnalian experience … Roberts brings art and artifice, the artefact of gender, the style of couture and cuisine up against the raw matter from which culture is forged … The short story is an intimate, subtle and enigmatic form: Michèle Roberts reminds us in this virtuoso collection that she is one of our foremost practitioners of the art’ Stevie Davies, Guardian

‘We are engulfed by these stories and in them, we remember our own lives’ Elaine Feinstein, Independent

‘In Michele Roberts’s new collection, which contains more powerful, uncompromising writing than you will find in most novels, women’s sexual consciousness and a radical perception of sexual difference hold centre stage … The short story is all about the ending, the point towards which the reader and the writer hurtle together. Roberts delivers her often unexpected, startling resolutions with wit and style … Her prose is sharp as a whip and as unforgettable as a lover’s tenderness’ Patricia Duncker, Literary Review

‘Michèle Roberts draws emotional pain with precision, describing confusion with a limpid finesse’ Chloe Campbell, TLS

‘It is in the inventiveness of form and the angle at which her words are cut that Roberts still manages to dazzle … She takes pleasure in unpicking the fabric of fiction … Roberts’s greatest skill is the insight with which she writes about women caught up in heightened states of awareness’ Megan Walsh, The Times

‘Entertaining, elegant, bite-sized gulps of fiction, full of lust for life’ Red

Also by Michèle Roberts

Fiction

A Piece of the Night

The Visitation

The Wild Girl

The Book of Mrs Noah

In the Red Kitchen

Daughters of the House

During Mother’s Absence

Flesh and Blood

Impossible Saints

Fair Exchange

The Looking Glass

Playing Sardines

The Mistressclass

Reader, I married him

Non-Fiction

Food, Sex & God

Paper Houses

Poetry

The Mirror of the Mother

Psyche and the Hurricane

All the Selves I Was

Artist’s Books

Poems (with Caroline Isgar)

Fifteen Beads (with Caroline Isgar)

Dark City Light City (with Carol Robertson)

The Secret Staircase (with Caroline Isgar)

Copyright

Published by Hachette Digital

ISBN: 9780748134021

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 2010 Michèle Roberts

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

Hachette Digital

Little, Brown Book Group

100 Victoria Embankment

London, EC4Y 0DY

www.hachette.co.uk

in memory of Monique Caulle Roberts

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Ayesha Karim, Clare Alexander and everyone at Aitken Alexander Associates. Thanks to Lennie Goodings, Victoria Pepe, Sophie McIvor and everyone at Little, Brown and Virago. Thanks to Patricia Duncker, Sarah LeFanu and Jenny Newman for helpful ongoing critical feedback and discussions and for generous writerly support. Thanks to Jenny Fry, Christie Hickman, Hermione Lee and Richard Wainwright for helpful critical feedback on an earlier draft of part of this book. Thanks to all my friends and to my sister Margi Defriez and all my family.

NOTE

Earlier versions of three of these stories have been previously published and earlier versions of four have been broadcast on radio. I am grateful to the editors concerned for permission to republish these stories, which have been re-written for publication here.

MUD

Every morning I walked in to work at the university from a nearby village where I rented a room from a sad widow. I was a widow myself, in a manner of speaking (I’d run off and left my husband), but you wouldn’t have known it to look at me unless you thought all women of thirtyfive were in mourning. Black clothes were fashionable at that time: we all wore them. I strode in my long black mackintosh along the muddy roads edged by fields, into the great park, and thence, following a footpath, to my place of work.

Every morning I laced up my shoes; flat black suede brogues, with a thick dimpled rubber sole, a pointed triangular toe, just two eyelets, and a black lace thin as a string of liquorice that I tied into a sharp bow.

My mother frequently scolded me for my childishness: you see everything in terms of food and eating. Those black suede shoes, when I’d spotted them, furry and glistening in the shop, had indeed seemed good enough to eat. At night, when I walked back to my lodgings, to my small front bedroom in my landlady’s cramped modern house, my shoes sat by the side of my single bed while I ate my bowl of spaghetti and drank my wine, and then I’d lift the shoes up, one after the other, wipe and brush them tenderly, scrape and fiddle off, with the tip of a knife, the caked mud that clotted them. Crusts clunked down, pale and dried. I liked knowing that earlier I’d left my traces along the road, that my footsteps had imprinted the scars of water-glinting gravel, the muddy ruts. In these depressions I could have cast reliefs of rubber, of plaster, of wax. I always liked seeing others’ footprints, the tracks of their journeys. I liked taking a bit of the road surface home with me.

It’s true I was childish. I wanted too much of everything; too much pleasure; my mouth opened to the world to kiss it and take it in. Children want to eat the world. It’s a way of knowing. Touch the world. Stroke it, grasp it, pick it up, cram it into your mouth. Children who can’t yet talk don’t understand metaphor; they want mud; the real thing. As a child I made mud pies, sitting outside Dad’s shed on his allotment. I watched him dig his vegetable plot; turning over the earth with his spade. Don’t dig too deep, he said to me years later, when he realised I could talk: a spit’s just right. One spit at a time, going from left to right; row after row; like writing. Worms like commas wriggled up and I gave them lifts in Dad’s barrow. Sometimes I chopped the worms in half with Dad’s spade to see if both halves still wriggled. I know it was cruel, but I like to know what things are made of and how they work. I prodded at my husband as I prodded earth and earthworms: let me love you; and he complained: don’t dig too deep. Mud on my father’s allotment held china and tin shards of memory, an agricultural past, and it held the repeated imprint of my thumb, the press of our Wellingtons. Now churchyard mud holds Dad, and Mum too. They’re baked in a holy mud pie; beaks sticking up out of the mud crust, mud blackbirds still warbling hymns at me. They’ve rotted to good compost inside me. I fork them up from time to time. I turn them over gently. Like leaf mould. Like the leaves of a book.

I flicked over the leaves of my story so far, felt at a loss, determined to begin my story again, took the job in eastern England. Most mornings, all through that autumn and winter when I lived with the gentle widow, I left her house to walk in to work, rather than hitching a lift, and it rained. Fine drizzle wetted my face. The ploughed fields formed long ripples of mud, as though they were a beach abandoned by the retreating tide. The sky gleamed opal and pearl, and white mist like mohair threaded the thorny black hedgerows. I marched along the muddy side of the gravelled road, its surface broken and roughed up, following the length of the field; one field after another; a soft strobe of mud; my eyes levelling with the deep furrows, the turned, buttery earth. When the fog dispersed, the sun burst out: each clod sparkled, cast a tiny precise shadow; the field glittered, shapes of pale brown and purple and coffee and black broken up, gleaming like chocolate; tilted blocks that stretched far away; and a fringe of hairy elms on the horizon. I passed a pink-washed farm, a clump of cottages with kitchen gardens neat as Dad’s, ruled with dotted lines of leeks. I studied the tall knobbed twists of turquoise Brussels sprouts; the pure pale green of cabbages, tight-waisted and frilly; about to bolt. (I’d bolted; donned my black suede shoes and run away.) Yes I could have eaten a handful of earth, dry-damp-delicious in my mouth, and I could have eaten the long woven hedges and the bright grass and the black thorns glossy as silver. I wanted to lick all of it, taste it and swallow it and be one with it. And then, dissolving, I wasn’t myself, I wasn’t myself any more. I’d gone. I was just part of the mud, fresh in the rain and the sun and I was fed by the world, mouth open, full, churning with joy.

At work, in the white university building beyond the great park, in the office attached to the campus gallery, I turned over words. I dug into language, I moulded lumps of it between my hands, it formed half moons under my fingernails. I picked at these earthy crescents until they broke into crumbs which I swept together until they formed sentences I could edit; the introduction to an exhibition catalogue. Outside, students and lecturers tapped from one concrete tower to the next. I studied the artist given the job of curating the show: his blue eyes, his big hands. He walked me round the gallery. I could look, I could touch, I could talk, as much as I wanted to. On some canvases, the work of a woman painter who cherished the texture of flesh, the oil paint creased so heavy and thick that when the paintings were first hung the paint began to slide off, down towards the floor, and the artist had to catch the loose body of the paintings in his hands; cradle it. Shrugs and ripples of paint like the ripples of mud in the field, the ripples of mud in the estuary when the tide slumped out.

Springtime inched and shivered in, pigeons and gulls twirling above the estuary in a grey metal sky. With the artist I went for a walk along the river. A bottle of red wine in his coat pocket and camembert sandwiches in mine. We lay on the muddy river bank, kissing, at three in the afternoon. We rolled each other over and over like cylindrical seals, we rolled our trousers down, we pressed each other into the mud, we imprinted our names our bodies, we stamped ourselves into each other into the mud then heard cries and laughter, a boat going past, two men leaning on their oars and shouting to the artist good on yer matey.

Before coming to this eastern county I’d been in a sad, a sorry state, like a mould split in two, broken open, but no precious casting inside. A mussel shell with no mussel. An oyster lacking a pearl. At night in my rented room I knocked, clumsy and speechless, between four plasterboard walls. My arms flailed empty, shaped to a body that had gone. Now on that chilly picnic on the riverbank I had earth in my mouth and that meant I was alive and I could taste mud and I mouthed to the artist and nibbled and licked him and we were each other’s camembert red wine mud feast and we waved to the men gawping from their boat and blew them on their way with gales of laughter.

Hurricanes of laughter. We both remembered the hurricane a few months previously. I’d walked about in the park, watching the men inspecting the damage, tidying up with chain-saws. A heap of lopped trees, thrusting their maimed limbs forward. Amputations. Traumatic, like the end of a marriage. The chopped trunks of the fallen pines were blue; bracts of blue; black; pearl. People bunched together and peered down into the caverns of mud left by the uplifted roots. The hurricane had twisted through, stood the park on its head and then sped off. An honest, delinquent wind, enacting its rage, creating havoc, accepting no responsibility.

In March the scarred landscape furred with green, as soft and tender to touch as the suede of my shoes. I rode around the flat countryside on the back of the artist’s motor-bike, exploring. He showed me his rented room, at the other end of the village from mine, and his temporary studio in the lean-to shed next door. At the moment he was making pots. I remembered Dad on his allotment, and the clay shells I’d made and given to him which he broke with one stomp of his Wellington boot. The artist was making pots like little mud babies. Experiments. Some, the successes, he painted with slip and fired in a kiln and others, the failures, he took down to the estuary. He laid them flat on the sheeny mud and abandoned them to the tide; mud to mud.

I parked my black suede shoes at one side of the low double bed in his attic bedroom. I lifted them up, tapped them on the floor, knocked them until flakes of brown mud fell off the soles. I picked up the curls of mud and balanced them on my palms. Loops and half-circles of mud. Mud words. Mud commas and full stops. Bits of writing, broken apart, like the pieces of an old pot you dig up when going over your allotment. I’d piece them back together again, make something new with them.