GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2023/24
K. LOCKWOOD JEFFORD
‘A Family Gathering’
A FAMILY GATHERING: a front room. A white screen unrolled from its grey ribbed plastic canister and perched on a metal tripod. Curtains drawn on daylight. Extra chairs from the kitchen. Cousins cross-legged on the floor, all knees and elbows, prodding for space. Bella, poised by the light switch with arm-ache, watches an uncle fiddle with the reel of cine film with the fingers he uses to pinch and poke their ribs and tummies. Squeeze their knees.
Coughs, chat, laughter. Glasses clink. Shandies or Martini and lemonades for the women. Beer from a hired silver barrel for the men. Orange pop in paper cups for the kids. Bubbles up their noses, stomachs filling with fizz and air making them burp and giggle. Shush. Quiet in the sixpennies. Laughter.
Ready! Bella’s cue to snap the lights off.
Dust motes dancing sideways in the funnel of light. A vinegary, metallic burning as the projector heats up. The sound of the film running like a thousand frantic typists typing.
The first scene flickers onto screen. Colours of high summer watered down. Three little girls on a beach in a row. Bella, Kit and Sydney. They start to move, simultaneously as if instructed by whoever’s holding the camera. Slow, noiseless high steps like Thunderbird puppets. They wave. They lick Rocket ice-lollies in red-yellow-green. Get bold on all fours with buckets and spades, shovelling sand into subsiding castles. Awww.
A shot of the sea. Bella and Sydney, upper arms swollen by inflatable Day-Glo bands, stride into rolling waves, up to knees, thighs, waist. A close-up of Kit, her skinny body stiff and still on stick brown legs, a blue ribbon slipping wonkily in her straight black shoulder-length hair. The frothy-edged tide rushes over her feet, circles her ankles like lacy-topped socks. She stiffens more, lifts her arms wide as if to steady herself. Wobbles. Opens her mouth but no sound comes out. (It’s the cine.)
The camera pans in. It takes a while to see – face crumpling, gooseberry eyes hardening – Kit’s mouth is not wide with awe or joy. What they are witnessing is a little girl alone at the edge of the tide, terrified of the water. The wish and wash of the waves. And they laugh.
Kit never learned to swim. She loved to lie in the sun. Tanned brown as conkers. When she worked in Benidorm, people thought she was a local.
—-
Two photos – black and white and well-thumbed – taken the same summer’s day in a long-ago garden: Bella in a white puff-sleeved smock, Kit in a flowery-patterned playsuit bulked out by her nappy. Both have thick, dark, home-cropped hair and wear sandals with no socks. Sydney – still a baby – is likely parked in the shade out of sight in the third-hand pram.
In the first picture they sit on a low wall edging a bed planted with rhubarb. Bella is looking over her right shoulder, hands folded in her lap, and Kit’s head is tilted down to where her left hand plays with the soil. The photographer’s shadow – the recognisable flick-up hairstyle of their mother – is midday-sharp on the high white wall behind them.
In the second one, the shadow is a line of rectangular-shaped washing – nappies, probably – no doubt pegged out by their mother in the interval between pictures. Bella stands, gripping the handlebars of her tricycle, craning, eyes screwed up in the sun. What or who is she searching for? Her mother – always nearby – or the father who would slam a door and leave as soon as they were all too big to scoop up onto his shoulders, swing around by the arms and legs?
Kit – in the background – still digs her fingers into the mud.
—-
When Bella was old enough to have her sisters on her lap, Sydney wiggled and wiggled like a worm, so Bella’s skirt twisted and rode up her legs. Kit always sat completely still until Bella’s legs went numb below the knees.
When Bella and Sydney turned cartwheels, kicked balls, climbed trees and scraped their knees, Kit hung back. On the side. Left out. Helped their mother round the house.
Kit couldn’t do handstands or head-over-heels or roll her body down a slope like a log. She was NHS glasses and dental braces. Elocution lessons. (Tuh-tuh-tuh-toffee apples they teased.) She was an awkward gait, an earnest face. Tiny Tears in a toy pram.
One, two, three little girls in a bubble-bath Sunday nights. Pulps of their fingers and toes like prunes. Soap-sud Father Christmas beards. Smoky smell of Vosene shampoo.
Three little girls like spoons between candy-striped sheets in a room with Magic Roundabout curtains. Florence, Dougal and Zebedee. Bella’s knees snug in the warm hollow at the back of Kit’s knees snug in the warm hollow at the back of Sydney’s. Kit’s hair tickling Bella’s face. The milky-malty smell of her sisters up her nose, the ebb and flow of their sleeping breath in her ears.
Three little girls walking to school the wrong way. The woods way. The Red Riding Hood way. The way that bypassed the kids who went to the other school. The kids who spat and chucked stones and called them words they’d never heard but Bella sensed were bad. The way with wet leaves to slip them up and mud to clog their shoes, the way that smelled of rain and the river rushing past, where nettles scratched their bare legs and left rashes they rubbed with dock leaves.
Three little girls told not to accept lifts or sweets from strangers.
Three little girls growing up. Breaking out. Bella the brainy one. The pile of books and a light on late one. The she’ll-go-to-university one. Kit the slow one, whose teenage spots melted into satin-smooth skin the colour of milky coffee making her the pretty one. The she’ll make a wonderful mother one. And Sydney. Leggy, lanky, loping Sydney. The sporty one. The she-should-have-been-a-boy one who wanted to be a chef.
And Bella held her sisters one inside the other inside her. Like Matryoshka dolls. Their mother’s nest of tables.
—-
A colour snapshot, taken by Bella her first Christmas home from medical school and cut to fit a window in her wallet: Kit and Sydney sleep-fresh and side by side at the breakfast table, arms folded, heads cocked towards each other. Page-boy haircuts. One side of Kit’s always curling up instead of under.
A flash photo: Sydney, Kit and Bella squeezed onto a banquette, tinselly Christmas lights looped on the wall behind them. Bella – in her third year – has her stethoscope slung round her neck having listened to all their hearts. Sydney flashes her set of second-hand Sabatier knives. Kit’s beaming. She’s been offered a job as an au pair on the Costa Blanca. She has fistfuls of pesetas. A flight to book.
A photo snapped the night Kit and Sydney go out to celebrate Kit’s twenty-second birthday. Sydney, tall, lip-sticked and laughing in a black leather biker’s jacket, a fag in her blistered commis-chef’s hand. Kit, shyly beautiful, gooseberry eyes flecked with gold, skin aglow from Spanish sun, and wearing a midnight-blue shimmery dress. Bella remembers it had a flounce on the hem that bounced as she moved. But she can’t remember why she wasn’t with them.
Her sisters, no longer too young for bars or clubs. Too young to dress up their curving, budding bodies. To fix their hair, Rimmel their lips and Maybelline their lashes. To put on a Top Shop top and totter-heels. Leave notes of musk and citrus in their wake.
—-
When their mother called to tell her what happened to Kit, Bella was revising for exams. She remembers her bony elbows grinding into the hard sill, her forehead pressing against the windowpane, comforting like a cold compress. She remembers the smooth, shiny plastic feel of the phone in her hand, the weight of it. The shriek of Saturday night sirens. Garlicky-oily-tomatoey smells of student-house spaghetti sauce simmering on the stove.
She remembers picturing their mother on the cushioned seat of the teak telephone table with its slot for directories in the hallway one hundred and fifty miles away. Remembers their mother’s voice stripped of its resonance. Bare. But she can’t ever remember what her mother says. Except, Bella needn’t come home. There’s nothing she can do.
So, Bella didn’t go home straightaway. She bought a card with flowers on. To Kit, Thinking of you. Busy with exams but hope to see you soon. Love, Bella XX.
She cringes when she comes across it years later amongst Kit’s things: every card, postcard and letter Bella ever sent saved in old shoeboxes at the bottom of Kit’s wardrobe.
Sydney tells Bella that when she went to see Kit in the hospital, she thought they’d sent her to the wrong room. Until she saw Kit’s silver signet ring – the one they’d clubbed together to buy for her 18th – in a plastic bag on the bedside locker. In two pieces because they had to cut it from her swollen finger.
Sydney tells her a passer-by found Kit in a phone box. The one next to where they used to go to dancing classes. Learned plies and arabesques. Kit always so gawky, trying so hard.
Bella has to re-sit her finals twice but glosses over the details with her family. With herself.
—-
Kit moves twenty miles away from their city to a place where property’s cheap and the roads are steep, pot-holed and poorly signed. There are few trains, and the buses are full. She doesn’t drive.
Kit’s house smells of Cif and Viakal. Bleach to slice your nose off. Her fridge is spotless and contains a pint of milk, three eggs, a lump of cheese and four bottles of white wine. Spanish.
She talks about getting another job. She talks about this and that person she’s friendly with. She says it will be a long time before she can trust a man again.
Below Kit’s left eye is a pale line, three inches long, twelve faint dots either side. A slight puckering in the loosening pudginess of her fortysomething face.
Before she switched career paths to Psychiatry, Bella worked in Accident & Emergency where she became expert at stitching, especially faces. She would inject lignocaine along the edges of facial lacerations, and when the skin was numb, place the sutures 1–2 mm from the edge, 3 mm apart. Remove in three to five days. The sooner the stitches come out, the fainter the mark.
Kit’s were left too long.
—-
Sydney moves to San Diego. The first time Bella visits there’s a condo and a husband from a wedding no-one knew about. Fresh rolls of fat and jiggly bits on her cartwheel body. Her kitchen has granite surfaces. Brand-new professional chef’s knives. A fridge stocked with enough meat to feed a family of five. A pregnancy test in the bathroom cabinet next to a child-proof bottle of diazepam.
Bella senses Sydney’s distraction in the blunt knives. The tough steaks. The pair of earrings Sydney gives her as a belated birthday gift which she can’t wear as they’re for pierced ears. Every time she tries to get Sydney to herself – suggests a walk, a film, a drive – the husband’s there. They don’t have time alone until Sydney drives her to the airport.
What are you moving away from Syd? Bella says.
Sydney tells Bella she’s not moving away from anything. She’s moving towards something. She doesn’t say what.
At the gate they hug. Bella doesn’t know what it looks like from the outside, but inside it feels like she’s hugging a hologram of her sister. She wants to hug her harder but is afraid Sydney will evaporate into the chill, air-conditioned air..
When Bella and Sydney phone or FaceTime each other they hop, skip and skate over the cracks. There are so many things to not talk about.
—-
A family gathering: their mother’s 60th birthday. A private room in a four-star hotel. High ceilings, chandeliers, soft fabrics in biscuity shades. Guests standing around like carboard cut-outs of themselves. Faces pinched. The low-lying murmur of stop-start chat punctuated by the gust and thud of doors swinging open and shut on the two-way traffic of staff serving and clearing canapes. Aromas of smoked fish, garlic, parmesan, mushrooms. Corks pop and flutes of honey-coloured cava twinkle and fizz. The air pulses with anxiety. About etiquette. About Kit.
Kit who flits from one to the other to the other, a smile sliding around her face and a glass of cava sloshing in her hand as she speaks too loud and slurred. She lurches towards their mother, brings her mouth to her ear. Nobody knows what’s said. A kerfuffle as Kit upends her wine over their mother’s head and bangs out through the doors. Their mother puts her drink down, pats her hair with both hands, lifts her glass again. Smiles. She won’t create more of a scene.
Staff exchange glances. The party continues with skittery conversations. Kit is an empty space, a looking away, a change of subject. An anxious laugh. A cousin’s new girlfriend asks if she has special needs.
A photograph taken at the event: everyone raising a glass in a white-knuckled grip. Their mother in the centre – hair smoothed down and smiling as if for dear life – with Bella and Sydney either side, both in black trouser-suits. (Who died? an uncle quips.)
—-
Kit tries to work. She gets job after job – washing up in a school canteen, an old people’s home, office cleaning – and has to leave every one because she falls. She says it’s her leg, it gives way. Bella’s worried it’s blackouts. Kit fractures an ankle. Dislocates a shoulder, snaps her clavicle. Her wrist. Her ankle again. She has plaster, crutches, a stick. Unremitting pain in her foot requiring fusion. Pain and weakness in her leg, her shoulder, her leg, her leg, her leg.
Kit phones Bella and rants incoherently. Sobs. Sometimes Bella finds it so unbearably painful to listen she has to fight her compulsion to slam the phone down. Sometimes she places it down carefully and walks away instead, just within earshot.
When Bella suggests she talk to someone, Kit gets angry. Says it’s her leg. She’s not mental like Bella’s patients.
Kit’s house is the itch of faux fur throws. The shiver of under-heating, an uncarpeted staircase with three hairpin twists. She walks carefully, one foot in front of the other, as if trying out her legs for the first time.
—-
Walking to her car after work to drive to their mother’s, a gust of wind lifts Bella’s skirt, exposing slightly bulbous knees, purpled in the chilled air. Her hands are too full to pull it back down. Sydney has these knees too, disguised by longer legs. Kit has her own knees, bashed and battered on slanting streets. She loses her step on gradients of one in four. One in three. Twists her ankle, her knee, breaks her wrist, chips her shoulder. Her leg just gives way, she says.
On the motorway, Bella keeps the needle hovering at eighty-five, slowing only when the sun slips and blinds and signs warn keep two chevrons apart. She flies over the bridge and misses the exit for their mother’s. She has to double-back from the next exit making her late.
Bella and their mother hug like two straight-backed chairs. Knock heads, glasses. Bella wonders how long their mother’s hair has been white, her face, the borders of her body blurred. As if she’s a sketch of herself someone’s tried to rub out.
The phone rings and their mother flinches but doesn’t answer. Bella sees the distress in her switched off eyes, the nothing planned for dinner. The coffee she forgot to buy.
On the wall in the hallway is a photo. Their Nana’s 80th birthday. All the branches, the generations, the uncles and aunts and cousins and assorted spouses and partners. Assembled in two lines for the picture.
Bella isn’t in it because she was delayed in motorway traffic, and they didn’t wait. Sydney isn’t in it because she was doing a pregnancy test and calling her ex-husband in the Ladies. Kit isn’t in it because they didn’t tell her about the party.
Kit is tears in their mother’s eyes. She is guilt and helplessness swelling in Bella’s chest. Pressing on her heart. Her lungs.
She is a phone ringing and ringing.
—-
A family gathering: Nana’s funeral, a forest of aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews and nieces in the church hall. Cups of tea or coffee. Glasses of haven’t you got anything stronger?
Kit’s staggery. Her now-permed hair twizzles and frizzles all ways out of her head. Her smile’s there and not there. Her eyes slide upwards. Her mouth droops. She is wine breath, weight loss. Going in and out laughing with her head back.
Bella and Sydney talk about going through Kit’s bins when she’s out, to see if she’s telling the truth about her drinking. They both know they won’t actually do it.
—-
When they stop Kit’s Employment Support Allowance, the person sent to re-examine her cuts and pastes the previous report and upholds the outcome. This is what the man from Citizens’ Advice tells Bella they would do.
Bella cross-checks both reports and compares them with Kit’s medical records, identifying fourteen disparities and thirty-one errors.
When she accompanies Kit to the tribunal the security check-in asks her to drink from her bottle of water to prove it isn’t acid. The chair of the tribunal asks in what capacity Bella is there. Sister or doctor?
As kids, when they went to a Saturday morning matinee of The Railway Children, Kit’s nose bled down the front of her yellow crimplene dress and a woman in the Ladies’ toilets told Bella to hold the stain in running water from the cold tap. And Bella managed to wriggle Kit’s dress up and over her head and into the sink. The water ran pink, and the dress turned yellow like buttercups again. Like magic.
—-
A family gathering: a weekend in a country cottage, girls only. Siblings and first cousins and someone’s daughter-in law. Weeks of WhatsApping about bedrooms and bathrooms and who shares with who. Excitement about an outdoor Jacuzzi.
The girls arrive in all their shapes and sizes. The chat is about cattlegrids and satnavs. Road closures and contra-flow systems. The Waitrose carpark. They disembowel bulging shopping bags and stuff the fridge with chicken breasts, cheese, yogurts, avocados, butter, milk, salad and salad and salad. There’s not enough sparkling water. Too much white wine. The liqueur for a special cocktail someone wants to make is missing.
In the Jacuzzi, talk is about weddings and christenings Sydney and Bella haven’t been invited to. Kit is the name on no-one’s lips, the questions unasked, left hanging in the pine-scented air-freshened air.
After dinner everyone wants to watch Strictly except Sydney and Bella. The others can’t believe they don’t watch Strictly.
Kit watches Strictly but, of course, Kit is not there.
Sydney tells Bella that since her last miscarriage she’s decided not to have kids. She has met a widower from LA with a ready-made family. Three sons. There are too many chefs in LA. She’s reinventing herself as a fitness trainer.
Next time Bella visits, Sydney will be bench-presses and baseball caps. Lycra-skinned biceps and calves. The hiss and steam of showers dousing workout sweat. Building herself a manmade body.
—-
Bella calls Kit on Saturday mornings. Mornings are better.
Kit says she’d love to go and visit Sydney. She’d have to get her passport renewed. She’s not been anywhere since she had to come back from Spain.
When Bella forgets to call Kit, the punch of guilt winds her. Such a tiny fraction of her memory to remember and she can’t even give her sister that. As if something plucks her sister from her mind and flicks her out.
Kit is an unmade call. A lurch, a stab. A pang.
—-
Kit calls Bella late and disjointed and says she wants her leg cut off. She can’t stand the pain and the pills make her sick. She can’t keep anything down. Her weight’s dropped to under seven stone.
Kit says the teachers at school used to accuse her of lying when she said she was Bella’s sister.
Bella drives around and around looking for the hospital. There are too many roundabouts. Too many wrong exits taken. U turns.
Kit is in a private room, en-suite.
Her cheeks are hollowed out, her skin pale as tissue paper. Tissue paper that’s been balled up for the wastebasket then retrieved and flattened out. But not completely. Her legs are twig-thin, her joints misshapen. She is skin and bones. Hurting bones.
On Kit’s locker is the polka dot toilet bag Bella bought her for the job in Spain. A photograph of Kit in a plastic frame: her hair glossy, her figure shapely, her skin sun-kissed, smooth and blooming.
Their mother tells Bella she wanted the doctors and nurses to see how Kit used to be. There’s a person there, she says.
—-
Kit is not answering her phone, so Bella calls their mother who says, yes, sometimes she doesn’t. This is news to Bella. Kit’s landline is her lifeline. She can’t get the hang of the mobile phone they bought her. Her fingers are too stiff and stubby for texts. She’s not on the internet. When she needs to order more of her special joint cream, she phones the number in the small print on the back of the bottle.
Bella asks what their mother means by ‘sometimes’?
Now and then, she says. She might be at Tesco’s, or the doctor’s. In the garden.
Not all day.
You know how your sister is. No point worrying.
The opening bars of the theme tune for their mother’s favourite soap blurts into the call.
Bella calls Sydney, eight hours behind in California. She doesn’t answer. This is not unusual. Not anymore.
—-
On a shelf next to Bella’s desk is a Kodachrome photo, overexposed and blurry, placed in a clip-frame and propped at eye-level: Bella, Kit and Sydney aged five, four and three. Bella in the middle, Kit close on her right, Sydney on her left, already a few paces away.
They are standing in front of their father’s van – the one he’ll drive off in. Part of the number plate – TNT – can be made out behind them. They wear shorts and t-shirts, their hair tied with wide-ribboned bows that sit on top of their heads like small, expired birds.
K. LOCKWOOD JEFFORD is from Cardiff, South Wales, and a former NHS psychiatrist and psychotherapist. She completed an MA in creative writing with distinction at Birkbeck in 2017. Awards include first prizes in Brick Lane Bookshop short story award (2023), Bath Short Story Award (2021) and the VS Pritchett Prize (2020). Her work appears in Prospect Magazine, Mechanics’ Institute Review, Aesthetica magazine, 100 Voices (Unbound, 2022) and many short story prize print anthologies including Bristol, Fish Publishing, Rhys Davies. She has recently completed her first collection of short stories, Picasso’s Face, supported by an Arts Council DYCP grant.