Shauna is a single mother, avid swimmer, and works in east London in safeguarding and managing allegations of harm to children by those in positions of trust. She also makes her own line of fragrances and body creams using only edible ingredients and essential oils.
Despite repeatedly vowing to avoid further studies, Shauna is in the process of acquiring her third masters degree from Goldsmiths in creative writing (previous masters include English Literature and Language from University of Glasgow and in Social Work from Middlesex University).
She is currently working on a YA science fiction novel and several short stories. This is an extract from her first novel.
shauna.c.mcallister@gmail.com
[ Novel extract ]
If I were to look back at the story of those who birthed me, a series of mothers and their mothers and those before them, all the way back – according to 23andMe – to the mitochondrial DNA that can trace my millions of mothers back to folds in the old hide of Africa… if I were to look back, in order to understand the unique ways in which I do not fit, the unique quirks of, say, epigenetics that only my forebears with their experiences could have passed on within their genes, I would have to start with my mother.
I would start with her, because. Because I can’t quite forgive her. Because I have only just learned the things she tried to hide from me: the realities of my heritage, my story, my unfolding. I would start with her because, even though her mother forgot the truth, my mother understands that I need it. I would start with her because she is the closest in a long lineage, the easiest to understand, and because she is the only one who has told me everything since I asked, and because if I don’t understand, and remember, I will not be able to pass on what she has given me to those whom I will in turn birth.
My mother, Chiara, grew up on the Via Galliari in Turin. In the mid-seventies, it was a narrow market street lined with six-storey buildings – grand crumbling facades corseted with washing lines, weaved between facing balconies along the length of the street. Each balcony had its own wrought-iron railings that thrust out like theatre boxes – a place where a small child might sit, watch and draw, and not feel so alone with the sounds of the streets all around her.
At four or five, Chiara spent her days at home alone with her mother, Hania. But, with Hania in her bed, Chiara’s main companions were the books that lined the tall walls or that were stacked in piles across each of the the large rooms, and along the hallways. First, Chiara made friends with the pictures in the books, and later, with the words. There were also the feral cats who caught mice in the stairwell and for whom Chiara collected her own dinner scraps to maintain their loyalty.
Her main comfort, however, was to draw, and when she drew she could go to a new place, a new world, where life was different, as was she. Most children her age attended the local Asilo, or nursery, but that would require a mother who was awake and who knew what time it was, who could take her down the stairs. Chiara’s father was at work at the university all day, a renowned and popular professor in archeology. Hania rarely raised herself from her closed-curtained slumbers. Her dark eyes – imprisoned behind a glassy film – would glide over Chiara with only mild recognition on most days, but Thursdays or even as early as Wednesdays, they would become more alert and would fix her with more purpose, perhaps with anger.
On Fridays, things were different. There was an energy about her mother. Fridays, Hania would rise from her bed, pace, fidget and mutter as she tripped over Chiara who, suddenly a playful kitten, kept getting under Hania’s feet.
Once the short frenzy was over, and her mother was again so composed that she could have been gliding. Hania would leave Chiara with the tobacconist on street level, so casually that one might have thought that Chiara had fallen out of her pocket without Hania knowing, like one of her silken hankies.
Chiara would watch her slender mother divide the crowds before her. People noticed Hania, her garish getup and her shadowed skin sliced her out of any drab northern city. As she watched her go further away, Chiara worried that her mother, paper thin, would float away, out in the world, like one of the folded airplanes she launched from the balcony, or that all her colours would bleed away like watercolours in the rain. Chiara would watch her mother’s colour, dark skin easeful grace weave through the staid shoppers and market salls and tuck away behind a corner.
Chiara never knew where her mother would go, but she knew how she’d return.
‘Bambina,’ the fruit and vegetable stand man would call her over. Chiara sucked on overripe oranges and allowed the rancid juice to meander down the side of her mouth, stinging a little, and trickling all the way down to her sandled sock.
A procession of greetings and forgettings would follow her along the street. Small gifts filled her pockets – an artichoke, some cheese, a flower for her hair; ‘che carina’, ‘Chiara mia’.
Eventually, after her cheeks were pinched pink Chiara would find her way to the small enclave where the market stalls ended and the electrical cables coiled around themselves like large snakes beside the generators.
There the Signorine would stand leaning on walls that smelled of urine and petrol, and Chiara would scan their faces for the most glorious of them all. It was still early. All the Signorine were more beautiful than any other women Chiara had ever seen, but there were a few who always made her gawp with awe.
‘Paula!’, Chiara called, and the most spectacular among them picked her up in strong muscular arms and kissed her with cherry glossed lips, and a voice deeper than any Chiara had ever heard, but also softer. She stood tall and strong, wore a short bright skirt and lashes so long that her eyelids drooped, and every day a different wig.
‘Chiara, che fai sta matina?’ Paula clucked. Chiara told stories from the market, how the cheese merchant and his wife are arguing again; the butcher’s wife was still eating her own salumi and fatter than ever, and with each kilo she gained, her husband seemed to lose one; the old garlic seller’s wife was in hospital but, with his eyes full of cataracts, it was he who seemed too far away. The new girl at the chicken roasting stall was causing scandals because she had eyes for both the Giordano brothers, and their wives cast a united front of jealousy and vengeance.
Paula laughed at Chiara’s tales and clicked her tongue, ‘You know how to weave a tale, baby girl, I promise, you’ll go far,’ but Chiara knew she’d never surpass the beauty or endless wisdom of Paula.
‘I want to be just like you,’ Chiara would say with a kiss to Paula’s nose. Paula’s eyes would fill with sadness and say, ‘no baby, no. Just no.’
More kisses and for a moment, in her arms, Chiara felt safe and things made sense. Had Chiara eaten? Did she sleep well last night? Did she need some money? When would her mother send her to the Asilo with all the other children?
It always felt like Paula knew without Chiara ever having to explain anything. Some people know, without words, and Paula was one of them. Still, Paula would say that words were important.
‘Don’t forget, baby, words can kill. Worse than any other weapon,’ she would say, ’So, remember to be kind with words, baby girl.’
She told Chiara about the trouble the night before pointing at Antonella with her face swollen blue and black dots at the sides of her neck.
‘And that’s not the worst of it. Natalia is in hospital.’
Paula explained to Chiara that men both love and hate all women. Because desire makes men feel weak in their souls, but forceful in their bodies. The worst, she said, was that they were always ashamed of their desire, and that they blamed the Signorine for the dread of returning to their sullen lives, tired wives and noisy children, and they blamed the Signorine for being more than just a woman. Chiara never knew exactly what this meant until many years later, but she agreed that the Signorine were certainly more than just women, more than just human; they were transformative.
Too soon, Paula said that it was time for what she called ‘the lunch crowd’ even though it was only eleven. A man hovered, then whistled. He was short with cheap clothes and greasy hair but was acting like he had it all. He pulled Paula to him like a dog on a lead, his face level with her breasts. Chiara was afraid for Paula, especially after the pain she heard that men caused the Signorine. But Paula smiled reassuringly and shooed Chiara away, ‘Vai a casa, piccola, a domani, Chiara, domani!’. As Chiara looked back, she saw Paula’s long nails stroking the length of the short man’s chest, pouting her lips and talking in deep baby coos.
Chiara dragged her shoes slowly, reluctantly, right up to the cracks in the pavement and then carefully stepped over them. She slowly climbed the six flights of stairs to the large apartment door, each small footstep echoing through the large corkscrew stairwell, scrawny cats rubbing her ankles with their off-key cries.
She knocked at Signora Angioli’s door, opposite theirs. Signora Angioli would make Chiara lunch every day; a bowl of soup and a plate of tagliatelli, some meat and salad. And then Signora Angioli would start to clean and hum and it was time for Chiara to go home.
She sat at the table by the lowered blinds, her legs dangling, for the rest of the afternoon. A pencil held between tightly at a loose end of her wrist. The feel of the hexagonal wood in the heart of her palm, that place that feels tender, a whispering ache. She pushed the lead into the paper, first slowly, then a thick indentation. An alchemy of paper pulp and pencil graphite pounded like spices in a mortar. She leaned her head close to the paper to see the detail of it, to smell it, the cold lead dust. She wished she were smaller, and that she could crawl under the grey graphite and smudge herself chalky grey. Pushing more densely across the page now. A thought caught her hummingbird hands, the shapes begin to resemble, from disparate desperate lines, a whole. The separateness of the page. Her power to make it as she wanted it; a thought made grey and white. .
Since those first drawings, she’d perfected the art of creating and orchestrating aesthetics to foreshadow her, distract from her true essence, and to enable her to become all but invisible. Sidestepping had become such a habit that she found that she had forgotten that she was doing it.
Till she forgot to tell me anything true about who she was, and about who I was.
First, her mother would return home in the early evening with a her rattlesnake bag filled with glass bottles and tiny white pills like the loose bones in the snake tail tip used to ward off threats.
‘What a pretty picture,’ her mother said without feeling and her eyes had already moved onto her own reflection in the dark window, and her bag with the little white pills, her deep need to go to them, to go to her bed. Her mother with the long dark hair, smooth as petrol, humming.
Chiara followed her mother to her bedroom and watched her undress, garment by garment. Hania changed from one woman to another by removing one piece of fabric and then another. Chiara longed to transform with her own new fabrics, and the new lives and layers they would bring her.
The smell, a mixture of silk, wool and sweat, trailed along the floor just before being discarded and returned to the velvet dust of the wardrobe. Once undressed, her mother played music, swigged from a wine bottle to swallow a handful of pills, and went to bed.
Chiara would call to her mother but her mother would not move. She’d half-open her eyes, and, seeing Chiara, would let them shut and drift away, far away.
Chiara fell sleep on the red armchair and an hour later her father brought home some colleagues from work; they’d already been out to eat and had had some drinks. Chiara woke but pretended to still be asleep, and watched through the veil of her eyelashes, in between dosing off.
Within a couple of hours, only a woman remained. Her father and the woman drank and smoked some more, the woman laughed too much and too high. Chiara watched the green bottles in the lamplight and their retreating red liquid to the the chime of glass touching glass. She hid a little further into the big red armchair so that she wouldn’t be noticed. She listened to cooing and drowsy giggles, and even if she understood the words on their own, she couldn’t understand them together. Her father took the woman into his office and heard short, high cries as though the woman was being wounded. Chiara was too scared to move, to help. Besides her father could help.
She fell asleep again and was being carried to her bed. Her father had noticed her, asleep, when he showed the woman out. It was quiet. No giggles, no voices, the perfume had all gone.
Chiara’s bed sheets oyster and a red blanket. A smell of jasmine the way it smells late at night when sweet verges on putrid.
His deep voice resonating in her chest because he was up against her, as if they were the same, as if his heartbeat were hers. The weight of his forearm over her ribs and a feeling of hope because he was there, because he was solid and breathing and looking at her as if he saw her, as if he really saw her, as if she were finally real. As if he knew her.
There was a fury or a fear in his brow but still he saw her in a way that her mother never could, but it felt too much, too close, too short. Chiara thought of Paula’s face, her kind and gentle eyes, and longed for her.
And there was a red and a sharp, deep, in the centre of her belly like the cut of jagged steel. She closed her eyes. She was not there when she closed her eyes. She was a little spider crawling into the crease between ceiling and wall, finding a place to hide and sleep, curling its legs up so that it was just a dot, not even a spider any more. She was dreaming or asleep. She saw her father get out of the bed from the top corner of the ceiling, where she had crawled and was small and hiding. He left the room and now she was alone and hiding on the ceiling, in the crease like the smallest of dots. She felt dark and invisible and hopelessly small. She felt metallic sharp like the steel of a drum in her tummy, like she was sucking on old rust, and then her thoughts let go.
She thought she was asleep and dreaming in wet sticky sheets, in the deepest of pools, so deep she would never come up for breath but she would live with the submerged, the breathless. She was asleep. He had left the room and she was alone, on the Via Galliari, a narrow market street where she grew up, lined with six-storey buildings; grand crumbling facades and balconies like theatre boxes.