TYPES OF EVERLASTING REST
Clio Gray
For Clio Gray's author page, please click here.
From Italy and Russia in the time of Napoleon to the fate of Boy Scouts in Czechoslovakia during the Second World War, Clio Gray’s short stories are filled with intrigue, conspiracy and murder. Laden with sumptuous detail, each story leads the reader directly into the compelling and sometimes bizarre inner worlds of her fascinating characters.
Praise for Types of Everlasting Rest:
‘Clio Gray is a master of atmosphere and sensuousness. She combines historical realism with the bizarre, whimsy with the macabre. Reading her is like being at a sumptuous feast in a palace, just before it is stormed.’
Alan Bissett
‘Powerful stuff ... worth savouring. Clio Gray is an uncommonly interesting writer. One wonders, expectantly, what she will do next.’
Allan Massie, The Scotsman
‘Fresh, original, beautifully written... a highly impressive collection.’
Lesley McDowell, Scottish Review of Books
About Clio Gray
Clio Gray was born in Yorkshire, brought up in Devon and has been living in Scotland for the past fifteen years, where she works at her local library. She has won many prizes for her short stories, most notably the Scotsman/Orange Award in 2006. Her first novel, Guardians of the Key, a historical mystery, was published by Headline in 2006; the sequel, The Roaring of the Labyrinth, was published in 2007.
An extract from Types of Everlasting Rest
BP’s Boys
Mafeking, 1900, May 12th and the town has been besieged for almost seven months. Sergeant Major Goodyear of the Cadet Corps, twelve years old, pedals madly through lines of enemy fire carrying messages and what little supplies are left. He prefers the bicycle to the donkeys: faster, more manoeuvrable. The downside is you can’t eat bicycles and food is getting very short. He tries not to worry, concentrates on weaving around potholes and unexploded munitions. He doesn’t know it, but this is the last big assault before reinforcements finally arrive. B-P, the Commanding Officer, has held back troops nine times the size of his own for two hundred and seventeen days, and in a few short days Mafeking will be won.
Kimski Gopnik thinks of Goodyear and his dead donkeys while he sits shivering in the lee of a fallen tree. It is cold but, oddly, thunderclouds have gathered over the mountains and lightning shrieks from peak to peak. His dog Smiv was so frightened that she has run off into the trees. Half an hour ago they heard the shot whistling through the cold air, heard the brief bark of protest. Kimski tries to stop the tears, freezes his face with snow. He knows what will happen now. The snow covered their tracks as they went, but now little Smivka has given them all away. The soldiers will follow her tracks through the forest and find them. The stronger ones have gone ahead, are going to try to reach the gorge, drop down into the caves that line its sides. The younger ones, like Kimski, have volunteered to stay behind, to sweep over footmarks, crack branches, make false trails, try to melt back into the trees and down to the town before they are spotted. But for Kimski it is too late. He has twisted his knee and has no where else to go. He has whistled the alert, but knows no-one will reach him in time. He thinks of his mother, closes his eyes, tries to feel the warmth of her kitchen, smell the bread rising as she grinds up poppy-seeds, tells him how proud she is that he has joined the Cubs.
‘Just like your father,’ she says and sighs, wipes her hair away with the back of her hand, grinds the pestle a little harder.
And like his father, Kimski too will soon be dead.
Abaft, abeam, adrift, astern, haul the warp from the weatherside, and carry away. You could drown a man in the linguistic undercurrent of boats. Right now their rhythm gives me comfort, and I try not to think what is happening below. Six blasts on the whistle and we know someone is in trouble. The thunder has closed the sky over us like a box; the lightening is so close the air is crackling and our skin tingles as it splits the air, sends shockwaves gliding over the surface of the snow. We’re in the hills of the Nizke Tatry trying to reach the river at Spisska Nova Ves. The Hitler Jugend have been tracking us ever since we left Bystrica. We didn’t think they were so close. But haven’t they always been close? Wasn’t Cacek, their leader, at school with me? He always came in crumpled clothes and only ever wore one sock. He never told us why. Look at him now! All shiny in his uniform, just like the ones we used to wear, exactly the same ones we used to wear. We were all together then, proud of our hats and our badges, happy to shout out that we were the Scouts of Zvolenka, worked hard for the honour it gave us. And then came 1939, and our country was carved up like a chicken and handed out on other people’s plates. Midnight, and as the clocks of Munich chime, the men around the table pen their names to the paper. The Germans are there, and the Italians, the English, the French. But where are the Czechs? They are not represented at their own autopsy, and as September 29th slips in, we are hacked in two. If you axe a man off at the knees, the rest of him will soon fall. And so it was with us.
We’ve been trekking through these mountains all our lives, making camps and tying knots, setting traps, learning the names of trees and plants and the berries you can eat and those you can’t, making canoes and paddles out of hand-sawn planks, learning to box the compass and follow the stars at night. Now our uniforms have been confiscated and our huts occupied by the Jugend. Several of our Scoutmasters have been shot for insurgency. Others have managed to survive out in the woods, on the hills, in caves. We have brought them food and clothing. We have passed messages between them, formed contacts with the Partisan Alliance, kept clear the escape routes that will lead them over the border into Russia and finally to join the exiled government of Benes in London.
I am running through the thin snow, my boots skidding on the frozen pine needles beneath. My breath comes short and hard, the air getting too cold to be comfortable in my lungs. We have gone past the gorge and lowered the men by rope and gaffe. We have brushed the ground at the lip; disguised the scuffle by overlaying tracks of wolf and bear which we have stamped in wood. We have caught and killed a small deer, sprayed its blood in an arc through the trees. Now we are slipping away like fish down a salmon ladder, separating, keeping to shadows and undergrowth. I can hear them, the Jugend, crashing up the path we have just left. The cramp in my side makes me stop, doubles me over. I lean against a tree gasping for air, the cold bark melting snow into my back. Thunder growls overhead, knocks shivers of ice from my hat onto the hands I have braced against my knees. Just one more minute, I think, planning my route. I will speed my ascent, go up instead of down. I will go through the pass that will take me down to Brezno, I will…
Two strong bare hands have taken hold of my arms, forced them behind my shoulder-blades, sent me stumbling forward, my face hitting the frost-hard snow. My nose breaks with a crack and blood is forced through my mouth, gagging out dark and thick around my head. My hat has fallen off and someone grabs me by the hair, drags at my head, stretches the skin across my throat. I see two snow-sodden boots, one sock.
‘He died today, your Baden-Powell. Did you know?’
He laughs, puts the blade of his knife under my chin, whispers in my ear, ‘Somewhere in Africa, so I heard. Not much use to you now, eh?’
We are grateful to the Scottish Arts Council for a grant towards the publication of Types of Everlasting Rest.
