(The short story “Smoke” is part of Nicola Winstanley’s short story collection, which is entitled SMOKE.)
I took a writing class, long time ago, and the professor pronounced to us on day one, that “Your characters are your babies. And if you want to be a good writer, you have to make your babies suffer.” He was a bit dramatic, but academically, his was correct; characters have to be knocked down to make their eventually rise have any dramatic or cathartic weight. This is not a revolutionary idea, as its just essential to storytelling.
Nicola Winstanley isn’t afraid to make her characters suffer. In her title story, “Smoke,” she allows the nine-year old Amanda to suffer, but also shows us the suffering of her family, and how each of their own pain affects and inflicts on the others. As the story begins, children are being called home for supper by their mothers, but Amanda’s mother has recently passed away, so no one is calling for her. At home, her older sister Judy, dealing with the loss in her own detached way, instructs Amanda to make herself a dinner of toast, as that is all the food in the house that their father has left for them. They tell themselves that their father is still at work and will be home soon. Eventually, he does come home, but its late, the children should be in bed, and he seems aloof to how to take care of two daughters, let alone himself. What follows is a story about a family dealing with grief, but the focus is on Amanda and her wrestling and discovery of the emotions she is experiencing – as for a nine-year-old, these emotions are just beyond her ability to articulate and understand them, but her feelings are strong enough to engage her to action.
At times I felt that this story was brutal in its honesty. Amanda at first believes that her mother has just gone away, as if there was a chance for her return, but Amanda’s actions betray this belief of hers. Winstanley marvelously illustrates how Amanda does everything in her power to keep the loneness and the emptiness within her at bay, but Amanda is a child, and handles these complex feelings as a child would – playing with a friend, eating sweets, hiding from her sister, and waiting for her father to return. All for not, as slowly it dawns on Amanda that she is alone.
The other touch that I enjoyed with this story was how the other two family members dealt with their own grief. Judy’s reaction is to leave this home, and stay with a friend’s family. Maybe Judy is saving herself, finding a way to survive this situation, but to do that she has to abandon her sister. And then there is their father, who’s way of coping is to not be in the home, which clearly no longer feels like a home. Though the story never goes into detail what is keeping their father away, it’s a question that I never felt needs to be answer. No, he is looking out for himself as well, because Winstanley drops an illuminating point, by observing that while the girls are going without, he has time to get new glasses for himself. From this point, Amanda begins to spiral down, and it is painful to watch. She doesn’t have clean or good fitting clothes. There isn’t enough to eat, and she goes to school hungry, and without a lunch. She finds some sympathy with other children, but she also finds unwanted attention from the local teenagers.
And here the story takes a turn, in a direction I wasn’t fully expecting; Amanda tries to find her way out of where she’s at. Maybe she doesn’t fully understand why she’s doing it, but we know. The need to sleep in the same bed with her father. The attempts to clean their home. Amanda tries to eat better, and be better. Amanda doesn’t give up, she tries, she fights for security, and to keep the loneness away.
With the end of the story, and the reconciliation between Amanda and her father, I felt that these characters were now seeing each other, acknowledging that they need to and can do better. But… but there is a melancholy to this ending. The damage has been done. The trauma has been created. These few days of this story might be some of the most impactful days of her life. I felt that at the conclusion of this story, I knew Amanda would be okay, but it would be a journey where she would have to deal with her feelings of abandonment, neglect, food anxiety, authority figures, and shame. There was such a hopeful melancholy with this story, that I just felt crushed by a feeling of compassion for these characters.
It wasn’t the reaction I was expecting, but as the days went on after reading this story, I kept thinking about Amanda, and how this story very quietly illuminated the exact moment in this person’s life where they stopped seeing the world as a child does, and started taking the first steps toward understanding the world of adulthood.
Nicola Winstanley made her baby suffer. Yet, Amanda came out on the other end. It was hard at times reading certain passages, and not because something shockingly brutal happened. No, difficult to read because I know that those little indignities that happen in childhood, those are the deepest cuts that take a lifetime to deal with. Maybe I would prefer to be the kid eating sweets, trying to ignore that pain deep down. Nicola Winstanley had the courage to confront that pain, and let Amanda start her healing.
