Yes Yes More More Read online

  ‘Fresh, funny, fabulous, Yes Yes More More had me gripped. These stories surprise and delight. Anna Wood is the real thing – a writer you immediately want more of.’

  jackie kay

  ‘Yes Yes More More gives us precisely realised worlds of gloriously observant and hyper-attentive specificity. Devoid of cliche, Anna Wood’s writing presents people and situations that are laugh-out-loud funny but there is a stealth to her stories, an unshowy intelligence, which makes them deeply satisfying.’

  wendy erskine

  ‘Vivid, heartbreaking and jubilant – I couldn’t get enough of Yes Yes More More. Anna Wood examines life under a brilliant shifting light, finding beauty, horror and meaning in every moment. A triumph.’

  catriona ward

  ‘Bursting with zing and vitality, Yes Yes More More is an absolute marvel of a short story collection. What it feels like to be alive, to dance wildly, to be surrounded by friends.’

  elizabeth macneal

  ‘Anna Wood’s stories are urban, sexy, darkly and uniquely comic, and tuned to the zeitgeist like the bass player every band would want. Her prose has the precision and economy of the best poetry, deployed to offer us cinematic glimpses of the lives we recognise, endure and rejoice in. Fiction has a new star in its firmament.’

  carol ann duffy

  ‘Sexy and sweaty and tender and weird, Yes Yes More More pulses with the pure joy of being human.’

  ruth gilligan

  ‘A writer of exciting contradictions, Anna Wood tackles the dynamics of desire and the vicissitudes of a rich inner life with lyricism and levity, in a literary register that is both frank and digressive, coolly detached one moment and achingly sincere the next. Yes Yes More More is intimate and surprising, a joy to read.’

  sharlene teo

  ‘Poignant and pulsing with quiet joy, these stories are full of those moments that flutter by, too quick to catch – the tastes, the throbbing sensations, fleeting connections, in-between times of reflection. Yes Yes More More reminded me of the sheer, delicious goodness of life. It made me want to live forever.’

  alice ash

  ‘This is a riot of a collection – wild, libidinous and greedy for life.’

  naomi booth

  THE INDIGO PRESS

  50 Albemarle Street

  London w1s 4bd

  www.theindigopress.com

  The Indigo Press Publishing Limited Reg. No. 10995574

  Registered Office: Wellesley House, Duke of Wellington Avenue

  Royal Arsenal, London se18 6ss

  copyright © anna wood 2021

  This edition first published in Great Britain in 2021 by The Indigo Press

  Anna Wood asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Great Britain in 2021 by The Indigo Press

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organisations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-911648-28-4

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-911648-29-1

  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, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  Design by houseofthought.io

  Typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London

  For my friends

  Contents

  Rise Up Singing

  At the Log Cabin by the Lake in the Middle of the Woods

  When Can You Start?

  A Shania Story

  Pussycat

  Lauren, Our Path Emerges For a While

  Love! Love!

  Good Solid Obliterating Fuck

  Lunch

  Half a Point for a Good Guess

  Chronicle of a Baffled Spinster

  Wild Nights!

  Sorrow, Borrow

  Sex in New Orleans

  Meeting

  ‌Rise Up Singing

  You do get hot summers in Bolton and we had one that year, for weeks on end as I remember it although it may just have been a fortnight or so. This was 1990, I think, and it was a Friday afternoon because we had double English with Mr Howard. Lisa and Claire had both taken a full tab, but Janey and I just had half each.

  “Who or what do you think is causing the friction between Jane and Elizabeth?” asked Mr Howard. His hair was aglow and the walls pulsed gently. Lisa put up her hand but then pulled it down slowly and shot it up in the air again. She did this a few times, mesmerised. Claire sat to Lisa’s left, giggled and swooned.

  “Lisa?” said Mr Howard.

  “Mr Rochester,” said Lisa, beaming. It was impossible to know whether she had forgotten Mr Howard’s name or whether she was simply talking about the wrong book.

  Claire was stroking her copy of Pride and Prejudice and crying. “There’s no need for any of this,” she said, her voice quiet and bleak.

  “Sir,” my voice came out too loud.

  “Annie Marshall.” He used my full name, and it made me feel important.

  “I’m taking Claire out of class. She’s not well.” But then the bell went, and class was over anyway. I had no idea where those eighty minutes had gone.

  Janey and I were free now, heading away from our classes and classmates. We were only a little bit trippy – I noticed my ears slipping gently and endlessly towards my neck while Janey was tapping her arm with her forefinger to see if it was solid. We started walking into town, down long empty Deane Road. The pavement smelled dusty in the sun, the terraced houses watched us, friendly. We waved at cars, who occasionally honked back at us, and we sang. “Say it’s only a paper moon,” at a passing Volvo Estate, “Hanging over a cardboard sea,” at an XR2i. We’d been playing my parents’ Ella Fitzgerald CD for weeks, all sophisticated.

  We walked on the shady side of the road, and decided to twist our T-shirts at the front then tuck them over into the neckline, our sixteen-year-old midriffs in the open air and our 32A bras showing. A tee-kini! We got more honks after that but no lift which was fine because we were belting out our song, striding like jaguars and immune to other people.

  Before we got as far as town there was Toys R Us, all solid and primary colours by the roundabout. A world of adventure. “We’ll go and play,” I told Janey. “We won’t steal anything.” Inside we found a corner with no apparent staff and mounds of plush, squidgy dogs and rabbits and cats. I plunged my arm into a pile of white puppies, right up to my elbow, and felt the softness and warmth. I compared my skin, the tiny criss-crosses and hairs, to the gleaming, lifeless fabric of the toys. “Everything that is good smells and moves,” I told Janey, hugging her, smelling her.

  We gave the little circling helicopters a wide berth on the way out, and ran the last five minutes into town. Sitting in the square, panting, I tried to work out where my lungs were. “Higher than you probably think,” Janey informed me. “Way up here,” she patted my shoulder, more or less. “Remember you’ve got to have room for your liver and your stomach too, they’re all protected behind your ribs.” I was besotted by the earnest teacherly tone in Janey’s voice, but I knew better than to think for too long about my internal organs after taking acid.

  We sat there on the steps in front of the town hall, in the full sun, watching Bolton. We tracked cute boys across the square, gazed all giddy when Neil Curtains and Hot Colin, sitting on a bench just outside Superdrug with their legs sprawling, to
ok off their T-shirts, stretched their arms along the back of the seat and let their heads loll back, eyes closed to the light. Their necks were muscly, lumpy invitations, curving and pulsing. All warm.

  “Should we eat soon?” Janey asked.

  “I’ve got spliff at home.” I had most of a bag left in my sock drawer, although my house was a bus ride away. “How can we get there?” The journey for a moment seemed unthinkable, and then we forgot that it was.

  We walked part of the way, through the park making a list of the worst haircuts in history, and which character from EastEnders, if we really had to, we would shag.

  “Roly!” I shouted, to make Janey laugh, and it did. When we saw the 617 coming we ran and caught it, the day still bright but now not warm enough for our silly bellies. We pulled our T-shirts back down, winked at a small grey-haired woman, felt rude, smiled.

  “You’d know the world had been taken over by aliens,” explained Janey, “if people got on the bus and filled up the seats in order, from the back corner, you know, one seat at a time.”

  Two girls who’d left our school the year before, dyed hair and Doc Martens, got on and gave us glancing smiles. Approval. They held on to the pole by the pram space, leaned back and swung gently.

  My parents weren’t home but we went straight up to my room anyway, stopping in the kitchen just to take a packet of chocolate digestives from the cupboard and to lift Clementine, our ginger cat, from the sofa.

  “Who’s got better coloured hair?” Janey asked, lying on my bed and tugging on her own copper hair, draping it over Clementine’s head to give our cat a kind of toupee. Janey’s hair used to change colour, quite dramatically and quite naturally – it was brighter in the summer and some kind of red forest universe in the winter.

  “Can you still feel that trip?” I didn’t mind that mine was gone, as long as Janey’s had too.

  “My arms feel kind of stretchy,” she observed, extending an arm and contemplating its length, her fingers playing an invisible keyboard. “But maybe they just are a bit stretchy. It’s time for some alcohol anyway.”

  So we got ready to go out with a bottle of Cointreau from downstairs sitting on my table next to the stereo and the moisturiser and the make-up. We took sticky sips and had quick showers and decided what to wear (Janey borrowed my white jeans again). It was a gentle excitement. We were in no hurry because the night was waiting for us, full of people and music and happy unknowns.

  We got off the bus a stop early when we went back into town, so we could go to the corner shop and buy a flask each of Pernod – £4.49, fits into the back pocket of your jeans and tastes good poured into a pint of blackcurrant for 50p behind the bar at Fifth Avenue.

  We never did have that spliff at my house, got distracted by the Cointreau, so we decided to take another half tab each before we went in. “Let’s not get fucked,” Janey said. “But let’s get a bit fucked.”

  The entrance to Fifth Avenue had two bouncers, just inside the main door, and then you pushed through big silver doors into a dark room with low ceilings and lights, blue, red, green, yellow, jerking and swinging across the people.

  What do I remember? That night, or maybe another night, I danced to Sylvester with a man I didn’t fancy but who moved all fast and hips and fun. I kissed a man called James with long curly hair who was at least twenty-five. Which was old. Leanne was there with Unsy and Unsy’s mate Clive, who talked a lot. Clive looked like a lizard, his eyes swung in their sockets and his skin was leather. While he talked, sitting down on the floor in the back of the room, the fire extinguisher behind him whispered over his shoulder, making it difficult to concentrate. The toilets were busy and we were desperate so we peed in the sinks. No one minded. Then later I went to the toilet again with Leanne’s little brother who had cocaine. I thought he might kiss me but we just took the drugs. Christine and Rhona from Canon Slade didn’t talk to me. They never liked me or Janey, I don’t remember why.

  Then “Let’s go home,” Janey said, and we did. It was a few years later that we got into the habit of staying to the very end of the night, or some way past it. On this night, we left early so we could miss the cheesy last song and get chips in pitta over the road without having to queue.

  The taxi place was quiet too. It was still warm and two of the drivers sat outside, smoking and watching the drunk people. “Where you headed, girls?” His appearance didn’t really register with me but the sight of his belly, just a pale hairy roll of it between his T-shirt and his jeans, lodged in my brain.

  “Markland Hill,” Janey told him. She was not entranced by the belly but was stroking the front of her face as if it was a cat. “Just by The French Arms.”

  “That whole street was bombed years ago, love, in the war.” Not a glance to his mate, not a snigger, nothing. “We can’t take you there.”

  Janey swung round, chin tucked down, and linked her arm into mine. She steered me away, taking short fast strides. “What’s he talking about? Wanker. He knows we’re fucked.” Then she began to laugh and I did too. We were singing again.

  “Summertime!”

  We were yelling really, at the stars and the chimneys.

  “And the living is e-e-e-easy!”

  I started to cry when I remembered that this was the song my parents used to sing to me when I was very small. I felt lucky, I think, and guilty. I felt something, anyway, and I didn’t want it to be nothing just because I’d had some drugs. Janey sat down next to me on the pavement.

  “You’re a good girl,” she told me, stroking my shoulders, squeezing me. “We’re good girls.”

  For a minute I thought the growling was Janey, trying to make me laugh. Then I growled back, and she said, “What are you growling at, dafthead?” Then, like slow-motion cartoons, we turned round to see an actual dog just behind us. Growling. He was behind a fence, which was good news because he was a dog that looked like a furry muscle with teeth. The fence was tall.

  “Dogs know when you’re tripping,” said Janey, very quietly. This is true, I thought. The dog knows. He was in a frenzy of growling and twitching now. He was headbutting the fence. Janey had a look of delighted horror.

  “Just walk slowly away,” I told her. This was a serious situation requiring a serious voice. The dog stopped growling, watched us clinging together and shuffling down the pavement. Then we saw the gate, which was wide open.

  “Ha!” Hysterical air shot from Janey’s mouth. “Fence high,” she said to me. Whispered. “Gate open.”

  “Fence high,” I repeated. “Gate open.” We swerved straight into the road, across to the other side, did not look back, and ran. The dog was probably inches from us, perhaps jumping at our backs. We kept on up the street and didn’t turn round all the way home, although after a while we forgot about what we weren’t looking back at.

  My mum and dad had left the hall light on for us. I unlocked the back door, enjoying the fit of the key in the lock. Janey was thinking about the dog again.

  “Fence high,” she repeated. “Gate open. Fucking hell.”

  “Fence high,” I said, putting my hands straight up in the air to demonstrate. “Gate open,” I stretched my arms wide and pulled a silly face of panic.

  “Shhhh!” Janey told me, giggling now, and we went in. Kettle and sofa and telly. Janey would sleep in the spare room, same as usual. I had a pair of pyjamas that I didn’t wear anymore because I thought of them as Janey’s pyjamas.

  Janey sat on the kitchen floor in front of the open fridge while I made us Horlicks. She scooped houmous from a tub and into her mouth, using two fingers. In the next room, The Twilight Zone was just starting.

  Then my dad appeared at the kitchen door in a T-shirt and boxer shorts. He blinked and shrank a little from the light. I was lost in the magic of how kettles know when to turn themselves off. Janey was humming to herself, although there was no tune as such.

  “Did you two have a good night?”

  “Yes, Mr Marshall!” sang Janey. She straightened h
er back and waved the tub of houmous as if it was proof of all the fun we’d had.

  “Yes, it was fab,” I said, teaspoon clinking on the mug.

  “Good stuff. Sleep tight, then.” And he stood for a couple of seconds in the doorway, his head tilted to one side, smiling.

  ‌At the Log Cabin by the Lake in the Middle of the Woods

  They arrived in the afternoon, Karen and Claire, staring out each side of the taxi, gawping at the nature and the sky and the trees. It was a proper actual log cabin nestled at the edge of a woods by a lake. A loch. They tipped the driver a quid (“That’s a lot of money in Scotland,” Karen said) and stood on the gravel, looking out across the flat water to the mountains (bens, munros, whatever) on the other side, saying the things you’re meant to say. “Wow!” and “Doesn’t the air smell fresh?” and “The sky is so BIG here!” Claire stretched her arms wide, breathed in deep.

  As promised by the weekend lettings company, the key to the cabin was on the ground by the front door under a stone carving – a hare, mossy in its crevices. When Karen pushed the big wooden door open, the creaking sound was so long and pitch-bending, so much like something from a BBC or Hammer Horror sound library, that she looked around as if she might see cameras or a man with a clapperboard.

  Instead they saw two fat velvet sofas facing each other, perpendicular to a fireplace that was taller than them and wider than that, with a wood-burning stove inside, a box of logs beside it and still room for a seat – an inglenook. There was a low table between the sofas with piles of books – two old Agatha Christie paperbacks, and a little hardback guide to wild birds. Fitted dark-wood bookshelves filled the one wall, right up to the ceiling with a sliding ladder to get to the toppermost titles.

  “This is not a log cabin, really, is it?” said Claire. She was laughing, slightly hysterical, nervous to go into the other rooms. She looked at the rows of books, imagined a hidden door which would open if you tugged on the right encyclopedia.