First of the Mad Notions by Jess Moody

Shortlisted for the second Lunate 500 competition

‘First of the Mad Notions is the most purely magical work on this luminous shortlist. It is balanced by several of the key signatures of Jess’s writing: precision character creation; impossibly efficient storytelling (the narrative making great leaps in barely a handful of words — “Unlined paper. A scrappy Bic. Then a world.”); the most elegant prose. The latter, as ever, a delight: paper that “buckles dry in the heat”, a bag that “yawns open”. Every sentence brims with sensory examination. The language is effortlessly advanced. But it is how it pulls the rug to engage with — it seems — another world entirely, that offers the reader the most satisfying jolt. Like the best work of Alan Garner, there is a thick seam of folk magic shining through the apparently humdrum setting. A genuine tour-de-force.’

(Lunate editors)

***

The boy hands over the teacher's instructions. Sans-serif links to the relevant apps, logins, Google Earth. A multidisciplinary exercise: the making of a map.

Mags (never Nan, lad, for chrissake) holds the worksheet like one of the unpaid bills.

"And this is learning, is it?"

She tosses the paper on the open coal fire. Orange coils through the helpful 5-step process.

"Uppity place. No wonder your ma packed it in." A rare allusion to who is absent, and thus, the current Arrangement.

Mags gives him a pinch to stave off tears.

"C'mon." She takes him into the kitchen: cold flagstones, the dog as draft excluder by the back door.

She begins the lesson. Unlined paper. A scrappy Bic. Then a world. Snaking lanes and dying trees and caves hiding horrors. Fins. Claws. She outlines a nightmare with a jolly hum. A patient scrimshaw, finished with an X.

Tea is brewed, dark and cloying (and one for the pot), then swept over it all with bristles still smelling of solvents.

Back by the fire, the paper buckles dry in the heat. Then the final affront: skewered with a poker, into the flames, its edges spark and fall and then it is done — she stamps it out. The map is scarred, sooty and torn. In his hands it feels like her. Ancient. Impatient.

The inevitable humiliation. A letter home in his backpack. He takes to his bed, yells through the wall all the things he has been left with.

Silence in return.

Head buried, he ignores the buttered toast left on the nightstand.

He wakes to barking, the spring of the back door, and an unfamiliar scrape of metal. The choke of the old Land Rover elicits the first real fear. It is night. Too late to be alone out here. Yet Mags roars away.

He lies awake for hours, still in his uniform. A wet face etched with crumpled lines.

The smell of breakfast — bloody and greased — leads him to the kitchen. Mags sits at the table, tea in hand, plate smeared red with ketchup.

He sits, carefully. She stares back at him, slurping through thin lips. Her fingernails are filthier than usual. A scratch on her jawline.

When she rises, her boots leave wads of black earth across the stone. Through the frosting of the back door he sees the silhouette of a long-handled shovel. The dog kicks in its sleep.

He is about to ask — to accuse her, too, of abandonment.

But she drops a sack in front of him with the sound of a thousand baby teeth. Cloth turned to leather and secured with salt-crusted rope. A halo of dirt and sand on the table.

She sits again. Slaps the salvaged map down.

Waits.

His small fingers tug and worry at the knots.

The bag finally yawns open. A dawning glow.

Mags laughs loud, rich and wide. The light from the coins flashes off and off and off her golden molars. A conversation in greatness.