Safely Gathered In by Sarah Schofield
Review by Hannah Clark
The cover of Sarah Schofield’s debut collection is a line drawing of a woman with her head is trapped in a bell-shaped birdcage; its base encircles her neck like a collar. Five red birds perch on and around her. Her eyes are closed, her chin is slightly lifted, and there is the merest hint of a smile at the corner of her lips. She is experiencing the strangest repose: a moment of quiet bliss in the middle of an unsettling arrangement. Reader, you are warned about the contents of this discomfiting collection before you even peel back the cover.
Safely Gathered In comprises seventeen stories — they are not directly connected, yet they feel very much like they might be pieces of the same puzzle. The book has much in common with the short stories of Lara Williams; her Treats, too, pulled off the trick of binding together, both stylistically and thematically, stories that darted across the breadth of human behaviour.
The title story, written in the style of a customer service confirmation email, lists items contained within storage units at SelfStore4U! Written in an uneasy second-person, Schofield builds unease as the the tone of the email changes: ‘Our customers come back time and again. Each walled-off pod is your own private world. We are only here to help you fulfil your storage needs. We care about you. We see how fearful you are of forgetting.’
To disclose more would be to risk spoilers, but suffice to say, as someone with a near pathological resistance to the hoarding of nostalgic memorabilia, this passage alone sent chills down my spine.
Schofield’s willingness to experiment with form, as she does similarly in the delightful Nostalgia4Beginners is hugely satisfying, but she comes into her own when she places seemingly real life situations and characters into stories that walk the tightrope of the uncanny. She does this with winning bravado, crucially swerving unnecessary whimsy.
In Dead Man’s Switch, Emmy receives emails from her dead husband, David, and they dwell uncomfortably in her thoughts even as she plans for a holiday with her new partner, Gary. She shares her concerns and frustrations with her sister, Kath, whose sympathy remains an opaque and elusive thing, the reader unsure as to whether Emmy’s assessments are fair or not. Likewise, Emmy notices but does not confront or confirm Gary’s feelings about this very specific kind of haunting. It is an excellent premise for a short story but it is the minor details which elevate it: ‘David had been dead for four weeks and she’d been eating leftover tagine for breakfast, standing at the kitchen hob with a fork and a cupped hand.’
Schofield elegantly unfolds a scenario that at once provides bare facts and a sense of the aimlessness that sudden loss creates within a person’s routine, and does so without overwhelming the reader. Emotional acuity of this type requires the writer to establish a delicate sort of trust with their readers, and Schofield is accomplished enough here to earn that trust throughout.
Arguably the finest piece here is Expectant Management. Another second-person narrative, the story follows Jess, a woman devoted to her work and currently living alone, and her unusual friend who gets her through a very difficult time. The title references the phrase used to describe the process of waiting to see if a miscarriage will resolve itself naturally, without medical intervention. A strange, unwieldy term, it is bland enough to almost neutralise the distress and trauma visited upon a woman’s body. Schofield describes the acute physical and mental anguish with a light touch, displaying a natural authorial instinct for when to pull back.
The story focuses on the demands and concessions of womanhood: what it means to hold a job in a competitive field when your body betrays you in a way that a man cannot comprehend, and the navigation of a pain that you cannot give adequate voice to, while the world continues around you. Schofield makes much of her seaside setting, with vivid coastal imagery (‘The sea breeze is abrasive and you close your eyes as it tingles across your skin’) that tips the uncanny into the folkloric and gives a knowing nod to the eternal cyclical nature of the female experience that binds us to our ancestral mothers and promises our knowledge to our daughters.
Safely Gathered In is a truly striking debut, rich with innovation and imagination; it prods irreverently at the preconceptions one might have about what a short story collection can be, what its contents can do.
Safely Gathered In is published by Comma Press, 4th November 2021