Suzannah Dunn - Tenterhooks

BLOOD SUGAR

‘ Blood Sugar is lit up by images of rare vitality and beauty.’

MAGGIE GEE

‘Suzannah Dunn is that rarity among contemporary novelists: a genuine stylist. Her prose is like truffles – rich, rare, dark, but never cloying.

WENDY PERRIAM

‘Suzannah Dunn is a writer with a brilliant touch.’

MALCOLM BRADBURY

PAST CARING

‘Poignant and believable… Past Caring is a perceptive novel by a writer who skilfully blends the everyday with the fantastic.’

HELEN DUNMORE

‘Suzannah Dunn writes in loaded and knowing prose, like a hip Edna O’Brien or Muriel Spark.

Glasgow Herald

‘Suzannah Dunn is a gifted writer.’

POLLY TOYNBEE, The Times

QUITE CONTRARY

‘The writing is loaded with vibrant, visual images of so strongly evocative, so poetic a quality that they seem about to burst and to yield up a weight of hidden meaning.’

Literary Review

‘A compelling debut novel from a writer steadily gathering critical plaudits for her penetrative eye and unfussy style… a luminous, honest and haunting portrait of a single woman doing a demanding job and trying to stay alive inside as well.’

Scotland on Sunday

‘A brilliant portrayal of a young woman coming to terms with her past and present.’

Company

VENUS FLARING

‘The prose is precise, images bloom like bruises or blood drops… compact worlds are contained in the simplest of descriptions. Dunn is a surgeon of the heart, and her observations are sparky’.

EITHNE FARRY, Time Out

‘A writer with a subversive wit that few of her peers can match.’

JONATHAN COE

‘ Venus Flaring treats familiar themes to a witty and original overhaul. Dunn marries plot and themes, to create a haunting, melancholy tone perfectly suited to the sense of loss which afflicts even minor characters.’

ALISON WOODHOUSE, TLS

‘After reading Venus Flaring no other book will strike quite so close to your soul… Dunn time after time stuns the reader. This is a vital, refreshing, terrifyingly brilliant novel that demands to be read’.

SUSANNA GLASER, Finetime

With love and thanks to my editor,

Charlotte Windsor

Cover

Title Page SUZANNAH DUNN Tenterhooks

Praise

Dedication

1 White Goods

2 Sync

3 Tie-Breaker

4 Night Flight

5 Possibility Of Electricity

6 Guts For Garters

7 Slipping the Clutch

8 A Good Airing

9 Stood Up and Thinking of England

10 Don’t Touch It, Don’t Ignore It, Stay Calm

Keep Reading

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

As we walked down the aisle, he murmured, ‘Spinach …’

I stopped, leaned over and looked down onto the frozen vegetables. During the two days since the delivery of our freezer I had had numerous fantasies, but none about spinach. Sara Lee, yes; spinach, no. And now Christie was beginning with spinach? I dipped down into the fizzy chill to scratch my way to greenery; packs of carrots and sweetcorn hissed as they slipped over one another. Spinach? I called up. ‘Are you sure? ’ By comparison, the sweetcorn looked glamorous.

Above me, behind me, he laughed, ‘ Never been more sure.’

But I tried, ‘Broccoli florets?’ Because florets sounded faintly enticing.

‘Deceptive.’

I surfaced, enquiringly.

‘Thaws to rubber,’ he explained.

‘How do you know?’

He shrugged, more than necessary, both hands off the moving trolley, Look, Mum, no hands . ‘I just do. Cauliflower, too. Anything that’s not spinach.’ A twitch of a smile. ‘Which is why I said spinach. ’ Then he said, ‘I noticed the mound of Mars Bars,’ and managed more of the smile.

Those Mars Bars would have been hard to miss: the only contents, so far, of the freezer. ‘A girl needs her luxuries.’

His eyes dropped wider: he is the only person whom I know who has eyes like trap doors. He said, ‘And I was so sure that it was greens that a girl needed.’

I returned to the matter of the frozen spinach, which, I found, existed in two forms: solid blocks, the size of paperback books; or pellets, packed loosely into cushion-sized bags. A block would be slow to thaw, and then would swamp us in spinach: a problem to which there is no solution (spinach sandwiches?). I had never had a freezer, but I knew the rule, I knew never to refreeze: everyone knows that to thaw food is to disturb the undead. I reached down into the freezer. Although they were impractical, I liked the feel of the solid blocks, but they were made of leaf spinach: a leaf which is not in fact a leaf but a length of vivid green silk to make bobbins of our front teeth. I turned my attention to the pellets: chopped spinach, which I recognized as a euphemism for minced. Silently vowing that spinach was the only minced vegetable that I would allow before my ninetieth birthday, I hauled a pack from the icy-fluffy depths.

Three weeks later, three weekly shopping trips later, and our frozen food supply is three feet deep. On several occasions we have filled a saucepan with those frosted pellets of moss, and hey presto … Hey presto, thawed spinach. But Christie thinks of something, he always thinks of something, he saves the day with a curry or a lasagne. By contrast, I am quick to despair. In my hands, thawed spinach remains thawed spinach, becomes nothing better than warm spinach. The freezer has not made a cook of me. But Christie can cook, and now our lives have become like other people’s lives, with proper meals, like clockwork. Our freezer needs feeding, but this is fun: we drive to a hangar of a supermarket, spin a trolley around stacks of food, pick up whatever we fancy and then pay by card, which is not like paying at all. And the freezer more than repays us: a lift of the lid to find the fruits of our labours. I have heard that the hitch is a loss of flavour over time, but I am sure that I can live with that.

But now I have to do something because the food is thawing below me in the kitchen, slowly losing its lifeblood of ice as I float warm here in my bed. A moment ago, opening my eyes, I turned to my clock to find that the digital display was wholly black – hollow. I ran my hand down the wall for the switch for my lamp; the switch snapped down but seemed to fall short – nothing, no power. We are deep into the night: the moon is high, shrunk to a pearl; the silence is as thorough as new, heavy snow. I am softened by sleep and can only wait for my clock to open its green eyes, to show me how the power cut is merely a momentary failure, a flicker, a mistake. But nothing. There is nothing that I can do to fix this. Time for damage limitation: I will have to leave my bed and go downstairs with blankets for the freezer.