He Used to Do Dangerous Things is the debut short story collection from poet Gaia Holmes. These stories deal with a range of issues including family relations, grief, loneliness, depression and environmental protest. One of the things I enjoyed was how certain motifs occur in several of the stories (eg power cuts and batteries) creating connections between the stories.
The title story He Used to Do Dangerous Things focuses on Mick, who used to do dangerous things to raise money for charity, after being diagnosed with depression. Mick sees his depression as a black dog:
"He said he couldn’t walk through depression or away from it, but he could walk with it. He said that sometimes when he was out, it was as if the dog had seen a rabbit and it would race away from him through the gorse. It was a beautiful and powerful thing to watch, such a big, heavy beast running so quickly and weightlessly.”
Unloved Flowers follows Connor, a security guard in a garden centre with a strong feeling for nature. I can totally relate to this description of a train journey:
“The sun’s just coming up, wheat fields a dull gold in the light, eagle on a telegraph pole, swallows swooping, deer. The woman sitting beside him is researching off-grid techno-detox holidays. She scrolls through Instagram photos of barefoot people and yurts and campfires... package holidays, ‘be free with the trees’, ‘Wild women’. The man across the aisle is in some angular virtual world shooting killer robot rabbits and outside there are trees, the smell of rain and foxes, a kestrel, a field humming with the blue of cornflowers, a heron, a huge lolloping hare. Look up! Look out, he wants to shout into the crowded carriage but he doesn’t.”
Connor gets to know a group of homeless people living in a greenspace that becomes threatened with development, becomes part of the community and joins in their fight to save their home, culminating in a beautifully surreal ending.
Environmental protest also features in 198 Methods of NVDA (NVDA is Non-Violent Direct Action) which takes the form of a diary of a participant at the protest against the Newbury bypass. The story gradually reveals the diary writer's motivations for protest.
In Poached, the narrator gives us three inter-related stories. She and her partner are regularly enjoying the eggs from their adopted rescue chickens while watching the nesting birds in their garden and worrying about their own inability to conceive a child. A story that starts off sweet but ends up in a much darker place.
In Ratguts and Lola, a long distance lorry driver picks up two hitch-hikers and introduces them to his goldfish, Lola, who is losing her shine. The journey seems to have a transformational effect on the goldfish.
Two stories explicitly deal with COVID. Defrosting, in which a woman who lost her husband to COVID ponders death as she wonders what to do with the left over Christmas turkey and her husband's favourite robin who has just died in their garden. Surge shows us how one lonely old man tries to cope with lockdown in his block of flats where the neighbours barely acknowledge each other in the stairs. He finds a unique way of dealing with things and is then suprised by an act of generosity by a neighbour.
The other story I want to mention individually is Taste the Raisin, in which a visit from the plumber takes an unexpected turn, with very positive effects for the narrator.
This is an excellent collection of varied stories that show people finding ways of coping and helping each other through difficult situations. Often surreal, sometimes amusing and occasionally dark, these are stories that you will want to read again.
He Used to Do Dangerous Things by Gaia Holmes, published (2024) by Comma Press.
Disclaimer: I was sent a free pdf of this book to consider reviewing.
