Stone Children and Other Stories

Publishing as an industry is obsessed with new – books yet to come out… but what about the brilliant books that have already been published? Each month we spotlight a different author whose book was published more than a year ago, which you might be yet to meet… This month Clare Colvin introduces a short story from her Hay Press collection Stone Children and Other Stories…

Shuffling the Shelves: Stone Children and Other Stories by Clare Colvin

Sometimes I feel my life is like a series of short stories. The stories I gathered over the years for my short-story collection for Hay at Renard Press range widely in subject, but are connected through my passion for travel, largely in Europe and India. They can also express a feeling of otherness, stemming from the unexplained or supernatural. The fable of ‘The Archduke’s Dwarf’ was inspired when I visited Salzburg’s gloriously baroque Mirabell Palace where an eighteenth-century miniature statue of a small man remains in the palace courtyard. ‘Stone Children’, the title story, was inspired by sculpture, too, in the works of the sculptor Elizabeth Muntz, part of a group of artists and writers, known as the Powys Circle, living last century in a sparsely inhabited area of Dorset.

The stories reflect the British fascination with its continental neighbours, the negative consequence of which was Brexit. There’s hardly a day goes by without my regretting its psychologically deadening effect on arts and culture, which has led to a substantial exodus of the new generation of young singers to the opera houses of Europe. But thank God we still have those who work for what is good in the arts generally. Among them is Renard Press, which celebrates its fifth anniversary this November 2025.

At the Pussycat Café

Go to Goa, they said. That’s the best cure. Maya didn’t feel ill, but the relief of having made the decision at last had left her exhausted. On her own again, finally, after how many years was it? Ten – far too long. She had fallen out of love a year after they had married, but ties of pain replace those of pleasure. Incompatibility was not reason enough to leave.

Ten years of marriage. Half a lifetime since she had last been to Goa. Since she had taken the ferry from Bombay to Panjim, the capital city, and a bus to a fishing village north of Calangute. She remembered the cry of the driver as he had canvassed for passengers. ‘Candolim! Calangute! Baga!’ in tones that implied his bus was the bargain of the day, and anyone who disagreed could Baga off. The marigold garlands over the windscreen, the blue-robed Madonna precariously pinned to the dashboard, and then after a bone-shaking drive to the driver’s choice of amplified pop songs, standing under the palm trees with her rucksack, looking towards the sea, the waves breaking on the beach, and the rustle of palm fronds. She had felt a sublime contentment just being there.

The charter flights had arrived a year or two after she had first left Goa, and this time she had travelled with Sunshine Holidays on a jumbo jet with a couple of hundred other tourists. There was an air-conditioned coach waiting at the airport for the Sunshine clients, dropping them off at different hotels on the route – so many hotels, either side of the road, obscuring the view of the sand dunes and sea. Finally, she and half a dozen others were deposited at the misleadingly named Sea View Beach Hotel, a four-storey complex centred on a swimming pool. White plastic sunbeds were grouped on the paved concrete surrounds. 

Maya looked at the breakfast buffet next morning, prepared to concede she had made a terrible mistake. Tinned orange juice, dry toast, industrial jam. All taken on a patio overlooking the swimming pool in which a large, lobster-hued man was ploughing up and down, impeding others who were trying to do so. She remembered the breakfasts they used to have at Mario’s bar, overlooking the beach. Fresh mango juice, yoghurt, newly baked Goan rolls, while they watched the fishers pulling in the nets, to the rhythmic chant of the head man. 

After breakfast this time she walked along a dusty track to the beach. It was as if Mario’s shack had multiplied a hundred times. There was amplified music playing at the bar, and several large people in tight T-shirts were sitting around with mango smoothies. The beach cafés were placed within a few yards of each other, and in front of them were ranks of beach beds and umbrellas. One of the cafés displayed a banner of a Welsh dragon, another a Union Jack. Maya spread her mat on the sand and began to apply sun lotion. Within thirty seconds a sarong pedlar was spreading out his wares in front of her, followed by a bead merchant. They would not go away. She suddenly understood the meaning of the T-shirt slogan she had seen on one of the roadside stalls – ‘Goa Way’. She retreated to a beach bed at a nearby café and paid the day rate. It was protection money. As long as she was within the fiefdom of the café owner, he would chase off all hawkers and pedlars. It was a small price to pay. She had to walk a hundred yards or so before the sound of the waves could be heard over the thudding beat of garage. More overweight people, with skins red-hued from too fast an exposure of northern skin to the subcontinent’s heat, lay prone on the sunbeds. It was as if a different race from the skinny hippies had invaded Goa.

Was she searching for peace, or was she trying to turn back the clock? As she sat, memsahib mode, in the back of a taxi along the coastal road and away from the village she had stayed at all those years before, in her mind her younger self bicycled beside her in a flowered sarong. Nobody’s serious when they’re nineteen. Young Maya had laughed as the small boys in baggy shorts raced along beside her. Older Maya raised her hand to her mouth in concern as a bright-eyed little chap grabbed at the door handle of the moving car. He could have been hurt, she exclaimed to the driver, a cheerful Goan called Joseph. 

He looked over his shoulder and grinned. ‘Take no notice, ma’am, these boys are all rascals.’ 

Maya sat back and tried to think only of the present – the sun, the bumpy ride, the beach. Into her mind, inconsequentially, slid a picture of a black leather-bound book. A record of dinner-party menus and guests. She had kept it assiduously for several years, a record of awkward evenings entertaining people she hardly knew. 

I must have been mad, thought Maya. How did I end up doing things like that?

‘Everything’s changed since I was here last,’ she said to Joseph. ‘I remember an almost empty beach, a few people lying in the shade of the fishing boats, and watching the sun go down, just listening to the sea. Is there nowhere that isn’t full of crowds and hawkers?’

‘As soon as the tourists come, the sellers follow,’ said Joseph. ‘You can still find a perfect beach, ma’am, but it’s many miles from here.’

‘Where is it? North of Anjuna?’

He shrugged in an ambivalent way that could have meant, Yes, No or Don’t Know, and said, after some thought, ‘North of Arambol, near the border, ma’am.’

‘Let’s go there, Joseph. We’ve got the whole day ahead.’

They left the flat beach road for the hills, a landscape of dry red earth and scrubby large-leaved trees. There was a heady, cloying scent in the air, which Joseph said was from the cashew trees. They distilled cashew-nut feni from them, which was far worse than palm toddy. It made men go crazy.

‘Well, we’d better keep off the brew, then,’ said Maya. ‘Shouldn’t we be near the beach now?’

She could tell from Joseph’s vague response he wasn’t sure where the beach was, and she began to wonder if such a beach existed, or whether it was just an excuse to rack up the taxi miles. Suspicious, middle-aged thinking, she told herself, but she felt a sudden nervousness. No one knew where she was – she was miles from anywhere with an unknown taxi driver, and she noticed the whites of his eyes were bloodshot. Alcohol or drugs, perhaps.

‘What’s the beach called?’

‘It’s the Pussycat Beach, ma’am, after the café.’

The road dropped down towards the coast again, surrounded both sides by thick scrubland. They made a river crossing by ferry. 

Joseph drove slowly, peering to the left and then, looking back at her rather than the road, said, ‘Ma’am, I think we’ve found it.’ The taxi veered down a cart track through the bush. Maya could see coconut palms ahead. Joseph stopped the car at a place where the track widened out, and said, ‘The beach is through the trees, and the café is further down. When do you want me to come back?’ 

It transpired that he had relatives in the area he wanted to see, so they made an arrangement for him to return in three hours. Maya shouldered her beach bag and walked down the track. 

On the side furthest from the sea was a lagoon, edged by palms. A cow was standing knee-deep in the water among the lotus flowers, contentedly immovable. Maya stayed immovable herself for some time, taking in the vibrant stillness of the scene. She could hear the song of a bellbird and the harsh caw of the crows. She walked on towards the café. 

It was different from the beach shacks in that it was a solid house, built in the Portuguese style with a deep veranda. There was a wild garden around it of palms, hibiscus and oleander. Maya drew closer, and then she saw the cats. They were sprawled on the veranda – half a dozen of them at least. They looked at her, blinking in the warm midday sun with lazy curiosity. A tabby rose from its sprawled position, arching its back, and rubbed against her legs, as if greeting a new friend. The doors to the house were open, and she stepped inside to see yet more cats. They were prowling over the wooden tables, perched on shelves and cupboards. Her appearance raised a plaintive mewing, as of an expectation of food. There were another twelve or thirteen of the animals, she counted. Apart from the cats, the café was deserted. She left their domain and walked down to the beach.

Here was the picture she had carried in her mind over the years – a wide expanse of sand stretching as far as a promontory of palm trees. Several fishing boats in tarred wood lay on the beach, above the high-water mark. She spread her mat out in the shade of a crescent shaped boat, stripped to her bathing suit and waded into the sea. The water was as intensely blue as the sky, with flecks of white foam from the breakers. As she swam, the young Maya swam with her until they merged into one.

An hour or so later, her skin dry and salty from the sun, she walked back to the café, in the hope of finding some food. This time it was not deserted. A young man wearing a tie-dye sarong was lounging in the planter’s chair on the veranda, gazing contemplatively into space. 

‘Is this the Pussycat Café?’ Maya asked – rather obviously, she thought.

‘It has pussycats, but I’m afraid it’s not a café at the moment,’ he said. ‘Come and sit, have something to drink – a mango juice, or lime soda?’

He got to his feet, and she noticed how slim he was, like the cats, and how his dark eyes had that quality she had noticed before in India, of seeming to see beyond the material world. Over lime sodas they talked, and the sensation of the years rolling away to time past intensified. There was none of the guarded conversation with which strangers meeting in England communicate. He told her how he was originally from Delhi and had come to Goa ten years ago, looking for peace. He had been attracted to the sea – he could feel the eternal harmony of the moon and the tides. At night the waves glowed with phosphorescence, and the beach was white in the moonlight. He had built this house near the beach, and had lived in it with his wife, running it as a café and taking in paying guests. But she was Scandinavian, and had gone back to Oslo. He didn’t know when she would be back, and accepted her desertion with calm fatalism. Meanwhile, he was unable to go anywhere, because he had to feed the cats.

‘For months I have been wanting to go to the ashram in Poona, but there’s no one here I can trust to care for the cats.’ And then, suddenly, ‘Would you like to stay here and look after them?’

‘But you don’t know me…’ Maya began.

‘You’re looking for peace as well, and you’ll find it here. I know you’ll look after the cats, and you’ll have space to dream, to write or to paint.’

It was as if he had tapped into her dream – to live in a beautiful place near the sea, to spend the days writing and swimming, cut off completely from the disjunction of her present life – haphazard jobs reached by rib-crushing Tube or bus journeys, walking along pavements splattered with blackened chewing gum. 

‘I would love to do that,’ she said, and it seemed that this was what she had been waiting for all her life. 

It was past sunset when the headlights of Joseph’s car appeared over the top of the hill, sending a pale wash over the landscape, and the golden oil lamps in the garden stirred with the evening breeze. In the gathering darkness, white sparks of phosphorescence from the breakers matched the brightness of the stars. 

‘Yes,’ said Maya. ‘I should really, really love to do that.’

So why is Maya waiting instead for the 38 bus, on a cold April day, to take her to her new job in the marketing department of Premier Dream Productions? Why is she living in a dim basement flat in Hackney? Why is she listening to all this claptrap round the dinner table about house prices and street crime? 

‘Well,’ Maya says, if you ask her, ‘you can’t just throw everything up in the air and take off into the unknown. And there’s a lot going on here I would miss.’ But when she thinks about it, after her friends have left, something almost like a line from a poem comes into her mind: Mankind cannot bear very much perfection. She would have been submerged by the perfect place. The palms and the hibiscus, the lotus flowers floating on the lagoon, the wide, empty sands. Remembering it now, she feels a suffocating sensation, as if she is drowning in beauty.