Thames Gateway 01; Wide Open

by Nicola Barker

  Just Big Ron.

  Remember him?

  Then Little Ronny was born.

  What a relief.

  ♦

  Big Ron and all his friends. Feel of brickwork. Half smile. Smell of camphor. Wet sheet.

  ♦

  It’s a mould, the letter said, a mould. You wipe it off the wall but it comes back because there’s damp in the wall. It comes back. You bleach the wall, you scrub it, but the mould comes back. And the mould’s in you. You cunt. You fucking evil cunt. And your brother. Do you know what you’ve done? Do you know?

  Remember Big Ron?

  Empty. Twist. Wind. Grave. Lonely. Sharp. Stiff. Spoiled. Breath, no-breath. Ruined. Empty. Hollow, hollow, hollow, hollow.

  Oh thank God little Ronny came. Oh thank God, thank God.

  But he’s only little.

  Only.

  Little.

  And even that didn’t stop him.

  ♦

  Nathan’s thoughts were a giant, angry sea tap-tap-tapping on a small dyke wall. He tried to hold the sea at bay.

  He tried to run it off. He ran, sometimes, through the park, along the road, down by the canal. He ground his teeth on buses. He bit his nails to the quick. He held his breath. He tried to be a gentle man.

  But the sea kept on tapping.

  After Connie’s visit, a blood vessel burst in his eye. He gazed at it in the mirror. It resembled a river. A tiny, bloody Amazon.

  Nobody saw. Nobody ever saw. Because Nathan was grown up now. The past was such a long time ago. And Big Ron was dead dead dead. He was dead.

  ∨ Wide Open ∧

  Thirteen

  “I was very surprised by your bathroom cabinet,” Ronny said, wiping egg from his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “What were you doing in my bathroom cabinet?” Jim asked, an edge in his voice.

  “I was hunting for a razor,” Ronny said, “and there’s an edge in your voice.”

  “I don’t have a razor.”

  Jim was clearing the hearth. It was full of ash.

  “But do you have an edge?”

  Jim stopped clearing and almost smiled. “An edge? Doesn’t everybody? Don’t you?”

  Ronny grinned. “Sometimes.”

  “I have an edge,” Jim confided, “but what I don’t have is a temper.”

  Ronny sat down on the sofa. He was holding a small pair of nail scissors.

  “I’m going to cut off my beard.”

  Jim said nothing. Ronny began snipping. “The way you said it!” he chuckled, sotto voce.

  “Said what?”

  “I don’t have a temper. Have. Like a temper was something you were really searching for.”

  Jim straightened up. Ronny continued. “Like in a children’s story. He was looking for his temper. He looked in the fireplace. He looked in the bread bin. He looked in the bathroom cabinet…”

  “No. You looked in the bathroom cabinet.”

  Ronny snorted, but then continued mining the same vein, un-repentantly, “So Ronny looked for Jim’s temper. He thought he’d found it in the bathroom cabinet but in fact all he’d found was an edge,” he looked up, “and loads of pills. What are they for?”

  “Indigestion,” Jim said.

  “Really?”

  “No.” Jim smiled.

  “Hair is extremely flammable,” Ronny muttered, cutting with vigour.

  “We need kindling and driftwood if you want a fire later,” Jim said, standing up with the ash-can in one hand and a brush in his other. “Do you want to come out and collect some?”

  “Sure.”

  Ronny chucked a handful of his hair into the empty fireplace and then followed Jim outside with all the casual ease and familiarity of an old basset hound.

  They walked along the beach. It was mid-afternoon.

  “So why did you lose your hair?” Ronny asked.

  “I had a habit,” Jim said, bending over to pick up a stick, “of pulling out single strands.”

  “Why?”

  “It was a nervous habit. A bad habit. I didn’t even know I was doing it. After a while I made a little bald patch.”

  “Where?”

  “At the back, underneath. You couldn’t see it. But one day it began falling out spontaneously. I’d find handfuls of it on my pillow in the morning. Then I was prescribed certain drugs, hormones, which made it worse. Eventually it all went. Even my lashes.”

  Ronny kicked at a large log. “How about this?”

  “Not if it’s damp.”

  Ronny picked up the log. He grinned. “I thought I might find your temper under it.”

  Jim scratched his nose. “I don’t think I’d keep my temper under a log.”

  He walked on.

  “How come those chalets are all fenced off?” Ronny asked, catching up, readjusting the log under his right arm and then nodding towards the hamlet.

  “It’s a private community. They think the locals are all freaks. Anti-social. Inbred. So they put the fence up to distinguish themselves. And we tend to think they’re weird because they put up the fence and because they come here principally on summer weekends to use the nudist beach.”

  “Could I squat one?”

  “The chalets? I shouldn’t think so. But a couple of the prefabs near mine are empty.”

  They had walked far enough along the beach to reach Ronny’s shell display which had remained untouched since its completion that morning. Jim paused in front of it, Ronny too.

  “What do you think?” he asked, smiling.

  “Very…uh…nice,” Jim said finally, having struggled valiantly for a better word.

  “You know,” Ronny looked calmly at his work, “I think I could mess around with shells forever. It’s very calming. Perhaps I’ll make this display bigger. I could fill the whole beach with it.”

  Jim stared at the shell display. “What about the sea?”

  “What about it?”

  “And the bathers?”

  “I wouldn’t care about them.”

  “And how would you eat?”

  “I’d fish and I’d pilfer.”

  Ronny chuckled at Jim’s serious expression, because he hadn’t actually meant a word of it. Jim wasn’t smiling though. He found it difficult to imagine someone being willing to settle for so little. He said as much.

  “Wouldn’t you get bored?”

  “I don’t get bored. That’s one of my virtues. I never get bored. I have this great ability to focus.”

  Jim scratched his heck. “I’m unsure whether being unable to get bored is necessarily a good thing.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “OK.” Jim conceded so quickly it was almost comical. Ronny shrugged, not really caring. He pointed towards his shell display. “Can you read it?”

  “Read it? No.”

  “Honestly?”

  “No.”

  Ronny had made a small romantic gesture. Like a girl laboriously scratching a boy’s initials on to a school desk. Jim stared blankly at his own name spelled out in sweet pastels.

  “And there was a razor,” Ronny said, focusing in on the shells himself, “in the cabinet. At the back.”

  Jim’s expression remained frozen.

  ♦

  Sure enough, she’d returned to Luke when the afternoon was getting dolled up in extravagant pinks and violets for the evening. Luke was one of those men to whom such things habitually occurred. His life had been full of women, calling by, dropping in, vacating. So the prospect of another meeting with Sara had left him feeling wonderfully bold, delightfully sassy, and, well, he had to admit it, the smallest, the tiniest, the most infinitesimal fraction guilty.

  The truth was that he’d been fully intending to clear out: his body, his mind. He’d wanted to rid his existence of people. His last wife (his second wife) had yearned to cram his life full of them, full of herself, principally: her wants, her needs, her desires. But Luke had actually felt himself congested enough already. Crammed up in a too-small
space with his booze, his fags, his belly and all his countless other vices.

  He’d enjoyed a substantial life, a substantial career, substantial work, he felt, but real substance, true substance, he suddenly believed, depended on a kind of purity. A meanness, a thinness, a vigour. He wanted these things. He’d earned money. He’d been flash and greasy and commercial. And it had filled him up, certainly. But now he felt a need to recreate himself in the image of a world that was sparse and bare and elemental. Reaching the zenith, he told himself, depended not on doing more, but on doing less.

  Luke was so unperturbed, so casual, so easy, in fact, following his chat with Jim, that instead of returning straight home in anticipation of Sara’s probable arrival, he strolled off along the beach in search of Ronny’s elusive black rabbits. He even took his camera with him. Maybe this would be the start of something? He couldn’t be a landscape man, not straight off, that was asking too much, but he could be a dot on a landscape man. Any dot would do. A rabbit, a bird, a rat, even.

  Sara, for her part, was thoroughly fearful and flustered. It was by no means unusual for her to act on impulse, but her impulses were invariably uniform, dull and doggedly predictable. Fish on Friday. Cheese scones. Skimmed milk. Germolene. She had thought long and hard about what to wear. In the mirror her own face stared back at her, weather-beaten. A buffeted face. Brown, although not with a posh tan or a holiday tan, but with an outside tan – the kind of tan workmen had, and bin-men. She had bright blue eyes and black hair. But her hair was wiry and it wouldn’t go, not anywhere, it hung around her face, sulkily. It stuck up.

  In her cupboard there was precious little to choose from. After a time she decided on something frivolous. Anything wintery was too serious, too full of weight and intent. So outside she threw on her best, long summer dress – even though the summer was over – and inside she wore the special bra and pants that she saved for medical examinations. All new. All bright white. Utterly unimpeachable.

  She sneaked out of the house through the back door. Lily was in. She was upstairs in the bathroom. She’d complained that there was never any hot water when she wanted it, so Sara had quietly switched on the immersion. Twice Lily had stood before her, both times draped in a large brown towel.

  “Do you think I’m dirty?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Am I the kind of girl whose friends write about her to magazines?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Why are you wearing your best summer dress?”

  “I’m not. And stop scratching your neck. That’s just tan.”

  “I know! I told him it was fucking tan!”

  “Told who?”

  Lily ran upstairs to check in the mirror again.

  She returned later and hung around in Sara’s bedroom.

  “Is that lipstick?”

  Sara’s eyes widened. “Lip balm. They felt chapped.”

  “What I want to know is this,” Lily mooched, not having listened, “how come the bald one knew I was dirty when I’ve never even spoken to him before? It must’ve been the fishy one who said it first.”

  “You aren’t dirty.”

  Sara slipped perfume and some face powder into her handbag. “Haven’t you bathed yet?”

  “No.”

  “Isn’t the water hot enough?”

  “Of course it’s hot enough…”

  Lily’s eyes tightened and her jaw jutted out from the smooth coastline of her face. “Christ almighty. Is it any wonder that I have no self esteem?”

  “I wasn’t…”

  But like a pretty pleated skirt at a country dance, Lily flounced right on out.

  ∨ Wide Open ∧

  Fourteen

  Connie pressed her nose to the sheets of paper. They smelled of tobacco and floor polish. Not traditionally exotic aromas, but in this, her own particular context, she found them bewitching. She was sitting at a desk in the guest bedroom of her mother’s house. The room was a forget-me-not blue with a navy trim halfway up the walls and bright white above. Pine desk, pine bed, high-polished pine floors. Everything spotless. She wore a pair of reading glasses which sat far down on her small nose and slipped if she blinked.

  ♦

  Something bit me in the night and now I’m sick. I have nets over my bunk and these stunted ochre-coloured candles which I burn while I sleep in an attempt to keep the mosquitos at bay. But there are bites on my belly, two of them, either side of my navel, like rusty little anthills. The local man – he’s no doctor and he speaks no English – expressed no interest in the lumps. Instead he blamed the rain. It’s the rainy season, he said, and made the sign of rain falling.

  Yet Louis reckons that they could be something more sinister. So I lie in my bed to please him, and although outside it’s stupidly damp, inside it’s still relentlessly hot, hot, hot. The smell of the candles enters everything. Their scent is similar to cardamom only more acrid. Their aroma stinks up my clothes and my sheets and my hair. I taste it under my nails. I find a brown dust in my nostrils. I have a pathetic cough.

  You should hear me, Ronny, with my pathetic cough.

  The smell gets behind your eyes and feels so intense, like a bee buzzing in the ridge of your nose, also it tangs bitterly on the back of my tongue. I try constantly to swig it down with glasses of boiled water, but the vinegarish taste just clings and cloys. So what good after all were my countless precautions? I caught this tiresome sickness anyway, and it doesn’t even amount to what Louis would call A Proper Ailment. It has no dignity. It isn’t grandly tropical like I’d hoped. It isn’t a fever or a temperature or anything like that. It is simply a heaviness.

  I can feel every bone. Even my individual ribs, which as I breathe are like hard iron hoops tightening around my chest. My knees feel terrible. It’s true! Like a gorilla’s heavy knuckles, dragging, dragging. I tried to rub them with my hands at first, but my actual knuckles soon grew numb and weighty and ineffectual.

  Pity me, Ronny!

  Naturally, for all his apparent concern, Louis refused point blank to call out the proper doctor again. Again? He had come once already a month ago when a blister on my heel went septic and my whole foot turned a whitish blue colour. That often happens here. The local people use forest herbs to prevent infections, even the chimps do the same, Louis says, but neither he nor I are botanists.

  Anyway, I bound it up. I ignored it. It didn’t hurt. And then one day the skin came loose. The layers had separated and resembled a flaky, filo pastry. But harboured underneath this fragile crust were a hundred writhing orange worms. A bright, vibrant, zesty tangerine. A crazy synthetic colour. Orange bodies tipped with jet-black pin-heads.

  I went mad. When the doctor came he burned them out. He was disgusted that neither Louis nor I had taken any kind of first aid course back at home. He was a sour, grey-haired, safari-suited New Zealander who clearly thought us both fools. And his fee was exorbitant. Louis literally spewed. He was livid.

  So I was glad of the local man, when he came to my shack, inspected my hands, my neck, my ankles and then stuck his tongue deep into his cheek with a correspondingly speculative shrug of his shoulders. One of the trappers – we call him Monty, Christ knows why – told Louis afterwards that the heavy bones are a sign that the soul is light and longs to fly away. Like a butterfly, he said, or like a wild jungle parrot in a keep net.

  But nobody keeps me, Ronny.

  I have a window. No glass in it. And through the window I can see the forest and the sky as I recline on my bunk. The dense forest and the high grey sky. The air oozes with different sounds. As I lie here, heavy-boned and hopeless, I can detect the calls of twelve distinct birds. The monkeys chatter and squeal relentlessly. I hear the chuck and hiss of a stream. The trees, the leaves, the warm wind. I hear them.

  And most of all I hear the rain. The soft earth sucks up its sudden tears so readily with its ardent red-hard lips. I hear nature’s lovemaking – the perpetual tickle and thrill of it all – from this my sick-sick
bed. But where do I fit? Hidden in my shack. A nut in its husk? Perhaps, I tell myself, I am the earth’s pale tongue. Or a small, dull bud. Or a heavy chrysalis. An insect? A turning, yearning, bleached, blanched milk-white aphid.

  I lie and I lie and I wonder what I am.

  Ronny? M.

  ♦

  Connie threw down the letter, knocked her glasses off and on to the desk, pushed her chair back and stood up. On the high-polished floor to her left was a powder-blue rug, fluffy and small. She sprang on to it, settled her weight and then kicked off. She had done this before, countless times.

  She flew from the desk to the opposite wall, from the wall she flew to the bed and back again. She kept her balance exquisitely, and then, just as suddenly, she absolutely lost it. The rug tucked and gathered. It tipped. She felt the wooden boards jar and crack against her palms and her knees. “Ow!” she whispered, as a matter of form, and then she lay down flat on her stomach and pushed her cheek hard against the floor’s cold, wooden boards. She listened to their creaking as the blood pumped in her ears. She closed her eyes.

  It was in this strange position that her mother discovered her.

  ♦

  Lately, Lily had begun remembering things which she knew for a fact she’d done herself, as if somebody else had done them. Small acts of cruelty. Unjustifiable lies. Tiny injuries. Arguments. Plain observations. Whims.

  Her brain – keen for mischief, for diversity – had started experimenting with notions of context, and meaning, and responsibility. Lily found herself experiencing certain intimate, everyday occurrences second-hand. She would remember actual events, but only as hearsay, as stories, or as interesting fragments of other people’s conversation.

  Had she ever doubted her own judgement, questioned her own motivations or struggled against her worse inclinations, this development might have given Lily pause. But she never doubted herself. She was bold and wild and sure. This was how she survived.

  Anyhow, that sheer ravine which suddenly seemed to exist between memory and action could be tantalizing when experienced, she felt, and sometimes liberating. Like a drug. Scary. Addictive. And, yes, there was the occasional bad trip, too. Inevitably.