Thames Gateway 01; Wide Open

by Nicola Barker

  “Yes,” the woman nodded. Her feet were bare and she wore a light summer dress which was wet and virtually transparent, torn in the skirt and blotched in a couple of places with what looked like mud or lichen.

  Jim had no intention of driving Luke to the hospital. He had his own reasons for this which he felt no desire to discuss publicly. Instead he spoke to Ronny: “No. You should drive.”

  “I can’t,” Ronny’s face glistened with rain. “I mean I would if it was an automatic, but it isn’t.”

  Jim turned to the woman. “Could you drive?”

  “No. I don’t have a licence. I can’t even drive a tractor.” She glanced down at herself. “Anyway, look at me, what would people think?”

  “Does it matter?”

  Her eyes were round. She was incredulous. “How long have you lived in this community? Of course it matters.”

  Ronny spoke again, more insistently this time. “You should drive him, Jim. I wouldn’t even know the route.”

  Luke grunted from the sofa. His lips were moving. “What’s he saying?” Ronny squatted down next to him and grabbed hold of his wrist. After a great deal of effort Luke raised his head and managed to utter two complete words: “Recovery…position.”

  Ronny looked up, scowling. “Recovery position?”

  Jim was flummoxed. “I don’t know any first aid. Would that involve lying him on his side or something?”

  He looked to Sara who shrugged helplessly. Ronny turned to Luke again. “What is the recovery position, Luke?”

  Luke waved his hands, weakly, like he was conducting a small rodent orchestra. He clearly had no idea.

  Ronny smiled, tickled by something. “What we should all bear in mind,” he said gently, “Luke especially, is that dying is not such an extraordinary thing. In fact,” he addressed himself directly to Luke, “it’s actually very ordinary.”

  Luke did not react well to this information. He found his voice, somewhere way deep down inside of him, although its note was as weedy as a reed pipe. “It is…bad,” he panted, “you stupid fuck.”

  “Turn him on his side,” Jim spoke to Sara, who was beginning to look frantic, “his left side, and while you’re doing that we’ll go next door and find the car keys.”

  Sara did just as he’d asked. She was well accustomed to responding without a murmur to curt instructions. Jim walked into the rain and Ronny followed. “Will you drive him after all?”

  Jim didn’t answer. Instead he pushed Luke’s prefab door open and began scouting around.

  “You seem very calm,” Ronny said.

  Jim shifted some papers and photos on Luke’s table. A strange montage of pictures of a woman inserting the bulb end of a flowering hyacinth into her vagina occupied his attention for a second. They were so irrelevant, so inappropriate that he almost laughed out loud when he saw them, but instead of laughing he pushed them aside, roughly. Several fell to the floor. Ronny picked them up and inspected them.

  “I really hope Luke cleared the mud off the bulb end,” he said, “before he set about taking these.”

  Jim found the keys in a cup on the table. He took a deep breath. “I’ve got the keys, Ronny,” he spoke quietly, “but I’d rather not drive him to the hospital.”

  “Why not?” Ronny put down the photos.

  “They might recognize me there.”

  “How come?”

  “I stole some drugs a while ago. I don’t feel happy about going back.”

  Ronny was surprised. “You stole drugs?”

  “I needed them. I had a prescription but it was difficult to renew it. I’ll be in trouble if I go back.”

  “I don’t think they’d recognize you,” Ronny said quickly, “not in an emergency.”

  “They would. This is a small community, and I’m hardly inconspicuous.”

  Ronny looked miserable. “It’s just that I already had to use my right arm earlier to carry Luke into the prefab and I felt strange after, kind of sick and fluttery inside. It felt all wrong.”

  Jim struggled to sympathize. He struggled. “Just this once, Ronny. He may be dying.”

  Ronny gnawed at his thumbnail. “But what about her? Why can’t she do it?”

  “She said she can’t drive.”

  “I don’t believe her. Everyone can drive.”

  Jim frowned. “If we end up having a huge row over it she’ll get suspicious.”

  “Why should she?”

  Jim’s face was blank.

  “Suspicious about what?” Ronny persisted.

  “I’m asking you,” Jim said, his voice so hollow and urgent it was really quite eerie, “please. Please.”

  Ronny scowled, snatched up the keys and walked out into the rain.

  ∨ Wide Open ∧

  Eighteen

  The longer it took for Sara to arrive home, the more enraged Lily became. Where was she anyway? She hadn’t told her she was going out. Eventually it grew dark. Lily was freezing. She was still undressed. The pink hand towel was cold and damp. Her legs and midriff felt all itchy and stiff. Her toe throbbed. She shifted. Her arms were indented with the pattern of the woodchip wallpaper. Her bottom was pocked with several small dustballs and hair-clusters which the Hoover hadn’t quite reached, but her soft skin had reached them.

  She was sitting, knees up, huddled, in a corner of the landing. After the incident…The Incident. After The Incident she’d cowered there, more for effect than for anything. What was the point, after all, in making a scene if there was no one present to witness it? She hadn’t minded the initial twenty minutes. It had all been quite exciting. But she’d been waiting for almost two hours now, and she was bored and furious. In fact she’d almost forgotten why it was that she had snuck down there in the first place.

  The only thing that kept her – crouched and resentfully timorous – in her corner, was the galling apprehension that if she moved all her suffering would be for nothing. And Sara had to be punished. For not being there. For not understanding her secrets. For being old and clumsy and separate. Yes.

  Finally she heard a key in the lock. Voices. She listened, holding her breath. Two voices, one of them male. She jumped up and ran to her bedroom – a startled hare – threw on a precautionary dressing-gown, then came on out boxing. They were in the hallway.

  “I’ve been going out of my mind!” she expostulated, making a grand entrance at the top of the stairs, limping extraordinarily. “And something terrible bit my toe. Where were you?”

  She stopped in her tracks. On the first stair, close to the wall, lay a sharp blade with blood at its tip. She bent down, grabbed it, and held it behind her back. At the foot of the stairs stood Sara and Ronny. Sara looked washed out. She was torn and wrecked. “Look,” she said hoarsely, ignoring Lily’s protestations, “this is Ronny. He needs to get back to one of the prefabs on the beach. Will you take him? I know it’s dark but you could push your bike there and then ride it back again.”

  This was all utterly unforeseen. Lily was thrown off-kilter. “You mean right now?”

  “Yes. He doesn’t know the way.”

  She was disgruntled. And she was about to complain, to heehaw, to dig in her hooves like a mule, when she noticed that her mother was holding something. “What is that?” she asked nervously. Sara looked down. “A towel. It was in the driveway. It must’ve blown off the line.”

  “Oh.”

  Lily stared at the brown towel.

  “So will you take him?”

  But Lily wasn’t listening. She was staring at the wall and at the banisters.

  “What’s wrong?” Sara’s eyes followed the route Lily’s had just taken. She stepped forward, squinting. “What is that? What’s been happening here?”

  Lily recoiled. “I don’t know.”

  Sara climbed a couple of the stairs. “My God,” she stepped back again, “that’s revolting.”

  The wall was smeared with blood. A thick blood. Liverish. It was a reddish brown colour and almost dry. The banisters were
spotted with it, the skirting boards. It was everywhere.

  “What is this? What have you done?”

  “Me?” Lily was aggrieved and righteous. “I haven’t done anything.”

  But Sara was distracted, suddenly. She was looking down at her own two hands which were red, and the front of her dress, also red. She dropped the towel. “I thought it was wet from a puddle, not…” she mumbled, stunned.

  Ronny remained stock still at the foot of the stairs. He had said nothing, hitherto, but he was rubbing his stomach. He looked queasy.

  “Oh Christ!” Lily yelled, seeing his expression, her girlish dignity suddenly in tatters. “All this mess! It’s so embarrassing. Why the hell did you have to bring him here?”

  “Uh…” Ronny interjected, “I felt sick anyway. It has nothing at all to do with your wallpaper.”

  Sara gingerly lifted the bloody towel by its corners. She held it up. Several downy feathers adhered to its sticky, damp fabric. Lily took a cautious step backwards.

  “It’s absolutely soaking,” Sara said softly, “heavy Do you have any idea how this could have happened?”

  Lily scowled. “No.”

  “You’ve not been bleeding or anything?”

  “No!”

  Lily’s eyes were stony with mortification.

  “Not even…you know?”

  “Oh, my God, I hate you!” Lily yelled, sprinting off towards the sanctuary of her bedroom. “You just want everyone to think I’m some kind of crazy witch or a pervert or a stupid weirdo!”

  The door slammed. Ronny sat down on the bottom stair. Sara pushed past him. “I’d better wash my hands and put this in to soak.”

  Lily tossed the knife into a drawer and then listened, furtively. Their voices were muffled but audible. And while she listened she pressed her hands to her cheeks to feel how hot they were and then tried to cool them – first with her fists, then with the back of a plastic hairbrush, and finally with the cool innards of her A Level Business Studies text book. She was a skinny statuette. She was Tome-Head.

  “I’m really sorry about this,” Sara said, “it’s just so strange. If you wait in the sitting room until Lily’s calmed down, I’ll quickly try and clear up the worst of it.”

  “I’m fine here,” Ronny said, watching her disappear into the kitchen, remaining seated, picking off a couple of feathers from his cardigan’s sleeve and then raising his voice over the sound of water running. “It smells kind of like iron, don’t you think? The blood? Like metal.”

  “Yes.” Sara’s voice was distant and then close again. “I’d hate you to think we made a habit of doing this kind of thing.”

  Ronny was silent for a moment and then he said thoughtfully, “Your daughter seems very angry about something.”

  “Lily? You think so?”

  “Lily. That’s pretty.”

  “Yes. I’ve always liked it.”

  Lily growled into her text book. She hated her fucking name.

  Sara was holding a bucket and a cloth. “It’s mainly just her age. You know? Hormones.”

  Lily growled again. Oh how she would make Sara suffer for this! She was seventeen, for heaven’s sake. Seventeen!

  “When I was thirteen,” Ronny said, “I remember that things seemed very confusing.” He didn’t add that they still felt that way.

  “She’s actually seventeen,” Sara said, wringing out the cloth and applying it to the banister.

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” Sara grunted slightly as she rubbed, “Lily’s a late developer. She’s always beerrslightly taller than average but very gawky. It’s taken her a while to mature physically…I mean as quickly as other girls of the same age.”

  Lily squealed. She threw down her book, pulled on a T-shirt, some jeans, yanked on her trainers, flinching, slightly, when her sore toe clashed with the fabric interior, then ran into the hallway. “Let’s go! Let’s go!” she yelled, facing her humiliation head on, butting it aside, taking the stairs two at a time, pushing past Sara and her bucket of soapy water, grabbing Ronny by the arm and dragging him, dragging him towards the front door.

  “Come on!”

  ♦

  The fire was blazing. Jim was preparing a Fray Bentos chicken pie. It was steaming in the kitchen. He sat on the sofa, a pen in his hand, a pad of paper on his lap. He wore no hat. Light from the bulb above glanced off his bright pate. He was fleshy, like a sea anemone. He was bare.

  Jim swapped the pen into his right hand. Dear Nathan, he wrote, in shaky print, and then he stared at these words for a long, long time. Eventually he glanced up, into the fire.

  Red flames. Red hair. Hot. Hot. Hot. It took him right back. He remembered his brother and the last time he ever saw him, in his father’s house. Nathan. All tough, and bullish and twenty-four, with a regular job and a bedsit and everything.

  “You can sleep on the sofa,” he’d said, his eyes dense and glossed with earnestness, “and you can stay just as long as you like. That’s a promise.”

  Little Ronnie, who was now Jim, sat on his bed, his arms around his knees, barely there, really. Eventually he whispered, “It’s too late.”

  “It’s never too late,” Nathan smiled, “never. You’re fifteen. Fifteen! You can do anything you want with your life.”

  “I don’t dare think about it,” Little Ronnie mumbled, “there’s just too much stuff…”

  He gazed around at his dank, grey room, his few books, his posters, his chemistry set, his bed, the notches in the wall from the bedposts, and the scratches in the plaster he’d made himself with a compass. Little pictures and lines and notes and messages in baby code. His scratches. This was everything, wasn’t it? These were all his possibilities.

  “I’ve got the car. It’ll be two trips, that’s all. Two stupid trips.”

  “But there’s all these arrangements, Nathan. Things I can’t get out of.”

  “I want you to come with me.” Nathan was insistent.

  “I can’t.”

  “I’m begging you to come. I’m begging you.”

  Little Ronnie looked up into his brother’s kind eyes. “Force me.”

  “No.” Nathan would not be drawn. He was better than that, he was bigger than his father, he was decent. “I can’t force you. It’s your own decision. You’re not a child any more.”

  “It’s just…”

  Little Ronnie was tugging at his hair. His thin hair, which was worn and patchy like an old animal pelt.

  “Don’t be afraid of him,” Nathan exclaimed, “he’s just a stupid, stinking old man.”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  Oh God, he was.

  “Then what is it?”

  “I can’t make the decision.”

  Help me, help me, help me, Little Ronnie was thinking. Help me.

  Nathan grew impatient. He was offering the world.

  “Is your suitcase still packed and tucked away under your bed?” He suddenly spoke like an ally. Because this was their past, their pact, their sweet secret he’d rejuvenated.

  “No.” Little Ronnie shook his head.

  Nathan squatted down and glanced under. “I see it.”

  He put out a hand to grab it.

  “Not the suitcase!”

  Little Ronnie tried to stop his older brother, but Nathan pulled out the case anyway, and Ronnie bent to his will like a strand of corn, a straw.

  “Always packed,” Nathan said, “like when we were kids, remember? And I promised I’d take you away the very first time?”

  He was only eight years old when Big Ron returned from his long trip away. But even then he’d longed to escape. He’d planned to.

  Nathan opened the case, expecting to find the little shirts and little shoes, the baby clothes that he’d packed himself when Little Jim was still a toddler and he’d yearned so much to save him. But he recoiled at what he saw instead, and then his expression dulled and his eyes glazed over like the eyes of a fish too long out of water.

  In the case lay
a collection of polaroids, some self-assembled newsletters, a camera, some rope, a knife, a hot water bottle, a roll of thick brown sticky tape, other stuff. He slammed the case shut. Something inviolate had been violated.

  “What’s going on?” he asked. His voice was heavy-vowelled. He was sticky-throated. Little Ronnie scratched at his cheeks like a limp, long-limbed baby monkey. He said nothing. Nathan fastened the locks on the case and picked it up. He wouldn’t leave it. No bloody way.

  “Are you coming?”

  He was rough now. Little Ronnie shook his head. It was too late. It had always been too late. Even breathing implicated him. Even blinking.

  “This is the very last time,” Nathan said, his voice creaking, “that I’m going to ask.”

  Little Ronnie huddled up.

  Nathan felt his heart judder inside his rocky chest like a pebble on the thick-set surface of an icy pond. He wouldn’t crack. He couldn’t. He inhaled. Deep, deep. He exhaled. He turned. He went. And that was the end of everything. Because when Nathan left his father’s house, all decency left with him.

  ∨ Wide Open ∧

  Nineteen

  He was sick four times. The first time, up against the back wheel of the green Volvo.

  “Yuk.”

  Lily watched him.

  “Is it food poisoning?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then what?”

  “Misery.”

  “Shiiiiit!”

  Ronny straightened up and began walking down the farm’s long drive. It was dark and the moon was high.

  “Why don’t you take the car?” She limped along next to him.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  He glanced at her with something approaching bewilderment. She was so angry. After a while he said gently, “So we’ve all appreciated the joke now, Lily.”

  “What joke?”

  She scowled at him.

  “That I walk a little strangely.”

  Lily stopped short. “I didn’t even notice,” she said, all stiff-necked huff, “and if you actually want to know, I’ve injured my foot.”