Clear

by Nicola Barker

  He grabs hold of his head. Jax doesn’t object (just looks a little hurt, perhaps, and surprised).

  ‘Right.’ Solomon prises Jax’s head to the correct angle, pulls the eye wide with the fingers of one hand, then tips up the tiny bottle of eye-drops with his other. Nothing happens. The lid’s still on.

  ‘So Skat D, alias Darren Weir, enters a Cardiff hotel lobby…’ Jalisa starts up (with quite exquisitely bad timing).

  ‘God, not this again…’ Solomon groans, trying to pull the lid off with his teeth.

  ‘He’s standing around with all his So Solid posse. He sees a fifteen-year-old girl walking by. He makes a crude pass at her–’

  ‘He just spoke to her,’ Solomon interrupts weakly, ‘he just propositioned her. He doesn’t grab her or anything.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I…’

  Pop!

  The lid flies off the tiny bottle. But Solomon’s had to yank at it so ferociously that his hand flies back with an unexpected force and punches the refrigerator.

  Jax barks and leaps up in panic. The bottle bursts out from between Solomon’s fingers and rolls beneath the washing machine.

  ‘You damn bitch,’ he squeaks.

  Jalisa, too, has sprung up, having presumed (she was facing the other way) that Solomon has just punched the refrigerator in order to add more colour (and defiance) to his side of the Skat D argument (and the ‘bitch’ comment certainly hasn’t assisted matters).

  ‘Taking a page from Skat D’s book, are we?’ she hisses.

  ‘The girl hit him first,’ Solomon’s still down on his knees (Luckily. It’s the only way he’s coming out of this alive).

  ‘She slapped him,’ Jalisa gasps (as if the slap is some kind of fundamental legal and constitutional right of the female).

  ‘And?’

  ‘So he hits her back and he breaks her jaw!’ Jalisa banshees.

  ‘He went too far…’ Solomon concedes, ‘no one’s actually denying that. But what about Tupac?’

  Jalisa blinks.

  Huh?

  ‘What about Tupac?’ she snarls.

  Solomon shoves the flat of his hand under the washing machine and shuffles it about, violently. The bottle–and some onion peel- comes shooting out. The bottle rolls–at speed–in the general direction of the hallway.

  ‘Jailed for statutory rape,’ Solomon expounds, ‘gets shot, dies, promptly becomes some kind of folk hero for radical American womanhood.’

  Jalisa’s jaw drops

  Now he’s gone too far.

  I duck downstairs, grab some shoes, jeans, a jacket, the i-Pod, and head back up.

  ‘What do you mean double standards?’ Jalisa is bellowing.

  ‘Double standards, you hypocrite,’ Solomon yells defiantly, ‘that’s what I mean. Because it’s one of life’s many cruel paradoxes that the more fuckable a man is, the less culpable his actions are…’

  The air is sucked out of the room.

  Silence.

  I tiptoe–with the Blaine book–across the kitchen tiles. I place it down gently on to the table top. I fold it open. I point, tentatively. ‘You were right about Fitzcarraldo. Look. He’s listed it under his eleven all-time favourite films. It comes in at number four.’

  Jalisa glances down. ‘I don’t even like Tupac,’ she murmurs, distractedly, then, ‘Oh my God, he likes Night of the Hunter…’

  I half-turn towards Solomon, touch my nose, warningly, then hum five note-perfect bars from Norah Jones’ ‘Come Away With Me’.

  He slits his eyes.

  I pause (perhaps enjoying my pivotal peacemaking role slightly more than is completely healthy). ‘Off the record,’ I smugly confide, ‘you’re completely right about Tupac. All that sainthood shit’s got way out of control if you ask me.’

  I bow. I make a faultless exit.

  Okay. So I tread on that tiny eye-medication bottle on my way out and smash it.

  Fuck.

  That pooch is now officially my friend for all eternity.

  No. No. I can’t quite believe that I’m doing this, either, but less than 35 minutes later I’m comfortably ensconced back in that Philippe Starck chair, up to my eye-balls in The Future of Nostalgia (Okay. So it’s a great book, but why don’t you try saying tsyplenok zharenji* without the benefit of vodka?).

  On my short walk over there I catch that brief (but so-necessary) glimpse of Aphra (from the bridge), sitting quietly on her wall; chin up and cheeks shining, carefully overseeing the rumpled Blaine at his nightly slumber.

  Blaine (by the by) has been having a rather tough time of it lately (if Bly’s detailed reports are to be taken seriously). On Saturday (Day 30), he apparently called out for food, banged on the walls of his box and began barking like a dog (he’s hallucinating, has spells of dizziness, is short of breath, and his mouth tastes of pear drops).

  Hmmm. Call me cynical (if you will), but doesn’t it seem a mite convenient for this poignant little spectacle to’ve been timed for a Saturday–during his peak viewing period? We know the boy went to drama college, after all (and probably magicked himself a nice, neat, grade A there).

  I experience some difficulty in gaining access this time (the hospital. Yup. The NHS is in safe hands after all), because my name isn’t down on the list etc., but the man on reception is persuaded to phone up to the ward, and the Angry Blonde Nurse (her name, it transpires, is Lorna) comes stomping down and gives me the all-clear.

  On our way back up, I ask if she’s seen Aphra.

  ‘An hour ago,’ she puffs, ‘dropped off a bag of food and then bolted.’

  She pauses. ‘I keep telling her he’s off solids now–has been for weeks–but it just doesn’t seem to sink in, somehow.’

  She pulls a face.

  ‘And how’s Mr Leyland?’

  ‘Bad,’ she scowls, ‘and considerably worse for not seeing her.’

  She pauses. ‘He just dotes on the woman. Although rumour has it she’s been having an affair…’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘That’s what the real family say. The first Mrs Leyland and Sherry Leyland, his unmarried sister.’

  Sherry?

  She clocks my expression. ‘Famous family of vintners,’ she explains, ‘didn’t you know that already?’

  ‘Of course,’ I scoff.

  ‘Although Punch,’ she continues dreamily, ‘was named after his great-grandfather, who was a bare-knuckle fighter in Perth in the second half of the nineteenth century.’

  (My. This girl certainly has swallowed the book of Leyland family history.)

  I suddenly feel an uncommonly strong urge to say something nice about Aphra.

  Uh…Yes.

  Hmmn.

  ‘She’s a great cook,’ I eventually murmur.

  ‘He signed himself out for the night a couple of weeks ago,’ she continues (refusing to commit on the culinary issue), ‘he was slightly stronger then- but not nearly strong enough, if you want my opinion…They managed- I don’t really know how- to keep it a secret from the others. Then apparently she just took him back to this cruddy little flat, tucked him up and deserted him. He was so distressed when he returned to the ward on the Monday morning that he had to be forcibly tranquillized. His sister sanctioned it. “For his own good,” she said.’

  She pauses.

  ‘Lovely man. An amazing philanthropist. Hospital patron. Incredibly generous.’

  ‘But why did she take him to the flat?’ I ask (my mind, for some reason, still dwelling on that).

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Aphra.’

  ‘Oh…’

  She frowns.

  ‘I don’t know. Apparently he owns loads of real estate in this area. They have a huge place on Regent Street, too, but since he’s been officially terminal, lots of the Australian family have been staying there…You know, the kids, the first wife. Perhaps she just couldn’t bear it any more. Or perhaps…’

  She widens her eyes, meaningfully.

  We’
re standing outside the door. I shrug, knock, and enter.

  Must’ve been hard at it all day. He’s ploughed his way through to chapter 17–the conclusion. Only six pages to go (Damn. You know what this means? I’m to be denied the untold pleasures of Part 3: ‘Exiles and Imagined Homelands: On Diasporic Intimacy’).

  Before I sit down (He’s not going to make me go through that dense wodge of appendixes, is he?) I take a quick peek at the timetable.

  Hmmn. Now let’s see…Punch’s been in (first thing. Of course), then the original Mrs Leyland (who- strangely enough-retains that same moniker i.e. Mrs L (1), then someone called Mordecai Roast (classic name, eh?), then Sister Leyland (riding under ‘Sherry L’), who seems to stay longer than almost anybody else here, except for (last but not least) Aphra, who’s due to start at ten and remain through to the morning (the most miserable shift by some margin, in my opinion).

  He observes me scrutinising the timetable and grunts, ‘Bad diabetic’, by way of an explanation.

  ‘Who is?’

  He points to his chest, ‘Me. Very bad. Drinker…’ He mimes taking a quick shot. ‘Blood-sugar was erratic. She used to sit up at night and watch over me. The habit stuck.’

  He closes his eyes.

  ‘Johnny Walker, Black Label,’ I say (it’s a great knack of mine to guess a person’s tipple. People are, after all, the brew they consume).

  He snorts, derisively. Then he lifts his mask for a second and points at me.

  ‘Jim Beam,’ he says, ‘with an inch of ginger wine.’

  Jesus Christ.

  He pauses. ‘You have a powerful appetite for anything fortified.’

  (What? So which of you bastards told him about my weakness for sherry?)

  ‘Favourite artist…’ he muses, ‘Jackson Pollock.’ He smirks: ‘Because he “lived” it. But in your teens you worshipped Peter Blake, because of the Sergeant Pepper album cover…’ He coughs for a while, then clears his throat. ‘You thought it was “terribly clever”.’

  (So wasn’t it? Huh?)

  ‘Favourite food…’ He frowns. ‘White sliced, spread with ketchup, doubled over. Definitely no butter.’

  ‘Good God.’

  I lick my lips, anxiously (Reckon he might know how I shagged his wife this afternoon on HMS Belfast in the communications centre?).

  ‘Wasted a lot of time sitting in bars with complete strangers over the years.’ He shrugs. ‘It’s one of the few useful knacks I gleaned from the experience.’

  (Fuck him anyway. It’s brown sauce. And I can tolerate a smear–just a smear–of margarine on a good day).

  I take a second pop.

  ‘Maker’s Mark.’

  He smirks and jiggles his face mask at me.

  ‘Chivas Regal.’

  ‘Fucking pathetic,’ he coughs, grabbing a hold of his pencil. ‘Just read the damn book, will you?’

  When Lorna’s shift finishes, Brandy sends me off on a furtive little mission to discover (and retrieve) Aphra’s food parcel. I don’t have far to search, though. Good Nurse is standing in an adjacent kitchen, cheerfully devouring a summerfruit crêpe direct from the Tupperware.

  ‘So Brandy wants to take a look at the food again, huh?’ she asks, through her mouthful.

  (Is this woman a mind reader?)

  I nod.

  She points to the bag. ‘Tell him not to swallow, only to chew. That’s the deal here, okay?’

  I nod again.

  She looks stern: ‘Sure?’

  ‘Absolutely.’ I grab the bag.

  She touches my arm, confidingly. ‘You know, when I was a child,’ she whispers, ‘I had one of those special dolls. Those crying dolls. You feed her water with a tiny, little bottle, then after a few seconds her tears start to flow, then you feel her nappy and of course she’s pissed herself, so you change her.

  But one day I decided to give her some solids along with the water. Proper food, yeah? Fed her some cabbage. Some chicken. I just pushed it right in…’ She laboriously mimes this process. ‘But it wouldn’t go down properly. It just stuck there. Right behind the lips. Wouldn’t flush out. And over the course of time, it started to rot,’ she grimaces, ‘and to stink.’ She sighs at the memory, shakes her head, regretfully, then releases her grip and bustles off.

  Who the hell is this woman, anyway? The reincarnated spirit of Nikolai Gogol?

  Here’s what she’s prepared:

  A fresh green pesto served with home-fried potato crisps

  A tiny, but perfect quail’s egg florentine

  Two fat poussins, oven-baked, with whole lemons

  Stuffed baby aubergines with chilli and coconut

  Mango and yoghurt chutney, date and orange chutney

  (To be served with six rye-flour chapattis)

  Stuffed baked apples

  Half a summerfruit crêpe.

  One cup of smooth guava lassi

  He can’t swallow, obviously. So I prop him up, he takes off his mask, coughs for a while, reaches some sort of equilibrium, and I pass him a tub. He closes his eyes and inhales (‘Ah…’). Coughs some more (I wipe his mouth clean with a tissue), he requests a small forkful. I do the honours. He holds the food–dead still, on his tongue (mouth shut), for a minute or so, then he chews, winces, screws up his face in an agony of desire, inhales (to gain strength), and spits it back out (into a plastic cup).

  He then cleans his palate with a rinse of water.

  Kind of messy. And the entire process takes well over an hour.

  Often his eyes fill with tears.

  ‘Each taste,’ he says afterwards, gasping for breath, ‘each shape, each texture, crashes me into a whole new wave of memory…’

  Then, ‘Love this fucking life,’ he admonishes me.

  I toss in Malibu and Coke, as a curve ball.

  ‘That was my very favourite drink,’ he simpers, ‘as a teenage girl.’

  Yeah. Might shelve the champagne cocktail for a while.

  As if in joyful celebration of all our culinary endeavours, the next book we commence reading is Colin Spencer’s thwacking-great British Food: An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History.

  By 3 a.m. we’ve worked our way through ‘Anglo-Saxon Gastronomy,’ ‘Norman Gourmets: 1100–1300’, ‘Anarchy and Haute Cuisine 1300–1500’ and ‘Tudor Wealth and Domesticity’.

  I’m in the midst of a detailed description of how to prepare ‘Cabbage Cream’ (a sugary Tudor delight made out of individual ‘sheets’ or ‘leaves’ of skin, fished from off the top of a warm bowl of cream), when–

  —

  Oh shit

  —

  Brandy Leyland suddenly drops his pencil and collapses sideways. He vomits, copiously, into his oxygen mask–a lethal black-cherry coloured substance–and immediately commences choking on it. I jump up, curse, yank off the mask and ring for the nurse. She strides in.

  ‘I swear to God he didn’t swallow anything,’ I tell her, watching, in horror, as the cherry substance drips down off the bedsheets and on to the floor tiles.

  ‘Don’t worry.’ She arranges him firmly into the recovery position, cleans his nostrils out and he starts to scream. Piercing screams at first (girl screams), until his vocal cords give up (collapse? What do vocal cords do?) and he just peeps and squeaks like an inefficient dog whistle.

  ‘Go home,’ she says cheerfully, pushing her hand into his mouth and grappling with his tongue, ‘come back tomorrow.’

  I’m halfway down the stairs when I realise that I’m still clutching the Spencer book. But I’m too scared to take it back up. And the porter’s gone temporarily AWOL (Uh…Safe in whose hands was that?). So I’m obliged to lug it home with me.

  Could come in handy, though, on the off chance that I wake up at five, desperate to understand more about Jane Austen’s passion for ox cheek.

  When I walk past Blaine, I see that Aphra’s temporarily abandoned her station–

  Where she be?

  –so I stand, and I watch for twenty minutes or so (
perhaps secretly hoping that she might actually rematerialise).

  He’s restless tonight. Tossing and turning. On his back, then on his belly. Knees up, then down. Arms flung out, willy-nilly…

  I imagine some no-nonsense Australian housewife watching this exact same image on Sky–with half an eye on her rampaging toddler–as she devours a haphazard afternoon tea.

  And then I remember something Blaine said about how he feels at his most honest, his most pure, when he’s performing his Challenges, then something else, about how, when he was Frozen in Time, he coped with all the pain and all the anxiety by dint of simply fantasising.

  A warm bath (you might be forgiven for thinking), a mug of cocoa, a Caribbean holiday…

  Uh-uh. Miles off.

  His fantasies weren’t happy ones. Instead he imagined that he was a prisoner of war, or that he was suffering and dying from some horrendous disease. And these crazy thoughts sustained him, they made him rally, they kept him strong.

  (‘Uh…excuse me, but there seems to be a badly-trained production assistant violently yanking at the small plastic tube which is currently glued to the tip of my cock…Would you actually just mind telling him to pull a little harder there?’)

  Here’s another thing: Blaine got himself fit for Vertigo (standing on that pillar in New York) by walking around the city in a 65lb chain mail suit (A romantic image, certainly, but just consider–if he’d encountered a random rain storm on 24th Street, he’d’ve been rusted into oblivion by Broadway).

  These masochistic feats all put me in mind, somehow, of that poor Archbishop of Canterbury (Thomas à Becket) who was murdered in his cathedral, and then, when his servants kindly stripped his body of all its bishoply regalia (‘You take the cross, I’ll take the rings’), they discovered, to their astonishment, that he was wearing a hair shirt, underneath, right next to the skin, which’d been itching him for years into an excruciating piety.