Five Miles from Outer Hope

by Nicola Barker

  We are eating kippers with our fingers. And drinking goat’s milk (Feely has a dairy allergy). It’s all pretty primeval. Either way, I am finishing my first fish (telling Feely his feet are stinking), lifting up my glass, swigging on it – eyes unintentionally rolling – when yik! I espy a total stranger. Over the table. In the half-dark.

  I stop glugging, burp, and put down my glass. He is staring at me morosely. Big, meanwhile, has quietly and most inconveniently abandoned the baize. Patch is telling Feely his feet stink (the girl’s my fucking echo), and for a split second I consider how uncool it would be if I ask him straight out who he actually is. I don’t want to be wrong-footed.

  (Instantly I see he will wrong-foot me – he has that kind of jaw, and he’s ginger – and don’t forget I’m in my flimsy night-dress with my nipples doubtless digging like blind moles through the holes in the waistcoat crochet – why can’t the man just knit for Chrissakes?)

  ‘Chin,’ the stranger says suddenly, and points at me. It’s dark. His poky finger is lit for a second like silver. He withdraws it again, into smudginess.

  ‘What?’ I say, rather rudely, blinking at him. He is weird-accented.

  ‘Chin.’ He points to his own chin in the bored manner of a man much-accustomed to being misheard.

  ‘Oh.’ I wipe my hand over my chin, thinking I have milk on it, but I feel no hint of moisture.

  ‘You have a handsome chin.’ He smiles. He has an effeminate manner. His lips are thin and prone to pursing. Already I smell him; kind of clean but rotten. Bad antiseptic. Not erotic (like I’d want to shag a drain).

  I look down. ‘Can you see my nipples through my top?’ I ask.

  He stares fixedly.

  ‘I believe I can,’ he sighs.

  I nod and continue eating. The stranger stretches over, picks up a book from the place where Big was sitting previously, and then quietly starts reading it. In the Belly of the Beast, by Jack Henry Abbott. Hardback. Boring cover.

  ‘Mo wrote,’ Patch mutters, and tosses me a letter. I nod, pick it up, unfurl, and not another word is spoken.

  Big is no help whatsoever. He is weeding the tennis courts when I finally catch up with him. ‘So who is he?’ I demand. Big straightens.

  ‘Did you see Mo wrote?’ he asks.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  (He loves to receive his news second-hand. And he needs to buy some reading glasses. Feely used his last pair in an outdoor experiment – he wanted to set fire to the sea – and a freak wave took them. The child is so damned ill-bred.)

  ‘Deep South. Death Row. New Lawyer Friend. Some strange, fresh angle about the Probe being marketed as a means to improve prisoner safety and dignity (my God, the woman’s such an opportunist). Worried about Barge’s tongue. Poodle’s been visiting. And the book. She sent it.’

  Big nodded. ‘I don’t like this new prison reform stuff,’ he says, passingly. (Big loathes progressive politics. The man’s a Nazi.)

  ‘I could give a shit,’ I say.

  ‘Watch your mouth.’ He looks into the sky. A gull’s flying over. Greater Black Backed. It squawks at me.

  ‘All the same, bad Elmore Leonard novel or what?’ I snipe.

  Big just frowns.

  (These are the conversations we have. They’re profoundly inconclusive. But it’s all that’s really necessary. I won’t change him. He won’t change me. We’re our own fucking people.)

  Big bends over and picks up his weeding implement again.

  ‘His father’, he offers finally, ‘is a gynaecologist. He delivered Feely in Wellington, remember? We owe him a favour. He’s from Cape Town.’

  ‘Clipped vowels. Horrible.’

  ‘That’s the nature of the beast.’ Big looks uneasy. He scans the horizon.

  ‘How long will he stay?’

  Big shrugs, squats, starts truffling. Not long, I surmise, by the look of him. I move on.

  Hmmn. Something tells me Mr Big is definitely not Mr Happy.

  ‘Don’t you find being a woman in the eighties complicated?’

  Jessica Lange, Tootsie

  Are you telling me – I said are you telling me – that it’s gonna be a whole other year before that monumental short-arse Dustin Hoffman gets to set the whole world straight on the fundamental dilemmas of modern womanhood in his cross-dressing masterpiece, Tootsie? But where does that leave things, currently? I mean feministically?

  Meryl Streep taking it up the arse and looking wantonly choleric in A French Lieutenant’s Woman? Marg Thatch writ large – all nose, no jaw – in her preposterous pearls and pin-stripes? Sue Ellen in Dallas with her pop eyes and alcoholism? Or do they honestly expect me to seek succour from that inconsequential drippy-draws playing the worthless girl part in Chariots of Fire? Can this really be it?

  Look, there’s not a damn thing wrong with my sexuality (excluding those private issues detailed previously), but show me internationally acclaimed actress Jessica Lange in

  (a) grey sweatpants

  (b) a nurse’s uniform

  and – screw Hoffman – even I get a little horny.

  I’d better tell you about the barman. It’s a touch convoluted, but bear with me. The point is (can you hear me backpedalling like fucking crazy?), when you move around a lot you get to meet plenty of new people and, frankly, you don’t give a damn about them – not really – because in your heart of hearts you both know it doesn’t really count, for one (you’re just treading water, dammit), or matter, for another, however much you screw each other over, because soon you’ll be gone and it’ll all just be water under the hump-backed proverbial.

  (You’re calling my family a bunch of users? Spot on. You’re sharper than you look. We prefer to call the whole sordid flyby-night exchange thing ‘a short-cut to intimacy’. Ha! God fucked up good when he gave us vocabulary.)

  There’s this small pub on the island: the Pilchard Inn – the pilchard used to swim these waters, way back, but now the Gulf Stream has shifted and they’ve taken to foaming further afield; they’re canny. It’s three hundred years old. Balanced precariously half-way up the one and only pot-holed, sharp-tilted road which staggers dejectedly from the beach to the hotel.

  Mud-coloured inside, with big fish jaws on the walls and stuffed birds. Smells of dust and treacle. The owner’s nephew still runs it. Keeps it ticking over. Twenty-five. A tragic soak. Stinks like brandy and dry-roasted nuts. Huge, brown eyes (a thyroid problem, but let’s not spoil it). A dark heart. They call him Black Jack. Like the card game (I’ve never played it).

  Barely speaks a word. Caters to the tourists. Resents our presence like a rat resents Rentokil. He is literally filthy. Naturally I have it in mind to seduce him. Or for him to seduce me. Come on, the man’s a modern Heathcliff with his catatonic dial, his cat-gut breath, his loose, lardy belly (So I’m only four inches taller. I picture it as an act of revenge, on his part. Well hell. Beggars can’t be choosers).

  In the absence of all other island staff, Jack has been temporarily placed in charge of the Sea Tractor – a mythological machine in these parts: half bird, half monster, which, when the tide is high and the conditions are tolerable, we use to ferry post and people and provisions one way and another.

  It is his pride. Seven-foot-wide wheels attached to twelve-foot-tall stilts. On top, a kind of oily, open-sided tram carriage. It chugs through the water like a superannuated steamroller.

  I have cunningly been employing monosyllabic Jack’s passion for this vehicle in my four-pronged attack on his affections. Last week I cleaned it. This week I’m expressing an interest in its rudimentary mechanics. I’ve invited him out fishing (I’m a dab-hand, me). And all the while I bore him with tales of our time on Soames Island in Wellington harbour, New Zealand. He loves it.

  (Jack has this fantasy about turning our current crummy bolt-hole into some kind of nature reserve. He’s a nutter. He likes to mutter about the surf and stuff. He’s into Polynesian culture. He even has a Maori tatt
oo.

  The man is plainly out of his tree. I mean, how does he plan to keep nature reserved on a place part-connected to the mainland? In truth he’s nothing more than a tragic booze casualty, but somehow, in some way, he brings out the nasty, sexy, six-foot Nurse Nightingale in me.)

  This particular morning I find him standing on an overturned bucket, poking his nose into the ancient inn’s low-slung but very clogged-up gutters. It’s still high tide. We’re cut off. The coast is clear. And luckily my extra inches mean I don’t have to yell up at him.

  ‘Need a hand?’ I whisper.

  He jumps and scowls. ‘Why did God make you so obliging?’

  Side-on he looks like Gene Wilder. But no perm. I say nothing. (What do I know of God’s intentions?) Instead I peer through a window then saunter down the hill a way.

  ‘So who’s the freak in the balaclava?’ he asks. He can’t help himself. He wants me. I stop sauntering.

  ‘Balaclava?’

  ‘Five this morning, I brought him over on the tractor. Your dad was spitting fucking tacks.’

  I shrug. I am mesmerized by the sheer sum of words spilling out of him.

  ‘Sorry,’ I finally manage again, ‘you said balaclava?’

  ‘Then not ten minutes since,’ he continues, ‘I saw him carrying a shitload of chicken wire…’

  He points to the hazy summit – past the old croquet lawn, towards the Herring Cove – a sumptuous grass-strewn rise glimmering with an obscene verdancy in the early summer shine (the cliffs crash beyond it, all chalk and shag).

  ‘That way.’

  Jesus, the man is almost trippy.

  He peers again, ‘And there he goes…’

  I walk back towards him, up the hill. Once I reach his level I stretch my neck. Sure enough, I see a black-headed creature processing regally along the horizon, arms full of silver.

  ‘Chicken wire? Where’d he get that from?’

  ‘And he’s got some old lavender,’ Jack observes almost squinting, ‘and a fucking tonne of blue grass… Still in his balaclava, note. The twat.’

  You know what? He’s been here all of three hours or something and already the bastard’s appropriating. He’s re-inventing. He’s running bloody riot. Collecting chicken wire for no known reason, and gathering lavender. Wearing a balaclava.

  Oh, so he’s softened you already with the chin thing, has he? You think I didn’t notice? You have a handsome chin. You think that didn’t impact? This man is clever, certainly. But I am single-minded, oestrogen-fuelled and cunning.

  Right. So he sees me coming from way off and is courteous enough to stand waiting. As I draw closer – I am panting a little and wet-legged from the dew (I’m resolutely bare-footed – my soles are like emery boards. You can strike matches off them. We do it all the time in winter), I see that the balaclava has no nose or mouth holes, although the wool’s much darker where the mouth and nose should be. Wet. Sweaty.

  ‘And the chicken wire?’

  He stares at me, hazel-eyed. My words hang in the air a while. Soon they’re flapping like old underwear on a windy washing line.

  And the chicken wire?

  He blinks.

  ‘Oh. Was that a question you just asked me?’

  (Imagine his words, all tight and clipped and southern hemispherical, but completely ensnared by woollen weave – Uh. Gnah, gnah, gnah, gnah, gnah, gnah, gnah, gnah hi?)

  ‘Sorry,’ I lie. ‘I cannot understand what you’re saying through your mouth.’

  He still looks quizzical.

  ‘Sorry,’ he answers eventually, ‘I cannot hear what you’re saying through my ears.’

  He proffers me the bunch of blue grass. I stare at it, impassively.

  ‘Are you offering that grass to me?’

  He nods.

  ‘And the chicken wire?’

  ‘No. That’s mine. I have need of it.’

  I take the grass. He grunts his satisfaction at our transaction then strolls away.

  ‘Thank you,’ I finally yell, but he’s already twelve steps down the hill. I inspect the bunch then look up.

  Four foot off, perched on the clifftops, two jackdaws are quietly watching. Heads cocked, beaks glinting. I tickle my nose self-consciously with the grass’s silver, whispy flower-heads, my eyes still fixed upon them.

  Suddenly they lift and plummet, peeling like bells. I stiffen. Perhaps I’m paranoid, but I honestly get the impression they might be laughing at me. I drop the grass that very instant (well, almost immediately), and calmly kick it over the cliff and down and down and down, into the sea.

  The mean-beaked, dirty-vented, scraggy-feathered sods.

  Chapter 4

  I corner Patch in the Ganges Room. She likes to hang out there sometimes with Feely. It’s actually the front half of an old ship (the Ganges, circa 1821, you nerd), the captain’s cabin, to be precise, but sawed off and just kind of tacked on to the hotel dining-room, with a steering-wheel (not period) dug into the dark timber floor, and portholes and old wooden benches and ancient photos on the walls and everything. A view out to sea.

  Patch props Feely on a box and he steers. She stands right beside him, daydreaming. I creep up behind them, minutely galled by their gentle companionability.

  ‘Where’s he taking you?’ I whisper, over her shoulder.

  Patch jumps from her deep reverie. ‘What?’ she almost pants.

  ‘Tobago,’ Feely answers curtly.

  ‘And then what? Swordplay? Pillaging? Piracy?’

  He turns and gives me a serious look. ‘You’re making too much of things,’ he says gently. ‘It’s only imaginary.’

  (Who the hell made this child so snotty?)

  Patch sniggers and Feely steers onward, rather smugly.

  After a canny minute’s silence (as if in quiet tribute to Feely’s considerable skills as navigator and helmsman), I clear my throat, then let the little shit have it. ‘This isn’t Tobago, you dunce,’ I pronounce firmly. ‘It’s Newfoundland. What the heck is up with your geography?’

  ‘Geography?’ He echoes, blinking repeatedly. I have entered his world.

  ‘It’s Newfoundland!’ I repeat, then gasp, as if only now fully comprehending the shimmering blue-green vista which unfolds right before me.

  Feely shakes his head. He’s seeing orange skies and sandy shores and parrots in flocks and pine trees. ‘It’s Tobago.’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘It’s Tobago.’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘It’s Tobago.’

  ‘Whatever you say.’

  He pauses. He turns.

  ‘It’s Tobago!’

  I smile pityingly, ‘Of course it is, Feely.’

  He jumps from the box, his face stricken. ‘It’s Tobago!’

  ‘Whatever you think, little man.’

  (Little man is, of course, the final blow.)

  He runs off, screaming.

  Proud at having done my sisterly duty, I kick the box aside, grab the wheel and steer Patch and me straight into the heart of the tropics.

  ‘Ah, Tobago!’ I croon.

  (Ever seen it? Me neither.)

  Patch has sat down, meanwhile, on a bench beneath a port-hole and is gnawing at her thumbnail. She clearly has much on her twelve-year-old mind.

  I glance over. ‘You look exceptionally porcine,’ I inform her.

  ‘I hate you,’ she answers cheerfully. She doesn’t exactly know what porcine means. But she’s probably in the area. She’s a bright kid. Reads far more than is properly healthy.

  ‘You hate my hormones, not me,’ I enlighten her, ‘and in one year’s time, you too will be a monster.’

  ‘Balls.’

  I let go of the wheel and slither over.

  ‘So tell me all about the new man,’ I whisper. ‘The interloper.’

  She shrugs. She’s not having any of it.

  ‘Jack says when he arrived this morning Big was spitting fucking tacks. I quote directly.’

  Patch wriggles her toes.
‘I don’t know about that,’ she says, then pauses, ‘but I do know…’ (The child wants my tall teen approval so desperately) ‘… that he’s bedding down way up on the top floor. And when Big showed him a room, he double-checked the cupboard space, but insisted there wasn’t sufficient reach, so strode next door and claimed the neighbouring suite instead. The big one at the end with the hole in the roof.’

  I’m impressed. ‘The man is saucy.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Has he much baggage?’

  ‘Psychologically, perhaps – I mean he’s a white South African – but literally, none. A tiny suitcase and a very small guitar.’

  (This chubby pup is facetious beyond belief.) ‘Was he wearing the balaclava?’

  ‘Initially.’

  ‘Any reason given as to why?’

  ‘None.’

  I mull a while. ‘And did he mention his name?’

  Patch shrugs, ‘I didn’t catch it. Something stupid. French-sounding. Double-barrelled.’

  ‘How curious.’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘You have served me well,’ I wave my arm regally, ‘and now you may go to find and comfort Feely.’

  Patch wipes her nose on the hem of her kaftan (it’s hayfever season), pulls herself to her feet, then trundles away. She pauses, though, for an instant, in the doorway.

  ‘He stole the book Mo sent us,’ she informs me, ‘and I want it back. Will you ask him?’

  Too obvious, you’re thinking? Obvious? Me?

  Forty-five seconds, thirty stairs, two landings, one long, leaky hallway later, I lift my fist and rap on his door. The paint is peeling. It’s aquamarine. Through the cracks filter the mysterious sounds of scratching and heaving. Some heavy breathing. Metallic jangling.

  I knock again. After two whole seconds the door is wrenched open and The Balaclavaed One beholds me. He is panting like a Dobermann trapped in a summer car.

  ‘Now what?’

  (How welcoming.)

  ‘I heard you scratching.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Like some old hen.’

  He pauses for a moment, as if deep in thought, then rips his balaclava off. ‘I love the way,’ he announces passionately (his eyebrows all skewwhiff, his hair on end with static electricity), ‘I love the way you think hens have wings for arms, but when you watch them – I mean, properly – they actually have arms for legs.’