A childish impulse, I know. It’s kind of a brother/sister thing. He’s older and meaner, but – thank the Lord for tall mercies – I’m a damn sight bigger.
That said, what a complete and utter bastard, don’t you reckon?
Chapter 6
I stumble across that good-for-nothing, pre-pubescent Patch, huddled snugly into a soft, grassy dip on our most westerly clifftop, all cross-legged and pink-cheeked and wind-thrashed, gazing down and out into the grey-blue grandeur of Bigbury Bay, clutching the book Mo sent tight to her chest and meditating deeply.
Get this: way before I even get a chance to reprimand her sharply and fully and roundly for her sudden, shameless abandonment of snotty little Feely (I’ve dragged him along with me – he currently has his left hand stuck tight inside a plastic mug with a terrible, half-worn illustration of what looks like Mickey Mouse fellating Pluto on the front of it), she expansively casts out her chubby arm, points to the green-humped horizon behind her: the distant white-daisy-headed settlements dotting the spine of this chalk-chiselled coastline, and asks in a voice impossibly breathless and chimerical, ‘Medve, do you think you might tell me…’ I mean, the girl’s literally gasping. It’s so ludicrously Jackie ‘… the real difference between Inner and Outer Hope?’
‘Of course I can,’ I bridle, squinting with sour-eyed sisterly efficiency. ‘Outer Hope is apparently much bigger. It’s in bold print on the map, which I imagine must count for something. I’d guess it’s approximately five miles down the coast. A small town, possibly. Inner Hope isn’t in bold and it’s a short distance further. At best a village. At worst, a hamlet.’
(So what if I said I didn’t like geography? This is Medve The Older Sister at work: a role which never fails to bring out the apprentice girl Fascist in me.)
She shakes her head. ‘That’s not what I mean at all. It’s not a geographical question. It’s kind of…’ she pauses, ‘metaphysical.’
Not geographical? I squat down in front of her, enraged by this unexpected surge of youthful precocity. ‘You’re twelve years old!’ I bellow. ‘What need have you of metaphysicals? Get back indoors, you chubby, godforsaken little whore and play with your fucking Barbie like every other ill-adjusted puppy-fat-ridden girl your age.’
I toss Feely towards her. As he tumbles he taps himself on the head with his mug-covered paw and gives a slight bleat. His tongue is the colour of diarrhoea. Patch catches him deftly and plumps him onto her capacious knee. ‘I knew you wouldn’t get it,’ she murmurs, then inhales deeply and stares out towards the horizon. The girl’s so smug, so self-important, so mumsy.
I stand and turn.
‘You gangly bitch.’
I turn back again. ‘Did I hear you mutter something, or was it just the gulls spewing at the sickening bulge of your second stomach?’
Feely, who of course takes his translating responsibilities very seriously, serves, temporarily, as a most-minor adjudicator. ‘She said You gangly bitch,’ he repeats, his emphasis all up the creek, as if he’s speaking Hindi or Urdu or Pekinese. Then he pauses and shakes his cup-hand thoughtfully, ‘Whatever the heck that means.’
Ah. The innocence.
Patch, meanwhile – just check her out! – is rubbing the grass stains off her knees, whispering something wholly reprehensible into little Feely’s ear and smiling like Buddha. The brat.
In our house (okay, in our hotel, you anal blighter), we never ever eat a proper dinner. We graze. We wander hither and thither, like Thompson gazelles, or dik-dik, just plucking and nibbling. We pick and mix. It’s kind of a low-maintenance familial buffet.
Big’s totally against proper dinners. On his list of priorities, the debunking of the very notion of a proper dinner comes extremely high indeed – just below an aversion to bestiality (although if feelings are mutual, he certainly might waver) and casual infanticide. In Big’s mind, The Proper Dinner is like a slap in the face to your bowel. It’s a digestive Pearl Harbor.
So our evenings are all rice cakes (Big imports them in bulk from the US – where apparently they don’t turn a hair at the concept of food-as-polystyrene – they’re so well up on healthy living), green olives, hummous and sugar-free peanut butter. For pudding: dried apricots and prunes reconstituted in warm water. No sweetening. Evaporated milk, if you’re lucky. Fennel tea (great for the gut). Elderberry compress for the under-sevens.
Big loves Japanese fare, but only the stuff you can boil for five hours on the understanding that it’ll promise blind to hold its shape and remain tasteless, bright white and viscous. He’s into seaweed. Squid and wholemeal noodles. But only on feast days and weddings. Followed by ritual purging and emetic cleansing. Of course.
I know for a fact he thinks soy sauce is a Chinese conspiracy to keep communism unhealthy. And ketchup or HP? The Devil’s linctus. I mean did one man ever spend so much time considering the exact nature of the organic matter entering his intestine? Never mind the stuff he finally squeezes out of it.
But credit where credit’s due. Big was into faeces long – that’s literally ages – before it was really fashionable. (You’re saying you don’t remember all those articles in the style mags on feculence? The I-D defecation issue? You really don’t? Where the hell were you?)
As I remember, Big must’ve been the world’s only potty-training father who took more pride in what was passed (I’m talking size, shape, consistency) than in the actual passing. The apex of descriptive phrases in Big’s bowel-related-vocabulary is (wait for it) pellet. The pellet – small, odourless, hard, plentiful – is the very ultimate in Big-gratification. If you use the word pellet in casual conversation his irises tighten. It delights him.
Did we rebel? Of course we did. We rebelled plenty. Barge especially. I mean this boy was nine years old before he knew ‘cake’ was a sweet thing. He was weaned on the rice and the oat and the fish varieties. He thought a sponge was something you washed your face with. He thought chocolate was a shade of brown. He thought nougat was… What is nougat, precisely?
And the rest of us? The gang? Why the hell are you asking? We’re children. We get what we’re given and like it or lump it. Sometimes both. Everyone knows childhood is gastronomical slavery. No surprises there.
Ironically – I know this’ll kill you – that trusty Queen of Misery, M’lady Poodle, who by nature you might think would be a foodie revolutionary, is actually the most crushingly anal, hummous-spreading, sprout-eating, sugar-eschewing member of our culinary party. She is blessed with the taste-awareness of your average hard-core puritanical self-flagellator. She’s a nutritional whore. She’ll eat something wholemeal and then beg you for more.
So I’m still diligently painting Margaret’s blessed mug at half-past-nine in the ping-pong chamber – a small, grim box-room which clumsily straddles the stairway between the kitchens and the foyer – while every so often an individual family member will stroll past the door clutching handfuls of macadamia nuts, tiny, parboiled cocktail sausages (100 per cent soya and absolutely kosher), salted anchovies and nail-thin slices of badly peeled kiwi. All in all it’s a suitably high-flown and tempting gastronomical procession. But I’m not partaking. I’m working.
That said, I still find the time to listen in on Big informing La Roux about the ban on Black Beauty (so I let slip this little detail. It was purely accidental). He’s cornered him on the stairway and he’s telling him off in no uncertain terms, his voice cascading effortlessly down the sensuous curve of the walls – like the very best kind of public transport announcement – but sounding all tight-lipped and brisk and nasty.
Poor blighter.
In truth, I’ve rarely known Big take against another human being with so much mean determination. Not since Roy Jenkins turned his back on the British Labour Movement (that was in March, and it’s June already).
The man’s a messed-up liberal with strong totalitarian tendencies, but he places a very high premium on natural loyalty. Which is why he loves pooches, come to think of it – loyalty
’s supposedly their most essential characteristic (well, loyalty and greed. And halitosis. And don’t forget all that relentless farting – three things you’d have to be crazy to place any kind of premium upon).
I’m still cheerfully mulling over how badly La Roux will have taken this unexpected dose of bitter medicine when, out of the blue, at nine-forty-five precisely, he quietly enters my ping-pong kingdom (as I’m sure you can imagine, a most unwelcome intrusion) and does his utmost to attract my attention without actually resorting to simply speaking.
Still in that damned khaki boiler suit. He picks up a ping-pong bat, plays a mean air-game (he wins 21–2 – I mean, he kills that imaginary fucker) then lounges, slightly breathless, against the damp white wall, ditches the bat, sticks his thumbs through his belt-holes and sighs several times just a fraction too loudly. I peek up, grimace, and carry on painting.
‘Big really has it in for me,’ he finally grumbles, as if under some illusion that I’m in the slightest bit interested.
‘How tragic,’ I say, literally dripping with empathy.
‘You could’ve told me about the ban on Black Beauty,’ he mutters, ‘he just completely lost it. He cornered me on the stairway – and here’s the strange part – he didn’t even bother pushing home a strategic advantage by standing on the stair above. Quite the opposite. He stood on the one below, like some kind of deeply deranged pixie, and then just completely ripped into me.
‘It was frightening. I felt like I was trapped inside Gulliver’s Travels: the part where he wakes up and a group of tiny maniacs are disabling him with string. It was really quite…’ he pauses, ‘quite unsettling.’
‘The Lilliputians,’ I shrug wisely.
‘I mean, how messed-up can a four year old be?’
I glance towards him. ‘Feely’s just morbid. It’s a phase.’
La Roux sniffs plaintively a couple of times (he’s such a damn lamb), wanders off for a while, then returns dragging a fold-up chair behind him.
He opens it next to the table, sits down, grabs a mug and a brush, then watches my each and every move with all the unblinking concentration of a deeply transcendental iguana. I don’t crack under the pressure. I don’t shake, I don’t whimper.
‘Can I help you with this?’ he says, after a rather painful few minutes. ‘I think I’ve got the general hang of it. My hand-to-eye coordination’, he swanks, ‘is actually quite legendary.’
I pause and give him a steely glare.
‘Help me? Why?’
He sighs. ‘It’s just…’ He thinks for a while. ‘It’s just – how to explain it?… It’s just politics. I think I need to re-establish my power base. Within the family.’
Was ever a man so rank and duplicitous?
‘How?’ I gasp. ‘By slithering your way in here and ingratiating yourself with me?’
(Oh, come on. Don’t be taken in by my tone. Wise up. Tune in. It’s just basic girl-grandstanding.)
‘Yes,’ he smiles, reading me perfectly, his teeth overlapping like the yellowing slats in an old ivory-spined fan. ‘Yes,’ he repeats, ‘you’ve got it exactly.’
Then he stares at me for a moment (okay, so I’m finally smiling. I can’t help myself. The damn fucker’s charmed me) and then slowly and painstakingly he starts painting some pottery.
And I’ll tell you something for nothing: he’s not half-bad at it, either.
So there you have it: the strangely simple story of precisely how – in case you’re at all interested – that unashamedly high-gusseted, acne-ridden chancer known as La Roux finally wins me over with his brutal candour.
Happy now?
No. Of course I don’t know what I’m getting myself into. Lighten up a little. Weren’t you ever sixteen?
Chapter 7
Interest in the hotel – all things considered – has been pretty downright bloody phenomenal. I think it’s the part-island factor that really sets people a-tingle. We’ve had born-agains, nudists, the krishna-conscious, the military. We’ve had a bona fide Hollywood star (or just about: David Soul’s masseur’s mother), a school for children with learning difficulties, a famous astrologer, a football player. We’ve had them all. They’ve come, they’ve seen, they’ve felt the itch. But no one’s really Nails-Out Scratching. Not, that is, until now.
(So I’m hardly an economist, but it suddenly feels like 1980s Britain is sweetly faltering on the quiet cusp of soon-to-be full-throttle, hard-roaring, break-the-sound-barrier booming. She’s like an anxious, sherry-drenched virgin nervously considering the scary technicalities of her imminent deflowering. She’s staggering. She’s teetering.)
And sure enough (as if to vindicate my intellectual theorising), on the morning after the impasse before, a brand-spanking-new prospective buyer hitches a lift over to the island on the back of Black Jack’s antiquated, jaw-juddering Sea Tractor (ah, how fleeting my fancies).
This woman has an insolent look about her. A haughtiness. In fact, when she dismounts it’s with the ridiculously inappropriate demeanour of a small but feminized Vasco da Gama loftily laying claim to the Horn of Africa (kind of fuck the indigens from the outset, if you know what I mean).
As far as I can tell, Ms Penny Smolly (for that is the appellation of this paragon) is a bad-arsed but well-heeled fruit cake. More money than sense (although astonishingly mean with it), and worse still, an unadulterated cat lover.
Believe it or not, she actually has it in mind to transform this blameless isle into a feline sanctuary (doesn’t she know cats hate water?) and although you wouldn’t know it just to look at her – she’s slight with grey eyes, an unusual strawberry-blonde moustache and a chin like a truncheon – this wench has a masters in snarling and whining.
Oh my dear Lord. She’s already brought the poor estate agent out in an allergy (all that fur on her collar and the cuffs of her cardigan) and as she strolls about the gaff unearthing countless imperfections he politely punctuates her on-going invective with his quiet but chesty and exquisitely timed sneezing.
Big’s nose (which frankly is the only really sizeable thing about him, apart from his ego, his temper and his libido) is also put out of joint royally when – on espying his current adventure in crochet: a wall-hanging of the USA with each state a different colour (that’s fifty states in total, so naturally someone’s gonna have to draw the short straw in relation to tincture. Texas is post-box red; Nevada, apple green; Philadelphia a sunflower yellow; Denver a bright south-sea blue; and from there on in things get a little hairy: Utah is the subtle shade of dirty bathwater; Virginia resembles a badger’s scrotum; Louisiana’s like a dead man’s liver… ) – she asks him whether he ever learned to knit (he never did), then she promptly takes issue with his painstaking re-arrangement of the main back shrubbery.
During the following two hours she goes on to scrutinize every single intimate nook and crevice of this huge Art Deco edifice, paying more attention to fine detail than a police chief inspector (I mean, down to the extent of noting how nine bulbs need replacing) and is suitably appalled when in one dark corner she accidentally happens across fat Patch biting loving chunks out of Feely’s dimpled, putty-coloured buttocks (purely for the hell of it. His arse is irresistible. It literally demands masticating).
Of course he’s protesting – and powerfully – writhing like a hungry pup, absolutely hysterical, the plastic mug jammed firm onto his fist again, his chin already pink-tinged with carpet burn. It’s like an obscene early tableau from Caligula.
Rather too soon after she finds me, large as life – if not larger – sitting cross-legged on the cocktail counter, painstakingly dissecting a troublesome verruca (I’ve learned over the years that if you soak your foot for long enough in slightly salted warm water and then pluck at the offending growth with tweezers, the whole organism can be extracted in one complete segment, like a perfectly-formed miniature cauliflower).
But the real surprise still lies quietly in wait for this punctilious Miss – like a low-slung, huge-jawed, gent
ly growling jaguar – upstairs, at the very far end of the furthest top landing. Ah, mais oui! The lair of La Roux!
So they’ve inspected all the other suites (that’s fourteen in total) and this is the last. As a precaution the agent knocks cautiously on that (by now worryingly familiar) peeling aquamarine door, hears no audible answer, enters, inhales, blanches, staggers straight to the window and flings it wide open – the smell in there is already quite extraordinary, a burning, eye-watering odour of rank antiseptic – indicates the view (it’s a great one), the carpets and the original light fitments.
Catwoman snipes on about the heady aroma (she thinks something died somewhere), the hole in the ceiling, finds fault with the window-frames and bemoans the poor finish on the en-suite tiling. Phew. At last the inspection is finally over and they are literally just about ready to turn on their tails when Miss Fur-ball suddenly detects an untoward squeaking.
I think you know whither. She makes a hasty bee-line towards the stroll-in storage facility (hoping, no doubt, to add a minor infestation to her major demolition), yanks the door wide, and finds not a mouse in her house, as she’d fully anticipated, but a bad-skinned, balaclavaed, South African nest-builder spanking his pink plank in an orgy of wank, right there, large as life, just inside.
But that’s not the worst of it. La Roux (the sauce) is employing something rather unusual as his masturbatory inspiration – his stimulus, his trigger. It is a photograph (old, well-worn, black and white) of a mongrel: part-chow, part-pug, part-golden labrador (when you think about it, a really horrible genetic mixture; bug-eyed, blue-tongued but with a ridiculously obliging, indeed, perhaps even accommodating nature).
Doesn’t look good, does it? Especially to a cat lover.
Five Miles from Outer Hope Page 5