Five Miles from Outer Hope

by Nicola Barker

  La Roux can’t say much as Ms Smolly gasps, curses, turns and scampers, but he does say something (credit him at least with the genius of brevity). In fact he says two things: the first is, ‘This is not as bad as it seems. I actually know this animal.’ The second? ‘My father’s a gynaecologist.’

  Virtually a life history, really, when all the silly woman actually wanted – or needed – was a rather more basic but nonetheless suitably cringing apology.

  More fool she.

  Oh dear. I duly deputize myself to mediate a peace between the two warring parties (that’s Big and The Masturbator – Ms Penny Smolly having hissy-fitted and high-tailed it almost immediately after).

  To say Big is cross hardly does proper justice to his colossal rage. Don’t get me wrong. The man is not against masturbation per se. He simply thinks there’s a time and a place. And This Time and This Place just don’t happen to be it.

  He’s probably right. To try and calm him down I back him up assiduously, I chip in gamely, I parrot, I chirrup, I echo. Mrs Mary Whitehouse herself would’ve been hard-pressed to find a spare ounce of moral laxity in me.

  Of course I have motives ulterior.

  We happen to be conducting this particular conversation ensconced downstairs in the ladies’ loo, accompanied by Feely, who is squirming on the tiling like a greased pig in a pie shop. The cold-water tap is gushing and we are struggling to hold his rapidly purpling paw beneath it. I am in charge of the mug-end, Big is in charge of his wrist, Feely is in charge of absolutely nothing, his foul temper included.

  ‘La Roux’s plainly demented,’ I tell Big, turning the tap on a little harder, ‘even muskrats have better instincts.’

  Big stares at me suspiciously and then shakes his head. He’s small but he’s on the ball. He plainly smells something. My odious perfidy, probably.

  ‘So who cares’, I continue, ‘if his stupid father delivered Feely? What does it matter? That was four whole years ago. And look what a nightmarish liability he turned into.’

  I give the mug a twist and a yank. Feely yowls. It loosens a fraction. I push it under the tap again. My stomach is soaking.

  Big adjusts his position. ‘Why not give me a break’, he growls, ‘from your pathetic attempts at reverse psychology? You seem to forget that I’m the same old man who spends his time watching that ginger moron Denis Waterman displaying five times your level of clumsy fudge in The bloody Sweeney.’

  My head snaps back. ‘Waterman’s a blonde,’ I gurgle.

  ‘From where I’m standing’, Big continues, ‘it’s very clear that this devious South African has somehow managed – no conspired – to win you over. Heaven alone knows how or why, but he’s done it.’

  Well I never. I’m so astonished by Big’s unexpected gust of insight that my grip momentarily relaxes. He notices. ‘Don’t let up,’ he grumbles, ‘keep trying. I think it’s finally coming.’

  I still don’t react. He peers up at me, morosely.

  ‘Uh… that’s probably exactly what Penny Smolly was thinking,’ I splutter.

  Big does not smile. He’s struggling to keep Feely’s wrist firm. Feely has helpfully removed all the weight from his feet and is now just poignantly dangling. I get into gear and twist again. As I do so I feel a very gradual easing. Then pop! It’s out.

  Not his hand, unfortunately, but his shoulder bone, which slips from its socket with all the smooth ease of a bloated bee from a bluebell. Except not nearly so quietly. In fact the astonishing howl this four year old promptly delivers would strike envy into the hearts of a hundred-strong convention of Primal Screamers. He literally bellows.

  Yikes! We both drop him so fast it’s like he’s suddenly on fire, and the poor kid’s barely hit the floor (with a bang) before he’s up on his feet again and hopping around the ladies like a badly-injured baby ape, his entire right arm and shoulder hanging completely off-kilter. It’s hideous.

  Big (always an ass in a crisis) flies into an immediate panic. The tide’s in. The tractor’s out. How the heck will we manage to get the doctor over? I’m still pathetically fumbling to turn that damn tap off like a sweaty-pawed, slack-jawed, cack-handed water lover (like father, like daughter). All is chaos.

  Then suddenly something rather magnificent happens. As if from nowhere (okay, it seems likely the little pervert was hiding in a cubicle all the while, but I only actually realize this after), La Roux crashes into our crazy-palpitating, terror-struck environs, catches a firm hold of Feely, slams him down onto the floor, straightens his back, grabs his shoulder, gets him to count to three, applies a monumentally well-judged amount of force (but only very briefly) to the offending region, and then click, manages to shunt that pesky bone straight back into its socket again.

  The whole affair takes approximately seven seconds. In fact the drama’s all over so quickly that Feely can’t help feeling a fraction disgruntled and yanks the plastic mug off his fist just to facilitate his socking La Roux a firm blow with it.

  La Roux takes his thrashing like a man (upon his knee – he’s standing already), folds his arms anxiously across his puny chest (in the intimidating face of Big’s astonished gaze) and says – his tone almost apologetic – ‘I trained as a medic in the South African Army.’

  Army?

  ‘Somebody, somewhere trusted this misfit with a firearm?’

  (So I thought I was just thinking, but in the heat of the moment I find my mouth is moving and I am actually speaking.)

  La Roux sticks out his chin. ‘I said I was a medic,’ he repeats. ‘My most essential weapons – aside from my trusty pill box and my hypodermic syringe – were my natural cunning, my fierce intelligence…’ he pauses, ‘… and my cast-iron stomach, obviously.’

  Feely takes this rather appropriate opportunity to deal him a further well-aimed blow, then drops the mug, sits down squarely on the cold tiles and commences a brand-new (and very lengthy) phase of uninhibited howling.

  Big, clucking like a mother hen, bends over to pick him up. I turn briefly to try and wring out my soaking skirt (wool’s so appallingly absorbent, don’t you find?), and when I finally chance to glance his way again, our diabolical hero – sweet and silent as a dark Red Admiral on a soft sea breeze – has bashfully flitted.

  Hell’s bells. Events are certainly progressing at a fair old whack: especially strategically. I mean, one minute things are looking rather bleak for that cheerfully conniving South African buffoon, and then, in the very next instant, his fortunes have altered course completely.

  It’s like a critical scene in a TV drama where the character you couldn’t help liking the best suddenly turns out to be the self-same bastard who viciously murdered his best friend’s budgerigar. Only back to front (which would have to make him the person you like least offering a timely portion of mouth-to-beak resuscitation).

  Oh, liven up, you know what I mean.

  Initially it’s rather difficult to gauge the subtle shifts and slides in La Roux’s general household popularity. Patch – having been anything from lacklustre to indifferent previous to the Feely disaster – now thinks the sun shines out of this medically trained impostor’s most intimate orifice.

  Big has been briefly – if not entirely convincingly – won over. Feely – now here’s the weird part – having liked La Roux from the outset, suddenly can’t bear to catch the slightest whiff of him. And me? I liked the fool before, and now I love him ever more dearly.

  These feelings are – if anything – intensified by a small and ridiculous incident which occurs later that self-same evening. Having espied La Roux’s miniature guitar in his nest the day before, I suggest (with the secret aim of mollifying Feely a little) that we all get together that night, once my lengthy stint of painting is over, for a spot of musical revelry.

  The whole family just loves to warble. Unfortunately we possess not a single harmonious bone between us. We have voices like chainsaws. In gloriously cacophonous union we’re sufficiently discordant to unhinge a raven (except, that
is, for Barge, who sang like a nightingale prior to becoming tragically tone-deaf aged nine after firing off a cap gun inside his ear to forestall a riotous stint in some degraded, robe-wearing atoll-based version of the Vienna Boy’s Choir. The clever nipper).

  At half past eight we all assemble in the Palm Court – a glorified greenhouse which adjoins my sleeping quarters. Big thinks the large glass surround will make the acoustics spectacular. La Roux duly arrives (a little later than the rest of us, swathed in a dusty red velvet curtain garnered from one of the upstairs toilets, resembling a half-cocked thrift-shop Roman emperor), his small guitar ensconced snugly under his plush-draped arm.

  As chief musician, he immediately takes possession of the best (if also the most arse-clenchingly uncomfortable – the man’s all show) high-backed bamboo chair available. The rest of us cluster around him, balanced precariously on ill-maintained, mouldy-cushioned garden furniture.

  Feely naturally has his bean-bag with him, but refuses to sit upon it. Instead he crouches suspiciously on the parquet and clutches it to his chest as if living in a constant state of dread that La Roux will suddenly and arbitrarily snatch it from him, hurl it to the floor and conduct some agonizing experiment upon it.

  La Roux makes a meal out of tuning up his instrument (a skinny bare knee and a tantalizing flash of thigh just visible from beneath his crude acres of velvet) while the rest of us debate which songs we’ll be singing.

  Big – for reasons which will probably always remain a mystery to any person of taste or intelligence – is rather keen to wrap his tonsils around Cliff Richard’s ‘Living Doll’, Patch has set her heart on Kate Bush’s ‘Babooshka’, Feely demands Chas and Dave’s ‘Rabbit’. I suggest ‘The Art of Parties’ by Japan just to show how highbrow I am. But no one – least of all the guitar-player – seems to appreciate how clever I’m being.

  In the end a compromise is reached when Patch suggests this year’s Eurovision smash: Bucks Fizz’s ‘Making Your Mind Up’ (sweet Jesus, how unifying), and even though I hold out against it with ugly oodles of teen-determination, the majority still somehow maintains its sway (Yeah, so fuck Euro-democracy).

  La Roux, on being asked whether he’d be all right to strum this tune, modestly acknowledges that he can play ‘by ear only’. We are all suitably impressed – to the extent that Big asks him, just once, to adjust his curtains after they gape even further to reveal a slightly off-putting pair of capacious white y-fronts, and even then in a voice you might almost call indulgent.

  We illustrate our sing-a-long expertise by clapping out an approximate beat to start off with (two minutes are wasted deciding the appropriate tempo) then I duly deputize myself to count us all in. One, two, three, FOUR. And we’re off.

  Patch is immediately on her feet doing the requisite Euro-band hand movements. Feely – still clutching his bean-bag like it’s his dancing partner – is performing a marvellously seductive baby wiggle. Big is all smiles. It’s a party.

  But it doesn’t last. Barely a single verse is completed before everything descends inexorably into chaos. La Roux is banging out an unbearably noxious racket on his guitar (which while small in stature is still large on volume). He would appear to possess no musical talent whatsoever.

  Big is the first to really discern it (the man actively relishes disappointment). ‘I thought’, he says stiffly, ‘you said you could play that thing.’

  La Roux stops his horrible strumming. He thinks hard for a while, then he shakes his head, slowly. ‘Uh…’ he pauses, as if deeply confused by our plain irritation. ‘Uh, no,’ he smiles, ‘I don’t think I ever said I could play.’

  ‘Not anything?’ Patch asks.

  ‘So why’, Big interrupts, ‘do you own a guitar?’

  La Roux looks down at the offending object? ‘This old thing?’

  We all nod in unison. He shrugs. ‘I stole it off a child on the train.’ He frowns. ‘A very bad child.’

  Big abruptly clambers to his feet and marches outside onto the wide sweep of the hotel’s grand balcony. Patch scratches her head. ‘Wow,’ she mumbles (and it’s almost in awe), ‘what a complete and utter embarrassment you are.’

  Feely is staring at the guitar with worried eyes as he stands behind a bamboo, glass-topped table, making a meal out of the contents of his nasal passages. He plainly has La Roux down as a certifiable child-hater.

  La Roux adjusts his robe. ‘You know something?’ he whispers confidentially. ‘I find your family unusually uptight for a bunch of hippies.’

  I say nothing (What’s to say?).

  ‘And the worst part is,’ he continues, ‘I could’ve learned the guitar as a boy, but I missed my opportunity. I actually went and took swimming lessons instead.’

  ‘Really?’ I ask gamely. ‘And are you an impressive swimmer?’

  He blinks. ‘Swimmer? Me?!’ He chuckles. ‘No. I could never get my head around the basic knack of…’ he thinks for a while, ‘… the knack of floating.’

  For a few, brief seconds he silently mulls over this poignant irony, then he smiles, stands up, passes me the guitar, yawns, gathers his red robe grandly around him and glides off with all the mile-high airs and inappropriate graces of an unkempt, over-indulged Folies Bergère.

  Would you believe it? The cheeky freak.

  Chapter 8

  It’s mid-morning, low-tide, and I’m taking La Roux on a tour of this tiny island’s most tantalizing rock pools. La Roux has recently divulged an unusual interest in crustaceans.

  ‘I find that the happy sight of a little crab or a shrimp or a lobster’, he pontificates cheerily, ‘will always set me up nicely.’

  Set him up for what exactly, he doesn’t deign to specify.

  And he still persists in wearing his balaclava, even though the air is intoxicatingly soft and camomile-scented and balmy. That said, his sharp eyes peer out from behind their black woollen prison as bright and keen as a Siamese fighting rat’s, and his two feet on the slippy rocks have such a confidently sure-hoofed and nimble character that to all intents and purposes they seem virtually cloven. In general, his demeanour is one of infuriatingly uninhibited perkiness.

  He is strangely attired in a thin, well-worn, pale-blue summer sweater with a ill-preserved embroidered illustration of an Appaloosan pony on the front of it, and some light, canvas-coloured baggy trousers, so low on the hips and wide on the thigh that it’s as if he has a small section of a trellis stuck up inside of them. They may well be African in origin, or perhaps even Indian.

  Naturally his unorthodox garb means he receives a couple of slightly perturbed sideways glances from the occasional sharp-eyed but nonetheless deeply inconsequential tourist – and if they’re staring at me, coincidentally, then they’re simply marvelling at my loose, well-worn, brown leather pedal-pushers matched with a scant but utterly modest cheesecloth halter – either way, he doesn’t seem to notice.

  Slightly more perturbing, though, is the shadowy figure of Black Jack leaning heavily on the fence near the Pilchard Inn, glaring pointedly down in our general direction.

  La Roux gives a fine impression of complete self-absorption as he shuffles carefully around the edge of a good-sized pool, squats and peers (He has painstakingly fashioned a pokey stick from a stray twig and has already become ludicrously attached to this implement which he swishes and waves whenever the opportunity presents itself).

  ‘See anything?’

  He doesn’t answer. He lifts some yellowing flotsam with his twig, shifts slightly, and stares some more. While he’s quietly preoccupied I resolve to ask him some leading questions.

  ‘I imagine you must’ve lived quite close to the sea in Cape Town. The city’s right on the coast, isn’t it?’ I begin with.

  ‘Must I?’ he answers haughtily. ‘Is it?’

  He clearly doesn’t appreciate this particular line of questioning.

  ‘And your father’s a gynaecologist.’

  La Roux unbuckles his sandles, pulls off his socks, then laboriousl
y rolls up his canvas trousers. His legs are phenomenally ginger-hairy against a contrasting skin-tone on the bright-white side of feta.

  His two feet are practically skeletal and in the dry morning heat the aroma from his absurdly long toes hinges on the fragile cusp of sweet Swiss-cheesy. He tests the pool’s temperature with the tip of his fingers, then clambers in.

  The water hits just under his knee. He shuffles around awhile, sending everything cloudy, then he pauses.

  ‘I remember Christmas mornings,’ he whispers suddenly. ‘My father, as always, up early and working at the large oak bureau in the sitting-room, waiting for me and my brother, the tree lights twinkling, the presents wrapped, paging and paging through a thousand graphic gynaecological illustrations of chronically diseased wombs and vaginas.’

  My face creases.

  ‘I’m starting to wonder,’ he continues, glancing over his shoulder for a second, ‘whether Black Jack might be sexually inverted.’

  I continue frowning. ‘Inverted? What does that mean?’

  ‘A lover of men.’

  ‘Jack? Never.’

  ‘It’s just that he will keep staring.’

  I frown (I mean how to put this politely?). ‘Perhaps it’s your balaclava. It does give you a slightly intimidating aura.’

  ‘No.’ La Roux shakes his scraggy head firmly. ‘It goes deeper. It’s something…’ he thinks for a moment, ‘…something untapped, something underneath, something… something goosy.’

  Goosy?

  ‘Jack? Untapped?’ I cackle. ‘That’s twisted.’

  La Roux swaps his stick into his other hand and then proceeds to wave it in Jack’s general direction. Jack freezes and turns briefly to peer behind him. Luckily Patch and Feely are just within sight carrying the nets to the tennis court.

  ‘It has subsequently become very difficult for me’, La Roux continues, ‘to even think about a woman’s sexual and reproductive organs without experiencing strong feelings of fear and revulsion. And believe it or not, in certain especially intimate situations, I find I lose all sensation in the pads of my fingers.’