I frown. ‘That’s just tragic.’
La Roux nods, sadly, plainly immune to my withering sarcasm. ‘When I asked him about it, the family doctor said the only way to get over this problem was to reacquaint myself with the vagina, but in what he called a gentle, open and unthreatening environment. By a process of calmly inspecting and slowly re-educating. Just glimpsing…’
He gives me a sudden, furtive glance, to see how he’s doing (Who does he think he’s kidding?). My face is a surly mask of violent antipathy. I think he gets the message.
‘Anyway,’ he chuckles wryly, ‘in many respects I see this strange affliction as the ultimate festive offering from my father.’
‘Give me a Chopper any day,’ I mutter.
He points his stick accusingly. ‘You’re still such a baby.’
I scowl back.
‘In defence of the vagina,’ I tell him, watching indulgently as he bends over and tries but fails to dismantle a limpet, ‘I’m pretty certain men’s genitals do their own fair share of rotting and festering.’
La Roux’s eyes widen. ‘Are you trying to destroy my sexual impulses altogether?’ he whispers hoarsely. I can’t tell if he’s joking. He straightens up, wipes his fingers on his trousers and shuffles around some more with a curiously unconvincing tragic air about him.
After a brief lull he pauses. ‘When I was a kid,’ he begins dreamily, ‘I once went on holiday to a farm in the Orange Free State…’
‘A place full of liberated citrus, presumably,’ I wisecrack. He yanks up his balaclava so that I can now observe his thin lips moving.
‘That was pathetic,’ his disembodied mouth informs me, then he carefully readjusts his head-gear to its former position. ‘Anyhow,’ he continues, ‘they had a water hole – we called it a Boer hole – it was like a pond, only above the ground and large – five or six metres in diameter – and round but not too deep. Concrete. Like a murky swimming-pool. Full of all kinds of crap. And I’d climb into it on hot days and romp about.
‘One day I clambered in and I was lounging against the edge, just relaxing, when suddenly a huge fish swam between my legs…’ He catches my expression. ‘I mean, my calves and my knees. And it got trapped there. Only briefly.’
‘I’ve had porcupines graze my shins before,’ I immediately trump him, ‘and I was stung by a jellyfish once on my thigh, and my leg blew up like it was badly scalded. Not here, obviously, but in an obscure region of northern Madagascar.’
La Roux is patently not the slightest bit interested. ‘In truth I think it was the single most happy moment of my life,’ he continues, his voice still seductively blissful, ‘to feel the weed in the water, the hot sun on my skin and that frantic fish just… just wriggling.’
He pauses. ‘Oh dear me,’ he mutters conspiratorially, his voice immediately dropping by half an octave. ‘Black Jack’s approaching.’
‘It doesn’t happen often,’ I tell him, finally getting into the swing of things, ‘but sometimes when you’re floating in the Mermaid Cove, over on the other side of the island, you occasionally get to feel the fish in the water.’
His eyes widen. ‘On your lower limbs specifically?’
‘Yes. Sometimes they burrow into the sandy shingle and you find yourself treading on them. And sometimes they glance off your arms when you’re swimming. But usually only tiddlers.’
‘I don’t swim,’ he reminds me.
‘Or even if you’re just paddling.’
He scowls. ‘I don’t paddle.’
I struggle obligingly to recall the word he’d used previously. ‘When you romp then,’ I exclaim, ‘when you’re romping.’
Jack is now standing just a few feet away from us. He’s still on the firm sand at the edge of the rocky section. He doesn’t want to trouble himself with clambering over. La Roux sniffs, turns away and continues wading. I nod half-heartedly.
‘I think you’d better tell your father,’ Jack shouts, clearly not at all affected by his apathetic reception, ‘that a segment of the cliff-top fencing next to the old chapel has just gone missing. He’ll need to replace it before some idiot tourist topples over.’
While Jack is speaking La Roux tickles me distractingly behind my knee with the fiendishly scratchy tip of his damp twig. ‘Ask him,’ he suddenly whispers, when I turn defensively and slap the spot, ‘whether Jack is short for anything.’
‘Sorry?’ (Inside me an angry dialogue is being conducted between my breasts and my brain – that bastard stick has only gone and made my nipples tighten!)
‘Go on,’ he hisses, ‘just ask him.’
I clear my throat and cross my arms (These are pre-Lycra days, smart-arse, and I’m wearing a semi-translucent pale halter top. It’s turning into an intimate Armageddon down there – my aureoles darkening dramatically, my nipples jutting like tent-pegs… ). ‘La Roux here was just wondering,’ I say loudly (perhaps, under the circumstances, without sufficient due-consideration), ‘whether the name Jack is actually short for anything.’
La Roux, once again, has his back to me, but I think I can detect his bony shoulders shaking. Jack scowls. ‘What do you mean?’
I turn to La Roux again. ‘He wants to know what you mean exactly.’
La Roux’s shoulders are now shuddering uncontrollably.
‘What does he mean, short for anything?’ Jack repeats.
I shrug limply.
A minute’s uneasy silence commences, only punctuated by La Roux’s hysterical snuffling. When the minute is over, and the tension’s just about to diffuse, La Roux contains his inexplicable excitement for just long enough to heighten it again. ‘I was only idly wondering,’ he creaks, ‘whether it was short for anything.’
Jack is quiet for a moment. He looks down at his feet, as if he is actually, physically walking the fine line between fury and bemusement.
‘Whether what is short for anything?’ he answers finally.
La Roux starts laughing again. ‘Your name,’ he splutters.
Jack takes a small step forward. His fists are slowly clenching and unclenching. His brown cheeks are suddenly livid.
‘I just wondered,’ La Roux bellows, throwing out his arms and twirling his stick infuriatingly, ‘I just wondered about your name.’
Jack carefully lifts his right foot up on to the rocks, then pauses, his large bulk swaying. He’s like a huge, newly blinded bison slowly negotiating the scarily multifarious world around him. Trying. Failing.
For the first time – as he sniffs and blinks in a curiously affecting slow motion – I see that he’s actually fragile. A mesmerizing mix of the distressingly magisterial and the irredeemably bovine (well, hell, it worked for John Wayne all those years).
After a few loose moments he gradually gathers himself together. ‘I’m going fishing tomorrow morning, Medve,’ he announces, turning to me directly and in the process cutting that rude dog La Roux completely.
Medve. My bare toes curl into the rock and muck and weed. It’s gentle weather but I’m very nearly blown away. Black Jack just used my name for the first time ever! And so naturally, too, like he’s been secretly rehearsing it in private or something.
La Roux responds by emitting a series of musical burps. He can apparently do this to order.
‘About five,’ Jack continues stiffly, ‘in the little boat, if you fancy it.’
I nod again. ‘Well, I’ll certainly think it over. Thanks.’
He removes his foot, smiles thinly, turns and leaves.
Well I never.
La Roux, meanwhile, has sat himself down on the edge of the pool with his two feet dangling into the shallow water. ‘Medve! Medve, quickly!’ he whispers. ‘Quickly. Come here.’
He has his hands tightly cupped on his lap as if he’s captured a small but skittish crustacean. His balaclava has been pulled up, off his face, and is now balanced on top of his head – still maintaining its shape – like some weirdly cylindrical mobile chimney.
‘Jesus!’ he exclaims delightedly
. ‘It’s really tickling! Come on. Come quickly, before it gets away.’
I stagger across the slippy rocks and join him. I squat down and peer.
‘Show.’
‘I’m not sure what it is exactly,’ he whispers, his keen thin lips dripping in anticipation.
‘Probably a common shrimp,’ I debunk. ‘I thought I caught a glimpse of one earlier.’
‘It’s entirely possible. Look.’
He opens his cupped hands gradually. I stare hard. Then harder still. His pale fingers are gently surrounding a little red organism, a mollusc, a soft thing. A deep sea creature…
I blink. A brief flash follows. The shutter lifts.
What that cheeky varmint is actually cradling is the disembodied, yanked back, grinning tip of his unrepentantly uncut, small-eyed, purple-lipped pecker.
La Roux blinks up at me, his wool-blotched face suffused in a childlike glow of absolute – almost bewildered – wonderment (He’s like a favourite nephew offering his ancient aunt his very last piece of toffee brittle. It’s appalling).
I grit my teeth. I steady my feet. I clear my throat. I balance internally. Then: ‘My God,’ I whisper gently, my face a profoundly sympathetic mask of quite the tenderest bewilderment. ‘La Roux, my God! It’s so very ugly. And tiny too, really tiny.’
His smile falters. And while it’s faltering, with a single hefty kick from my huge left hoof I shove that ginger-haired and deeply perverted mother-fucker straight down, head first, into the water.
You know what? In my trivial pursuit of the fine 1980s Free Enterprise Ethic, I’m seriously considering establishing my very own International Library of Gullibility – kind of along the same lines as The School of Hard Knocks, but warmer, and friendlier and with unlimited lending.
Think there’s any future in it? Better still, fancy joining?
Chapter 9
Don’t ask me why, but I suddenly feel like the time is prime to get something rather hefty off my 38B (that’s my chest measurement, you booby), both on behalf of my huge-hoofed self and my dilapidated family.
Unorthodox we may well be. Laughing-stocks? Certainly. Eccentric? Eclectic? Erratic? Entopic? (We can do all the ‘e’s without even blinking.)
Yeah, so we’re the first to chuckle at our own endless inadequacies, but when everything’s finally said and done, we still take great umbrage at the insulting suggestion that we’re completely obsessed by crass anality (I mean, did I even yet make mention of my capacious anus?).*
It just so happens that there are some things, some… how to put it?… some cracks in the plaster, some issues (Big’s gut, his pedantry, my mail-order addiction, Poodle’s tiny breasts, Barge’s beet-boiling) which just won’t budge or shift no matter how hard or how diligently you try to paper them over. And that anus probus, I fear, is clearly no exception.
Right. So I know it’s a subject which we have all – so far and so assiduously – been avoiding, but when it actually comes down to it the only real problem with Mo’s mighty invention is that there is no real problem (and I have a powerful teenage yen for exaggeration).
The Anal Probe – Sick, you’re thinking? Weird? Shameful?
Saucy? Problematic? Traumatic? Nah! I know it sounds crazy, but the inescapably tedious truth of the matter is that the Probe is nothing more creepy or glorious than an actual-factual, down-to-earth, dull-as-dishwater metal detector: a plain plastic chair (and there’s nothing remotely invasive) which, when you sit down upon it, kindly informs a disinterested observer whether there’s anything remiss clenched inside your cavities (and I don’t exactly mean your teeth here, either).
Mo says the results are nothing short of fantastic. During a trial run in Idaho’s main female prison one woman was apprehended with six razor blades lodged inside her vagina, all neatly wrapped in a small, neat sheath of protective plastic (some indication – if any were needed – of the sheer lengths these girls will go to to avoid unsightly stubble).
Not only an absolute boon for the prison authorities, a smart innovation and a serious time-saver, the Probe also – in real terms – means a serious reduction in rubber-glove expenditure (Lord! To hear me flog this pony you’d think I was on commission). And last, but certainly not least, it’s a huge potential money-spinner for my dear mother Mo and her shifty, lily-livered, liberally inclined, financial and ideological partner, Bob Ranger.
(I’d rather not dwell, if you don’t mind, on the tough early days of this fine device’s preparatory testing regimen. Just whisper the dread words metal pessary within earshot and my eyes begin watering – although, on the upside, my powerful vaginal muscles could choke a weasel.)
And that, as they say, is basically the sum of it. So how’s about we all try and set our sordid minds to finally putting this whole damn Probe thing behind us?
Ah-hah-hem. If you get my meaning.
Talk about a whole host of weird shit. I’ve hardly set a well-turned toe back inside the hotel foyer again before Little Big Man lunges out unexpectedly from behind a ludicrously monumental translucent pink glass statue of Diana the Huntress (a goddess with huskies. For some reason they seemed to dote on this crazy broad way back in the thirties. I’m uncertain of her eighties status, but whenever we’re engulfed by a spot of DIY chaos, Diana’s always the first thing to split the scene on a series of specially-adapted squeaky castors. The girl’s an ancient, godly, dog-infested, iced-glass absconder).
He grabs a tight hold of me and spirits me off into a quiet corner. He has a deranged air, Polyfilla-coated fingers and is clutching a telegram from our dear mother Mo. He hands it over (there’s hardly any sticky residue) and kindly but firmly obliges me to read it.
Here’s what it says:
Oh my sweet darling I need more money. Please, please strong-arm the lovely S. African. To hell with principle! Am on the cusp of reforming greatness! Clever Bob R. has made serious contacts with a major international security manufacturer. Wahhh! Still prison visiting. Tell kids J. H. got parole last week June 5. God Bless Norman Mailer! All is madness. Mo
‘J. H.? Who’s that, then?’ I ask stupidly, once I’ve carefully completed my scrupulous re-reading.
Big scowls. ‘Abbott. The mass murderer. The writer.’
I make the connection. ‘Ah, you mean…’
‘Yes. And that’s another thing,’ Big rapidly continues (having failed to tell me the first thing first), ‘I don’t need Patch filling her silly head with a pointless heap of anti-establishment propaganda. I need you to get that book off her.’
‘And then what?’ I chortle. ‘Burn it?’
He’s so pent-up, he can’t even tell I’m joking. He just nods his agreement and then suddenly stiffens. ‘Just do something for once,’ he yells, ‘without bloody arguing.’
I stare down at him for a moment. He seems barely recognizable.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say plaintively, ‘but I can’t help feeling like I’m not getting something.’
(I mean, either the man’s displacing for some reason or his fuse has sparked out and short-circuited his sanity.) He frowns for a minute, then shrugs, then shakes his head. ‘I miss Barge,’ he mutters weakly, touching his hands to his temples and inadvertently war-painting them. ‘And I miss Poodle. It’s nothing against you, nothing personal, they’re just that tiny little bit older and, well, wiser.’
He indicates a short inch between his thumb and his index finger (This is Barge we’re talking about: a twenty-three-year-old man wholly incapable of expressing himself artistically in anything even loosely amounting to 3D, an atheist pumpkin, a salivating ninny).
Yeah. Thanks a bunch. So I’m sixteen years young, criminally undervalued and hurting, but I still take the requisite time out to carefully re-inspect that unenlightening telegram.
‘I don’t quite understand the South African thing. Strong arm who for money? Does she mean La Roux? Is he loaded or something?’
Big takes a deep breath. ‘Not La Roux. She means his father.’
&nbs
p; ‘Uh…’ I frown. ‘Sorry. I’m still not following.’
He snatches the telegram and carefully refolds it. ‘La Roux’s staying here illegally,’ he whispers, all sotto. ‘He’s meant to be fighting in a war with Angola. He’s AWOL. He’s done a runner.’
‘La Roux fighting a war?’ I bellow, and then instantly start sniggering. ‘La Roux? Perhaps it’s just me, but I find it rather difficult to picture a big…’ (I pause, and scrabble) ‘… a big goose like him engaged in violent hand to hand conflict with anybody, let alone the marshalled armed forces of an entire British colony.’
(In my mind I have a sudden vision of La Roux in his strangely structured trousers and Appaloosan pony sweater thumbing his nose idly at ten thousand well-armed Angolan warriors. It’s a huge joke. It must be.)
Big waves his hand. ‘It’s an ex-German colony, if you must know, and more in the style of a guerilla conflict,’ he says airily, as if this explains everything.
‘Wow,’ I muse. ‘Real guerillas? How wonderfully African.’
Big spends a difficult thirty seconds struggling to comprehend my position. And then, when he thinks he’s finally got it (I’m just a scab he’s idly peeling), the tight set of his expression implies that it’s a standpoint hardly worth comprehending.
‘Perhaps you might bear in mind’, he snipes meanly, ‘that there’s nothing remotely wonderful about evading your duties, bludging off complete strangers, masturbating at will and strong-arming miniature guitars from defenceless children.’
‘Bludging?’ I blink anxiously at Big’s ferocity. ‘I thought you just said his dad was paying.’
‘And another thing,’ Big adds, ignoring my sneaky intervention, ‘and it’s something you might do well to try and remember…’ (I hold my breath and listen, appalled, as always, to be in the direct firing line of a parental pronouncement.) ‘There’s nothing more sickening’, he growls emphatically, ‘than the spectre of science parading as morality.’
He pauses dramatically. ‘Remember the nuclear bomb?’
I nod.
Five Miles from Outer Hope Page 7