Jack shakes his head. ‘Not that I can recall.’
‘Well,’ La Roux continues determinedly, ‘I would happily bet a considerable amount of money that Bruce was probably the best Joseph in any production.’
Jack says nothing (He seems to have no particular feelings either way on this subject, and why should he?).
‘The South African version had some minor differences to the English version,’ La Roux continues, ‘but they were all good differences in my opinion. They were improvements.’
Jack continues fishing in silence for a while and then he suddenly says, ‘How can you be sure of that? You didn’t even see the English version. Or any others, for that matter.’
La Roux (plainly delighted at having finally provoked some opposition, no matter how half-hearted) instantly jumps onto his high-horse and straddles it like a pincer-kneed professional. ‘That’s hardly the point,’ he says. ‘In my experience of musical theatre – which is extensive because we have a real passion for it in South Africa – I have never seen an actor so well cast for a role as Bruce was for Joseph.’
‘But you didn’t even see the English Joseph,’ Jack counters dogmatically.
‘I heard him on record and that was enough for me. He was useless. In fact he was embarrassing.’
Jack immediately takes offence at La Roux’s harsh and fatuous criticisms. He indignantly draws himself up to his full height. ‘He certainly wasn’t useless when I saw him.’
‘Well, he was useless on record. And Bruce was great recorded. That must mean something.’
Jack snorts derisively. ‘I’m afraid I simply can’t agree with you. A recording is a very different kettle of fish indeed from a live performance. Someone could easily perform live brilliantly and then record badly. It happens.’
‘Fine,’ La Roux concedes, ‘but if you’re such an admirer of his talents, how about telling me the actual name of the actor who played the English Joseph?’
Jack thinks hard for a minute. ‘I can’t honestly say I remember. All I can recollect is the fine performance he gave. I don’t believe he was especially famous. I can’t even recall having seen him in anything before or since…’
‘But doesn’t that tell you something?’ La Roux expostulates victoriously. ‘He performed in Joseph and then he sank without a trace. You never heard of him again. Listen to yourself! It’s so easy. It’s like snatching candy from a little baby.’
‘No. I said I’d never heard of him since. That doesn’t mean he didn’t have a perfectly respectable career after. I just don’t happen to follow the world of musical theatre as closely as…’
‘Enough!’ I bellow. ‘What the heck is wrong with the two of you? That is it. If I hear another fucking word about Joseph I am going to kill somebody. I am fishing. Don’t you know what that means? It’s a spiritual experience. It’s a kind of devotion. I need some peace and bloody quiet!’
Both men turn and stare at me with expressions of surprised incomprehension, as if my sudden show of bile is entirely disproportionate to the net irritation caused.
‘Fine then,’ Jack eventually mutters. ‘Very sorry, I’m sure.’
He turns his back on us and reels in his line. As soon as he’s not watching I poke a stiff finger into La Roux’s spine (he yelps like a kitten). ‘I know what you’re doing,’ I whisper ferociously, ‘and you’ll live to regret it if you carry on. Just shut the fuck up and stop driving me crazy.’
La Roux leans back a way and stares at me indignantly. ‘Well get a load of you, Miss High and Mighty!’ he exclaims. ‘As far as I am aware,’ he continues haughtily, ‘you have absolutely no reason to believe my voice isn’t actually deeply alluring to fish. In fact, you have no logical or scientific basis for thinking fish aren’t actively attracted to my singing.’
‘La Roux, just put a bloody sock in it,’ I hiss.
I return to my rod. A mere five short seconds later, La Roux cheerfully commences whistling the overture to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (the English version, naturally, to garner support from his Lloyd-Webber ally), then calmly proceeds to perform it in full. With a whole infuriating variety of embellishments.
Straight after the overture comes the first vocal number. And it is exactly half-way through his hyper-energetic performance of this song (during which the narrator kindly sets the BC scene) that I finally decide to throw my first punch.
Thereafter, things get really ugly.
When we arrive back at the island (a tumultuous twenty soggy, splashy, salty, sweaty minutes later), knuckles have been bitten, bruises have blossomed on lips and on backs-of-heads, blood has been drawn.
Jack clambers out first, ties up the boat, then turns and peers down at me.
‘Is he still breathing?’ he asks anxiously.
I peruse La Roux at my leisure. ‘Of course he is. Can’t you see his chest moving?’
‘But did you really have to sit on his face all the way home?’ Jack persists.
I smile, brightly. ‘Come on, Jack, I gave him fair warning. When I sat astride his chest he still persisted in whistling. In my book that’s a declaration of war and at that point I was actively obliged to take the appropriate action. There was no alternative.’
Jack still doesn’t look convinced. ‘For heaven’s sake,’ I tell him, ‘this man has had six months training in the South African armed forces. He’s seen military action. I am a sixteen-year-old girl with a short fuse. It’s hardly unfair competition.’
La Roux kicks out his right leg, furiously. Jack shrugs, rescues his mackerel and quickly makes off with it. As I watch him retreating, I take a good, deep breath, clench my buttocks one last time and then rise from that boat like a tall, teen, phoenix.
Unrepentant, ruddy-cheeked and righteous.
Yeah, Buster. That’s me.
Chapter 13
Talk about one helluva lousy and unproductive fishing expedition. When I finally arrive home again (it’s seven a.m. already – I mean, the day’s literally over), completely fish-free and horribly groin-grazed (you honestly think he let me sit on his face for quarter of an hour without champing at my genital region like an avenging two-humped camel?) I spend a fair old while digging out and then trowelling half a bottle of Germolene on to my assorted cuts and grazes.
My lower lip – I mutely observe in the bathroom mirror – is fatter than a Christmas-week turkey and redder and moister than a half-pint jug of cranberry jelly.
La Roux (very sensibly) lies low until way after eleven, when I eventually catch a glimpse of him outside on the balcony, struggling to make his creepy peace with Feely (This man’s an emotional juggler. If he’s out of favour in one place he’s bound to be energetically ingratiating himself in another).
After the awful Shiro Chan drama I’m astonished the loose-bladdered little one will even look at him again, let alone actively welcome his clumsy advances. But look he will, and welcome he does (which I guess speaks volumes about the natural, heedless folly of Human Nature; or maybe it’s just my small brother the masochist voluntarily offering his other cheek in the secret anticipation of yet a further slapping).
Everything falls into place, though, when I finally discover how it is that La Roux’s aiming to re-enter the Leaking Sprout’s good graces. Not with Pomfret cakes or gentle kisses or games of Snap or Snakes and Ladders. No. He earns his forgiveness by dint of teaching him the complex and much-vaunted technique of burp-speaking (i.e. to speak coherent sentences in the guise of an extended belch).
This is, without doubt, just the kind of knack any well-adjusted whippersnapper might happily offer up his milk teeth for. Where, after all – I overhear La Roux asking rhetorically – is any real man without such a talent when participating in a riotous rugby club dinner, a bachelor party or a five-hour-long car journey?
Where? He wants to know where? Whatever happened to lighting farts, or hiring strippers or experimenting with depilatory cream or inhaling a reliably noxious cocktail of correction fluid, nai
l polish and paint thinners? (Is it just me or is the world really changing far too fast this half of the century?)
The secret to burp-speaking effectively – it turns out – lies in creating a syncopated rhythm of breathing and swallowing. It takes some doing. Although you wouldn’t know it, to watch La Roux in action (demonstrating, experimenting, encouraging, enjoying), since he does it all so naturally; to the extent that I’m honestly starting to doubt whether English truly is his first language.
Indeed, to see this ginger gentleman valiantly burping is to observe true indigestive craftsmanship at it’s absolute zenith. He can even recite the Twenty-third Psalm in belches with no artificial breaks or pauses. And he makes it look effortless.
Downstairs in the kitchen, meanwhile, poor Patch has been thrown into a sudden confusion by the unexplained disappearance of her carefully pre-prepared lunch menu (spicy Moroccan Curry Balls, to you).
The oil smokes mournfully in the pan as she stares fixedly into the well-pilfered refrigerator and mutters, ‘I’m certain I made twelve of those pesky things. Now there’s only seven left, and two of those look partially regurgitated.’
(They actually say Agatha Christie was a regular visitor to these parts in the 1930s, and frankly, on the basis of what I’ve witnessed today, is it really any wonder? I mean, talk about a scintillating culinary-based art-deco murder-mystery in the making.)
Lunch is at one, formally, by which time La Roux has developed a rather attractive shiner (brown on its edges, blue-grey at its centre), and lucky for me the whole family gets to witness it in all its cinematic luminosity because today we just so happen to be picnicking on the tennis court, upon a blanket, with the searing midday sun blazing obligingly down and generously picking out each and every vicious Technicolor detail from this showy-looking but insignificant small-scale ocular injury.
After a painful five minutes on the concrete I dash inside again and fetch myself a cushion; this small foam square is found exceedingly welcome in my nether regions (ah, some brief respite at long last for my too-too-tender undercarriage).
La Roux and I are still barely speaking. Hitherto nobody (but nobody) has dared to mention our dramatic pot-pourri of physical maladies (excepting Feely who, at one point, looks from me to the South African and then back again – the kid puts two and two together so effortlessly that I must be teaching him something properly – his eyes as round as picnic plates, and delightedly whispers, ‘Wow! Big’s really going to kill you this time, sister.’)
Kill me? This time?! I give La Roux another furtive once over. In the harsh light, and without his balaclava, his hair looks dramatically moth-infested (Patch certainly did a dandy job there). Ringworm? Now it’s finally settling down again it’s starting to look as if someone spiteful’s been yanking out handfuls of it.
He has a graze on his cheek (with an oddly well-delineated bite mark at its centre), a second on his knuckle, and – worst of all – he appears to have chipped his main front tooth rather badly: just a small pointed spike remains where once there was a tombstone (To tell the absolute truth, I had no idea I’d succeeded in wounding him so categorically. Perhaps I’m really much more of a bruiser than I’ve ever previously given myself credit for?).
And my battle-scars? Well there’s my extensively bruised bottom (and that’s hardly up for inspection), a tetchy shoulder injury, and my swollen lip, which has quietened down considerably (in the swelling department) over the past six hours.
Naturally both La Roux and I have studiously avoided countenancing Big since returning home from our bumpy voyage, but as luck would have it, the Little Man has lain deliciously a-slumbering in his cot ’til noon.
And (doubly lucky), as he bouncily approaches us across the hard green concrete court, he seems to physically exude the healthy benefits of his lengthy span of pillow-punching. You might even say his lunch-time disposition is decidedly jaunty.
He turns up humming, a melon under his arm, sits down, grabs a knife, smiles at everybody (his expression full of a strangely airy and open geniality), then proceeds to hack up the honeydew and proffer it in chunks to the assembled masses. He says nothing – not anything – even when Feely thanks him for his dripping segment in ill-formed burp-language.
Unfortunately, La Roux has recently developed an odd new tick to compliment his other, more visible, multi-coloured ailments. And it’s suitably maddening. Each and every time he uses his hands (which is quite a bit when he’s eating), he neurotically presses the individual pads of his eight fingers down – in order – on to his two thumbs as if testing them for something. He’s been doing it all morning.
On the seventh or eighth occasion he does this during lunch, Patch can apparently stand the suspense no longer. ‘La Roux,’ she says, ‘could I ask you a question?’
La Roux wipes some melon juice from his chin, then immediately does this finger thing again.
‘Of course you may.’
‘What’s that weird thing you keep doing with your fingers there?’
The entire assembled company turns, as one, to look at him. ‘My tips are numb,’ he explains (free air whistling through the gap in his tooth as he’s speaking).
‘Oh. Okay.’ Patch seems perfectly satisfied with this answer, but unfortunately not everyone in the party is as easily fobbed-off as she. Big in particular.
At long last, on the back of this deeply inconclusive sally from my nosey sister, he is finally spurred into his own casual enquiry. ‘How did that happen, then?’ he asks gently.
‘Uh… You know what?’ La Roux thinks hard for a minute. ‘I don’t honestly remember.’
‘Hmmmn. Concussion,’ Big mutters ruminatively, grabbing some curry balls and a handful of green salad, then reaching out his hand, a second time, to proffer La Roux a slice of cucumber. ‘For your shiner,’ he says. Then he turns to me.
‘Been scrapping again, Medve?’ he asks softly.
I gape, then artfully double-bluff him. ‘Again? What on earth are you implying?’
Patch chuckles fondly. ‘How well I remember’, she callously intervenes, ‘when you got thrown off the under-twelves’ hockey team in Madagascar for breaking the referee’s wrist after a bad decision. God, that was funny. And then when you bloodied that girl’s nose in New Zealand for stealing my rubber chicken…’
Big thinks for a while (chewing peaceably). ‘To get back to the point,’ he continues. ‘The rather serious calibre of injuries sustained here would seem to imply either…’ he emphasizes cheerily, ‘… scrapping of a fairly serious nature, or,’ he smiles sweetly, ‘a minor traffic accident. But,’ he sighs, ‘there’s no indigenous traffic on this island. And the tide’s been in for much of the morning, so…’ He pauses tantalizingly (I say nothing; I’m simply wondering what’s made him so infuriatingly self-satisfied all of a sudden). ‘In summing up,’ he finishes with a facetious flourish, ‘I guess it must’ve been a car accident, then?’
‘You know what?’ (Uh-oh. I spy a light-bulb suddenly lighting inside La Roux’s dark head) ‘… We were actually riding pillion on Black Jack’s delivery bike, when Medve took a really ill-judged corner and we both fell off it.’
La Roux smiles his deep satisfaction at this ridiculous-sounding porky-pie and then does that crazy-making thing with his fingers again.
‘La Roux,’ I speak calmly, ‘would you mind just not doing that?’ (It suddenly dawns on me that the whole stupid finger thing is an indirect reference to my most intimate of Girl Places. Don’t you remember? His fingers always go numb after bouts of vaginal interference.)
‘Why?’ he asks smugly.
‘Because it’s irritating me.’
‘I actually quite like it,’ Feely contributes (in burp, so it’s hard to decipher) and starts doing it himself like he thinks he’s being clever. Then Patch does the same, but with her left hand only.
Big ignores this (the man’s a terrier). ‘A bike accident?’ he repeats casually. La Roux nods. Big frowns. ‘You mean that sharp corner
on the road down near where Jack parks the Sea Tractor?’
I immediately start cringing, but La Roux totally ignores my agonized expression and continues nodding along gamely. ‘Yup. That’s the one.’
Big claps his hands delightedly. ‘But there is no corner. And Jack doesn’t own a bike. His last one rusted to pieces shortly after we first arrived here.’
La Roux’s face stiffens. ‘Oh,’ he says, and does his finger-twitching thing again, but much faster this time. Big frowns sympathetically. ‘Is it a circulation problem you have there?’ he asks. ‘Are your finger pads prickling?’
La Roux licks his lips nervously. ‘Yes. Something like that.’
‘And when did this start happening? Was it before or after the invisible bicycle accident on the imaginary corner?’
‘Uh…’ La Roux glances my way anxiously and then does the finger thing again.
‘Stop doing that!’ I bellow. Big (still wincing from the sheer volume of my intervention) turns and raises a warning brow at me.
(Enough is enough. This tiny man’s eyebrows have long rendered him the south coast’s answer to Mr Roger Moore. And the sharply cocked brow – as you may well have gleaned – invariably anticipates imminent slaughter.)
‘Okay, okay,’ I come clean immediately (but with a suitable portion of pitiable mewing), ‘we went fishing and La Roux kept on whistling, so I threatened to hit him. But he wouldn’t stop – in fact he began singing instead, and really horribly – so I did hit him. Then he still kept on at it so I was faced with no real alternative but to sit on his head to try and quieten him.
‘Which was when his fingers went numb. From feverishly scrabbling on the bottom of the boat. Either that or from the shock, I imagine. And that’s the whole story.’
La Roux’s hyperactive hands seem suddenly frozen. Big is quiet for a long while as if mulling the whole thing over. Feely was right. I am in for it this time (the child’s a four-year-old fucking seer).
Five Miles from Outer Hope Page 11