Five Miles from Outer Hope

by Nicola Barker

  ‘All the same, I think we should move over a little…’

  Before I can muster the strength to oppose him, he’s thrown off his blanket, is clambering around on his hands and knees like an poisonous but insipid four-legged spider, and is shoving my mattress (with me still upon it – and that’s no mean achievement) several feet over towards the bar.

  I’m too whacked to complain. I just glare at him silently as he clambers back on board and readjusts his blanket.

  ‘That’s much, much better,’ he mutters, and then yawns again.

  ‘What’s wrong with you, La Roux?’

  He shrugs. ‘Can’t sleep. I was wondering whether you might like to read me a story. To calm my nerves down. To cheer me up.’

  I rub my eyes. ‘What kind of story did you have in mind?’

  ‘Anything.’ He smiles. ‘And I bought you my special peacock feather. It’s a present. I got it from the back-end of a bad-tempered bird in Wolverhampton.’

  He hands it over. I take it. It’s a fine one.

  ‘Wolverhampton? What on earth were you doing there?’

  ‘Nothing in particular. That’s just where I was staying before I came here.’

  ‘Oh.’ I sniff the feather. It smells of nothing. ‘Thank you. Although they’re bad luck. Did you know that?’

  ‘No.’ He yanks at the blanket and sniffs, mournfully. ‘The nights are the worst,’ he finally confides, after a pause.

  ‘In what respect?’

  ‘I miss my family. And other stuff… like…’ his voice softens, ‘like the way the farmers burn the veld in winter. The smell of charcoal and the sight of the dry grass flaming. The fire engines. And the noise the flocks of mousebirds make. A special whistle. Like a tree-ree-ree.’

  I try and shush him, but he doesn’t listen. ‘And the stag beetles,’ he chuckles, ‘big as your fist, caught in potholes on the roads. The red earth. And the coastal drive to Cape Point. And the thieving apes who attack the tourists and steal their sandwiches. And the huge moths. And my best friend, Thiens.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Thiens. He’s a student at Witwatersrand University. Near Johannesburg. If you become a student you can avoid conscription. He’s doing foreign languages.’

  ‘So why didn’t you become a student then?’

  He tuts at me. ‘Too stupid, stupid.’

  ‘Thanks a bunch.’

  He leans back on his elbows. ‘Oh, how I miss the purple jacaranda,’ he muses, ‘and the sunbirds. And the bee-eaters. Table Mountain. The big winds. The water shortages. The braai vleis,’ he smiles, ‘which I always really hated when I was there. And the flowers in the Karoo Desert. And the summer storms. And hail the size of golf balls. And the proteas in the Stellenbosch Botanical Gardens. And the boys selling newspapers on the roadways.’

  ‘The men,’ I correct him.

  ‘And these special bubblegums we have called Wicks’s. Turns your mouth pink. Tastes of antiseptic. And grape-flavoured Fanta. And Datsuns…’

  ‘I bet your mother misses you,’ I intervene softly (if I was his mother, I believe I would miss him).

  He smiles. ‘She thinks I’m a coward. I’m a local embarrassment. Everybody knows about it. And the maid – my nanny – Dorothea. She thinks the same way. For once in their lives they’re in total agreement. They’re both equally ashamed of me.’

  ‘And are you a coward?’

  ‘Probably.’

  He stares up at the ceiling. ‘The Peacock Lounge,’ he says, yawning, ‘that’s why I brought you the feather. And because you’ve made me feel at home here. And for showing me your panties. And for never having seen Joseph. Which is a tragedy.’

  He’s quiet for a while and I think he must be sleeping. Then his voice breaks the silence. ‘Tell me the story of Shiro Chan,’ he whispers, turning over on to his belly. ‘I want to hear it again.’

  ‘I don’t know where the book is.’

  ‘Then make it up.’

  I grumble a little (as may well be expected under the circumstances), then place down the feather and lie on my back, staring up at the blue-green-glass ceiling.

  ‘In the beautiful Japanese city of Nara,’ I whisper, softly, ‘there once lived around about a thousand wild red deer. In the spring, the bucks would proudly display their antlers while the gentle does would tend to their fawns. One year, however, a special doe was born with a wonderful crown of strange white fur on top of her head. They called her Shiro Chan, Queen of the Deer of Nara.

  ‘The beautiful Shiro Chan was always very popular with the tourists, who loved her, dearly. But after only a few short years of life she was tragically killed in a road traffic accident. It would seem that true beauty…’ I pause, momentarily.

  ‘It would seem,’ La Roux repeats dozily, ‘that true beauty…’

  ‘It would seem that true beauty is fated to a short life only. Even among the deer.’

  ‘Ah,’ he sighs peacefully. ‘The beautiful Shiro Chan. Queen of all the Bovines.’

  In the morning, when I awaken, no sign of him remains. Only the peacock feather, an abandoned blanket near to the doorway, and a strangely all-pervasive smell of antiseptic on the bed linen.

  I’m thinking of aborting the plan (The Malay Brownies were spot on, see?). It’s just the fun’s kind of gone out of it. I’m not sure when it happened, exactly. That’s just the way I’m feeling. My mind is virtually made up. Then something rather inexplicable happens. And I can’t make head or tail of it. But it changes things.

  After breakfast (a genial occasion: Big’s been out early to pick mussels from the rocks and Patch boils them perfectly and serves them in the foyer, on a blanket, at the feet of Diana. Feely doesn’t remove the tricky, green, anal area on one of his and nearly vomits. All very stimulating), I’m diligently putting in some extra hours on my pottery when I hear a heated conversation going on way down below me. In the kitchens.

  Patch and La Roux, arguing about I don’t know what, precisely. And Patch is going off at him like a firecracker.

  Five minutes later, La Roux wanders past my doorway. I call him in. He looks different, somehow, from before.

  ‘I just heard you arguing with Patch. What happened?’

  He shrugs. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I don’t know if you realize this, but Patch doesn’t argue with anybody. She’s too placid. That’s simply her disposition.’

  La Roux is staring over my shoulder and out of the window. ‘The weather’s fine,’ he says, ‘maybe we can go swimming later, with the fishes, like you said we should yesterday.’

  I nod. He smiles. ‘Patch just…’ he pauses, as if something terrible is weighing on his mind. ‘She’s just going on about apartheid and all this complicated political stuff I don’t understand. She’s been reading about the Sharpeville Massacre and she got upset when I didn’t know much about it…’ he grimaces, ‘which I suppose is pretty embarrassing, really.’

  He shrugs helplessly, then he leaves me.

  Jesus! What got into him all of a sudden?

  When I see Patch just before lunch, her face is blotchy like she’s been crying all morning. She’s about as tetchy as a nesting reed warbler when there’s a cuckoo in the area. She won’t let me go near her. She’s cooking a Thai vegetable concoction with ginger and fresh coriander.

  I pull out a chair. ‘I heard you arguing with La Roux earlier…’

  I might as well have slapped her, her reaction is so violent. Her head jerks around. She nearly knocks the pan off the cooker. ‘And what did you hear?’

  ‘Nothing. Just voices. La Roux said you’d had an argument about the Sharpeville Massacre, which seemed – I don’t know – a fairly stupid thing to have an argument about, really.’

  Her eyes flash. ‘Do you know how many innocent people were murdered at Sharpeville, Medve?’

  I shake my head (Am I quite simply the worst person in the world, or am I actually missing something here?).

  ‘Sixty-nine,’ she hisses, ‘all unarmed
. Peacefully protesting. Women and children.’

  ‘Right,’ I inspect my hands. When I look up again, a minute or so later, she seems to have brightened a little. She turns down the stove and walks over. ‘Is the plan still on for this afternoon?’ she asks.

  I rub my cheek. ‘I don’t know. I was thinking maybe the fun had gone out of it.’

  ‘Oh come on,’ she whispers (slightly crazy around her edges), ‘don’t be ridiculous. It’s going to be fantastic.’

  She pulls open a kitchen drawer and stealthily removes a brown paper bag from it. ‘I have the thing you wanted here. And I have my front-row seat reserved, upstairs, in the Chaplin Suite, which has a perfect view of the cove.’

  She yanks out a chair and sits down on it. ‘And I’ve had some ideas,’ she says, ‘on the very best way to go about it…’

  Then she cheerfully proceeds to blow on my embers. She huffs and she puffs. She has such a way about her, my little sister, that in five minutes flat, she’s completely inflamed me.

  Everything else is only filling, so I’ll cut to the chase. Six p.m. The sun is low. The weather is as good as it needs to be. The coast is clear (Big has taken Feely off on some private mission somewhere. They’ve been gone for several hours). I get my swimming togs together – my towel, my flip-flops – throw on a bikini. I tie up my hair.

  On my way down to the cove I bump into Black Jack with a bee in his bonnet (La Roux’s trailing ten steps behind me – in shorts and his balaclava, an eye-boggling combination – and still seems a little mournful after this morning’s excitations).

  ‘I was just thinking,’ Jack says, ‘how it might be fun if we went to see the parliament together. Tomorrow, maybe. The three of us. Or we could invite the others if you think they’d be interested. It’s not supposed to be especially good this time of year, but it should still be worth seeing…’

  ‘Is it far?’ I ask quizzically.

  ‘Half an hour. I could borrow a friend’s Land Rover. We’d need to time it well, though, to get there for dusk, otherwise you miss all the best of the action.’

  La Roux has caught up by now, and brightens visibly at the idea of the starlings. So much so that he invites Jack to come swimming with us. Lucky for me he has some other stuff to do, and slouches off like a big, moribund bullock to slowly get on with it.

  Perfect.

  The Mermaid Cove lies at the bottom of a steep, rocky incline. It’s circular, slate-bottomed, and ebbs and flows with the sea. To get in there you need to clamber down a badly excavated stone stairway (no safety rope, it’s rotted away) which is slippery as hell when it’s wet. But as luck would have it, it’s dry today.

  La Roux loves the cove. He’s never ventured here before. He enjoys the cormorants on the cliff-tops, and the tufts of heather and the wild daisies crowned and kissed by frantic spring bees, and the verdant clumps of early clover.

  On the way down he finds a huge, hairy caterpillar which he pokes with a twig and then moves off the pathway (‘for its own safety’, he tells me, solemnly).

  Once we reach the bottom I throw down my towel and point to the far end. ‘Do you see in the deep section where the water looks paler?’ I ask.

  He nods. He sees it.

  ‘Well, that’s actually a kind of bandstand. It’s a huge, flat rock in the water, and Jack told me how, in the old days, in the 1930s when they built the hotel, they sunk the rock there so that during summer parties this tiny band could stand on it and serenade the swimmers and the people on the lawns above, drinking cocktails before dinner. Great idea, huh?’

  La Roux likes this notion very much indeed.

  ‘It’s a couple of inches under now. I guess the water levels must’ve risen slightly, over the years.’

  ‘How deep does it get, though,’ he asks, ‘before you can climb up there?’

  ‘When the tide’s starting to go out, like it is now, it can’t be more than five and a half foot or so. You could probably make it if you stand on tippy-toe.’

  ‘Okay,’ La Roux shrugs, pulling off his balaclava. ‘I’m keen to try it if you are.’

  He starts wading. The water is cool but it’s wonderfully inviting.

  (And yes, there’s a method to my madness: because of the steep rock walls all around us, if Patch is to clearly witness this tantalizing saga unfolding from the privacy of an upstairs window, I will need to be standing slightly higher than the water level.

  ‘The old bandstand’, she explained to me earlier, over the kitchen table, ‘will be like an ancient stage on which you’ll re-enact your masterful revenge like some kind of exquisitely formal, pre-Oedipal Greek drama.’ She seems to simply love this idea.)

  There are reasons – which for the sake of modesty I can’t go into here – why my wade over is not as easy and trouble-free as it might be. But thankfully nothing too disruptive or disastrous happens on the way.

  La Roux chatters amiably the whole time (ignoring my distractedness) about how cold the sea is off the Cape coast because of the Antarctic current, and how stormy it can be, and how treacherous, and how fine I look in my bikini (Is he mad? Or blind? Or just too easily pleased to be human?).

  At one point he even thinks he feels something slippery under his big toe, but then he realizes it’s just a stray piece of seaweed.

  We reach the rock basically intact. I take my time pulling myself on to it (La Roux chuckles uncontrollably when he espies my bikini bottoms – heavy with water – slipping off my rump, but I rectify this situation immediately). Then I politely give La Roux a hand.

  He’s in his element. I silently observe how what little remained of his cheek-bite make-up has now been all-but washed away (and this, if anything, strengthens my resolve).

  ‘If ’twere done, Medve,’ I counsel myself quietly, ‘’tis best ’twere done quickly…’ So while La Roux stands – his hands on his hips in a saucy manner like he thinks he’s Sir Edmund Hillary or somebody – looking like a soggy but anaemic ginger stick-insect, I turn my back on him, give a little yell, then start yanking frantically at my bikini knickers.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asks, almost instantly panicked.

  I hop about a bit, on one foot, and then on the other. ‘What’s wrong?’ he repeats, anxiously surveying my little war-dance. I don’t answer him directly. I just pant maniacally and prance around.

  ‘What’s happening?’ he bellows, taking an apprehensive step closer.

  ‘I think… I think,’ I finally stutter, ‘I think there’s something horrible up inside my knickers.’

  And that, dear friends, is when I do it. I yank them down to knee-level, I turn around, I bend over, I insert my hand into the approximate, intimate parameters of my vaginal area, and then, from its soggy and protesting confines, I remove a five inch, red-coloured, jelly-textured, thirty-seven-scraggy-legged centipede.

  La Roux is not a happy-chappie. He gives a yell, and then a scream (I kind of hoped he’d fall backwards, into the water, but instead he slips over and lands flat on his coccyx).

  I turn, I whoop, I chuck that rubber fucker into the air, I yell, ‘You thought you’d got one over on me, you little shit, but I knew about the capped tooth and the make-up and everything!’

  La Roux doesn’t utter a single word back at me. He just shakes his head, gingerly fingers the waistband of his swimmers and breathes deeply. He’s plainly considering vomiting as an option.

  I glance up, grinning, towards the Chaplin Suite, and do my utmost to squint in through the window. The sun’s reflecting quite strongly, so at first I can’t see anything, but eventually I’m able to distinguish… not Patch.

  Not only Patch, I mean, but four faces. Staring down at me. Big and Patch and Poodle and little Feely (presumably balanced on a chair). And Patch’s fat face is puce with the gloating satisfaction of her low-down and dirty scheming little victory.

  I guess, as I stand there, that I’m pretty much up shit creek without a paddle. And, frankly – I suddenly start thinking – panties might a
ctually be a rather useful addition down here.

  Chapter 17

  The bitch is back but with an Eton Crop – it’s a hairstyle, stupid – and tits like torpedoes (I know it’s not a particularly original assessment, but under the difficult circumstances of her sudden return, how fucking snappy do you expect me to be?).

  And I fear I’ve really gone and outdone myself this time. There’s no shrugging it off or wriggling out of it; I’m in Double Trouble with a capital D. T.

  ‘It’s been a long while coming, Medve,’ Big announces ominously, when he finally catches up with me (my hair’s still wet. I’ve not even changed yet), ‘but your day of reckoning is finally here.’

  He’s not angry or anything, just disappointed (oh God, how I hate it when parents pull this manoeuvre). He says I’ve confused and confounded him, that he thought I knew better, and where, oh where, he wonders, in cacophonous conclusion, is my natural-born dignity?

  ‘Well it’s certainly not hidden inside her vagina,’ Poodle intervenes, bitchily, from her roost in the far corner, ‘because we’ve all had a pretty good look up there today.’

  ‘Oh shit!’ I gasp back at her, in phoney-teen-retaliatory amazement. ‘Perhaps it might’ve taken some brief refuge in the gaping chasm where your sense of humour’s meant to be.’

  (She doesn’t like this. Nor does he.)

  ‘Learn some manners,’ Big snaps.

  ‘But where the fuck from?’ I ask indignantly.

  Oh dear. Three weeks of washing-up duty suddenly lie ahead of me.

  Poodle. Back again – with no fair warning, either – and the sudden proud possessor of these two huge breasts which nobody’s allowed to mention under pain of decapitation. But even little Feely seems hypnotized by them. (And he’s never been a breast man. He was fed by bottle, all the way.)

  The same applies to Mr La Roux, who, when he finally meets Poodle face to face (he’s been keeping out of harm’s way for as long as is decently feasible) acts about as green as a debutante at her coming-out party. He blushes and floor-watches and almost bloody curtseys. Well that’s sodding men for you. Slam-dunked by beauty.