The Yips

by Barker, Nicola

  ‘You feel things very deeply,’ he insists, ‘that’s all.’

  ‘And you don’t?’

  She delivers him a sharp look. He frowns, momentarily caught off guard.

  ‘Bully for Sheila and all her misguided passion, eh?!’ she scoffs. ‘Angry, bitter, exhausted old Sheila! Bully for her!’

  ‘You feel frustrated – unappreciated.’ He moves towards her, instinctively, and touches her arm. ‘That’s inevitable. You’re a woman in a male-dominated profession. It goes with the territory …’

  ‘No.’

  She’s not buying it. ‘I’m judgemental. I’m opinionated. I’m short-tempered. And it’s all rooted in ego. In pride.’ She knocks his hand from her arm by adjusting her hair. ‘I lack humility. I lack resignation. I’m too … urgh … stressed all the time. Like the other day, with the bishop –’

  ‘That’s just part and parcel of what you do,’ he interrupts, possibly hoping to divert her, ‘you’re an arbitrator between the forces of good and evil.’

  She ponders this for a second. ‘Like Luke Skywalker?’ she mutters, amused, in spite of herself.

  ‘Or Miss Marple.’ He grins.

  ‘That’d be right.’ She chuckles. ‘Nothing too glamorous or high-tech – just the light perm, the pleated skirt, the nice, comfy pair of leather brogues …’

  ‘Down on the church allotments, spy-glass in hand …’ Gene teases her.

  ‘Not even Miss Marple could reason her way out of that particular hole.’ She grimaces, plucking a stray hair off her sleeve.

  ‘The decision’s been made?’ Gene suddenly looks serious. ‘He’s flogging them off?’

  ‘Yup.’

  She twists the stray hair around her index finger.

  ‘You discussed the petition?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She looks up, defensive. ‘I said we had over seven hundred signatures – two hundred more than we currently have …’

  ‘And how did he respond?’ Gene demands.

  ‘He didn’t. He just shrugged.’

  ‘He just shrugged?!’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘Bloody hell!’ Gene’s incensed. ‘How’s that sanctimonious little prig manage to sleep at night?!’

  ‘He sleeps like a baby,’ Sheila sighs, removing the washing-up cloth from the washing-up bowl, wringing it out and then draping it over the tap. ‘He doesn’t really see it as a problem he can resolve. He says his hands are tied …’

  ‘That’s bullshit! You know that’s just bullshit!’

  ‘Is it, though?’ Sheila dries her damp fingers on a tea towel and then rubs her eyes with her knuckles, exhausted. ‘It’s easy to demonize him, Gene, but we both know – in our heart of hearts – that this was never so much a simple choice between right and wrong as a fluffed-up compromise between two lesser kinds of evil …’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’ Gene’s plainly not convinced.

  ‘Uh. No,’ Sheila admits, removing the tea towel from its small, plastic hook, shaking it out and then folding it in half, ready for use, ‘which could well be a sign that I need to take a step back from the situation – distance myself from the campaign; try and focus my limited energies on something more positive, something more attainable …’

  ‘Nah. Not your style,’ Gene maintains.

  ‘My style?’ she grumbles, grabbing a teacup and starting to dry it. ‘What’s my style, exactly? Three years of senseless rancour followed by a long and drawn-out nervous breakdown?’

  ‘Why change the habits of a lifetime?’ Gene teases her.

  ‘Well maybe, just this once, I need to rise above – be the bigger person …’

  Sheila’s almost laughing as she says this.

  ‘Pshaw!’ Gene’s incredulous.

  ‘Thanks.’ She shoots him a jaundiced look as she places the dried cup into a nearby cupboard.

  ‘You don’t need me to tell you that there’s a massive principle at stake here,’ he persists, ‘which is that the church has a responsibility to the wider community, even if they don’t happen to be members of the Christian faith per se.’

  ‘You know, increasingly I’m coming to see the virtues in your philosophy,’ Sheila muses, grabbing a saucer from the draining-board this time.

  ‘Mine?’ Gene frowns.

  ‘Yeah’ – she gives the saucer a cursory buff and then places it alongside the cup – ‘taking the path of least resistance.’

  ‘That’s my philosophy?’

  Gene’s plainly irritated by this.

  ‘I need to be more pragmatic’ – she shrugs – ‘compromise. Let things go.’

  ‘Who are you,’ Gene demands (only semi-joking now), ‘and what the hell have you done with my wife?’

  ‘I’ve placed her into an old box labelled “idealist”,’ she sighs, ‘punctured the cardboard with a couple of air-holes, and then carefully taped over the lid.’

  She gives the tea towel a cursory inspection. ‘I don’t think she’ll be especially missed,’ she adds.

  ‘Well, for what it’s worth,’ Gene maintains, ‘I’ve always really loved your reformist zeal.’

  ‘But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,’ she quotes, ‘And loved the sorrows of your changing face.’

  Gene looks at her, quizzically.

  ‘W.B. Yeats. “When You are Old”.’

  She gazes around the kitchen, pensively. ‘I feel old,’ she mutters. ‘I feel ancient. In fact I feel sort of … sort of desiccated.’

  ‘Like a religious coconut,’ Gene suggests.

  ‘Strung up on a high branch for all the blue tits to peck at.’ She grimaces.

  ‘I do love your pilgrim soul,’ Gene avows, ‘but not the sorrow. The sorrow part I can live without.’

  ‘With idealism comes heartbreak. With stoicism comes …’ She thinks for a moment, scrunching up the tea towel in her hand. ‘… yet more stoicism.’

  ‘Great! Bucket-loads of stoicism,’ Gene grumbles, ‘where the hell will we find the room to store it all?’

  ‘We can rent a railway arch,’ Sheila suggests.

  ‘Yeah …’ Gene quickly warms to this idea. ‘We can tie the bishop to a chair and chuck him in there, too.’

  ‘Alongside my little box of idealism,’ she muses.

  ‘Not such a little box,’ Gene snorts, ‘how about an unwieldy, plywood crate with rusting, stainless-steel supports?’

  Sheila refuses to take his bait. She turns and grabs a cereal bowl. ‘Maybe my appointment to this post wasn’t the start of something after all,’ she ruminates, ‘but the end of it.’

  ‘How so?’ Gene scowls.

  ‘I just don’t think they view me as a functioning part of the team …’ She finishes with the bowl and places it into the cupboard. ‘And that’s not only locally, but in the diocese as a whole …’ This time she grabs a dinner plate. ‘I mean the bishop honestly seems to believe that my appointment was enough – that his involvement ends there.’

  ‘The pace of change was always bound to be slow,’ Gene interjects, ‘you knew that when you accepted the post.’

  ‘I basically just tick a box,’ she continues, ignoring his interjection. ‘I fill a quota. At best I’m a hollow symbol of change; the most shallow … the most superficial …’ Words fail her, temporarily, and she polishes the plate with an especial vigour. ‘It’s his automatic, fall-back position every time I bring up any kind of problem I might be experiencing with the PCC or any kind of issue I might have with the church warden …’

  She places the plate down on to the worktop and quickly grabs another. ‘He basically just peers at me over the top of his spectacles as if to say, “You’re there, aren’t you? I’ve done my bit. I’ve stuck my neck out. Now stop your infernal carping, woman, grit your teeth, and get on with it!”’

  ‘He did stick his neck out,’ Gene concedes.

  ‘Yeah. I know that, Gene’ – Sheila’s starting to work up a real head of steam, now – ‘but what’s the point in making a c
ontroversial appointment if – once the appointment’s finally secured – you just back off, holding your hands up, basically refusing all further involvement?’

  She finishes drying the second plate and slides it on top of the first. ‘I mean I’m virtually disabled by the PCC, the church warden’s from the Dark Ages, every remotely interesting initiative I try and undertake is either blocked outright or dies a slow and painful death due to a universal lack of interest …’

  ‘Is this a crisis of faith?’ Gene asks, mock-seriously, peering down at his watch. ‘Because Evening Service starts in approximately two minutes.’

  Sheila frowns but says nothing. She reaches out and grabs a third plate.

  ‘What’s that thing you’re always quoting at Mallory?’ He tries his best to pep-talk her. ‘You know – that weirdly sadistic thing about God always testing the people he loves best the hardest?’

  After a long pause in which she dries the third plate with a spectacular level of thoroughness, Sheila finally rouses herself to answer him: ‘For he maketh His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust,’ she suggests.

  ‘Uh, no,’ Gene demurs.

  ‘The inestimable treasure of tribulation,’ she second guesses.

  ‘There you have it.’ He nods, gratified.

  ‘So I suppose – by my own warped logic – that I must be incredibly blessed right now …’

  She smiles over at him, brightly, then places the third plate on top of the other two. ‘I must be tremendously blessed, stupendously blessed.’

  ‘Is that a roundabout way of saying you’re depressed?’ Gene wonders, concerned.

  ‘Uh …’ She ponders this for a while. ‘Let’s change the subject, shall we?’

  He stares at her, uncertain whether to do as she asks. Her mouth is slowly turning down at its corners. Her jaw is tightening. Her nostrils begin to flare.

  ‘Let me finish off the drying,’ he murmurs, reaching out his hand for the cloth.

  ‘It’s almost done, now,’ she sniffs, glancing up at the ceiling as if to preclude any unwanted accumulation of excess moisture in her eyes.

  ‘D’you know anything about agoraphobia?’ he promptly demands (keen not to precipitate a total breakdown directly before Evening Service). ‘Is it a curable condition? Didn’t you counsel a parishioner with it at one stage?’

  ‘Agoraphobia?’

  She struggles to focus. ‘Uh …’

  ‘I met this young woman today –’

  ‘Fear of the marketplace,’ Sheila butts in (pulling herself together with what appears to be a mammoth amount of effort).

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Agora …’ She grabs another cereal bowl. ‘It’s the Greek for marketplace. Agora-phobia: a fear of the marketplace.’

  ‘I see.’ Gene is nonplussed.

  ‘There was a woman I visited while I was in training up in Sheffield. Her name was …’ She thinks hard for a second as she looks down at the cereal bowl then notices a small food remnant still gracing its rim. ‘Nina. Late thirties, early forties, unhappily married. Her husband was incredibly overbearing. Didn’t take the condition seriously – just thought it was yet more evidence of a basic lack of moral fibre …’ She places the bowl back into the sink, and then stares, glumly, through the window. ‘I think it was him who got the church involved, although it wasn’t an especially successful manoeuvre. She just really seemed to resent it.’

  Sheila raises a hand to her face but Gene cannot tell – from the rear – if she’s moving aside a strand of hair or wiping away a tear with it. ‘Not my greatest piece of Community Outreach work, as I recollect.’

  Her voice starts to shake a little.

  ‘This woman I met today – this agoraphobic …’ Gene is about to confide in her about the meeting with Valentine (the broken meter, the strange bruise), but then – in the light of the whole Stan farrago – he suddenly thinks better of it and falls silent.

  ‘This woman you met today …’ Sheila prompts him.

  ‘Uh … Yeah. She’d done something really strange to herself,’ Gene improvises.

  ‘Really?’

  Sheila glances over her shoulder at him, her powerful, dark eyes dulled with a profound indifference.

  ‘She’d tattooed a brick on to her leg,’ Gene expands. ‘Several bricks. Incredibly lifelike …’

  ‘Bricks?’ Sheila echoes, blankly.

  ‘She’s an artist. It was some kind of an art statement, I suppose. She showed me this photograph. It was really beautifully taken …’

  ‘Ah …’

  Her eyes suddenly glimmer with a momentary show of engagement. ‘Women Who Marry Houses,’ she muses.

  ‘Women who …?’

  Sheila returns the tea towel to its hook.

  ‘It’s the title of a book I salvaged from the church jumble a couple of years back. Looked intriguing. There was a quote on the title page by Anne Sexton – one of the women poets I wrote my dissertation on at Oxford …’ She picks up the four, dry plates and places them into a cupboard. ‘It went something along the lines of …’ She frowns as she struggles to recall it: ‘Women marry houses. It’s another kind of skin.’

  She shrugs. ‘An odd concept, really, but it’s always stuck with me for some reason.’

  Gene gazes at her as she speaks – slowly drinking in her ragged fringe, her deep frown lines, an area of inflammation in the centre of her right cheek, a suggestion of staining on one of her front teeth – and suddenly feels an incredibly powerful rush of emotion towards her.

  ‘You’re amazing,’ he says, his voice low and unexpectedly guttural. ‘So bloody wise.’

  She turns to look at him, shocked.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ she snaps, then pats him on the shoulder, straight after, almost as an afterthought, before heading off, morosely, to Evening Service.

  ‘I’m sorry …’ Valentine stares at her brother, her cheeks flushing, her expression one of complete bewilderment. ‘What kind of therapist did you say he was, exactly?’

  Noel turns to the small, rotund, beetle-browed Asian man currently perched on their sofa and says, ‘What kind of therapist did you say you were?’

  ‘What kind? Hmmn. Well, I suppose – in the current vernacular – you might call me “a jack of all trades”,’ he says, amiably.

  ‘Karim was recommended by Salvatore at the daycare centre,’ Noel fills in. ‘He works with three – was it three?’ He looks to Karim for confirmation and Karim nods. ‘Three, yes.’

  ‘Three of the other patients. Salvatore says he works magic, that he’s a genius.’

  Karim merely flaps his hand, modestly, at Noel’s compliments. He is wearing a pair of thin, white cotton trousers which finish some distance above his beige socks and brown sandals, a long, white cotton smock, with a light, grey cotton waistcoat over the top (its small, front pockets bulging with various paraphernalia). His hair curls behind his ears and he has a short, neat, prematurely greying beard but no moustache.

  ‘The Arabic translation of Karim,’ he volunteers, ‘is “the generous one”.’

  He raises his eyes heavenward. ‘I believe that I have been given my many gifts by Almighty God, and that it is God’s will for me to share them generously. So here I am, today’ – he shrugs – ‘sharing them with you and your charming family.’

  As he finishes speaking his gaze moves from the statue of the Virgin Mary to the picture of Kali on the shrine. The large, framed photograph on the wall of the genital tattoo has now been removed, but his gaze rests on the spot where it was formerly hung, as if – by some paranormal mechanism – it might actually still be visible to him.

  ‘Could I get you a drink?’ Vee wonders, finally remembering her manners. ‘A cup of tea, perhaps?’

  ‘No, not for me. I can’t stay long.’ Karim grimaces. ‘My stupid wife is in the car.’

  ‘Then you must invite her in!’ Valentine insists, horrified. ‘She’d be very welcome …’


  ‘Please don’t take this the wrong way’ – Karim leans forward and pulls up a sock – ‘but I’m actually relishing this brief interlude apart.’

  As he speaks, Valentine glances towards her brother (who is busily tapping out a text on his phone), then leans over and peers through the front bay window. Between a couple of the slats in the blinds she sees what appears to be a magnificent, old Citroën (pale blue, with exquisite chrome-work). Sitting in the back seat, somewhat incongruously, is a lone woman in the full veil.

  ‘Don’t be shocked,’ Karim counsels, gauging her expression (that foggy, insect-ridden no-man’s-land between surprise and alarm). ‘It’s just a silly phase. A kind of social revolt against what she perceives as the corrupt and corrupting mores of Western society’ – he snorts, mirthlessly – ‘chiefly represented by yours truly, of course!’

  He performs a little bow, palms pressed together, then adds, ‘Perhaps a Sprite, or a Diet Pepsi?’

  Noel promptly heads off to the kitchen, still texting. Valentine continues to inspect Karim’s wife. It’s a warm evening. She is fanning her face (the tiny part of it that’s still visible) through a tiny slit in the dense mass of heavy-seeming, black fabric.

  ‘She looks hot,’ Vee observes.

  ‘It’s like a portable bread oven inside that thing,’ Karim clucks. ‘Crazy! My current philosophy is that if I give her enough rope …’

  He simulates sudden asphyxiation (hands at his throat, eyes popping, tongue out), then removes a handkerchief from the pocket of his waistcoat and vigorously blows his nose on it.

  ‘I tell her it’s a form of cultural hysteria’ – he dabs at his nostrils, fastidiously – ‘an emotional anorexia. Not about faith! Ha! Not remotely. God is Love! God is Wisdom! God is Truth! God is Generosity – Ya Karim, eh?’

  Valentine smiles, obligingly (although she’s not entirely sure what she’s smiling at).

  ‘God isn’t just dotted here or there, boxed into a series of little, sacred spaces,’ Karim expands, scowling, ‘hidden under that piece of black fabric – swirling around like a tiny whirlwind inside the cool shadows of the mosque – trapped within the vowels of a prayer … Heavens, no! He’s everywhere, inside every created thing …’ He throws out his hand, expressively (the white handkerchief waving its fleeting surrender between his fingers). ‘God is the invasive gaze of an arrogant stranger!’ he exclaims. ‘God is the modest curl of a pretty lip into a welcoming smile. God is the warmth of the sun on a beautiful girl’s bronzed shoulder. God is the exquisite brush of cool silk against a tautening nipple. God is life, eh?’ He grins. ‘He enlivens us! He stimulates! He titillates! God opens us up, he doesn’t shut us down. He didn’t give us the whole, wide world so that we should wrinkle up our noses and turn away from it, full of haughty condemnation, riddled with disgust …’