Heading Inland

by Nicola Barker

  Wesley started sobbing. He was inconsolable.

  Wesley’s teacher met Wesley’s mother in the school car park. It was eight o’clock and Wesley had been crying for four and a half hours. He was sitting in the car, still crying.

  ‘You must think I’m a fool,’ Wesley’s mother said, ‘but I can’t stand seeing him so distressed. He’s just got it into his head that his little friend is locked in the classroom and nothing I can say . . .’

  The teacher looked over towards the car. Wesley’s face was puce with sobbing. ‘When his brother died,’ she said gently, ‘how did he react?’

  Wesley’s mother shook her head. ‘Just quiet and frightened. Not a tear.’

  The teacher sighed. ‘This is his way of grieving for his brother,’ she said. If we unlock the classroom, it’ll be almost like we’re pretending that we can bring his brother back. Do you know what I mean?’

  Wesley’s mother was scowling but she sort of understood. She said, ‘Wesley makes up little games and little rules for himself all the time . . .’

  ‘And why,’ his teacher added, ‘would he have decided to lock this invisible friend of his in the classroom if he hadn’t wanted, in his heart of hearts, to finally be rid of her?’

  The car door slammed. Wesley was out of the car and racing towards the school buildings, in the dark, towards his classroom. His mother, his teacher, called out and then followed him.

  They found Wesley with his face pushed up against the window of the schoolroom. He was looking for Joy but he couldn’t see her in the darkness. ‘Open it!’ he screamed. ‘Let her out! Open it! Open it!’

  And when they wouldn’t open it he started slapping his face on his bad cheek. His teacher tried to hold him and his mother tried to hug him. But they wouldn’t open it. His teacher kept saying, ‘She’s not in there. You don’t need her. You lost her because you wanted to.’

  And his mother kept saying, ‘It’s not Christopher. Christopher is dead now, Wesley. Christopher is dead now.’

  Wesley broke free. He ran from them, screaming, his arms windmilling, so angry that they’d mentioned Christopher, so angry that Joy was stuck in the classroom and they wouldn’t let him have her back. And he’d never been angry before, not really. Joy was the angry one. Joy was the cross one who made him do bad things but now Joy was gone and he was angry. They had taken her. They had taken her. And now she would starve during the summer holidays. Oh, his throat – oh, his chest – oh, his heart.

  Joy sat at a desk. Now what? She was bored. It was dark in here. There was nothing to do. She found some chalk and scribbled on the blackboard. She drew a big white rectangle. She stared at it for a while. ‘Christopher,’ she whispered, ‘come and play with me. Christopher, Christopher, come and play.’

  Nothing happened. She scratched at the blisters on her ankles. She closed her eyes. And then she moved herself, in an electric current, in a bolt of static, in an electrical pulse, out of that classroom and into Wesley’s brain.

  Wesley was still running and shouting and screaming. He was making so much noise that he didn’t even know Joy had come back to him. She moved herself, her braces and her blisters and her bruises, into the darkest corner of Wesley’s mind, that place where Christopher was. And they played together then, Joy and Christopher, the two of them, quietly, silently. Bitter, ugly, cruel little games which nobody knew about.

  Even Wesley stopped remembering who they really were.

  Mr Lippy

  The first time Iris met Mr Lippy he was in Hunstanton, sitting on the ocean wall, watching the tide from the Wash as it lapped away at the concrete just below his feet. His right fist was wrapped up in a thick, white gauze. Iris guessed straight away that he must have sustained this injury in a fight. She should have avoided him. Naturally. If only she’d known what was good for her. Perhaps she didn’t know. Or if she did, she didn’t care.

  ‘Hi,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t talk to girls,’ he responded.

  ‘You from the West Country?’ she asked, brutally, registering some kind of rural burr in his voice.

  He said nothing.

  ‘How’d you hurt your hand, then?’

  He ignored her.

  ‘Live around here?’

  She sat down next to him and swung her legs. She was eighteen and liked a challenge. She wore sandals and a halter-neck top even though it was late October.

  His bottom lip stuck out while she spoke to him. He pouted without thinking, like he was sulking about something, only he didn’t know what, didn’t know, even, that he was sulking.

  ‘What’s a good-looking man like you got to sulk about?’ she said.

  ‘Pardon?’ He turned and looked at her.

  ‘Mr Lippy!’ She laughed. She stuck her bottom lip out, mimicking him.

  ‘I wasn’t doing that!’

  ‘Wanna bet?’

  ‘I wasn’t!’ He switched on his brain and stared at her properly, for the first time.

  From that moment onwards, Iris always called him Mr Lippy if he scowled or sulked or swore at her. His real name was Wesley but she called him Wes. She always wanted things different from the way they were.

  Wesley had yearned all his life to be close to the sea. His dad had been a sailor. But he was born inland and had lived there until he’d arrived at the Wash under his own steam aged twenty-four. Now he was twenty-eight.

  Sometimes he worked on the funfair in Hunstanton. Sometimes he went potato picking. He worked in the sugar beet factory until they closed it, and then, after a spate in the arcade, got a job ferrying tourists across the Wash in an open-topped, antiquated hovercraft to visit Seal Island.

  Iris didn’t know that Wesley’s broken fist had been sustained, not in a fight as she’d imagined, but in an accident at work: one of the other lads had reversed the hovercraft too close to the ocean wall where Wesley was stationed at the back of the craft, ready to put out the gang-plank. The lad’s foot had slipped off the brake on to the accelerator, and Wesley’s hand had been crushed that way.

  An accident. But Wesley relished the pain. He liked punishment. And anyhow, he’d received several hundred pounds in compensation, just like that. A gift from the gods. So he opened a bank account and nested it there.

  Iris was living in a bed and breakfast facing the seafront. She was a bully but he thought it was because life had been hard on her. He was wrong. They made love under a single duvet. If Wesley got carried away, if he threatened to come before she was ready, then she’d squeeze his bad fist until he saw only stars. It was good, she thought, to keep him distracted. Just a little bit.

  He’d known her for a month when she told him she was pregnant. She didn’t know anything about him.

  ‘I don’t care,’ he said, ‘what happens, really, so long as I can stay close to the sea.’

  ‘Why?’ She was only two weeks pregnant but already she felt different about things and she wanted Wesley to feel different too.

  ‘I don’t know. My dad was a sailor.’

  ‘Really? And your mum?’

  ‘She lives in Gloucester.’

  ‘Yeah? Think she’ll be pleased?’

  Wesley shrugged. Iris waited for Wesley to ask about her mum and dad. He didn’t ask. She wanted him to.

  ‘Do you love me?’

  ‘I’m used to being on my own.’

  ‘Don’t you have any plans? For the future, I mean?’

  Wesley rearranged the gauze on his fist.

  ‘Not me,’ he said.

  ‘Why not?’

  Wesley closed his eyes.

  Seal Island. In the summer the boat was packed to its gills with children. Clutching their packed lunches and their cans of fizzy pop. They’d all passed the morning on the big wheel and the dodgems, eating candy-floss and bags of sticky honeycomb. And now they were headed for Seal Island. They had dreams of palm trees and Captain Hook and hidden treasure to help them over the brown sea and the lurching waves. An island, full of basking seals.

>   When the tide was out, you might see the sluttish brown outline of the sandbank. You might see a lethargic seal, on its edge, rolling to the bank’s perimeter, and then the flip of its tail as it swam off and under. If the tide was in, you were lucky to see that much.

  Seal Island. Wesley loved it. Every day. The tears, the screams, the disappointment. He loved that stuff. He’d turn and he’d look at the children, the occasional mum, the odd uncle. And he’d think, ‘Good, they should learn that life is shit. Good they should know it.’

  Iris became worried about Wesley’s motivation. ‘That’s cruel,’ she’d say, ‘to lead the little buggers into thinking that they’re getting more for their money than they’ve a right to expect.’

  ‘No crueller,’ Wesley said, ‘than leading them into thinking that life is anything better than a bitch.’

  One day Wesley came back to Iris’s room to discover her parents there. They weren’t at all as he’d imagined.

  ‘Mum and Dad want me to come home again,’ Iris said, ‘and I want you to come with me, Wes.’

  ‘Home, where?’ he asked, shifting his weight from foot to foot.

  She’d promised him it was close to the sea. In the back of the car, they sat. One suitcase between them. ‘Nearly there,’ she kept saying. ‘Nearly, nearly.’

  Iris’s father showed Wesley the shop, the nursery, the rabbit pen, the pet section, the field with the ponies, the café. The whole kit and caboodle. Finally he showed him the owl sanctuary. Twenty cages.

  ‘What’s it mean?’ Wesley asked. ‘Sanctuary?’

  ‘Couldn’t survive in the wild,’ Iris’s father said. ‘Some come from exotic places.’

  Wesley stared at the owls. They stared back. Not blinking.

  ‘You never told me,’ Wesley said, that night, in their bedroom, ‘that your parents were rich like this.’

  ‘Never asked,’ Iris said.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Wesley said, ‘why anyone should want to run away from something that’s as good as here.’

  Iris shrugged. ‘I’m back, aren’t I?’ she said, all saucy.

  ‘It’s far from the sea,’ Wesley said.

  ‘Fuck that shit.’

  He turned to look at her.

  ‘You don’t even like the sea,’ she said, ‘not really. It just makes you sad and angry. It’s all mixed up in your head with some stupid fantasy about your dad.’

  Wesley was injured by this. It was almost as though, he thought, Iris didn’t respect his reasons. Like his reasons weren’t good enough.

  Big eyes. Big wings. Big beaks. He’d feed them little chicks and small white mice. Their keeper, Derek, told Wesley all about them. ‘See those big eyes,’ he’d say. ‘Well, that leads people into thinking that they’re wise and all, but they aren’t.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. Their eye sockets take up much of the space in their skulls, so their brain is as tiny as a hazelnut, just about.’

  Wesley would stare at the owls for hours on end, unblinking, but only during the week. At weekends he avoided the sanctuary because then it was crowded with tourists who whistled and screamed and pointed. Some of the cages had little notices which read: mind fingers and noses. these are wild animals. do not touch wire mesh.

  Wesley worked in the nursery. Sometimes he helped out in the cafeteria. Iris would trail around after him, trying to make him smile.

  ‘Aren’t you happy here?’ she’d ask. ‘Don’t you love me?’

  He did quite like her, actually.

  ‘Do you resent me being pregnant?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Will we ring your mother yet and tell her about it?’ ‘Nope.’ ‘Why not? Why not?’ It had started to gall Iris, his inability to celebrate anything.

  One owl especially. He’d stare and stare. It was as big as a spaniel. Grey feathered. Pop-eyed, crazy-looking. Like an emu. Like something unimaginable.

  Wesley wondered what would happen if he set the bird free. When he was younger he’d dreamed about freedom, but now he was resigned to a life of drudgery. Free, he’d whisper, and then, die. Free. Die. Free. Die. Free. Die.

  Derek had told him, you see, that if the owls were released they would starve to death or some of them would freeze. They were too bloody conspicuous, Wesley thought, for their own safety.

  ‘Why don’t you want me to meet your family? Are you ashamed of me? Am I too young?’

  Wesley stood up, picked up his coat, as if to leave the room.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Outside.’

  ‘Where? To look at those bloody owls again? I swear you spend more time looking at those owls than at me.’

  He left her. She followed him, in her slippers, barely dressed. It was dark out. He ignored her. He went to the owl pens.

  In the dark he could hardly see them, only the white ones. He made his way to the pen of his favourite. If he stared and he stared he could make out the pale moon-slip of her beak.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Iris whispered.

  Wesley tried to see the owl more clearly but his eyes weren’t yet adapted. He could hear the others, though. Ghostly trills. Occasional squeals.

  ‘It’s worse at night, don’t you think?’ he asked. ‘To keep them here?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘People watch them during the day and they don’t seem too bad, but at night, that’s their time. That’s when they wake and want to fly.’

  Iris crossed her arms over her chest. It was cold out here.

  ‘I’m haunted,’ Wesley said, eventually, ‘by things that happened in the past.’

  ‘What things?’ Iris asked. ‘Why won’t you tell me, Wes?’

  ‘I lost my right hand,’ Wesley said.

  ‘What?’ Iris was confused now.

  ‘People kept leaving me. When I was a boy.’

  ‘Your dad?’ she said, trying to follow him.

  ‘And all the time,’ he said, ‘I wanted to try and find the thing I’d lost. Searching. Searching. Punishing everyone.’

  ‘What?’ She was shivering now. It was cold. It was cold.

  ‘But I’ll tell you,’ he said, ‘that I’ve finally realized something. All the time I thought I was punishing others I was actually only punishing myself, but not properly.’

  He was trying to see the owl in the darkness. He could make out her shape now.

  ‘Let’s go in,’ Iris said. ‘Let’s talk inside.’

  He turned to face her. ‘I must do something,’ he said, ‘to show you how much I love you.’

  ‘What?’ He had lost her, completely.

  ‘For the baby,’ he said.

  He stretched open his right hand in front of her face. For a moment she was frightened that he might try to hurt her. He might hit her or smother her with that hand. But then he turned from her and slowly, deliberately, finger by finger, he pushed his hand into the wire mesh of that giant and wakeful emu-owl’s cage.

  He could see his white fingers in the darkness, and finally, too, he could see her. She could see him. She was still. She was silent. He heard one of the other birds calling and then she was on him. Ripping and tearing with her beak like a blade.

  Iris screamed.

  She couldn’t forgive him. On his right hand was left only a thumb. She griped that she’d almost lost their child with the shock of it. He apologized. Over the following months he kept apologizing. He stopped pouting. He couldn’t stop smiling now. Sometimes she’d catch him touching his spoiled hand with his good one, talking to himself, but so softly, like it was a child’s face he was stroking.

  On the night their baby was born he left her. An envelope lay on the bed. Her parents found it and brought it to her. Inside was a cheque for several hundred pounds and a note which said only: ‘Heading Inland’. That was all.

  The Piazza Barberini

  Tina was doing Rome on a budget. Her companion was horrible. He was called Ralph. She met him accidentally, and he stuck to her like a burr, like a leech, unti
l he grew bored of her. Then he let go, just as suddenly.

  He had, she discovered, over seven different ways of describing the rectum. His favourite was ring which he used and used until it was quite worn out. Ironically – she just knew this was funny – Ralph was actually an arsehole himself. But she was too polite to say anything. He even looked like an arsehole. Not literally, but he wore dark glasses, a furry trilby – right there, on the back of his head, monstrously precarious – and thick-soled loafers. She presumed that he thought his look was, in some way, Italian. She knew better. Even the Italians knew better.

  Ralph was staying at a pensione south of Termini. It wasn’t particularly salubrious around there. Tina didn’t like it. She, by contrast, was staying in Old Rome, in the heart of Rome, close to the fruit market, the best piazza, the better cafés.

  Tina had met Ralph while she was queueing for the Vatican Museum. It had been a ridiculously long queue, but she presumed that the wait would be worth it. Ralph had joined the queue behind her, had introduced himself, had asked whether she’d mind saving his place for him while he popped off for a minute, then disappeared. An hour later, when she’d nearly reached the front, he reappeared again. She’d completely forgotten about him by then. She almost didn’t recognize him. His glasses were pushed up on to his head. His eyes – bold, empty – stared at her: a mucky brown. Two round hazelnuts. He said he didn’t have quite enough money for the entrance fee – ‘What? You’re kidding! That much?’ – so she paid for him on the understanding that he’d pay her back later.

  He never did. Ralph was from Reading. He worked for British Telecom. He had a smattering of Italian. He could order coffee, ice-cream, several flavours of pizza, without even consulting his guidebook.

  Tina felt sorry for him. He wore a Lacoste polo shirt, but it wasn’t actually Lacoste because the alligator was facing the wrong way. She knew about these things. She was training to be a buyer at Fenwicks, New Bond Street, London. Ah, yes.

  Ralph tried to persuade Tina to have a piece of brightly coloured cotton twine plaited into her hair on the Spanish Steps. Several men, unkempt, like hippies, were offering this service for a small sum.