Heading Inland
Page 16
‘Why?’
‘I don’t want you fitting my filter any more. I feel weird about this now.’
‘Don’t be foolish. I’ll fix the filter.’
‘Give me the key.’
He laughed and handed her the key. She closed the door on his smiling face. She wrapped her arms around her breasts and shuddered.
It took almost an hour for the police to arrive. The constable who finally turned up was thickset and blond-haired and held his hat under his arm like it was a baby. He had a habit, Bethan noticed, of wiping his palms on the side of his thighs. She invited him in.
He took out his notebook and waited for her to say something.
‘I came home from work,’ she said, ‘to discover that someone had broken into my property, through the back gate . . .’
‘Did they force the lock?’
‘No. I think they broke the lock and then replaced it. I found some new keys posted through my letterbox.’
‘Someone changed the locks and then posted the new keys through your letterbox?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you happen to know who might have done such a thing?’
‘Yes. I know who did it. He’s called Parker Swells.’
Bethan spelled Parker’s name out loud and checked as the constable wrote it on his pad.
‘I have his address and all the details you could want about him, only everything’s still at work . . .’
The policeman nodded. ‘And what, exactly,’ he said, ‘apart from changing the lock on your back gate, did he actually do?’
‘Come outside.’
Bethan took the police officer into her back garden. She pointed. He looked around him. There was little to see. A neat lawn, flowerbeds, nothing amiss.
‘He stole my ponds,’ she said, her voice cracking.
‘Your what?’
She pointed. He saw five, large, beautiful fish in a curious selection of small, clear-glass containers.
‘He stole my ponds.’
Ponds, the policeman wrote down in his book. Stolen.
Bethan watched as he wrote this. His writing, she saw, was round and girlish and immature. She wished they’d sent someone else. He clearly wasn’t going to prove competent.
‘And why do you think he did this? Why did he steal your ponds?’
Bethan didn’t know. She couldn’t answer. She felt so ridiculous.
‘He had a duck, a pet duck,’ she said, eventually. ‘Maybe he stole them for his duck.’
She glanced up and saw the policeman was smiling at her. She looked away.
‘Those are beautiful,’ he said, indicating towards the fish. She nodded. Her fish hung, suspended, in their small, plain glass bowls; tight and bright and golden. Their gills moved; in and out, in and out. Bethan could clearly see every tiny little detail now.
By the same author
Love Your Enemies
Reversed Forecast
Small Holdings
Wide Open
Five Miles from Outer Hope
Behindlings
Clear
Darkmans
Burley Cross Postbox Theft
Praise
NICOLA BARKER’S eight novels include Darkmans (short listed for the 2007 Man Booker and Ondaatje prizes, and winner of the Hawthornden prize), and Wide Open (winner of the 2000 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award). She has also written two prize-winning collections of short stories, and her work has been translated into more than twenty languages. She lives in east London.
From the reviews of Heading Inland:
‘Unique, funny, dark, cute, sarcastic and clever’
Literary Review
‘Barker goes from strength to strength’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Another extremely accomplished collection. The writing is sharp, intricate and stylish. Each story presents its own particular and perfectly realized world . . . Nothing is too weird or too ordinary for Nicola Barker’
Guardian
‘The language is unfussy, direct, at times colloquial, and then, just when it is needed to produce the right emotional counterpoint, elegant and formal . . . What could have been heavy-handed in another writer’s hands is here transformed into something light, enchanting and moving. Heading Inland achieves everything it sets out to do. Highly recommended’
Literary Review
‘Devastatingly funny and totally original . . . only Will Self can match her for black humour and bizarre fabrications . . . No one else in England writes like this. Don’t miss this book’
Tatler
‘The short story collection of the year’
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Thanks
With thanks to the Arts Council of Great Britain for the Writer’s Award (1994/5) without which this book would not have been completed.
Copyright
Copyright © Nicola Barker 1996
‘Bendy-Linda’ first appeared in Critical Quarterly
Nicola Barker asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-0-00-743571-5
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © 2011 ISBN: 9780007455775
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