‘Oh.’ Sarah paused for a second. ‘I don’t know where she is.’
Sam endeavoured to take stock of the situation, ignoring Brera’s desperate gestures from the front seat.
‘OK. Well, thanks for putting up with her. I’ll see you.’
‘What do you mean? Is that it?’
‘I think so.’
She used the cut-off mechanism on the phone and handed it to Brera. ‘It’s all yours.’
Brera was in a state of intense agitation. ‘Who was that? Who slapped Sylvia?’
Sam laughed. ‘Someone who should know better,’ she said.
Shortly after Sarah had hung up, Vincent arrived, demanding money for a cab, clutching, somewhat incongruously, a large iced cake which smelled of apples and cinnamon.
Sarah said, ‘Hi,’ and made as if to give him a hug, but he put out a restraining hand.
‘Hold on. This is precious.’
‘Who’s it for?’
‘Nobody.’ He glanced over his shoulder. ‘Would you pay the cab? He’s waiting outside.’
Sarah went to get her purse. Vincent walked into the living-room and was about to switch on the television when an assortment of peculiar noises captured his attention. They were radiating from the bathroom. He walked in and found Sylvia.
She was in the bath, up to her neck in water. The bathroom smelled like a perfume counter. Sylvia was naked but seemed unembarrassed.
‘Hello,’ she said, recognizing him from their previous encounter. She sloshed around lazily in the water, grinning, watching as waves of liquid spilled over the rim of the bath and on to the floor.
Vincent tried not to fall over on the tiles; which were now wet and slippery. He held his cake aloft. Sylvia spotted it as she peered over the edge of the bath. She sat up. ‘What’s that? Is it for me?’
He shrugged. ‘I suppose it could be.’
She stretched out an arm towards him. He saw that her hand was covered in eczema.
‘You shouldn’t stay in there for too long.’
‘Sod it. Give me the cake.’
Her face shone out wetly at him: a round, yellow, exuberant moon.
There was something in her that he found suddenly irresistible. What was it? A carelessness? He said, ‘No cake until you get out of that bath.’
She scowled. ‘Yeah? Is it really worth it?’
He showed it to her. ‘Smell it. It’s delicious. It’s all natural.’
He saw her nostrils twitch and her eyes ignite. She tried to snatch at it and water spilled from the bath in even greater quantities.
‘Out,’ he said authoritatively, ‘out or no cake.’
She turned her back on him. ‘I’m not a bloody kid, or a dog.’
He enjoyed this little display. He liked her unreasonableness. He put down the lid on the toilet and sat on it. ‘Fine.’
He then said, ‘Ruby must be worried about you.’
‘Ruby?’
Sylvia considered this for a moment. He smiled at her expression, which was so expressive, suddenly so serious. Eventually she said, ‘From now on I’m living only for pleasure.’
He put a finger into the icing on his cake, scooped some off and ate it. Sylvia watched jealously, her mouth watering. She stood up, stepped out of the bath and grabbed a large fistful of it, shoving it into her mouth. It was delectable.
Vincent watched her, offered her the plate to hold. ‘Hedonism,’ he said. ‘You’ve become a hedonist.’
She ignored this. She didn’t understand what he meant. She said, ‘Where’s this from? I want more of it. Different kinds, different types. I want to build a world out of tastes like this. A life. Something so beautiful, so delicious, completely full of touching and tasting and smelling and seeing.’
Vincent passed her a towel.
‘I made it,’ he said calmly. ‘And I can make more. I can show you how.’
‘Right.’
Sylvia was pleased by this notion. ‘I’ll get my clothes. Let’s go.’
Vincent watched her as she padded from the room. His gut tightened. Ruby was cheap, he thought.
He was cheap too. He had to spread himself very thinly.
So much happens here on a Saturday night, Ruby thought, as she walked from street to street through Hackney - from Pembury Road to Amhurst Road to Mare Street, then along this main thoroughfare for a long, long time.
Eventually, outside the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood, she ground to a halt. The dog had been behaving perfectly pulling on her lead only where appropriate, for the most part trotting amiably at Ruby’s side, obliging and obedient.
‘Good girl,’ she said, squatting down next to her. She stared up at the bright lettering on the front of the museum and thought, Hackney Wick and Bethnal Green. How far between the two?
She decided to take a bus.
After several false starts she established herself comfortably upstairs on a number 6. The dog clambered on to the seat next to her. It was empty up here, apart from the two of them. She stared out of the front window. The scene before her, lit by orange lights, dark but not yet properly dark - The city, she thought, is never really dark - seemed inexplicably grand. The dog sat beside her, also watching, but her eyes saw things differently, saw everything in monochrome, like fragments of an old film, every detail rendered stark and formal.
The dog sat next to Ruby like another person, upright on the seat, her legs tucked under her, her back ramrod straight. But with every unexpected jerk she fell forward, sometimes only a couple of inches, but other times almost crashing into the window, on to the floor. On these occasions Ruby tightened a possessive arm around the dog to save her from falling, from injury. The dog was too big, too bulky and unsuitable. Like so bloody many of the things in my life, she thought, and then instantly dismissed this idea. Instead she decided, My life is too small, that’s the problem. Maybe I’m too small.
She tried to map out in her mind the basic constituents of her immediate future. I’ll take the dog back, I’ll leave her there. I’ll return to Soho. I won’t see Vincent again.
These were all things she could imagine happening. Also, though - and this was the wonderful part, the amazing part - she could imagine, just as easily, these same things not happening.
Sometimes, she thought, you can get on to a bus and the bus driver forgets to stop, or he loses his way, or he has to change his route because something unexpected happens - roadworks, or a traffic jam, or a flood - and then everything is changed; because of that, everything is different.
She relaxed and smiled to herself. In life, she decided, there’s an outside and an inside. Things happen outside and things happen inside your body, inside your mind … ideas, decisions, feelings. Happiness is just a question of balancing the two.
The bus stopped abruptly and the dog fell forward. She caught hold of the dog, falling forward too.
In that split second - as she moved through the air, hearing the bus’s horn and the squeal of brakes, feeling the dog’s ribs, her fur, her breath - in that tiny dart of time her mind became a microscope. It took in everything, and every detail was significant.
This could be the beginning of something immaculate, she thought.
NICOLA BARKER
Burley Cross Postbox Theft
Other people’s letters are always a guilty pleasure. But for PC Roger Topping - contemplating 27 undelivered missives, dumped in an alley in Skipton - they’re also a job of work.
From complaints about dog shit to passive aggressive fanmail, via Biblical amateur dramatics and a disastrous Auction of Promises, Topping’s investigation leads him into the curtain-twitching lives of Jeremy Baverstock, the Jonty Weiss-Quinns, Mrs Tirza Parry (widow) and a host of other eccentrics who inhabit the moorside village of Burley Cross.
Irresistibly readable and brilliantly unconventional, Burley Cross is a Cranford for today, albeit with a dose of Tamiflu, some dodgy sex-therapy, and a whiff of cheap-smelling vodka.
‘A funny, heartbreaking book. From love lette
rs to suicide notes, her language vaults, somersaults and cartwheels across the page’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Nothing short of dazzling … this is the work of a writer in love with language’
Observer
‘A mix of modern-day Cranford with The League of Gentleman’s Royston Vasey … Barker’s best writing is also her funniest’
Evening Standard
NICOLA BARKER
Darkmans
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2007
Hauntings. History. Hysteria.
In this uproarious contemporary ghost story, the medieval past takes on a human face and roams the backstreets and bypasses of 21st-century Ashford, bringing chaos to the lives of all those it touches. No one is safe: not uptight, upstanding Beede, nor Kane (his laid-back, drug-dealing son), who share a home together but have nothing else in common - bar a mutual obsession with the same woman; Elen, an enigmatic chiropodist, whose unstable husband, Dory, believes that their only son, Fleet, has been fathered by the deranged ghost of an evil, 500-year-old court-jester.
Darkmans conjours up a magical yet somehow instantly familiar world in which language crackles like static - twitching with barely containable energy. Past and present mingle and blur, and the lines between fantasy and reality, sanity and madness are continually rubbed out and redrawn … but by whose hand?
‘A loud shout of glorious, untidy, angry, joyous life. At the end of 838 blinding, high-octane pages, I was bereft that there weren’t 838 more’
Guardian
‘[Barker] is one of the most exhilarating, audacious and, for want of a better word, ballsy writers of her generation’
Observer
‘Darkmans is an ambitious, daring, delightful and compelling work. If any young British writer - male or female - is dreaming big nightmares and taking jaw-dropping risks, it’s Barker’
Scotland on Sunday
NICOLA BARKER
Wide Open
WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD
The Isle of Sheppey: strange, flat and empty like the moon. In front of this bare, blasted backdrop, a host of characters try to manage lives that are anything but. There’s Luke, purveyor of dot-to-dot pornography; Connie, the inconstant optician and Lily, just 17 and full of outrageous anger. And then there’s Lost Property Officer Nathan, alopecia-ridden Jim and mysterious drifter Ronny, bound bleakly together by the tide of an awful secret past which refuses to retreat.
Wide Open is a beautiful, startling and heart-breaking novel about the unfashionable corners of life, from one of our most brilliantly unconventional literary talents, Nicola Barker.
‘Razor-sharp comic sensibility … flawless’
Independent on Sunday
‘Outrageously well-written … a stunningly original novel by the most unexpected talent around’
Time Out
‘The brilliance of Barker’s style is beyond question … Stricken, troubling and grand, Wide Open is unmistakably an important novel by an important novelist’
Spectator
NICOLA BARKER
Love Your Enemies
WINNER OF THE DAVID HIGHAM PRIZE FOR FICTION
WINNER OF THE PEN MACMILLAN SILVER PEN AWARD FOR SHORT STORIES
Layla Carter, 16, from North London, is utterly overwhelmed by her plus-size nose. Rosemary, recently widowed and the ambivalent owner of a bipolar tomcat, meets a satyr in her kitchen and asks, ‘Can I feel your fur?’ In these ten short stories, a series of marginalised characters seek truth in the obsession and oppression of everyday existence, via a canine custody battle, sex in John Lewis and some strangely expressive desserts.
Love Your Enemies is the brilliantly unconventional Nicola Barker’s loving depiction of the beautiful, the grotesque and the utterly bizarre in the lives of overlooked suburban Britons, with results that are exuberantly individual and enticingly strange.
‘One of the most exhilarating, audacious and ballsy writers of her generation’
Observer
‘Barker’s writing is an antidote to, a laughing cure for, and an energiser for the more moribund forms of Englishness and English fiction’
ALI SMITH, Guardian
‘Like Roald Dahl, Barker can take a commonplace situation - cooking a meal, starting a diet, taking in a stray - and use it to bounce off into a surreal fantasy world’
Independent
NICOLA BARKER
Five Miles from Outer Hope
Summer, 1981. Medve, 16 years old and 6-foot-3 in her crocheted stockings, is marooned in a semi-derelict hotel on a tiny island off the coast of Devon. There’s nothing to do but paint novelty Thatcher mugs, dream of literary murderer Jack Henry Abbott, and despair of her gothically unprepossessing family - including Mo, her anal-probe-inventing mother; Poodle, her shamefully flat-chested sister; and four-year-old Feely, who wants to grow up to be a bulimic (he thinks it’s a veterinarian who specialises in livestock). Until one day a ginger stranger arrives, stinking of antiseptic …
One of our most brilliantly unconventional contemporary writers, Nicola Barker roots out the darkly surreal in a forgotten corner of England, with results that are hilariously original.
‘Makes you wince, gasp and laugh out loud’
Independent on Sunday
‘A sort of literary tonic for enervation and grumpiness … a welcome despatch from Barker’s determinedly peverse and ungovernable imagination’
Guardian
‘A rites of passage novel, refreshingly free of rose-tinted sentiment … very funny’
Literary Review
NICOLA BARKER
Small Holdings
An attractive park in Palmers Green plays host to Phil, a chronically shy gardener who feels truly at home only with his plants. He and his gentle colleague Ray, a man with all the sense of a Savoy cabbage, are tortured by Doug, their imposing and unpredictable supervisor, and a malevolent one-legged ex-museum curator called Saleem. In love with the truck-obsessed Nancy, Phil strives nobly to maintain his equilibrium despite being systematically mystified, brutalised, drugged, derided and seduced. But when he loses his eyebrows, he decides to fight back.
Hilarious, poignant and frequently surreal, Small Holdings is another despatch from a neglected corner of everyday life by the brilliantly unconventional Nicola Barker.
‘An anarchic and lovingly perverse writer’
ALI SMITH
‘Funny and intelligent … Barker’s sense of plot and comic timing is faultless’
RACHEL CUSK, The Times
‘Marvellous … explodes into action, with Barker letting off fireworks and flares in all directions’
TLS
‘[Barker] writes of the comic and sometimes sinister surrealism of ordinary people’s lives, and the results are books to make you wince, gasp and laugh out loud’
Independent on Sunday
About the author
NICOLA BARKER’S eight novels include Darkmans (shortlisted 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.
Other books by Nicola Barker
Love Your Enemies
Small Holdings
Heading Inland
Wide Open
Five Miles from Outer Hope
Behindlings
Clear
Darkmans
Burley Cross Postbox Theft
Praise
From the reviews of Reversed Forecast:
‘Reversed Forecast is an imaginative lowlife tale, told with acuteness and verve’
Literary Review
‘Reversed Forecast is beautifully rendered - well written, clear and revelatory’
The Times
Copyright
Fourth Estate
An imprint of
HarperCollinsPublishers
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First published in Great Britain by Faber and Faber Ltd in 1994
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 978-0-00-743605-7
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.
REVERSED FORECAST. Copyright © Nicola Barker 1994. 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 © SEPTEMBER 2011 ISBN: 978-0-00-745560-7
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