NICOLA BARKER

Five Miles From Outer Hope

Dedication

In loving memory of Jason, Anna and little Romy

Thanks

With special thanks to Jessamy Calkin

Contents

Cover

Title page

Dedication

Thanks

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

About the author

Praise

By the same author

Credits

Copyright

About the publisher

Chapter 1

It was during those boiled-dry, bile-ridden, shit-ripped, god-forsaken early-bird years of the nineteen eighties. The same summer my brother Barge started acrylic-ing his internationally celebrated collection of bad canvases featuring derelict houses with impractical tomato-red masonry and gaping windows: his agonizing L. S. Lowry period (and look what happened to him – a gleeful life of Northern bliss, stuck in Pendlebury with his bed-ridden mother. Pretty fucked up. Ask anybody).

And it was the identical year, more to the point, that my vicious but voluptuously creamy candle-wax-skinned sister, Christabel (Poodle for short, or Poo, if you really wanted to risk a trouncing) went out and invested in a brand-new pair of breasts, and then, with the kind of infuriating randomness only ever exhibited by terriers, High Church clerics, and the despicably attractive, finally got around to making the one and only decent-minded decision of her rancid, fatuous, nineteen-year-old life (a good impulse, you’ll be pleased to know, that she never, ever recovered from).

And it was the self-same summer – June 5th, if precision is your watchword – that I first set eyes on a stringy southern hemisphere home-boy, a man-boy, a prankish puck by the name of La Roux (with very bad skin and even worse instincts), who sailed into the slow-beating heart of our half-arsed, high-strung, low-bred family, then casually capsized himself, but left us all drowning (now they don’t teach you that at the Sea Scouts, do they?).

In order to pinpoint this nebulous time chronologically, to locate it in terms of general events of national – fuck – galactic significance, to set it all in perfect sync, so to speak, it was actually the very year in which that resplendent Sylph of Synth, that unapologetically greased-back, eye-linered soprano imp, Marc Almond (the rivetingly small-c’d Marc) enjoyed a late summer smash with his electro remake of Gloria Jones’s old Northern Soul big-belter, ‘Tainted Love’, then celebrated it by devouring well over a pint of warm, pale cum in a public toilet – somewhere horribly unspecific – and got his gloriously effete wrist slapped, and his adorably flat stomach pumped for his sins.

Yes, that year.

And let us pause (momentarily), lest we forget the curious story of Mr Jack Henry Abbott, the bastard Yankee killer, the ingeniously literate reprobate (whose lucky-lettered surname would ensure him an opening position on the index of every World Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Murder for ever and ever more, amen), who in this particular summer somehow managed to prick the precious consciences of all those fine-minded, high-flying American writerly types (sure I can gloat – I lived in Texas for fifteen months. It was hot as Hades. It was dry as toast. I was resplendent in two completely random scarlet eczema mittens. I walked around with plastic bags on my hands to stop me sticking to furniture. I was medically advised not to get wet in the shower. Medically advised, I tell you. Call that humane?) and then spat, and spat again, in their kindly, good-intentioned, well-bred faces. (Don’t you just love it?)

It was that year. It was that summer. Late that summer.

It was 1981.

Remember?

So my dad loved Thurber. He had a penchant. What can I say? Thurber. The American who – so far as I can tell, anyway – made a living out of writing witty stuff on the fascinating subject of canine behaviour. And he drew cartoons of bloodhounds doing human things in a mutty way but being all high and mighty about it, like making citizen’s arrests and drinking pale ale in public houses and suffering from acute depression. As if dogs have all that much to be worried about – existentially – or superior about, come to think of it. And this clever cheeseball made a career from these meanderings.

He was born in 1894 (this is Thurber, dimwit) and he lived – like my father – the first seven formative years of his life tortured by his incapacity to digest solids. Horrible gut problems. Huge coincidence, and hence, That Bond.

All told, there are seven of us: Big, that’s Daddy. He’s four foot nine in his clogs, which is pretty embarrassing, but when we were little, we were tiny. That’s nature. We knew no better.

Painfully thin. Like a toothpick with elbows (yet in our minute consciousnesses, a giant pink radio mast, a wild, fleshy skyscraper), which is why Barge – who’s already coming over slightly too idiosyncratic in these pages for my taste – went right on ahead and nicknamed him in one single syllable with his soft, slightly lisping, sweet baby-lips. Big.

Big does some landscape gardening. He’s in the midst of compiling a supernaturally tedious Pocket Guide to Garden Shrubs. He lives to crochet. He still finds it extremely difficult to digest cheese. It’s a daily battle.

Okay, Barge. Barge! What a wit! What a prodigy! Well, the truth is this kid’s name was actually lifted straight from the collar of that ridiculous ale-lapping hound I believe I might already’ve mentioned earlier (a mongrel, a drunk, an ineffectual guard dog – these are details only a Thurber fanatic would find telling) and he is distinguished by being the oldest child in our considerable and cosmopolitan clan. Our clutch.*

By mid-1981 Barge was living on the only kibbutz not actually inside Israel. I think it was deep in the Balkans, somewhere. He kept the faith by painting assiduously in the evenings and boiling beet for his keep. Clear-pored and righteous (This was 1981, for God’s sake. He’d never even heard Bill Wyman’s ‘Je Suis un Rock Star’. It was depraved).

Naturally the degraded root vegetable-based enclave to which he had only recently become attached consciously eschewed all unnecessary contact with modern technology. If you’d thought to ask, he’d’ve said Abacab was some kind of taxi service.

Next up, or down, was the lovely Christabel with her two brand-new, out-of-the-blue, special-purchase, proudupstanding, oxygen-tank tits (after she’d turned fifteen, if you called her Poo to her face, she’d string your teeth into a necklace and then make you pass it), a cheerfully malevolent teen queen, the only paid-up member of our benighted eighties familial troupe to wear normal – read as English – clothing (the rest of us stepped out boldly in our embroidered kaftans, fur-trimmed hide waistcoats and crochet knickers. We were mutants): I’m talking pleated skirts, high-neck blouses, court shoes. Standard hideous. All acquired – without exception – as a consequence of her devious and persistent extra-marital conjunctions.

But she was always Daddy’s favourite, his pride, named after Thurber’s most beloved black French poodle (although I fear close textual scrutiny reveals this animal to be an inconsistent, teasing, curly-hinded harridan: please refer to Mr T’s essay on ‘How to Name a Dog’. He doesn’t say it, in so many words, but I believe the modern vernacular is slut.)

I’m next down and I’m Medve. No, it isn’t a verb. And it isn’t Ancient English for river or whore. Medve was also, if you must know, a Thurber canine, another poodle, not quite so beloved as Christabel, but, shucks, a great breeder by all accounts, and an independent dog blessed with the talent of throwing her own balls and then retrieving them. A bitch. Obviously.

Medve is Hungarian for bear, which, when you think about it, is pretty fucking grizzly. And don’t ask me how to pronounce it. I will inflate and then I will gently burst. And it will be messy, because I am built like a shire horse. Six foot three in my crocheted stockings. I am huge. Sixteen years old in 1981, with a tongue taut and twisted as a tent-hook and two tremendous hands like flat meat racquets.

Thwack !

My serve, I think.

Sadly, I am the only recorded giant in our tribal history. There are no magnificent, monolithic, Humber-Bridge-building great-grandfathers hanging around helpfully in our fine family tree, no cousins-twice-removed making a fortune as novelty attractions in disreputable out-of-town freakshows. No one, in other words, for a poor, tall girl to look up to.

I am not stupid or rebellious enough to consider my difference a boon. I am anti-genetic. I am unnatural. And this hugeness is not even counterbalanced by any degree of sleekness or sveltness or grace. I have knees as wide as the skull of Neolithic man. They knock together sometimes, as I walk, and the subsequent crashing makes sheltering rabbits, deep in their burrows, roll their eyes skyward, embrace each other with their funny bunny arms and quake. I am clumsy. I lumber. I can only buy shoes through mail order. I disorientate seagulls.

Hang on, you’re thinking (you’re so transparent): seagulls?!

I’ll get to that. Hold your horses. First off, I just want you to imagine my little mother, Mo (there’s nothing cutesie in this moniker, she’s Maureen, that’s all), five foot two inches tall, struggling to pass my huge head through her cervix. Think small African pygmy being force-fed a planet. Mars, maybe. Or Pluto. There will be screeching. There will be retching. And tearing. And tears. Afterwards the whole Sahara desert will look like a badly managed Halal butcher’s.

Poor Mo. Mo is actually very scientific. In the fifties she published her Ph.D. entitled The Intellectual Woman’s Guide to Atomic Radiation. It was a smash. There were so many intellectual women around back then, and all of them absolutely gagging to understand the atom. She might almost have planned it.

Naturally this fine specimen of emancipated womanhood cashed in on her little victory by choosing to spend the bulk of the following decade breeding with a man without a stomach on a series of far-flung atolls. She has a passion for atolls (not, I fear, an interest as inspiringly universal as atomics. But give it time).

By early 1981 things had picked up a little. The urge to reproduce having momentarily abated, she was fully occupied in stringing out a long-extended but very temporary American visa working alongside a rather shifty man called Bob Ranger in developing and patenting a fascinating new security device for the US prison service. An Anal Probe. (And remember, this was the kind of woman who always made a habit out of bringing her work home.)

I don’t want to talk about it.

Well, not yet, anyway.

There are just two others; both younger and not particularly interesting. Patch. A girl. Twelve years old. Fat-cheeked. Literate. Needy. The only one among us not named after a Thurber pooch. Would you believe it? I mean how harsh. How excluding.

Then there’s Feely (a slack, ill-bred Boston Bull Terrier), our smallest. Four. When he grows up he wants to be a bulimic (He thinks it’s a veterinarian who specialises in livestock. He’s so credulous). He’s into amateur naturalism. He is obsessed by the life story of a Japanese deer called Shiro Chan, a special doe with a strange white fringe whose story Barge came across by chance once in a poor-quality Japanese travel book. It’s a tragic tale. Lovely deer: road traffic accident. Oh Lord. Don’t even get me started.

That’s it. So I’ll toss you a few crumbs, some details, to fill in, to plump out…

We all have bad teeth (A direct consequence of:

(a) Non-fluoridated drinking water

(b) Brushing for six years (1968–74) with only our middle fingers

(c) Never eating solids as kids.

In his mid-thirties – no doubt as a consequence of his own dreary digestive dramas – Big became really interested in nutrition and spent the bulk of the seventies developing what turned out to be an unsuccessful forerunner to the Cambridge Diet. A shake for breakfast, one for lunch. You know the story. The upshot was I didn’t chew until I was ten years old. I only ever sipped. I suffered chronic muscle wastage in my jowls. My teeth crumbled. Everyone thought I had cheekbones, but it was only deprivation.)

And we live on an island off the coast of South Devon. In fact we’ve lived on a whole host of islands, bigger than this one, if you must know, and grander (Islands were the atolls of the seventies, but inverted. It’s a geographical joke. Just let it wash over). New Zealand. The Philippines. Jersey. The Scillies. That shithole where they made South Pacific, the 1950s Technicolor army-based bikini-drama (Remember me? I was the impeccably moral girl who somehow sustained a successful military career in hair rags and prescription hotpants. Ah yes. So lifelike).

Guess what? Joking aside, I have no interest in geography. I’m a teenager. It’s my foible. And anyway, if I stand on my tippy-toes and squint, I get to watch Margaret Thatcher crawling up Reagan’s arse all the way over in Missouri. I’m a big girl. I see things coming.

In truth, the Devon thing is only very temporary: almost derelict Art Deco hotel up for sale. Needs renovating. Sounds romantic. Isn’t. Big’s sorting out the grounds as a favour to the current owner, who spends most of her year sucking extraneous segments of tangerine from the dregs of her sangria in a sumptuous corner of Bilbao.

And it’s only part-island. When the tide goes out there’s a nifty hourglass of sand attaching us, inexorably, to the remainder of the coastline. So during daylight, every six hours, the sightseers swarm over like fat ants across butter.

We live in squalor. We paint pottery for extra cash. It screws up your vision. It gives you the shakes. It’s not at all cool.

But it’s the summer, don’t forget, and not half-bad weather, either. 1981. I believe I mentioned that already. And soon Marc’s going to be at the top of the charts, all dressed in black and irresistibly nasal. And Jack Henry will publish his wonderful book, then start campaigning like crazy for early parole (just you watch as he gets it). And Dolly Parton is up on the big screen, doing it for the girls in her office-based bio-pic, Nine-to-Five (oh Lordy, Lordy, thank you, Dolly!).

And there will be riots in Brixton, and Royal marriages and the space shuttle Columbia: flying and orbiting. And somehow they’ll check-mate the Yorkshire Ripper, and baseball will strike, and air traffic controllers, and McEnroe will win the US Open, and Karpov will reign as World Chess Champion, and in May, Bob Marley’s short life will be over. Cancer.

It is the Year of the Rooster: the strangest, darkest, screwed-up time of scratching and strutting and shitting and crowing. 1981.

Jesus Christ, my fucking ears are burning.

*At the time of writing – I must debunk, for the sake of narrative accuracy – he is embroiled in that most fascinating of occupations: court illustrator, somewhere noteworthy within the salubrious confines of the great city of Woolwich. But back then, it was matchstick men, matchstalk twats, L. S. Lowry, the abandoned houses. Twenty-one years old, poor sod, and dippy as a hungry swallow – his unconscious patently embroiled in some kind of inexplicably acute trauma, his day-to-day personality far too slight and light and breezy for belief. What a fuck up.

Chapter 2

(I have pins in my ears. Flashforward, Dumbo. If my narration gets a little hot-diggedy it’s because I have pins in my ears. Seven in my right, one in my left. This is acupuncture. I’m giving up smoking. And I don’t even smoke yet.

It’s very messed up. You’ll find out later.)

Let’s get this straight, for starters: I don’t have beautiful eyes. If you dare even think it (and I’m not kidding), then this whole damn business is over, buster. I’ve been knocked hard and I’m hurting, see? Because that asinine You Have Beautiful Eyes thing is exactly the kind of shudderingly clumsy gambit well-intentioned five-foot-seven morons really seem to enjoy trying out on a sixteen-year-old girl giant in mail-order shoes. So I don’t want to hear it, okay?

And the truth is (more to the point), if you ever chanced to glance into the nappy of a five-month-old baby who’d recently swallowed a gallon of mashed banana on a seven-hour boat trip, well, that would be a fair representation of the colour of my eyes. Or if you peered into Shakin’ Stevens’s pituitary gland after a lengthy night out on the piss, that would be the colour of my eyes. I don’t have beautiful eyes. I do have a beautiful chin. But unfortunately that’s simply not the kind of thing people feel comfortable remarking upon in 1981.

It’s a very dark time.

I didn’t sleep much in May. Hormones. I’d been spending the bleached-out early hours of every morning honing my masturbatory skills with only Peter Benchley’s Jaws (come on! Not literally) and Barry Manilow’s ‘Bermuda Triangle’ for company.

My clitoris, you’ll be pleased to know, is as well-defined as the rest of me. It’s the approximate size of a Jersey Royal. But whenever I try and mash it (don’t sweat, I know these particular potatoes are determined boilers, but flow with the analogy, for once, why don’t you?), all I can think about is Mr Michael Heseltine MP eating an overripe peach on a missile silo somewhere deep in the South Downs – or the general vicinity – juice on his tie, shit on his shoes. Am I ringing a bell? Do you think this might mean something?

I’m still young. I don’t want to develop any sick sexual habits (to plough any permanent furrows) that I may have trouble casting off later. The way I see it, sex is rather like a hair parting; if it falls a certain way, after a while, it sticks. One day, I tell myself, I’m absolutely certain I’ll want to fuck Tony Hadley like all the other girls.

If, by sheer chance, you’re interested in the layout, I have my portable mattress down on the ground floor in the old Peacock Lounge, next to the empty fountain with its rusty residue, the silver-tiled swoop of the cocktail bar and, best of all, glimmering high above me, the peacocked glass ceiling – every feather rattling if the wind so much as sighs on it – which means whenever I deign to close my eyes it’s like that great, big barman in the sky is mixing me a Manhattan.

Cocks aside, in those long, listless, liquid-ceilinged early hours I often find myself thinking about the big issues: Can my hair sustain a wedge? Is the Findus Crispy Pancake truly a revelation in modern cuisine? Am I ‘Hooked on Classics’? Will Poodle see the folly of her ways and extricate herself from her disastrous affair with that repulsively lascivious travel agent whose skin resembles an ill-used leather hold-all? Is exploding candy truly a part of God’s scheme?

Big has this great story about God which he’ll tell you at the drop of a stitch if you’re stupid enough to consider asking. It involves six roadkills and it explains a lot. Wanna hear it?

Okay. It’s circa 1957, and Big is driving a group of student buddies on a wild coast-to-coast excursion through some barely roaded, shit-slicked, no-horse parts of America. Christ knows where. He is driving – this I can help you with, it’s the question Barge always asks whenever Big cranks this story up – some old-fashioned type of American Cadillac, an ancient, dusty, sludgy green-coloured cheap rental with no air-con or heating.

It is night time. Big is tired. He is not, however, under the malign sway of any kind of boozy or druggy concoction (Patch asks this. She’s interested in narcotics. When she grows up she expects to be a pharmacist. Ironically, history has much greater things in store for her; after a bumpy start she ends up being part of the team who revolutionize thermal clothing – you know, that whole pitiful nineties ‘inner-wear becomes outer-wear’ farrago?)

Bear in mind, this is a man with half a stomach, remember? A dwarf. He can barely reach the pedals without standing upright. It’s not half so romantic as you’re thinking, trust me.

Anyway, it’s late. Big’s pals – a group of shallow horticultural students with hayseed in their teeth and manure on their breath (this is a point of interest to Poodle, who can already identify most of Big’s associates by their vasectomy scars) are dozing in the front and in the back. On the radio (this is my moment) are a selection of classy orchestral standards arranged by Glen Miller or Robert Farnon or somebody.

Well, Big has not been driving over-long when he sees something quick and dinky suddenly skipping in front of him. He blinks. There on the road stands a tiny fieldmouse. He brakes, quickly, but still he hears the inevitable ‘ka-ting’ and then feels the front left-hand wheel hiccup slightly. Oh dear.

Big drives on. Twenty minutes later, he turns a sharp corner only to see a jackrabbit standing in his headlights like some kind of out-of-work Disney character: up on its back legs, its little paws flailing. He can’t even brake. Phut! Dent in the bumper the size of a turnip. Fur on the mudguard. The rabbit, I fear, is plainly no longer.

He drives on… Okay, I’ll cut this short as I’m presuming you’re a quick learner… Next up, a racoon. He’s lucky this time – just clips it. It squeals like a banshee then jumps up and scarpers.

Yikes! A dog. A manky farm pooch. Bang! He’s whacked and he’s winded. Big does what he can to help the creature. Trawls it back to the farmhouse, et cetera.

Not even an hour later – you guessed it – a sheep. Swerves to avoid. Manages it. Phew! Then finally, the big one. A cow. Large cow, just standing in the road, licking its nose, quietly passing the time of night like its whole life has been leading to this one exquisitely meditative moment.

By this time, Big is so head-fucked that he drives off the road, into a tree, and spends the rest of the night half-way up it.

Let’s get this straight. It is not the fact that Big has experienced the horror of six potential roadkills in one single evening that disturbs him (and the bottom line is, only two of these animals were squelched for sure), it’s the fact that he suddenly perceives the simple truth that these night creatures were arranged into some weird kind of order: smallest to largest. And in his mind, this orderliness contains vague – I’m talking really vague (he doesn’t shave his head or enter a monastery or anything) – implications of Divine Intervention.

(Let us not forget – this is Feely’s contribution whenever he hears this particular story – that llamas have an inbuilt need to arrange themselves in order of size. It’s just an instinct, Feely opines. Ask any llama farmer – yeah, so do you happen to know one? – and they will all swear blind that if you go to bed with your fields full of llamas, plodding about their business, quite arbitrarily, when you eventually awaken, the llamas will, without fail, have arranged themselves into an immaculate line: tallest one end, smallest the other. They will be in perfect order, ready for inspection. That’s llamas. They are bloody obsessive.

An interesting fact, certainly, but not, I fear, particularly pertinent to the story at hand. But he’s four. And let’s not forget that whole tragically morbid Shiro Chan thing, either. Which is pertinent. As a matter of fact it’s a rather sensitive issue. So give the little runt a break, will you?)

If there is a God, Big maintains, then (and this is the important part) he is surely a very pedantic deity. For some reason Big finds this notion a source of great comfort. Perhaps it’s because he is an extremely pedantic man himself at heart, and the idea that God has seen fit to arrange the whole world in perfect sync with his own shortcomings is, quite frankly, rather flattering.

In my opinion, there are many other adjectives I’d rather associate with the Creator of All Things: muscular, avuncular, priapic, whiffy, bolshy, galvanized, funky. Pedantic, in my book, just doesn’t really cut it. Sorry.

Like you care.

I should fill you in on the Poodle thing. And be warned, it’s complicated. So I’m going to take some stuff for granted; the basic social and geographical organization of the Scilly Isles in the years 1979–81, for one thing.

If you care to imagine it (approximately fifty islands stuck slap-bang in the middle of the gulf stream), we were washed up on Bryher for eighteen months (golf course, small hotel, a scattering of sheep, high winds, too much granite. A teen dream, basically).

Big is working on Tresco in their famous gardens (even I can’t knock Tresco, with its ravens and exotic flowers and shit). But all civilized life is happening on St Mary’s, which is kind of the capital of this shredded little universe, and it is in this place that Poodle – who is making money selling T-shirts in a tourist shop – catches the eye of a physically repellent cod fisherman called Peter Bunch.

Now Poodle has had many offers. She is a very pretty lady. She has this inadvertent post-punk/pre-goth Siouxsie and the Banshees/Kim Wilde ‘Kids in America’ pale-skinned, back-combed hair thing going on which is pretty bloody irresistible – especially to men over forty, not least the head of St Mary’s travel kingdom, a swine called Donovan Healy, who is coincidentally promising Poodle the world as her whelk if she wants it.

Mo, naturally (as any good mother would be), is sharp to his manoeuvrings, and just before setting sail for the States makes Poodle promise to look elsewhere for her entrées. Poodle merely sneers, which for her is pretty damn obliging.

Pete Bunch, it must be said, is only known throughout Scilly for one thing: the grandeur of his astonishing overbite. His top jaw hangs over his bottom lip like… go on, create an image for yourself. Preferably something to do with Venezuelan Swamp Hogs or the Beano… But if there’s one thing you can’t take away from him it is the undeniable fact that the man has balls.

He is the ugliest, stupidest, most unappetizing reprobate in all of the fifty isles (gannets included) and it is because of this, and as a matter of sheer perversity, that he sets his sights on my beautiful sister.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking surely that surly, sassy, egocentric bitch can look after herself? And you’d probably be absolutely right, if you weren’t, on this occasion, the complete and utter opposite.

I must just – as a kind of aside – let you in on one of Pete Bunch’s sad little routines. The Italian pop star Joe Dolce (a one-man reason why joining the EC was such a huge, fucking catastrophe) was at this particular point riding high in the charts with his nightmarish novelty hit ‘Shaddupa Your Face’, and Pete Bunch is so tragic that he has adopted this little ditty as his trademark song of the moment and is walking around the town doing the most pathetic Joe Dolce impression, with hand-gestures and everything, that you – or any sentient being – have ever seen.

Naturally when Poodle first sets eyes on this (and remember, she’s the girl who has travelled the whole world, carelessly feeding on its rich and remarkable multicultural bounty) she thinks it’s one of the most embarrassingly fatuous displays she has ever, ever come across.

The problem is, the man is so depraved, so stupid and persistent that she almost feels sorry for him. And you know what that means? Her defenses come down a little (this girl invented defensiveness) and she starts to find him pitiful, but, well, pitiful.

As any sharp mind will know, it’s a terribly short step from pitiful to go-on-then-and-fuck-me. In less than twelve days, Poodle is crammed into the cabin of a fishing boat, mid-way between Gugh and Samson, yanking her knickers down and sucking on this Dolce wannabe’s obscenely protrusive upper set. It was sheer madness.

But it doesn’t end there. Any intelligent person might think that Mr Bunch would be insanely gratified at the idea of casually dating the most beautiful creature then currently inhabiting the Scillies. And they would be wrong.

After only one piece of interaction, Bunchy goes all cold on Poodle. And while the truth is that Poodle only really ever intended their canoodle to be a one-off thing – she deserves a man with status and money, doesn’t she? – she doesn’t get a chance to knock The Bunch back because The Bunch knocks her back first, and for one very specific reason.

Every pub and bar in St Mary’s is alive with it. Bunch won’t screw the new girl again because she has no tits. He is a tit man. She has none. And that is his bottom line.

It is at this point that things get a little shaky. The titless, shitless Poodle-related gossip gets so swollen and inflated and dark and vicious that eventually Big feels obliged to step in himself and stop it. He says not a word to our Poodle on the matter – God forbid. Instead he chugs quietly over to St Marys, calls Pete Bunch out and gives him what for. Barge, naturally, is working as back-stop.

It is all very humiliating. The man is four foot nothing. Bunch laughs in his face (or the clean air above it) and poor Barge is obliged to step in and steady things. In the process, he loses the tip of his tongue, a slightly ironic injury, really, considering the fact that his tongue hitherto had always been too long and hence slightly lispy. Now it is slightly short and the net result is not – you stupid dreamer! – a miraculous cure of his former difficulty, but one of the worst speech impediments in the whole northern hemisphere: with the added bonus of a future literally dripping in spittle and indignity (french kissing? Out of the picture).

Wow.

That Pete Bunch could really sock it to ya.

Epilogue

You might think Poodle would be grateful for her family’s intervention in this island drama. You would be wrong to think so. She is livid. She will never forgive Barge for losing his tongue on her account. She will never forgive Big for being so small. She will never forgive Mo for buggering off to America just at the juncture when her moral guidance skills were most needed, and the whole, damn family, more to the point, for being so strange and weird and different and tall and kaftan-ridden and freakish and poor and lean and curly.

She falls, henceforward (has the girl not an ounce of originality?) into the leathery arms of Donovan Healy. He has volunteered to ease the pressure for a while by getting Poodle off the scene in some kind of phoney, bull-shitty couriering capacity.

And that is how Poodle becomes Healy’s whore. But there is a price to pay. And Poodle won’t be paying it. She has been burned. She has been spurned. The bitch, as they say, has truly turned.

Shortly after, we stagger back to the mainland, our numbers cruelly depleted: Mo-less, Barge-less (the poor boy can’t even talk for three months after, then there’s the infection), Poodleless. A mournful, slightly moth-eaten rag-bag of a family. Feely, Patch, Big and me.

Appendix

She had lovely breasts, dammit. That’s the worst part, really. Tiny chocolate-button-tipped conches, soft as a moth’s wing, pale as a priest’s kiss. Lovely breasts.

So screw that infuriatingly gormless, over-bitten, cod-fishing Peter Bunch to hell and back, I say.

Chapter 3

I’d hate you to have me down as the world’s greatest ever L. S. Lowry fanatic – the man couldn’t interest me less – but I must get something off my chest about how sick and disgusted I feel over the treatment doled out to this silly, scratchy, mother-loving, messed-up art-genius in his dirty old home town of Pendlebury.

Pendle-where? Ah, precisely. You see the rudimentary facts of the matter are these: initially Lowry dwelled a life of infinite contentment in Victoria Park (a smart, suburban area of Manchester, vastly Pendlebury’s social superior), before, rather tragically, his dad’s oxtail soup business went all to seed and a move down-market became horribly obligatory.

Let us not for one moment pretend that it was the dream of Lowry’s life to end up living in a mill-ridden shithole with nothing to recommend it bar a whole host of spindly cats, rheumatic brats and cockroaches. No, sirree.

That said, the man soon set out, singlehandedly, to steam-iron this god-forsaken buttock of a place into the annals of Art History. No one can deny that Lowry put Pendlebury on the map with his bad brush and his keen eyes and his soft oils. He made it matter. He gave it soul. He offered it a shot in the arm of much-needed bloody integrity.

And as he did so – records maintain – he was the absolute living epitome of patience and politeness and calm, sweet modesty. He weren’t no fat-head or bully or big-gob. Quite the contrary.

(Okay, the man had some serious mental health issues. He was still a virgin aged eighty. He was chronically depressive. Wanna make something of it?)

So how do you imagine this beleaguered little area goes about thanking L. S. for all his crucial Northern Realist creativity?

‘They laughed at me for thirty years in Pendlebury,’ quoth he. To be laughed at for thirty years! L. S. Lowry. Laughed at by those wank-ridden tosspots in Pendlebury. Those smug, piss-infested, self-righteous, small-minded, ill bred bastards. Those losers. Those fools. Those inconsequential small town scumbags.

You know what? Sometimes it feels pretty damn hard for a six-foot girl giant to love the world.

(So I lied about the oxtail soup business. That’s hardly the point, is it?)

Yes, yes, yes, I am a truly, irredeemably, unapologetically moo-faced, big-blotched, large-arsed, yank-my-udder Friesian (how can I deny it?), but I do have some inkling as to how poor old Poodle felt over the Bunch disaster. Humiliated. Small. Cast-off. Ugly.… And the strange thing is, I miss her. For a short while the sweet May sun suddenly shines just a little less brightly on our tiny, ten-acre almost-island.

Oh please. You actually believe this stuff? Jesus H! I’m so full of shit my ears are dripping. Miss the bitch? Are you kidding? I’m in my fucking element. It’s like I’ve suffered for sixteen years with a dose of Bell’s Palsy, and suddenly it’s lifted. It’s gone. I am no longer disfigured by the shadow of my nasty sibling’s shallow, sulky, arse-aching misery. I mean, this girl made Ian Curtis look like Zebedee.

At last, at long last, I am free (You really expect me to mourn the brief bliss which has suddenly entered our once-dark world with all the unexpectedness of an exotic fungus sprouting on a once-putrid pile of manure? What do you take me for?)

I am buoyant. I can boss Patch into performing all the kitchen chores. I can mess with little Feely’s head then send him straight to bed. I rule this damn ten-acre patch with a rod of cod.

I spend my days peering into rock-pools, fishing, swimming in the cove, snarling at tourists, flirting (pathetically) with local yokels and marching around this dilapidated Art Deco hotel like a six-foot Queen Tut in carpet slippers.

I’m still painting pottery. We’re doing a concession of Thatcher mugs: mustard-yellow hair, sharp blue eyes. We are part of the zeitgeist, so why oh why do I feel so oooooh… grubby?

Come on. I’ll get over it.

Then, out of the blue, with no prior warning, something rather peculiar happens. Over breakfast. For some reason, on the morning in question, we are partaking of our victuals in the snooker room. Huge table, covered in a thick sheet of protective plastic. Dark green walls, no windows, but all the vital central action carefully low-lit by a long, rectangular fluorescent strip which hangs over the table like some kind of gratuitously industrial extractor fan. It’s a magical chamber; fuzzy-edged, subterranean, bruised, mysterious.

We all have our stools and sit perched upon them, miles apart from one another, like dirty-etched characters in a Rembrandt painting; half-lit in the dark-light. The room reeks of damp.

This is where Patch has chosen to serve. No one says anything. It is her decision. She’s twelve. If we make too much of it she gets to think she’s interesting or something.

I am wearing my cheap, synthetic nightdress (a garment so flammable that if I fart the buttons tinkle) and a long crocheted knee-length waistcoat. Rubber flip-flops. My heels hanging over. Hair like Medusa.

We are eating kippers with our fingers. And drinking goat’s milk (Feely has a dairy allergy). It’s all pretty primeval. Either way, I am finishing my first fish (telling Feely his feet are stinking), lifting up my glass, swigging on it – eyes unintentionally rolling – when yik! I espy a total stranger. Over the table. In the half-dark.

I stop glugging, burp, and put down my glass. He is staring at me morosely. Big, meanwhile, has quietly and most inconveniently abandoned the baize. Patch is telling Feely his feet stink (the girl’s my fucking echo), and for a split second I consider how uncool it would be if I ask him straight out who he actually is. I don’t want to be wrong-footed.

(Instantly I see he will wrong-foot me – he has that kind of jaw, and he’s ginger – and don’t forget I’m in my flimsy night-dress with my nipples doubtless digging like blind moles through the holes in the waistcoat crochet – why can’t the man just knit for Chrissakes?)

‘Chin,’ the stranger says suddenly, and points at me. It’s dark. His poky finger is lit for a second like silver. He withdraws it again, into smudginess.

‘What?’ I say, rather rudely, blinking at him. He is weird-accented.

‘Chin.’ He points to his own chin in the bored manner of a man much-accustomed to being misheard.

‘Oh.’ I wipe my hand over my chin, thinking I have milk on it, but I feel no hint of moisture.

‘You have a handsome chin.’ He smiles. He has an effeminate manner. His lips are thin and prone to pursing. Already I smell him; kind of clean but rotten. Bad antiseptic. Not erotic (like I’d want to shag a drain).

I look down. ‘Can you see my nipples through my top?’ I ask.

He stares fixedly.

‘I believe I can,’ he sighs.

I nod and continue eating. The stranger stretches over, picks up a book from the place where Big was sitting previously, and then quietly starts reading it. In the Belly of the Beast, by Jack Henry Abbott. Hardback. Boring cover.

‘Mo wrote,’ Patch mutters, and tosses me a letter. I nod, pick it up, unfurl, and not another word is spoken.

Big is no help whatsoever. He is weeding the tennis courts when I finally catch up with him. ‘So who is he?’ I demand. Big straightens.

‘Did you see Mo wrote?’ he asks.

‘Yep.’

‘What did she say?’

(He loves to receive his news second-hand. And he needs to buy some reading glasses. Feely used his last pair in an outdoor experiment – he wanted to set fire to the sea – and a freak wave took them. The child is so damned ill-bred.)

‘Deep South. Death Row. New Lawyer Friend. Some strange, fresh angle about the Probe being marketed as a means to improve prisoner safety and dignity (my God, the woman’s such an opportunist). Worried about Barge’s tongue. Poodle’s been visiting. And the book. She sent it.’

Big nodded. ‘I don’t like this new prison reform stuff,’ he says, passingly. (Big loathes progressive politics. The man’s a Nazi.)

‘I could give a shit,’ I say.

‘Watch your mouth.’ He looks into the sky. A gull’s flying over. Greater Black Backed. It squawks at me.

‘All the same, bad Elmore Leonard novel or what?’ I snipe.

Big just frowns.

(These are the conversations we have. They’re profoundly inconclusive. But it’s all that’s really necessary. I won’t change him. He won’t change me. We’re our own fucking people.)

Big bends over and picks up his weeding implement again.

‘His father’, he offers finally, ‘is a gynaecologist. He delivered Feely in Wellington, remember? We owe him a favour. He’s from Cape Town.’

‘Clipped vowels. Horrible.’

‘That’s the nature of the beast.’ Big looks uneasy. He scans the horizon.

‘How long will he stay?’

Big shrugs, squats, starts truffling. Not long, I surmise, by the look of him. I move on.

Hmmn. Something tells me Mr Big is definitely not Mr Happy.

‘Don’t you find being a woman in the eighties complicated?’

Jessica Lange, Tootsie

Are you telling me – I said are you telling me – that it’s gonna be a whole other year before that monumental short-arse Dustin Hoffman gets to set the whole world straight on the fundamental dilemmas of modern womanhood in his cross-dressing masterpiece, Tootsie? But where does that leave things, currently? I mean feministically?

Meryl Streep taking it up the arse and looking wantonly choleric in A French Lieutenant’s Woman? Marg Thatch writ large – all nose, no jaw – in her preposterous pearls and pin-stripes? Sue Ellen in Dallas with her pop eyes and alcoholism? Or do they honestly expect me to seek succour from that inconsequential drippy-draws playing the worthless girl part in Chariots of Fire? Can this really be it?

Look, there’s not a damn thing wrong with my sexuality (excluding those private issues detailed previously), but show me internationally acclaimed actress Jessica Lange in

(a) grey sweatpants

(b) a nurse’s uniform

and – screw Hoffman – even I get a little horny.

I’d better tell you about the barman. It’s a touch convoluted, but bear with me. The point is (can you hear me backpedalling like fucking crazy?), when you move around a lot you get to meet plenty of new people and, frankly, you don’t give a damn about them – not really – because in your heart of hearts you both know it doesn’t really count, for one (you’re just treading water, dammit), or matter, for another, however much you screw each other over, because soon you’ll be gone and it’ll all just be water under the hump-backed proverbial.

(You’re calling my family a bunch of users? Spot on. You’re sharper than you look. We prefer to call the whole sordid flyby-night exchange thing ‘a short-cut to intimacy’. Ha! God fucked up good when he gave us vocabulary.)

There’s this small pub on the island: the Pilchard Inn – the pilchard used to swim these waters, way back, but now the Gulf Stream has shifted and they’ve taken to foaming further afield; they’re canny. It’s three hundred years old. Balanced precariously half-way up the one and only pot-holed, sharp-tilted road which staggers dejectedly from the beach to the hotel.

Mud-coloured inside, with big fish jaws on the walls and stuffed birds. Smells of dust and treacle. The owner’s nephew still runs it. Keeps it ticking over. Twenty-five. A tragic soak. Stinks like brandy and dry-roasted nuts. Huge, brown eyes (a thyroid problem, but let’s not spoil it). A dark heart. They call him Black Jack. Like the card game (I’ve never played it).

Barely speaks a word. Caters to the tourists. Resents our presence like a rat resents Rentokil. He is literally filthy. Naturally I have it in mind to seduce him. Or for him to seduce me. Come on, the man’s a modern Heathcliff with his catatonic dial, his cat-gut breath, his loose, lardy belly (So I’m only four inches taller. I picture it as an act of revenge, on his part. Well hell. Beggars can’t be choosers).

In the absence of all other island staff, Jack has been temporarily placed in charge of the Sea Tractor – a mythological machine in these parts: half bird, half monster, which, when the tide is high and the conditions are tolerable, we use to ferry post and people and provisions one way and another.

It is his pride. Seven-foot-wide wheels attached to twelve-foot-tall stilts. On top, a kind of oily, open-sided tram carriage. It chugs through the water like a superannuated steamroller.

I have cunningly been employing monosyllabic Jack’s passion for this vehicle in my four-pronged attack on his affections. Last week I cleaned it. This week I’m expressing an interest in its rudimentary mechanics. I’ve invited him out fishing (I’m a dab-hand, me). And all the while I bore him with tales of our time on Soames Island in Wellington harbour, New Zealand. He loves it.

(Jack has this fantasy about turning our current crummy bolt-hole into some kind of nature reserve. He’s a nutter. He likes to mutter about the surf and stuff. He’s into Polynesian culture. He even has a Maori tattoo.

The man is plainly out of his tree. I mean, how does he plan to keep nature reserved on a place part-connected to the mainland? In truth he’s nothing more than a tragic booze casualty, but somehow, in some way, he brings out the nasty, sexy, six-foot Nurse Nightingale in me.)

This particular morning I find him standing on an overturned bucket, poking his nose into the ancient inn’s low-slung but very clogged-up gutters. It’s still high tide. We’re cut off. The coast is clear. And luckily my extra inches mean I don’t have to yell up at him.

‘Need a hand?’ I whisper.

He jumps and scowls. ‘Why did God make you so obliging?’

Side-on he looks like Gene Wilder. But no perm. I say nothing. (What do I know of God’s intentions?) Instead I peer through a window then saunter down the hill a way.

‘So who’s the freak in the balaclava?’ he asks. He can’t help himself. He wants me. I stop sauntering.

‘Balaclava?’

‘Five this morning, I brought him over on the tractor. Your dad was spitting fucking tacks.’

I shrug. I am mesmerized by the sheer sum of words spilling out of him.

‘Sorry,’ I finally manage again, ‘you said balaclava?’

‘Then not ten minutes since,’ he continues, ‘I saw him carrying a shitload of chicken wire…’

He points to the hazy summit – past the old croquet lawn, towards the Herring Cove – a sumptuous grass-strewn rise glimmering with an obscene verdancy in the early summer shine (the cliffs crash beyond it, all chalk and shag).

‘That way.’

Jesus, the man is almost trippy.

He peers again, ‘And there he goes…’

I walk back towards him, up the hill. Once I reach his level I stretch my neck. Sure enough, I see a black-headed creature processing regally along the horizon, arms full of silver.

‘Chicken wire? Where’d he get that from?’

‘And he’s got some old lavender,’ Jack observes almost squinting, ‘and a fucking tonne of blue grass… Still in his balaclava, note. The twat.’

You know what? He’s been here all of three hours or something and already the bastard’s appropriating. He’s re-inventing. He’s running bloody riot. Collecting chicken wire for no known reason, and gathering lavender. Wearing a balaclava.

Oh, so he’s softened you already with the chin thing, has he? You think I didn’t notice? You have a handsome chin. You think that didn’t impact? This man is clever, certainly. But I am single-minded, oestrogen-fuelled and cunning.

Right. So he sees me coming from way off and is courteous enough to stand waiting. As I draw closer – I am panting a little and wet-legged from the dew (I’m resolutely bare-footed – my soles are like emery boards. You can strike matches off them. We do it all the time in winter), I see that the balaclava has no nose or mouth holes, although the wool’s much darker where the mouth and nose should be. Wet. Sweaty.

‘And the chicken wire?’

He stares at me, hazel-eyed. My words hang in the air a while. Soon they’re flapping like old underwear on a windy washing line.

And the chicken wire?

He blinks.

‘Oh. Was that a question you just asked me?’

(Imagine his words, all tight and clipped and southern hemispherical, but completely ensnared by woollen weave – Uh. Gnah, gnah, gnah, gnah, gnah, gnah, gnah, gnah hi?)

‘Sorry,’ I lie. ‘I cannot understand what you’re saying through your mouth.’

He still looks quizzical.

‘Sorry,’ he answers eventually, ‘I cannot hear what you’re saying through my ears.’

He proffers me the bunch of blue grass. I stare at it, impassively.

‘Are you offering that grass to me?’

He nods.

‘And the chicken wire?’

‘No. That’s mine. I have need of it.’

I take the grass. He grunts his satisfaction at our transaction then strolls away.

‘Thank you,’ I finally yell, but he’s already twelve steps down the hill. I inspect the bunch then look up.

Four foot off, perched on the clifftops, two jackdaws are quietly watching. Heads cocked, beaks glinting. I tickle my nose self-consciously with the grass’s silver, whispy flower-heads, my eyes still fixed upon them.

Suddenly they lift and plummet, peeling like bells. I stiffen. Perhaps I’m paranoid, but I honestly get the impression they might be laughing at me. I drop the grass that very instant (well, almost immediately), and calmly kick it over the cliff and down and down and down, into the sea.

The mean-beaked, dirty-vented, scraggy-feathered sods.

Chapter 4

I corner Patch in the Ganges Room. She likes to hang out there sometimes with Feely. It’s actually the front half of an old ship (the Ganges, circa 1821, you nerd), the captain’s cabin, to be precise, but sawed off and just kind of tacked on to the hotel dining-room, with a steering-wheel (not period) dug into the dark timber floor, and portholes and old wooden benches and ancient photos on the walls and everything. A view out to sea.

Patch props Feely on a box and he steers. She stands right beside him, daydreaming. I creep up behind them, minutely galled by their gentle companionability.

‘Where’s he taking you?’ I whisper, over her shoulder.

Patch jumps from her deep reverie. ‘What?’ she almost pants.

‘Tobago,’ Feely answers curtly.

‘And then what? Swordplay? Pillaging? Piracy?’

He turns and gives me a serious look. ‘You’re making too much of things,’ he says gently. ‘It’s only imaginary.’

(Who the hell made this child so snotty?)

Patch sniggers and Feely steers onward, rather smugly.

After a canny minute’s silence (as if in quiet tribute to Feely’s considerable skills as navigator and helmsman), I clear my throat, then let the little shit have it. ‘This isn’t Tobago, you dunce,’ I pronounce firmly. ‘It’s Newfoundland. What the heck is up with your geography?’

‘Geography?’ He echoes, blinking repeatedly. I have entered his world.

‘It’s Newfoundland!’ I repeat, then gasp, as if only now fully comprehending the shimmering blue-green vista which unfolds right before me.

Feely shakes his head. He’s seeing orange skies and sandy shores and parrots in flocks and pine trees. ‘It’s Tobago.’

‘Nope.’

‘It’s Tobago.’

‘Nope.’

‘It’s Tobago.’

‘Whatever you say.’

He pauses. He turns.

‘It’s Tobago!’

I smile pityingly, ‘Of course it is, Feely.’

He jumps from the box, his face stricken. ‘It’s Tobago!’

‘Whatever you think, little man.’

(Little man is, of course, the final blow.)

He runs off, screaming.

Proud at having done my sisterly duty, I kick the box aside, grab the wheel and steer Patch and me straight into the heart of the tropics.

‘Ah, Tobago!’ I croon.

(Ever seen it? Me neither.)

Patch has sat down, meanwhile, on a bench beneath a port-hole and is gnawing at her thumbnail. She clearly has much on her twelve-year-old mind.

I glance over. ‘You look exceptionally porcine,’ I inform her.

‘I hate you,’ she answers cheerfully. She doesn’t exactly know what porcine means. But she’s probably in the area. She’s a bright kid. Reads far more than is properly healthy.

‘You hate my hormones, not me,’ I enlighten her, ‘and in one year’s time, you too will be a monster.’

‘Balls.’

I let go of the wheel and slither over.

‘So tell me all about the new man,’ I whisper. ‘The interloper.’

She shrugs. She’s not having any of it.

‘Jack says when he arrived this morning Big was spitting fucking tacks. I quote directly.’

Patch wriggles her toes. ‘I don’t know about that,’ she says, then pauses, ‘but I do know…’ (The child wants my tall teen approval so desperately) ‘… that he’s bedding down way up on the top floor. And when Big showed him a room, he double-checked the cupboard space, but insisted there wasn’t sufficient reach, so strode next door and claimed the neighbouring suite instead. The big one at the end with the hole in the roof.’

I’m impressed. ‘The man is saucy.’

‘Yes.’

‘Has he much baggage?’

‘Psychologically, perhaps – I mean he’s a white South African – but literally, none. A tiny suitcase and a very small guitar.’

(This chubby pup is facetious beyond belief.) ‘Was he wearing the balaclava?’

‘Initially.’

‘Any reason given as to why?’

‘None.’

I mull a while. ‘And did he mention his name?’

Patch shrugs, ‘I didn’t catch it. Something stupid. French-sounding. Double-barrelled.’

‘How curious.’

‘Yup.’

‘You have served me well,’ I wave my arm regally, ‘and now you may go to find and comfort Feely.’

Patch wipes her nose on the hem of her kaftan (it’s hayfever season), pulls herself to her feet, then trundles away. She pauses, though, for an instant, in the doorway.

‘He stole the book Mo sent us,’ she informs me, ‘and I want it back. Will you ask him?’

Too obvious, you’re thinking? Obvious? Me?

Forty-five seconds, thirty stairs, two landings, one long, leaky hallway later, I lift my fist and rap on his door. The paint is peeling. It’s aquamarine. Through the cracks filter the mysterious sounds of scratching and heaving. Some heavy breathing. Metallic jangling.

I knock again. After two whole seconds the door is wrenched open and The Balaclavaed One beholds me. He is panting like a Dobermann trapped in a summer car.

‘Now what?’

(How welcoming.)

‘I heard you scratching.’

‘So?’

‘Like some old hen.’

He pauses for a moment, as if deep in thought, then rips his balaclava off. ‘I love the way,’ he announces passionately (his eyebrows all skewwhiff, his hair on end with static electricity), ‘I love the way you think hens have wings for arms, but when you watch them – I mean, properly – they actually have arms for legs.’

My face remains blank.

‘I love that,’ he sighs, ‘dearly.’

He rubs his two hands on his face, repeatedly, like he’s scrubbing at it, and makes a gurgling noise through his mouth meanwhile, like he’s standing under a waterfall. After a shortish duration he stops what he’s doing and stares at me.

‘Do you have to quack to get through doors?’

I weigh him up. Ten stone. Approximately five foot nine.

‘Sorry,’ he chuckles, ‘I meant to say duck.’

‘Apparently you have a double-barrelled name,’ I titter. ‘Something silly. French-sounding.’

‘Confirmed, lady.’

He straightens majestically. ‘They call me La Roux.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Nineteen years.’

‘I’m sixteen. And don’t call me lady. Everyone thinks you’re a freak already. That kind of formality won’t improve matters.’

‘Who’s everyone? You and your little fat sister?’

‘And my brother, Feely.’

‘The four year old?’

(Already I’m regretting this tack but still I say yes, defiantly.) He ponders this for a minute. ‘Hmmmn. Feely too, you say?’

I nod.

‘Now you’ve got me scared literally shitless.’

He gurns preposterously. ‘And the man who brought you over. Black Jack. He agrees.’

‘A retard.’

‘La Roux,’ I murmur spikily, ‘the cream.’

‘No,’ he primps, ‘the mixture.’

I give this translation a moment’s thought, then sniff.

‘Can I come in?’

He steps back. ‘Go ahead.’

‘Presumably’ – I bend my knees slightly to facilitate my easy access (he almost sniggers) and walk past, glancing up at the ceiling – ‘you know there’s a hole in the roof?’

‘I do. Your tiny father told me.’

‘And there was apparently some kind of a dispute over cupboard space?’

‘It’s always a factor, comfort-wise, I find.’

‘And how long are you intending to stay?’

As I speak I stroll through to the sitting-room. To my left, the door which leads into the walk-in storage cupboard stands tantalizingly ajar. I pull it wider. Inside lies the chicken wire, some twigs and lavender, formed into a rough oval, about four foot in diameter, dipped in the middle. In its centre is a beautifully embroidered cushion cover, a photograph of a dog, a wooden pipe, a very small guitar, some cigarettes, two odd socks, the book Mo sent and a peacock feather.

I turn, stare at him quizzically, take one step back and point. He shrugs. ‘A nest.’

‘A nest?’

He nods. ‘Indeed so.’

‘Are you broody? Is that it?’

He just smiles.

I bend over and grab the book. ‘Patch wants this back. Do you mind?’

‘Not at all.’

I turn to go. He clears his throat. ‘And you said your name was?’

I pause. Now he’s got me.

‘Medve.’

‘Ah,’ he smiles disingenuously. ‘German for pretty chin?’

‘No,’ I glower, ‘Hungarian for bear.’

He embraces himself and smirks. ‘How cuddly.’

I merely growl, slap the hardback against the flat of my paw, then leave, red-cheeked and fuzzy, knowing (oh, screw the bugger) that this spotty, flimsy, mean-vowelled little man has pricked and pinched and skidaddled me.

Chapter 5

Stuff your faxes up your jaxies. Terminate your damn telegrams. Eradicate your e-mails. I just don’t want them. Because I know, I said, I know that Mr James Thurber is a Full-blown American Literary Legend and that the dog business (the cartoons, the anecdotes, all the rest of that tripe) was simply an aside, a side-line, an adjunct to his other, far greater, literary masterworks. I know that stuff. So please, please, please just give over, will ya?

Anyway, facts are facts, and a patently undeniable one is that James Thurber loved his pet poodle Christabel with a passion (and who the hell am I to deny the intensity of Thurber’s feelings one way or another…?), but (oh, here goes), if you ask me, there was one dog, and one dog alone, which the great man loved – I mean, really loved – way and above all of the others.

It was his very first dog, a mutt called (ahem) Rex, an American Pit Bull, a cat-killer extraordinaire (I quote: ‘He killed cats, that is true, but quickly and neatly and without any especial malice’) and a pretty bloody phenomenal jumper.

When he was a kid, Thurber and his two co-Rex-owning brothers had this special sadistic little trick they’d play on him involving a ten-foot pole and a four-foot-wide garden gate.

Rex loved to retrieve. It was practically his nature. And he was as keen as mustard. And he was no genius, either (as is very often the way with that special, crazy, monomaniacally yappy breed of dog, the terrier).

And so it was for these three simple reasons that Thurber and his two demonic brothers engineered a game whereby the ten-foot pole was thrown beyond the gate and Rex was then sent to bring it right on back to them at something approximating a full-blown, smoking-paw-provoking canter.

So off Rex leaps, stumpy tail held high, mouth gaping, fully intending to retrieve that pole. He scampers through the gate, he runs straight for it, he locates it, he turns, he grips, he lifts, he gallops back to the gate again (meanwhile, his three mischievous owners, just beyond it, are calling and yelling and whistling: all in all whipping up a storm of general approbation) when bam!! That long horizontal stick hits the sturdy wall on either side of poor Rex’s avowedly muscular dog shoulders, and the poor, silly, short-sighted, over-enthusiastic barker is left toothless and numb-lipped and juddering.

What a prank! What a wheeze! What a jaw-breaker!

There’s a moral here somewhere. I hope you can find it. I have it down pat as being something to do with the touching but nonetheless naïve and irritating (to say nothing of painful) perils of over-enthusiasm: a kind of canine Look Before You Leap.

We use the works of Thurber, in our house (I don’t know what you do with Thurber in yours, couldn’t care less, to tell the truth) as a kind of pseudo-moral manual. We forsook the Judaeo-Christian tradition back in 1974 when Barge got angry with God for treating Job so shoddily (I mean, to plague him with boils and locusts simply for being a basically good-intentioned, well-adjusted kind of guy? Is that fair? Is that reasonable?).

Barge always felt God was a fraction too needy. If God was your brother, he’d say (or your lover, for that matter), you’d steal his specs and lock him in the cellar. We told him God would (in all probability) have twenty-twenty vision, but Barge felt God would wear glasses on account of him spending so much time – pre-Genesis, before he moulded the sun and moon and everything – struggling to read dear Thurber’s wonderfully inclusive dog stories in very poor light.

We’ve all been there.

I digress.

A major 1981 early summer dilemma amongst our little island clan (Poodle aside, and the tongue of Barge, and the kibbutz and the Lowry, and the anal probe and all of that other assorted malarkey) is that during Mo’s infuriatingly indeterminate absence I have been placed solely in charge of young Feely’s moral and ethical development (To trust Big in this arena would be beyond a miscalculation, it would be downright insanity – the man’s idea of house-training a puppy would be to ram a cork up its arse. He has the patience of a mink).

But under my careful (if intellectually fickle) tutelage the kid has recently turned morbid. Are children like bananas? When they get a little bruised on the outside, does it mean they’re bad for good? To the centre?

Feely’s propensity to empathize with inappropriate tales of animal tragedy has become a source of recent concern to me. A case in point being the intensity of his interest in the Death Of Ginger (Black Beauty’s slightly snappy chestnut chum. Remember her?) as written by nineteenth-century spinster-come-Quaker-come-horse-lover Anna Sewell (a woman whose life was not just scarred but wrecked by an arbitrary ankle injury mysteriously sustained on a trip home from school circa 1835. Well, I ask you).

This is a woman – coincidentally – whose mother liked nothing better than to spend her evenings holding temperance meetings, while her father took up his marvellous vocation as – uh-oh! – a brewer. It’s little wonder Anna got all her kicks talking to equines.

At first, Feely simply liked you to read him the segment (chapter 40, if you want to immerse yourself completely) appropriately entitled ‘Poor Ginger’ (to summarize: after a shaky start in life, the chestnut mare, Ginger – apparently so named because of her propensity to snap – is taken on by the squire at Birtwick Park and treated with great kindness and cordiality until she learns to open her heart and love again. Alas, certain disasters follow – remember the fire in the barn?! – and both Beauty and Ginger are sold on. Beauty suffers adversity with a certain degree of stoic nobility. But what of Ginger? Little is heard of her until the fortieth chapter, and nothing, I’m afraid, is heard thereafter).

Initially Feely derived large portions of – what to call it? Delight? Cheer? – pleasure from his companion’s reading and re-reading of the Death Of Ginger (the lines ‘Men are strongest, and if they are cruel and have no feeling, there is nothing we can do but bear it, bear it on and on to the end’ and the slightly later ‘the lifeless tongue was slowly dripping with blood; and the sunken eyes! but I can’t speak of them, the sight was too dreadful’ seeming to bring him especial succour).

Soon, however, a mere reading was no longer enough to satisfy him and a certain amount of ‘acting out’ became necessary. Initially – this’ll fascinate the psychologists among you, amateur and otherwise – Feely enjoyed playing at being Black Beauty, apprehending and then dutifully mourning Ginger’s unseemly demise with an impressive degree of muscular restraint.

But after a while, his priorities changed and gradually he began to want to inhabit Ginger.

Henceforth, he would trot around bearing his ill-treatment and his painfully swollen joints and his cruelly injured mouth with such piety and restraint and (how to say it?), uh… sanctity, that eventually the whole farce looked in danger of leaving the realms of horse fiction and entering the exalted sphere of morbidly masochistic sacrilegiosity.

Enough is enough. When Feely began imposing ‘little moments of Ginger’ on his day-to-day activities (a certain tremble in the knee on afternoon walks; bolting, randomly, on fishing trips; struggling to eat his meals because of his bit-induced lower-lip deformity), Big decided he’d had it with the bastard chestnut mare, and Black Beauty was closed for good and placed up on a high shelf, out of harm’s way.

But the boy is canny. He has found ways of sublimating his need for Ginger into other stories. And now, even (God forbid), into his readings of Thurber (has the child not a smidgen of dignity?), principally – although not exclusively – into the story of the aforementioned Rex, the most exalted and beloved dog of all.

Say, for example, I am reading little Feely the tale of Rex and the ten-foot pole (an essential moral lesson for any unapologetically attention-grabbing four year old, as I’m sure you’ll agree), the boy will listen keenly, he’ll seem to be all ears, but his eyes will be travelling down the page, ever further, in the hope of reaching the end of this useful story – Rex’s tragically premature demise.

And it’s a nasty one. Beaten to a pulp by another dog’s angry owner, Rex (only ten years old) staggers back to Maison Thurber and prepares to die. But wait! Two brothers are home, but where’s the third? Surely Rex cannot meet his maker without first having bade a touching farewell to this kind and loving third brother?

So he waits. He fights death. He battles against it with all the final, paltry remnants of his considerable doggy will, until, at last, a full hour later: that familiar creak of the gate! That gentle step! That whistle! The third brother returns, Rex takes a few haltering steps towards him, caresses his hand with his bloodied muzzle. And then… and then…

Oh, come on. Talk about milking the bugger. Feely (naturally he’s a sharp young tyke) always wants to know whether Thurber loved Rex because he died so painfully, or because he was a fighter, a cat-killer, a butt, a fool? I explain that it was because Rex was an American Pit Bull Terrier (an exalted breed) and because he was their first dog ever.

The first, I tell him, is always the sweetest. The first word. The first step. The first kiss. The first punch. The first pie. The first high. The first, I tell him, is always the best. I mean, who remembers seconds?

I don’t really know if Feely finds this theory plausible. Secretly I think he still believes James Thurber loved Christabel most dearly and that Rex was only really fondly remembered for his astonishingly moving deathbed loyalty.

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