Nicola Barker - In the Approaches

Although Carla Hahn, Kim had confided, was definitely the one to watch out for. She’d been the family’s nanny and cleaner during their time in Pett Level and had later inherited the house. ‘She was very quiet, rarely spoke. I don’t know why, but I always thought of her as “the other camera”. She had this strangely unsettling watchful quality about her. Engaged but unengaged. Hardly uttered a word to me the whole week I was there. Smiled a lot. A strange girl, very tight – tender – with the child, training to be a nurse.’

Carla was the key, Kim maintained, the ‘inside-outsider’.

So I came. I waited. I made connections with the other witnesses. Lara left; there’d always been … well … fault-lines. I drank heavily for a few weeks. Just the atmosphere of this place – the house . This awful feeling of … the simplicity, the roaring quiet, the certainty. An unbearable itchiness . In my head. In my soul . As if the place, the sea, the furniture, the entire house were all slowly rejecting me. Developing a gradual intolerance. I know it sounds …

Or was that just …?

Then the phone call – the garbled message. Kimberly Couzens was dead. Dead! Something to do with a botched tooth extraction. Kimberly Couzens was dead.

I left the cottage in my suit and dress shoes. I was empty, flat (remember?) and I was paradoxically Day-Glo; blank and cynical, yet strobing with emotion. Urgh! I was neither. I was both. I was confused. I was walking away from my feelings and I was running straight into them. It wasn’t … I wasn’t … I … I dunno.

I staggered down on to the beach. I just put one foot in front of the other. I tried not to think. I tried desperately to process the news. I could, but I couldn’t.

Of course we had never been formally divorced, Kim and I. It was one of the many things Lara couldn’t forgive me for. Yes, I petitioned for divorce: 23rd December 1972. She was still in Ireland. In hospital. The date is singed into my brain with a cattle iron – the day of the Managua earthquake. Even my hurt, my outrage at Kim’s devastating betrayal couldn’t be allowed to take centre stage, couldn’t bask, bleeding, in the limelight. Nope. God went and killed 2,000 people, in one stroke, and I – by necessity – was left feeling petty and pitiful.

It was tough. I was wounded ( I was wounded! What a joke!). But her burns were so bad that I couldn’t follow through with it. We were a team. Above and beyond everything else, Kim and I were a team. I was the ears, she was the eyes. Funny to think of it that way now. The ears stopped working a long time ago. They waxed up. They froze. They ceased functioning. Why? I have so many reasons, each one so tiny and humble and insignificant; each one merely an ant – or a black, darting termite – but collected together? An infestation. A great hill. An immovable mountain.

And the eyes? After the ‘accident’, they thought they could save at least one of them – on the right-hand side. It was her camera eye, her all-seeing eye. She had such high hopes for it. She was such a fighter. But full vision never returned. And she was melted, poor Kim, like a candle.

We moved her into a granny flat in Toronto. Her mother, Trudy (the actual granny), lived upstairs. And everything cost. From that moment onward, everything was calibrated – rage, hurt, resignation, paranoia, claustrophobia, frustration, resentment – through a shiny curtain of dollars and cents. I opened my import/export business in Monterrey, Mexico. We struggled along, me here, her there. How else to manage it?

Did I forgive her? No. Did I stop loving her? No. Could I let go? No. And Bran Cleary? My dear friend Bran (whose injuries had totalled a slightly sprained wrist, some bruising and a broken nose because – ever the gentleman – he had opened the car door for her – for my wife !). Did I forgive him? No. Did I stop loving him? No. Could I let go? Yes. Yes. Yes.

I let go. I moved on. I never wanted to feel that way again. People have often asked me my professional opinion (although what profession I belong to now I struggle to decipher – laughing stock? Entrepreneur? Crook? Social worker?). Did Bran deserve what happened to him? Was it all just bad luck? A conspiracy? Was it revenge? Murder? Something beyond that – the (God forbid!) ‘supernatural’?

No more questions! I just didn’t want to speculate. I didn’t want to engage. I didn’t want to let it all in again. And yet here I was, immersed in the whole mess right up to my chin, resenting every moment, hating every moment. Wishing I was dead. Why did she ask me? Why did I agree to it? And now Kim. Poor Kim. Brave Kim. Un-Kim.

Call that … call that fair ?!

The eternally fragrant, sweet-natured and well-meaning Alys Jane Drury is absolutely appalled by what I have done (how might I have imagined it could be otherwise?).

‘Whatever possessed you, Carla?’ she demands. ‘He’s such a nice man! So very interesting. Debonair. Handsome. All those lovely curls! And so incredibly polite . I just don’t understand how …’

She is silent for a moment. I hold my breath and press the receiver even tighter into my ear.

‘It’s so out of character!’ she finally declares. ‘Did Shimmy put you up to it?’

‘No,’ I insist (perhaps a split-second too quickly), ‘it was all my idea. I mean Shimmy wasn’t happy – after the incident with Rolfie, obviously …’

‘But you said Mr Huff had already apologized for that.’

‘Yes. He had. Well, in a manner of speaking. The letter was very arrogant. And a complete tissue of lies about the exact circumstances of—’

‘To protect everyone’s feelings, perhaps?’ she interrupts.

I ignore this. ‘He actually went so far – in the letter – as to admit to not even liking cats.’

‘ I don’t like cats,’ Alys snorts. ‘Well, not especially,’ she qualifies.

‘But that’s because you love birds, Alys!’ I insist.

‘Franklin – Mr Huff – likes birds,’ she counters. ‘He made a huge fuss of the parrot when he visited. Teobaldo even allowed him to stroke his chest. And Teobaldo hates people. He won’t even let me do that. We spent ages talking about the birds of Me-hico. He collects feathers – exotic feathers. For the shrunken heads. But he never kills anything. He’s very strong on conservation. Very respectful of the environment which I thought was just lovely.’

‘Shrunken …?’ I echo weakly, half-remembering something along the same lines that Mrs Barrow had said.

‘Didn’t he tell you? He has a business which manufactures shrunken heads. The kind you get in Peru. He makes them in Me-hico and exports them. They’re incredibly beautiful. He showed me a sales pamphlet. I mean disgusting but beautiful. Hand-stitched. Extraordinary. Some sell for thousands of dollars. People collect them. He makes them with carved animal bones and skins. He has a small team of ex-gangsters and addicts in Monterrey working for him. The whole enterprise is run like a kind of social programme …’

I think it would be fair to say that Mrs Alys Jane Drury (widow) has been thoroughly won over by Mr Frankin D. Huff (con-artist). The woman is besotted.

‘Rather odd, don’t you think,’ I muse, ‘that Mr Huff should come here with the express intention of finding out things about you , and then should end up talking endlessly all about himself ?’ I pause, meaningfully. ‘Did it ever dawn on you that maybe …?’

‘It might all be just a ruse?’ Alys promptly fills in for me, sharp as a tack. ‘A “technique”? To beguile me? Uh, yes. It did occur to me, as a matter of fact.’