Nicola Barker - Reversed Forecast / Small Holdings

She sat on the end of her bed and drained the cup of its last few drops of tea. As she swallowed her tea, the incident in the park popped into her mind. The tea turned into dirty water in her mouth. She tried to swallow in air as the tea went down but she could not. She gagged on the liquid and it choked her. She imagined herself in the lake, with the mud and the slime and the tin cans. She imagined that she was the young girl and that she could not swim. She did not feel remorse, just fear. She wished that she could tie a tourniquet around her imagination, a piece of strong rope or cloth that could effectively cut off all dangerous ideas and fanciful notions, stop the flow of her thoughts from streaming, frothing, flooding and overwhelming her.

She could hear Brera singing in the living-room with her guitar. She tried to concentrate on this sound and to block out everything else. Then she heard Sam’s voice. Sam had been laughing and talking before, but now she too had started to sing. Her voice toned in with Brera’s perfectly. Brera sang in a higher register with a Celtic twang. Sam sounded very low and clear, like a soft, brown thrush – intense and lyrical.

She heard Sam emerge from her room and walk towards Brera’s voice, still singing herself. She rolled her eyes towards the ceiling. They infuriated her. She found them unbearably smug and confident, like nuns or traffic wardens – self-assured and immensely self-motivated. Pure.

She inspected the eczema on her hands and wrists. The skin here was bumpy and itchy, some of it moist and shiny. She pulled off a scab which covered the tender flesh that linked the space between her finger and thumb. Her eyes watered. She enjoyed this strum of pain, lost herself in it and savoured its tone.

Suddenly she saw the little girl’s face in the chafed and pinky pattern of her flesh, imagined for a second how the cold water would have felt entering her nose and throat, covering her eyes.

The sound of Connor’s hesitant tread in the hallway distracted her. She stopped breathing for a moment and listened out for the slight noises he made, her head to one side, eyes closed. He had a light tread. Must be thin, she thought. His step seemed tentative, well-meaning, self-conscious. She heard him enter the living-room and began breathing again. The air she drew into her lungs felt dry and coarse. It rattled in her throat. She coughed for a short while then swallowed down a mouthful of phlegm.

Connor was singing now too. He was doing a comic version of Dolly Parton’s ‘Love is like a Butterfly’, in a low, brash voice. She could hear the two women laughing. She put her hands over her ears, imagined that her hands were like shells, and the noise of the blood, the compressed air in her ears, the wail in her head, was really the sea. She stood on a bone-pale beach. It was an airless place.

Ruby awoke to the sound of the telephone ringing. She opened her eyes and tried to pull herself up straight. She’d been slumped over sideways on to her bedside table. Her face felt strange, like warm wax that had set overnight into a distorted, lopsided shape. Her neck ached, even her tongue ached and her body felt, in its entirety, distinctly askew.

Vincent was there. Ugh! She looked at him. A horrible face. Dirty. Phlegm, mucus, special smells. Blood, dried. Everything inside spilling out.

His face was a solid bruise. He was a car accident, still jumbled. She had no clear impression of him. Not mentally, not visually. It was bright in her room, a yellow-white brightness, reflecting unkindly off him.

She sprang out of bed to answer the ringing. She was still wearing her cardigan, which she pulled close around her, and her T-shirt, which she noticed had coffee stains down the front.

The telephone – it had a long extension cord – was situated in the centre of the draining-board next to the sink. She picked up the receiver. ‘Yeah? Ruby here.’

She licked a finger and applied it, somewhat hopelessly, to the stain.

‘You sound rough.’

She didn’t recognize the voice. ‘Hold on.’

She put down the receiver, turned on the cold tap and stuck her head under it, inhaling sharply as the water gushed over her hair, into her ears and down her neck. She turned it off and shook her head, like a dog after a dip, then picked up the receiver again. ‘Hi.’

She felt the water dripping down her back and her face. Eventually a voice said, ‘Hello, Ruby?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Donald Sheldon. Is it too early?’

‘I’ve been up ages,’ she lied. He’d never phoned her before.

He said, ‘Actually, I’d like to see you. This afternoon if it’s possible.’

‘Oh. OK.’

‘There’s a café near Seven Sisters tube.’ He described its precise location. ‘We could meet twelve-ish.’

Twelve was too early.

‘Yeah, that’s fine. Seven Sisters. Twelve-ish.’

‘See you then.’

She put down the receiver and walked into the bathroom to look for a towel. She found one slung over the edge of the bath and wrapped up her dripping hair in it before putting the plug in the bath and turning on the taps.

Back in her bedroom, she rooted out a pair of jeans, a black vest and some clean underwear. Vincent lay across the bed, his legs spread, his feet dangling off the end. His arms, she noticed, now held a pillow over his face. She said, ‘I wouldn’t do that. Someone might be tempted to press down on it.’

He said nothing.

She returned to the bathroom. While she undressed, she debated how soon it would be acceptable to ask him to leave. She tested the water with her hand, climbed in, then lay back and relaxed, staring abstractly beyond her breasts, her knees, her toes, at the taps and the steam from the water.

Vincent felt like a caterpillar changing into a butterfly. That inbetween stage. A pupa. His skin, hard, semi-impervious; himself, inside, withered and formless.

He was not himself. His head bumped and pumped. The light, the morning, scorched him.

During the night he had awoken, he didn’t know what time, and had found a girl, a stranger, next to him. Her hip near his chin. Wool, scratching; cold skin. He had pressed his forehead against her thigh. It had cooled him.

And now it was morning. He needed something. Had to stretch his body – that crumpled thing – his mind, his tongue.

Ruby picked up a bar of soap and started to build up a lather. What does Sheldon want? she wondered. What does he want from me? Her toes curled at the prospect. She stared at them and thought, Why am I doing that with my feet?

Vincent stood on the other side of the bathroom door with his hand on the handle. He shouted, ‘You could’ve told me you were having a bath.’

Ruby dropped the soap and covered her breasts. ‘Don’t you dare come in.’

‘I have no intention of coming in,’ he said scathingly. After a pause he added, ‘Why the hell did you bring me here? I’ve had the worst time.’

She gasped at this, her expression a picture, and shouted, ‘I didn’t bring you here.’

‘Well, I didn’t get here on my own.’

His voice sounded muffled, further away now. ‘Do you always live like this?’

She stood up, indignant, and stepped out of the bath. ‘Like what?’

Silence, then, ‘Forget it.’

‘Like what?’

She grabbed a towel, wrapped it around her and pulled open the door. ‘Live like what?’

He was standing in the kitchen, looking inside one of her cupboards. He glanced at her, in the towel. ‘For a minute there,’ he said, grinning, ‘I thought you were a natural blonde. But it’s only foam.’

She yanked the towel straight. With his cut, his pale, white face, the bruises, the suggestion of a black eye, he looked like Frankenstein’s monster. But he didn’t frighten her. She said calmly, ‘Get out of my flat.’