Nicola Barker - Reversed Forecast / Small Holdings

‘You think I’m ashamed of her?’

Brera’s eyes filled. Sam found the sight of her mother’s imminent tears disagreeable and unsettling. I shouldn’t feel that way though, she decided, and tried not to. She pulled off a piece of kitchen roll and handed it to her. Brera blew her nose and then looked up. Her eyes were bloodshot.

‘I’m frightened, that’s all. I want to protect her.’ Her eyes exuded tears: large, fat tears like transparent slugs, slithering down her face. ‘She’s such a little shit.’

Sam watched the tears. If I taste one, she thought, then everything will be all right. She put out her hand and brushed a tear from Brera’s chin on to her finger, then let it fall from her finger on to the end of her tongue.

‘She’ll be fine,’ she said.

Vincent had been staring at his hands with unswerving concentration for almost five hours. During this time there had been no perceptible change in their appearance.

After his initial statement to the two police officers – ‘I fell over. I banged my head’ – a short period of speculation about bail payments and a perfunctory medical check, he had refused to involve himself in any further interaction. This hadn’t really worked to his advantage, but he hadn’t honestly expected it to.

Within the previous couple of weeks he had been detained on two occasions and charged on one of these for breach of the peace. He was hardly a novice in the cells, and, as such, no one paid him much attention.

While he stared at his hands his mind ran over a variety of subjects. Larson. Arson. Willie Carson. Occasionally he slumped into an unthinking daze, but when he came to and refocused on his dirty nails, fingers and the pale hair on the back of his knuckles, his mind raced on with as much enthusiasm as if it had never paused. Blood in my nostrils, dried blood, like paint.

He often lost all track of time. His life was a strange mixture of time-using (demonstration) and time-wasting (remonstration).

He has many opinions, his own opinions, and he has many faults. The chief one is intolerance. He sees himself as an anarchic bob-a-job man – doing favours, splitting hairs, trading down. Always down. He is unusual in that his intolerance and his pureness of vision haven’t made him into boot-boy, a Tory or a fascist. He is the opposite of these things; is ceaselessly, peacelessly contrary.

My life. What fucking life? No life. Low life.

He has a terror of involvement, of commitment – to places, to things. He won’t be held culpable or responsible, will only represent one view: his own view. He thinks the world, everything, is stupid.

Stupid!

During the course of his twenty-nine years, he has never seen any purpose in dedicating himself to traditionally worthy or helpful occupations. He refuses to give over his considerable powers to anything specifically useful. His prime, twin attributes of determination and energy have never been expressed constructively. If they are – and of course he thinks that they are – he has a definition of ‘constructive’ which is all his own.

He survives on a diet of grand gestures, obnoxiousness and guile.

Only one thing blots his anarchic copy-book. It is a simple thing. He is full of love. So full of love – indiscriminate, luminous, pulsating, unremitting – that it threatens to make him weak, to make him burst, to make him give in, completely. To what, though? He doesn’t know.

The strange thing about love, Vincent decided, studying the white flecks on the pink moons of his nails, is that it starts off as one thing, and comes out as something altogether different.

His arresting officer pushed open the cell door and walked in. ‘Your bail’s been settled.’

I love this man, Vincent thought, but it’ll come out some other way.

He looked up from his hands. ‘Fucking bail. What a joke.’

‘Yeah, very funny.’

He stood up. ‘Can I go?’

‘Sign a couple of papers and you’re a free man, for the time being, anyway. So long as you don’t behave like a lunatic again before your court case.’

Vincent smiled. ‘Well, that’s hardly too much to ask for, is it now?’

When he caught sight of Ruby she was leaning against the reception desk reading a pamphlet about the police cadets. She looked up as the door swung back and slammed behind him. He thought, My God, she’s a push-over. The best kind of girl.

He pulled on his canvas jacket and said, ‘You can get me something to eat if you like.’

Ruby picked up the pamphlet and stuffed it into her pocket. ‘I don’t think so.’

His eyes, she noticed, were like two blue marbles. He adjusted the collar on his jacket, grinned at her and strolled outside. Ruby nodded to the constable behind the reception desk and followed him.

She stepped into the afternoon sunlight and saw him disappearing into a burger bar over the road. She crossed cautiously and followed him in. He beckoned to her from the counter. ‘How about buying me a burger and a drink?’

‘Why should I?’

‘Because you’re loaded.’

She scowled at him. ‘How did you work that one out?’

‘I want a burger, a Coke and some chips.’

The counter girl flinched at the mention of the word ‘chip’ and then looked to Ruby for her order. Ruby sighed. ‘I’ll have a medium coffee please, with cream.’

Vincent sauntered off and took possession of a plastic table next to the window. Ruby paid, and while she waited for the order, counted the remaining small coins in her purse. Vincent was sitting at the table and running his fingers over the cut on his hairline. The cut stretched across a bluish lump and glimmered like a red mouth. Ruby supposed that he must have been given a stitch, although it didn’t look like it from where she was standing.

Her order arrived. She picked up her tray and made her way to the table. Vincent looked up at her. ‘I haven’t eaten all day.’

She sat down, removed her coffee and then pushed the tray towards him. She felt light-headed.

‘Your hands aren’t very clean. I don’t think you should touch that cut. It might get infected.’

He shrugged. ‘I’ve had worse. It’s given me one hell of a headache, though. I could do with a proper drink.’

‘Maybe you’re concussed. What did the doctor say?’

‘I don’t know. Some crap. I might get gangrene of the brain.’

He was joking. Ruby gently removed the lid from her polystyrene cup. You’ve already got it, mate, she thought.

He noticed the tattoo on her hand. ‘What’s that? A name? A bird?’

‘A swallow. I did it when I was seventeen.’

He wiped some ketchup from the side of his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Let’s see.’

She opened her palm and showed him.

‘You did it yourself?’

She nodded. ‘Pen and a pin.’

‘Ouch.’

She sipped her coffee. ‘What did you tell the police?’

‘I told them I tripped.’

‘Did they believe you?’

‘No.’

‘Was your friend all right? The epileptic’

‘I only met him once before.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He wasn’t my friend.’

Ruby tried to understand this, but had trouble doing so.

‘Was he an epileptic?’

‘Might be. He didn’t say he wasn’t.’

‘He was unconscious.’

‘Exactly.’

She said, ‘You’re not from London, are you?’

‘Why?’

‘You don’t sound like you are.’

‘Nope.’

‘Where are you staying?’

He thought for a while. ‘Wembley.’

‘Really?’

‘On someone’s floor. Before that I was in Amsterdam. Squatting.’

She visualized him, squatting, in a field full of tulips. A windmill.