Nicola Barker - Heading Inland

‘Mr Lippy!’ She laughed. She stuck her bottom lip out, mimicking him.

‘I wasn’t doing that!’

‘Wanna bet?’

‘I wasn’t!’ He switched on his brain and stared at her properly, for the first time.

From that moment onwards, Iris always called him Mr Lippy if he scowled or sulked or swore at her. His real name was Wesley but she called him Wes. She always wanted things different from the way they were.

Wesley had yearned all his life to be close to the sea. His dad had been a sailor. But he was born inland and had lived there until he’d arrived at the Wash under his own steam aged twenty-four. Now he was twenty-eight.

Sometimes he worked on the funfair in Hunstanton. Sometimes he went potato picking. He worked in the sugar beet factory until they closed it, and then, after a spate in the arcade, got a job ferrying tourists across the Wash in an open-topped, antiquated hovercraft to visit Seal Island.

Iris didn’t know that Wesley’s broken fist had been sustained, not in a fight as she’d imagined, but in an accident at work: one of the other lads had reversed the hovercraft too close to the ocean wall where Wesley was stationed at the back of the craft, ready to put out the gang-plank. The lad’s foot had slipped off the brake on to the accelerator, and Wesley’s hand had been crushed that way.

An accident. But Wesley relished the pain. He liked punishment. And anyhow, he’d received several hundred pounds in compensation, just like that. A gift from the gods. So he opened a bank account and nested it there.

Iris was living in a bed and breakfast facing the seafront. She was a bully but he thought it was because life had been hard on her. He was wrong. They made love under a single duvet. If Wesley got carried away, if he threatened to come before she was ready, then she’d squeeze his bad fist until he saw only stars. It was good, she thought, to keep him distracted. Just a little bit.

He’d known her for a month when she told him she was pregnant. She didn’t know anything about him.

‘I don’t care,’ he said, ‘what happens, really, so long as I can stay close to the sea.’

‘Why?’ She was only two weeks pregnant but already she felt different about things and she wanted Wesley to feel different too.

‘I don’t know. My dad was a sailor.’

‘Really? And your mum?’

‘She lives in Gloucester.’

‘Yeah? Think she’ll be pleased?’

Wesley shrugged. Iris waited for Wesley to ask about her mum and dad. He didn’t ask. She wanted him to.

‘Do you love me?’

‘I’m used to being on my own.’

‘Don’t you have any plans? For the future, I mean?’

Wesley rearranged the gauze on his fist.

‘Not me,’ he said.

‘Why not?’

Wesley closed his eyes.

Seal Island. In the summer the boat was packed to its gills with children. Clutching their packed lunches and their cans of fizzy pop. They’d all passed the morning on the big wheel and the dodgems, eating candy-floss and bags of sticky honeycomb. And now they were headed for Seal Island. They had dreams of palm trees and Captain Hook and hidden treasure to help them over the brown sea and the lurching waves. An island, full of basking seals.

When the tide was out, you might see the sluttish brown outline of the sandbank. You might see a lethargic seal, on its edge, rolling to the bank’s perimeter, and then the flip of its tail as it swam off and under. If the tide was in, you were lucky to see that much.

Seal Island. Wesley loved it. Every day. The tears, the screams, the disappointment. He loved that stuff. He’d turn and he’d look at the children, the occasional mum, the odd uncle. And he’d think, ‘Good, they should learn that life is shit. Good they should know it.’

Iris became worried about Wesley’s motivation. ‘That’s cruel,’ she’d say, ‘to lead the little buggers into thinking that they’re getting more for their money than they’ve a right to expect.’

‘No crueller,’ Wesley said, ‘than leading them into thinking that life is anything better than a bitch.’

One day Wesley came back to Iris’s room to discover her parents there. They weren’t at all as he’d imagined.

‘Mum and Dad want me to come home again,’ Iris said, ‘and I want you to come with me, Wes.’

‘Home, where?’ he asked, shifting his weight from foot to foot.

She’d promised him it was close to the sea. In the back of the car, they sat. One suitcase between them. ‘Nearly there,’ she kept saying. ‘Nearly, nearly.’

Iris’s father showed Wesley the shop, the nursery, the rabbit pen, the pet section, the field with the ponies, the café. The whole kit and caboodle. Finally he showed him the owl sanctuary. Twenty cages.

‘What’s it mean?’ Wesley asked. ‘Sanctuary?’

‘Couldn’t survive in the wild,’ Iris’s father said. ‘Some come from exotic places.’

Wesley stared at the owls. They stared back. Not blinking.

‘You never told me,’ Wesley said, that night, in their bedroom, ‘that your parents were rich like this.’

‘Never asked,’ Iris said.

‘I don’t understand,’ Wesley said, ‘why anyone should want to run away from something that’s as good as here.’

Iris shrugged. ‘I’m back, aren’t I?’ she said, all saucy.

‘It’s far from the sea,’ Wesley said.

‘Fuck that shit.’

He turned to look at her.

‘You don’t even like the sea,’ she said, ‘not really. It just makes you sad and angry. It’s all mixed up in your head with some stupid fantasy about your dad.’

Wesley was injured by this. It was almost as though, he thought, Iris didn’t respect his reasons. Like his reasons weren’t good enough.

Big eyes. Big wings. Big beaks. He’d feed them little chicks and small white mice. Their keeper, Derek, told Wesley all about them. ‘See those big eyes,’ he’d say. ‘Well, that leads people into thinking that they’re wise and all, but they aren’t.’

‘No?’

‘No. Their eye sockets take up much of the space in their skulls, so their brain is as tiny as a hazelnut, just about.’

Wesley would stare at the owls for hours on end, unblinking, but only during the week. At weekends he avoided the sanctuary because then it was crowded with tourists who whistled and screamed and pointed. Some of the cages had little notices which read: mind fingers and noses. these are wild animals. do not touch wire mesh.

Wesley worked in the nursery. Sometimes he helped out in the cafeteria. Iris would trail around after him, trying to make him smile.

‘Aren’t you happy here?’ she’d ask. ‘Don’t you love me?’

He did quite like her, actually.

‘Do you resent me being pregnant?’

‘Nope.’

‘Will we ring your mother yet and tell her about it?’ ‘Nope.’ ‘Why not? Why not ?’ It had started to gall Iris, his inability to celebrate anything .

One owl especially. He’d stare and stare. It was as big as a spaniel. Grey feathered. Pop-eyed, crazy-looking. Like an emu. Like something unimaginable.

Wesley wondered what would happen if he set the bird free. When he was younger he’d dreamed about freedom, but now he was resigned to a life of drudgery. Free, he’d whisper, and then, die. Free. Die. Free. Die. Free. Die.

Derek had told him, you see, that if the owls were released they would starve to death or some of them would freeze. They were too bloody conspicuous, Wesley thought, for their own safety.

‘Why don’t you want me to meet your family? Are you ashamed of me? Am I too young?’

Wesley stood up, picked up his coat, as if to leave the room.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Outside.’