Nicola Barker - Heading Inland

Tina squatted down. A loafer was visible, protruding from the end of the bed.

‘What the hell are you doing under there?’

Ralph was silent for a moment and then he said gently, ‘I think I’m dying.’

‘You’re what?’

‘Dying. I climbed in. You were in the shower. I needed to talk to you. Then I heard someone else climbing up the escape, so I scrambled under here. Then he sat down on the bed and now I’m stuck.’

‘Stuck? How?’

Ralph cleared his throat. ‘To put it bluntly, I have an erection and it’s stuck inside the mesh on the underside of the mattress. It’s like chicken wire or something.’

‘You’ve got a what?’

‘I’ve got an erection.’

Tina recoiled. She grabbed hold of her clothes, her jacket, her shoes, and dashed into the bathroom. She shot the bolt and got dressed. When she’d finished dressing she called through. ‘If you’ve not gone by the time I count to ten, Ralph, I’m going to scream and scream until the police come.’

‘One.’ She put her ear to the door to listen out for his response. ‘Two.’ She could hear him speaking but not what he said. ‘Three.’ She pulled the door open a fraction.

‘Four.’

Ralph’s loafer protruded, as before. He had not moved.

‘Five.’

‘What’s the guy’s name, anyway?’ Ralph asked, apparently unruffled by Tina’s little display.

‘None of your business.’

‘Funny name. Must be foreign.’

Tina scowled. ‘Paolo.’

‘Paolo?’ Ralph snorted. ‘He’s so fucking paranoid. More to the point, he’s so hairy . Even his ankles. I was staring at his ankles for a full five minutes while you were still in the shower and, I’m not kidding you, the hair was half an inch thick. It was extraordinary. Staring at his ankles was the only thing that stopped me from screaming myself stupid.’

Tina paused and then addressed herself emphatically to Ralph’s loafer. ‘Paolo has every reason to feel paranoid on my behalf. I have a strange man stalking me, pestering me, hiding under my bed while I’m in the shower. .’ Modesty forbade her to mention the erection.

‘And the erection,’ Ralph said. ‘Don’t forget about that.’

He twitched his foot. Tina stared at it malevolently. The thick sole, the scuffed heel. Slip-ons, she thought. So common. They were brothel creepers, really, with a large ornamental buckle glued on the side. Nasty, stupid shoes.

‘Anyhow, Paolo’s a doctor,’ Tina muttered, dragging her eyes from Ralph’s footwear. ‘Doctors are caring by nature . It’s an instinct.’

‘A doctor !’ Ralph parroted. ‘How gratifying for you.’

He was quiet for a while and then he said, ‘You wouldn’t happen to have a pair of nail clippers handy, would you?’

‘Nail clippers?’

‘So I could try and cut myself free.’

Tina looked churlish but picked up her bag anyway and was about to open it but then paused. ‘I don’t know if I want you cutting yourself free. You might be dangerous.’

Ralph snickered. ‘Let’s get one thing straight between us, Tina. I had no interest at all in ever seeing you again after our little bit of fun in the crypt yesterday. And although I have an erection, that’s no reason to think I find you irresistible.’

Tina tucked her bag under her arm and headed for the bathroom. She’d just remembered Paolo’s mushrooms and wanted to clear them out over the sink to minimize the mess.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Finding some clippers.’

‘Oh.’

Tina grabbed some tissues and pulled the bag wide. She paused. She stared.

‘Oh, shit.’

In her bag, instead of the mushrooms she’d expected, there were ten finger bones. Ten clittery-clattery finger bones. Yellow bones. Earthy bones.

She dropped the bag.

Ralph was still talking. Tina wasn’t listening. She backed away from the sink, out of the bathroom, into the bedroom and gently pushed the door shut. When she next spoke her voice was low. ‘I couldn’t find any clippers after all.’

‘Great.’ Ralph sighed. ‘So now what?’

Tina grimaced. ‘If you leave yourself alone for a few minutes maybe it’ll have a chance to go down.’

‘It won’t go down. It has no intention of going down. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.’

Tina said nothing, only stared peevishly up at the lamp fitment. Ralph continued talking, undaunted. ‘You don’t know the half of it.’

‘I don’t want to know. I’m not interested. I just want you out of here.’

‘So I got home to my hotel yesterday,’ Ralph said, his voice slightly muffled by the bed and the mattress, ‘sat down, dozed for a while and then ching ! A hard-on. Well that’s hardly anything out of the ordinary. So I grappled with it for a while, but the more I touched it the harder it got. And it wasn’t a good hard. It was a bad hard. It was angry. I couldn’t relax. It hurt if I sat down, it was even worse if I stood up. It burned . And it wasn’t a sexy feeling, just kind of irritating. Eventually I started to get depressed. Frustrated too. But then out of the blue, after a few hours struggling, I found relief. Want to know what it was that relieved me?’

Tina’s lip was tingling. She curled it. ‘Desperately.’

‘You. It was you.’

She recoiled.

‘Funny, huh? As soon as a thought of you flitted into my mind I felt a kind of loosening , I mean, it didn’t go down or anything but the discomfort eased a bit. But it kept me up all night just the same. And I felt weak. Like all the blood had been diverted from my body and brain into just that particular part of me.’

Tina smirked but said nothing. ‘In the morning I walked over to your hotel. I left you the note. In the foyer it stopped hurting altogether. Strange, huh?’ He paused. ‘So you don’t even have some scissors handy?’

‘No.’

‘Well, can you try and lift the bed then? It feels like I’m being garrotted.’

Tina appraised the bed. It was large and heavy and the headboard was a thick, dark wood. She squatted down. ‘There’s no way I can lift this thing. It’s huge. You’re just going to have to untangle yourself.’

Ralph fiddled quietly for a while. The sound of his nails against the mattress wire set her teeth on edge. She stared over at the bathroom door.

‘Have you ever had a 24-hour erection before, Ralph?’

Ralph stopped fiddling.

‘Nope.’

‘Maybe you should go to a doctor or something.’

‘Why? Fancy calling Paolo over?’

Tina’s thoughts turned to Paolo. She touched her bottom lip with her index finger and dwelt on his pistachio-flavoured kisses. Her fingers, she noticed, after a short interval, smelt very strongly of soil. Soil ? She stared at her hands. They were clean. They were spotless.

‘I’m only saying,’ Tina continued, slightly anxious now, ‘that you snapped that bone yesterday and ever since. .’

Ralph chuckled. From under the bed his laughter sounded like a mouse scampering. ‘Have you got bones on the brain or something?’

‘You snapped that bone and now you have this strange stiffness .’

‘The penis doesn’t have a bone in it, Tina. It’s blood that makes it hard.’

After a pause, Ralph added, ‘I guess it’s just one of those things. We don’t much like each other but in some weird way we’re destined to be together.’

Tina struggled to stop herself from growling.

‘Fate,’ Ralph sighed, and then tapped his foot against the mattress.

Tina felt claustrophobic. She walked to the window. ‘So why do I keep seeing bones everywhere?’ she asked, almost piteously. ‘And why does this whole room reek of soil? Damp soil. Can’t you smell it?’ She yanked the window open.