Nicola Barker - Heading Inland

‘Do you hear that, Ralph?’ Tina whispered, conspiratori-ally. ‘The pen’s making a noise like a penny whistle. Do you hear it?’ Ralph’s eyes had been shut since the pen had entered him. But now, slowly, gradually, he opened them. His mouth moved, it started to form a word. Tina stared at his lips. What was he saying? Was it ‘Thank you’? Was it ‘Sorry’? What was it? And then she realized. Chiropodist, he said. Chiropodist! Ha. Ha. Ha.

Tina felt lead in her belly. And rage. ‘Take that back, Ralph. I mean it.’

Ralph’s lips were smiling. Ha. Ha. Ha.

His head remained clamped between her knees. Tina took her index finger and waved it calmly in front of Ralph’s eyes. ‘See this?’

He blinked yes. She took the finger and placed it over the tip of the pen shell. The shell stopped whistling. Ralph’s eyes bulged. His chest stopped moving. He stopped smiling, finally.

‘Want to take it back yet, Ralph?’

Ralph struggled to nod. Tina tightened her knees around his skull.

‘Mean it, Ralph?’

Again, he struggled. His hands flailed, helplessly. His brown eyes, not blank, not empty any more, but saying something, emphatically. He was sincere. Just this once. He’d taken it back. He’d meant it.

Tina smiled, nodded, and casually asked Paolo how long he thought the ambulance would be.

‘About four metres,’ Paolo said, grinning, trying to win back her favour.

‘Did you hear that, Ralph?’ Tina asked softly. ‘Paolo made a joke. He made a joke. Ha. Ha. Ha .’

Ralph wasn’t smiling.

‘I can hear the sirens,’ Paolo said. ‘Can’t you?’

Tina listened carefully and then nodded slowly. ‘Yes, I think I do hear them.’

The sirens grew louder. Her eyes filled with tears. They sounded strange and strong and quite beautiful. Tina sniffed, blinked, looked down for a moment, and then, so regretfully , and with the sweetest, the softest, the gentlest of sighs, she lifted up her finger again.

‘Oh!’ she said. ‘If I had her breasts I’d become a topless model or a cocktail waitress, or I’d go to Saint-Tropez and lie on the beach all day.’

‘And get cancer.’

Mandy was sitting on the bus with her mother. They had met up outside the gym. Her mother finished work fifteen minutes before the end of Mandy’s aerobics class. She waited outside by the bus stop, frustratedly watching the buses go by. Sometimes she waited for twenty minutes, occasionally longer. The gym was in Deptford.

‘Breasts are for milk,’ her mother said. ‘You get pregnant, they fill up, you squirt it out. Like a cow.’

I wonder if it’s erotic, Mandy thought, feeding babies.

Her mother added, ‘When I had you my nipples cracked. They were chapped and they bled. Every time you sucked on them it felt like I’d shut them in a suitcase.’

Mandy imagined this. Breasts bare, suitcase open, packing for holiday, breasts jut forward, suitcase accidentally slams shut. Whap! Chop! Nipples sliced neatly off. Inside the dark suitcase; two soft, pink jellytots.

Then she remembered Imogen’s breasts. She had seen them in the showers, and then after, when Imogen patted them dry on a pale blue towel, 36C. Small tan nipples. No unsightly blemishes or stretch marks. She didn’t wear a bra! No! Not even in the class ! Only a tight, high-cut leotard like the one Jamie Lee Curtis wore in Perfect .

By rights they should be down by her knees, Mandy thought, and secretly, in the back of her mind, I wish they were!

But the truth of it was this: Imogen could easily have no inkling of how fantastic her breasts were. She probably wished they were smaller, or that her nipples were a different shade.

I hope she thinks that, Mandy thought, imagining how it would be to carry two breasts like those around — light, soft trophies.

Mandy’s own breasts were much too heavy and much too round. She wore a bra to exercise in, a terrible contraption like the kind of restraining garment people were strapped up in at mental hospitals. To stop them from hurting themselves. Surgical.

Mandy pictured herself wearing no bra for the class, her breasts bouncing so much that after half an hour the skin holding them to her ribs becomes slack, thin, sticky, eventually tears. The breasts break free and travel downwards in her leotard, eventually settling either side on top of her hip bones, like two fistfuls of cellulite.

Her mother said suddenly, ‘When you were a kid, three or four, we were sitting on a bus, on the top deck, close to the front, and a brassy woman came up the stairs and sat close by. She had on a tight skirt, heels, blonde curls piled up high and a low-cut top, with her breasts on display, shoved together, like plums, shoved up. You stared at them for a while, all solemn, and then you turned to me and said, very loudly, “Mummy, why has that lady got a front bottom?”’

Mandy laughed. She had heard this story before, many times. Another breast story. Ha Ha. Funny breasts, tits, boobs, dugs, knockers.

One good thing about my breasts, she thought — focusing on herself again, on the two soft pieces of fat in flesh under her sweatshirt — when I drop off food from my fork, it lands on my chest instead of on my lap. Why was this so good? She couldn’t decide, only knew that it was. Her breasts were a buffer zone, they protected her, padded her, covered her heart. If she ate popcorn at the cinema, eating in a scruffy way, fistfuls shoved in at once, to avoid embarrassment, she had to take care to remember to collect and consume the formal white line of fluffy kernels before lights up.

‘You think just because you’re getting married you can say that word in this house? You think that?’

Susan had repeatedly pronounced the synonym for ‘copulate’, loudly, unashamedly, with emphasis, and Margaret, her mother, wasn’t pleased.

‘For heaven’s sake, Mum!’

‘Fine. That’s it.’ Margaret picked up Susan’s breakfast tray and took several steps towards the door. ‘If you want to speak like that in this house then you can go and eat your breakfast in the garden.’

‘Mum!’ Susan started to wheedle. ‘It’s my wedding day. I can’t eat in the garden on my wedding day.’

A sheen of perspiration had appeared through Margaret’s make-up. She hadn’t yet had time to apply powder. That’s how hectic it had been all morning.

Susan added, ‘Anyway, I’m not stepping outside with my hair like this. Call Leanne.’

Margaret held on to the breakfast tray, eyeing the half-finished glass of Buck’s Fizz, and then swallowed down her irritation. It is her wedding day, she thought. Let her get away with it. She dumped the tray down on to Susan’s bed and went to call her second daughter.

Leanne was downstairs giving Dad his pep-talk. Scott, her son, was playing on the stairs, bumping noisily up and down, one step at a time, on his skinny, bony rump. He came when Margaret called. He popped his head into Susan’s room, took stock of the situation and said, ‘Why does Aunty Susan’s hair look so funny?’

Susan slammed her hair brush down on to her dressing-table. ‘Mum, get that little sod out of here before I wring his neck.’

Margaret placed a firm hand on to the top of Scott’s head. Her fingers could almost grasp his crown in its entirety. His head felt cool, like an ostrich’s egg. She applied pressure, twisted him around, his head first, his body following like a small spinning top. After she had turned him 180 degrees, she pushed him gently with her knee out of the room.

‘Go,’ she muttered. ‘Go find Grandad. Ask him if the cars are sorted.’

‘OK.’ He didn’t seem particularly bothered.