Nicola Barker - Heading Inland

‘Sit on the bed,’ she said. ‘I don’t ever bother making it into a sofa. Too much trouble. Watch the legs are out properly. It has a tendency to collapse.’ She filled the kettle.

Marcus didn’t sit down immediately. First he inspected some of the photographs on her pinboard. ‘These are. .’

‘Me. Yes. When I was a kid. I got gymnastics medals. I was nearly in the Olympics but I sprained my wrist very badly two weeks before. I cried for a month.’

The pictures were eerie. Belinda at eight, ten, fourteen. Belinda doing headstands, handstands, flying on the high bar. Belinda with no breasts, mosquito bites, breasts like tiny buds under the thin fabric of her leotard.

Little girls; gymnastics. He always found this combination vaguely unsettling. On television, with their stiff backs, pointed toes, determined visages. Obscene. Tumbling was different. Better.

‘Coffee or tea?’

‘Coffee.’

He sat down. The bed collapsed.

‘Merde!’ This word slid out of his mouth as quickly, as smoothly as an angry cat escaping the arms of its owner.

Belinda stopped what she was doing, turned around and then started to laugh at him, at his clumsy disarray. She said, ‘You aren’t hurt, are you?’

He shook his head and dragged himself up, then tried to rearrange the coverlet and cushions. Belinda turned back, still smirking, to complete her coffee-making.

This bed reminded Marcus in its construction of the deckchairs his parents had used at home; space-efficient but impossible to set up and make secure. He pulled out the metal bar that acted as the front legs and pushed up the springs and mattress. As he lifted he saw the tortoise.

Initially, it looked to him like an exotic seashell, or a lump of wood, centuries old, glossed up by the touch of many fingers, many hands. Then he saw it shudder, noticed a head, four feet. He reached out towards it, expecting a reaction. None came. One of its eyes was open, the other shut. That couldn’t be right. He tapped its shell. Nothing.

I’m going to have to tell her now, he thought frantically, that I’ve killed her tortoise. How will I tell her? After several attempts, he said her name.

‘Belinda. .’

‘Yeah?’

She had put two cups on to a tray. She picked up the tray and walked towards him. ‘You haven’t managed to get the bed up properly yet?’

He stared at her helplessly, as endearing and muddy-eyed as a golden retriever at tea-time. He pointed towards the tortoise. Her eyes followed the line he was indicating.

‘Smedley!’

She quickly slid the tray on top of her dresser and crouched down. ‘What’s happened to him?’

‘The. . bed. .’

‘He looks all squashed.’

Marcus thought this an exaggeration, but took into account the fact that he hadn’t seen the tortoise before its misadventure.

‘Is he dead?’

‘I. .’

‘He looks dead.’ She reached out her hand as if to pick him up but then shuddered and withdrew. ‘I can’t stand the idea of something being not quite dead.’ She added tremulously, ‘If he wasn’t dead and I touched him and he moved. .’ The thought of this made her feel queasy.

Marcus was staring at her. She saw his face — his expression a mixture of guilt and horror — and realized that these few seconds were crucial.

‘He’s dead!’ she said, and burst into tears.

‘I. . I. .’

For once he couldn’t think of anything to say. Usually he could think of things only couldn’t say them. Eventually he said, ‘Sorry.’

‘Tortoises,’ she said, ‘are protected. Did you know that? I never really knew what it meant, though. Protected. I never really knew. He was my grandmother’s. He lived in her garden for thirty-five years. He was called Smedley. He didn’t hibernate, only ran about in my trailer. He wasn’t terribly demonstrative, but he seemed. . happy.’

Marcus stood up. He was eighteen. He didn’t feel sufficiently senior, sufficiently adult, experienced enough, loquacious enough, to be able to cope with this situation. He felt like phoning his mother, packing and leaving, joining that other circus, that human circus, that un-animalled circus. He could see it already, how good it would be.

Belinda sat down on the bed. It promptly collapsed again. Marcus had only propped up the bottom leg, he hadn’t got around to securing it properly. Belinda scrambled up. ‘Christ! If he wasn’t dead before, he is now. Christ!’

She was still crying, but was already sick of crying. Her tears weren’t sufficiently effective. He wasn’t hugging her yet, wasn’t comforting her. Why am I crying? she thought. To seduce him? That was the sum of it. She wondered idly if you could go to hell for emotional blackmail.

Marcus took a deep breath. ‘The tortoise could be hibernating.’

Belinda stopped crying in an instant and said, ‘Five words all in a row! Well done! Five words, just like that!’ She then burst out laughing. ‘Hibernating? Please! ’

He was mortified by her laughter. She’s evil, he thought. Absolutely insincere. Absolutely unprincipled.

He’s only eighteen, she thought kindly. Poor bastard.

Marcus turned to leave, so furious now, so angry that he felt like fire, like liquid. ‘Your face. .’ he said, struggling, choking, ‘. . Chinese Dragon!’ Then walked out quickly.

Belinda stopped laughing after he’d gone, stood up, walked over to the mirror. Her face was still mirthful but tear-smattered. Chinese Dragon?

He was right. She looked like one of those brightly coloured, finely painted Chinese masks, the dragon faces, covered in tears, but grinning, grimacing. A frightening face, apparently, but only, she supposed, if you were Chinese.

Belinda went over to lift her mattress, pulled up the bed and kicked Smedley out from under it. He slid about on the floor like the puck in a game of ice hockey. Click, slither, thud.

Oh, well, she thought, this could’ve been sad, but I really don’t care. I could’ve shocked myself by caring, but I don’t care.

She started to laugh again. Laughing was good for you. A kind of internal aerobics. Then she heard a voice, and it was not her own. ‘Merde!’ it said, and cackled. ‘Merde! Merde! Merde!’

Belinda stopped laughing, her eyes tightened, and her mouth — quite spontaneously — performed a sudden, gorgeous, perfectly inadvertent back-bend.

Jennifer, 42, had a special gift which God had given her — out of the blue — to compensate for all the things that had happened to her in the past. All the awful things.

Jenny had the gift of knowing that something had occurred — either nice or nasty, but usually nasty — straight after it had happened. If she trod on a dog’s foot and it yelped, if the milk boiled over on to the oven, if she dropped a glass and it smashed. Well, then she would know . This was the gift that God had given her and she thanked God for it.

Jenny lived in a small complex of sheltered housing close to the big Safeways in Stamford Hill. She lived independently, but if anything bad happened she had a cord she could pull in her hallway, next to the door, so that someone else — the warden, Peter — would come along and sort everything out.

The only problem with this set-up was that Jenny refused to pull the cord. She would not. She referred to it as ‘that fucking cord’ and she would not pull it. It was a matter of principle. Instead, her neighbour, Naomi, would pull her cord on Jenny’s behalf to call Peter over if she felt Jenny was in some kind of difficulty and Peter was needed.

Naomi was seventy-six years old and had a bad hip and could, occasionally, be clumsy and hurt herself. Sometimes she had to be taken to hospital when she scorched her hand or slipped over when climbing out of the bath.