Nicola Barker - Heading Inland

‘The buttons on your coat. You’ve done them up all wrong.’

He looked down and pretended surprise. ‘I have?’

Jack held his hands aloft, limply, gave her a watery smile but made no attempt to righten them. Carrie, in turn, put her hand to her curls. She imagined that Jack must be enormously clever to be so vague. Maybe a scientist or a schoolteacher at a boys’ private school or maybe a philosophy graduate. Not for a moment did it dawn on her that he might be a fool. And that was sensible, because he was no fool.

Carrie met Sydney two decades later, while attending self-defence classes. Sydney had long, auburn ringlets and freckles and glasses. She was Australian. Her father owned a vineyard just outside Brisbane. Sydney was a sub-editor on a bridal magazine. She was strong and bare and shockingly independent. On the back of her elbows, Carrie noticed, the skin was especially thick and in the winter she had to apply Vaseline to this area because otherwise her skin chapped and cracked and became inflamed. The reason, Sydney informed Carrie, that her elbows got so chapped, was that she was very prone to resting her weight on them when she sat at her desk, and also, late at night, when she lay in bed reading or thinking, sometimes for hours.

Sydney was thirty years old and an insomniac. Had been since puberty. As a teenager she’d kept busy during the long night hours memorizing the type-of-grape in the type-of-wine, from-which-vineyard and of-what-vintage. Also she collected wine labels which she stuck into a special jotter.

Nowadays, however, she’d spend her wakeful night-times thinking about broader subjects: men she met, men she fancied, men she’d dated, men she’d two-timed, and if none of these subjects seemed pertinent or topical — during the dry season, as she called it — well, then she’d think about her friends and their lives and how her life connected with theirs and what they both wanted and what they were doing wrong and how and why.

Carrie appreciated Sydney’s attentiveness. If Jack had been working late, if Jack kept mentioning the name of an actress, if Jack told her that her skin looked sallow or her roots were showing, well, then she would tell Sydney about it and Sydney would spend the early hours of every morning, resting on her elbows and mulling it all over.

Sydney had a suspicion that Jack was up to something anti-matrimonial and had hinted as much to Carrie. Hinted, but nothing more. Carrie, however, took only what she wanted from Sydney’s observations and left the rest. In conversational terms, she was a fussy eater.

Jack walked out on Carrie after twenty-one years of marriage, two days before her forty-fourth birthday. The following night, after he’d packed up and gone, she and Sydney skipped their karate class and sat in the leisure centre’s bar instead. Sydney ordered two bottles of Bordeaux. She wasn’t in the least bit perturbed by Carrie’s predicament. In fact, she was almost pleased because she’d anticipated that this would happen a while ago and was secretly gratified by the wholesale accuracy of her prediction.

‘You’re still a babe, Carrie,’ Sydney whispered, pouring her some more wine. ‘You could have any man.’

‘I don’t want any man,’ Carrie whimpered. ‘I only want Jack. Only Jack. Only him.’

‘That guy Alan,’ Sydney noted, ‘who takes the Judo class. I know he likes you. Sometimes it seems like his eyes are stuck to your tits with adhesive.’

‘Please!’

‘It’s true.’

‘Jack only walked out yesterday, Sydney, probably for a girl fifteen years my junior. You really think I care about anything else at the moment?’

Sydney had great legs; long and lithe and small-kneed. Gazelle legs, llama legs. She crossed them.

‘I’m simply observing that Jack isn’t the only shark in the ocean.’

Carrie took a tissue from her sports bag and dusted her cheeks with it.

‘I remember the very first time I ever met Jack, waiting for a bus outside the National Portrait Gallery. A Sunday afternoon. He had his coat buttoned up all wrong and I pointed it out to him and we started talking. .’ Carrie stopped speaking and hiccuped.

Sydney chewed her bottom lip. That old three button trick, she was thinking. The slimy bastard.

‘You know, Carrie,’ she said sweetly. ‘You’re still so beautiful. You’re still the biggest lily in the pond. You’re still floating on the surface and bright enough to catch the attention of any insect or amphibian that might just happen to be passing.’ She paused. ‘Even a heron,’ she added, as an afterthought.

Carrie scrabbled in her sports bag. She grabbed her purse, opened it, took out a twenty-pound note to pay the barman for the bottles of wine.

‘My treat,’ Sydney interjected.

Carrie paid him anyway. She was about to shut her purse but then paused and delved inside it.

‘Look,’ she said, her voice trembling, holding aloft a blue card.

Sydney put out her hand. ‘What is it?’

‘Our season ticket to the ballet. We went every week. It was one of those routines. .’

‘Well,’ Sydney took the ticket and perused it, ‘you shall go to the ball, Cinders.’

‘What?’

‘You and me. We’ll go together. When is it?’

‘Wednesday.’

Sydney handed the card back. ‘Fine.’

As it turned out, Sydney couldn’t make it. She rang Carrie at the last minute. Carrie answered the phone wrapped up in a towel, pink from a hot bath.

‘What? You can’t make it?’

‘But I want you to go, anyway. Find someone else.’

‘There is no one else. It doesn’t matter, though. I wasn’t really in the mood myself.’

‘Carrie, you’ve got to go. Alone if needs be. It’s the principle of the thing.’

‘I know, but it’s just. .’

‘What?’

‘It’s kind of like a regular box and we share it with some other people and if I go alone. .’

‘So? That’s great. It means you won’t feel entirely isolated, which is ideal.’

‘And then there’s this fat old man called Heinz who’s always there. A complete bore. We really hate him.’

‘Heinz?’

‘Yes. Jack always found him such a pain. We even tried to get a transfer. .’

‘Bollocks. Just go. Ignore him. What’s the ballet?’

‘Petrushka.’

‘Yip!’

‘I’ve seen it before. It’s not one of my particular favourites.’

‘Go anyway. You’ve got to start forging your own path, Carrie. You’ll thank me after. Honestly.’

She’d made a special effort, with her hair and her make-up. She was wearing a dress that she’d bought for the previous Christmas. It was a glittery burgundy colour. Her lips matched. The box was empty when she arrived. She felt stupid. She sat down.

After five minutes, a couple she knew only to say hello to arrived and took their seats. They smiled and nodded at Carrie. She did the same in return. She then paged through her programme and pretended that she wasn’t overhearing their conversation about the kind of conseratory they should build on to the back of their house. He wanted a big one that could fit a table to seat at least six. She wanted a small, bright retreat full of orchids and tomato plants.

Carrie kept reading and re-reading the names of the principal dancers. The orchestra’s preparatory honking and parping jangled in her throat and with her nerves. She closed her eyes. I will count to ten. One, two, three, four. .

‘Ooof! Here we go, here we go!’

Heinz, squeezing his way over to his seat, pushing his considerable bulk between the two rows of chairs.

‘Oi! Hup! There we are.’

Carrie opened her eyes and stared at him. He had a box of chocolate brazils in one hand and a bulging Selfridges bag in the other, which he almost, but couldn’t quite, fit into the gap between his knees and the front of the box.