Nicola Barker - Three Button Trick and Other Stories

Time rolled by. Selina’s life was as flat as the fens and just about as interesting. Nothing much happened at all.

Joanna, Selina’s best friend, had lived a very similar sort of life except that she had enjoyed little success at school and had never attended teacher training college. She had got married at sixteen to John Burger whose family owned a large farm to the north of Grunty Fen, and had borne him two children before she reached twenty. She had always been wild and mischievous, but in a quiet way, a way that pretended that nothing serious was ever going on, or at least nothing seriously bad. Joanna was the bale of hay in Selina’s field. She made Selina’s landscape moderately more entertaining.

Joanna didn’t really know the meaning of hard work. Most country women throw in their lot with their husbands and work like automatons on the farm. But Joanna had more sense than that. She preferred to stay at home creating a friendly home environment’ and cultivating her good looks.

At the age of thirty-nine she aspired to the Dallas lifestyle. She spent many hours growing and painting her nails, making silk-feel shirts and dresses on her automatic sewing machine and throwing or attending Tupperware parties.

Joanna was Grunty Fen’s only hedonist, but hedonism wasn’t just her way of life, it was her religion, and she tried to spread it like a spoonful of honey on buttery toast.

They were in a café in Ely, a stone’s throw from the cathedral, eating a couple of cream eclairs with coffee. Selina was making fun of Joanna but Joanna didn’t seem to mind. She pulled the chocolate away from the choux pastry with her cake fork as Selina said laughingly, ‘I still can’t think of that birthday without smiling. My fortieth, and I thought it would be some sort of great landmark. I was so depressed. I opened Tom’s present and it was a home first aid kit. Of course I said how lovely it was. Then, trying to hide my disappointment, I opened your present, firmly believing that it would contain something frivolous and feminine. But inside the parcel there were only ten odd pieces of foam, all neatly and pointlessly sewed up around the edges. Neither of us knew what the hell they were. I thought they might be miniature cushions without covers. Tom thought they were for protecting your knees during cricket games, a sort of knee guard. I even thought they might be falsies.’

Joanna smiled. ‘This must be one of the only places in the world where a woman of forty doesn’t understand the basics of sophisticated dressing. I thought you could sew the shoulder pads into all your good shirts and dresses. It’s a fashionable look, Selina, honestly.’

Selina shrugged her non-padded shoulders. ‘I will sew them in eventually, I promise.’

Joanna grinned to herself. She looked rather cheery. Usually before, during and after the consumption of a cream cake Joanna panicked about its calory content and moaned about its probable effect on her midriff.

As Selina waited for the inevitable outburst she said, ‘If we didn’t come to Ely every few weeks for a chat and a break I’m sure I’d go mad. Ely. Imagine! This small, insignificant town has come to symbolize freedom and independence to me. It’s rather sad; it’s like the Americans symbolizing freedom with a sparrow instead of a bald eagle.’

She looked into Joanna’s face. Joanna was smiling. It was as if she was listening to a song that no one else could hear. Selina stared at her in silence for a minute or so and then said, ‘What is it, Joanna? I’m sure you’re up to something.’

Joanna’s eyes were vaguely glassy. Selina frowned. ‘You’ve not been taking those tranquillizers again, have you?’

Joanna laughed. It was a sort of throaty, gutsy laugh. ‘Oh Selina, if only you knew. If only! What’s Tom like in bed at the moment? Has it improved since our last little chat?’

Selina shrugged and her cheeks reddened. ‘Nothing much has happened in that department. Are you enjoying that cake?’

She had finished hers several minutes before, but Joanna was still (uncharacteristically) pushing her cake around her plate. Selina added quickly—to distract Joanna from intimate territory—‘School’s been awful. Felicity has been sitting in on classes. It’s to do with the new assessment rules from the education authority. The classroom is no longer my kingdom. It’s been taken over by men in little grey suits. Of course Felicity loves it all. She even had the cheek to offer me a few tips on my teaching technique the other day. I’m surprised she was capable of taking any of the lesson in. Most of it she spent fiddling with her hearing aid. Anyway, everyone knows that Heads are incapable of controlling classes and that’s why they become Heads in the first place. Maybe I’m just bitter, but the thought of that old crone deigning to tell me how to handle a class! She said something like, “Be freer, Selina, be more adventurous, take risks!” I tried to tell her that the syllabus had destroyed all elements of spontaneity in the classroom. If the kids want to cope with the workload nowadays it’s all blackboard, chalk and copying.’

As Selina finished speaking Joanna shuddered slightly. Selina smiled. ‘Ghost walk over your grave?’

Joanna shook her head and then giggled furtively. ‘Look Selina, it’s not that I’m not interested in what you are saying about school—God knows, my two did well enough under your tuition and they thought you were a great teacher—it isn’t that I’m not interested, but I just must change the subject for a moment.’

As Joanna spoke, she leaned towards Selina conspiratorially and her voice dropped to a whisper, ‘Selina, I’m wearing Dual Balls.’

Selina frowned. ‘What do you mean? Is it a girdle of some kind, or some sort of skin ointment?’

Joanna never ceased to amaze her with her violent enthusiasms with frivolity. She pushed a slightly greying brown curl behind her ear and thought abstractedly, ‘I must have my hair cut, it’s almost touching my shoulders now.’

Joanna’s chair scraped along the floor as she pulled it up closer to Selina. Selina could smell her perfume—something heady like Opium—which flushed through the air like bleach through water. Joanna whispered again, ‘I’ve got Dual Balls, Selina. I’ve had them in since I left the house. It’s been incredible.’

Selina shrugged, ‘You’re going to have to explain this to me, Joanna. I don’t know what Dual Balls are.’

Joanna bit her lip and stared at Selina through her heavily mascaraed lashes for a moment, then she said, ‘I got them from an underwear catalogue. I ordered them and they came in the post. John doesn’t know anything about them.’

Selina cleared her throat nervously, ‘Are they something rude, Joanna?’ Joanna winked saucily. ‘I should say so. They’re like two small round vibrating grapes. Battery operated.’

Selina took a sip of her coffee to try and deflate the tension, then said, ‘Have you got them in your bag?’

Joanna snorted loudly and several people at other tables turned and stared at them both for a moment. Selina felt slightly embarrassed. Joanna soon recovered from her fit of hilarity and whispered, ‘They’re not in my bag, stupid. I’ve got them in my fanny.’

Selina was not initially so much shocked by the idea of Joanna’s little vibrating grapes as by her casual use of the word ‘fanny’. It was an old-fashioned word. She had once had a great aunt called Fanny, a gregarious, light-hearted aunt who had always seemed very old to her as a child; old, frail but charming.

She didn’t really know how to reply to Joanna, how to disguise her intense unease and embarrassment. Luckily Joanna had other things on her mind. After a few seconds silence she squeezed Selina’s arm and said, ‘I’m going to nip into the toilets and take them out, then you can have a proper look at them.’