Nicola Barker - Three Button Trick and Other Stories

Scott stood in the path behind Susan as they waited to arrange her comfortably in the car.

‘Aunty Susan,’ he said, his small voice chiming out as clearly and purely as a perfect crystal bell.

‘What?’ She barely turned.

He said, ‘Aunty Susan, it looks like you’ve wee-weed all down the back of your dress.’

Susan’s good intentions flew out of her mouth like a big, fat, red, angry robin.

NICK WAS BACK TO front, but only on the inside. When he was born, the midwife held him up by his tubby, bloody legs, cleared out his mouth and his nasal passages while the doctor, holding his stethoscope, aimed it like it was a dart and Nick’s heart the bulls-eye, listened, blinking, holding his own breath, for the infant’s heartbeat.

But he heard nothing. Just the faintest scuddering; a faraway, dreamy sound, something so distant from the white, harsh delivery chamber, the long, tiled hospital corridors, the clatter of trolleys, the banging of doors; something so soft and fragile, so remote, that it sounded like the peripheral scuffle and bicker of two wagtails arguing over a berry in a holly bush.

He tried not to panic. Nick’s mother, propped up on four pillows, whipped and battered, noticed in an instant.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing’s wrong.’

‘Tell me!’

‘If you’ll just quieten down for a moment …’

The young doctor held his breath until his eyes began to water. Still that rattling noise, and very indistinct. But the child was as fresh and ripe as a little cherry, a boy, breaming and gurgling and thinking about squealing.

‘I’m just going to take him off with me for a minute,’ the doctor muttered, grabbing Nick’s legs and righting him. The midwife caught the doctor’s eye. Nick’s mother caught the midwife catching the doctor’s eye. As Nick was carried from the delivery room, she struggled to count the number of his fingers and the number of his toes. Ten of each. Before he was gone.

And so it was. Nick was set apart. He was different. Outwardly, not a sign, but inside, everything back to front.

‘Everything,’ the doctor told the midwife, five minutes later, full of wonder, ‘the opposite way around from how it should be. I couldn’t hear his heart at first but it’s beating well enough, except it’s on the right-hand side of his body instead of on the left. And all his other organs too. Topsy-turvy. There’s a name for it.’ But he didn’t know the name because Nick was his first.

Nick’s mother, Grace, told all the other mothers how her Nick was back to front. ‘I called him Nick,’ she said, ‘because he came along in just the Nick of time.’

The other mothers cackled. Although, in truth, there was nothing medically dangerous about Nick’s condition, and time, or the lack of it, was of no consequence whatsoever.

Nevertheless, every day she counted his fingers and his toes just to make sure. Ten. Ten. She was a pernickety mother. As Nick grew older, if he complained about her coddling she’d tell him how he was taken from her on the day he was born, set aside, examined, and all the while she hadn’t known what was wrong, had only imagined. And there’s nothing worse than imagining. Not a thing.

So Nick was set aside and he was special, but only on the inside, and that kind of difference, the invisible kind, can be very hard to live with.

At school, his teachers found him to be a small, sharp peak-slippery and unassailable. He was so convinced of his own superiority. And the other children had no interest in anatomy, or where exactly the heart was located. It would be a long time until that particular juncture—third form biology, maybe, but certainly not yet.

It was hard for Nick to understand his own apparent insignificance. At first he’d emphasized his difference and this had made the other children hate him. So he wouldn’t fit. Didn’t want to either. And then they teased, insulted and derided him. So then he couldn’t fit, even if he’d cared to. But finally they began to ignore him. He became a blank. A nil. A nothing.

When Nick was aged fifteen, Grace remarried. His stepfather, Thomas Siswele, was Nigerian by birth. Grace thought Thomas was different, not ordinary like she and Nick were but, oh so special. He taught Grace how to cook groundnut stew with plantain.

And so it started. Each day Thomas would bring home the local paper and read out titbits to Grace as she prepared their dinner. He’d read out news about fêtes and fairs and infestations, an award-winning garden on the eighth storey of a tower-block, a fight, a rape, arson, theft.

You’d almost believe, Nick thought, standing in the doorway, unheeded, that he’d gone and written that paper himself, with all the fuss she makes over it.

One Friday afternoon, Nick turned himself in at the police station for shoplifting.

‘What did you steal?’ they asked. He told them.

‘Where did you put the stolen goods?’

‘In my bedroom.’

They searched Nick’s house and found nothing. So he had to tell them how he’d stolen a car.

‘What’s the registration? The car type? The colour?’

He told them, details he’d seen in the paper. But then they found the missing car in a lock-up in Walthamstow and covered in someone else’s prints.

Nick told them how he’d set fire to a factory in High Barnet. ‘Why? What fuel did you use? Whereabouts and how much?’

‘Petrol. Everywhere.’

But the specialists told the police that the fire had started because of an electrical fault. There were no traces of petrol.

After a while the police got sick of Nick. His timewasting. Nick was excited by this. He kept on wasting their time hoping it would lead somewhere, but instead of charging him for it they decided to ignore him. They told him he was the boy who cried wolf. And you know what happened to the boy who cried wolf, they said, don’t you? Nick prayed it would happen.

Back to front, back to front, back to front. Had to mean something.

Then he met Lyndon, in a police cell.

‘What you up for?’ Lyndon asked.

Nick struggled to remember. ‘Armed robbery,’ he said. ‘Jewellers.’

‘H. Samuel’s?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘Did you do it?’ Lyndon already knew the answer. His question was merely a matter of form.

‘Yes, I did it,’ Nick said.

Lyndon eyeballed Nick while rubbing his chin. You see, this was his crime Nick was appropriating.

‘You didn’t do that job,’ Lyndon said eventually. ‘I did that job.’

Nick merely shrugged.

‘I did that job,’ Lyndon reasserted. And this was the act he’d been denying and recanting, in his own mind, to the coppers, for hours now, for days now.

‘What you in for?’ Lyndon asked again.

‘Robbery,’ Nick said, ‘H. Samuel’s.’

‘Fuck you, man. I did that thing.’

Nick shrugged.

‘Don’t fuck with me, man. I did that thing.’

Lyndon was no great respecter of lies, except of his own. He squared up to Nick. Nick sighed and turned to the wall.

‘What you in for, man?’

Nick said nothing. His mind was miles away, thinking about the distinction between being different and doing different. He didn’t have to be, only to do.

Lyndon had no interest in distinctions of any kind. He had a small knife secreted in the sole of his trainer. He drew it out.

‘What you in for?’

Nick was busy deciding in his own mind whether a plantain and a banana were the selfsame thing.

Lyndon calculated that if he stuck his knife in, just so, in that place where nothing particularly important was stationed … He knew the distinction, it must be admitted, between grievous bodily harm and murder. Nick had his back to him. Lyndon’s knife was so sharp it slid in with ease.