Nicola Barker - Three Button Trick and Other Stories

Oh, the G-string was a modern thing, but it looked so horrid! Gillian wanted to be a modern girl but when she espied her rear-end engulfing the slither of string like a piece of dental floss entering the gap between two great white molars, her heart sank down into her strappy sandals. It tormented her. Like the pain of an old bunion, it quite took off her social edge.

When Mr Kip didn’t remark favourably on her new dress; when, in fact, he drew a comparison between Gillian and the cone-shaped upstanding white napkins on the fancily made-up Rotary tables, she almost didn’t try to smile. He drank claret. He smoked a cigar and tipped ash on her. He didn’t introduce her to any of his Rotary friends. Normally, Gillian might have grimaced on through. But tonight she was a modern girl in torment and this kind of behaviour quite simply would not do.

Of course she didn’t actually say anything. Mr Kip finally noticed Gillian’s distress during liqueurs.

‘What’s got into you?’

‘Headache,’ Gillian grumbled, fighting to keep her hands on her lap.

Two hours later, Mr Kip deigned to drive them home. It was raining. Gillian fastened her seatbelt. Mr Kip switched on the windscreen wipers. They drove in silence. Then all of a sudden, wheeeu-woing ! One of the wipers flew off the windscreen and into a ditch. Mr Kip stopped the car. He reversed. He clambered out to look for the wiper, but because he wore glasses, drops of rain impaired his vision.

It was a quiet road. What the hell. Mr Kip told Gillian to get out and look for it.

‘In my white dress?’ Gillian asked, quite taken aback.

Fifteen minutes later, damp, mussed, muddy, Gillian finally located the wiper. Mr Kip fixed it back on, but when he turned the relevant switch on the dash, neither of the wipers moved. He cursed like crazy.

‘Well, that’s that,’ he said, and glared at Gillian like it was her fault completely. They sat and sat. It kept right on raining.

Finally Gillian couldn’t stand it a minute longer. ‘Give me your tie,’ she ordered. Mr Kip grumbled but did as she’d asked. Gillian clambered out of the car and attached the tie to one of the wipers.

‘OK,’ she said, trailing the rest of the tie in through Mr Kip’s window. ‘Now we need something else. Are you wearing a belt?’

Mr Kip shook his head.

‘Something long and thin,’ Gillian said, ‘like a rope.’

Mr Kip couldn’t think of anything.

‘Shut your eyes’, Gillian said. Mr Kip shut his eyes, but after a moment, naturally, he peeped.

And what a sight! Gillian laboriously freeing herself from some panties which looked as bare and sparse and confoundedly stringy as a pirate’s eye patch.

‘Good gracious!’ Mr Kip exclaimed. ‘You could at least have worn some French knickers or cami-knickers or something proper. Those are preposterous!’

Gillian turned on him. ‘I’ve really had it with you, Colin,’ she snarled, ‘with your silly, affected, old-fashioned car and clothes and everything .’

From her bag Gillian drew out her Swiss Army Knife and applied it with gusto to the plentiful elastic on her G-string. Then she tied one end to the second wiper and pulled the rest around and through her window. ‘Right,’ she said, ‘start up the engine.’

Colin Kip did as he was told. Gillian manipulated the wipers manually; left, right, left, right. All superior and rhythmical and practical and dour-faced.

Mr Kip was very impressed. He couldn’t help himself. After several minutes of driving in silence he took his hand off the gearstick and slid it on to Gillian’s lap.

‘Watch it,’ Gillian said harshly. ‘Don’t you dare provoke me, Colin. I haven’t put my Swiss Army Knife away yet.’

She felt the pressure of his hand leave her thigh. She was knickerless. She was victorious. She was a truly modern female.

JACK HAD WON CARRIE’S heart with that old three button trick.

At the genesis of every winter, Jack would bring out his sturdy but ancient grey duffel coat and massage the toggles gently with the tips of his fingers. He’d pick off any fluff or threads from its rough fabric, brush it down vigorously with the flat of his hand and then gradually ease his way into it. One arm, two arms, shift it on to his shoulders, balance it right—the tips of the sleeves both perfectly level with each wrist—then straighten the collar.

Finally, the toggles. The most important part. He’d do them one-handed, pretending, even to himself, some kind of casualness, a studied—if fallacious—preoccupation, his eyes unfocused, imagining, for example, how it felt when he was a small boy learning to tell the time. His father had shown him: ten past, quarter past, see the little hand? See the big hand? But he hadn’t learned. It simply didn’t click.

So Jack’s mother took over instead. She had her own special approach. The way she saw it, any child would learn anything if they thought there was something in it for them: a kiss or a toy or a cookie.

Jack’s mother baked Jack a Clock Cake. Each five-minute interval on the cake’s perimeter was marked with a tangy, candied, lemon segment. The first slice was taken from the midday or midnight point at the very top of the cake and extended to the first lemon segment on the right, which, Jack learned, signified five minutes past the hour. ‘If the little hand is on the twelve,’ his mother told him, ‘then your slice takes the big hand to five minutes past twelve.’

Jack wrinkled up his nose. ‘How about if I have a ten past twelve slice?’ he suggested.

He got what he’d asked for.

Jack was born in Wisconsin but moved to London in his early twenties and got a job as a theatrical producer. He’d already worked extensively off-off Broadway. He met Carrie waiting for a bus on a Sunday afternoon outside the National Portrait Gallery. It was the winter of 1972. He was wearing his duffel coat.

Carrie was a blonde who wore her hair in big curls, had milk-pudding skin and breasts like a roomy verandah on the front of her body’s smart Georgian townhouse frame. Close up she smelled like a bowl of Multi-flavoured Cheerios.

Before Jack had even smelled her, though, he smiled at her. She smiled in return, glanced away—as girls are wont to do—and then glanced back again. Just as he’d hoped, her eyes finally settled on the toggles on his coat. She pointed. She grinned. ‘Your buttons …’

‘Huh?’

‘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.