Nicola Barker - Clear - A Transparent Novel

She sighs. ‘The end of the Millennium kind of drew a line under that jumble of feelings…and yet, somehow, paradoxically, it also brought them back, ever more acutely.’

Solomon merely snorts as he experiments with his second and third gooseberry. Jalisa starts counting things off on her fingers—‘ First there’s all the Herzog stuff,’ she says, ‘which I think is terribly symbolic, and then the double irony of Blaine, in that tiny box — totally rekindling all those images of Jews being shipped in those cramped railway carriages to the concentration camps, without food, you know? The sense of something unspeakable taking place, but in public —and finally, there’s the fact of the “ Jew ”, Blaine, being guarded as he starves in that box by his beautiful German girlfriend…’

Solomon chokes on his grated beetroot. ‘ Now you go too far,’ he almost bellows.

( What ? The king of controversy, finally on the run? Arse-whipped by a woman ?)

Jalisa doesn’t turn a hair.

‘Why?’ she asks insouciantly. ‘This is just Art , after all…’

I step in. ‘Do you approve of what Blaine’s doing?’ I ask.

She rolls her eyes, boredly. ‘It’s not a question of liking or disliking,’ she says. ‘Good or bad. This kind of Art is like a Stop sign. You can either put on your brakes or decide to run through it. You don’t get angry with the sign itself, or love the sign. That’d be kinda inappropriate.’

‘So are Blaine and Korine feeling guilty or representing guilt?’ Solomon asks.

‘Both, of course,’ Jalisa says pertly, helping herself to another chunk of pie.

‘Well I suppose you should know,’ Solomon smiles, icily.

‘Pardon?’

Jalisa glances up.

‘The headscarf .’

Solomon enunciates his words so cleanly I can almost hear them squeaking. A short, tight silence follows. Then Jalisa merely shrugs. ‘You’re right ,’ she says, ‘perhaps that’s just the culture we find ourselves in,’ she takes a defiant swig of her wine, ‘where looking back is, in a sense, our only real way of looking forward.’

She gently puts her glass down again. ‘Everybody nowadays feels this overwhelming urge to source the root of their own perceived oppression,’ she says, ‘victimhood is the new black, or green or whatever…’

Then she pauses, ‘But fuck you, anyway.’

Solomon says nothing, but he’s plainly utterly delighted by the impact he’s had (am I just out of my depth here, or does this man have no idea how to secure himself a shag?).

Man …

You’d struggle to chip this atmosphere with an ice pick. I shift in my seat and look down at the table. It’s then that I observe how almost all of Aphra’s food has been casually ingested during the course of this ‘discussion’. And none of it by me .

Jalisa suddenly gets up and stalks off to the bathroom. Solomon marches defiantly upstairs in the apparent pursuit of weed. I go to the fridge and grab myself a Coke (Nusrat Fateh howling away rhythmically in the background about the eternal love of bloody Allah — and only my heathen ears to hear him), when bugger me if I don’t turn around at the critical moment to see those three evil curs forming a vile, black tripod across the table and decimating the paltry remainder of Aphra’s fine repast. Bud even goes so far as to snatch a Tupperware container — holding the fragrant chicken — in his gnashing white teeth and carry it off.

You fancy getting that thing back off him? Huh ?

Nope.

Me neither.

‘There’s an apple pie in Shane , actually. The book. It features quite prominently in chapter 3. The narrator’s mother — Marian — bakes this huge, succulent, deep-dish pie, in the pathetic hope (at some level) of impressing “the dark stranger”, Shane, with it, but then she gets distracted and the pie burns and she goes absolutely loopy — in that fantastically “repressed housewife of the developing American West” sort of way.

It’s a classic interlude…’

Aphra — who is currently holding my (recently rediscovered) copy of Shane in her hoity hand, having just that second dug it out of her (recently returned) Premier Christian Radio bag — gazes up at me, blankly. Oh dear .

So it’s the morning after the feast before and I’m just blathering on meaninglessly to a — frankly, strangely laid-back-seeming — Aphra as I struggle to explain why exactly I (or not I) demolished her succulent food-store.

‘While I’m incredibly impressed by your literary critique,’ she says (casually leaving the entire food-theft issue behind her — which I’m extremely grateful for), ‘Westerns don’t really ring my bell.’

She tries to pass the book back over to me.

‘Don’t judge a book by its cover,’ I say, taking a step back and refusing — out of principle — to take it from her.

‘I’m not a great reader ,’ she says, scowling.

‘I’ll bet you a fiver,’ I say, ‘that you won’t be able to put it down after the first two chapters.’

She rolls her tired eyes (been working the hospital night shift, maybe? I mean this girl has ‘nurse’ written all over her. Uh . Except for the feet part, where today she’s wearing the most alarmingly flirtatious pair of scarlet, patent-leather, pointy-toed, kitten-heeled creations I’ve ever beheld). ‘You honestly think I’m gonna be fatally seduced by the story of a burnt pie? ’ she asks.

‘The pie is symbolic ,’ I sniff.

She merely shrugs, shoves the book roughly back into her bag again (it’s an early edition , for Heaven’s Sake), and glances down along the embankment wall where — about ten feet away from us — two rookie coppers are lounging disconsolately.

‘Looks like somebody took yesterday’s attack seriously,’ she observes.

‘ Hmmn . They certainly seem over the moon to be here,’ I murmur.

It’s a dull old autumn morning. Grey sky. Nippy wind.

‘Been here long yourself?’ I ask, shivering involuntarily, then sneezing, then yanking my short, beige, heavy canvas Boxfresh jacket even closer around me.

‘Bless you,’ she says (sidestepping my question with typical finesse), then casually adjusting the Tupperware bag in her hand, before pausing for a second to inspect the contents more closely.

‘How hungry were you?’ she asks, lifting out a badly mangled dish.

‘The dogs ,’ I cringe. ‘Sorry. We all got a little distracted after my flatmate and his girlfriend had this unholy row about Blaine…’

‘Really?’

(Is that a glimmer of interest?)

‘Yup.’

As I speak her bleary eyes settle quietly just above my left shoulder (it almost feels as if I have an extremely entertaining parrot crouching there). The magician (for it is he who crouches, not a bird) is still asleep (yeah, not crouching then, so scrap that), bundled up inside his bag — corpsing it — just a dark, slightly poignant, elongated blob.

‘Remember what your friend Larry said yesterday?’ I ask. ‘About there being this whole, unspoken, anti- semitic agenda against Blaine?’

‘Larry who? ’

‘Punk’s Not Dead,’ I say.

‘Yes it is ,’ she snaps, then yawns again.

‘Well anyway,’ I continue (why’s it always such a battle with this girl? Is it simply dispositional? Is it her? Is it me ?), ‘my flatmate’s girlfriend, Jalisa…’