Nicola Barker - Clear - A Transparent Novel

‘I have an oven,’ I say, ‘at home. We could jump into a cab and hightail it on over there.’

‘How far?’ she asks.

‘Five minutes, tops.’

‘Good,’ she says. ‘Okay. Let’s.’

Part of me thinks she might be upset by it. She might be sensitive (invalids can sometimes be funny like that), but she isn’t. Not remotely. She’s fine. In fact she’s beatific .

We’ve dumped three bags of provisions (and one of Tupperware) on to the kitchen table, she’s growled at the dogs (and they’ve fled) and she’s followed me downstairs, quite willingly, into my lair.

I put N *e *r *d on the stereo- ‘In Search Of…’

First thing she does is open a window.

‘Air,’ she gasps, then glances up towards street level.

‘How lovely for you,’ she murmurs, ‘to see everyone’s shoes …’ She pauses, ‘And up everyone’s skirts , too.’

Then she sits down on my bed and I show her the pictures.

‘The eyes ,’ I say (the way Blaine does in the text), flipping between the two images.

‘Good gracious me. I get your point ,’ she murmurs.

‘The way I see it,’ I say, my own eyes drawn inexorably towards her shapely bare thigh, ‘Houdini’s like Blaine’s inspirational father -figure.’

She tips her head slightly. ‘ Okay …’ she says, tentatively.

‘We know nothing about his relationship with his actual dad,’ I continue, ‘except that he died when Blaine was young. It’s entirely conceivable that he might’ve been obliged to watch him suffer , as a boy, and magic — this strange and mysterious world of wands and tarot — was an escape for him. A release.’

Aphra says nothing.

‘At one point in the book he talks — at some length — about this recurring dream he has as a child. In the dream he suddenly finds himself standing inside this amazing room crammed with countless magical devices and huge, ornate glass display cases. He says that the room made him feel inexpressibly happy. It was a refuge. He would enter this room and he would feel magic all around him. In fact he would enter this room and he was magic.’

I pause. ‘These two worlds were probably entirely separate at first. But then one day, in the library, the 5-year-old Blaine accidentally happens across this extraordinary image of the great Houdini. And it’s when his eyes connect with Houdini’s eyes that those two initially disparate sides of his life suddenly forge together. Houdini was the unifier, see? When he saw Houdini’s eyes, maybe — at some fundamental level — he recognised his own eyes (and through them, by extension, his own dead father’s eyes). Through the terrified gaze of this master magician, Blaine suddenly experiences this powerful sense of a unity of suffering . And magic was the facilitator. Magic brought everything into relief. Magic brought his father and his suffering back to him. But through a filter. In an accessible way, a distanced way, a controllable way.’

Aphra stays quiet, presumably digesting my diatribe. I quietly indicate towards the little straps and bolts on the baby Blaine’s leg.

‘God bless him,’ she gasps, and leans down to kiss the picture. ‘God bless him.’

‘But what about his mother ?’ I murmur. ‘His mother always supported him, he says, no matter what. She was his rock. But part of me can’t help thinking that maybe she supported him too much. And maybe that’s because he’d lost his dad, but maybe it was also because he was actually sick himself, and she really needed to nurture him. He was in pain , so she indulged him.’

Aphra has fallen down off the bed on to her knees. She has crawled forward slightly and is inspecting a line of my shoes by the wall as she listens. Her skirt just about trims the back of her buttocks.

‘He says at one point, when he was in his teens,’ I blabber on, trying not to stare too much (but still staring), ‘that he locked himself into his bedroom cupboard for two entire days. He can’t remember why. But she didn’t object, she just brought him all his food in on trays. And at another point he says how he slept on his hard bedroom floor for a whole year because he became obsessed by the idea of mites in his bed linen.’

She picks up my yellow trainers and sniffs them.

‘You love black olives,’ she says.

‘He was very obsessive, very compulsive,’ I continue, ‘he used to challenge himself to do things — like climb a tree or cross a road, and as he grew older the challenges became more risky, more dangerous, but he convinced himself that if he didn’t do them straight away then something bad would happen…’

‘We’ve all done that,’ Aphra mutters.

‘ I didn’t.’

‘Well you’re the exception, then,’ she says, grabbing an old pair of Patrick Cox’s and inspecting them quizzically. ‘Adair Graham MacKenny,’ she sighs, ‘ so well adjusted. A shining example to us all .’

A quick sniff later she murmurs, ‘Mints. Terrible for male fertility.’

I simply gaze at her.

‘Didn’t anyone ever tell you that?’

She crawls over the floor towards me on her hands and knees (I can see her breasts, hanging down, through the V in her sweater, partially confined by some kind of bizarre, crocheted bright pink bra top). She reaches my legs, pushes them open and shoves herself between them. She stares into my face.

‘Hello,’ she whispers, then starts adjusting the collar on my shirt and tucking my hair behind my ears (in an irritating way, in a false way, like I’m some scruffy kid she’s preparing for his first day of school, or an ancient invalid uncle). I grab her hands and restrain them. Then I kiss her. She bends back on her knees under the pressure. The harder I push, the more she gives. Eventually I’ve moved a foot forward and she’s arched into a lithe, girlie Z. I feel her teeth against my lips and tongue. I open my eyes.

‘What’s so funny?’ I ask.

‘Everything,’ she says. ‘ You .’

I grab her shoulders, yank her forward and kiss her again.

‘ Ow ,’ she says afterwards, falling back on to her heels, touching her bottom lip, scowling, ‘that hurt .’ Three long seconds pass. Then she looks up, sees my concern and laughs.

She’s vicious. Careless. Wildly provoking.

I let go of her shoulders (What to do next? How to contain this mischief?), and in that same moment she puts her hands down to her sweater, grabs the fabric at the waist and pulls it over her head.

Wow . She suddenly looks like a cover shot from one of those slightly sordid Summer In Ibiza albums. Very pale. Slightly dirty. Several pins drop from her head on to the wooden floor. Scraps of hair fall loose.

Slowly she rises up again and leans her weight in against me. Her hands are behind her back. I can see her fingers twisting lithely together as her chin rests on my shoulder. Then she turns her head and kisses my neck. I start to move my hands and she stops. I stop moving my hands and she starts again.

Her lips are soon at my ear. ‘Remember that bit,’ she murmurs, grabbing my lobe between her teeth and pulling slightly, ‘when they’re trying to dig up that old tree stump — Shane and the kid’s father…?’

Her hands are on my knees, moving up slowly towards my thighs.

I nod, my breathing irregular.

‘And they’re just chopping into it, hacking into it, one after the other?’

She draws a deep breath, tickles my ear with her nose, moves her hands up past my hips, under my shirt and on to my stomach.