Nicola Barker - Clear - A Transparent Novel

By 3 a.m. we’ve worked our way through ‘Anglo-Saxon Gastronomy,’ ‘Norman Gourmets: 1100–1300’, ‘Anarchy and Haute Cuisine 1300–1500’ and ‘Tudor Wealth and Domesticity’.

I’m in the midst of a detailed description of how to prepare ‘Cabbage Cream’ (a sugary Tudor delight made out of individual ‘sheets’ or ‘leaves’ of skin, fished from off the top of a warm bowl of cream), when–

—

Oh shit

—

Brandy Leyland suddenly drops his pencil and collapses sideways. He vomits, copiously, into his oxygen mask — a lethal black-cherry coloured substance — and immediately commences choking on it. I jump up, curse, yank off the mask and ring for the nurse. She strides in.

‘I swear to God he didn’t swallow anything,’ I tell her, watching, in horror, as the cherry substance drips down off the bedsheets and on to the floor tiles.

‘Don’t worry.’ She arranges him firmly into the recovery position, cleans his nostrils out and he starts to scream. Piercing screams at first ( girl screams), until his vocal cords give up (collapse? What do vocal cords do ?) and he just peeps and squeaks like an inefficient dog whistle.

‘Go home,’ she says cheerfully, pushing her hand into his mouth and grappling with his tongue, ‘come back tomorrow.’

I’m halfway down the stairs when I realise that I’m still clutching the Spencer book. But I’m too scared to take it back up. And the porter’s gone temporarily AWOL ( Uh …Safe in whose hands was that?). So I’m obliged to lug it home with me.

Could come in handy, though, on the off chance that I wake up at five, desperate to understand more about Jane Austen’s passion for ox cheek.

When I walk past Blaine, I see that Aphra’s temporarily abandoned her station–

Where she be ?

— so I stand, and I watch for twenty minutes or so (perhaps secretly hoping that she might actually rematerialise).

He’s restless tonight. Tossing and turning. On his back, then on his belly. Knees up, then down. Arms flung out, willy-nilly…

I imagine some no-nonsense Australian housewife watching this exact same image on Sky — with half an eye on her rampaging toddler — as she devours a haphazard afternoon tea.

And then I remember something Blaine said about how he feels at his most honest, his most pure , when he’s performing his Challenges, then something else, about how, when he was Frozen in Time , he coped with all the pain and all the anxiety by dint of simply fantasising .

A warm bath (you might be forgiven for thinking), a mug of cocoa , a Caribbean holiday …

Uh- uh. Miles off.

His fantasies weren’t happy ones. Instead he imagined that he was a prisoner of war , or that he was suffering and dying from some horrendous disease . And these crazy thoughts sustained him, they made him rally, they kept him strong.

(‘Uh… excuse me, but there seems to be a badly-trained production assistant violently yanking at the small plastic tube which is currently glued to the tip of my cock …Would you actually just mind telling him to pull a little harder there?’)

Here’s another thing: Blaine got himself fit for Vertigo (standing on that pillar in New York) by walking around the city in a 65lb chain mail suit (A romantic image, certainly, but just consider —if he’d encountered a random rain storm on 24th Street, he’d’ve been rusted into oblivion by Broadway).

These masochistic feats all put me in mind, somehow, of that poor Archbishop of Canterbury (Thomas à Becket) who was murdered in his cathedral, and then, when his servants kindly stripped his body of all its bishoply regalia (‘You take the cross, I’ll take the rings’), they discovered, to their astonishment, that he was wearing a hair shirt , underneath, right next to the skin, which’d been itching him for years into an excruciating piety.

But he’d kept it together.

Like any true saint would.

Remember St Simeon — on whose bizarre example that particular Challenge was based? (Okay, so I didn’t, either, before I read Blaine’s book.) This was a man who spent 37 years on top of various pillars (circa AD 389–his cable reception was much better up there), a man who, as a matter of course , went 40 days — the whole of Lent —without even the tiniest morsel of edible sustenance. And why?

Why ? Because he was fucked up. That’s why. He was a nut-case. A fanatic . Because — and this really is the bottom line — just like Blaine, he simply loved to do it.

Oh yeah (I nearly forgot), and because he used personal suffering ’as a vehicle for interpreting Christ’s Teaching’.

What ? You think Christ didn’t go through enough himself ?

I mean why the hell didn’t he just go that extra mile , huh?

Glass in his shoes , perhaps.

You know, now I actually come to think about it, the quality of sound on the i-Pod does seem a little too compressed. Boxed up. Flattened out. Smaller.

Have you noticed that?

And here’s another thing: now that I actually have all this choice, I find that I just keep on hankering after the same short selection. Time and again. Ad infinitum .

Which is terribly disappointing.

Ideologically speaking.

Home.

At last .

I quietly let myself into the house, tiptoe through to the kitchen, and am not a little surprised to discover Jalisa, sitting alone at the table — wrapped up in one of Solomon’s Oriental robes (which is way too big for her), drinking a mint tea and reading the Blaine book.

‘Don’t you find that Blaine story quite amazing?’ she says, not even glancing up (as if I’ve been standing there, all night, just waiting for her observations).

‘Which one?’

‘He’s a six-year-old kid, travelling alone to school on the subway. It’s a very straightforward journey, just two stops. And he’s playing with this bunch of tarot cards, which he loves to perform tricks with…’

I suddenly remember.

‘Yes,’ I take over, ‘and these two old women take an interest in the cards, so he shows them a trick or two, but his hand slips at one point and he accidentally drops them—’

‘The train stops suddenly,’ she interrupts (the story fresher in her mind), ‘and they fall on to the floor. But by the time they’ve gathered them all together, he’s missed his stop.’

‘So he panics.’

‘But then the women get off the train with him at the next station, take him over to the other side, catch another train back, walk him to school, and explain to his teacher why he’s late…’

She glances up at me, then down at the book again. ‘He says that this experience taught him how much — even at such a young age — his magic affected people.’

She smiles. ‘But what it actually taught him, was how magic was a useful device for making people care for him. Magic placed him in jeopardy , and then magic seemingly pulled him through again.’

She closes the book and puts a hand up to her eyes.

‘I think I caught conjunctivitis off the dog.’

‘ What? That’s ridiculous.’

She sighs. ‘I caught it off a cat before…’

‘Well in that case, maybe Jax caught it off you .’

She gives this possibility some serious thought.

I pick up the book myself and turn to an image towards the back.