Nicola Barker - Clear - A Transparent Novel

If I look closer I can make something else out. Solomon (no word of a lie). He’s waving from the back. He’s beaming, ear to ear.

‘DIZZEE!’ I find myself screaming, when the song reaches its climax and then cuts out.

‘DIZZEE!’

And as one, the people on that boat turn, look up at the bridge, and they cheer .

So what’s the deal with Rasket? Has he come to push everyone’s faces in it?

This sprig of young cum — this cocky afterthought — this shock of vitality?

And Blaine? What would he make of it? Does he notice? Would he care ? Is he furious? Is he beyond all that?

I don’t know. But I’m beaming. And the Rasket starts singing again, and the Brothers start dancing, and the boat takes a couple of reckless swerves, and the sound system is blasting back the nets on all those million pound riverside pads and flats…

First the nearly-Jew, starving?

Then the raucous black kid?

What the hell’s happening to this neighbourhood?!

That night I watch the news and Blaine barely figures. The PM’s had heart murmurs. Three soldiers are shot in Iraq. At about eleven I see a short report. They’re saying it was all an anticlimax. They show Blaine, close-up, and it’s a different Blaine from the one I saw on the bridge. It’s a tragic Blaine. He’s choked with emotion. And he’s saying, ‘I just want to thank…’ and then this cry comes out of him. Like the squeal of a baby fox. A bleat. Then they carry him off.

It’s only TV. But I swear to God, in that moment, my heart nearly stops.

Hang on a minute, though…

Listen . Listen closely …

In the background I hear Rasket ; the relentless thud of his distinctive bass-line, the jackdaw cackle of his rebellious lyric. It’s him . Yet nobody mentions Rasket’s coup…

Sure, they want him in their colour supplements, and on their cutting-edge radio shows. But they need to squeeze him out of here. He won’t fit here. He just won’t do .

But guess what? Fuck them. Yeah . Fuck the deriders and the egg-throwers and the opinion formers.

Fuck them all !

Because he came , see? And he sang , and he took .

Hmmn . Wonder where he might’ve got that idea from.

So what happened after?

They took Blaine to hospital? They put him on a drip for seven days? They fussed over his electrolyte balance? They waited to see if he’d done himself ‘any permanent damage’? They bid millions for his diaries?

On the BBC radio news, in the morning, they say, ‘Illusionist David Blaine has left his perspex box after forty-four days and nights with apparently no food of any kind.’

Apparently.

Couldn’t even give him that .

Isn’t it all about boxes , huh? He arrived an illusionist but he came out something else. He changed (I need to believe it). But the world says you can’t change. You pulled the wool over our eyes once , kid, you played tricks on us before . You made us feel all confused and stupid, and you could do it again, at any moment. We just can’t — we won’t —take you from one neat box and put you into another. No way. Uh- uh .

The following morning, a Monday, I return for the last time to the scene of the crime. And when I get to the point on the bridge where I caught my first glint of him — that initial sighting, that seductive perspex glimmer — there’s just this huge hole in the sky. Even the crane has gone. And when I get to the far end, where all the cars used to honk their horns at him, I see every driver, turning and staring. I see their heads turn, one after the other. And all they see now are clouds and the tops of trees. And seagulls. But their heads still turn, and they look. Car after car after car. And it’s a ballet of I Miss You David.

A Symphony of He’s Gone.

I got the words wrong. No kidding. The opening words. Shane . I said ‘barely as tall as our perimeter fence’ (Remember?), but when I looked — when I checked —I saw that it was actually ‘barely topping the backboard of father’s old chuck-wagon’. Which is better, much better, eh ?

‘I guess that’s all there is to tell…’

Chapter 16. It’s the shortest chapter you could ever imagine. And it ends:

‘He was the man who rode into our little valley out of the heart of our great glowing west and when his work was done rode back whence he had come and he was Shane.’

Observe the total lack of punctuation.

(Jesus H. How’d he ever get away with that stuff?)

Not even a comma after ‘whence he had come’? Or a dash ?

Man .

Is Jack Schaefer some fuck-you, balls-out writer or what ?

NICOLA BARKER’S previous books include The Three Button Trick and Other Stories and the novels Wide Open , which won the IMPAC Award, and Behindlings , all available in paperback from Ecco.

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*Sorry to interrupt Solomon’s flow and everything, but when he uses the word ‘Melanic’ he’s referring to the dark skin pigment, melanin, which is found in far greater proportions in those skins of a darker hue — now let’s dive straight back in again, eh?

*I once loaned Solomon a copy of Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers where a couple on holiday get drugged, tied up and tortured by an apparently genial pair of bogus holidaymakers. Solomon called the book, ‘morally void. A pointlessly sadistic exercise in controlled, middle-class degeneracy.’

‘But did you like it?’ I asked.

*The Soviet equivalent of Kentucky Fried.