Nicola Barker - The Yips

‘ Yipeee! ’ Mallory claps her hands and skips off, delighted.

‘We’re going to Eurodisney!’ she sings, all the way down the stairs.

‘Eurodisney!’ Sheila snorts. ‘Good try, kiddo!’ she shouts. ‘Better luck next time, eh?!’

Gene hasn’t moved. He is in a state of profound mental and emotional turmoil. His mouth is dry. His eyes are burning. He parts his lips to speak at exactly the same instant as Mallory trills: ‘I love your new hair, Mummy!’ from the bottom of the stairs.

‘Thank you, Mallory,’ Sheila shouts back, then turns to Gene with a fond smile. ‘Aw! Bless her!’

‘Big news?’ Gene creaks.

‘Did you get my text?’ Sheila asks (determined not to be diverted from her original course). He nods, grimly, expecting the worst — almost willing her to know everything simply to save him from the trouble of saying it out loud; composing it into tawdry sentences. So many words available … he muses (moving from his former state of verbal paucity to one of verbal superfluity in the course of a mere instant), feeling himself floating — without hope or sense or mass — in an alien constellation of possible nouns, verbs and pronouns.

‘It was just so uncomfortable — embarrassing,’ she clucks, ‘I mean she had no idea that you were working with Ransom, for starters —’

‘I didn’t think …’ Gene tries to interject.

‘And she didn’t have a clue about the letter.’

‘The letter?’ Gene echoes.

‘From the bank. The one you said you’d found. She had no idea — not an inkling. So when I mentioned it — thinking she already knew — she had this awful kind of … of mini-meltdown. Then the bloody meter fell out of the cupboard. Nessa was sitting on the floor just behind me so I took the weight of it on my leg.’ She points to her bandage. ‘Valentine had run upstairs, in floods of tears, meanwhile …’

Gene winces.

‘And that’s when I find the little safe — the collection. It was all just so …’ — she draws a deep breath — ‘so completely overwhelming.’

‘Hold on a second.’ He frowns, shaking his head, confused. ‘The meter fell out and you found …’

‘Her dad’s collection,’ Sheila repeats, ‘behind the meter. The whip, the medals, the rings, the wallet.’

She blanches. ‘I actually picked the thing up. I held it in my hand. There was the registration number …’

She shudders. ‘Valentine went mad when she found me holding it — I honestly had no idea at that stage. She came over all dark and full of self-loathing, talking about how bad she was, how she deserved to be unhappy, how she hated herself, how she was just like her father, all this stuff about his “legacy” and her love of the skin and how the paler the skin was the stronger the mark …’

Sheila shakes her head, exhausted. ‘I just wish you’d told me in the first place,’ she rounds off.

‘There was a wallet?’ Gene’s still all at sea.

‘The pride of his collection, apparently. A skin wallet. From a concentration camp.’

Gene stares at her for a few seconds, uncomprehending.

‘And this stuff was actually being stored …?’ he finally murmurs.

‘Behind the meter. In a little safe. Like a dusty, brick larder. You’re telling me you didn’t know?’ It’s now Sheila’s turn to look disbelieving.

‘Nope.’ Gene shakes his head.

She stares at him for a minute.

‘You look awful. Pale. D’you feel okay?’

He nods. Then he shakes his head again, his shoulders slumping forward.

‘I’ve done something terrible —’ he starts off.

‘Tea’s ready!’ Mallory yells up the stairs.

‘We’re on our way down!’ Sheila calls back.

‘Sorry.’ She stands up and moves towards him, frowning, concerned. ‘I’ve been so busy banging on about myself …’

She reaches up and softly touches his cheek then his forehead with the back of her hand. Gene’s mobile starts ringing from his jacket pocket in the hallway.

‘Warm,’ she murmurs.

He tries to tear his eyes away from hers but he can’t. He tries to swallow but he can’t. He feels his guilt leaking from every orifice. He is drenched in self-loathing.

‘Tell me!’ She gazes up at him, her eyes full of a sudden tenderness. ‘It can’t be all that bad, surely?’

‘Come on!’ Mallory calls. ‘Before it goes cold!’

Sheila doesn’t move.

‘I … I … I … I did a reading,’ Gene stutters, nauseous, ‘for Ransom’s assistant, and I ended up lying about what I saw.’

‘You mean a palm reading?’

Sheila withdraws slightly, shocked. Gene nods. Coward! he’s thinking. Quitter! Gutless ninny!

These insults whirlpool around him, every harsh consonant dressed — as though for combat — in jingling spurs.

‘But I thought …’ — she’s confused — ‘I thought you didn’t do that kind of thing any more — simply as a matter of principle.’

‘I don’t.’ Gene winces, listening to his phone ringing, the spurs jangling, half there, half absent, his tongue in ribbons. ‘But he begged me. We were stuck in traffic.’

‘Well I can’t pretend I’m not a little disappointed.’ Sheila limps over to a nearby chest of drawers, takes out some pants and a pair of tracksuit bottoms and starts to gingerly pull them on under her dressing gown. ‘I mean to do a reading in the first place, but then to lie about the results …’

‘There were just so many bad things about the hand’ — Gene struggles to focus, to defend himself — ‘a weak Line of Head, an interrupted Line of Life, his Line of Fate ascending to the Mount of Saturn — which is a really tragic sign at the best of times …’

‘So you lied.’ Sheila has her back to him. She’s taken off her dressing gown and is now putting on a bra. Gene idly watches her reflection in the dressing table mirror. Her nipples are the colour of drinking chocolate — beautiful — a pale, creamy, malted brown. He blinks.

‘So you lied,’ she repeats.

‘It reminded me of when I was a kid and I got presented with a tragic hand,’ he murmurs, ‘I’d always try and accentuate the positive no matter what.’

‘By lying,’ Sheila persists.

‘By improvising,’ he modifies.

‘Improvising?’ Sheila’s incredulous. ‘How, exactly?’

‘Well,’ Gene struggles to remember, ‘there was a car overheating nearby and the driver was pouring a bottle of water into the tank … I suddenly found myself telling him that there was a strong connection with travel and water on his hand — there was a tiny square near the Line of Life which made me think of …’

‘Travel and water ?!’ Sheila snorts.

‘… of a lake, or some kind of … an enclosed expanse of …’

‘Hardly the world’s most imaginative scenario!’ Sheila pertly derides him.

‘But that was the awful thing!’ Gene confesses. ‘He lapped it up! He was ecstatic! It was exactly what he’d been hoping for! He told me how he’d recently become obsessed by this Mexican tycoon, an engineer who’s developed this system, this state-of-the-art treatment system for creating giant, crystal-clear lagoons.’

‘Lagoons?’ Sheila’s becoming a little overwhelmed by all this information.

‘He’d reached out to this man and he’d been offered some kind of work experience in Chile or Peru — I forget which — but he can’t drive and he was naturally nervous about such a radical change in direction at this stage in his career.’

He looks to Sheila for some kind of input but she’s momentarily preoccupied with adjusting her hair in the mirror.

‘Then he asked me if there was any prospect of … of romance.’