Nicola Barker - The Yips

‘How’s the gorgeous Marek?’

‘Do you still receive the college magazine?’

‘ Urgh! ’ she exclaims, reading on.

‘… more tentative, more honest and organic way!’ she witters.

‘Vania thought your email was completely hilarious!’

‘Oh ha! ha! ha!’ she trills, then, ‘Breathless? Volcanic?! I’ll give you volcanic!’

She grabs a mini-baseball sitting, innocuously, on Stan’s desk and throws it — with a strangled yell — on to the nearby bed.

She closes her eyes and inhales.

‘Okay, okay … She likes the work,’ she murmurs, ‘she thinks it’s “interesting”. This is actually very positive. This is actually good news.’

She opens her eyes.

‘ Is this a nervous breakdown?’ she wonders, startled, trying to encompass what that might consist of in her mind.

‘I don’t feel nervous,’ she eventually surmises, ‘and I don’t feel broken.’

She tips her head, speculatively. ‘A little chipped, maybe.’

She turns and inspects the ladder which still hangs, unfolded, in the hallway. She considers Mallory and her copious tears over dinner.

‘But I don’t want you to go to Jamaica, Mummy!’

Her mind turns to Gene — how quiet he’d been at tea, how wan and hollow-seeming and compliant, then to her earlier conversation with Valentine.

‘I mean if Gene isn’t religious. If you’ve never actually shared the same, core beliefs, doesn’t it make him feel almost …’

Sheila scowls.

‘Almost what?’ she wonders, spooked. She promptly recalls their pre-tea chat about the illicit palm reading — his feelings of guilt. Was there something odd in the way …? Something …?

‘No wonder you look ill!’ She re-enacts their conversation, remembering herself laughing, on edge, just wishing she could tell him, yes … her mind packed full of other stuff — her big escape — her sacrifice — her … Gene just standing there, same as always, at the edges of the page — Gene, the white surround — the frame — the margin.

She recalls the odd look on his face.

‘That’s not why I look ill.’

Is that what he’d …? Or was it …?

‘That’s not why I …’

Her heart momentarily freezes.

Is there something else? Something wrong? Was he about to …?

She stands up, panicked.

‘No.’

She sits down again.

The phone starts ringing.

She stands up again, turns, and limps out of Stan’s room, heading towards the sound. In the hallway is her old suitcase, pressed up against the wall. She pulls it out, places it down and opens it. She stares at it, frowning.

‘Really must check those messages,’ she sighs, but doesn’t move. Instead she kicks off her sandals and steps inside it. She sits down, then lies on one side, curling up, reaching out her arm to grab the lid.

‘Breathless! Volcanic! Zealous! Grandiloquent!’ she announces (perhaps somewhat grandiloquently), then lets it fall.

Five seconds later: ‘Just a little chipped,’ she mutters.

Ten seconds later: ‘For heaven’s sake, Sheila! This is completely ridiculous!’

Much to Gene’s evident discomfort, Valentine insists on clutching on to his hand from the moment they leave the car, throughout their clandestine journey to Ransom’s room, during the brief but detailed consultation (in dramatic whispers) between she and Ransom about the nature of the tattoo itself, on a short trip to the bathroom (where she stares into the mirror and emphatically whispers, ‘All will be well,’ then turns, with a gulp, ‘I’m doing this for Sheila. It’s for her. To make amends. You’ll tell her that, won’t you?’), right up until she finally commences unfolding her portable tattooing bench and unpacking various, exotic items of tattooing paraphernalia (and some less so — the rubber gloves, the sterile wipes) from a large and battered holdall.

In fact she barely shifts her eyes from his face, even (and this is a source of some confusion and embarrassment) during a series of formal introductions. There’s a thoroughly bedazzled Terence Nimrod, for starters (who flits around the room like an earthbound, media Tinkerbell, a trusty Bic his magic wand), a photographer called Kenny (a small, fine-boned, shaven-headed Spaniard — with cold, thick-black-lashed green eyes and an improbably perfect smile — to whom Gene takes an immediate dislike) and Kenny’s downtrodden assistant, Duke (a tall, powerful-looking, ginger-haired Glaswegian — with a surprisingly effete voice — who seems to have no real function except as the silent repository of intermittent abuse).

Kenny has a tiny, digital camera and he snaps away with it from the moment they enter, interspersing savage assaults on Duke (delivered in a whispered, rasping, guttural Spanish, which Duke doesn’t appear to understand) with a series of keening instructions and compliments (‘Chin up — God you’re so beautiful. I love it! I love you! You’re amazing! You’re dynamite! Now just … good … good … give me just a little bit more of the … Perfect! You’re a genius! You’re a natural! This is so easy! You’re making this so easy for me! I love it!’).

Ransom seems subdued. He admits to having taken a fistful of benzodiazepines and has a bottomless glass of whisky virtually glued to his right hand. He and Valentine circle each other, warily (like two, tired dogs eyeing the same padded basket), but all exchanges — while cool — are profoundly courteous. Gene almost detects a quiet kind of bond there; an immediate, almost instinctual shorthand operating between them, like they’re members of two very different tribes (one disports itself, wildly, in rough hides and feathers, the other simply glistens, mysteriously, in hi-tech, silver fabrics) who have fought and been wounded in the same awful war.

Ransom appears to love the grass idea (‘So stupid!’ he raves. ‘So random! So obvious!’), and seems still more delighted when Valentine goes on to describe how she’d like to tattoo a ‘hole’ right in the middle of it. ‘Imagine …’ she whispers, eyes shining excitedly, ‘the messy, geometric textures of the grass, then that harsh, dark, cut into the compacted soil beneath; the man-made juxtaposing the arbitrary — the formal juxtaposing the natural — the surface juxtaposing the subterranean …’

Ransom wonders (with typical, golfing homo-centricity) whether there might even be the suggestion of a ball inside this posited ‘cup’ of hers. Valentine’s enthusiasm immediately diminishes. She shakes her head. ‘The tattoo is all about desire,’ she tells him (eyes still intermittently darting towards Gene’s), ‘not deliverance. Possibility is everything — the bud, the green shoot. Fulfilment — the flower — is death.’

‘Good point,’ Ransom concedes, doing an excellent job (Gene thinks) of looking like he knows what the hell she’s banging on about.

Del Renzio phones the room (on a series of spurious provisos) three times during the ten minutes subsequent to their arrival. Nimrod — in a state of acute paranoia — takes the precaution of putting on some music (finally settling — after a period of heated debate among the assembled parties — on Willie Nelson’s charming covers album Across the Borderline ; the one CD from the small selection kindly provided by the hotel that nobody actively hates).

He tries to adjust the volume according to how much noise Valentine’s tattoo gun produces. She obligingly plugs it in and hits the foot pump while Gene dashes outside to check how audible it is from the hallway. After several trips in and out, it’s decided that the volume necessary to disguise the resultant buzz will be so loud as to engender complaints from nearby residents. Nimrod — still thinking on his feet — dashes off to his room and returns — minutes later — holding an electric razor.