Nicola Barker - The Yips

‘Is that a roundabout way of saying you’re depressed?’ Gene wonders, concerned.

‘Uh …’ She ponders this for a while. ‘Let’s change the subject, shall we?’

He stares at her, uncertain whether to do as she asks. Her mouth is slowly turning down at its corners. Her jaw is tightening. Her nostrils begin to flare.

‘Let me finish off the drying,’ he murmurs, reaching out his hand for the cloth.

‘It’s almost done, now,’ she sniffs, glancing up at the ceiling as if to preclude any unwanted accumulation of excess moisture in her eyes.

‘D’you know anything about agoraphobia?’ he promptly demands (keen not to precipitate a total breakdown directly before Evening Service). ‘Is it a curable condition? Didn’t you counsel a parishioner with it at one stage?’

‘Agoraphobia?’

She struggles to focus. ‘Uh …’

‘I met this young woman today —’

‘Fear of the marketplace,’ Sheila butts in (pulling herself together with what appears to be a mammoth amount of effort).

‘Sorry?’

‘ Agora …’ She grabs another cereal bowl. ‘It’s the Greek for marketplace. Agora-phobia: a fear of the marketplace.’

‘I see.’ Gene is nonplussed.

‘There was a woman I visited while I was in training up in Sheffield. Her name was …’ She thinks hard for a second as she looks down at the cereal bowl then notices a small food remnant still gracing its rim. ‘Nina. Late thirties, early forties, unhappily married. Her husband was incredibly overbearing. Didn’t take the condition seriously — just thought it was yet more evidence of a basic lack of moral fibre …’ She places the bowl back into the sink, and then stares, glumly, through the window. ‘I think it was him who got the church involved, although it wasn’t an especially successful manoeuvre. She just really seemed to resent it.’

Sheila raises a hand to her face but Gene cannot tell — from the rear — if she’s moving aside a strand of hair or wiping away a tear with it. ‘Not my greatest piece of Community Outreach work, as I recollect.’

Her voice starts to shake a little.

‘This woman I met today — this agoraphobic …’ Gene is about to confide in her about the meeting with Valentine (the broken meter, the strange bruise), but then — in the light of the whole Stan farrago — he suddenly thinks better of it and falls silent.

‘This woman you met today …’ Sheila prompts him.

‘Uh … Yeah. She’d done something really strange to herself,’ Gene improvises.

‘Really?’

Sheila glances over her shoulder at him, her powerful, dark eyes dulled with a profound indifference.

‘She’d tattooed a brick on to her leg,’ Gene expands. ‘Several bricks. Incredibly lifelike …’

‘Bricks?’ Sheila echoes, blankly.

‘She’s an artist. It was some kind of an art statement, I suppose. She showed me this photograph. It was really beautifully taken …’

‘Ah …’

Her eyes suddenly glimmer with a momentary show of engagement. ‘ Women Who Marry Houses ,’ she muses.

‘Women who …?’

Sheila returns the tea towel to its hook.

‘It’s the title of a book I salvaged from the church jumble a couple of years back. Looked intriguing. There was a quote on the title page by Anne Sexton — one of the women poets I wrote my dissertation on at Oxford …’ She picks up the four, dry plates and places them into a cupboard. ‘It went something along the lines of …’ She frowns as she struggles to recall it: ‘ Women marry houses. It’s another kind of skin .’

She shrugs. ‘An odd concept, really, but it’s always stuck with me for some reason.’

Gene gazes at her as she speaks — slowly drinking in her ragged fringe, her deep frown lines, an area of inflammation in the centre of her right cheek, a suggestion of staining on one of her front teeth — and suddenly feels an incredibly powerful rush of emotion towards her.

‘You’re amazing,’ he says, his voice low and unexpectedly guttural. ‘So bloody wise.’

She turns to look at him, shocked.

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ she snaps, then pats him on the shoulder, straight after, almost as an afterthought, before heading off, morosely, to Evening Service.

‘I’m sorry …’ Valentine stares at her brother, her cheeks flushing, her expression one of complete bewilderment. ‘What kind of therapist did you say he was, exactly?’

Noel turns to the small, rotund, beetle-browed Asian man currently perched on their sofa and says, ‘What kind of therapist did you say you were?’

‘What kind? Hmmn . Well, I suppose — in the current vernacular — you might call me “a jack of all trades”,’ he says, amiably.

‘Karim was recommended by Salvatore at the daycare centre,’ Noel fills in. ‘He works with three — was it three?’ He looks to Karim for confirmation and Karim nods. ‘Three, yes.’

‘Three of the other patients. Salvatore says he works magic, that he’s a genius.’

Karim merely flaps his hand, modestly, at Noel’s compliments. He is wearing a pair of thin, white cotton trousers which finish some distance above his beige socks and brown sandals, a long, white cotton smock, with a light, grey cotton waistcoat over the top (its small, front pockets bulging with various paraphernalia). His hair curls behind his ears and he has a short, neat, prematurely greying beard but no moustache.

‘The Arabic translation of Karim,’ he volunteers, ‘is “the generous one”.’

He raises his eyes heavenward. ‘I believe that I have been given my many gifts by Almighty God, and that it is God’s will for me to share them generously. So here I am, today’ — he shrugs — ‘sharing them with you and your charming family.’

As he finishes speaking his gaze moves from the statue of the Virgin Mary to the picture of Kali on the shrine. The large, framed photograph on the wall of the genital tattoo has now been removed, but his gaze rests on the spot where it was formerly hung, as if — by some paranormal mechanism — it might actually still be visible to him.

‘Could I get you a drink?’ Vee wonders, finally remembering her manners. ‘A cup of tea, perhaps?’

‘No, not for me. I can’t stay long.’ Karim grimaces. ‘My stupid wife is in the car.’

‘Then you must invite her in!’ Valentine insists, horrified. ‘She’d be very welcome …’

‘Please don’t take this the wrong way’ — Karim leans forward and pulls up a sock — ‘but I’m actually relishing this brief interlude apart.’

As he speaks, Valentine glances towards her brother (who is busily tapping out a text on his phone), then leans over and peers through the front bay window. Between a couple of the slats in the blinds she sees what appears to be a magnificent, old Citroën (pale blue, with exquisite chrome-work). Sitting in the back seat, somewhat incongruously, is a lone woman in the full veil.

‘Don’t be shocked,’ Karim counsels, gauging her expression (that foggy, insect-ridden no-man’s-land between surprise and alarm). ‘It’s just a silly phase. A kind of social revolt against what she perceives as the corrupt and corrupting mores of Western society’ — he snorts, mirthlessly — ‘chiefly represented by yours truly, of course!’

He performs a little bow, palms pressed together, then adds, ‘Perhaps a Sprite, or a Diet Pepsi?’

Noel promptly heads off to the kitchen, still texting. Valentine continues to inspect Karim’s wife. It’s a warm evening. She is fanning her face (the tiny part of it that’s still visible) through a tiny slit in the dense mass of heavy-seeming, black fabric.

‘She looks hot,’ Vee observes.