Nicola Barker - The Yips

Jen stares at him for a few seconds, ruminatively, then her focus shifts slightly, and after another, shorter, somewhat more speculative pause:

‘Holy fuck , Gene! You little scamp!’

He glances over his shoulder, spooked.

‘Do my eyes deceive me,’ Jen demands, with a pantomimic gawp, as he turns back around to face her again (still none the wiser), ‘or are those a bunch of filthy love bites on your neck?’

There are no empty tables in the crowded hospital canteen. Sheila scans the room, her eyelids weighted by an excess of painkillers. She is precariously balanced on one crutch, her handbag swinging on her shoulder, her free hand clutching on to a packet of egg mayonnaise sandwiches and a piping-hot cappuccino in a sealed, plastic cup. She eventually fights her way over to a spare chair in the corner, smiles at the table’s glowering occupant and asks if she might occupy the seat.

The woman she addresses is slight, of colour, and wears a heavy pair of square, tortoiseshell reading glasses which have slipped halfway down the bridge of her nose. Her small face is framed by a mass of wild, curly black hair. Her full lips shine with Vaseline. She has dark rings under her eyes.

‘Sure,’ she says, after a long, five-second pause, ‘feel free.’

She twitches her nose then returns to her book. It’s entitled The Diary of Frida Kahlo — An Intimate Self-Portrait. The cover is an arrestingly amateurish daub by the artist of herself in the guise of a scary, witch-like wild-woman. This cartoon is — by sheer coincidence (and in the loosest possible sense) — a fairly accurate depiction of the general overall demeanour of the person currently in possession of it.

Sheila sits down, with a grunt. Her lone crutch falls to the floor. She curses under her breath. The glowering woman gazes up at her, laconically — a further five seconds pass, another nose twitch follows — then she sucks on her tongue and bends over to retrieve it.

‘You fall?’ she demands, in her husky but nicely modulated Jamaican accent. ‘Or something fall on you?’

‘Something fell on me.’ Sheila takes back the crutch, with a nod of thanks. ‘An electricity meter. I tried to block it with my shin …’

The woman bursts out laughing. Her laugh is like the warning bark of a hyena. Several people turn to peer at them, alarmed.

‘I’m waiting for an x-ray,’ Sheila continues (somewhat discomforted by the laugh herself). ‘I blacked out mid-way through a baptism — just for a couple of seconds, tops — and my parishioners insisted on dragging me down here. The doctor thinks the bone might be chipped.’

She pauses (embarrassed by this high level of unburdening). ‘They only have one free crutch in casualty. Somebody stole the other.’

‘Shins can be dicey,’ the woman muses. ‘I crushed both my shins one time during an anti-logging demonstration in south-eastern Venezuela — Bolivar State. Been there?’

Sheila shakes her head.

‘Well site security “accidentally” rolled a twenty-ton pile of timber on to our small group of protesters. One man was killed outright — decapitated — a local indigenous tribesman, a chief. Father of twelve girls. Another lost both his legs. I broke both feet. Shins were crushed. The nearest hospital was twenty-nine hours away. Dirt roads. Mountain passes. They called for a helicopter but it never came. We did the journey in an open-backed Land-Rover. We had one bottle of water between five of us and nothing to eat. The pain was incredible. I had two blood transfusions. Contracted a rare form of hepatitis as an added bonus.’

She grimaces at the memory, twitches her nose, and then returns to her book, a slight sneer playing at the corner of her lips.

Sheila gazes at the woman for several seconds, uncertain how to react (Awe? Sympathy? Incredulity?), then unwraps her sandwiches, takes a bite and carefully eases the lid from her coffee cup. She watches the woman read.

‘I really enjoyed the Heyden Herrera,’ she eventually murmurs.

The woman ignores her.

‘His biography of Frida Kahlo,’ Sheila adds, almost to herself.

‘Never read it.’ The woman glances back up again, takes a sip from her glass of orange juice and snaps a small chunk from the end of her unappetizing-looking organic flapjack.

‘It’s very good.’ Sheila shrugs.

The woman pops the flapjack into her mouth then appraises Sheila from under heavily weighted lids as she chews.

‘Why?’ she eventually wonders.

‘Well it’s very detailed … uh … nicely anecdotal, cleverly structured, beautifully illustrated … Oh, and he pulls no punches about the serious artistic and emotional ramifications of her tram accident.’

‘Tram accident?’

The woman twitches her nose.

Sheila nods.

‘There was a tram accident?’

‘The handrail went straight through her womb,’ Sheila expands. ‘She was eighteen. The bus was criminally overcrowded. It’s what defined Kahlo as an artist — as a woman. She could never have children. She spent her entire adult life in unendurable pain. That’s basically what her paintings are all about.’

‘ Hmmn …’ The woman continues to appraise Sheila, eyes still half-closed, then eventually murmurs, ‘You remind me of … What they call that old girl again? Sister Mary Beckett? The art critic?’

‘Sister Wendy Beckett,’ Sheila corrects her (uncertain whether to be pleased or offended). ‘Well I’m very flattered …’ (she opts to settle for the former), ‘although I’m not actually a nun, I’m a minister.’

‘Well you got hair like a nun,’ the woman counters.

‘You think so?’ Sheila raises her hand to her head. ‘I only just had it cut.’

‘It’s gay hair,’ the woman opines, with a mischievous snort. ‘Gay nun’s hair and that’s a fact.’

‘Thanks.’ Sheila smiles back, brusquely. ‘Ever considered a career in the diplomatic corps?’

‘It’s funny you should ask that …’ the woman snorts again, not remotely offended.

‘It is?’ Sheila’s nonplussed.

‘It is,’ the woman confirms, gnomically.

‘How so?’ Sheila persists.

‘I work in the field of human and environmental rights,’ the woman explains, ‘I spend my whole life rubbing up against arseholes and diplomats.’

‘A lawyer?’ Sheila asks. ‘Or a journalist?’

‘Lawyer, blogger, activist. Although I’ve been disbarred from practising in half the West Indies and most of both the Americas. I stir up shit, basically,’ she continues, taking another sip of her juice. ‘They call me a bitch-kitty, a rabble-rouser, a ball-breaker …’

‘You’re the anti-diplomat,’ Sheila opines.

‘Just like your good friend Jesus Christ,’ the woman smirks, then twitches her nose, then peers down at her book, then blinks, then twitches her nose again, then looks up. Sheila is anxiously combing her fingers through her hair.

‘The hair’s cute,’ the woman clucks. ‘I’m a big fan of those butch gay girls. I lived with two gay nuns in Barbados for six months one time. We was protesting against a two hundred million dollar landfill site.’

‘Any injuries?’ Sheila wonders, drolly.

The woman opens her mouth and loosens one of her front teeth. She then pushes it back in again, adjusts her glasses and returns to her book. As she reads the glasses slip back down her nose.

‘Are you prone to headaches at all?’ Sheila wonders.

‘Pardon me?’

The woman glances up, irritated.

‘Headaches?’

‘Why d’you ask?’

‘I notice how your glasses keep slipping down your nose. Mine used to do that all the time. I suffered from these really terrible headaches and I didn’t know why. Thought it might be an allergy or something. Turns out it was caused by reading through out-of-focus eyeglasses. When the glasses slip down your nose they automatically go out of focus. You’re straining your eyes without even realizing.’