Nicola Barker - Reversed Forecast

Sam didn’t pause to check her own reflection. Her stomach . How did it feel? As if she’d just been told the lemonade she’d been drinking was actually turpentine. A kind of horror. Confusion? No. A pure feeling without fixed meaning.

Sarah led the way, pushing past people at the back, moving gradually forwards. Near the front, everyone was dancing. Several people were stage diving.

Sam shouted over the noise, ‘If we get too close we’ll get thrown about. Everyone’s pushing.’

Sarah launched herself into the middle of the fray. Sam opted to stay back, craning her neck, trying to see Connor. Eventually she could see him, banging away at his drum-kit, hair in his face, T-shirt still on but soaking wet.

I want to feel part of this, she thought. She wanted to, but suddenly she felt removed from everything. Lonely. Alone. The drum, the beat, the sound it made, reminded her. Of what?

She was twelve years old and Sylvia was asking her if she could borrow her skipping rope. The music — she couldn’t escape it, but she could block it — came in waves. It reminded her of the rope: swinging round and round, whizzing, whirring and slapping the ground.

Sylvia had borrowed it. Sam heard the rope turning: vicious, unstoppable, cyclical. She watched Sylvia’s feet as she jumped, inefficiently shod in a pair of old, soft, blue canvas deck shoes. Sylvia counted as she jumped, ‘One, two, three, four …’ By the time she’d reached fifty, her feet had grown heavier, faltering. She stopped on fifty-four, without grace, clumsily tangled, her breathing laboured.

On the ground, surrounding her, their necks and wings broken, were five or six birds. Injured by the rope. Killed by the rope.

Sylvia fell to her knees and gathered them up with her hands, her breath turning into jerky tears.

Sam had watched coldly, thinking, Will I ever love anything that much?

Her heart contracted and the feeling she experienced was not so much love as jealousy.

Steven spent the evening watching Sophie’s Choice on video. During any especially tedious or gut-wrenching moments he cast an eye, somewhat apathetically, over the latest edition of The Stage .

Steven loved Meryl Streep. If asked to explain this adoration, he’d say that he loved the way that she was never shrewish. She was so dignified. She could be angry — he thought she did Angry extremely well — but she was never vulgar. She didn’t forget herself, her dignity.

Sometimes he’d masturbate as he watched her on screen. She was so aloof, and that in itself was sexy. But after he’d finished — when he’d cleared away the tissues and washed his hands — he’d always feel an intense pang of self-disgust.

He’d been staring at one particular page of The Stage for several minutes, reading but not reading, when something caught his eye and caused him to blink, pick up the paper and stare at it more intently. The focus of his attention was a small but nicely written obituary towards the bottom of the page. He read it, re-read it.

Sylvia watched Brera talking on the phone. She watched but she didn’t listen. She’d been using the nebulizer since the morning, and its vapours had been opening her bronchial tubes, releasing the hostage air in her lungs, and then escaping; travelling onwards, upwards, making her brain smart, glisten, pulsate, making colours painfully clear, and smells … but she couldn’t smell anything, she just knew that everything was clearer, magnified, extended, elongated. Her senses were ecstatically jumbled.

Brera was sitting close by, talking on the phone but also staring at Sylvia, thinking, It’s not so much that she can’t breathe, more that she doesn’t want to breathe. She’s happier not breathing.

She focused on Sylvia’s face. Her lips were moving, she was muttering, and whenever the mask fell from her nose and mouth, Brera could hear disjointed pieces of conversation. She struggled to keep her attention focused on Steven.

Inside Sylvia’s head facts and images were floating, connecting, disconnecting. She said, ‘I can see these conversations taking place, everywhere, but really the conversation is the same one. It’s the same conversation.’

She saw herself in a place full of bright lights and a bright girl with white hair was saying something about ideas.

‘You say you like ideas? What does that mean?’

A voice responded. It came from nowhere, but it was a harsh voice, full of emphasis: ‘Ideas alter things, form things, change things unilaterally. They can be modified, disciplined, controlled. I see stuff. Life. I see life and it’s only a mishmash of facts, thoughts, images, pictures. But everything crystallizes in my head, forms doctrine, produces its own clear meaning. My mind works that way.’

Sylvia couldn’t understand this at all. The girl seemed to be having difficulty too, but she said, ‘Life is more jumbled than you think. Caring about things should be enough. Even if you can only manage to care about one thing. You have to understand what it is to be good. Not so much what you can make of life, but what you can give to it.’

Sylvia wasn’t bothered any more, but the dialogue continued anyway. ‘That’s an idea, though! It’s just that you can’t be bothered to take it any further, to politicize. It’s just sloppy thinking.’

Sylvia could taste the word politicize on her tongue. Its rough edges, its sharpness. She had no feelings either way — towards it or against it — she could only taste it.

The white voice was saying, ‘I never take things further because that’s how you get into trouble. Once you accept one thing, you end up accepting loads of stuff, half of which you don’t really understand. When things get too big, they get out of your control. You start off by thinking that you’re being good, but you end up finding out that ideas have a life of their own. They can turn bad, can make you bad and you don’t even know it.’

The hard face, the hard voice, laughed. This laughter tickled Sylvia. It had its own particular charm, this laugh, like snuff, or the smell of fruity pipe tobacco. ‘But I want to get into trouble! Don’t you? Why not get into trouble? You’re naive. You know it too, and you think that your naivety makes you good, but in fact all it makes you is easy to manipulate.’

‘Manipulate? Who by?’

‘By me. By anyone and everyone.’

Sylvia felt herself being sucked away and thrown between the stars, but the stars were on the ceiling, were, in fact, just one star: a bright bulb peeking through a wicker shade. The roof was white. Now she heard something else, but it was the same thing she had heard before. A familiar voice, but a different place, in a sea of orange and roughness: ‘I’m like you. I like to think about things, to be open to every influence and then to make up my mind. But sometimes, sometimes it becomes impossible to make up your mind because the information, the information … books, paper, pens, books, films, paper, pens …’

Sylvia digested the word information and it made her want to burp. The voice said ‘information’ almost as though it had not said that word at all but had said ‘sex’ — with a mixture of desire and dread. ‘Sometimes you end up finding out too much. Reading, discovering and uncovering.’

Sylvia wanted to locate the other half of this conversation, thought for one awful second that she herself was expected to provide it. Luckily this was not so. The voice came, the rebuttal. It was a loving voice, wheedling and whining: ‘You don’t have to digest everything, to crystallize it. Why can’t you just open yourself up to things, be open to things and let that be an end in itself? I guess that’s a sort of, a kind of …’ The voice hesitated. ‘I was going to say “liberalism”, but I don’t want to involve myself in all that.’