Nicola Barker - Small Holdings

Ray sighed again, even deeper this time. ‘It’s true, then,’ he determined, out of nowhere, ‘what Saleem said about you being a man of integrity.’

‘What?’

Ray sighed again. ‘I might have some crisps,’ he muttered, and then, ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe we should just bide our time and keep things in proportion. And maybe Doug’s right too, about the circle and everything coming back to where it started. You never know. You can’t tell with life, can you? What’s around the next corner?’

Ray finished his drink with a flourish and ordered three packets of smoky bacon.

I TESTED OUT the physical viability of my damaged hand during my walk home from the pub. First off, I tried bending the fingers with the aid of my undamaged hand, then I tried bending them without assistance, next I tried to form them into a kind of half-fist, and finally I pulled out Dr John Sledge’s I’m Not Angry, I’m Hurting from my jacket pocket and tested whether I could fold my fingers round it and bear its weight. After performing this final task with some ease I decided that maybe things weren’t as bad in dextral terms as they’d initially seemed.

Home is the ground floor of a nice house on Broomfield Road which has been converted into two self-contained flats. The road runs adjacent to the park on its southern perimeter. The flat used to belong to my grandmother and now it belongs to me. Consequently, it has a dusty old chintz and velvet feel to it, but is spartan too, like the home of someone in two minds about the nature and possibilities of interior decor. And although by instinct I’m a small, shy, dozy creature, happy holed up, solitary, contained, in fact I get claustrophobic inside and prefer a place where there is no roof, only sky, and a high sky at that.

I held Dr John Sledge in my hand and I swung my arm. I sniffed the tea-towel, which was still damp, but drier now, and musty, robust, sassy with the tang of sweat. Using my good hand, I felt inside my pocket for my keys. And then I saw her. On my doorstep.

Saleem was glaring. ‘Where the hell have you been? I’ve been round here twice. I’ve been waiting for absolutely bloody hours.’

Saleem, incongruously, on my doormat. Was she a figment? A fragment? An ugly spectre? An invasive sylph? A sprite?

I tested out my voice. It was steady. ‘What are you doing here?’

She carried right on scowling. ‘We’ve got to talk. Now. ‘

I was tired, suddenly, ‘Can’t it wait? Would you mind?’

She shook her head. ‘It can’t wait. Open the door. Let me inside. I’m freezing.’

It was a warm night. I didn’t want to open the door. If I let her in she might never leave, might take up residence, squat, like she did in the park keeper’s house. She had that adhesive, that sticky quality which wouldn’t come out in the wash.

‘You’re pissed,’ she muttered, watching as I fumbled with my keys.

‘I had three pints and I’m perfectly sober.’

‘Great in a fucking crisis. First thing you do is reach for the bottle.’

I took my keys out. ‘There’s no crisis and I’m not drunk.’

‘Let me smell your breath.’ Uninvited, unexpected, she pushed her face into mine, sniffed, grinned and then took this opportunity to bite me, sharply, impishly on the nose.

‘Oh Christ.’ Why did she do that? Her tongue was a cattle prod. She was a ball of venom, slobbering on me.

She cackled. ‘Open up. Make me wait out here any longer and I’ll fuck you up the arse with my stump. And remember,’ she added, ‘I’ve been standing all the while on only one sure limb, which is twice as tiring.’ She knocked my shins with her stick.

She has that capacity to offend, Saleem, to hurt, mortally. I hate that in her. I’d like to hurt her back but I just don’t have it in me. I’d like to injure her, knock the other leg out from under her, just once.

I opened the door. She pushed past me and bounded into the kitchen, pulled wide the oven door and switched the gas on full.

‘What’re you doing?’

‘Gassing myself. What d’you think? I’m cold. Give me a match.’

‘If you want to light it then use the ignition.’

‘I want a match. I’m cold. Give me a bloody match right now or else.’

She was cold-blooded. An amber mamba. I gave her the match and said, ‘Switch it off first. Don’t just. .’

Floooom! A gust of blue flame bellowed out of the oven. Saleem didn’t move or shirk. ‘Yeah! I love that.’

She stared at the flame for a while, grinning, while it filled her irises and made them yellower. Then she snatched her eyes away, blinked, pulled out a chair and sat down.

‘OK, ‘ she said, ‘So you don’t know why I’m here, do you? Maybe you think I’ve come to appraise your living quarters. I’ve never even been in your house before. You never invited me.’ She looked around the kitchen. ‘Yeah, not bad. If things go wrong at the park after Friday I could easily make a den for myself here. Wouldn’t take too much adjusting.’

She smiled, apparently well satisfied with this pronouncement, waiting, now, for a response.

I didn’t respond. I said, ‘What’s the problem?’

‘Make me a cuppa.’

‘It’s late.’

‘Go on, I’m freezing.’

‘It’s nearly midnight. I want to go to bed, if you don’t mind.’

‘Make me a cuppa and then I’ll come with you.’

‘I haven’t got any milk.’

‘Fine.’ She stood up, picked up her stick from the table. ‘Let’s fuck.’

My temples throbbed. I took one deep breath and then another. ‘Why are you here Saleem?’

She grinned at me, dug her hand into the pocket of the large denim jacket she was wearing and pulled out a sheet of paper.

‘See this?’ She passed it to me. I took it with my good hand. ‘Nancy left it out for Doug on the kitchen table. It’s from the nursery in Southend she visited today.’

‘So?’

‘Well read it, stupid.’

I inspected it.

‘Look at it,’ she said, excitedly. ‘Privet!’

She nudged me between my ribs with her elbow.

‘Privet!’ she exclaimed, yet again. ‘And all the while I’d been thinking private. Doug’s been going on about being private, but I’d got it all wrong, see? He meant privet.’

Saleem had lost it.

‘No I don’t see.’

I did see, however, that Doug had ordered literally a ton of the stuff. He’d spent a fortune on it. Three hundred pounds which I was certain the park didn’t possess.

Saleem eyed me inquisitively. ‘And there I was, ‘ she said, ‘thinking that the park was broke and that you could all barely afford to put petrol in the mower.’

‘It’s nothing,’ I said, calmly. ‘I already had an inkling about this.’ My words sounded half-formed.

Saleem snorted, ‘Phil, you’re so bloody transparent. Like a square of polythene.’

I folded up the receipt and handed it back to her.

‘Privet, private,’ she continued, speculatively, ‘one letter different.’

‘I can’t dispute that.’

She pushed her skinny face up close to mine, ‘Doug’s going to do something very stupid, and he’s going to do it soon, and it’s going to screw everything up.’

If I’d stepped back at this point I’d have ended up in the oven. Warm air against the back of my legs was already making me prickle.

‘And where would you be without the park, huh? And where would I be? If someone new takes over the tender they’d be bound to evict me. They wouldn’t care about my history with the place. Not strangers.’

‘It won’t come to that.’

She drew even closer, ‘It might. It just might.’

And I felt something strange, in my midriff. Saleem’s finger. It had threaded its way through a gap in my shirt, between the buttons, and was poking, sharply, pointedly, into my navel. Then it rotated, like I was a clockwork mouse and she was winding me up.