Nicola Barker - Small Holdings

Nancy started wheezing more violently.

‘Out!’ the coat-check girl yelled, ‘before she hurls. Quick!’

‘Nancy.’ I shook her shoulder, harder this time, ‘Hey, Nancy, wake up.’

Very slowly, very gradually, Nancy opened her other eye. Wide and then wider.

‘Phil!’ she mumbled, speaking like her tongue had trebled in size and was working on inhabiting the whole of her head. Her right eye stared through me, the left eye skittered and slid around.

‘Hello Nancy. Where’s Doug?’

She turned her head, ‘Doug? Where?’

‘Yes. ‘

She eyed me expectantly. I stared back, for a moment, before it dawned on me that she wasn’t intent on telling but on waiting for an answer. I said, isn’t he still in your truck?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Nancy muttered, woozily, ‘all the veg-e-ta-bles.’ After a short pause she added, ‘Boom! Just like Gregory Peck. Boom!’ She cackled and made pathetic little mushroom-shaped cloud pictures in the air with her hands.

I peered up at the coat-check girl again. ‘Do you remember by any chance whether she arrived here alone or with someone else? A man.’ The coat-check girl was no longer feeling quite as cooperative as before. ‘She could’ve come in with seventeen eunuchs and a Jack Russell for all I care. I want her out of here.’

Nancy’s eyes were closing again. ‘Come on,’ I said, and grabbed hold of her arm. I tried to tug her up but wasn’t strong enough.

‘Out of my way, you twat,’ the coat-check girl clucked, pushing me aside, bending from the knee, lifting Nancy up with apparent ease and draping her across her shoulder. ‘I’ll take her down the corridor to the public phone and then it’s up to you,’ she declared tartly, and led the way.

The cab driver stared at Nancy and said, ‘If she spews in my car I’ll make you lick up every last drop of it.’

I gave him Ray’s address and then spent the entire journey staring at Nancy’s mouth and her throat, waiting for her to retch, waiting to catch any liquid in my cupped hands or in the flaps of my shirt-front.

Nancy didn’t seem to know what she was doing or where she was going. She lay across my lap and panted like an old dog pants when the sun has risen to its midday height and the shade he was lying in has crept a short distance away, but he’s too old and too tired to drag his stiff bones back into it. She panted in just that way, but thank God she did not retch. I still tried talking, though. ‘Doug,’ I kept asking, ‘where did you put him? Is he still in your truck? Was he bleeding?’ ‘Mine’s a Bacardi,’ she rasped, ‘with coke and ice.’

Once we’d arrived, the driver didn’t want to help me with Nancy but he didn’t have much choice. She had to be moved and I wasn’t man enough to move her. He dumped her on Ray’s doormat. She grinned up at him, gratefully, while he overcharged me.

Ray answered the door wearing an old striped night-shirt that reached just below his knees. He looked like a waxen and buttery Wee-Willie-Winkie.

‘So you found Nancy, then,’ he said, sounding not the slightest bit surprised, picking her up and tossing her like a bag of compost over his shoulder. I followed him upstairs, into his flat. He threw her face down on to his sofa. She pushed her nose into a pillow and wheezed.

‘How about Doug?’ Ray asked, ‘Did you find him too?’

‘Nope.’

He looked down at Nancy. ‘Did she tell you anything?’

To o drunk. I found her truck. I banged on the back of it but I got the feeling Doug wasn’t in there. It has a certain kind of echo when it’s empty.’

‘So, ‘ Ray inspected the palms of his hands, ‘either she dumped him somewhere or she took him to hospital. .’

‘Or else. .’

‘What?’

‘Or else she never took him in the first place.’

Ray didn’t seem impressed by this line of reasoning. He said, ‘Then why would she have taken her truck and gone and got herself so drunk that she could hardly string a sentence together?’

I shook my head, ‘I don’t know. Maybe she was ashamed. She wrecked the greenhouse. I’m positive of that.’

‘And maybe,’ Ray added, catching on to the whys and wherefores of speculation, ‘maybe Saleem did tell Doug after all, after she’d promised not to, about Nancy being blind in her eye.’

It was feasible, but I couldn’t help wondering what Saleem would have to gain from that particular line of action. I told Ray as much. Ray stared at me, wide-eyed.

‘You, of course,’ he said.

‘Me?’

‘She likes you.’

‘Nancy likes me?’

Ray cackled at this. When he laughed he tensed his belly and his night-shirt lifted to reveal the top of his dimpled knees. ‘Not Nancy, Saleem!’

‘Saleem?’

‘Yep. ‘

My chin dropped. ‘You don’t know that.’

‘I know it.’

‘She hates me.’

‘She hates everybody, but she hates you with a special kind of, uh, intensity.’ Ray was proud of these four fancy syllables. He would have worn them on his lapel as a badge if it had been possible.

I said, ‘I think that just means that she hates me more than other people, not that she. .’ I couldn’t say it, Noway. ‘Not that she. . hates me any less.’

Ray shrugged, i didn’t mean to step over the mark,’ he said, i just thought it might have had something to do with this particular situation.’

He nodded over towards Nancy. ‘She thinks you don’t like her,’ he added, off the top of his head.

‘Nancy?’

‘No! Saleem!’ He laughed.

‘She thinks I don’t like her? Why would she think that?’

‘I don’t know. She just does.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Just little things.’

‘Like what?’

‘Well. .’ Ray thought about it for a while, ‘she thinks she makes you angry. You never pay her any attention when she talks to you. You just get, kind of, huffy.’

‘Huffy?’

‘Yeah.’

I scratched my head. Why was I having this conversation? It was so embarrassing and I was embracing that embarrassment, but Ray plainly didn’t know what he was talking about.

‘Maybe we should phone Mercy,’ Ray said, changing tack suddenly, ‘and see if Doug’s there. Or maybe I should ring around some of the hospitals in the area and see if he’s been checked in.’

‘We wouldn’t want to ring Mercy and make her worry unnecessarily,’ I said, and then realized that Saleem had said the very same thing earlier that afternoon. ‘I’m sure Doug’s capable of looking after himself. I don’t think Nancy could have done anything too terrible to him. We’ll just have to wait until she sobers up a bit and see what she says then.’

‘And what about the meeting?’

‘Hopefully Doug will have turned up by the morning.’

‘And what if he’s crackers?’

‘We’ll work something out.’

Nancy started snoring. Her mouth vibrated into the pillow.

‘She’s got her own built-in muffler, there,’ Ray said, smiling, and added, ‘By the way, I don’t think she’s a bad person at heart. I don’t think she’d’ve wrecked the greenhouse without someone else putting her up to it.’

‘Well, I didn’t,’ I said, somewhat stupidly.

‘Neither did I,’ Ray said quickly. ‘And Doug wouldn’t have. And the Chinaman. .’

‘Forget about him.’

‘Yeah.’

We stared at each other in silence for a moment, then Ray showed me out.

RAY LIVES ON a strange street. Actually it’s a road, Avondale Road, and his flat is next door to the house where Stevie Smith, the poet, used to live. I checked my watch. Eleven twenty-two. Now what?

Stevie Smith, as far as I know, was Palmers Green’s most famous inhabitant, ever. The house she had lived in — a plain and undistinguished place — was rendered exceptional only by the cobalt-blue plaque on its wall. I stared at the plaque but it was too dark to read it properly.