Nicola Barker - Small Holdings

‘Nah. ‘

We followed behind at a slow pace. There seemed no reason to rush. As we walked I said, ‘You know, I think Doug’s right after all about everything going in a circle.’

‘Bollocks.’

We walked down and past the burnt-out museum.

‘He is right,’ I said, growing ever more certain, watching as the tractor turned right and picked up speed.

‘Ten pounds,’ Saleem whispered, reverently, ‘ten pounds says he goes straight into the ornamental pond.’

I put my hand into my pocket. ‘Ten pounds he doesn’t.’

The tractor veered boldly towards the pond.

‘He’s my hero,’ Saleem said. ‘He’s off his fucking head.’

And the tractor drew closer to the pond. And the ducks and the geese were waggling their tails and getting nervous. Some stood up. A couple honked and hissed. Doug’s hand waved regally from the tractor. He applied his brakes.

‘Told you,’ I said, cheering up suddenly, forgetting about the crazy golf and the litter and the dog mess and all that other business. ‘Told you,’ I said, ‘he’s slowing right down.’

Doug slowed down to a trundle but he didn’t stop. Not quite. Instead, very slowly, very carefully, he eased the tractor into the pond: front wheels, back wheels, drove for a few seconds and then stalled.

Saleem showed me the palm of her hand. ‘What did I tell you?’

Doug climbed out of the cab, holding his shears and with a length of green hose curled around his arm like a python. He waded through the pond, climbed up and out the other side, turned, waved again, holding the shears aloft, and then carried straight on walking.

Just for an instant, less than a second, Saleem’s outstretched palm sagged. ‘What’s he doing?’

‘More to the point,’ I said, ‘what’s he thinking?’

‘Easy enough,’ Saleem smirked, her palm coming back up and flattening out again. ‘He’s thinking about how badly and how thoroughly he’s going to fuck us all over.’

Her face sagged and then it tightened. She cackled. I turned, amazed, and watched her laughing. Then I found myself laughing. She made me laugh. The simple way she sliced through things. The wonderful way that she hissed and she slithered.

And up until that point, I’ll admit it, I had been wound up, halted, blocked, but then my mind did something so curious. It flew backwards, it turned, it clicked over — like one of those calendars that each day clicks over a page — and I saw Doug, in that instant, so clearly, so thoroughly.

I saw Doug as many things; pure and bright and full of light. I saw Doug as many things, in all his incarnations; and he was an insect, an egg, a pearl, an onion, a giant onion, many-layered. He was a jewel and a flower and a beautiful, bright yellow bird. He was all these things. He was everything. Doug was God and God was do G and Evil was dEvil and Devil was liveD, was livid, red, angry, emergent, emergency, was 999, was 666. I saw them, so clearly. I saw all these things.

And the park was my soul. And I would not leave this place. Soul. Soil. I would not. I could not. I could not leave this place.

It was then that the eye was like the ear, and the ear like the nose, and the nose like the mouth: for they were all one and the same. The mind was in rapture, the form dissolved, and the bones and flesh all thawed away; and I did not know how the frame supported itself and what the feet were treading upon. I gave myself away to the wind, eastward or westward, like leaves of a tree.

Lieh-tzu

NICOLA BARKER’S eight novels include Darkmans (short-listed for the 2007 Man Booker and Ondaatje prizes, and winner of the Hawthornden prize), and Wide Open (winner of the 2000 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award). She has also written two prize-winning collections of short stories, and her work has been translated into more than twenty languages. She lives in east London.

From the reviews of Small Holdings :

‘This marvellous short novel explodes into action, with Barker letting off fireworks and flares in all directions, performing dazzling verbal gymnastics. She has a great talent for the creation of eccentric characters, and the assorted misfits in Small Holdings fizz with playfulness and the author’s obvious delight at her own powers of invention. A hilarious and remarkably assured novel’

ALEX CLARK, TLS

‘Funny and intelligent. Barker’s sense of plot and comic timing is faultless: she goes for big effects, which resound brilliantly within the small space her narrative describes, and holds the whole thing together with writing that is resolved down to the last detail. Small Holdings paints the big picture on a small canvas, cap — turing in it the universality that is the essence of good writing’

RACHEL CUSK, The Times

‘Edgy and comic, it succeeds by virtue of Barker’s flamboyant sense of the absurd’

Elle magazine