Nicola Barker - Five Miles from Outer Hope

How do I react? Calmly and with guile, that’s how. I yell three simple syllables across the foyer ( Pomfret cake !) and march resolutely towards the downstairs kitchens. Twenty seconds later I hear a gentle pitter-patter just behind me. Feely, on my trail, his bare feet hitting the red-polished concrete with all the enthusiastic slap of the small, rare but gregarious blue penguin’s flippers.

When we reach our destination, I lift him on to a stool and retrieve the liquorice bounty from its hidey-hole. I give him one petite cake and remove a second. ‘Stay here,’ I tell him, ‘and when I return I’ll give you the other.’

At first he’s mistrustful. When he was three, Barge made the same kind of promise, then didn’t return for a full five hours (so he forgot ; is it a crime?) and Mo later found Feely — all hunched-up and foetal — in the midst of sustaining a serious bladder injury. Since this time he’s been a tad more cynical — the boy has total recall; he’s like a High Court judge with a grudge — and so, as he wraps his delighted tongue around his dark prize, he asks, ‘Just how long will you be, exactly? For the record?’

‘Five minutes at best.’

He nods, sucks ferociously, kicks his feet and stares up at the ceiling, two tenacious rivulets of snot trickling from his nostrils like a couple of keen, green maggots making good their escape from a flesh-toned apple.

When I arrive back upstairs, La Roux is still lounging against the counter casually turning the pages on Anna Sewell’s equine homily. He glances up briefly as I enter. ‘Let’s face it,’ he mutters, ‘this book amounts to little more than a half-witted piece of flapdoodle.’

Flapdoodle?

‘Fuck you,’ I say. ‘It’s a classic.’

He continues paging. ‘I mean, how could one woman ever make so much fuss about a stupid small-scale ankle injury?’

‘Did you ever injure your ankle?’ I ask defiantly.

‘Twice. I sprained my left ankle in 1976 and then broke the same leg four years later in a terrible rabbit-hole calamity.’ He pauses, then calculates. ‘1980. Last year. What is a Pomfret cake, anyway?’

Since I don’t reply immediately, he glances up again. Unfortunately I have become momentarily distracted by the sight of his genitalia in his preposterously high-yanked boiler suit, where they hang on his left thigh, all limp and lopsided, like a small bag of crushed intestines newly liberated from the back-end of a turkey.

Three seconds too late and blushing slightly, I open my hand to reveal its foul black bounty. The Pomfret cake.

‘Not so much a cake’, I explain, ‘as an edible instrument of torture.’

He leans forward, frowning. ‘I can’t see.’

I step closer. ‘Show me properly.’

I draw closer still. Soon we are only two feet apart. He peers into my palm, intently. I peer too, sensing his bad skin, smelling its antisepticness. And I’m just about to explain how they taste disgusting, like tobacco, and about Feely’s dairy allergy, and the fact that after sucking his mouth turns brown and how he likes nothing better than to stare at it in the mirror, when, in a flash, La Roux’s left arm snakes out (with all the sudden velocity of a viciously pale-skinned, striking cobra), grabs a tight grip of my other arm, pulls it towards him and thrusts my hand, palm-upwards, into his high-held, soft-centred and utterly reprehensible gizzards.

The Pomfret cake arches skywards, I gasp and topple, La Roux bellows victoriously, fully cognisant of having humiliated me comprehensively (I suspect this man might still have some outstanding issues remaining with his mother. I mean, who was this woman? A modern-day vixen with the conflicted soul of Lucretia Borgia?)

So, lummie , what’s a girl to do under such trying circumstances but to grab and twist and squeeze for all she’s worth? (I have hands with a grip like Goliath’s from kneading bread and extracting carrot, celery and beet juice daily. )

Ha . Now the jack-boot’s on the other foot! La Roux’s fleeting but nonetheless nasty little grin of victory soon transmogrifies into a violent squawk of downright displeasure. And when he’s sufficiently displeased — which is pretty bloody displeased — I relinquish my grip and then run, hell-for-leather.

A childish impulse, I know. It’s kind of a brother/sister thing. He’s older and meaner, but — thank the Lord for tall mercies — I’m a damn sight bigger.

That said, what a complete and utter bastard , don’t you reckon?

I stumble across that good-for-nothing, pre-pubescent Patch, huddled snugly into a soft, grassy dip on our most westerly clifftop, all cross-legged and pink-cheeked and wind-thrashed, gazing down and out into the grey-blue grandeur of Bigbury Bay, clutching the book Mo sent tight to her chest and meditating deeply.

Get this : way before I even get a chance to reprimand her sharply and fully and roundly for her sudden, shameless abandonment of snotty little Feely (I’ve dragged him along with me — he currently has his left hand stuck tight inside a plastic mug with a terrible, half-worn illustration of what looks like Mickey Mouse fellating Pluto on the front of it), she expansively casts out her chubby arm, points to the green-humped horizon behind her: the distant white-daisy-headed settlements dotting the spine of this chalk-chiselled coastline, and asks in a voice impossibly breathless and chimerical, ‘Medve, do you think you might tell me…’ I mean, the girl’s literally gasping . It’s so ludicrously Jackie ‘… the real difference between Inner and Outer Hope?’

‘Of course I can,’ I bridle, squinting with sour-eyed sisterly efficiency. ‘Outer Hope is apparently much bigger. It’s in bold print on the map, which I imagine must count for something. I’d guess it’s approximately five miles down the coast. A small town, possibly. Inner Hope isn’t in bold and it’s a short distance further. At best a village. At worst, a hamlet.’

(So what if I said I didn’t like geography? This is Medve The Older Sister at work: a role which never fails to bring out the apprentice girl Fascist in me.)

She shakes her head. ‘That’s not what I mean at all . It’s not a geographical question. It’s kind of…’ she pauses, ‘ metaphysical .’

Not geographical ? I squat down in front of her, enraged by this unexpected surge of youthful precocity. ‘You’re twelve years old !’ I bellow. ‘What need have you of metaphysicals? Get back indoors, you chubby, godforsaken little whore and play with your fucking Barbie like every other ill-adjusted puppy-fat-ridden girl your age.’

I toss Feely towards her. As he tumbles he taps himself on the head with his mug-covered paw and gives a slight bleat. His tongue is the colour of diarrhoea. Patch catches him deftly and plumps him onto her capacious knee. ‘I knew you wouldn’t get it,’ she murmurs, then inhales deeply and stares out towards the horizon. The girl’s so smug, so self-important, so mumsy .

I stand and turn.

‘ You gangly bitch .’

I turn back again. ‘Did I hear you mutter something, or was it just the gulls spewing at the sickening bulge of your second stomach?’

Feely, who of course takes his translating responsibilities very seriously, serves, temporarily, as a most-minor adjudicator. ‘She said You gangly bitch ,’ he repeats, his emphasis all up the creek, as if he’s speaking Hindi or Urdu or Pekinese. Then he pauses and shakes his cup-hand thoughtfully, ‘Whatever the heck that means.’