Nicola Barker - Five Miles from Outer Hope

Ah. The innocence .

Patch, meanwhile — just check her out ! — is rubbing the grass stains off her knees, whispering something wholly reprehensible into little Feely’s ear and smiling like Buddha. The brat .

In our house (okay, in our hotel , you anal blighter), we never ever eat a proper dinner. We graze. We wander hither and thither, like Thompson gazelles, or dik-dik, just plucking and nibbling. We pick and mix. It’s kind of a low-maintenance familial buffet.

Big’s totally against proper dinners. On his list of priorities, the debunking of the very notion of a proper dinner comes extremely high indeed — just below an aversion to bestiality (although if feelings are mutual, he certainly might waver) and casual infanticide. In Big’s mind, The Proper Dinner is like a slap in the face to your bowel. It’s a digestive Pearl Harbor.

So our evenings are all rice cakes (Big imports them in bulk from the US — where apparently they don’t turn a hair at the concept of food-as-polystyrene — they’re so well up on healthy living), green olives, hummous and sugar-free peanut butter. For pudding: dried apricots and prunes reconstituted in warm water. No sweetening. Evaporated milk, if you’re lucky. Fennel tea ( great for the gut). Elderberry compress for the under-sevens.

Big loves Japanese fare, but only the stuff you can boil for five hours on the understanding that it’ll promise blind to hold its shape and remain tasteless, bright white and viscous. He’s into seaweed. Squid and wholemeal noodles. But only on feast days and weddings. Followed by ritual purging and emetic cleansing. Of course.

I know for a fact he thinks soy sauce is a Chinese conspiracy to keep communism unhealthy. And ketchup or HP? The Devil’s linctus . I mean did one man ever spend so much time considering the exact nature of the organic matter entering his intestine? Never mind the stuff he finally squeezes out of it.

But credit where credit’s due. Big was into faeces long — that’s literally ages — before it was really fashionable. (You’re saying you don’t remember all those articles in the style mags on feculence? The I-D defecation issue? You really don’t ? Where the hell were you?)

As I remember, Big must’ve been the world’s only potty-training father who took more pride in what was passed (I’m talking size, shape, consistency) than in the actual passing . The apex of descriptive phrases in Big’s bowel-related-vocabulary is (wait for it) pellet . The pellet — small, odourless, hard, plentiful — is the very ultimate in Big-gratification. If you use the word pellet in casual conversation his irises tighten. It delights him.

Did we rebel? Of course we did. We rebelled plenty. Barge especially. I mean this boy was nine years old before he knew ‘cake’ was a sweet thing. He was weaned on the rice and the oat and the fish varieties. He thought a sponge was something you washed your face with. He thought chocolate was a shade of brown. He thought nougat was… What is nougat, precisely?

And the rest of us? The gang ? Why the hell are you asking? We’re children . We get what we’re given and like it or lump it. Sometimes both. Everyone knows childhood is gastronomical slavery. No surprises there.

Ironically — I know this’ll kill you — that trusty Queen of Misery, M’lady Poodle, who by nature you might think would be a foodie revolutionary, is actually the most crushingly anal, hummous-spreading, sprout-eating, sugar-eschewing member of our culinary party. She is blessed with the taste-awareness of your average hard-core puritanical self-flagellator. She’s a nutritional whore. She’ll eat something wholemeal and then beg you for more .

So I’m still diligently painting Margaret’s blessed mug at half-past-nine in the ping-pong chamber — a small, grim box-room which clumsily straddles the stairway between the kitchens and the foyer — while every so often an individual family member will stroll past the door clutching handfuls of macadamia nuts, tiny, parboiled cocktail sausages (100 per cent soya and absolutely kosher), salted anchovies and nail-thin slices of badly peeled kiwi. All in all it’s a suitably high-flown and tempting gastronomical procession. But I’m not partaking. I’m working .

That said, I still find the time to listen in on Big informing La Roux about the ban on Black Beauty (so I let slip this little detail. It was purely accidental). He’s cornered him on the stairway and he’s telling him off in no uncertain terms, his voice cascading effortlessly down the sensuous curve of the walls — like the very best kind of public transport announcement — but sounding all tight-lipped and brisk and nasty.

Poor blighter.

In truth, I’ve rarely known Big take against another human being with so much mean determination. Not since Roy Jenkins turned his back on the British Labour Movement (that was in March, and it’s June already).

The man’s a messed-up liberal with strong totalitarian tendencies, but he places a very high premium on natural loyalty. Which is why he loves pooches, come to think of it — loyalty’s supposedly their most essential characteristic (well, loyalty and greed . And halitosis. And don’t forget all that relentless farting — three things you’d have to be crazy to place any kind of premium upon).

I’m still cheerfully mulling over how badly La Roux will have taken this unexpected dose of bitter medicine when, out of the blue, at nine-forty-five precisely, he quietly enters my ping-pong kingdom (as I’m sure you can imagine, a most unwelcome intrusion) and does his utmost to attract my attention without actually resorting to simply speaking .

Still in that damned khaki boiler suit. He picks up a ping-pong bat, plays a mean air-game (he wins 21–2 — I mean, he kills that imaginary fucker) then lounges, slightly breathless, against the damp white wall, ditches the bat, sticks his thumbs through his belt-holes and sighs several times just a fraction too loudly. I peek up, grimace, and carry on painting.

‘Big really has it in for me,’ he finally grumbles, as if under some illusion that I’m in the slightest bit interested.

‘How tragic,’ I say, literally dripping with empathy.

‘You could’ve told me about the ban on Black Beauty ,’ he mutters, ‘he just completely lost it. He cornered me on the stairway — and here’s the strange part — he didn’t even bother pushing home a strategic advantage by standing on the stair above. Quite the opposite. He stood on the one below , like some kind of deeply deranged pixie, and then just completely ripped into me.

‘It was frightening. I felt like I was trapped inside Gulliver’s Travels : the part where he wakes up and a group of tiny maniacs are disabling him with string. It was really quite…’ he pauses, ‘quite unsettling .’

‘The Lilliputians,’ I shrug wisely.

‘I mean, how messed-up can a four year old be?’

I glance towards him. ‘Feely’s just morbid. It’s a phase.’

La Roux sniffs plaintively a couple of times (he’s such a damn lamb), wanders off for a while, then returns dragging a fold-up chair behind him.

He opens it next to the table, sits down, grabs a mug and a brush, then watches my each and every move with all the unblinking concentration of a deeply transcendental iguana. I don’t crack under the pressure. I don’t shake, I don’t whimper.