Nicola Barker - Five Miles from Outer Hope

‘Can I help you with this?’ he says, after a rather painful few minutes. ‘I think I’ve got the general hang of it. My hand-to-eye coordination’, he swanks, ‘is actually quite legendary.’

I pause and give him a steely glare.

‘Help me? Why?’

He sighs. ‘It’s just…’ He thinks for a while. ‘It’s just — how to explain it?… It’s just politics. I think I need to re-establish my power base. Within the family.’

Was ever a man so rank and duplicitous?

‘How?’ I gasp. ‘By slithering your way in here and ingratiating yourself with me ?’

(Oh, come on . Don’t be taken in by my tone. Wise up. Tune in. It’s just basic girl-grandstanding.)

‘Yes,’ he smiles, reading me perfectly, his teeth overlapping like the yellowing slats in an old ivory-spined fan. ‘Yes,’ he repeats, ‘you’ve got it exactly .’

Then he stares at me for a moment (okay, so I’m finally smiling. I can’t help myself. The damn fucker’s charmed me) and then slowly and painstakingly he starts painting some pottery.

And I’ll tell you something for nothing: he’s not half-bad at it, either.

So there you have it: the strangely simple story of precisely how — in case you’re at all interested — that unashamedly high-gusseted, acne-ridden chancer known as La Roux finally wins me over with his brutal candour.

Happy now?

No. Of course I don’t know what I’m getting myself into. Lighten up a little. Weren’t you ever sixteen?

Interest in the hotel — all things considered — has been pretty downright bloody phenomenal. I think it’s the part-island factor that really sets people a-tingle. We’ve had born-agains, nudists, the krishna-conscious, the military. We’ve had a bona fide Hollywood star (or just about: David Soul’s masseur’s mother), a school for children with learning difficulties, a famous astrologer, a football player. We’ve had them all . They’ve come, they’ve seen, they’ve felt the itch. But no one’s really Nails-Out Scratching. Not, that is, until now.

(So I’m hardly an economist, but it suddenly feels like 1980s Britain is sweetly faltering on the quiet cusp of soon-to-be full-throttle, hard-roaring, break-the-sound-barrier booming. She’s like an anxious, sherry-drenched virgin nervously considering the scary technicalities of her imminent deflowering. She’s staggering. She’s teetering. )

And sure enough (as if to vindicate my intellectual theorising), on the morning after the impasse before, a brand-spanking-new prospective buyer hitches a lift over to the island on the back of Black Jack’s antiquated, jaw-juddering Sea Tractor (ah, how fleeting my fancies).

This woman has an insolent look about her. A haughtiness. In fact, when she dismounts it’s with the ridiculously inappropriate demeanour of a small but feminized Vasco da Gama loftily laying claim to the Horn of Africa (kind of fuck the indigens from the outset, if you know what I mean).

As far as I can tell, Ms Penny Smolly (for that is the appellation of this paragon) is a bad-arsed but well-heeled fruit cake. More money than sense (although astonishingly mean with it), and worse still, an unadulterated cat lover.

Believe it or not, she actually has it in mind to transform this blameless isle into a feline sanctuary (doesn’t she know cats hate water?) and although you wouldn’t know it just to look at her — she’s slight with grey eyes, an unusual strawberry-blonde moustache and a chin like a truncheon — this wench has a masters in snarling and whining.

Oh my dear Lord . She’s already brought the poor estate agent out in an allergy (all that fur on her collar and the cuffs of her cardigan) and as she strolls about the gaff unearthing countless imperfections he politely punctuates her on-going invective with his quiet but chesty and exquisitely timed sneezing.

Big’s nose (which frankly is the only really sizeable thing about him, apart from his ego, his temper and his libido) is also put out of joint royally when — on espying his current adventure in crochet: a wall-hanging of the USA with each state a different colour (that’s fifty states in total, so naturally someone’s gonna have to draw the short straw in relation to tincture. Texas is post-box red; Nevada, apple green; Philadelphia a sunflower yellow; Denver a bright south-sea blue; and from there on in things get a little hairy: Utah is the subtle shade of dirty bathwater; Virginia resembles a badger’s scrotum; Louisiana’s like a dead man’s liver…) — she asks him whether he ever learned to knit (he never did), then she promptly takes issue with his painstaking re-arrangement of the main back shrubbery.

During the following two hours she goes on to scrutinize every single intimate nook and crevice of this huge Art Deco edifice, paying more attention to fine detail than a police chief inspector (I mean, down to the extent of noting how nine bulbs need replacing) and is suitably appalled when in one dark corner she accidentally happens across fat Patch biting loving chunks out of Feely’s dimpled, putty-coloured buttocks (purely for the hell of it. His arse is irresistible. It literally demands masticating).

Of course he’s protesting — and powerfully — writhing like a hungry pup, absolutely hysterical, the plastic mug jammed firm onto his fist again, his chin already pink-tinged with carpet burn. It’s like an obscene early tableau from Caligula .

Rather too soon after she finds me, large as life — if not larger — sitting cross-legged on the cocktail counter, painstakingly dissecting a troublesome verruca (I’ve learned over the years that if you soak your foot for long enough in slightly salted warm water and then pluck at the offending growth with tweezers, the whole organism can be extracted in one complete segment, like a perfectly-formed miniature cauliflower).

But the real surprise still lies quietly in wait for this punctilious Miss — like a low-slung, huge-jawed, gently growling jaguar — upstairs, at the very far end of the furthest top landing. Ah, mais oui! The lair of La Roux !

So they’ve inspected all the other suites (that’s fourteen in total) and this is the last. As a precaution the agent knocks cautiously on that (by now worryingly familiar) peeling aquamarine door, hears no audible answer, enters, inhales, blanches, staggers straight to the window and flings it wide open — the smell in there is already quite extraordinary, a burning, eye-watering odour of rank antiseptic — indicates the view (it’s a great one), the carpets and the original light fitments.

Catwoman snipes on about the heady aroma (she thinks something died somewhere), the hole in the ceiling, finds fault with the window-frames and bemoans the poor finish on the en-suite tiling. Phew . At last the inspection is finally over and they are literally just about ready to turn on their tails when Miss Fur-ball suddenly detects an untoward squeaking .

I think you know whither. She makes a hasty bee-line towards the stroll-in storage facility (hoping, no doubt, to add a minor infestation to her major demolition), yanks the door wide, and finds not a mouse in her house, as she’d fully anticipated, but a bad-skinned, balaclavaed, South African nest-builder spanking his pink plank in an orgy of wank, right there, large as life, just inside.

But that’s not the worst of it. La Roux (the sauce ) is employing something rather unusual as his masturbatory inspiration — his stimulus, his trigger . It is a photograph (old, well-worn, black and white) of a mongrel: part-chow, part-pug, part-golden labrador (when you think about it, a really horrible genetic mixture; bug-eyed, blue-tongued but with a ridiculously obliging, indeed, perhaps even accommodating nature).