Nicola Barker - Five Miles from Outer Hope

Slightly more perturbing, though, is the shadowy figure of Black Jack leaning heavily on the fence near the Pilchard Inn, glaring pointedly down in our general direction.

La Roux gives a fine impression of complete self-absorption as he shuffles carefully around the edge of a good-sized pool, squats and peers (He has painstakingly fashioned a pokey stick from a stray twig and has already become ludicrously attached to this implement which he swishes and waves whenever the opportunity presents itself).

‘See anything?’

He doesn’t answer. He lifts some yellowing flotsam with his twig, shifts slightly, and stares some more. While he’s quietly preoccupied I resolve to ask him some leading questions.

‘I imagine you must’ve lived quite close to the sea in Cape Town. The city’s right on the coast, isn’t it?’ I begin with.

‘Must I?’ he answers haughtily. ‘ Is it?’

He clearly doesn’t appreciate this particular line of questioning.

‘And your father’s a gynaecologist.’

La Roux unbuckles his sandles, pulls off his socks, then laboriously rolls up his canvas trousers. His legs are phenomenally ginger-hairy against a contrasting skin-tone on the bright-white side of feta.

His two feet are practically skeletal and in the dry morning heat the aroma from his absurdly long toes hinges on the fragile cusp of sweet Swiss-cheesy. He tests the pool’s temperature with the tip of his fingers, then clambers in.

The water hits just under his knee. He shuffles around awhile, sending everything cloudy, then he pauses.

‘I remember Christmas mornings,’ he whispers suddenly. ‘My father, as always, up early and working at the large oak bureau in the sitting-room, waiting for me and my brother, the tree lights twinkling, the presents wrapped, paging and paging through a thousand graphic gynaecological illustrations of chronically diseased wombs and vaginas.’

My face creases.

‘I’m starting to wonder,’ he continues, glancing over his shoulder for a second, ‘whether Black Jack might be sexually inverted .’

I continue frowning. ‘Inverted? What does that mean?’

‘A lover of men.’

‘ Jack? Never.’

‘It’s just that he will keep staring.’

I frown (I mean how to put this politely ?). ‘Perhaps it’s your balaclava. It does give you a slightly intimidating aura.’

‘No.’ La Roux shakes his scraggy head firmly. ‘It goes deeper. It’s something…’ he thinks for a moment, ‘…something untapped, something underneath, something… something goosy .’

Goosy?

‘Jack? Untapped?’ I cackle. ‘That’s twisted .’

La Roux swaps his stick into his other hand and then proceeds to wave it in Jack’s general direction. Jack freezes and turns briefly to peer behind him. Luckily Patch and Feely are just within sight carrying the nets to the tennis court.

‘It has subsequently become very difficult for me’, La Roux continues, ‘to even think about a woman’s sexual and reproductive organs without experiencing strong feelings of fear and revulsion. And believe it or not, in certain especially intimate situations, I find I lose all sensation in the pads of my fingers.’

I frown. ‘That’s just tragic .’

La Roux nods, sadly, plainly immune to my withering sarcasm. ‘When I asked him about it, the family doctor said the only way to get over this problem was to reacquaint myself with the vagina, but in what he called a gentle, open and unthreatening environment. By a process of calmly inspecting and slowly re-educating. Just glimpsing…’

He gives me a sudden, furtive glance, to see how he’s doing (Who does he think he’s kidding ?). My face is a surly mask of violent antipathy. I think he gets the message.

‘Anyway,’ he chuckles wryly, ‘in many respects I see this strange affliction as the ultimate festive offering from my father.’

‘Give me a Chopper any day,’ I mutter.

He points his stick accusingly. ‘You’re still such a baby .’

I scowl back.

‘In defence of the vagina,’ I tell him, watching indulgently as he bends over and tries but fails to dismantle a limpet, ‘I’m pretty certain men’s genitals do their own fair share of rotting and festering.’

La Roux’s eyes widen. ‘Are you trying to destroy my sexual impulses altogether ?’ he whispers hoarsely. I can’t tell if he’s joking. He straightens up, wipes his fingers on his trousers and shuffles around some more with a curiously unconvincing tragic air about him.

After a brief lull he pauses. ‘When I was a kid,’ he begins dreamily, ‘I once went on holiday to a farm in the Orange Free State…’

‘A place full of liberated citrus, presumably,’ I wisecrack. He yanks up his balaclava so that I can now observe his thin lips moving.

‘That was pathetic ,’ his disembodied mouth informs me, then he carefully readjusts his head-gear to its former position. ‘Anyhow,’ he continues, ‘they had a water hole — we called it a Boer hole — it was like a pond, only above the ground and large — five or six metres in diameter — and round but not too deep. Concrete. Like a murky swimming-pool. Full of all kinds of crap. And I’d climb into it on hot days and romp about.

‘One day I clambered in and I was lounging against the edge, just relaxing, when suddenly a huge fish swam between my legs…’ He catches my expression. ‘I mean, my calves and my knees. And it got trapped there. Only briefly.’

‘I’ve had porcupines graze my shins before,’ I immediately trump him, ‘and I was stung by a jellyfish once on my thigh, and my leg blew up like it was badly scalded. Not here, obviously, but in an obscure region of northern Madagascar.’

La Roux is patently not the slightest bit interested. ‘In truth I think it was the single most happy moment of my life,’ he continues, his voice still seductively blissful, ‘to feel the weed in the water, the hot sun on my skin and that frantic fish just… just wriggling.’

He pauses. ‘Oh dear me,’ he mutters conspiratorially, his voice immediately dropping by half an octave. ‘Black Jack’s approaching.’

‘It doesn’t happen often,’ I tell him, finally getting into the swing of things, ‘but sometimes when you’re floating in the Mermaid Cove, over on the other side of the island, you occasionally get to feel the fish in the water.’

His eyes widen. ‘On your lower limbs specifically ?’

‘Yes. Sometimes they burrow into the sandy shingle and you find yourself treading on them. And sometimes they glance off your arms when you’re swimming. But usually only tiddlers.’

‘I don’t swim,’ he reminds me.

‘Or even if you’re just paddling.’

He scowls. ‘I don’t paddle .’

I struggle obligingly to recall the word he’d used previously. ‘When you romp then,’ I exclaim, ‘when you’re romping .’

Jack is now standing just a few feet away from us. He’s still on the firm sand at the edge of the rocky section. He doesn’t want to trouble himself with clambering over. La Roux sniffs, turns away and continues wading. I nod half-heartedly.

‘I think you’d better tell your father,’ Jack shouts, clearly not at all affected by his apathetic reception, ‘that a segment of the cliff-top fencing next to the old chapel has just gone missing. He’ll need to replace it before some idiot tourist topples over.’

While Jack is speaking La Roux tickles me distractingly behind my knee with the fiendishly scratchy tip of his damp twig. ‘Ask him,’ he suddenly whispers, when I turn defensively and slap the spot, ‘whether Jack is short for anything.’