Nicola Barker - Five Miles from Outer Hope

‘Sorry?’ (Inside me an angry dialogue is being conducted between my breasts and my brain — that bastard stick has only gone and made my nipples tighten!)

‘Go on ,’ he hisses, ‘just ask him.’

I clear my throat and cross my arms (These are pre-Lycra days, smart-arse , and I’m wearing a semi-translucent pale halter top. It’s turning into an intimate Armageddon down there — my aureoles darkening dramatically, my nipples jutting like tent-pegs…). ‘La Roux here was just wondering,’ I say loudly (perhaps, under the circumstances, without sufficient due-consideration), ‘whether the name Jack is actually short for anything.’

La Roux, once again, has his back to me, but I think I can detect his bony shoulders shaking. Jack scowls. ‘What do you mean?’

I turn to La Roux again. ‘He wants to know what you mean exactly.’

La Roux’s shoulders are now shuddering uncontrollably.

‘What does he mean, short for anything ?’ Jack repeats.

I shrug limply.

A minute’s uneasy silence commences, only punctuated by La Roux’s hysterical snuffling. When the minute is over, and the tension’s just about to diffuse, La Roux contains his inexplicable excitement for just long enough to heighten it again. ‘I was only idly wondering,’ he creaks, ‘whether it was short for anything.’

Jack is quiet for a moment. He looks down at his feet, as if he is actually, physically walking the fine line between fury and bemusement.

‘Whether what is short for anything?’ he answers finally.

La Roux starts laughing again. ‘Your name ,’ he splutters.

Jack takes a small step forward. His fists are slowly clenching and unclenching. His brown cheeks are suddenly livid.

‘I just wondered ,’ La Roux bellows, throwing out his arms and twirling his stick infuriatingly, ‘I just wondered about your name.’

Jack carefully lifts his right foot up on to the rocks, then pauses, his large bulk swaying. He’s like a huge, newly blinded bison slowly negotiating the scarily multifarious world around him. Trying. Failing.

For the first time — as he sniffs and blinks in a curiously affecting slow motion — I see that he’s actually fragile . A mesmerizing mix of the distressingly magisterial and the irredeemably bovine (well, hell , it worked for John Wayne all those years).

After a few loose moments he gradually gathers himself together. ‘I’m going fishing tomorrow morning, Medve,’ he announces, turning to me directly and in the process cutting that rude dog La Roux completely.

Medve. My bare toes curl into the rock and muck and weed. It’s gentle weather but I’m very nearly blown away. Black Jack just used my name for the first time ever! And so naturally, too, like he’s been secretly rehearsing it in private or something.

La Roux responds by emitting a series of musical burps. He can apparently do this to order.

‘About five,’ Jack continues stiffly, ‘in the little boat, if you fancy it.’

I nod again. ‘Well, I’ll certainly think it over. Thanks.’

He removes his foot, smiles thinly, turns and leaves.

Well I never .

La Roux, meanwhile, has sat himself down on the edge of the pool with his two feet dangling into the shallow water. ‘Medve! Medve , quickly!’ he whispers. ‘ Quickly. Come here.’

He has his hands tightly cupped on his lap as if he’s captured a small but skittish crustacean. His balaclava has been pulled up, off his face, and is now balanced on top of his head — still maintaining its shape — like some weirdly cylindrical mobile chimney.

‘Jesus!’ he exclaims delightedly. ‘It’s really tickling ! Come on . Come quickly, before it gets away.’

I stagger across the slippy rocks and join him. I squat down and peer.

‘Show.’

‘I’m not sure what it is exactly,’ he whispers, his keen thin lips dripping in anticipation.

‘Probably a common shrimp,’ I debunk. ‘I thought I caught a glimpse of one earlier.’

‘It’s entirely possible. Look .’

He opens his cupped hands gradually. I stare hard. Then harder still. His pale fingers are gently surrounding a little red organism, a mollusc, a soft thing. A deep sea creature…

I blink. A brief flash follows. The shutter lifts.

What that cheeky varmint is actually cradling is the disembodied, yanked back, grinning tip of his unrepentantly uncut, small-eyed, purple-lipped pecker.

La Roux blinks up at me, his wool-blotched face suffused in a childlike glow of absolute — almost bewildered — wonderment (He’s like a favourite nephew offering his ancient aunt his very last piece of toffee brittle. It’s appalling ).

I grit my teeth. I steady my feet. I clear my throat. I balance internally. Then: ‘My God,’ I whisper gently, my face a profoundly sympathetic mask of quite the tenderest bewilderment. ‘La Roux, my God ! It’s so very ugly. And tiny too, really tiny.’

His smile falters. And while it’s faltering, with a single hefty kick from my huge left hoof I shove that ginger-haired and deeply perverted mother-fucker straight down, head first, into the water.

You know what? In my trivial pursuit of the fine 1980s Free Enterprise Ethic, I’m seriously considering establishing my very own International Library of Gullibility — kind of along the same lines as The School of Hard Knocks, but warmer, and friendlier and with unlimited lending.

Think there’s any future in it? Better still, fancy joining ?

Don’t ask me why, but I suddenly feel like the time is prime to get something rather hefty off my 38B (that’s my chest measurement, you booby ), both on behalf of my huge-hoofed self and my dilapidated family.

Unorthodox we may well be. Laughing-stocks? Certainly. Eccentric? Eclectic? Erratic? Entopic? (We can do all the ‘e’s without even blinking. )

Yeah , so we’re the first to chuckle at our own endless inadequacies, but when everything’s finally said and done, we still take great umbrage at the insulting suggestion that we’re completely obsessed by crass anality (I mean, did I even yet make mention of my capacious anus?). *

It just so happens that there are some things, some… how to put it?… some cracks in the plaster, some issues (Big’s gut, his pedantry, my mail-order addiction, Poodle’s tiny breasts, Barge’s beet-boiling) which just won’t budge or shift no matter how hard or how diligently you try to paper them over. And that anus probus , I fear, is clearly no exception.

Right. So I know it’s a subject which we have all — so far and so assiduously — been avoiding, but when it actually comes down to it the only real problem with Mo’s mighty invention is that there is no real problem (and I have a powerful teenage yen for exaggeration).

The Anal Probe — Sick , you’re thinking? Weird? Shameful?

Saucy? Problematic? Traumatic? Nah! I know it sounds crazy, but the inescapably tedious truth of the matter is that the Probe is nothing more creepy or glorious than an actual-factual, down-to-earth, dull-as-dishwater metal detector: a plain plastic chair (and there’s nothing remotely invasive ) which, when you sit down upon it, kindly informs a disinterested observer whether there’s anything remiss clenched inside your cavities (and I don’t exactly mean your teeth here, either).