Nicola Barker - Five Miles from Outer Hope

In this instance I don’t even have to look any real distance to unearth her. She’s secreted snugly inside the hotel lift (100 per cent out of service) earwigging like a hyperactive Sugar Glider (a nocturnal Antipodean tree rat. Have you never thought of investing in the National Geographic ?).

Feely is crammed in there with her, pressing at the buttons (for all the damn good it’s doing him). I yank the door open and peer in at them through the metal shutter.

‘So I need an opinion on this weird telegram,’ I tell her. ‘Fancy providing one?’

She frowns, unhelpfully. ‘I’ve got a pot of dhal boiling dry on the cooker. Might you consider making do, for the time being, with a list of recommended reading matter?’ (The girl’s such a swot .)

‘Hmmmn. What volumes do you have in mind, specifically?’

She thinks for a moment. ‘Uh… a social and political history of apartheid South Africa, for starters. Something short by Desmond Wilcox on human behaviour. The Female Eunuch — Germaine Greer.’

‘Any Thurber?’

She shakes her head.

‘Marilyn French, The Women’s Room ?’

The twelve year old sneers. ‘So fucking seventies !’

‘And Jack Henry Abbott ?’ I enunciate clearly.

She scowls. ‘To call him a mass murderer! I mean the sheer prejudice of the man! He simply killed one con and seriously injured another in an act of absolutely righteous self-defence. Then the bastards slapped him with a maximum sentence…’

‘Before you go on and break my heart completely,’ I intervene, ‘Mo says he got early probation last Friday.’

This emphatic sprout looks briefly delighted, then she frowns. ‘So,’ she sighs tiredly, ‘Big still thinks Mo’s screwing Bob Ranger, then?’

I nod. ‘The man’s such a pathetic Sultan . Did you hear his crazy “don’t mix science and morality” speech?’

She sniggers. ‘Good job you didn’t bring up the invention of penicillin. That would’ve really fucked with his logic.’

‘In truth,’ I lie, ‘I seriously thought about it.’

She pulls herself together and glances regretfully down at little Feely. ‘Well, I guess I’d better start thinking about getting back to the kitchens.’

I step sideways. ‘Make sure lunch is something digestible. Big-Man-No-Stomach is definitely on the warpath.’

She pulls open the metal gate. ‘I’ll tell you something for nothing…’ she says, sliding quickly on past me.

I raise my brow. ‘So pray tell .’

As she trundles towards the downstairs kitchens, yanking Feely like a small teddy behind her, she tosses some crucial information over her pudgy shoulder. ‘Angola, you fucking moron , is a Portuguese colony.’

On the stairs I hear her smartly asking, ‘I mean, what is up with that girl’s history?’

But from where I’m standing, diplomatic little Feely isn’t heard to answer.

*My capacious anus ?! Wise up , you blimp.

La Roux has this absolutely infuriating way of eating. How to describe it? Instead of using his molars for chewing and grinding — like the Good Lord intended — he much prefers to employ his incisors (the sharp, foreteeth, principally designed to bite and to cut) for the main body of his masticatory work.

It’s a very messy business: try and imagine a scenario where his thin lips and his sharp tongue are constantly at battle for the ultimate custody of his overall eating process (with his chin and his shirt-front this squalid dispute’s main casualty), or simply visualize an eerie but rather noisy mixture of sucking and muttering (an irritable fruit bat harshly reprimanding an encroaching tree snake whilst simultaneously laying waste to an overripe fig). Either way, it’s pretty gruesome .

Obviously, as far as Feely’s concerned, La Roux’s complex and unusual ingestive routine is completely mesmerizing. And even Patch’s extremely cynical, grub-loving eyes can sometimes be seen to leave the precious confines of her own high-piled plate and to flitter, inquisitively, towards La Roux’s voluble but hard-working mandibles.

On my many world-wide travels, I was once privileged to witness some freshwater piranha frenziedly devouring a baby stork who’d fallen from his nest on high — most tragically — and down into the cruelly infested water below. From brand-new flesh, keen squawk, bright eye and fine feather to bare, pale beak and chalky bone, the whole stripping and dismantling process took less than twelve brief seconds.

Unfortunately for us, La Roux is not blessed with quite this high level of digestive efficiency. He tends to take just a little longer.

So it’s lunch-time, and we’re all perched — shoved up close, like house-martins on a phone line — thigh against thigh upon two small benches (La Roux and I on one side, Feely and Patch on the other: Big is yet to join us), our elbows clashing like unwieldy, flesh-tipped fencing swords as we struggle for territory around the tiny, thick-slatted, fold-up table which has been temporarily situated by pesky Patch in the creaking bow of that big-beamed, portholed Ganges Room for the short duration of our lunching.

We are consuming a veritable feast of cold bottled, well-preserved winter vegetables: whole beet, dark spinach, red onions, fibrous celery, sweet potatoes. Served with warm dhal made from leeks and red lentils. Natural yoghurt. Unleavened bread — some strange, ill-formed, oily paratha , badly wound into snail-shell-curls by the clumsy hands of little Feely.

Big joins us once we’ve already begun to apportion, squabble and guzzle, carrying a tray of five clay mugs and a jug of water cut with salt and fresh lemon. He places it on the table and squeezes in next to Feely. Feely shunts along resentfully, whining like a disgruntled chihuahua.

From the corner of my eye (full-blown visual contact has, as yet, been carefully avoided: to meet an angry animal’s gaze is always dangerous and I’m still keenly fearing a random strike of sudden retribution), La Roux’s hair seems unusually feathered-up and wispy (I guess the sun must’ve dried it), but the rest of him hasn’t remained quite so unaffected by his earlier misadventure.

My rapid glances detect traces of damp around his armpits and ( a-hem ) his fly. He has his favourite twig with him, however, caught and held between his bony knees.

‘So what happened to your back?’ Big asks, casually, picking up a spoon and dipping it into his dhal. We all look up. La Roux blinks. ‘ My back?’ he asks, as if certain Big must be making conversation with another, far more significant individual.

‘Well, nobody else at this table, so far as I’ve noticed,’ Big observes drily, ‘has an extra-large, weed-green footprint on their sweater.’

He leans out on the bench and stares — just for effect — at the un-printed backs of Patch and Feely.

‘Nope. No bigfoots there.’

La Roux twists his head to try and peer over his own shoulder. Then he stops trying and takes a large and evasive mouthful of beetroot. ‘I can only imagine’, he speaks with crimson-lipped muffledness, ‘that I must’ve been kicked unexpectedly.’

‘And why, I wonder, might anyone have felt the urge to do that ?’ Big asks (the tone of his voice strongly implying that there could be few activities in the whole world he himself might relish more).

La Roux shrugs and then shoots a mean sideways glance at me. ‘I’m afraid I have no plain answers, sir.’

Patch nudges Feely, who is staring across the table at La Roux, his small mouth held open in a swoop of drooping wonderment. Big grunts and commences eating. His mood is patently still wholesale stinky .