Nicola Barker - Five Miles from Outer Hope

He pats Feely on the shoulder. Feely grimaces (he’s not fooled. He’s still mistrustful, and he’s horribly proprietorial about his fictions), then pitter-patters off to fetch his bean-bag. I set about trying to find the appropriate book, with the requisite amount of banging and swearing.

Patch, meanwhile (supremely oblivious), quietly discusses La Roux’s trichological aspirations.

‘I think you need it short at the sides but fluffy on top. That’s the style of the moment. Do you know the pop star Terry Hall?’ she asks. ‘He’s the stupid, blond one in Fun Boy Three?’

‘I don’t, actually, but here’s my idea,’ he tells her. ‘You know how it is when someone catches a ringworm?’

She frowns, not quite getting it. ‘You mean on their head? In their hair?’

He nods. ‘Exactly. Let’s do that, keeping the overall look and length much as it is currently, just cutting out a couple of bald circles in really unexpected places.’

Patch muses this over for a minute, in silence.

‘Think you’re up to it, technically?’ La Roux asks.

Patch’s serious face breaks into a wide smile. She repositions the scissors on her fingers. ‘Hell,’ she says firmly, ‘just shut up and watch me.’

Feely quietly returns, having located his bean-bag. I show him the book. He smiles, plumps himself down and makes himself comfy as I flip through the pages, lounging casually up against the cobwebbed Aga.

‘Okay,’ I tell him, ‘I can do you five paragraphs on the Kasuga Grand Shrine…’ He winces. Not a particular favourite. ‘Or a page and a half about the Art and Architecture of the Kofuku Temple…’

Feely waves his arm and closes his eyes languidly (he knows what he’s here for). ‘Just give me the deer,’ he whispers.

‘Fine,’ I tell him, ‘but I’ll read it once only. That’s the rule.’ (This child’s a devil for sordid repetitions.)

He nods, pulls in his paws and balls up completely, neatly tucking his mucky knees under his dirty ears.

La Roux raises his hand while Patch snips up a storm; hair flying everywhere. I glance over.

‘What the fuck kind of children’s story is this, anyway?’ he asks.

I show him the cover. ‘It’s a book about the Japanese city of Nara. Feely’s brother Barge used to read it to him when he was a baby. It’s his favourite. He finds it extremely calming .’

La Roux scowls but says nothing. Feely opens one eye and shifts a little. I notice his disquiet and resolve — before his unusually restful demeanour can be further disrupted — to smartly commence with the reading.

‘ The Deer of Nara ,’ I begin softly.

‘Deer?’ La Roux mutters. ‘In a city ?’

I ignore him.

‘ Shiro Chan, Queen of the deer of Nara .’ I glance up. ‘That’s the subtitle.’

La Roux sticks his hands under his opposite armpits (eclipsing his embroidered pony) and stares at me with a worryingly attentive air.

I continue, ‘“There are approximately one thousand deer in Nara Park. While the bucks proudly display their large antlers, the does gently tend to their fawns. One doe was born with a strange crown of white fur on the top of her head. She was very popular with all the tourists…”’

At this point, Feely — one eye still open — swallows down a huge gulp of ill-suppressed emotion (He knows what’s coming). I pause briefly, to let it all sink in. La Roux’s own eyes are slowly widening. I repeat the sentence, ‘Yes, “one doe was born with a strange crown of white fur on the top of her head. She was very popular with all the tourists and they called her Shiro Chan. But after only a few short years of life, Shiro Chan was killed in a traffic accident. It would seem that a true beauty is fated to live a short life only, even among the deer.”’

I squat down next to Feely. ‘Want to see the picture?’

He lifts his head and peeks. ‘The beautiful Shiro Chan…’ He recites the caption automatically. ‘… Yes. I see her.’

I close the book. Feely collapses back, replete. La Roux blinks repeatedly, ‘Is that it ?’

I nod.

‘And you say reading this book was your brother Barge’s idea?’

I nod again.

‘Is he some kind of maniac?’

I glare. ‘Not that I’m aware of.’

‘He’s living on a kibbutz,’ Patch intervenes, as if inadvertently determined to justify all La Roux’s worst prejudices, ‘in the Baltics. He’s hoping to become a famous painter one day. He lost the tip of his tongue in a fight defending the honour of our oldest sister. It was terribly tragic. He needed twenty-seven stitches. Which is loads.’

‘In his tongue ?’ La Roux is plainly appalled.

‘Yup.’

‘And is he a good painter?’

Patch snorts. ‘Really bad . He’s nuts about L. S. Lowry. He paints red houses. Industrial scenes. That kind of thing. With a palette knife. He eschews brushes. It’s very messy. I’ve repeatedly told him my theory about how the real future of art is in cat paintings. Cats, flowers and cottages. That’s what people prefer nowadays. Nobody in the eighties wants to be reminded of Britain’s great industrial heritage. It’s all terribly passé. ’

‘Cats?’

‘I’m telling you.’

La Roux is silent for a minute, as if quietly thinking something over. ‘Do you really, honestly believe, Medve,’ he suddenly turns and asks me, ‘that true beauty is fated to live a short life only, even among the deer ?’

I glance down at Feely, somewhat cautiously, and hedge my bets. ‘I can’t say I know enough about deer to answer that question either way.’

La Roux shakes his head.

‘Stop shaking,’ Patch tells him, ‘or you’ll mess up your ring.’

‘A road traffic accident ,’ La Roux repeats. ‘It’s plainly impractical to keep wild animals in a modern city. And to think I actually had the Japanese down as a sensible people.’ He pauses. ‘So let me see the picture of this crazy, white-headed doe for a minute…’

He puts out his hand. I pick up the book again and am just about to pass it over when Feely explodes from his bean-bag, snatches the book away from me, yells, ‘How dare you make fun of Shiro Chan!’ and then copiously wets himself where he stands. Before anyone can add anything, he hurtles — with all the speed and precision of a one-wheeled biplane attempting an emergency landing with a serious fuel leak — out of the kitchen.

La Roux shrugs, sighs and peers mournfully after him. ‘I can’t help thinking’, he murmurs thoughtfully, ‘how that poor, morbid child takes a little too much after his tiny father.’

Immediately after — as if nothing at all significant has happened — he starts telling a fascinated Patch, at length, about his troubled South African school-days (about the unflattering shorts he wore and the horrible haircuts, about the corporal punishment and the compulsory rugby. Oh, the eternal smarts of a thousand indignities!) while I slide around silently on the slippy tiles, do a spot of mopping, grab a fresh cloth, the bean-bag, a Pomfret cake, and then skid grimly off to try and tackle the too-tender, one-wheeled, wet-bellied plane-wreck of little Feely.

Just four brief years old, dear Reader, and my , what a tangle.

So they give you the regulation pep-talk, render you horizontal, stick these blessed little pins in your ears and then bugger off for half an hour. At first there’s a burning and your whole face turns scarlet. Then there’s a nasty, queasy interlude. Then an overwhelming taste of metal (like licking a newly sharpened knife, or getting a filling, or chewing down hard on silver foil).