Nicola Barker - Five Miles from Outer Hope

‘Uh… You know what?’ La Roux thinks hard for a minute. ‘I don’t honestly remember.’

‘Hmmmn. Concussion, ’ Big mutters ruminatively, grabbing some curry balls and a handful of green salad, then reaching out his hand, a second time, to proffer La Roux a slice of cucumber. ‘For your shiner,’ he says. Then he turns to me.

‘Been scrapping again, Medve?’ he asks softly.

I gape, then artfully double-bluff him. ‘ Again ? What on earth are you implying?’

Patch chuckles fondly. ‘How well I remember’, she callously intervenes, ‘when you got thrown off the under-twelves’ hockey team in Madagascar for breaking the referee’s wrist after a bad decision. God , that was funny. And then when you bloodied that girl’s nose in New Zealand for stealing my rubber chicken…’

Big thinks for a while (chewing peaceably). ‘To get back to the point,’ he continues. ‘The rather serious calibre of injuries sustained here would seem to imply either…’ he emphasizes cheerily, ‘… scrapping of a fairly serious nature, or ,’ he smiles sweetly, ‘a minor traffic accident. But,’ he sighs, ‘there’s no indigenous traffic on this island. And the tide’s been in for much of the morning, so…’ He pauses tantalizingly (I say nothing; I’m simply wondering what’s made him so infuriatingly self-satisfied all of a sudden). ‘In summing up,’ he finishes with a facetious flourish, ‘I guess it must’ve been a car accident, then?’

‘You know what?’ (Uh-oh. I spy a light-bulb suddenly lighting inside La Roux’s dark head) ‘… We were actually riding pillion on Black Jack’s delivery bike, when Medve took a really ill-judged corner and we both fell off it.’

La Roux smiles his deep satisfaction at this ridiculous-sounding porky-pie and then does that crazy-making thing with his fingers again.

‘La Roux,’ I speak calmly, ‘would you mind just not doing that?’ (It suddenly dawns on me that the whole stupid finger thing is an indirect reference to my most intimate of Girl Places. Don’t you remember ? His fingers always go numb after bouts of vaginal interference.)

‘Why?’ he asks smugly.

‘Because it’s irritating me.’

‘I actually quite like it,’ Feely contributes (in burp, so it’s hard to decipher) and starts doing it himself like he thinks he’s being clever. Then Patch does the same, but with her left hand only.

Big ignores this (the man’s a terrier). ‘A bike accident?’ he repeats casually. La Roux nods. Big frowns. ‘You mean that sharp corner on the road down near where Jack parks the Sea Tractor?’

I immediately start cringing, but La Roux totally ignores my agonized expression and continues nodding along gamely. ‘Yup. That’s the one.’

Big claps his hands delightedly. ‘But there is no corner. And Jack doesn’t own a bike. His last one rusted to pieces shortly after we first arrived here.’

La Roux’s face stiffens. ‘Oh,’ he says, and does his finger-twitching thing again, but much faster this time. Big frowns sympathetically. ‘Is it a circulation problem you have there?’ he asks. ‘Are your finger pads prickling?’

La Roux licks his lips nervously. ‘Yes. Something like that.’

‘And when did this start happening? Was it before or after the invisible bicycle accident on the imaginary corner?’

‘Uh…’ La Roux glances my way anxiously and then does the finger thing again.

‘ Stop doing that! ’ I bellow. Big (still wincing from the sheer volume of my intervention) turns and raises a warning brow at me.

(Enough is enough. This tiny man’s eyebrows have long rendered him the south coast’s answer to Mr Roger Moore. And the sharply cocked brow — as you may well have gleaned — invariably anticipates imminent slaughter .)

‘Okay, okay ,’ I come clean immediately (but with a suitable portion of pitiable mewing ), ‘we went fishing and La Roux kept on whistling , so I threatened to hit him. But he wouldn’t stop — in fact he began singing instead, and really horribly — so I did hit him. Then he still kept on at it so I was faced with no real alternative but to sit on his head to try and quieten him.

‘Which was when his fingers went numb. From feverishly scrabbling on the bottom of the boat. Either that or from the shock, I imagine. And that’s the whole story.’

La Roux’s hyperactive hands seem suddenly frozen. Big is quiet for a long while as if mulling the whole thing over. Feely was right. I am in for it this time (the child’s a four-year-old fucking seer).

After a while, having said nothing, Big slowly begins eating again. Gradually Patch and Feely follow suit (La Roux and I merely chew on our tongues and glare at each other). Big feeds well and at his leisure, then — when he’s finally replete, has wiped his lips clean with a paper napkin, has pushed his plate away and cordially complimented the chefette on her sterling endeavours — he turns, scratches his stomach idly and fixes his most sternly penetrating gaze on me.

‘ Whistling , you say?’ he asks softly.

I clear my throat. ‘Yes. And singing too.’

Big rubs his chin, slowly. ‘It’s difficult to condone violence, Medve,’ he tells me calmly, ‘under any circumstances, but to sit on someone’s face because they disturb you when you’re fishing…’ He shakes his head as if in utter disbelief at the things he’s been hearing. ‘Only a saint could have reacted less savagely under those conditions.’

La Roux’s smug expression melts like a cheap chocolate (from almost-cocky to very-tragic) in a mere matter of seconds. My own face starts glowing with an incendiary piety.

‘La Roux,’ Big turns to him decisively, ‘there are obviously some rather important things you need to understand about my middle daughter. The most important of these is that everything she ever learned in the fishing department she learned from me, her father.

‘I’m afraid we all take the art of angling very seriously around here,’ he smiles angelically. ‘Now finish up your lunch and let’s go inside for a while. I’ve actually got something quite wonderful in mind for those troublesome fingers of yours.’

La Roux’s thin lips tighten fractionally. ‘Oh yes?’ he manages. ‘And what might that be exactly?’ (I think he’s having awful visions of thumb-screws or something.)

‘I am going to teach you how to crochet ,’ Big beams. ‘It’s always been a great solution to the tricky problem of bad circulation.’

He stands up. ‘Come on,’ he beckons benevolently, ‘follow me.’

So I got off lightly. The important thing is I know I did, and this apprehension will help to guide all my future decisions and thoughts and behaviour, and will ultimately shape me into a better person. ( Yeah . If you actually believe this kind of fatuous Dr Spock bullshit you’re in for a rather rude awakening. The truth is my teen-trouble-making facility is now as well-honed and destructively arbitrary as a badly wired Exocet thingummy. But when I finally blow — and boy , will I blow — take succour from the fact that I’m fully intending to take that bastard Spock right down with me. Screaming and burning.)

Okay, so I’m still pretty-much the self-same rankly remorseless bitch I ever was after my trying lunch-time excitations, but even so I celebrate my unexpected getting-off-lightly by selflessly helping my hard-working (if relentlessly fleshy) sibling with the washing-up.