Nicola Barker - Five Miles from Outer Hope

As I’m sure you can imagine, this is about as rare a sight in these parts as a dodo getting accidentally caught up inside the flight propeller of a mid-air 747.

While I clumsily swill my two huge hands around inside a sink of hot water, Patch dries gamely, and we indulge in a rather mystifying conversation about my long, dark night spent in the questionable company of Mr Jack Henry (Patch is totally into dream interpretation. She’s like a pre-pubescent Freud but without the beard and the sexual fixation).

‘So you dreamed Jack Henry was imprisoned again, but this time he was locked up inside your brain?’ she summarizes.

‘That’s about the gist of it. And I kept telling him he was free and that he should bugger off, but he wouldn’t listen.’

Patch pauses and considers. ‘I really like it,’ she says, ‘it’s kind of clever.’

‘Well I appreciate your dream approval, Patch,’ I snipe, ‘but what about the hidden meaning ?’

‘It’s something philosophical,’ she smiles, ‘which I guess must mean that your considerable intelligence — so absent in your day-to-day thoughts and actions — gets all its exercise unconsciously.’

‘Is that a joke ?’ I ask uneasily.

‘Uh, no, but here’s my interpretation anyway,’ she quickly continues. ‘For some reason you seem to be preoccupied by the notion that a person’s freedom isn’t defined by their physical conditions…’

‘ Pardon? ’ I turn around to peer at her and accidentally drip suds on to the tiling.

‘You’re dripping,’ she scolds. I guiltily shove my hands over the sink again.

‘It’s a kind of cynicism ,’ she explains. ‘You think Jack Henry — for all of his insight and wise words and everything — is actually in a prison of his own construction, and that even now he’s free he won’t be able to escape it…’ She pauses. ‘Which in my book is an interesting but fairly depressing analysis. I myself have a much greater faith in the strength and resilience of the human animal.’

‘You’re right,’ I tell her. ‘I am much cleverer when I’m sleeping.’

She sniggers. ‘ I’ll say you are.’

For some indefinable reason her reaction strikes me as slightly excessive. I frown. ‘Meaning?’

The snigger expands into a chuckle.

‘ Meaning? ’

Her eyes widen. ‘La Roux .’

‘What about him?’

She gnaws delightedly on her thumb-nail, her cheeks glowing. ‘You really thought you’d done a job on him, didn’t you?’

I slowly shake dry my hands as she ducks behind the table.

‘A job? How exactly?’

‘The black eye, the tooth and the other stuff.’

She’s laughing so hard all of a sudden that I can barely understand what she’s saying.

‘But the thing is…’ she continues, now almost bent double, ‘the thing is…’

I put my hands on my hips. ‘Tell me the thing , why don’t you?’

Her convulsing fingers scrabble on the table-top. ‘The thing is, it was all make-up . Almost all of it!’

‘Make-up?’

‘His injuries!’

‘ Make-up?! ’ My jaw drops. ‘Are you serious ?’

She nods in mute hilarity.

‘And… and the tooth?’

‘A cap! He can pull it off whenever the fancy takes him. A final absolute stroke of bloody genius , if you ask me.’

But I am not asking. In fact, I am lost for words, temporarily. ‘So was Big in on everything?’ I eventually manage.

‘He was !’ she explodes, ‘and little Feely too. We all were.’

Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh . My feet are suddenly glued to the kitchen tiles, my fists are slowly clenching and unclenching, I am gasping and choking and blinking and panting. My rage is wild and absolute and all-consuming.

Trumped! My whole family employed in a plot to humiliate me by that persistently whistling, masturbating, fountain-pissing, sleep-walking, high-thigh-squeezing interloper? How could they! Even Big? Even he ? (I mean, suddenly developing a sense of humour without even warning me?)

Patch is still laughing a full five minutes later, clutching ineffectually at her big belly, her round face gargoyled with uncontrollable hysteria.

‘Okay,’ I eventually splutter, when I am finally capable of speaking coherently again, ‘what — if you can actually remember — is that irritating thing people always say about revenge?’

She stops laughing. ‘Oooh. Best served cold ,’ she tells me, her small nose twitching.

‘Right,’ I smile, ‘and that, my dear sister, is exactly how it’s going to be. I have a plan. It’s a nasty one. And I will be needing your assistance…’

Patch immediately starts rubbing her two fat hands together, her laughter forgotten, her cheeks drawn in hungrily . A second serving? Another helping? A double whammy ? I mean, what could be better ?

Absolutely nothing.

So I don’t want to keep harping on about it, but do you know what really gets to me about this whole, damn, phoney, black-eyed, broken-toothed La Roux-inspired travesty? It’s the way it was all arranged with so much guile and finesse and — I hate to say it — real, honest-to-goodness subtlety (perhaps there’s actually more than meets the average untrained eye to this rank outsider’s military history).

I mean, making me think I’d had such a sweet little victory when Big so unexpectedly took my side over the face-sitting incident. And that ludicrous ‘teaching him to crochet’ business. And the infuriating finger pinching. And my — come on, I have to admit it — ridiculous smugness when I thought I’d inadvertently done him a serious injury (all that ‘Am I more of a bruiser than I thought I was?’ crap. How embarrassing ).

To think I actually imagined I’d got off scot-free. And all those silly pangs of guilt I nearly considered suffering (no matter how briefly) at his expense . All that wasted moral energy!

My God , what a triumph. And how to top it? There’s little doubt in my fevered mind that it’ll take some doing. But never, ever let it be said that canny Miss Medve can’t rise to a challenge. He’s thrown down the gauntlet, and blow me backwards if I’m not calmly bending over and casually retrieving it.

What is a gauntlet anyway? (I only hope it’s hygienic.)

Right. So here’s how I arrange things: first off, Patch is sworn to secrecy over having let slip the fact that La Roux is not really as seriously injured as he seems to be. More importantly, she is immediately sent along to tell him how much I would appear to regret my misdoings, how tender and tearful I currently seem, consumed as I am by my powerful and overwhelming feelings of awful remorsefulness.

Big is to be kept in line by being told by this most devious sister of mine that my sudden rash of guilty feelings are teaching me exactly the kind of fruitful lesson in personal responsibility any parent should be proud of instilling (the kind of lesson I have so far, apparently — according to Patch, and Big actively agrees with her — been basically incapable of learning).

So where’s the harm — she asks — in temporarily extending my useful bout of moral education? Where indeed, the short-arsed traitor tells her, damn him.

Patch soon scurries back to base (my table-tennis headquarters), her clutch of missions successfully undertaken, absolutely glowing with self-satisfaction. And when Mr La Roux happens to pass this way himself, just a few minutes later (patently intent on pressing home his advantage), this very useful and utterly duplicitous little fattie scarpers, a fifty-pence piece clutched inside her hot hand and some careful instructions to head for the mainland (a ten-minute walk while the tide is low) to buy me something very particular from the tourist-trap newsagents in Bigbury-on-Sea to further facilitate my dastardly machinations.