Nicola Barker - Five Miles from Outer Hope

When Patch has gone I can finally give La Roux my full attention (I’m actually rather busy painting my pottery, but I glance up regularly whenever the need arises. Come on. I don’t want to be too obvious, now, do I?).

‘So how was the crochet lesson, then?’ I ask him solicitously.

La Roux pulls something out of his pocket. ‘Big gave me this,’ he holds up a needle.

‘Ah. The crochet implement.’

‘And this too.’

From the other pocket he withdraws some wool. Yellow.

‘Ah. The means of production.’

‘He says I have a natural talent. He thinks I should get into lace-making. He’s always wanted to do it himself but he says he doesn’t have the patience.’

I smile weakly at this notion and continue my painting. La Roux casts on, meanwhile, performs a couple of clumsy stitches (for show, principally) then quickly shoves his pitiful endeavours back into his pockets.

‘Need a hand with that?’ he eventually whistles. (The de-capped tooth is still interfering a little with his vocalizing.)

I look up. ‘What? With those fingers? Aren’t they still troubling you like they were earlier?’

‘Uh…’ he quickly glances down at them.

I lay my brush on the table.

‘La Roux…’

He looks up again.

‘Yes?’

‘It’s just… I was… I was only wondering…’ I peer modestly towards the ceiling.

‘What?’

‘Well, whether there was any way…’ I falter. His face stares intently back at me, his every feature cut into an almost marble-carved rictus of anticipation (The harder I look, incidentally, the more clearly I see what a botched-up job that make-over was. Jesus wept ! And to think I still went right on and fell for it!)

‘What are you trying to say, exactly?’ he mutters.

I take a deep breath (this is killing me). ‘What I’m trying to tell you is that I’m really, really sorry. I suppose I must’ve got pretty carried away, earlier. But I so much regret the broken tooth and the eye injury that I’d be willing to do just about anything …’

1‘And the knuckle,’ he interrupts.

‘That too,’ I gurgle.

‘And the bite on my cheek.’

‘ Naturally ,’ I squeak.

He pauses and his eyes tighten, ‘And the fingers…’

‘Yes.’ I chew my lip (quite adorably, under the circumstances — well it’s either that or I’m going to have to spit on him). ‘It’s just I had no idea my sitting on you like that would have so many unexpected… um… repercussions .’

(Ah. Like launching a fart . Just one little shove and he’s flying .)

‘But don’t you remember’, he whines artfully, ‘how I explained the other day about my father and that awful gynaecological business?’

‘Of course I do,’ I purr. ‘Christmas Day. You and your brother. Spookie the dog. The rotting and festering. I remember perfectly.’

‘Spookie?’ he sounds confused. ‘I don’t ever recall mentioning him .’

‘Oh,’ my eyes widen, ‘perhaps I got the wrong end of the stick there, for some reason.’

La Roux ponders awhile.

‘You know, I’m uncertain whether I might’ve mentioned previously how I went to see a doctor over the problem with my fingers and he said that the thing to do…’ he catches my eye and then suddenly stops talking, but his unspoken and (plainly) malign intent hangs in the air like a bad-meat kite in a high wind. Stinking hideously .

My eyes widen (Lord, this is easy). ‘What thing exactly?’

‘Something specialists in the area call… um…’ (I can see even he thinks this is cheeky. So I try and help him out.)

‘Aversion therapy?’

He smiles (just a touch of unease there, around the edges of his mouth). ‘Uh… no. The direct opposite. More like a sort of… well, a sort of curing with kindness. ’

His tone, at this point — as I’m sure you can imagine — is quite revoltingly ingratiating.

‘I don’t know anything about that,’ I tell him (feeling the need to take the initiative a little, not to give in too easily, to wriggle, to struggle), ‘but I once read something fascinating about aversion therapy,’ I lie, ‘in some of Thurber’s dog writings…’

La Roux scowls. ‘Thurber? Who’s he?’

I don’t bother answering (I mean, the ignorance of the man), I simply say, ‘In one of Thurber’s stories there was a badly trained bloodhound called Charlatan…’

La Roux frowns. ‘That’s an odd name for an animal.’

‘Well he was a very odd man. He was born in Ohio.’

‘Right.’ La Roux crosses his arms (not good body language, so I babble on, rapidly).

‘Anyway, Charlatan had this awful habit of stealing the remains of the pork roast every Sunday when Thurber was cooling it in the pantry after dinner. For sandwiches, later.’

‘Here’s a question,’ La Roux interrupts. ‘How on earth did Charlatan get into the pantry in the first place?’

‘He opened the door with his paws. It was a knack he’d perfected. He was a very intelligent creature, but horribly devious.’

‘Hmmmn,’ La Roux ponders, ‘they needed to fix up some kind of bolt arrangement. That would almost certainly have stopped his antics.’

‘Ah,’ I shake my head, ‘but that’s where you’re missing the point entirely. Thurber felt resorting to a bolt would’ve undermined general man — dog household relations. All trust would’ve been lost. What they needed was a situation of greater not lesser understanding.’

‘Oh,’ La Roux starts frowning again.

‘Anyhow, Thurber decided to solve his problem by trying a little aversion therapy on Charlatan. And for the next three weeks, every time he put the pork roast into the pantry he would do something unexpected to the carcass — like a mouse trap inside it, or a small incendiary device. Or applying rat poison. Or some of that powder you get in joke shops that makes you guff like a monkey…’

La Roux looks appalled. Perhaps I’ve waxed too lyrical. My imagination is plainly rampant today.

‘The point is, in the end Charlatan learned his lesson and he never stole the pork roast again.’

La Roux is still not happy. ‘I’d’ve fixed a bolt and to hell with all the other business,’ he opines stubbornly.

I nod. ‘I know what you mean. Perhaps Thurber’s techniques were a little excessive, but his intentions, in principal, were pure and loving. He adored that dog. He simply wanted a positive renewal of trust between them.’

‘But how does all this affect me?’ La Roux asks (seeming rather to have lost the plot again).

‘I have a plan,’ I tell him, firmly girding my loins (not an attractive notion, I’ll admit, with all that residual bruising). ‘It’s still in its early stages. It’s madly formative, and you may well think it’s stupid. But I personally think it’s a corker …’

Already he looks interested.

‘To try and pay you back for all the awful damage I inflicted this morning — although, frankly, the whistling was unbearably provoking — I want to do something helpful, in my own small way, to try and renew your faith in the female anatomy.’

La Roux’s eyebrows rise hilariously. I pause for a moment. I need to be careful and stealthy. This man is a professional bullshitter himself. I might’ve got him hooked, but I don’t want to risk losing him by reeling him in too quickly.

‘I mean, I could draw you a few pictures to start off with and explain some things to you that might seem frightening or confusing. And then you could sneak a tiny little peek at me — I mean while I’m still in my underwear, and from several feet away — just to get into the swing of things. And we could take it one step at a time until…’