Nicola Barker - Five Miles from Outer Hope

Don’t call me overconfident. Just call me silly .

Two a.m. One moment I am deep asleep (dreaming about a true-life incident in which Jack Henry is found guilty by a Kansas-based Grand Jury, and sentenced to ten bonus years in prison for carrying a dangerous weapon concealed about his battered person. A Bic biro, but without its inky middle.

Jack Henry is incandescent with rage. He can’t honestly believe they’d send him down for this trifle. A Bic pen? Are you kidding ?

But although I keep asking him why he was carrying the pen and what exact purpose it was serving — it’s a long night and I have nothing better to do with myself — he just keeps cursing at me and saying it’s irrelevant or that I’m bothering him unnecessarily. He wants some peace . Can’t I see that? Am I stupid or something?

‘But this is my head, you rascal,’ I bleat at him. ‘ So?! ’ he yells back at me. ‘You think I actually want to be in this hell-hole? Do you imagine I like being trapped inside the teenage skull of a girl who’s never even bothered reading Marx or Jung or Sartre or Dostoevsky…?’) Then — bam! — the very next instant I am wide awake and giggling. Yes. I said giggling. Uncontrollably.

Because I am receiving a relentless tickling at the hands of a Master Tickler. Guess who? No. On second thoughts, don’t bother. It can be none other than the Pesky South African.

I don’t know if the actual tickling is entirely intentional (I’ve just woken up, how sodding rational do you expect me to be?), but he’s applying something soft as thistle-down to the base of my spine; that tantalizing junction where my baby-doll nightie is just supposed to cover its matching puffball panties (I get two baby-dolls every year from my Great Aunt Sonya who thinks because I’m so huge she’s literally obliged to buy me everything in miniature).

I slap at the place at least five times before I realize it’s not in fact a deeply misguided leaden-arsed mosquito or a mischievously fluffy-footed fairy tap-dancing cheerily at the top end of my buttocks. It’s something altogether different. It’s a peacock feather.

I sit up and blink. La Roux stands before me (in his regulation army pyjamas), waving the feather around like an air-traffic controller. I rub my eyes. ‘Are you sleep-walking again?’ I whisper querulously.

‘ What? ’

(Plainly not by the strength of his reaction.) He sits down, cross-legged, on the end of my mattress and pulls a spare blanket around his bony shoulders.

‘So, what are you doing?’ he asks.

I blink, indignantly. ‘What am I doing ? I was fucking sleeping .’

‘Oh.’ He sighs, yawns, scratches his head a little and stares up at the colourful dome above him. ‘There’s a piece of glass, a green piece, directly above us. The wind’s really rattling it. Can you see it shifting?’

I look to where he’s pointing. ‘It’s always done that. It’s just part of the stained-glass deal. Lovely but noisy. Like an intelligent female.’

‘All the same, I think we should move over a little…’

Before I can muster the strength to oppose him, he’s thrown off his blanket, is clambering around on his hands and knees like an poisonous but insipid four-legged spider, and is shoving my mattress (with me still upon it — and that’s no mean achievement) several feet over towards the bar.

I’m too whacked to complain. I just glare at him silently as he clambers back on board and readjusts his blanket.

‘That’s much, much better,’ he mutters, and then yawns again.

‘What’s wrong with you, La Roux?’

He shrugs. ‘Can’t sleep. I was wondering whether you might like to read me a story. To calm my nerves down. To cheer me up.’

I rub my eyes. ‘What kind of story did you have in mind?’

‘Anything.’ He smiles. ‘And I bought you my special peacock feather. It’s a present. I got it from the back-end of a bad-tempered bird in Wolverhampton.’

He hands it over. I take it. It’s a fine one.

‘Wolverhampton? What on earth were you doing there?’

‘Nothing in particular. That’s just where I was staying before I came here.’

‘Oh.’ I sniff the feather. It smells of nothing. ‘Thank you. Although they’re bad luck. Did you know that?’

‘No.’ He yanks at the blanket and sniffs, mournfully. ‘The nights are the worst,’ he finally confides, after a pause.

‘In what respect?’

‘I miss my family. And other stuff… like…’ his voice softens, ‘like the way the farmers burn the veld in winter. The smell of charcoal and the sight of the dry grass flaming. The fire engines. And the noise the flocks of mousebirds make. A special whistle. Like a tree-ree-ree .’

I try and shush him, but he doesn’t listen. ‘And the stag beetles,’ he chuckles, ‘big as your fist, caught in potholes on the roads. The red earth. And the coastal drive to Cape Point. And the thieving apes who attack the tourists and steal their sandwiches. And the huge moths. And my best friend, Thiens.’

‘ Who? ’

‘Thiens. He’s a student at Witwatersrand University. Near Johannesburg. If you become a student you can avoid conscription. He’s doing foreign languages.’

‘So why didn’t you become a student then?’

He tuts at me. ‘Too stupid , stupid.’

‘Thanks a bunch.’

He leans back on his elbows. ‘Oh, how I miss the purple jacaranda,’ he muses, ‘and the sunbirds. And the bee-eaters. Table Mountain. The big winds. The water shortages. The braai vleis ,’ he smiles, ‘which I always really hated when I was there. And the flowers in the Karoo Desert. And the summer storms. And hail the size of golf balls. And the proteas in the Stellenbosch Botanical Gardens. And the boys selling newspapers on the roadways.’

‘The men,’ I correct him.

‘And these special bubblegums we have called Wicks’s. Turns your mouth pink. Tastes of antiseptic. And grape-flavoured Fanta. And Datsuns…’

‘I bet your mother misses you,’ I intervene softly (if I was his mother, I believe I would miss him).

He smiles. ‘She thinks I’m a coward. I’m a local embarrassment. Everybody knows about it. And the maid — my nanny — Dorothea. She thinks the same way. For once in their lives they’re in total agreement. They’re both equally ashamed of me.’

‘And are you a coward?’

‘Probably.’

He stares up at the ceiling. ‘The Peacock Lounge,’ he says, yawning, ‘that’s why I brought you the feather. And because you’ve made me feel at home here. And for showing me your panties. And for never having seen Joseph. Which is a tragedy.’

He’s quiet for a while and I think he must be sleeping. Then his voice breaks the silence. ‘Tell me the story of Shiro Chan,’ he whispers, turning over on to his belly. ‘I want to hear it again.’

‘I don’t know where the book is.’

‘Then make it up.’

I grumble a little (as may well be expected under the circumstances), then place down the feather and lie on my back, staring up at the blue-green-glass ceiling.

‘In the beautiful Japanese city of Nara,’ I whisper, softly, ‘there once lived around about a thousand wild red deer. In the spring, the bucks would proudly display their antlers while the gentle does would tend to their fawns. One year, however, a special doe was born with a wonderful crown of strange white fur on top of her head. They called her Shiro Chan, Queen of the Deer of Nara.