Nicola Barker - Five Miles from Outer Hope

‘The beautiful Shiro Chan was always very popular with the tourists, who loved her, dearly. But after only a few short years of life she was tragically killed in a road traffic accident. It would seem that true beauty…’ I pause, momentarily.

‘It would seem,’ La Roux repeats dozily, ‘that true beauty…’

‘It would seem that true beauty is fated to a short life only. Even among the deer.’

‘Ah,’ he sighs peacefully. ‘The beautiful Shiro Chan. Queen of all the Bovines.’

In the morning, when I awaken, no sign of him remains. Only the peacock feather, an abandoned blanket near to the doorway, and a strangely all-pervasive smell of antiseptic on the bed linen.

I’m thinking of aborting the plan (The Malay Brownies were spot on, see?). It’s just the fun’s kind of gone out of it. I’m not sure when it happened, exactly. That’s just the way I’m feeling. My mind is virtually made up. Then something rather inexplicable happens. And I can’t make head or tail of it. But it changes things.

After breakfast (a genial occasion: Big’s been out early to pick mussels from the rocks and Patch boils them perfectly and serves them in the foyer, on a blanket, at the feet of Diana. Feely doesn’t remove the tricky, green, anal area on one of his and nearly vomits. All very stimulating), I’m diligently putting in some extra hours on my pottery when I hear a heated conversation going on way down below me. In the kitchens.

Patch and La Roux, arguing about I don’t know what , precisely. And Patch is going off at him like a firecracker.

Five minutes later, La Roux wanders past my doorway. I call him in. He looks different, somehow, from before.

‘I just heard you arguing with Patch. What happened?’

He shrugs. ‘Nothing.’

‘I don’t know if you realize this, but Patch doesn’t argue with anybody . She’s too placid. That’s simply her disposition.’

La Roux is staring over my shoulder and out of the window. ‘The weather’s fine,’ he says, ‘maybe we can go swimming later, with the fishes, like you said we should yesterday.’

I nod. He smiles. ‘Patch just…’ he pauses, as if something terrible is weighing on his mind. ‘She’s just going on about apartheid and all this complicated political stuff I don’t understand. She’s been reading about the Sharpeville Massacre and she got upset when I didn’t know much about it…’ he grimaces, ‘which I suppose is pretty embarrassing, really.’

He shrugs helplessly, then he leaves me.

Jesus! What got into him all of a sudden?

When I see Patch just before lunch, her face is blotchy like she’s been crying all morning. She’s about as tetchy as a nesting reed warbler when there’s a cuckoo in the area. She won’t let me go near her. She’s cooking a Thai vegetable concoction with ginger and fresh coriander.

I pull out a chair. ‘I heard you arguing with La Roux earlier…’

I might as well have slapped her, her reaction is so violent. Her head jerks around. She nearly knocks the pan off the cooker. ‘And what did you hear?’

‘Nothing. Just voices. La Roux said you’d had an argument about the Sharpeville Massacre, which seemed — I don’t know — a fairly stupid thing to have an argument about, really.’

Her eyes flash. ‘Do you know how many innocent people were murdered at Sharpeville, Medve?’

I shake my head (Am I quite simply the worst person in the world, or am I actually missing something here?).

‘Sixty- nine ,’ she hisses, ‘all unarmed. Peacefully protesting. Women and children.’

‘Right,’ I inspect my hands. When I look up again, a minute or so later, she seems to have brightened a little. She turns down the stove and walks over. ‘Is the plan still on for this afternoon?’ she asks.

I rub my cheek. ‘I don’t know. I was thinking maybe the fun had gone out of it.’

‘Oh come on ,’ she whispers (slightly crazy around her edges), ‘don’t be ridiculous . It’s going to be fantastic.’

She pulls open a kitchen drawer and stealthily removes a brown paper bag from it. ‘I have the thing you wanted here. And I have my front-row seat reserved, upstairs, in the Chaplin Suite, which has a perfect view of the cove.’

She yanks out a chair and sits down on it. ‘And I’ve had some ideas,’ she says, ‘on the very best way to go about it…’

Then she cheerfully proceeds to blow on my embers. She huffs and she puffs. She has such a way about her, my little sister, that in five minutes flat, she’s completely inflamed me.

Everything else is only filling , so I’ll cut to the chase. Six p.m. The sun is low. The weather is as good as it needs to be. The coast is clear (Big has taken Feely off on some private mission somewhere. They’ve been gone for several hours). I get my swimming togs together — my towel, my flip-flops — throw on a bikini. I tie up my hair.

On my way down to the cove I bump into Black Jack with a bee in his bonnet (La Roux’s trailing ten steps behind me — in shorts and his balaclava, an eye-boggling combination — and still seems a little mournful after this morning’s excitations).

‘I was just thinking,’ Jack says, ‘how it might be fun if we went to see the parliament together. Tomorrow, maybe. The three of us. Or we could invite the others if you think they’d be interested. It’s not supposed to be especially good this time of year, but it should still be worth seeing…’

‘Is it far?’ I ask quizzically.

‘Half an hour. I could borrow a friend’s Land Rover. We’d need to time it well, though, to get there for dusk, otherwise you miss all the best of the action.’

La Roux has caught up by now, and brightens visibly at the idea of the starlings. So much so that he invites Jack to come swimming with us. Lucky for me he has some other stuff to do, and slouches off like a big, moribund bullock to slowly get on with it.

Perfect .

The Mermaid Cove lies at the bottom of a steep, rocky incline. It’s circular, slate-bottomed, and ebbs and flows with the sea. To get in there you need to clamber down a badly excavated stone stairway (no safety rope, it’s rotted away) which is slippery as hell when it’s wet. But as luck would have it, it’s dry today.

La Roux loves the cove. He’s never ventured here before. He enjoys the cormorants on the cliff-tops, and the tufts of heather and the wild daisies crowned and kissed by frantic spring bees, and the verdant clumps of early clover.

On the way down he finds a huge, hairy caterpillar which he pokes with a twig and then moves off the pathway (‘for its own safety’, he tells me, solemnly).

Once we reach the bottom I throw down my towel and point to the far end. ‘Do you see in the deep section where the water looks paler?’ I ask.

He nods. He sees it.

‘Well, that’s actually a kind of bandstand. It’s a huge, flat rock in the water, and Jack told me how, in the old days, in the 1930s when they built the hotel, they sunk the rock there so that during summer parties this tiny band could stand on it and serenade the swimmers and the people on the lawns above, drinking cocktails before dinner. Great idea, huh?’

La Roux likes this notion very much indeed.

‘It’s a couple of inches under now. I guess the water levels must’ve risen slightly, over the years.’

‘How deep does it get, though,’ he asks, ‘before you can climb up there?’

‘When the tide’s starting to go out, like it is now, it can’t be more than five and a half foot or so. You could probably make it if you stand on tippy-toe.’

‘Okay,’ La Roux shrugs, pulling off his balaclava. ‘I’m keen to try it if you are.’