Nicola Barker - Five Miles from Outer Hope

She just stares at me impassively. ‘I think you should know that Patch is going to have a baby,’ she says. Then she glances down the coast again like she finds the view captivating.

That night, when I’m sleeping, a piece of glass falls out of the ceiling. Green glass. And smashes into a thousand pieces next to the safe, warm place where I’m lying and I’m dreaming. But not of Jack Henry. For some strange reason, he’s gone away. He’s left me.

What more can I say? She was thirteen when she had it. A boy. She called it Michael. (How uninspired is that ?) The father was fifteen and lived in Scilly. Mo came back. We moved to Skye. It was cold. It was weird. It was winter. And dreary .

But before that, even, on the 18th of July, Jack Henry murdered a man called Richard Adan, a Cuban actor — waiter in a restaurant called the Boni-Bon. New York. Early one summer morning. For no particular reason. Then he went on the run. And they caught him. And they locked him up again.

The book sold. It made him a fortune. And a short while after, a famous comedian contacted him in prison and bought the film rights for a quarter of a million.

A few years later, when I’m a little older, I finally get to see a picture of Jack Henry Abbott. He’s not at all as I imagined. He has bouffant hair — this strange and audacious teddy-boy affair — like a pompadour. Jack Henry. A poseur . Who would have thought it?

And Patch says, ‘I’m sure if I’d seen a picture, I would’ve felt differently about him way back then…’

She’s a teenager now. She doesn’t know any better. And although I take her point, I’m not really sure if I agree with her…

Well, not entirely , anyway.

Here’s something funny. In 1995 I lose my older sister. She goes on some stupid skiing trip to Austria and ends up dead. At this stage, there’s only two of the family remaining in England. That’s Patch and me. So we go on a trip to the airport together, along with an undertaker, to collect the body.

And that’s when Patch tells me. ‘It wasn’t Poodle who phoned the immigration people, all those years ago,’ she says, staring up at the flight numbers, clutching a Styrofoam cup of coffee. ‘It wasn’t Poodle who betrayed La Roux, Medve. It was me. It was me .’

At first I’m not really listening. I don’t know what she’s saying. I can’t make sense of it.

‘Because he knew I was pregnant. But I swore him to secrecy. I thought if no one knew, then it would go away. So I set you both up in the cove that day. I thought Big’d get rid of him, after. But he didn’t. So I phoned them. The immigration people. And then later, when she put two and two together, Poodle said she’d pretend it was her. Because you were so angry . And I felt so terrible . And I was frightened .

‘She said you hated her anyway, so it wouldn’t really matter. But I suppose it did, in the end.’

I’m not looking at Patch. I’m staring up at the flight numbers. It’s eleven fifty-nine p.m. and fifty-seven seconds, and the screens are glowing, and my eyes are filling.

‘My God,’ I mutter, ‘did you know it was St Valentine’s Day?’

And as soon as I’ve uttered it, we’re in the day after.

I guess it’s time to pull those pins out. I’m getting quite dozy. I don’t know if I’ve been sleeping. But the acupuncturist returns and starts twiddling again. He takes out seven. ‘But the single one, in this ear,’ he says quietly, ‘I’m going to cover with a small plaster and leave there. So whenever you feel the urge you can give it a twirl, and hopefully it’ll help you.’

He does just as he says. Then I sit up and the bed creaks. He goes to the door. He passes through it, and into the reception area. He writes me out a bill and signs it. He hands it over. I take it.

‘You know what?’ he says casually, as I scrabble in my bag for my money. ‘I honestly believe you are sick enough and mad enough to walk out of here today without even openly acknowledging to me who the hell you are.’

I find my purse and open it.

‘Big spoke to your dad about a year ago. They bumped into each other on holiday in Florida. He said you were here, and I was in England for a while, so he wrote and he told me. ‘

La Roux shrugs his shoulders, like this is just an everyday occurrence, then asks me cordially about the family.

‘But I want to know first how you managed to stay here,’ I say. ‘I didn’t. I came back again in 1993. And I settled in Finchley. Then I moved to Tufnell Park. And I’ve grown quite attached to it actually.’

‘But what about the mousebird,’ I ask, frowning, ‘and the huge moths and the hail stones and the badly behaved apes near Cape Point who molest the tourists. And what about Grape Fanta?’

He smiles. ‘I can get that here now, if I feel the urge, at certain, specialist retailers. And you know what?’ he tells me, ‘I like British birds. Even though they’re kind of dowdy. I still have that book Black Jack sent me. I know the robin and the jay and the wren and the stonechat. I know their songs and their eating habits and their favoured terrain and everything.

‘In fact,’ he continues, grinning, ‘I was actually maid of honour at Black Jack’s wedding. He had a better man than me as best man already.’

I blink. ‘Black Jack? Somebody actually married him?’

‘Two years ago. He met this tiny Maori girl and settled in New Zealand near a place called Rotorua which is full of geysers and the smell of sulphur. And they have a whole theme park there dedicated to the kiwi fruit…’ He pauses. ‘You know, even though they grow it in South Africa, the first time I ever ate it was with you and Patch and Feely… Tell me about Feely,’ he says.

‘Oh God,’ I grin, ‘he’s living in Sydney, Australia. He’s a performance artist now. He sets fire to stuffed animals, puts them out by pissing on them, then paints himself with the wet, black ashes. It’s all ridiculously dramatic.

‘He’s in love with a man called Samson who has thirty-seven piercings. They have five miniature Schnausers together. He’s only four foot nine, but hugely muscular. He never got the regulation boy-growth-spurt in his mid-teens, which was problematic to begin with, but he eventually got over it.’

‘And Poodle?’ La Roux asks, still smiling. I pause and swallow.

‘ She died in 1995. In February. On Valentine’s Day. From this crazy little blister she got when she was skiing in Austria. She got blood poisoning and it killed her. It was really stupid. It was just one of those improbable things…’

He looks briefly crestfallen. ‘Big never mentioned it,’ he says, ‘in any of his letters.’

‘He never talks about it. She was always his favourite.’

‘It seems like true beauty is destined to live a short life only,’ he says sadly.

For some reason this irritates me. ‘Talking of letters…’ I quickly change the subject, ‘I wanted to say thanks for the lovely lace penguin you sent from prison. It was very, very sweet of you.’

(Naturally I don’t mention how I still sleep with it, propped up on my pillow, and how I bought some tea tree oil from a New Age pharmacy and doused this scruffy, ill-constructed, flightless bird with it. Or how I smell it at night when I’m dreaming and it fills my head with hospital dramas and minor infections and the horrible prospect of clinical enemas.)

He shrugs. ‘It’s always hard to know what to send for a baby.’

(Oh Jesus. How embarrassing.)