Nicola Barker - Five Miles from Outer Hope

I nod and continue eating. The stranger stretches over, picks up a book from the place where Big was sitting previously, and then quietly starts reading it. In the Belly of the Beast , by Jack Henry Abbott. Hardback. Boring cover.

‘Mo wrote,’ Patch mutters, and tosses me a letter. I nod, pick it up, unfurl, and not another word is spoken.

Big is no help whatsoever . He is weeding the tennis courts when I finally catch up with him. ‘So who is he?’ I demand. Big straightens.

‘Did you see Mo wrote?’ he asks.

‘Yep.’

‘What did she say?’

(He loves to receive his news second-hand. And he needs to buy some reading glasses. Feely used his last pair in an outdoor experiment — he wanted to set fire to the sea — and a freak wave took them. The child is so damned ill- bred. )

‘Deep South. Death Row. New Lawyer Friend. Some strange, fresh angle about the Probe being marketed as a means to improve prisoner safety and dignity (my God, the woman’s such an opportunist ). Worried about Barge’s tongue. Poodle’s been visiting. And the book. She sent it.’

Big nodded. ‘I don’t like this new prison reform stuff,’ he says, passingly. (Big loathes progressive politics. The man’s a Nazi.)

‘I could give a shit,’ I say.

‘Watch your mouth.’ He looks into the sky. A gull’s flying over. Greater Black Backed. It squawks at me.

‘All the same, bad Elmore Leonard novel or what ?’ I snipe.

Big just frowns.

(These are the conversations we have. They’re profoundly inconclusive. But it’s all that’s really necessary. I won’t change him. He won’t change me. We’re our own fucking people.)

Big bends over and picks up his weeding implement again.

‘His father’, he offers finally, ‘is a gynaecologist. He delivered Feely in Wellington, remember? We owe him a favour. He’s from Cape Town.’

‘Clipped vowels. Horrible.’

‘That’s the nature of the beast.’ Big looks uneasy. He scans the horizon.

‘How long will he stay?’

Big shrugs, squats, starts truffling. Not long, I surmise, by the look of him. I move on.

Hmmn . Something tells me Mr Big is definitely not Mr Happy.

‘ Don’t you find being a woman in the eighties complicated?’

Jessica Lange , Tootsie

Are you telling me — I said are you telling me — that it’s gonna be a whole other year before that monumental short-arse Dustin Hoffman gets to set the whole world straight on the fundamental dilemmas of modern womanhood in his cross-dressing masterpiece, Tootsie ? But where does that leave things, currently? I mean feministically ?

Meryl Streep taking it up the arse and looking wantonly choleric in A French Lieutenant’s Woman ? Marg Thatch writ large — all nose, no jaw — in her preposterous pearls and pin-stripes? Sue Ellen in Dallas with her pop eyes and alcoholism? Or do they honestly expect me to seek succour from that inconsequential drippy-draws playing the worthless girl part in Chariots of Fire ? Can this really be it ?

Look, there’s not a damn thing wrong with my sexuality (excluding those private issues detailed previously), but show me internationally acclaimed actress Jessica Lange in

(a) grey sweatpants

(b) a nurse’s uniform

and — screw Hoffman — even I get a little horny.

I’d better tell you about the barman. It’s a touch convoluted, but bear with me. The point is (can you hear me backpedalling like fucking crazy?), when you move around a lot you get to meet plenty of new people and, frankly, you don’t give a damn about them — not really — because in your heart of hearts you both know it doesn’t really count , for one (you’re just treading water, dammit), or matter , for another, however much you screw each other over, because soon you’ll be gone and it’ll all just be water under the hump-backed proverbial.

(You’re calling my family a bunch of users ? Spot on. You’re sharper than you look. We prefer to call the whole sordid flyby-night exchange thing ‘a short-cut to intimacy’. Ha! God fucked up good when he gave us vocabulary.)

There’s this small pub on the island: the Pilchard Inn — the pilchard used to swim these waters, way back, but now the Gulf Stream has shifted and they’ve taken to foaming further afield; they’re canny. It’s three hundred years old. Balanced precariously half-way up the one and only pot-holed, sharp-tilted road which staggers dejectedly from the beach to the hotel.

Mud-coloured inside, with big fish jaws on the walls and stuffed birds. Smells of dust and treacle. The owner’s nephew still runs it. Keeps it ticking over. Twenty-five. A tragic soak. Stinks like brandy and dry-roasted nuts. Huge, brown eyes (a thyroid problem, but let’s not spoil it). A dark heart. They call him Black Jack. Like the card game (I’ve never played it).

Barely speaks a word. Caters to the tourists. Resents our presence like a rat resents Rentokil. He is literally filthy . Naturally I have it in mind to seduce him. Or for him to seduce me. Come on, the man’s a modern Heathcliff with his catatonic dial, his cat-gut breath, his loose, lardy belly (So I’m only four inches taller. I picture it as an act of revenge, on his part. Well hell . Beggars can’t be choosers).

In the absence of all other island staff, Jack has been temporarily placed in charge of the Sea Tractor — a mythological machine in these parts: half bird, half monster, which, when the tide is high and the conditions are tolerable, we use to ferry post and people and provisions one way and another.

It is his pride. Seven-foot-wide wheels attached to twelve-foot-tall stilts. On top, a kind of oily, open-sided tram carriage. It chugs through the water like a superannuated steamroller.

I have cunningly been employing monosyllabic Jack’s passion for this vehicle in my four-pronged attack on his affections. Last week I cleaned it. This week I’m expressing an interest in its rudimentary mechanics. I’ve invited him out fishing (I’m a dab-hand, me). And all the while I bore him with tales of our time on Soames Island in Wellington harbour, New Zealand. He loves it.

(Jack has this fantasy about turning our current crummy bolt-hole into some kind of nature reserve. He’s a nutter. He likes to mutter about the surf and stuff. He’s into Polynesian culture. He even has a Maori tattoo.

The man is plainly out of his tree. I mean, how does he plan to keep nature reserved on a place part-connected to the mainland? In truth he’s nothing more than a tragic booze casualty, but somehow, in some way, he brings out the nasty, sexy, six-foot Nurse Nightingale in me.)

This particular morning I find him standing on an overturned bucket, poking his nose into the ancient inn’s low-slung but very clogged-up gutters. It’s still high tide. We’re cut off. The coast is clear. And luckily my extra inches mean I don’t have to yell up at him.

‘Need a hand?’ I whisper.

He jumps and scowls. ‘Why did God make you so obliging?’

Side-on he looks like Gene Wilder. But no perm. I say nothing. (What do I know of God’s intentions?) Instead I peer through a window then saunter down the hill a way.

‘So who’s the freak in the balaclava?’ he asks. He can’t help himself. He wants me. I stop sauntering.

‘Balaclava?’

‘Five this morning, I brought him over on the tractor. Your dad was spitting fucking tacks .’

I shrug. I am mesmerized by the sheer sum of words spilling out of him.