Nicola Barker - Five Miles from Outer Hope

Patch shrugs, ‘I didn’t catch it. Something stupid. French-sounding. Double-barrelled.’

‘How curious.’

‘Yup.’

‘You have served me well,’ I wave my arm regally, ‘and now you may go to find and comfort Feely.’

Patch wipes her nose on the hem of her kaftan (it’s hayfever season), pulls herself to her feet, then trundles away. She pauses, though, for an instant, in the doorway.

‘He stole the book Mo sent us,’ she informs me, ‘and I want it back. Will you ask him?’

Too obvious, you’re thinking? Obvious? Me?

Forty-five seconds, thirty stairs, two landings, one long, leaky hallway later, I lift my fist and rap on his door. The paint is peeling. It’s aquamarine. Through the cracks filter the mysterious sounds of scratching and heaving. Some heavy breathing. Metallic jangling.

I knock again. After two whole seconds the door is wrenched open and The Balaclavaed One beholds me. He is panting like a Dobermann trapped in a summer car.

‘Now what?’

(How welcoming .)

‘I heard you scratching.’

‘So?’

‘Like some old hen .’

He pauses for a moment, as if deep in thought, then rips his balaclava off. ‘I love the way,’ he announces passionately (his eyebrows all skewwhiff, his hair on end with static electricity), ‘I love the way you think hens have wings for arms, but when you watch them — I mean, properly — they actually have arms for legs.’

My face remains blank.

‘I love that,’ he sighs, ‘ dearly .’

He rubs his two hands on his face, repeatedly, like he’s scrubbing at it, and makes a gurgling noise through his mouth meanwhile, like he’s standing under a waterfall. After a shortish duration he stops what he’s doing and stares at me.

‘Do you have to quack to get through doors?’

I weigh him up. Ten stone. Approximately five foot nine.

‘Sorry,’ he chuckles, ‘I meant to say duck .’

‘Apparently you have a double-barrelled name,’ I titter. ‘Something silly. French-sounding.’

‘Confirmed, lady.’

He straightens majestically. ‘They call me La Roux.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Nineteen years.’

‘I’m sixteen. And don’t call me lady. Everyone thinks you’re a freak already. That kind of formality won’t improve matters.’

‘Who’s everyone ? You and your little fat sister?’

‘And my brother, Feely.’

‘The four year old?’

(Already I’m regretting this tack but still I say yes , defiantly.) He ponders this for a minute. ‘Hmmmn. Feely too, you say?’

I nod.

‘Now you’ve got me scared literally shitless .’

He gurns preposterously. ‘And the man who brought you over. Black Jack. He agrees.’

‘A retard.’

‘La Roux,’ I murmur spikily, ‘the cream .’

‘No,’ he primps, ‘the mixture .’

I give this translation a moment’s thought, then sniff.

‘Can I come in?’

He steps back. ‘Go ahead.’

‘Presumably’ — I bend my knees slightly to facilitate my easy access (he almost sniggers) and walk past, glancing up at the ceiling — ‘you know there’s a hole in the roof?’

‘I do. Your tiny father told me.’

‘And there was apparently some kind of a dispute over cupboard space?’

‘It’s always a factor, comfort-wise, I find.’

‘And how long are you intending to stay?’

As I speak I stroll through to the sitting-room. To my left, the door which leads into the walk-in storage cupboard stands tantalizingly ajar. I pull it wider. Inside lies the chicken wire, some twigs and lavender, formed into a rough oval, about four foot in diameter, dipped in the middle. In its centre is a beautifully embroidered cushion cover, a photograph of a dog, a wooden pipe, a very small guitar, some cigarettes, two odd socks, the book Mo sent and a peacock feather.

I turn, stare at him quizzically, take one step back and point. He shrugs. ‘A nest.’

‘A nest ?’

He nods. ‘Indeed so.’

‘Are you broody ? Is that it?’

He just smiles.

I bend over and grab the book. ‘Patch wants this back. Do you mind?’

‘Not at all.’

I turn to go. He clears his throat. ‘And you said your name was?’

I pause. Now he’s got me.

‘Medve.’

‘Ah,’ he smiles disingenuously. ‘German for pretty chin?’

‘No,’ I glower, ‘Hungarian for bear.’

He embraces himself and smirks. ‘How cuddly .’

I merely growl, slap the hardback against the flat of my paw, then leave, red-cheeked and fuzzy, knowing (oh, screw the bugger) that this spotty, flimsy, mean-vowelled little man has pricked and pinched and skidaddled me.

Stuff your faxes up your jaxies. Terminate your damn telegrams. Eradicate your e-mails. I just don’t want them. Because I know, I said, I know that Mr James Thurber is a Full-blown American Literary Legend and that the dog business (the cartoons, the anecdotes, all the rest of that tripe) was simply an aside, a side-line, an adjunct to his other, far greater, literary masterworks. I know that stuff. So please, please, please just give over, will ya?

Anyway, facts are facts, and a patently undeniable one is that James Thurber loved his pet poodle Christabel with a passion (and who the hell am I to deny the intensity of Thurber’s feelings one way or another…?), but (oh, here goes), if you ask me, there was one dog, and one dog alone, which the great man loved — I mean, really loved — way and above all of the others.

It was his very first dog, a mutt called (ahem) Rex, an American Pit Bull, a cat-killer extraordinaire (I quote: ‘He killed cats, that is true, but quickly and neatly and without any especial malice’) and a pretty bloody phenomenal jumper.

When he was a kid, Thurber and his two co-Rex-owning brothers had this special sadistic little trick they’d play on him involving a ten-foot pole and a four-foot-wide garden gate.

Rex loved to retrieve. It was practically his nature . And he was as keen as mustard. And he was no genius, either (as is very often the way with that special, crazy, monomaniacally yappy breed of dog, the terrier).

And so it was for these three simple reasons that Thurber and his two demonic brothers engineered a game whereby the ten-foot pole was thrown beyond the gate and Rex was then sent to bring it right on back to them at something approximating a full-blown, smoking-paw-provoking canter.

So off Rex leaps, stumpy tail held high, mouth gaping, fully intending to retrieve that pole. He scampers through the gate, he runs straight for it, he locates it, he turns, he grips, he lifts, he gallops back to the gate again (meanwhile, his three mischievous owners, just beyond it, are calling and yelling and whistling: all in all whipping up a storm of general approbation) when bam!! That long horizontal stick hits the sturdy wall on either side of poor Rex’s avowedly muscular dog shoulders, and the poor, silly, short-sighted, over-enthusiastic barker is left toothless and numb-lipped and juddering.

What a prank! What a wheeze ! What a jaw-breaker!

There’s a moral here somewhere. I hope you can find it. I have it down pat as being something to do with the touching but nonetheless naïve and irritating (to say nothing of painful ) perils of over-enthusiasm: a kind of canine Look Before You Leap.

We use the works of Thurber, in our house (I don’t know what you do with Thurber in yours, couldn’t care less, to tell the truth) as a kind of pseudo-moral manual. We forsook the Judaeo-Christian tradition back in 1974 when Barge got angry with God for treating Job so shoddily (I mean, to plague him with boils and locusts simply for being a basically good-intentioned, well-adjusted kind of guy? Is that fair ? Is that reasonable ?).