Nicola Barker - Five Miles from Outer Hope

Barge always felt God was a fraction too needy. If God was your brother, he’d say (or your lover, for that matter), you’d steal his specs and lock him in the cellar. We told him God would (in all probability) have twenty-twenty vision, but Barge felt God would wear glasses on account of him spending so much time — pre-Genesis, before he moulded the sun and moon and everything — struggling to read dear Thurber’s wonderfully inclusive dog stories in very poor light.

We’ve all been there.

I digress .

A major 1981 early summer dilemma amongst our little island clan (Poodle aside, and the tongue of Barge, and the kibbutz and the Lowry, and the anal probe and all of that other assorted malarkey) is that during Mo’s infuriatingly indeterminate absence I have been placed solely in charge of young Feely’s moral and ethical development (To trust Big in this arena would be beyond a miscalculation, it would be downright insanity — the man’s idea of house-training a puppy would be to ram a cork up its arse. He has the patience of a mink ).

But under my careful (if intellectually fickle) tutelage the kid has recently turned morbid. Are children like bananas? When they get a little bruised on the outside, does it mean they’re bad for good? To the centre ?

Feely’s propensity to empathize with inappropriate tales of animal tragedy has become a source of recent concern to me. A case in point being the intensity of his interest in the Death Of Ginger (Black Beauty’s slightly snappy chestnut chum. Remember her?) as written by nineteenth-century spinster-come-Quaker-come-horse-lover Anna Sewell (a woman whose life was not just scarred but wrecked by an arbitrary ankle injury mysteriously sustained on a trip home from school circa 1835. Well, I ask you).

This is a woman — coincidentally — whose mother liked nothing better than to spend her evenings holding temperance meetings, while her father took up his marvellous vocation as — uh- oh ! — a brewer . It’s little wonder Anna got all her kicks talking to equines.

At first, Feely simply liked you to read him the segment (chapter 40, if you want to immerse yourself completely) appropriately entitled ‘Poor Ginger’ (to summarize: after a shaky start in life, the chestnut mare, Ginger — apparently so named because of her propensity to snap — is taken on by the squire at Birtwick Park and treated with great kindness and cordiality until she learns to open her heart and love again. Alas, certain disasters follow — remember the fire in the barn ?! — and both Beauty and Ginger are sold on. Beauty suffers adversity with a certain degree of stoic nobility. But what of Ginger? Little is heard of her until the fortieth chapter, and nothing, I’m afraid, is heard thereafter).

Initially Feely derived large portions of — what to call it? Delight? Cheer? — pleasure from his companion’s reading and re-reading of the Death Of Ginger (the lines ‘Men are strongest, and if they are cruel and have no feeling, there is nothing we can do but bear it, bear it on and on to the end’ and the slightly later ‘the lifeless tongue was slowly dripping with blood; and the sunken eyes! but I can’t speak of them, the sight was too dreadful’ seeming to bring him especial succour).

Soon, however, a mere reading was no longer enough to satisfy him and a certain amount of ‘acting out’ became necessary. Initially — this’ll fascinate the psychologists among you, amateur and otherwise — Feely enjoyed playing at being Black Beauty, apprehending and then dutifully mourning Ginger’s unseemly demise with an impressive degree of muscular restraint.

But after a while, his priorities changed and gradually he began to want to inhabit Ginger.

Henceforth, he would trot around bearing his ill-treatment and his painfully swollen joints and his cruelly injured mouth with such piety and restraint and (how to say it?), uh… sanctity , that eventually the whole farce looked in danger of leaving the realms of horse fiction and entering the exalted sphere of morbidly masochistic sacrilegiosity.

Enough is enough. When Feely began imposing ‘little moments of Ginger’ on his day-to-day activities (a certain tremble in the knee on afternoon walks; bolting, randomly, on fishing trips; struggling to eat his meals because of his bit-induced lower-lip deformity), Big decided he’d had it with the bastard chestnut mare, and Black Beauty was closed for good and placed up on a high shelf, out of harm’s way.

But the boy is canny. He has found ways of sublimating his need for Ginger into other stories. And now, even (God forbid), into his readings of Thurber (has the child not a smidgen of dignity?), principally — although not exclusively — into the story of the aforementioned Rex, the most exalted and beloved dog of all .

Say, for example, I am reading little Feely the tale of Rex and the ten-foot pole (an essential moral lesson for any unapologetically attention-grabbing four year old, as I’m sure you’ll agree), the boy will listen keenly, he’ll seem to be all ears, but his eyes will be travelling down the page, ever further, in the hope of reaching the end of this useful story — Rex’s tragically premature demise.

And it’s a nasty one. Beaten to a pulp by another dog’s angry owner, Rex (only ten years old) staggers back to Maison Thurber and prepares to die. But wait ! Two brothers are home, but where’s the third? Surely Rex cannot meet his maker without first having bade a touching farewell to this kind and loving third brother?

So he waits. He fights death. He battles against it with all the final, paltry remnants of his considerable doggy will, until, at last , a full hour later: that familiar creak of the gate! That gentle step! That whistle! The third brother returns, Rex takes a few haltering steps towards him, caresses his hand with his bloodied muzzle. And then… and then…

Oh, come on . Talk about milking the bugger. Feely (naturally he’s a sharp young tyke) always wants to know whether Thurber loved Rex because he died so painfully, or because he was a fighter, a cat-killer, a butt, a fool? I explain that it was because Rex was an American Pit Bull Terrier (an exalted breed) and because he was their first dog ever .

The first, I tell him, is always the sweetest. The first word. The first step. The first kiss. The first punch. The first pie. The first high. The first, I tell him, is always the best. I mean, who remembers seconds?

I don’t really know if Feely finds this theory plausible. Secretly I think he still believes James Thurber loved Christabel most dearly and that Rex was only really fondly remembered for his astonishingly moving deathbed loyalty.

Sometimes, in the morning, when he’s slightly late rising and I go in to wake him, I find Feely propped up on his pillows, eyes closed, mouth agape, in a perfect physical recreation of Jacques-Louis David’s wonderful painting , The Assassination of Marat (Marat? You know . The crazy, messed-up, fuck-off French revolutionary). I keep telling him (when he finally stirs) that Marat died in the bath, not in the bed. Luckily, Feely fears enamel and much prefers foam and feathers. He knows on which side his bread is buttered.

Imagine my surprise, then (to say nothing of my horror), when I enter the hotel foyer just before three that self-same day to find the unbelievably bumptious newcomer La Roux (wearing an extraordinary khaki-coloured boiler suit with a thick brown leather belt pulled ridiculously high and tight at his waist) lounging against the dusty jet-and-mirror-encrusted reception desk, declaiming boldly from the severely banned text of Black Beauty , with little Feely huddled up next to him on a bean bag (Feely drags his bean bag wherever he goes; it is small and stained and purple, full of polystyrene bobbles), listening intently, his wide eyes brimming, his dirty hands entwined, his tiny, pointed chin digging into his knees.