Nicola Barker - Five Miles from Outer Hope

It was during those boiled-dry, bile-ridden, shit-ripped, god-forsaken early-bird years of the nineteen eighties. The same summer my brother Barge started acrylic-ing his internationally celebrated collection of bad canvases featuring derelict houses with impractical tomato-red masonry and gaping windows: his agonizing L. S. Lowry period (and look what happened to him — a gleeful life of Northern bliss, stuck in Pendlebury with his bed-ridden mother. Pretty fucked up. Ask anybody).

And it was the identical year, more to the point, that my vicious but voluptuously creamy candle-wax-skinned sister, Christabel (Poodle for short, or Poo, if you really wanted to risk a trouncing) went out and invested in a brand-new pair of breasts, and then, with the kind of infuriating randomness only ever exhibited by terriers, High Church clerics, and the despicably attractive, finally got around to making the one and only decent-minded decision of her rancid, fatuous, nineteen-year-old life (a good impulse, you’ll be pleased to know, that she never, ever recovered from).

And it was the self-same summer — June 5th, if precision is your watchword — that I first set eyes on a stringy southern hemisphere home-boy, a man -boy, a prankish puck by the name of La Roux (with very bad skin and even worse instincts), who sailed into the slow-beating heart of our half-arsed, high-strung, low-bred family, then casually capsized himself, but left us all drowning (now they don’t teach you that at the Sea Scouts, do they?).

In order to pinpoint this nebulous time chronologically, to locate it in terms of general events of national — fuck — galactic significance, to set it all in perfect sync, so to speak, it was actually the very year in which that resplendent Sylph of Synth, that unapologetically greased-back, eye-linered soprano imp, Marc Almond (the rivetingly small-c’d Marc) enjoyed a late summer smash with his electro remake of Gloria Jones’s old Northern Soul big-belter, ‘Tainted Love’, then celebrated it by devouring well over a pint of warm, pale cum in a public toilet — somewhere horribly unspecific — and got his gloriously effete wrist slapped, and his adorably flat stomach pumped for his sins.

Yes, that year.

And let us pause (momentarily), lest we forget the curious story of Mr Jack Henry Abbott, the bastard Yankee killer, the ingeniously literate reprobate (whose lucky-lettered surname would ensure him an opening position on the index of every World Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Murder for ever and ever more, amen), who in this particular summer somehow managed to prick the precious consciences of all those fine-minded, high-flying American writerly types (sure I can gloat — I lived in Texas for fifteen months. It was hot as Hades. It was dry as toast. I was resplendent in two completely random scarlet eczema mittens. I walked around with plastic bags on my hands to stop me sticking to furniture. I was medically advised not to get wet in the shower. Medically advised , I tell you. Call that humane ?) and then spat, and spat again, in their kindly, good-intentioned, well-bred faces. (Don’t you just love it?)

It was that year. It was that summer. Late that summer.

It was 1981.

Remember?

So my dad loved Thurber. He had a penchant. What can I say? Thurber . The American who — so far as I can tell, anyway — made a living out of writing witty stuff on the fascinating subject of canine behaviour. And he drew cartoons of bloodhounds doing human things in a mutty way but being all high and mighty about it, like making citizen’s arrests and drinking pale ale in public houses and suffering from acute depression. As if dogs have all that much to be worried about — existentially — or superior about, come to think of it. And this clever cheeseball made a career from these meanderings.

He was born in 1894 (this is Thurber, dimwit) and he lived — like my father — the first seven formative years of his life tortured by his incapacity to digest solids. Horrible gut problems. Huge coincidence, and hence, That Bond.

All told, there are seven of us: Big, that’s Daddy. He’s four foot nine in his clogs, which is pretty embarrassing, but when we were little, we were tiny . That’s nature. We knew no better.

Painfully thin. Like a toothpick with elbows (yet in our minute consciousnesses, a giant pink radio mast, a wild, fleshy skyscraper), which is why Barge — who’s already coming over slightly too idiosyncratic in these pages for my taste — went right on ahead and nicknamed him in one single syllable with his soft, slightly lisping, sweet baby-lips. Big .

Big does some landscape gardening. He’s in the midst of compiling a supernaturally tedious Pocket Guide to Garden Shrubs . He lives to crochet. He still finds it extremely difficult to digest cheese. It’s a daily battle.

Okay, Barge . Barge! What a wit! What a prodigy! Well, the truth is this kid’s name was actually lifted straight from the collar of that ridiculous ale-lapping hound I believe I might already’ve mentioned earlier (a mongrel, a drunk, an ineffectual guard dog — these are details only a Thurber fanatic would find telling) and he is distinguished by being the oldest child in our considerable and cosmopolitan clan. Our clutch. *

By mid-1981 Barge was living on the only kibbutz not actually inside Israel. I think it was deep in the Balkans, somewhere. He kept the faith by painting assiduously in the evenings and boiling beet for his keep. Clear-pored and righteous (This was 1981 , for God’s sake. He’d never even heard Bill Wyman’s ‘Je Suis un Rock Star’. It was depraved ).

Naturally the degraded root vegetable-based enclave to which he had only recently become attached consciously eschewed all unnecessary contact with modern technology. If you’d thought to ask, he’d’ve said Abacab was some kind of taxi service.

Next up, or down, was the lovely Christabel with her two brand-new, out-of-the-blue, special-purchase, proudupstanding, oxygen-tank tits (after she’d turned fifteen, if you called her Poo to her face, she’d string your teeth into a necklace and then make you pass it), a cheerfully malevolent teen queen, the only paid-up member of our benighted eighties familial troupe to wear normal — read as English — clothing (the rest of us stepped out boldly in our embroidered kaftans, fur-trimmed hide waistcoats and crochet knickers. We were mutants ): I’m talking pleated skirts, high-neck blouses, court shoes. Standard hideous. All acquired — without exception — as a consequence of her devious and persistent extra-marital conjunctions.

But she was always Daddy’s favourite, his pride, named after Thurber’s most beloved black French poodle (although I fear close textual scrutiny reveals this animal to be an inconsistent, teasing, curly-hinded harridan: please refer to Mr T’s essay on ‘How to Name a Dog’. He doesn’t say it, in so many words, but I believe the modern vernacular is slut .)

I’m next down and I’m Medve. No, it isn’t a verb. And it isn’t Ancient English for river or whore. Medve was also, if you must know, a Thurber canine, another poodle, not quite so beloved as Christabel, but, shucks, a great breeder by all accounts, and an independent dog blessed with the talent of throwing her own balls and then retrieving them. A bitch. Obviously.