Nicola Barker - Wide Open

“So what are yours?”

Ronny was smiling as though he imagined Jim’s habits would be nothing to write home about.

“Well…” Jim disliked talking about himself but he resolved to do so, just this once, to make his point, “when I was a kid my dad used to break things if I formed an attachment to them. To teach me a lesson about dependence. And in a way it set me free, although I really hated him for it at the time. But now…” Jim twisted his fork in his hand, “now, if ever I form an attachment to something, to anything, I feel the need to break it myself.”

Ronny was clearly impressed. He looked around him, at the furniture, at the walls.

“What kinds of things?”

“All sorts of stuff. Cups. Clothes. Watches.”

“And you still do it?”

Jim nodded. “Sometimes.”

“Why?”

“I have no idea. I don’t bother analysing.”

“But you should.”

Jim shook his head.

“No, really, you should. It’s interesting.” Ronny frowned for a moment and then continued. “By rights you should’ve grown up to really treasure things. In fact, by rights you should’ve become a real hoarder. Don’t you think?”

Jim was happy to accept this theory, but he wouldn’t think about it.

“Look…” Ronny took something from his pocket and unfolded it, “I got this from your neighbour.”

“What is it?”

“A pamphlet. It mentions the black rabbits.”

Jim began eating again. “And so?”

“For a second back there I thought you’d gone and made it up.”

Jim stopped chewing. “Why would I have done that?”

“To get me here.”

Jim’s stomach convulsed. “But why?”

Ronny shook his head. “I don’t know. I felt uneasy. Just for a split second, which was stupid.”

“You said I had an honest face,” Jim sounded pathetic, to himself. “You said it was an instinct.”

“It is an instinct. That’s just my point. I was right about your face. This simply confirms it.”

Ronny tossed the pamphlet down on to the table, then stood up and went to the doorway to stare out at the sea. “Look, a tanker!” he exclaimed. “Do you see the lights?”

Jim didn’t respond. He put down his fork. He’d lost his appetite. He felt very strange, all of a sudden, like this was a dream he was living, like this was a tired, old dream, and he didn’t like the feel of it. Not one bit.

For a second he wished himself inanimate. It was a knack he’d always had; the capacity to disengage himself from any situation, to empty his body and to go elsewhere. And for a fraction of a second he got his wish. He was no longer inside, but outside, and from outside he saw two men in a bare prefab by the brown sea. It should have been a simple image, thoroughly uncontentious. But it suddenly transformed, it was peeled like a banana, and while the outside had been fine, had been firm, the inside was soft and brown and bruised. The inside was marred and scarred and tarnished. Jim felt a profound, jarring sense of unease. Everything was curbed and complicated and twisted and blocked. Could this be right? Even from the outside, from the cold, cold outside, it all seemed so pleasureless .

He blinked and then looked around him, bewildered. He was back, he was back, but who was this man? What was this place? He put up a hand to his cheek, to his nose. He felt his own face. What am I playing at?

For a brief moment Jim questioned his own motivation and then, just as abruptly, he stopped questioning.

“Ronny,” he said quietly, “what happened to all your stuff?”

“My stuff?”

“The box. The box you had.”

“Ah!” Ronny murmured, “I gave it away. I lost it.”

Jim shuddered. He didn’t know why. Suddenly, though, he was wide awake. His nose was tingling. It was getting cold.

Cold outside. Cold . Cold inside.

As far as Lily knew, her father, Ian, had been in Southampton for eight weeks taking care of her grandmother, who had suffered from a minor stroke three months before and was now fresh out of hospital and finding her feet back at home.

Lily’s mother, Sara, was taking care of the farm in his absence. Luckily, the farm pretty much looked after itself, because Sara was in a state of flux. She was forty-two and had shed over four stone during the previous year. A yeast allergy. When she’d avoided bread and buns and all those other yeasty temptations — the pizzas, the doughnuts, the occasional half pint of stout — the weight quite literally fell away. She’d been prone to extended attacks of thrush before, and now that had cleared up too, which was definitely an added bonus.

She was a new woman.

They had forty boar altogether. Which wasn’t many, actually. But the market for them had become increasingly lucrative over recent years. They were organic. They were shot at the trough. One minute they were gorging, the next they were dead. Quick as anything. The other boars took the shootings phlegmatically, each one just as keen to shove in their shoulder and take another’s place.

And in that respect, Lily felt, they were just like people.

Lily enjoyed the boars. She preferred them to pigs. They were hairier and even less genteel. They were bloody enormous. They were giant bastards. But they could be fastidious. They could smarm and twinkle if the mood took them.

Pigs, though, she’d observed, and with some relish, had very human arses. Like certain breeds of apes. Big, round bottoms. And they tiptoed on their trotters like supermodels in VivienneWestwood platforms. But oh so natural. Boars were less human and they were less sympathetic, but they were so much more of everything else. They were buzzy and rough and wild .

Sara didn’t like Lily. Lily was not likeable. It was a difficult admission for a parent to make, but Lily was a bad lot. She was rough and she had no soft edges. She’d led a sheltered life. She’d been born premature and had lain helpless and bleating in an incubator for many months before they could even begin to consider taking her home.

And there were several further complications; with her kidneys, parts of her stomach, her womb. Things hadn’t entirely finished forming. Nothing was right. She was incomplete. So fragile .

And the bleeding. Her blood would not clot. Not properly. Even now, mid-conversation, her nose might start running, her teeth might inadvertently nick her lower lip, her nail might catch her cheek, her arm. Blood would trickle and drip, then gush, then flood. It wouldn’t stop. There were never any limits with Lily. There was never any sense of restraint or delicacy.

She was an old tap, a creaky faucet, she was an overflow pipe that persistently overflowed. She would ooze, perpetually. She seemed almost to enjoy it. She was a nuclear-accident baby. She was improperly sealed. She was all loose inside. She was slack. Thin. Pale. Blue-tinged. She was puny.

At first they’d thought they’d lose her. They’d prepared themselves. They’d almost bargained on it. They were on tenterhooks, year after year, just waiting for the life to be extinguished in a flash or a spasm or a jerk or a haemorrhage.

But Lily didn’t die. Her own particular brand of puniness was of the all-elbow variety. All-powerful. It burgeoned. It brayed and it whinnied. It charged and trampled. It essentially ran amok.

Her body remained weak but her mind hardened. She got stronger and stronger and crosser and crosser and wilder and wilder. She needed no one. And yet they’d made so many accommodations! They’d changed from an arable farm to a pig farm and finally to boar. Boar were less trouble. Less time-consuming. They’d stiffened themselves for some kind of terrible impact, but the impact never came. It never came. And so things began to fray. Slowly, imperceptibly. Down on the farm.