Nicola Barker - Wide Open

Sara, staring but never seeing, looking but never focusing, tried to search out probable justifications for Lily’s obnoxious-ness, but she could find none. She searched her own heart. She wished Lily would do the same. But Lily wouldn’t. She didn’t. Not ever. And yet Lily had her own moral set-up, her own fears and beliefs, which were complex, abundant, comprehensive. They were simply well hidden. Like potatoes. Several feet under.

She worshipped a deity. It was her secret. The deity had a special name. It was called The Head. It survived in spirit but had been born and had died on one long, still night in 1982. An August night. So it made perfect sense that August should become the month that Lily set apart to celebrate The Head with some special rituals of her own making. She wasn’t unduly creative, usually, but in August she made an exception. In August she cut a neat incision on her arm with a piece of wire from the boar pens. Special wire. Then she killed one of the hens and blamed it on a fox.

Fox must’ve done it .

With the blood from the hen, and with her own blood, she soaked the earth behind the yew tree where she pretended that The Head had been buried. But The Head had not been buried there. It had been taken away by her father and incinerated, in all probability. Although they’d never discussed it.

The Head. A freak. Lily was five and had witnessed its birth. A reliable sow from the old herd had been mated with a boar. The farm’s first boar. They’d built a special enclosure just for him. It had been an experiment. Her father had wanted the best of both worlds. He’d called it ‘toe-dipping’. And sure enough, the sow had delivered eight healthy young, but then The Head had come, last of all, and it had taken the mother with it. Like Shiwa. God of destruction.

Lily didn’t get a good look at it, initially. Her father had tried to hide it. He’d tossed it aside and kicked straw over it, like he did with all the stillborn babies whenever Lily was in attendance. But then he’d been obliged to run into the house to call a vet when the mother began struggling, so Lily had taken her chance to inspect the freak as it lay caked and smothered in its musty tomb of hay and grass.

When she pulled its cover aside, so tentatively, what had she seen? She’d seen a head — extended, elongated — and the remainder of a body; like a tiny, moist mitten. The body of a baby rat. Or a gerbil. No tail though. But it had lived! She knew it lived. Its mouth moved. Its eyes were as round and as trusting as a puppy’s. Its skin was pale and soft and glossy like blancmange. She wanted to touch it but her father returned, yelled at her and then sent her indoors.

The next day she could find no sign of it. The Head had gone. And she knew in her gut that he had done it in. Her own father. But The Head did not go, ultimately, because it infiltrated Lily’s dreams. It inked up her mind like an octopus. And it felt, strangely, as though there had been a space, a special gap in her imagination which was only just big enough to be inhabited by this particular creature. As though the creature had known that she lacked something. As if it had known that she needed it to feel complete. It satiated her. It became a deity. And so Lily celebrated it, and in celebrating it, she celebrated, however lop-sidedly, her own sweet self.

Naturally, also, she blamed herself. And her father. She should have saved it. The Head. If only she could have touched it. If only, if only. It had needed understanding but it had received none. While the mother pig lay dying, Lily had watched coldly as the babies all struggled to suckle. They were not pigs and they were not boars. They were little, hairy hybrids. Striped. Distinctive. Cute, certainly, but neither one thing nor the other. Lily despised them. The Head did not consider suckling. He was looking for understanding, not food. He was set apart. The world would have different standards for him. For him things were much more complex. For Lily, also.

Nature was a hard taskmaster, Lily realized. That night she witnessed nature, nurture and then — the final blow — nothing.

Lily alone grieved for The Head. She’d learned that nobody loved freaks. Not Dad, not Mum. No one loved freaks. Only she loved them. That was her role. And when The Head told her in a dream that she too was a freak, on the inside, and that the only reason Daddy didn’t kill her was because he hadn’t noticed what a freak she was yet, and that Mummy hadn’t caught on either, Lily saw no reason to disbelieve him.

But what if they did see? What was to stop them from covering her with straw? From getting rid of her? And acting afterwards like none of it had ever happened? What was to stop them?

Lily grew furtive. She grew stealthy .

♦

She’d seen Jim. She’d noticed that he had no eyebrows, no eyelashes. He always wore a hat. Hiding something, she’d supposed. No hair. She imagined that he was ill, with leukaemia. He looked sick. Too pale. Always alone. Bent over like an old man, his body withered. She watched him. Nothing escaped her. She gathered information because it might come in handy, one day. You could never tell.

♦

Sara was in the kitchen leaning against the Aga drinking hot Vimto when Lily arrived home, soaking wet. She demanded to know what was up. Her daughter should have been at college all afternoon, not dawdling on the beach. Lily couldn’t face a confrontation.

“Here’s what happened,” she said, licking the salt from her fingers. “I met this man down by Shellness Hamlet. Totally naked. He’s renting one of the prefabs.”

“You mean the bald one?”

“No. The bald one doesn’t use the beach. He keeps to himself. This guy was fat and smelled of fish. Anyhow, I told him he shouldn’t be allowed to walk on a public highway totally stark-ers.”

Sara frowned. “What did he say?”

“Nothing. He didn’t get my point. He was heading down to the sea for a dip. But then I noticed that he’d gone and left his prefab door wide open. I was cycling past, so I couldn’t help seeing that all over the floor were these pictures of naked ladies. And I don’t mean just naked, I mean weird. Things stuck up their arses and everything. Animals .”

“My God.”

“Exactly. So I confronted him about it and he said it was none of my business. I didn’t like the look of him. I mean, he was naked. I thought he might turn nasty so I jumped into the sea to avoid him.”

Even Sara found this last bit difficult to comprehend.

“You jumped into the sea? Why didn’t you just ride home?”

“I dunno. I was angry, I suppose. He’s a sicko. This is a small place. There’s the nudist beach, which attracts the worst kind of people anyway. And now there’s this man. Attracted by the nudity. You know? Like this is a sewer. Our home.”

Sara shook her head. “It’s not good, certainly.”

“It’s terrible.”

“I don’t want you going down there again.”

“Oh no,” Lily smiled at this, her eyes icy, “no one stops me from going where I want to go and doing what I want to do. No bloody pervert, anyway.”

Sara felt vexed by Lily’s moral certainty. “Go and get changed. You’ll catch your death.”

Lily had dripped a puddle on to the kitchen flags. She held up her hands. Her knuckles were purple with cold.

“I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with the human body in its natural state,” she said piously. “I’m not suggesting that for a moment. But what I am saying, though, is that one thing leads to another.”

She sounded just like her father.

♦

“I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the human body in its natural state,” Sara said staunchly, “but what I am saying is that enough’s enough. My daughter is seventeen. She has a right to travel on a public highway without encountering this kind of thing.” Luke was fully dressed. It was hard to believe that he would even consider walking a public highway stark naked.