Nicola Barker - Wide Open

Remember Big Ron?

Empty. Twist. Wind. Grave. Lonely. Sharp. Stiff. Spoiled. Breath, no-breath. Ruined. Empty. Hollow, hollow, hollow, hollow.

Oh thank God little Ronny came. Oh thank God, thank God.

But he’s only little.

Only.

Little.

And even that didn’t stop him.

♦

Nathan’s thoughts were a giant, angry sea tap-tap-tapping on a small dyke wall. He tried to hold the sea at bay.

He tried to run it off. He ran, sometimes, through the park, along the road, down by the canal. He ground his teeth on buses. He bit his nails to the quick. He held his breath. He tried to be a gentle man.

But the sea kept on tapping.

After Connie’s visit, a blood vessel burst in his eye. He gazed at it in the mirror. It resembled a river. A tiny, bloody Amazon.

Nobody saw. Nobody ever saw. Because Nathan was grown up now. The past was such a long time ago. And Big Ron was dead dead dead. He was dead .

“I was very surprised by your bathroom cabinet,” Ronny said, wiping egg from his mouth with the back of his hand.

“What were you doing in my bathroom cabinet?” Jim asked, an edge in his voice.

“I was hunting for a razor,” Ronny said, “and there’s an edge in your voice.”

“I don’t have a razor.”

Jim was clearing the hearth. It was full of ash.

“But do you have an edge?”

Jim stopped clearing and almost smiled. “An edge? Doesn’t everybody? Don’t you?”

Ronny grinned. “Sometimes.”

“I have an edge,” Jim confided, “but what I don’t have is a temper.”

Ronny sat down on the sofa. He was holding a small pair of nail scissors.

“I’m going to cut off my beard.”

Jim said nothing. Ronny began snipping. “The way you said it!” he chuckled, sotto voce .

“Said what?”

“I don’t have a temper. Have . Like a temper was something you were really searching for.”

Jim straightened up. Ronny continued. “Like in a children’s story. He was looking for his temper. He looked in the fireplace. He looked in the bread bin. He looked in the bathroom cabinet…”

“No. You looked in the bathroom cabinet.”

Ronny snorted, but then continued mining the same vein, un-repentantly, “So Ronny looked for Jim’s temper. He thought he’d found it in the bathroom cabinet but in fact all he’d found was an edge,” he looked up, “and loads of pills. What are they for?”

“Indigestion,” Jim said.

“Really?”

“No.” Jim smiled.

“Hair is extremely flammable,” Ronny muttered, cutting with vigour.

“We need kindling and driftwood if you want a fire later,” Jim said, standing up with the ash-can in one hand and a brush in his other. “Do you want to come out and collect some?”

“Sure.”

Ronny chucked a handful of his hair into the empty fireplace and then followed Jim outside with all the casual ease and familiarity of an old basset hound.

They walked along the beach. It was mid-afternoon.

“So why did you lose your hair?” Ronny asked.

“I had a habit,” Jim said, bending over to pick up a stick, “of pulling out single strands.”

“Why?”

“It was a nervous habit. A bad habit. I didn’t even know I was doing it. After a while I made a little bald patch.”

“Where?”

“At the back, underneath. You couldn’t see it. But one day it began falling out spontaneously. I’d find handfuls of it on my pillow in the morning. Then I was prescribed certain drugs, hormones, which made it worse. Eventually it all went. Even my lashes.”

Ronny kicked at a large log. “How about this?”

“Not if it’s damp.”

Ronny picked up the log. He grinned. “I thought I might find your temper under it.”

Jim scratched his nose. “I don’t think I’d keep my temper under a log.”

He walked on.

“How come those chalets are all fenced off?” Ronny asked, catching up, readjusting the log under his right arm and then nodding towards the hamlet.

“It’s a private community. They think the locals are all freaks. Anti-social. Inbred. So they put the fence up to distinguish themselves. And we tend to think they’re weird because they put up the fence and because they come here principally on summer weekends to use the nudist beach.”

“Could I squat one?”

“The chalets? I shouldn’t think so. But a couple of the prefabs near mine are empty.”

They had walked far enough along the beach to reach Ronny’s shell display which had remained untouched since its completion that morning. Jim paused in front of it, Ronny too.

“What do you think?” he asked, smiling.

“Very…uh…nice,” Jim said finally, having struggled valiantly for a better word.

“You know,” Ronny looked calmly at his work, “I think I could mess around with shells forever. It’s very calming. Perhaps I’ll make this display bigger. I could fill the whole beach with it.”

Jim stared at the shell display. “What about the sea?”

“What about it?”

“And the bathers?”

“I wouldn’t care about them.”

“And how would you eat?”

“I’d fish and I’d pilfer.”

Ronny chuckled at Jim’s serious expression, because he hadn’t actually meant a word of it. Jim wasn’t smiling though. He found it difficult to imagine someone being willing to settle for so little. He said as much.

“Wouldn’t you get bored?”

“I don’t get bored. That’s one of my virtues. I never get bored. I have this great ability to focus.”

Jim scratched his heck. “I’m unsure whether being unable to get bored is necessarily a good thing.”

“Of course it is.”

“OK.” Jim conceded so quickly it was almost comical. Ronny shrugged, not really caring. He pointed towards his shell display. “Can you read it?”

“Read it? No.”

“Honestly?”

“No.”

Ronny had made a small romantic gesture. Like a girl laboriously scratching a boy’s initials on to a school desk. Jim stared blankly at his own name spelled out in sweet pastels.

“And there was a razor,” Ronny said, focusing in on the shells himself, “in the cabinet. At the back.”

Jim’s expression remained frozen.

♦

Sure enough, she’d returned to Luke when the afternoon was getting dolled up in extravagant pinks and violets for the evening. Luke was one of those men to whom such things habitually occurred. His life had been full of women, calling by, dropping in, vacating. So the prospect of another meeting with Sara had left him feeling wonderfully bold, delightfully sassy, and, well, he had to admit it, the smallest, the tiniest, the most infinitesimal fraction guilty .

The truth was that he’d been fully intending to clear out: his body, his mind. He’d wanted to rid his existence of people. His last wife (his second wife) had yearned to cram his life full of them, full of herself, principally: her wants, her needs, her desires. But Luke had actually felt himself congested enough already. Crammed up in a too-small space with his booze, his fags, his belly and all his countless other vices.

He’d enjoyed a substantial life, a substantial career, substantial work, he felt, but real substance, true substance, he suddenly believed, depended on a kind of purity. A meanness, a thinness, a vigour. He wanted these things. He’d earned money. He’d been flash and greasy and commercial. And it had filled him up, certainly. But now he felt a need to recreate himself in the image of a world that was sparse and bare and elemental. Reaching the zenith, he told himself, depended not on doing more, but on doing less.