Nicola Barker - Wide Open

It came, it was coming! She could feel that bolt loosening, a shifting, a shunting.

One! she said, her own voice stunning her like the sting of a wet rope, Two and Three and Four! She counted and counted. Sometimes she lost the thread but then the numbers came back to her like swearwords.

Oh fuck! On thirty-six her hips went dead. On thirty-eight that bench just buckled with the sweetesthardestloudest creaking. Crack! She went down with it. This was the hottest and the wettest vandalism. She gasped out laughing. Ashamed and glistening.

The floor was dusty. Her face, inky-rosy. She rolled off. Her limbs were shaking. Her dress was tangled. She tugged some skirt out from under. She put a hand to her medical underwear. She felt herself, holding her breath, suddenly cautious, as though testing the ripeness of an avocado. Oh shit, she whispered, All torn! She staggered to the door. She yanked it open.

“Excuse me…”

A voice, from deep in the dark behind her, so muffled, so muffled that it could have been something wildly unbidden hidden inside her own head.

“I think,” Luke stuttered, clutching her abandoned sandals to his wide chest, his face as white and ghastly on emerging from the hide’s darkness as what little remained of the bleak afternoon light, “I think, Sara, I honestly believe you’ve gone and killed me.”

Her face was black with mascara as she watched his knees give way.

The doctor was a family friend, naturally. And Connie knew, and Kitty her mother knew, that Connie knew, that Kitty had been fucking him, on and off, for the previous ten years. Kitty was magnificently post-menopausal, with great white curls, snazzy lips and eyes as soft, grey and glossy as a rabbit’s ears. And tall. Almost five nine. She rendered Connie dwarf-like by comparison.

Her mother hovered, decorously, on the perimeter of the blue room, smelling of White Linen and a heavy French hand cream, recently applied. She’d been completing the washing-up from supper when she’d heard the crash. Connie wouldn’t believe that she’d sprained her wrist. She kept touching it to check if it hurt. And it did, but only slightly.

“You may well be concussed,” the doctor said.

“But I didn’t hit my head when I tripped…” she was automatic, “only my knees and my palms.”

“But you have a bruise, darling,” her mother volunteered, “on your cheek.”

Connie was dazzled at this notion. She had merely pressed her cheek to the floor and listened to her own blood pumping. She had thought she understood her own strength, her own silliness. But apparently not. The doctor had already bandaged up her wrist, made a sling and put some kind of elasticated material on top for support.

“It was a tiny fall,” she repeated, feeling a charlatan. She’d only told her mother she’d tripped to save fuss, not to cause it.

“When I found her,” Kitty said anxiously, twisting her wedding ring around on her finger, “flat out like that, I was utterly petrified.”

“How about,” the doctor said softly, “I have a quiet word with Connie here while you fetch her something warm and sweet to drink?”

Kitty pursed her lips and laced her fingers together, softly resisting, but then she nodded and quietly left them.

Connie resented being alone with him. As a child she’d called him Doctor Donald. Now she called him Donald. He had metallic hair and a dimple in his chin that any girl could fall into. He was a big man and perpetually peaking, she felt; always on top form. He was ruddy and Brylcreemed and reeked of suede and clean tweed. Considerably younger, she couldn’t help noting, than her father had been.

He was so polite. The situation, the affair, had been so polite. No feathers ruffled, as far as she remembered. Merely her own.

“Your mother is anxious,” he said gently, “about the will and the special bequest.”

“That’s her business,” Connie said abruptly, stretching out her legs under the covers, “and my business. Nobody else’s.”

She imagined that her knees were two volcanoes. In Sumatra there were over a hundred volcanoes. Or so Monica had written. Over a hundred volcanoes. Eighteen active.

“The simple fact of the matter is that nobody actually cares,” Donald said, staring at her intently, thoroughly logical, “so there’s really no need for any of this.”

She brought up her legs defensively. “Any of what?”

“Any of this…commotion.”

“In truth…” Connie pondered what she was about to say for a moment, “it isn’t even my mother’s business, strictly speaking. It’s mine. My business. My loan.”

“Have you been sleeping?”

“Why?” He’d caught her off her guard.

“Did you take the pills I prescribed?”

She nodded. “Yes. I took them.”

She hadn’t slept. She hadn’t taken the tablets either. It had been five long months. Waking and dreaming were merging so wonderfully now. And what could be the harm in that?

“So you’re still determined to sell?”

Connie nodded. “Certainly. The money for the premises, the flat above, the stock, everything else should just about make up the required amount.”

Donald was perched uneasily on the desk’s small pine chair. He adjusted his weight slightly and it creaked. It was a girl’s chair, she thought, and he was no girl.

“What saddens me is that your father clearly wanted you to make a go of this business. He wanted you to be secure.”

“No,” Connie shook her head, “he didn’t want me to be secure. He wanted me to commit myself. Which is something altogether different.”

“I don’t see that.”

She was irritating him. He still saw her as a small child. She was a mere toddler. Her knees wobbled, her feet faltered. In his eyes she would always be, at the very best, a dewdrop on life’s river bank. She could never cause a splash, the most she could hope for would be to glimmer slightly and then to evaporate. That’s what he’d always wanted.

But Connie saw it differently. She had another slant, which she sensed was her father’s slant too. The slant was inherited, it was legitimate, she felt, and as such it had to be embraced, it had to be hugged and treasured and cosseted. When she had called herself inconstant to Nathan, that morning, she had not meant it lightly. It was absolutely true.

She was a small blonde flea and she jumped from place to place, from man to man, from job to job. And yes, sometimes she’d found her feet, but only briefly, and on one of these occasions she’d remained static long enough to qualify as an optician. Got the certificate. Got the frames and the lenses and the premises. Did all that stuff. And Daddy loaned her. No conditions. But when he wrote her the cheque he’d said, “I have a strong suspicion you’ll pay me back.”

What had he meant, exactly? Even at the time she’d wondered. And yet now she was paying him back. But she didn’t happen to know how or why. At first she’d thought it was the other way around, that he was paying her back. Now, however, she sensed that doubt itself was his legacy. His gift.

Donald was staring at her. “What on earth could your father have been thinking of?”

She shrugged. “Me. Probably.”

“And your mother? What about her feelings?”

Connie felt absolutely no desire whatsoever to discuss any of this with Doctor Donald. Why should she? She sighed languorously. “My knees feel so heavy ,” she said.

♦

The Head had instructed Lily not to wash. For the month of August. August was gorgeously equable weather-wise, so she’d perspire less, he said. Nobody would even notice. And hitherto she’d done just as he’d asked. Until now.