Nicola Barker - Wide Open

Lily gazed at the bath water. She felt slightly dizzy but couldn’t think why. She wondered idly what would happen if she disregarded The Head’s wishes. Her stomach nagged her. It was a feeling akin to hunger. A pinchy, poky anxiety. She gnawed at her tongue. Then she abandoned her reserve, yelped and sprang in.

Once submerged she forgot all about The Head. Instead she watched her small breasts bobbing in the water. She tried to line up her nipples with her toes. She closed her eyes and focused hard, like a fighter pilot squinting through his viewfinder. Left a little. Right a little. Pow!

Out of the corner of her eye she sensed a movement. She blinked. She sat up and peered around her. Hot water lapped against her ribs. She looked down between her knees and saw a tiny line of gravel on the bath’s enamel base. She felt vaguely perplexed. But then she sniffed, casually, and picked up a bar of soap.

Five minutes and the water had cooled perceptibly. She rinsed herself off and then clambered out. She looked around for her towel. The brown towel. It was not on the floor. She turned in a circle, still looking. She inspected the towel rack. There was a pink hand towel, nothing else. She grabbed hold of the hand towel and tried to cover herself.

She wanted the brown towel. Still looking, she walked to the door. She pushed it wide and watched steam escape into the crooked hallway. She walked down and along. On the landing at the top of the stairs she thought she saw the brown towel, all in a heap. Carelessly abandoned. Lily stared at it a while. Could she remember dropping it in that place? It was such a small detail but she scowled because it didn’t fit. She wanted it to fit.

She bent down to pick it up anyway. Her hand touched the towel and it felt as light as thistledown. She tried to lift it. It lifted, but not by any significant amount before it fractured in her hand and under its own weight. It was like dust and ashes. It was cobweb, snuff and soft fur.

She gave a little yell. She withdrew and then kicked out with her foot. The towel sprang into the free air at the top of the stairs like a skinny, vital, flat brown creature. A flying squirrel, a feathery, heathery fruitbat. Then it disintegrated. But Lily didn’t see this happen. She had sprung backwards and was yodelling because her foot was stinging. She hopped and then whimpered, clutching her injured toes in her hands. There was blood on her foot, and a mark which could have been a scratch, or a nettle sting or, more disgustingly, it could have been a bite.

Ronny had been weaving around in the prefab’s open doorway, in a state remarkably close to hysteria, for well over an hour. He was ludicrously buoyant, Jim felt, and for the silliest of reasons. “The rain hitting the sea!” he kept exclaiming, “Whap! Whap! Whap !” From the rear he resembled a little wooden puppet, a stick-doll, which somehow struck Jim as very poignant. He took a deep breath and then tried his utmost to focus on piling up the kindling in the fireplace.

In fact he found the puppet image a surprisingly resonant one, perhaps because for the first time in a long while he felt as though his own strings were being twitched — but not in a terrible way, not in a calculated way — and he was perplexed, jarred, undone , even, by the multiplicity of sensations it afforded him.

Usually he lived on one level. He preferred it that way. His colours were one colour, his music a monotone. That’s how he liked it. Even so, he couldn’t really understand Ronny’s apparent fixation on honing things down. To simplify life, certainly, but to achieve this end only through such petty deprivations? He told himself that Ronny had too much time on his hands. Which was true. But Ronny seemed to have no actual notion of time and what it really meant.

“What?”

Ronny had stopped jiggling and was peering sideways, out of the doorway, gesticulating madly into the rain.

Again.

“What?” he said, and then, “who, me?”

Quick as a flash he bolted.

Jim paused, threw down the kindling and walked to the doorway himself. A short distance down the beach Ronny joined a man and a woman. The woman seemed to be supporting the man although he was almost half her size again. Ronny procrastinated, just for a moment, and then took hold of the man’s other arm and helped to carry him, staggering, towards the prefab.

As they drew closer Jim saw that the man was Luke.

“What’s happened?”

Jim assisted them inside. Luke looked terrible. The woman didn’t look much better. Ronny was short of breath. “He thinks he’s had a heart attack,” he explained, panting.

They lay Luke down on the sofa. He seemed calm but was pale and incapable of speech.

“Do you have a phone?” the woman asked Ronny. Ronny shook his head. He turned to Jim. “You should drive him to hospital. That’d be quicker than an ambulance. His Volvo’s right outside.”

“Yes,” the woman nodded. Her feet were bare and she wore a light summer dress which was wet and virtually transparent, torn in the skirt and blotched in a couple of places with what looked like mud or lichen.

Jim had no intention of driving Luke to the hospital. He had his own reasons for this which he felt no desire to discuss publicly. Instead he spoke to Ronny: “No. You should drive.”

“I can’t,” Ronny’s face glistened with rain. “I mean I would if it was an automatic, but it isn’t.”

Jim turned to the woman. “Could you drive?”

“No. I don’t have a licence. I can’t even drive a tractor.” She glanced down at herself. “Anyway, look at me, what would people think?”

“Does it matter?”

Her eyes were round. She was incredulous. “How long have you lived in this community? Of course it matters.”

Ronny spoke again, more insistently this time. “You should drive him, Jim. I wouldn’t even know the route.”

Luke grunted from the sofa. His lips were moving. “What’s he saying?” Ronny squatted down next to him and grabbed hold of his wrist. After a great deal of effort Luke raised his head and managed to utter two complete words: “Recovery…position.”

Ronny looked up, scowling. “Recovery position?”

Jim was flummoxed. “I don’t know any first aid. Would that involve lying him on his side or something?”

He looked to Sara who shrugged helplessly. Ronny turned to Luke again. “What is the recovery position, Luke?”

Luke waved his hands, weakly, like he was conducting a small rodent orchestra. He clearly had no idea.

Ronny smiled, tickled by something. “What we should all bear in mind,” he said gently, “Luke especially, is that dying is not such an extraordinary thing. In fact,” he addressed himself directly to Luke, “it’s actually very ordinary.”

Luke did not react well to this information. He found his voice, somewhere way deep down inside of him, although its note was as weedy as a reed pipe. “It is…bad,” he panted, “you stupid fuck.”

“Turn him on his side,” Jim spoke to Sara, who was beginning to look frantic, “his left side, and while you’re doing that we’ll go next door and find the car keys.”

Sara did just as he’d asked. She was well accustomed to responding without a murmur to curt instructions. Jim walked into the rain and Ronny followed. “Will you drive him after all?”

Jim didn’t answer. Instead he pushed Luke’s prefab door open and began scouting around.

“You seem very calm,” Ronny said.

Jim shifted some papers and photos on Luke’s table. A strange montage of pictures of a woman inserting the bulb end of a flowering hyacinth into her vagina occupied his attention for a second. They were so irrelevant, so inappropriate that he almost laughed out loud when he saw them, but instead of laughing he pushed them aside, roughly. Several fell to the floor. Ronny picked them up and inspected them.