Nicola Barker - Wide Open

We both stared into the lens. Louis counted down, under his breath. Ten, nine, eight, he said, seven, six, five. We weren’t even propped and stilted and steadied yet when the fruit came down. The durian fruit. It falls in July and early August. A giant, spiky bomb of a fruit. A menace .

Phut!

It killed his camera. Yes! It killed it stone dead. And that, I told myself, is the law of this fucking jungle. M .

“Ronny was sick four times,” Lily shouted, like she was proud of his achievement. Jim didn’t answer. He was skulking in his bedroom, hiding. He couldn’t face her. She busied herself around the prefab. She rescued the pie from the pan in the kitchen which was threatening to boil dry and then tried to invite herself to dinner. She craved a slice of something meaty.

Jim listened as Ronny ejected her. He did it so gently. He said her mother would be worried. He said it was getting late. He said he needed to rest a while. He played every stroke with such grace and finesse. Jim envied him. And Lily, in turn, wanted to nibble him all over. Her foot didn’t even sting any more. This was a new reality, she told herself. This was a brand new world. She could step right into it. She could shed her old skin.

Ronny finally closed the door on her. He went and found Jim sitting on his bed. He had been upset by something. Ronny could tell. His eyes were red. He wore no hat. He was round-shouldered, diminutive, buff-headed. “Guess what?” Ronny was jovial.

“What?”

“Kidney stones!”

“Really?” Jim didn’t brighten.

“Kidney stones. They can be very painful. And he’d been having these bad rumblings for ages but he’d been too frightened to go and see anyone about it. He thought he was dying. That’s why he came here.”

Jim shook his head at Luke’s apparent weakness.

“Sara gave me directions but stayed hiding in the car. I took him in. It worked out just fine in the end. I left the Volvo at the farm. You could pick it up tomorrow. Luke can get a cab home when he’s ready.”

“So how do you feel?” Jim said.

“Me?” Ronny was cheerful. Resolutely. “Absolutely great.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

He glanced over his shoulder. “I see you’ve got the fire burning.”

Jim noticed that Ronny’s hands were shaking. He quickly stood up. “Would you like something to eat?”

“Uh…” Ronny nodded.

Jim went into the kitchen. He dished up the pie. He could hear the fire crackling in the other room. He picked up the plates and walked through. He stood in front of Ronny and offered him his plate. Ronny put out one hand to take the plate, then his other. Both hands. A battle took place, inside him, on his face. But he could not take the plate. He suddenly grew stiff. He froze. It was as though he was restraining something huge inside him. An uncertainty. A monstrous indecision. A blank-ness. He was paralysed.

Jim put down the plates.

“Oh God,” he said, “I shouldn’t have made you go. I knew it was wrong. I have a powerful instinct for survival. That’s all. It’s my downfall. It’s horrible.”

Ronny tried to speak. He whispered something. Jim couldn’t hear. He drew nearer. He put his ear close to Ronny’s lips, then closer still until finally he heard him. Such a little voice.

“I’m lost. I’m lost. I’m lost.”

Jim felt sick. “No. You’re not lost.”

“I’m lost. I’m lost.”

Jim grabbed hold of Ronny’s hand. He had never held another person’s hand before. His mother’s hand, perhaps, when he was very small. He had been held himself, forcibly, but he had never held.

“Help me, Jimmy,” Ronny said.

Jim could see in Ronny’s eyes that he was leaving. He was walking away. His pupils were big at first but then they grew smaller and smaller until they were almost only pin-pricks. Little black tadpoles drowning in a dense, swampy green. He was far. He was further. Like his whole soul was vacating.

Jim wanted to speak, but what could he say? What did he have to say? Nothing. Nothing. He tried to reach inside himself for something concrete, but all he could find was Monica and her words. Monica and her world. Because Monica had a strength, a colour, a real solidity, but hidden inside an almost infinite uncertainty.

Jim started speaking. Randomly. Babbling.

“Come back,” he said, “I have something to tell you. I have a friend,” he said, “called Monica. She’s far away too. Far away. And she’s trying to find this missing ape. She calls it the oran-pendic. It lives in Sumatra. In the rain forests. They have volcanoes. And the world’s largest flower. She says in the summer the whole place reeks so violently of pepper that your nostrils feel fiery.”

“Pepper?” Ronny’s voice, dazed, dead, an echo.

“Pepper. From the plantations…but there’s tea and timber and coffee too. It’s a kind of paradise. Fertile and steaming and opulent and lavish. The very opposite of this empty place.”

“Oran…?”

“Pendic. Which means upright. He’s covered in a pale-coloured hair. He has no big toes. She says he walks the forest but he’s so alone. He mistrusts. He’s full of fear. And she has no real evidence that he exists, just one brief sighting. She’s never even seen him but she loves him. She believes in him and that’s enough. It’s all instinct with Monica. She’s so…” Words failed him.

Ronny closed his eyes and saw a chasm. He gasped.

“Intense,” Jim said, “that’s it. She’s so intense. There’s this story she told me,” Jim paused and then started off again, winding himself up like a clockwork mouse, a watch, a musical box, “about the day she went to take a photo of the world’s largest flower. Rafflesia arnoldii . She’d been spending all her time in this bat cave and so she didn’t want to go at first…”

“Bat cave?”

On Ronny’s face, a flicker of recognition.

“Yes, yes…bat cave…” Jim pounced like a spider. The cave. The darkness. He started talking. And before he knew it he was weaving a yarn. He was spinning it and braiding it and twisting it. And Ronny was found and bound and reeled in. Slowly, surely, safely, soundly.

He was hooked.

Lily was invincible. She placed one foot in front of the other and that alone proved it. Legs are strange, she thought. Pink and stick-like and joined at the top but they work in a way that is truly extraordinary. She loved herself. She stared down the dark road.

These pale sticks, she told herself, will take me from here to there in no time at all. She wondered what distance consisted of and whether you could abuse it. Then she plotted her route via Ronny’s sticky expulsions. She inspected the wide sky for meteors. She whistled.

Near home, soon enough, on the farm’s long driveway, close to the fence which ran along the boar pens, she hunted for Ronny’s second ejaculation. She was counting down. She was dot-to-dotting. She had nothing better to do.

Three different places, she inspected, and in none of them did she find what she was looking for. Ahead she saw a shadow in the roadway, like a puddle. That’ll be it, she told herself, and drew closer. But then she stopped. It was not a liquid but a solid. A small thing. Hunched over. Engrossed. She held her breath. She skirted, tremulously.

But she could tell that he had good ears. He was a wild one. And he walked on little stumps, but not quickly. He shifted his position. He was not afraid of Lily although caution was inscribed deep within his genes. His giant head was domed. And his mouthparts, they were moving. He was licking. He was gobbling.