Nicola Barker - Wide Open

Lily edged, she pulled as wide as she could but she was hinged, somehow, on to this thing. It held her in. It plotted her perimeter. Needle-toothed. He chewed. He growled as he ate, unintentionally, breathing laboriously through his flat, misshapen nose. And what was he eating?

Oh God, she whispered, You’re eating Ronny! What are you doing?

But the creature did not respond. He remained stooped. He kept on scooping. And Lily kept on edging until she was past him. And then she walked and walked, in slow motion, feeling something ghastly at the back of her.

♦

Sara had bathed. Her hair was coiled up in a towel. Her head was buzzy with regretfulness. A kind of sweet-bitter-sweetness.

Lily came in wiping her mouth. Like she’d been kissing. She had mud on her nose and savage eyes. She smelled of bile. Sara tried to smile but there were miles between them. It was easier not to speak. And so much cleaner.

R onny, darling .

We’re still not speaking. Louis and me. He’s slow to forgive. It takes him a while. Each new situation leaves him spinning. He has to dig in his heels hard, hard, take a deep breath and then struggle to acclimatize .

So I’m back in the cave. The bat cave. You understand these places, don’t you, Ronny? These dark places with tough, rough walls. With each notch, each rocky dimple so staunch and reliable? And every single, individual breath and rustle and whisper and footfall I make is answered by the dark’s harsh leathery voice. The darkness attends. It never ignores. With its black eyes and soft grip it asks for nothing, it gives nothing .

And here I find a balance. Because if I were a scale I’d be tipping, Ronny. I’d be all lopsided. I’d be tilting. I don’t want to tilt. But I was despairing; walking in the forest, surrounded by brightness but not seeing. Understanding how every single natural thing here has its own special place except me. (And Louis, naturally, but he doesn’t care less where he fits.)

I don’t want to be the exception. I so want to merge. It was eating me up. I saw myself as an excrescence in the forest’s vivid walkways. I was pink and bald in the midst of its green. It was painful. I was squinting and gaping and scrabbling for shade. But then I found the cave. The bat cave. It’s a giant. Its roof is all bat-fleshy, like suede. Upside down and dangling. These bats, they chatter. They shit. They blister. Their radar bounces. I’ve been getting the feel of it in my jaw. I know it sounds crazy. Inside the soft parts of my mouth. The radar gets trapped, temporarily, and sparks from cheek to cheek like static electricity .

Why the cave? I don’t know why. Perhaps because if they were hunting for me I’d run to this place. And so might he. The oran-pendic. He could be here. He could be near. Am I grabbing at straws? Louis thinks so. But he would. He’s so methodical. He’s so unforgiving. He’s so marginal. Do you know what I mean?

In the darkness I can dream I see him. This pale ape. This toe-less man. And he, like me, is flattened up against a wall. Not in the main cavern but in an anti-chamber. A crevice. We both feel around blindly, like deep-water fish. Touching, whispering, bumping, retreating .

One day I thought I felt a snake. Hibernating, on a rocky shelf. Thigh-high. And the shock! But then I realized that it was a root. An ancient root from a giant tree that flowered once, far, far above .

Sometimes visitors come. With their torches, their unbearable voices and their sharp-eyed guides. I watch them from my crevices. They don’t find me in this labyrinth .

And he is here, somewhere, watching me. I feel it. I am hunter and hunted. I am avoider, avoided. I am complete. Replete .

Men arrive daily to scoop up the bat shit. Louis tells me they make medicines with it. They use it for fertilizer .

One day Louis came himself to try and find me. He called out my name and my name rebounded. I was a spider. I was all eyes. He couldn’t see where he was going. He wasn’t acclimatized. He grumbled and stumbled and his hands were hungry on the walls. I stood close by him but he couldn’t tell. I even smiled at him but my teeth were as black as the darkness that spiked them .

Two weeks in the cave. In before light, out after nightfall. This is a dark world. Louis gives me bitter glances when I return. He gives me the coldest cold shoulder but he doesn’t speak. He thinks I know something that he doesn’t know. He’s growing distrustful. Last night I heard him taking the film from my camera and then replacing it with another .

My ears have grown so sharp that I can hear my hair and my nails growing. My skin is a soft dough-white and I absorb everything. I eavesdrop, I intercept. And like an exotic woodpecker on a sky-high line I wire tap, tap, tap .

Hear me knocking, Ronny. M .

Nathan was rota’d on for the Sunday shift with Laura and Laura’s dumb friend Karen. The office wasn’t open. They were merely sorting; slotting stuff into cubicles, tagging it and then tapping it on to the database. Filling in and keeping on top of things.

Mid-morning, Laura consulted Nathan over some art books. They were in a plastic bag. They came from a specialist art bookshop in the West End. Some were in English, others were in foreign languages; Spanish, Italian. Laura was still stuck at that desperately helpful stage. She had yet to evolve from private eye to clerical worker. “Perhaps we should phone the bookshop,” she suggested, “the receipt says they paid by credit card. Over a hundred and thirty quid, in fact.”

“They’ll find them here if they want them.”

Nathan, stiff-necked and dismissive, waited at the keyboard. He wanted some details so that he could type them in and then abandon the edit.

But Laura had pulled one of the books out of the bag and was turning its pages. Here, after all, was a whole world of art and gloss and gorgeous paper which smelled like high quality furniture polish. Spain. The Prado Museum. El Greco’s bloodless gristle. His pale pigments and aching holy ligaments. Then blue. Then red. Goya. All that drowning. Those inky eye-rollers. The lolling.

“Look, a dog,” Laura smiled, “swimming!”

The Italian Renaissance. “Just smell the paper, Nathan.” Karen had sniffed already. Laura offered him the open book. He swallowed hard and took it. He sniffed at it. It was open on a very particular page. He looked and then he looked again.

“What’s wrong?”

Laura moved closer and peered over his shoulder. She loved the musky scent of him. Man. Soap. Hair oil. And although Nathan wanted to, he just couldn’t stop staring. Laura glanced at the picture and then at the adjoining script. “Antonello da Messina,” she said. “It’s called the Pieta . 1477.”

Then she read: “The picture is remarkable in its use of the prominent psychological diagonal which goes from Christ’s face to his right hand…”

She inspected the picture. It was Christ with an angel. Christ, crucified, down from the cross, still breathing, perhaps, a wound bleeding profusely under his right nipple. Head back, eyes closed, mouth falling open. A little angel at his right shoulder supported him. Her face shining with tears. And they were all alone. Just these two.

“How amazing!” she pronounced, feeling uneasy. Because there was something not quite right about the picture. Something amiss. Christ had a tiny sheet on his lap which barely covered him, and his hand, not the psychological hand (which was curled back, all cramped and uncomfortable) but the left hand which rested on his thigh, had its fingers curled in a particular way…it verged on the indecent. It was sex and death and other stuff that Laura didn’t much relish contemplating.