Nicola Barker - Wide Open

“Do you like it?” She spoke.

“No.”

Nathan closed the book.

♦

He went home. He caught the Tube. She knew his route. She left the office just shortly after. She found him on the platform. Deep down underground. The Tube arrived. She climbed on with him. It was virtually empty. They didn’t sit.

“You took the book.”

She was not accusing. He breathed harder, restraining something.

“Why did you take it?”

He shook his head. They didn’t speak again. But she went all the way home with him.

In his living room he put down his briefcase. “Will you report me for this?”

Laura shook her head, almost shocked at the suggestion. “I imagined you were planning to return it,” she said quietly. As though she knew! She had such faith in him. He nodded.

“I just want you to fuck me,” she added, astonishing herself almost as much as Nathan, “because I’m honestly starting to hate you and I really want to flush it right out of my system once and for all.”

Nathan was appalled. Against the door, fully clothed, gasping, he did exactly as she’d asked.

♦

Later, much later, he spent hours just gazing. He stared in wonder at the thirteenth-century Christ-as-Masturbator. And the angel. A little angel-optician, liny, tearful, bobbing at his shoulder. A languid warmth filled him. From his teeth to his prick to his toes. For the first time in his long life he was truly, unspeakably, ineluctably suffused .

The car was the only thing Connie wasn’t selling. It was completely her own. She drove one-handed, blinking herself awake, eating a greasy brioche from the services. Her mother had begged her not to go. Sunday morning. Her arm was still in its sling but it felt as normal. She yanked the sling off and used the arm without even thinking. In fact she was almost convinced that all the fuss had been merely a conspiracy to stop her from leaving.

Gravesend to Sheppey was no distance. But she took a diversion to Cobham en route , where her aunt lived. Her father’s sister. She had packed a case. Enough clothes for a week. The letters in their bright ribbon. And also a cheque for the amount of twenty-five thousand pounds. Her mother had signed it in lieu .

It was all so dreamy. The motorway. Crumbs on her lap. It had rained at first and then a shaft of light cut through the clouds and nearly blinded her. She drove on into it, squinting.

Her aunt was exquisitely dithery, which was, Connie felt, just as things should be. She drank some tea. She was loitering.

“You look so tired.”

“Do I?”

“Are you sleeping properly?”

“Yes.”

“And where will you go now?”

“To Sheppey.”

“And where will you stay?”

“I don’t know. In a hotel.”

“But you have an uncle…” her aunt went and found her address book, “he runs a farm.”

Connie frowned. “But I’ve never even met him.”

“So I’ll ring them.”

She rang them. Someone was dead. A vacancy. She needed to feel useful, to fill it.

Connie barely registered the conversation. She was idling in neutral. I am free of all ties, she thought, and I have a cheque for twenty-five thousand pounds. I could take my little smart car and head for Sheerness, drive it on to the ferry and then drive it off again at the other side, just randomly.

It wasn’t escape. No. She had yearned for the shock of resolution, the force of will, the sense of sacrifice, of application, to complete her obligations to her father. Before this moment it had all been procrastination. A yearning. A waiting. And yet now that she was moving, now that she had that cheque on her person, now that her willpower had finally been located, shaped, funnelled, she felt an overwhelming urge to do something new with it. To channel it elsewhere.

Was that wrong? She could be the girl in the car commercial who just drove and drove. Or she could be like Monica and search for something that was missing. A missing something. But she was too short to be the girl in the commercial and her hair was too curly, and of the many things she had yet to discover that were missing from her life, the main one Was still her own self. Was constancy.

When her aunt handed her a piece of paper with an address on it and specific instructions, Connie slipped it into her pocket, fully intending to ignore it. But in her pocket her hand located something she did not remember packing. Her passport.

In that instant she felt certain that if she had troubled to open her passport and inspect her own pale face in the small grey portrait within, she would have discovered two harsh words boldly inscribed across her sweet, round cheeks: DIRTY FRAUD.

And as luck would have it, this struck her as a perfectly fair assessment.

♦

When Jim awoke — his neck aching, his throat sore — he found himself still on the sofa. Ronny was sitting close by, on the floor, wide awake, fiddling with some of the embers in the fireplace. He was holding a charred remnant with a red tip. He was blowing on it and watching the heated end brighten.

Jim focused on him, blearily, slowly regaining his senses. He saw Ronny apply the ember to several surfaces. First, to another piece of wood. Then to the bottom of his white shoe. Finally, he held it in front of his nose and gazed and gazed. Then he moved it an iota and set fire to his fringe.

He was so slow. Jim expected him to jolt, at the very least, and then to jump up with dispatch to quell the flames. But Ronny did not move. He remained where he was, just watching, as though he wasn’t in the least bit affected, as if he’d actually intended it.

Jim thought he must be dreaming. But he was not dreaming. So he roused himself, bounded off the sofa, shouted something…He grabbed a pillow from behind him and belted Ronny about the head with it. He hit him and hit him until the flames were all gone. Then he picked up the ember from the carpet, where it burned, slightly fractured now, and tossed it back into the fire.

Ronny lay, prostrate, just smiling, with a black hole in his fringe and the stink of burning surrounding him. Jim held on to the cushion. He inspected it. It was blackened but seemed otherwise undamaged. Neither of them spoke. Eventually Ronny sat up. He felt around in his pockets with his left hand. He drew out a pair of nail scissors. He offered them to Jim. Jim threw down the cushion and took hold of them.

“Are you burned?”

“I don’t think so.”

“The smell of scorched hair is sickening.”

“Cut it off then. All of it.”

Jim inspected Ronny’s scalp.

“The hair’s melted, like plastic.”

“Cut it short and then shave it.”

But Jim had misgivings. “With no hair and a beard you’ll look like Lenin.”

“Then get rid of the beard too.”

Jim hesitated. “If I do that then we’ll both end up looking like members of some kind of crazy half-arsed cult.”

“True.”

Ronny chuckled. He clearly relished this notion. Jim shrugged and began snipping.

“I never worked out,” Ronny said, eventually, watching his hair fall in clumps down on to the linoleum, “why it was you had that razor. Did you ever need to shave?”

“No.” Jim was wary.

“Then why?”

Jim continued cutting. When he spoke it was without emotion. “It was my father’s razor. I was planning to kill myself with it.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Jim took a deep breath. “It would’ve been too easy,” he said softly.

Ronny smiled. “The way you explain things,” he scratched his chin, “it’s so,” he paused, “it’s so sweet .”