Nicola Barker - Wide Open

And somehow I feel like that great, white ape is watching us and laughing. We wanted to invade him but have only ended up invading each other. Sniffing and pawing and whittling .

It finally came to a head. It had to. Were you there, Ronny? Did you see it? I’ll write you my side of things, anyhow, and then you can tell me if my account is the true account. Louis’s is different. We keep lying to each other. We believe our own lies, religiously, but also each other’s. Oh my brain is fizzing. It’s curdling .

Here’s how it went, Ronny. Here’s the truth of it, honestly. Remember the bat cave? It all feels so long ago now; the clammy warmth of its darkness, its heady black blanket…Well, Louis got Monty and a couple of Monty’s friends to stake it out. You wouldn’t think it possible, but Louis made it so .

I arrived one morning, as usual, before dawn, and they were there by the mouth of the cave and they were building something out of leaves and twigs and straw. A giant bonfire. I asked them what they were doing. They were laughing at me. I said, “If you light afire in the entrance you’ll kill the bats. They’re just inside. Some of them are still returning home. See? ”

I pointed skywards. In the air, above me, I could feel their radar .

Monty pulled a face like he didn’t understand me. He was shaking a box of matches. He shook them and shook them, beating out his own sick little rhythm. Finally he spoke. “We won’t light it,” he said, “until we absolutely have to .”

He cocked his head to one side. He grinned at me .

And I knew then that it was over. I’d been invaded. It was the end of the bat cave, Ronny. I could not enter. Instead, very quietly, so calmly and gently, I returned to the shacks. Louis was outside, sitting on an over-turned crate, cleaning his boots as though nothing at all was happening. I stood and I watched him. I said nothing .

He washed the mud off his boots. Then he dried them. He applied some polish with a cloth. He brushed them and brushed them. The sky was quite bright by the time that he’d finished. He was pleased with his job. He put the boots down in front of him and was about to pull them on when I tipped my head to one side. The slightest movement, but he caught it, Mr All-Eyes .

What? He glanced at me. What? I shrugged. What? “You should buff,” I said quietly. Buff! Like this one word was the most delicious, the most seductive syllable ever spoken. He peered down at the boots. Buff? I have the softest cloth, I said, in a tin, under my bed .

Louis stood up and went into our shack. One of the boots fell over, as he passed it, on to its side. He was gone a while. I watched the boot. And I saw, at its lip, at its giant, dark entrance, a small congregation of insects; termites, leaf-cutter ants, who knows what else, just guarding, patrolling. And then I saw my sister, the scorpion, standing close by, just willing them to allow her to enter .

When Louis returned, he held the cloth, the buffing cloth, and he straightened the two boots and he buffed them with the stupidest, stuffiest military precision. Then, when it was done, he threw down the cloth and he pulled them on, one by one, so luxuriously .

But the second boot was already inhabited, and its inhabitant made a sudden, harsh acquaintance with Louis’s big, boney ankle, his calf. She raised her tail — My sister! Just a warning, I tell you — but Louis doesn’t understand warnings, only attack. So she stung him .

He screamed. He howled. I stood and watched him, doing nothing, not even smiling. He yanked the boot off. He was bleating. He ripped off his sock. He shook it, the boot too. He needed to find her, to see her, to identify. My sister was so tiny. But it’s the tiny ones you have to watch .

Help met He screamed. Slotted into my belt is my wide jungle knife. I unsheathed it. I took his sock, I shook it, I tied it above his calf, I tightened it. I touched the blade on the place that was red and now swelling. I sliced into him. Oh, the feeling!

Louis, meanwhile, was still gabbling, jabbering, hollering. He kept telling me that tourniquets were not proper medical practice any more. People get gangrene that way. Or clotting. He asked me what I was doing with the knife. And when I put my lips to the raw, new wound and sucked, his eyes widened as though I was draining out the very pith of him .

Then the storm abated. There was a strange quiet, a moment of respite, and Louis did something, Ronny. Something unthinkable. Before I could spit, he grabbed hold of my head, my chin, he placed his giant polish-smattered fingers over my mouth .

What would happen if I made you swallow? Monica? What would happen?

His blood and that tiny sting, discovering a new world inside my soft pink mouth. He held me and held me. I thought he would kill me. Then he let go. He watched me spitting and choking. He staggered back into the shack. I heard the mattress creaking as he lay down upon it .

God’s truth. M .

♦

Connie was small and had a child’s tread. So light she almost floated. When she entered her room, she was not heard. Lily was entirely engrossed, her eyes wide, her mouth ajar, her hand at her throat.

“What are you doing?”

Even as she spoke Connie knew that this was the silliest question. She could see perfectly well what Lily was doing. She was invading. She was knifing and filleting. Lily looked up, noticed Connie, was surprised that she’d materialized so silently but wasn’t in the slightest bit ashamed at being apprehended. Connie saw it. Lily held out the paper. “This is Ronny’s letter,” she said, “so why do you have it?”

Connie was laughing inside but also white with fury. “Those are my letters,” she hissed, “and nobody else’s.”

My birthright, she was thinking, my deathright.

Lily reached out her hand for the rest of the bundle. Connie bounded forward and stopped her. She grabbed her wrist. Her hands were tiny but surprisingly powerful. Lily tried to free herself. Connie snatched the letters first, and then slapped her, so hard, with the back of her hand, that the neat little ring she wore snicked into Lily’s cheek.

Lily gasped, amazed. She’d fallen back against the wall. But as soon as she’d exclaimed her lips snapped shut and her eyes tightened. Blood began trickling down her cheek. She did not try to stop it. Instead, she straightened up. She was tall. She towered. A skyscraper. A terrible, flat building. Ominously one-dimensional.

“Give me that!”

Connie put out her hand for the letter Lily still held.

“Why should I,” Lily smirked, “when it’s Ronny’s?”

She folded the letter with a violent precision; once, twice, three times, then slipped it into her shirt pocket. In the same movement she withdrew Connie’s lipstick, pulled off its cover, twirled it out, applied it to her lips, smacked them together, closed the lipstick and returned it to her pocket.

“Does it suit me?” she asked, primping hatefully. Connie was stunned by the spitefulness in Lily’s small voice. But more stunned, really, by how protective she felt. The letters. The words. They were hers. Hers . Nobody else’s.

She put her head to one side and stared at Lily’s lips. “It suits you perfectly,” she whispered, her eyes in slits. “I know.” Lily kissed the air and then left her.

Nathan returned the stolen book on Monday morning, but during his tea break he travelled to the Fine Art Bookshop — it was only a short trip on the bus — and attempted to buy a copy of his own. Unfortunately they didn’t have another volume in stock, but the assistant found a different text — in Italian — which also contained a representation of Antonello’s Pieta , as well as a further full-page colour illustration of another of his better known works: a painting of Saint Sebastian, who posed, quite exquisitely, the very epitome of youth and strength and gorgeous-ness. Almost naked, too, Nathan noted, vaguely unsettled, except for the briefest pair of tight, white, extremely modern-looking shorts.