Nicola Barker - Wide Open

Nathan paid up (a considerable sum) without a moment’s hesitation and took his prize back to work with him. It was Laura’s day off. Secure in this knowledge, Nathan kept his new book split open, its spine creaking, under his counter, and in between customers he glanced down at it, expecting, each time, that the sensation he felt — the charge — would be less powerful, watered down, weaker. But it was not.

During lunch he rang the number on Connie’s business card. He received an answerphone message. The premises were now closed, any further inquiries etc. He jotted down a second number and rang it.

He found himself speaking to Connie’s mother. As a ruse, he improvised a story about being one of Connie’s old customers seeking out a prescription. It was all very simple. The deceit. Almost a treat. He rang on, to an aunt’s house, and she, in turn, gave him the number of a distant relative in Sheppey where she thought Connie might be staying.

He smiled to himself as he copied the digits down on to the back of a lost property form. Then, on the spur of the moment, he turned the sheet over, and under the heading Item(s) Lost, he wrote: Inhibitions.

Then quickly scratched it out.

♦

Jim had given Ronny his bed, because Ronny was so much taller than he was, and the sofa seemed a far more appropriate resting place for his own more compact torso. Ronny enjoyed lying on the bed. It was soft. He could smell Jim on the bedclothes. On the sheet and the blankets. At night, if he couldn’t sleep, he’d run his fingers along the scratches in the wall. Little sketches. Bats and leaves and tiny figures. Silly voodoo. Sometimes maps and sometimes doodles. On the windowsill he’d found an old compass. He chiselled his own name with it. The plaster disintegrated. It felt as soft as chalk.

In the morning, though, when Ronny awoke and tiptoed through to the living room, he couldn’t help noticing that Jim was curled up completely, almost foetally, on the sofa, and even then seemed to experience almost as much difficulty finding space on it as he himself had.

“Jim.”

He stared down at him. Jim was deeply asleep. His eyes blinked rapidly under their swollen lids. And with each blink, a tear. Ronny watched the tears, gently lulled by their quiet regularity as they travelled from Jim’s eyes and down on to his pillow. The pillow was stained with them. Little tidemarks, like splotches of lichen, white-edged. Ronny gazed at these marks, fascinated. How many nights of tears were resting here? How many years?

“Jim.”

The curtains were closed, but it was breezy outside. They moved intermittently, turning the grey ceiling and the walls into a kaleidoscope of rippling shadows.

“Jim.”

Jim did not seem like he was about to wake, so Ronny took a step away from the couch, intending to go into the kitchen to pour himself a glass of water. But it was this smallest and quietest of shuffling movements that generated something giant and raw and completely unforeseen: a scream, so shrill and wide and terrible that Ronny himself started violently and began screaming too, and Jim, who was hardly awake yet, opened his eyes to find himself standing, surrounded by a wild tornado of wailing — jolted, exposed, breathless.

“What? What? ”

He blinked, dazed, seeing Ronny, not recognizing him at first, then recognizing. “What?”

Ronny’s heart was beating crazily.

“God,” he sat down on the sofa. His knees were weak.

“What am I doing?”

Jim looked down at himself, at where he was standing, completely disorientated, panting.

“I don’t know. God,” Ronny repeated, feeling his new, smooth head with his left hand.

“Was I sleepwalking?” Jim said. “Did I do anything?”

“Do anything? No. You jumped up and screamed, that’s all.”

“Did you do anything?” Jim seemed suspicious. “Did you?”

“Me? Nothing. I was going to get a glass of water. You scared me when you screamed so I screamed. It was…” he grinned shakily, “very frightening.”

Jim finally stopped panting. He felt ludicrous.

“I’m sorry, then.”

“And you were crying,” Ronny said. He turned and touched the pillow where Jim’s cheek had been. It was warm and damp. It made him think of the Mediterranean sea, although he’d never actually been anywhere near it.

“I don’t cry.”

“Yes. While you were sleeping. And another thing…”

“What?” Jim was hunched over. His hands were linked tightly across his belly.

“We’re the same size.”

Jim didn’t know what he’d been expecting Ronny to say but it hadn’t been that. Ronny stood up. He was wearing some pyjamas. Old ones that belonged to Jim. And his white shoes. He never took them off.

“Look. They fit. The pyjamas.”

He stood next to Jim. “Up straight…”

“What?” Jim scowled.

“Up straight.”

Ronrty placed his hand on to the small of Jim’s back.

“Pull up.”

Jim jerked, reacting nervously to Ronny’s touch.

“There,” Ronny pulled his own shoulders back, “we are eye to eye. See?”

They were eye to eye.

“I am a firm believer,” Ronny continued, “in good posture.”

Jim smiled. He couldn’t help himself. It seemed like Ronny was a firm believer in only the silliest of things.

“Good posture.” He put his hand to his forehead. He felt ill. “I don’t feel too good.”

He went and sat down.

“Pills,” Ronny said. “Your body’s missing them.”

“I feel weak.”

“Then I’ll get you something to eat.”

Ronny shuffled into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. Inside were two eggs and a large bundle of small, foil-wrapped butter pats; the kind you might find in a café or at a service station. In the cupboard was tea, powdered milk and some tins of beans, meatballs, peas.

Ronny took hold of a couple of the butter pats and the two eggs. He walked back into the living room. “Eggs all right?”

“Fine.” Jim was curled up at the end of the sofa. He had a blanket tight around him. He was shivering slightly. He looked anxious.

“I like these,” Ronny held the butter pats aloft, “but the process involved in making tin foil is actually very harmful to the environment.”

“Really.” Jim seemed unstimulated.

“Someone told me that once while I was eating a Kit-Kat.”

Ronny returned to the kitchen. Here he opened the first of the butter pats, placed it into Jim’s only saucepan, waited until the butter dissolved and then broke an egg on top. When it had cooked he placed it on to a plate and then repeated the process over.

After they’d eaten — Jim ate with his right hand, still determined to gratify Ronny, although the effort almost killed him; he was shaking too much for any real competence on either side — Ronny asked whether Jim would teach him to whistle. Jim’s chest felt tight. He shook his head. “I haven’t much breath today.”

“Go on.”

Jim closed his eyes for a short interlude. “Just give me a second…”

He spent some time considering how it was that he whistled. Eventually he decided on a good way of demonstrating it. “If you pucker up your lips and then get your tongue and crush the tip of it down on to the back of your bottom row of teeth…”

Ronny looked confused.

“You do have a bottom row of teeth?”

Ronny bared his teeth. They were perfect.

“Perfect teeth,” he said proudly.

“Really?” Jim frowned, he felt a moment’s unease and then suppressed it. “No fillings?”

“None. How about you?”

“No, none either, but my teeth are a mess.”

“Why?”

“Because I won’t allow anything inside my mouth.”

“How about food?”