Nicola Barker - Wide Open

Shuffling. How much later? Hours? Minutes? Seconds? Jim’s eyes shot open and he yanked himself up. The prefab was silent. But he’d detected…what? The door closing? He looked over towards the window and his heart began hammering. He threw off the blanket and walked to the door. He opened it. He peered out into the bright morning. It was brisk. There was a sharp wind. What time was it? Still early.

The beach was empty. But when he looked out and along, sharply, to his right, he thought he saw something white…just fluttering. In the distance. A sail? A gull? A plastic bag? No. No. Bigger. Far away. Something bright and light and strangely reflective. Then it struck him like a giant breaker. The white suit. It was the white suit! Bleached. Plastic. Lily-palie. Alabaster. The spacesuit. It was the white suit. And the light was glancing off it. And the wind was blowing. And it was Ronny wearing it. It was Ronny.

Jim gave a low, wounded gasp, then started running.

♦

I was lost, Nathan told himself, but now I am found. He climbed out of the car to stretch his legs and glanced around him. His feet were numb. He had yet to work out whether he’d stayed because he’d wanted to or because, finally, he hadn’t known where the hell he was heading.

He was parked up in a dead-end, close to a desolate-looking fenced-off cluster of holiday chalets. The prefabs were a short distance behind him. The nature reserve lay ahead. The road just stopped. It was a true dead ending.

And it had been the longest of nights. The car had been cold. He’d run the engine, intermittently, but then he’d noticed the petrol gauge leaning eerily towards the empty mark. After that he’d just shivered, his coat spread ineffectually across his knees.

A short while after five the sun came up. Over the sea. And Nathan had stared at it. He’d thought about himself. He’d thought about Ronny. He’d thought about Connie. She was right, he reasoned, about angels usually being boys. She was right about the masturbating Jesus. He tried to understand what it meant, this rightness. In the end he resolved that it meant only two things, and even they weren’t mutually exclusive.

The first? Well, at some level, some subtle level, it seemed as if maybe he’d always known that the angel was a boy. Perhaps, he thought, the evil really is inside me. Deep inside me like I always feared it would be. That unexplored dread was a real dread. That unbidden terror, a true terror. Yet when he faced this possibility, head on, a wall rose up inside him, same as always, and his thoughts turned away.

The second thing. The other option? He tried to focus again. The second possibility was that this whole mess was not about love or infatuation or art or anything, but about God. God . Perhaps he had finally found his own true salvation in the strange, tarnished image of this masturbating Christ? This idiosyncratic Jesus, this human Jesus, this sensual, unashamed, uninhibited Jesus could surely understand and encompass all those black, unthinkable feelings which tormented and dogged and plagued him. This worldly Jesus would not turn away from sin. No. He would embrace it. Here, in this dark saviour, Nathan told himself, lay a final, complete and absolute understanding.

This was a bold Jesus, after all. This was the fearless Jesus who would, without thinking, have forced Little Ronny to leave his father’s wicked house. This Jesus would have damned the consequences. This was the Jesus who could forgive himself anything, and in so doing, forgive others all of their sinning.

I cannot get over what has happened, Nathan told himself, but I can let go of it. I can simply let go of it. I can forgive. I can forgive myself. I can forgive Little Ronny. I can forgive Big Ronny. Yes. Even him.

And as the sun rose, Nathan felt something corresponding within him. Something hot. A nugget. Something rising. It burned inside of him. This is Jesus, Nathan told himself, this is God. And God was an enormous, infinite, all-consuming blankness.

Nathan closed his eyes and felt himself transformed into a state of total rapture as the sheer, clean, white spirit of the good father filled him. At last, he sighed, at long last, I am truly lifted .

♦

She hadn’t opened the box. If I open it, she thought furtively, then I’m merely replacing one bad thing with another. I have to hold back, like Ronny said, just this once. I have to turn away. She wondered, idly, as she fell to sleeping, whether growing up was simply about relinquishing everything of value. Dreams, fears, expectations. This cynical concept appealed to her. But she didn’t relinquish the box, just the same. She closed her eyes and slept with her arms still curled like small, pale stamens, tightly and firmly around it.

♦

Another interminable night of not-quite-sleeping. Connie half-dreamed that she saw her father sobbing, elbows up, head down, at the kitchen table. She was a little girl again, at home, and had accidentally walked in on him. Daddy? He’d lifted his head as she approached, and pretended that he’d not been crying after all. I’ll never forgive you! She found herself screaming. But she was screaming not at her father but at Lily, outside, by Nathan’s car, and Lily was Sara, only younger. I’ll never forgive you your awful betrayal! Never! Then she turned back to face her father again, picked up a dirty dishcloth and tried to blot his tears with it. But his tears were blood, not water. His eyes were red and they were bleeding.

Shit!

Connie sat up and scrabbled around in the sleeve of her jumper for a tissue. Her nostrils were burning. Her throat was dry. She blew her nose, swung her feet out of bed, then pulled on her trousers and her shoes. It was morning. At last. She crept through the house and out into the world. She began walking.

♦

Ronny was not thinking. He was counting. All the way along the beach, a sharp left turn, then up over a dune, past the chalets and into the reserve. To his right, the river and the fields, to his left, the extensive, desolate swampy yellow of the salt flats. He picked up pace when he saw them.

It was difficult walking in the white suit. It was difficult inhaling. It was difficult hearing anything except his own breaths and the thoughts he was thinking. The counting. He had only so much time. He did not notice Nathan standing by his car. He did not hear Jim calling. Everything was slow and calm and self-contained. He walked on, along the flats and out towards the sea.

Outside, in the world, Jim was running and shouting and waving his arms. “Stop him!” he yelled, “just stop him!”

He wanted to pick up pace, he wanted to, but his feet kept sinking in the sand like they were lead weighted. He couldn’t move .

Nathan turned and saw his brother, far away, in the distance. He curved his hands around his lips to form a fleshy megaphone. “It’s nothing,” he shouted, “he can’t possibly sink in that suit. It’s plastic. It’ll simply fill with air.”

But Jim kept running, onwards and then upwards, not even seeing Nathan, not even hearing him.

Ronny found the proper place. He felt a dampness around his ankles. It was wetter here than he’d anticipated. But that didn’t matter, did it? No. He shook his head. He opened his right hand and stared at what it contained through the clear plastic visor of his face mask. Nestled inside his palm was a butter pat. A small square. Innoffensive. Hard. Cold. Gold-wrapped.

He lifted his visor to render his mouth accessible. He placed the butter pat on to his tongue, then shoved it down into his throat with a white-gloved finger until it lodged hard and deep and fast inside there. He didn’t gag.

I really want to die, he thought. Then he lay down on the grass, feeling the wind blowing against his clothing, hearing it like a giant, imaginary audience roaring along to this, his final act; laughing and cheering and whooping and jeering. All in equal measure.