Five Miles from Outer Hope

by Nicola Barker

  My face remains blank.

  ‘I love that,’ he sighs, ‘dearly.’

  He rubs his two hands on his face, repeatedly, like he’s scrubbing at it, and makes a gurgling noise through his mouth meanwhile, like he’s standing under a waterfall. After a shortish duration he stops what he’s doing and stares at me.

  ‘Do you have to quack to get through doors?’

  I weigh him up. Ten stone. Approximately five foot nine.

  ‘Sorry,’ he chuckles, ‘I meant to say duck.’

  ‘Apparently you have a double-barrelled name,’ I titter. ‘Something silly. French-sounding.’

  ‘Confirmed, lady.’

  He straightens majestically. ‘They call me La Roux.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Nineteen years.’

  ‘I’m sixteen. And don’t call me lady. Everyone thinks you’re a freak already. That kind of formality won’t improve matters.’

  ‘Who’s everyone? You and your little fat sister?’

  ‘And my brother, Feely.’

  ‘The four year old?’

  (Already I’m regretting this tack but still I say yes, defiantly.) He ponders this for a minute. ‘Hmmmn. Feely too, you say?’

  I nod.

  ‘Now you’ve got me scared literally shitless.’

  He gurns preposterously. ‘And the man who brought you over. Black Jack. He agrees.’

  ‘A retard.’

  ‘La Roux,’ I murmur spikily, ‘the cream.’

  ‘No,’ he primps, ‘the mixture.’

  I give this translation a moment’s thought, then sniff.

  ‘Can I come in?’

  He steps back. ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Presumably’ – I bend my knees slightly to facilitate my easy access (he almost sniggers) and walk past, glancing up at the ceiling – ‘you know there’s a hole in the roof?’

  ‘I do. Your tiny father told me.’

  ‘And there was apparently some kind of a dispute over cupboard space?’

  ‘It’s always a factor, comfort-wise, I find.’

  ‘And how long are you intending to stay?’

  As I speak I stroll through to the sitting-room. To my left, the door which leads into the walk-in storage cupboard stands tantalizingly ajar. I pull it wider. Inside lies the chicken wire, some twigs and lavender, formed into a rough oval, about four foot in diameter, dipped in the middle. In its centre is a beautifully embroidered cushion cover, a photograph of a dog, a wooden pipe, a very small guitar, some cigarettes, two odd socks, the book Mo sent and a peacock feather.

  I turn, stare at him quizzically, take one step back and point. He shrugs. ‘A nest.’

  ‘A nest?’

  He nods. ‘Indeed so.’

  ‘Are you broody? Is that it?’

  He just smiles.

  I bend over and grab the book. ‘Patch wants this back. Do you mind?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  I turn to go. He clears his throat. ‘And you said your name was?’

  I pause. Now he’s got me.

  ‘Medve.’

  ‘Ah,’ he smiles disingenuously. ‘German for pretty chin?’

  ‘No,’ I glower, ‘Hungarian for bear.’

  He embraces himself and smirks. ‘How cuddly.’

  I merely growl, slap the hardback against the flat of my paw, then leave, red-cheeked and fuzzy, knowing (oh, screw the bugger) that this spotty, flimsy, mean-vowelled little man has pricked and pinched and skidaddled me.

  Chapter 5

  Stuff your faxes up your jaxies. Terminate your damn telegrams. Eradicate your e-mails. I just don’t want them. Because I know, I said, I know that Mr James Thurber is a Full-blown American Literary Legend and that the dog business (the cartoons, the anecdotes, all the rest of that tripe) was simply an aside, a side-line, an adjunct to his other, far greater, literary masterworks. I know that stuff. So please, please, please just give over, will ya?

  Anyway, facts are facts, and a patently undeniable one is that James Thurber loved his pet poodle Christabel with a passion (and who the hell am I to deny the intensity of Thurber’s feelings one way or another…?), but (oh, here goes), if you ask me, there was one dog, and one dog alone, which the great man loved – I mean, really loved – way and above all of the others.

  It was his very first dog, a mutt called (ahem) Rex, an American Pit Bull, a cat-killer extraordinaire (I quote: ‘He killed cats, that is true, but quickly and neatly and without any especial malice’) and a pretty bloody phenomenal jumper.

  When he was a kid, Thurber and his two co-Rex-owning brothers had this special sadistic little trick they’d play on him involving a ten-foot pole and a four-foot-wide garden gate.

  Rex loved to retrieve. It was practically his nature. And he was as keen as mustard. And he was no genius, either (as is very often the way with that special, crazy, monomaniacally yappy breed of dog, the terrier).

  And so it was for these three simple reasons that Thurber and his two demonic brothers engineered a game whereby the ten-foot pole was thrown beyond the gate and Rex was then sent to bring it right on back to them at something approximating a full-blown, smoking-paw-provoking canter.

  So off Rex leaps, stumpy tail held high, mouth gaping, fully intending to retrieve that pole. He scampers through the gate, he runs straight for it, he locates it, he turns, he grips, he lifts, he gallops back to the gate again (meanwhile, his three mischievous owners, just beyond it, are calling and yelling and whistling: all in all whipping up a storm of general approbation) when bam!! That long horizontal stick hits the sturdy wall on either side of poor Rex’s avowedly muscular dog shoulders, and the poor, silly, short-sighted, over-enthusiastic barker is left toothless and numb-lipped and juddering.

  What a prank! What a wheeze! What a jaw-breaker!

  There’s a moral here somewhere. I hope you can find it. I have it down pat as being something to do with the touching but nonetheless naïve and irritating (to say nothing of painful) perils of over-enthusiasm: a kind of canine Look Before You Leap.

  We use the works of Thurber, in our house (I don’t know what you do with Thurber in yours, couldn’t care less, to tell the truth) as a kind of pseudo-moral manual. We forsook the Judaeo-Christian tradition back in 1974 when Barge got angry with God for treating Job so shoddily (I mean, to plague him with boils and locusts simply for being a basically good-intentioned, well-adjusted kind of guy? Is that fair? Is that reasonable?).

  Barge always felt God was a fraction too needy. If God was your brother, he’d say (or your lover, for that matter), you’d steal his specs and lock him in the cellar. We told him God would (in all probability) have twenty-twenty vision, but Barge felt God would wear glasses on account of him spending so much time – pre-Genesis, before he moulded the sun and moon and everything – struggling to read dear Thurber’s wonderfully inclusive dog stories in very poor light.

  We’ve all been there.

  I digress.

  A major 1981 early summer dilemma amongst our little island clan (Poodle aside, and the tongue of Barge, and the kibbutz and the Lowry, and the anal probe and all of that other assorted malarkey) is that during Mo’s infuriatingly indeterminate absence I have been placed solely in charge of young Feely’s moral and ethical development (To trust Big in this arena would be beyond a miscalculation, it would be downright insanity – the man’s idea of house-training a puppy would be to ram a cork up its arse. He has the patience of a mink).

  But under my careful (if intellectually fickle) tutelage the kid has recently turned morbid. Are children like bananas? When they get a little bruised on the outside, does it mean they’re bad for good? To the centre?

  Feely’s propensity to empathize with inappropriate tales of animal tragedy has become a source of recent concern to me. A case in point being the intensity of his interest in the Death Of Ginger (Black Beauty’s slightly snappy chestnut chum. Remember her?) as written by nineteenth-century spinster-come-Quaker-come-horse-lover Anna
Sewell (a woman whose life was not just scarred but wrecked by an arbitrary ankle injury mysteriously sustained on a trip home from school circa 1835. Well, I ask you).

  This is a woman – coincidentally – whose mother liked nothing better than to spend her evenings holding temperance meetings, while her father took up his marvellous vocation as – uh-oh! – a brewer. It’s little wonder Anna got all her kicks talking to equines.

  At first, Feely simply liked you to read him the segment (chapter 40, if you want to immerse yourself completely) appropriately entitled ‘Poor Ginger’ (to summarize: after a shaky start in life, the chestnut mare, Ginger – apparently so named because of her propensity to snap – is taken on by the squire at Birtwick Park and treated with great kindness and cordiality until she learns to open her heart and love again. Alas, certain disasters follow – remember the fire in the barn?! – and both Beauty and Ginger are sold on. Beauty suffers adversity with a certain degree of stoic nobility. But what of Ginger? Little is heard of her until the fortieth chapter, and nothing, I’m afraid, is heard thereafter).

  Initially Feely derived large portions of – what to call it? Delight? Cheer? – pleasure from his companion’s reading and re-reading of the Death Of Ginger (the lines ‘Men are strongest, and if they are cruel and have no feeling, there is nothing we can do but bear it, bear it on and on to the end’ and the slightly later ‘the lifeless tongue was slowly dripping with blood; and the sunken eyes! but I can’t speak of them, the sight was too dreadful’ seeming to bring him especial succour).

  Soon, however, a mere reading was no longer enough to satisfy him and a certain amount of ‘acting out’ became necessary. Initially – this’ll fascinate the psychologists among you, amateur and otherwise – Feely enjoyed playing at being Black Beauty, apprehending and then dutifully mourning Ginger’s unseemly demise with an impressive degree of muscular restraint.

  But after a while, his priorities changed and gradually he began to want to inhabit Ginger.

  Henceforth, he would trot around bearing his ill-treatment and his painfully swollen joints and his cruelly injured mouth with such piety and restraint and (how to say it?), uh… sanctity, that eventually the whole farce looked in danger of leaving the realms of horse fiction and entering the exalted sphere of morbidly masochistic sacrilegiosity.

  Enough is enough. When Feely began imposing ‘little moments of Ginger’ on his day-to-day activities (a certain tremble in the knee on afternoon walks; bolting, randomly, on fishing trips; struggling to eat his meals because of his bit-induced lower-lip deformity), Big decided he’d had it with the bastard chestnut mare, and Black Beauty was closed for good and placed up on a high shelf, out of harm’s way.

  But the boy is canny. He has found ways of sublimating his need for Ginger into other stories. And now, even (God forbid), into his readings of Thurber (has the child not a smidgen of dignity?), principally – although not exclusively – into the story of the aforementioned Rex, the most exalted and beloved dog of all.

  Say, for example, I am reading little Feely the tale of Rex and the ten-foot pole (an essential moral lesson for any unapologetically attention-grabbing four year old, as I’m sure you’ll agree), the boy will listen keenly, he’ll seem to be all ears, but his eyes will be travelling down the page, ever further, in the hope of reaching the end of this useful story – Rex’s tragically premature demise.

  And it’s a nasty one. Beaten to a pulp by another dog’s angry owner, Rex (only ten years old) staggers back to Maison Thurber and prepares to die. But wait! Two brothers are home, but where’s the third? Surely Rex cannot meet his maker without first having bade a touching farewell to this kind and loving third brother?

  So he waits. He fights death. He battles against it with all the final, paltry remnants of his considerable doggy will, until, at last, a full hour later: that familiar creak of the gate! That gentle step! That whistle! The third brother returns, Rex takes a few haltering steps towards him, caresses his hand with his bloodied muzzle. And then… and then…

  Oh, come on. Talk about milking the bugger. Feely (naturally he’s a sharp young tyke) always wants to know whether Thurber loved Rex because he died so painfully, or because he was a fighter, a cat-killer, a butt, a fool? I explain that it was because Rex was an American Pit Bull Terrier (an exalted breed) and because he was their first dog ever.

  The first, I tell him, is always the sweetest. The first word. The first step. The first kiss. The first punch. The first pie. The first high. The first, I tell him, is always the best. I mean, who remembers seconds?

  I don’t really know if Feely finds this theory plausible. Secretly I think he still believes James Thurber loved Christabel most dearly and that Rex was only really fondly remembered for his astonishingly moving deathbed loyalty.

  Sometimes, in the morning, when he’s slightly late rising and I go in to wake him, I find Feely propped up on his pillows, eyes closed, mouth agape, in a perfect physical recreation of Jacques-Louis David’s wonderful painting, The Assassination of Marat (Marat? You know. The crazy, messed-up, fuck-off French revolutionary). I keep telling him (when he finally stirs) that Marat died in the bath, not in the bed. Luckily, Feely fears enamel and much prefers foam and feathers. He knows on which side his bread is buttered.

  Imagine my surprise, then (to say nothing of my horror), when I enter the hotel foyer just before three that self-same day to find the unbelievably bumptious newcomer La Roux (wearing an extraordinary khaki-coloured boiler suit with a thick brown leather belt pulled ridiculously high and tight at his waist) lounging against the dusty jet-and-mirror-encrusted reception desk, declaiming boldly from the severely banned text of Black Beauty, with little Feely huddled up next to him on a bean bag (Feely drags his bean bag wherever he goes; it is small and stained and purple, full of polystyrene bobbles), listening intently, his wide eyes brimming, his dirty hands entwined, his tiny, pointed chin digging into his knees.

  How do I react? Calmly and with guile, that’s how. I yell three simple syllables across the foyer (Pomfret cake!) and march resolutely towards the downstairs kitchens. Twenty seconds later I hear a gentle pitter-patter just behind me. Feely, on my trail, his bare feet hitting the red-polished concrete with all the enthusiastic slap of the small, rare but gregarious blue penguin’s flippers.

  When we reach our destination, I lift him on to a stool and retrieve the liquorice bounty from its hidey-hole. I give him one petite cake and remove a second. ‘Stay here,’ I tell him, ‘and when I return I’ll give you the other.’

  At first he’s mistrustful. When he was three, Barge made the same kind of promise, then didn’t return for a full five hours (so he forgot; is it a crime?) and Mo later found Feely – all hunched-up and foetal – in the midst of sustaining a serious bladder injury. Since this time he’s been a tad more cynical – the boy has total recall; he’s like a High Court judge with a grudge – and so, as he wraps his delighted tongue around his dark prize, he asks, ‘Just how long will you be, exactly? For the record?’

  ‘Five minutes at best.’

  He nods, sucks ferociously, kicks his feet and stares up at the ceiling, two tenacious rivulets of snot trickling from his nostrils like a couple of keen, green maggots making good their escape from a flesh-toned apple.

  When I arrive back upstairs, La Roux is still lounging against the counter casually turning the pages on Anna Sewell’s equine homily. He glances up briefly as I enter. ‘Let’s face it,’ he mutters, ‘this book amounts to little more than a half-witted piece of flapdoodle.’

  Flapdoodle?

  ‘Fuck you,’ I say. ‘It’s a classic.’

  He continues paging. ‘I mean, how could one woman ever make so much fuss about a stupid small-scale ankle injury?’

  ‘Did you ever injure your ankle?’ I ask defiantly.

  ‘Twice. I sprained my left ankle in 1976 and then broke the same leg four years later in a terrible rabbit-hole calamity.’ He pauses, then calculates. ‘1980. Last year. What
is a Pomfret cake, anyway?’

  Since I don’t reply immediately, he glances up again. Unfortunately I have become momentarily distracted by the sight of his genitalia in his preposterously high-yanked boiler suit, where they hang on his left thigh, all limp and lopsided, like a small bag of crushed intestines newly liberated from the back-end of a turkey.

  Three seconds too late and blushing slightly, I open my hand to reveal its foul black bounty. The Pomfret cake.

  ‘Not so much a cake’, I explain, ‘as an edible instrument of torture.’

  He leans forward, frowning. ‘I can’t see.’

  I step closer. ‘Show me properly.’

  I draw closer still. Soon we are only two feet apart. He peers into my palm, intently. I peer too, sensing his bad skin, smelling its antisepticness. And I’m just about to explain how they taste disgusting, like tobacco, and about Feely’s dairy allergy, and the fact that after sucking his mouth turns brown and how he likes nothing better than to stare at it in the mirror, when, in a flash, La Roux’s left arm snakes out (with all the sudden velocity of a viciously pale-skinned, striking cobra), grabs a tight grip of my other arm, pulls it towards him and thrusts my hand, palm-upwards, into his high-held, soft-centred and utterly reprehensible gizzards.

  The Pomfret cake arches skywards, I gasp and topple, La Roux bellows victoriously, fully cognisant of having humiliated me comprehensively (I suspect this man might still have some outstanding issues remaining with his mother. I mean, who was this woman? A modern-day vixen with the conflicted soul of Lucretia Borgia?)

  So, lummie, what’s a girl to do under such trying circumstances but to grab and twist and squeeze for all she’s worth? (I have hands with a grip like Goliath’s from kneading bread and extracting carrot, celery and beet juice daily.)

  Ha. Now the jack-boot’s on the other foot! La Roux’s fleeting but nonetheless nasty little grin of victory soon transmogrifies into a violent squawk of downright displeasure. And when he’s sufficiently displeased – which is pretty bloody displeased – I relinquish my grip and then run, hell-for-leather.