Small Holdings

by Nicola Barker

  ‘But I don’t have anything to do with the business side of things. That’s Doug’s department.’

  ‘You’d just have to acquaint yourself with a selection of the most salient facts, that’s all. I could help you.’ She pointed towards one of the kitchen drawers. ‘It’s all in there. The papers, the bills, receipts, accounts. Everything we need.’

  ‘It won’t come to that.’

  ‘Look,’ Saleem pushed herself up off the table, ‘I’ve got something for you. It’s kind of last-minute, but I think it might help.’ She picked up her stick and disappeared from the kitchen.

  Cog came and slithered around my ankles. My knuckles felt like they were growing. Expanding. I looked around and my eyes settled on a tea-cloth over by the sink. I stood up, grabbed hold of it, dampened it in some cold water and tried to apply it to my hand. Saleem returned.

  ‘What’re you doing?’

  ‘I’m trying to tie this around my knuckles.’

  Saleem was holding a book. She put it down on the table and came over. She snatched the tea-towel, wrung it out and tied it on firmly. I winced. Pain and her proximity left me squeamish.

  ‘Sit.’

  She pushed me down on to the chair again. She picked up the book. It had a red cover.

  ‘See this?’ She held the book up to me. It was called I’m Not Angry, I’m Hurting by Dr John Sledge. ‘Guess what, Phil?’

  ‘What?’ I wished the book didn’t have a red cover. Not red. ‘You’re not angry, Phil, you’re hurting.’

  I inspected my makeshift bandage. I said, ‘I think I’m feeling a little of both, actually.’

  Saleem ignored this.

  ‘I went to a psychiatrist, after the accident,’ she said, ‘after the museum burned down and I lost my leg.’ She paused for a moment and then grinned. ‘Fuck all wrong with me, though. But for some reason, that quack gave me this book. Obviously, it’s all bollocks. Most of it. But there’s something in here, Phil, that I think might help us. Kind of like the inside of a nut.’

  ‘ A kernel.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  She paged through the book. She pushed the pages flat on Chapter four: ‘How I Feel, How You Feel’. She handed me the book. ‘Read.’

  I closed the book. I said. ‘I’ll read it later. I think I should go and see Ray.’

  ‘It’s a quick fix,’ Saleem said, undaunted, ‘and if you’re going to attend that meeting on Friday then we’re going to need a quick fix, because You know and I know that you won’t have the balls to stand up in front of five people and present a good case for our tender without some kind of divine intervention.’

  ‘It won’t come to that.’

  ‘It might.’

  She took the book back and opened it again. ‘The main point Sledge makes is this, right. He says, it’s not what happens in life that screws you up but how you interpret events. See? So sometimes, if you’re very sensitive, then often it’s not like bad things have actually happened, only that they feel bad to you. So it’s all a question of getting things in proportion, yeah?’

  I gave my sore knuckle a little squeeze so that the pain would distract me. A kind of anaesthetic.

  ‘And right here’s how you go about it. Chapter Four. Right here. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. Something called the three Cs. Cool, calm, confident. Uh . . . rhythmic exercises and stuff. Breathing.’

  I scratched my beard. ‘Did Ray say he’d be in The Fox?’

  Saleem looked up from the book. She suddenly wasn’t as affable as she’d seemed before.

  ‘You’d better listen to me, Phil. I’m not bullshitting you. I’m taking control of this situation and it’s going to be a bumpy fucking ride.’

  Her anger blew in my face like hot air from a hairdryer. Hot. Dry. She looked down at the book again. ‘You’ve got to get stuff in proportion. You’ve got to do it quickly, that’s all I’m saying. And it won’t be easy.’

  Cog jumped up on to the table next to her. He’d barely landed before she knocked him off with a vigorous swipe. He skidded as he landed on the tiles.

  ‘You and I are going out together, right now, and we are going up on to the High Street, to the chemist’s, and you are going to walk in there, straight to the counter, and in a clear, loud voice you are going to ask the assistant for a packet of extra-small condoms.’

  I shook my head. I continued staring down at the tiles.

  ‘OK, so it sounds stupid, but there’s a reason behind it . . .’

  ‘I’m not doing that.’

  ‘It’s therapeutic. Kind of like embarrassing yourself on purpose. Taking it to the limit. Forcing yourself. Taking control of embarrassing situations and so taking the sting out of them.’

  Sting. Saleem. Cog stood by the kitchen door. I wanted to be where Cog was. I wanted to be Cog. I shook my head. Outside I could hear something. Footsteps, a door opening, a metallic jangle. The engine of Nancy’s truck bursting into life.

  Nancy. I looked up and over towards the window. Saleem was staring at me. I didn’t meet her eye. And then I heard her voice whispering under the growl of the truck. Lower than the truck and growlier. She said, ‘And you care about this place, and you care about Nancy, but you don’t have the guts to do anything. You won’t speak up. You won’t even do that. That one small thing. And I’d give up my fucking body, and Doug’d give up his fucking soul. But you, you won’t give anything.’

  Saleem threw the book down onto my lap, picked up her stick, left me. I heard the front door slam. Outside I heard female voices. And whispering.

  RAY WAS ON HIS third pint by the time I’d arrived at The Fox. He was perched on a stool by the bar. The pub wasn’t too full, although Ray’s enough of a man to fill any room. His arms are giant leeks, white leeks tipped with two artichoke paws, a full fist of fingers which he wiggles and he waggles to great dramatic effect.

  I pulled up a stool for myself. Ray inspected my hand.

  ‘Did Nancy do that?’

  ‘No. ‘

  ‘Saleem?’

  ‘Let me just say something, Ray.’

  He looked up, surprised by my determined tone. ‘What?’

  I thought for a moment. ‘I just think we’v e got to make a real effort to keep Doug calm. Especially over the next couple of days.’

  ‘OK. ‘

  I smiled. It was so easy with Ray. And I said, ‘I don’t think we should involve Saleem too much in the park’s affairs either.’

  Ray suddenly looked uneasy, he fidgeted on his stool. ‘Saleem’s quite involved,’ he said, ‘already.’

  ‘Well she doesn’t need to be any more involved, that’s all I’m saying.’

  ‘No, ‘ Ray took a sip of his beer.

  ‘Doug’s doing fine.’

  Ray took another sip. He smacked his lips. ‘You’re right,’ he said. He ordered me a pint, paid, passed it over. As he passed it I said, almost casually, almost incidentally, ‘And the Chinaman . . .’

  ‘Wu.’

  ‘You know about him?’

  Ray knew. He knew. Ray, it turned out, knew more than I’d thought. Ray, it turned out, had served as a confidant, a gatherer of scraps, an unobservant observer.

  People feel they can trust Ray. They trust his gormlessness, his softness, his delicious, harmless squelchiness.

  People mention things to Ray and they know that no judgement will be forthcoming, no private reckoning will take place in the cavern of Ray’s brain, no stern moral hypothesis will be formulated and delivered. Ray is a sponge. Ray is natural, is, above all other things (and how could it be otherwise, really?), himself.

  Something dawned on me. A kind of shame. No one tells me stuff. No one tells me anything. Not of their own accord. My head is so full of other things, of myself, of itself, that no one ever bothers telling me anything else.

  ‘No one told me this stuff, Ray,’ I said at one point, during a conversational hiatus. ‘No one mentioned any of this to me.’

  ‘You’re lucky,’ Ray answered blithely. �
��You’ve got your own business going on. You’ve got,’ he paused for greater emphasis, ‘you’ve got a secret life, up there,’ he tapped his skull.

  ‘And you don’t?’

  He grinned, ‘I’ve got all the outside stuff. That’s plenty.’ By Ray’s fourth pint I wasn’t worried any more, not shy to be spoken to, not conscious of his gaze. Ray’s eyes were watery, wandering; tadpoles in the jelly of his face. ‘You want to know about Wu?’ he asked. ‘Well, if you want to know about Wu, then first you have to know about Doug and Mercy and the Anniversary Dinner.’

  ‘I do?’

  He nodded. ‘You see, I don’t understand all this business myself. It’s only that Saleem said something and then Doug mentioned something else. It’s not like anything fits together in any way. Nothing like that. But I keep picking up this information and slotting it away . . .’

  ‘But Wu . . . ?’

  ‘Remember three weeks ago? Before Doug moved in with Saleem? Before all this weird stuff? Doug and Mercy’s thirtieth wedding anniversary. That’s where it started . . .’

  ‘Mercy and the diarrhoea, Saleem said something . . .’

  Ray nodded. ‘That’s the one. Just listen,’ he said. ‘You won’t hardly believe it.’

  And slowly, slowly, with commendable precision, Ray rolled open his canvas and covered it with colour. And each stroke was perfect, each touch, each piece of his narrative fitted, each portion, each serving, so neat and geometrical, every element, a balance. Like he was neatly laying squares of turf down for a brand new lawn.

  ‘Picture it,’ Ray said, his eyes sparkling, ‘Friday night, three weeks ago. Italian restaurant. La Bruschetta on Green Lanes. Doug’s all dressed up for dinner. Jacket, tie. Mercy’s wearing a new dress. Doug’s been busy all day working on the accounts for the park. Things are tight. The budget’s stretching thin . . . yeah, well, who cares, because they’re out for a special night together. Thirty years! That’s something worth celebrating.

  ‘Now here’s the important part, right, pay attention. Doug is perfectly happy. Four words: Doug is perfectly happy’. He’s got other things on his mind, naturally, other pressures: work, the park, money, their gas boiler might be on the blink . . . yeah, well, but everything’s fine, and the waiter comes over to their table and they order their starters.

  ‘Mercy has Parma ham. Great. Doug’s about to have the same - he always follows Mercy’s lead in culinary matters, that’s just the way it is between them - and then his eye swerves, he looks down the menu, and his gaze settles on the words “prawn cocktail”. He thinks: what the hell. I’m thirty years married. Time for something new. Prawn cocktail.

  ‘Doug looks up at the waiter and he says “Prawn cocktail, please.” And Mercy stares at him with a strange expression on her face. He stares back at her. “What’s up?” he says. “Doug, what made you choose that prawn cocktail?” He gives it some thought. He says, “Do I need a reason?” She shrugs.

  ‘They order the rest of their meal, their drinks, and off the waiter goes. Fine. Except Doug can’t help noticing that Mercy’s expression is a little bit brighter, a little bit tighter.

  ‘The starters arrive. Doug digs in. Mercy’s staring at his prawns. She’s not touched her ham yet. She says, “Doug, why did you order that prawn cocktail when you know we never have prawns?” Doug puts down his fork. He says, “Now what? What’s the big problem with the prawns?” Mercy says, “Remember our very first date?” Doug gives it some thought. He remembers. Mercy says, “Well, on that occasion I had prawns.” Doug is flummoxed. So what? And he turns his mind back to that very first date.

  ‘And the truth is - and he remembers it - that he didn’t much like Mercy when he first met her. Not for any particular reason, but there was no spark between them, not on his side, at least, and he firmly believes in a spark. He’s romantic like that, although you’d be hard pressed to imagine it now.

  ‘Anyway, he remembers their first date, thirty years ago. Remembers it clearly, how, at the beginning, on their way to the restaurant, things were really dragging, and he was wondering why he agreed to go, and he was thinking about how his parents knew Mercy’s parents and how Mercy’s brother was at the same cricket club, all this stuff.

  ‘And then Doug remembers, with a smile, how it happened, during the meal, how something peculiar, something completely unexpected happened. They were on their second course, they’d been talking, and suddenly, out of the blue, he saw that Mercy was brighter than he’d thought, and sparky, and nervous, and she had this restlessness, this vivacity. And the candle on the table flickered its light on her and she was beautiful. Beautiful.

  ‘In that instant, Doug knew that there was a spark. Right there, in his heart. And she wasn’t pushy, she wasn’t slow, she wasn’t any of the things he’d thought she was. She was fine, jumpy, mysterious; a thoroughbred.

  ‘Doug remembered. Thirty years! He grinned to himself. He picked up his spoon. Mercy was glaring. He put down his spoon. Now what? What’s the problem? “ I hate prawns, Doug,” Mercy mutters. “That very first date we went on, I had prawns as a starter and they nearly ruined everything.”

  ‘Well you can imagine, Doug is staring at her like she’s crazy. “ I mean it, Doug, “ she says. “ I had some prawns and they gave me the quickest and the worst and the strongest dose of food poisoning I’ve ever had. How I sat through that meal I’ll never know. My stomach was a volcano, my head was on fire. I could barely hold my fork.”

  ‘Bang! Suddenly Doug’s mind is clicking and whirring, turning over and everything’s playing back in slow motion. And he realizes, it dawns on him, it strikes him that Mercy is not the woman he thought she was. She wasn’t the woman he fell in love with. He fell in love with - and this is the best part or the worst part according to how you look at it - he fell in love with a small dose of staphi cocci. That’s bacteria, incidentally.

  ‘You see, Mercy wasn’t that vivacious woman, that flighty, peachy, jumpy thoroughbred. She was a boring person with a gastric disorder. But Doug hadn’t seen it. He’d duped himself. He’d sold himself down the river. Bang! Just like that. Doug had built his house on sand. Doug had been living a lie. It was over. That was it. He moved out of their home that very same night.’

  Ray rested his head on the bar, sideways, and stared at me. I was gawping.

  ‘Ray,’ I said, ‘I’ve never heard such a pile of absolute garbage.’

  Ray was unfazed. ‘Later I saw Mercy,’ he said, ‘and she was sobbing her eyes out because Doug had told her she was never the person he thought she was. She just didn’t get it, and I didn’t get it either. I told her so. I said, “He’s having a brainstorm. Men sometimes go funny at fifty.” She said, “Women go funny too but they don’t make such a song and dance about it.” I said, “Fair enough.” That’s all I could say.’

  ‘Is there anything else?’

  Ray sighed. ‘Well, Saleem thinks the problem is longer term. The big vegetables in the greenhouse. His obsession with getting the bandstand built. Wu. She thinks Doug’s having all these weird thoughts about religion and truth and culture and the Mercy thing’s just a part of it. She says she hears him talking to himself at night, having whole conversations all on his own. She says Doug’s been muttering stuff to her about how events all go in a circle and that everything inside has to come outside and that all actions should be true actions and direct actions. He’s private and secretive but also evangelical. You’d think it’d be hard to be all these things at once but Doug seems to manage it.

  ‘Anyhow, Saleem says that if he talks to anyone for a period longer than five minutes then it becomes extremely apparent that he’s very disturbed indeed. Very disturbed. She said he can’t go to the meeting on Friday because it’ll be as plain as her face that he’s as mad as a hatter. We’ll lose the tender.’

  ‘Forget about Saleem, Ray,’ I said, ‘Doug might be thinking a lot of strange things but it hasn’t affected us directly yet. I’m sure we can sort out the business with Nanc
y during the two weeks she’s working out her notice. He’ll come around. And there’s no reason for us to believe that the meeting won’t be just fine. It’s all a question of keeping things in proportion.

  ‘And if what Doug says is true, and things do move in a circle, then maybe Doug will get back to how he used to be eventually. Maybe even quite soon if everything stays calm.’

  Ray sighed again, even deeper this time. ‘It’s true, then,’ he determined, out of nowhere, ‘what Saleem said about you being a man of integrity.’

  ‘What?’

  Ray sighed again. ‘I might have some crisps,’ he muttered, and then, ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe we should just bide our time and keep things in proportion. And maybe Doug’s right too, about the circle and everything coming back to where it started. You never know. You can’t tell with life, can you? What’s around the next corner?’

  Ray finished his drink with a flourish and ordered three packets of smoky bacon.

  I TESTED OUT the physical viability of my damaged hand during my walk home from the pub. First off, I tried bending the fingers with the aid of my undamaged hand, then I tried bending them without assistance, next I tried to form them into a kind of half-fist, and finally I pulled out Dr John Sledge’s I’m Not Angry, I’m Hurting from my jacket pocket and tested whether I could fold my fingers round it and bear its weight. After performing this final task with some ease I decided that maybe things weren’t as bad in dextral terms as they’d initially seemed.

  Home is the ground floor of a nice house on Broomfield Road which has been converted into two self-contained flats. The road runs adjacent to the park on its southern perimeter. The flat used to belong to my grandmother and now it belongs to me. Consequently, it has a dusty old chintz and velvet feel to it, but is spartan too, like the home of someone in two minds about the nature and possibilities of interior decor. And although by instinct I’m a small, shy, dozy creature, happy holed up, solitary, contained, in fact I get claustrophobic inside and prefer a place where there is no roof, only sky, and a high sky at that.