Heading Inland

by Nicola Barker

  ‘Ow!’

  ‘You, get ready for me to lift the bed. I’ll go slowly but prepare yourself for some discomfort.’

  Tina turned away. Paolo braced himself, grunted and then lifted. Ralph cursed and rapidly made some necessary adjustments.

  ‘Right,’ he said finally, ‘I’m decent. Hold it three seconds longer, Paolo, and I’ll roll out from under.’

  After exactly three seconds Paolo dropped the bed, unceremoniously. Ralph tried to stand up. But before he could straighten himself Paolo had darted over and shoved him, quite forcefully, in the centre of his chest. Ralph jerked and then wilted. Paolo was at least a foot taller than he was.

  ‘Sit! Over there. In that chair.’

  Paolo pointed. Ralph winced, staggered over and sat down.

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘So,’ Paolo glared at the significant protuberance between Ralph’s thighs. ‘I can clearly see that there is indeed some activity in your trousers.’

  Ralph looked down at himself, as if to confirm in his own mind that this was true.

  ‘Yes.’

  Ralph’s penis was stretched and erect under the fabric of his jeans.

  ‘Tina,’ Paolo said softly. ‘Make yourself comfortable on the bed. I myself will take the other chair.’

  Tina did as Paolo had asked. Paolo pulled a chair over to a position directly opposite Ralph’s, and then settled himself into it. Nobody spoke. Finally, Tina said gently, ‘It’s late. Hadn’t Ralph better get going?’

  Ralph nodded keenly, all previous thoughts of his improbable connection with Tina patently abandoned.

  ‘No, Tina,’ Paolo replied calmly. ‘Now we wait.’

  Tina frowned. ‘But what for?’

  ‘We wait until his magical erection goes down. Then I will kill him.’

  Ralph’s eyes widened. So did Tina’s. Paolo just smiled and kept his eyes fixed on Ralph’s thighs. Ralph squirmed.

  ‘Ah yes!’ Paolo sneered, looking and sounding quite demonic. ‘Try and maintain that erection under real pressure, little man. We’ll all see how long it lasts, eh, Tina?’

  Tina cleared her throat. ‘But maybe, Paolo . . .’

  Paolo silenced her with an impressive jerk of his eyebrow. ‘You called me, Tina, and I came. This is my business now. Keep out of it.’ Tina retreated back on to her pillows.

  Ten minutes. Twenty minutes. Thirty minutes passed. Nothing moved except for Tina’s eyes which turned every so often towards the clock on her bedside table. After forty minutes Paolo was still as watchful and focused as a kestrel in a summer wheatfield. Ralph was pale and bug-eyed and sweating. But his erection remained prodigious.

  Eventually Paolo stirred. ‘Tina, I need to use your bathroom.’ Tina nodded. Paolo stood, went to the window and fastened it, turning the security lock at its base and pocketing the key.

  ‘The room keys?’

  Tina pointed to the bedside table. Paolo picked these up on his way into the bathroom. He closed the door behind him.

  In a flash Ralph turned to her and whispered frantically. ‘He’s a fucking maniac! He’s going to kill me. He means it. Why the fuck did you have to go and phone him?’

  Tina gaped. ‘Me? Why did I phone him? It was your idea in the first place. How was I to know he’d react this way? Anyhow,’ Tina pointed, ‘the erection’s still there, isn’t it?’

  Ralph unzipped his fly and brought out a cheese straw. Tina stared, dumbstruck. Finally she murmured, ‘What is that?’

  ‘What does it look like? I never had an erection. It was a wind-up. I wanted to pay you back for being such a stuck-up bitch the other day. And for passing me over.’

  ‘Passing you over? Are you mad?’

  ‘I was going to run off once you’d phoned him, so that he’d come round and you’d look stupid. But,’ he indicated the zip on his fly, ‘this fucking thing did get caught and I was stuck there for a while so then I thought, why the hell not sit this out and be in on all the fun?’

  The toilet flushed. Tina gestured frantically. ‘Put that back in! He’s coming.’

  A droplet of perspiration had formed on the tip of Ralph’s nose. ‘I can’t. It’s crumbling. It’s hot down there.’ He waved the straw and it drooped. Tina’s hand darted into her pocket and she pulled out the Bic pen.

  ‘Take this. Quickly.’

  Ralph snatched the pen and stuck it down his trousers with dispatch. Just in time. Paolo came strolling out of the bathroom. Tina was still staring anxiously in Ralph’s direction and so failed to detect that Paolo was holding something in his hands. Her bag. After a cursory glance at Ralph’s genitals, he sat down in his chair again and placed the bag on his lap.

  ‘Tina, could you possibly explain something for me?’

  Tina glanced over. ‘Paolo?’

  ‘Could you perhaps explain why it was that when I went to wash my hands in your sink I found your handbag in there, and it was open, and inside it was the mushroom dinner I cooked you?’

  Ralph turned and appraised Tina. His mouth had fallen slightly ajar. Tina looked down at the counterpane. She opened her lips to say something but then Ralph spoke first.

  ‘Actually, Paolo,’ he said calmly, ‘she throws up everything. It’s a medical condition. She’s an anorexic.’

  ‘Bulimic,’ Tina corrected him, quickly.

  ‘That too.’

  Tina chewed on her lower lip. She felt so tired. She could barely call up the strength – physical, moral – to meet Paolo’s gaze. ‘I’m sorry, Paolo,’ she said finally, peering up beseechingly. ‘It was no reflection on the meal. Really it wasn’t.’

  Paolo continued frowning for a few seconds longer and then suddenly he smiled. Tina smiled back. Even Ralph smiled.

  ‘Dear Tina,’ he said gently, ‘you must think me a beast. I had no right to look into your bag. I’m sorry.’

  His face softened and, true to form, Tina’s heart – like a lump of semi-congealed butter on a warm hotplate – softened with it. Everything would be all right. She felt it, suddenly. Everything would be just fine. She turned to Ralph. ‘This is ridiculous, Ralph,’ she said boldly, ‘and it’s all gone on for long enough. We should tell Paolo about the pen. I’m positive he’ll understand.’

  ‘The pen?’ Paolo’s eyebrows rose.

  Ralph’s face was rigid. ‘I don’t think so, Tina,’ he said slowly, his eyes fixed on her most expressively.

  But Tina didn’t baulk. ‘It’s just got way out of control,’ she said firmly. ‘Tell him, Ralph. Get it over with.’

  ‘Get what over?’ Paolo leaned forward in his chair, his neck extending so that the muscles stretched and pumped with all the elasticity of chewing gum.

  Tina took a deep breath. ‘It isn’t an erection, Paolo. Ralph’s got a pen down his trousers. It was all just a stupid joke. He told me while you were in the bathroom.’

  Paolo got to his feet, very slowly. ‘Ralph,’ he said softly. ‘Over the past hour I have had the opportunity to scrutinize your clothes and your footwear at some length. Your shoes are very unusual. In Italy we don’t have anything quite like them. Perhaps I could take a closer look. Would you mind?’

  Ralph, paradoxically, had pushed his body as far back into his chair as it would go. He took a deep breath. He shook his head. ‘Of course I wouldn’t mind.’

  Slowly, stiffly, he lifted up his foot so that Paolo might see one of the shoes without bending down. Paolo took hold of the foot, pulled the shoe off and quietly inspected it.

  As he did this, Ralph watched him fixedly, and then, for a split second, his eyes darted sideways, towards Tina. In that instant Paolo grabbed hold of Ralph’s jaw, prised his mouth open and rammed the tip of the loafer into it.

  Ralph flailed helplessly, his jaw stretched wide, his eyes squeezed tight. Tina sprang up and grabbed hold of Paolo’s arm. ‘Stop it! Leave him alone! You’ll hurt him!’

  As soon as she touched him, Paolo let go. He raised his palms to the ceiling. ‘See? I’ve let go. See?’

/>   Tina nodded.

  ‘Are you happy now?’

  She nodded again.

  ‘Good.’ Paolo smiled. Tina tried to smile but couldn’t quite manage it. Ralph? Ralph didn’t even try to smile. He was too busy choking. The loafer lay in his lap, bereaved of its fancy buckle.

  Tina hadn’t yet noticed. Ralph, gagging, threw his shoe at her to get her attention. He tried to cough but his throat was blocked and he couldn’t exhale. Tina caught the shoe. She looked down at it and then over at Ralph who was slack-jawed and drooling.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  He clutched at his throat.

  Paolo glanced down too.

  ‘I think he’s choking on something. Ah!’ He pointed to the shoe Tina held. ‘The buckle’s come off. He must have swallowed it.’

  ‘Oh God!’ Tina dropped the shoe. ‘So now what?’

  Paolo shrugged. ‘I suppose we should call for an ambulance.’

  He walked over to the phone and picked it up. Tina watched as Ralph’s complexion rainbowed from red to wine to damson to ivory. Then he fell from his chair and on to the carpet.

  Tina felt sick. Ralph was writhing. She was panicking. Paolo, perfectly calm, spoke on the phone for a short interval and then returned to Tina’s side.

  ‘An ambulance?’

  He nodded. ‘It’ll be a short while.’

  ‘But he’s choking!’

  ‘Sì.’

  ‘Can’t you do something?’

  Paolo shook his head. ‘I am not insured to intervene in this kind of situation. If he dies I might get sued by the family. It could ruin me.’

  ‘If he dies?’ Tina gasped. ‘You’re a doctor, Paolo!’

  Paolo cleared his throat. ‘Roughly.’

  ‘Roughly? What do you mean, roughly?!’

  ‘I’m a chiropodist.’

  Tina fell to her knees, grabbed hold of Ralph’s head, stared up at Paolo and said, ‘So, fine, if you were a doctor, what would you do?’

  Paolo scratched his head. ‘I suppose I would try the Heimlich Manoeuvre.’

  ‘Yes!’ Tina exclaimed. ‘How does it go?’

  ‘I have no idea. But, uh, after I’d tried that, if it didn’t work, I’d make an incision at the base of the throat and push a straw into it so that he could breathe from below the blockage.’

  Ralph, meanwhile, was undergoing some kind of spasm. Tina didn’t know what kind of a spasm it was, only that it looked almost biblical in its monstrosity. His face was ashen, his eyes were rolling.

  Tina exploded. ‘I need a knife. But I haven’t got one. Do you have one?’

  Paolo shook his head.

  ‘I need something pointed. Anything pointed.’

  Ralph clutched at his groin.

  Typical, Tina thought. Even in his moment of crisis . . . But then she remembered. She grabbed at his trousers, yanked down the zip, ripped out the Bic pen and held it aloft. Ralph had started to foam and to slacken.

  Tina indicated towards her own throat as she looked up at Paolo. ‘Is this the place? At the bottom here? Is this it?’

  Paolo shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t know, but I don’t think shoving a bone into his throat is any way to go about it. It looks dirty and it’s blunt at its tip.’

  Tina scowled down at the pen. It was a pen. It was a pen. It was. She started shaking. She looked into Ralph’s face. Oh God, she thought, Rome was holding something special just for me. Not a statue, not an orange tree, not even a shady walkway, but Ralph. Ralph!

  She stared at him, fixedly. How did she feel? She hated him. Ralph opened his eyes. They were the colour of two brown hazelnuts. That did it. Tina shoved his head between her knees, raised the sharp point of the Bic pen skywards, paused for one second, one long second, and then brought it down, forcefully, with as much accuracy as she could muster, into the base of Ralph’s throat. It entered so easily. Ralph arched and stiffened, but she kept her hand steady.

  ‘Stay still. Hold on.’

  Tina yanked the pen out again, ripped the biro section from its centre and then firmly thrust the hollow pen shell back into the wound.

  Glub.

  Ralph lay still, corpse-like, flaccid. Two seconds, three seconds, four seconds, five . . . And then his chest started to rise. It rose, it rose, it rose. Air whistled through the pen’s shell. In, in, in and then out.

  Paolo threw himself into a chair. ‘You could’ve killed him.’

  ‘But I didn’t,’ Tina said, almost regretfully, and as she spoke she cleared a piece of clotted blood away from the pen tip. The air whistled in and it whistled out.

  ‘Do you hear that, Ralph?’ Tina whispered, conspiratori-ally. ‘The pen’s making a noise like a penny whistle. Do you hear it?’ Ralph’s eyes had been shut since the pen had entered him. But now, slowly, gradually, he opened them. His mouth moved, it started to form a word. Tina stared at his lips. What was he saying? Was it ‘Thank you’? Was it ‘Sorry’? What was it? And then she realized. Chiropodist, he said. Chiropodist! Ha. Ha. Ha.

  Tina felt lead in her belly. And rage. ‘Take that back, Ralph. I mean it.’

  Ralph’s lips were smiling. Ha. Ha. Ha.

  His head remained clamped between her knees. Tina took her index finger and waved it calmly in front of Ralph’s eyes. ‘See this?’

  He blinked yes. She took the finger and placed it over the tip of the pen shell. The shell stopped whistling. Ralph’s eyes bulged. His chest stopped moving. He stopped smiling, finally.

  ‘Want to take it back yet, Ralph?’

  Ralph struggled to nod. Tina tightened her knees around his skull.

  ‘Mean it, Ralph?’

  Again, he struggled. His hands flailed, helplessly. His brown eyes, not blank, not empty any more, but saying something, emphatically. He was sincere. Just this once. He’d taken it back. He’d meant it.

  Tina smiled, nodded, and casually asked Paolo how long he thought the ambulance would be.

  ‘About four metres,’ Paolo said, grinning, trying to win back her favour.

  ‘Did you hear that, Ralph?’ Tina asked softly. ‘Paolo made a joke. He made a joke. Ha. Ha. Ha.’

  Ralph wasn’t smiling.

  ‘I can hear the sirens,’ Paolo said. ‘Can’t you?’

  Tina listened carefully and then nodded slowly. ‘Yes, I think I do hear them.’

  The sirens grew louder. Her eyes filled with tears. They sounded strange and strong and quite beautiful. Tina sniffed, blinked, looked down for a moment, and then, so regretfully, and with the sweetest, the softest, the gentlest of sighs, she lifted up her finger again.

  Popping Corn

  ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘If I had her breasts I’d become a topless model or a cocktail waitress, or I’d go to Saint-Tropez and lie on the beach all day.’

  ‘And get cancer.’

  Mandy was sitting on the bus with her mother. They had met up outside the gym. Her mother finished work fifteen minutes before the end of Mandy’s aerobics class. She waited outside by the bus stop, frustratedly watching the buses go by. Sometimes she waited for twenty minutes, occasionally longer. The gym was in Deptford.

  ‘Breasts are for milk,’ her mother said. ‘You get pregnant, they fill up, you squirt it out. Like a cow.’

  I wonder if it’s erotic, Mandy thought, feeding babies.

  Her mother added, ‘When I had you my nipples cracked. They were chapped and they bled. Every time you sucked on them it felt like I’d shut them in a suitcase.’

  Mandy imagined this. Breasts bare, suitcase open, packing for holiday, breasts jut forward, suitcase accidentally slams shut. Whap! Chop! Nipples sliced neatly off. Inside the dark suitcase; two soft, pink jellytots.

  Then she remembered Imogen’s breasts. She had seen them in the showers, and then after, when Imogen patted them dry on a pale blue towel, 36C. Small tan nipples. No unsightly blemishes or stretch marks. She didn’t wear a bra! No! Not even in the class! Only a tight, high-cut leotard like the one Jamie Lee Curtis wore in Perfect.

 
By rights they should be down by her knees, Mandy thought, and secretly, in the back of her mind, I wish they were!

  But the truth of it was this: Imogen could easily have no inkling of how fantastic her breasts were. She probably wished they were smaller, or that her nipples were a different shade.

  I hope she thinks that, Mandy thought, imagining how it would be to carry two breasts like those around – light, soft trophies.

  Mandy’s own breasts were much too heavy and much too round. She wore a bra to exercise in, a terrible contraption like the kind of restraining garment people were strapped up in at mental hospitals. To stop them from hurting themselves. Surgical.

  Mandy pictured herself wearing no bra for the class, her breasts bouncing so much that after half an hour the skin holding them to her ribs becomes slack, thin, sticky, eventually tears. The breasts break free and travel downwards in her leotard, eventually settling either side on top of her hip bones, like two fistfuls of cellulite.

  Her mother said suddenly, ‘When you were a kid, three or four, we were sitting on a bus, on the top deck, close to the front, and a brassy woman came up the stairs and sat close by. She had on a tight skirt, heels, blonde curls piled up high and a low-cut top, with her breasts on display, shoved together, like plums, shoved up. You stared at them for a while, all solemn, and then you turned to me and said, very loudly, “Mummy, why has that lady got a front bottom?”’

  Mandy laughed. She had heard this story before, many times. Another breast story. Ha Ha. Funny breasts, tits, boobs, dugs, knockers.

  One good thing about my breasts, she thought – focusing on herself again, on the two soft pieces of fat in flesh under her sweatshirt – when I drop off food from my fork, it lands on my chest instead of on my lap. Why was this so good? She couldn’t decide, only knew that it was. Her breasts were a buffer zone, they protected her, padded her, covered her heart. If she ate popcorn at the cinema, eating in a scruffy way, fistfuls shoved in at once, to avoid embarrassment, she had to take care to remember to collect and consume the formal white line of fluffy kernels before lights up.

  Water Marks

  ‘You think just because you’re getting married you can say that word in this house? You think that?’