Five Miles from Outer Hope

NICOLA BARKER

Five Miles From Outer Hope

Dedication

In loving memory of Jason, Anna and little Romy

Thanks

With special thanks to Jessamy Calkin

Contents

Cover

Title page

Dedication

Thanks

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

About the author

Praise

By the same author

Credits

Copyright

About the publisher

Chapter 1

It was during those boiled-dry, bile-ridden, shit-ripped, god-forsaken early-bird years of the nineteen eighties. The same summer my brother Barge started acrylic-ing his internationally celebrated collection of bad canvases featuring derelict houses with impractical tomato-red masonry and gaping windows: his agonizing L. S. Lowry period (and look what happened to him – a gleeful life of Northern bliss, stuck in Pendlebury with his bed-ridden mother. Pretty fucked up. Ask anybody).

And it was the identical year, more to the point, that my vicious but voluptuously creamy candle-wax-skinned sister, Christabel (Poodle for short, or Poo, if you really wanted to risk a trouncing) went out and invested in a brand-new pair of breasts, and then, with the kind of infuriating randomness only ever exhibited by terriers, High Church clerics, and the despicably attractive, finally got around to making the one and only decent-minded decision of her rancid, fatuous, nineteen-year-old life (a good impulse, you’ll be pleased to know, that she never, ever recovered from).

And it was the self-same summer – June 5th, if precision is your watchword – that I first set eyes on a stringy southern hemisphere home-boy, a man-boy, a prankish puck by the name of La Roux (with very bad skin and even worse instincts), who sailed into the slow-beating heart of our half-arsed, high-strung, low-bred family, then casually capsized himself, but left us all drowning (now they don’t teach you that at the Sea Scouts, do they?).

In order to pinpoint this nebulous time chronologically, to locate it in terms of general events of national – fuck – galactic significance, to set it all in perfect sync, so to speak, it was actually the very year in which that resplendent Sylph of Synth, that unapologetically greased-back, eye-linered soprano imp, Marc Almond (the rivetingly small-c’d Marc) enjoyed a late summer smash with his electro remake of Gloria Jones’s old Northern Soul big-belter, ‘Tainted Love’, then celebrated it by devouring well over a pint of warm, pale cum in a public toilet – somewhere horribly unspecific – and got his gloriously effete wrist slapped, and his adorably flat stomach pumped for his sins.

Yes, that year.

And let us pause (momentarily), lest we forget the curious story of Mr Jack Henry Abbott, the bastard Yankee killer, the ingeniously literate reprobate (whose lucky-lettered surname would ensure him an opening position on the index of every World Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Murder for ever and ever more, amen), who in this particular summer somehow managed to prick the precious consciences of all those fine-minded, high-flying American writerly types (sure I can gloat – I lived in Texas for fifteen months. It was hot as Hades. It was dry as toast. I was resplendent in two completely random scarlet eczema mittens. I walked around with plastic bags on my hands to stop me sticking to furniture. I was medically advised not to get wet in the shower. Medically advised, I tell you. Call that humane?) and then spat, and spat again, in their kindly, good-intentioned, well-bred faces. (Don’t you just love it?)

It was that year. It was that summer. Late that summer.

It was 1981.

Remember?

So my dad loved Thurber. He had a penchant. What can I say? Thurber. The American who – so far as I can tell, anyway – made a living out of writing witty stuff on the fascinating subject of canine behaviour. And he drew cartoons of bloodhounds doing human things in a mutty way but being all high and mighty about it, like making citizen’s arrests and drinking pale ale in public houses and suffering from acute depression. As if dogs have all that much to be worried about – existentially – or superior about, come to think of it. And this clever cheeseball made a career from these meanderings.

He was born in 1894 (this is Thurber, dimwit) and he lived – like my father – the first seven formative years of his life tortured by his incapacity to digest solids. Horrible gut problems. Huge coincidence, and hence, That Bond.

All told, there are seven of us: Big, that’s Daddy. He’s four foot nine in his clogs, which is pretty embarrassing, but when we were little, we were tiny. That’s nature. We knew no better.

Painfully thin. Like a toothpick with elbows (yet in our minute consciousnesses, a giant pink radio mast, a wild, fleshy skyscraper), which is why Barge – who’s already coming over slightly too idiosyncratic in these pages for my taste – went right on ahead and nicknamed him in one single syllable with his soft, slightly lisping, sweet baby-lips. Big.

Big does some landscape gardening. He’s in the midst of compiling a supernaturally tedious Pocket Guide to Garden Shrubs. He lives to crochet. He still finds it extremely difficult to digest cheese. It’s a daily battle.

Okay, Barge. Barge! What a wit! What a prodigy! Well, the truth is this kid’s name was actually lifted straight from the collar of that ridiculous ale-lapping hound I believe I might already’ve mentioned earlier (a mongrel, a drunk, an ineffectual guard dog – these are details only a Thurber fanatic would find telling) and he is distinguished by being the oldest child in our considerable and cosmopolitan clan. Our clutch.*

By mid-1981 Barge was living on the only kibbutz not actually inside Israel. I think it was deep in the Balkans, somewhere. He kept the faith by painting assiduously in the evenings and boiling beet for his keep. Clear-pored and righteous (This was 1981, for God’s sake. He’d never even heard Bill Wyman’s ‘Je Suis un Rock Star’. It was depraved).

Naturally the degraded root vegetable-based enclave to which he had only recently become attached consciously eschewed all unnecessary contact with modern technology. If you’d thought to ask, he’d’ve said Abacab was some kind of taxi service.

Next up, or down, was the lovely Christabel with her two brand-new, out-of-the-blue, special-purchase, proudupstanding, oxygen-tank tits (after she’d turned fifteen, if you called her Poo to her face, she’d string your teeth into a necklace and then make you pass it), a cheerfully malevolent teen queen, the only paid-up member of our benighted eighties familial troupe to wear normal – read as English – clothing (the rest of us stepped out boldly in our embroidered kaftans, fur-trimmed hide waistcoats and crochet knickers. We were mutants): I’m talking pleated skirts, high-neck blouses, court shoes. Standard hideous. All acquired – without exception – as a consequence of her devious and persistent extra-marital conjunctions.

But she was always Daddy’s favourite, his pride, named after Thurber’s most beloved black French poodle (although I fear close textual scrutiny reveals this animal to be an inconsistent, teasing, curly-hinded harridan: please refer to Mr T’s essay on ‘How to Name a Dog’. He doesn’t say it, in so many words, but I believe the modern vernacular is slut.)

I’m next down and I’m Medve. No, it isn’t a verb. And it isn’t Ancient English for river or whore. Medve was also, if you must know, a Thurber canine, another poodle, not quite so beloved as Christabel, but, shucks, a great breeder by all accounts, and an independent dog blessed with the talent of throwing her own balls and then retrieving them. A bitch. Obviously.

Medve is Hungarian for bear, which, when you think about it, is pretty fucking grizzly. And don’t ask me how to pronounce it. I will inflate and then I will gently burst. And it will be messy, because I am built like a shire horse. Six foot three in my crocheted stockings. I am huge. Sixteen years old in 1981, with a tongue taut and twisted as a tent-hook and two tremendous hands like flat meat racquets.

Thwack !

My serve, I think.

Sadly, I am the only recorded giant in our tribal history. There are no magnificent, monolithic, Humber-Bridge-building great-grandfathers hanging around helpfully in our fine family tree, no cousins-twice-removed making a fortune as novelty attractions in disreputable out-of-town freakshows. No one, in other words, for a poor, tall girl to look up to.

I am not stupid or rebellious enough to consider my difference a boon. I am anti-genetic. I am unnatural. And this hugeness is not even counterbalanced by any degree of sleekness or sveltness or grace. I have knees as wide as the skull of Neolithic man. They knock together sometimes, as I walk, and the subsequent crashing makes sheltering rabbits, deep in their burrows, roll their eyes skyward, embrace each other with their funny bunny arms and quake. I am clumsy. I lumber. I can only buy shoes through mail order. I disorientate seagulls.

Hang on, you’re thinking (you’re so transparent): seagulls?!

I’ll get to that. Hold your horses. First off, I just want you to imagine my little mother, Mo (there’s nothing cutesie in this moniker, she’s Maureen, that’s all), five foot two inches tall, struggling to pass my huge head through her cervix. Think small African pygmy being force-fed a planet. Mars, maybe. Or Pluto. There will be screeching. There will be retching. And tearing. And tears. Afterwards the whole Sahara desert will look like a badly managed Halal butcher’s.

Poor Mo. Mo is actually very scientific. In the fifties she published her Ph.D. entitled The Intellectual Woman’s Guide to Atomic Radiation. It was a smash. There were so many intellectual women around back then, and all of them absolutely gagging to understand the atom. She might almost have planned it.

Naturally this fine specimen of emancipated womanhood cashed in on her little victory by choosing to spend the bulk of the following decade breeding with a man without a stomach on a series of far-flung atolls. She has a passion for atolls (not, I fear, an interest as inspiringly universal as atomics. But give it time).

By early 1981 things had picked up a little. The urge to reproduce having momentarily abated, she was fully occupied in stringing out a long-extended but very temporary American visa working alongside a rather shifty man called Bob Ranger in developing and patenting a fascinating new security device for the US prison service. An Anal Probe. (And remember, this was the kind of woman who always made a habit out of bringing her work home.)

I don’t want to talk about it.

Well, not yet, anyway.

There are just two others; both younger and not particularly interesting. Patch. A girl. Twelve years old. Fat-cheeked. Literate. Needy. The only one among us not named after a Thurber pooch. Would you believe it? I mean how harsh. How excluding.

Then there’s Feely (a slack, ill-bred Boston Bull Terrier), our smallest. Four. When he grows up he wants to be a bulimic (He thinks it’s a veterinarian who specialises in livestock. He’s so credulous). He’s into amateur naturalism. He is obsessed by the life story of a Japanese deer called Shiro Chan, a special doe with a strange white fringe whose story Barge came across by chance once in a poor-quality Japanese travel book. It’s a tragic tale. Lovely deer: road traffic accident. Oh Lord. Don’t even get me started.

That’s it. So I’ll toss you a few crumbs, some details, to fill in, to plump out…

We all have bad teeth (A direct consequence of:

(a) Non-fluoridated drinking water

(b) Brushing for six years (1968–74) with only our middle fingers

(c) Never eating solids as kids.

In his mid-thirties – no doubt as a consequence of his own dreary digestive dramas – Big became really interested in nutrition and spent the bulk of the seventies developing what turned out to be an unsuccessful forerunner to the Cambridge Diet. A shake for breakfast, one for lunch. You know the story. The upshot was I didn’t chew until I was ten years old. I only ever sipped. I suffered chronic muscle wastage in my jowls. My teeth crumbled. Everyone thought I had cheekbones, but it was only deprivation.)

And we live on an island off the coast of South Devon. In fact we’ve lived on a whole host of islands, bigger than this one, if you must know, and grander (Islands were the atolls of the seventies, but inverted. It’s a geographical joke. Just let it wash over). New Zealand. The Philippines. Jersey. The Scillies. That shithole where they made South Pacific, the 1950s Technicolor army-based bikini-drama (Remember me? I was the impeccably moral girl who somehow sustained a successful military career in hair rags and prescription hotpants. Ah yes. So lifelike).

Guess what? Joking aside, I have no interest in geography. I’m a teenager. It’s my foible. And anyway, if I stand on my tippy-toes and squint, I get to watch Margaret Thatcher crawling up Reagan’s arse all the way over in Missouri. I’m a big girl. I see things coming.

In truth, the Devon thing is only very temporary: almost derelict Art Deco hotel up for sale. Needs renovating. Sounds romantic. Isn’t. Big’s sorting out the grounds as a favour to the current owner, who spends most of her year sucking extraneous segments of tangerine from the dregs of her sangria in a sumptuous corner of Bilbao.

And it’s only part-island. When the tide goes out there’s a nifty hourglass of sand attaching us, inexorably, to the remainder of the coastline. So during daylight, every six hours, the sightseers swarm over like fat ants across butter.

We live in squalor. We paint pottery for extra cash. It screws up your vision. It gives you the shakes. It’s not at all cool.

But it’s the summer, don’t forget, and not half-bad weather, either. 1981. I believe I mentioned that already. And soon Marc’s going to be at the top of the charts, all dressed in black and irresistibly nasal. And Jack Henry will publish his wonderful book, then start campaigning like crazy for early parole (just you watch as he gets it). And Dolly Parton is up on the big screen, doing it for the girls in her office-based bio-pic, Nine-to-Five (oh Lordy, Lordy, thank you, Dolly!).

And there will be riots in Brixton, and Royal marriages and the space shuttle Columbia: flying and orbiting. And somehow they’ll check-mate the Yorkshire Ripper, and baseball will strike, and air traffic controllers, and McEnroe will win the US Open, and Karpov will reign as World Chess Champion, and in May, Bob Marley’s short life will be over. Cancer.

It is the Year of the Rooster: the strangest, darkest, screwed-up time of scratching and strutting and shitting and crowing. 1981.

Jesus Christ, my fucking ears are burning.

*At the time of writing – I must debunk, for the sake of narrative accuracy – he is embroiled in that most fascinating of occupations: court illustrator, somewhere noteworthy within the salubrious confines of the great city of Woolwich. But back then, it was matchstick men, matchstalk twats, L. S. Lowry, the abandoned houses. Twenty-one years old, poor sod, and dippy as a hungry swallow – his unconscious patently embroiled in some kind of inexplicably acute trauma, his day-to-day personality far too slight and light and breezy for belief. What a fuck up.

Chapter 2

(I have pins in my ears. Flashforward, Dumbo. If my narration gets a little hot-diggedy it’s because I have pins in my ears. Seven in my right, one in my left. This is acupuncture. I’m giving up smoking. And I don’t even smoke yet.

It’s very messed up. You’ll find out later.)

Let’s get this straight, for starters: I don’t have beautiful eyes. If you dare even think it (and I’m not kidding), then this whole damn business is over, buster. I’ve been knocked hard and I’m hurting, see? Because that asinine You Have Beautiful Eyes thing is exactly the kind of shudderingly clumsy gambit well-intentioned five-foot-seven morons really seem to enjoy trying out on a sixteen-year-old girl giant in mail-order shoes. So I don’t want to hear it, okay?

And the truth is (more to the point), if you ever chanced to glance into the nappy of a five-month-old baby who’d recently swallowed a gallon of mashed banana on a seven-hour boat trip, well, that would be a fair representation of the colour of my eyes. Or if you peered into Shakin’ Stevens’s pituitary gland after a lengthy night out on the piss, that would be the colour of my eyes. I don’t have beautiful eyes. I do have a beautiful chin. But unfortunately that’s simply not the kind of thing people feel comfortable remarking upon in 1981.

It’s a very dark time.

I didn’t sleep much in May. Hormones. I’d been spending the bleached-out early hours of every morning honing my masturbatory skills with only Peter Benchley’s Jaws (come on! Not literally) and Barry Manilow’s ‘Bermuda Triangle’ for company.

My clitoris, you’ll be pleased to know, is as well-defined as the rest of me. It’s the approximate size of a Jersey Royal. But whenever I try and mash it (don’t sweat, I know these particular potatoes are determined boilers, but flow with the analogy, for once, why don’t you?), all I can think about is Mr Michael Heseltine MP eating an overripe peach on a missile silo somewhere deep in the South Downs – or the general vicinity – juice on his tie, shit on his shoes. Am I ringing a bell? Do you think this might mean something?

I’m still young. I don’t want to develop any sick sexual habits (to plough any permanent furrows) that I may have trouble casting off later. The way I see it, sex is rather like a hair parting; if it falls a certain way, after a while, it sticks. One day, I tell myself, I’m absolutely certain I’ll want to fuck Tony Hadley like all the other girls.

If, by sheer chance, you’re interested in the layout, I have my portable mattress down on the ground floor in the old Peacock Lounge, next to the empty fountain with its rusty residue, the silver-tiled swoop of the cocktail bar and, best of all, glimmering high above me, the peacocked glass ceiling – every feather rattling if the wind so much as sighs on it – which means whenever I deign to close my eyes it’s like that great, big barman in the sky is mixing me a Manhattan.

Cocks aside, in those long, listless, liquid-ceilinged early hours I often find myself thinking about the big issues: Can my hair sustain a wedge? Is the Findus Crispy Pancake truly a revelation in modern cuisine? Am I ‘Hooked on Classics’? Will Poodle see the folly of her ways and extricate herself from her disastrous affair with that repulsively lascivious travel agent whose skin resembles an ill-used leather hold-all? Is exploding candy truly a part of God’s scheme?

Big has this great story about God which he’ll tell you at the drop of a stitch if you’re stupid enough to consider asking. It involves six roadkills and it explains a lot. Wanna hear it?

Okay. It’s circa 1957, and Big is driving a group of student buddies on a wild coast-to-coast excursion through some barely roaded, shit-slicked, no-horse parts of America. Christ knows where. He is driving – this I can help you with, it’s the question Barge always asks whenever Big cranks this story up – some old-fashioned type of American Cadillac, an ancient, dusty, sludgy green-coloured cheap rental with no air-con or heating.

It is night time. Big is tired. He is not, however, under the malign sway of any kind of boozy or druggy concoction (Patch asks this. She’s interested in narcotics. When she grows up she expects to be a pharmacist. Ironically, history has much greater things in store for her; after a bumpy start she ends up being part of the team who revolutionize thermal clothing – you know, that whole pitiful nineties ‘inner-wear becomes outer-wear’ farrago?)

Bear in mind, this is a man with half a stomach, remember? A dwarf. He can barely reach the pedals without standing upright. It’s not half so romantic as you’re thinking, trust me.

Anyway, it’s late. Big’s pals – a group of shallow horticultural students with hayseed in their teeth and manure on their breath (this is a point of interest to Poodle, who can already identify most of Big’s associates by their vasectomy scars) are dozing in the front and in the back. On the radio (this is my moment) are a selection of classy orchestral standards arranged by Glen Miller or Robert Farnon or somebody.

Well, Big has not been driving over-long when he sees something quick and dinky suddenly skipping in front of him. He blinks. There on the road stands a tiny fieldmouse. He brakes, quickly, but still he hears the inevitable ‘ka-ting’ and then feels the front left-hand wheel hiccup slightly. Oh dear.

Big drives on. Twenty minutes later, he turns a sharp corner only to see a jackrabbit standing in his headlights like some kind of out-of-work Disney character: up on its back legs, its little paws flailing. He can’t even brake. Phut! Dent in the bumper the size of a turnip. Fur on the mudguard. The rabbit, I fear, is plainly no longer.

He drives on… Okay, I’ll cut this short as I’m presuming you’re a quick learner… Next up, a racoon. He’s lucky this time – just clips it. It squeals like a banshee then jumps up and scarpers.

Yikes! A dog. A manky farm pooch. Bang! He’s whacked and he’s winded. Big does what he can to help the creature. Trawls it back to the farmhouse, et cetera.

Not even an hour later – you guessed it – a sheep. Swerves to avoid. Manages it. Phew! Then finally, the big one. A cow. Large cow, just standing in the road, licking its nose, quietly passing the time of night like its whole life has been leading to this one exquisitely meditative moment.

By this time, Big is so head-fucked that he drives off the road, into a tree, and spends the rest of the night half-way up it.

Let’s get this straight. It is not the fact that Big has experienced the horror of six potential roadkills in one single evening that disturbs him (and the bottom line is, only two of these animals were squelched for sure), it’s the fact that he suddenly perceives the simple truth that these night creatures were arranged into some weird kind of order: smallest to largest. And in his mind, this orderliness contains vague – I’m talking really vague (he doesn’t shave his head or enter a monastery or anything) – implications of Divine Intervention.

(Let us not forget – this is Feely’s contribution whenever he hears this particular story – that llamas have an inbuilt need to arrange themselves in order of size. It’s just an instinct, Feely opines. Ask any llama farmer – yeah, so do you happen to know one? – and they will all swear blind that if you go to bed with your fields full of llamas, plodding about their business, quite arbitrarily, when you eventually awaken, the llamas will, without fail, have arranged themselves into an immaculate line: tallest one end, smallest the other. They will be in perfect order, ready for inspection. That’s llamas. They are bloody obsessive.