Five Miles from Outer Hope

An interesting fact, certainly, but not, I fear, particularly pertinent to the story at hand. But he’s four. And let’s not forget that whole tragically morbid Shiro Chan thing, either. Which is pertinent. As a matter of fact it’s a rather sensitive issue. So give the little runt a break, will you?)

If there is a God, Big maintains, then (and this is the important part) he is surely a very pedantic deity. For some reason Big finds this notion a source of great comfort. Perhaps it’s because he is an extremely pedantic man himself at heart, and the idea that God has seen fit to arrange the whole world in perfect sync with his own shortcomings is, quite frankly, rather flattering.

In my opinion, there are many other adjectives I’d rather associate with the Creator of All Things: muscular, avuncular, priapic, whiffy, bolshy, galvanized, funky. Pedantic, in my book, just doesn’t really cut it. Sorry.

Like you care.

I should fill you in on the Poodle thing. And be warned, it’s complicated. So I’m going to take some stuff for granted; the basic social and geographical organization of the Scilly Isles in the years 1979–81, for one thing.

If you care to imagine it (approximately fifty islands stuck slap-bang in the middle of the gulf stream), we were washed up on Bryher for eighteen months (golf course, small hotel, a scattering of sheep, high winds, too much granite. A teen dream, basically).

Big is working on Tresco in their famous gardens (even I can’t knock Tresco, with its ravens and exotic flowers and shit). But all civilized life is happening on St Mary’s, which is kind of the capital of this shredded little universe, and it is in this place that Poodle – who is making money selling T-shirts in a tourist shop – catches the eye of a physically repellent cod fisherman called Peter Bunch.

Now Poodle has had many offers. She is a very pretty lady. She has this inadvertent post-punk/pre-goth Siouxsie and the Banshees/Kim Wilde ‘Kids in America’ pale-skinned, back-combed hair thing going on which is pretty bloody irresistible – especially to men over forty, not least the head of St Mary’s travel kingdom, a swine called Donovan Healy, who is coincidentally promising Poodle the world as her whelk if she wants it.

Mo, naturally (as any good mother would be), is sharp to his manoeuvrings, and just before setting sail for the States makes Poodle promise to look elsewhere for her entrées. Poodle merely sneers, which for her is pretty damn obliging.

Pete Bunch, it must be said, is only known throughout Scilly for one thing: the grandeur of his astonishing overbite. His top jaw hangs over his bottom lip like… go on, create an image for yourself. Preferably something to do with Venezuelan Swamp Hogs or the Beano… But if there’s one thing you can’t take away from him it is the undeniable fact that the man has balls.

He is the ugliest, stupidest, most unappetizing reprobate in all of the fifty isles (gannets included) and it is because of this, and as a matter of sheer perversity, that he sets his sights on my beautiful sister.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking surely that surly, sassy, egocentric bitch can look after herself? And you’d probably be absolutely right, if you weren’t, on this occasion, the complete and utter opposite.

I must just – as a kind of aside – let you in on one of Pete Bunch’s sad little routines. The Italian pop star Joe Dolce (a one-man reason why joining the EC was such a huge, fucking catastrophe) was at this particular point riding high in the charts with his nightmarish novelty hit ‘Shaddupa Your Face’, and Pete Bunch is so tragic that he has adopted this little ditty as his trademark song of the moment and is walking around the town doing the most pathetic Joe Dolce impression, with hand-gestures and everything, that you – or any sentient being – have ever seen.

Naturally when Poodle first sets eyes on this (and remember, she’s the girl who has travelled the whole world, carelessly feeding on its rich and remarkable multicultural bounty) she thinks it’s one of the most embarrassingly fatuous displays she has ever, ever come across.

The problem is, the man is so depraved, so stupid and persistent that she almost feels sorry for him. And you know what that means? Her defenses come down a little (this girl invented defensiveness) and she starts to find him pitiful, but, well, pitiful.

As any sharp mind will know, it’s a terribly short step from pitiful to go-on-then-and-fuck-me. In less than twelve days, Poodle is crammed into the cabin of a fishing boat, mid-way between Gugh and Samson, yanking her knickers down and sucking on this Dolce wannabe’s obscenely protrusive upper set. It was sheer madness.

But it doesn’t end there. Any intelligent person might think that Mr Bunch would be insanely gratified at the idea of casually dating the most beautiful creature then currently inhabiting the Scillies. And they would be wrong.

After only one piece of interaction, Bunchy goes all cold on Poodle. And while the truth is that Poodle only really ever intended their canoodle to be a one-off thing – she deserves a man with status and money, doesn’t she? – she doesn’t get a chance to knock The Bunch back because The Bunch knocks her back first, and for one very specific reason.

Every pub and bar in St Mary’s is alive with it. Bunch won’t screw the new girl again because she has no tits. He is a tit man. She has none. And that is his bottom line.

It is at this point that things get a little shaky. The titless, shitless Poodle-related gossip gets so swollen and inflated and dark and vicious that eventually Big feels obliged to step in himself and stop it. He says not a word to our Poodle on the matter – God forbid. Instead he chugs quietly over to St Marys, calls Pete Bunch out and gives him what for. Barge, naturally, is working as back-stop.

It is all very humiliating. The man is four foot nothing. Bunch laughs in his face (or the clean air above it) and poor Barge is obliged to step in and steady things. In the process, he loses the tip of his tongue, a slightly ironic injury, really, considering the fact that his tongue hitherto had always been too long and hence slightly lispy. Now it is slightly short and the net result is not – you stupid dreamer! – a miraculous cure of his former difficulty, but one of the worst speech impediments in the whole northern hemisphere: with the added bonus of a future literally dripping in spittle and indignity (french kissing? Out of the picture).

Wow.

That Pete Bunch could really sock it to ya.

Epilogue

You might think Poodle would be grateful for her family’s intervention in this island drama. You would be wrong to think so. She is livid. She will never forgive Barge for losing his tongue on her account. She will never forgive Big for being so small. She will never forgive Mo for buggering off to America just at the juncture when her moral guidance skills were most needed, and the whole, damn family, more to the point, for being so strange and weird and different and tall and kaftan-ridden and freakish and poor and lean and curly.

She falls, henceforward (has the girl not an ounce of originality?) into the leathery arms of Donovan Healy. He has volunteered to ease the pressure for a while by getting Poodle off the scene in some kind of phoney, bull-shitty couriering capacity.

And that is how Poodle becomes Healy’s whore. But there is a price to pay. And Poodle won’t be paying it. She has been burned. She has been spurned. The bitch, as they say, has truly turned.

Shortly after, we stagger back to the mainland, our numbers cruelly depleted: Mo-less, Barge-less (the poor boy can’t even talk for three months after, then there’s the infection), Poodleless. A mournful, slightly moth-eaten rag-bag of a family. Feely, Patch, Big and me.

Appendix

She had lovely breasts, dammit. That’s the worst part, really. Tiny chocolate-button-tipped conches, soft as a moth’s wing, pale as a priest’s kiss. Lovely breasts.

So screw that infuriatingly gormless, over-bitten, cod-fishing Peter Bunch to hell and back, I say.

Chapter 3

I’d hate you to have me down as the world’s greatest ever L. S. Lowry fanatic – the man couldn’t interest me less – but I must get something off my chest about how sick and disgusted I feel over the treatment doled out to this silly, scratchy, mother-loving, messed-up art-genius in his dirty old home town of Pendlebury.

Pendle-where? Ah, precisely. You see the rudimentary facts of the matter are these: initially Lowry dwelled a life of infinite contentment in Victoria Park (a smart, suburban area of Manchester, vastly Pendlebury’s social superior), before, rather tragically, his dad’s oxtail soup business went all to seed and a move down-market became horribly obligatory.

Let us not for one moment pretend that it was the dream of Lowry’s life to end up living in a mill-ridden shithole with nothing to recommend it bar a whole host of spindly cats, rheumatic brats and cockroaches. No, sirree.

That said, the man soon set out, singlehandedly, to steam-iron this god-forsaken buttock of a place into the annals of Art History. No one can deny that Lowry put Pendlebury on the map with his bad brush and his keen eyes and his soft oils. He made it matter. He gave it soul. He offered it a shot in the arm of much-needed bloody integrity.

And as he did so – records maintain – he was the absolute living epitome of patience and politeness and calm, sweet modesty. He weren’t no fat-head or bully or big-gob. Quite the contrary.

(Okay, the man had some serious mental health issues. He was still a virgin aged eighty. He was chronically depressive. Wanna make something of it?)

So how do you imagine this beleaguered little area goes about thanking L. S. for all his crucial Northern Realist creativity?

‘They laughed at me for thirty years in Pendlebury,’ quoth he. To be laughed at for thirty years! L. S. Lowry. Laughed at by those wank-ridden tosspots in Pendlebury. Those smug, piss-infested, self-righteous, small-minded, ill bred bastards. Those losers. Those fools. Those inconsequential small town scumbags.

You know what? Sometimes it feels pretty damn hard for a six-foot girl giant to love the world.

(So I lied about the oxtail soup business. That’s hardly the point, is it?)

Yes, yes, yes, I am a truly, irredeemably, unapologetically moo-faced, big-blotched, large-arsed, yank-my-udder Friesian (how can I deny it?), but I do have some inkling as to how poor old Poodle felt over the Bunch disaster. Humiliated. Small. Cast-off. Ugly.… And the strange thing is, I miss her. For a short while the sweet May sun suddenly shines just a little less brightly on our tiny, ten-acre almost-island.

Oh please. You actually believe this stuff? Jesus H! I’m so full of shit my ears are dripping. Miss the bitch? Are you kidding? I’m in my fucking element. It’s like I’ve suffered for sixteen years with a dose of Bell’s Palsy, and suddenly it’s lifted. It’s gone. I am no longer disfigured by the shadow of my nasty sibling’s shallow, sulky, arse-aching misery. I mean, this girl made Ian Curtis look like Zebedee.

At last, at long last, I am free (You really expect me to mourn the brief bliss which has suddenly entered our once-dark world with all the unexpectedness of an exotic fungus sprouting on a once-putrid pile of manure? What do you take me for?)

I am buoyant. I can boss Patch into performing all the kitchen chores. I can mess with little Feely’s head then send him straight to bed. I rule this damn ten-acre patch with a rod of cod.

I spend my days peering into rock-pools, fishing, swimming in the cove, snarling at tourists, flirting (pathetically) with local yokels and marching around this dilapidated Art Deco hotel like a six-foot Queen Tut in carpet slippers.

I’m still painting pottery. We’re doing a concession of Thatcher mugs: mustard-yellow hair, sharp blue eyes. We are part of the zeitgeist, so why oh why do I feel so oooooh… grubby?

Come on. I’ll get over it.

Then, out of the blue, with no prior warning, something rather peculiar happens. Over breakfast. For some reason, on the morning in question, we are partaking of our victuals in the snooker room. Huge table, covered in a thick sheet of protective plastic. Dark green walls, no windows, but all the vital central action carefully low-lit by a long, rectangular fluorescent strip which hangs over the table like some kind of gratuitously industrial extractor fan. It’s a magical chamber; fuzzy-edged, subterranean, bruised, mysterious.

We all have our stools and sit perched upon them, miles apart from one another, like dirty-etched characters in a Rembrandt painting; half-lit in the dark-light. The room reeks of damp.

This is where Patch has chosen to serve. No one says anything. It is her decision. She’s twelve. If we make too much of it she gets to think she’s interesting or something.

I am wearing my cheap, synthetic nightdress (a garment so flammable that if I fart the buttons tinkle) and a long crocheted knee-length waistcoat. Rubber flip-flops. My heels hanging over. Hair like Medusa.

We are eating kippers with our fingers. And drinking goat’s milk (Feely has a dairy allergy). It’s all pretty primeval. Either way, I am finishing my first fish (telling Feely his feet are stinking), lifting up my glass, swigging on it – eyes unintentionally rolling – when yik! I espy a total stranger. Over the table. In the half-dark.

I stop glugging, burp, and put down my glass. He is staring at me morosely. Big, meanwhile, has quietly and most inconveniently abandoned the baize. Patch is telling Feely his feet stink (the girl’s my fucking echo), and for a split second I consider how uncool it would be if I ask him straight out who he actually is. I don’t want to be wrong-footed.

(Instantly I see he will wrong-foot me – he has that kind of jaw, and he’s ginger – and don’t forget I’m in my flimsy night-dress with my nipples doubtless digging like blind moles through the holes in the waistcoat crochet – why can’t the man just knit for Chrissakes?)

‘Chin,’ the stranger says suddenly, and points at me. It’s dark. His poky finger is lit for a second like silver. He withdraws it again, into smudginess.

‘What?’ I say, rather rudely, blinking at him. He is weird-accented.

‘Chin.’ He points to his own chin in the bored manner of a man much-accustomed to being misheard.

‘Oh.’ I wipe my hand over my chin, thinking I have milk on it, but I feel no hint of moisture.

‘You have a handsome chin.’ He smiles. He has an effeminate manner. His lips are thin and prone to pursing. Already I smell him; kind of clean but rotten. Bad antiseptic. Not erotic (like I’d want to shag a drain).

I look down. ‘Can you see my nipples through my top?’ I ask.

He stares fixedly.

‘I believe I can,’ he sighs.

I nod and continue eating. The stranger stretches over, picks up a book from the place where Big was sitting previously, and then quietly starts reading it. In the Belly of the Beast, by Jack Henry Abbott. Hardback. Boring cover.

‘Mo wrote,’ Patch mutters, and tosses me a letter. I nod, pick it up, unfurl, and not another word is spoken.

Big is no help whatsoever. He is weeding the tennis courts when I finally catch up with him. ‘So who is he?’ I demand. Big straightens.

‘Did you see Mo wrote?’ he asks.

‘Yep.’

‘What did she say?’

(He loves to receive his news second-hand. And he needs to buy some reading glasses. Feely used his last pair in an outdoor experiment – he wanted to set fire to the sea – and a freak wave took them. The child is so damned ill-bred.)

‘Deep South. Death Row. New Lawyer Friend. Some strange, fresh angle about the Probe being marketed as a means to improve prisoner safety and dignity (my God, the woman’s such an opportunist). Worried about Barge’s tongue. Poodle’s been visiting. And the book. She sent it.’

Big nodded. ‘I don’t like this new prison reform stuff,’ he says, passingly. (Big loathes progressive politics. The man’s a Nazi.)

‘I could give a shit,’ I say.

‘Watch your mouth.’ He looks into the sky. A gull’s flying over. Greater Black Backed. It squawks at me.

‘All the same, bad Elmore Leonard novel or what?’ I snipe.

Big just frowns.

(These are the conversations we have. They’re profoundly inconclusive. But it’s all that’s really necessary. I won’t change him. He won’t change me. We’re our own fucking people.)

Big bends over and picks up his weeding implement again.

‘His father’, he offers finally, ‘is a gynaecologist. He delivered Feely in Wellington, remember? We owe him a favour. He’s from Cape Town.’

‘Clipped vowels. Horrible.’

‘That’s the nature of the beast.’ Big looks uneasy. He scans the horizon.

‘How long will he stay?’

Big shrugs, squats, starts truffling. Not long, I surmise, by the look of him. I move on.

Hmmn. Something tells me Mr Big is definitely not Mr Happy.

‘Don’t you find being a woman in the eighties complicated?’

Jessica Lange, Tootsie

Are you telling me – I said are you telling me – that it’s gonna be a whole other year before that monumental short-arse Dustin Hoffman gets to set the whole world straight on the fundamental dilemmas of modern womanhood in his cross-dressing masterpiece, Tootsie? But where does that leave things, currently? I mean feministically?

Meryl Streep taking it up the arse and looking wantonly choleric in A French Lieutenant’s Woman? Marg Thatch writ large – all nose, no jaw – in her preposterous pearls and pin-stripes? Sue Ellen in Dallas with her pop eyes and alcoholism? Or do they honestly expect me to seek succour from that inconsequential drippy-draws playing the worthless girl part in Chariots of Fire? Can this really be it?

Look, there’s not a damn thing wrong with my sexuality (excluding those private issues detailed previously), but show me internationally acclaimed actress Jessica Lange in

(a) grey sweatpants

(b) a nurse’s uniform

and – screw Hoffman – even I get a little horny.

I’d better tell you about the barman. It’s a touch convoluted, but bear with me. The point is (can you hear me backpedalling like fucking crazy?), when you move around a lot you get to meet plenty of new people and, frankly, you don’t give a damn about them – not really – because in your heart of hearts you both know it doesn’t really count, for one (you’re just treading water, dammit), or matter, for another, however much you screw each other over, because soon you’ll be gone and it’ll all just be water under the hump-backed proverbial.

(You’re calling my family a bunch of users? Spot on. You’re sharper than you look. We prefer to call the whole sordid flyby-night exchange thing ‘a short-cut to intimacy’. Ha! God fucked up good when he gave us vocabulary.)

There’s this small pub on the island: the Pilchard Inn – the pilchard used to swim these waters, way back, but now the Gulf Stream has shifted and they’ve taken to foaming further afield; they’re canny. It’s three hundred years old. Balanced precariously half-way up the one and only pot-holed, sharp-tilted road which staggers dejectedly from the beach to the hotel.

Mud-coloured inside, with big fish jaws on the walls and stuffed birds. Smells of dust and treacle. The owner’s nephew still runs it. Keeps it ticking over. Twenty-five. A tragic soak. Stinks like brandy and dry-roasted nuts. Huge, brown eyes (a thyroid problem, but let’s not spoil it). A dark heart. They call him Black Jack. Like the card game (I’ve never played it).

Barely speaks a word. Caters to the tourists. Resents our presence like a rat resents Rentokil. He is literally filthy. Naturally I have it in mind to seduce him. Or for him to seduce me. Come on, the man’s a modern Heathcliff with his catatonic dial, his cat-gut breath, his loose, lardy belly (So I’m only four inches taller. I picture it as an act of revenge, on his part. Well hell. Beggars can’t be choosers).

In the absence of all other island staff, Jack has been temporarily placed in charge of the Sea Tractor – a mythological machine in these parts: half bird, half monster, which, when the tide is high and the conditions are tolerable, we use to ferry post and people and provisions one way and another.

It is his pride. Seven-foot-wide wheels attached to twelve-foot-tall stilts. On top, a kind of oily, open-sided tram carriage. It chugs through the water like a superannuated steamroller.

I have cunningly been employing monosyllabic Jack’s passion for this vehicle in my four-pronged attack on his affections. Last week I cleaned it. This week I’m expressing an interest in its rudimentary mechanics. I’ve invited him out fishing (I’m a dab-hand, me). And all the while I bore him with tales of our time on Soames Island in Wellington harbour, New Zealand. He loves it.

(Jack has this fantasy about turning our current crummy bolt-hole into some kind of nature reserve. He’s a nutter. He likes to mutter about the surf and stuff. He’s into Polynesian culture. He even has a Maori tattoo.

The man is plainly out of his tree. I mean, how does he plan to keep nature reserved on a place part-connected to the mainland? In truth he’s nothing more than a tragic booze casualty, but somehow, in some way, he brings out the nasty, sexy, six-foot Nurse Nightingale in me.)

This particular morning I find him standing on an overturned bucket, poking his nose into the ancient inn’s low-slung but very clogged-up gutters. It’s still high tide. We’re cut off. The coast is clear. And luckily my extra inches mean I don’t have to yell up at him.

‘Need a hand?’ I whisper.

He jumps and scowls. ‘Why did God make you so obliging?’

Side-on he looks like Gene Wilder. But no perm. I say nothing. (What do I know of God’s intentions?) Instead I peer through a window then saunter down the hill a way.

‘So who’s the freak in the balaclava?’ he asks. He can’t help himself. He wants me. I stop sauntering.

‘Balaclava?’

‘Five this morning, I brought him over on the tractor. Your dad was spitting fucking tacks.’

I shrug. I am mesmerized by the sheer sum of words spilling out of him.

‘Sorry,’ I finally manage again, ‘you said balaclava?’

‘Then not ten minutes since,’ he continues, ‘I saw him carrying a shitload of chicken wire…’

He points to the hazy summit – past the old croquet lawn, towards the Herring Cove – a sumptuous grass-strewn rise glimmering with an obscene verdancy in the early summer shine (the cliffs crash beyond it, all chalk and shag).

‘That way.’

Jesus, the man is almost trippy.

He peers again, ‘And there he goes…’

I walk back towards him, up the hill. Once I reach his level I stretch my neck. Sure enough, I see a black-headed creature processing regally along the horizon, arms full of silver.

‘Chicken wire? Where’d he get that from?’

‘And he’s got some old lavender,’ Jack observes almost squinting, ‘and a fucking tonne of blue grass… Still in his balaclava, note. The twat.’