Wide Open. Nicola Barker
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They went out for a drink together. It was unprofessional, admittedly, but she didn’t regret it. She merely told Nathan that he shouldn’t see James again. He shouldn’t give him anything. That was all. There was no mystery. He’d said, ‘I hadn’t realized … I mean I didn’t realize there was anything … uh … untoward … I didn’t. God. I didn’t think that for a second.’
‘It’s a real shame,’ Margery said kindly, trying to reassure him, ‘but the world is such a sick place. You do something in all innocence and the world manages to make it cheap in some way. That’s just how it is, I’m afraid.’
Then James went missing. Initially the police expressed a tolerable level of interest. A list of names were fed into a computer. They called on Margery. Flat hat, blue suit, big boots. Did she know about Nathan? Did she know about Nathan’s history? More specifically, did she know about Nathan’s father? He was a convicted paedophile. Did she understand what that meant? Nathan’s dad was sexually deviant. He fucked small children. All the time. Big Ron. Big bad Ron. He huffed and he puffed and he blew their fragile houses down. And his own little piggies? He tucked them up tight at night, so tight that they couldn’t move their tiny arms, and then he peered and he leered and he panted through their weak straw walls. It was all spelled out. Every letter. And every letter spelled a single word. And the word was horrible.
Horrible. Horrible. Horrible.
She wanted to withdraw. But no. Nathan had red hair and blue eyes and skin so pale it was almost transparent. He was almost transparent. So soft and so gentle. He was see-through.
And by then she was in too deep, dammit.
Nathan had prepared a chicken-in-a-bag meal that you boiled for ten minutes. It tasted like chalk, but fibrous. She never told him that she knew. She simply waited for signs of it. She studied him like you’d study a tomato plant in a greenhouse. Was it getting enough water? Were there greenfly? Was there mildew? She kept on waiting for something to go wrong. Like he was a bomb just a tick-tick-ticking.
Nathan watched Margery eating. She didn’t complain. She munched dutifully.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘it tastes awful.’
He was as soft as a strawberry cream.
‘It does taste awful,’ she said quietly, eating on regardless, then picking up the ketchup from a tray resting on top of a brown cardboard box which had been propped, without her noticing, next to the sofa. The box. All close and closed and tightly bound. Nathan gave it the quickest of glances, every so often. Some things, he resolved, no, many things, many, many things were often better just left that way.
7
‘Now here’s the thing,’ Ronny said, appraising Luke and detecting a powerful smell of fish, ‘he’s changed his name and now he’s called Jim.’
Luke turned to Jim, surprised and clearly determined not to believe the testimony of a total stranger. ‘You changed your name since this morning?’
Jim nodded. He already seemed thoroughly reconciled to this superficial alteration. The new name had settled on him during the previous hour as softly and as completely as a thin layer of soot over the rim of a chimney.
Luke frowned, somewhat disgruntled. ‘But what was wrong with Ronny?’
Ronny interjected. ‘It was his dad’s name and he didn’t like his dad.’
‘Anyway,’ Jim said, carefully steering the conversation away from his father, ‘my friend here is called Ronny, and if we’re both Ronnies it makes things too complicated.’
Luke was tickled by this. His broad face broke into a grin. ‘So in fact,’ he said, chuckling, ‘you’re The Two Ronnies.’
Ronny shook his head. ‘No. We’re not the two anythings. That’s the whole point of it. He’s Jim.’
Luke stopped smiling. Jim took his chance and handed him the car keys. ‘I really appreciate you lending me the car. It’s been a real life-saver.’
While he spoke, Luke squinted at Jim’s cheek. ‘You have a slight rash …’ he indicated, ‘just there.’
‘He knows,’ Ronny said. Jim nodded. ‘I think it may even be going down a bit now.’
‘Actually,’ Luke glanced wistfully over Ronny’s shoulder, although all that lay behind him was darkness and the roar of the tide, ‘I met one of our neighbours today. A girl with a flat face. She looked slightly …’
‘Dirty,’ Jim filled in.
Luke laughed, as though this hadn’t previously occurred to him. ‘That’s true. She was dirty. Her neck especially. Do you know her?’
Jim shook his head. ‘I’ve seen her around but we’ve never spoken.’
‘Well she was snooping around my prefab and then she jumped into the sea. With all her clothes on and everything. Crazy, really. I didn’t warm to her at all.’ Luke paused. ‘In fact she actually objected to me walking the short distance from here to the nudist beach with no clothes on. It’s not even as if there was anyone about …’
‘She was about,’ Ronny said, but not provocatively. He was rubbing his ear and seemed uninvolved now that the naming issue had been resolved. Luke just grunted.
‘Anyway …’ Jim said, his voice trailing off into the sound of the waves.
‘Yes …’ Luke responded brightly and jangled the keys in his hand, ‘any time.’
‘Great.’
Jim walked off, expecting Ronny to follow. But Ronny didn’t follow.
‘Did you see the black rabbits yet?’ he asked.
‘Black rabbits?’
Luke was temporarily bewildered.
‘Jim said that there were black rabbits here. Wild ones.’
‘Uh …’ Luke considered this for a moment. ‘I’ve never …’ he frowned, ‘although now you come to mention it …’
He disappeared into his prefab in search of something. Ronny held the door ajar with his foot. He saw the picture of the woman with the chin-high breasts which Luke had now hung squarely, unapologetically, above his sofa. Ronny touched one of his own nipples with his left hand. He had a fantastic capacity for empathy.
‘Ouch.’
‘Pardon?’ Luke reappeared, looking testy.
‘Nothing. It’s just …’ Ronny pointed, ‘her breasts are very high. That isn’t natural, is it?’
‘Natural?’
Luke didn’t understand the implications of this word. He was holding a pamphlet. It was a free handout from the Nature Conservancy Council about the Swale reserve. He cleared his throat. ‘Breasts are fatty tissue. That particular model has quite large ones which means that there’s some …’ he searched for the right word, ‘slack,’ he said, finally, although he couldn’t help thinking that it sounded ungallant. Graceless, even. And it was such a real, no, not real … it was such a resonant image, after all.
Ronny was already inspecting the pamphlet.
‘Take it,’ Luke said, ‘I think it mentions something about rabbits in there although I wouldn’t swear to it.’
‘Thanks.’
Ronny took the pamphlet and turned to go. Luke half-closed the door and then said quickly, ‘It didn’t hurt, you know.’
‘What didn’t?’
Luke thumbed over his shoulder. ‘The breasts. She’s my ex-wife. It didn’t hurt. It was actually her idea in the first place.’
‘Oh,’ Ronny nodded, still clutching his