The Yips. Nicola Barker
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touching various objects with her hand. She finally sits down (with a bump) on the rug directly behind Valentine and gazes at her, fascinated, rocking along in time.
Valentine eventually stops chanting. Approximately ten or so minutes have now passed. She slowly opens her eyes. She stares at the picture of Kali again, raptly, pulling her face in close to it.
‘Monster!’ she murmurs, smiling.
She seems calmer.
‘Where’s Daddy?’ a little voice suddenly demands.
Valentine turns, surprised. She gazes at the small child.
‘Where’s your nightie, Nessa?’ she asks.
‘What’s rehob?’
‘Rehob?’ Valentine echoes.
‘Is Grandad gone to rehob?’ the little girl wonders.
‘How did you get down here?’ Valentine tuts, gazing out into the hallway. ‘You should be in bed.’
The little girl just stares at her.
‘No,’ Valentine eventually answers, ‘Grandad is in heaven. Mummy is in … in rehab.’
She pauses. ‘Mummy will come home soon, but Grandad …’
She frowns.
The little girl stares at her, blankly. Valentine takes the sandalwood beads and hangs them around the child’s neck.
‘Beautiful!’ She smiles, then claps the child’s hands together. ‘Hurray!’
The little girl peers down at the beads.
‘So who told you about rehab?’ Valentine wonders.
The little girl continues to inspect the beads.
‘Was it one of the big boys at Aunty Sasha’s?’
The little girl doesn’t answer.
Valentine sighs then turns, picks up the candle from the shrine and offers it to her.
‘Would you like to blow the candle out?’
The little girl nods.
‘Okay, then. Deep breath,’ Valentine instructs her. ‘Deep, deep breath.’
The child leans forward and exhales, as hard as she possibly can, but the flame just flattens – like a canny boxer avoiding a serious body blow – then gamely straightens up again.
Although plainly startled – and not a little annoyed – by Noel’s boorish behaviour, Ransom tries his best to disguise his irritation. ‘You’ve lost weight,’ he mutters, appraising him, almost tenderly.
Noel has long, curly black hair, pale green eyes and an intelligent face, but his youthful bloom (he’s only twenty-one) has all but evaporated. There is a weariness about him, a sallowness to the skin, a sunkenness under the eyes and cheeks. He looks hollowed-out, withered, shop-soiled. He reeks of skunk and cigarettes. One of his front teeth is badly chipped and prematurely yellowed. He is heavily tattooed. The left hand has, among other things, LTFC printed – in a somewhat amateurish script – across the knuckles. The right hand and arm – by absolute contrast – have been expertly fashioned into the eerily lifelike head, neck and torso of a snake. Only his fingers remain un-inked and protrude, somewhat alarmingly, from the serpent’s gaping mouth.
‘Can I get you a drink?’ Ransom asks (gazing, mesmerized, at the reptilian tattoo), and then (when this question garners no audible response), ‘You seem a little tense.’
‘My mother used to work in this place,’ Noel growls, glancing around him, angrily. ‘Head of Housekeeping. But I guess you already knew that.’
‘Sorry?’ Ransom stares up at him, confused.
‘My mother,’ Noel repeats, more slowly this time, more ominously, his nostrils flaring. ‘My mother used to work at this hotel.’
‘What?! Here?! At this hotel?’ Ransom echoes, visibly stricken. ‘You’re kidding me!’
‘Kidding you?’ Noel scoffs. ‘You actually think I’d joke about a thing like that?’
While this short exchange takes place, Jen casually strolls to the far end of the counter and peers over towards the front desk. The desk has been temporarily vacated. A small, conservatively dressed, middle-aged Japanese woman is standing in front of it, her finger delicately poised over the bell.
Jen cocks her head for a moment and listens, carefully. She thinks she hears a commotion near the hotel’s front entrance and wonders if the receptionist might be offering back-up to Gerwyn from Security (who’s currently on door duty). She scowls, checks the time, then returns her full attention back to the bar again.
‘Man! You’re just incredible!’ Noel’s laughing, hollowly. ‘I mean the levels you’ll sink to for a little bit of press.’
He shakes his head in disbelief. ‘It’s scary, Ransom. It’s fucked-up. It’s sick.’
‘Now hold on a second …’
The golfer frowns as his drink-addled brain slowly puts two and two together, then his expression rapidly transmogrifies from one of vague bemusement, to one of deep mortification. ‘Aw come on, Noel!’ he wheedles. ‘You can’t seriously think …?’
Noel delivers him a straight look.
‘But that’s crazy!’ Ransom squawks. ‘I didn’t have the first idea – I swear. I just got a message from Esther. You know Esther? My PR?’
Noel looks blank.
‘Esther. Remember? Jamaican? Bad attitude? I was booked in at the Leaside. She texted and said you’d switched the venue, so I –’
‘So you thought you’d set up a lovely, little photo opportunity at the Thistle, eh?’ Noel sneers, pointing. ‘Slap bang in front of the giant, plate-glass window.’
Ransom turns and gazes over at the window. Three photographers are now standing behind the glass, two of them busily snapping. The third starts banging, aggressively, at the service hatch.
‘FUCK OFF !’
The golfer grabs a handful of nuts and hurls them towards the glass.
‘Oi!’ Jen yells (in conjunction with the golfer – recognizing this malefactor from their previous encounter). ‘I thought I told you earlier …’
She stands there for a second, momentarily flummoxed, then reaches under the counter, grabs the first aerosol that comes to hand, and steams around the bar.
‘I don’t understand …’ Ransom pulls out his phone. ‘This doesn’t make any kind of sense … I was booked in at the Leaside and then I got a text …’
He begins paging through his messages while Jen dances around in front of the window, chuckling vengefully and spraying voluminous clouds of furniture polish all over the glass. The photographers curse and bellow as their view is initially compromised and then entirely obfuscated (Jen only adds insult to injury by sketching a dainty, girlish heart in the centre of the goo and then – after a brief pause – neatly autographing it).
Ransom finally locates the message and shows it to Noel. ‘There. See?’ He passes Noel his phone. Noel takes it, inspects it for a few seconds and then tosses it over his shoulder. The phone slides across the parquet and comes to rest, with a clatter, under a nearby table. Jen – like a well-trained blonde labrador – promptly charges off to retrieve it.
‘Just tell me what you want,’ Noel growls, ‘so I can get the hell out of here. This place gives me the creeps.’
‘Jesus.’ Ransom shakes his head, depressed. ‘You really must think I’m some kind of a monster …’
‘You destroyed my family.’ Noel shrugs.