I Am Sovereign Read online

  NICOLA BARKER

  I Am Sovereign

  Contents

  1. GO, LOCAL SPORTS TEAM, GO!

  2. EVERY TIME YOU MAKE A TYPO, THE ERRORISTS WIN

  3. ASK ME ABOUT MY VOW OF SILENCE

  4. CAT HAIR IS LONELY PEOPLE GLITTER

  5. SORRY I’M LATE, BUT I DIDN’T WANT TO COME

  6. I RUN WITH SCISSORS

  7. IF YOU BELIEVE IN TELEKINESIS, PLEASE RAISE MY HAND

  7. (REVISED) IF YOU BELIEVE IN TELEKINESIS, PLEASE RAISE MY HAND

  8. LET’S EAT GRANDMA. LET’S EAT, GRANDMA. COMMAS SAVE LIVES.

  9. PROCRASTINATORS UNITE!

  About the Author

  Nicola Barker was born in Ely in 1966 and spent part of her childhood in South Africa. She is the author of twelve novels – including Wide Open, Darkmans, The Yips and In the Approaches – and two short story collections. She has been twice longlisted and once shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, has won the IMPAC, the John Llewellyn Rhys and the Hawthornden Prizes, and was named one of Granta’s 20 Best Young British Writers in 2003. Her latest novel, H(A)PPY, won the 2017 Goldsmiths Prize and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2018.

  Also by Nicola Barker

  Novels

  Reversed Forecast

  Small Holdings

  Wide Open

  Five Miles from Outer Hope

  Behindlings

  Clear

  Darkmans

  Burley Cross Postbox Theft

  The Yips

  In the Approaches

  The Cauliflower®

  H(A)PPY

  Short Story Collections

  Love Your Enemies

  Heading Inland

  For Patrick Hargadon

  and his trademark luminously bright white socks

  Where is the life we have lost in living?

  T.S. Eliot

  1.

  GO, LOCAL SPORTS TEAM, GO!

  Charles can’t get started. He has written an email to the help-desk at Silencing the Inner Critic telling Richard Grannon that he can’t get started and wondering if there’s anything in particular that he can do to rectify this parlous situation. He honestly doesn’t know why he can’t get started. When he thinks about how angry he is with himself (because of how he can’t get started) he begins to flashback and remember how his dad always used to say that he was a pathetic piece of crap who would never amount to anything. Next he feels this unbearable ‘constricted feeling’ in his chest, and, in exquisite conjunction with that unbearable constriction – like a cowboy cantering along, determinedly, beside a demented heifer – an equivalently overwhelming urge to go online and surf the algorithms and buy a book or – better still – an audio book called something like: Living Your Unlived Life.

  He imagines listening to this audiobook at night on his laptop while he’s sleeping – or on his nifty, brand-new, clean-white, kinda-space-cube-y, wall-mounted CD player (if he can burn a CD on his brand-new-as-yet-unboxed CD burner) which seems to have no automatic stop mechanism (the reviewers on Amazon were definitely niggled/bemused by this) so is essentially permanently on repeat – and … and … yes, and the positive messages will seep gently and painlessly into his unconscious mind … or … or his conscious mind (more likely), when he’s not managing to sleep, because he actually cannot sleep, because he is so frustrated by the fact that he can’t get started and he truly fucking hates himself. He fucking hates himself for this blatant sign of his manifold cowardice and impotence and ineffectualness and weakness.

  Just. Can’t. Get. Started.

  Never. Quite. Got. Started.

  My. Whole. Damn. Life.

  This is his Toxic Super-Ego at work. Surely? The Toxic Super-Ego tells Charles that he is a pathetic piece of crap just like his dad always said he was. The Toxic Super-Ego is the Parent voice. It’s his dad’s voice. It is constantly at work within him – hectoring him, lecturing him, pointing the finger. Finding fault.

  Plenty to find fault with here, kiddo …

  ‘WAH! NO! Stop it! Stop it, Toxic Super-Ego!’ Charles immediately counters. ‘I’m calling you out, see? I’m wise to your games now! I know who you are! I know what you do!’

  In the Introductory Module which Charles has only watched half of because he suddenly felt terrified and overwhelmed and tired – tired, just so ludicrously, deliriously tired – Richard Grannon stood majestically in front of a whiteboard wearing a newly pressed blue shirt and calmly outlined the role of the Toxic Super-Ego. The Toxic Super-Ego was sitting (Grannon drew a little cartoon with his trusty marker pen) in its own small bath of ‘toxic shame’.

  Grannon is funny and handsome and ‘buff’ and Charles finds it difficult to believe that Grannon was also an unholy screw-up a mere two years ago. Two years. Before he cured himself.

  He and Richard Grannon are approximately the same age.

  There is still hope.

  Although there is already something about this picture that doesn’t entirely add up. If a person is truly, authentically an unholy screw-up then how the hell do they still manage to hold down a job as a life-coach/therapist and teach high-level martial arts and do a series of other remarkably cool and interesting things like becoming an NLP Master Practitioner and living in the Far East and having an encyclopedic knowledge of Important Cultural Moments in both fiction and film while owning a giant, blonde dog which lollops about shedding hair and stealing socks?

  ?

  Who looks after this beloved dog while Grannon’s kicking back in the Far East?

  Huh?

  If Grannon doesn’t take good care of his dog, how do you know you can trust him to take proper care of YOU?!

  Charles has inherited a hairless Sphynx cat called Morpheus and the cat refuses to either eat or drink if Charles goes away on a trip. When Charles went to an uncle’s funeral (not a real uncle but a real funeral) in Wick for three days the cat had to be rushed to the vet and put on a drip.

  Fucking co-dependent fucking cat.

  This is your Toxic Super-Ego at play, Charles tells himself. Grannon warned you that the Toxic Super-Ego (TSE) would start trying to undermine and ridicule ‘the process’. The TSE doesn’t want to be eclipsed.

  You are AT WAR with the TSE. The TSE is a vicious rogue element – a terrorist – which has secretly hijacked your brain. It is bloated beyond all recognition – like a degenerate mid-seventies Elvis. It is marching around vaingloriously – like a psychological Napoleon in a ridiculous cocked-hat. It has short man syndrome.

  But remember – remember! – that you don’t want it to know you are AT WAR with it. Too risky. You want to sneak up on it and catch it unawares. To set a cunning trap. To approach it, with stealth, and then …

  to POUNCE.

  Because … shhh!

  YOU ARE NOT STRONG ENOUGH TO DECLARE OUTRIGHT WAR ON THE TSE! IT WILL CALMLY AND SYSTEMATICALLY PULVERISE AND DEGRADE AND HUMILIATE YOU IF IT CATCHES WIND THAT ANYTHING – ANYTHING – UNTOWARD IS UNDER WAY. BECAUSE THAT’S SIMPLY WHO IT IS AND WHAT IT DOES.

  IT IS POWERFUL.

  IT IS CUNNING.

  IT *gasp!* HATES YOU.

  Beware!

  Oh balls. Oh balls, Charles thinks. If only I could get to grips with the course, watch it from start to finish (YES! The Holy Grail!) instead of just dipping in and dipping out. If only I could muster a sense of … of order, of connectedness, of coherence. If only I could marshal my wayward spirit. Then – only then – might I finally be able to come to grips with the malign influence the Toxic Super-Ego is exerting on my every waking thought and feeling and breath and impulse.

  Charles feels so … so disparate.

  Desperate?

  No.

  Disparate.

  ‘I suppo
se the important detail here is that he – or she – didn’t actually break in,’ Avigail murmurs, ‘she just tried. She tried but she failed.’

  Avigail looks at Charles. Charles is holding a popcorn maker (retailing at £14.95 excl. p&p) which is still boxed and which he is trying to give to the prospective purchaser, a ferocious-seeming Chinese woman called Wang Shu who seems to speak no English. Wang Shu is barely through the front door. Wang Shu’s interpreter is her dumpy daughter who has her right arm encased – wrist to elbow – in slightly grimy gauze. The daughter is called Ying Yue. Ying Yue has emphatically assured Avigail (on Wang Shu’s behalf – and insofar as Ying Yue can be emphatic, which isn’t very far) that Wang Shu will not be put off by the sheer amount of stuff clogging up Charles’s small property, because the property number just happens to be 8, which is highly propitious in Chinese culture.

  Charles lives in the centre of Llandudno in a curious house which has no real, independent character and seems more like the back end of a giant office space (a dark corner for designated parking, drains and growling air-conditioning filters) or possibly even the unkempt kitchens of a large but seedy hotel. There is no front. It is all rear. Small windows. It’s on a grimy side street close to the seafront. There is no garden. There is hardly any pavement. He inherited the property from his mother. His mother (Branimira) had worked for thirty years as a veterinary nurse in Conwy – after arriving in Wales from her native Bulgaria in 1964 – even though she was always allergic to both hair and fur.

  Hair and fur.

  (In fact hair and fur aren’t actually, qualitatively different, they’re just alternate words for the same kerotin-based substance. It’s the proteins – Can f 1 and Fel d 1 – which are released in the dog’s saliva and the cat’s saliva/skin that provoke allergic responses.)

  Charles’s mother was not a home-body or a consumerist. Charles’s mother was made of sterner stuff. Charles’s mother lived at a high altitude – a lofty attitude. Charles’s mother lived a life of the spirit.

  Charles’s mother LOVED TO GIVE.

  Without inhibition.

  But not to Charles. No. No. No. Not to Charles.

  Mainly to the helpless, the dispossessed and animals (including insects and birds).

  Then to Charles.

  All the left-overs. The scraps. The hard rind. The soggy remnants.

  The mess was one thing, Avigail thought, but the gulls – the gulls – which nested on every, single chimney pot on Trevor Street and shat everywhere. Everywhere. And the young – the fledglings – just crashing about and mewing incessantly and getting squashed on the road.

  Charles had also tried to give this same boxed popcorn maker to the previous person she brought to view the place – tried – and yet still didn’t quite manage to part with it. The previous viewer was called Malc and loved popcorn.

  This is the problem.

  This is one of the problems with selling the property.

  This is one of the problems with Charles.

  Avigail has tried (politely, yet strenuously – if these two adverbs can ever really be believably applied in conjunction) to encourage Charles to go out during viewings – to vacate the property, to leave everything in her perfectly capable hands – because he is tall and awkward and sarcastic and ungainly and he makes the house seem even smaller than it actually is. But he won’t. She thinks he’s fearful about leaving his stuff unguarded. He is a hoarder.

  He is very protective of his stuff, while pretending – to himself, at least, but he’s not fooling anyone – that he can’t wait to get rid of it – the burden of it – and to move on with his life. Hence the whole silly performance with the popcorn maker.

  Oh yes.

  Avigail is perfectly wise to Charles’s little games.

  She can see that it’s all just a pathetic charade.

  Charles wears ironic T-shirts. Today’s reads: Go, Local Sports Team, Go!

  He is chronically shy but he still somehow conspires to over-share. He is very happy to talk about the attempted burglary that took place over twelve years ago when his mother was living alone in the property.

  Oh my goodness! The attempted burglary! The broken window! The dropped knife!

  Ying Yue doesn’t even want the popcorn maker. Ying Yue doesn’t like popcorn. She has sensitive teeth so finds corn problematic; the way it pretends to be fluffy and then a nasty piece of kernel sneaks up into the tight gaps between your molars and … and … ouch.

  But Wang Shu has a keen eye for an opportunity. Always. Ying Yue hopes that Wang Shu won’t embarrass them both by snatching the popcorn maker from Charles and charging off with it. Second-hand goods are not considered propitious in Chinese culture, but Wang Shu is one of life’s great pragmatists. Wang Shu was raised by a group of kindly but brutish prostitutes in Guangzhou. Her sullen, calculating father was their pimp. Okay. Not even their pimp. He was the sullen, calculating half-brother of their sullen, calculating pimp. Wang Shu never had a mother – or nobody she could officially call a mother – just a succession of ‘aunties’ who sincerely tried to do their best for her (and failed). This is why Wang Shu is an obsessive deal maker. She has always made deals. It’s how she understands love.

  Wang Shu is constantly talking on the phone in Chinese to various important contacts back home. Making deals. At this very moment, Wang Shu is on the phone talking in Chinese.

  Ying Yue grew up in North Wales and cannot speak Chinese. At least she doesn’t feel like she can speak Chinese. Perhaps she can. Yes. Perhaps she can. But she doesn’t feel like she can, somehow. It’s like not remembering that you can ride a bike until you are seated on the saddle and then you pick up your feet and suddenly, instinctively, start to pedal …

  Ying Yue has never owned a bike or ridden on one. It is a dream of hers that one day – one day – she will ride on a bicycle. As she stands in the hallway she rests her hand on the saddle of Charles’s late mother’s bicycle that is parked there: it’s a heavy, old-fashioned, deep blue British Roadster with a wonderful, brown sprung saddle, full mudguards, a sturdy chain case, useful kickstand and bell.

  Ying Yue is twenty-seven years old and has never really been given the opportunity to relax, to unwind and to play. She is – and has always been – on perpetual guard; on watch duty for Wang Shu. Because she has never been able to let loose and have fun in her day-to-day life, she gently rebels (although she would never see it in these terms – she is not remotely rebellious) by constantly playing funny little games inside her mind. Ying Yue is extremely earnest. On the surface, at least, Ying Yue is a perfect picture of submissive conformity. Of polite obedience. Ying Yue always takes everything very seriously – aside from herself, that is.

  As long as she can remember, Ying Yue – the true daughter of Wang Shu – has been completely grown up and burdened by a huge number of weighty responsibilities. Even as a toddler she worried about – and felt the burden of – Wang Shu’s immense import and majesty.

  Ying Yue is Wang Shu’s mirror. She reflects Wang Shu back at her (but a nicer version of Wang Shu. A better, more contained and more obliging version of Wang Shu). That is Ying Yue’s job – to be a mirror.

  The name Wang Shu belonged originally to the god who drives the carriage of the moon. The moon, to the Chinese, represents gentleness and tenderness, so the god who drives the carriage of the moon is a renowned and important figure. Ying Yue’s name, on the other hand, means simply ‘reflection of the moon’.

  Ying Yue is almost … but not quite.

  Ying Yue is very nearly … but not actually.

  Aw. Never mind.

  What people don’t realise about Ying Yue is that she is invisible (to all intents and purposes). Nobody ever really notices her. Even that ‘special’ teacher at school – who you always see featured prominently in heartfelt documentaries about the gradual decline of the British educational system – even that special teacher never bothered to notice Ying Yue.

  Ying Yue believes she may act
ually become altogether invisible whenever she holds her breath.

  Nobody has ever indicated otherwise.

  Ying Yue cannot speak Chinese. But she can understand it. Bits of it, at least. Although nothing ever really sticks with Ying Yue. She is ferociously innocent. She is so innocent that sometimes she forgets that she is a person and believes, instead, that she is a small, insignificant white feather – a little piece of fluff – drifting gently – in an infinitely descending circle – down,

  down,

  down, to the ground.

  Does that make any sense? If something is infinitely descending can it ever actually reach the ground? Wouldn’t the ground – its presence, its absence – be immaterial?

  Ying Yue’s not sure that even Wang Shu knows that her only daughter can’t speak Chinese. Nobody on earth is more Chinese than Wang Shu, or more proud of being Chinese than Wang Shu. Every follicle and mole and pore on Wang Shu’s body is Chinese. Wang Shu sweats green tea.

  Or maybe Wang Shu does know. Maybe Wang Shu does know that her only daughter doesn’t speak Chinese. Maybe Wang Shu never actually wanted Ying Yue to learn. To maintain a sense of distance.