Thames Gateway 01; Wide Open Read online

“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 pamphlet, “well, that’s good, then.”

  “Yes.”

  Luke closed the door. He resolved not to show Ronny his portfolio. He was alone in this wilderness. This moonscape. Although Jim, at least, seemed relatively open-minded. Or was that just…uh…he searched for the word. Then he found it. Reticence. Maybe Jim was just reticent.

  Jim. His neighbour. Jim. Bit of a blank spot, really.

  ♦

  Jim’s prefab was bare and functional. One bedroom. Small. A shower, a toilet, a sink. The living room and a tiny kitchen. White walls. Linoleum flooring throughout. Red in colour. A portable TV. Terrible reception. No lampshades. Bare bulbs.

  Chilly. Ronny was impressed. It was already dark when they arrived but he quickly got the gist of it.

  They’d had to wait for ten minutes before entering the island. The Kingferry bridge had been raised for a tanker to pass through. Ronny had clambered out of the car and walked to the river bank to watch. The bridge was a great, concrete, multi-storey car park, but roofless. A monstrosity. A giant. When he climbed back into the car his face was alight. He hadn’t bargained on it being a real island.

  “You could swim it easily,” Jim said, as they crossed over the river, “but it’s pretty deep in the middle.”

  And now they were by the sea. Jim pulled his curtains wide. Outside Ronny saw blackness broken by foam-tipped waves. It was fantastic.

  He pointed. “You’re almost on the beach.”

  “Yes. In fact, we are on the beach.”

  “Just five foot of it and then the sea.”

  “That’s right.”

  Jim was making something to eat, heating a tin of beans and mini chipolatas.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Always.”

  Jim tipped half of the panful into a bowl. The other half he poured on to a plate for himself. He cut some bread. He passed Ronny a piece.

  “No bread,” Ronny said, sitting himself down at the kitchen table. “I only ever eat enough…” he paused, choosing his words carefully, “to remain active.”

  Jim handed Ronny a fork. “That’s a strange habit.”

  “Yes,” Ronny agreed, “but it’s these little things that keep me going. These habits.”

  He ate with his left hand. He held his fork in his fist with no finesse.

  “And you only use your left hand,” Jim said, watching Ronny carefully as though he was some kind of scientific experiment.

  “Yes. It slows me down.”

  “You feel the need to slow down?”

  “I did.” Ronny thought for a moment. “What I mean to say is that it helps me concentrate. I used to have a very short attention span. Then I started these little challenges. It all came to me on the spur of the moment. I’d always had a natural instinct to do things right-handed, but I began to stop myself. I controlled that instinct. I curbed it.”

  He smiled. “At first it makes you irritable, because the body and the brain hate doing things the hard way. But it’s simply a question of working through that initial hostility, and once you’ve worked it through, you feel this intense kind of joy. Really intense.”

  Jim tore a piece of bread in half. At length he said, “You must have been extremely miserable at some point. I mean before all this.”

  “I was,” Ronny grinned, “but not any more.”

  He then ate four mouthfuls of his meal and pushed his plate aside.

  Jim focused on the plate. “It’s very…” he considered for a moment, “well, frustrating. It’s frustrating to see you push your plate away when you’re obviously still hungry.”

  Ronny shook his head. “I’m not hungry.” He rested his elbows on the table. “You’re much bossier than you think, Jim,” he added cheerfully.

  Jim was taken aback. He’d been considering Ronny and his unhappiness. He hadn’t considered himself as a part of any equation. “Me? Bossy?”

  He saw the guiding light in his life as a palpable indifference. A supreme, a superb, a spectacular indifference. Ronny shrugged. “If you ate less you might feel better about things. The way I see it, the less you eat, the less energy you have to expend on unnecessary stuff. If you were hungry you probably wouldn’t be the slightest bit interested in what I did or didn’t do.”

  Jim wasn’t impressed by Ronny’s reasoning, but for the sake of argument he pushed his own plate away for a moment and said, “Everyone has a few stupid habits. I’m sure I have plenty, but I try not to dwell on them, and I certainly wouldn’t want them to influence my life any more than they do already.”

  “So what are yours?”

  Ronny was smiling as though he imagined Jim’s habits would be nothing to write home about.

  “Well…” Jim disliked talking about him
self but he resolved to do so, just this once, to make his point, “when I was a kid my dad used to break things if I formed an attachment to them. To teach me a lesson about dependence. And in a way it set me free, although I really hated him for it at the time. But now…” Jim twisted his fork in his hand, “now, if ever I form an attachment to something, to anything, I feel the need to break it myself.”

  Ronny was clearly impressed. He looked around him, at the furniture, at the walls.

  “What kinds of things?”

  “All sorts of stuff. Cups. Clothes. Watches.”

  “And you still do it?”

  Jim nodded. “Sometimes.”

  “Why?”

  “I have no idea. I don’t bother analysing.”

  “But you should.”

  Jim shook his head.

  “No, really, you should. It’s interesting.” Ronny frowned for a moment and then continued. “By rights you should’ve grown up to really treasure things. In fact, by rights you should’ve become a real hoarder. Don’t you think?”

  Jim was happy to accept this theory, but he wouldn’t think about it.

  “Look…” Ronny took something from his pocket and unfolded it, “I got this from your neighbour.”

  “What is it?”

  “A pamphlet. It mentions the black rabbits.”

  Jim began eating again. “And so?”

  “For a second back there I thought you’d gone and made it up.”

  Jim stopped chewing. “Why would I have done that?”

  “To get me here.”

  Jim’s stomach convulsed. “But why?”

  Ronny shook his head. “I don’t know. I felt uneasy. Just for a split second, which was stupid.”

  “You said I had an honest face,” Jim sounded pathetic, to himself. “You said it was an instinct.”

  “It is an instinct. That’s just my point. I was right about your face. This simply confirms it.”

  Ronny tossed the pamphlet down on to the table, then stood up and went to the doorway to stare out at the sea. “Look, a tanker!” he exclaimed. “Do you see the lights?”

  Jim didn’t respond. He put down his fork. He’d lost his appetite. He felt very strange, all of a sudden, like this was a dream he was living, like this was a tired, old dream, and he didn’t like the feel of it. Not one bit.

  For a second he wished himself inanimate. It was a knack he’d always had; the capacity to disengage himself from any situation, to empty his body and to go elsewhere. And for a fraction of a second he got his wish. He was no longer inside, but outside, and from outside he saw two men in a bare prefab by the brown sea. It should have been a simple image, thoroughly uncontentious. But it suddenly transformed, it was peeled like a banana, and while the outside had been fine, had been firm, the inside was soft and brown and bruised. The inside was marred and scarred and tarnished. Jim felt a profound, jarring sense of unease. Everything was curbed and complicated and twisted and blocked. Could this be right? Even from the outside, from the cold, cold outside, it all seemed so pleasureless.

  He blinked and then looked around him, bewildered. He was back, he was back, but who was this man? What was this place? He put up a hand to his cheek, to his nose. He felt his own face. What am I playing at?

  For a brief moment Jim questioned his own motivation and then, just as abruptly, he stopped questioning.

  “Ronny,” he said quietly, “what happened to all your stuff?”

  “My stuff?”

  “The box. The box you had.”

  “Ah!” Ronny murmured, “I gave it away. I lost it.”

  Jim shuddered. He didn’t know why. Suddenly, though, he was wide awake. His nose was tingling. It was getting cold.

  Cold outside. Cold. Cold inside.

  ∨ Wide Open ∧

  Eight

  As far as Lily knew, her father, Ian, had been in Southampton for eight weeks taking care of her grandmother, who had suffered from a minor stroke three months before and was now fresh out of hospital and finding her feet back at home.

  Lily’s mother, Sara, was taking care of the farm in his absence. Luckily, the farm pretty much looked after itself, because Sara was in a state of flux. She was forty-two and had shed over four stone during the previous year. A yeast allergy. When she’d avoided bread and buns and all those other yeasty temptations – the pizzas, the doughnuts, the occasional half pint of stout – the weight quite literally fell away. She’d been prone to extended attacks of thrush before, and now that had cleared up too, which was definitely an added bonus.

  She was a new woman.

  They had forty boar altogether. Which wasn’t many, actually. But the market for them had become increasingly lucrative over recent years. They were organic. They were shot at the trough. One minute they were gorging, the next they were dead. Quick as anything. The other boars took the shootings phlegmatically, each one just as keen to shove in their shoulder and take another’s place.

  And in that respect, Lily felt, they were just like people.

  Lily enjoyed the boars. She preferred them to pigs. They were hairier and even less genteel. They were bloody enormous. They were giant bastards. But they could be fastidious. They could smarm and twinkle if the mood took them.

  Pigs, though, she’d observed, and with some relish, had very human arses. Like certain breeds of apes. Big, round bottoms. And they tiptoed on their trotters like supermodels in VivienneWestwood platforms. But oh so natural. Boars were less human and they were less sympathetic, but they were so much more of everything else. They were buzzy and rough and wild.

  Sara didn’t like Lily. Lily was not likeable. It was a difficult admission for a parent to make, but Lily was a bad lot. She was rough and she had no soft edges. She’d led a sheltered life. She’d been born premature and had lain helpless and bleating in an incubator for many months before they could even begin to consider taking her home.

  And there were several further complications; with her kidneys, parts of her stomach, her womb. Things hadn’t entirely finished forming. Nothing was right. She was incomplete. So fragile.

  And the bleeding. Her blood would not clot. Not properly. Even now, mid-conversation, her nose might start running, her teeth might inadvertently nick her lower lip, her nail might catch her cheek, her arm. Blood would trickle and drip, then gush, then flood. It wouldn’t stop. There were never any limits with Lily. There was never any sense of restraint or delicacy.

  She was an old tap, a creaky faucet, she was an overflow pipe that persistently overflowed. She would ooze, perpetually. She seemed almost to enjoy it. She was a nuclear-accident baby. She was improperly sealed. She was all loose inside. She was slack. Thin. Pale. Blue-tinged. She was puny.

  At first they’d thought they’d lose her. They’d prepared themselves. They’d almost bargained on it. They were on tenterhooks, year after year, just waiting for the life to be extinguished in a flash or a spasm or a jerk or a haemorrhage.

  But Lily didn’t die. Her own particular brand of puniness was of the all-elbow variety. All-powerful. It burgeoned. It brayed and it whinnied. It charged and trampled. It essentially ran amok.

  Her body remained weak but her mind hardened. She got stronger and stronger and crosser and crosser and wilder and wilder. She needed no one. And yet they’d made so many accommodations! They’d changed from an arable farm to a pig farm and finally to boar. Boar were less trouble. Less time-consuming. They’d stiffened themselves for some kind of terrible impact, but the impact never came. It never came. And so things began to fray. Slowly, imperceptibly. Down on the farm.

  Sara, staring but never seeing, looking but never focusing, tried to search out probable justifications for Lily’s obnoxious-ness, but she could find none. She searched her own heart. She wished Lily would do the same. But Lily wouldn’t. She didn’t. Not ever. And yet Lily had her own moral set-up, her own fears and beliefs, which were complex, abundant, comprehensive. They were simply well hidden. Like potatoes. Several feet under.
>
  She worshipped a deity. It was her secret. The deity had a special name. It was called The Head. It survived in spirit but had been born and had died on one long, still night in 1982. An August night. So it made perfect sense that August should become the month that Lily set apart to celebrate The Head with some special rituals of her own making. She wasn’t unduly creative, usually, but in August she made an exception. In August she cut a neat incision on her arm with a piece of wire from the boar pens. Special wire. Then she killed one of the hens and blamed it on a fox.

  Fox must’ve done it.

  With the blood from the hen, and with her own blood, she soaked the earth behind the yew tree where she pretended that The Head had been buried. But The Head had not been buried there. It had been taken away by her father and incinerated, in all probability. Although they’d never discussed it.

  The Head. A freak. Lily was five and had witnessed its birth. A reliable sow from the old herd had been mated with a boar. The farm’s first boar. They’d built a special enclosure just for him. It had been an experiment. Her father had wanted the best of both worlds. He’d called it ‘toe-dipping’. And sure enough, the sow had delivered eight healthy young, but then The Head had come, last of all, and it had taken the mother with it. Like Shiwa. God of destruction.

  Lily didn’t get a good look at it, initially. Her father had tried to hide it. He’d tossed it aside and kicked straw over it, like he did with all the stillborn babies whenever Lily was in attendance. But then he’d been obliged to run into the house to call a vet when the mother began struggling, so Lily had taken her chance to inspect the freak as it lay caked and smothered in its musty tomb of hay and grass.

  When she pulled its cover aside, so tentatively, what had she seen? She’d seen a head – extended, elongated – and the remainder of a body; like a tiny, moist mitten. The body of a baby rat. Or a gerbil. No tail though. But it had lived! She knew it lived. Its mouth moved. Its eyes were as round and as trusting as a puppy’s. Its skin was pale and soft and glossy like blancmange. She wanted to touch it but her father returned, yelled at her and then sent her indoors.

  The next day she could find no sign of it. The Head had gone. And she knew in her gut that he had done it in. Her own father. But The Head did not go, ultimately, because it infiltrated Lily’s dreams. It inked up her mind like an octopus. And it felt, strangely, as though there had been a space, a special gap in her imagination which was only just big enough to be inhabited by this particular creature. As though the creature had known that she lacked something. As if it had known that she needed it to feel complete. It satiated her. It became a deity. And so Lily celebrated it, and in celebrating it, she celebrated, however lop-sidedly, her own sweet self.