clan. Our clutch.*
By mid-1981 Barge was living on the only kibbutz not actually inside Israel. I think it was deep in the Balkans, somewhere. He kept the faith by painting assiduously in the evenings and boiling beet for his keep. Clear-pored and righteous (This was 1981, for God’s sake. He’d never even heard Bill Wyman’s ‘Je Suis un Rock Star’. It was depraved).
Naturally the degraded root vegetable-based enclave to which he had only recently become attached consciously eschewed all unnecessary contact with modern technology. If you’d thought to ask, he’d’ve said Abacab was some kind of taxi service.
Next up, or down, was the lovely Christabel with her two brand-new, out-of-the-blue, special-purchase, proudupstanding, oxygen-tank tits (after she’d turned fifteen, if you called her Poo to her face, she’d string your teeth into a necklace and then make you pass it), a cheerfully malevolent teen queen, the only paid-up member of our benighted eighties familial troupe to wear normal – read as English – clothing (the rest of us stepped out boldly in our embroidered kaftans, fur-trimmed hide waistcoats and crochet knickers. We were mutants): I’m talking pleated skirts, high-neck blouses, court shoes. Standard hideous. All acquired – without exception – as a consequence of her devious and persistent extra-marital conjunctions.
But she was always Daddy’s favourite, his pride, named after Thurber’s most beloved black French poodle (although I fear close textual scrutiny reveals this animal to be an inconsistent, teasing, curly-hinded harridan: please refer to Mr T’s essay on ‘How to Name a Dog’. He doesn’t say it, in so many words, but I believe the modern vernacular is slut.)
I’m next down and I’m Medve. No, it isn’t a verb. And it isn’t Ancient English for river or whore. Medve was also, if you must know, a Thurber canine, another poodle, not quite so beloved as Christabel, but, shucks, a great breeder by all accounts, and an independent dog blessed with the talent of throwing her own balls and then retrieving them. A bitch. Obviously.
Medve is Hungarian for bear, which, when you think about it, is pretty fucking grizzly. And don’t ask me how to pronounce it. I will inflate and then I will gently burst. And it will be messy, because I am built like a shire horse. Six foot three in my crocheted stockings. I am huge. Sixteen years old in 1981, with a tongue taut and twisted as a tent-hook and two tremendous hands like flat meat racquets.
Thwack !
My serve, I think.
Sadly, I am the only recorded giant in our tribal history. There are no magnificent, monolithic, Humber-Bridge-building great-grandfathers hanging around helpfully in our fine family tree, no cousins-twice-removed making a fortune as novelty attractions in disreputable out-of-town freakshows. No one, in other words, for a poor, tall girl to look up to.
I am not stupid or rebellious enough to consider my difference a boon. I am anti-genetic. I am unnatural. And this hugeness is not even counterbalanced by any degree of sleekness or sveltness or grace. I have knees as wide as the skull of Neolithic man. They knock together sometimes, as I walk, and the subsequent crashing makes sheltering rabbits, deep in their burrows, roll their eyes skyward, embrace each other with their funny bunny arms and quake. I am clumsy. I lumber. I can only buy shoes through mail order. I disorientate seagulls.
Hang on, you’re thinking (you’re so transparent): seagulls?!
I’ll get to that. Hold your horses. First off, I just want you to imagine my little mother, Mo (there’s nothing cutesie in this moniker, she’s Maureen, that’s all), five foot two inches tall, struggling to pass my huge head through her cervix. Think small African pygmy being force-fed a planet. Mars, maybe. Or Pluto. There will be screeching. There will be retching. And tearing. And tears. Afterwards the whole Sahara desert will look like a badly managed Halal butcher’s.
Poor Mo. Mo is actually very scientific. In the fifties she published her Ph.D. entitled The Intellectual Woman’s Guide to Atomic Radiation. It was a smash. There were so many intellectual women around back then, and all of them absolutely gagging to understand the atom. She might almost have planned it.
Naturally this fine specimen of emancipated womanhood cashed in on her little victory by choosing to spend the bulk of the following decade breeding with a man without a stomach on a series of far-flung atolls. She has a passion for atolls (not, I fear, an interest as inspiringly universal as atomics. But give it time).
By early 1981 things had picked up a little. The urge to reproduce having momentarily abated, she was fully occupied in stringing out a long-extended but very temporary American visa working alongside a rather shifty man called Bob Ranger in developing and patenting a fascinating new security device for the US prison service. An Anal Probe. (And remember, this was the kind of woman who always made a habit out of bringing her work home.)
I don’t want to talk about it.
Well, not yet, anyway.
There are just two others; both younger and not particularly interesting. Patch. A girl. Twelve years old. Fat-cheeked. Literate. Needy. The only one among us not named after a Thurber pooch. Would you believe it? I mean how harsh. How excluding.
Then there’s Feely (a slack, ill-bred Boston Bull Terrier), our smallest. Four. When he grows up he wants to be a bulimic (He thinks it’s a veterinarian who specialises in livestock. He’s so credulous). He’s into amateur naturalism. He is obsessed by the life story of a Japanese deer called Shiro Chan, a special doe with a strange white fringe whose story Barge came across by chance once in a poor-quality Japanese travel book. It’s a tragic tale. Lovely deer: road traffic accident. Oh Lord. Don’t even get me started.
That’s it. So I’ll toss you a few crumbs, some details, to fill in, to plump out…
We all have bad teeth (A direct consequence of:
(a) Non-fluoridated drinking water
(b) Brushing for six years (1968–74) with only our middle fingers
(c) Never eating solids as kids.
In his mid-thirties – no doubt as a consequence of his own dreary digestive dramas – Big became really interested in nutrition and spent the bulk of the seventies developing what turned out to be an unsuccessful forerunner to the Cambridge Diet. A shake for breakfast, one for lunch. You know the story. The upshot was I didn’t chew until I was ten years old. I only ever sipped. I suffered chronic muscle wastage in my jowls. My teeth crumbled. Everyone thought I had cheekbones, but it was only deprivation.)
And we live on an island off the coast of South Devon. In fact we’ve lived on a whole host of islands, bigger than this one, if you must know, and grander (Islands were the atolls of the seventies, but inverted. It’s a geographical joke. Just let it wash over). New Zealand. The Philippines. Jersey. The Scillies. That shithole where they made South Pacific, the 1950s Technicolor army-based bikini-drama (Remember me? I was the impeccably moral girl who somehow sustained a successful military career in hair rags and prescription hotpants. Ah yes. So lifelike).
Guess what? Joking aside, I have no interest in geography. I’m a teenager. It’s my foible. And anyway, if I stand on my tippy-toes and squint, I get to watch Margaret Thatcher crawling up Reagan’s arse all the way over in Missouri. I’m a big girl. I see things coming.
In truth, the Devon thing is only very temporary: almost derelict Art Deco
