are eating kippers with our fingers. And drinking goat’s milk (Feely has a dairy allergy). It’s all pretty primeval. Either way, I am finishing my first fish (telling Feely his feet are stinking), lifting up my glass, swigging on it – eyes unintentionally rolling – when yik! I espy a total stranger. Over the table. In the half-dark.
I stop glugging, burp, and put down my glass. He is staring at me morosely. Big, meanwhile, has quietly and most inconveniently abandoned the baize. Patch is telling Feely his feet stink (the girl’s my fucking echo), and for a split second I consider how uncool it would be if I ask him straight out who he actually is. I don’t want to be wrong-footed.
(Instantly I see he will wrong-foot me – he has that kind of jaw, and he’s ginger – and don’t forget I’m in my flimsy night-dress with my nipples doubtless digging like blind moles through the holes in the waistcoat crochet – why can’t the man just knit for Chrissakes?)
‘Chin,’ the stranger says suddenly, and points at me. It’s dark. His poky finger is lit for a second like silver. He withdraws it again, into smudginess.
‘What?’ I say, rather rudely, blinking at him. He is weird-accented.
‘Chin.’ He points to his own chin in the bored manner of a man much-accustomed to being misheard.
‘Oh.’ I wipe my hand over my chin, thinking I have milk on it, but I feel no hint of moisture.
‘You have a handsome chin.’ He smiles. He has an effeminate manner. His lips are thin and prone to pursing. Already I smell him; kind of clean but rotten. Bad antiseptic. Not erotic (like I’d want to shag a drain).
I look down. ‘Can you see my nipples through my top?’ I ask.
He stares fixedly.
‘I believe I can,’ he sighs.
I nod and continue eating. The stranger stretches over, picks up a book from the place where Big was sitting previously, and then quietly starts reading it. In the Belly of the Beast, by Jack Henry Abbott. Hardback. Boring cover.
‘Mo wrote,’ Patch mutters, and tosses me a letter. I nod, pick it up, unfurl, and not another word is spoken.
Big is no help whatsoever. He is weeding the tennis courts when I finally catch up with him. ‘So who is he?’ I demand. Big straightens.
‘Did you see Mo wrote?’ he asks.
‘Yep.’
‘What did she say?’
(He loves to receive his news second-hand. And he needs to buy some reading glasses. Feely used his last pair in an outdoor experiment – he wanted to set fire to the sea – and a freak wave took them. The child is so damned ill-bred.)
‘Deep South. Death Row. New Lawyer Friend. Some strange, fresh angle about the Probe being marketed as a means to improve prisoner safety and dignity (my God, the woman’s such an opportunist). Worried about Barge’s tongue. Poodle’s been visiting. And the book. She sent it.’
Big nodded. ‘I don’t like this new prison reform stuff,’ he says, passingly. (Big loathes progressive politics. The man’s a Nazi.)
‘I could give a shit,’ I say.
‘Watch your mouth.’ He looks into the sky. A gull’s flying over. Greater Black Backed. It squawks at me.
‘All the same, bad Elmore Leonard novel or what?’ I snipe.
Big just frowns.
(These are the conversations we have. They’re profoundly inconclusive. But it’s all that’s really necessary. I won’t change him. He won’t change me. We’re our own fucking people.)
Big bends over and picks up his weeding implement again.
‘His father’, he offers finally, ‘is a gynaecologist. He delivered Feely in Wellington, remember? We owe him a favour. He’s from Cape Town.’
‘Clipped vowels. Horrible.’
‘That’s the nature of the beast.’ Big looks uneasy. He scans the horizon.
‘How long will he stay?’
Big shrugs, squats, starts truffling. Not long, I surmise, by the look of him. I move on.
Hmmn. Something tells me Mr Big is definitely not Mr Happy.
‘Don’t you find being a woman in the eighties complicated?’
Jessica Lange, Tootsie
Are you telling me – I said are you telling me – that it’s gonna be a whole other year before that monumental short-arse Dustin Hoffman gets to set the whole world straight on the fundamental dilemmas of modern womanhood in his cross-dressing masterpiece, Tootsie? But where does that leave things, currently? I mean feministically?
Meryl Streep taking it up the arse and looking wantonly choleric in A French Lieutenant’s Woman? Marg Thatch writ large – all nose, no jaw – in her preposterous pearls and pin-stripes? Sue Ellen in Dallas with her pop eyes and alcoholism? Or do they honestly expect me to seek succour from that inconsequential drippy-draws playing the worthless girl part in Chariots of Fire? Can this really be it?
Look, there’s not a damn thing wrong with my sexuality (excluding those private issues detailed previously), but show me internationally acclaimed actress Jessica Lange in
(a) grey sweatpants
(b) a nurse’s uniform
and – screw Hoffman – even I get a little horny.
I’d better tell you about the barman. It’s a touch convoluted, but bear with me. The point is (can you hear me backpedalling like fucking crazy?), when you move around a lot you get to meet plenty of new people and, frankly, you don’t give a damn about them – not really – because in your heart of hearts you both know it doesn’t really count, for one (you’re just treading water, dammit), or matter, for another, however much you screw each other over, because soon you’ll be gone and it’ll all just be water under the hump-backed proverbial.
(You’re calling my family a bunch of users? Spot on. You’re sharper than you look. We prefer to call the whole sordid flyby-night exchange thing ‘a short-cut to intimacy’. Ha! God fucked up good when he gave us vocabulary.)
There’s this small pub on the island: the Pilchard Inn – the pilchard used to swim these waters, way back, but now the Gulf Stream has shifted and they’ve taken to foaming further afield; they’re canny. It’s three hundred years old. Balanced precariously half-way up the one and only pot-holed, sharp-tilted road which staggers dejectedly from the beach to the hotel.
Mud-coloured inside, with big fish jaws on the walls and stuffed birds. Smells of dust and treacle. The owner’s nephew still runs it. Keeps it ticking over. Twenty-five. A tragic soak. Stinks like brandy and dry-roasted nuts. Huge, brown eyes (a thyroid problem, but let’s not spoil it). A dark heart. They
