Buch lesen: «In the Approaches»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

1 Miss Carla Hahn

2 Mr Franklin D. Huff

3 Miss Carla Hahn

4 Mr Franklin D. Huff

5 Miss Carla Hahn

6 Teobaldo

7 Mr Franklin D. Huff

8 Miss Carla Hahn

9 Mr Franklin D. Huff

10 Miss Carla Hahn

11 Mr Clifford Bickerton

12 Mr Franklin D. Huff

13 Miss Carla Hahn

14 Teobaldo

15 Mr Franklin D. Huff

16 Miss Carla Hahn

17 Mr Franklin D. Huff

18 Miss Carla Hahn

19 Mr Franklin D. Huff

20 Teobaldo

21 Miss Carla Hahn

22 Mr Clifford Bickerton

23 Mr Franklin D. Huff

24 Miss Carla Hahn

25 Mr Franklin D. Huff

26 Teobaldo

27 Miss Carla Hahn

28 Mr Franklin D. Huff

29 Miss Carla Hahn

30 Mr Clifford Bickerton

31 Mr Franklin D. Huff

32 Miss Carla Hahn

33 Mr Clifford Bickerton

34 Miss Carla Hahn

35 Mr Franklin D. Huff

36 Miss Carla Hahn

37 Mr Franklin D. Huff

38 Miss Carla Hahn

39 Mr Clifford Bickerton

40 Miss Carla Hahn

41 Mr Franklin D. Huff

42 Miss Carla Hahn

43 Mr Franklin D. Huff

44 Miss Carla Hahn

45 Mr Franklin D. Huff

46 Miss Alys Jane Drury (and Baldo!)

47 Mr Franklin D. Huff

48 Miss Carla Hahn

49 Mr Franklin D. Huff

50 Miss Carla Hahn

51 Mr Franklin D. Huff

52 Miss Carla Hahn

53 Mr Franklin D. Huff

Also by Nicola Barker

About the Publisher

Dedication

For my dear friend, Claire Clifton;

Hastings’ favourite Floridian

1
Miss Carla Hahn

‘Well I suppose as we must all seem very dull and pedestrian to such a bold and cosmopolitan gentleman as the likes of our Mr Franklin B. Huff!’ Mrs Barrow ruminates, borderline resentful, as I hand over a crisp, ten pound note and she shoves it – unacknowledged – into the pocket of her pristine housecoat. ‘What with all his escapades amongst them hordes of filthy banditos and drug-smugglers and what-not in the dusty prairies of Mexicano.’

‘Mr Franklin D. Huff,’ I correct her.

‘He was only telling me the other day as how he keeps a collection of shrunken heads,’ she continues, eyes widening. ‘Stores ’em in an old suitcase, he does. No word of a lie, Carla! Thinks as they’re historical artlifacts!’ she snorts. ‘I says, “Wouldn’t those be the actual heads of real-life dead folk, Mr Huff? Isn’t that a sort of sacrelig?” But he just lowers his book and peers at me over his spectacles, all lofty-like. “It’s the culture there, Mrs Barrow. They have a different way of going about things. Everything’s fast and loose. Life is cheap.”

‘“The men are men and the women are glad of it!” I jokes, but he just returns to his reading, face sour as a slapped arse. So I says, “It must all seem very dull and pedestrian here in Pett Level to a chap such as yourself, Mr Huff, what with all your adventurings amongst them buckaroos and rancheros and the shrunken heads and what-not …” and he says, “I can’t pretend I’m not finding it a little flat, Mrs Barrow, a tad wispy and windswept and prarochial for my tastes, perhaps.”’

As Mrs Barrow finishes speaking we both gaze up from the bus-stop, in unison, towards the large, concrete block of the old Look Out which crowns the top end of Toot Rock. It is here that Mr Franklin D. Huff is currently sitting, in glorious isolation, fully suited and booted, intermittently gusted by the sea wind, partaking of a picnic lunch.

‘They say as he “went native” out amongst all them strumpets and gunsels,’ Mrs Barrow murmurs, squinting, ominously, into the eternally drab yet still pitifully hopeful early autumn light, ‘but I find that hard to believe, Carla, when I sees him of a morning, sitting on the balcony in his socks and his braces, smoking his pipe like one of those right and proper gentlemen straight off the cover of an old sewing pattern.’

‘Who says that, exactly?’ I ask, frowning.

‘I beg yours?’

‘Who says he—?’

‘Them Sullivan boys down at the New Beach Club for one,’ Mrs Barrow interrupts. ‘Seems as he’s got his-self temporary membership,’ she snorts, ‘by hook or by crook …’

She gives me a significant look. ‘Glory O’Dowd says as how he drank up their whole stock of gin in the first week after Mrs Huff left. On the second week he comes out in hives. Both cheeks was covered!’ She chuckles. ‘I thought, That’s the gin, that is! Mother’s Ruin! But I kept it schtum as your old dad would say.’

She taps her lips with a thick, brown, heavily calloused finger.

‘You mentioned that he’d broken the dining table,’ I interject, ‘and a chair in the living room?’

Mrs Barrow promptly removes the finger. ‘I’ve never known a man so accident-prone!’ she gasps. ‘This morning I heard a yell as I was hanging out the washing. I rushes round there, Carla, and Mr Huff – as God is my witness – is lying flat on his face in the middle of the allotment, his head in the last of the season’s cabbages. Turns out as he tripped in a badger hole! Sprained his wrist! I says, “Did you put out them monkey nuts for the badgers last night, Mr Huff? You know them’s the rules at Mulberry Cottage. Miss Hahn is very particular on the monkey nuts being put out. She has herself an arrangement with them badgers, Mr Huff, and they don’t likes it one bit if gets itself broke.”’

She shakes her head, forlornly. ‘I mean there was holes dug all over the lawn, Carla! The leeks was all pulled up! It was chaos – pure chaos! But he just cusses and rolls about, belly-aching like a big girl! I mean imagine a man such as that surviving in the tundra, Carla, where there’s no laws and no pavements and no manners and no taps? Doesn’t bear thinking of!’

‘The dining table …’ I persist.

‘Later on I see as he’s thrown some old soup tins, a fly paper and a broken milk bottle into the flower bed by the little girl’s shrine,’ she adds, scowling. ‘I thought, Well that’s as why you ended up arse-over-tit, Mr Huff! Shrunken heads or no! You don’t need to be messing around with forces beyond your ken, my friend. The tundra’s your business, Mr Huff, but we has our own ways of going about things up here on Toot Rock. Wispy and prarochial, indeed! Ignore ’em at your peril, sir!’

She shakes her head, scowling.

‘I suppose I should have a quick word with him,’ I murmur, registering the hungry grumble of the Rye bus on the Fairlight Road as Mrs Barrow takes out a scarf and ties it around her head, forming a small knot under the chin and pulling the two ends tight with such a jerk that one might almost imagine the cosmopolitan Mr Huff’s head compressed between them.

‘I won’t pretend as I’m not prone to having the odd grumble about the quality of the furniture in Mulberry,’ she confides. ‘I know as it has historical value, Carla, and all the rest of it’ – she raises a jaundiced brow – ‘but it’s just a pile of old driftwood and matchsticks for the most part. Even so, how one middle-aged man on his lonesome-ownsome can cause so much mess and mayhem is quite beyond me, I swear!’

She reaches out her hand towards the oncoming bus and it slows to a gradual halt with a blood-curdlingly cacophonous squeal of brakes, as if each of her calloused fingers has summoned a banshee from between its wheels.

‘All as I can say is: I hope his poor wife paid you the full deposit – in cold hard cash – before she upped and ran off!’ Mrs Barrow barks over the engine noise, then clambers on board. I pass over her old shopping trolley. It has a tricky wheel on the right-hand side which is sometimes given to seizing up. She grabs it, gives the offending wheel a practised kick, then disappears into the bus with a sharp – and suitably conclusive – bantam-like cluck.

2
Mr Franklin D. Huff

In the end it was Carla Hahn who approached me. I knew the only way to draw her in – the only way – would be to ignore her completely. It had taken six weeks, in total. I was sitting on top of the gun emplacement eating a stale, unbuttered roll and a jar of pickled walnuts. She was slightly out of breath after cycling up. I’d seen her from atop my airy lookout talking to Mrs Barrow at the request bus-stop on the Sea Road. Mrs Barrow – like so many of the permanent residents on Toot Rock, not to mention those of Pett Level in the flatlands below (although the weekenders, I confess, are of a different complexion altogether) – appears to hail from an indeterminate epoch. She seems to have no presentiment whatsoever that she’s living in a modern age: the 1980s for heaven’s sake!

This morning, as she skivvied, we had an extraordinary discussion about the Home Computing Revolution. She’d gleaned via the elusive Mr Barrow’s tabloid rag (Mr Barrow is Toot Rock’s very own smooth-skinned McCavity; he may only ever be apprehended as an absence) that something called the ‘Apple Mackintosh’ was, as of this very day, to be made available, for money, in shops, to the general public. She was unable to comprehend how or why this much heralded object would be in any way better or more useful than a standard typewriter: ‘And they only ever as write out bills to torment us poor working folk with those!’ she muttered. I silently held up my book. ‘It’s all the same to me,’ she grumbled. ‘Words is words is words is words.’

‘Well, thank goodness Trollope and De Quincey weren’t of your blinkered mind-set, Mrs Barrow!’ I quipped, then went on to laboriously explain the demarcation between mechanical, electronic, analogue and digital technologies – even drawing a little diagram on the inside back cover of my jotter. I cogently summarized Claude Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communication and Moore’s Law in what I hoped were layman’s terms. I said, ‘This is the Third Industrial Revolution, Mrs Barrow. You are witness to the genesis of a new era: the Information Age – the paperless office, the revolutionary concept of information sharing. This is bigger than people walking on the moon,’ I said. ‘One day our entire lives – everything, literally everything: transport, personal hygiene, sex – will be digitized.’

As Mrs Barrow brushed out and then re-set the fire I explained how I’d been posted as a foreign correspondent to California during the late 1960s and how it’d been – by a lucky coincidence – the fertile breeding ground, the hub, of all these extraordinary, nay game-changing hypotheses. I told her how the scientists had discovered a way of sending letters to each other via computer: digital letters! Mrs Barrow paid great heed as she flitted about the cottage – a spry grey squirrel in pleated skirt and pop socks – with her bucket, her broom and her mop. Then, once I’d completed my lecture, she placed her hands on her hips, laboriously cleared her throat and said, ‘I remember as when they invented the ballpoint pen, Mr Huff. Everyone making a big old fuss about it, they was. Now it’s just something and nothing. I’m as happy to be using a pencil myself! Nobody cares about the ballpoint pen no more, Mr Huff. This’ll be the same. A flush in the pan. You mark my words.’

‘Those walnuts have been in the cupboard for at least five Christmases, Mr Huff!’ Miss Hahn yells up at me, throwing down her bike into the long grass. I’ve seen her throw it down before. Many times. Toss it down, without a care. I find it difficult to marry this apparent recklessness with her complete fastidiousness in regard to every detail connected to Mulberry Cottage. The lists! The rules! The special requirements! I also observed the pointed way she used my surname. Of course we made the booking for the cottage under Lara’s maiden name: Ashe. I’m no fool. We’d never have got it for the full eight weeks otherwise.

‘They have sentimental value?’ I ask (somewhat facetiously, I confess).

‘Sorry?’

‘The walnuts?’

‘Mrs Barrow tells me there’s a problem with the dining table,’ she says, swiping her short, unkempt, sun-bleached blonde hair impatiently behind her ear. I can instantly tell that she cuts it herself. She’s that kind of a woman. No make-up bar a light smear of Vaseline on the lips and the angular bone of either cheek. Dressed in a pair of men’s baggy, canvas trousers (rolled over at the waist and belted with what looks like a length of old rope) and a drab, linen blouse in grey or brown – or both, or neither – un-ironed but worn and worn into a flat shine, buttoned right up to the neck. Scuffed plimsolls on her feet, no socks. She has broad shoulders and is tanned. She is built like a swimmer. I see the German in her, and I see the Soviet.

Around the nose – the chin. Poor thing.

‘It collapsed,’ I say, screwing the lid back on to the walnuts. ‘I’d placed the television on top of it to try and improve the reception. It caved under the weight. The middle flap seems to’ve been constructed out of plywood. That or the woodworm’s got the better of it. Either way, the table is irretrievably damaged, although – on a positive note – the picture on the TV’s been much clearer ever since.’

‘Your wife left,’ she says, her eyes – the colour of a mean bruise, edged in octopus ink – slitting, infinitesimally.

‘The second week.’ I nod, studiedly indifferent. ‘Mrs Barrow mentioned it? One of the other neighbours, perchance?’

Of course nothing ever happens in this ludicrous place without the neighbours mentioning it! A fool might imagine it to be the kind of wonderful location where a person might be rendered invisible – somewhere an artist or a criminal or a film star might flee in order to cultivate a precious, fragile sense of anonymity; a place where you might melt into the fringes, the margins, the nothingness; a place of privacy – insularity – isolation – retreat. But Toot Rock is not like that. Oh not at all! Not a whit of it.

‘She ran over a cat,’ Carla Hahn says, inspecting my tie with a small frown, her hand lifting, unconsciously, to her own very slightly frayed collar.

Her hands are the colour of boiled gammon! Extraordinary! Raw-looking. I quite pity her those awful hands.

‘Yes. The tail,’ I confirm, ‘in broad daylight. The cat was immensely fat. She was reversing at high speed, drunk as a skunk.’

‘The tail’ – she nods, slightly baleful, now – ‘was later amputated, and at some considerable cost to the owner, I’m told.’

‘You heard all about it, then?’ I smile, sarcastically.

‘He’s my father’s cat.’ She shrugs.

‘Oh. Mrs Barrow didn’t mention that,’ I murmur, somewhat perturbed by this sudden, quite unexpected, turning of the tables.

‘I think you’ll probably discover, on further acquaintance, that Mrs Barrow generally prides herself on leaving out the most important detail in any story. In fact you could almost say it’s her speciality.’ She smiles. Good, straight teeth. But the eyes … Tsk! Watch out for those eyes! Dead as a dodo’s! Deader still! A predator’s eyes (the dodo, to its eternal credit, was a humble vegetarian). These are a carnivore’s eyes. These are the eyes of a pterodactyl, a tyrannosaurus rex.

‘He was your father’s cat …’ I ruminate, trying to work out the wider implications of this unwelcome detail, somewhat on the hoof, I’ll admit. ‘And I suppose that horrendously fat dog I see you dragging up and down the beach every morning and evening is your father’s dog?’

‘Strictly speaking, he was my late mother’s cat,’ she explains (ignoring the dog comment). ‘He’s called Rolfie. He’s forty-one years of age.’

‘The average life expectancy of a cat is fifteen,’ I say, incredulous.

‘Yes. I know.’ She nods, solemnly. ‘Rolfie is an incredibly old cat.’

‘So Rolfie has lived almost three times longer than the average cat?’ I persist, then promptly calculate: ‘The equivalent age – in a person – would be two hundred and ten.’

‘Yes,’ she confirms, patently unshaken by the comparison.

I just can’t let this one go. ‘Doesn’t that strike you as a little … uh … improbable?’ I wonder.

‘Yes’ – she nods again – ‘highly improbable. It’s perfectly amazing. A miracle of nature. And then your wife drove straight into him. Drunk. In broad daylight. At high speed.’

‘Oh. Well, I apologize for that,’ I mutter.

‘My father was rather traumatized,’ she idly adds, gazing dreamily at the clouds scudding across the sky above my head.

‘In all my born days,’ I muse, ‘I’ve never heard of a cat living to forty-one years of age. He must be the oldest cat in the world. The oldest cat in the known universe.’

‘You have a ladybird on your fringe,’ she murmurs, squinting slightly. ‘In fact you have two. Yes. Two. They appear to be … to be copulating.’

‘You have very red hands,’ I respond, swiping at my fringe.

‘I’m allergic to disinfectant.’

‘Then why don’t you wear rubber gloves?’ I demand.

‘And latex,’ she adds.

In truth I’m not entirely certain if there are two ladybirds on my fringe. This worries me. I’ve had no previous intimations that Miss Hahn might turn out to be an unreliable witness. Quite the opposite. A little mouse. I was told. A lamb. Wouldn’t say boo to a goose. I was told. Damn. Damn. A propensity towards lying could prove catastrophic to my plans.

‘Anything else?’ I wonder.

‘Sorry?’

Her eyes are back with the clouds again. She seems to find great solace in the clouds, much as I do myself.

‘Allergies?’

‘Uh, nickel,’ she confirms, ‘and arrogance.’ She smiles. ‘You?’

‘Bullshitters.’

‘Oh, me too.’ She nods, most emphatically.

I can see now that this isn’t going to be all plain sailing. A short silence follows, punctuated by the cries of several gulls and the shrill whistle of a farmer in a nearby field, directing his sheepdog from the comfort of his tractor cab.

‘I’ll need to pop around to the cottage and have a look at that table,’ she eventually murmurs; ‘perhaps you might provide me with a convenient time to come over when you know for certain that you’ll be out?’

I’m still fiddling with my fringe.

‘The ladybirds have gone,’ she adds. ‘They flew away home.’

‘I may need to get back to you on timings,’ I say, with a measure of diffidence.

‘Fine.’ She shrugs. ‘Well you have my number, Mr Huff.’

‘Yes I do, Miss Hahn.’

She turns and picks up her bike. She suddenly seems very annoyed, but why exactly I am not entirely sure.

‘You seem rather annoyed,’ I say.

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ she exclaims, piqued. ‘Do enjoy the rest of your afternoon.’

And off she stalks, red hands and all.

What a curious woman she is! So brusque. A suggestion – a mere shadow – of the Germanic in her accent. Unkempt. Chaotic. Not unclean, just …

Unattractive. Well, not unattractive. But boyish. Uncouth. And untrustworthy, too – possibly. Yes. And tragically repressed! Poor little thing! A hysterical virgin. Ha! Obviously. Obviously. Could tell that from a mile off.