Five Miles from Outer Hope - Nicola Barker

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hate you to have me down as the world’s greatest ever L. S. Lowry fanatic – the man couldn’t interest me less – but I must get something off my chest about how sick and disgusted I feel over the treatment doled out to this silly, scratchy, mother-loving, messed-up art-genius in his dirty old home town of Pendlebury.

      Pendle-where? Ah, precisely. You see the rudimentary facts of the matter are these: initially Lowry dwelled a life of infinite contentment in Victoria Park (a smart, suburban area of Manchester, vastly Pendlebury’s social superior), before, rather tragically, his dad’s oxtail soup business went all to seed and a move down-market became horribly obligatory.

      Let us not for one moment pretend that it was the dream of Lowry’s life to end up living in a mill-ridden shithole with nothing to recommend it bar a whole host of spindly cats, rheumatic brats and cockroaches. No, sirree.

      That said, the man soon set out, singlehandedly, to steam-iron this god-forsaken buttock of a place into the annals of Art History. No one can deny that Lowry put Pendlebury on the map with his bad brush and his keen eyes and his soft oils. He made it matter. He gave it soul. He offered it a shot in the arm of much-needed bloody integrity.

      And as he did so – records maintain – he was the absolute living epitome of patience and politeness and calm, sweet modesty. He weren’t no fat-head or bully or big-gob. Quite the contrary.

      (Okay, the man had some serious mental health issues. He was still a virgin aged eighty. He was chronically depressive. Wanna make something of it?)

      So how do you imagine this beleaguered little area goes about thanking L. S. for all his crucial Northern Realist creativity?

      ‘They laughed at me for thirty years in Pendlebury,’ quoth he. To be laughed at for thirty years! L. S. Lowry. Laughed at by those wank-ridden tosspots in Pendlebury. Those smug, piss-infested, self-righteous, small-minded, ill bred bastards. Those losers. Those fools. Those inconsequential small town scumbags.

      You know what? Sometimes it feels pretty damn hard for a six-foot girl giant to love the world.

      (So I lied about the oxtail soup business. That’s hardly the point, is it?)

      Yes, yes, yes, I am a truly, irredeemably, unapologetically moo-faced, big-blotched, large-arsed, yank-my-udder Friesian (how can I deny it?), but I do have some inkling as to how poor old Poodle felt over the Bunch disaster. Humiliated. Small. Cast-off. Ugly.… And the strange thing is, I miss her. For a short while the sweet May sun suddenly shines just a little less brightly on our tiny, ten-acre almost-island.

      Oh please. You actually believe this stuff? Jesus H! I’m so full of shit my ears are dripping. Miss the bitch? Are you kidding? I’m in my fucking element. It’s like I’ve suffered for sixteen years with a dose of Bell’s Palsy, and suddenly it’s lifted. It’s gone. I am no longer disfigured by the shadow of my nasty sibling’s shallow, sulky, arse-aching misery. I mean, this girl made Ian Curtis look like Zebedee.

      At last, at long last, I am free (You really expect me to mourn the brief bliss which has suddenly entered our once-dark world with all the unexpectedness of an exotic fungus sprouting on a once-putrid pile of manure? What do you take me for?)

      I am buoyant. I can boss Patch into performing all the kitchen chores. I can mess with little Feely’s head then send him straight to bed. I rule this damn ten-acre patch with a rod of cod.

      I spend my days peering into rock-pools, fishing, swimming in the cove, snarling at tourists, flirting (pathetically) with local yokels and marching around this dilapidated Art Deco hotel like a six-foot Queen Tut in carpet slippers.

      I’m still painting pottery. We’re doing a concession of Thatcher mugs: mustard-yellow hair, sharp blue eyes. We are part of the zeitgeist, so why oh why do I feel so oooooh… grubby?

      Come on. I’ll get over it.

      Then, out of the blue, with no prior warning, something rather peculiar happens. Over breakfast. For some reason, on the morning in question, we are partaking of our victuals in the snooker room. Huge table, covered in a thick sheet of protective plastic. Dark green walls, no windows, but all the vital central action carefully low-lit by a long, rectangular fluorescent strip which hangs over the table like some kind of gratuitously industrial extractor fan. It’s a magical chamber; fuzzy-edged, subterranean, bruised, mysterious.

      We all have our stools and sit perched upon them, miles apart from one another, like dirty-etched characters in a Rembrandt painting; half-lit in the dark-light. The room reeks of damp.

      This is where Patch has chosen to serve. No one says anything. It is her decision. She’s twelve. If we make too much of it she gets to think she’s interesting or something.

      I am wearing my cheap, synthetic nightdress (a garment so flammable that if I fart the buttons tinkle) and a long crocheted knee-length waistcoat. Rubber flip-flops. My heels hanging over. Hair like Medusa.

      We 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

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