Wide Open. Nicola Barker
no pockets. If you’ve got no pockets then you’ve got no keys.’
Luke felt enraged, violated, defiled, but when he finally spoke it was with great softness. ‘Put those down and get out of here.’
Lily, rather surprisingly, responded to the softness. She closed the portfolio.
‘You’re a bit of a pervert then, on the quiet?’
‘You’re a silly little sneak.’
‘A what?’
Lily stood up, smirking. Luke felt embarrassed by his nakedness and picked up a coat from a chair by the door. He put it on. He looked ridiculous now, naked, wearing only a coat. The coat was incriminating.
‘So that’s why you’ve come here,’ she said, pouting deliciously, ‘to take some more of these dirty pictures?’
‘They aren’t dirty pictures.’
She’d struck a nerve. She knew it. She always knew. She laughed. ‘So what’s that then?’
Against the wall, yet to be hung, stood a picture of a naked female cupping her breasts like they were two neat apples, but the breasts had been yanked up high as though she planned to pillow her chin on them. It looked uncomfortable.
‘It’s a nude.’
‘A nude. Oh. I get it.’
Lily continued to eye the picture.
‘Ouch!’ she said.
‘Get out.’
‘Certainly.’
She sauntered towards the door.
‘If you break into my house again I’ll call the police.’
Lily just giggled. ‘I didn’t break into anything. It was wide open.’
‘Get out.’
‘I’m getting out.’
The sea lapped coldly outside the prefab’s door. Three giant steps and she was in it. Fully dressed. Feet, knees, hips, breasts. She waved her arms at him.
‘I’m freeeee!’ she screamed.
He hated her then. She was free.
In fact she had screamed I’m freezing! but a small wave had hit her.
She had no grand scheme. Not yet. Nothing like that.
4
No one else would do these jobs. It was like being a spaceman, but with all of the discomfort and none of the glory. In the trade they called them skins. There was a theatrical side. Ronny did that sometimes but he hated being around children.
Then there was the industrial side. Councils hired him to spray weedkiller, to clean stuff up, to juggle with noxious chemicals. Someone had to do it. So Ronny obliged. He was that someone. A consummate professional.
Others found the precautionary clothing bothersome and claustrophobic. Several people had sued after contracting breathing difficulties and skin infections from handling dangerous substances. Ronny knew that this was because they took off their helmets when it got too hot. They didn’t take precautions. He always took them. That was his trademark, his hallmark. That was his stamp of quality.
Anyway, it was part of the kick. No air. To be enclosed. The chafing, the sweating. The chronic discomfort. That was all part of it.
He wore white shoes. Special shoes. In fact the entire get-up was white, even the helmet. Ronny peered down at his shoes. He thought about the man on the bridge, wide open, and in the same instant he thought of Monica.
Monica.
She had been his confidante. His correspondent. His best friend. His only friend. He’d liked it that way.
Monica had an opinion on everything. She had an interest in biology. Physical things. She was an adventuress. She hated to be enclosed, which was why, finally, she ended up in Sumatra, in the rain forests. She was working out there with a journalist. They were interested in DNA; all that complex genetic stuff which, quite honestly, meant precious little to Ronny.
Monica could never simplify the nature of her work in conversation without becoming impish and flirtatious. If Ronny couldn’t understand what it was that she was doing she’d crystallize it by saying, ‘I’m interested in what it is that makes a man a man, Ronny. I’m interested in apes.’
So they were searching for a missing ape in the forests of Sumatra. A missing link. A great ape. A fantastic ape. A pale giant. He walked on his hind legs and to all intents and purposes he resembled a man but his feet turned inwards. And unlike his human relations he had no big toes.
Monica had never seen him. She’d seen Ronny though, but only fleetingly, a long time ago. He’d made a great impression. He’d become indelible. He’d left his footprint in the mud of Monica’s brain. She couldn’t shake him.
Oran-pendic. That was the ape’s name. Mr Unpronounceable. In his dictionary Ronny saw that orang – or something quite like it – was Malay for man. Like in orang-utan which roughly speaking translated as ‘man of the forest’.
Oranpendic was not in his dictionary. He didn’t exist. Not yet, anyway. When Monica found him he would exist but not before. When Monica found him Ronny too would see him, not physically – nothing nearly so dramatic – but slotted in among all his other words and definitions. On paper. In print. In bold.
But for now the oranpendic was their own special creature. Not a fact or a definition. Nothing absolute. Merely a fragment.
Ronny looked up pendic for the exercise but could find only pend which meant to hang (as in ‘pendant’). He guessed the word had something to do with per-pend-icular. Upright. Vertical. But frankly he found both this description and the original name unsatisfactory.
Oranpendic.
Monica didn’t give a shit. It didn’t matter. She was more interested in the hunt. She’d been called a hoaxer. Well, not Monica so much as the journalist, Louis, who was the truly infamous half of the duo.
She’d heard him on the radio and then she’d saved up all her money working as a lab assistant at a school in Swindon to fly out and join him. She was impulsive like that. Some called it gullible. Either way, she was never afraid. Nothing daunted her.
Initially the journalist had been discomfited by Monica’s presence. He’d felt invaded. Monica could have that effect sometimes. But then he grew accustomed to her and they began the hunt proper.
Ronny had seen several articles about the hoax. Naturally people doubted the existence of the oranpendic. But the journalist claimed to have seen him, briefly, and his account of this fantastical discovery was fairly convincing.
Monica had a theory about faces. She said honesty was something you could see in a person’s face. Someone’s sincerity, their integrity, was as apparent to Monica on the first meeting as their hair colour or the shape of their nose. This was her preoccupation. Her instinct.
In fact she had two main instincts. The first was for honesty, and the second told her that the oranpendic was alive but that he was afraid. The threat of discovery terrified him. So he kept hidden.
She wrote to Ronny.
He’s afraid, Ronny. I know that much. He lives and walks in fear. Some days, if I wake early, I go out alone just after dawn. Everything is glazed. The air is full of moisture. It’s as thick, as dense as a woollen scarf pressing down on to my lips and up into my nostrils.
At these times I dream I’ll see him. But he’s pale like the mist and he’s so afraid that it’s as if he’s only a ghost. I always have the camera – not Louis’s big professional thing, I have my own, a cheap one that I’ve never yet used, just in case – but I sometimes imagine that if I tried to photograph him, the fear, the focus, the technology, would obliterate him. And all that would