Five Miles from Outer Hope. Nicola Barker
interesting fact, certainly, but not, I fear, particularly pertinent to the story at hand. But he’s four. And let’s not forget that whole tragically morbid Shiro Chan thing, either. Which is pertinent. As a matter of fact it’s a rather sensitive issue. So give the little runt a break, will you?)
If there is a God, Big maintains, then (and this is the important part) he is surely a very pedantic deity. For some reason Big finds this notion a source of great comfort. Perhaps it’s because he is an extremely pedantic man himself at heart, and the idea that God has seen fit to arrange the whole world in perfect sync with his own shortcomings is, quite frankly, rather flattering.
In my opinion, there are many other adjectives I’d rather associate with the Creator of All Things: muscular, avuncular, priapic, whiffy, bolshy, galvanized, funky. Pedantic, in my book, just doesn’t really cut it. Sorry.
Like you care.
I should fill you in on the Poodle thing. And be warned, it’s complicated. So I’m going to take some stuff for granted; the basic social and geographical organization of the Scilly Isles in the years 1979–81, for one thing.
If you care to imagine it (approximately fifty islands stuck slap-bang in the middle of the gulf stream), we were washed up on Bryher for eighteen months (golf course, small hotel, a scattering of sheep, high winds, too much granite. A teen dream, basically).
Big is working on Tresco in their famous gardens (even I can’t knock Tresco, with its ravens and exotic flowers and shit). But all civilized life is happening on St Mary’s, which is kind of the capital of this shredded little universe, and it is in this place that Poodle – who is making money selling T-shirts in a tourist shop – catches the eye of a physically repellent cod fisherman called Peter Bunch.
Now Poodle has had many offers. She is a very pretty lady. She has this inadvertent post-punk/pre-goth Siouxsie and the Banshees/Kim Wilde ‘Kids in America’ pale-skinned, back-combed hair thing going on which is pretty bloody irresistible – especially to men over forty, not least the head of St Mary’s travel kingdom, a swine called Donovan Healy, who is coincidentally promising Poodle the world as her whelk if she wants it.
Mo, naturally (as any good mother would be), is sharp to his manoeuvrings, and just before setting sail for the States makes Poodle promise to look elsewhere for her entrées. Poodle merely sneers, which for her is pretty damn obliging.
Pete Bunch, it must be said, is only known throughout Scilly for one thing: the grandeur of his astonishing overbite. His top jaw hangs over his bottom lip like… go on, create an image for yourself. Preferably something to do with Venezuelan Swamp Hogs or the Beano… But if there’s one thing you can’t take away from him it is the undeniable fact that the man has balls.
He is the ugliest, stupidest, most unappetizing reprobate in all of the fifty isles (gannets included) and it is because of this, and as a matter of sheer perversity, that he sets his sights on my beautiful sister.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking surely that surly, sassy, egocentric bitch can look after herself? And you’d probably be absolutely right, if you weren’t, on this occasion, the complete and utter opposite.
I must just – as a kind of aside – let you in on one of Pete Bunch’s sad little routines. The Italian pop star Joe Dolce (a one-man reason why joining the EC was such a huge, fucking catastrophe) was at this particular point riding high in the charts with his nightmarish novelty hit ‘Shaddupa Your Face’, and Pete Bunch is so tragic that he has adopted this little ditty as his trademark song of the moment and is walking around the town doing the most pathetic Joe Dolce impression, with hand-gestures and everything, that you – or any sentient being – have ever seen.
Naturally when Poodle first sets eyes on this (and remember, she’s the girl who has travelled the whole world, carelessly feeding on its rich and remarkable multicultural bounty) she thinks it’s one of the most embarrassingly fatuous displays she has ever, ever come across.
The problem is, the man is so depraved, so stupid and persistent that she almost feels sorry for him. And you know what that means? Her defenses come down a little (this girl invented defensiveness) and she starts to find him pitiful, but, well, pitiful.
As any sharp mind will know, it’s a terribly short step from pitiful to go-on-then-and-fuck-me. In less than twelve days, Poodle is crammed into the cabin of a fishing boat, mid-way between Gugh and Samson, yanking her knickers down and sucking on this Dolce wannabe’s obscenely protrusive upper set. It was sheer madness.
But it doesn’t end there. Any intelligent person might think that Mr Bunch would be insanely gratified at the idea of casually dating the most beautiful creature then currently inhabiting the Scillies. And they would be wrong.
After only one piece of interaction, Bunchy goes all cold on Poodle. And while the truth is that Poodle only really ever intended their canoodle to be a one-off thing – she deserves a man with status and money, doesn’t she? – she doesn’t get a chance to knock The Bunch back because The Bunch knocks her back first, and for one very specific reason.
Every pub and bar in St Mary’s is alive with it. Bunch won’t screw the new girl again because she has no tits. He is a tit man. She has none. And that is his bottom line.
It is at this point that things get a little shaky. The titless, shitless Poodle-related gossip gets so swollen and inflated and dark and vicious that eventually Big feels obliged to step in himself and stop it. He says not a word to our Poodle on the matter – God forbid. Instead he chugs quietly over to St Marys, calls Pete Bunch out and gives him what for. Barge, naturally, is working as back-stop.
It is all very humiliating. The man is four foot nothing. Bunch laughs in his face (or the clean air above it) and poor Barge is obliged to step in and steady things. In the process, he loses the tip of his tongue, a slightly ironic injury, really, considering the fact that his tongue hitherto had always been too long and hence slightly lispy. Now it is slightly short and the net result is not – you stupid dreamer! – a miraculous cure of his former difficulty, but one of the worst speech impediments in the whole northern hemisphere: with the added bonus of a future literally dripping in spittle and indignity (french kissing? Out of the picture).
Wow.
That Pete Bunch could really sock it to ya.
Epilogue
You might think Poodle would be grateful for her family’s intervention in this island drama. You would be wrong to think so. She is livid. She will never forgive Barge for losing his tongue on her account. She will never forgive Big for being so small. She will never forgive Mo for buggering off to America just at the juncture when her moral guidance skills were most needed, and the whole, damn family, more to the point, for being so strange and weird and different and tall and kaftan-ridden and freakish and poor and lean and curly.
She falls, henceforward (has the girl not an ounce of originality?) into the leathery arms of Donovan Healy. He has volunteered to ease the pressure for a while by getting Poodle off the scene in some kind of phoney, bull-shitty couriering capacity.
And that is how Poodle becomes Healy’s whore. But there is a price to pay. And Poodle won’t be paying it. She has been burned. She has been spurned. The bitch, as they say, has truly turned.
Shortly after, we stagger back to the mainland, our numbers cruelly depleted: Mo-less, Barge-less (the poor boy can’t even talk for three months after, then there’s the infection), Poodleless. A mournful, slightly moth-eaten rag-bag of a family. Feely, Patch, Big and me.
Appendix
She had lovely breasts, dammit. That’s the worst part, really. Tiny chocolate-button-tipped conches, soft as a moth’s wing, pale as a priest’s kiss. Lovely breasts.
So screw that infuriatingly gormless, over-bitten, cod-fishing Peter