In the Approaches. Nicola Barker
48 Miss Carla Hahn
For my dear friend, Claire Clifton;
Hastings’ favourite Floridian
1
‘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
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