Heading Inland (14 page)

‘And what was wrong with my second interview?’

‘Um . . .’ She paused. ‘We felt that your answers on the quiz were slightly unconventional. Like, uh, like, well, like my pond at home . . .’

‘Your pond?’

‘Yes. My main pond at home has my three best fish in it, but it’s hard to see them because it gets greened up a lot. Algae and plants and what-not. I bought a filter for it, to keep it cleaner, but I haven’t installed it yet.’

‘And my answers . . .’

‘Like the pond. There was something good in there, deep down, something interesting, but it was difficult to see, to decipher, and your writing . . .’

‘Scruffy.’

‘Yes.’

‘I know.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘That’s OK.’

She cleared her throat. ‘And the duck?’

‘The duck?’ he reiterated, looking surprised. ‘Oh, the duck. The duck. It’s doing fine.’

Parker lay on Bethan’s bed with his arms crossed behind his head. He stared up at her light fitment. A heavy, glass lamp, yellow, the wiring, he noticed, coming slightly away from the cornice and the ceiling. He made a fist out of his damaged hand. He’d lost count of the number of women who had taken him into their beds simply because of this one, small, gorgeous imperfection. Sympathy was a powerful emotion. Might not seem it, but it was. And guilt.

Bethan strolled back into her bedroom. She was carrying a packet of biscuits and a couple of apples. She was naked. She bit into one of the apples and handed Parker the other. She sat down on the bed.

‘We missed dinner,’ she said, and grinned.

‘How big is your garden?’ Parker asked.

‘It’s tiny, really.’

‘Do the ponds take up most of it?’

‘Come and look,’ Bethan said, and pulled on a T-shirt.

‘I didn’t build them, they were here when I bought the flat, so I thought I might as well put in some fish. Initially I just had goldfish and then one day I saw some carp at a garden centre and I thought they were so beautiful. So big. They come in every colour. See him? The gold one? Gold and white. He’s called Samson. He’s the oldest. The biggest too: I feed them by hand.’

Parker stared into the water. The ponds were antique and grand and well-established.

‘That’s a beautiful pond,’ he said. ‘Is it deep?’

‘Very deep. Too deep. Sometimes the fish swim under and I don’t get to see them for days. And see how murky it gets towards the bottom? That’s why I bought the filter.’

‘It’s good, though,’ Parker interjected, ‘not to see the bottom. The fish must like to dive and disappear.’

‘Only I haven’t been able to set it up myself,’ Bethan said, like she hadn’t heard him, ‘the filter. Too complicated. I’ll show you it, if you like. It’s in the shed. You might be able to give me some tips.’

She stood up.

It was late and Parker was pulling on his coat. She had given him the key to the side gate.

‘I’d give you the house keys,’ she said, ‘only I’ve not got an extra set.’

He smiled at her. He found it strange that she’d have sex with him, let him inside her, but the keys to her home she couldn’t quite trust him with.

‘I wish you could bring the duck along while you’re fixing up the filter,’ she said, out of the blue, as he was walking through her front door.

‘What?’

‘The duck. He’d do well on my two ponds but I don’t think the fish would like it.’

Parker laughed. ‘There is no duck,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘No duck. I made it up.’

She stared at him, her mouth open, barely comprehending. Eventually she said, ‘But the duck . . . that was the best part of it.’

‘Of what?’

‘The story. The duck . . .’ She looked flabbergasted.

Parker put his head to one side, still smiling. ‘While I was filling out that quiz you brought me in a cup of tea, remember?’

She nodded.

‘And I saw the bangle you were wearing, full of fish and birds and stuff. I thought the duck story would appeal to you. That was all.’

‘So you lied on your application form?’

‘Doesn’t everybody? Didn’t you?’ Somehow, though, he thought he already knew the answer to this question. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘It’s only a question of telling the right kind of lies.’

‘Doesn’t matter? Of course it matters.’

‘You really want the full picture?’

His smile was strange, suddenly, and full of pain. ‘You don’t want the full picture,’ he said, answering his own question. ‘You wouldn’t recognize the full picture if someone sat down and painted every tiny stroke of it straight on to your pretty hands and your silly face.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You didn’t know I was disabled but you came to certain conclusions about me because of my writing, you read into what I’d written things I hadn’t said. It was kind of . . .’ he paused and considered for a moment, ‘kind of despicable.’

‘Was it all lies?’

‘Only the duck.’

‘So you are a liar. I was right. I was right about you.’

He ignored this. ‘Was I a liar,’ he asked, ‘before I filled in your stupid quiz form?’

She stared at him in silence for a while and then she put out her hand. ‘Can I have my key back?’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t want you fitting my filter any more. I feel weird about this now.’

‘Don’t be foolish. I’ll fix the filter.’

‘Give me the key.’

He laughed and handed her the key. She closed the door on his smiling face. She wrapped her arms around her breasts and shuddered.

It took almost an hour for the police to arrive. The constable who finally turned up was thickset and blond-haired and held his hat under his arm like it was a baby. He had a habit, Bethan noticed, of wiping his palms on the side of his thighs. She invited him in.

He took out his notebook and waited for her to say something.

‘I came home from work,’ she said, ‘to discover that someone had broken into my property, through the back gate . . .’

‘Did they force the lock?’

‘No. I think they broke the lock and then replaced it. I found some new keys posted through my letterbox.’

‘Someone changed the locks and then posted the new keys through your letterbox?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you happen to know who might have done such a thing?’

‘Yes. I know who did it. He’s called Parker Swells.’

Bethan spelled Parker’s name out loud and checked as the constable wrote it on his pad.

‘I have his address and all the details you could want about him, only everything’s still at work . . .’

The policeman nodded. ‘And what, exactly,’ he said, ‘apart from changing the lock on your back gate, did he actually do?’

‘Come outside.’

Bethan took the police officer into her back garden. She pointed. He looked around him. There was little to see. A neat lawn, flowerbeds, nothing amiss.

‘He stole my ponds,’ she said, her voice cracking.

‘Your what?’

She pointed. He saw five, large, beautiful fish in a curious selection of small, clear-glass containers.

‘He stole my ponds.’

Ponds, the policeman wrote down in his book. Stolen.

Bethan watched as he wrote this. His writing, she saw, was round and girlish and immature. She wished they’d sent someone else. He clearly wasn’t going to prove competent.

‘And why do you think he did this? Why did he steal your ponds?’

Bethan didn’t know. She couldn’t answer. She felt so ridiculous.

‘He had a duck, a pet duck,’ she said, eventually. ‘Maybe he stole them for his duck.’

She glanced up and saw the policeman was smiling at her. She looked away.

‘Those are beautiful,’ he said, indicating towards the fish. She nodded. Her fish hung, suspended, in their small, plain glass bowls; tight and bright and golden. Their gills moved; in and out, in and out. Bethan could clearly see every tiny little detail now.

By the same author

Love Your Enemies
Reversed Forecast
Small Holdings
Wide Open
Five Miles from Outer Hope
Behindlings
Clear
Darkmans
Burley Cross Postbox Theft

Praise

NICOLA BARKER’S
eight novels include
Darkmans
(short listed for the 2007 Man Booker and Ondaatje prizes, and winner of the Hawthornden prize), and
Wide Open
(winner of the 2000 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award). She has also written two prize-winning collections of short stories, and her work has been translated into more than twenty languages. She lives in east London.

From the reviews of
Heading Inland
:

‘Unique, funny, dark, cute, sarcastic and clever’

Literary Review

‘Barker goes from strength to strength’

Sunday Telegraph

‘Another extremely accomplished collection. The writing is sharp, intricate and stylish. Each story presents its own particular and perfectly realized world . . . Nothing is too weird or too ordinary for Nicola Barker’

Guardian

‘The language is unfussy, direct, at times colloquial, and then, just when it is needed to produce the right emotional counterpoint, elegant and formal . . . What could have been heavy-handed in another writer’s hands is here transformed into something light, enchanting and moving.
Heading Inland
achieves everything it sets out to do. Highly recommended’

Literary Review

‘Devastatingly funny and totally original . . . only Will Self can match her for black humour and bizarre fabrications . . . No one else in England writes like this. Don’t miss this book’

Tatler

‘The short story collection of the year’

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Thanks

With thanks to the Arts Council of Great Britain for the Writer’s Award (1994/5) without which this book would not have been completed.

Copyright