Five Miles From Outer Hope (2 page)

And there will be riots in Brixton, and Royal marriages and the space shuttle Columbia: flying and orbiting. And somehow they’ll check-mate the Yorkshire Ripper, and baseball will strike, and air traffic controllers, and McEnroe will win the US Open, and Karpov will reign as World Chess Champion, and in May, Bob Marley’s short life will be over.
Cancer
.

It is the Year of the Rooster: the strangest, darkest, screwed-up time of scratching and strutting and shitting and crowing. 1981.

Jesus Christ, my fucking ears are burning
.

*
At the time of writing – I must debunk, for the sake of narrative accuracy – he is embroiled in that most fascinating of occupations: court illustrator, somewhere noteworthy within the salubrious confines of the great city of Woolwich. But back then, it was matchstick men, matchstalk twats, L. S. Lowry, the abandoned houses. Twenty-one years old, poor sod, and dippy as a hungry swallow – his unconscious patently embroiled in some kind of inexplicably acute trauma, his day-to-day personality far too slight and light and breezy for belief. What a
fuck
up.

Chapter 2

(I have pins in my ears. Flashforward, Dumbo. If my narration gets a little hot-diggedy it’s because I have pins in my ears. Seven in my right, one in my left. This is acupuncture. I’m giving up smoking. And I don’t even smoke yet.

It’s very messed up. You’ll find out later.)

Let’s get this straight, for starters: I
don’t
have beautiful eyes. If you dare even
think
it (and I’m not kidding), then this whole damn business is over, buster. I’ve been knocked hard and I’m hurting, see? Because that asinine You Have Beautiful Eyes thing is exactly the kind of shudderingly clumsy gambit well-intentioned five-foot-seven morons really seem to enjoy trying out on a sixteen-year-old girl giant in mail-order shoes. So I don’t want to hear it, okay?

And the truth is (more to the point), if you ever chanced to glance into the nappy of a five-month-old baby who’d recently swallowed a gallon of mashed banana on a seven-hour boat trip, well,
that
would be a fair representation of the colour of my eyes. Or if you peered into Shakin’ Stevens’s pituitary gland after a lengthy night out on the piss,
that
would be the colour of my eyes. I
don’t
have beautiful eyes. I
do
have a beautiful chin. But unfortunately that’s simply not the kind of thing people feel
comfortable
remarking upon in 1981.

It’s a very dark time.

I didn’t sleep much in May.
Hormones
. I’d been spending the bleached-out early hours of every morning honing my masturbatory skills with only Peter Benchley’s
Jaws
(come on! Not
literally
) and Barry Manilow’s ‘Bermuda Triangle’ for company.

My clitoris, you’ll be pleased to know, is as well-defined as the rest of me. It’s the approximate size of a Jersey Royal. But whenever I try and
mash
it (don’t
sweat
, I know these particular potatoes are determined
boilers
, but
flow
with the analogy, for once, why don’t you?), all I can think about is Mr Michael Heseltine MP eating an overripe peach on a missile silo somewhere deep in the South Downs – or the general vicinity – juice on his tie, shit on his shoes. Am I ringing a bell? Do you think this might
mean
something?

I’m still young. I don’t want to develop any sick sexual habits (to plough any permanent furrows) that I may have trouble casting off later. The way I see it, sex is rather like a hair parting; if it falls a certain way, after a while, it sticks. One day, I tell myself, I’m absolutely certain I’ll want to fuck Tony Hadley like all the other girls.

If, by sheer chance, you’re interested in the layout, I have my portable mattress down on the ground floor in the old Peacock Lounge, next to the empty fountain with its rusty residue, the silver-tiled swoop of the cocktail bar and, best of all, glimmering high above me, the peacocked glass ceiling – every feather rattling if the wind so much as
sighs
on it – which means whenever I deign to close my eyes it’s like that great, big barman in the sky is mixing me a Manhattan.

Cocks aside, in those long, listless, liquid-ceilinged early hours I often find myself thinking about the big issues: Can my hair sustain a wedge? Is the Findus Crispy Pancake truly a revelation in modern cuisine? Am I ‘Hooked on Classics’? Will Poodle see the folly of her ways and extricate herself from her disastrous affair with that repulsively lascivious travel agent whose skin resembles an ill-used leather hold-all? Is exploding candy truly a part of God’s scheme?

Big has this great story about God which he’ll tell you at the drop of a stitch if you’re stupid enough to consider asking. It involves six roadkills and it explains a
lot.
Wanna hear it?

Okay. It’s circa 1957, and Big is driving a group of student buddies on a wild coast-to-coast excursion through some barely roaded, shit-slicked, no-horse parts of America. Christ knows where. He is driving – this I
can
help you with, it’s the question Barge always asks whenever Big cranks this story up – some old-fashioned type of American Cadillac, an ancient, dusty, sludgy green-coloured cheap rental with no air-con or heating.

It is night time. Big is tired. He is not, however, under the malign sway of any kind of boozy or druggy concoction (Patch asks this. She’s interested in narcotics. When she grows up she expects to be a pharmacist. Ironically, history has much greater things in store for her; after a bumpy start she ends up being part of the team who revolutionize thermal clothing – you know, that whole pitiful nineties ‘inner-wear becomes outer-wear’ farrago?)

Bear in mind, this is a man with half a stomach, remember? A
dwarf
. He can barely reach the pedals without standing upright. It’s not
half
so romantic as you’re thinking, trust me.

Anyway, it’s late. Big’s pals – a group of shallow horticultural students with hayseed in their teeth and manure on their breath (this is a point of interest to Poodle, who can already identify most of Big’s associates by their vasectomy scars) are dozing in the front and in the back. On the radio (this is my moment) are a selection of classy orchestral standards arranged by Glen Miller or Robert Farnon or
somebody
.

Well, Big has not been driving over-long when he sees something quick and dinky suddenly skipping in front of him. He blinks. There on the road stands a tiny fieldmouse. He brakes, quickly, but still he hears the inevitable ‘ka-
ting
’ and then feels the front left-hand wheel hiccup slightly. Oh
dear
.

Big drives on. Twenty minutes later, he turns a sharp corner only to see a jackrabbit standing in his headlights like some kind of out-of-work
Disney
character: up on its back legs, its little paws flailing. He can’t even brake.
Phut!
Dent in the bumper the size of a turnip. Fur on the mudguard. The rabbit, I fear, is plainly no longer.

He drives on… Okay, I’ll cut this short as I’m presuming you’re a quick learner… Next up, a racoon. He’s lucky this time – just clips it. It squeals like a banshee then jumps up and scarpers.

Yikes!
A dog. A manky farm pooch.
Bang
! He’s whacked and he’s winded. Big does what he can to help the creature. Trawls it back to the farmhouse, et cetera.

Not even an hour later – you guessed it – a sheep. Swerves to avoid. Manages it.
Phew!
Then finally, the big one. A cow. Large cow, just standing in the road, licking its nose, quietly passing the time of night like its whole life has been leading to this one exquisitely meditative moment.

By this time, Big is so head-fucked that he drives off the road, into a tree, and spends the rest of the night half-way up it.

Let’s get this straight. It is not the fact that Big has experienced the horror of six potential roadkills in one single evening that disturbs him (and the bottom line is, only two of these animals were squelched for sure), it’s the fact that he suddenly perceives the simple truth that these night creatures were arranged into some weird kind of
order
: smallest to largest. And in his mind, this orderliness contains vague – I’m talking
really
vague (he doesn’t shave his head or enter a monastery or anything) – implications of Divine Intervention.

(Let us not forget – this is Feely’s contribution whenever he hears this particular story – that llamas have an inbuilt need to arrange themselves in order of size. It’s just an instinct, Feely opines. Ask any llama farmer – yeah, so do you happen to
know
one? – and they will all swear blind that if you go to bed with your fields full of llamas, plodding about their business, quite arbitrarily, when you eventually awaken, the llamas will,
without fail
, have arranged themselves into an immaculate line: tallest one end, smallest the other. They will be in
perfect
order, ready for inspection. That’s llamas. They are bloody obsessive.

An 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
).