The Yips. Nicola Barker

dunno.’ Jen’s still not buying it. ‘Gene’s a whole lot smarter than you think. Could just be one of those double-bluff scenarios …’

      But Ransom’s not listening. His eyes de-focus for a second, and then, ‘My God!’ he erupts. ‘What a performance! You were completely friggin’ nuts back there! You were truly demented!’

      Jen merely smiles.

      ‘And the stuff about selfish sports was a fuckin’ master stroke!’ Ransom continues. ‘It was brilliant! Insane! How the hell’d you just spontaneously come up with all that shit?’

      ‘I’m a genius.’ Jen shrugs.

      ‘Ha!’ Ransom grins at her, grotesquely, like an overheating bull terrier in dire need of water.

      ‘No joke,’ Jen says, firmly, ‘I am a genius. I have an IQ of 210 …’

      ‘Pull the other one!’

      Ransom kicks out his foot. ‘It’s got bells on!’

      ‘… which is apparently the exact-same score as that scientist guy,’ Jen elaborates.

      ‘Who? Einstein?’ Ransom quips.

      Jen thinks hard for a moment. ‘Stephen Hoskins …? Hokings? Hawkwing?’

      Pause.

      ‘Hawking?’ Ransom suggests.

      ‘The one who wrote that book about … uh …’

      ‘Time travel. A Brief History of Time. Stephen Hawking.’

      ‘Yeah. Yeah. Stephen Hawkwing. We have the same –’

      ‘Haw-king,’ Ransom interrupts.

      ‘Pardon?’

      ‘Haw-king. You keep saying Hawk-wing, but it’s actually …’

      ‘I’m crap with names,’ Jen sighs. ‘People automatically assume that I’ll have this amazing memory just because I’m super-brainy, but I don’t. My short-term memory is completely shot. I’m not “clever” at all – at least not in any practical sense of the word. I’m intellectual, yes – hyper-intellectual, even – but I’m definitely not clever. The embarrassing truth about intellectuals is that we can be amazingly dense sometimes. And clumsy. And insensitive. And really, really tactless. And incredibly forgetful,’ she sighs. ‘It just goes with the territory. Remember Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind?’

      ‘I saw it on a plane,’ the golfer murmurs, eyeing her, suspiciously, ‘twice. But I fell asleep both times.’

      ‘Because our brains are generally operating at such a high level,’ Jen expands, ‘that we simply don’t have the space up there for all these reams and reams of more conventional data …’

      The golfer gazes at her, perplexed, noting, as he does so, a slight, pinkened area – almost a gentle chapping – on her upper lip. This idle observation sends a frisson of excitement from his inside knee to his thigh.

      ‘… data relating to, say – I dunno – table manners,’ Jen rambles on, ‘or road safety, or basic personal hygiene. Take me, for example,’ she expands, ‘I actually started reading Aristotle when I was five – in the original Greek. By seven I’d discovered that a particular chemical component in bananas advances the ripening processes in other fruits. A tiny fact, something people just take for granted nowadays. But it was a huge revelation at the time – had a massive impact on the wine and fruit export industries …’ She shrugs. ‘I got my English language GCSE when I was eight, maths A-level when I was nine. But I was actually twelve years of age before I was successfully toilet-trained.’

      ‘Wuh?!’

      Ransom’s horrified.

      ‘And I never learned to tell the time.’ She points to her wrist. ‘Couldn’t ever really master it, somehow. I just thank God the world had the good sense to go digital …’ She fondly inspects her watch, notices a tiny smear on its face and then casually buffs it clean on her breast (Ransom observes these proceedings with copious levels of interest).

      ‘Even tying my own shoelaces was a nightmare,’ Jen continues. ‘At school I always wore trainers with Velcro flaps …’

      She illustrates this poignant detail with a little mime. Halfway through, though, Ransom clambers to his feet, reaches over the counter, grabs her arm and yanks her, unceremoniously, towards him.

      She squeals, half-resisting. He ignores her protests, roughly twists her wrist and pulls the newly buffed timepiece right up close to his face. He inspects it for several seconds, his breathing laboured.

      ‘You manipulative little cow,’ he eventually mutters.

      Much as he’d surmised, her watch has a leather strap, a gold surround, a traditional dial and two hands.

      

      * * *

      

      ‘So you just took out the batteries and then tossed the casing into the bin,’ Valentine murmurs (more rueful now than accusing).

      Her mother gazes at Valentine in much the same way a slightly tipsy shepherd might gaze at the eviscerated corpse of a stray sheep on a neighbouring farmer’s land (a gentle, watercolour wash of concern, querulousness and supreme indifference).

      ‘Well it’s my remote,’ she eventually sniffs, ‘so I can do what the hell I like with it!’

      As if to prove this point, categorically, she marches over to her daughter, snatches the remote from her hand and returns to her bed again.

      Valentine remains where she stands. ‘It’s not really a question of ownership, Mum –’

      ‘Frédérique,’ her mother interrupts.

      ‘Sorry?’

      ‘Frédérique,’ her mother repeats.

      Valentine struggles to maintain her composure.

      ‘It’s not really a question of ownership, Frédérique …’ (she pronounces the name with a measure of emotional resistance), ‘no one’s denying that the remote is yours. It’s more a question of …’

      She is about to say trust.

      ‘Piffle!’ her mother snorts (before she gets a chance to). ‘Absolute, bloody piffle!’

      Valentine freezes.

      ‘I do find it odd how it’s never a question of ownership,’ her mother grumbles on, oblivious, ‘whenever I happen to own something.’

      Valentine doesn’t respond.

      ‘I mean don’t you find that just a tad hypocritical?’ her mother persists.

      Still nothing from Valentine.

      ‘Well don’t you, though?’

      Her mother squints over at her daughter through the gloom.

      Valentine is silent for a few seconds longer and then, ‘Piffle!’ she whispers, awed.

      ‘What?’

      Her mother stiffens.

      ‘Piffle!’ Valentine repeats, raising a shaky hand to her throat, her voice starting to quiver. ‘You just said … you just said …’ She can’t bring herself to utter it again. ‘That was one of Mum’s favourite …’

      ‘I’M FRÉDÉRIQUE!’ her mother snarls, pointing the remote at her (as if hoping to turn her off with it – or, at the very least, to change the channel). ‘Don’t you dare start all that nonsense again!’

      Valentine promptly bursts into tears.

      ‘STOP IT!’ her mother yells.

      ‘I can’t stop it!’ Valentine sobs, the grip of her hand