Wide Open. Nicola Barker

… uh … he searched for the word. Then he found it. Reticence. Maybe Jim was just reticent.

      Jim. His neighbour. Jim. Bit of a blank spot, really.

      Jim’s prefab was bare and functional. One bedroom. Small. A shower, a toilet, a sink. The living room and a tiny kitchen. White walls. Linoleum flooring throughout. Red in colour. A portable TV. Terrible reception. No lampshades. Bare bulbs. Chilly. Ronny was impressed. It was already dark when they arrived but he quickly got the gist of it.

      They’d had to wait for ten minutes before entering the island. The Kingferry bridge had been raised for a tanker to pass through. Ronny had clambered out of the car and walked to the river bank to watch. The bridge was a great, concrete, multi-storey car park, but roofless. A monstrosity. A giant. When he climbed back into the car his face was alight. He hadn’t bargained on it being a real island.

      ‘You could swim it easily,’ Jim said, as they crossed over the river, ‘but it’s pretty deep in the middle.’

      And now they were by the sea. Jim pulled his curtains wide. Outside Ronny saw blackness broken by foam-tipped waves. It was fantastic.

      He pointed. ‘You’re almost on the beach.’

      ‘Yes. In fact, we are on the beach.’

      ‘Just five foot of it and then the sea.’

      ‘That’s right.’

      Jim was making something to eat, heating a tin of beans and mini chipolatas.

      ‘Are you hungry?’

      ‘Always.’

      Jim tipped half of the panful into a bowl. The other half he poured on to a plate for himself. He cut some bread. He passed Ronny a piece.

      ‘No bread,’ Ronny said, sitting himself down at the kitchen table. ‘I only ever eat enough …’ he paused, choosing his words carefully, ‘to remain active.’

      Jim handed Ronny a fork. ‘That’s a strange habit.’

      ‘Yes,’ Ronny agreed, ‘but it’s these little things that keep me going. These habits.’

      He ate with his left hand. He held his fork in his fist with no finesse.

      ‘And you only use your left hand,’ Jim said, watching Ronny carefully as though he was some kind of scientific experiment.

      ‘Yes. It slows me down.’

      ‘You feel the need to slow down?’

      ‘I did.’ Ronny thought for a moment. ‘What I mean to say is that it helps me concentrate. I used to have a very short attention span. Then I started these little challenges. It all came to me on the spur of the moment. I’d always had a natural instinct to do things right-handed, but I began to stop myself. I controlled that instinct. I curbed it.’

      He smiled. ‘At first it makes you irritable, because the body and the brain hate doing things the hard way. But it’s simply a question of working through that initial hostility, and once you’ve worked it through, you feel this intense kind of joy. Really intense.’

      Jim tore a piece of bread in half. At length he said, ‘You must have been extremely miserable at some point. I mean before all this.’

      ‘I was,’ Ronny grinned, ‘but not any more.’

      He then ate four mouthfuls of his meal and pushed his plate aside.

      Jim focused on the plate. ‘It’s very …’ he considered for a moment, ‘well, frustrating. It’s frustrating to see you push your plate away when you’re obviously still hungry.’

      Ronny shook his head. ‘I’m not hungry.’ He rested his elbows on the table. ‘You’re much bossier than you think, Jim,’ he added cheerfully.

      Jim was taken aback. He’d been considering Ronny and his unhappiness. He hadn’t considered himself as a part of any equation. ‘Me? Bossy?’

      He saw the guiding light in his life as a palpable indifference. A supreme, a superb, a spectacular indifference. Ronny shrugged. ‘If you ate less you might feel better about things. The way I see it, the less you eat, the less energy you have to expend on unnecessary stuff. If you were hungry you probably wouldn’t be the slightest bit interested in what I did or didn’t do.’

      Jim wasn’t impressed by Ronny’s reasoning, but for the sake of argument he pushed his own plate away for a moment and said, ‘Everyone has a few stupid habits. I’m sure I have plenty, but I try not to dwell on them, and I certainly wouldn’t want them to influence my life any more than they do already.’

      ‘So what are yours?’

      Ronny was smiling as though he imagined Jim’s habits would be nothing to write home about.

      ‘Well …’ Jim disliked talking about himself but he resolved to do so, just this once, to make his point, ‘when I was a kid my dad used to break things if I formed an attachment to them. To teach me a lesson about dependence. And in a way it set me free, although I really hated him for it at the time. But now …’ Jim twisted his fork in his hand, ‘now, if ever I form an attachment to something, to anything, I feel the need to break it myself.’

      Ronny was clearly impressed. He looked around him, at the furniture, at the walls.

      ‘What kinds of things?’

      ‘All sorts of stuff. Cups. Clothes. Watches.’

      ‘And you still do it?’

      Jim nodded. ‘Sometimes.’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘I have no idea. I don’t bother analysing.’

      ‘But you should.’

      Jim shook his head.

      ‘No, really, you should. It’s interesting.’ Ronny frowned for a moment and then continued. ‘By rights you should’ve grown up to really treasure things. In fact, by rights you should’ve become a real hoarder. Don’t you think?’

      Jim was happy to accept this theory, but he wouldn’t think about it.

      ‘Look …’ Ronny took something from his pocket and unfolded it, ‘I got this from your neighbour.’

      ‘What is it?’

      ‘A pamphlet. It mentions the black rabbits.’

      Jim began eating again. ‘And so?’

      ‘For a second back there I thought you’d gone and made it up.’

      Jim stopped chewing. ‘Why would I have done that?’

      ‘To get me here.’

      Jim’s stomach convulsed. ‘But why?’

      Ronny shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I felt uneasy. Just for a split second, which was stupid.’

      ‘You said I had an honest face,’ Jim sounded pathetic, to himself. ‘You said it was an instinct.’

      ‘It is an instinct. That’s just my point. I was right about your face. This simply confirms it.’

      Ronny tossed the pamphlet down on to the table, then stood up and went to the doorway to stare out at the sea. ‘Look, a tanker!’ he exclaimed. ‘Do you see the lights?’

      Jim didn’t respond. He put down his fork. He’d lost his appetite. He felt very strange, all of a sudden, like this was a dream he was living, like this was a tired, old dream, and he didn’t like the feel of it. Not one bit.

      For a second he wished himself inanimate. It was a knack he’d always had; the capacity to disengage himself from any situation, to empty his body and to go elsewhere. And for a fraction of a second he got his wish. He was no longer inside, but outside, and from outside he saw two men in a bare prefab by the brown sea. It should have been a simple image, thoroughly uncontentious.