Wide Open. Nicola Barker

had been firm, the inside was soft and brown and bruised. The inside was marred and scarred and tarnished. Jim felt a profound, jarring sense of unease. Everything was curbed and complicated and twisted and blocked. Could this be right? Even from the outside, from the cold, cold outside, it all seemed so pleasureless.

      He blinked and then looked around him, bewildered. He was back, he was back, but who was this man? What was this place? He put up a hand to his cheek, to his nose. He felt his own face. What am I playing at?

      For a brief moment Jim questioned his own motivation and then, just as abruptly, he stopped questioning.

      ‘Ronny’, he said quietly, ‘what happened to all your stuff?’

      ‘My stuff?’

      ‘The box. The box you had.’

      ‘Ah!’ Ronny murmured, ‘I gave it away. I lost it.’

      Jim shuddered. He didn’t know why. Suddenly, though, he was wide awake. His nose was tingling. It was getting cold. Cold outside. Cold. Cold inside.

      8

      As far as Lily knew, her father, Ian, had been in Southampton for eight weeks taking care of her grandmother, who had suffered from a minor stroke three months before and was now fresh out of hospital and finding her feet back at home.

      Lily’s mother, Sara, was taking care of the farm in his absence. Luckily, the farm pretty much looked after itself, because Sara was in a state of flux. She was forty-two and had shed over four stone during the previous year. A yeast allergy. When she’d avoided bread and buns and all those other yeasty temptations – the pizzas, the doughnuts, the occasional half pint of stout – the weight quite literally fell away. She’d been prone to extended attacks of thrush before, and now that had cleared up too, which was definitely an added bonus.

      She was a new woman.

      They had forty boar altogether. Which wasn’t many, actually. But the market for them had become increasingly lucrative over recent years. They were organic. They were shot at the trough. One minute they were gorging, the next they were dead. Quick as anything. The other boars took the shootings phlegmatically, each one just as keen to shove in their shoulder and take another’s place.

      And in that respect, Lily felt, they were just like people.

      Lily enjoyed the boars. She preferred them to pigs. They were hairier and even less genteel. They were bloody enormous. They were giant bastards. But they could be fastidious. They could smarm and twinkle if the mood took them.

      Pigs, though, she’d observed, and with some relish, had very human arses. Like certain breeds of apes. Big, round bottoms. And they tiptoed on their trotters like supermodels in Vivienne Westwood platforms. But oh so natural. Boars were less human and they were less sympathetic, but they were so much more of everything else. They were buzzy and rough and wild.

      Sara didn’t like Lily. Lily was not likeable. It was a difficult admission for a parent to make, but Lily was a bad lot. She was rough and she had no soft edges. She’d led a sheltered life. She’d been born premature and had lain helpless and bleating in an incubator for many months before they could even begin to consider taking her home.

      And there were several further complications; with her kidneys, parts of her stomach, her womb. Things hadn’t entirely finished forming. Nothing was right. She was incomplete. So fragile.

      And the bleeding. Her blood would not clot. Not properly. Even now, mid-conversation, her nose might start running, her teeth might inadvertently nick her lower lip, her nail might catch her cheek, her arm. Blood would trickle and drip, then gush, then flood. It wouldn’t stop. There were never any limits with Lily. There was never any sense of restraint or delicacy.

      She was an old tap, a creaky faucet, she was an overflow pipe that persistently overflowed. She would ooze, perpetually. She seemed almost to enjoy it. She was a nuclear-accident baby. She was improperly sealed. She was all loose inside. She was slack. Thin. Pale. Blue-tinged. She was puny.

      At first they’d thought they’d lose her. They’d prepared themselves. They’d almost bargained on it. They were on tenterhooks, year after year, just waiting for the life to be extinguished in a flash or a spasm or a jerk or a haemorrhage.

      But Lily didn’t die. Her own particular brand of puniness was of the all-elbow variety. All-powerful. It burgeoned. It brayed and it whinnied. It charged and trampled. It essentially ran amok.

      Her body remained weak but her mind hardened. She got stronger and stronger and crosser and crosser and wilder and wilder. She needed no one. And yet they’d made so many accommodations! They’d changed from an arable farm to a pig farm and finally to boar. Boar were less trouble. Less time-consuming. They’d stiffened themselves for some kind of terrible impact, but the impact never came. It never came. And so things began to fray. Slowly, imperceptibly. Down on the farm.

      Sara, staring but never seeing, looking but never focusing, tried to search out probable justifications for Lily’s obnoxiousness, but she could find none. She searched her own heart. She wished Lily would do the same. But Lily wouldn’t. She didn’t. Not ever. And yet Lily had her own moral set-up, her own fears and beliefs, which were complex, abundant, comprehensive. They were simply well hidden. Like potatoes. Several feet under.

      She worshipped a deity. It was her secret. The deity had a special name. It was called The Head. It survived in spirit but had been born and had died on one long, still night in 1982. An August night. So it made perfect sense that August should become the month that Lily set apart to celebrate The Head with some special rituals of her own making. She wasn’t unduly creative, usually, but in August she made an exception. In August she cut a neat incision on her arm with a piece of wire from the boar pens. Special wire. Then she killed one of the hens and blamed it on a fox.

      Fox must’ve done it.

      With the blood from the hen, and with her own blood, she soaked the earth behind the yew tree where she pretended that The Head had been buried. But The Head had not been buried there. It had been taken away by her father and incinerated, in all probability. Although they’d never discussed it.

      The Head. A freak. Lily was five and had witnessed its birth. A reliable sow from the old herd had been mated with a boar. The farm’s first boar. They’d built a special enclosure just for him. It had been an experiment. Her father had wanted the best of both worlds. He’d called it ‘toe-dipping’. And sure enough, the sow had delivered eight healthy young, but then The Head had come, last of all, and it had taken the mother with it. Like Shiva. God of destruction.

      Lily didn’t get a good look at it, initially. Her father had tried to hide it. He’d tossed it aside and kicked straw over it, like he did with all the stillborn babies whenever Lily was in attendance. But then he’d been obliged to run into the house to call a vet when the mother began struggling, so Lily had taken her chance to inspect the freak as it lay caked and smothered in its musty tomb of hay and grass.

      When she pulled its cover aside, so tentatively, what had she seen? She’d seen a head – extended, elongated – and the remainder of a body; like a tiny, moist mitten. The body of a baby rat. Or a gerbil. No tail though. But it had lived! She knew it lived. Its mouth moved. Its eyes were as round and as trusting as a puppy’s. Its skin was pale and soft and glossy like blancmange. She wanted to touch it but her father returned, yelled at her and then sent her indoors.

      The next day she could find no sign of it. The Head had gone. And she knew in her gut that he had done it in. Her own father. But The Head did not go, ultimately, because it infiltrated Lily’s dreams. It inked up her mind like an octopus. And it felt, strangely, as though there had been a space, a special gap in her imagination which was only just big enough to be inhabited by this particular creature. As though the creature had known that she lacked something. As if it had known that she needed it to feel complete. It satiated her. It became a deity. And so Lily celebrated it, and in celebrating it, she celebrated, however lopsidedly, her own sweet self.

      Naturally, also, she blamed herself. And her father. She should have saved