In the Approaches. Nicola Barker

The body was inside the coffin! Bang, bang, bang! The lid was sealed! Bang, bang, bang! But still the word kept on providing new nails, and of course they needed to be applied (demanded it), to be neatly and dispassionately embedded. But where? The wall? The door? My heart? My head? My soul? No! No, I had to get rid of that word. I had to eliminate it. It had suddenly become too real, too meaningful. How even to approach it now without … without feeling the urge to emit a terrible, wolf-like howl? Without jabbering? Without flailing around? Falling to my knees and tearing at my clothes? Without an all-out collapse, in other words? Surely it’s better to just … just use something else, something less definitive, something that evades … that compresses … that curtails the connected emotion. A band-aid word. Yes. A slightly vague, pointless, polite, peripheral word. To cleverly create a separate universe in language and then quietly retreat into it, to hide, like a cringing ninny, from … from …

      From Kimberly’s passing?

      Yes.

      Kimberly has passed … Oh, look! There she goes! Hear the whistle? Kimberly! She’s a heavy-goods train thundering through the station of life (no timetabled stop) and then into the glorious bleakness – the billowing clouds of dry ice – beyond. Only the truly adventurous – the demented hobo, the illegal, the felon – would consider running after her and hitching a ride. Those trains are heavily guarded, I’ve heard. No. Better just wait a little longer on the welcoming, well-lit platform and flick through the local paper (great article about piles. Wonderful small ads. Nothing really amounting to ‘news’, as such) then head over to the kiosk for a hot cup of coffee (avoid the tea. The tea’s dreadful, like warm iron filings. It’s been stewing for days inside a giant rusty urn).

      Just stand back (always respectful, mind) and let that old, heavy-goods train rumble on through …

      Rumble.

       Rrrrrrumble?

      Gracious me! A sudden outbreak of goose-bumps on my forearm. How odd!

      Uh …

      No.

      No. Let’s not talk of death, eh? Death sticks between the teeth like a pesky piece of sweetcorn husk. Sweetcorn’s way too ambitious a vegetable for a man in my state. I need mashed potato softened with milk. Or mushy peas. Or a lightly seasoned dollop of glowing swede, shining with butter. Or porridge. I need porridge! I need custard! A soft-boiled egg!

      I’m too delicate!

      Coddle me!

      Uh …

      No.

      It wasn’t a great scheme, in other words. I wasn’t genned up on the Tide Times. I just headed out – flew out.

      Perhaps I was more upset than I thought. Everything felt very sharp – the light, the sound of the gulls, the waves – the damn Channel so unapologetic, so vital, so unbearably bloody there; the texture of the pebbles on the beach, the individual grains of sand … Everything sharp. Everything cruel. And then … What happened?

      I’m struggling to … uh …

      Ten paces after I saw Miss Hahn and her ridiculous dog – that awful, fat dog; a barely perambulating canine offence, a cruel joke – I suddenly stopped short and thought, God. Did I actually just say that? Did I actually just speak those words from here … up here … from this mouth? The exchange – was there an exchange, though? – fell across the beach in front of me like a shadow in bright sun. I moved, it moved. Good heavens! Did I actually just …? No. Surely not! So I promptly strode on. Had to get through it. Simple as that. Fight or flight. Fight and flight. Pure instinct. Couldn’t think. Didn’t want to. Continued walking.

      It’s possible the plan hadn’t even been fully hatched at that stage – the epic hike. It was barely in incubation. I was just … still can’t quite remember what I … I think it was just … just getting away from that word. The relentless hammer-blow of that word.

      ‘Good afternoon, Ms Hahn! The renovations? Uh … not now, dear. I’m … uh … My wife just died. We weren’t really married … well we were, but in title alone. We lived on separate continents. But I still reserve the right to be intensely pissed off – alternately numbed, bewildered, shattered, even – by the news. All right, Miss Hahn? Okay with that, are we? Is that acceptable to you, Miss Hahn? It is? It is? Good! Great! Toodle-oo!’

      I just … I just … I wanted to blurt it out! Yes! I wanted to castigate, to blame – worse still, to share. I felt this sudden, overwhelming urge to unload! To unburden, to spill out my guts to that awful Miss Hahn with her … her frayed collar, her fat dog, her man’s trousers and her Soviet-style nose. But why her? Why then? Why there? Eh?!

      Happenstance. Pure happenstance! A fluke. She could’ve been anyone! That’s why. And worse still, I’m sure I even found myself thinking: eyes on the prize, Franklin! This could actually prove useful – playing the sympathy card! I did! I swear! But then I suddenly realized (hammer-blow – bang!) that without Kimberly there was no meaning – no book (and no Advance! Bang, bang! Double whammy!). And I also realized that I couldn’t play the card if I didn’t accept the feeling. And I didn’t accept it. No! I just didn’t. So I stopped myself. I tried to find a suitable cover for my confusion. My mind was racing (but there was no race, no track, just miles and miles of empty air) and I found myself blurting out … Uh … What? Did I say that the dog was fat? Yes. Yes. I think I did, actually. But then the dog is fat. Big deal! I merely stated a known fact! No harm done there, then.

      And so I calmly walked on. And a while later it started to rain. And I can remember the pebbles and the rocks all shiny in the wet. And my shoes – dress shoes – splattered with mud. And I remember how high the cliffs were. So high. So improbably high … Woo! Woo-hoo! (I’m spinning around, gazing upwards, woo-hooing, like a jackass) … Oh look – there … See that black bird, just circling above? Is it a raven? A chough? Do they even have choughs in this part of the British Isles? Or ravens for that matter? Uh … No. Possibly not. What’s that …? (Stops spinning, staggers slightly.) What’s that extraordinary … uh …?

      And then … And then – Wham! Bam! Alakazam! – forty-eight hours had passed me by, in what felt like the merest of breaths, and I was waking up in the cells with the mother of all hangovers, a tin bucket by the bed, splayed across a creepy, squeaky, rubber-coated mattress, no bed-linen, no blanket, not so much as a pillow – a humble pillow – to rest my pounding head upon.

      Oh. And there was a baby rabbit tucked away snugly inside my vest. My suit was still wet. The pockets were full of leaves. White ash? Eucalyptus? After approximately five minutes a young constable brought me some sweet tea and said that they were releasing me without charge but I needed to provide them with some details of my identity. I had no idea at this stage that I was missing an entire day. A day had been stolen! But by whom?! My wallet (a matter of secondary importance; it was empty, remember?) was also gone. Apparently I’d been apprehended by a passing member of the local foot patrol – in riotous mood (me, not the copper) – drinking on the beach the previous morning with a couple of reprobate old fisher-folk. I’d tried to break into a church: St Thomas of Canterbury and the English Martyrs (in St Leonards) which contains exquisite painted murals (stencils, but still lovely) by Nathaniel Westlake, no less. Amazing. Yes – yes! I had broken in (I have no memory of this) and I’d confessed a pile of hysterical mumbo-jumbo, in Spanish, to the priest, then knelt and prayed with him (we’d conversed freely – he was born and raised in Alicante), then jumped up and ran off. I’d tried to make a sled out of a bakery pallet and had careered down the Old London Road on it (I was relatively successful, in other words), ending up in a large bush of pampas grass (slightly cut lip – evidence of white fluff in hair). I had stolen and eaten half a loaf. I was wearing lipstick (yes!). Orange lipstick. In giant circles around my eyes. Three cigarettes had been stubbed out on the top of my hand. My right hand. And the rabbit? A dwarf breed. Quite rare. Of indeterminate age, it transpires. Nobody knew where it had come from, only that I’d been finding great