Five Miles From Outer Hope by Nicola Barker Page B

got the general hang of it. My hand-to-eye coordination’, he swanks, ‘is actually quite legendary.’
    I pause and give him a steely glare.
    ‘Help me? Why?’
    He sighs. ‘It’s just…’ He thinks for a while. ‘It’s just – how to explain it?… It’s just politics. I think I need to re-establish my power base. Within the family.’
    Was ever a man so rank and duplicitous?
    ‘How?’ I gasp. ‘By slithering your way in here and ingratiating yourself with me ?’
    (Oh, come on . Don’t be taken in by my tone. Wise up. Tune in. It’s just basic girl-grandstanding.)
    ‘Yes,’ he smiles, reading me perfectly, his teeth overlapping like the yellowing slats in an old ivory-spined fan. ‘Yes,’ he repeats, ‘you’ve got it exactly .’
    Then he stares at me for a moment (okay, so I’m finally smiling. I can’t help myself. The damn fucker’s charmed me) and then slowly and painstakingly he starts painting some pottery.
    And I’ll tell you something for nothing: he’s not half-bad at it, either.
    So there you have it: the strangely simple story of precisely how – in case you’re at all interested – that unashamedly high-gusseted, acne-ridden chancer known as La Roux finally wins me over with his brutal candour.
    Happy now?
    No. Of course I don’t know what I’m getting myself into. Lighten up a little. Weren’t you ever sixteen?

Chapter 7
    Interest in the hotel – all things considered – has been pretty downright bloody phenomenal. I think it’s the part-island factor that really sets people a-tingle. We’ve had born-agains, nudists, the krishna-conscious, the military. We’ve had a bona fide Hollywood star (or just about: David Soul’s masseur’s mother), a school for children with learning difficulties, a famous astrologer, a football player. We’ve had them all . They’ve come, they’ve seen, they’ve felt the itch. But no one’s really Nails-Out Scratching. Not, that is, until now.
    (So I’m hardly an economist, but it suddenly feels like 1980s Britain is sweetly faltering on the quiet cusp of soon-to-be full-throttle, hard-roaring, break-the-sound-barrier booming. She’s like an anxious, sherry-drenched virgin nervously considering the scary technicalities of her imminent deflowering. She’s staggering. She’s teetering. )
    And sure enough (as if to vindicate my intellectual theorising), on the morning after the impasse before, a brand-spanking-new prospective buyer hitches a lift over to the island on the back of Black Jack’s antiquated, jaw-juddering Sea Tractor (ah, how fleeting my fancies).
    This woman has an insolent look about her. A haughtiness. In fact, when she dismounts it’s with the ridiculously inappropriate demeanour of a small but feminized Vasco da Gama loftily laying claim to the Horn of Africa (kind of fuck the indigens from the outset, if you know what I mean).
    As far as I can tell, Ms Penny Smolly (for that is the appellation of this paragon) is a bad-arsed but well-heeled fruit cake. More money than sense (although astonishingly mean with it), and worse still, an unadulterated cat lover.
    Believe it or not, she actually has it in mind to transform this blameless isle into a feline sanctuary (doesn’t she know cats hate water?) and although you wouldn’t know it just to look at her – she’s slight with grey eyes, an unusual strawberry-blonde moustache and a chin like a truncheon – this wench has a masters in snarling and whining.
    Oh my dear Lord . She’s already brought the poor estate agent out in an allergy (all that fur on her collar and the cuffs of her cardigan) and as she strolls about the gaff unearthing countless imperfections he politely punctuates her on-going invective with his quiet but chesty and exquisitely timed sneezing.
    Big’s nose (which frankly is the only really sizeable thing about him, apart from his ego, his temper and his libido) is also put out of joint royally when – on espying his current adventure in crochet: