Heading Inland by Nicola Barker Page A

asked casually. ‘From here, I mean?’
    The fisherman gave this question some consideration while sucking his tongue and rolling his rod between his two hands.
    ‘I should think,’ he said, eventually, ‘I should think it’s in the exact opposite direction from the one you’re travelling.’ Then he turned, stared down along the path Wesley had just trodden, and pointed.

Braces
    After she’d eaten her sandwiches, Joy would push her hand into her mouth, manipulate her fingers – Wesley could hear the clink as her short nails touched steel – and grunt and puff as she laboriously pulled her braces out. She’d had problems with her top row ever since she’d lost her first set of milk teeth. The main front incisor was buckled and protrusive, had a gap to its left but partially covered its neighbour to the right.
    To rectify this problem, a dentist had fitted Joy with a thin wire which circled her front teeth and was held in place by a large, plastic disc.
    This disc had been specifically modelled to the contours of the roof of Joy’s mouth. Not modelled well enough, though, by every indication, because bits of bread and fruit and food and sweet-stuff always got lodged under it while she ate. They snook and snuck and jostled against the wire and the roof of her mouth. They stuck around and niggled her, even after gargling.
    Wesley watched as Joy sucked her teeth and then inspected the brace as it lay on her hand. It was semi-transparent. It made him think of jelly fish and the middle of an oyster. ‘Ruff! Ruff!’ he barked, and bounced around like a dog so that he didn’t have to watch her as she picked at the residue on her brace with her fingers and then licked them clean with her tongue. It was like she was eating a second meal, he thought, feeling intimate twinges in his gut.
    Joy, distracted from her brace by Wesley’s barking, glanced over at him. ‘Shut up, big mouth!’ she yelled, and then, ‘Crunchy peanut butter!’ she glowered. ‘Tell your mum to buy smooth next time. It’s easier.’
    Wesley stopped bouncing and barking. He stood perfectly still, like she’d asked, and nodded submissively. ‘Will do,’ he said.
    Wesley had invented a series of rules for himself. He was nine years old and had a terrible strawberry-coloured nerve rash on his right cheek which he’d had for so long that even his mother acted like it was a birthmark and told the people at his new school – his teacher, the dinner ladies – that it was simply something he was born with.
    His mother let him do just as he pleased. If he wanted sweets she would give him some money. If he wanted a gun or a sword or a portable television she would buy it for him. She didn’t like Joy, but she couldn’t stop him from seeing her. She wouldn’t dare, she wouldn’t.
    Wesley was so busy and there were so many things to do. Joy would come with him. She was a little bit older than him and she had a bad temper. Sometimes she tripped him up or spat at him and often she gave him Chinese burns.
    ‘Stupid, stupid boy! Stupid boy!’
    There were several children at his new school who asked him to play with them, but Joy told him that they were ignorant. ‘They don’t know,’ she’d say, ‘all the things we know.’ And then she’d tell him to do something naughty as a dare and he’d do it because otherwise, Joy told him, he would break his arm or his mum would be in a car accident.
    Joy was so pretty. She wore her yellow hair in a pony tail and she had blisters on her ankles and bruises on her knees.
    One of his new friends at school was called Simon. Simon liked to play basketball and he could walk on his hands. Wesley liked Simon and even asked his mother to buy him a basketball jacket like the one Simon wore. Joy didn’t like Simon, though, and she didn’t like basketball.
    ‘There’s a new rule, Wesley,’ she said, as they walked home from school one afternoon. ‘If you play with Simon again then I’ll hit you in the face.