The Yips. Nicola Barker

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СКАЧАТЬ nagging at him to display them properly.’

      ‘I was looking for a spoon.’ Ransom quickly drops the medal back into the drawer, adjusts the towel he’s wearing (a pink towel) and turns to engage with the boy directly.

      ‘You finished the milk,’ the boy mutters, darting Ransom’s cereal bowl a petulant look before silently retreating.

      Ransom glances down at his bowl, shrugs, devours another forkful, saunters over to a nearby bookshelf and casually scans the books on display there. After a brief inspection he soon deduces that the books are divided – by and large – into two main categories: the military and the spiritual. Ransom instinctively shrinks from the religious side and focuses his attention on the military end instead. Here, his eyes run over Clausewitz’s On War, Conrad Lorenz’s On Aggression, Richard Holmes’s Acts of War, then rest – for a brief interlude – on Wendy Holden’s Shell Shock. He carefully places down his bowl and pulls it out, opening it, randomly: ‘Too many people are jumping on the trauma bandwagon,’ he reads, ‘in a society where to be a victim confers on people a state of innocence.’

      He scowls, tips the book over and inspects the cover, then slaps it shut and shoves it, carelessly, back into the shelves again. Next he removes the Clausewitz. ‘The element of chance, only, is wanting to make of war a game,’ he reads, ‘there is no human affair which stands so constantly and so generally in close connection with chance as war …’ He scratches his head, intrigued. ‘War is a game both objectively and subjectively …’ he continues, and then, ‘Every activity in war necessarily relates to the combat, either directly or indirectly. The soldier is levied, clothed, armed, exercised, he sleeps, eats, drinks and marches all merely to fight at the right time and place.’

      Ransom ponders this for a moment and then places the book under his arm, grabs Richard Holmes’s Acts of War, and quickly flips through it, pausing for a moment, beguiled, at a section that discusses how man’s aggressive drive is inherited from his anthropoid ancestors. This genetic legacy apparently inclines him to fight members of his own species. Most other creatures, he discovers, avoid lethal combat with their own kind by employing a series of simple mechanisms like a pecking order, the ritualization of combat etc. Piranhas generally prefer to attack other piranhas with their tails rather than their teeth. Rattlesnakes air their grievances not by biting other rattlers but through bouts of wrestling …

      ‘Brilliant!’

      Ransom chuckles to himself as he carefully turns over the corner of the page (for future reference), closes the book and shoves it under his elbow along with the Clausewitz.

      His eye now settles on a tiny copy of Sun Tzu’s Art of War, which has been secreted, sideways, on top of a row. He pulls it out with a small, wry smile of recognition. It’s a miniature hardback – under three inches in width – wrapped, like an expensive chocolate, in shiny black, red and silver foil-effect paper. He enjoys the sumptuous feel of it in his hand. He opens it up.

      ‘Simulated chaos is given birth from control,’ he reads. ‘The illusion of fear is given birth from courage; feigned weakness is given birth from strength.’

      He muses on this for a moment, his attention briefly distracted by the sound of a phone ringing in a far corner of the house. He can tell from the distinctive ringtone (Queen’s ‘We Are The Champions’) that it is his phone. He scowls. The ringing stops. His eye returns to the Sun Tzu and he slowly re-reads the previous sentence: ‘Simulated chaos is given birth from control; the illusion of fear is given birth from courage; feigned weakness is given birth from strength.’

      Ransom considers this for a while, then he smiles, almost sentimentally, closes the book, carefully slots it under his elbow (alongside the other two) and is about to grab his cereal and move away when his eye alights on a distinctive-looking beige and black hardback with an old-fashioned drawing of an open palm on its spine. He pauses. His mind turns – very briefly – to the previous evening and to Jen.

      Ah yes, Jen. Jen with her pale arms, her chapped upper lip and her infinite lashes. Jen with her ponytails and her pierced – and piercing – tongue. Jen. He winces. He draws in closer. Written above the illustrated hand he reads: Cheiro’s Palmistry for All; 2/6 NET.

      ‘Cheiro?’ He pronounces the name out loud, as if trying it on for size.

      ‘Cheiro.’

      He pauses. Then, ‘Goll-uff,’ he murmurs, quizzically. ‘Gol-ol-ol-ol …’

      He shakes his head. ‘Cheiro! Cheiro! Cheiro!’

      He tweets the name like a canary, then snorts, pulls the book out and opens it up, randomly, to ‘an autographed impression of Lord Kitchener’s hand given to “Cheiro”’ –

      ‘Eh?’

      – ‘on the 21st of July, 1894 (hitherto unpublished).’

      As he gazes down at the photograph, two important things happen. The first is that the boy – the stroppy, dark-haired teenager – enters the room, holding out a dripping mobile.

      ‘I just found this in the toilet bowl,’ he’s saying. ‘Is it yours by any chance?’

      The second is that a loose wad of papers falls down from within the pages of the palmistry book – an old letter, a dried flower, a couple of photos, the order of service for a funeral …

      Ransom curses, loudly, as the order of service and the photo slide down on to the floor, but the dried flower and the letter plop into his cereal bowl. He instinctively snatches for the letter – keen to preserve it – but, in his panic, he clumsily knocks his knuckle into the fork and tips up the bowl, sending it (and all its contents) cascading down on to the carpet.

      Ransom stares at the milky, wheaten mess, agog.

      ‘Wow!’ The boy is impressed (and Ransom can instantly deduce that it takes a fair amount to impress this kid): ‘You really fucked up,’ he announces, delighted (like all teenagers, immeasurably enlivened by the prospect of a catastrophe), ‘that stuff belonged to Mallory’s dead mum.’

      Ransom’s already on his knees, yelping plaintively, plucking photos and dried flowers from the goo.

      ‘Kitchen roll,’ the boy announces, sagely, and then promptly abandons him.

      

      ‘I don’t understand,’ the woman mutters, peering over Gene’s shoulder. ‘You’ve come to collect Nessa, but now that you’re here you’ve decided to …’

      ‘Read the meter. Yeah.’ Gene tries to sound nonchalant as he straightens up, switches off his torch and scribbles the relevant digits on to his clipboard. ‘It’ll save me from bothering you twice, that’s all.’

      ‘I see.’

      The woman gives this some thought, and then, ‘But you are actually friends with Valentine?’ she demands (she is short and heavy-hipped, with long, wavy, black hair, down to her waist, and a piercing, brown gaze). ‘I mean you do actually know each other?’

      ‘Uh …’ Gene frowns. He senses trouble. ‘Uh … Yes. Yes. Of course I know Valentine,’ he insists. ‘Of course I do.’

      ‘Of course you do.’ The woman laughs, nervously, then smiles up at him, somewhat ruefully. ‘God – I’m getting so cynical in my old age! I mean it’s hardly as if you just turned up СКАЧАТЬ