Five Miles From Outer Hope Read Online Free PDF Page A

‘is a gynaecologist. He delivered Feely in Wellington, remember? We owe him a favour. He’s from Cape Town.’
    ‘Clipped vowels. Horrible.’
    ‘That’s the nature of the beast.’ Big looks uneasy. He scans the horizon.
    ‘How long will he stay?’
    Big shrugs, squats, starts truffling. Not long, I surmise, by the look of him. I move on.
    Hmmn . Something tells me Mr Big is definitely not Mr Happy.
    ‘ Don’t you find being a woman in the eighties complicated?’
    Jessica Lange , Tootsie
    Are you telling me – I said are you telling me – that it’s gonna be a whole other year before that monumental short-arse Dustin Hoffman gets to set the whole world straight on the fundamental dilemmas of modern womanhood in his cross-dressing masterpiece, Tootsie ? But where does that leave things, currently? I mean feministically ?
    Meryl Streep taking it up the arse and looking wantonly choleric in A French Lieutenant’s Woman ? Marg Thatch writ large – all nose, no jaw – in her preposterous pearls and pin-stripes? Sue Ellen in Dallas with her pop eyes and alcoholism? Or do they honestly expect me to seek succour from that inconsequential drippy-draws playing the worthless girl part in Chariots of Fire ? Can this really be it ?
    Look, there’s not a damn thing wrong with my sexuality (excluding those private issues detailed previously), but show me internationally acclaimed actress Jessica Lange in
    (a) grey sweatpants
    (b) a nurse’s uniform
    and – screw Hoffman – even I get a little horny.
    I’d better tell you about the barman. It’s a touch convoluted, but bear with me. The point is (can you hear me backpedalling like fucking crazy?), when you move around a lot you get to meet plenty of new people and, frankly, you don’t give a damn about them – not really – because in your heart of hearts you both know it doesn’t really count , for one (you’re just treading water, dammit), or matter , for another, however much you screw each other over, because soon you’ll be gone and it’ll all just be water under the hump-backed proverbial.
    (You’re calling my family a bunch of users ? Spot on. You’re sharper than you look. We prefer to call the whole sordid flyby-night exchange thing ‘a short-cut to intimacy’. Ha! God fucked up good when he gave us vocabulary.)
    There’s this small pub on the island: the Pilchard Inn – the pilchard used to swim these waters, way back, but now the Gulf Stream has shifted and they’ve taken to foaming further afield; they’re canny. It’s three hundred years old. Balanced precariously half-way up the one and only pot-holed, sharp-tilted road which staggers dejectedly from the beach to the hotel.
    Mud-coloured inside, with big fish jaws on the walls and stuffed birds. Smells of dust and treacle. The owner’s nephew still runs it. Keeps it ticking over. Twenty-five. A tragic soak. Stinks like brandy and dry-roasted nuts. Huge, brown eyes (a thyroid problem, but let’s not spoil it). A dark heart. They call him Black Jack. Like the card game (I’ve never played it).
    Barely speaks a word. Caters to the tourists. Resents our presence like a rat resents Rentokil. He is literally filthy . Naturally I have it in mind to seduce him. Or for him to seduce me. Come on, the man’s a modern Heathcliff with his catatonic dial, his cat-gut breath, his loose, lardy belly (So I’m only four inches taller. I picture it as an act of revenge, on his part. Well hell . Beggars can’t be choosers).
    In the absence of all other island staff, Jack has been temporarily placed in charge of the Sea Tractor – a mythological machine in these parts: half bird, half monster, which, when the tide is high and the conditions are tolerable, we use to ferry post and people and provisions one way and another.
    It is his pride. Seven-foot-wide wheels attached to twelve-foot-tall stilts. On top, a kind of oily, open-sided tram carriage. It chugs through the water like a superannuated