Читать книгу Wide Open - Nicola Barker - Страница 13

Jim found Ronny on the beach. Ronny was surrounded by several large piles of shells. It was six a.m.

‘What are you doing?’

Ronny was engrossed. He spoke slowly. ‘You know, one minute I was just sitting here, watching the sea, and the next I was sorting out these shells.’

‘Sorting them? What for?’

‘Into families. Into colours.’

Jim sat down. He took one shell from one of the piles and one from another. He held them next to each other. ‘I see no difference.’

Ronny inspected Jim’s two shells. ‘Then you aren’t looking.’

Jim put the shells back down. ‘So what will you do with them once they’re all sorted?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Perhaps you could create something.’

‘Like what?’

‘People cover wine bottles in them. Or they make shell frogs or shell dolls in shell dresses.’

Jim watched as Ronny picked up the two shells he had just put down.

Ronny displayed them to him. ‘You put these back on the wrong piles. Couldn’t you tell?’

Jim focused on the shells again. Ronny held them in his left palm. Jim noted, once more, that Ronny’s fingers were strangely waxy at their tips, but also that his wrist had been lacerated. Scars as thick as pale maggots, long scars, nosed out from the dark shelter of his cardigan.

‘Maybe there is a difference,’ he said, in a spirit of compromise, although if there was then it was so slight that he could hardly detect it. Ronny nodded, gratified.

The squeal of seagulls alerted Jim to the arrival of a woman and a man on a distant section of the beach. They were disrobing. Jim observed them, unobtrusively, from the corner of his eye. Ronny continued to sort the shells, oblivious. The couple undressed completely and then ran into the sea. The cold made the woman yell and the man laugh. Ronny looked up.

‘Are they naked?’

‘That’s the nudist beach. There’s a sign over there to say exactly where the nudist zone begins and ends.’

‘Ah,’ Ronny peered over. ‘I was wondering what that said.’

‘Why?’ Jim picked up a random shell and placed it gently on to one of Ronny’s piles. ‘Can’t you read?’

‘I can read,’ Ronny said, carefully removing the shell and placing it on to another pile. ‘It’s just that I prefer to read only certain types of lettering.’

‘Certain types?’

‘I met someone once who worked in printing and graphics. She told me how there were certain kinds of letters that made you feel happy.’ He looked into Jim’s face. ‘You think that’s reasonable?’

‘I don’t know. I’m not an expert on lettering.’

‘Well, there’s a particular kind of lettering that’s apparently very friendly. And because of the shape of the letters – their roundness, their whole design – they can’t help but make you feel cheerful when you read them. They use them a lot in adverts to make people feel good about certain products.’

‘I never knew that.’

Jim was fanning at the beach with his hand, shifting shells aside and revealing the sand below.

‘How about,’ Ronny said, ‘you clear a space about as big as a table and then I lay out my shells on it.’

‘Like a picture?’

‘No,’ Ronny spoke gently, but very seriously, ‘not like a picture, like a table.’

Jim sensed something contract. His face. His mouth. His chest. He felt a dart of panic. Was it a sickness? Then he realized that he was not in pain. It was not uncomfortable. It was simply a smile. A smile. He was smiling. It was nothing to worry about.

It was a real smile and it had started off from somewhere deep down inside him, somewhere numb next to his breast-bone. He tentatively touched the spot where the smile came from with his index finger as he shifted forward, clumsily, to clear a patch on the beach. It was all very sudden and rather peculiar. He looked around him, squinting, like he was all at sea in familiar territory.