Free Five Miles From Outer Hope by Nicola Barker Page A

could play .’
    ‘Not anything ?’ Patch asks.
    ‘So why’, Big interrupts, ‘do you own a guitar?’
    La Roux looks down at the offending object? ‘This old thing?’
    We all nod in unison. He shrugs. ‘I stole it off a child on the train.’ He frowns. ‘A very bad child.’
    Big abruptly clambers to his feet and marches outside onto the wide sweep of the hotel’s grand balcony. Patch scratches her head. ‘Wow,’ she mumbles (and it’s almost in awe ), ‘what a complete and utter embarrassment you are.’
    Feely is staring at the guitar with worried eyes as he stands behind a bamboo, glass-topped table, making a meal out of the contents of his nasal passages. He plainly has La Roux down as a certifiable child-hater.
    La Roux adjusts his robe. ‘You know something?’ he whispers confidentially. ‘I find your family unusually uptight for a bunch of hippies.’
    I say nothing (What’s to say?).
    ‘And the worst part is,’ he continues, ‘I could’ve learned the guitar as a boy, but I missed my opportunity. I actually went and took swimming lessons instead.’
    ‘Really?’ I ask gamely. ‘And are you an impressive swimmer?’
    He blinks. ‘Swimmer? Me?! ’ He chuckles. ‘No. I could never get my head around the basic knack of…’ he thinks for a while, ‘… the knack of floating .’
    For a few, brief seconds he silently mulls over this poignant irony, then he smiles, stands up, passes me the guitar, yawns, gathers his red robe grandly around him and glides off with all the mile-high airs and inappropriate graces of an unkempt, over-indulged Folies Bergère .
    Would you believe it? The cheeky freak.

Chapter 8
    It’s mid-morning, low-tide, and I’m taking La Roux on a tour of this tiny island’s most tantalizing rock pools. La Roux has recently divulged an unusual interest in crustaceans.
    ‘I find that the happy sight of a little crab or a shrimp or a lobster’, he pontificates cheerily, ‘will always set me up nicely.’
    Set him up for what exactly, he doesn’t deign to specify.
    And he still persists in wearing his balaclava, even though the air is intoxicatingly soft and camomile-scented and balmy. That said, his sharp eyes peer out from behind their black woollen prison as bright and keen as a Siamese fighting rat’s, and his two feet on the slippy rocks have such a confidently sure-hoofed and nimble character that to all intents and purposes they seem virtually cloven. In general, his demeanour is one of infuriatingly uninhibited perkiness.
    He is strangely attired in a thin, well-worn, pale-blue summer sweater with a ill-preserved embroidered illustration of an Appaloosan pony on the front of it, and some light, canvas-coloured baggy trousers, so low on the hips and wide on the thigh that it’s as if he has a small section of a trellis stuck up inside of them. They may well be African in origin, or perhaps even Indian.
    Naturally his unorthodox garb means he receives a couple of slightly perturbed sideways glances from the occasional sharp-eyed but nonetheless deeply inconsequential tourist – and if they’re staring at me , coincidentally, then they’re simply marvelling at my loose, well-worn, brown leather pedal-pushers matched with a scant but utterly modest cheesecloth halter – either way, he doesn’t seem to notice.
    Slightly more perturbing, though, is the shadowy figure of Black Jack leaning heavily on the fence near the Pilchard Inn, glaring pointedly down in our general direction.
    La Roux gives a fine impression of complete self-absorption as he shuffles carefully around the edge of a good-sized pool, squats and peers (He has painstakingly fashioned a pokey stick from a stray twig and has already become ludicrously attached to this implement which he swishes and waves whenever the opportunity presents itself).
    ‘See anything?’
    He doesn’t answer. He lifts some yellowing flotsam with his twig, shifts slightly, and stares some more. While he’s quietly