The Yips by Nicola Barker

Author:Nicola Barker [Barker, Nicola]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General
ISBN: 9781443419918
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Published: 2012-07-19T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Sheila has an extremely furtive air about her. She is dressed in her standard, drab black and dog collar, but her hair is down and unkempt, falling over her face – one large segment hastily pinned back with an oversized paper-clip. She is in Stanislav’s room, sitting at his small desk, hunched over his computer, completing an email.

Pressed under her elbow are three editions of a magazine (hailing from some time in the early nineties), poorly printed on low-quality paper, which she has recently dug out of a box in the garage. The magazine is called OnTheRag. The cover of the top copy features a photograph of a bulldog with a tampon dangling from between its lips wearing a Union Jack bikini stuffed with screwed-up pages from the Sun.

Another edition is opened to the contents page where there are four contributors’ mug shots, one of which is of Sheila herself as a student journalist, spitting out her tongue, fists clenched, combatively, at her chin (on the knuckles the words ‘riot’ and ‘grrl’ scribbled in Biro, a lit roll-up clutched between the ‘g’ and the first ‘r’). She wears heavy, black eye make-up and her brutally hennaed hair is carelessly sculpted into a jaunty mohican.

Elsewhere in the house, two phones are ringing.

After an extended period of frenzied typing Sheila re-reads her email, grimaces, re-reads it again, adds a couple of tiny alterations, then presses ‘send’. One of the phones stops ringing. She glances down at her contributor’s photo with a wan smile. The second phone stops ringing. She rises to her feet and goes to stand in the doorway.

‘Bugger off, school governors!’ she mutters, peeking around the doorframe like a naughty child, then checking her watch, guiltily, her shoulders slumping forward slightly.

The second phone starts up again. Its insistent beep appears to be emanating from the general direction of her bedroom. Sheila plods off to answer it, removing an elastic band from around her wrist (which the post had come tied up in that very morning) and arranging her hair into a scruffy ponytail.

Arriving at her dressing table (where the phone currently sits), she swipes an impatient hand over her new hairstyle, encounters the paper-clip, scowls, pulls it out and inspects it, bemused.

Her phone rings on as she drops the clip into a tiny, cracked ceramic bowl (containing a vial of anti-nail-biting solution, a pair of cheap stud earrings and an acorn) which perches to the rear of the table’s protective, glass top. She finally picks up the phone. It falls silent the instant she places it to her ear. She opens her mouth to speak, then closes it again, shrugs, throws down the phone and leans forward to look at herself in the mirror.

She seems neither depressed nor delighted by the weatherworn sight that greets her there, just rubs a tiny crust of sleep from the corner of her left eye and roughly shoves her fringe behind her ear. The natural curl in her hair refuses to be gainsaid,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.