Darkmans

by Nicola Barker

  He processed these words internally and then promptly tore them into a thousand pieces –

  You clumsy, heartless old fool!

  He felt like an earthworm in the midday heat, trapped on an endless-seeming expanse of tarmac – crispening up, frightened. He longed for a moist, damp crack to crawl into; for the soil, the dank, the dark.

  It took a mammoth effort, but he reached up his arm and cupped his large hand over the back of her small head (like a father might, with his son, or a priest, to a grieving widower). Elen responded to his touch. She drew a deep, shaky breath. She tried to control herself.

  ‘Here’s a tissue, you foolish thing,’ he murmured.

  She removed one hand from her face – it was soaking – and took the tissue from him, clenching it – like a child – for succour.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, her voice just as calm and as soft as before. ‘Everything’s so…so complicated, that’s all. And sometimes I don’t really know…’ she paused, ‘how to…’ she paused again, drew another deep breath, and then shuddered, in wordless conclusion. She looked exhausted. She dabbed at her face with the tissue.

  Beede removed his hand. He twisted around and pulled his chair closer, then clambered to his feet and sat back down on it. They were knee to knee.

  ‘You’re still not sleeping.’

  It was a statement of fact.

  ‘No. I mean yes. I mean I’m absolutely fine. It’s just the…the roof,’ she back-pedalled, desperately, ‘it’s still leaking. And the builder, Harvey – Mr Broad – he keeps on stalling…’

  ‘Harvey Broad?’ Beede echoed, stiffening slightly. ‘Harvey Broad is your builder?’

  ‘And I’ve had a request from Fleet’s teacher to come in and see her,’ Elen continued (almost as if she hadn’t actually heard him). ‘I think there might be some kind of…of problem there.’

  ‘But mainly it’s Isidore,’ Beede spoke with a quiet authority, ‘he’s much worse again, isn’t he?’

  She glanced up, dismayed. ‘Isidore’s fine. He’s fine. He’s…’

  She groped around, desperately, for a better word.

  ‘Fine,’ Beede echoed, dryly. ‘Yes. I get the picture. Even if he did just steal a horse and ride it, bareback, along a busy dual carriageway.’ Her former – somewhat shaky – resolve seemed visibly undermined by this callous summation. Her shoulders drooped, pathetically.

  ‘So what now?’ he asked, observing the droop with a bitter pang. She didn’t answer him straight away. Instead, she unclenched the fist in which she’d held the tissue, observed it, balled up, in her palm, and then addressed her next few thoughts directly to it. ‘Things were so much better when you were around,’ she murmured, wistfully. ‘He seemed so much more…’ she paused, ‘so much easier…’

  Beede also stared down at the tissue – not a little jealously, at first (I mean what had the damn tissue done to earn itself this gentle homily?).

  ‘Easier in himself, somehow,’ Elen continued (apparently undeterred by the tissue’s taciturnity). ‘But lately he’s grown so…’ she shivered, involuntarily, ‘dark. Dark. Just…’

  A long pause: ‘just furious. Full of…’

  A still longer pause ‘…anger. Bile. And then suddenly – out of nowhere – there’ll be that awful, that cruel…the…the laughter,’ she glanced up, fearfully, ‘you know?’

  Beede nodded. He did know.

  ‘He’s homing in on the boy,’ she continued, warming to her theme now, ‘more every day. And at night, if I rest – even for a moment – then he’s up and he’s gone. He just…just flits…’

  Beede’s expression did not alter. ‘You need to use those new tablets I gave you.’

  She shook her head, looking down, focussing all her energies – once again – on the tissue.

  ‘Just for a while,’ Beede wheedled. ‘The other approach obviously isn’t working.’

  She shifted in her seat. ‘I’d rather medicate myself,’ she glanced up, anxiously, ‘control myself. Don’t you see? To do anything else would just feel…’ she sighed ‘…detestable.’ She paused, shrugged, smiled resignedly. ‘And those other pills helped me enormously. They really did. I used them in conjunction with the ones from my doctor and was able to stay awake for several weeks, just taking quick naps, during the day, between clients…’

  ‘That’s crazy, Elen,’ Beede interjected, harshly, ‘and dangerous and short-sighted and irresponsible…’

  ‘I honestly believed,’ she interrupted, almost pleadingly, ‘in fact I still believe, that if I could just keep a close watch on him, build up some kind of a regular…a pattern, then things might have a chance – however slight – of falling back into place again.’

  She closed her eyes. She frowned. ‘But everything’s the wrong…the wrong shape, somehow.’

  Beede was still furious. ‘How on earth did you persuade me to get involved in all of this?’ he asked (and it was a question as much to himself as to anybody). ‘It’s just…It’s madness, don’t you see? You’re looking after a child, you’re running a household, you’re holding down a job…’

  She dumbly nodded her acquiescence, a large tear forming in her eye and then sliding, plumply, down her cheek.

  ‘You’ve lost so much weight,’ Beede struggled, valiantly, to redirect his anger, ‘you’re so thin. I mean you look like you might just…just blow away.’

  Elen shrugged (what did she care about that?). ‘Dory’s still exercising,’ she murmured, trying – and almost succeeding – to maintain her fragile equilibrium. ‘He’s really, really trying. And it’s so…so unbearably sad, somehow. He’s doing the breathing – the yoga breathing – which is all very positive and empowering and everything…’ she paused again, ‘but there are just so many repercussions which he doesn’t know about – which he can’t know about – and I don’t honestly feel like I can tell him – kill off that little bit of…of hope. But the more control he believes he has, the worse it becomes for everybody else. The less he goes under…I don’t know…when he does go…’ she bit her lip, ‘it’s just so much more terrible. I mean the consequences…And if the police get involved again…’

  She shrugged, helplessly.

  ‘Dissolve a tablet into his tea,’ Beede instructed her, ‘or whatever he drinks before bed. That’s the most difficult time, isn’t it? The REM? When everything’s in transition? He’ll get to sleep much quicker. It’ll be deeper. And that’s bound to take the pressure off.’

  ‘Oh God,’ Elen clenched her hands together. ‘If only it were that simple…’

  ‘Try, at least,’ Beede cajoled her. ‘Think about Fleet. Your main priority has to be the boy. And yourself, obviously…’ he paused, frowning, ‘I’ve let you down recently. I can see that now…’

  He scowled. ‘We’ve been short-staffed here for a while. I’ve been taking too much on. And then there’s this whole Monkeith situation. I seem to have become…’ he shrugged ‘…horribly enmeshed in the whole thing…’

  A look of fleeting interest crossed Elen’s face. ‘Well it’s certainly a good cause,’ she gently chivvied him, ‘and so tragic. He was only eleven. Dory knows the godparents. He’s been doing some leafleting for them.’

  ‘I know,’ Beede’s voice sounded just a fraction sharper than before, ‘it was actually Dory who recommended me to them.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Elen struggled to let the implications of this news sink in.

  ‘But I can play around with my rota here at work…’ Beede leaned over and grabbed a photocopied time-table from his desk, ‘juggle things around a bit. I’ve certainly got some holiday owing. I can try my best over the next few weeks to keep up with him during the day again. And then you can have a rest. A proper rest. Believe me, things’ll look ten times brighter after a couple of good nights’ sleep.’

  ‘But if he finds out…’ Elen covered her mouth with her hand and stared at him, over her fingers, almost in panic. ‘He’s grown so suspicious. So paranoid. If he has
any kind of inkling…’

  ‘I know. I know.’

  ‘And if he realises that we met up earlier…’

  Beede stiffened. ‘The trick is not to deny anything. If the worst comes to the worst, say you took Fleet out to do some shopping, that you stopped at the restaurant, that I was there with my son…’

  ‘That’s true,’ she nodded, ‘you were.’

  She nodded again.

  ‘The critical thing,’ Beede continued doggedly, ‘is that you need to get some rest – you both do; you and Dory – otherwise neither of you will be able to function properly.’

  Elen patted her eyes with the tissue, then unfastened her hair to try and disguise their blotchiness.

  ‘And as I said before,’ Beede persisted, ‘there’s Fleet to consider…’

  ‘It was such a surprise,’ she said softly, changing the subject (exchanging one son for another), ‘to see Kane there this morning.’ ‘I know,’ Beede grimaced, ‘apparently he goes there all the time. I had no idea.’

  ‘I hadn’t seen him in so long…’ she smiled, vaguely. ‘Not since…Well, since Heather…’

  Beede tipped his head, momentarily at a loss, then his brows lifted. ‘But of course – you would’ve met him as a boy…’

  ‘He…’

  Elen began to say something, then suddenly checked herself. ‘He had a…’ she gesticulated, vaguely, ‘on his arm. He had a burn. He showed me.’

  Beede frowned. ‘On his arm?’

  ‘Yes. He said he got it in the desert. In America.’

  ‘I don’t actually…’ Beede slowly shook his head, then something struck him; a memory ‘…Yes. He does have a burn there. He got sunstroke as I recollect. It was very severe…’

  He still wasn’t quite following her.

  Elen touched her own arm, ruminatively, in exactly the same place. Beede frowned, perplexed. ‘Did he mention it for some reason?’

  She opened her mouth to speak, but before she could answer, they were interrupted by a quick knock. A member of staff thrust an impatient hand into the office, proffering an invoice. Beede scrambled up and followed them outside. A terse conference took place, and then they headed off, Beede cursing, towards the storeroom.

  When he returned to his cubby (five minutes later) Elen had gone. On his blotter she’d scribbled, ‘Danny – Thanks. And SORRY. See you later. Godbless.

  E.’

  He ripped the page out, turned it over, sat down, picked up a pen in one hand and the phone receiver in his other. He pressed it between his cheek and his shoulder and he dialled the line for Casualty, then waited. As it rang he quickly wrote: Eva Barlow. He stared at it for a moment then scratched it out. Eliza Barlow (his next attempt). He crossed this out, too.

  He frowned, gazing out into the middle distance, racking his brains to remember the proper name of the client Elen had mentioned with the malfunctioning pace-maker.

  ‘Liz? Lizzie Brownlow?’

  He grimaced.

  ‘Damn.’

  He slammed down the receiver.

  ‘Damn.’

  He leaned back in his chair, ruminatively.

  ‘Cunning,’ he eventually murmured, ‘two names I would’ve remembered. But the nickname on top…’

  He threw down the pen.

  ‘That was clever.’

  He picked up his mug of tea and took a quick sip of it –

  Cold

  He leaned over and took a hold of Elen’s mug –

  Virtually untouched

  His eye casually alighted upon the tea-stained tissue where he’d rested the spoon, previously –

  What?!

  He peered around him, thoroughly puzzled –

  But where…?

  EIGHT

  It never rang; not ever. The last time Kane could actually remember (and the fact that he could still clearly recall this occasion – and in florid detail – said it all, really) was when his Great-Aunt Glenda (a true family gem) had died, aged ninety-six, in 1994.

  To mark her passing, Beede’s cousin, Trevor (who was horribly burned to death – a mere eight months later – in a tragic house blaze), had rung him up on that distinctive, brick-orange phone with a complex assortment of funeral arrangements:

  1. All mourners to wear pink (she’d considered it a ‘sacred’ colour).

  2. Lengthy, heartfelt readings to be performed (and then distributed in the guise of a commemorative pamphlet within a one-mile radius of her home in Esher, Surrey) from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, Joyce’s Dubliners and Problems of Reconstruction by Annie Besant.

  3. A proper, old-fashioned High Tea to be served, accompanied by home-made egg-custards, cinnamon buns (from Fitzbillies’ traditional bakers in Cambridge), tumblers of apricot wine and her own very smoky blend of Lapsang Suchong.

  4. Marigolds to form the centre of all her flower arrangements (she’d been a devoted gardener, but had suffered from chronic hayfever, and this cheerful, brightly coloured genus had been one of its main perpetrators. In consequence of this fact, she’d thought it might be ‘a bit of a hoot’ to make her final journey in a coffin absolutely swathed in the damn things: ‘Bring along a jemmy,’ she’d said, ‘and if you hear a sneeze, then be sure and prise me out…’).

  She’d died – inevitably – in the depths of winter. Not a single humble British marigold to be had. The import costs had been astronomical and Beede had been furious (although his objections – he’d insisted – weren’t so much monetary as environmental –

  Yeah, right…)

  Kane had just loved her for that.

  And then –

  But of course…

  – there was his father’s magnificently choleric expression as he stood, in church, determinedly booming forth one of Gibran’s more flowery flights of fancy dressed in a crazily lurid, salmon-coloured shirt –

  Absolute fucking class!

  Even now, all these years later, Kane could distinctly recall over-hearing that landmark conversation through the cracks in his linoleum. He’d been upstairs stewing in the bath at the time – eight…nine Christmases ago. Ten, even.

  And the phone had barely rung since (so far as he was aware – I mean he didn’t stand guard over it or anything). It lived a very quiet existence (what could it comprehend, poor soul, of the advent of touch-tone, of texting and the internet?). It was almost superfluous (like Sleeping Beauty, in the midst of that great, big doze); to all intents and purposes, it was pretty much dysphonic.

  Beede was resolutely ex-directory and nobody but distant (and now mainly dead) family had ever been privy to that particular number (even Beede’s brother only ever contacted him via the hospital laundry).

  But it had a fantastic bell. When it rang it produced an astonishingly pure, clear, old-fashioned sound; an elevated, almost ecstatic ‘peal’, a rousing, piercing, energising clamour.

  Kane loathed phones. He really did. It was one of the few chinks in his easy-going armour. Yet it wasn’t the technology itself that he objected to (Come on – he prostrated himself, hourly, at the altar of the disk and the drive and the chip), so much as the inbuilt element of surprise; the sense of a demand being made, then registered, then automatically responded to (‘What am I?’ he’d sometimes mutter. ‘A dog to be whistled at?’).

  He used his own phone continuously (had to, for work), but he chiefly relied on its texting facility, and if – by chance – he was awaiting an urgent call, he’d set it on to vibrate (a vibration he could just about tolerate – it didn’t shriek or keen or insist) and then shove it, carelessly, into the front pocket of his denim jacket.

  The brick-orange phone continued to sing.

  Kane re-entered the flat, strolled over to Beede’s desk, placed his hands on to his knees (bending from his hips, keeping his legs tensed – like a linesman at a tennis match) and gazed down at the phone, scowling.

  Still – still – it rang. He expostulated, sharply, then crouched down and curled his arm around the pile of magazines (acciden
tally snagging the top few with the turned-up cuff of his jacket and pulling them down on to the carpet –

  Damn!)

  He grabbed the receiver –

  Wow…

  Heavy

  – then placed it, tentatively, to his ear. He didn’t speak.

  And at the other end of the line?

  Silence.

  ‘Hello?’ Kane whispered, finally.

  (Was this an entirely different world, this Beede-phone world? Was he speaking into some kind of supernatural vacuum, into a sphere utterly beyond everyday concepts of the here and the now?)

  ‘Beede?’

  Male. Young-ish. A pronounced German accent.

  ‘No.’ Kane stood up, smartly (the highly coiled, creamy-white wire connecting the receiver to the phone stretching itself, languorously).

  ‘No. This is Kane, his son.’

  ‘Kane?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Kane nodded.

  ‘Beede’s son?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is Beede there, by any chance?’

  ‘Uh,’ Kane glanced nervously around him, ‘no. No, he isn’t.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Long pause

  ‘I suppose you could always try him at work,’ Kane volunteered, helpfully.

  ‘Yes. Yes. That’s true. I could. In fact I was. But this number suddenly just…it just popped into my head. Out of the blue. It was really…really quite odd. So I grabbed the bull by the horns and I just…I rang it.’