Her wait was over. The worst had finally happened. This was the beginning.
This was the crossing.
They’d pushed the two boys together in class (what else to do?). They were both a little dippy. Steven Bradley had a Gameboy and a registered learning disability – dyspraxia; but very mild (words spilled out of his mouth in entirely the wrong order; he made regular trips to see the speech therapist in Canterbury). He could be clumsy –
Bless him
Came from a family of ten, so it was difficult, sometimes, for his parents (who were extremely well-meaning) to give him all the attention he so desperately required. He could be slow on the uptake, obdurate, even, but he was fundamentally a solid, sweet-natured boy.
Fleet on the other hand…
Hmmn
Fleet had…
What did Fleet have? Whatever it was, the parents wouldn’t deal with it (were uncooperative, wouldn’t face facts), which automatically rendered them a part of the problem. To care too much was a weakness all parents could quite reasonably be found guilty of, but to actively obstruct? To smother? To deny? Not only was it unhealthy, but in the voluminous wardrobe of parental misdemeanours, this was that fine-seeming, well-laundered garment hanging neatly alongside the foul and mouldering suit of abuse (contamination was always a real possibility when two items were hung so close).
Fleet wasn’t a lost cause. Absolutely not. Because when all was finally said and done – with a modicum of support, a few one-to-one sessions, some firm guidance – they might actually be able to straighten the poor boy out (although he’d never be…not quite what you might call…well…vertical, exactly).
It was nothing insurmountable, in other words. But it was something (a blip, a phase – rather hard to put your finger on, really, without the benefit of professional input).
One thing was for certain: the boy was much smarter than he might initially appear. He was no Will o’ the Wisp. No charming, harmless Puck. He was evasive, sly, elusive. And –
Why not let’s just call a spade a spade, eh?
– you didn’t have to hunt very far to find out who he might’ve learned that particular mode of behaviour from.
The mothers sat in Elen’s brand-new kitchen (pale ash units, double-sink, waste disposal, grey marble counter) and enjoyed a pot of tea together. Fleet’s father – the German, terribly handsome – Dory? Isidore? – had popped in to say ‘Hi’ (shook Mrs Bradley’s hand, very formally, before heading upstairs for a quick nap. He’d been out on a job, he informed her – with an apologetic yawn – since eleven o’clock the night before).
Fleet (who didn’t initially seem entirely delighted by their arrival) took Steven up to his bedroom and guided him, nervously (the boy was just an accident waiting to happen) around his model of Albi (which currently took up a significant proportion of the floor-space in there).
Steven (extremely polite, but essentially unmoved by the tour) listened, blankly, waited until it was all over (offering no comment), then perched himself on the edge of Fleet’s bed, took out his computer and instituted his own kind of play (his head at an angle, his mouth falling slack, his fingers convulsing).
Okay
Fleet squatted down, picked up a boxful of matches and shook them, meditatively. He appraised his work. He mused. He calculated.
This arrangement suited them both perfectly (no pressures here, no expectations, no demands). Fleet worked away diligently on The Dragon Tower, leaving Steven entirely to his own devices.
Everything was proceeding in the best possible manner, and then…
Eh…?
Fleet scowled. He suddenly found himself distracted by the computer’s tiny voice. A tune. So simple. So repetitive. It hung in the air around him like a busy hover-fly. It buzzed. It troubled his ear. It reminded him of something. A folk memory. He cocked his head quizzically and focussed in on it, fully –
Zzzzzzzzzeeeee
Click –
Ah…
He closed his eyes, briefly.
Steven pressed pause and glanced up. ‘What?’
Fleet looked straight back at him (his fingers slightly glue-ey). ‘Huh?’ Steven frowned, then looked down, released pause, and continued to play. He tried to concentrate, but something was interfering. He pressed pause for a second time.
‘Stop that,’ he demanded.
‘What?’
Fleet didn’t even turn around, he just continued to build, methodically.
Steven cocked his head to one side. Couldn’t he hear it? The humming? Didn’t it…? Wasn’t he…?
It filled the air around them.
‘That!’ Steven exclaimed, pointing at nothing (his tongue twisting awkwardly).
Fleet slowly shrugged his shoulders and then continued on – doggedly – with what he was doing.
Steven sat in silence, frowning. He studied Fleet’s breathing patterns from the back, to see if they might give him away.
‘It’s not song…not even same,’ he eventually stammered.
‘It is the same,’ Fleet’s voice was deadly calm, ‘only it came from before.’
He continued to build.
‘No,’ Steven stammered. ‘Not.’
Fleet merely shrugged.
‘Not!’
Steven looked down at his Gameboy. His hand was shaking slightly. He wanted to play – he needed to – but he was suddenly overwhelmed by an extraordinary sense of dislocation. He blinked, then he gasped. A gulf was opening up around him (was being scribbled – in thick, dark crayon – over the gleaming surface of his everyday world).
He sat on the edge of the bed, like a frightened nestling on the lip of a precipice, remaining perfectly still, hardly even breathing, until his mother had finished her tea and was standing at the bottom of the stairs, calling him –
‘Steven? Steven!’
Then, and only then, could he blink back the darkness and run.
For the next two days, he didn’t feel even the remotest inclination to turn his Gameboy on again.
The second time she literally had to drag him there. He kept telling her that he didn’t like Fleet, that Fleet was mean, that he really didn’t want to go and visit him any more. But the school had recommended it, and Mrs Bradley thought Elen was incredibly charming (quite the loveliest person. It took a little while to get to grips with her – sure – what with that severe, home-spun look; the dark, sober clothes, the long hair, the thinness, the birthmark – but once you did, there was something so…so friendly, so informal, so calm, so intelligent…).
And the house was so nice. And the area. Everything so new. Everything so…Shhhhhh! (Can’t you hear that? The silence? No traffic, no dogs barking, no stereos blaring…)
Although on this occasion – it soon transpired – the marvellous quiet was to be interrupted (and quite notably), by a series of strange noises emanating from above.
Elen was cutting into a small, home-made fruitcake when the pandemonium first began. The mothers’ eyes had met – in mutual alarm – across the table-top.
‘Are they…are they singing?’ Mrs Bradley asked (she couldn’t actually remember ever having heard Steven sing before).
Elen gently pushed a slice of cake towards her.
‘Yes. Yes, I think they must be…’
‘But isn’t your husband still working nights? Won’t they disturb him?’
‘No. That’s…It’s fine, honestly.’
Elen stood up – slightly flustered – and went over to close the door. Then a few minutes later, while she was refreshing the pot, she casually turned on the oven’s extractor-hood.
All subsequent extraneous sounds were expunged by its whirr.
She’d gently questioned Fleet about his ‘project’ (this matchstick structure now took up the best part of their dining table – his bedroom having long since been evacuated because of the leak). She was especially interested in why it was that he hadn’t completed the cathedral itself before moving on to some of the surrounding b
uildings.
‘But what about this section?’ she’d asked, standing on the cathedral’s south side, where a large hole still gaped, unattractively, at the entrance.
‘It’s not finished,’ Fleet had murmured.
‘Then finish it,’ she’d said.
He’d scowled up at her. ‘It’s not finished,’ he repeated, as if speaking to an imbecile. ‘They haven’t built it yet.’
Steven had the most beautiful voice, and once he’d been set off, there was literally no stopping him (although he only ever really sang one song, and he sang it in what appeared to be a foreign tongue). When he did sing, though, his usually jumbled pronunciation sounded smooth and unhalting.
His speech therapist claimed that she’d seen this happen before (that it was relatively common, even). ‘Remember Gareth Gates,’ she’d said, ‘with his terrible stutter, who finished up second on Pop Idol? Steven’s like him…’ she paused, speculatively ‘…although perhaps a little…uh…’
One of the volunteers in Steven’s class was a member of Ashford Church’s prestigious choir. With Mrs Santa’s encouragement, she took Steven – and his mother – along to meet the choir master. Steven sang for him. In fact he sang – his shoulders back, his hands clasped, his tiny face all pinkly beatific – for upwards of half an hour.
The choir master had been both charmed and bemused.
‘It’s an early Madrigal,’ he told them (over the continuing sounds of Steven’s vocalising), ‘in a kind of bastardised Latin. Or maybe Welsh or Cornish. Definitely not a tongue I’m especially familiar with…’
‘D’you think he made it up?’ his mother asked.
‘I simply can’t answer that.’
‘D’you think you could make him sing something else?’
‘I’m sure I could try.’
But when the choir master sat down at his piano and began to play, Steven put his hands over his ears, began rocking and screaming.
The instrument, the rhythm, the tempo, the pitch. They were all wrong. They were vile and cacophonous.
Modern.
He found it disgusting.
Elen couldn’t help wondering why.
Why Albi?
At first she’d considered the actual place – its geography; its historical background – tales of religious strife were certainly legion; the basilica had been built by a cruel bishop –
Blah blah
Uh…
– Toulouse Lautrec had been born in the town, they’d built him a museum…
Hmmn
But after a while she decided to simplify things. She went back to basics. She began by considering the word itself, the name; its linguistic ramifications; the actual semantics (to do so, she’d found – in her extensive experience of problems of this kind – could often pay dividends).
Albi?
Al – bi?
Hang on…
If you inserted the ‘I’ (placed yourself in the picture), you got ‘al-i-bi’.
Alibi
In Latin (she looked it up in a dictionary) that meant ‘elsewhere’. I-am-elsewhere.
This funny little riddle just lodged in her head. And it stayed there.
Soon Steven was actually speaking – was chatting away, and with an amazing fluency – in this extraordinary new language of his, but only – Mrs Santa noted – when he was in (or around) Fleet’s general vicinity. It was almost as if he felt Fleet might respond (but Fleet never did), as if he thought Fleet might actually understand.
And while Fleet wasn’t ever aggressive (it wasn’t in his nature to be), it was plain that he found the boy (and his language) both stupid and exasperating. He would turn his face to the wall, or simply walk away. He made his contempt quite obvious. Everybody noticed.
Eventually the home visits were gently discouraged.
Two weeks after Steven had entered the Special Care stream, he completely abandoned his strange, new tongue. He began to stammer and to falter again. He lost his curiously ecstatic air. He recommenced his relationship with the Gameboy (head cocked, mouth open, fingers jabbing), but he’d only ever play with the sound turned off. He was almost ludicrously punctilious on that point.
He took no interest in Fleet any more.
A while after that, when the dust had finally settled, Mrs Santa caught Fleet staring at Steven during break one morning.
‘Is anything wrong, Fleet?’ she’d asked.
Fleet’s eye-line didn’t alter. It remained fixed on Steven as he answered her.
‘Steven should stay hiding behind the shapes,’ he murmured, ‘inside that funny little play-box of his.’
‘Really?’
Mrs Santa tried her best to draw him out.
‘Yes.’
‘And why do you say that, Fleet?’
Fleet glanced up at her, a look of mild surprise in his impish eyes.
‘Because that’s where he’s safe, Mrs Santa. All alone. In the quiet.’
‘But of…of course.’
Mrs Santa delivered him one of her brightest smiles. She glanced nervously around her. Two girls were squabbling over a skipping rope –
Of course…
She rapidly marched towards them, determined to interfere.
ELEN
It wasn’t all just corns and bunions –
Uh-uh
– No way.
Of course there was a certain amount of what a novice might term ‘the run-of-the-mill stuff’ (although for Elen, nothing was ever ‘run-of-the-mill’, because in her eyes every symptom – no matter how small or uncontentious – invariably belied a deeper cause, and uncovering something’s origin, its genesis, was an essential part of the challenge of good chiropody; part of that special, ‘transformative’ magic – the buzz, the voodoo – which made all the hard daily slog – the cancelled appointments, the stroppy clients, the crazy hygiene – feel absolutely worthwhile).
Take bandaging, for example. Elen just loved it. As a small girl she remembered painstakingly binding the limbs and the torsos of all her dolls and her teddies with neat strips of fabric cut from old handker-chiefs (almost mummifying them, in several cases). It was just like weaving (was artistic; provided her with a similar kind of primitive thrill), but there was always that fascinating hidden variable in her line of work – a particular kind of condition, a certain shape of instep or toe, a preferred type of shoe – which made each and every application into something fresh and stimulating.
And it wasn’t just the medical aspect. It was the mundane things, too. The chiropody minutiae: the pad, the splint, the plaster, the wedge, the gauze, the strapping, the brace, the stockingette –
Oh the smells –
And the whiteness –
Or – better still – the creamy-white –
The stretch, the non-stretch –
The earthy putty,
The sterilising tingle
The dizzy glue
Each item –
Oh, but look…
Aren’t they all just…just beautiful?
– tidily arranged inside her briefcase (or laid out in that neat, spotless provisions drawer at her usual room in the practice). Every object immaculately packaged; each box and label so plain and clinical, so severe and uncompromising, so unapologetically –
Uh…
– generic
That was it!
– and timeless, too: the future/the past, all painstakingly rolled up into one hugely reliable sanitary bundle.
Elen liked the clean (very much – of course she did – she had to), but she absolutely loved the dirty: the malformation, the bump, the crust, the fungus. To Elen a foot was like a city, an infection was the bad within, and she was its ombudsman; making arrangements, sorting out problems, instituting rules, offering warnings.
On a good day she was a Superman or a Wonderwoman, doggedly fighting foot-crime and the causes of foot-crime (usually – when all was finally said and done – the ill-fitting shoe…Okay, so it was hardly The Riddler, or
The Penguin, but in a serious head-to-head between a violent encounter with either one of these two comic-book baddies and an eight-hour, minimum-wage shift behind the bar of a ‘happening’ Ashford night-spot with a corn the size of a quail’s egg throbbing away under the strappy section of your brand-new, knock-off Manolo Blahniks…Well…it’d be a pretty close call).
Elen firmly believed that she was making a difference.
She was nothing less than an evangelist for the foot. She was a passionate devotee. She worshipped at the altar of the arch and the heel.
Sometimes it wasn’t easy. The foot was hardly the most glamorous of the appendages (‘yer dogs’, ‘yer plates’, ‘yer hoofs’). No one really gave a damn about it (although – fair’s fair – the acupuncturists had done a certain amount for the cause, and the reflexologists had sexed things up a little, but in Elen’s view, the short-fall still fell…well, pretty damn short).
The foot had sloppy PR; it mouldered, uncomplainingly, down at the bottom (the fundus, the depths, the nadir) of the physiological hegemony. It had none of the pizzazz of the hand or the heart. The lips! The eyes (the eyes had it all their own way). Even the neck, the belly…the arse. Even the arse had a certain cachet.
But not the foot. The foot had none (the foot had Fergie, with her lover, sprawled on a deckchair, in the Côte du Tawdry).
Darkmans Page 17
