Darkmans

by Nicola Barker

  The foot lived in purdah – in cold climes particularly. It was hidden away, crammed inside, squeezed.

  Sometimes, as Elen dutifully chiselled into thickened wodges of hardened skin –

  Ah, the bread-and-butter work…

  – flakes of which would shoot like shrapnel on to her apron-front, hit her goggles, or fly past her ears, Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Daddy’ would suddenly pop into her head and take up a brief residency there. She’d learned it at school…

  ‘You do not do, you do not do

  Anymore, black shoe

  In which I have lived like a foot

  For thirty years, poor and white,

  Barely daring to breath or Achoo.’

  Ah yes

  She loved that poem.

  If she’d actually ever thought about it – and she honestly hadn’t – then she might have drawn a few, tired parallels between her own life and the life of the foot (that frustrating opposition of support and neglect). But then again, if she’d thought about it some more, she’d have realised that all struggles – foot-related or otherwise – could be encapsulated as some kind of battle between an object’s natural function and its actual – often thwarted – circumstances.

  Them’s the breaks, huh?

  Her own daddy (to extend the Plathian metaphor just one stage further), whom she’d admired devotedly (up until – and beyond – his premature death in 1989), had been a hard nut to crack; fair but irascible, sincere but undemonstrative, he’d worked his entire adult life in the Services. Elen had been a true Army Daughter (drilled, polished, guarded, wrapped up, packed off – sometimes left behind, sometimes shoved dutifully into a khaki knapsack).

  There was never a happy medium with Dad: he was either perpetually absent or too resolutely there (like a badly focussed close-up –

  Lobe –

  Cheek –

  Whoops!

  Moustache –

  Teeth –

  Pore –

  – in an amateur video), and each state (too little, too much) somehow rendered its opposite inexplicably traumatic.

  He’d served four years in Germany, two, undercover, then was posted to Northern Ireland (where his iron nerve and skills in the realm of bomb disposal were deemed especially useful). He retired in ‘83 (well-decorated for bravery after the Falklands War).

  Following two, brief years on Civvy Street (a wonderful reprieve for the family, but he’d found it hard to relax, felt drained and grey, seemed to sorely miss his old life of careless extremity) he’d joined the Metropolitan Police Marine Support Unit: the Underwater and Confined Space Search Team (even working – briefly – as a freelance safety consultant on the Channel Tunnel, although he’d resigned, in disgust, after their first fatality).

  The circumstances of his own death had been profoundly unsatisfactory. He’d been one of countless casualties in the Marchioness Pleasure Boat Disaster (a small Thames cruise ship, pole-axed, in the dark, by an unlit dredger).

  ‘But what was he doing on the boat in the first place?’ people constantly asked. Try as Elen might, she could never provide an adequate answer.

  It’d all been so very sudden (so abrupt, so random, so incredibly unfair). He’d faced eternity so many times: head on, with such unfathomable bravery; had gambled with life so fearlessly, only to be grabbed – snatched – from the rear; no chance to ‘take stock’ or ‘make his peace’. Denied, at the last – and this was the cruellest part – that pious mantle of ‘a noble sacrifice’.

  Her mother (who’d long found the role of serviceman’s wife an uneasy one) promptly remarried a dairy farmer and now lived a life of bucolic bliss in rural North Yorkshire.

  Anxiety over the welfare of her father had glued Elen and her mother tight at certain points during her child- and teen-hood, but with his unexpected demise, the bond had slackened. And there’d been some ill-feeling over her mother’s lack of involvement in the hard-fought campaign for a proper inquest (‘You think if some random judge finds the cruise-ship company negligent it’ll bring your father back to me?’ she’d griped. And then, later – when things got really nasty – ‘They don’t decorate the wives, Elen. Sometimes, when a man risks everything so easily you have to stop and wonder what “everything” actually means to him…’).

  To cut things short: they were not so close now as they once had been.

  Talking of fathers –

  Yes

  Good –

  Moving swiftly on…

  Franklin Charlesworth was the don. He was chiropody’s Big Daddy. His absolute classic Chiropody: Theory and Practice, Elen had owned in hardback (in its 5th edition) just about as long as she could remember (it’d got to the point, in Germany, during school holidays – she was ten – when she’d read virtually every tome in the Base’s library. So she’d borrowed this one. Pored over the pictures –

  Oh my God!

  What is that?!

  – and had never troubled to take it back).

  It was her Bible (that so-familiar frontispiece illustration of a septic bunion was her spiritual equivalent of Genesis – it was where everything first began). Charlesworth was definitely Moses (who else?). He delivered chiropody (or podiatry, as the Americans were so determined to call it) from the Dark Ages. He brought the tablets down from the mountain.

  It was chiefly through his dedication, generosity, lateral thinking and hard endeavour that chiropody finally came to be recognised as a Medical Auxiliary (and won the Holy Grail: State Registration). It was the same text-book she’d used at college (her grades so superlative, they’d pushed her towards Surgery, but she’d resisted, for some reason).

  Elen rarely dreamed, but when she did, Charlesworth provided her with the Foreword, the Contents, the Index, the Appendices. He represented so much for her (stuck a career-based band-aid over her emotional tribulations – such as they were), fulfilled all her wishes…

  Uh…

  Yes.

  Skin diseases:

  Count them off…

  Primary Lesions:

  The Macule,

  The Papule,

  The Tubercule,

  The Vesicle,

  The Pustule,

  The Bulla,

  The Wheal,

  The Squames…

  That’s all eight.

  Good.

  Secondary Lesions:

  Crusts,

  Ulcers,

  Scars,

  Fissures.

  Just the four…

  Count them…

  Uh…

  Charlesworth was her guide, her inspiration and her mentor. He was her role model; the parent who was never absent. He was her constant, her anchor. He’d given so much, for so long; was so painstaking, so fastidious…

  Sometimes she’d lie in bed at night and consider the many years he’d spent embroiled in the careful manufacture of corrective, protective and palliative foot appliances –

  Oh those magnificent, one-off, hand-stitched surgical boots – With the ‘Charlesworth’ splint, nestling softly inside…

  Love could be rather like shoe-making, she’d quietly reason –

  All in the finish –

  And in the detailing…

  For maximum comfort and minimum wear, your basic raw materials – be they plastic, synthetic, fabric or leather – had to be carefully – nay scrupulously – manipulated to fit. Over-the-counter, made-to-measure; it didn’t really matter. There was definitely a craft in it.

  218.

  No, seriously…

  That’s Two Hundred (one, two, three, four, five –

  Go on,

  Count them)

  – and Eighteen (one, eight) faults –

  Yes, faults –

  ie

  Problems,

  Botch-ups

  – on your average New Build property.

  218.

  She’d seen it on a television report. Some houses fared slightly better, they’d claimed, and some fared slightly wor
se. But 218 was the average –

  Can that really be right?

  They’d also maintained – during this same incendiary broadcast –

  Why oh why did I insist on staying up late?

  Why didn’t I just go to bed early, like Isidore said?

  – that the sensible buyer should at no costs –

  Under Strictly No Circumstances

  – consider purchasing a New Build property situated either in, or around, a notable dip. This was because most New Builds were sited on meadowland – bogs – flood plains; on the outskirts of town; the left-over bits of land; bits that nobody had ever bothered with before –

  But hang on…

  – Which inevitably begs the question, ‘Why?’

  Exactly!

  Hmmn…

  Remote control –

  Volume…uh…

  Up

  Were our ancestors all just thoroughly unadventurous? Were they obstinately – neurotically, even – attached to mounds and to hillocks? Was it merely a question of safety (of finding the best site to defend against the marauding invader)? Or was the population so tiny back then that they never felt the urge (there was simply no call) to build in these left-over places?

  Finally (and here’s the rub) did they perhaps know something about the kinds of environments best suited for human habitation? Had they worked out this equation themselves, over time, through a system of trial and error? Did they have more respect for the pitfalls of nature? Did they understand the land? And then did we –

  Those damn politicians –

  And those evil-bastard, money-grabbing contractors –

  – just conveniently resolve not to understand? To forget all the lessons they’d learned, and to build on these marginalised sites anyway (while offering a swift –

  arrogant

  – but mechanical nod to that delightfully infallible modern double-act of ‘progress’ and ‘technology’?

  Infallible, that is, until they’ve got your damn money).

  The bottom line (the programme stated) was that available sites were often empty for perfectly good reasons. If there wasn’t landfill somewhere in the general vicinity (oozing a terrifying cocktail of poisonous gases out into the stratosphere), then there would definitely be water.

  That horrible, interminable drip, drip, drip…

  Elen and Isidore lived in a New Build. It was set in a slight dip (a little saucer), and she absolutely hated it. She’d always loathed New Builds (she’d never made any bones about this fact. At root – Isidore carped – she was a snob. ‘So are you,’ she’d say, ‘but just of a different kind.’).

  Of course a tiny part of her quite liked the idea of something new, something virgin, but it was only a very small part, and it was dramatically overshadowed by the general thrust of her opinion –

  Unfashionable, maybe…

  – that something’s intrinsic value was inversely proportional to its longevity –

  The blackened frying-pan

  The antique, diamond cuff-links

  The family Bible

  It’d been a sacrifice, but she’d made it in all good faith. She’d moved there for Isidore –

  Clean slate,

  New broom

  – but it rapidly came between them. And the reasons? So far she’d tabulated 77 –

  77 flaws

  And while she knew that it was unhelpful, she simply couldn’t stop herself. She kept an on-going list, in chalk, on a small blackboard in the kitchen –

  Day sixty-four:

  The garage door is sticking…

  – and every entry (in tinier and tinier writing, towards the bottom) caused her husband immeasurable suffering. But she kept on tabulating.

  73 had just been insignificant things (a chip in the woodwork, a cracked tile, the oven grill not wired-in properly). Four had been fundamental:

  1. The dip (obviously). The autumn after they’d moved in, the entire front garden had flooded. And it didn’t drain properly. And this had affected the front fascia. There was a great deal of mould. Black, dark green.

  2. A crack in the kitchen. It wasn’t horizontal (like all good cracks should be). It zig-zagged, like a child’s drawing of lightning, and Isidore now thought –

  Oh, great…

  – that there might be a problem with one of the supporting walls.

  3. The window-sills on the front of the house hadn’t been fixed in properly (hadn’t been made good). If you pulled at them, they either wobbled alarmingly or simply came away –

  Actually came off

  – in your hand.

  4. The roof. It didn’t work. If you stood in the attic, craned your neck and looked up, you could see shafts of light shining in. Dozens of them. And the problem was especially severe around the chimney where the damp had spread lower, had entered the plaster. In Fleet’s room, the wall on the chimney-breast side felt as soft as icing sugar (you could push your fingers straight through the panelling) and the ceiling was starting to mould-up and to sag.

  Power and Higson Ltd, the contractors –

  All credit to them

  – had been very sympathetic. They’d promptly sent around an independent surveyor, and he’d posited the precise sum they’d be willing to invest on ‘making good’. But they were well behind schedule, and it was winter, and their workers were all fully occupied in maintaining the build elsewhere –

  Oh. Dear.

  So they provided Isidore with a list of approved contacts for local firms who might – they believed – be able to do a good job. He left about thirty messages. He received only two responses. In both instances nobody was available to come over and even assess the job for the following two months.

  He grew desperate. He pulled out the Yellow Pages and thumbed his way through the relevant section –

  Uh…

  A Priori Builders Ltd –

  Okay…Uh…So that’s…

  He tapped in the digits, and waited…

  Damn.

  Engaged.

  His finger hovered – for the briefest of moments – over the redial button, but his eyes scanned onward…

  AAABuilders and Plumbers PLC –

  What?! You’ve got to be kidding!

  Aardvaak Builders inc. –

  Huh?!

  Abacus…

  Hmmn

  Abacus Builders Ltd –

  Sounds better

  He called them. They answered. A meeting was set up for the following morning with Harvey, one of their key personnel.

  Harvey arrived on time and made all the right noises (thought it was ‘a good little house, mate, a solid little dwellin’, just a few, small creases, and we’ll iron them out, no problem’).

  He assured them – with all sincerity – that since they found themselves in ‘a rather urgent predicament’, a couple of his people would make a start on things by the following Tuesday (‘The kid deserves his own room back, poor bugger. It’s like a fucking paddlin’ pool up here…Look at his face! Just look at him! I think he might be in love with me. What’s your name, kid-o? Fleet? Mum got knocked up in the Motorway Services, did she? Eh? Only kidding! Okay, Dad, we’ll need to bang up some scaffoldin’, straight off, and an absolute, bloody ton of tarpaulin…’).

  Harvey drove a bright red and gold, customised 4x4 Toyota Hi Lux with lifted suspension, imported, 39” Mickey Thompson tyres, an electric winch and PIAA lights, front and back. He took ‘the boys’ for ‘a quick spin’ in it. Elen stood and waited for them, out on the pavement. And she waited. And waited.

  She checked her watch.

  It was a full forty-three minutes until they finally returned home again. As Harvey re-entered the cul-de-sac – and performed a stately lap of honour – he sounded his siren.

  It was a bastardised version of Madonna’s 1986 anti-abortion classic, ‘Papa Don’t Preach’, from the True Blue album.

  ‘Do you remember Chicken Licken?’ Elen whispered, tucking Fleet up for the thi
rd week in a row on the living-room sofa.