Darkmans

by Nicola Barker

‘You’d be quite astonished,’ Pat faux-sniffed, ‘how “modern” Tom can get around a clutch of attractive office girls.’

  ‘Attractive?! That lot?!’ Tom howled. ‘Back me up, Charlie. Most of ‘em are homely enough to stop the clock!’

  ‘Stop the what?!’ Cheryl snorted.

  ‘The last time Tom brought me coffee in bed was when Max was three months old,’ Pat sighed, all misty-eyed, ‘on my twenty-fifth birthday…’ she glanced around the assembled company, ‘and how old is Max now?’

  Tom began wailing.

  ‘No! Seriously! How old is he?’

  ‘Twenty-three?’ Laura took a wild guess.

  ‘Twenty-four!’ Pat struggled to make herself heard over the general commotion. ‘Getting Tom to lift a finger at home…?’ she threw up her free hand, despairingly. ‘It’d be easier to get the Pope to fit a condom.’

  ‘Proper coffee and everything,’ Tom ignored his wife and continued to swank about his office achievements, ‘in the cafetiere…’

  ‘Really?’ Laura looked suitably impressed. ‘Proper coffee? Charlie wouldn’t know one end of a cafetiere from the other.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Charlie snapped, ‘of course I do.’

  ‘No you don’t.’

  ‘It’s a little plastic thing-y with a plunger…’

  Charlie quickly mimed how to use the object in question.

  Laura puckered up her lips, irritably.

  ‘I’m right aren’t I?’

  ‘How old is she?’ Cheryl asked Pat.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The caterer.’

  ‘Old enough to know better,’ Tom grumbled.

  ‘Young enough to teach an old dog new tricks,’ Pat struck back.

  ‘We’ll get a good look at her when she brings out the starter,’ Laura said, reaching for a stuffed, green olive from a nearby bowl, biting one end and inadvertently squirting the stuffing out through the other and straight down the front of her top.

  ‘Oh bugger.’

  She grabbed her napkin and began dabbing.

  ‘Can’t take you anywhere,’ Tom moaned.

  ‘I really should…’ Beede used this brief, domestic interlude to try and start backing towards the door again.

  ‘Don’t be such a party pooper!’ Pat clung tenaciously on to his arm.

  ‘Pull out a pew,’ Tom seconded her, ‘there’s plenty to go around.’

  ‘I’ve already eaten…’ Beede lied, a thin line of perspiration dotting his upper lip.

  ‘That doesn’t matter…’ Pat insisted, ‘it’s just a social thing. We’re one short and I’d be so grateful…’

  ‘To be perfectly frank,’ Beede brusquely informed her, ‘I’ve got a fair bit of paperwork to be getting on with at home…’

  ‘But it’s our Wedding Anniversary,’ Pat gazed at him, pleadingly. ‘Sit down, old boy or I’ll never hear the end of it,’ Tom exhorted.

  ‘If it’s me you’re worried about,’ Cheryl delivered him a frank smile, ‘then I absolutely promise to leave your virtue intact.’

  ‘Well…’ Tom muttered, ‘until she’s finished her second glass…’

  ‘Tom! Stop provoking your sister!’ Pat scolded him, yanking a reluctant Beede forward a step. ‘Cheryl, this is Beede. Beede, this is Cheryl…’

  Cheryl frowned. ‘Bead? As in necklace?’

  ‘No. Beede as in…’ Pat thought for a second. ‘Yes. As in necklace, but without the “a” and with two extra “e”s.’

  ‘So not as in necklace,’ Tom rolled his eyes, long-sufferingly.

  ‘And of course you know Tom,’ Pat continued.

  Beede smiled, curtly.

  ‘Everybody knows Tom,’ Laura exclaimed.

  ‘And the woman with the embarrassing stain down her cleavage…’ Charlie interrupted her.

  ‘That’s Laura, my sister-in-law…’

  Pat paused as Laura waved a genial hello. ‘And Charlie, my brother…’ she cleared her throat, carefully, ‘Laura and Charlie Monkeith.’

  Beede stiffened as he reached out to shake Tom’s hand. ‘But of course…’ he said, nodding sharply, like a tight-arsed but intensely respectful commandant, ‘very pleased to meet you.’

  ‘Beede just did us the great honour of accepting the post of Chairman on the Road Initiative Committee,’ Pat continued, somewhat nervously, ‘for Ryan.’

  Silence

  ‘I must actually…’ Beede gently demurred.

  ‘It’s not embarrassing at all,’ Laura brusquely interrupted him, peering down at her generously proportioned bust and rapidly dabbing again. ‘Look. It’s almost come off.’

  Charlie didn’t look. Instead he pointed towards Beede’s piss-pot.

  ‘Come on a bike, eh?’

  Beede gazed down at his helmet as if it were a curious tumescence which had just that second sprouted from the tips of his fingers.

  ‘Uh…’

  ‘I admire your fortitude, old boy,’ Tom whistled, ‘it’s stinking weather for it.’

  As Tom spoke Pat whisked away Beede’s helmet and then placed her hands on to his shoulders to lift off his waterproofs. Beede started, involuntarily, as if her graceful hands were the clumsy mitts of an arresting officer.

  ‘I’m sorry, Pat,’ he insisted, ‘but I’m afraid I really must…’

  ‘Is it an old one?’ Charlie asked.

  Beede didn’t answer. He was too busy fighting a losing battle to keep hold of his jacket.

  ‘Didn’t you hear it back-fire,’ Tom asked, ‘five minutes ago, pulling up?’

  ‘Charlie here is a car and bike fanatic,’ Pat informed Beede as she neatly folded his jacket over the crook of her arm, ‘he owns that huge Jag’ dealership on the edge of the Orbital Park, just across from the market…’

  Beede nodded, despairingly, half an eye still fixed on the door. ‘Yes. Yes. I’m familiar with the place,’ he murmured.

  Underneath his coat Beede was wearing his white hospital overalls, the bottom half of which were partially obscured by a pair of voluminous, plastic, all-weather trousers.

  The assembled company sat quietly for a moment and quietly assessed his unconventional garb. Beede looked down at himself, mortified.

  ‘Remove your plastic trousers,’ Pat instructed him, ‘and then we can stick your all-weather gear in the laundry to dry off.’

  ‘Drove a Ducatti for over twenty years,’ Charlie fondly reminisced.

  ‘Well you kept it in the garage for twenty years,’ Laura corrected him, ‘gathering a thick layer of dust.’

  ‘That’s simply not true,’ Charlie snapped, ‘I used to love taking it out on the road to follow the Tour de France…’

  ‘You did that once,’ Laura scoffed, ‘the year we got engaged, then came staggering home – after three days, at most – with a dozen septic blisters all over your arse.’

  ‘Beede drives an old Douglas, Charlie,’ Tom quickly stepped in. ‘Makes a racket like a constipated mule on a diet of beans, it does.’

  ‘You’ll probably need to remove your boots first,’ Pat gently encouraged him.

  ‘Uh…’

  Beede glanced down. ‘Yes…’

  He noticed some suspicious-looking brown stains on the carpet behind him. ‘Oh dear…I’m afraid I should’ve…’

  A lean, fine-boned but imperious-seeming woman suddenly appeared in the doorway wearing a pristine serving apron and matching cap. She was holding a grand silver server piled high with tiny rolls. On espying Beede in the act of disrobing, she froze.

  Pat glanced over, unabashedly. ‘Is that the starter already, Emily?

  Because we’ve actually got one extra…’

  ‘So we’re back up to six again?’ Emily enquired, icily.

  ‘Yes we are.’

  Pause

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Is that a problem?’

  Longer pause

  ‘No. But it’ll put the entire first course back by at least half an hour.’

  ‘That’s absolutely
fine, dear,’ Pat beamed at her, ‘just do the best you can.’

  Beede miserably yanked off his boots and his all-weather trousers. He was now a vision of social inappropriateness in head-to-toe dazzling white.

  Emily remained in the doorway, inspecting his attire, blinking rapidly. ‘Are those the rolls?’ Pat asked, grabbing Beede’s boots and his waterproofs.

  ‘Yes they are.’

  ‘Well how about you slide those on to the sideboard and I’ll do the honours while you take Beede’s biking gear and hang it up in the laundry…?’

  Emily opened a disdainful mouth to answer as Pat bustled towards her, but Pat jinked in first. ‘That’s wonderful. You’re an angel. She’s an angel, isn’t she, everybody?’

  No takers

  ‘…and if you could just open an extra bottle of white and stick it in the cooler…Bang the rolls on to the sideboard, dear…that’s right. I’ll deal with those later.’

  Emily slid the rolls on to the sideboard and was then promptly swaddled with Beede’s boots and muddy outerwear.

  ‘Let’s leave the helmet here, shall we?’

  Pat displayed Beede’s dented piss-pot on a highly varnished incidental table next to a beautiful vase brimming with fabulous pink and red imported peonies.

  As Emily left the room she shot Beede a look of compressed rage. Pat had already grabbed the salver of rolls. She held them aloft, on the flat of an upturned palm, and sashayed around the table dispensing them with a pair of matching tongs.

  ‘You’d never guess my lovely wife was once a cocktail waitress…’ Tom sighed (with a look of quiet satisfaction), gently patting her rump as she passed him by.

  ‘Yes you would,’ Laura chided him, ‘just look how beautifully she’s carrying that tray…’

  ‘That’s exactly what he meant, Laura,’ Charlie sniped.

  ‘Pat and I first met when we were working as bunnies,’ Laura informed Beede, ‘in the seventies.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Beede said.

  ‘Yes. Playboy bunnies,’ she dimpled, ‘with wittle white cotton-tails and loooong pink ears…’

  Beede looked horrorstruck.

  ‘I think Beede’s probably already perfectly familiar with the concept of a Playboy bunny, Laura,’ Charlie snarled.

  ‘Beede,’ Pat pointed to an empty place on Cheryl’s left, ‘you squeeze in there, next to Cheryl. That’s right.’

  Beede pulled out a chair and sat down. He removed a large, linen napkin from its silver ring and spread it out with methodical – almost exaggerated – care across his lap.

  Cheryl watched on, intently.

  ‘You have my intense sympathy,’ she murmured, when he was finally done, ‘bright whites can be such bastards to maintain, can’t they?’

  ‘So an old Douglas, eh?’ Charlie returned staunchly to his former subject.

  Beede glanced up, still struggling to process Cheryl’s last comment.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Dragonfly?’

  ‘Uh…The bike? Yes.’

  ‘As a point of interest, how long did that marque actually survive?’

  ‘I believe they ended production in ‘56.’

  Beede took a tiny, brown roll from his bounteous hostess.

  ‘So what’s the grunt?’

  Beede’s brows rose slightly. ‘The engine’s a 348cc horizontally opposed twin cylinder four-stroke.’

  ‘Heavy, is she?’

  ‘365lbs.’

  ‘So top speed…I’m estimating seventy-odd?’

  ‘Seventy-five, at a push.’

  ‘How the hell d’you find parts?’ Tom butted in.

  ‘On the internet, mainly…’ Beede tore his tiny roll in half. ‘There’s a handful of extremely useful dedicated sites.’

  ‘So what do you do, Beede?’ Laura suddenly interjected, plainly still mesmerised by the bright gleam of his uniform.

  Beede placed the two halves of his roll down on to his side-plate. ‘I run the Laundry Department at the Frances Fairfax.’

  ‘The laundry? Really?’ Laura looked astonished.

  Beede nodded.

  ‘Wow…’ Laura continued to look amazed.

  ‘Believe it or not,’ Pat stepped in, leaning over his shoulder and filling one of his glasses with wine and the other with sparkling water, ‘Beede here has actually been awarded the Freedom of the Borough for a lifetime of service to the community. It’s an incredible honour.’

  ‘The Freedom of the Borough?’ Laura parroted.

  ‘Yes,’ Beede muttered, embarrassed, ‘for what it’s worth.’

  ‘The Freedom of the Borough…’ Laura repeated. ‘What’s that mean, exactly?’

  ‘It means he can go anywhere he likes in the town without any kind of restriction,’ Cheryl told her.

  ‘Anywhere at all?’

  ‘Oh God…’

  Charlie shook his head, despairingly.

  ‘Of course…’ Cheryl smiled, ‘his big speciality is turning up – at mealtimes – to demand a free feed.’

  Beede shifted in his seat, uneasily. Laura frowned, as if not entirely convinced.

  ‘There’s an ancient custom,’ Beede volunteered, spontaneously, ‘among certain nomadic desert tribes which demands that whenever you meet a stranger on his travels you’re duty-bound to feed and to water him: however much – or however little – food and water you actually have. It’s a charming – even altruistic – tradition in many respects but entirely based on pragmatism, because – of course – if ever you find yourself in dire need then you can always depend on the kindness of others.’

  Silence

  ‘Apparently they were phenomenal speedway bikes…’ Charlie observed.

  ‘The Dragonfly? Yes.’ Beede nodded. ‘They were.’

  ‘I have several lucrative contracts with the Saudis,’ Tom piped up, ‘and let me tell you, those people really know how to entertain.’

  ‘So what did you actually do,’ Laura asked, ‘to get this Freedom?’

  ‘Did you see the look that woman gave you?’ Cheryl suddenly asked Pat, ‘when you took the rolls off her?’

  ‘What look?’

  Pat seemed bemused.

  ‘What look? You didn’t notice the look?’

  ‘Was there a look?’ Tom asked.

  ‘I’ll say there was.’

  ‘I have a friend who once managed the women’s clothing department in the Marble Arch branch of Marks & Spencer’s,’ Laura told Beede, ‘which is always full of Arabs. And she told me how one of her girls was crouched down – picking up some stock which’d fallen off its hanger – and as she was bent over this Arab came across and just and sat down on her.’

  Silence

  ‘How do you mean?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘He sat down on her back, like she was a chair or…’ Laura frowned, ‘or a pouf.’

  ‘A pouf?’ Cheryl repeated, blankly.

  ‘Yes. Like a little chair without arms. A pouf. Or a footstool.’

  ‘And an Arab man came and sat down on her back?’ Tom repeated, as Emily re-entered the room holding a soup tureen.

  ‘Yes.’

  Silence

  ‘Because apparently in Arabia it’s quite commonplace behaviour. But my friend said she went up to him and she told him – very firmly – that we didn’t treat our shop assistants in that way. Not here in England.’

  Emily began ladling some soup into Tom’s bowl, the corners of her lips tightened into a supercilious smile.

  ‘In all my years of visiting the Middle East,’ Tom mused, picking up his spoon, ‘I’ve never witnessed the kind of behaviour you describe.’ Laura shrugged.

  ‘If I may be so bold…’ Beede said, ‘that story has the slight ring of an urban myth to it.’

  ‘A what?’ Laura asked, as she jinked over to the side to receive her portion.

  ‘An urban myth,’ Beede repeated.

  ‘He means a lie,’ Charlie translated, somewhat unhelpfully. Laura looked horrified. ‘It’s not a lie at all,’ s
he insisted, ‘my friend told me…’

  Her eyes filled with tears.

  Emily served Charlie. Charlie was grinning broadly, apparently utterly delighted by the trouble he’d instigated.

  ‘That’s not actually what it means at all…’ Beede rapidly backtracked.

  ‘Isn’t it, though?’ Cheryl asked.

  ‘No. Urban myths are stories which possibly have some fundamental basis in truth but which become…’ he paused, carefully, ‘exaggerated.’

  ‘Kind of like a game of Chinese Whispers, Laura,’ Pat explained, diplomatically.

  ‘But a Chinese Whisper starts out one way and ends up completely the other,’ Laura reasoned, ‘and my friend actually worked in Marks & Spencer’s. She was there.’

  ‘In Marble Arch. Yes. We know,’ Charlie interrupted.

  Laura turned to him. ‘Alice Wilson told me. You know Alice Wilson. She wouldn’t just lie, would she?’

  ‘Alice Wilson?’ Charlie frowned. ‘Oh Christ. You mean that awful cockney woman who runs the salon?’

  Laura nodded.

  Charlie rolled his eyes. ‘Appalling creature.’

  Laura stared down into her bowl, her mouth tightening.

  ‘I mean what were you thinking,’ Charlie casually fished a prawn out of his soup and popped it into his mouth, ‘idly repeating some stupid story she told you in the salon here, at Pat and Tom’s anniversary dinner?’

  Emily was now poised across Beede’s shoulder with her ladle. ‘I’m sorry…’ Beede suddenly covered his bowl with his hand, ‘but are there prawns in this soup?’

  ‘It’s a spicy Thai seafood broth,’ Emily informed him, in clipped tones.

  ‘It sounds delicious,’ he smiled, grimly, ‘but I’m afraid I’m extremely allergic to prawns.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ Pat said, ‘I wish I’d known that.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Beede smiled, ‘I’ll just eat the roll. The roll’s more than enough.’

  He picked up his roll.

  ‘Emily could always fish the prawns out…’