He paused, ‘And I’ve got you a new car.’
‘Yah?’ Gaffar sounded intrigued. ‘Whas?’
‘It’s a Lada.’
‘Fuck off!’
‘Seriously. It’s a Lada. A Lada Estate. Black. Fat wheels. Crazy suspension. From Jamaica.’
‘Fuck off.’
Kane chuckled, ‘Yup.’
He prepared to hang up, but before he did, ‘And guess what else?’ he said, his smile slowly fading.
‘What?’ Gaffar asked (still pondering the Lada).
‘I just won forty grand on a scratchcard…’
Kane inspected the scratchcard as he spoke, with a scowl.
‘Lucky, huh?’
Maude had approximately 150 trees still to do. She was exhausted, and she had a painful splinter in her finger, but she kept on hacking away at the collars. She was determined to get the job done, come hell or high water.
‘Hello again.’
She glanced up. It was Kane. He was leaning out of a black Lada.
‘What are you doing back here?’ she growled.
‘I’m looking for my friend,’ Kane said. ‘He’s short, dark, Kurdish – doesn’t speak much English…’
Maude shook her head.
‘He was pushing a scooter. He said he’d be waiting for me down at the roundabout. I found the scooter dumped by the road there, but he’d vanished, so I’m just driving the whole circuit in the vain hope…’
Maude was inspecting her finger. She seemed upset.
‘It’s been crazy around here,’ she observed.
‘There was a huge fire on the estate, apparently,’ Kane said. ‘You can see the plume of smoke for miles…’
‘There was a crash on the slip road,’ Maude interrupted him, ‘in almost the exact spot where you hit me, earlier. It was a ten-car pile-up. This fire engine slammed into the back of…’
‘Did you see it?’
‘No. But I heard it. I ran down there. There was a pregnant woman. She was trapped inside her car. She was panicking. She thought she was losing her baby. I had to stand there and wait with her. Hold her hand. All these other people around me were crying out for help, bleeding, staggering from their vehicles…’
‘Jesus.’
Kane sprang from the Lada. ‘What on earth are you still doing here? You must be in shock. Get into the car. Let me drive you home…’
‘And I’ve got this…this stupid…’ Maude pointed, enraged ‘…this splinter in my finger…’
She yanked off her glove.
Kane drew in closer. He gently took her hand. ‘That isn’t actually too bad,’ he told her, ‘I can probably just…‘
He squeezed the splinter – hard – under his thumbnail.
‘Owwww!’ she bellowed.
He jerked back, alarmed.
‘I already tried that,’ she whimpered, ‘I need a pin to dig it out with, but I don’t…’
‘Hold on a second…’ Kane smiled. He removed the pink charity ribbon from his lapel.
‘I have one,’ he said, showing it to her.
She inspected the pin, mollified.
‘What’s that special word the Arabs always use…?’ Kane murmured, taking hold of her hand again, then gently applying the pin to her fingertip. He pushed it in, very carefully, and five seconds later, the splinter was out.
‘There you go,’ he said, brushing it on to his own fingertip. ‘See? It was only very tiny…’
‘Thanks.’
She smiled up at him. ‘That didn’t hurt at all.’
Kane placed the pink ribbon against his lapel and tried to pin it back into place again, but as he applied pressure to it, the pin – for no reason that he could fathom – suddenly snapped in half. He grimaced, hung the ribbon over his button and dropped the two tiny fragments into the grass.
Maude, meanwhile, had returned to her task.
‘God, you’re tenacious,’ he said, almost admiringly.
She didn’t respond.
‘Not too many left now,’ he continued, peering down along the embankment.
‘You’d better head off and find your friend,’ she suggested.
‘Yeah.’
Kane turned to go. He took a couple of steps towards the car, then he paused and turned back again. ‘Let me do the last few,’ he said.
‘I’m fine,’ she insisted.
‘No, go on. I’d be happy to…’ he paused. ‘I’d like to.’
He put out his hand for the Stanley knife.
‘It’s pretty blunt,’ she warned him.
Kane took the knife, bent over, and removed five collars in quick succession.
‘Easy,’ he said.
She snorted.
‘So you’re a student?’ he asked.
‘Yeah.’
He removed another three collars.
‘What of?’
‘English, Economics and Political Theory, although I’m pretty crap on the financial side of things…’
‘And what do you plan to do with those?’
‘You mean when I graduate?’ She shrugged. ‘Become a teacher, I suppose.’
Kane removed a further two collars.
‘So what do you do?’ she wondered.
‘Huh?’ he scowled. ‘How d’you mean?’
‘Well I’ve seen you in the French Connection…’
She gave him a significant look.
‘Oh…’ Kane slowly straightened up. ‘Uh…’
He gave his response some careful consideration. ‘Well, I suppose I’m what you might call a vagabond,’ he answered finally.
Maude glanced over at him, mystified.
‘A kind of…of medical vagabond,’ he expanded, before casually delivering her his most disarming smile.
The Darkmans lay in wait. He knew it would only be a matter of time before one of the two men came. Gaffar was the first to arrive. He was limping. He’d developed a blister on his heel from his new, leather boots. He was searching for the bird, but all he found was a stray feather by the edge of the road.
As he bent down to inspect it Gaffar noticed that there were shards of broken glass everywhere. And traces of blood. And there was corn on the tarmac – tiny, crushed ears of corn.
He approached the feather with caution (he had no intention of picking it up), but then he spotted The Darkmans – from the corner of his eye – moving stealthily towards it.
‘No,’ Gaffar said firmly, reaching down and grabbing it for himself, ‘it’s mine.’
He clutched the feather, tightly, in his hand. He claimed it as his own.
He annexed it.
The Darkmans prowled around him, foiled, enraged, fascinated. And as The Darkmans prowled, Gaffar’s mind was suddenly transported back to Hasankeyf. He was just a boy, sitting by the banks of the Tigris River, dreaming of the cool caves, of the magnificent obelisk, of the old, stone archway. Then – without warning – everything was submerged. Gaffar saw himself drowning. He saw his life slowly washing away from him (his family, his dreams, his home, even his tongue).
He felt a moment’s sharp anxiety – a sense of suffocating panic – but then he quickly turned away from it. He kicked hard with his feet and swam up to the surface. He drew a long, deep breath –
Haaaaaaah!
The Darkmans crouched down and appraised Gaffar intently. He held out his hand for the feather. He pretended to be sad. He pretended to be broken. He dabbed at his eyes. He shivered like a kicked puppy.
Nope. Gaffar shook his head. But as he watched The Darkmans’ pathetic act, Gaffar’s mind was suddenly transported back to Diyarbakir; the Town of the Black Walls. And he was standing, barefoot, in the dirt, his hands clenched into fists. And he was fighting a losing battle to keep his insides in and the outside out. Then, half-way through the battle, he turned, with a gasp (the taste of blood on his lips), and he saw his poor mother standing behind him, on the sidelines: abandoned, disappointed, alone.
Gaffar winced. He felt a moment of profound self-loath
ing, but then he sprang forward and he delivered it a swift, sharp upper-cut. He kicked it. He winded it. He hurled it down.
The Darkmans slowly rose to his feet. He scratched his chin, thoughtfully. Then he pulled himself up to his full height, placed his hands on to his hips, opened his mouth and demanded the feather. His voice crashed through the air like rolling thunder.
Gaffar tipped his head and he listened. And as he listened, his mind was suddenly transported back to a place that he’d never seen before; a place of his father’s ancestors, a place called Sinjar. He saw his people farming in peace there. He saw them caring for their livestock, delivering their lambs, waiting patiently for the summer rains. He saw them praying. He saw white turbans, clean robes and joyous devotion. He smelled incense burning. It was a lovely vision, but it quickly faded. Then everything was overturned. He saw chaos, he saw movement, he saw poverty, he saw persecution, and in the midst of all of this he saw his father, alone, in the Sheikhallah Bazaar. He saw the light. He saw the dream. He saw the whale. He saw the lie.
Gaffar scowled. He felt a moment of despair, of profound desolation, but instead of giving in to it, he shoved his hand into his pocket and he felt for his five die. He rattled them in his palm. He removed them from his pocket and showed them to The Darkmans, proudly –
See?
I make my own history
The Darkmans pricked up his ears. He stood to attention. He seemed intrigued, even delighted. He took a small, halting step forward.
Gaffar watched The Darkmans’ uncertain approach through bright yet slightly hooded eyes. He chucked quietly to himself, and the chuckle echoed down deep inside of him (it reverberated against the walls of that bottomless well within, that place where the women came to gossip, where the children played, where the mythical peacock loved to perch).
Then, without further ado, Gaffar smiled, extended a gracious hand, and with the legendary ease and beneficence for which his ancient tribe were duly famed, he cordially invited The Darkmans to a game. He even went so far as to promise him the first throw.
Also by Nicola Barker
Love Your Enemies
Reversed Forecast
Small Holdings
Heading Inland
Wide Open
Five Miles from Outer Hope
Behindlings
Clear
Praise
‘A whirligig modern version of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair… this flowing, discursive storytelling washes along like the Thames itself, embracing everything’
Michèle Roberts, Financial Times
‘This is the work of a very fine storyteller indeed, one who has already won prizes for her fiction and doubtless will go on to win more’
The Times
‘Highly original…I whipped through its more than 800 pages with attention unbroken. The very night I finished it, it showed up in my dreams’
Literary Review
‘Only David Lynch could do justice to a celluloid version of its surreal humour, its gathering darkness and its beautiful, mystifying strangeness’
Scotland on Sunday
‘Hilarious and erudite, spooky and unconventional, Darkmans is a dazzling achievement’
Washington Post
‘A novel like no other – hilarious, bizarre, and possibly mind-altering’
Entertainment Weekly
‘History, in this novel’s presentation, isn’t a smoothly flowing river; it’s clogged, jammed, with all sorts of debris that floats up at unexpected moments. For Barker, the past is most vibrantly – and visibly – alive in language’
Los Angeles Times Book Review
Copyright
Harper Perennial
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Visit our authors’ blog at www.fifthestate.co.uk
This edition published by Harper Perennial 2008
FIRST EDITION
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2007
Copyright © Nicola Barker 2007
Nicola Barker asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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EPub Edition © MARCH 2010 ISBN: 978-0-007-37276-8
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