Darkmans

by Nicola Barker

  ‘Here’s the context,’ Dory said, determined to persuade him, ‘when I was a boy my father would constantly go on at me about something he referred to as “The Witness”. The Witness – as my father expressed it – was this inner voice, this calm, authoritative voice…’ he paused, frowning. ‘It’s quite difficult to express – to…to explain – just off the top of my head…but in the early chapters of Richard Rosen’s book he also refers to something which he calls “The Witness”, and from what I can tell – and I find this oddly comforting, somehow, strangely uplifting, even – Rosen’s Witness is pretty much identical – conceptually – to my father’s.’

  He gazed at Beede, intently, as if awaiting a response.

  ‘So there’s this linguistic connection,’ Beede mused, ‘to some arcane practice from your childhood…?’

  ‘No. Yes. I mean it transpires,’ Dory continued (refusing to let Beede burst his bubble), ‘that The Witness actually has its earliest origins in Pranayama. In the yoga of breath. Although in Sanscrit I believe the word they generally use is Sakshin…’

  ‘I see,’ Beede said, blankly rotating his coffee carton.

  ‘It almost feels like a…I mean it sounds silly when I say it out loud, but it’s almost like a kind of…’

  He lifted his hands.

  ‘Sign?’ Beede filled in, dryly.

  Dory shrugged, apologetically.

  Beede gazed back at him, warily. ‘So did you actually ask Elen…’ he began.

  ‘Rosen says that we can only get into contact with our Witness,’ Dory plodded on, regardless, ‘by divorcing ourselves from our everyday consciousness. By turning away from it. What generally happens is that over time, the…now how does he describe it?…the babbling brook of this consciousness – which basically consists of all our thoughts, our feelings, our passing desires, our physical and sexual impulses – slowly begins to overwhelm – or drown out – our inner or real sense of self, to the extent that we often find ourselves at a point where we actually believe that this everyday consciousness – or citta – is our real self. But the truth is that these momentary thoughts and impulses don’t describe who we are at all. Quite the opposite. They actively limit it. And if we allow ourselves to identify too strongly with them then it results in what the yogis like to call duhkha – a kind of profound confusion, a feeling of deep misery…’

  Dory leaned forward and lifted his journal from the air vent. As he lifted it, the pages flapped violently, like the wings of an injured bird. He immediately calmed the bird with a soft cooing sound and then drew it towards him, supporting it, gently, in both hands. He caressed its soft chest feathers with a tiny rotation of his thumbs, then spread out its wings – like a dark fan – with his other fingers. Beede blinked.

  Dory had opened the journal and was scanning one of his early entries. ‘This is my journal,’ he explained, ‘Rosen insists that you keep one when you embark on the journey.’

  ‘So how long is it now?’ Beede asked.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘How long have you been…’ Beede faltered on the word ‘journeying’, ‘How long have you been practising now, in total?’

  ‘Uh…Two months. And I’m not practising, as such, not completely. It takes about a year to learn all the basics.’

  ‘And have you been feeling better for it?’ Beede wondered.

  ‘Yes.’

  Dory was unequivocal.

  ‘Really?’ Beede seemed unconvinced. ‘Significantly better?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘During the eight or so weeks you’ve been practising, has everything…?’

  ‘Better?’ Dory scowled. ‘Yes…Well, no…’

  ‘Correct me if I’m wrong,’ Beede persisted (remembering what Elen had confessed to him, in the laundry, several days before), ‘but I was under the impression that things had grown quite difficult over the past few months, that things might even have grown worse in some regards, less controlled…’

  ‘Sorry?’ Dory seemed confused. ‘When did I tell you that?’

  As he spoke he slapped the book shut. Beede watched his hands closely, sensing the bird squatting down, readying itself, tensing itself, as if intending to take flight. Dory was scowling. ‘Over the past few months or so? I don’t know…I thought…’ His eyes moved around the car, restlessly, then focussed in on the dashboard clock.

  ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘it’s late…I should’ve been…’ He inspected his wrist-watch. ‘I should’ve been well on my way to Charing by now…’

  Beede stared at him, perplexedly, for a couple of seconds. ‘Sorry…’ Dory apologised, yanking down his seat-belt and fastening it.

  ‘Don’t apologise…’ Beede grabbed his gloves and reached for the door handle, trying not to upset his carton of coffee.

  ‘Ring me,’ Dory said, ‘and next time let’s try and make it all a little less ad-hoc…’

  ‘Now you come to mention it,’ Beede told him, climbing out of the car, ‘I’ve actually arranged some time off from work. I thought we might…’

  ‘Great. Fantastic.’

  Dory cut him short, leaning forward, pumping the clutch, reaching one hand for the gears and the other for the ignition. Beede continued to hold the door ajar as the engine roared into life.

  ‘I will phone you,’ he promised.

  ‘You do that.’

  Dory checked his mirror, then glanced over his shoulder. Beede slammed the door shut and took a step back.

  Beede.

  Beede.

  He blinked. Dory had wound down the passenger window and was addressing him through it.

  ‘Yes? Sorry?’

  He inclined his head, slightly.

  ‘I meant to tell you,’ Dory shouted, over the din of the engine, ‘I met your son.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  Beede leaned down still further.

  ‘Kane. Your son. I saw him. I met him.’

  ‘Kane?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You saw…?’

  ‘Yes. He came to my house. This afternoon.’

  Beede looked stunned. ‘Kane came to your house? Are you sure?’

  ‘He said he had an appointment. With Elen. Although she certainly hadn’t mentioned it. He claimed it was for his foot. For a verruca. He didn’t introduce himself, but I just…I sensed it was him. Call it…’ he shrugged, ‘call it instinct. In fact I recognised his voice of all things. His accent. You know…drawling, very distinctive, slightly American…’

  Beede opened his mouth as if to speak, but he said nothing. His mind was racing.

  ‘You look very different,’ Dory said.

  ‘How?’ Beede put a hand to his face, panicked.

  ‘Not you. You and Kane. Different from each other.’

  ‘Oh. Yes…’ Beede nodded, distractedly, ‘I suppose we are very different.’

  ‘Phone me.’

  Dory smiled. He waved. He wound the passenger window back up.

  He pulled off, smoothly.

  Beede stared after the car, his expression unreadable.

  A white van sounded its horn. He started. He turned. The van’s driver gesticulated, indignantly, as he slowly drew past him. Beede stared down at himself, vacantly. How long had he been standing there?

  He noticed – with small grimace – that he was still holding the coffee carton. He flared his nostrils, shoved out his arm, tipped his hand, and poured the remaining liquid, angrily – almost contemptously – down on to the tarmac. Then he crushed the carton in his hands, paused, and then popped it – ever heedful of the environment – into his coat pocket.

  ‘Lackwitted…?’ he muttered, heading for the kerb, scowling, ‘lack-witted? Where the hell’d he root up that particular configuration? Dim-witted, yes. Dim-witted I could almost accept – almost. But lack?’

  It was a photograph; a picture of Kane, as a baby, sitting in a small, suburban garden, crammed into a plastic washing-up bowl (wearing a disarmingly sensorious – almost Churchillian – expres
sion), totally naked but for a large, white hanky which had been knotted at each corner and plopped down, rather jauntily, on to his head.

  Behind him sprawled a gorgeous, curly-haired blonde on a smart, plaid blanket, wearing a skimpy pair of purple, suede hot-pants, some flip-flops, a tie-dye vest and a huge-brimmed straw hat. She’d just made a daisy-chain and was hanging it – with a huge smile – around the baby’s neck.

  ‘So where the fuck d’you unearth the Goth?’ Kane muttered, taking a swig of his beer and peering after her, suspiciously, as she sauntered off – in a girlish swirl of heels and black netting – towards the bathroom.

  Gaffar didn’t answer. He was sifting through a dusty, old shoebox full of photographs which Kane had removed (several hours earlier – he wasn’t entirely sure why) from the top of his wardrobe.

  ‘Leave those alone, will you?’ Kane snapped. He was in a filthy mood. And nothing seemed able to lift it.

  Gaffar quietly ignored him and continued sifting.

  ‘Is something burning in the oven?’ Kane asked, sniffing. The air was rich with the mingling scents of lamb and tomato and mint and cinnamon.

  Gaffar shook his head. ‘Is Kurdish meatball,’ he said. ‘Slow cook.’

  ‘Did you ask Beede’s permission to use his kitchen?’

  Gaffar shrugged, insouciant (he hadn’t).

  ‘She’s an incorrigible kleptomaniac,’ Kane grumbled, peeling at the corner of his beer, label, ‘did you know that?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘A thief. You literally can’t take your eyes off her.’

  ‘Thief?’

  Gaffar looked up, briefly, then glanced down again. He was now staring at a photograph in which a younger Daniel Beede – with slightly longer hair, the same glasses but an entirely different – you might almost say affable – demeanour – graciously received some kind of special plaque at a large, social occasion from a gentleman wearing unthinkable quantities of gold jewellery and a three-tiered hat.

  ‘Who this?’ Gaffar asked, pointing to Ashford’s then-Mayor.

  ‘Not just a normal kind of thief – because that’d be fine, I mean she’s a Broad, after all – but she’ll literally steal anything. It’s actually an illness. A compulsion.’

  He leaned across the sofa and began feeling around inside the pockets of Geraldine’s coat.

  Gaffar continued to stare at the photograph, frowning. ‘There’s a strange kind of…of luminosity. It’s odd, but I’ve only ever observed this quality once before, in pictures of my own father, shortly after he left the Sheikhallah Bazaar, embraced Islam and journeyed to Silopi – the town of my birth…’ He held the shot up for Kane’s perusal: ‘When exactly was this taken? Eh? Kane?’

  Kane didn’t bother looking up, so he turned the picture over and inspected the back (as he inspected, Kane removed a small, metal kidney tray from Geraldine’s pocket of the type generally used in a hospital to deposit swabs or samples in). The photo wasn’t dated. Gaffar sucked on his tongue, irritated. He was suddenly fascinated by this luminescent Beede.

  ‘Well, well, well…’ Kane chuckled, cupping his hands together and rattling four, small dice in them. Gaffar’s eyes shot up, attracted by their familiar sound. He tapped, naively, at his jacket pocket, removed one, lonely die, gazed at it, appalled, then mutely held out his hand for the others. Kane passed them over and then delved back into the coat again…

  Six used scratchcards.

  ‘Are these yours?’ Kane asked.

  Gaffar shook his head.

  ‘Good,’ Kane grumbled, ‘I hate those fucking things…’

  He tried Geraldine’s other pocket. ‘A-ha!’

  He withdrew Gaffar’s set of house keys and cheerfully jangled them at him. ‘The mystery is finally solved…’

  ‘That evil vixen!’ Gaffar exclaimed. ‘She must’ve ransacked my pockets when we were riding on the scooter.’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Damn!’ Gaffar looked disappointed. ‘So that’s the reason why her hands were crawling everywhere.’

  Kane dug around some more. He gingerly removed the bottom half of an old pair of dentures.

  ‘Are those hers?’ Gaffar asked, shaking his head, horrified.

  Next up, a book. A paperback. Kane stared at it for a moment. ‘Jesus. How’d she get a hold of this? It’s Beede’s. He dropped it, the other day, in the restaurant, and I picked it up…’

  He inspected the front cover. There was something slightly unusual about it. Then he realised – no author’s name. He turned to the back.

  ‘Cony-Catchers and Bawdy Baskets,’ he read out, somewhat haltingly, ‘concerns the world of patriarchs, palliards and priggers of prancers, of autem morts and walking morts, of fraters, abraham men and rufflers – the elaborate, criminal anti-society of Elizabethan England…’

  ‘Hang on…’ he stared up at Gaffar, blankly.

  ‘Huh?’

  Gaffar wasn’t paying attention. Kane slowly shook his head, frowning.

  ‘For a moment back there – for a split second, as I read – I suddenly…it just…I dunno – it all made perfect sense…’

  He opened the text, perplexedly, to where Beede had finally quit reading during their random meeting at the French Connection (the corner had been carefully turned at page 103). Here Kane’s eye alighted on the sub-heading: ‘Priggers of Prancers’ and the following sentence: ‘A prigger of prancers be horse stealers; for to prig signifieth in their language to steal, and a prancer is a horse…’

  He re-read this sentence.

  ‘A prigger of prancers be horse stealers; for to prig…’

  ‘I already knew that,’ he murmured.

  ‘Beede knew of this rug,’ Gaffar joined in, shuffling, distractedly, through some of the other photographs (in one there was an image of Beede, at ease, in full, white, Marine regalia. In another, a four-year-old Kane was snuggled up asleep in his pushchair with the woman from the previous picture crouched down behind him, grimacing theatrically as she held on to a rapidly melting ice cream. In a third, a ten-year-old Kane was gamely pushing the same woman around in a wheelchair. The woman was now totally transformed, but smiling).

  ‘What?!’

  Kane was gazing up at him, shocked. ‘How could he tell? That burn had all-but disappeared. Jesus wept, the man’s like some kind of pneumatic hound…’

  Gaffar stared at him, blankly.

  ‘Did you let it slip?’

  ‘Me?!’ Gaffar looked hurt.

  ‘Was he furious?’

  ‘No. Was fine. We laugh. He thought was big…uh…joke.’

  ‘A joke?’ Kane didn’t look convinced.

  ‘Sure. Ha ha.’

  Kane glanced down at the book again, opening the text, randomly, and finding himself on page 57 in a chapter entitled: ‘A Manifest Detection of Dice Play’. There, placed neatly between the folds of the pages, was a small, white card, a business card: Petaborough Restorations, he read. No address, just a number. He inspected the code. Was that Appledore? Tenterden?

  ‘Petaborough Restorations,’ he murmured, ‘P.B.R.’

  P.B.R.?

  It rang a distant bell.

  P.B.R.?

  His mind turned back to a day or so before, when he’d been rummaging through Beede’s old cheque stubs, struggling to decipher his impenetrable short-hand. P.B.R. He was pretty sure – no, certain – that he’d encountered these three letters, and repeatedly, somewhere.

  He peered down at the book. A section of print had been heavily underlined towards the bottom of the page: ‘At the gentleman’s next returning to the house, the damsel dallied so long with the chain, sometimes putting it about her neck, and sometimes about his, that in the end she foisted the copper chain in the other’s place, and thereby robbed him of better than forty pounds.’

  ?

  Kane shut the book and inspected the cover. It consisted of a slightly yellowed detail from a sixteenth-century painting in which several gentlemen could be seen hunched over a table pl
aying cards. The table was liberally sprinkled in gold coins. The only hand on display (to the viewer, at least) was one held to the fore of the detail where a heavily beringed gentleman clutched on to a Jack. He looked closer. The Jack of Hearts; and a blond, plump, slightly dissolute-seeming Jack, at that.

  ‘Jack of Hearts,’ Kane murmured.

  He blinked.

  Eh?!

  He opened the book to page 103 again. ‘A prigger of prancers,’ he read. He shut his eyes for a moment. He saw a man, in yellow, astride a horse –

  Holy fuck!

  His eyes flew open.

  The toilet flushed. He leaned sideways and tipped the kidney-shaped tray and the teeth back into Geraldine’s coat pocket. He shoved the book down his side of the sofa.

  ‘You’re not gonna confront her?’ Gaffar asked loudly, pointing indignantly.

  ‘Christ no. It’s a sickness,’ Kane hushed him, ‘it’s not vindictive. It’s pathetic. She can’t control it.’

  Geraldine re-emerged from the bathroom and sailed back into their orbit, quite the ship of state; magnificently serene, blissfully unaware.

  ‘Shit. I’m suddenly really hungry…’ Kane exclaimed, clutching on to his stomach, as if at once panicked and delighted by this sudden, very real, very powerful sense of appetite.

  SEVEN

  In Beede’s dream he was hurling himself – at breakneck speed – up a steep, spiral staircase. The staircase was built of stone and it was dimly lit. As he climbed he felt panicked, angry – caught in the grip of some kind of emotional frenzy – but still astonishingly vigorous. So much stronger – inside, out – than normal. So much lighter. His limbs – legs, arms, chest – far more obliging, more supple, more resilient…