Darkmans

And nothing – nothing – had felt the same, afterwards. Nothing had felt comfortable. Nothing fitted. A full fifteen years had passed, and yet – and at complete variance with the cliché – for Beede time had been anything but a great healer.

Progress, modernity (all now dirty words in Beede’s vocabulary) had kicked him squarely in the balls. I mean he hadn’t asked for much, had he? He’d sacrificed the Spider Orchid, hadn’t he? A familiar geography? He’d only wanted, out of respect, to salvage…to salvage…

What?

A semblance of what had been? Or was it just a question of…was it just a matter of…of form? Something as silly and apparently insignificant as…as good manners?

There had been one too many compromises. He knew that much for certain. The buck had needed to stop and it never had. It’d never stopped. So Beede had put on his own brakes and he had stopped. The compromise culture became his anathema. He had shed his former skin (Mr Moderate, Mr Handy, Mr Reasonable) and had blossomed into an absolutist. But on his own terms. And in the daintiest of ways. And very quietly –

Shhh!

Oh no, no, no, the war wasn’t over –

Shhh!

Beede was still fighting (mainly in whispers), it was just that – by and large – they were battles that nobody else knew about. Only Beede. Only he knew. But it was a hard campaign; a fierce, long, difficult campaign. And as with all major military strategies, there were gains and there were losses.

Beede was now sixty-one years of age, and he was his own walking wounded. He was a shadow of his former self. His past idealism had deserted him. And somehow – along the way – he had lost interest in almost everything (in work, in family), but he had maintained an interest in one thing: he had maintained an interest in that old mill.

He had become a detective. A bloodhound. He had sniffed out clues. He had discovered things; stories, alibis, weaknesses; inconsistencies. He had weighed up the facts and drawn his conclusions. But he had bided his time (time was the one thing he had plenty of – no rush; that was the modern disease – no need to rush).

Then finally (at last) he had apportioned blame. With no apparent emotion, he had put names to faces (hunting, finding, assessing, gauging). And like Death he had lifted his scythe, and had kept it lifted; waiting for his own judgement to fall; holding his breath – like an ancient yogi or a Pacific pearl diver; like the still before the storm, like a suspended wave: freeze-framed, poised. He held and he held. He even (and this was the wonderful, the crazy, the hideous part) found a terrible equilibrium in holding.

Beede was the vengeful tsunami of history.

But even the venerable could not hold indefinitely.

‘You know what?’ Kane suddenly spoke, as if waking from a dream. ‘I’d like that.’

Beede didn’t stir from his book.

‘I’d actually like it if you drew me a picture. Do you have a pencil?’

Kane was twenty-six years old and magnificently quiescent. He was a floater; as buoyant and slippery as a dinghy set adrift on a choppy sea. He was loose and unapologetically light-weight (being light-weight was the only thing he ever really took seriously). He was so light-weight, in fact, that sometimes (when the wind gusted his way) he might fly into total indolence and do nothing for three whole days but read sci-fi, devour fried onion rings and drink tequilla in front of a muted-out backdrop of MTV.

Kane knew what he liked (knowing what you liked was, he felt, one of the most important characteristics of a modern life well lived). He knew what he wanted and, better yet, what he needed. He was easy as a greased nipple (and pretty much as moral). He was tall (6' 3", on a good day), a mousy blond, rubber-faced, blue-eyed, with a full, cruel mouth. Almost handsome. He dressed without any particular kind of distinction. Slightly scruffy. Tending towards plumpness, but still too young for the fat to have taken any kind of permanent hold on him. He had a slight American accent. As a kid he’d lived for seven years with his mother in the Arizona desert and had opted to keep the vocal cadences of that region as a souvenir.

‘Come to think of it, I believe I may actually…’

Kane busily inspected his own trouser pockets, then swore under his breath, sat up and glanced around him. A waitress was carrying a tray of clean glasses from somewhere to somewhere else. ‘Excuse me…’ Kane waved at her, ‘would you happen to have a pencil on you?’

The waitress walked over. She was young and pretty with a mass of short, unruly blonde hair pinned back from her neat forehead by a series of precarious-looking, brightly coloured kirby grips. ‘I might have one in my…uh…’

She slid the tray of glasses on to the table. Kane helpfully rearranged his large Pepsi and his cherry danish (currently untouched) to make room for it. Maude (the strangely old-fashioned name was emblazoned on her badge) smiled her thanks and slid her hand into the pocket of her apron. She removed a tiny pencil stub.

‘It’s very small,’ she said.

Kane took the pencil and inspected it. It was minuscule.

‘It’s an HB,’ he said, carefully reading its chewed tip, then glancing over at Beede. ‘Is an HB okay? Is it soft enough?’

Beede did not look up.

Kane turned back to the waitress, who was just preparing to grapple with the tray of glasses again.

‘Before you pick that up, Maude,’ Kane said, balancing his cigarette on the edge of his plate, ‘you wouldn’t happen to have a piece of paper somewhere, would you?’

‘Uh…’

The waitress pushed her hand back into her apron and removed her notepad. She bit her lip. ‘I have a pad but I’m not really…’

Kane put out his hand and took the pad from her. He flipped though it.

‘The paper’s kind of thin,’ he said. ‘What I’m actually looking for is some sort of…’

He mused for a moment. ‘Like an artist’s pad. Like a Daler pad. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that brand name before? It’s like an art brand…’

The waitress shook her head. A kirby grip flew off. She quickly bent down and grabbed it.

‘Oh. Well that’s a shame…’

The waitress straightened up again, clutching the grip.

Kane grinned at her. It was an appealing grin. Her cheeks reddened. ‘Here…’ Kane said, ‘let me…’

He leaned forward, removed the kirby grip from her grasp, popped it expertly open, beckoned her to lean down towards him, then applied it, carefully, to a loose section of her fringe.

‘There…’

He drew back and casually appraised his handiwork. ‘Good as new.’

‘Thanks.’ She slowly straightened up again. She looked befuddled. Kane took a quick drag on his cigarette. The waitress – observing this breach – laced her fingers together and frowned slightly (as if sternly reacquainting her girlish self with all the basic rules of restaurant etiquette). ‘Um…I’m afraid you’re not really…’ she muttered, peeking nervously over her shoulder.

‘What?’

Kane gazed at her. His blue eyes held hers, boldly. ‘What?’

She winced. ‘Smoke…you’re not really meant to…not in the restaurant.’

‘Oh…yeah,’ Kane nodded emphatically, ‘I know that.’

She nodded herself, in automatic response, then grew uncertain again. He passed her the pad. She took it and slid it into her apron. ‘Can I hold on to this pencil?’ Kane asked, suspending it, in its entirety, between his first finger and his thumb. ‘As a keepsake?’

The waitress shot an anxious, side-long glance towards Beede (still reading). ‘Of course,’ she said.

She grabbed her tray again.

‘Thank you,’ Kane murmured, ‘that’s very generous. You’ve been really…’ he paused, weighing her up, appreciatively ‘…sweet.’ The waitress – plainly disconcerted by Kane’s intense scrutiny – took a rapid step away from him, managing, in the process, to incline her tray slightly. The glasses slid around a little. She paused, with a gasp, and clumsily readjusted her grip.

‘Bye then,’ Kane said (not even a suggestion of laughter in his voice). She glanced up, thoroughly flustered. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘of course. Thank you. Bye…’

Then she ducked her head down, grimacing, and fled.

Beede continued reading. It was as if the entire episode with the waitress had completely eluded him.

Kane gently placed the pencil next to Beede’s coffee cup, then picked up his danish and took a large bite of it. He winced as his tooth hit down hard on a stray cherry stone.

‘Shit.’

He spat the offending mouthful into a napkin – silently denouncing all foodstuffs of a natural origin – then carefully explored the afflicted tooth with his tongue. While he did so, he gazed idly over towards the large picture window to his right, and out into the half-empty car park beyond.

‘Expecting someone?’ Beede asked, quick as a shot.

Kane took a second (rather more cautious) bite of the danish. ‘Yup,’ he said, unabashedly, ‘Anthony Shilling.’

‘What?!’

Beede glanced up as he processed this name, a series of conflicting expressions hurtling across his face.

‘I thought you knew,’ Kane said (eyebrows slightly raised), still chewing.

‘How would I know?’ Beede snapped, slapping down his book.

‘Because you’re here,’ Kane said, ‘and why else would you be? It’s miles away from anywhere you’d ever normally go, and it’s a shithole.’

‘I come here often,’ Beede countered. ‘I like it. It’s convenient for work.’

‘That’s just a silly lie,’ Kane sighed, evincing zero tolerance for Beede’s dissembling.

‘Strange as this may seem,’ Beede hissed, ‘I’m actually in no particular hurry to get caught up in some sordid little situation between you and one of my senior work colleagues…’

‘Well that’s a shame,’ Kane said, casually picking up his cigarette again, ‘because that’s exactly what’s about to happen.’

Beede leaned down and grabbed a hold of his small, khaki workbag – as though intending to make a dash for it – but then he didn’t actually move. Something (in turn) held him.

Kane frowned. ‘Beede, why the fuck are you here?’ he asked again, now almost sympathetically.

‘They make a good coffee,’ Beede lied, dropping the bag again.

‘Fuck off. The coffee is heinous,’ Kane said. ‘And just look at you,’ he added, ‘you’re crapping yourself. You hate this place. The piped music is making you nauseous. Your knee is jogging up and down under the table so hard you’re knocking all the bubbles out of my Pepsi.’

Beede’s knee instantly stopped its jogging.

Kane took a quick swig of the imperilled beverage (it was still surprisingly fizzy), and as he placed the glass back down again, it suddenly dawned on him – the way all new things dawned on him: slowly, and with a tiny, mischievous jolt – how unbelievably guarded his father seemed –

Beede?

Hiding something?

His mind reeled back a way, then forwards again –

Hmmn

Beede. This rock. This monolith. This man-mountain. This closed book. This locked door. This shut-down thing.

For once he actually seemed…almost…well, almost cagey. Anxious. Wary. Kane stared harder. This was certainly a first. This was definitely a novelty. My God. Yes. Even in his littlest movements (now he came to think of it): knocking his disposable carton of creamer against the lip of his coffee cup (a tiny splash landing on the spotless nail of his thumb); kicking his bag; picking up his book; fumbling as he turned over the corner of a page, then unfolding it and jumpily pretending to recommence with his reading.

Kane rolled his cigarette around speculatively between his fingers. Beede glanced up for a moment, met Kane’s gaze, shifted his focus off sideways – in the general direction of the entrance (which was not actually visible from where they were seated) – and then looked straight down again.

Now that was odd. Kane frowned. Beede uncertain? Furtive? To actively break his gaze in that way?

What?!

Unheard of! Beede was the original architect of the unflinching stare. Beede’s stare was so steady he could make an owl crave Optrex. Beede could happily unrapt a raptor. And he’d done some pretty nifty groundwork over the years in the Guilt Trip arena (trip? How about a gruelling two-month sabbatical in the parched, ancient Persian city of Firuzabad? And he’d do your packing. And he’d book your hotel. And it’d be miles from the airport. And there’d be no fucking air conditioning). Beede was the hair shirt in human form.

Kane took another swig of his Pepsi –

Okay –

But how huge is this?

He couldn’t honestly tell if it was merely the small things, or if the big things were now also subtly implicated in what he was currently (and so joyously) perceiving as a potentially wholesale situation of emotional whitewash (Oh come on. Wasn’t he in danger of blowing the whole thing out of proportion here? This was Beede for Christsakes. He was sixty-one years old. He worked shifts in the hospital laundry. He hated everybody. The word ‘judgemental’ couldn’t do him justice. If Beede was judgemental then King Herod was ‘a little skittish’.

Beede thought modern life was ‘all waffle’. He’d never owned a car, but persisted in driving around on an ancient, filthy and shockingly unreliable Douglas motorcycle – c. 1942, with the requisite piss-pot helmet. He didn’t own a tv. He found Radio 4 ‘chicken-livered’. He feared the microwave. He thought deodorant was the devil’s sputum. He blamed David Beckham – personally – for breeding a whole generation of boys whose only meaningful relationship was with the mirror. He called it ‘kid-narcissism’…although he still used hair oil himself, and copiously. Unperfumed, of course. He was rigorously allergic to sandalwood, seafood and lanolin; Jeez! An oriental prawn in a lambswool sweater would probably’ve done for him).

Okay. Okay. So Kane freely admitted (Kane did everything freely) that he took so little interest in Beede’s life, in general, that he might actually find it quite difficult to delineate between the two (the big things, the small). He tipped his head to one side. I mean what mattered to Beede? Did he live large? Was he lost in the details?

Or (now hang on a second) perhaps – Kane promptly pulled himself off his self-imposed hook (no apparent damage to knitwear) – perhaps he did know. Perhaps he’d drunk it all in, subconsciously, the way any son must. Perhaps he knew everything already and merely had to do a spot of careful digging around inside his own keen – if irredeemably frivolous – psyche (polishing things off, systematising, card-indexing) to sort it all out.

But Oh God that’d be hard work! That’d take some real effort. And it’d be messy. And he was tired. And – quite frankly – Beede bored him. Beede was just so…so vehement. So intent. So focussed. Too focussed. Horribly focussed. In fact Beede was quite focussed enough for the both of them (and why not add a small gang of Olympic Tri-Athletes, an international chess champion, and that crazy nut who carved the Eiffel Tower out of a fucking toothpick into the mix, for good measure?).

Beede was so uptight, so pent up, so unbelievably…uh…priggish (re-pressed/sup-pressed – you name it, he was it) that if he ever actually deigned to cut loose (Beede? Cut loose? Are you serious?!) then he would probably just cut right out (yawn. Again), like some huge but cranky petrol-driven lawnmower (a tremendously well-constructed but unwieldy old Allen, say). I mean all that deep inner turmoil…all that…that tightly buttoned, straight-backed, quietly creaking, Strindberg-style tension. Where the hell would it go? How on earth could it…?

Eh?

Of course, by comparison – and by sheer coincidence – Kane’s entire life mission –

Oh how lovely to hone in on me again

– was to be mirthful. To be fluffy. To endow mere trifles with an exquisitely inappropriate gravitas. Kane found depth an abomination. He lived in the shallows, and, like a shark (a sand shark; not a biter), he basked in them. He both eschewed boredom and yet considered himself the ultimate arbiter of it. Boredom terrified him. And because Beede, his father, was so exquisitely dull (celebrated a kind of immaculate dullness – he was the Virgin Mary of the Long Hour) Kane had gradually engineered himself into his father’s anti.

If Beede had ever sought to underpin the community then Kane had always sought to undermine it. If Beede lived like a monk, then Kane revelled in smut and degeneracy. If Beede felt the burden of life’s weight (and heaven knows, he felt it), then Kane consciously rejected worldly care.

A useful (and gratifying) side-product of this process was Kane’s gradual apprehension that there was a special kind of glory in self-interest, a magnificence in self-absorption, a heroism in degeneracy, which other people (the general public – the culture) seemed to find not only laudable, but actively endearing.

Come on. Come on; nobody liked a stuffed shirt; nobody found puritanism sexy (except for Angelo who wanted to shag Isabella in Measure for Measure. But Shakespeare was a pervert; and they didn’t bother teaching you that in O-level literature…); nobody – but nobody – wanted to stand next to the teetotaller at the party –

Hey! Where’s the guy in the novelty hat with the six pack of beer?

Kane half-smiled to himself as he took out his phone, opened it, deftly ran through his texts, closed it, shoved it back into his pocket, took a final drag on his cigarette and then stubbed it out.

‘So what’s that you’re reading?’

He picked up his lighter (a smart, silver and red-enamelled Ronson) and struck it, lightly –

Nothing.

After an almost interminable six-second hiatus, Beede closed his book and placed it down – with a small sigh – on to his lap. ‘Whatever happened to that girl?’ he asked mechanically (having immediately apprehended the fatuous nature of Kane’s literary enquiry). Kane frowned –

Wow…

To answer a question with a question –

Masterly.

‘Girl?’ Kane stared back at him, blankly. ‘Which girl? The waitress?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Beede snapped. ‘The little girl. The skinny one. I haven’t seen her around in a while…’

‘Skinny?’

Kane adopted a look of cheerful bewilderment.

‘The redhead,’ Beede persisted (thoroughly immune to Kane’s humbug). ‘Too skinny. Red hair. Bright red hair…’

‘Red hair?’

‘Yes. Red hair. Purple-red…’

‘Purple?’

‘Yes…’ (Beede yanked on his trusty, old pair of mental crampons and kicked them, grimly, into the vertical rockface of his self-control).

‘Yes. Purple.’

Kane didn’t seem to notice.

‘Purple?’ he repeated, taking some time out to savour the feel of this word on his tongue –

Purple

Purrrrr-pull

– then glancing up –

Ooops

– and relenting. ‘You probably mean Kelly,’ he vouchsafed, almost lasciviously. ‘Little Kelly Broad. Lovely, filthy, skinny, little Kelly…’

‘Kelly Broad. Of course,’ Beede echoed curtly. ‘So are the two of you still an item?’

An item? Kane smirked at this quaint formulation. ‘Hell, no…’ he took a long swig of his Pepsi, ‘that’s all…’ he burped, ‘excuse me…totally fucked now.’

Beede waited, patiently, for any further elucidation. None was forthcoming.

‘Well that’s a pity,’ he finally murmured.

‘Why?’ Kane wondered.

Beede shrugged, as if the answer was simply obvious.

‘Why?’ Kane asked again (employing exactly the same maddening vocal emphasis as before).

‘Because she was a decent enough girl,’ Beede observed stolidly, ‘and I liked her.’

Kane snorted. Beede glanced up at him, wounded. He took a quick sip of his coffee (in the hope of masking any further emotional leakage), then – urgh – winced, involuntarily.

‘Tasty?’ Kane enquired, with an arch lift of his brow. Beede placed the cup back down, very gently, on to its saucer. Kane idly struck at his lighter again –

Nothing.

‘So you think I had a problem with her?’ Beede wondered, out loud, after a brief interval.

‘Pardon?’ Kane was already thoroughly bored by the subject.

‘A problem? You mean with Kelly? Uh…’ He gave this a moment’s thought. ‘Yes. Yes. I suppose I think you did.’

Beede looked shocked.

Kane chuckled. ‘Oh come on…’

‘What?’

‘You oozed disapproval.’

‘Did I?’

‘Through every conceivable orifice.’

Beede’s nostrils flared at this cruel defamation, but he drew a long, deep breath and swallowed down his ire.

‘Okay. Okay…’ he murmured tightly. ‘So what do you think I “disapproved” of exactly?’

Kane threw up his hands. ‘Where to begin?’

Beede folded his arms. Kane duly noted the folding. ‘All right then,’ he volunteered, ‘you thought she was a tart.’

Beede blinked –

Tart?

‘You know…’ Kane’s voice adopted the tender but world-weary tone of an adult describing something simple yet fundamental to a wayward toddler – like how to eat, how to walk (‘So you put one foot…that’s it, one foot, very slowly, in front of the other…’)‘…a tart; a harlot, a strumpet, a whore…’

Beede opened his mouth to respond, but Kane barrelled on, ‘Although you shouldn’t actually feel bad about it. I was fine with it. In fact – if anything – it was an incentive of sorts…I mean romantically.’

He paused for a second, musing. ‘Isn’t it odd how the disapproval of others can often contribute so profoundly to one’s enjoyment of a thing?’

Beede opened his mouth to answer.

‘Tarts especially,’ Kane interrupted him.

‘Well she certainly dressed quite provocatively…’ Beede ruminated.

Kane waved this objection aside. ‘Nah. It was all just an act. Smoke and mirrors. A total fabrication. She was a sweetheart, an innocent. Her bad reputation was down to nothing more than a couple of stupid choices and some bad PR.’

‘But you still broke up with her,’ Beede needled.

Kane shrugged.

‘Indicating that perhaps – at some level – it did actually bother you?’

‘No,’ Kane shook his head. ‘It wasn’t ever a question of virtue with Kelly. It was simply an issue of trust.’

‘Ah-ha…’ Beede pounced on this idea, greedily. ‘But isn’t that the same issue?’

‘Absolutely not.’

Kane smiled at his father, almost fondly, as if touched – even flattered – by the unexpectedly intrusive line of his questioning. ‘She wasn’t a tart. Not at all. But she was a thief, which is a quality I find marginally less endearing.’

Beede seemed taken aback by this piece of information.