Darkmans (18 page)

It was nothing insurmountable, in other words. But it
was
something (a blip, a phase – rather hard to put your finger on, really, without the benefit of professional input).

One thing was for certain: the boy was much smarter than he might initially appear. He was no Will o’ the Wisp. No charming, harmless Puck. He was evasive, sly, elusive. And –

Why not let’s just call a spade a spade, eh?

– you didn’t have to hunt very far to find out who he might’ve learned
that
particular mode of behaviour from.

The mothers sat in Elen’s brand-new kitchen (pale ash units, double-sink, waste disposal, grey marble counter) and enjoyed a pot of tea together. Fleet’s father – the German,
terribly
handsome – Dory? Isidore? – had popped in to say ‘Hi’ (shook Mrs Bradley’s hand, very formally, before heading upstairs for a quick nap. He’d been out on a job, he informed her – with an apologetic yawn – since eleven o’clock the night before).

Fleet (who didn’t initially seem entirely delighted by their arrival) took Steven up to his bedroom and guided him, nervously (the boy was just an accident waiting to happen) around his model of Albi (which currently took up a significant proportion of the floor-space in there).

Steven (extremely polite, but essentially unmoved by the tour) listened, blankly, waited until it was all over (offering no comment), then perched himself on the edge of Fleet’s bed, took out his computer and instituted his own kind of play (his head at an angle, his mouth falling slack, his fingers convulsing).

Okay

Fleet squatted down, picked up a boxful of matches and shook them, meditatively. He appraised his work. He mused. He calculated.

This arrangement suited them both perfectly (no pressures here, no expectations, no demands). Fleet worked away diligently on The Dragon Tower, leaving Steven entirely to his own devices.

Everything was proceeding in the best possible manner, and then…

Eh…?

Fleet scowled. He suddenly found himself distracted by the computer’s tiny voice. A tune. So simple. So repetitive. It hung in the air around him like a busy hover-fly. It buzzed. It troubled his ear. It
reminded
him of something. A
folk
memory. He cocked his head quizzically and focussed in on it, fully –

Zzzzzzzzzeeeee

Click –

Ah…

He closed his eyes, briefly.

Steven pressed
pause
and glanced up. ‘What?’

Fleet looked straight back at him (his fingers slightly glue-ey). ‘
Huh?
’ Steven frowned, then looked down, released
pause
, and continued to play. He tried to concentrate, but something was interfering. He pressed
pause
for a second time.

‘
Stop
that,’ he demanded.

‘What?’

Fleet didn’t even turn around, he just continued to build, methodically.

Steven cocked his head to one side. Couldn’t he
hear
it? The humming? Didn’t it…? Wasn’t he…?

It filled the air around them.

‘
That
!’ Steven exclaimed, pointing at nothing (his tongue twisting awkwardly).

Fleet slowly shrugged his shoulders and then continued on – doggedly – with what he was doing.

Steven sat in silence, frowning. He studied Fleet’s breathing patterns from the back, to see if they might give him away.

‘It’s not
song
…not even
same
,’ he eventually stammered.

‘It
is
the same,’ Fleet’s voice was deadly calm, ‘only it came from
before.
’

He continued to build.

‘No,’ Steven stammered. ‘
Not.
’

Fleet merely shrugged.

‘
Not!
’

Steven looked down at his Gameboy. His hand was shaking slightly. He wanted to play – he
needed
to – but he was suddenly overwhelmed by an extraordinary sense of dislocation. He blinked, then he gasped. A gulf was opening up around him (was being scribbled – in thick, dark crayon – over the gleaming surface of his everyday world).

He sat on the edge of the bed, like a frightened nestling on the lip of a precipice, remaining perfectly still, hardly even breathing, until his mother had finished her tea and was standing at the bottom of the stairs, calling him –

‘Steven?
Steven!
’

Then, and only then, could he blink back the darkness and run.

For the next two days, he didn’t feel even the remotest inclination to turn his Gameboy on again.

The second time she literally had to drag him there. He kept telling her that he didn’t like Fleet, that Fleet was mean, that he really didn’t want to go and visit him any more. But the school had recommended it, and Mrs Bradley thought Elen was incredibly charming (quite the
loveliest
person. It took a little while to get to grips with her –
sure
– what with that severe, home-spun look; the dark, sober clothes, the long hair, the thinness, the birthmark – but once you did, there was something so…so
friendly
, so informal, so calm, so intelligent…).

And the house was so nice. And the area. Everything so new. Everything so…S
hhhhhh!
(Can’t you
hear
that? The
silence
? No traffic, no dogs barking, no stereos blaring…)

Although on this occasion – it soon transpired – the marvellous quiet was to be interrupted (and quite notably), by a series of strange noises emanating from above.

Elen was cutting into a small, home-made fruitcake when the pandemonium first began. The mothers’ eyes had met – in mutual alarm – across the table-top.

‘Are they…are they
singing
?’ Mrs Bradley asked (she couldn’t actually remember ever having heard Steven sing before).

Elen gently pushed a slice of cake towards her.

‘Yes. Yes, I think they must be…’

‘But isn’t your husband still working nights? Won’t they disturb him?’

‘No. That’s…It’s
fine
, honestly.’

Elen stood up – slightly flustered – and went over to close the door. Then a few minutes later, while she was refreshing the pot, she casually turned on the oven’s extractor-hood.

All subsequent extraneous sounds were expunged by its
whirr.

She’d gently questioned Fleet about his ‘project’ (this matchstick structure now took up the best part of their dining table – his bedroom having long since been evacuated because of the leak). She was especially interested in why it was that he hadn’t completed the cathedral itself before moving on to some of the surrounding buildings.

‘But what about
this
section?’ she’d asked, standing on the cathedral’s south side, where a large hole still gaped, unattractively, at the entrance.

‘It’s not finished,’ Fleet had murmured.

‘Then finish it,’ she’d said.

He’d scowled up at her. ‘It’s not
finished
,’ he repeated, as if speaking to an imbecile. ‘They haven’t
built
it yet.’

Steven had the most beautiful voice, and once he’d been set off, there was literally no stopping him (although he only ever really sang one song, and he sang it in what appeared to be a foreign tongue). When he did sing, though, his usually jumbled pronunciation sounded smooth and unhalting.

His speech therapist claimed that she’d seen this happen before (that it was relatively common, even). ‘Remember Gareth Gates,’ she’d said, ‘with his terrible stutter, who finished up second on
Pop Idol
? Steven’s like him…’ she paused, speculatively ‘…although perhaps a little…
uh
…’

One of the volunteers in Steven’s class was a member of Ashford Church’s prestigious choir. With Mrs Santa’s encouragement, she took Steven – and his mother – along to meet the choir master. Steven sang for him. In fact he sang – his shoulders back, his hands clasped, his tiny face all pinkly beatific – for upwards of half an hour.

The choir master had been both charmed and bemused.

‘It’s an early Madrigal,’ he told them (over the continuing sounds of Steven’s vocalising), ‘in a kind of bastardised Latin. Or maybe Welsh or Cornish. Definitely not a tongue I’m especially familiar with…’

‘D’you think he made it up?’ his mother asked.

‘I simply can’t answer that.’

‘D’you think you could make him sing something else?’

‘I’m sure I could try.’

But when the choir master sat down at his piano and began to play, Steven put his hands over his ears, began rocking and screaming.

The instrument, the rhythm, the tempo, the pitch. They were all
wrong.
They were vile and cacophonous.

Modern.

He found it
disgusting.

Elen couldn’t help wondering why.

Why Albi?

At first she’d considered the actual
place
– its geography; its
historical
background – tales of religious strife were certainly legion; the basilica had been built by a cruel bishop –

Blah blah

Uh…

– Toulouse Lautrec had been born in the town, they’d built him a museum…

Hmmn

But after a while she decided to simplify things. She went back to basics. She began by considering the word itself, the name; its linguistic ramifications; the actual
semantics
(to do so, she’d found – in her extensive experience of problems of this kind – could often pay dividends).

Albi?

Al – bi?

Hang on…

If you inserted the ‘I’ (placed
yourself
in the picture), you got ‘al-i-bi’.

Alibi

In Latin (she looked it up in a dictionary) that meant ‘elsewhere’. I-am-elsewhere.

This funny little riddle just lodged in her head. And it stayed there.

Soon Steven was actually speaking – was chatting away, and with an amazing fluency – in this extraordinary new language of his, but only – Mrs Santa noted – when he was in (or around) Fleet’s general vicinity. It was almost as if he felt Fleet might respond (but Fleet never did), as if he thought Fleet might actually understand.

And while Fleet wasn’t ever aggressive (it wasn’t in his nature to be), it was plain that he found the boy (and his language) both stupid and exasperating. He would turn his face to the wall, or simply walk away. He made his contempt quite obvious. Everybody noticed.

Eventually the home visits were gently discouraged.

Two weeks after Steven had entered the Special Care stream, he completely abandoned his strange, new tongue. He began to stammer and to falter again. He lost his curiously ecstatic air. He recommenced his relationship with the Gameboy (head cocked, mouth open, fingers jabbing), but he’d only ever play with the sound turned off. He was almost ludicrously punctilious on that point.

He took no interest in Fleet any more.

A while after that, when the dust had finally settled, Mrs Santa caught Fleet staring at Steven during break one morning.

‘Is anything wrong, Fleet?’ she’d asked.

Fleet’s eye-line didn’t alter. It remained fixed on Steven as he answered her.

‘Steven should
stay
hiding behind the shapes,’ he murmured, ‘inside that funny little play-box of his.’

‘Really?’

Mrs Santa tried her best to draw him out.

‘Yes.’

‘And why do you say that, Fleet?’

Fleet glanced up at her, a look of mild surprise in his impish eyes.

‘Because that’s where he’s
safe
, Mrs Santa. All alone. In the quiet.’

‘But of…of
course.
’

Mrs Santa delivered him one of her brightest smiles. She glanced nervously around her. Two girls were squabbling over a skipping rope –

Of course…

She rapidly marched towards them, determined to interfere.

It wasn’t all just corns and bunions –

Uh-uh

– No way.

Of course there was a
certain
amount of what a novice might term ‘the run-of-the-mill stuff’ (although for Elen, nothing was ever ‘run-of-the-mill’, because in her eyes every symptom – no matter how small or uncontentious – invariably belied a deeper cause, and uncovering something’s origin, its genesis, was an essential part of the challenge of good chiropody; part of that special, ‘transformative’ magic – the buzz, the voodoo – which made all the hard daily slog – the cancelled appointments, the stroppy clients, the crazy hygiene – feel absolutely worthwhile).

Take bandaging, for example. Elen just loved it. As a small girl she remembered painstakingly binding the limbs and the torsos of all her dolls and her teddies with neat strips of fabric cut from old handker-chiefs (almost mummifying them, in several cases). It was just like weaving (was
artistic;
provided her with a similar kind of primitive thrill), but there was always that fascinating hidden variable in her line of work – a particular kind of condition, a certain shape of instep or toe, a preferred type of shoe – which made each and every application into something fresh and stimulating.

And it wasn’t just the medical aspect. It was the mundane things, too. The chiropody minutiae: the pad, the splint, the plaster, the wedge, the gauze, the strapping, the brace, the stockingette –

Oh the smells –

And the whiteness –

Or – better still – the creamy-white –

The stretch, the non-stretch –

The earthy putty,

The sterilising tingle

The dizzy glue

Each item –

Oh, but look…

Aren’t they all just…just beautiful?

– tidily arranged inside her briefcase (or laid out in that neat, spotless provisions drawer at her usual room in the practice). Every object
immaculately
packaged; each box and label so plain and clinical, so severe and uncompromising, so unapologetically –

Uh…

– generic

That was it!

– and
timeless
, too: the future/the past, all painstakingly rolled up into one hugely reliable sanitary bundle.

Elen liked the clean (
very
much – of course she did – she had to), but she absolutely
loved
the dirty: the malformation, the bump, the crust, the fungus. To Elen a foot was like a city, an infection was the bad within, and she was its ombudsman; making arrangements, sorting out problems, instituting rules, offering warnings.

On a good day she was a Superman or a Wonderwoman, doggedly fighting foot-crime and the causes of foot-crime (usually – when all was finally said and done – the ill-fitting shoe…Okay, so it was hardly The Riddler, or The Penguin, but in a serious head-to-head between a violent encounter with either one of these two comic-book baddies and an eight-hour, minimum-wage shift behind the bar of a ‘happening’ Ashford night-spot with a corn the size of a quail’s egg throbbing away under the strappy section of your brand-new, knock-off Manolo Blahniks…
Well
…it’d be a pretty close call).

Elen firmly believed that she was making a difference.

She was nothing less than an evangelist for the foot. She was a passionate devotee. She worshipped at the altar of the arch and the heel.

Sometimes it wasn’t easy. The foot was hardly the most glamorous of the appendages (‘yer dogs’, ‘yer plates’, ‘yer hoofs’). No one really gave a damn about it (although – fair’s fair – the acupuncturists had done a certain amount for the cause, and the reflexologists had sexed things up a little, but in Elen’s view, the short-fall still fell…
well
, pretty damn short).

The foot had sloppy PR; it mouldered, uncomplainingly, down at the bottom (the fundus, the depths, the
nadir
) of the physiological hegemony. It had none of the pizzazz of the hand or the heart. The lips! The eyes (the eyes had it
all
their own way). Even the neck, the belly…the
arse.
Even the arse had a certain cachet.

But not the foot. The foot had none (the foot had Fergie, with her lover, sprawled on a deckchair, in the Côte du Tawdry).

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 worse. 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 –