Darkmans. Nicola Barker
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What was that?
He drew a sudden, sharp breath as he registered an unpleasant, pinching sensation in his forearm. He glanced down. He realised that he was now supporting the phone receiver against his shoulder and that his right hand was clutching – very tightly – on to his left arm (where the old sunburn scars were) –
Ow!
He blinked. He relaxed his grip –
What?!
The outer edges of his scar tissue had been reddened by the roughness of its manhandling. He scowled.
‘But of course,’ he suddenly found himself saying, ‘it must’ve been you – on the horse.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes. You…Tall. Fair-haired. Wearing some kind of…of navy-blue uniform.’
The German seemed bewildered by this revelation. ‘Me? On a horse? Riding? You actually saw me on horseback?’
‘Yeah…Well, no. You were climbing off. You’d climbed off.’
‘And you were there with Beede, you say? In the restaurant? Having coffee?’
Kane grimaced, impatiently. ‘I think we already established that.’
He leaned forward and picked up the stray magazines from the carpet.
Silence
‘And then?’ the German asked, tentatively.
‘What?’
As Kane carefully placed the magazines back on to the pile again he noticed a bank statement which’d been preserved, flat, between a couple of the editions.
‘Then Beede left?’ the German persisted. ‘Is that how it happened?’
‘Uh,’ Kane considered this for a moment, eyeing the statement, casually, ‘yeah. Quite soon after. Once the chiropodist arrived.’
‘The chiropodist?’
The German’s voice was hoarse with excitement. ‘You mean Elen? The chiropodist? She was there?’
Elen
Of course
Kane glanced up, smiling.
‘My wife was there?’
Kane’s smile faltered.
‘Good God.’
The German seemed overwhelmed by this idea.
‘Although in actual fact,’ Kane frowned as he remembered, ‘the boy almost had me convinced that there were two horses…’
‘Sorry? What? A boy?’
‘Her son,’ Kane paused, ‘your son. A sharp little character. He said that there were two. But if there were, then they were pretty much indistinguishable…’ He paused again ‘…which I suppose they’d need to be, really, for the trick to work.’
‘You’re telling me that there were two horses?’
The German – rather slow on the uptake, Kane thought – swung from excited to panicky.
Kane stared down at the statement again, distractedly, then his brows suddenly shot up –
What?!
Holy fuck…
‘Was Beede on one of them?’
Kane continued to stare at the statement, as if mesmerised.
‘Hello? Are you there? I said was Beede on one of them?’
‘No!’ Kane snapped, exasperated. ‘Beede was with me. I saw one horse. But the boy said that only by using two horses could you have managed the change-over so quickly. The swap. Like in a trick. A magic trick…’
‘Swap? Who swapped?’
The German sounded terrified.
‘You and the other man. The…’ Kane struggled to describe him, ‘the strange…the creepy…’
‘Which man?’ The German rasped.
Kane closed his eyes and tried to visualise –
Black
Yellow
Black
He shuddered, ‘The dark man…’
And then he found himself hissing – ‘…Ssssssss!’
With no forewarning, his mouth was –
Good God!
It was hissing – ‘Darkmansssss.’
Kane quickly clamped his errant lips shut –
Where?
How?
What the…?!
Isidore hung up.
‘There are many ways in which Fleet is much, much more advanced than all of the other children in his class,’ Mrs Santa explained, encouragingly, ‘his hand–eye coordination – for one thing – is really quite astonishing. And I mean really quite astonishing…’
She glanced over towards the play area in the corner of the classroom where Fleet was currently sitting and boredly constructing a small, neat structure –
A fort, was it?
– out of plastic bricks.
Elen detected a kind of anxiety in the glance. She felt a spontaneous knuckle of rage forming in her stomach (how dare she look at him like that? He was her son. She loved him), and then a balancing knuckle of sympathy (Oh God, he made her feel that way herself, sometimes).
These two contradictory knuckles were Elen’s constant companions; and her gut was the boxing ring in which they staged their spats. ‘Motherhood,’ she told herself, bleakly: ‘the pride, the humility.’
She tried to take a deep breath –
Breathe
Breathe from the stomach
(just like Dory said)
Kinking the back
Diaphragm flat, out, up…
They were sitting on two tiny chairs at a tiny table, like a couple of lady Gullivers amongst the Lilliputians. Elen couldn’t actually remember entering the classroom, or how she’d actually got there. It was all just a blank, a fug. She stared over at the teacher, frowning.
‘But