Darkmans. Nicola Barker
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down at her hands, then back over towards Fleet again. Fleet did a tiny, involuntary jump, for no apparent reason.
‘Did you just see that?’ she asked.
‘What?’
‘That little jump? That “tick”. He does it fairly regularly.’
‘Does he? Yes. Well that’s…’ Elen bit her lip ‘…that’s something he…he does, occasionally.’
She smoothed down the fabric of her skirt and folded her hands across her lap. She knew she wasn’t helping matters. She felt frustrated – impotent. There was so much she could contribute –
So much
– but she just…
Just…
No.
Can’t.
Her eyes shifted over towards the classroom windows. It was a new building (everything was new here – for Isidore, something being ‘new enough’ was always a primary concern). She idly noticed how one of the smaller, higher windows had been left open. She gazed up at it, ruminatively. Her eyes moved to the square of putty surrounding the pane of glass. She could see – even from where she was sitting – that the putty had been interfered with. It was puckered; sliced; gouged out in some places.
She shuddered.
‘We all want what’s best for Fleet, after all…’ Mrs Santa continued. ‘Of course,’ Elen was still distracted, still looking up at the window. ‘So we wondered,’ Mrs Santa grasped her moment, ‘if it might not be an idea to book him in for a brief session with the child psychologist.’
‘No.’
Elen immediately snapped back to attention. ‘Absolutely not.’
Mrs Santa seemed shocked; less by the refusal itself, than by the casual manner in which it was delivered. ‘But it’s a perfectly normal procedure,’ she emphasised, ‘a significant percentage of our children end up seeing the psychologist at some time or other during their school career.’
Elen pushed her hair firmly behind her ears. ‘What percentage would that be, exactly?’
Mrs Santa floundered, ‘I don’t know. Two…three…’
‘That’s not a significant percentage,’ Elen was very calm, ‘that’s a tiny percentage.’
Fleet had completed his task in the play area. He yawned. He rubbed his eyes and then stood up. Elen reached out her hand towards him, almost as if appealing for his support.
‘If you’re concerned that there might be some kind of…of stigma…’ Mrs Santa continued, staunchly.
‘Yes I am worried,’ Elen nodded, ‘very worried. Because there would be.’
‘The point is that we’re extremely concerned about Fleet, and we simply feel…’
‘The fact is,’ Elen interrupted, ‘that I’m not really the problem here. It’s Dory, Fleet’s father. He’s German. He’s very old-fashioned. He simply wouldn’t tolerate the idea.’
‘Fleet’s father doesn’t necessarily have to be involved,’ Mrs Santa proclaimed boldly (glancing towards the child with a bright smile), ‘it could simply be something that the school has instigated, something which just “spontaneously happens”, so to speak.’
Elen seemed genuinely alarmed by this suggestion. Fleet was standing at her side, now. She slipped her arm around his waist and pulled him closer.
‘I don’t like the sound of that at all, Mrs Santa.’
Her gentle voice contained a strong warning.
Mrs Santa looked uncomfortable, as if a breach had been established and she – for one – was going to experience some difficulty in recovering from it. ‘Well just think it over, at least. We’re only trying to do our best for the boy,’ she leaned forward and chucked Fleet, playfully, under his chin (he stiffened). ‘We want him to be happy. We want him to excel.’
‘Of course.’
There was a sudden, loud creaking sound directly above them. Elen glanced up. One of the classroom’s suspended strip-lights had slowly begun to rock.
Mrs Santa glanced up, too.
‘It’s the breeze,’ she said, ‘it often does that.’
She clambered to her feet, walked over to the line of windows, picked up a specially adapted pole and pushed its metal tip through the high, open window’s latch. She briskly pulled it shut.
The light continued to swing. Fleet stretched up his arm towards it, pointing his index finger. He paused for a second, then jumped again – a tiny, apparently involuntary jolt – before smiling and carefully touching that same index finger to his right shoulder (as if in some kind of convoluted boy scout salute).
Elen quickly stood up as Mrs Santa walked back over. She grabbed her bag to try and signal an end to their discussion.
‘There, that’s better,’ Mrs Santa murmured. They all looked up towards the light again, their heads tipping, in unison, their chins lifting; like three, simple flower petals unfurling from the bud in a time-lapse-photography nature documentary.
At night he did his real work. You couldn’t call it ‘play’, exactly. It was far too serious – too painstaking – for that. He’d been re-creating, in perfect miniature, the Cathedral of Sainte-Cecile (the world’s largest ever brick-built structure) which was located (and this meant nothing to Fleet, he was six years old, and geography, to him, was just a clumsy four-syllable word) in the beautiful, French medieval town of Albi.
Fleet’s tools: a trusty pair of children’s paper-cutting scissors (the blades of which he’d secretly stropped on a stone until they were razor-sharp), some general-purpose adhesive (the white kind which came in a blue tub and smelled of marzipan), and matchsticks (in abundance; pristine – never spent – with the brightly tinted sulphured end cleanly lopped off).
He had a small black and white picture of the cathedral (a partial view – it was a monumental, many-faceted construction, 200 years in the making) which he’d discovered, by chance (at least, that’s how he remembered it), aged four, in a French holiday brochure. He liked to keep it hidden (he didn’t know why: instinct, perhaps) inside a folded strip of cardboard hoarded from a cereal packet, shoved under the dishcloths in the back of a kitchen drawer.
Sometimes he would creep into the kitchen at night with his torch, open the drawer and stare at the picture for hours, without blinking (or until his re-chargeable batteries faded). He would consume it, devour it. Then he would squirrel it away, and not feel the need to refer to it for days.
It was all a question of dimensions with Fleet, and of form: the scale of a thing, the logistics (what was feasible, what was not). Aesthetics didn’t enter into it. Beauty was just something that worked. Beauty paid its way. It was infrastructure. It was superstructure. All the rest was simply floss.
He had no pictorial evidence of the cathedral’s interior (which was legendarily beautiful, with an immense nave containing an Italian fresco of the Last Judgement, hundreds of sculptures, and one of the world’s most impressive organs), but the inside of his matchstick monolith had been just as fastidiously re-created (was just as pristine – no bish-bosh job, this) as the exterior.
He’d made certain, educated leaps based on his tours of Ashford Church (the inside a crazy mish-mash of ancient period detail) and – but of course – two wonderful day trips he’d taken (aged three and a half and five) to the astonishing medieval village of Chilham, with its grand, stately home, thirteenth-century church and numerous timber-framed houses and cottages.