Darkmans. Nicola Barker

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       ONE

      Kane dealt prescription drugs in Ashford; the Gateway to Europe. His main supplier was Anthony Shilling, a Waste Management Coordinator at the Frances Fairfax. Shilling was a quiet, Jamaican gentleman (caucasian – his family originally plantation owners) who came to England in the early seventies, settled in Dalston, London, and fell in love with a woman called Mercy, whose own family hailed from The Dominican Republic.

      Mercy was British born. Anthony and Mercy moved to South Kent in 1976, where they settled and raised four daughters, one of whom was a professor of Political Sciences at Leeds University and had written a book called Culture Clashes: Protest Songs and The Yardies (1977–1999).

      Kane was waiting for Anthony at the French Connection; a vulgar, graceless, licensed ‘family restaurant’ (a mammoth, prefabricated hut, inside of which a broad American roadhouse mentality rubbed up against all that was most intimate and accessible in Swiss chalet-style decor) on the fringes of the Orbital Park, one of Ashford’s three largest – and most recent – greenfield industrial development sites.

      The restaurant had been thoughtfully constructed to service the adjacent Travel Inn, which had, in turn, been thoughtfully constructed to service the through-traffic from the Channel Tunnel, much of which still roared carelessly past, just beyond the car park, the giant, plastic, fort-themed children’s play area, the slight man-made bank and the formless, aimless tufts of old meadow and marshland with which the Bad Munstereifel Road (named after Ashford’s delightful, medieval German twin) was neatly – if inconclusively – hemmed.

      It was still too early for lunch on a Tuesday morning, and Kane (who hadn’t been to bed yet) was slouched back in a heavily varnished pine chair, sucking ruminatively on a fresh Marlboro, and staring quizzically across the table at Beede, his father.

      Beede also worked at the Frances Fairfax, where he ran the laundry with an almost mythical efficiency. Beede was his surname. His first name – his Christian name – was actually Daniel. But people knew him as Beede and it suited him well because he was small, and hard, and unquestionably venerable (in precisely the manner of his legendarily bookish eighth-century precursor).

      Beede knew all about Kane’s business dealings, and didn’t actually seem to give a damn that his only son was cheerfully participating in acts of both a legally and ethically questionable nature. Yet Anthony Shilling’s involvement was – in Beede’s opinion – an altogether different matter. He just couldn’t understand it. It deeply perplexed him. He had liked and admired both Tony and Mercy for many years. He considered them ‘rounded’; a respectable, comfortable, functional couple. Mercy had been a friend of Kane’s mother, Heather (now deceased – she and Beede had separated when Kane was still a toddler). Beede struggled to comprehend Tony’s motivation. He knew that it wasn’t just a question of money. But that was all he knew, and he didn’t dare (or care) to enquire any further.

      ‘Beede.’ Kane suddenly spoke. Beede glanced up from his second-hand Penguin orange-spine with a quick frown. Kane took a long drag on his cigarette.

      ‘Well?’

      Beede was irritable.

      Kane exhaled at his leisure.

      ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

      Kane’s tone was not aggressive, more lackadaisical, and leavened by its trademark tinge of gentle mockery.

      Beede continued to scowl. ‘What does it look like?’

      He shook the book at Kane – by way of an answer – then returned to it, huffily.

      Kane wasn’t in the slightest bit dismayed by the sharpness of Beede’s response.

      ‘But why the fuck,’ he said, ‘are you doing it here?’

      Beede didn’t even look up this time, just indicated, boredly, towards his coffee cup. ‘Should I draw you a picture?’

      Kane smiled.

      He and Beede were not close. And they were not similar, either. They were different in almost every conceivable way. Beede was lithe, dark, strong-jawed, slate-haired and heavily bespectacled. He seemed like the kind of man who could deal with almost any kind of physical or intellectual challenge –

       It’s the radiator. If you want to try and limp back home with it, I’ll need a tub of margarine, a litre of water and a packet of Stimorol; but I won’t make you any promises…

      Ned Kelly’s last ever words? Spoken as he stood on the scaffold: ‘Such is life.’

       You’re saying you’ve never used a traditional loom before? Well it’s pretty straightforward…

       Yes, I do believe the earwig is the only insect which actually suckles its young.

       No. Nietzsche didn’t hate humanity. That’s far too simplistic. What Nietzsche actually said was, ‘Man is something which must be overcome.’

      To all intents and purposes Daniel Beede was a model citizen. So much so, in fact, that in 1983 he’d been awarded the Freedom of the Borough as a direct consequence of his tireless work in charitable and community projects during the previous two decades.

      He was Ashford born and bred; a true denizen of a town which had always – but especially in recent years – been a landmark in social and physical re-invention. Ashford was a through-town, an ancient turnpike (to Maidstone, to Hythe, to Faversham, to Romney, to Canterbury), a geographical plughole; a place of passing and fording (Ash-ford, formerly Essetesford, the Eshe being a tributary of the River Stour).

      Yet in recent years Beede had been in the unenviable position of finding his own home increasingly unrecognisable to him (Change; My God! He woke up, deep in the night, and could no longer locate himself. Even the blankets felt different – the quality of light through his window – the air). Worse still, Beede currently considered himself to be one of the few individuals in this now flourishing ‘Borough of Opportunity’ (current population c. 102,000) to have been washed up and spat out by the recent boom.

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