Darkmans. Nicola Barker

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.

       ELEN

      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…