Darkmans. Nicola Barker

he asked again, now almost sympathetically.

      ‘They make a good coffee,’ Beede lied, dropping the bag again.

      ‘Fuck off. The coffee is heinous,’ Kane said. ‘And just look at you,’ he added, ‘you’re crapping yourself. You hate this place. The piped music is making you nauseous. Your knee is jogging up and down under the table so hard you’re knocking all the bubbles out of my Pepsi.’

      Beede’s knee instantly stopped its jogging.

      Kane took a quick swig of the imperilled beverage (it was still surprisingly fizzy), and as he placed the glass back down again, it suddenly dawned on him – the way all new things dawned on him: slowly, and with a tiny, mischievous jolt – how unbelievably guarded his father seemed –

      

       Beede?

       Hiding something?

      His mind reeled back a way, then forwards again –

      

       Hmmn

      Beede. This rock. This monolith. This man-mountain. This closed book. This locked door. This shut-down thing.

      For once he actually seemed…almost…well, almost cagey. Anxious. Wary. Kane stared harder. This was certainly a first. This was definitely a novelty. My God. Yes. Even in his littlest movements (now he came to think of it): knocking his disposable carton of creamer against the lip of his coffee cup (a tiny splash landing on the spotless nail of his thumb); kicking his bag; picking up his book; fumbling as he turned over the corner of a page, then unfolding it and jumpily pretending to recommence with his reading.

      Kane rolled his cigarette around speculatively between his fingers. Beede glanced up for a moment, met Kane’s gaze, shifted his focus off sideways – in the general direction of the entrance (which was not actually visible from where they were seated) – and then looked straight down again.

      Now that was odd. Kane frowned. Beede uncertain? Furtive? To actively break his gaze in that way?

       What?!

      Unheard of! Beede was the original architect of the unflinching stare. Beede’s stare was so steady he could make an owl crave Optrex. Beede could happily unrapt a raptor. And he’d done some pretty nifty groundwork over the years in the Guilt Trip arena (trip? How about a gruelling two-month sabbatical in the parched, ancient Persian city of Firuzabad? And he’d do your packing. And he’d book your hotel. And it’d be miles from the airport. And there’d be no fucking air conditioning). Beede was the hair shirt in human form.

      Kane took another swig of his Pepsi –

      

       Okay –

       But how huge is this?

      He couldn’t honestly tell if it was merely the small things, or if the big things were now also subtly implicated in what he was currently (and so joyously) perceiving as a potentially wholesale situation of emotional whitewash (Oh come on. Wasn’t he in danger of blowing the whole thing out of proportion here? This was Beede for Christsakes. He was sixty-one years old. He worked shifts in the hospital laundry. He hated everybody. The word ‘judgemental’ couldn’t do him justice. If Beede was judgemental then King Herod was ‘a little skittish’.

      Beede thought modern life was ‘all waffle’. He’d never owned a car, but persisted in driving around on an ancient, filthy and shockingly unreliable Douglas motorcycle – c. 1942, with the requisite piss-pot helmet. He didn’t own a tv. He found Radio 4 ‘chicken-livered’. He feared the microwave. He thought deodorant was the devil’s sputum. He blamed David Beckham – personally – for breeding a whole generation of boys whose only meaningful relationship was with the mirror. He called it ‘kid-narcissism’…although he still used hair oil himself, and copiously. Unperfumed, of course. He was rigorously allergic to sandalwood, seafood and lanolin; Jeez! An oriental prawn in a lambswool sweater would probably’ve done for him).

      Okay. Okay. So Kane freely admitted (Kane did everything freely) that he took so little interest in Beede’s life, in general, that he might actually find it quite difficult to delineate between the two (the big things, the small). He tipped his head to one side. I mean what mattered to Beede? Did he live large? Was he lost in the details?

      Or (now hang on a second) perhaps – Kane promptly pulled himself off his self-imposed hook (no apparent damage to knitwear) – perhaps he did know. Perhaps he’d drunk it all in, subconsciously, the way any son must. Perhaps he knew everything already and merely had to do a spot of careful digging around inside his own keen – if irredeemably frivolous – psyche (polishing things off, systematising, card-indexing) to sort it all out.

      But Oh God that’d be hard work! That’d take some real effort. And it’d be messy. And he was tired. And – quite frankly – Beede bored him. Beede was just so…so vehement. So intent. So focussed. Too focussed. Horribly focussed. In fact Beede was quite focussed enough for the both of them (and why not add a small gang of Olympic Tri-Athletes, an international chess champion, and that crazy nut who carved the Eiffel Tower out of a fucking toothpick into the mix, for good measure?).

      Beede was so uptight, so pent up, so unbelievably…uh…priggish (re-pressed/sup-pressed – you name it, he was it) that if he ever actually deigned to cut loose (Beede? Cut loose? Are you serious?!) then he would probably just cut right out (yawn. Again), like some huge but cranky petrol-driven lawnmower (a tremendously well-constructed but unwieldy old Allen, say). I mean all that deep inner turmoil…all that…that tightly buttoned, straight-backed, quietly creaking, Strindberg-style tension. Where the hell would it go? How on earth could it…?

       Eh?

      Of course, by comparison – and by sheer coincidence – Kane’s entire life mission –

      

       Oh how lovely to hone in on me again

      – was to be mirthful. To be fluffy. To endow mere trifles with an exquisitely inappropriate gravitas. Kane found depth an abomination. He lived in the shallows, and, like a shark (a sand shark; not a biter), he basked in them. He both eschewed boredom and yet considered himself the ultimate arbiter of it. Boredom terrified him. And because Beede, his father, was so exquisitely dull (celebrated a kind of immaculate dullness – he was the Virgin Mary of the Long Hour) Kane had gradually engineered himself into his father’s anti.

      If Beede had ever sought to underpin the community then Kane had always sought to undermine it. If Beede lived like a monk, then Kane revelled in smut and degeneracy. If Beede felt the burden of life’s weight (and heaven knows, he felt it), then Kane consciously rejected worldly care.

      A useful (and gratifying) side-product of this process was Kane’s gradual apprehension that there was a special kind of glory in self-interest, a magnificence in self-absorption, a heroism in degeneracy, which other people (the general public – the culture) seemed to find not only laudable, but actively endearing.

      Come on. Come on; nobody liked a stuffed shirt; nobody found puritanism sexy (except for Angelo who wanted to shag Isabella in Measure for Measure. But Shakespeare was a pervert; and they didn’t bother teaching you that in O-level literature…); nobody – but nobody – wanted to stand next to the teetotaller at the party –

       Hey! Where’s the guy in the novelty hat with the six pack of beer?

      Kane half-smiled to himself as he took out his phone, opened it, deftly ran through his texts, closed it, shoved it back into his pocket, took a final drag on his cigarette and then stubbed it out.

      ‘So what’s that you’re reading?’