Darkmans - Nicola Barker

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released pause, and continued to play. He tried to concentrate, but something was interfering. He pressed pause for a second time.

      ‘Stop that,’ he demanded.

      ‘What?’

      Fleet didn’t even turn around, he just continued to build, methodically.

      Steven cocked his head to one side. Couldn’t he hear it? The humming? Didn’t it…? Wasn’t he…?

      It filled the air around them.

      ‘That!’ Steven exclaimed, pointing at nothing (his tongue twisting awkwardly).

      Fleet slowly shrugged his shoulders and then continued on – doggedly – with what he was doing.

      Steven sat in silence, frowning. He studied Fleet’s breathing patterns from the back, to see if they might give him away.

      ‘It’s not song…not even same,’ he eventually stammered.

      ‘It is the same,’ Fleet’s voice was deadly calm, ‘only it came from before.’

      He continued to build.

      ‘No,’ Steven stammered. ‘Not.’

      Fleet merely shrugged.

      ‘Not!’

      Steven looked down at his Gameboy. His hand was shaking slightly. He wanted to play – he needed to – but he was suddenly overwhelmed by an extraordinary sense of dislocation. He blinked, then he gasped. A gulf was opening up around him (was being scribbled – in thick, dark crayon – over the gleaming surface of his everyday world).

      He sat on the edge of the bed, like a frightened nestling on the lip of a precipice, remaining perfectly still, hardly even breathing, until his mother had finished her tea and was standing at the bottom of the stairs, calling him –

      ‘Steven? Steven!’

      Then, and only then, could he blink back the darkness and run.

      For the next two days, he didn’t feel even the remotest inclination to turn his Gameboy on again.

      The second time she literally had to drag him there. He kept telling her that he didn’t like Fleet, that Fleet was mean, that he really didn’t want to go and visit him any more. But the school had recommended it, and Mrs Bradley thought Elen was incredibly charming (quite the loveliest person. It took a little while to get to grips with her – sure – what with that severe, home-spun look; the dark, sober clothes, the long hair, the thinness, the birthmark – but once you did, there was something so…so friendly, so informal, so calm, so intelligent…).

      And the house was so nice. And the area. Everything so new. Everything so…Shhhhhh! (Can’t you hear that? The silence? No traffic, no dogs barking, no stereos blaring…)

      Although on this occasion – it soon transpired – the marvellous quiet was to be interrupted (and quite notably), by a series of strange noises emanating from above.

      Elen was cutting into a small, home-made fruitcake when the pandemonium first began. The mothers’ eyes had met – in mutual alarm – across the table-top.

      ‘Are they…are they singing?’ Mrs Bradley asked (she couldn’t actually remember ever having heard Steven sing before).

      Elen gently pushed a slice of cake towards her.

      ‘Yes. Yes, I think they must be…’

      ‘But isn’t your husband still working nights? Won’t they disturb him?’

      ‘No. That’s…It’s fine, honestly.’

      Elen stood up – slightly flustered – and went over to close the door. Then a few minutes later, while she was refreshing the pot, she casually turned on the oven’s extractor-hood.

      All subsequent extraneous sounds were expunged by its whirr.

      She’d gently questioned Fleet about his ‘project’ (this matchstick structure now took up the best part of their dining table – his bedroom having long since been evacuated because of the leak). She was especially interested in why it was that he hadn’t completed the cathedral itself before moving on to some of the surrounding buildings.

      ‘But what about this section?’ she’d asked, standing on the cathedral’s south side, where a large hole still gaped, unattractively, at the entrance.

      ‘It’s not finished,’ Fleet had murmured.

      ‘Then finish it,’ she’d said.

      He’d scowled up at her. ‘It’s not finished,’ he repeated, as if speaking to an imbecile. ‘They haven’t built it yet.’

      Steven had the most beautiful voice, and once he’d been set off, there was literally no stopping him (although he only ever really sang one song, and he sang it in what appeared to be a foreign tongue). When he did sing, though, his usually jumbled pronunciation sounded smooth and unhalting.

      His speech therapist claimed that she’d seen this happen before (that it was relatively common, even). ‘Remember Gareth Gates,’ she’d said, ‘with his terrible stutter, who finished up second on Pop Idol? Steven’s like him…’ she paused, speculatively ‘…although perhaps a little…uh…’

      One of the volunteers in Steven’s class was a member of Ashford Church’s prestigious choir. With Mrs Santa’s encouragement, she took Steven – and his mother – along to meet the choir master. Steven sang for him. In fact he sang – his shoulders back, his hands clasped, his tiny face all pinkly beatific – for upwards of half an hour.

      The choir master had been both charmed and bemused.

      ‘It’s an early Madrigal,’ he told them (over the continuing sounds of Steven’s vocalising), ‘in a kind of bastardised Latin. Or maybe Welsh or Cornish. Definitely not a tongue I’m especially familiar with…’

      ‘D’you think he made it up?’ his mother asked.

      ‘I simply can’t answer that.’

      ‘D’you think you could make him sing something else?’

      ‘I’m sure I could try.’

      But when the choir master sat down at his piano and began to play, Steven put his hands over his ears, began rocking and screaming.

      The instrument, the rhythm, the tempo, the pitch. They were all wrong. They were vile and cacophonous.

       Modern.

      He found it disgusting.

      Elen couldn’t help wondering why.

      Why Albi?

      At first she’d considered the actual place – its geography; its historical background – tales of religious strife were certainly legion; the basilica had been built by a cruel bishop –

       Blah blah

       Uh…

      – Toulouse Lautrec had been born in the town, they’d built him a museum…

      

       Hmmn

      But after a while she decided to simplify things. She went back to basics. She began by considering the word itself, the name; its linguistic ramifications; the actual semantics (to do so, she’d found – in her extensive experience of problems of this kind – could often pay dividends).

      Albi?

      Al – bi?

      

       Hang on…

      If you inserted

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