Darkmans - Nicola Barker

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suddenly pop into her head and take up a brief residency there. She’d learned it at school…

       ‘You do not do, you do not do

       Anymore, black shoe

       In which I have lived like a foot

       For thirty years, poor and white,

       Barely daring to breath or Achoo.’

       Ah yes

      She loved that poem.

      If she’d actually ever thought about it – and she honestly hadn’t – then she might have drawn a few, tired parallels between her own life and the life of the foot (that frustrating opposition of support and neglect). But then again, if she’d thought about it some more, she’d have realised that all struggles – foot-related or otherwise – could be encapsulated as some kind of battle between an object’s natural function and its actual – often thwarted – circumstances.

      

       Them’s the breaks, huh?

      Her own daddy (to extend the Plathian metaphor just one stage further), whom she’d admired devotedly (up until – and beyond – his premature death in 1989), had been a hard nut to crack; fair but irascible, sincere but undemonstrative, he’d worked his entire adult life in the Services. Elen had been a true Army Daughter (drilled, polished, guarded, wrapped up, packed off – sometimes left behind, sometimes shoved dutifully into a khaki knapsack).

      There was never a happy medium with Dad: he was either perpetually absent or too resolutely there (like a badly focussed close-up –

      

       Lobe –

       Cheek –

       Whoops!

       Moustache –

       Teeth –

       Pore –

      – in an amateur video), and each state (too little, too much) somehow rendered its opposite inexplicably traumatic.

      He’d served four years in Germany, two, undercover, then was posted to Northern Ireland (where his iron nerve and skills in the realm of bomb disposal were deemed especially useful). He retired in ‘83 (well-decorated for bravery after the Falklands War).

      Following two, brief years on Civvy Street (a wonderful reprieve for the family, but he’d found it hard to relax, felt drained and grey, seemed to sorely miss his old life of careless extremity) he’d joined the Metropolitan Police Marine Support Unit: the Underwater and Confined Space Search Team (even working – briefly – as a freelance safety consultant on the Channel Tunnel, although he’d resigned, in disgust, after their first fatality).

      The circumstances of his own death had been profoundly unsatisfactory. He’d been one of countless casualties in the Marchioness Pleasure Boat Disaster (a small Thames cruise ship, pole-axed, in the dark, by an unlit dredger).

      ‘But what was he doing on the boat in the first place?’ people constantly asked. Try as Elen might, she could never provide an adequate answer.

      It’d all been so very sudden (so abrupt, so random, so incredibly unfair). He’d faced eternity so many times: head on, with such unfathomable bravery; had gambled with life so fearlessly, only to be grabbed – snatched – from the rear; no chance to ‘take stock’ or ‘make his peace’. Denied, at the last – and this was the cruellest part – that pious mantle of ‘a noble sacrifice’.

      Her mother (who’d long found the role of serviceman’s wife an uneasy one) promptly remarried a dairy farmer and now lived a life of bucolic bliss in rural North Yorkshire.

      Anxiety over the welfare of her father had glued Elen and her mother tight at certain points during her child- and teen-hood, but with his unexpected demise, the bond had slackened. And there’d been some ill-feeling over her mother’s lack of involvement in the hard-fought campaign for a proper inquest (‘You think if some random judge finds the cruise-ship company negligent it’ll bring your father back to me?’ she’d griped. And then, later – when things got really nasty – ‘They don’t decorate the wives, Elen. Sometimes, when a man risks everything so easily you have to stop and wonder what “everything” actually means to him…’).

      To cut things short: they were not so close now as they once had been.

      Talking of fathers –

      

       Yes

       Good –

       Moving swiftly on…

      Franklin Charlesworth was the don. He was chiropody’s Big Daddy. His absolute classic Chiropody: Theory and Practice, Elen had owned in hardback (in its 5th edition) just about as long as she could remember (it’d got to the point, in Germany, during school holidays – she was ten – when she’d read virtually every tome in the Base’s library. So she’d borrowed this one. Pored over the pictures –

       Oh my God!

       What is that?!

      – and had never troubled to take it back).

      It was her Bible (that so-familiar frontispiece illustration of a septic bunion was her spiritual equivalent of Genesis – it was where everything first began). Charlesworth was definitely Moses (who else?). He delivered chiropody (or podiatry, as the Americans were so determined to call it) from the Dark Ages. He brought the tablets down from the mountain.

      It was chiefly through his dedication, generosity, lateral thinking and hard endeavour that chiropody finally came to be recognised as a Medical Auxiliary (and won the Holy Grail: State Registration). It was the same text-book she’d used at college (her grades so superlative, they’d pushed her towards Surgery, but she’d resisted, for some reason).

      Elen rarely dreamed, but when she did, Charlesworth provided her with the Foreword, the Contents, the Index, the Appendices. He represented so much for her (stuck a career-based band-aid over her emotional tribulations – such as they were), fulfilled all her wishes…

       Uh…

       Yes.

       Skin diseases:

       Count them off…

       Primary Lesions:

       The Macule,

       The Papule,

       The Tubercule,

       The Vesicle,

       The Pustule,

       The Bulla,

       The Wheal,

       The Squames…

       That’s all eight.

       Good.

       Secondary Lesions:

       Crusts,

       Ulcers,

       Scars,

       Fissures.

       Just the four…

       Count them…

       Uh…

      Charlesworth was her guide, her inspiration and her

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