Darkmans - Nicola Barker

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simply came away –

      

       Actually came off

      – in your hand.

      

      4. The roof. It didn’t work. If you stood in the attic, craned your neck and looked up, you could see shafts of light shining in. Dozens of them. And the problem was especially severe around the chimney where the damp had spread lower, had entered the plaster. In Fleet’s room, the wall on the chimney-breast side felt as soft as icing sugar (you could push your fingers straight through the panelling) and the ceiling was starting to mould-up and to sag.

      Power and Higson Ltd, the contractors –

      

       All credit to them

      – had been very sympathetic. They’d promptly sent around an independent surveyor, and he’d posited the precise sum they’d be willing to invest on ‘making good’. But they were well behind schedule, and it was winter, and their workers were all fully occupied in maintaining the build elsewhere –

      

       Oh. Dear.

      So they provided Isidore with a list of approved contacts for local firms who might – they believed – be able to do a good job. He left about thirty messages. He received only two responses. In both instances nobody was available to come over and even assess the job for the following two months.

      He grew desperate. He pulled out the Yellow Pages and thumbed his way through the relevant section –

      

       Uh…

      A Priori Builders Ltd –

      

       Okay…Uh…So that’s…

      He tapped in the digits, and waited…

      

       Damn.

       Engaged.

      His finger hovered – for the briefest of moments – over the redial button, but his eyes scanned onward…

      AAABuilders and Plumbers PLC –

      

       What?! You’ve got to be kidding!

      Aardvaak Builders inc. –

      

       Huh?!

      Abacus…

      

       Hmmn

      Abacus Builders Ltd –

       Sounds better

      He called them. They answered. A meeting was set up for the following morning with Harvey, one of their key personnel.

      Harvey arrived on time and made all the right noises (thought it was ‘a good little house, mate, a solid little dwellin’, just a few, small creases, and we’ll iron them out, no problem’).

      He assured them – with all sincerity – that since they found themselves in ‘a rather urgent predicament’, a couple of his people would make a start on things by the following Tuesday (‘The kid deserves his own room back, poor bugger. It’s like a fucking paddlin’ pool up here…Look at his face! Just look at him! I think he might be in love with me. What’s your name, kid-o? Fleet? Mum got knocked up in the Motorway Services, did she? Eh? Only kidding! Okay, Dad, we’ll need to bang up some scaffoldin’, straight off, and an absolute, bloody ton of tarpaulin…’).

      Harvey drove a bright red and gold, customised 4x4 Toyota Hi Lux with lifted suspension, imported, 39” Mickey Thompson tyres, an electric winch and PIAA lights, front and back. He took ‘the boys’ for ‘a quick spin’ in it. Elen stood and waited for them, out on the pavement. And she waited. And waited.

      She checked her watch.

      It was a full forty-three minutes until they finally returned home again. As Harvey re-entered the cul-de-sac – and performed a stately lap of honour – he sounded his siren.

      It was a bastardised version of Madonna’s 1986 anti-abortion classic, ‘Papa Don’t Preach’, from the True Blue album.

      ‘Do you remember Chicken Licken?’ Elen whispered, tucking Fleet up for the third week in a row on the living-room sofa.

      ‘Uh-uh.’ Fleet slowly shook his head.

      ‘He thought the sky was falling in.’

      ‘Really?’ Fleet looked fearful, as if he could quite easily imagine the sky caving in on him. ‘Why did he think that?’

      ‘Because he got hit on the head by a chestnut – or an acorn – and he thought it was the sky.’

      Fleet pondered this for a while. ‘Well that was very silly of him,’ he finally announced, with a slight air of pomposity.

      ‘Exactly.’

      Elen gently adjusted his hair. His head seemed a little warm to the touch.

      ‘It’s only the ceiling,’ she murmured, kissing him, softly, on the ear, ‘it’s not the sky or anything.’

      The boy smiled and turned tiredly over, shoving his face into his pillow, hooking his feet together (as was his habit, each night, before slumber).

      Elen stood up to leave.

      ‘Well at least he likes the drip, drip, drip…’ the boy sighed.

      She froze, just for a split second, then she forced herself back into motion; pulling his duvet still tighter around him. ‘When the builder comes,’ she spoke brightly, normally, ‘when Harvey comes, everything will be fine again, you’ll see.’

      The mark –

      

       The blemish

      – there was no getting around it.

      When she was born they’d thought it might fade. But it did not fade.

      The mark was the first thing she saw each morning, and the last thing she saw, each night, before bed. Five hundred years ago, they might’ve burned her for it. And she seriously thought – at some sick, subterranean level – that they still would, if they possibly could (an unconscious suspicion remained. She saw it in people’s eyes – the revulsion, the hostility, the nagging fascination).

      The mark was undoubtedly a blotch on her good name. But it was there, dammit. So she’d had to work her way around it, she’d had to be strong, to look beyond.

      She never gave even a hint that it bothered her; was casual, cheerful and straightforward, in general, but she was only a woman, and not devoid of vanity (people would come up to her, in the street, and tap her, gently, on the shoulder, kindly informing her that there was something…

      

       Uh…

       Oh!

      Realising what it was – becoming embarrassed – apologising – then dashing off, humiliated. And those were the nice ones).

      The mark was the first thing Isidore noticed when they’d crashed into each other at the ice rink in Folkestone. They were both seventeen.

      She’d been visiting the coast for a weekend, to catch up with her father. Isidore had just completed a six-week School Exchange Programme in Tenterden. He was cutting loose in the summer, doing some casual work – mainly manual labour.

      He wasn’t actually wearing

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