Darkmans

Gaffar half-smiled as he returned to the living area. ‘Yes I do,’ he said, with exactly the level of conviction most calculated to fill Kane with doubt. And then, ‘Woof!’ he mimicked, satirically (with a huge grin), in a way that (Kane presumed) might be considered ‘cute’ in whichever godforsaken part of the planet he originally hailed from –

But not here

Kane rubbed his face with his hands (he was finding the Kurd rather exhausting). ‘Would you get me some water?’ He mimed turning on a tap, holding a glass under.

Gaffar did as he was asked. He was accustomed to following orders. There was a kind of dignity in submission which the quiet ox inside of him took an almost active pleasure in.

‘Thanks.’

As Kane drank he assessed Gaffar’s suit.

‘Nice suit…’ He exhaled sharply as he spoke, then burped and wiped his mouth with his hand.

Gaffar nodded.

‘Where’s it from?’

‘Beede.’

Kane blinked. ‘No way.’

‘Yes.’

‘No,’ Kane reiterated firmly. ‘Beede would never own a suit like that. It looks foreign, for starters, and he religiously supports the British Wool Trade…’

Gaffar scowled. ‘He give to me. Beede.In exchange for his losses, yeah?’

‘What is it?’ Kane casually flipped open one of the front jacket flaps (feeling the seductive, semi-hollow crackle of his Marlboro packet through the lining). Gaffar immediately slapped it shut.

‘Yves Saint Laurent,’ he announced, haughtily.

‘Not a chance, man,’ Kane snorted. ‘It’s gotta be knock-off.’

Gaffar (rising like a pike to the bait) shrugged the jacket from his shoulders and showed Kane the label.

‘Wow.’ Kane perused the label at his leisure (it looked legitimate), while casually slipping his free hand into the pocket and removing his cigarettes. ‘So there you go, huh?’

‘So there you go,’ Gaffar echoed, scowling, as Kane tapped out a smoke and flipped it into his mouth.

He pulled the jacket back on (wincing slightly as it snagged on his neatly re-bandaged arm). Kane relaxed down into the sofa again (matches? Lighter?), his expression one of tolerant bemusement. As he leaned he felt something crumple behind him. He shoved his hand under the blanket and withdrew a large, slightly dented brown envelope. He stared at it for a while, frowning.

Gaffar, meanwhile, had returned to the kitchen and was dishing himself up a large bowlful of beans. In the bread-bin he’d located a half-used wholemeal loaf from which he’d already torn a sizeable portion. He balanced the bread on top of the beans and carried the bowl over to Beede’s desk, placing it down, carefully, on to the battered, leather veneer and taking off his jacket (hanging it over the back of the adjacent chair).

He sat down and began to eat, employing the bread as a makeshift scoop. Several mouthfuls in, he noticed a large World Atlas on a bookshelf close by, hauled it out, one-handed, opened it, and began casually paging through the maps.

Kane watched Gaffar for a while, patting away – like a zombie – at his pockets (impressed by the Kurd’s apparent ability to make himself feel at home). The suit (Kane wryly observed) gave Gaffar the furtive air of a man struggling to pass himself off as Minister of Sport – or Information, or the Arts – in a tin-pot military dictatorship (somewhere much too hot) after his brother, Sergio (the ambitious, pissed-up lieutenant), had shot the bastard general and promptly stepped into his highly polished, size eleven lace-ups –

Ah yes –

The whole tragic socio-political edifice was currently hanging – like a badly mounted stuffed elk – on Gaffar’s family resemblance, terror, and the faultless cut of his Yves Saint Laurent.

Sergio?

Man –

What am I on?!

He finally located a box of matches (tucked down the side of the sofa), lit his cigarette and returned his full attention back to the brown envelope. He inspected the seal –

Not glued, just –

He kept his smoke dangling loosely from his lip as he popped out the flap. He peered inside – inhaled – and saw a thickish sheath of photocopied papers. He exhaled –

Hmmn

– and gently removed them.

It was a very old book – forty pages long – badly reproduced and slightly blurry (although the frontispiece was in bolder type and so marginally more legible than the rest). It was written in Old English –

Well, old-ish…

Some (but not all) of the ‘s’s were ‘f’s.

SCOGIN’S JESTS;

he read:

Full of witty Mirth and pleafant Shifts;

done by him in FRANCE

and other places.

BEING

A Prefervative against Melancholy.

Then underneath that:

Gathered by Andrew Board, Doctor of Phyfick.

This was followed by a whole ream of publishing guff.

Kane casually opened to the first page. He stiffened. On the blank, inner leaf, in pencil, somebody had written: –

So Beede –

There’s a whole series of these things (one for each of the various monarchs’ funny-men, although I didn’t get a chance to look at any of the others). Apparently there was quite a vogue for them in the 1600s (and for several hundred years after that – I saw at least two editions of this one – the earlier called Scoggin’s Jests by an Andrew Boord – 1626 – and this one, in which the spelling’s more familiar, from 1796 – that’s a 170-year gap!), indicating how popular these guys actually were (plus: note the celebrity publisher…)