Darkmans

‘Thanks.’ She slowly straightened up again. She looked befuddled. Kane took a quick drag on his cigarette. The waitress – observing this breach – laced her fingers together and frowned slightly (as if sternly reacquainting her girlish self with all the basic rules of restaurant etiquette). ‘Um…I’m afraid you’re not really…’ she muttered, peeking nervously over her shoulder.

‘What?’

Kane gazed at her. His blue eyes held hers, boldly. ‘What?’

She winced. ‘Smoke…you’re not really meant to…not in the restaurant.’

‘Oh…yeah,’ Kane nodded emphatically, ‘I know that.’

She nodded herself, in automatic response, then grew uncertain again. He passed her the pad. She took it and slid it into her apron. ‘Can I hold on to this pencil?’ Kane asked, suspending it, in its entirety, between his first finger and his thumb. ‘As a keepsake?’

The waitress shot an anxious, side-long glance towards Beede (still reading). ‘Of course,’ she said.

She grabbed her tray again.

‘Thank you,’ Kane murmured, ‘that’s very generous. You’ve been really…’ he paused, weighing her up, appreciatively ‘…sweet.’ The waitress – plainly disconcerted by Kane’s intense scrutiny – took a rapid step away from him, managing, in the process, to incline her tray slightly. The glasses slid around a little. She paused, with a gasp, and clumsily readjusted her grip.

‘Bye then,’ Kane said (not even a suggestion of laughter in his voice). She glanced up, thoroughly flustered. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘of course. Thank you. Bye…’

Then she ducked her head down, grimacing, and fled.

Beede continued reading. It was as if the entire episode with the waitress had completely eluded him.

Kane gently placed the pencil next to Beede’s coffee cup, then picked up his danish and took a large bite of it. He winced as his tooth hit down hard on a stray cherry stone.

‘Shit.’

He spat the offending mouthful into a napkin – silently denouncing all foodstuffs of a natural origin – then carefully explored the afflicted tooth with his tongue. While he did so, he gazed idly over towards the large picture window to his right, and out into the half-empty car park beyond.

‘Expecting someone?’ Beede asked, quick as a shot.

Kane took a second (rather more cautious) bite of the danish. ‘Yup,’ he said, unabashedly, ‘Anthony Shilling.’

‘What?!’

Beede glanced up as he processed this name, a series of conflicting expressions hurtling across his face.

‘I thought you knew,’ Kane said (eyebrows slightly raised), still chewing.

‘How would I know?’ Beede snapped, slapping down his book.

‘Because you’re here,’ Kane said, ‘and why else would you be? It’s miles away from anywhere you’d ever normally go, and it’s a shithole.’

‘I come here often,’ Beede countered. ‘I like it. It’s convenient for work.’

‘That’s just a silly lie,’ Kane sighed, evincing zero tolerance for Beede’s dissembling.

‘Strange as this may seem,’ Beede hissed, ‘I’m actually in no particular hurry to get caught up in some sordid little situation between you and one of my senior work colleagues…’

‘Well that’s a shame,’ Kane said, casually picking up his cigarette again, ‘because that’s exactly what’s about to happen.’

Beede leaned down and grabbed a hold of his small, khaki workbag – as though intending to make a dash for it – but then he didn’t actually move. Something (in turn) held him.

Kane frowned. ‘Beede, why the fuck are you here?’ 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?).