Nicola Barker
Darkmans
PART ONE
ONE
Kane dealt prescription drugs in Ashford; the Gateway to Europe. His main supplier was Anthony Shilling, a Waste Management Coordinator at the Frances Fairfax. Shilling was a quiet, Jamaican gentleman (caucasian his family originally plantation owners) who came to England in the early seventies, settled in Dalston, London, and fell in love with a woman called Mercy, whose own family hailed from The Dominican Republic.
Mercy was British born. Anthony and Mercy moved to South Kent in 1976, where they settled and raised four daughters, one of whom was a professor of Political Sciences at Leeds University and had written a book called Culture Clashes: Protest Songs and The Yardies (19771999).
Kane was waiting for Anthony at the French Connection; a vulgar, graceless, licensed family restaurant (a mammoth, prefabricated hut, inside of which a broad American roadhouse mentality rubbed up against all that was most intimate and accessible in Swiss chalet-style decor) on the fringes of the Orbital Park, one of Ashfords three largest and most recent greenfield industrial development sites.
The restaurant had been thoughtfully constructed to service the adjacent Travel Inn, which had, in turn, been thoughtfully constructed to service the through-traffic from the Channel Tunnel, much of which still roared carelessly past, just beyond the car park, the giant, plastic, fort-themed childrens play area, the slight man-made bank and the formless, aimless tufts of old meadow and marshland with which the Bad Munstereifel Road (named after Ashfords delightful, medieval German twin) was neatly if inconclusively hemmed.
It was still too early for lunch on a Tuesday morning, and Kane (who hadnt been to bed yet) was slouched back in a heavily varnished pine chair, sucking ruminatively on a fresh Marlboro, and staring quizzically across the table at Beede, his father.
Beede also worked at the Frances Fairfax, where he ran the laundry with an almost mythical efficiency. Beede was his surname. His first name his Christian name was actually Daniel. But people knew him as Beede and it suited him well because he was small, and hard, and unquestionably venerable (in precisely the manner of his legendarily bookish eighth-century precursor).
Beede knew all about Kanes business dealings, and didnt actually seem to give a damn that his only son was cheerfully participating in acts of both a legally and ethically questionable nature. Yet Anthony Shillings involvement was in Beedes opinion an altogether different matter. He just couldnt understand it. It deeply perplexed him. He had liked and admired both Tony and Mercy for many years. He considered them rounded; a respectable, comfortable, functional couple. Mercy had been a friend of Kanes mother, Heather (now deceased she and Beede had separated when Kane was still a toddler). Beede struggled to comprehend Tonys motivation. He knew that it wasnt just a question of money. But that was all he knew, and he didnt dare (or care) to enquire any further.
Beede. Kane suddenly spoke. Beede glanced up from his second-hand Penguin orange-spine with a quick frown. Kane took a long drag on his cigarette.
Well?
Beede was irritable.
Kane exhaled at his leisure.
What the fuck are you doing?
Kanes tone was not aggressive, more lackadaisical, and leavened by its trademark tinge of gentle mockery.
Beede continued to scowl. What does it look like? He shook the book at Kane by way of an answer then returned to it, huffily.
Kane wasnt in the slightest bit dismayed by the sharpness of Beedes response.
But why the fuck, he said, are you doing it here?
Beede didnt even look up this time, just indicated, boredly, towards his coffee cup. Should I draw you a picture?
Kane smiled.
He and Beede were not close. And they were not similar, either. They were different in almost every conceivable way. Beede was lithe, dark, strong-jawed, slate-haired and heavily bespectacled. He seemed like the kind of man who could deal with almost any kind of physical or intellectual challenge
Its the radiator. If you want to try and limp back home with it, Ill need a tub of margarine, a litre of water and a packet of Stimorol; but I wont make you any promises
Ned Kellys last ever words? Spoken as he stood on the scaffold: Such is life.
Youre saying youve never used a traditional loom before? Well its pretty straightforward
Yes, I do believe the earwig is the only insect which actually suckles its young.
No. Nietzsche didnt hate humanity. Thats far too simplistic. What Nietzsche actually said was, Man is something which must be overcome.
To all intents and purposes Daniel Beede was a model citizen. So much so, in fact, that in 1983 hed been awarded the Freedom of the Borough as a direct consequence of his tireless work in charitable and community projects during the previous two decades.
He was Ashford born and bred; a true denizen of a town which had always but especially in recent years been a landmark in social and physical re-invention. Ashford was a through-town, an ancient turn-pike (to Maidstone, to Hythe, to Faversham, to Romney, to Canterbury), a geographical plughole; a place of passing and fording (Ash-ford, formerly Essetesford, the Eshe being a tributary of the River Stour).
Yet in recent years Beede had been in the unenviable position of finding his own home increasingly unrecognisable to him (Change; My God! He woke up, deep in the night, and could no longer locate himself. Even the blankets felt different the quality of light through his window the air). Worse still, Beede currently considered himself to be one of the few individuals in this now flourishing Borough of Opportunity (current population c. 102,000) to have been washed up and spat out by the recent boom.
Prior to his time (why not call it a Life Sentence?) in the hospital laundry, Beede had worked initially at ground level (exploiting his naval training), then later, in a much loftier capacity for Sealink (the ferry people), and had subsequently become a significant figure at Mid-Kent Water plc; suppliers of over 36 million gallons of H2O, daily, to an area of almost 800 square miles.
If you wanted to get specific about it (and Beede always got specific) his life and his career had been irreparably blighted by the arrival of the Channel Tunnel; more specifically, by the eleventh-hour re-routing of the new Folkestone Terminals access road from the north to the south of the tiny, nondescript Kentish village of Newington (where Beedes maternal grandmother had once lived) in 1986.
Rather surprisingly, the Chunnel hadnt initially been Beedes political bête noire. Hed always been studiously phlegmatic about its imminence. The prospect of its arrival had informed (and seasoned) his own childhood in much the same way that it had informed both his parents and his grandparents before them (as early as the brief Peace of Amiens, Napoleon was approached by Albert Mathieu Favier a mining engineer from Northern France who planned to dig out two paved and vaulted passages between Folkestone and Cap Gris-Nez; the first, a road tunnel, lit by oil lamps and ventilated by iron chimneys, the second, to run underneath it, for drainage. This was way back in 1802. The subsequent story of the tunnel had been a long and emotionally exhausting tale spanning two centuries and several generations; an epic narrative with countless dead-ends, low-points, disasters and casualties. Daniel Beede and he was more than happy to admit as much was merely one of these).
Politically, ideologically, Beede had generally been of a moderate bent, but at heart he was still basically progressive. And hed always believed in the philosophy of a little and often, which by and large had worked well for him.
Yes, of course on the environmental brief hed been passingly concerned about the loss of the rare Spider Orchid (the site of the proposed Folkestone Terminal was one of the few places it flourished, nationally), and not forgetting the currently endangered great crested newt, which Beede remembered catching as a boy in local cuts and streams with his simple but robust combination of a small mesh net and marmalade-jar.
And yes, he was well aware more, perhaps, than anybody of what the true (and potentially devastating) implications of a Channel link would be on the Kentish shipping industry (a loss of around 20,000 jobs was, at that time, the popular estimate).
And yes, yes, he had even harboured serious fears and quite correctly, as it later transpired that many of the employment opportunities on the project would pass over local people (at that point Ashford had one of the highest unemployment rates in the country) to benefit non-indigens, outside investors and foreign businesses.
It went without saying that the Chunnel (now a source of such unalloyed national complacency and pride) had caused huge headaches and terrible heartache in East Kent, but Beedes greatest betrayal had been on a much smaller, more informal, more abstract level.
Beedes maternal grandmothers home had been a neat, quaint, unpretentious little cottage (pottery sink, tile floors, outside lavvy) in the middle of a symmetrical facade of five known as Church Cottages. They were located at the conjunction of the old School Road and Newingtons main, central thoroughfare The Street (no shop, no pub, twenty-five houses, at a push).
Much as their name implies, Church Cottages enjoyed a close physical proximity with Newingtons twelfth-century church and its similarly ancient and much-feted graveyard Yew.
Beedes paternal grandparents (to whom he was slightly less close) also lived locally several hundred yards north up the aforementioned Street in the neighbouring village of Peene. Just so long as any inhabitant of either of these two tiny Kentish villages could remember, they had considered themselves a single community.
When the developers plans for the new Folkestone Terminal were initially proposed, however, it quickly became apparent that all this was soon about to change. Several farms and properties (not least, the many charming, if ramshackle homes in the idiosyncratic Kentish hamlet of Danton Pinch) were to be sacrificed to the terminal approach and concourse, not to mention over 500 acres of prime farmland and woodland, as well as all remaining evidence of the old Elham Valley Railway (built in 1884, disused since 1947). But worse still, the access road from the terminal to the M20 was due to cut a wide path straight between Newington and Peene, thereby cruelly separating them, forever.