Jonathan Barnes - The Domino Men

The driver from the Directorate slouched on the threshold. “Fetch your coat,” he grunted. “The Prefects want a word.”

I made as much noise as I possibly could in retrieving my coat and preparing to leave the flat, but Abbey didn’t emerge from her bedroom and I was too proud to tell her that I was going.

Barnaby had Radio Four playing in the car, some piece of late-night esoterica with a couple of professors spatting crustily over the early works of H.G. Wells.

“Academics,” Barnaby spat as we drove past Tooting Bec station and began the usual protracted escape from south London.

“But weren’t you one of those once?” I asked mildly.

“Yeah,” Barnaby said, his voice bristling with an even greater than usual distillation of belligerence. “Difference is — I knew what I was talking about. Still would, as a matter of fact, if those bastards hadn’t set me up. If they hadn’t concocted that farrago of-”

“Where’s Jasper tonight?” I asked, eager to avoid another venting of the Barnaby spleen. “Where’s Steerforth?”

The driver grimaced. “Too chicken. Couple of nancy boys, the pair of them.”

“I don’t believe they’re cowards,” I said quietly. “It’s just Hawker and Boon. They’ve got a way of making you feel afraid.”

A grunt from the front seat.

“Have you ever met them?”

“No,” he said, although I could tell by the way he said it that he was lying.

I was about to ask more but Barnaby turned up the volume on the radio as high as it could go and refused to answer any further questions for the duration of the journey.

The phalanx of reporters and photographers who often loiter and preen outside Number Ten in daylight hours had long since retired to bed, and those who were left — the soldiers, the guards, the plainclothes policemen — all parted before me without the slightest murmur of a challenge and I marveled again at the skeleton key effect of the words “the Directorate.”

This time I had walked into Downing Street alone. Barnaby still sat in the car outside, gloomily turning the pages of Erskine Childers and the Drama of Utopianism: (Re)Configuring Bolshevism in “The Riddle of the Sands.”

If anything, the sense of oppression, of walking blithely into the gingerbread house, felt even stronger this time. I moved through the library, stepped behind the painting and descended into the depths, past the silent gallery of freaks and ghouls, and tiptoed along the twilight corridor until I reached the final cell, the dreadful resting place of the Prefects.

The guard, his hands white knuckled around his gun, nodded brusquely and I think I was able to detect, buried somewhere deep in his mask of military indifference, a flicker of concern, the merest suggestion of compassion.

Inside, the Domino Men were waiting, their gnarled, hairy legs swinging to and fro in their deckchairs. Everything seemed identical to my last visit, the room as pitilessly stark as before — except for one peculiar addition.

There was an ancient television set in the center of the circle, cranked up far too loud. I heard the blare of canned laughter, the squeak of poorly delivered wisecracks, the silken voice of one of our most prolific character comedians, but it was only when I recognized the tremulous soprano of my nine-year-old self that I realized with a jolt exactly what it was that those creatures were watching.

On-screen, my younger self walked onto a set which always wobbled and delivered my catchphrase to cyclones of tape-recorded mirth.

Hawker and Boon were staring sullenly at the television, like it was a lecture on photosynthesis which they were being forced to sit through in double-period science.

The smaller man groaned. “Dearie me.”

Hawker shook his head sorrowfully. “I’ve got to be honest with you, old top.”

“Got to be frank.”

“It ain’t the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Let’s be candid here, Mr. L. It’s about as funny as cholera.”

“It’s about as funny as…” Hawker thought for a moment, then sniggered. “A nun with leprosy.”

A dirty smirk twisted Boon’s features into something rubbery and grotesque. “And we should jolly well know.”

I moved before them, careful to keep outside the circle.

“Why are you watching that?” I asked, as I caught the familiar plonk and grind of the theme tune.

“It really is a clanger, isn’t it, sir?”

Hawker switched off the television, his lips pursed in a moue of distaste. “What a turkey, sir! What a tip-top stinker!”

Boon passed his hand to and fro in front of his nose, as though washing away an imaginary pong. “Phew!”

“Coo-ee!”

I let them finish. “I want you to tell me where Estella is,” I said as calmly as I could.

Hawker looked at me blankly, then cupped a hand to his ear. “Who?”

“Estella,” I said flatly, knowing that he’d heard me perfectly well the first time.

“Oh right! You should have said, sir! We were going to tell you the other day but you dashed out ’fore we got to it. Rather rude, I thought. Bit cheeky.”

“Dashed ungrateful,” said Boon. “Specially since we’d bent over backwards to make you feel welcome.”

“Where’s Estella?” I said again, trying my best to remain toneless.

Boon got to his feet and surveyed the little limits of his cell. “Do you miss it, sir? The old show?”

“The old routine?”

“The roar of the greasepaint?”

“The smell of the crowds?”

Though the Prefects squealed with laughter, I was careful not to let my expression alter. “Where’s Estella?”

“Pity you’re such a terrible actor, isn’t it, Mr. L?”

“S’pose you might have made a career of it if you’d been any good. But you’re nothing now, are you, sir? Is he, Boon?”

“Certainly not, my old Satsuma. He’s a real nobody.”

“Where,” I said, my voice at last betraying my impatience, “is Estella?”

“What a grump.”

“Someone’s in an awful dudgeon.”

“Young Mr. Lamb’s got up on the wrong side of the bed today.”

I glared. “I need to know where she is.”

“Yaroo!”

“You’ve got a rotten temper, Mr. L.”

I tried my best not to listen. “I want to know where Estella is.”

“And you think that’ll be it, do you, sir? You think, once you find the lady, they’ll let you trot back to your old life? Bad luck, old chum. No one ever leaves the Directorate. You’ll croak in the harness.”

“Where’s Estella?” I said.

Boon smirked. “Even chaps who don’t sign up for Dedlock’s mob end up dying for it,” he said. “Even your daddy, for instance.”

I felt tendrils of panic begin to stir inside me. “Don’t talk about my father.”

Hawker clapped his hands in joy. “Splendid, sir! You were starting to sound like a stuck record.”

“Your pa,” said Boon, “he never signed up for the Directorate. You’re granddad didn’t tell him a thing about it.”

“He wanted him to have a normal, dull sort of life.”

“And he did, didn’t he, Mr. L? Your pa — he was the dullest man you ever knew.”

I protested. “That’s not true!”

“Goodness me, but that fellow was a dullard!”

“And yet…” Boon smirked.

Hawker rubbed his hands together. “We did your granddad a favor once. We told him about the Process.”

“The Process?” I felt myself on the edge of the precipice. What are you talking about?”

“And we didn’t ask for much in exchange, did we, Hawker?”

“Certainly not, Boon. We’re not greedy boys.”

“It was the smallest of favors. The tiniest trinket.”

“What,” I gasped, “did he promise you?”