Nicola Barker - Darkmans

He just couldn’t quite locate himself.

‘I just can’t quite…’ he kept muttering, shaking his head, looking around…‘I just can’t quite orientate …’

The tiny, picturesque town of Winchelsea (so small it was almost a play town — an ornamental town) appeared to be completely empty — although its houses were all newly painted and their gardens were uniformly pristine.

It was a beautiful place, but deserted.

‘It must’ve been evacuated,’ Dory boldly surmised.

After several minutes of driving around, they eventually spotted a frail, somewhat beleaguered inhabitant forging a gradual path up the lonely High Street. Dory rolled down the car window as they drew alongside her.

‘Did something bad happen?’ he asked.

‘Bad?’ she echoed, carefully readjusting her walking frame. She seemed a little hard of hearing.

‘Yes. Something bad? An armed attack? Or a contagion of some kind?’

‘Sorry?’

‘Is everybody dead ?’

She looked shocked.

He pointed, increasingly panicked, towards Fleet on the back seat. ‘Because I have the boy, see? I need to be especially careful. I have the boy with me this time…’

Elen deemed this a good moment to gently accelerate. The car slowly pulled off with Dory still declaiming, loudly, from inside of it. The old woman stood and stared after them, bewildered.

Elen’s dearest wish at that point was to drive straight home, but Dory wouldn’t hear of it. ‘I simply need to…to locate …’ he kept repeating, almost poignantly, ‘to set this all straight , somehow…’ he tapped at his head, ‘in here. I need the two different things — the two ideas — to just…to unify .’

So she parked on a street adjacent to The Lookout (by the Old Strand Gate) where there was a famously stunning view over the marshes below (the Royal Military Canal, the long road into Rye, the remains of Camber Castle, Winchelsea Beach, Dungeness — the power station and the lighthouse, both twinkling, vaguely, in the Channel — even France, on a good day), and led him by the hand (although he insisted on leaving the boy behind: ‘as a precaution’) to take in the vista.

The wind was biting and it was threatening to rain again. Dory gazed down, in silence, for several minutes, yet no matter how hard he tried (and he was trying — the powerful wave of his reason crashing, indomitably, against the sheer cliff of his instinct), he seemed incapable of feeling any kind of rapport with the landscape.

‘But where’s the great forest, Elen?’ he finally murmured.

‘I don’t know…Fallen?’ Elen suggested tentatively. ‘Or cut down?’ ‘And the river? The Brede?’

‘Shrunken, perhaps, or…or diverted .’

He gazed at her, astonished. ‘But what about the pilgrims?’ he asked. ‘How will they manage? How will they set sail ?’

‘They won’t,’ Elen said, softly. ’There are no pilgrims, Dory.’

‘No pilgrims ?!’

He shot her a scathing look then turned on his heel and began striding, rapidly, downhill.

‘Dory?’

‘There will always be pilgrims, Elen,’ he bellowed over his shoulder.

‘Dory!’

‘No. No …’ he gesticulated impatiently, ‘I must find the water.’

He strode on, defiantly.

‘Dory!’

He didn’t respond.

She stood, clutching the car keys, uncertain whether or not to try and follow him on foot. But Fleet was alone, and she didn’t like to leave him unattended for too long. So she ran back to the car, unlocked it and wrenched open the door, only to be greeted by the unwelcome spectacle of a doleful-looking Michelle, hunched over on the driver’s seat, adrift in a large pool of her own feisty urine.

‘Look, Mama!’ Fleet chortled delightedly from the rear. ‘Michelle’s driving!’

‘Fleet!’ Elen exclaimed, dismayed. ‘I thought I told you not to move her from the plastic cover. Now she’s gone and done her business everywhere…’

She gingerly lifted the dog and surveyed the damage.

‘Oh God …’ she shook her head, horrified. ‘This is a company car, Fleet. What on earth will Daddy say when he sees the mess she’s made…?’

‘Nothing,’ Fleet observed, phlegmatically, ‘because he isn’t here.’

Elen leaned over, removed a handful of tissues from the glove compartment and did her best to wipe the dog clean. Once she’d finished, she dumped her, unceremoniously, into the back.

‘Mind my matches , Mama!’ Fleet squealed.

What?!

She saw that he had matches spread out all around him.

‘What are you thinking , Fleet?’ she reprimanded him. ‘You know you’re not meant to play with those until the sulphured ends’ve been chopped off. It’s too dangerous. They aren’t toys . Now put them away.’

He stared at her, insolently.

‘I said put them away !’

She began frantically dabbing at the saturated seat fabric.

‘I need the toilet, too, Mama,’ Fleet informed her, making no perceptible effort to tidy his mess up.

‘Well you’ll have to wait,’ she snapped. ‘We’re in a hurry.’

She continued dabbing.

Fleet gazed out of the window, glumly.

‘Put the matches away, Fleet,’ Elen warned him, ‘or I’m confiscating the lot — for good .’

She carefully laid out a wad of dry tissues over the worst affected areas then took off her mac and arranged it over the top. She sat down, slammed the door shut and attempted to fasten her seat-belt. But she was clumsy. Her hands were cold and unwieldy. Her fingers slipped. She cursed under her breath.

‘Where’s John?’ Fleet suddenly piped up.

‘Daddy’s gone for a walk…’

‘Yes, I know Daddy’s gone,’ Fleet persisted. ‘But where’s John , Mama?’ Before she knew quite what she was doing, Elen had spun around and had grabbed the boy’s shoulder. ‘ Never call him that again,’ she gasped, shaking him. ‘It’s Daddy. It’s Papa. It’s Dory. It’s Isidore. Never use that other name again. Never! D’you hear me?’

The boy stared up at her, coldly. She stared back at him, appalled. ‘Just tidy that mess up,’ she whispered, removing her hand, with a shudder. ‘ Please .’

The boy didn’t move.

She turned back around and lunged for her seat-belt, yanking it, violently, across her chest and then pushing it, viciously, into the requisite slot.

‘ Click ,’ Fleet said, as the two disparate parts made sudden contact.

The boy spotted him first. They’d just visited the public toilets on Winchelsea Beach (which stood adjacent to the playing fields in a site known locally as The Old Harbour) and had clambered up the steep sea wall to take a cursory peek at the Channel.

The tide was far out and the beach lay before them: a series of sharply graduating shingle banks, concluding in a smooth, delicately rippled expanse of golden sand. This sand was interspersed — at steady intervals — by deep swathes of sticky mud which’d been colonised by wading birds: oystercatchers, mainly (parading around, elegantly, in their suave black and white), a handful of hyperactive plover (dashing in and out with the waves like little wind-up toys), and a lone, peerlessly methodical dunlin (slipping its long beak into the goo like a conscientious nurse checking a patient’s temperature with an antique thermometer).

The beach — while wind-swept and desolate — felt oddly inhabited ( peopled , even) by the serried ranks of tall, wooden groynes which’d been neatly — almost miraculously — deposited into the sand, like a scruffy line of tin tacks half-tapped into plasterboard (‘They’re to stop the beach from washing away,’ Elen explained, much to Fleet’s burgeoning dismay. ‘But where will it wash to , Mama?’ he asked, querulously).