Nicola Barker - Darkmans

Nope

Luckily there was next to no proper planting in the adjacent patch of garden — just a brown, slightly frozen lawn (no gate, no fence). Kane calculated that — if the worst came to the worst — it’d be perfectly possible to reverse the Merc across it, over the pavement and down on to the road again without causing too much conspicuous damage.

As he made this calculation his eye was drawn — almost irresistibly — to the diary on the Rover’s dashboard. Its pages were still rotating–

Hmmn…

Air conditioning left on?

Kane grimaced, grabbed for the hem of his old crombie and began inching his way around it with his finger and thumb–

Where’d my stuff get to?

Is it lost in the lining?

— but he couldn’t feel anything and soon grew restive–

Need a smoke…

— so snatched his cigarettes from the front seat and lit one, then lay down flat on his back and gazed over towards his quarry, speculatively–

Nope.

It’s no good…

I just gotta…

He shoved his cigarette into the corner of his mouth, rolled on to his belly, felt for the door handle and slowly released it–

Click

As he pushed it open a cruel blast of winter air hit him square in the face. He closed his eyes for a moment (as if secretly hoping that it might jolt him back to his senses)–

Nah-ah

— then slowly, carefully, he slid out of the Merc, crouched down on to his hands and knees and began crawling, awkwardly, along the driveway. He was initially shielded from Dory’s sight — at least partially — by the Merc’s square chassis, but once he’d reached the bumper it became abundantly clear that the actual gap between the two vehicles was quite a considerable one–5 or 6 feet, at least — with every inch of them in plain view.

Kane peeked around the Merc’s heavy rump and up towards Dory. Lucky for him, Dory still seemed fully preoccupied with the scaffolding, so Kane snatched his opportunity and scrambled over towards the Rover, rising to his knees when he reached the driver’s door and peering in through the window to check out the alarm system–

Deactivated…

I think.

The black jotter continued to flap seductively on the dash. Kane applied his hand gently to the door handle, squeezed, heard the mechanism disengage, grinned, pulled the door open and leaned into the car to grab the book.

As he leaned, a small portion of ash from the tip of his cigarette dropped on to the seat.

Bollocks

Kane quickly swiped it off with his hand — knocking it down on to the tarmac. As he swiped he sensed a vague shift in the atmosphere around him — a strange, almost indefinable sensation — as if the wind had changed direction, or the sun had passed — very briefly — behind a cloud. He frowned, glancing nervously over his shoulder–

Nothing

— then shrugged and straightened up–

Oh shit

He froze.

Perched on the steering wheel, directly in front of him, was the bird.

Kane stared at the bird. The bird scratched itself, vigorously (patently unconcerned by Kane’s close proximity), spraying an extraordinary quantity of fluff and skin-flakes into the surrounding ether.

Kane flinched, revolted. The bird responded with a sharp sneeze, then shook out its remaining feathers and hunkered down (for the long haul, it seemed), its neck neatly disappearing into the black feather boa of its shoulders.

‘What do you want?’ Kane whispered.

The bird opened and closed its beak a few times, but without making a sound.

‘You’re guarding the diary, eh?’ Kane mused, noticing how the bird’s third eye-lid kept passing slowly across the eye, in between blinks. ‘Well, whether you like it or not,’ he continued bolshily (screwing his courage to the sticking place), ‘I’m still gonna take the damn thing…’

He reached out to grab the book and the bird instantly took wing. He cringed (automatically anticipating a physical assault of some kind) but the bird swooped gracefully over his head and out through the door, without so much as a sound.

No actual, physical assault as such — no — but he did feel…

Uh…?

— He definitely felt…

Kane glanced down at his crombie–

Jeeesus!

The bird had shat across his shoulder. Prodigiously.

You filthy little…

Kane reached up, snatched the diary, stuck it under his arm, carefully closed the Rover’s door–

Quietly…

Quietly…

— and scuttled back to the Merc, pulling off his crombie before clambering inside, unearthing an old tissue from under the seat and scraping off the worst of the mess with it–

Urgh!

He became so engrossed in this task that several seconds had elapsed (at least) before it finally dawned on him that the racket from the scaffolding had temporarily abated. He glanced over towards the house, alarmed. Dory was high up in the structure now, standing bolt upright, his hand shading his eyes (like a mariner in a crow’s nest searching for dry land).

Kane hurled himself down flat on to the back seat, covering himself with his crombie (struggling to hold his cigarette away from the coat’s fabric), thanking his lucky stars for the Merc’s tinted windows.

After thirty or so seconds he peeked out. Dory was inspecting his watch and frowning, as if to imply (Kane imagined) that he might be awaiting someone’s late arrival. Then he turned and calmly returned to work again.

Kane remained supine, quietly watching Dory’s progress as he finished off his cigarette. He was certainly impressed by the German’s dynamism, although still rather cynical about how much of an actual impact Dory’s frenzied repairs were having on the structure, overall. The scaffolding — as a whole — seemed increasingly unstable; so much so, in fact, that when at one point Dory straightened up and glanced around him (alerted by a distant sound, perhaps) the entire edifice seemed to wobble and Dory was obliged to grab on to the guttering (part of which came away in his hand) to stop himself from losing his balance and plummeting to the ground.

Kane sat up, shocked, almost preparing to leap from the car—‘And do what?’ he asked himself, scowling. ‘ Help? ’

He stubbed out his cigarette and lay back down again just in time to apprehend the lunatic German clambering on to the actual roof and scrabbling along the tiles like some kind of crazed, alpine goat, apparently heading for one of the two small, pitched promontories which jutted out — like a pair of frog’s eyes — above a couple of the upstairs windows. Sure enough, when Dory reached the first of these, he hauled himself on to it, slinging his leg over (as if mounting a horse), sitting jauntily astride it and gazing around him; the king of all he surveyed.

Kane glanced down at the jotter, frowning. He opened it up, randomly–

Wow…

Dory’s writing was inconceivably tiny and ludicrously neat, so much so that he’d managed to compress three lines of script between each of the printed lines on the page.

‘ Day 23 ’—Kane read—‘ I am trying to concentrate on the inner ear. I am drawing the channels of the ear together. They are certainly “soft and deep” now (as Rosen suggests). Svatmarama claims that after only two weeks’ practice it is possible to hear subtle sounds in the “yoga ear”. I am hearing these sounds. I have not heard clouds (or horns, for that matter), but I did hear bells, the sound of the sea and the buzz of a fly. With the sea comes nausea. With the bells? A sense of excitement, a longing, a strong pull…And the fly? I don’t know…A cruel mix of things. Boredom? Dread? Frustration? Fear?