Nicola Barker - Darkmans

She poured a fifth shot and offered it to him. He took it.

‘…so instead of signing either one design or the other, he signs in the middle of both and returns the plans with no further comment.’

He downed the shot–

Yup—

Good—

Better.

‘Were they divorced by then?’ she asked.

He glanced up, sharply.

‘Who?’

‘Beede and your mother.’

He was silent for a while; shocked.

‘Yes,’ he said, coldly, ‘of course they were.’

‘And then the two of you went off to live in America?’

He scowled. ‘No. Yes . I’m not sure what you mean. They got divorced when I was six or seven…’

‘But she wasn’t ill at that stage, was she?’

He could tell by the tone of her voice that his answer mattered to her.

‘No. Not exactly. I mean the signs were there…’

He refused (out of sheer spite) to let his father–

The canny bastard

— entirely off the hook. ‘A certain discomfort. A stiffness . They thought it might be arthritis. That’s why we emigrated somewhere warmer.’

‘Somewhere hot,’ she mused.

‘Arizona. The edge of the desert. We lived in a mobile home — a ramshackle kind of prefab — with rattlesnakes nesting beneath the floorboards and no air conditioning to speak of…’ ‘I thought rattlesnakes were notoriously shy.’

‘They are.’

Silence

‘And when you came back?’ she persisted.

‘What?’

‘Was she very ill?’

‘Yes.’

‘Terminal?’

He nodded.

Silence

‘It’s gradually coming back to me now…’ Elen murmured. ‘She had such beautiful feet. Powerful feet. Muscular.’

‘She trained as a dancer when she was younger.’

Elen’s eyes lit up.

‘Of course —yes. I remember her mentioning that…’

Silence

‘So they built both designs, then, in the end?’

She leaned forward and took the glass from his hand. ‘Because they were so afraid of Stalin that they didn’t dare question his decision? Is that how the story goes? They integrated both designs into a single building?’

‘Yes.’

Kane’s voice sounded flat.

‘You know…’ she frowned for a second, ‘that story does sound familiar, now you come to mention it…’

She picked up the bottle and inspected it again. ‘Although it doesn’t look like anything special in the drawing…’

‘They’re knocking it down, anyway,’ Kane glowered, ‘so it doesn’t really matter. They may’ve knocked it down already, in fact.’

He took a sudden, mean kind of pleasure in the thought of the hotel’s destruction.

‘That’s a great shame,’ she said.

He shrugged. ‘It was going to cost more to renovate it than to build something new.’

‘But if you actually stop and think about it,’ she ruminated, ‘the hotel was important. A symbol of Russia’s complicated past. A parable. I mean the fear, the power, the compromise, the confusion…’

‘And the decision to knock it down,’ he interrupted, ‘is a symbol of Russia’s future.’

She slowly shook her head. ‘No. That doesn’t necessarily follow…’ she paused, ‘and anyway, what kind of a future? One based on ignoring the mistakes of the past?’

‘Sure. Why not?’

She looked surprised.

‘But of course it follows,’ he snapped (frustrated by her willingness to take him at face value). ‘What you’re not seeing is that it’s all part of the same story. The same…uh… trajectory . You could almost say that the decision to knock it down is at the heart of the parable, that it actually tells us more about the Russia of today — the world of today — than the story of its construction told us about Russia back then.’

‘How depressing.’

She smiled, wistfully.

‘That’s progress,’ he shrugged.

‘And so progress — in your view — is generally contingent on bulldozing the painful stuff?’

He didn’t answer.

She filled the glass and downed another shot.

He stared at her. She filled the glass again.

‘Perhaps five’s enough.’

‘You’re keeping count,’ she muttered. ‘How sweet.’

He glowered at her.

‘Anyway…’ she shook her head, glumly, ‘I never get drunk. It’s something about my constitution…’ she put a graceful hand to her stomach and patted it. ‘Solid as a rock.’

Kane grimaced. ‘In my extensive experience,’ he observed, dryly, ‘it’s always the worst kind of drunks who like to bend your ear with that kind of nonsense.’

She calmly downed her fifth shot then carried the empty glass over to the sink.

‘When I was a student,’ she shoved up her sleeves and turned on the tap, ‘I once drank an entire bottle of surgical spirit…’

‘If you had actually done that,’ he said, bluntly, ‘then you wouldn’t be standing here now.’

‘But I am.’

She peered over her shoulder at him.

Silence

‘Yes. I suppose you are,’ he grudgingly conceded.

‘My father had recently drowned,’ she continued, ‘in an accident, on a commercial riverboat cruise, and I felt this almost…I don’t know…this overwhelming urge to just blank everything out.’

She placed the glass down, gently, on to the draining-board. As she did so Kane noticed a clutch of terrible bruises: hand-prints, fingerprints, in a remarkable array of greens and purple-pinks, just above her wrists. She turned around, grabbed the vodka bottle and casually inspected the label again. ‘Just like the Russians, I guess.’

‘Weren’t you ill?’ he asked (struggling to remain focussed on the matter in hand).

‘No,’ she opened the freezer and placed the vodka back inside again, ‘a dry mouth…a slight headache. I probably vomited most of it back up.’

She wiped her hands on her skirt and adjusted her sleeves.

The dog sneezed.

They both looked down at her.

Silence

And then — quite out of the blue–

‘I thought you were magnificent too,’ she said.

Kane froze. Had she actually just spoken? Out loud ?

‘And although she was beautiful — and she really was ; I’m not just saying that…I mean she was so funny and so brave and what she went through was so horrible…But I never cried for her — outside, in my car, remember? Not once did I cry for her. The only person I ever cried for…’ she paused, thoughtfully ‘…was you.’

She was staring at him — he could tell — but he didn’t dare look up. His eyes remained locked on the spaniel. He felt — he couldn’t …A maelstrom of emotion. Pain. Self-pity. Fury. Embarrassment.

His phone began vibrating–

Saved by the bell

— but he made no move to answer it.

And then suddenly–

Jesus

— there was this…this shadow . A dark shadow, in the kitchen. A huge, dark shadow moving slowly towards him, gaining — with every passing second — in both clarity and definition.

Kane angled his head slightly and leaned back, to try and get some kind of…

Good God—

An old man! Perfectly proportioned. Sharp-edged. Like a paper-cut. Hunched over, scraggy, and vaguely, well, comical to look at…An arthritic old man — hook-nosed, like Mr Punch or Don Quixote — sitting astride a black, shadow donkey. The donkey was limping — lamely but methodically — across the walls and the units and the tiling.

And the old man’s hand was holding up some kind of–