Nicola Barker - Darkmans

‘It’s not a question of allowing…’ Beede interrupted again.

‘But it is !’ Dory smacked down both hands, hard, on to the steering wheel (perhaps merely intending to express his frustration, or to add a little extra emphasis to his conversation, but somehow conniving to knock into the Rover’s horn mechanism). The horn blasted, loudly.

Beede jumped back, alarmed. He almost spilled his coffee.

‘Sorry,’ Dory looked slightly rueful.

Silence

‘Has something else happened, Isidore?’ Beede murmured, on finally regaining his equilibrium. ‘Something I don’t know about? Something you haven’t told me?’

Dory tipped back his head, with a soft grunt, and gazed up at the ceiling. He lifted his hand and gently massaged his throat, almost as if trying to ease the words out of it. When he eventually spoke his voice was uncharacteristically husky. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it has.’

‘Would it help to talk about it?’

Dory lowered his chin and stared straight ahead of him. He drew a deep breath. ‘I took a paternity test,’ he told the dashboard, coldly, ‘for Fleet.’

‘Sorry?’

Beede didn’t know quite what he’d been expecting, but it certainly hadn’t been that. ‘You took…?’

Dory nodded.

‘But why ?’

‘I don’t know. It was on a…a whim . It just…the idea just came to me. And I wish now — more than anything — that I hadn’t. That I didn’t. But I did.’

‘Have you had the result?’

‘Yes.’ Dory nodded.

Beede stared at him, leaning forward slightly, tensed.

‘And there’s something else,’ Dory continued, flatly, ‘something almost worse …’

‘Pardon?’

Beede still hadn’t quite got his head around the paternity issue.

‘It’s Elen. She has these…these awful…’ He winced.

‘What?’

‘Bruises,’ he muttered.

‘ Bruises? Where?’

‘Her arm. Just above her wrist. There.’

Dory indicated the approximate area on his own arm.

‘I see.’

Beede was quiet for a while. ‘Did she happen to mention how she got them?’

Dory nodded. ‘She said she almost fell down some steps — at the McArthur Glen — but then someone put out a hand and grabbed her. Pulled her back. Quite roughly.’

‘Maybe it’s true…’ Beede didn’t sound confident, ‘I mean maybe they did.’

Dory slowly shook his head. ‘When I came home the other night and she was sleeping — she’d dozed off in front of the tv, waiting up for me — I quietly leaned over…’

He slowly re-enacted the movement — the lean — and as he did so an icy chill surrounded Beede’s heart.

‘I quietly leaned over,’ Dory repeated (still leaning, a strange and unsettling expression on his face — an almost predatory expression — but when he spoke, it was still with Dory’s familiar accent, Dory’s familiar voice), ‘and I had a proper look. On closer inspection the fingerprints — the marks — corresponded — and I mean exactly —to the dimensions of my own hands.’

Dory held up his hands for inspection. They were uncontentious hands — innocent-seeming hands with long, slim fingers and neat, clean nails.

‘Well that’s…it could just be…’ Beede stuttered.

‘I tested it out, Beede — the fingers, the thumbs…And then — and I don’t even know why I felt the urge to do this, I just did — when I pushed up her other sleeve…’

He swallowed, hard.

‘ What? ’

‘There were more marks. Marks inconsistent with the story as she’d told it. Almost as if…’ he struggled to speak ‘ …you know — as she’d been held down at some point…Pushed down. Against her will.’

Beede remained silent.

Dory straightened his spine, lengthened his neck, tucked in his chin and inhaled, deeply. He held his breath for several counts and then slowly released it.

‘You’re still doing the yoga?’ Beede murmured.

‘The Pranayama? Yes. It’s pretty much the only thing keeping me sane right now.’ He glanced over at him. ‘I know I keep hammering on about it, but you really should buy the book…’

Beede shrugged.

Dory smiled. ‘You think it’s all rather too “New Age” to be taken seriously, eh?’

‘Not at all.’

‘But it’s an ancient discipline…’

‘New Age disciplines invariably are ,’ Beede said, disparagingly, ‘but in the modern world they lack context — we just pick them up and then toss them back down again, we consume them. They have no moral claim on us. No moral value . And without that they’re rendered meaningless, fatuous , even.’

‘Here’s the context,’ Dory said, determined to persuade him, ‘when I was a boy my father would constantly go on at me about something he referred to as “The Witness”. The Witness — as my father expressed it — was this inner voice, this calm, authoritative voice…’ he paused, frowning. ‘It’s quite difficult to express — to…to explain —just off the top of my head…but in the early chapters of Richard Rosen’s book he also refers to something which he calls “The Witness”, and from what I can tell — and I find this oddly comforting, somehow, strangely uplifting, even — Rosen’s Witness is pretty much identical —conceptually — to my father’s.’

He gazed at Beede, intently, as if awaiting a response.

‘So there’s this linguistic connection,’ Beede mused, ‘to some arcane practice from your childhood…?’

‘No. Yes . I mean it transpires,’ Dory continued (refusing to let Beede burst his bubble), ‘that The Witness actually has its earliest origins in Pranayama. In the yoga of breath. Although in Sanscrit I believe the word they generally use is Sakshin …’

‘I see,’ Beede said, blankly rotating his coffee carton.

‘It almost feels like a…I mean it sounds silly when I say it out loud, but it’s almost like a kind of…’

He lifted his hands.

‘ Sign? ’ Beede filled in, dryly.

Dory shrugged, apologetically.

Beede gazed back at him, warily. ‘So did you actually ask Elen…’ he began.

‘Rosen says that we can only get into contact with our Witness,’ Dory plodded on, regardless, ‘by divorcing ourselves from our everyday consciousness. By turning away from it. What generally happens is that over time, the…now how does he describe it?…the babbling brook of this consciousness — which basically consists of all our thoughts, our feelings, our passing desires, our physical and sexual impulses — slowly begins to overwhelm — or drown out — our inner or real sense of self, to the extent that we often find ourselves at a point where we actually believe that this everyday consciousness — or citta — is our real self. But the truth is that these momentary thoughts and impulses don’t describe who we are at all . Quite the opposite. They actively limit it. And if we allow ourselves to identify too strongly with them then it results in what the yogis like to call duhkha —a kind of profound confusion, a feeling of deep misery…’

Dory leaned forward and lifted his journal from the air vent. As he lifted it, the pages flapped violently, like the wings of an injured bird. He immediately calmed the bird with a soft cooing sound and then drew it towards him, supporting it, gently, in both hands. He caressed its soft chest feathers with a tiny rotation of his thumbs, then spread out its wings — like a dark fan — with his other fingers. Beede blinked.