Nicola Barker - Darkmans

‘Bigger cheese isn’t automatically better cheese,’ Beede counselled her, sagely.

‘Oh yes it is,’ she said.

‘Where is this…uh…?’ Gaffar interrupted them, putting an anxious hand to his neck.

‘The scarf? It’s here. On the floor. With your jacket. I took them both off to check your vital signs,’ Beede said. He reached down and retrieved them.

‘Kane’s mother knitted him this scarf,’ he said, proffering it, tenderly. ‘It’d be a shame to lose it.’

‘Sure.’

Gaffar took the scarf and began rewinding it back around his neck.

‘You should probably cancel the ambulance,’ Beede told Susan Pope. ‘He seems fine — quite back to his normal self.’

‘Really?’

‘Well as normal as he ever gets ,’ Beede averred.

‘I am good,’ Gaffar confirmed. ’I love passing out. When you come to it’s like starting afresh. Everything feels clean and new.’

‘He loves passing out,’ Beede interpreted, ‘he’s very accustomed to it. He’s a boxer, by trade.’

‘ Great boxer,’ Gaffar stressed. ‘Champ.’

Susan Pope still didn’t seem entirely convinced that he was all right.

‘It was just the shock,’ Beede said. ‘He has this morbid fear of salad…’

‘A morbid fear of salad ?’ Susan Pope echoed, taking out her phone. ‘I have a ten-year-old at home who suffers from the exact-same complaint.’

‘I’ll wheel him to the canteen, if I may,’ Beede said, ‘and buy him a cup of sweet tea.’

‘Good idea…’

Susan Pope stood up. She staggered slightly. ‘My poor knees,’ she sighed.

‘Lovely knees,’ Gaffar said, inspecting them.

‘Oh dear,’ she said, tutting, ‘his eyesight’s obviously still not quite up to scratch.’

‘His eyesight’s fine,’ Beede insisted.

Her cheeks pinkened.

‘I could always get a member of staff to ring through your shopping for you,’ she twinkled, ‘if that’ll help.’

‘That’d be great,’ Beede said.

Gaffar started to push himself up.

‘Sit down , Gaffar,’ they chorused.

It wasn’t so much a barn as a huge, converted storage space; a labyrinth of mysterious, dimly lit, air-conditioned rooms crammed with fascinating objects (mostly crated, or — in the case of some of the larger pieces — free-standing and fastidiously preserved in reams of brown paper and sheets of opaque plastic).

The rooms were connected by a warren of stark corridors with white walls and highly polished concrete floors, punctuated — at regular intervals — by heavy, metal, aircraft-carrier-style doors.

Kane felt like he’d inadvertently trespassed into the private back rooms of a museum, or a large art gallery, or an exclusive European auction house. Every detail — or lack of detail — oozed class; refinement ; exuded that sense of effortless pared-downness which was — in Kane’s not especially extensive experience — the exclusive prerogative of the extremely well-heeled.

‘This place is deceptive,’ he said, ‘outside it seems ancient — kind of ramshackle — but inside it’s fantastic…’

‘You think so?’ she shrugged. ‘There was virtually nothing on this site when Peter first arrived, just the foundations of the old cottage. He built it all up pretty much from scratch — take a look…’

She pointed to a montage of photographs and architectural plans on a nearby wall. Kane walked over to inspect them. ‘You weren’t kidding,’ he marvelled. ‘It was literally just a field with some old rubble in one corner…’

‘That’s the site of the old cottage there…’ she pointed. ‘See? Those were the foundations. It was just a skeleton, a shell…If you look over here you can see a very rare photograph of how the farm once was…’

Kane gazed at a tiny, blurred picture of the original cottage and its surrounding outbuildings.

‘Wow. It’s pretty much identical.’

‘Yup. It was a monumental project. A real challenge. Definitely a labour of love…’

‘But why bother?’ Kane wondered. ‘Why not just build something new?’

‘Where would’ve been the challenge in that?’ she demanded.

Kane snorted, ‘ God . It’s no wonder he and Beede have so much in common. They’re both men obsessed…’

He moved further along the wall to a slightly more recent image of a group of builders applying the last few tiles to the cottage’s roof. One was lounging against the chimney, grinning widely, toasting the photographer with a bottle of champagne.

‘Is that Peter?’ he asked, pointing.

‘No,’ she smiled, reaching out a gloved hand and gently plucking a stray goose feather from the sleeve of his jacket. ‘Let’s head off, shall we? I won’t put the lights on,’ she continued, moving swiftly ahead of him, ‘it’s so wasteful if we’re just passing through, don’t you think?’

Kane drew away from the photograph and followed her, directed through the surrounding gloom by the sound of her voice and her jauntily bobbing ponytail.

‘They’re Russian Arsamas, in case you’re interested,’ she volunteered, waving the feather at him over her shoulder.

‘Pardon?’

He was momentarily distracted by the sudden shudder of his phone. ‘The geese. They’re an especially ferocious breed, and terribly rare. Their bills are pink — you’ll’ve noticed — not orange, like the descendants of the western greylag…‘

She pulled open a heavy door, with a grunt. He reached out to help her.

‘Fire door,’ she puffed, allowing him to take the weight of it, then ducking through and walking on.

‘They were raised as fighters,’ she continued. ‘They had this infamous Goose Pit in St Petersburg where they fought them as late as the turn of the last century. On the upside they’re very hardy — will withstand virtually anything the British climate can throw at them — but on the down: they’re bad layers and the meat’s abysmal. Gamey. Very tough.’

‘So what’s the point in keeping them?’ Kane asked.

‘What’s the point?’ she echoed, pausing and turning. He paused too, gazing down at her. She was small, exquisitely well-preserved and hard as a ball-bearing.

‘What an absurd question,’ she said, peering up at him, pityingly, still casually twirling the feather in her free hand. He could smell cigar smoke on her skin and in her hair.

He liked her. There was something…

What was it?

Mordant?

Ballsy?

Wicked?

‘We used to worship geese,’ she darted on. ‘The English , I mean. Apparently when Caesar visited the island in 55 BC the primitive Celts kept huge flocks of them which were held sacred and never eaten. Geese’ve had this long and incredibly rich relationship with man. After the second ice age — when we evolved from nomadic hunters into farmers and cultivators — the goose was absolutely pivotal to the success of that transition; a kind of civilising force…’

They arrived at the base of a wide, oak staircase. Kane’s phone shuddered, once again, inside his pocket.

‘I had this appallingly handsome Russian lover in the sixties,’ she confessed, taking the first step, ‘a stone mason. Astonishingly talented but a revolting drunk. The Arsamas were his, originally — and a perfect symbol of the kind of relationship we had…’

She chuckled. ‘ You know; fierce. Uncompromising. Passionate…’

She glanced over her shoulder at him, raising a single, sardonic, charcoal brow.

‘The birds living here today are their descendants,’ she continued, her breath quickening slightly with the exertion of the climb. ‘I mean we always kept geese when I was a child — just your classic English whites and greys…My mother was raised in Essex and one of her favourite stories was of how she used to watch huge flocks of them being driven down from Norfolk to Smithfield Market. Over 8,000 birds at any one time. A journey of over 80 miles. She said they would dip the birds’ feet in tar to help preserve them.’