Authors: Nicola Barker
She nodded herself, in automatic response, then grew uncertain again. He passed her the pad. She took it and slid it into her apron. ‘Can I hold on to this pencil?’ Kane asked, suspending it, in its entirety, between his first finger and his thumb. ‘As a keepsake?’
The waitress shot an anxious, side-long glance towards Beede (still reading). ‘Of course,’ she said.
She grabbed her tray again.
‘Thank you,’ Kane murmured, ‘that’s very generous. You’ve been really…’ he paused, weighing her up, appreciatively ‘…
sweet.
’ The waitress – plainly disconcerted by Kane’s intense scrutiny – took a rapid step away from him, managing, in the process, to incline her tray slightly. The glasses slid around a little. She paused, with a gasp, and clumsily readjusted her grip.
‘Bye then,’ Kane said (not even a suggestion of laughter in his voice). She glanced up, thoroughly flustered. ‘
Yes,
’ she said, ‘of course. Thank you.
Bye
…’
Then she ducked her head down, grimacing, and fled.
Beede continued reading. It was as if the entire episode with the waitress had completely eluded him.
Kane gently placed the pencil next to Beede’s coffee cup, then picked up his danish and took a large bite of it. He winced as his tooth hit down hard on a stray cherry stone.
‘
Shit.
’
He spat the offending mouthful into a napkin – silently denouncing all foodstuffs of a natural origin – then carefully explored the afflicted tooth with his tongue. While he did so, he gazed idly over towards the large picture window to his right, and out into the half-empty car park beyond.
‘Expecting someone?’ Beede asked, quick as a shot.
Kane took a second (rather more cautious) bite of the danish. ‘Yup,’ he said, unabashedly, ‘Anthony Shilling.’
‘
What?!
’
Beede glanced up as he processed this name, a series of conflicting expressions hurtling across his face.
‘I thought you knew,’ Kane said (eyebrows slightly raised), still chewing.
‘How would I know?’ Beede snapped, slapping down his book.
‘Because you’re
here,
’ Kane said, ‘and why else would you be? It’s miles away from anywhere you’d ever normally go, and it’s a shithole.’
‘I come here often,’ Beede countered. ‘I
like
it. It’s convenient for work.’
‘That’s just a silly lie,’ Kane sighed, evincing zero tolerance for Beede’s dissembling.
‘Strange as this may seem,’ Beede hissed, ‘I’m actually in no particular hurry to get caught up in some sordid little situation between you and one of my senior
work
colleagues…’
‘Well that’s a shame,’ Kane said, casually picking up his cigarette again, ‘because that’s exactly what’s about to happen.’
Beede leaned down and grabbed a hold of his small, khaki workbag – as though intending to make a dash for it – but then he didn’t actually move. Something (in turn) held him.
Kane frowned. ‘Beede, why the fuck are you
here?
’ he asked again, now almost sympathetically.
‘They make a good coffee,’ Beede lied, dropping the bag again.
‘Fuck
off.
The coffee is heinous,’ Kane said. ‘And just
look
at you,’ he added, ‘you’re
crapping
yourself. You hate this place. The piped music is making you nauseous. Your knee is jogging up and down under the table so hard you’re knocking all the bubbles out of my Pepsi.’
Beede’s knee instantly stopped its jogging.
Kane took a quick swig of the imperilled beverage (it was still surprisingly fizzy), and as he placed the glass back down again, it suddenly dawned on him – the way all new things dawned on him: slowly, and with a tiny, mischievous jolt – how unbelievably guarded his father seemed –
Beede?
Hiding something?
His mind reeled back a way, then forwards again –
Hmmn
Beede.
This rock. This monolith. This man-mountain. This closed book. This locked door. This shut-down thing.
For once he actually seemed…almost…well, almost
cagey.
Anxious. Wary. Kane stared harder. This was certainly a first. This was definitely a novelty. My
God.
Yes. Even in his
littlest
movements (now he came to think of it): knocking his disposable carton of creamer against the lip of his coffee cup (a tiny splash landing on the spotless nail of his thumb); kicking his bag; picking up his book; fumbling as he turned over the corner of a page, then
un
folding it and jumpily pretending to recommence with his reading.
Kane rolled his cigarette around speculatively between his fingers. Beede glanced up for a moment, met Kane’s gaze, shifted his focus off sideways – in the general direction of the entrance (which was not actually visible from where they were seated) – and then looked straight down again.
Now
that
was odd. Kane frowned. Beede uncertain? Furtive? To actively
break
his gaze in that way?
What?!
Unheard of! Beede was the original
architect
of the unflinching stare. Beede’s stare was so steady he could make an owl crave Optrex. Beede could happily unrapt a raptor. And he’d done some pretty nifty groundwork over the years in the Guilt Trip arena (
trip?
How about a gruelling two-month sabbatical in the parched, ancient Persian city of Firuzabad? And he’d do your packing. And he’d book your hotel. And it’d be miles from the airport. And there’d be no fucking air conditioning). Beede was the hair shirt in human form.
Kane took another swig of his Pepsi –
Okay –
But how huge is this?
He couldn’t honestly tell if it was merely the small things, or if the big things were now also subtly implicated in what he was currently
(and so joyously) perceiving as a potentially wholesale situation of emotional whitewash (Oh come
on.
Wasn’t he in danger of blowing the whole thing out of proportion here? This was
Beede
for Christsakes. He was sixty-one years old. He worked shifts in the hospital laundry. He hated everybody. The word ‘judgemental’ couldn’t do him justice. If Beede was judgemental then King Herod was ‘a little skittish’.
Beede thought modern life was ‘all waffle’. He’d never owned a car, but persisted in driving around on an ancient, filthy and shockingly unreliable Douglas motorcycle – c. 1942, with the requisite piss-pot helmet. He didn’t own a tv. He found Radio 4 ‘chicken-livered’. He feared the microwave. He thought deodorant was the devil’s sputum. He blamed David Beckham – personally – for breeding a whole generation of boys whose only meaningful relationship was with the mirror. He called it ‘kid-narcissism’…although he still used hair oil himself, and copiously. Unperfumed, of course. He was rigorously allergic to sandalwood, seafood and lanolin;
Jeez!
An oriental prawn in a lambswool sweater would probably’ve done for him).
Okay.
Okay.
So Kane freely admitted (Kane did everything freely) that he took so little interest in Beede’s life, in general, that he might actually find it quite difficult to delineate between the two (the big things, the small). He tipped his head to one side. I mean what
mattered
to Beede? Did he live large? Was he lost in the details?
Or (now hang on a second) perhaps – Kane promptly pulled himself off his self-imposed hook (no apparent damage to knitwear) – perhaps he
did
know. Perhaps he’d drunk it all in, subconsciously, the way any son must. Perhaps he knew everything already and merely had to do a spot of careful digging around inside his own keen – if irredeemably frivolous – psyche (polishing things off, systematising, card-indexing) to sort it all out.
But Oh God that’d be hard work! That’d take some real effort. And it’d be messy. And he was tired. And – quite frankly – Beede
bored
him. Beede was just so…so vehement. So intent. So focussed.
Too
focussed.
Horribly
focussed. In fact Beede was quite focussed enough for the both of them (and why not add a small gang of Olympic Tri-Athletes, an international chess champion, and that crazy nut who carved the Eiffel Tower out of a fucking
tooth
pick into the mix, for good measure?).
Beede was so uptight, so pent up, so unbelievably…uh…
priggish
(
re
-pressed/
sup
-pressed – you name it, he
was
it) that if he ever
actually deigned to cut loose (
Beede?
Cut
loose?
Are you
serious
?!) then he would probably just
cut right out
(yawn.
Again
), like some huge but cranky petrol-driven lawnmower (a tremendously well-constructed but unwieldy old Allen, say). I mean all that deep inner turmoil…all that…that tightly buttoned, straight-backed, quietly creaking, Strindberg-style
tension.
Where the hell would it go? How on earth could it…?
Eh?
Of course, by comparison – and by sheer coincidence – Kane’s entire life mission –
Oh how lovely to hone in on me again
– was to be mirthful. To be fluffy. To endow mere trifles with an exquisitely inappropriate
gravitas.
Kane found depth an abomination. He lived in the shallows, and, like a shark (a sand shark; not a biter), he basked in them. He both eschewed boredom and yet considered himself the ultimate arbiter of it. Boredom terrified him. And because Beede, his father, was so exquisitely dull (celebrated a kind of immaculate dullness – he was the Virgin Mary of the Long Hour) Kane had gradually engineered himself into his father’s anti.
If Beede had ever sought to underpin the community then Kane had always sought to undermine it. If Beede lived like a monk, then Kane revelled in smut and degeneracy. If Beede felt the burden of life’s weight (and heaven knows, he felt it), then Kane consciously rejected worldly care.
A useful (and gratifying) side-product of this process was Kane’s gradual apprehension that there was a special kind of
glory
in self-interest, a magnificence in self-absorption, a heroism in degeneracy, which other people (the general public – the
culture
) seemed to find not only laudable, but actively endearing.
Come on. Come
on;
nobody liked a stuffed shirt; nobody found puritanism sexy (except for Angelo who wanted to shag Isabella in
Measure for Measure.
But Shakespeare was a pervert; and they didn’t bother teaching you
that
in O-level literature…); nobody – but
nobody
– wanted to stand next to the teetotaller at the party –
Hey! Where’s the guy in the novelty hat with the six pack of beer?
Kane half-smiled to himself as he took out his phone, opened it, deftly ran through his texts, closed it, shoved it back into his pocket, took a final drag on his cigarette and then stubbed it out.
‘So what’s that you’re reading?’
He picked up his lighter (a smart, silver and red-enamelled Ronson) and struck it, lightly –
Nothing.
After an almost interminable six-second hiatus, Beede closed his book and placed it down – with a small sigh – on to his lap. ‘Whatever happened to that girl?’ he asked mechanically (having immediately apprehended the fatuous nature of Kane’s literary enquiry). Kane frowned –
Wow…
To answer a question with a question
–
Masterly.
‘Girl?’ Kane stared back at him, blankly. ‘Which girl? The waitress?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Beede snapped. ‘The
little
girl. The skinny one. I haven’t seen her around in a while…’
‘
Skinny?
’
Kane adopted a look of cheerful bewilderment.
‘The redhead,’ Beede persisted (thoroughly immune to Kane’s humbug). ‘
Too
skinny. Red hair.
Bright
red hair…’
‘
Red
hair?’
‘Yes. Red hair.
Purple
-red…’
‘
Purple?
’
‘Yes…’ (Beede yanked on his trusty, old pair of mental crampons and kicked them, grimly, into the vertical rockface of his self-control).
‘
Yes.
Purple.’
Kane didn’t seem to notice.
‘
Purple?
’ he repeated, taking some time out to savour the feel of this word on his tongue –
Purple
Purrrrr-pull
– then glancing up –
Ooops
– and relenting. ‘You probably mean Kelly,’ he vouchsafed, almost lasciviously. ‘Little Kelly Broad. Lovely, filthy,
skinny
, little Kelly…’
‘Kelly
Broad.
Of course,’ Beede echoed curtly. ‘So are the two of you still an item?’
An
item?
Kane smirked at this quaint formulation. ‘Hell, no…’ he took a long swig of his Pepsi, ‘that’s all…’ he burped, ‘
excuse
me…totally fucked now.’
Beede waited, patiently, for any further elucidation. None was forthcoming.
‘Well that’s a pity,’ he finally murmured.
‘Why?’ Kane wondered.
Beede shrugged, as if the answer was simply obvious.
‘Why?’ Kane asked again (employing exactly the same maddening vocal emphasis as before).
‘Because she was a decent enough girl,’ Beede observed stolidly, ‘and I
liked
her.’
Kane snorted. Beede glanced up at him, wounded. He took a quick sip of his coffee (in the hope of masking any further emotional leakage), then –
urgh
– winced, involuntarily.
‘Tasty?’ Kane enquired, with an arch lift of his brow. Beede placed the cup back down, very gently, on to its saucer. Kane idly struck at his lighter again –
Nothing.
‘So you think I had a problem with her?’ Beede wondered, out loud, after a brief interval.
‘Pardon?’ Kane was already thoroughly bored by the subject.
‘A problem? You mean with Kelly?
Uh…
’ He gave this a moment’s thought. ‘Yes.
Yes.
I suppose I think you did.’
Beede looked shocked.
Kane chuckled. ‘Oh come
on…
’
‘
What?
’
‘You
oozed
disapproval.’
‘Did I?’