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"They were wrong," Bernard said triumphantly, cradling a tin of white powder protectively in one arm. "And you," he addressed the tin, "we'll never know if you'd have done your job."
"Wrong about what?" Manny replied, as Fran was determinedly not listening to either of them.
"All the time. All the time, they said to me, you know Bernard, after the apocalypse, the only thing left will be cockroaches. Do you see one cockroach? You do not. We win. Game over crawlies."
"We have cockroaches," Manny tried interjecting, tackling the easiest bit of the statement first. He was sure of that - they lived on the back shelf in the kitchen in what had begun to look uncommonly like a scaled down military camp, all tiny rows of orderly soldiers. He was almost sure that they used to salute when he reached past them for the sugar. The apocalypse business could come later.
"Had cockroaches, Manny, or did they not teach you the past participle in beard school?"
"It's not the past participle," Fran interjected, her voice a little higher pitched than usual, "it's something else that's not that. This doorman told me that, after he said that I'd had entry into the thingymabob convention, and then due to an unfortunate aspersion cast by the bartender, I didn't."
Bernard dismissed it with a wave. "Let's assume they didn't teach much of anything in beard school," he said. “Not even beards, judging by Manny’s specimen of the breed.”
Manny mourned the passing of time, and the rumblings of the digestive process. The Little Book of Calm, too long gone, no trace left bar trace admonitions of the wind is your lullaby, stamped on his kidneys, and that was useless, because whatever was howling outside the door was almost certainly not measured on the gale force scale.
Fran saved him. “If there’s no cockroaches, Bernard, it’s because there’s no kitchen.”
“And they say, I’m the drunk one. It’s because I’m Irish. National stereotyping. If I was Cornish, you’d expect me to be dead white. As it happens, I’ve a Pioneer badge in mint condition. I’ll sell it to you for the low low price of a gasper of Lidl gin. It keeps your liver in mint condition by fooling it into thinking you’re a tee-tee-teeto. ” He hacked up half the word, and swallowed the rest, evidently thinking the better of it.
“You’re enough of a clot, I thought you were from Devon. I’m not drunk, Bernard. There is no kitchen.”
“If you’re not drunk, then where did the wine go?” Bernard peered under the desk, lifting up the lamp and tiling back the postnote dispenser as though it might conceal a rogue Tesco Three for Ten.
“It’s in the kitchen,” Fran replied, but checked behind the unsellable diaries of Richard Madeley, bought by Bernard in a fit of absinthe-fuelled joviality as a fourth line of attack against the ‘youth’ penetrating the recesses of the shop.
“You said there was no kitchen,” Bernard pointed out, with near impeccable logic, and Manny felt the stirring of envy in his breast for the rigours of the modern comprehensive. It wasn’t that he’d minded beard school... “Make up your mind. Either there’s a kitchen or there isn’t.”
“There isn’t,” Fran said firmly. “It’s just us. Us and the books.”
“And if you two left, I’d be in good company.” Bernard looked around him in distaste. “Manny, why are you standing there gawking? I hypothetically pay you coin of the realm to keep me in a state of mild inebriation.”
There was of course the emergency, emergency, emergency supply, and if he dug up the floorboards underneath it, there was the actual emergency supply. Generally Manny kept Bernard off it by judicious applications of Dettol and a recorded cassette of Take That playing on loop. One of them gave Bernard hives, the other seemed to bring back memories of days past to Bernard’s eyes, with more efficacy than any baked good - unless what Bernard wanted to remember was the day of the fourteen trays of macaroons that Manny had baked, vainly trying to help Bernard recapture the lost days of his childhood, because apparently no good Irish granny would’ve heard of madeleines.
Whatever was outside the door sighed ominously, and from beneath the floorboards came the thin scratchy voice of Robbie Williams, We'll get a five minute warning for divine intervention. Manny’s hands shook enough that Bernard executed his best Cristiano Ronaldo impression, taking a dive, and saved the first bottle from smashing, incurring a nasty red rash where the Dettol touched.
“Don’t damage yourself Manny,” he said. “I’m not giving you a transfusion. No point putting new wine into old skins, eh?”
“You mean like in the Bible?” said Fran.
Bernard wrenched the top off the bottle. “The Bible?” he said blankly. “What on earth are you blathering about? I mean that time with the goats.”
“Oh,” said Fran unhappily. “I used to like goats before that.” She put on a pair of sunglasses and stared out the window.
“No sunglasses indoors. New rule. Unless I have a hangover, and I don’t, because someone’s neglecting their duties,” Bernard said, and Manny felt Bernard’s eyes bore into his back as he stretched for the other bottles.
“If I wear sunglasses then everything’s dark,” Fran said, “and it’s not so strange that there’s nothing we can see outside the shop, you know.”
Manny lifted up the final bottle, and something rippled under his fingers, soft and insistent. As he looked, blackness welled up through the exposed crevices of the miniature wine cellar, and snaked silently along. He slammed the floorboard down. Unfortunately, it made its way in through the window as well, sneaking under the single glazing.
“Bernard,” he said, and attempted to keep his voice level and placid, in case it might antagonize the tendrils.
“You deal with him Fran, he’s dropped a toy, I can tell by the whine,” Bernard said.
“Not now Bernard,” Fran replied, and pushed the sunglasses further up her nose. “Wait, can you smell candyfloss?”
“It’s behind you,” Manny howled.
“Any more of that panto nonsense, and I’m taking you back to Barnados and demanding a new one,” Bernard said, before a slim, exploratory thread of darkness emerged from a gap in a bookcase and tickled the back of his neck.
The next few minutes would have been recorded in the now defunct annals of history, as a cross between a horror film and Strictly Come Dancing, a mad waltz with an inky pool of blackness, that hovered all around them, leaving about twelve square feet of shop. The shelves of unsold fifth editions of The Collected Works of Nancy Mitford had been lost to the darkness, and it was threatening the health and lifestyle section (fourteen copies of “Lose Weight: Drink your Calories” and a lone, rogue copy of Beards 4 Men) just gently lapping over the outermost book.
“Do something, Fran!” Bernard shouted, a tinge of hysteria in his voice.
“Why me?” Fran wailed, picking up a hardback copy of Where the Wind Blows and poking it futilely in the darkness’s direction, apparently on the principle of fighting apocalypse with apocalypse.
“Who else in here was a girl guide? Isn’t there a badge for this, or whatever your strapping ladies in green breeches handed out?”
“I was a Brownie for two days, Bernard, we only covered raffia bracelets.”
“Pointless,” Bernard complained and raised an almost empty bottle as protection against the dread forces of darkness, before he thought the better of it, and drained it first. The molten pool of jet lapped against his feet almost tenderly.
“Ah, is this any way to treat a relation?” the darkness said, a hint of an Irish accent lurking around the edges of a voice that spoke from the utter bleakness of the abyss.
“Get away,” Bernard said, and swung the bottle with emphasis, Manny and Fran ducked, being more in danger than anything else. “If you were a relation of any sort, you’d not be touching my ankle like that.”
“Great-Aunt Grainne did,” pointed out the darkness. “You remember her rogue bunion concerns?”
“How do you know Great-Aunt Grainne?” Bernard asked suspiciously.
“And isn’t she my Great-Aunt as well, on my mother’s side?” came the quick reply. “You must know me, Bernard.”
“As I live and breathe,” Bernard breathed, as though in demonstration. “Your father was from some lake in Scotland yes? And your mother was my Aunt Deirdre? That would make you the…”
“Black-Ness,” the voice interjected agreeably. “Like name, like intent to destroy perfectly good worlds.”
Manny felt that he and Fran were intruders at an unexpected family reunion, and looking at Fran’s scrunched up face, he could tell she felt the same. On the other hand, surely if the darkness - the Black-Ness he quickly corrected himself internally, was some relation of Bernard’s (and he shuddered to imagine how that was possible) then surely… they’d be let go.
“And not a pink wafer in the house,” Bernard muttered distractedly. “I told you to go shopping Manny.”
“You told him to stay inside because the end of the world was coming,” Fran replied. “If you’d let the Tesco online people inside the shop instead of hysterically hurling your shoes at them, you wouldn’t have this problem.”
Looking at the way the Black-Ness was making its way up their legs, Manny had his doubts about the integrity of the once robust family unit.
“Oh it’s just a brief visit Bernard,” said the Black-Ness reproachfully. “No need for such a fuss. A quick bit of consumption, and I’ll be off. This is after all, a very small world, but then I am on a diet.”
“I don’t want to be eaten,” Manny managed to get out.
Bernard turned a reproachful look on him, that made him feel like a heel of the highest order, and even Fran mustered a slightly dismayed expression.
“Oh, I’m not going to eat you, I’m going to help you find transcendence, purpose, meaning,” replied the Black-Ness, and by now, they were all waist deep in the swirling inkiness of the physical extension.
“Is this the pyramid-marketing cousin you told us about?” gasped Fran.
“Every family has it black-ness sheep,” Bernard said, and neither Manny nor Fran, in recognition of the situation, mentioned that they’d supposed it was Bernard.
“No, I’m really not going to eat you,” said the Black-Ness. “Though I’m afraid I need the rest of it. I have to eat or I get dizzy. I’m sending you on a journey through time and space. There’ll probably be a bookshop there. There might even be booze.”
With that, the night covered their heads.
When they woke up, there was indeed a bookshop, there was even what looked like booze, and outside a slow gelatinous river oozed it’s way onwards through a teeming city. “Just like home,” Bernard said, brushing off a thing that tried to enter the shop to purchase a book.
“Fuck,” said Fran, without a great deal of emphasis.