Darkmans

by Nicola Barker

‘The truth,’ Peta informed him, baldly, ‘is just a series of disparate ideas which briefly congeal and then slowly fall apart again…’

‘The truth,’ Peta smiled, ‘is that there is no truth. Life is just a series of coincidences, accidents and random urges which we carefully forge – for our own, sick reasons – into a convenient design. Everything is arbitrary. Only art exists to make the arbitrary congeal. Not memory or God or love, even. Only art. The truth is simply an idea, a structure which we employ – in very small doses – to render life bearable. It’s just a convenient mechanism, Kane, that’s all.’

‘We’re all raised to think we’re so special,’ Peta scoffed, ‘that all our experiences are so important, so meaningful, so particular, so individual. But if you look at the work of the confidence trickster, the magician, the psychic – even the priest, for that matter – what they depend on – how they function – is to play on the universality of human experience, on how bland, how predictable, how homogenous we all really are…’