Behindlings

by Nicola Barker

  NICOLA BARKER

  Behindlings

  For dear Charles Edward Johnson, who slammed his way out of that damn velvet factory – smashing the glass door behind him – never, ever to look back again. And for his beautiful, blue-eyed wife, Betty, who, at the grand old age of 84, discovered that the pylons could love one another.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Ninteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Forty-one

  Forty-two

  Forty-three

  Forty-four

  Forty-five

  Forty-six

  Forty-seven

  Forty-eight

  Forty-nine

  Fifty

  By the same author

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  Wesley glanced behind him. Two people followed, but at a sensible distance. The first was familiar; an old man whose name he knew to be Murdoch. Murdoch, Wesley remembered, had been robust, once. He’d been grizzled. Huge. Frosty. A magnificent, clambering, prickly pear of a man. He’d been firm and strong and resolute. Planted; a man-tree, if ever there was one.

  Recently, however, Murdoch’s body had begun to curve, to arc (they all called him Doc, although he hadn’t even seen the inside of a hospital until his sixty-third year –he was a home birth, people invariably were, back then –when necessity dictated that a small reddish hillock, a mole, on his right shoulder blade, should be surgically removed. He was a scaffolder, by trade).

  But the curving was nothing medical. It went deeper. And along with this –initially –almost imperceptible transmutation (Wesley noticed details. It paid him to notice), Doc’s colours had begun to alter: his bodily palette had changed from its habitual clean, crisp white, to a painfully tender pink, to a pale, dry, crusty yellow. Up close he smelt all sweet and sickly, like a wilting honeysuckle tendril.

  Now, when Murdoch walked, it was as though he carried something huge and weighty within him, something painful, thudding, wearysome. His heart. It was too full and heavy. Stuffed but tremulous, like a chicken’s liver.

  Mmmm. Wesley felt hungry. I could devour him, he thought, smirking. But he knew –must I know everything? He wondered briefly, the smirk dissipating –that the thing Murdoch carried so heavily in his heart was grief. Yes, grief. And possibly, just possibly, a tiny, shrew-footed, virtually inaudible, pitter-patter of rage.

  Unwieldy burdens. Wesley understood. He’d carried them himself, and badly. But Murdoch was strong, and he supported them fearlessly, he slung them –like an ancient holdall with rotted handles –firmly and evenly between his two old arms.

  Doc was accompanied by a little dog. A sandy-coloured terrier. A plucky cur, a legendary ratter. The dog was called Dennis. Wesley knew Dennis well; the stout push of his legs, the familiar bump of his vertebrae, the inquisitive angle of his ears, his horribly intrusive nose, his fur wiry as poor quality pot scourers.

  He remembered, once, staring briefly into Dennis’s eyes and seeing a wild loop of fleas tightening in a crazy insect lassoo around the bridge of his snout. Ah. He was a good dog.

  And the other person? The second follower? A woman. Wesley peered. She rang no bells. She wasn’t familiar. She did not compute. Young. She seemed young and gangly, fine but big-boned with a delicate, tufty, parsnip-shaped head. Not unattractive, either. She was plain but wholesome, like a small, newly dug, recently scrubbed tuber. She was dressed like a boy.

  Wesley turned, smiling grimly to himself. They were a bane. Yes. A bane. But only so long as they followed him (and this had to be some kind of compensation), only so long as they stalked, surveyed, trailed, pursued, could he truly depend upon his own safety. They were his witnesses. Unwitting? Certainly. Witless? Invariably.

  But they were his witnesses. And Wesley knew (better, perhaps, than anybody) that he was a man who desperately needed watching.

  Early. It was too damn early. Wesley paused for a moment in front of a bakery and glanced through the window. They’d just opened. He drew close to the glass and touched it. He left a perfect thumbprint. I’m leaving traces, he thought.

  He stared down into a tray of speciality doughnuts. They were not the round kind, or the ring. They were not creamy zeppelins, apple-filled or cinnamon-sugar-rolled. No. They were shaped like people. Like gingerbread men.

  In Canvey –because that was where he found himself on this teeth-achingly cold, brutally bracing January morning –their wild and resolutely wool-infested island history was intertwined with the stamp of spicy ginger, with sweetness, with men (as late as the eighteenth century this precarious domain’s unhealthy air –the interminable dampness – brought the fever like an unwelcome wedding gift to raw hordes of eager new brides.

  Malaria. Concealed in the perilous but stealthy fog which constantly tiptoed around this fractured isle like a ravenously phantas-magorical winter mink, slipping, unobserved, between plump and tender post-nuptial lips, slinking, unapprehended, through the spirited flair of passionate nostrils.

  Making itself at home. Rearranging the furniture. Infiltrating. Infecting. Conquering. Killing. In those days one stout and ruddy shepherd could take ten wives and think nothing of it. Some, it was rumoured, took as many as thirty-five).

  Wesley knew his stuff. Or enough stuff, at least –he told himself tiredly –to be getting on with.

  The doughnuts he took to be a local peculiarity. He gazed at them. He was hungry. Each doughnut had an ugly red scar where its jam had been pumped in the sweetest transfusion. Generally, the wound was located under the right armpit. Sometimes, but rarely, in the chest.

  He glanced up. Instinct. A shop assistant watched him. She was tying on her apron but staring at his hand, her dark eyes, her clean mouth, battling instinctively against a wide tide of revulsion. On his right hand Wesley had only a thumb, and a mass of shiny scar tissue which glimmered a bright bluey-violet in the cold.

  He removed his hand and tucked it into his pocket. But the assistant didn’t stop her staring. ‘I know you,’ she said, the light of recognition gradually dawning. He could see her lips moving. ‘I know you.’

  Wesley stared at her, blankly, then turned and walked on.

  The old man reached the bakery seconds later. Murdoch stopped in Wesley’s tracks and peered through the window. He put his thumb where Wesley’s thumb had been. His old eyes fed upon the trays of sweet iced fingers, sticky currant buns, cold bread pudding.

  The small dog sat at his heels. Doc looked down at the dog, fondly, and then up into the face of the shop assistant. Her expression was no longer hostile, but pitying. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, her brown eyes suddenly unconscionably round and tender. The old man nodded, frowned, paused, blinked, nodded again, then hurried swiftly onward
s.

  The young woman wore baggy jeans, a pale blue sweatshirt, a quilted grey Parka and a solid pair of flat, brown walking shoes. Her hair was cropped. Like the old man before her, she carefully placed her thumb where Wesley’s thumb had been. The assistant was standing behind her counter now, arranging french sticks into a wicker display basket. She didn’t appear to notice her.

  The girl –Josephine –went into the shop.

  ‘I’ll have a doughnut,’ she said, raising her soft voice over the sound of the door bell jangling, then added, ‘No. Two. I’ll have two. Thank you.’

  She took a wallet out of her pocket. She opened it. She glanced over her shoulder. She was plainly in a hurry.

  ‘You did my smear,’ the assistant smiled, hastily brushing sugar from her fingers, passing over the doughnuts and then punching the appropriate three keys on the till. ‘Remember?’

  ‘Did I?’ Jo clutched the doughnuts to her chest. For some reason she’d believed herself quite invisible. A wisp. A shade. A wraith.

  ‘Yes. Southend Hospital. I was dreading it. I actually have –if you don’t mind my saying so –I actually have an unusually tight…’ she lowered her voice to only a whisper, ‘an unusually tight vagina.’

  Josephine –having leaned forward a fraction to catch what the assistant was saying –nodded sympathetically as she handed over her money.

  ‘I understand,’ she whispered back, ‘I understand completely.’ The assistant smiled, relieved.

  ‘My GP was absolutely bloody useless,’ she continued, taking the money, ‘so I demanded a referral to Southend after I heard you on the radio talking about your campaign for environmental sanitary products…’

  ‘Ah. Dioxin pollution,’ Jo intervened, automatically, ‘a dangerous by-product of the chlorine-bleaching process…’ As she spoke, she craned her neck slightly to try and peer down the road a way. From where she was standing, Wesley was well out of her range already, but Doc… Doc…

  ‘Unfortunately, some women are chronically allergic,’ she continued, doggedly, ‘and it can play total havoc with coastal marine… uh… coastal marine…’

  Had Doc just turned left or right? Or was it…? Hang on. There was a van, a dirty white van… The van pulled off.

  Damn. Now there was a stupid bus shelter in the way. She blinked. Wow. Was that fog? It suddenly seemed foggy. Or was it just her eyes? She usually wore glasses. Short-sighted. But she’d gone and sat on them, stupidly, first thing this morning, in her hurry. Needed sticky tape to… needed… early this morning. She’d been up since two-thirty. A full… she glanced down at her watch, squinting slightly… a full five and a half hours already.

  Jo sighed, frustratedly, then slowly turned back around to face the counter again, her expression blank. Three long seconds ticked by. ‘Oh… uh, sorry… coastal marine biology,’ she concluded, then smiled distractedly.

  ‘That’s it,’ the assistant nodded, ‘Dioxin pollution. I remember now. And you were great.’

  ‘Well thank you.’

  Jo’s money tinkled into the appropriate compartments. Fifty. Ten. Two. She took a small step backwards.

  ‘And I know this might sound a little bit peculiar,’ the assistant continued, plainly undeterred by Jo’s blatant inattentiveness, ‘but you actually have a real…’ she paused, thoughtfully, ‘a real knack.’

  Jo inhaled, but not –she hoped –impatiently, ‘It’s only a system. Everything depends upon identifying the precise angle of the womb…’ she flapped her free hand around in the air (a furiously migrating Italian finch, caught in the cruel swathes of a huntsman’s netting) in order to try and demonstrate, ‘and then the rest is all just basic common sense, really. Your GP should get hold of my pamphlet. It’s available free from the Health Authority. Tell him to send off for it.’

  She smiled brightly and turned to leave. Jesus Christ, she was thinking, how absolutely fucking excruciating. To be caught out. Like this. And here of all places.

  The assistant, for her part, smiled back at Jo, nodded twice, perfectly amiably, then slammed the till shut. Nothing –at least superficially –out of the ordinary there. But as the coins in their compartments shifted and jangled in a brief yet acrimonious base-metal symphony, Jo could’ve sworn she heard something. Something else. Something beyond. Something extra. Three words. Half-muttered. Virtually inaudible over the surrounding clatter.

  Don’t follow him.

  Jo froze. Her professional smile malfunctioned. ‘Did you just say something?’

  She spoke over her left shoulder, her hackles rising. The assistant’s brown eyes widened, ‘Me? No. Nothing.’

  Josephine walked quickly and stiffly to the door, put out her hand, grasped the doorhandle, was about to turn the handle, was just about to turn it, when, Oh God, how stupid. She simply couldn’t help herself. She spun around again.

  ‘You’ve got me all wrong,’ she wheedled defensively, her head held high but her voice suddenly faltering on the cusp of a stammer, ‘I’m hon… I’m honestly really only out shopping.’

  It was barely 8 a.m. A pale and freezing January morning on Canvey Island.

  Outside the distant fog horns blew, like huge metal heifers howling and wailing in an eerily undefined bovine agony.

  Don’t follow him.

  Two

  Broad as the whole wide ocean, I,

  Empty as the darkest sky,

  False as an unconvincing lie,

  Invisible as thin air.

  Others found me in the sweet hereafter –

  Look hard,

  Look harder,

  You’ll find me there.

  ‘Behindlings.’

  Arthur Young spoke this word quietly in his thin but rather distinctive pebble dash voice, and then abruptly stopped walking.

  His companion (who was strolling directly behind him) veered sharply sideways to avoid a collision. But although he executed this sudden manoeuvre with considerable agility, he still managed to clip Arthur’s scrawny shoulder as he crashed on by.

  ‘What did you just say?’

  He hurtled around to face him, slightly exasperated, his arms still flapping with the remaining impetus of their former momentum. Arthur stood silently, his eyes unfocussed, massaging his bony shoulder with a still-bonier hand, frowning. He was apparently deep in thought.

  They were pretending to hike through Epping Forest together, but they weren’t fooling anybody. A local woman walking a recalcitrant basset had already turned her head to stare after them, curiously. And a well-muscled young man on a mountain bike had peered at them intently through his steamed-up goggles.

  ‘That’s the special name he invented for the people who follow him,’ Arthur finally elucidated. ‘He calls them Behindlings.’

  After a second almost indecently lengthy pause he added, ‘We’ve actually been walking for almost an hour now…’ he tentatively adjusted his baseball cap, ‘and whether you choose to believe it or not,’ he continued tiredly, his gentle throat chafing and rasping like a tiny, fleshy sandblaster, ‘I’m really quite… I’m honestly quite weary.’

  His companion –a portly but vigorous gentleman who was himself sweating copiously inside his inappropriately formal bright white shirt and navy blue blazer –also paused for a moment, pushed back his shoulders, and then slowly drew a deep and luxurious lungful of air.

  He looked Arthur up and down. His eyes were as bold, bright and full of fight as a territorial robin’s, but his overall expression – while indisputably combative, perhaps even a touch contemptuous –was not entirely devoid of charity.

  That said, his immediate and instinctive physical assessment of the strangely angular yet disturbingly languid creature who stood so quietly and pliantly before him (speckled as a thrush by tiny shafts of morning light pinpricking through the dark embroidery of the thick forest canopy), plainly didn’t inspire him to improve his long-term, critical evaluation one iota.

  Arthur. Thin. Gaunt. Frayed at his edges; on his cuffs, at his col
lar. Wearing good but old clothes: nothing too remarkable, at first glance… Well, nothing, perhaps, apart from an ancient brown leather waistcoat (carefully hidden away under his waterproof jacket) with rotting seams and bald patches, a strange, waxy garment which effortlessly conjured up entire spools of disparate images: visions of a primitive world; the sweet, mulish stink of the traditional farmhand, the implacable fire and sulk of the Leveller, the fierce piety of the knight, the rich, meaty righteousness of Cromwell.

  It was a curious thing. Ancient. Aromatic. Romantic. Almost a museum-piece.

  Although superficially loose-limbed and listless, Arthur was actually exceedingly precise in both his movements and his manner. He was gentle but absolute. He was unforgiving. His mouth was unforgiving. The deep furrows from his nose to the corners of his lips were unforgiving. His hair –trapped under an old, plain, khaki-coloured baseball cap –was thinning. His skin was tight. They had not walked quickly but he seemed exhausted. Shrivelled.

  They inhabited entirely different worlds. His companion was ripe and unctuous; as grand and imposing as a high-class, three-tiered wedding cake. And although –in view of his recent exertions –his icing had a slight tinge of parboiledness about it, he remained, nevertheless, disconcertingly well-configurated.

  After a moment he drew a clean cotton handkerchief from his blazer pocket, mopped his brow and then exhaled heartily. For some reason he seemed inexplicably enlivened by Arthur’s frailty. Buoyed-up by it.

  ‘So you finally stopped drinking?’ he asked.

  Arthur twitched, then smiled, uneasily, ‘Yes. I finally stopped.’

  ‘And your family? Your wife?’

  Arthur glanced up into the sky. It was a cold, clear day. It was midwinter. Everything was icy. His lips. His teeth. His fingertips.

  ‘I never married.’

  His companion frowned. This was not the answer he’d anticipated. He’d imagined he knew everything he needed to know about Arthur. He’d investigated. He’d peeked, poked, connived, wheedled. The rest –the polite enquiries, the stilted conversation, the walk, even –was little more than mere etiquette. He continued to inspect Arthur closely –yet now just a fraction more aggressively –with his hard, round eyes.