Behindlings

by Nicola Barker

  ‘Don’t hike across beaches if you can’t understand the tides,’ Arthur counselled, somewhat unsympathetically, ‘especially in Anglesey. The water’s always been treacherous there. Everybody knows it.’

  ‘Good point,’ she concurred, ‘you heartless bastard.’ Then she smiled, casually up-ended her cigarette, softly blew onto the smoking tip of it and carefully inspected the glowing embers below, her knuckles peppered with flecks of ash.

  Several long seconds passed before she replaced the cigarette between her lips, grabbed hold of the bike, carried it to the edge of the pavement and stuck out her pale thumb. Now she was hitching. Now she was done with him.

  Heartless. Yes. Bastard. Yes. Arthur took these two words on board –not even flinching –and packed them neatly into his mental rucksack. ‘Good luck,’ he said, yanking up his actual rucksack, settling it comfortably between his two lean shoulders and walking on again.

  Katherine Turpin turned and stared after him, her chin high, her lips skewed, her characteristically disdainful expression seeming, for once, oddly ruminative.

  He was raddled. Yes. Emaciated. Yes. A rope. A bad thumb. An oar. An old oar. But even she had to admit that he walked, well, beautifully. An oiled machine; his legs snapping in and out with all the smooth, practical precision of a trusty pair of ancient, large-handled kitchen scissors.

  There goes a man, she thought idly –cocking her hitching thumb a couple of times like she was striking a flint or popping a cork –there goes a man who should always keep moving.

  ‘He’ll head straight for the library.’

  Doc threw out this apparently random observation towards Jo so pointedly, and with such clear intent, that had his words transmogrified into a volleyball they’d have hit her square between the eyes. They’d have fractured her nose. It was a fine nose.

  ‘I said the library,’ he reiterated, ‘and that’s an absolute bloody certainty.’

  Jo glanced around her, just to double-check she wasn’t simply imagining. No. It was beyond question: he had purposefully singled her out. She drew a deep, preparatory breath. ‘But how do you know?’ she asked cautiously, her voice wavering slightly at the prospect of a rebuff.

  ‘He always goes to the library when he first arrives somewhere,’ Doc elucidated matter-of-factly, as if there was nothing at all remarkable in his sudden decision to include her, ‘he considers the library the best place to gather local information.’

  He paused for a moment then added, ‘And while I suppose to an outsider Wesley might seem a little old-fashioned in this respect, in reality the whole process is much more complicated, much more…’ he pondered for a moment, ‘much more social than…’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  This unexpected interruption from Hooch’s direction was followed by a big wink, a small burp and then a succulent chuckle as he rubbed a gloved hand over his heart and lungs, his ribs and nipples, ‘It’s all very social indeed, eh, Doc?’

  Doc stiffened, visibly, at Hooch’s intervention. He plainly did not appreciate it. In fact and in principle he was far too sober a creature to involve himself in suggestive banter. He tried to play a higher game. His entire approach to the Art of Following was underpinned by a profound sense of ceremony. It was an intensely serious business; at least, he wanted it to be.

  He needed it to be. For how else might he –a weak old man, no funds, no education, no family to speak of –sustain his tacit position of undisputed pre-eminence in matters concerning Wesley, if not by strictly eschewing casualness and irreverence and pointless tomfoolery?

  How else, precisely?

  After a few seconds’ strained hiatus, Doc turned from Hooch and back towards Jo again, a slight frown still pinching the loose skin between his eyes.

  Hooch, however –not in the least bit subdued by Doc’s subtle rebuff –jinked in rapidly, grabbed Doc’s communicative baton, and ran swiftly on with it. ‘What he actually does,’ Hooch expanded ebulliently, ‘is he strolls in there, casual as anything, and quietly asks the first person he comes across serving behind the counter if she’s the Head Librarian. I’ve seen him do it…’ he threw up his hands, ‘must be a hundred times…’

  In his excitement, Hooch’s generous lower lip grew shiny with spit, flecks of which settled on Jo’s cheek and neck after every emphatic s and t. She tried not to flinch, but didn’t succeed entirely.

  ‘And although chances are that she probably won’t be…’ Hooch bowled on, perfectly oblivious, ‘Head Librarian, I mean; he’ll still find her captivating. And he’ll gradually get her talking. He has this ridiculous theory about the universal language of mammals…’

  Jo frowned. Hooch shrugged, ‘It’s just a pile of bollocks, basically. But he’ll invite her out for a drink, eventually. He’s charming. He’s got no scruples. He’ll ask out virtually anybody; even saggy old dears in their fifties.’ He grimaced (plainly appalled by the notion).

  Doc rolled his eyes at this.

  Hooch noticed. ‘I only mean,’ he quickly modified, ‘that his motivation isn’t entirely sexual.’

  ‘Not entirely?’ Jo echoed, slightly alarmed.

  For a second nobody said anything, then Patty sneezed three times in quick succession. When he’d finished, a drip of moisture clung tenaciously to the tip of his nose. He flipped it off with a sudden, violent jerk of his head.

  ‘Sawdust,’ he exclaimed, ‘bah!’

  ‘Bless you,’ Hooch murmured, quickly withdrawing a paper tissue from his pocket, patting his mouth with it and then carefully inspecting his pristine anorak for any stray remnants of damp residue.

  Doc, meanwhile –after swiftly yanking a meandering Dennis to heel –formally introduced Jo to the rest of the party. ‘This is Jo, everybody,’ he said, ‘and I’m Doc obviously, he’s Hooch, that’s Patty, and this here is Shoes.’

  Jo nodded at Shoes, then instinctively glanced down at his feet. They were bare –filthy –his toenails the approximate length and shade of ten rooks’ beaks. Dennis, for one, seemed absolutely riveted by them.

  ‘Shoes here is very clever with his feet,’ Doc explained, following the direction of Jo’s gaze, ‘he can use them like hands if he chooses. He can even hold a pen with them.’

  ‘I can eat a meal with them,’ Shoes volunteered, ‘I have double-jointed knees.’

  Shoes was a fat Geordie hippie in his forties.

  ‘That’d be a great bonus,’ Jo smiled, ‘if for some reason you needed to write a letter and eat a meal, concurrently.’

  ‘I must confess, I never yet tried it,’ Shoes replied, blinking uneasily, ‘but I suppose it’s always an option.’

  ‘Concurrently,’ Hooch parroted, under his breath, feeling blindly again for the pad in his pocket.

  ‘He can’t write,’ Patty interrupted scornfully, ‘even with his…’

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind,’ Doc spoke simultaneously, moving in a few steps closer to Jo and pulling out his pager, ‘perhaps you might go over the details of what just went on back there –between you and Wesley –for the benefit of the rest of the group.’

  The rest of the group?

  Jo glanced around, unsure whether to be delighted or disturbed by her sudden inclusion. She scratched her head, nervously, ‘I can’t recall… I mean not exactly – not word for word… but he seemed… Wesley seemed to have acquired the impression from somewhere that I was being… that I was actually being paid to follow him.’

  ‘And are you?’ Hooch asked, his pad open, his pen raised.

  Jo looked startled, ‘Paid? Who would pay me to follow Wesley?’

  ‘The same person, probably,’ Patty speculated mischievously, ‘as pays Doc to follow him.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Doc spoke softly.

  Patty wasn’t quelled, though. ‘I’ve seen Wesley in the library,’ he expanded nonchalantly, ‘and he doesn’t do nothing special with maps or globes or computers… Mostly all he ever does is sleep or read stupid cowboy books with bloody great letters…’

  ‘L
arge type,’ Hooch corrected, ‘he’s a lazy reader, but his vision is infallible.’

  ‘How can you tell?’ Jo asked.

  ‘By watching. He favours…’ Hooch licked his thumb and quickly paged back through his jotter, ‘he likes J.T. Edson and Louis L’Amour. He finds them relaxing. But he reads plenty of other stuff. Only last week it was…’ he inspected the jotter again, ‘The World Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Murder by J.R. Nash, and some big old tome by Thomas Paine –the philosopher –and then…’ he flipped the page over, ‘… something called Orientalism by…’ he coughed, ‘… by a Mr Edward W. Said.’

  ‘Louis L’Amour?’ Jo echoed, apparently bewildered by this sudden barrage of information.

  ‘You didn’t actually say yet,’ Doc continued tenaciously, ‘whether you are being paid to follow him.’

  ‘She did say she came from Southend,’ Patty interrupted, ‘I heard that much.’

  ‘Do you come from Southend?’ Hooch asked, already writing.

  ‘No… Yes…’ she struggled with her answer for a moment, ‘I was from Canvey itself, originally.’

  ‘Almost local,’ Shoes sucked on his tongue, ‘you messed up, man. You messed up badly.’

  ‘Messed up?’ Jo frowned. ‘You think I messed up?’

  Shoes turned to Doc, ‘I’d’ve played the local card, Doc. I’d’ve merged into the background –like the estate agent –and got taken into his confidence that way.’

  ‘You think I messed up?’ Jo repeated, rather more emphatically.

  ‘Of course you messed up,’ Patty snorted, jumping off the pavement, into the road, then back onto the pavement again.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he hates being Followed,’ Doc interjected, smiling (as if the thought of Jo messing up was somehow completely irresistible to him), ‘and he never speaks to the people Following. That’s the whole point. It’s the rule. We are the Behindlings. Wesley actually coined our name as a kind of swearword, as an insult, but we don’t treat it that way; we quite like it. It unites us. It…’

  ‘It legitimises us,’ Hooch interrupted.

  The others all nodded in unison at this, but Jo was still frowning, so Doc expanded further, ‘Wesley thinks you have to be backward to follow things. I’m talking organised religion, football teams, brand names. Anything at all. He’s a free spirit. People call him an anarchist –in the papers and so forth –but he despises labels; even that one…’

  ‘Especially that one,’ Shoes butted in, before instinctively tipping his head towards Doc and drawing a couple of steps back again.

  ‘The funny part about it,’ Doc continued, ‘is that people are drawn to him. They can’t help themselves. They like what he stands for –although he constantly bangs on about not standing for anything. And he has this strange way about him –a kind of simple charm –an innocence. Add to that all the pranks, the trickery, the mischief-making… and not forgetting the confectionery Loiter…’ Doc paused, ‘Wesley’s an angry man, make no mistake about it. We’ve all felt the brunt of it in one way or another.’

  Hooch grunted, gently, under his breath, as if this comment had an especial significance for him, personally. Shoes just sighed, tellingly.

  ‘He’s high-minded and he’s unpredictable, and most important of all: he’s a trouble-maker, and trouble-makers value their privacy. So he resents our eyes. We irritate him. In point of fact,’ Doc grinned widely, ‘he loathes the watching.’

  ‘Poor Wesley’s hiding from the truth,’ Shoes interrupted.

  The others all looked askance at this.

  ‘What truth?’ Jo indulged him.

  ‘The truth that he needs Following. Because –let’s face it –he is the very thing he’s so set upon despising. At root he’s the contradiction. He’s the puzzle. That’s what nobody understands. But we do…’ Shoes looked around him, detecting scant support in the others’ faces. ‘Well I do,’ he qualified.

  ‘Shoes is very philosophical,’ Doc sighed, ‘but no good at deciphering things. And terrible with maps. So we all try and help him out, time allowing.’

  ‘I do tend to go my own way, intellectually,’ Shoes averred.

  Patty –who’d finished his doughnut several minutes previously –now made a meal out of scrunching up the paper bag and drop-kicking it towards the hippie. It hit Shoes squarely on the thigh. Shoes’ wide face rippled piously, then he stretched out his left foot, picked up the bag with his toes and tossed it straight back to him. ‘Put it in a bin, lad,’ he said.

  ‘Aw, fuck it man!’ Patty exclaimed, full of bravado, but he took the bag and shoved it hard into his jacket pocket.

  ‘Wesley also said,’ Hooch told Doc, inspecting his notebook again, ‘that she wouldn’t find what she was looking for here.’

  There was a pause. Hooch eyed Jo closely, ‘What are you looking for, exactly?’

  Jo did not answer this question immediately. She was still gazing at Shoes’ feet. Then her focus shifted gradually onto Patty’s coat pocket. Her mind was working differently. It was working lengthways, horizontally.

  ‘Love.’

  Her face brightened. ‘Love,’ she repeated.

  ‘Love?’ Doc echoed querulously.

  ‘Yes,’ Jo grinned. ‘Love. I was just thinking…’ she counted off the words, one by one, onto her fingers, ‘Wesley… the library… Louis L’Amour… love.’

  They all stared at her, blankly. ‘Clue One,’ she said, ‘remember? Look for love.’

  ‘Okay… Okay…’ Hooch laboriously drawled out his vowels as he wrote down the letters, ‘Looking for love, you say? L… o… v… e. And your full name is?’

  He glanced up. Four backs, one tail. All emphatically retreating.

  Seven

  ‘If you must know,’ Ted whispered furtively, his nimble fingers fiddling with the small gold buckle on his lizard-skin watch strap, ‘I was with him less than fifteen…’

  He stopped speaking, turned abruptly and craned his neck anxiously towards what seemed –at first glance –to be a thoroughly unobtrusive door, standing slightly ajar to the rear of the office.

  ‘… but when we finally parted company,’ he eventually continued (having lost his drift but plainly having found –to his satisfaction –that the coast was now marginally clearer), ‘it was in the general, and I mean the very general vicinity of the local library.’

  While Ted spoke, his spine remained corkscrewed, yet his words –for all their undisputed softness –were propelled from the corner of his mouth and over his shoulder with astonishing accuracy and fidelity; as if he were delivering a tricky golf shot across a sloping green, but using only the gentlest putt of breath.

  Under the circumstances, Ted’s extraordinary wariness was not only prudent, it was positively necessary, for beyond that inoffensive door stood no less a man than Leo Pathfinder, his boss; a bluff and exuberant creature, a mischievous imp, often fondly referred to locally as ‘the little pitcher with big ears.’

  The unerring accuracy of this description (although, in truth, Leo was no jug-head) had necessitated –during the years Ted had been employed under Leo’s tutelage in the dark world of estate agenting (now numbering almost six) –his gradual adoption of certain basic ruses and stratagems, all cultivated with the fundamental aim of trying to maintain –in his life and in his affairs –some paltry semblance of inner peace and personal privacy.

  Ted’s skill as a whisperer, the occasional retreat of even his most expressive features into the protective shelter of The Deadpan, his timely adoption of a slightly forced naiveté; each of these little mannerisms and humble quirks regularly assisted him in his heroic struggle to maintain some tiny semblance of emotional independence in the ravening face of Leo’s all-consuming curiosity.

  It was, without doubt, a supremely humble and irksome existence, yet Ted had always been made most painfully aware (by none other, in fact, than Mr Leo Pathfinder himself), that it could never be deemed proper or fair-minded or sporting for a grown man
to overstate the magnitude of his work-a-day woes.

  While life with Leo could be tough, humiliating, sometimes even physically dangerous (an unfortunate incident involving Ted’s left sinus and a badly directed veterinary thermometer being a case in point), Ted was hardly –and this truth was undeniable –a prisoner of war.

  Leo was a blow-hard. He was gregarious. He was sociable to the point of immoderation (able to call, at any time, on the active support and keen participation –in his convoluted Ted-related devilry –of numerous visiting Estate Agenting Executives, the man who ran the sandwich round, the cleaner, certain suggestible clients, the local bookmaker, the bingo caller…) and while it would be erroneous to label him a consistent man, he was, nevertheless, quite revoltingly methodical.

  Fortunately there were sometimes small hiatuses, brief pauses, little breathing spaces from the relentless pressure of Leo’s obsessively systematic observations –there had to be –and these Ted celebrated with all the blissful fervour which a ninety-year-old man might exhibit on discovering –after many years of drought –a small but sweetly intrepid erection floating daintily in the tired suds of a hot bath.

  As part and parcel of their daily lives, both Ted and Leo spent certain portions of their working day taking out clients to view vacant properties. For Ted these were periods of inconceivable joy and quietude.

  Leo was also an atrocious timekeeper –generally preferring to start his day some considerable time after the early hour clearly specified in his contract of employment –and this represented yet another small but nonetheless significant boon in the microscopically-observed drama of Ted’s exquisitely benighted existence.

  Last, but by no means least, there was Leo’s moustache; his wild whiskers –his soup-strainer –his bold and brave and beautiful barbel.

  To employ the commonplace lingo and designate the moustache as merely ‘a Handle-Bar’ would be to do it a deep injustice. Leo’s moustache was a hugely ornate and flamboyant structure, almost burgundy in colour, which stretched voluptuously from the deep channel separating his nostrils, dipped like a sumptuous summer swallow over each cheek and concluded its dramatic journey in a saucy, curling, upward flourish (the kind of gesture a haughty waiter might employ on lifting the finely embossed silver lid from a succulent tureen of baked lambs’ livers) only a whisper from the dainty lobe of either ear.