Behindlings

by Nicola Barker

  Absolutely bloody typical, Jo ruminated (gazing up ahead towards his small but lean and fast-loping form, her neat features hard-etched with unashamed yearning, but her tidy mouth half-smiling, as if –somehow, somewhere –she was perfectly well-apprised of her own hypocrisy).

  So from being the least interesting individual on this whole bloody island, she mused, testily (and not entirely unreasonably), he’s now the most wanted, the most fascinating, the most… Her eyes rapidly jinked left a-way and scoured the horizon –giving the lie, immediately, to all her fine hypothesising.

  ‘I’ll be depending on you…’ Shoes observed furtively, as they eclipsed the Wimpy at a fast trot.

  ‘Pardon?’ Jo had almost forgotten that she was walking with him, that they were talking, that they were already in the middle of something. She was still hare-brained from her early start –

  Exhausted

  Had been working too… Had grown too… Had become too… Now what had they called it? Those people from the Hospital –those smug, useless, worthless Health Administration brown-noses? Too intent? Assiduous? Violent? Earnest?

  Ah…

  Earnest

  But was that reasonable? Was that… was that… was that just?

  Jo blinked –

  Yes

  And then there’d been the meeting with Dewi. To be so… so…

  Invisible

  – it’d brought stuff back which she’d all but forgotten about. Teenage stuff. The… the pull. God. Then to top it all off, the added stress of her unexpected discovery –with the Loiter –I mean wasn’t that just… just crazy? Really? Wasn’t it?

  Far too much complication for one… what had they called her? Earnest? Far too much complication for one plain, clean, earnest female to endure, let alone… let alone process.

  Why am I here?

  ‘Oh you know…’ Shoes chided, gently, ‘to tell me what’s going on with that slip of paper. For some stupid reason the boy has taken against me lately. He keeps stuff back. And he rips the piss a bit, too, when he thinks he can get away with it.’

  ‘Really?’ Jo shot Shoes a sympathetic sideways glance. From close up his profile was magnificently unbeguiling. He was corpulent (his chin a shuddering cacophony of roughly pleated flesh, a scrum of melted beef lard in a furious blue-white, an unguent waterfall; each dribbling tallow-cascade part-solidifying upon a former, fatter, thicker layer. His chin was like something you might see in a cavern –underground, spot-lit –inside a gorge. Something pale and dimpled that dangled from the ceiling. Something petrified).

  The bottom half of Shoes’ face was decidedly unshaven, but at the top end, his dirty blond hair receded, unforgivingly, and the hairline was dark with ancient dirt. Blackingrained.

  But no. She looked closer. Not dirt. Ink. A coarse navy stain. A spider’s web spanning his skull, and a mess of other crazy stuff, curling, in sensuous tendrils, along his nape, behind his ear.

  Her eyes settled, finally, upon the three books he was clutching. Had to keep him sweet. For the books. Needed the books. Couldn’t risk him… although didn’t the boy say earlier that the Geordie wasn’t much of a reader (wasn’t that what the boy had said)? That he couldn’t read? Which was actually –when she thought about it –rather… well, rather… what was the word she wanted? Strange? Ironic?

  Funny?

  Nope. Jo tempered herself, sharply. That was cheap. That was a bad way to be thinking. Even idly.

  ‘I’ll do what I can, Shoes,’ Jo replied (using the name again. Had to keep using the names), struggling to keep her breath at the pace they were moving.

  The boy –several yards ahead of them –was deep in conversation with Hooch. Hooch was smoking a roll-up (the tiny cigarette bound in a curious dark brown paper). He offered it to the boy (Jo’s every medical instinct rebelled against this gesture) but the boy declined.

  No.

  She saw his lips shape it.

  No.

  Patty had one small fist pushed inside his green Parka pocket, his four knuckles, visible, pushing out, hard, against the cheap jacket fabric. The slip of paper –she presumed –still hidden within. He plainly wasn’t giving anything away. Not yet. Or at least she didn’t…

  Hooch suddenly dropped back. ‘Little shit won’t give it up,’ he grumbled, flicking his half-finished fag over his shoulder. He was limping slightly. ‘Although if I know Wesley it’ll just be a few rhymes about birdsong and lavender. That’s generally the line he takes with librarians. Goes all sentimental on them. Gets their sad old juices flowing with this namby-pamby schmaltzy stuff. Poetry’s always been a brilliant hook for his whoring.’

  Jo grimaced. Even during their brief acquaintance she’d already begun to develop a sizeable sheath of misgivings about Hooch’s take on things (at least with Doc there was some suggestion of integrity. Although what that meant –morally –in relation to the actual practice of Following –a questionable occupation at the best of times –she wasn’t sure exactly). She disliked Hooch’s tactlessness, though. His cynicism. His subtle but constant overstepping.

  Hooch noticed Jo’s tick. He was struck by it. ‘So what’s your problem all of a sudden?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘No. Go on,’ he was emphatic, ‘spill it.’

  ‘It’s only…’ Jo smiled brightly at him with her neat lips and straight teeth –a beaming smile (but her cork-coloured irises were so tightly fixed into their glassy whites that when she blinked they very nearly squeaked with suppressed hostility), ‘it’s just a matter of… well,’ she shrugged, ‘of accuracy, really. In riddles, precision is everything, don’t you reckon?’

  Nobody agreed. Nobody disagreed. In fact nobody said anything. So she continued on, determinedly, ‘And you just said, “If I know Wesley.” But surely the whole point is that you don’t know Wesley…’

  Hooch interrupted, but Shoes got in first.

  ‘Oh he does,’ Shoes defended him, patently horrified by the tack Jo was taking, ‘he does know Wesley. Hooch knows everything. He’s…’

  ‘But I do know everything,’ Hooch spoke up himself, echoing the Geordie crossly, and talking him down, eventually, ‘I know all there is to know about Wesley. I’m an authority. I’ve watched him for over twenty-two months now, and I’ll tell you this for nothing: there’s not much you can’t learn about a person during twenty-two months’ serious observation. That’s almost two years. It’s probably difficult for an outsider to even conceive…’

  ‘I’m hardly the outsider here, Hooch,’ Jo’s tone was unexpectedly cutting.

  ‘And bearing in mind, Hooch, the days you took off, every now and then…’ Shoes hastily intervened, trying –and rather nobly, Jo felt, under the circumstances –to distract Hooch slightly.

  ‘What of it?’ Hooch snarled (ignoring Jo’s comments, ignoring her). ‘My mother’s funeral? When the van broke down in Morecambe? What of it? That hardly amounts to…’

  ‘Yes. No.’ Shoes was already regretting his intervention, but still he kept on at it, ‘And… well… then there’s…’ he winced, nervously, ‘then there’s… then there’s the problem with your… your foot and everything…’

  ‘The spur? Big bloody deal. So I had a minor operation on my spur. That’s hardly the stuff of major television drama, is it now?’

  Shoes kept quiet this time. They walked on. Eventually, though, he muttered, ‘Doc’s always said how important it is to appreciate the fact that Following, while an apparently intimate act, is not, in itself, an act of intimacy…’

  His voice petered out.

  Hooch harrumphed. ‘The thing about Doc,’ he spoke loudly, at first, then quietened down, on reflection (although Doc was now a good way ahead of them, striding on, resolutely), ‘is that sometimes he talks a whole load of palaver that he can’t even make head-or-tail of himself. Because he thinks it makes him look clever. And he wants to create the same kind of mystique around himself that our dear friend Wesley has. But the whole thing’s just moonshine. Just h
umbug.’

  This time, Jo intervened. ‘If Wesley refuses to speak to the people who follow,’ she said, ‘surely that means he doesn’t much appreciate the Following, and that, in turn, means that even while there’s a real comradeship between you all, and a real physical closeness to Wesley, still there’s no proper… no proper…’ Jo lost her thread, but it didn’t matter. She’d made her point… ‘So isn’t that what Doc’s getting at? Isn’t that what he meant?’

  Hooch flashed Jo a glance several stages beyond withering. But she didn’t wither. In fact, if anything, she rallied, ‘I mean how many times have you actually spoken to Wesley? Face to face? How many proper conversations have you ever been involved in with him? Fair enough, you might know what his favourite food is or his date of birth, you might know facts about him, but…’

  (And Jo could see, by Hooch’s expression, that even withholding this much information was very nearly killing him)

  ‘… but do you know why he likes, say…’ she grasped something from thin air –they were passing a seafood stall –‘why he likes whelks one day better than eels, or whether he drinks tea because he enjoys it or because he suffers an allergic reaction to instant coffee?’

  ‘Here’s a funny thing…’ Shoes quickly interjected, ‘and it’s fairly incredible, Jo, but I actually have…’

  He paused, delicately, ‘I actually have…’ his voice dropped to a whisper, ‘I actually have your name tattooed onto my arse.’

  Jo blinked. Twice. This was not quite the kind of input she’d been anticipating.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I said it’s a funny thing,’ Shoes repeated, ‘but I actually have…’

  ‘She heard you the first time,’ Hooch growled, then quickened his pace, pre-emptively, to catch up with the boy again.

  ‘But how,’ Jo was frowning now, ‘how do you even know what my full name is?’

  Shoes didn’t respond immediately. Only once Hooch was completely out of earshot did he silently beckon her to move in a little closer to him. Jo drew nearer, but hesitantly, her stomach twingeing.

  ‘The thing is,’ he whispered (his breath smelled of processed pork and Stimerol), ‘you don’t want to wind him up too much. Hooch is very…’

  ‘You think I wound him up?’

  Jo drew back, instinctively, looking suitably delighted at this possibility.

  ‘No. No,’ Shoes shushed her nervously, ‘I can see I’ve got my work cut out with you, Josephine. No. What you need to understand is that Hooch is actually very…’ Shoes quietly pondered what he needed to say, ‘I don’t know. He’s very… very powerful. Important. To everything. And you’d do well to remember that fact if you’re really serious about the Following.’

  Jo was fazed by Shoes’s jitteriness. It was plainly deeply-felt.

  ‘Are you intimidated by him, Shoes?’

  ‘Am I what?’ Shoes was suddenly no longer concentrating. In a flash he’d moved off. He’d switched off. He was elsewhere.

  ‘I said are you…’

  Shoes stuck up his hand to silence her. ‘Hold on a minute, hold on…’ he was chuckling now, ‘look… the dog. Dennis. The little terrier. Up ahead. See him?’

  Jo squinted.

  ‘Doc’s calling him. Oh yes. Ha. Oh yes just… just look at…’

  That was it. Shoes broke into a quick trot to catch up with the others. Jo resisted doing the same. But she quickened up, marginally, when Hooch finally left the side of the boy, joined Shoes, and jogged on himself.

  Shoes was still audible –way ahead –talking to whoever’d listen to him, ‘Next to the yukka. Would you believe that? Next to the bloody yukka.’

  Jo finally drew level with the boy. His pace had remained constant. She slowed down to his speed, with relief, watching the others pull away, confusedly.

  Patty seemed impassive now, had calmed down noticeably since his earlier euphoria in the library. Jo struggled to catch her breath, ‘What the hell is all this…’ she inhaled for a second, ‘… phew. I said what the hell is all this yukka business about, anyway? Can you fathom it?’

  The boy shrugged.

  ‘Does the yukka have some kind of…?’ She coughed with the exertion.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I don’t know,’ the boy’s tone was sarcastic, ‘I don’t know what they’re all getting so worked up about. He only uses it for laces. The stringy bit. And he makes foam –like soap foam –out of the roots. He’s always done it.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘To keep clean.’

  ‘And he makes laces?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Wow.’

  The boy gave her a scathing look then focussed his eyes way beyond the others –who were all now standing with the dog, and the yukka, in a huddle, outside the small hotel –and over towards Wesley. On the horizon.

  ‘Do you know where he’s going?’ Jo asked softly.

  Patty stopped in his tracks. Jo stopped shortly after him.

  ‘Of course I know where he’s going. He’s walking the island. He’s done it every day since he was here. Don’t you know anything?’

  ‘Course I do,’ she defended herself, staunchly, slightly hurt by his savagery, ‘it’s just that I know different things, that’s all.’

  The boy shrugged, ‘If you want my opinion, I think he’s losing it. Doing the same stupid walk every day. He’s taking the piss out of everybody.’

  Jo cut to the chase.

  ‘If I give you a fiver will you let me take a peek at that piece of paper you took earlier?’

  The boy sneered. ‘Are you kidding me?’ He was grossly self-righteous, ‘I don’t want your fucking money.’

  His jaw, she noticed, was sharp as cut tin. His eyes were a cold grey. The colour of black ice on a fast road. He really was too thin.

  ‘I already turned down that other bugger, and he offered me a hell of a lot more than five.’ He pointed up ahead of him.

  ‘Doc, you mean?’

  ‘Sod off.’

  He actually seemed to find this funny. ‘Hooch, then?’

  The boy grinned then took a step closer to Jo, ‘You see that’s not what I’m in it for. Not short change. That won’t satisfy me.’

  ‘You’re in it for the competition, then, is that it?’ The boy shrugged. ‘Or for the Following?’

  He didn’t even credit Jo’s second guess with a reaction.

  ‘I’m not clever or nothing,’ he told her, fiddling around inside his pockets as he spoke, ‘but I do like puzzles. I’ve always been good with them. Crosswords in the papers and in books, and wordsearch. And I like working out stuff. And I watch stuff. And I keep my ears open…’ he smiled at Jo, ‘in actual fact I saw you in the library…’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Jo stiffened.

  ‘I saw you read something in that book you had. Your cheeks went all red. I saw that. And then you kicked over the chair just after. On purpose.’

  ‘To help you,’ Jo interjected.

  The boy snorted, derisively, ‘To help yourself more like it.’

  He withdrew the piece of paper from his pocket. White. Neatly folded. He dangled it in front of her, taunting her with it. Then he screwed it up, smirking, and threw it at her feet, his slate grey eyes mocking her, almost goading her to scrabble for it.

  The three others, Jo noticed, were now all looking their way.

  ‘What you need,’ the boy spoke softly, ‘isn’t written on there. What you need is in here,’ he tapped the side of his head, ‘and if you want some of it, then I suggest you leave the others, leave him,’ he tipped his head towards Wesley, in the far distance, rapidly disappearing, ‘and follow me.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ Jo asked –Wesley was moving left, tight left, out of vision –she felt almost (was it panic?) at the thought of losing sight of him. But this was a challenge from the boy, wasn’t it? It might prove foolish to deny him. And she was thirsty, dammit, and her feet were aching.

  The others were silently heading back, like three
strange birds, like vultures, fully intent upon feasting on the boy’s dropped bounty.

  And Jo wanted it. She wanted it.

  (What had he written to the librarian? Was it rubbish? Was it poetry? Was it a clue? Would it incriminate him? Would it exonerate him? Why did she care? Why did she?)

  ‘I’m going for a Coke, Josephine,’ the boy half-turned and spoke cheekily over his bony shoulder, ‘and for a very quick wee-wee. Do you think you might possibly be coming along with me?’

  Seventeen

  What was it with this walk? It was definitely sneaky. Initially unremarkable –everything muddied-right-up or wrung-right-out, or plain and grey and horizontal –but then it gradually snuck up on you (furtively, stealthily), tapped you softly on the shoulder (made you twist, made you stagger) stared you full in the face (without tact, without graciousness, without the slightest modicum of bloody courtesy) and blew the world’s fattest, wettest and most unrepentant raspberry.

  It was aberrant. It was… it was deviant. And worst of all –worst, worst, worst of all –it was time-warped. Seriously.

  The hours just melted. That, or they simply elongated. They kicked out their legs, picked their noses and yawned, rudely, like a clutch of hearty schoolboys in double chemistry.

  The minutes? Like sneezes. Or tiny kisses on the nape. Or flea bites. Or buzzing black midges. Urgent, sometimes, like the industrial snarl of the greenfinch, or the shamelessly arable, silver-muddied, plough-bladed tssweee! of the tiny warbler, hiding-and-seeking it in the blonde reeds of summer.

  Ah, summer.

  Wesley shuddered. Three-thirty and the sky was already nagging its way peevishly towards a tight and grey and implacable evening. Icy cold. Danker, now. The fog still gliding in and out –like a suspicious moorhen treading water with its prodigious pale toes on a busy river. Now you see him…

  Gone.

  The seconds drowned at high tide; grabbing for him; lunging at him, gasping, or they shivered disconsolately at low tide, barely acknowledging him before turning tail and slinking off, sullenly. Or both. Or either. They lapped reassuringly. Close upon him –far away. They were full of sense and inclination, but utterly devoid of weight or meaning.