Behindlings

by Nicola Barker

  ‘It was dying,’ he continued, ‘I sat with it until it stopped breathing and then I ate some of it. I was starving. Later on I climbed inside it to keep warm. It’s a basic survival technique. I was alone on the Yorkshire Moors. It was snowing.’

  Wesley turned and peered into the depths of the fridge again where –apart from the chocolate –he saw a blue-tinged loaf of Jamaican tea bread (unused), a plastic bag of celery (half-rotted), a carrot, two jars of Dijon mustard, half a cold omelette on a paper plate, a handful of butter (he stuck his finger in, sucked on it –hmmn, unsalted) reduced to ghee and left mouldering in a saucer.

  ‘A dead horse?’

  Katherine was finding this concept difficult to digest.

  ‘Aren’t you worried about your daughter?’ Ted asked, still running the tap, thinking about her out there –like Wesley had been –in the cold and the dark.

  Katherine’s head jerked up, but it might’ve been the chilli in her chocolate bar.

  ‘What?’

  The tone of Wesley’s voice implied a very strong warning. This was patently not the kind of question he wanted to be asked. He instinctively raised his hand to his cheek, then realised what he was doing and pulled it away again so violently that he slapped the door of the fridge with it.

  Ted noticed –out of the corner of his eye –and flinched –

  The bad hand

  A bad sign

  ‘I just… I only wondered…’

  Pond

  Pond

  ‘It wasn’t my horse,’ Wesley addressed Katherine again, ‘and I didn’t kill it. But when I cut into it, the flesh was still warm. I got arrested two days after. Charged with theft. Two lesser charges of cruelty.’

  ‘If you… if you…’ Ted continued, indomitably, ‘if you were putting on an act, by any chance –I mean for the Police…’

  Wesley straightened his damaged hand, then knuckled it. The good hand rushed towards it, as though in some kind of complex damage-limitation manoeuvre.

  ‘If you…’ Ted finally glanced over properly, his forehead creasing, ‘I mean if you were… putting it on or something… it was very…’ he paused, his throat tightening, ‘convincing,’ he almost gibbered.

  ‘Did I possibly detect…’ Wesley spoke directly into the scandalously empty salad compartment, trying to push the dead horse from his mind –

  The flop of the intestine

  The stink

  The steam

  ‘Did I inadvertently pick up a tiny smattering of sexual tension back there, Ted? Between you and the young officer? Is that why you’re asking? Is that what you’re really interested in?’

  An instinct to be cruel –deep within him –to purge –

  Fine to brag about the horse

  But it was different in fact

  Nearly died in that cold night

  Not brave

  Not outrageous

  Not clever…

  Oh that beautiful pony

  Velvet belly –

  New-dead –

  Not clever or funny

  No

  Only–

  Only pathetic

  Like the judge had said

  Nobody ever remembered the bad…

  Brother Christopher

  Bright summer morning

  Such blackness inside of it

  So much dark inside of it

  Remember the warm –

  Daughter

  The warm –

  Horse

  The warm –Christopher

  Warm –velvet –closeness

  Wesley suddenly pushed the nails on his good hand into the flesh on the palm of his bad. Five nails. Felt them cutting. Celebrated the wound –

  The absence

  The absences

  Blood –

  Blood

  Over

  Ted looked up, bemused, ‘But she’s not…’

  ‘Not the woman, stupid,’ Wesley interrupted harshly.

  Ted’s face was a picture –

  Shocked

  Hurt

  Wesley immediately felt better. He reached into the fridge and grabbed the carrot and the celery.

  Ted hung his head. His chest caved. He blushed. He pushed his fist into Katherine’s blue mug –

  Pushed

  Wesley shoved the carrot and celery under his elbow, opened a jar of mustard, sniffed, saw a moss-green coating of mould around the top of the glass…

  Ouch

  – a sudden, stinging impact in the region of his ear. A rubber band. Katherine had yanked it deftly from her hair, taken aim and fired. He glared at her.

  She was smiling. Dark chocolate on her teeth.

  ‘You’re just like the rest of us,’ she said.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Just the same. Yes you are.’

  He shrugged, listlessly, ‘Did I ever say I wasn’t?’

  ‘You didn’t say it,’ Katherine mused, ‘but you certainly think it. You need to believe you’re decent –deep inside –but sometimes you worry that you’ve lost the facility –on your travels. And you may well be right.’

  He pondered this for a moment, ‘But it’s not about decency,’ he said thickly, ‘is it?’

  He wasn’t asserting so much as asking. Her answer plainly mattered to him.

  Katherine shrugged, tipped forward slightly, inspected her skirt –

  Drunk

  ‘Nothing is immaculate,’ he suddenly quoted, ‘until it is consumed or distressed.’

  ‘Wuh?’

  She looked up again.

  ‘It’s from a song.’

  Katherine struggled to pull herself out of her niche. Couldn’t manage it. Wesley bent down, grabbed the band from the place it’d landed and dropped it, dismissively, into her lap. ‘I welcome hurt,’ he whispered.

  Katherine positioned the band between her fingers again and aimed it at him.

  ‘Don’t you fuck with Ted,’ she said –her tone was menacing –‘that’s my job.’ She hiccuped. Wesley turned back to the fridge. He suddenly felt like he’d been staring into that fridge forever.

  ‘To use a device like this,’ he grumbled, ‘in the middle of fucking winter. Where’s the sense in it?’

  ‘Oh bugger off,’ Katherine mumbled, staring through the lip of the bottle to inspect the floating stub of her cigarette –

  Apricot

  Liquid

  Burned sugar

  ‘We’ll have to run down to that bar at eight,’ Wesley told Ted, his voice gentler than previously. ‘I arranged to meet somebody. He said he’d take a squint at your computer.’

  Ted spun around, ‘He did?’

  ‘If you’re lucky.’

  ‘It’s an Apple Mac. Does he know about Apple Macs?’

  ‘Arthur Young,’ Wesley declared, ‘is the fucking Godhead of Apple Macs.’

  Katherine began coughing. Ted inspected his watch. His delight promptly dissipated. ‘It’s already eight-thirty,’ he said.

  ‘What of it?’

  Wesley slammed the fridge shut (Katherine finished spluttering, wiped her nose on her arm and stretched out her legs again with a groan of relief). He took the carrot and the celery over to the table where he chopped them up, tossed them into the pot, secured the lid and slammed the whole thing into the oven.

  ‘Now I need paper,’ he told Ted. He had something to prove to her.

  Ted was still standing by the sink, picking tufts of fluff from his jacket and trousers. He was looking dishevelled. His tie was askew. His jacket was off. There were spots of blood on his cuffs. He was hot.

  Wesley was hot too. Even the chinchilla was panting. He strolled over and checked its water, saw it was low, took out the bottle, filled it and replaced it.

  In that same corner of the kitchen (in the background Katherine was humming a paradoxically sombre version of Kabalevsky’s The Clown) Wesley came across a stray handout from Holland and Barrett (shoved between a First Edition of Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and Iris Murdoch�
��s Nuns and Soldiers) about the benefits of Spirulina (he’d found a jar of it languishing unopened in the empty freezer –had added four capsules to dinner). He turned it over and grabbed a pen from the table-top.

  ‘If you refuse to come into the living room and see for yourself you lazy, pissed-up freak,’ (the last part he murmured provocatively under his breath and Ted indicated his unease with a tiny flinch), ‘then I’ll prove it to you here.’

  ‘What?’

  She’d already forgotten their earlier disagreement.

  (Now she liked him. Yes she did. The way he’d taken her judgement of him and had swallowed it. She liked that. He’d never know how much –of course –until she got him into bed.)

  Wesley began writing, ‘I want your opinion on this, Ted.’

  Ted looked up from his watch for the second time. ‘It’s eight-forty,’ he said, ‘weren’t we…?’

  ‘The way I see it,’ Wesley spoke as he wrote (in longhand) the same word several times over, ‘the only real threat to the future of our culture –insofar as the concept of “our culture” means a damn thing any more –is the universal inclination towards what Alvin Toffler calls The Alien Time Sense.’ He glanced up. ‘People no longer have any concept of real time, Ted. You must see this every day in your own particular line of work; the breaking of appointments, the financial overstretching, the desire to represent the self through the conduit of property –wall colour –decoration –the hunger… Toffler says the rot set in with the burger.’

  Ted struggled to grasp what Wesley was telling him. The struggle ended with his use of the word alien.

  ‘Everything takes,’ Wesley continued (writing again), ‘just as long as it takes. Never lose the sense of how long something should be in actual time, Ted. A death. A dream. A meal. A transaction. To wait well is to truly express your lack of alienation from what is actual. When I make people take pause it’s really a kind of reaching out. It’s like a giant bear-hug from an alternate time-frame.’ He shrugged, ‘I think about this kind of stuff a lot when I’m out walking.’

  Katherine expectorated, noisily, from the corner.

  ‘Alien Time…’ Ted parroted, endearingly.

  ‘We are the aliens, Ted. The alien is progress. We scapegoat the stranger, but the stranger is the alien within us. The alien is what we aspire to. He abducts. He steals the earth and brings modernity. He comes from another planet. He laughs at the mundanity of nature. His world is nowhere to him. He seeks only to invade and to pilfer…’

  ‘You are the alien, then, you pretentious fucker,’ Katherine interjected, gurgling on cocoa.

  Wesley ignored her. He continued talking, without drawing breath, ‘The alien, Ted, has no constraints. He is both what we crave and what we fear. We have wrung the neck of time, Ted. And in the process we have asphyxiated our own reality. Urban man lives only in dreaming.’

  Wesley completed his task the same moment he finished speaking. He carried the results of his labours to Ted, flashed them at him, then squatted down next to Katherine.

  ‘Take a squint.’

  He passed the paper to her. Katherine took it, frowned and peered. She read it, laboriously, ‘C-u-n-t,’ she said.

  ‘No. Try the one below. Take your time. Experience the complexity.’

  ‘C-u-n-t,’ she repeated, jiggling her knees –

  Pale knees

  Two field mushrooms on a damp Autumn pasture

  Wesley inspected the paper again himself, ‘No. Make some bloody effort.’

  She opened her mouth for the third time.

  ‘Aunt,’ Wesley interrupted, snatching the paper back again, ‘a-u-n-t. That’s what I wrote. But I did it longhand. I never join my downstrokes to my… It’s my style. It means…’

  ‘Unreliable,’ Katherine said, ‘you’re an unreliable little turd. Sometimes vicious. You kill birds. You hide inside horses. You reject good chocolate. You abuse the gentle.’

  ‘The point I’m making,’ Wesley talked over her, ‘is that I have an aunt in the area. And I was thinking about her a little earlier when I was playing with your sand. I wrote aunt. Therein lies the confusion. I did not call you a cunt. You called yourself that.’

  ‘Where?’ Ted glanced up from his fluff-infested trousers.

  ‘South Benfleet. My father’s younger sister, Penelope. Married to an ex-vicar. We don’t speak.’

  ‘So you’re telling me,’ Katherine was suddenly slurring her words, ‘that your aunt is a cunt?’

  (She pronounced it caaant for added humour.)

  ‘You’re so funny,’ Wesley chuckled, ‘it’s no wonder every twelve-year-old boy in this town beats a path to your door.’

  Ted’s eyes widened. His thoughts turned to Bo.

  Katherine scowled.

  ‘This woman I once dated…’ Wesley turned back to Ted, ‘the female with the antique pond…’

  Ted’s head jerked up –

  Pond

  ‘she was a Careers Consultant with a major Bank. They analysed your writing –just as a matter of course –before they’d make you a job offer. I write with my left hand now the right one’s gone. It makes me a whole lot scruffier.

  ‘But what do they read into that? The truth is that these people will fuck you up just for being who you are, they will reject you for being yourself –the product of their environment –the product of capitalism – and that is fucking sinful.’

  ‘I need a fag,’ Katherine said, reaching up and grappling around blindly on the counter above her.

  ‘This guy I knew on the markets,’ Wesley continued, reaching for the cigarette packet and knocking one out for her –finding a lighter hidden inside the packet too, removing it –‘got pissed up then fell asleep in the shed where we all stored our stalls at night. Had a fag in his hand. Burned everything to shit. Himself included.’

  ‘Did he die?’

  (A flutter of interest in Katherine’s grey-blue eyes.)

  ‘Nope,’ Wesley sounded regretful, ‘just burned his palm very badly. So drunk it didn’t even wake him at the time. My work associate –Trevor –pulled him from the flames. Said he burned off all his pubic hair. He was having a… you know: markets –stalls –sheds…’

  ‘No I don’t know,’ Katherine interjected.

  ‘What did you sell?’ Ted asked.

  Katherine was battling with her lighter.

  ‘Fruit.’

  Wesley grabbed the lighter and lit the cigarette for her.

  ‘What kind of fruit?’ Ted asked.

  ‘Fruit.’

  He looked around him. ‘There’s no ashtrays,’ he said.

  ‘It’s actually ten to nine,’ Ted interjected.

  Wesley ignored him and sat down on the floor next to Katherine, stretching out his legs and placing the piece of paper between his knees. He then deftly folded it, tore it into two perfect squares, took one of these squares and began folding again in earnest.

  ‘What’re you doing?’ Katherine exhaled smoke at him.

  ‘You stink of violets,’ Wesley said.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘You smell of violets.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘According to Freud, violets have strong psychological implications.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Violence.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Violets… Violence. You have an aggressive scent.’

  ‘Grrrrrrrrrr.’ Katherine snarled at him.

  Wesley smiled. ‘Katherine Turpin suddenly found herself possessed…’ he told her softly, folding all the more deftly, pulling corners, inverting points, twisting, doubling back, ‘by the uncontrollable spirit,’ he finished with a flourish and held what he’d made out to her, ‘of a bear.’

  Katherine peered at it.

  ‘Just like Jim Morrison,’ she said.

  ‘I believe it was a Native American in that instance.’

  ‘You are so clever,’ she said, and took the object from him, ‘although it’s a shitty little squirrel, in
actual fact.’

  ‘Squirrels can be very aggressive,’ Wesley demurred, ‘and they have a profound spiritual aspect.’

  ‘Can I have a look?’ Ted asked.

  Wesley snatched the squirrel from Katherine and passed it over. Ted smiled at it.

  ‘How’d you learn to do that?’ Katherine asked.

  ‘Therapy for my hand. I had a specialist who recommended origami to improve coordination. This was during the short phase when I convinced myself that I wanted to be better. Now I understand that the concept of “better” is just an evil myth put about by fascist medical practitioners.’

  While he was speaking, Wesley was folding. This time the object was easier to assemble.

  ‘Guess,’ he said, holding it up to Ted.

  Ted frowned.

  ‘Your parents named you after this man.’

  ‘Ted fucking Heath,’ Katherine spluttered. ‘Correct.’

  He handed the plain origami head to her.

  ‘I must learn how to do that,’ she mused, ‘do you play mah’jong by any chance?’

  ‘I have a book in my rucksack by Robert Harbin,’ he said, ignoring her question. ‘He’s the best we British have: a serious folder, but with a great sense of humour. The Japs and the Yanks are rather more po-faced about it.’

  Wesley unfolded Ted Heath and refolded. Katherine watched on, fascinated.

  ‘Ashtray,’ he said, pushing it across the tiles at her and springing to his feet, ‘dinner will be in about an hour. Take that wing off. It’s cutting into your neck. We’re going to the pub.’

  ‘Bar.’ Ted picked up his jacket.

  ‘Spot on, Ted,’ Wes smiled, grabbing a chunk of Katherine’s chocolate, ‘you’re so reliably…’ he placed it on his tongue and sucked for a moment, ‘chilli,’ he said.

  Ted frowned, struggling to assimilate this compliment as he followed him out.

  Twenty-five

  Oh yes he was in alright, but he’d left the lights off as a precaution; a safeguard –

  All the better to…

  Shut-up

  Preferred the calm of the dark after the strain of work. There was nothing… nothing untoward in it. Nothing at all. It was simply a quirk. A preference.

  Came home – in fact – slightly later than usual –No hard and fast rules in this line of business