Behindlings

by Nicola Barker

  Doc slid his hand into his pocket and drew out a fiver.

  ‘Get me another stout, Shoes, will you? And whatever you’re after having.’

  Shoes took the note and stood up, still staring at the bar, a mite distractedly. ‘Need a quick slash first,’ he said, ‘if you don’t mind waiting, Old Man.’

  ‘Remember to wash your hands, love,’ Hooch trilled after him.

  Ladies… Ladies… Ladies’ toilets. Or had she… uh…

  Nope

  (The Sanitary Towel Dispenser on the wall to the left of her was a sure-fire give-away.)

  Jo craned her neck around to confirm in fact the distinctively male reflection which’d quietly materialised in the mirror before her (she was standing at the basins, the tap running, washing and washing).

  Not simply… not…

  Not hiding

  Shoes.

  She shuddered, careful to keep her body angled strictly away from him, her wrist hidden.

  ‘I think you’re in… This is meant to be…’

  She felt a million miles away from everybody (and what did rules matter, anyway, in this alien, fucked-up, Wesley-informed environ?).

  Why am I still here?

  ‘We were just talking about you,’ Shoes said, smiling at her (his reflected image transformed –in person –by her frazzled neurons into something ever-skewed –buckling –distorted).

  His toenails made a subtle kind of clattering on the lino as he walked over and casually rested his bulk against the hand dryer.

  Jo wiggled her wet hands in the air ineffectually, the left hand more gently. She didn’t…

  ‘Is it bad?’ Shoes asked, matter of factly.

  ‘What?’

  Hunted rabbit

  ‘The cut. Didn’t you wrap it up?’

  ‘No I… But how did…? I was just rinsing it… under the warm tap…’

  ‘I’m a wholehearted fan of pain myself,’ Shoes informed her. ‘It’s the root of my connection to both the Following and to Wesley. Are you the same way inclined yourself, Josephine?’

  Jo stared over at him, confused.

  He straightened up and pressed the wide silver button on the hand dryer, activating it.

  ‘Hold the wound under here,’ he advised, ‘to dry it out. I’m just going for a slash…’ He disappeared into a cubicle, but didn’t close the door.

  Jo walked over to the dryer. She held her hands under it. Her wrist. The wrist was bleeding, the blood still mixing and diluting with what remained of the tap water.

  It was stinging now. A good two hours since she’d cut it. Had tried to start her car. Had tried to flee. Had failed, abysmally –

  Damp in the pistons

  Dried them

  Dripping blood

  Snivelling

  Sat inside there for an hour

  The pain singing

  Motherfucking Mini

  ‘Remember how I told you…’ Shoes’ voice emerged affably from the cubicle, over the splash of urine hitting the pan, the purr of the machine, her own breathing, ‘that I had your name tattooed on my…’

  ‘Pardon?’

  Shoes popped his head around the door, halting his flow of urine to order.

  ‘My arse. Remember I told you earlier how I had your name tattooed on it? Do you remember that?’

  Jo held her slashed arm under the dryer. The cubicle was at an exact halfway point between the handbasins and the door. She felt the wounds instinctively tightening as the blood released its moisture. They weren’t as bad as all… as all… saw much worse every half-hour on her training stints in Casualty.

  She nodded. She did remember about the name, her name, tattooed on…

  ‘I do remember,’ she said –

  Too left-field for any kind of reason

  ‘So what d’you make of it?’ he continued smiling.

  Had he been drinking, maybe?

  Silly question

  ‘I didn’t…’ Jo frowned, ‘I wasn’t…’

  ‘Well I’m currently in a good position to prove it,’ Shoes said, ‘would you like that, Josephine Bean? Would you like to see the proof of the pudding?’

  ‘Uh…’ Jo blinked.

  ‘Would you?’

  This is just silly

  Need a nurse’s curt voice

  Need to call on all those old…

  Defences

  All that…

  ‘Go ahead,’ she said. Utterly obeisant.

  ‘Well you’ll have to excuse…’

  Shoes indicated delightedly to his lower regions (not so much an excuse as an outright celebration), finished urinating, shook himself clean, hitched up his trousers –but not fully, just to the base of his sumptuous shudder of buttocks –emerged from the cubicle and walked casually towards her.

  He was in an awkward state of semi-arousal (yet seemed to find no embarrassment in it), but that wasn’t the worst part. He had… he…

  Every kind of genital piercing known to man

  And then some

  Balls like two pin-cushions. Punched and peppered. Sleepered and studded. The shaft a complex silver lattice-work, base to tip.

  On his belly –

  That belly

  That magnificent tub of manly blubber –

  Hanging, swaying

  Regal as an obese bantam after a henhouse seduction -

  – she saw (among the many tattoos, one in particular, a badly-drawn hangman; still pink with new-infection: the gallows completed, the rope, the body –the head, the torso, the legs and the feet –everything, in fact, but the right hand, which was missing.

  Underneath, two words, seven letters and five –

  G – – D – I – /S – – S

  Jo stared at these letters, her mind struggling to make sense of it –

  Why am I…

  How thoroughly…

  ‘That’s not it.’ Shoes looked down at himself, relishing his work-of-art status, completely at ease with it. He turned around and pointed.

  His arse was bare at the back –not just naked, but without any notable embellishments except for a further two words, written in a faded blue ink at the precise point where his momentous buttocks joined into the base of his spine: YOUR NAME

  Jo stared at these two words for a few seconds –

  Your name

  Shoes peeked over his shoulder, ‘Get it? I have your…?’

  Jo nodded. She wasn’t quite smiling.

  Shoes yanked up his trousers (they were elastic-waisted –his penis caught on the waistband and flipped high before being tightly enveloped).

  ‘See you back in the bar, gorgeous,’ he whispered, clicking his fingers, swishing his hips, and sashaying pertly away from her.

  Twenty-nine

  Ted was struggling valiantly to convince a twenty-four hour glazier that it would be worth his while driving over from Benfleet (on the night of his Twelfth Wedding Anniversary, as luck would have it) to undertake the pointless-seeming task of installing a mirror, while Arthur (a prodigiously ironic expression tightening one corner of his lips and feeding through, automatically, to the outer edge of his adjacent eye) tapped away diligently at the virus-ridden computer.

  The agency lights had been cautiously turned off again (a detail which hardly aided Arthur’s quiet endeavours) but he was a competent touch-typist and seemed a skilful technician –if not exactly the genius that Wesley had proclaimed him.

  The room was coolly bathed by a spooky-seeming, almost-undulating, semi-aquatic blue-grey glow (generated, in its entirety, by the defective hardware), yet both men seemed quite at their ease floating around inside this dreamy liquidity.

  ‘Lucky you kept the back-up disks to hand,’ Art murmured, once Ted’s abortive-sounding conversation had finally concluded (Ted saw his words emerging in a series of shimmering air pockets, which trickled from his mouth and then hung, vibrating gently, just above his head), ‘there’s nothing too bad gone on here, really. It’s only a question of…’ he tapped. He tapped ag
ain. ‘… feeding it all in. Setting it all up again. You should let me show you how, then you could easily do it yourself next time.’

  Ted paddled over and stood at his shoulder.

  ‘There won’t be a next time,’ he gurgled.

  He was certain of it.

  ‘I don’t know how much general information you were keeping on the desktop…’ Arthur mused, still tapping.

  ‘A whole stack of it,’ Ted affirmed, not appreciating –at first –the negative implications of Arthur’s musings –

  Gone

  All gone

  Drifted clean away…

  ‘You didn’t copy any of it onto a spare floppy by any…?’

  He glanced up. He clocked Ted’s expression –

  Drowning

  He looked down again.

  Tap tap

  ‘I’m dead in the water,’ Ted pronounced miserably.

  Arthur rapidly switched tack, ‘So will the glazier be coming over later?’

  ‘Much later. He’s taking his wife out to dinner. It’s their wedding anniversary.’

  Arthur grimaced, sympathetically, ‘And the carpenter? For the door?’

  ‘That’d be Dewi. I left him a message…’

  ‘Great,’ Arthur suddenly exclaimed, ‘your mouse is finally up and running, now we’re really getting somewhere…’

  ‘But I have the distinct feeling,’ Ted continued, ‘that he might be otherwise engaged this evening.’

  Tap tap…

  Tap tap tap…

  ‘Why’s that, then?’ Arthur glanced up distractedly.

  ‘He’s the big fellow who clouted Wesley.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘In love with Katherine. Works mainly in flooring. Did these floors…’ Ted tapped his foot (the sound held back, trapped in liquid, then echoing eerily, seconds later), ‘did them rather beautifully, in actual fact.’

  Ted leaned across Arthur’s shoulder and inspected the screen more closely. ‘The worst part,’ he said, still sounding suitably traumatised by the whole experience, ‘was the way the information just kept on… kept on spurting. There was this real sense of… of viciousness… a redness. Then everything just went click. Dead.’

  ‘I think you might’ve…’ Arthur suddenly reached down to his feet and felt around blindly, ‘I think you might’ve unplugged it, inadvertently. The socket’s extremely overloaded down there. You should definitely consider getting a second adaptor…’ he straightened up again, ‘… but we’re working through it. Don’t worry. And it all seems pretty much… pretty much… uh… ’

  He was frowning at the screen. An arbitrary snatch of debris was floating past them;

  HOUSE FOR SALE: Semi-detached, quiet cul-de-sac, all local amenities, three bedrooms, no chain

  Then another –

  UNUSED GASOMETER for Auction: 5th February; Set in 2 1/2 acres. Road access available. No planning permission as yet for full residency. Suit artist as studio or other

  Then –

  Splat!

  Ted blanched as a man –a square-headed soldier –beamed out of the screen at them with seven giant marbles packed under his foreskin (an eighth –held jauntily –between his thumb and forefinger).

  ‘Gracious,’ Arthur murmured, ‘I guess that’s one way of keeping active during those long winter nights in Kosovo.’

  ‘It’s not… it belongs

  Ted couldn’t muster up the moral fibre.

  Tap tap tap…

  Tap

  ‘If the virus arrived in an email attachment…’ Arthur paused, speculatively, ‘you should definitely put in some work to try and stop it getting any further.’

  ‘It wasn’t an email,’ Ted said.

  Arthur turned sharply, mid-procedure (a series of ripples spreading out dramatically behind him), ‘You downloaded this thing from the web?’

  Ted rubbed an uneasy shoe –still spotlessly clean –onto the back of its opposite calf.

  ‘From a Wesley site, actually,’ he admitted, feeling himself, his surroundings, the atmosphere, mysteriously dry up.

  Arthur almost smiled.

  ‘How very…’

  He shrugged –

  Appropriate

  He didn’t seem shocked (Ted was relieved to note –I mean there were rules in this business, weren’t there? And not just Following rules, either, but fundamental codes of common… of common…)

  ‘So which site was it, exactly?’

  Arthur was back at work already. Ted frowned, ‘I thought there was only…’

  Tap tap…

  Hiatus

  ‘Nope. There are several.’

  … Tap

  ‘The main one, then. The big one. The one all the Followings use, and the newspaper people…’

  ‘Behindlings.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Behindlings.’

  ‘Yes… Yes, precisely.’

  Arthur grabbed a pen and scribbled an address down. He showed it to him.

  ‘This lot are notoriously shonky.’

  Ted stared at it, frowning. He shook his head.

  Arthur adjusted the pen and began writing out another.

  ‘Nope,’ Ted said, grabbing the pen himself, the paper, pressing down on the desk and writing out the address he’d used in bold, clear lettering.

  ‘Here.’

  He pushed it over.

  Arthur took the pad, glanced at the address, shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, pushing it away, ‘you must’ve got that wrong.’

  Ted half-smiled, ‘Which is exactly what Wesley said when the police questioned him about it earlier.’

  Arthur twisted around on his stool –all pretence of indifference suddenly gone, ‘I don’t understand. Did Wesley put you up to this? Because please don’t think for a minute that you can fuck with me and get away with it.’

  He was prodigiously emphatic.

  Ted stepped back, nervously. It hadn’t dawned on him… It hadn’t occurred to him that this person might be… I mean after the interlude with the would-be doctor and everything…

  ‘Don’t be frightened,’ Arthur said (even his tone –its demand for calm –seeming intimidating).

  ‘I’m not…’ Ted stuttered –

  Think of the pond

  The lilies

  The hiss of bullrushes

  ‘And I’m not wrong, either. The local constabulary accessed the site this afternoon –probably round about the same time I did –and they were burned by it too. That’s what they said.’

  This site?’

  Arthur held up the pad again. He pointed.

  ‘Yes. I think they had a suspicion that Wesley himself might be behind it. But he obviously wasn’t by the way he…’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Arthur snapped, ‘this site has absolutely nothing to do with Wesley.’

  Ted paused, took stock, then shook his head, slowly. ‘I’m not being ridiculous,’ he discurred, ‘and it has everything to do with him.’

  Arthur took this gentle rebuff on the chin. ‘So what did Wesley have to say about the site being down?’ he asked, reviving his sympathetic side, softening his tone slightly.

  ‘He said there had to be a mistake. Same as you did. And he seemed…’ Ted paused, ‘I’m not very…’ he scratched his head, ‘I’m not terribly familiar with all this Wesley… all the rules and the etiquette and everything…’

  ‘That’s why he chose you, presumably,’ Arthur mumbled.

  Chose?

  Ted considered this concept, momentarily.

  To be chosen

  ‘Do you at least know why the police were visiting him?’ Arthur was feeling around inside his pocket for his phone. ‘Was it about the site or about the Loiter? Did he mention?’

  Ted seemed to experience some difficulty in answering.

  Arthur found his phone, tried to turn it on –realised that it was turned on already –swore –then attempted to call up his text messages.

  ‘It’s important, Ted…’

&nb
sp; Had to use the name

  ‘Was it about the competition, perhaps?’

  ‘No. No it was… it was nothing…’

  Ted watched on as Arthur jabbed away at his phone, unsuccessfully.

  ‘It was something more…’

  He fell silent. Arthur didn’t seem to be listening, anyway.

  ‘Was it to do with New Year, by any chance? The stuff in Brighton?’

  Ted shook his head.

  Arthur snapped the phone shut with a growl and slipped it into his pocket. He turned back to the computer again. He seemed deeply preoccupied, if not necessarily by it –Profound absence of tap

  He turned back around again. ‘I have some equipment in my bag,’ he said, ‘and I need to charge it. Is it okay to use the plug here?’ He pointed.

  ‘What kind of stuff?’ Ted felt uneasy. He was in enough bloody trouble with Leo already. Didn’t feel the need to add to it particularly.

  ‘Portable computer. Nothing risky. I’d charge it at home but I’m staying on a boat. I have no mains power there.’

  ‘I suppose it’d be churlish to refuse…’ Ted murmured –wishing he could be churlish for once in his damn life. But this man was fixing his… Doing him a… And Wesley seemed to… to trust… He’d invited him back for dinner, after all. Katherine’s. In an hour (had seemed pretty confident that he’d be finished with the police by then).

  Ted glanced at his watch. The hour was almost done.

  ‘It’s nearly time to meet Wesley at the bungalow. I could walk you over, then dash back here and sit it out for the glazier. I’m certain Katherine would let you re-charge there if you asked her.’

  Arthur shrugged.

  Tap tap tap

  ‘I still can’t…’ he promptly changed the subject, ‘I still can’t get over that girl in the bar. The skinny girl with the short…’

  ‘Yes,’ Ted said. ‘It was…’ He couldn’t think of a word. ‘Odd,’ he said, finally.

  ‘Is she local? She seemed to know her way around the place. She was having a drink with the police officer.’

  ‘Right.’

  Ted seemed indifferent.

  ‘She drew blood,’ Arthur continued, ‘I don’t know how bad the wounds were. Wesley always seems to inspire that kind of…’

  Crazy

  ‘that kind of…’

  Lunatic…

  ‘that kind of mind-boggling loyalty.’

  ‘I do know her…’ Ted interrupted –as if only just patching it all together, ‘she’s a Bean. She’s the Bean girl.’