It was tiny –much smaller than she’d expected it to be –plainly very old, had hardly any back to it (wasn’t contained, wasn’t boxed-up like a guitar. Could that be right? Would it still work that way?), bore virtually no ornamentation or design –the pegs and supports were all clumsily fashioned from a worn, dark wood (walnut? Oak?) and there were a series of strong steel clips to the side holding the pigskin frontal-piece (which had the look of a sheet of well-used, oil-stained baking parchment) into place.
This pigskin was firm to the touch. She tapped at it with her knuckle –the way you’d tap a tambourine –then she plucked at a string with her index finger. She sniggered, guiltily. It produced that deliciously tinny, utterly distinctive banjo sound –that dizzy twang –that stifled yowl of an angry tabby with its tail caught in a malfunctioning cat-flap. She liked it.
Katherine gently placed the banjo down by the bed and peered inside the bag again. Next she removed a rolled up, tightly bound sleeping bag, an old plastic ground sheet, a pillow case stuffed with –she peeked inside, grimaced –two worn pairs of brown socks, some old, white y-fronts, three vests, a black T-shirt, five handkerchiefs, all mixed up with some sprigs of lavender (Hmmn), several pieces of rosemary, a tuft of sage, at least ten bay leaves and twenty or more cardamom pods.
She took out two further T-shirts, both short-sleeved. One had a picture of a cockroach on its front and the address of an exterminating firm in Hoboken, New Jersey. The other was blue and bore a cartoon of a camel’s face with the word Palace inscribed underneath it in fancy white lettering. This T-shirt was well-worn and had a small tear under the armpit.
A pair of jeans. Extremely scruffy. Some baggy shorts –brown corduroy. Some combat trousers (German, apparently). Another pair of combats cut down to knee-length. Another jumper. Brown. Heavy wool. Slightly ragged.
A plastic bag containing several animal pelts. Some still fairly aromatic. Katherine carefully removed two rabbit skins, a badger skin, three rat pelts. Even the skin of a tiny field mouse.
She stared at the field-mouse skin for a long time, flattened it out between her fingers, uncrossed her legs from around the rucksack and bounced off her bed, still holding it. She walked over to her doll’s house, gently unclipped the latch on the right-hand-side, opened the front, peeked into the living room (on the ground floor), shoved a couple of pieces of furniture aside –leaving a space before the hearth –then pushed the little mouse-skin inside, placed it next to the fire, adjusted it, drew a rocking chair in close again, pulled back, smiling.
She returned to her bed, and to Wesley’s rucksack. Next she found a scarf. Hand knitted. Grey. White skull and crossbones at either end. Matching gloves. Fingerless.
At the bottom of the central section she discovered a home-made (yet rather lovely) wooden box. Inside this (she opened it cautiously; it was hinged and squeaked a little) were two improvised wooden banjo picks and one in imitation tortoiseshell, several fragments of ancient-seeming pottery –all unpatterned –burned. An envelope with what seemed to be –but couldn’t be, surely? –gunpowder inside of it.
About ten old buttons. A cotton reel and needle. A ball of string. Several rubber bands. A comb with most of its teeth missing. A strip of velcro. Three hypo-allergenic plasters. Five thick black marker pens. Two small HB pencils. A rubber. A packet of condoms (Durex, half used). A pack of playing cards (hailing from Jamaica). A small tin of Germolene. An even smaller tin of Tiger Balm. Some Rizla papers –
Ah-ha
Two tiny fossils. An owl dropping made out of hair (this made her shiver a little). A photo of two young boys sitting on two swings, both smiling wildly. The one slightly older, the other… it had to be Wesley: green eyes, a mop of brown hair, a striped jumper, flares. Gappy teeth.
Katherine stared at this picture for a long while. She turned it over. On the back was written –but very faded –Wes and Chris, Portmeirion, 1973.
She drew a deep breath, and –for the first time in a good while –looked over towards the door, uneasily, then replaced the picture back inside the box, very carefully.
Three postcards; two from the British Museum. One depicting a simple-seeming Egyptian-style tapestry, the other an old jug shaped like an owl. She turned them over. The first was addressed simply to King’s Lynn, Norfolk, and said Wes you fucking cunt! Marty. The other had just an address in Barnstaple (Three Chimneys, Pembury Road) but no message. The third was a picture of ‘The New Penguin Enclosure at London Zoo’, was very dog-eared, had a foreign stamp on the back –postmark … uh… somewhere in Japan?
To Wes, it said, Wish you were here, son. Dad
Katherine frowned at this, confused. The address it’d been sent to was somewhere in Gloucester.
A small locket –a woman’s locket, by the look of things; gold, tiny –with… (Katherine struggled to open it. Her clumsy nail seemed so huge by comparison to the clasp of the thing)… a tiny lock of hair inside and a photo of a man and woman –the man in some kind of military uniform –sitting on the deck of a ship, their arms wrapped around each other, smiling, perhaps slightly uncomfortably.
Katherine closed this locket, carefully.
Last of all, and perhaps most eerily: two plaster casts –joined together by wire –of the teeth of a mouth; a child’s mouth. The kind of cast dentists made when they were moulding the jaw for braces (maybe) or a cap, or some kind of serious dental surgery.
A curiously tiny but neat set of teeth. Not particularly gappy. The top front two slightly overlapping.
Katherine shuddered. She put the mould away. She sat still for a while, deep in thought, frowning.
Finally she closed the box and placed it back into the rucksack, followed by every other item, refolded and put back in meticulous order. Last of all –and most regretfully –the banjo.
Next she started in on the side pockets. On the left-hand side she found a tartan Thermos, three spoons, a fork and a knife inside a plastic tupperware sandwich box. A small pale blue enamel plate with dark blue trim. A matching bowl. Some strange metal prongs which seemed darkened at their tips by –she sniffed –meat juices. Old blood. A very small saucepan. Very battered. Stained black.
A wooden spoon. A strange –this was hard to pull out, there was obviously a special technique –metal rack thing like you’d have in a grill pan, which unfolded, from its centre, so was pretty handy (for cooking fish or fillets over a fire, she presumed).
Matches, matches, matches. Tiny boxes, from all over the place. Pubs and bars mainly. A tiny tin of –she opened it –gravy browning? Cocoa? Coffee?
Hard to tell.
Dozens of sugar sachets.
The other side. Mainly cosmetics. There was an old tube of smoker’s toothpaste. A toothbrush –so ancient its bristles were flat and yellow. A half-used bottle of Rescue Remedy (she raised her brows at this). A damp brown towel. A small bottle of cardamom oil (an amateur pressing; on the front was written; CARDAMOM, FOR INDIGESTION. DO NOT APPLY DIRECT TO SKIN OR SWALLOW (two exclamation marks).
Katherine unscrewed the lid and inhaled. She smiled. It was a good smell. It reminded her of Wesley (that moment when he’d leaned forward to kiss her. She closed her eyes. Remembered that moment, her lips moving, unconsciously. She opened her eyes again. Cleared her throat. Twitched her shoulder).
An old fashioned razor –bone handled –wrapped up in a small off-white face towel (Katherine almost cut herself upon it. She squeaked. Gazed. Tested its sharpness on her thumb. Was impressed. Wrapped it carefully back up again). A whole pile of –
Urgh
– goo (how else to describe it?). In an old shaving tin. Bits of stringy green stuff and some kind of cactusy foamy…
She closed the tin, rapidly.
A pill bottle containing a series of odd-looking tablets. Several kinds. Homeopathic. An ancient –very battered –hip flask –
Yip yip!
– containing (Katherine unscrewed it) bourbon or sour mash whiskey. She put it to her lips, swigged, coug
hed, grinned.
A cream fabric bag with a draw-string top containing (she thought it’d be dope or something) grass, but of the seed variety, poppy seeds, too, and countless other kinds –
Sweet
She had a vision of Wesley strolling along in high summer, haphazardly scattering seed into the hedgerows, out of pure… pure…
Altruism
Or was that just naive of her?
Three books. One called (deep breath) Famous Utopias; an omnibus containing the complete texts of More’s Utopia, Campanella’s City of the Sun, Rousseau’s Social Contract, Bacon’s New Atlantis.
Katherine scowled tiredly as she paged through it. It seemed ancient –so old, in fact, that the pages were raw and uncut. But the cover was beautiful –black and white, with freaky lettering –of several different styles and all just sort of shoved up together, willy-nilly.
Inside was an inscription;
For Wes, (it said, in a beautiful hand; real green ink) For laughing and feeling,
Stevie
Two kisses.
Katherine raised her brows at this, almost jealously, and as she flipped through it again something fell out –a picture. A photo. She picked it up from her lap and gazed at it. She blinked and stared harder.
A little girl. Oddly familiar. Katherine gazed up at the ceiling for a moment, then back down at it, as though testing herself: small girl, dark haired, wearing an alice band, not smiling, serious-seeming, thin, sickly-looking.
It was the same –
Wasn’t it?
– almost the same photograph Arthur had shown them during dinner (perhaps taken at the same sitting, on the same occasion? Christmas? Birthday?). The same little girl, she was certain.
Katherine scrutinised the photo closely again. Nodded to herself, frowning. Idly turned it over. On the back was written –in pen, but very neatly –This is the daughter. 9 yrs. Birthday Jan 7th. Lives with the mother.
Now that was definitely –
Hmmn
– more than a little strange. She gazed over briefly to the letter she’d tossed down onto the floor –
A well-wisher
– then slipped the picture into the front pocket of her dressing gown. Almost surreptitiously. She closed the book gently and put it down. Took a deep breath. Exhaled it, slowly. Snapped back to the task in hand.
The second volume –this one a paperback –was called Ravens in Winter by Bernd Heinrich. She paged through it (one field biologist’s struggle to uncover the mysteries of raven behaviour in Canada or North America or somewhere). The book was marked by a series of feathers. She drew every feather out, one by one. They were all perfect. All iridescent. A deep blue-black-green (hard to see it properly in the muted light), with the occasional sidelong smear of white –
Magpie
Whatever else?
Next to each feather –in the book’s margins –she discovered that Wesley had scribbled a series of comments –seemingly unconnected to the text –in pencil.
NB. Contact: (one such comment read) Michael Hitchens; re. Goodwin; then a phone number. There were other numbers too. Other names. Another scribble said In Madagascar an acceptable unit of time is ‘rice-cooking time’, or shorter; ‘the frying of a locust’. Toffler (TTW).
There were plenty of these cryptic comments (all saying Toffler TTW afterwards –Katherine presumed Toffler was a person –a writer –a seer of some kind).
Somewhere else Wesley had written: Edward Albee: ‘the permanent transient’.
Elsewhere; Support the GPO! In big letters.
‘Social decay is the compost-bed of our civilisation’, then after, in capitals, BUT THAT’S SO FUCKING PRAGMATIC!
Katherine grabbed her dictionary again. Under Pragmatic(al) she read; meddlesome, positive, dictatorial (she snorted, irritably). Then later; doctrine that the conception of an object is no more than the conception of its possible practical effects.
She slammed the dictionary shut and threw it at her cupboard. She continued to inspect Wesley’s Raven book, crossly.
Next to another feather marker was written: Joseph Williamson; King of Edge Hill. Tunnels. Must see. Then further on: Time: circular or linear?
As she read, Katherine carefully returned each feather to its original position. Towards the back, her eyes suddenly tightened as she struggled to decipher an especially interesting but rather badly written scribble. She stared at it for a long while. Eventually she made out…
Korsikov;
Alcohol abuse.
Short term memory-Liver-Testicular
She straightened her neck, flipped her second plait over her shoulder, growled, slotted away the last feather and sat still for a long while, rocking –almost imperceptibly –and quietly musing.
Finally, she grabbed hold of the third book –gazed at the cover –Ah
Now this was more like it –Bottersnikes and Gumbles by S.A. Wakefield. A slim children’s story about some squidgy but very pliant creatures called…
She frowned… called…
Gumbles
(Now why did that mean something to her? Why was that ringing an alarm bell, somewhere?)
She inspected the picture. A small, white and rather adorable koala-type animal… Her forehead cleared. She grinned.
And they were relentlessly bullied and manipulated, these… these Gumbles (and kept in old tin cans) by an angry but regal pointy-red-eared creature called Chank who lived in a dump with his furiously lazy Bottersnike compadres. Fully illustrated.
Katherine collapsed back onto her pillows with Wesley’s flask in her spare hand, emitted a gentle burp, licked the remaining slick of spirit from her lips and commenced reading.
Thirty-eight
Of course this was Wesley’s child. He’d known it – he told himself (if a touch unconvincingly) –
An instinct, call it…
– from the very first moment, the first instant he’d laid eyes on her.
Wesley’s own little Sasha. The freak-girl who lived among the deer at her grandparents’ Norfolk-based Menagerie-cum-Garden Centre.
She looked like him, too. Arthur shot her a sly glance. But not exactly. He’d seen pictures of the mother (blonde, angry, angular) and she appeared to resemble that side of the family in no way whatsoever.
The mother was a hard-nut. Had gone to the papers – several times – during all the maintenance complications the previous year. Seemed to actively enjoy unburdening on the subject of her ex-lover. Told everything and yet – Arthur’s brow rose, minutely – nobody could ever tell quite enough, could they?
He visualised the page on the website;
Uh…
Food: ‘When we lived by the sea in the little bed and breakfast in Hunstanton, we’d cook macaroni cheese from the tin on our tiny cooker – share a bowl of it – curled up in bed together.’
Hygiene: ‘He was never all that big on changing his clothes or dressing up or having a bath. He’d swim in the sea, though, all the time. Even in winter. He was like a seal. Or a machine. He never seemed to feel the cold.’
Sex: ‘He was straight down the line, but sometimes he liked me to bite and pinch. Once he’d lost his hand we didn’t really sleep together any more – he lost interest, but I was heavily pregnant by then, with Sasha.’
And of course:
Wildlife: ‘At first – when he raised his hand – I thought he was going to hit me. But then he turned and pushed his fingers into the cage instead. It was dark… very dark. There was a scream. But it wasn’t him. It was the bird, the owl. This horrible… this unforgettable squealing noise. Like an animal in terrible pain.’
At this point Iris turns towards her fiancé for support. He takes her hand and squeezes it, comfortingly. The small, dark girl – Wesley’s daughter – sits by the window, apparently lost in her own childish world, smiling at a sparrow on the lawn, playing with her hair…
‘He said it was…’ Iris’s voice falters, ‘he tried to pretend it was me – when we tal
ked about it, after – but it wasn’t. It wasn’t. It was the bird. And later on, Derek – the keeper – said that Wes’d asked to feed that particular owl himself over the previous couple of weeks – said he’d been paying it a lot of personal attention.
‘He actually thought Wes’d been disposing of its food, that he’d been starving it, in secret. On purpose. He thought he’d been planning the whole thing for quite a while…’
Iris clears her throat, her eyes fill with tears, ‘I mean he’s charming when he feels like it, but he’s a real manipulator. He plays with people’s feelings. I think he’s a…’ Iris lowers her voice, for the sake of the child, but she seems terrified, ‘a schizophrenic. He has two personalities. You can’t trust him. Especially after – well, his history – what he did to the younger brother*. That’s why I never want him to have anything to do with my Sasha.’
© Printed with kind permission of William Harvey
Arthur blinked –
Was I asleep?
He blinked again –
Why do I always remember the Wesley things?
And with such painful – such inexcusable – clarity?
He shivered, struggling to switch himself back into the present.
They were sitting together, close to the doorway. It was freezing. Arthur didn’t want to move any further inside – couldn’t risk it – and they’d kept the door open, in case of –
If the girl – the daughter – fell into the water
If she was lost in the water
That would be just…
Stop
That would be just…
STOP!
‘Snowing,’ the girl suddenly murmured. They’d been quiet for a long while. The only sounds were the gurgle of the low tide hitting the boat’s stilts, the boat creaking, the slight wind, the distant and intermittent throb of the flyover.
Arthur looked down at his wrist –
Time
– it was three forty a.m. –
Late
– then he gazed up into the sky. She was right. Snow. Improbably large flakes. His heart sank.
Behindlings Page 39
