Behindlings

by Nicola Barker

  ‘The final clue, as you probably already know, was announced only three weeks ago, after a certain amount of procrastination. At first we’d considered cancelling the whole thing –as a tribute to the dead man, as an apology –but then the father became involved. The old boy. The scaffolder. You’ll have seen him in the papers.’

  Arthur nodded. Yes. He’d seen the old man.

  ‘So press attention at that point was obviously intense. It still is. But we were handling it. Unfortunately, Wesley then decided to raise the stakes. He broke off all communications with the company. He grew uncooperative. Three days ago he travelled to Canvey…’

  Arthur clucked, shrewdly, ‘Ah. Candy Island. Daniel Defoe. The first clue.’

  His companion shrugged this off boredly. ‘Of course. It’s a very famous linguistic corruption. But that’s not what concerns you. What concerns you is that I have recently developed some misgivings about Wesley’s intentions. His motivations. His reliability. In short, I have stopped trusting him.’

  Arthur sniffed, dismissively, then touched the cuff of his coat to the tip of his nose. A small droplet darkened its khaki. ‘If you suspect fraud you could have him arrested.’

  ‘Oh yes, before some poor, deluded fool went and killed himself, very possibly. But now it’s much too fucked up. It’s too complicated.’

  Arthur still seemed befuddled.

  ‘I need you to help me,’ his companion continued, ‘I need you to… to involve yourself in some way. I’m surrounding him. I’ll need information. You’ll have to be circumspect. My ultimate ambition is to defuse the situation. I need to understand it. I need to distract Wesley. To… to debilitate him.’

  He paused for a moment, then continued on again, silkily, ‘Naturally, you’re not the only person I’m involving. There will be others. They will know different things, but they won’t know everything. Overall, my intention, my need, is to distance the company from the drowned man, from the old boy, and, ultimately, from Wesley. To keep things clean.’

  Arthur was silent. But his mind was working.

  His companion watched him, benignly. ‘Here’s some advice for you,’ he whispered, ‘I know about the history. I also know that you’re screwing countless different sources for money. I know why. I understand. And if you help me I will ensure that nobody finds out. And I mean nobody. I will do things for you,’ he paused, ‘but if you go to the papers, if you act indiscreetly, there’s sufficient ill-feeling between you and Wesley for me to manipulate that and to use it against you. At this particular point we have no way of knowing what it is exactly that Wesley’s planning…’

  Arthur’s eyebrows rose. ‘Perhaps he’s not planning anything. Perhaps he’s just… just…’ he struggled, ‘just plain mooching. Have you even considered that possibility?’

  His companion nodded, unmoved by Arthur’s cynicism. ‘Of course we have. But it’s unlikely. This is Wesley, after all.’

  Out of the blue, he swung himself forward and moved his two lips right up close to Arthur’s ear. ‘The air around you,’ he whispered gently, ‘it smells of death. Hospitals. Disinfectant. Why? Who is responsible? Will you tell? Will you enlighten me?’

  Arthur stiffened. He struggled to stop his hands from trembling. It was just a misunderstanding, that was all. Eventually his companion pulled away again and the warmth of his breath –on Arthur’s cheek, his ear –transformed, gradually, into something quite different; a thing no less intimate, but cool now, and lingering.

  Arthur sat and watched quietly as he stood up, slowly, pushing his hands onto his knees for leverage. Those strangely vocal knees, Arthur thought, and listened to them protesting. Perhaps he had room to protest himself? But he did not.

  Instead, he remained mute, sucking his tongue and staring dumbly ahead of him, down the path, into the distance. He could not bring himself to speak again. It was simply not necessary. His mouth was so thick and full now with the taste of Wesley.

  Three

  ‘What you did back then was unforgivable. It was mean, it was selfish, it was thoughtless, it was just… it was just plain wrong.’

  The man who spoke these stem words –his name was Ted, and he was a fresh-faced but avuncular small town estate agent –did so without the slightest hint, the slightest note, the slightest tremble of disapproval in his voice. His absolute lack of ire was not merely striking; it teetered, it lurched, it practically tumbled head first into the realm of remarkable.

  Wesley, to whom this speech had been principally directed (but who didn’t appear to have digested a word of it), acknowledged as much –internally –as he swung himself from left to right on an ancient and creaking swivel chair in Ted’s Canvey High Street office. He was inspecting property details. He was considering renting.

  ‘Which bad thing in particular?’ he asked idly. There were so many bad things.

  ‘Which thing? The Canvey thing. In the book. The Katherine Turpin thing.’

  Wesley stopped swivelling and glanced up. ‘What? In the walks book? All the stuff about perimeters? That was years ago.’

  He liked this man. Ted. He liked his wide mouth, his charming effervescence, his loopy sincerity, his almost-silliness. Wesley appraised Ted’s thick lips as they vibrated, like two fat, pink molluscs performing a shifty rhumba.

  ‘Two years ago. Twenty-seven months, if you want to be precise about it,’ Ted calculated amicably.

  ‘Two years? Fuck. Is that all?’

  Wesley frowned –as if this was a vexatious detail that had not previously occurred to him –while Ted waved to a passerby through the agency’s large, exquisitely high-polished picture window. It was the third time he’d done so in as many minutes.

  ‘You seem to know everybody around here,’ Wesley observed drily, turning his head to peer outside, ‘it must be very trying.’

  ‘Trying? Why?’ Ted didn’t understand. ‘I find people their homes. It’s an essential… it’s a quint-essential service.’

  ‘I get your point,’ Wesley puckered his lips slightly, to try and stop an inadvertent grin from sneaking out and plastering itself –with unapologetic candour –all over his mouth. Then, in a bid to distract Ted’s attention, he suddenly pointed, ‘There’s a woman. Do you see her? Over in the Wimpy. Sitting in the window, directly opposite the Old Man.’

  ‘The sun’s in my eyes,’ Ted squinted, then moved to the left a fraction. ‘Ah… Yes. The one in the sweatshirt? Short hair? Eating a doughnut? Looks like a boy?’

  ‘That’s her.’

  ‘Who is she?’

  Wesley shrugged, ‘I don’t know. That’s why I asked.’

  He glanced around him, momentarily nonplussed. It was a neat office. Ted was neat. In fact he was immaculately presented. He wore a dark grey suit from Next, a spotless white shirt and a silk tie with an image of Sylvester the Cat spewed repeatedly in full technicolor onto a noxious, salmon pink background. His two shoes shone like heavily glacé’ed morello cherries.

  ‘So… Ted, was it?’

  Ted nodded.

  ‘So Ted, are you the boss of this agency?’

  Ted did a humourful double-take, ‘Do I look like the boss?’

  ‘I don’t know. How does the boss look?’

  ‘Different. Older. Shorter. Brown hair. Glasses. Huge moustache.’ Ted was a strawberry blond.

  ‘I knew a man like you once,’ Wesley observed, rather ominously, casually flipping through the sheets of property details again. ‘He looked like you, had the same cheerful… no, altruistic notions. Always beautifully turned-out. Then one day he became fascinated by pigeons’ feet, and that was the end of him.’ Ted tried to look unfazed by this strangely baroque influx of information. He almost succeeded.

  ‘He’d travel around,’ Wesley elucidated, ‘catching stray pigeons and giving them pedicures. He made special splints from old lolly sticks. Eventually he even began constructing his own, tiny, perfectly executed false limbs. Somebody made a documentary about his work and tried to sell it to Cha
nnel 5, but I don’t think they bought it. He was involved in radical causes. It frightened the shit out of them.’

  Wesley glanced up. Ted was rubbing his clean-shaven jaw with his nimble fingers in such a way as to indicate a certain want of credulity. Wesley scowled, irritated. ‘I’m perfectly serious. He simply couldn’t abide the sight of a bird with a limp. He was mad about feet. Birds’ feet. Loathed human feet, though. If you pulled off your socks in front of him he’d break out into a sweat. It was tragic.’ Wesley gave the forefinger and thumb on his good hand a cursory lick to improve his turning power. ‘Pigeons aren’t indigenous to Britain,’ he observed, helpfully, ‘and that was his beef. His argument was that they were kept domestically, originally, but then they strayed or were abandoned. Yet somehow they were canny enough to adapt and survive. That was partly why he felt such a powerful connection with them. He was temporarily fostered himself as a kid…’

  Wesley paused for a moment to inspect a particular sheet, frowned, then continued turning the pages, ‘People think factory farming is a modern phenomenon, but pigeons were kept by the Romans in the fourth century BC inside these huge, airless towers. They had their legs broken and their wings clipped to prevent them from moving…’, he cleared his throat. ‘This friend of mine waged a campaign against lime-use. People put it on their windowsills. Extremely common in the 1970s. Very cruel. Melts the bird’s toes…

  ‘The point I’m making…’ Wesley stopped leafing and paused for a minute, ‘is that he was actually ridiculously sensitive, underneath all that other stuff. Underneath that thick layer of poise and helpfulness and affability…

  ‘Right,’ he passed Ted a sheet, ‘this is the place.’

  Ted took the sheet and glanced at it, his mind still fully occupied by images of lime and feet and feathers. After a few seconds, though, his eyes cleared and widened. He shook his head. He began to snigger, nervously. ‘You can’t be…’ he managed eventually, shaking his head and trying vainly to hand the sheet back again.

  Wesley scowled. He would not take it. ‘What’s so funny?’

  Ted’s mirth slowly evaporated. He stared intently at Wesley for a moment, struggling to tell if he was sincere. But he couldn’t tell. Wesley’s expression was completely unreadable. He was a human hieroglyphic.

  ‘This is her house,’ Ted said, finally. ‘She’s renting out the spare bedroom. Shared use of bathroom and kitchen facilities. I’m only handling it as a personal favour.’

  ‘Whose house?’ Wesley sounded perfectly innocent. Benign. Casual.

  ‘Whose house?’ he repeated, after a pause.

  Ted pointed at the printed details: ‘This is Katherine Turpin’s house. This is the house of the local woman whose life you ruined.’

  A short silence followed, punctuated, briefly, by Wesley’s stomach rumbling.

  ‘Blow me,’ Wesley finally expostulated (almost convincingly), ‘that’s some crazy coincidence. I suppose we’d better go and take a look, then, hadn’t we?’

  He stood up. Ted didn’t move a muscle.

  ‘Take me there,’ Wesley ordered, reaching over to grab Ted’s jacket from the back of his chair, bundling it up into a compact ball, and throwing it at him.

  ‘You don’t know me…’ Josephine said, squeezing her way between the plastic bench and its table.

  ‘I don’t know you,’ Doc affirmed, not even looking up at her, but applying all his energy to dissolving the foam on his coffee by stirring at it vigorously with the back end of a knife. The foam wouldn’t dissolve though. Too dense. Too soapy.

  He was occupying a window kiosk in the Wimpy. Dennis sat outside, tied to a lamppost, his snout pushed mournfully against the glass, his breath steaming up the window in small, cloudy patches.

  ‘My name’s Josephine,’ she said, sitting down.

  ‘Why all this foam?’ Doc muttered, not anticipating an answer.

  ‘That’s a cappuccino. I believe it’s prepared with frothy milk.’

  Doc finally glanced up and inspected Josephine. He frowned slightly. He couldn’t pretend to understand this irritating modern phenomenon of girls who dressed like boys. Did it mean she hated men? Was she sexually deviant? Was she frigid? Was she frightened? Was she predatory? Either way, she made him feel old and alienated and uneasy.

  ‘Who made you an authority?’ he asked curtly.

  Josephine didn’t respond at once. First, she picked up a napkin and neatly turned over each of its four comers –double-checking the sharpness of the fold, in each instance.

  ‘I’m hardly an authority,’ she murmured, unfolding the napkin again, smoothing it out with the flat of her palm and then shoving it away. Doc ignored her fidgetings. He occupied himself instead by staring out of the window and over the road towards the estate agency.

  ‘Do you think he’s only after information,’ Josephine queried, leaning forward, pushing both elbows onto the table, cupping her neat chin inside her two immaculately clean hands (her short, white nails thin as ten tight crescent moons; bright as albumen) and glancing over herself, ‘or do you reckon he might actually be planning to stay here awhile?’

  Doc took a quick sip of his coffee. It was hot. He cursed under his breath and hastily put the cup down again.

  ‘I bought your dog a doughnut,’ Josephine said, indicating towards the paper bag she’d been holding, already dark with grease stains, ‘I hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘He’s diabetic,’ Doc growled, clumsily wiping away his foam moustache with the back of his hand and then staring, bemusedly, at the remaining slick of cocoa-splattered residue, like it was some kind of toxic extra-terrestrial slop.

  ‘A diabetic? Really?’

  Doc –still refusing formal eye contact –gritted his teeth and then muttered gutturally through them, ‘I hardly think it’d be worth my while to lie about such a thing.’

  ‘No.’

  Josephine frowned and leaned back, somewhat unnerved by Doc’s pugnacity. She grabbed hold of the offending bag, removed a doughnut from inside (glancing, guiltily, towards the service counter), then sat and stared at it.

  ‘It’s shaped like a man,’ she observed, biting off both of its arms in quick succession.

  Doc didn’t respond. He was concentrating on the estate agency again. Inside he thought he could see Wesley standing up and throwing something. He roughly pushed his cup aside (the coffee pitched then spilled, still steaming, into its saucer), fastened a couple of buttons on his cardigan, grabbed his oilskin jacket from the bench beside him, and clambered to his feet.

  But before he beat his hasty retreat, Doc paused –almost regretfully –shifting his weight heavily from his bad leg to his better leg like a small child anxiously queuing to collect his Good Conduct certificate at school assembly.

  ‘Look,’ he spoke quickly, his voice –Josephine noticed –fractionally less abrasive than it had been previously, ‘I’ve made it my business to follow Wesley for well over three and a half years now,’ Doc inadvertently clenched then unclenched his left fist as he spoke, testing the joints for any hint of arthritic stiffening, ‘and what I want you to understand…’ his bleary brown eyes were already focussing beyond Josephine, out of the window, over the road, ‘what I need you to understand is that for me this isn’t just a game or a hobby. It’s actually like a kind of…’ he paused, struggling, his eyes briefly flickering towards the ceiling, ‘a kind of pilgrimage.’

  Still he wasn’t satisfied, ‘A way of life, if you will…’

  He scowled, temporarily incapable of encompassing the complex landscape of his emotions verbally of fully encapsulating The Following and all its myriad implications.

  ‘I truly, fully appreciate the depth of your commitment,’ Josephine butted in, quickly snatching her opportunity, trying her utmost to sound sufficiently submissive, ‘I mean I know you’re quite the expert…’

  ‘There are some people,’ Doc rapidly continued, almost as if he hadn’t heard her, ‘who have Followed him even longer than I have, in terms
of actual years, but none so intensively. There are many –especially since the big confectionery Loiter –who Follow him mostly at the weekends or perhaps for a day or two when they’re on holiday, and others who simply turn up, at the drop of a hat, whenever the fancy takes them. We call these people,’ Doc allowed himself a wry smile, ‘we call such people Fleas, because their… because their infestation is almost always very temporary.’

  Josephine inspected her armless sundry –a rather unwieldy wodge of dough still tucked inside her cheek –all too fully aware of which horribly capricious category Doc had already slotted her into.

  ‘You see, to me, as yet,’ Doc observed, pushing home his point rather more blatantly than was necessary, ‘you are just another one of those people. Those Fleas. And while I would hate you to take this the wrong way, Josephine…’

  (Her name. He’d remembered. He’d snatched it from the ether, quite arbitrarily.)

  ‘… I’d much prefer it if you’d refrain from questioning me or talking to me, bothering me or pestering me. Because any information I may have gathered is my information. I have worked for it. I have earned it. I use it as I see fit. I don’t…’ he thought hard about the word he needed, ‘disseminate. I do not disseminate it,’ he paused. ‘Well, I do, sometimes, but only when I want to, when I choose to,’ he smiled briskly (old teeth. Yellow teeth. Wonky). ‘I hope that settles things.’

  The smile stopped (Doc turned it off in a flash –with a small click in his jaw –like the neat switch on a wall-socket) then he nodded abruptly and strode to the door.

  Outside, Dennis dashed joyously forward until his elasticated leash stretched to capacity –like a horizontal bungee –and jerked him –ears flying, claws scrabbling comically –all the way back again.