Behindlings

by Nicola Barker

  Leo’s moustache was so grand and so mesmerising in its scope and its audacity that it could always be depended upon to make friends squint, strangers gawp, dogs growl and babies squeal. Unfortunately (as with all this world’s artifacts of peerless pulchritude: The Golden Gate Bridge, The Cistine Chapel), Leo’s barbel was confoundedly difficult to preserve in all its hirsute glory.

  And so it was –on that relentlessly icy winter morning –that while Ted surreptitiously struggled to accurately describe the general whereabouts of Wesley to his mysterious interlocutor, Leo was quietly holed-up inside the office’s tiny back cloakroom, deeply engrossed in the brief but complex daily ritual of combing out and re-waxing his moustache.

  Fortunately this process always necessitated –Ted knew not why –the boiling of a kettle, and above its steamy whining he calculated that Leo could probably detect little from the office area beyond the repetitive mutter of distant voices sparring. Even so, as he finally turned to apprehend his fact-seeking friend across the clean, smooth span of his low-quality, high-glossed MDF desk, his gentle face remained cruelly bleached by a pale fog of unease. ‘Oh I know perfectly well where Wesley is, locationally, it’s more his state of mind that interests me.’

  The man who spoke was known as Bo because his surname was Mackenzie, and the calf-length gaberdine mac was his main sartorial preference (even during climatic conditions generally thought inappropriate to the wearing of protective garb).

  In all other respects though –excluding the mackintosh and the nickname –he bore absolutely no resemblance to Columbo the TV detective. He was not an ingenious sleuth. He had little grasp of irony. He was an improbably tall ex-tennis pro with perfectly straight eyes, badly receding black hair (which he grew long to the rear, hoisting it up neatly into a glossy ponytail) and a pathological inability to dither: the kind of inability, in fact, only ever possessed by the successful gambler (who’ll always call a spade a spade, except, of course, when he doesn’t), the pulpiteer and the bully.

  He and Ted went way back. They’d attended school together. And after, when Bo’s legendary backhand had buckled (during a much-publicised Canvey-based charity mixed-doubles match with a popular local lady councillor, a post-menopausal pop singer and a lesser-known royal biographer) he’d funnelled his considerable energies into the fertile field of major and minor-league sports journalism.

  Unfortunately, Bo’s imagination in print (and, alas, also out of it) had always been rather cruelly curtailed by the rudimentary stylistic limitations of serve and return. But Bo was not now, nor ever had been, the kind of man to allow a scandalous want of talent to impede his indomitable physical encapsulation of spunk and grit and zeal.

  ‘But how do you know where he is?’ Ted asked (diligently ignoring the question about Wesley’s state of mind). ‘How could you possibly know he was in the library?’

  Bo scowled, ‘Internet, stupid.’

  He waggled his right foot. On the floor just next to it stood a small, rectangular, fabric-coated bag containing his laptop and a choice combination of other high-tech journalistic gadgetry.

  ‘Really?’ Ted’s innocent eyes widened. ‘You’re saying it actually records where Wesley is, from moment to moment, right there, on your portable computer?’

  ‘Yes,’ Bo growled, ‘how the heck would I know otherwise?’

  ‘You’re saying he’s…’ Ted paused as the true horror of the situation descended upon him, ‘he’s bugged?’

  Bo snorted, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. It’s nothing like that. People keep tabs. His people. They watch him. They ring in. They help each other. It’s a voluntary thing.’

  ‘Good Lord,’ Ted mulled this over for a minute, ‘that’s terrifying.’

  ‘How?’ Bo was uncomprehending.

  ‘How what?’

  He took a deep breath, ‘How is it terrifying that Wesley’s on the internet? Everything’s on the fucking internet. That’s precisely what it’s there for.’

  Ted smiled sagaciously, ‘Remember 1984?’

  ‘All too clearly. The year I lost my virginity.’

  Ted stopped smiling, ‘You lost your virginity at ten years of age?’

  Bo looked unremorseful. ‘I was two years younger,’ he expanded nonchalantly, ‘than your dear friend Katy Turpin, who kindly plucked my cherry from me.’

  Ted’s colour rose slightly. ‘Anyhow,’ he rapidly continued, ‘I didn’t mean the year, I meant the novel. 1984. We read it at school. The film starred John Hurt.’

  Bo shrugged.

  ‘John Hurt,’ Ted reiterated. ‘He was in The Elephant Man. He was nominated for an Oscar.’

  Bo stared at Ted in scornful bemusement, ‘The Elephant Man? What the fuck does a film have to do with anything?’

  Ted picked up a bendy ruler from his desktop and manipulated it between his two hands, carefully. ‘A book,’ he murmured gently, ‘it was a book, originally.’

  Bo looked up coolly so that he might make a meal out of inspecting the ceiling fan, but instead found himself blinking into a rather uninspiring strip light. After a couple of seconds he focussed in on Ted again. Ted had suddenly acquired a fluorescent white stripe across his nose.

  ‘God, Rivers,’ in his pique Bo returned temporarily to the reassuring cruelty of formal class lingo, ‘why I ever even gave you the time of day at school still remains a monumental fucking mystery to me.’

  Ted said nothing. Bo, he mused, had clearly forgotten the exact nature of their scholastic interactions. Maybe this blip indicated some deep psychological problem involving malfunctioning synapses? Or perhaps –and more probably –the simple act of forgetting helped him to sleep a little sounder during the long, bleak hours of the early morning (although, frankly, Bo did not –he had to admit –look in any way like a man who had ever suffered from a shortage of shut-eye. He was devastatingly vital; spruce as a fine Swiss pine).

  On considering Bo’s spruceness –and its implications in terms of any illusions he may’ve clung to relating to the existence of a fair and vengeful deity –Ted’s throat involuntarily contracted and his mind turned briefly to Wesley’s story about the supposed cruelty of ancient Roman pigeon farming. He wondered whether Bo might jump for this scrap –did it qualify as newsworthy? –but before he could speak, Bo spoke himself.

  ‘So does he think it’s frightening that he’s on the internet?’

  ‘Uh…’ Ted’s brain fizzed. He put down the ruler and fingered his tie, ‘I don’t know. I didn’t ask him. How could I? I only just this second found out about it.’

  ‘Oh come on, Rivers,’ Bo hissed impatiently, ‘after spending well over an hour in his company, even a cretin like you must’ve unearthed something printworthy.’

  Ted tried to think for a moment, ‘I found out…’

  He paused, then spoke, all at once, in a guilty rush, ‘I found out that he lost his hand after he fed it to an owl. But I don’t think you should write about that. It seemed very personal.’

  Bo grimaced, ‘Old news. Everybody already knows about the sodding hand.’

  ‘They do?’ Ted felt inexplicably disappointed.

  ‘What planet are you living on, Rivers? How could you have missed out on all that fuss in the papers early last year about his long-term evasion of Child Support payments?’

  ‘He has a child?’

  ‘A girl. Nine years old. Lives in Norfolk on a kind of crazy Fen zoo. Keeps reindeer. A total freak.’

  ‘And the owl?’

  ‘That’s where the fucking owl lived, you moron.’

  ‘Oh.’ Ted mulled this over, then stared up at Bo again, a newly-burnished respectfulness shining in his brass-brown eyes, ‘So what other stuff have you unearthed about him during your investigation?’

  Bo shoved his hand into his mac pocket and withdrew a crumpled roll of paper. He tossed it down onto Ted’s desk. Ted reached out, picked it up and unfurled it. The sheet was a computer print-out containing a huge list of biographical facts about Wesley, as well as a sele
ction of articles amassed and reprinted from a variety of sources.

  1994, Ted read randomly, Wesley (at this juncture operating under the pseudonym Parker Swells – for further information see www.parkerswells.co.uk) completes a B-Tec in Business Studies with honours at the (as then was) North London Polytechnic (for student reports, course details, interviews with significant lecturers etc. see section entitled wes:b-tec/northlondon). He applies for several jobs in the field of banking. It is during this time that he meets a woman called Bethan Ray, becomes sexually involved with her and then steals a priceless antique pond from her garden. He is subsequently charged with theft and mental cruelty.

  Ted stopped reading. He frowned then firmly folded the sheet over. ‘But how can you be sure it’s all true?’

  ‘Of course it’s true,’ Bo snatched the sheet back again, ‘and if it isn’t, who gives a fuck? I’m not here,’ he spoke loudly, initially, then lowered his voice slightly as the kettle clicked off in the cloakroom, ‘to tell you about Wesley, or to discuss some pathetic book you might’ve read at school, or to chat about the nature of truth or the underlying problems of technology…’

  He drew a deep breath, ‘I am here, however, to find out, to accrue, to glean information. And you are here to give it to me. Unless, that is…’ Bo’s eyebrows rose suggestively. His silence spoke volumes. Ted squirmed a little under the weighty pressure of all this quiet insinuation, but still he said nothing.

  ‘I mean that is the understanding between the two of us, currently?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ted finally murmured, breaking eye contact to inspect his desktop, ‘it’s just that… in retrospect…’ he picked up the ruler and bent it virtually double, ‘in retrospect it seems like I wasn’t very well primed. Perhaps I should’ve been more aware of certain things –special areas of interest –to do with the competition. That kind of stuff.’

  ‘The Loiter.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Loiter. So where did you take him?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  Ted looked up, guiltily. Bo was pressing his hands down hard onto his desk. He had knuckles like horse chestnuts.

  ‘I said where did you take him?’

  ‘It didn’t mention,’ Ted asked, swallowing nervously, his shoulders hunching, ‘on the internet?’

  ‘No. It listed the Furtherwick Road –this address, presumably –but that was all. The information’s always fairly sketchy. Everybody has stuff they want to keep to themselves. Even the informants. That’s the…’ he thought for a while, ‘… I guess that’s the irony.’

  ‘Well, we just…’ Ted paused, ‘we just walked down the road a way… we had a look around… took in the sights… uh #x2026;’ he cleared his throat, ‘looked at the school and stuff…’

  ‘You didn’t view any houses?’

  ‘Houses?’ Ted almost squawked. ‘No. Absolutely not. Absolutely no way did we view any houses. No,’ he crossed his legs, then his fingers, under the table, ‘it was all just… well, just simple lay of the land stuff, really… he needed to find his bearings… he said he wanted to… to mooch around… he said he was interested in geography… and pigeons… and birds’ feet, generally…’

  As Ted laboriously belched up these unedifying informational gobbets (he had evasion written all over him. He was too genuine by a mile. Honest as a humble bunny. More honest), Mr Leo Pathfinder, in all his neat and tidy well-groomed glory, could be observed –a new moth, glistening, fresh from its pupa –silently emerging from the cloakroom behind them.

  He pushed the door wide and posed dramatically in its sweep, his hair preposterously bouffant, his moustache quivering, his index finger raised and pressed firmly to his smiling lips in gentle warning.

  Bo –who was facing him –saw Leo immediately, yet gave Ted no intimation of his silent re-entry. His eyes barely flickered from their minute inspection of Ted’s benign physiognomy.

  ‘I don’t know…’ Ted continued, now utterly immersed in what he was saying, ‘I mean I’m not certain if it’ll help you, but early on, when we were still in the office, Wesley told me some fascinating stuff about pigeon farming. He said that people prefer to cling to the idea that factory farming is a very modern thing, but in actual fact the Romans used to keep pigeons –and I mean literally thousands of them –inside these huge, nasty, airless…’

  Bo said nothing, just continued to stare at him, focussing on his nose, especially. Ted took his silence as a sign of encouragement and so kept on talking.

  Behind him, meanwhile, Pathfinder was on the move. He began to tiptoe, exaggeratedly (holding up his hands, as if scalded, lifting his feet in a crazy goose-step, like a deviant Lipizzaner), very quietly, very deliberately, over from the far wall.

  ‘Sometimes they’d clip their wings and break their legs so that the birds couldn’t move around too much. I mean if you can only imagine…’

  Four foot away. Three foot. Two.

  Then all at once, like an industrial rubberized, burgundy-bewhiskered Zebedee, Leo sprang –emitting an ear-splittingly wild yet eerily pitch-perfect yodel –and landed, seconds later, with both his hands, stiffened into a terrifying, claw-like rictus, clamped down hard onto poor Ted’s shoulders.

  Ted jolted, he bucked, his eyes popped.

  ‘WAH?’

  He kicked himself backwards –his swivel chair pivoting –and as he spun, his jaw jerked insanely like a low-budget skeleton on a funfair ghost-train. The wheels continued rolling and twisting. Twice he almost toppled, nearly taking Pathfinder with him. Leo was agile though, and sprang out, sideways.

  ‘YES!’ he bellowed.

  The chair finally stalled –it stopped spinning –but Ted’s jowls continued juddering, his usually sallow complexion now the exact same hue as a sweet potato skin.

  ‘Oh fuck me, Ted, your face,’ Bo cackled, bending forwards and placing both his hands flat onto the desk again.

  ‘Was it good?’ Leo panted, scurrying around to Bo’s side to get a better look. ‘Did I kill him?’

  Ted’s breath came in nasty gasps as his hands, white knuckled and shaking, clung onto his knees. His cheeks were hollow, his tie skewed. The material on his trousers, several inches below his right thigh, had mysteriously darkened. Moisture. A tiny patch of it.

  Ted gulped, flattened his hand, covered the stain, pushed himself up, turned and ran –scalded, staggering –into the close, steamy privacy of the tiny back cloakroom. He slammed the door behind him.

  Outside they continued laughing. Leo laughed so hard that his mouth grew gummy.

  ‘I need water,’ he yelled joyously, ‘right now Teddy.’

  Ted heard Leo shouting, but he didn’t move immediately. What a small room this is, he found himself thinking. His back was still jammed firmly against the door; his head, his hands, his heels, his buttocks, all hard up against it.

  It was solid behind him. And reassuring.

  His breath returned gradually. His palms stopped sweating. His eyes moved down slowly from their temporary refuge in the uncontentious angles of the ceiling, and turned, ineluctably, to catch the pitiful half-formed blur of his reflection in the mirror.

  He gulped several times –his trembling lower lip curling down clownishly –then he reached out his hand –inhaling deeply, pushing his chin up, sticking his chest out –and hooked his shaking fingers around the smooth metal of the sink’s cold tap.

  ‘Water,’ he whispered quietly, resting his hand limply on the faucet for a moment, his damp, brown eyes scanning the room for a suitable receptacle to hold it in.

  But then he froze. Because suddenly –out of nowhere –he was beset by a vision. And it was a queer vision. It was plush. It was singular; as strange and unexpected as it was outlandish.

  Water. Yes. Water. A vision of a pond. A small pond. With a bayonet-toting regiment of green reeds on its periphery, white lilies the size of soup bowls floating effortlessly on its surface, exotic carp –in bright golds and oranges –twisting sinuously just underneath.

/>   A pond. A beautiful pond. An image of infinite calm. A picture of pure serenity, of boundless peace, of wonderful –of endless –of exceptional tranquillity. An astonishingly complex biosphere, just… just hanging in mid-air.

  He closed his eyes for a while, felt a warm breeze on his skin carrying the scent of wild jasmine, heard the infernal gnats buzzing… So how on God’s Earth, he found himself thinking, do you set about stealing a pond? A garden pond?

  His mind struggled to embrace the viability of such an undertaking –the logistical problems, the practical details, the horrible technicalities –and while it battled to do so, his fingers began cohering; his palm contracted (like a woodlouse, furling up, at the first sign of danger), his hand tightened, then squeezed, then twisted…

  His eyes flew open as the tap began gushing; he smiled broadly, bent over, splashed his face in cool water, straightened up again, felt it drip off his chin, down his neck, onto his collar. He thought about Wesley –Him

  To steal a pond.

  To steal an antique pond.

  Now that was truly something.

  Eight

  There’s lamb and lynx and lion,

  Yet no fowl and no fish, either,

  Left on my terra firma.

  So wait awhile –

  Malinger –

  And if you stay a loser,

  Then plant your feet firmly on Daniel’s Candy

  To find a pill that’s sweeter still,

  A sugar far more bitter

  Suddenly…

  Huh-huh

  HAH!

  … having a little trouble…

  Huh-huh

  HAH!

  … inhaling…

  Huh-huh

  Tired.

  HAH!

  Huh-huh

  He was tiring. Had to regulate his…

  HAH!

  … breathing…