Behindlings

by Nicola Barker

  ‘We met on the road, this morning,’ he said, trying to keep things casual, ‘when your tyre got a puncture.’

  Katherine had grabbed her cigarettes from the counter-top. Her hands were shaking.

  ‘Oh God yes,’ she murmured emphatically, not even looking at him, ‘you’re a lovely walker.’

  ‘You have a fold-up bike,’ he said, slightly embarrassed, inspecting the marks across the back of her shoulders –

  Friction burns

  Blood prints

  ‘I do’, she readily agreed, her low voice quavering. She turned to face him as she lit up. ‘Smoke?’

  ‘Why not?’ he found himself saying –

  You’ve given up

  She was still wearing peach, in many layers –

  Or was that apricot?

  ‘Please shut the fucking door,’ she whispered, hugging herself and shivering, ‘before I freeze my bony arse off.’

  The house was improbably hot. The kitchen was still smoky. But he closed the door anyway.

  She’d lit up a fag for him and made as if to pass it over. He reached out a hand for it. She dropped it onto the floor. Purposefully.

  ‘I am very…’ she said, smiling at him alluringly (as if she’d finished this sentence and not just left it hanging), ‘and not only that,’ she continued, ‘but painfully…’

  He bent over to retrieve the cigarette, uncertain how to respond to her. When he straightened up, though, holding it firmly, she casually dropped the other.

  ‘… disappointed,’ she concluded, with a sigh.

  It rolled towards the cabinets. He bent down again, automatically.

  When he’d plucked it from the tiles (they were warm under his fingers –he rested his palms there, for a second) and stood up again, holding a cigarette in both hands now (what better way to give up giving up?), he noticed –with a kind of alarm, but also a kind of… a kind of thudding… delight, was it? –that she’d removed a prodigious cross-section of her copious silky layers. They’d slid to the floor, as if of their own volition.

  She was now all but naked, except for an old-fashioned bra (which looked like it was made from a combination of cream-coloured tent fabric and some coordinated boot-laces) and a pair of loosely-fitting, almost contemporaneous (1920s? ‘30s? –what did he know of historical trends in female undergarments?) cami-knickers. The knickers hung off her hips revealing…

  What was the word for the nape, the dimple of no-flesh, the cleft that lay so desirably underneath the knuckle of a girl’s hip?

  What was the name for that?

  Her body was hairless. She was white as a maggot. Her breasts –inside those hockey-shoe-lace-cricket-white contraptions –

  Oh shit

  – deliriously full and slack.

  Arthur closed his mouth. It had fallen open. He took a puff on a cigarette.

  Its fire crackled into him –

  Why am I here again?

  Back in this effortless, hungry, instinctive place I so confidently believed I’d left behind me?

  ‘I have some terrible knots,’ Katherine said, perching her marbled hip onto the corner of the table –

  The whiteness, like a joint of flesh, all pearled in death; all plucked, un-hung…

  The grain of old pine underneath

  Its ancient creak

  The shower of grey-black feathers

  A Still Life–

  Corbieres–

  They were calling it…

  Arthur stole another puff –

  They were calling it…

  She was pointing to her brassiere. The laces were all…

  This has to happen

  – he moved closer, like a man passionately engaged by a fascinating dilemma –a puzzle… They were all… all co… co… co… coagulated.

  A kind of miniature bodice, knotted to the fore –a tangle of closed-openings –an impossibility.

  He put out his hands to untie them; clumsily, at first –a blind man reaching for the kettle cord; a schoolboy wiping down the classroom blackboard…

  These huge brown hands

  How could they achieve anything useful here?

  He drew his face in close, was now down on his knees, miraculously…

  The smell of… of violence from the tiny pleats in her belly. The clefts between…

  Made the hairs on his…

  No –

  No

  – the smell of Violets –

  Spring flowering so sweetly-mauve in the moist shelter of shady corners –

  Uh…

  – and cigarettes.

  Where had he put them?

  But the tangle was too… too important. He stared even harder at it. His nose was very nearly… and his fingers… the pale skin –when he brushed it, inadvertently –hot as seared chicken, straight from the spit of frying –

  The tangle…

  His fingers pulled and teased and twisted and wound and interwound. Then his teeth were pulling too, but only very gently, and the laces were dampened and the ancient moth-smelling, cricket-pad, english-lawn-green-wax-rubbing cotton and the flesh just to the left of it –and to the right of it –and the damper flesh, pinkened by the pressure of fabric just under –

  The tightness…

  They were suddenly on the…

  Tiles hot below the scrape of pale and the knickers loose as butter-fabric slipping with the ineluctable pleat of…

  Five fingers each with… She had five fingers and they had that pressure-warm-push-and-determined force of… of… Snout

  Busy as any kind of sharp-nosed wild white woodland creature you might care to mention in the ice-snow-cold of winter with the searing-hot-scarlet of… of…

  Snow Fox!

  Teeth!

  Fur!

  Claw!

  Arthur Young –Man of History –lay there, pulsating, whipped and panting, eyes without irises purple-flowering, calm as a log split and crashed into the moss-sodden forest of infinite languor, while she bit and tunnelled and dug him over.

  •  •  •

  ‘We worked on the markets together,’ Wesley said. ‘Have you ever been to Bow? It’s in the East of London. An infernal shit-hole, point of fact, but I almost considered making my permanent home there… until things … uh…

  Caught up

  They always catch up

  Josephine shook her head (perhaps a little too quickly). ‘I don’t know it,’ she lied, then changed tack slightly, ‘I’ve never been there,’ she modified.

  Of course she’d heard of it. She’d read the name, frequently; the famous old Roman Road Market, Bow… The Story of the Freeing of the Eels. The first Wesley story. It was the start of everything. It was all but legendary.

  She blinked. She felt her heart banging. She saw her breath condensing, right there, just in front of her.

  Here he was, in person, and it wasn’t so much a story, to him, as a bundle of memories, none really connecting. And he was telling it to her now. Haltingly.

  She held her breath, staring at him –

  Please don’t let me spoil anything

  ‘I’ve never been there,’ she carefully repeated, ‘I don’t know London well.’

  She was down to her grey, thermal vest –thankfully still dry in patches –and some matching grey, calf-length leggings. Her feet were bare.

  ‘Your feet…’ Wesley told her, inspecting them dispassionately –

  Like tiny, dried-out bat’s claws

  Long-toed

  Tender

  ‘seem to have fared worse than the rest of you. Ears aside…’

  Pink as a piglet’s with the sun shining behind them

  ‘and your neat hands, obviously.’

  Neat hands

  The windows were already steamed to capacity. Wesley had discovered an old blanket in the back. She didn’t remember ever having seen it there before –

  Can this really be my car?

  The blanket was covered in dog hair. It smelled of stale
sick. Wesley didn’t care. He was towelling her dry with it. She might as well have been an itinerant pony or a muck-drenched lurcher for all the pains he took to preserve her dignity. And when he got down to her toes, he threw aside the blanket and smacked her feet

  –hard – until she could feel it.

  Only when she gasped (three times, four) did he stop, with a smile, and without apology.

  He made her put on his jumper and his jacket –

  The smell of them…

  Like juniper and off-milk and pipe-smoke-tangerine-old-pelt-grandfather

  – then he wrapped up her legs –like a tortilla –in the blanket.

  There was no room inside that tiny car for anything. He flipped her seat back, lay back himself, pulled her feet onto his lap, rubbed them.

  ‘So why didn’t you?’ she asked, still shivering.

  ‘Why didn’t I what?’

  He leaned forward, scrabbled around inside his coat pocket and removed a sweet, some matches and a cigarette stub.

  He unfurled the sweet and popped it into her mouth.

  He lit the cigarette for himself.

  She pushed the sweet –

  Barley sugar

  – into her cheek, ‘Why didn’t you make a home there?’

  Wesley obviously disliked this question.

  ‘I was involved in a dispute,’ he muttered, ‘with a foreman on a job… And you know what?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘I should probably go out and find you some dock leaves, later…’ he opened his door and tossed the spent match into the gutter. ‘For the cuts,’ he added.

  ‘In Bow?’ she persisted.

  He slammed the door shut.

  ‘Nope,’ he gave up evading her, ‘Holloway. He fell off a ladder. Broke four ribs. So I ended up working on the markets in the East with this character called Trevor…’

  Wesley inspected his cigarette, his bad hand still resting casually on her foot.

  She felt his hand there. In that moment she was her foot.

  ‘Trevor was the potter you mentioned earlier…’ he lifted his bad hand and pulled open the ashtray on the dash –

  Hand gone

  ‘He wasn’t the world’s most conscientious co-worker –not back then –but we were solid together for almost a year. It was alright for a while. Got a little…’ Wesley paused, ‘claustrophobic,’ he tapped the ash off his stub then rested his hand –without thinking –on her foot again –

  Hand back

  Jo shivered. Wesley misconstrued it as the cold, and began rubbing, distractedly, ‘Anyhow I got involved in some other stuff –at a pie and mash shop, releasing a few eels –and I fucked the situation up…’

  He sniffed. He was starting to feel the cold himself. He grimly hunched his shoulders against its steady encroachments, continued talking to try and keep his mind off the breeze whistling through the crack in his side-window.

  ‘A long old while after, Trev pulled himself together and became a potter. At first just casual labour in one of the big Staffordshire factories –in the warehouse or something –then he gradually worked his way up. Got involved in some of the actual… the hands-on… the creative stuff…’

  Wesley was distractedly rubbing his own arm with his smoking hand. Jo quickly pulled some of the blanket free and placed it, demurely, across his knees.

  ‘What happened then?’ she tentatively asked.

  Wesley accepted the blanket without comment. He adjusted its placement slightly. He dragged on his cigarette.

  ‘We met again –years later –while I was Loitering near there. He looked me up. He was fairly desperate –and angry about some of the things that’d gone wrong –pissed off about… had a gambling problem. Marriage was…’

  Wesley shrugged, choosing not to specify the exact locus of Trevor’s irritability, ‘So we walked down to Devon together. Started talking about trying to do something special with all the stuff he’d learned in Staffordshire. Setting up our own pottery, maybe. Something old-fashioned, because Trev’s traditional to the core, but in the loveliest… in a very primitive… he has this overwhelming… an innocence. A real innocence. And that makes him hot-headed sometimes, which is a pity. A few weeks in each other’s company and we end up almost killing each other.’

  Wesley shot her a look. He hadn’t made eye contact with her since he’d climbed into the car.

  ‘Was he violent?’ Jo whispered, frightened that if she spoke too loudly she might kill the story.

  Wesley cleared his throat. Drew on his cigarette.

  ‘We built this traditional Anagama kiln,’ he continued, ‘or a round-about version of it; approximately four-hundred-and-fifty cubic feet in diameter…’ he exhaled, using both hands to outline its shape, ‘takes a couple of months to fill, ten days to pack, five days to fire, a week –at least –to cool…’

  ‘And this was Trevor’s idea?’

  Wesley shifted in his seat, ‘You can flog it as art –that’s the clever thing –and folk’ll swallow it whole, because the entire set-up’s so fantastically arse about face…’

  Wesley smiled at the thought. It was the first time she’d seen him smile properly –ever. She gazed at the smile, proprietorially.

  ‘For most potters,’ Wesley explained, ‘the clay is the crucial factor, the moulding, the glaze, the artistry. And that’s how it was for Trev, initially. He’d developed this really precise streak –never had it when we worked on the markets –don’t know where it came from, really. But it wasn’t right for him. It was part of the problem. He needed…’ Wesley pondered, for a moment, ‘… to exorcise it. Which is why the new techniques have been so liberating. Because now it’s not all about creating the perfect object so much as creating the most legitimate process…’

  Wesley’s hand returned –under the blanket now –to Jo’s foot, and stroked it, unthinkingly, ‘Out of every fifty mugs or plates he sticks into that kiln, he gets –at best –fifteen back. And they are fucked, let me tell you. Crazy-looking things. All the glaze cracked. All the purity gone. Takes literally days to clean them. And Trevor rages against it. He rages. But that’s… What he doesn’t quite understand yet is how that’s just as it should be, because it’s all about… the whole process is all about… not finish or perfection, but turbulence…’

  ‘Does he make a living at it?’

  Wesley frowned at this question, then shrugged, as if he couldn’t be bothered trying to understand it, ‘The pieces that survive –and this is the whole point, really, the way I see it –the things that somehow survive this chaos are absolutely… they’re dazzling…’

  That smile again

  ‘They’re without compare. They’re magical. Like old soldiers marching on VE day, proudly carrying their medals and their scars of battle.’

  Josephine nodded.

  ‘To have a thing,’ Wesley explained, his cigarette stub burning down to nothing, ‘that isn’t so much an entity in the present sense –I mean entirely functional or anything –so much as an object with its whole history, its whole journey, physically embedded…’

  ‘And is Trevor happy?’

  Jo immediately regretted this question. It seemed so… so…

  Prissy

  Wesley shrugged (not appearing, on the surface, to object). ‘He’s perfectly viable.’

  Viable?

  Josephine pondered this concept for a while. This word.

  ‘For Trevor,’ Wesley didn’t notice her marginal retreat, ‘for him it’s just a different kind of gambling. It’s another channel. It’s very physical.’

  Wesley stubbed out his cigarette and squinted through the windscreen. ‘Looks like… bollocks,’ he shrank down in his seat, ‘it’s the Old Man. I recognise the glow of his torch. Cover me over with the blanket. He shouldn’t see me here.’

  Wesley pushed himself down onto the floor, using the segment of the blanket he already had to cover himself as best he could. Jo stared at him confusedly, then at herself –his distinctive
jacket wrapped so tightly around her –then out through the windscreen.

  In the distance she saw a flashlight wavering. She pulled the blanket off her legs and covered him more thoroughly, then took off the jacket, the jumper, wound down her window and peeked out, cautiously.

  The cold teared her eyes up. She blinked. She focussed again.

  It was Doc. He was walking unsteadily (either his feet were still a mess or he was slightly tipsy). As he drew even closer, she wound the window down further –but not too far –so that her whole face was now visible, and the top of her shoulder. She hoped the dark (and the condensation) would protect the car’s interior.

  ‘I had a gut feeling this was yours when we drove past it earlier,’ Doc shouted at her, kicking the tyre tread, ‘can’t you get the bugger started?’

  Jo shook her head.

  ‘Did you try the points? They’re always the first thing to play up with a Mini.’

  Jo nodded, ‘I did try them. But I think it might be the carburettor. It’s squealing. It went once before.’

  ‘Not with the AA, eh?’

  She shook her head. Doc clucked to himself, ‘Hooch couldn’t possibly survive without it. Calls them at the drop of a hat. Got banned by the RAC for taking the piss. He’s useless with technical stuff.’

  He peered over her shoulder and into the car. She straightened up a little to impede his view.

  ‘Shoes said he saw you a few hours back in the Lobster Smack,’ Doc continued benignly. ‘You should’ve come through to the bar. We were all in there, getting royally pissed up.’

  Jo nodded again. ‘I should’ve,’ she said, ‘but I was very…’ she paused, embarrassed.

  ‘I brought you a bit of stuff over, anyway,’ Doc tactfully interrupted her, ‘a spare sleeping bag, a flask, a few sandwiches we had left. It’s a filthy night to be sleeping out if you’re not…’

  ‘That’s very kind…’ Jo smiled at him (he shrugged, as if momentarily resenting his own amiability) then she wound the window down further and pushed out her hands, ‘I’m actually in my…’

  She glanced modestly towards her chest, ‘so it’s a little…’

  Doc stepped back, circumspectly –

  Pissed, he was

  For certain

  – then leaned forward, trepidatiously, from his new position (careful not to encroach even a half-inch further) and handed her each item, individually. The bag was a stretch, but she managed to pull it through, with a tug.