Nicola Barker - Behindlings

She shook her head, opened her mouth…

‘Shut up,’ he raised his wounded hand, ‘ enough. ’

‘If you’d only just…’

Still she persisted.

‘No.’ Wesley pointed behind her. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘ there’s everything you need to know. There’s all your answers…’

At first she thought it was a trick, that he was going to swipe her or shove her or run off. She hesitated. But then she turned, very slowly…

In the distance; Doc. The young kid. Hooch.

‘You’re running away,’ she said miserably.

‘No. I’m just running. I like to run.’

He clutched at his stomach again. She saw that his nose was dripping, that he was shaking.

‘You want to stop,’ she said calmly, ‘and you can.’

‘I can never stop walking,’ he whispered, drawing close to her, staring at her cheek, her ear, as if he longed to touch her there. ‘Not now, not ever.’

She turned, tried to speak. He stopped her. ‘The boy is dead,’ he said softly. ‘He is dead. Nothing we can do can bring him back. Doc has nothing left now but the Following. It’s his mission. It’s my legacy. He will die behind me. On his feet, struggling. On duty. In service. I am…’ he almost laughed at his own verbosity, ‘I am the Colonel of his undoing. I am his reaper. That’s my obligation. It’s the law. It is written. I can’t… I can’t… I can’t… ’

He couldn’t even say it.

‘Which boy?’ she asked flatly.

‘What?’ he did a double take, was immediately furious. ‘This is the end, Bean, aren’t you even listening?’

‘Your brother,’ she said, ‘Christopher.’

Wesley’s left hand lunged towards his right.

But she stopped it. She grabbed a tight hold of it.

‘No,’ she said, ‘he’s gone. Your brother is gone. Christopher is dead. You can’t bring him back, but you can… you can stop.’

He slapped her face. His fingerless hand. Hard.

She released his other, in shock, clutched at her cheek.

‘I’m a vessel,’ he said, falling backwards, reeling away from her, ‘they inhabit me. They find a home in me. I give them breath. I give them meaning. I am…’ he started laughing, indicated down towards his body, almost tripping with self-disgust, ‘there’s nothing left of me. I’m what remains on the beach after the high tide. I am the flotsam. I am gathered up. I am spat out. I am redundant, surplus, debris… ’

‘ Rubbish. ’

‘Exactly!’

He pointed at her, howling.

She frowned, ‘That’s not what I…’

But he’d turned and was walking again. With wide strides. Joyously. Like a whistling lumberjack in a mature pine plantation. Like a cowboy in spurs at the start of a long cattle drive.

‘ I am the fucking, ’ he suddenly yelled, then started running.

She knew she’d never catch him, then.

‘ I AM THE FUCKING. ’

He was abandoned

He was delirious

He was un-stopped

He was begun

Then a car pulled over, onto the hard shoulder. Two men piled out of it. She had never seen them before. But they were entirely at their ease here. They were familiar. They set their faces, established their paces. And suddenly they were Following. They were… I am the FUCKING

She could hear him, still shouting, and then clapping his hands and laughing.

And soon the boy drew adjacent with her — then Hooch — then Doc — just one shoe on his foot — the little dog — they drew abreast of her, they drew ahead of her, they pulled away from her.

The fucking…?

She shook her head.

The fucking what?

She stood. She stood and waited –

Just waited

— frowning.

She waited for an end to it –

She waited for a conclusion –

She waited for a rounding off — a flattening out — a consummation — She waited for a termination — an ultimation — a comeuppance ( Oh God, yes, please, anything ) — a noun — a verb — a full… a full… a full… a full… a full…

Stop

Nicola Barker

lives and works in east London. She was the winner of the David Higham Prize for Fiction and joint winner of the Macmillan Silver Pen Award for Love Your Enemies, her first collection of stories. Her second story collection, Heading Inland, received the John Llewellyn Rhys/Mail on Sunday Prize. Her novel Wide Open won the IMPAC Prize in 2000. She is one of Granta’s ‘Best Young British Novelists’ of the decade.

Further praise for Behindlings:

‘Barker’s work always has linguistic gusto and self-awareness; it is always anarchic and lovingly perverse, taking its readers with relish down unrecognizable roads and challenging narrative. With Behindlings, Barker, already a story-maker of astonishing energy, finds even more freedom of form. Imagine an Ealing comedy, but rewritten by a Surrealist. Behindlings has the energetic verve of Five Miles from Outer Hope and the remarkable lyrical strangeness of Wide Open. There is a playful immediacy, a swiftness and lightness of style and an almost Dadaist liberation here which shifts the writing on to a new level and into a new and true originality. Plot, in fizzing, exploded pieces, is all surface, and dialogue, full of half words, forgotten syntax and unended phrases, is as messy as talk is in life. This is the sort of novel which changes things — transforms closed narrative into openness, quirky Englishness into startling passion, and the Essex Estuary, with its modern wastelands and left-over oil terminals, into something poetic. An earthy, hilarious, romping runaway, Behindlings acts in itself as an argument for narrative originality and against all forms of homogeneity. It is marvellously inventive, a cornucopia of cornucopias all the way to its brilliant non-ending — its refusal to end. It is a new kind of book, and an intense kind of joy.’

ALI SMITH, TLS

‘Written with the exuberant, violent energy of a Saturday morning cartoon show, laced with the easy bits of Wittgenstein. Behindlings are like trainspotters — they’re hobbyists, insulated by their enthusiasm. They are the stuff of pure farce. They allow Barker to reinvent, joyously, the cogs, gears and mechanics of the genre. She knows, as Wodehouse also knew, how to rev up the language, even break into a kind of poetry. She knows the funniest gags are sometimes just statements of the obvious, what people can see. Sheer wit and energy make Behindlings an excellent candidate for a cult novel — and not just a very good novel about a cult.’

MICHAEL PYE, New York Times

‘Barker’s twisted take on people and reality is as intriguing as a half-remembered dream, her writing grabs you, twisting you into a skein of voices, rhythms and personalities which drags you along in its bewildering, bumpy wake. Like all the best storytellers, Barker begins in medias res, plunging the reader into confusion, challenging us to make sense of the overspill of information. Barker lets her bizarre, beguiling creation wander off into the mist, unknowable and untameable. Wesley is a great fictional creation. Never explained, never fully described, he is a down-at-heel hero, a rucksack carrying refusenik whose rebellion against capitalism and consumption has caught the public imagination, making him an icon of independence to the disaffected of the twenty-first century. If there are any rules left in novel writing, Barker breaks them all. Beautifully. I think she’s brilliant.’