Nicola Barker - Behindlings

Jo did not answer this question immediately. She was still gazing at Shoes’ feet. Then her focus shifted gradually onto Patty’s coat pocket. Her mind was working differently. It was working lengthways, horizontally.

‘Love.’

Her face brightened. ‘ Love, ’ she repeated.

‘Love?’ Doc echoed querulously.

‘Yes,’ Jo grinned. ‘ Love. I was just thinking…’ she counted off the words, one by one, onto her fingers, ‘Wesley… the library… Louis L’Amour… love. ’

They all stared at her, blankly. ‘Clue One,’ she said, ‘remember? Look for love. ’

‘Okay… Okay…’ Hooch laboriously drawled out his vowels as he wrote down the letters, ‘Looking for love, you say? L… o… v… e. And your full name is?’

He glanced up. Four backs, one tail. All emphatically retreating.

‘If you must know,’ Ted whispered furtively, his nimble fingers fiddling with the small gold buckle on his lizard-skin watch strap, ‘I was with him less than fifteen…’

He stopped speaking, turned abruptly and craned his neck anxiously towards what seemed — at first glance — to be a thoroughly unobtrusive door, standing slightly ajar to the rear of the office.

‘… but when we finally parted company,’ he eventually continued (having lost his drift but plainly having found — to his satisfaction — that the coast was now marginally clearer), ‘it was in the general, and I mean the very general vicinity of the local library.’

While Ted spoke, his spine remained corkscrewed, yet his words — for all their undisputed softness — were propelled from the corner of his mouth and over his shoulder with astonishing accuracy and fidelity; as if he were delivering a tricky golf shot across a sloping green, but using only the gentlest putt of breath.

Under the circumstances, Ted’s extraordinary wariness was not only prudent, it was positively necessary, for beyond that inoffensive door stood no less a man than Leo Pathfinder, his boss; a bluff and exuberant creature, a mischievous imp, often fondly referred to locally as ‘the little pitcher with big ears.’

The unerring accuracy of this description (although, in truth, Leo was no jug-head) had necessitated — during the years Ted had been employed under Leo’s tutelage in the dark world of estate agenting (now numbering almost six) — his gradual adoption of certain basic ruses and stratagems, all cultivated with the fundamental aim of trying to maintain — in his life and in his affairs — some paltry semblance of inner peace and personal privacy.

Ted’s skill as a whisperer, the occasional retreat of even his most expressive features into the protective shelter of The Deadpan, his timely adoption of a slightly forced naiveté; each of these little mannerisms and humble quirks regularly assisted him in his heroic struggle to maintain some tiny semblance of emotional independence in the ravening face of Leo’s all-consuming curiosity.

It was, without doubt, a supremely humble and irksome existence, yet Ted had always been made most painfully aware (by none other, in fact, than Mr Leo Pathfinder himself), that it could never be deemed proper or fair-minded or sporting for a grown man to overstate the magnitude of his work-a-day woes.

While life with Leo could be tough, humiliating, sometimes even physically dangerous (an unfortunate incident involving Ted’s left sinus and a badly directed veterinary thermometer being a case in point), Ted was hardly — and this truth was undeniable — a prisoner of war.

Leo was a blow-hard. He was gregarious. He was sociable to the point of immoderation (able to call, at any time, on the active support and keen participation — in his convoluted Ted-related devilry — of numerous visiting Estate Agenting Executives, the man who ran the sandwich round, the cleaner, certain suggestible clients, the local bookmaker, the bingo caller…) and while it would be erroneous to label him a consistent man, he was, nevertheless, quite revoltingly methodical.

Fortunately there were sometimes small hiatuses, brief pauses, little breathing spaces from the relentless pressure of Leo’s obsessively systematic observations — there had to be — and these Ted celebrated with all the blissful fervour which a ninety-year-old man might exhibit on discovering — after many years of drought — a small but sweetly intrepid erection floating daintily in the tired suds of a hot bath.

As part and parcel of their daily lives, both Ted and Leo spent certain portions of their working day taking out clients to view vacant properties. For Ted these were periods of inconceivable joy and quietude.

Leo was also an atrocious timekeeper — generally preferring to start his day some considerable time after the early hour clearly specified in his contract of employment — and this represented yet another small but nonetheless significant boon in the microscopically-observed drama of Ted’s exquisitely benighted existence.

Last, but by no means least, there was Leo’s moustache; his wild whiskers — his soup-strainer — his bold and brave and beautiful barbel.

To employ the commonplace lingo and designate the moustache as merely ‘a Handle-Bar’ would be to do it a deep injustice. Leo’s moustache was a hugely ornate and flamboyant structure, almost burgundy in colour, which stretched voluptuously from the deep channel separating his nostrils, dipped like a sumptuous summer swallow over each cheek and concluded its dramatic journey in a saucy, curling, upward flourish (the kind of gesture a haughty waiter might employ on lifting the finely embossed silver lid from a succulent tureen of baked lambs’ livers) only a whisper from the dainty lobe of either ear.

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.