Nicola Barker - Behindlings

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 selection 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.