Nicola Barker - Behindlings

‘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