Nicola Barker - Behindlings

‘Fuck me it’s heavy, ’ he groaned, and started walking. Five steps on and he spun around, as if he’d suddenly thought of something. ‘You know,’ he spoke quietly, even at this distance, but perfectly audibly, ‘these burdens never get any lighter, do they?’

Then he smiled and turned and walked on again.

Jesus. Was that it? Was that everything?

Arthur stood up himself, almost panicking, discovering his voice already inhabiting his mouth, already speaking.

‘ Wesley, ’ his voice shouted. Then again, ‘ WESLEY. ’

Wesley broke his stride for the final time, turned.

‘What if I say no?’ Arthur’s voice yelled…

Calm down Arthur

Don’t go and blow it

Don’t go and fuck it up without even …

‘What if… what if I want nothing to do with it? Nothing to do with the deal? What happens then?’

Wesley threw his hands into the air. For a moment Arthur thought he hadn’t heard him and steadied himself to shout again. But then Wesley spoke, ‘Nothing happens. It’s your choice entirely… ’ his voice faded, before coming back again, stronger. ‘Like I already said; it’s your call, Arthur.’

Then he waved his fingerless hand in a half-salute, turned with an air of absolute finality, and continued on his way.

Ted always asked for Leo’s permission before he used the computer — asked him repeatedly, every half-hour, with an almost military rigour — even when Pathfinder was out of the agency; attending to a client, at lunch, or just plain wagging (in the winebar or at Bingo or having his regular ‘massage’ with ‘Terry’ for an old ‘hamstring-related fencing injury’). Under these circumstances Ted would simply write him a note, in longhand — neatly signed, neatly dated — saying something like:

Leo, it is ten-thirty a.m. and I need to use the computer again.

Thankyou,

Ted

And because on some days Ted used the computer continually — almost without interruption (except, of course, to get Leo’s permission) — to the outside observer this established procedure, this formalised ritual between the two of them, might’ve seemed at best, laborious, at worst, quite ridiculous.

The computer wasn’t even a strange or new or novel innovation. It had been there — on the desk, in the office — from the very beginning, and had always formed a vital component of Ted’s basic job description.

In actual fact, his Computer Studies O level had been the absolute making of him, employment-wise (what the hell else could he do? Who the hell else would have him?) and had looked wonderfully contemporary on his curriculum vitae, way back at the onset of what he now — and very modestly — called his ‘Agenting Career’.

(Previous to that there were six ‘lost’ years in the British Navy. The catering corps. His late father’s idea:

‘ You start off frying the eggs, Ted, you end up running the ship… ’

Not an experience he looked back upon with anything remotely approaching equilibrium: it took upwards of six months to scrub the sheen of grease from his skin — he was like a body-builder, but without the body — without the tan, without the thong. A pale and ineffectual jar of jellied petroleum.)

Ted was a paid-up participant in the digital age, but (and there was always a but with Ted, or a yet or a despite or a notwithstanding) even this part of his life had hardly been plain sailing.

In the mid-eighties — the pinnacle, the peak, the prime of his schooldays — they’d had a technological shortfall (a Word Processing paucity) at Furtherwick Park, so he’d started out with a keyboard, drawn in felt-tip, on cardboard, and a veritable slew of hypothetical scenarios:

(a) Pascal clicked on ‘font’ before saving her document. What happened next? Did she lose that difficult maths problem she’d been working so hard upon?

(b) William has just written an 80 line, free verse epic poem about ‘Esme’ straight onto his desktop. In your opinion, was that a misguided or a sensible thing for him to have done?

And due to this ‘Temporary Word Processing Deficiency’, Ted had spent half his time doing secretarial stuff in Elementary Typing with the meanest crew of girls you could possibly imagine; devilish harpies who spent a large proportion of their thrice-weekly lessons ripping the piss unmercifully out of this poor, long-limbed, tight-arsed, blushing, clumsy, ginger-topped pansy who laboured (and not without difficulty) under the cuddly pseudonym of Mister Teddy…

(Hang on there. Hang on: he was that pansy. But he’d show them — he’d shown them, hadn’t he? — when they all left school with their shorthands and their words-per-minute, unable to get a job because they were computer illiterate. Secretary? A ridiculous sodding anathema in the 1990s.)

Yes. He’d shown them alright.

Well, in actual fact he hadn’t really shown anybody. Not computer-wise, anyway. Because Leo had played this little joke on him (when he was still too fresh and too raw in those sweet and silly early days), and while Ted had known that it was a joke, initially, he was soon, nevertheless, persuaded by it, subconsciously.

It was a simple ruse. It was elementary. Leo had painstakingly altered the Screensaver, in his spare time, late one evening, so that when Ted turned it on the following morning, it’d told him — in no uncertain terms — and in the most offensively jagged script imaginable, that

LeO iS deeP inSide oF Me. He INhabits My eVerY nerVe, My veRy cOrE, mY evERy fibRe!! Yes! YeS! YES He Is riGht, DEEp INSIde OF mE — witH hiS big HAndS and His kEEn tonGuE aND HIs BOLD anD sTRonG aND INSIStaNT cOCk. Yes! yES! YeS!! hE is rISEn and he is COme! He iS COMe! HE is comE aND coMe and COme aLL ovER me!! AHHHHHHHHhhhHHHHHH!

Do Not PLAy wiTH my KeyS So TEDDy. It is TicklinG. It is HA HA ha fucKINg Ha Ha HA!

I am LEO’s whORE. So have CleaN hanDs whEN yOU touCH me, okAy? And alwAYS asK NICeLy wheN you — uH! uH! UH! USE ME.

(Insistant? Someone had forgotten to use spellcheck, apparently.)

It was childish and it was puerile — it was sheer, pointless bloody folly — so Ted pretended that it didn’t bother him, but it did. It bothered him enormously.

Because he was a prude, but a gentle prude, with wit and discrimination and sensibility. A kindly prude, with a soft core.

Leo depended upon this softness as he gradually transformed that computer into a purely hardcore entity. He did it slyly and cynically, with small interventions, little nudges and ticks and touches. He made that machine his own. He colonised it. He monopolised it. He squatted like a mating toad inside its deepest inner recesses — clinging on, clutching, squeezing — until its disarmed and prostrated eighty-digit keyboard quite literally groaned when his plump and clumsy pale male finger deigned to press on it and slowly enter.

He downloaded porn (predictably) — stuff with hairy women and shaved women (Goddamn he wasn’t fussy), stuff with old women with falsies, lasses with big asses, girls in their nighties taking pisses in bushes, stuff with horses and collies. He downloaded tit-shots and beaver-shots, shit-shots and tot-shots, shots with women in such curious positions that it was hard to tell which end was which and what exactly… uh… was what. This confusion aroused him.