Nicola Barker - Behindlings

Jo’s expression did not change. Her face remained as smooth and uncomplicated as the pale shell on a hen’s egg.

‘Hang on…’ he paused for a second, ‘weren’t we at school together?’

He was still staring at her intently.

‘And didn’t I actually see you Following earlier?’

‘Jo’s working at Southend General,’ Anna curtly intervened, knocking his hand from her knee, ‘where she’s making great strides in the gynaecological department. She’s heading an environmental sanitary product campaign. You may’ve read about her in the local press.’

‘No way, ’ Bo was smirking, ‘you’re fucking with me.’

Anna shrugged at Jo, apologetically, ‘He’s not terribly clever, and he doesn’t read much, either. Only the sport, which he writes, very badly. And sometimes, I suspect, not even that.’

Bo swigged on his beer. ‘Anna and I dated for a while,’ he told Jo, burping, ‘but I dumped her. She’s still smarting.’

‘His penis is the size of my little finger,’ Anna continued, unabashedly, ‘same thickness, same length. His biggest muscle is his tongue. And he never put that to much good use, as I recollect.’

Bo smirked on, defiantly, while Anna inspected her smallest digit. ‘I’m actually being ludicrously overgenerous,’ she sighed, ‘that’s so typical of me.’

Bo honed in on Jo again, totally unconcerned by Anna’s assault on him, ‘I did see you Following. You were in the Library earlier.’

Jo said nothing.

‘Playing with the big boys now, are we, Bo?’ Anna snorted, ‘trying to grub yourself up a piddling exclusive for your pathetic little Canvey rag? Oh Diddums… ’ she chucked him under his prodigiously square chin, ‘that’s so sweet. ’

‘You wished you knew what I know, Officer,’ Bo snapped, draining his bottle with a swagger, every inch the cool hack-sleuth.

‘Meaning?’ Anna gazed down at him, sympathetically.

‘Just what I say,’ he placed the empty bottle next to Jo’s stool, almost touching her ankle with his hand before slowly drawing it away, ‘I have a contact.’

‘Who?’

‘You’ll need to beat that information out of me.’

He winked at her.

‘Ted. The estate agent,’ Anna sighed. ‘No beating necessary.’

Bo rocked back on his heels.

‘How the…?’

‘Oh come on. You’ve been breaking his balls since all that graffiti rubbish with the Turpin girl. And I saw him tonight with Wesley. He’s right up to his puny, ginger neck in it.’

Jo suddenly stood up. Her coat fell to the floor. ‘I need…’ she put her hand to her face, her cheek, ‘I must… I need the toilet… Here… ’

She thrust the untouched beer at Bo and launched herself off — like an ill-constructed canoe hurtling down a particularly treacherous stretch of white-water — towards the Ladies.

‘Was it something I said?’ Bo murmured, grabbing Jo’s coat and lounging against her stool to swig on her beer. He looked around him, cleared his throat, then casually slipped his hand into one of her front pockets, withdrawing some car keys and a couple of sweet wrappers.

‘I didn’t see you do that,’ Anna warned him, lighting up another cigarette and tossing the empty packet onto the floor.

Bo pushed his hand in again.

‘Tell me,’ Anna asked him, exhaling a little self-consciously and then turning her face into the light, ‘do you see anything… anything out of the ordinary… just…’

She touched her cheek, where Jo had touched hers only a minute before, and where a good hour earlier, Wesley had touched his.

‘Just there? ’

Bo frowned, drew slightly closer, adjusted his angle so as not to cast her in shadow, and stared.

All he needed was a pen and some paper to prove his point to her.

Ms Katherine Turpin (the female in question) was wedged tightly (and inexplicably — and no one dared ask why, exactly) between her fridge and her kitchen cabinets; bottle in hand, fag on her lip, flat on her arse and maintaining the constant — if physically unfeasible — angle of 63 degrees.

She’d consumed the best part of a litre of apricot brandy and she hadn’t even peed yet (or expressed the slightest urge — Wesley couldn’t for the life of him work out how she’d managed it; her bladder must’ve been fashioned from industrialised rubber) but she was still successfully projecting (due, in the main, to her scabrous barrage of vocal comebacks) a perfectly passable simulation of trenchant clear-headedness –

Trenchant

— Wesley smiled –

That was her

That was Katherine

One wing had fallen off (the wire emerging from beneath her bra-strap, concluding in a lethal point ten inches behind her, etching random diagrams into the cupboard’s pale melamine) and she was sitting squarely and heavily on what remained of the other.

Ted had picked up the fallen wing and was holding it on his lap — sometimes tucking and straightening, sometimes just stroking. Wesley was flitting around between them like a lunatic gnat; hypothesising — self-justifying — scheming — cooking.

The heron’s cadaver was now plucked and cut, the breasts (and every other passably edible scrap) seared in fat, thrown into a stewing pot with thyme, bayleaf — Wesley carried his own fire-dried supply in his rucksack — a spoonful of Marmite and a litre of water.

In her fridge — when he’d chanced to look, hoping for something healthy or hearty as (he erroneously believed) would befit a part-time sprout cultivator — he found only her extensive collection of high quality organic chocolate (plain, some flavoured with lavender, cardamom, chilli and juniper).

‘Fairtrade,’ Katherine told him, raising a single, imperious finger above the door which eclipsed her, ‘I get it posted.’

Wesley casually scrutinised a finely-embossed wrapper. ‘ Whizz- o,’ he murmured.

‘ Huh? ’

She squinted up at him (looking like a Greek marble sculpture after a very major earth tremor), ‘Seventy fucking percent pure cocoa solids. Organic. ’

Wesley gave the chilli bar a tentative sniff. He withdrew, grimacing.

‘Beat that. ’

He just smiled.

‘ Give it here.’

Katherine put down her brandy, took the cigarette out of her mouth, looked around for an ashtray, couldn’t find one so pushed it clumsily through the bottle’s lip. Its burning tip fizzed out quietly inside the two remaining inches of liquor. She reached out her hand, then suddenly changed her mind.

‘Is there a cup?’ she asked. ‘Or a mug? Teddy?’

Ted looked up. A blue mug of water sat on the table at his elbow. He drained it and passed it to her.

‘Thanks.’ She tipped the last few remaining drops out onto the floor, conducted a fastidious inspection of the mug’s interior and then vomited cleanly into it. She filled it to the rim, stopped, to order, then passed the mug back to Ted again, wiping her mouth on the pale curve of flesh inside her right arm.

‘Chocolate,’ she instructed loftily.

Wesley held out the bar. She took it, unwrapped a corner and nibbled on it, daintily.

‘I’m the man who became a social outcast for sleeping inside the body of a horse,’ Wesley told her, ‘and even I could teach you a thing or two about the social graces.’

Ted felt the mug’s enamel warming, inexorably, beneath his finger-pads. His gorge rose.

‘Where’s… where’s Saks, Ted,’ Wesley suddenly switched tack, ‘is it far from here?’

Ted stood up and walked over to the sink. ‘It’s just…’ his voice shook a little as he removed the washing up bowl, carefully tipped the contents of the mug down the plughole, and then turned on the tap to rinse it, ‘a couple of doors down from the Agency. Opposite the Leisure Centre. It’s an American bar. They sell food and… and… and beer.’