Nicola Barker - Behindlings

‘Of course. Now I remember.’

‘You slept inside a horse?’ Katherine was gazing up at him. ‘Was it dead already?’ She was obviously unfamiliar with this story.

‘I found the animal,’ Wesley explained, bored. Why all these explanations?

(He didn’t want to backtrack any more, he longed to consolidate. Why did nobody ever want to consolidate with him? The repetition was so… so dull, so boring… so repetitious.)

‘It was dying,’ he continued, ‘I sat with it until it stopped breathing and then I ate some of it. I was starving. Later on I climbed inside it to keep warm. It’s a basic survival technique. I was alone on the Yorkshire Moors. It was snowing.’

Wesley turned and peered into the depths of the fridge again where — apart from the chocolate — he saw a blue-tinged loaf of Jamaican tea bread (unused), a plastic bag of celery (half-rotted), a carrot, two jars of Dijon mustard, half a cold omelette on a paper plate, a handful of butter (he stuck his finger in, sucked on it — hmmn, unsalted) reduced to ghee and left mouldering in a saucer.

‘A dead horse? ’

Katherine was finding this concept difficult to digest.

‘Aren’t you worried about your daughter?’ Ted asked, still running the tap, thinking about her out there — like Wesley had been — in the cold and the dark.

Katherine’s head jerked up, but it might’ve been the chilli in her chocolate bar.

‘ What? ’

The tone of Wesley’s voice implied a very strong warning. This was patently not the kind of question he wanted to be asked. He instinctively raised his hand to his cheek, then realised what he was doing and pulled it away again so violently that he slapped the door of the fridge with it.

Ted noticed — out of the corner of his eye — and flinched –

The bad hand

A bad sign

‘I just… I only wondered…’

Pond

Pond

‘It wasn’t my horse,’ Wesley addressed Katherine again, ‘and I didn’t kill it. But when I cut into it, the flesh was still warm. I got arrested two days after. Charged with theft. Two lesser charges of cruelty.’

‘If you… if you…’ Ted continued, indomitably, ‘if you were putting on an act, by any chance — I mean for the Police…’

Wesley straightened his damaged hand, then knuckled it. The good hand rushed towards it, as though in some kind of complex damage-limitation manoeuvre.

‘If you…’ Ted finally glanced over properly, his forehead creasing, ‘I mean if you were… putting it on or something… it was very…’ he paused, his throat tightening, ‘ convincing, ’ he almost gibbered.

‘Did I possibly detect…’ Wesley spoke directly into the scandalously empty salad compartment, trying to push the dead horse from his mind –

The flop of the intestine

The stink

The steam

‘Did I inadvertently pick up a tiny smattering of sexual tension back there, Ted? Between you and the young officer? Is that why you’re asking? Is that what you’re really interested in?’

An instinct to be cruel — deep within him — to purge –

Fine to brag about the horse

But it was different in fact

Nearly died in that cold night

Not brave

Not outrageous

Not clever…

Oh that beautiful pony

Velvet belly —

New-dead —

Not clever or funny

No

Only—

Only pathetic

Like the judge had said

Nobody ever remembered the bad…

Brother Christopher

Bright summer morning

Such blackness inside of it

So much dark inside of it

Remember the warm —

Daughter

The warm —

Horse

The warm — Christopher

Warm — velvet — closeness

Wesley suddenly pushed the nails on his good hand into the flesh on the palm of his bad. Five nails. Felt them cutting. Celebrated the wound –

The absence

The absences

Blood –

Blood

Over

Ted looked up, bemused, ‘But she’s not…’

‘Not the woman, stupid,’ Wesley interrupted harshly.

Ted’s face was a picture –

Shocked

Hurt

Wesley immediately felt better. He reached into the fridge and grabbed the carrot and the celery.

Ted hung his head. His chest caved. He blushed. He pushed his fist into Katherine’s blue mug –

Pushed

Wesley shoved the carrot and celery under his elbow, opened a jar of mustard, sniffed, saw a moss-green coating of mould around the top of the glass…

Ouch

— a sudden, stinging impact in the region of his ear. A rubber band. Katherine had yanked it deftly from her hair, taken aim and fired. He glared at her.

She was smiling. Dark chocolate on her teeth.

‘You’re just like the rest of us,’ she said.

‘Pardon?’

‘Just the same. Yes you are.’

He shrugged, listlessly, ‘Did I ever say I wasn’t?’

‘You didn’t say it,’ Katherine mused, ‘but you certainly think it. You need to believe you’re decent — deep inside — but sometimes you worry that you’ve lost the facility — on your travels. And you may well be right.’

He pondered this for a moment, ‘But it’s not about decency,’ he said thickly, ‘is it?’

He wasn’t asserting so much as asking. Her answer plainly mattered to him.

Katherine shrugged, tipped forward slightly, inspected her skirt –

Drunk

‘Nothing is immaculate,’ he suddenly quoted, ‘until it is consumed or distressed.’

‘ Wuh? ’

She looked up again.

‘It’s from a song.’

Katherine struggled to pull herself out of her niche. Couldn’t manage it. Wesley bent down, grabbed the band from the place it’d landed and dropped it, dismissively, into her lap. ‘ I welcome hurt, ’ he whispered.

Katherine positioned the band between her fingers again and aimed it at him.

‘Don’t you fuck with Ted,’ she said — her tone was menacing —‘that’s my job.’ She hiccuped. Wesley turned back to the fridge. He suddenly felt like he’d been staring into that fridge forever.

‘To use a device like this,’ he grumbled, ‘in the middle of fucking winter. Where’s the sense in it?’

‘Oh bugger off,’ Katherine mumbled, staring through the lip of the bottle to inspect the floating stub of her cigarette –

Apricot

Liquid

Burned sugar

‘We’ll have to run down to that bar at eight,’ Wesley told Ted, his voice gentler than previously. ‘I arranged to meet somebody. He said he’d take a squint at your computer.’

Ted spun around, ‘He did?’

‘If you’re lucky.’

‘It’s an Apple Mac. Does he know about Apple Macs? ’

‘Arthur Young,’ Wesley declared, ‘is the fucking Godhead of Apple Macs. ’

Katherine began coughing. Ted inspected his watch. His delight promptly dissipated. ‘It’s already eight-thirty,’ he said.

‘What of it?’

Wesley slammed the fridge shut (Katherine finished spluttering, wiped her nose on her arm and stretched out her legs again with a groan of relief). He took the carrot and the celery over to the table where he chopped them up, tossed them into the pot, secured the lid and slammed the whole thing into the oven.