Nicola Barker - Behindlings

‘Now I need paper,’ he told Ted. He had something to prove to her.

Ted was still standing by the sink, picking tufts of fluff from his jacket and trousers. He was looking dishevelled. His tie was askew. His jacket was off. There were spots of blood on his cuffs. He was hot.

Wesley was hot too. Even the chinchilla was panting. He strolled over and checked its water, saw it was low, took out the bottle, filled it and replaced it.

In that same corner of the kitchen (in the background Katherine was humming a paradoxically sombre version of Kabalevsky’s The Clown) Wesley came across a stray handout from Holland and Barrett (shoved between a First Edition of Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and Iris Murdoch’s Nuns and Soldiers) about the benefits of Spirulina (he’d found a jar of it languishing unopened in the empty freezer — had added four capsules to dinner). He turned it over and grabbed a pen from the table-top.

‘If you refuse to come into the living room and see for yourself you lazy, pissed-up freak, ’ (the last part he murmured provocatively under his breath and Ted indicated his unease with a tiny flinch), ‘then I’ll prove it to you here.’

‘What?’

She’d already forgotten their earlier disagreement.

(Now she liked him. Yes she did. The way he’d taken her judgement of him and had swallowed it. She liked that. He’d never know how much — of course — until she got him into bed.)

Wesley began writing, ‘I want your opinion on this, Ted.’

Ted looked up from his watch for the second time. ‘It’s eight-forty,’ he said, ‘weren’t we…?’

‘The way I see it,’ Wesley spoke as he wrote (in longhand) the same word several times over, ‘the only real threat to the future of our culture — insofar as the concept of “our culture” means a damn thing any more — is the universal inclination towards what Alvin Toffler calls The Alien Time Sense. ’ He glanced up. ‘People no longer have any concept of real time, Ted. You must see this every day in your own particular line of work; the breaking of appointments, the financial overstretching, the desire to represent the self through the conduit of property — wall colour — decoration — the hunger… Toffler says the rot set in with the burger.’

Ted struggled to grasp what Wesley was telling him. The struggle ended with his use of the word alien.

‘Everything takes,’ Wesley continued (writing again), ‘just as long as it takes. Never lose the sense of how long something should be in actual time, Ted. A death. A dream. A meal. A transaction. To wait well is to truly express your lack of alienation from what is actual. When I make people take pause it’s really a kind of reaching out. It’s like a giant bear-hug from an alternate time-frame.’ He shrugged, ‘I think about this kind of stuff a lot when I’m out walking.’

Katherine expectorated, noisily, from the corner.

‘Alien Time…’ Ted parroted, endearingly.

‘ We are the aliens, Ted. The alien is progress. We scapegoat the stranger, but the stranger is the alien within us. The alien is what we aspire to. He abducts. He steals the earth and brings modernity. He comes from another planet. He laughs at the mundanity of nature. His world is nowhere to him. He seeks only to invade and to pilfer…’

‘ You are the alien, then, you pretentious fucker,’ Katherine interjected, gurgling on cocoa.

Wesley ignored her. He continued talking, without drawing breath, ‘The alien, Ted, has no constraints. He is both what we crave and what we fear. We have wrung the neck of time, Ted. And in the process we have asphyxiated our own reality. Urban man lives only in dreaming.’

Wesley completed his task the same moment he finished speaking. He carried the results of his labours to Ted, flashed them at him, then squatted down next to Katherine.

‘Take a squint.’

He passed the paper to her. Katherine took it, frowned and peered. She read it, laboriously, ‘ C-u-n-t, ’ she said.

‘No. Try the one below. Take your time. Experience the complexity.’

‘ C-u-n-t, ’ she repeated, jiggling her knees –

Pale knees

Two field mushrooms on a damp Autumn pasture

Wesley inspected the paper again himself, ‘No. Make some bloody effort.’

She opened her mouth for the third time.

‘ Aunt, ’ Wesley interrupted, snatching the paper back again, ‘a-u-n-t. That’s what I wrote. But I did it longhand. I never join my downstrokes to my… It’s my style. It means…’

‘Unreliable,’ Katherine said, ‘you’re an unreliable little turd. Sometimes vicious. You kill birds. You hide inside horses. You reject good chocolate. You abuse the gentle.’

‘The point I’m making,’ Wesley talked over her, ‘is that I have an aunt in the area. And I was thinking about her a little earlier when I was playing with your sand. I wrote aunt. Therein lies the confusion. I did not call you a cunt. You called yourself that.’

‘Where?’ Ted glanced up from his fluff-infested trousers.

‘South Benfleet. My father’s younger sister, Penelope. Married to an ex-vicar. We don’t speak.’

‘So you’re telling me,’ Katherine was suddenly slurring her words, ‘that your aunt is a cunt? ’

(She pronounced it caaant for added humour.)

‘You’re so funny, ’ Wesley chuckled, ‘it’s no wonder every twelve-year-old boy in this town beats a path to your door.’

Ted’s eyes widened. His thoughts turned to Bo.

Katherine scowled.

‘This woman I once dated…’ Wesley turned back to Ted, ‘the female with the antique pond…’

Ted’s head jerked up –

Pond

‘she was a Careers Consultant with a major Bank. They analysed your writing — just as a matter of course — before they’d make you a job offer. I write with my left hand now the right one’s gone. It makes me a whole lot scruffier.

‘But what do they read into that? The truth is that these people will fuck you up just for being who you are, they will reject you for being yourself — the product of their environment — the product of capitalism — and that is fucking sinful. ’

‘I need a fag,’ Katherine said, reaching up and grappling around blindly on the counter above her.

‘This guy I knew on the markets,’ Wesley continued, reaching for the cigarette packet and knocking one out for her — finding a lighter hidden inside the packet too, removing it —‘got pissed up then fell asleep in the shed where we all stored our stalls at night. Had a fag in his hand. Burned everything to shit. Himself included.’

‘Did he die?’

(A flutter of interest in Katherine’s grey-blue eyes.)

‘Nope,’ Wesley sounded regretful, ‘just burned his palm very badly. So drunk it didn’t even wake him at the time. My work associate — Trevor — pulled him from the flames. Said he burned off all his pubic hair. He was having a… you know: markets — stalls — sheds…’

‘No I don’t know,’ Katherine interjected.

‘What did you sell?’ Ted asked.

Katherine was battling with her lighter.

‘Fruit.’

Wesley grabbed the lighter and lit the cigarette for her.

‘What kind of fruit?’ Ted asked.

‘ Fruit. ’

He looked around him. ‘There’s no ashtrays,’ he said.

‘It’s actually ten to nine,’ Ted interjected.

Wesley ignored him and sat down on the floor next to Katherine, stretching out his legs and placing the piece of paper between his knees. He then deftly folded it, tore it into two perfect squares, took one of these squares and began folding again in earnest.