Nicola Barker: Behindlings

‘The point I’m making…’ Wesley stopped leafing and paused for a minute, ‘is that he was actually ridiculously sensitive, underneath all that other stuff. Underneath that thick layer of poise and helpfulness and affability…

‘ Right, ’ he passed Ted a sheet, ‘this is the place.’

Ted took the sheet and glanced at it, his mind still fully occupied by images of lime and feet and feathers. After a few seconds, though, his eyes cleared and widened. He shook his head. He began to snigger, nervously. ‘You can’t be…’ he managed eventually, shaking his head and trying vainly to hand the sheet back again.

Wesley scowled. He would not take it. ‘What’s so funny?’

Ted’s mirth slowly evaporated. He stared intently at Wesley for a moment, struggling to tell if he was sincere. But he couldn’t tell. Wesley’s expression was completely unreadable. He was a human hieroglyphic.

‘This is her house,’ Ted said, finally. ‘She’s renting out the spare bedroom. Shared use of bathroom and kitchen facilities. I’m only handling it as a personal favour.’

‘Whose house?’ Wesley sounded perfectly innocent. Benign. Casual.

‘ Whose house?’ he repeated, after a pause.

Ted pointed at the printed details: ‘This is Katherine Turpin’s house. This is the house of the local woman whose life you ruined.’

A short silence followed, punctuated, briefly, by Wesley’s stomach rumbling.

‘Blow me,’ Wesley finally expostulated (almost convincingly), ‘that’s some crazy coincidence. I suppose we’d better go and take a look, then, hadn’t we?’

He stood up. Ted didn’t move a muscle.

‘Take me there,’ Wesley ordered, reaching over to grab Ted’s jacket from the back of his chair, bundling it up into a compact ball, and throwing it at him.

‘You don’t know me…’ Josephine said, squeezing her way between the plastic bench and its table.

‘I don’t know you,’ Doc affirmed, not even looking up at her, but applying all his energy to dissolving the foam on his coffee by stirring at it vigorously with the back end of a knife. The foam wouldn’t dissolve though. Too dense. Too soapy.

He was occupying a window kiosk in the Wimpy. Dennis sat outside, tied to a lamppost, his snout pushed mournfully against the glass, his breath steaming up the window in small, cloudy patches.

‘My name’s Josephine,’ she said, sitting down.

‘Why all this foam?’ Doc muttered, not anticipating an answer.

‘That’s a cappuccino. I believe it’s prepared with frothy milk.’

Doc finally glanced up and inspected Josephine. He frowned slightly. He couldn’t pretend to understand this irritating modern phenomenon of girls who dressed like boys. Did it mean she hated men? Was she sexually deviant? Was she frigid? Was she frightened? Was she predatory? Either way, she made him feel old and alienated and uneasy.

‘Who made you an authority?’ he asked curtly.

Josephine didn’t respond at once. First, she picked up a napkin and neatly turned over each of its four comers — double-checking the sharpness of the fold, in each instance.

‘I’m hardly an authority,’ she murmured, unfolding the napkin again, smoothing it out with the flat of her palm and then shoving it away. Doc ignored her fidgetings. He occupied himself instead by staring out of the window and over the road towards the estate agency.

‘Do you think he’s only after information,’ Josephine queried, leaning forward, pushing both elbows onto the table, cupping her neat chin inside her two immaculately clean hands (her short, white nails thin as ten tight crescent moons; bright as albumen) and glancing over herself, ‘or do you reckon he might actually be planning to stay here awhile?’

Doc took a quick sip of his coffee. It was hot. He cursed under his breath and hastily put the cup down again.

‘I bought your dog a doughnut,’ Josephine said, indicating towards the paper bag she’d been holding, already dark with grease stains, ‘I hope you don’t mind.’

‘He’s diabetic,’ Doc growled, clumsily wiping away his foam moustache with the back of his hand and then staring, bemusedly, at the remaining slick of cocoa-splattered residue, like it was some kind of toxic extra-terrestrial slop.

‘A diabetic? Really?’

Doc — still refusing formal eye contact — gritted his teeth and then muttered gutturally through them, ‘I hardly think it’d be worth my while to lie about such a thing.’

‘No.’

Josephine frowned and leaned back, somewhat unnerved by Doc’s pugnacity. She grabbed hold of the offending bag, removed a doughnut from inside (glancing, guiltily, towards the service counter), then sat and stared at it.

‘It’s shaped like a man,’ she observed, biting off both of its arms in quick succession.

Doc didn’t respond. He was concentrating on the estate agency again. Inside he thought he could see Wesley standing up and throwing something. He roughly pushed his cup aside (the coffee pitched then spilled, still steaming, into its saucer), fastened a couple of buttons on his cardigan, grabbed his oilskin jacket from the bench beside him, and clambered to his feet.

But before he beat his hasty retreat, Doc paused — almost regretfully — shifting his weight heavily from his bad leg to his better leg like a small child anxiously queuing to collect his Good Conduct certificate at school assembly.

‘Look,’ he spoke quickly, his voice — Josephine noticed — fractionally less abrasive than it had been previously, ‘I’ve made it my business to follow Wesley for well over three and a half years now,’ Doc inadvertently clenched then unclenched his left fist as he spoke, testing the joints for any hint of arthritic stiffening, ‘and what I want you to understand…’ his bleary brown eyes were already focussing beyond Josephine, out of the window, over the road, ‘what I need you to understand is that for me this isn’t just a game or a hobby. It’s actually like a kind of…’ he paused, struggling, his eyes briefly flickering towards the ceiling, ‘a kind of pilgrimage. ’

Still he wasn’t satisfied, ‘A way of life, if you will…’

He scowled, temporarily incapable of encompassing the complex landscape of his emotions verbally of fully encapsulating The Following and all its myriad implications.

‘I truly, fully appreciate the depth of your commitment,’ Josephine butted in, quickly snatching her opportunity, trying her utmost to sound sufficiently submissive, ‘I mean I know you’re quite the expert…’

‘There are some people,’ Doc rapidly continued, almost as if he hadn’t heard her, ‘who have Followed him even longer than I have, in terms of actual years, but none so intensively. There are many — especially since the big confectionery Loiter — who Follow him mostly at the weekends or perhaps for a day or two when they’re on holiday, and others who simply turn up, at the drop of a hat, whenever the fancy takes them. We call these people,’ Doc allowed himself a wry smile, ‘we call such people Fleas, because their… because their infestation is almost always very temporary.’

Josephine inspected her armless sundry — a rather unwieldy wodge of dough still tucked inside her cheek — all too fully aware of which horribly capricious category Doc had already slotted her into.

‘You see, to me, as yet,’ Doc observed, pushing home his point rather more blatantly than was necessary, ‘you are just another one of those people. Those Fleas. And while I would hate you to take this the wrong way, Josephine… ’

(Her name. He’d remembered. He’d snatched it from the ether, quite arbitrarily.)