Nicola Barker - Behindlings

She nodded. She did remember about the name, her name, tattooed on…

‘I do remember,’ she said –

Too left-field for any kind of reason

‘So what d’you make of it?’ he continued smiling.

Had he been drinking, maybe?

Silly question

‘I didn’t…’ Jo frowned, ‘I wasn’t…’

‘Well I’m currently in a good position to prove it,’ Shoes said, ‘would you like that, Josephine Bean? Would you like to see the proof of the pudding?’

‘ Uh… ’ Jo blinked.

‘Would you?’

This is just silly

Need a nurse’s curt voice

Need to call on all those old…

Defences

All that…

‘Go ahead,’ she said. Utterly obeisant.

‘Well you’ll have to excuse…’

Shoes indicated delightedly to his lower regions (not so much an excuse as an outright celebration), finished urinating, shook himself clean, hitched up his trousers — but not fully, just to the base of his sumptuous shudder of buttocks — emerged from the cubicle and walked casually towards her.

He was in an awkward state of semi-arousal (yet seemed to find no embarrassment in it), but that wasn’t the worst part. He had… he…

Every kind of genital piercing known to man

And then some

Balls like two pin-cushions. Punched and peppered. Sleepered and studded. The shaft a complex silver lattice-work, base to tip.

On his belly –

That belly

That magnificent tub of manly blubber —

Hanging, swaying

Regal as an obese bantam after a henhouse seduction -

— she saw (among the many tattoos, one in particular, a badly-drawn hangman; still pink with new-infection: the gallows completed, the rope, the body — the head, the torso, the legs and the feet — everything, in fact, but the right hand, which was missing.

Underneath, two words, seven letters and five –

G — D — I — /S — S

Jo stared at these letters, her mind struggling to make sense of it –

Why am I…

How thoroughly…

‘That’s not it.’ Shoes looked down at himself, relishing his work-of-art status, completely at ease with it. He turned around and pointed.

His arse was bare at the back — not just naked, but without any notable embellishments except for a further two words, written in a faded blue ink at the precise point where his momentous buttocks joined into the base of his spine: YOUR NAME

Jo stared at these two words for a few seconds –

Your name

Shoes peeked over his shoulder, ‘Get it? I have your…? ’

Jo nodded. She wasn’t quite smiling.

Shoes yanked up his trousers (they were elastic-waisted — his penis caught on the waistband and flipped high before being tightly enveloped).

‘See you back in the bar, gorgeous, ’ he whispered, clicking his fingers, swishing his hips, and sashaying pertly away from her.

Ted was struggling valiantly to convince a twenty-four hour glazier that it would be worth his while driving over from Benfleet (on the night of his Twelfth Wedding Anniversary, as luck would have it) to undertake the pointless-seeming task of installing a mirror, while Arthur (a prodigiously ironic expression tightening one corner of his lips and feeding through, automatically, to the outer edge of his adjacent eye) tapped away diligently at the virus-ridden computer.

The agency lights had been cautiously turned off again (a detail which hardly aided Arthur’s quiet endeavours) but he was a competent touch-typist and seemed a skilful technician — if not exactly the genius that Wesley had proclaimed him.

The room was coolly bathed by a spooky-seeming, almost-undulating, semi-aquatic blue-grey glow (generated, in its entirety, by the defective hardware), yet both men seemed quite at their ease floating around inside this dreamy liquidity.

‘Lucky you kept the back-up disks to hand,’ Art murmured, once Ted’s abortive-sounding conversation had finally concluded (Ted saw his words emerging in a series of shimmering air pockets, which trickled from his mouth and then hung, vibrating gently, just above his head), ‘there’s nothing too bad gone on here, really. It’s only a question of…’ he tapped. He tapped again. ‘… feeding it all in. Setting it all up again. You should let me show you how, then you could easily do it yourself next time.’

Ted paddled over and stood at his shoulder.

‘There won’t be a next time,’ he gurgled.

He was certain of it.

‘I don’t know how much general information you were keeping on the desktop…’ Arthur mused, still tapping.

‘A whole stack of it,’ Ted affirmed, not appreciating — at first — the negative implications of Arthur’s musings –

Gone

All gone

Drifted clean away…

‘You didn’t copy any of it onto a spare floppy by any…?’

He glanced up. He clocked Ted’s expression –

Drowning

He looked down again.

Tap tap

‘I’m dead in the water,’ Ted pronounced miserably.

Arthur rapidly switched tack, ‘So will the glazier be coming over later?’

‘Much later. He’s taking his wife out to dinner. It’s their wedding anniversary.’

Arthur grimaced, sympathetically, ‘And the carpenter? For the door?’

‘That’d be Dewi. I left him a message…’

‘ Great, ’ Arthur suddenly exclaimed, ‘your mouse is finally up and running, now we’re really getting somewhere…’

‘But I have the distinct feeling,’ Ted continued, ‘that he might be otherwise engaged this evening.’

Tap tap…

Tap tap tap…

‘Why’s that, then?’ Arthur glanced up distractedly.

‘He’s the big fellow who clouted Wesley.’

‘ Ah. ’

‘In love with Katherine. Works mainly in flooring. Did these floors…’ Ted tapped his foot (the sound held back, trapped in liquid, then echoing eerily, seconds later), ‘did them rather beautifully, in actual fact.’

Ted leaned across Arthur’s shoulder and inspected the screen more closely. ‘The worst part,’ he said, still sounding suitably traumatised by the whole experience, ‘was the way the information just kept on… kept on spurting. There was this real sense of… of viciousness… a redness. Then everything just went click. Dead.’

‘I think you might’ve…’ Arthur suddenly reached down to his feet and felt around blindly, ‘I think you might’ve unplugged it, inadvertently. The socket’s extremely overloaded down there. You should definitely consider getting a second adaptor…’ he straightened up again, ‘… but we’re working through it. Don’t worry. And it all seems pretty much… pretty much… uh… ’

He was frowning at the screen. An arbitrary snatch of debris was floating past them;

HOUSE FOR SALE: Semi-detached, quiet cul-de-sac, all local amenities, three bedrooms, no chain

Then another –

UNUSED GASOMETER for Auction: 5th February; Set in 2 1/2 acres. Road access available. No planning permission as yet for full residency. Suit artist as studio or other

Then –

Splat!

Ted blanched as a man — a square-headed soldier — beamed out of the screen at them with seven giant marbles packed under his foreskin (an eighth — held jauntily — between his thumb and forefinger).

‘ Gracious, ’ Arthur murmured, ‘I guess that’s one way of keeping active during those long winter nights in Kosovo.’