Nicola Barker - Behindlings

‘Your guess is as good as mine.’

She suddenly stopped and turned and stared up at him, ‘What brought you here, exactly?’ She scratched her head, vaguely, ‘I can’t for the life of me…’

‘Wesley,’ he promptly answered, ‘we’re meant to be meeting for dinner. He went off with the police about an hour ago…’ Arthur glanced at his watch, ‘in fact closer on two.’

‘Was it about the librarian?’ Katherine asked, frowning doubtfully, turning back around, still not focussing properly. ‘Or was it about his daughter?’

‘His…’ Arthur stopped in his tracks, ‘… pardon? ’

Katherine rubbed her right eye, yawned, started walking again.

‘The daughter,’ she repeated, over her shoulder, ‘like earlier… when the police…’

She paused a second time, and shook her head (as if something had come loose inside her skull and the consequent rattle was truly provoking her) ‘… and talking of earlier, didn’t we meet before? I’m experiencing a disturbing déjà… ’

She walked on, coughing, without waiting for an answer.

He followed her into the kitchen where the smoke was billowing (much to Katherine’s disinterest, and Arthur’s horror) in graceful plumes through the occasional crack in the oven’s perished rubber lining. The floor was covered in feathers and paper. No — stranger still — in feathers and origami.

A heron’s wing was hung over the back of a chair by a piece of wire.

Katherine pointed to this wing, rather querulously, ‘Dinner,’ she announced, placing her hand onto her belly, ‘in case you weren’t yet acquainted with the menu.’

She went over to the sink, turned on the cold tap, ran it for a while, bent over and drank from it. When she eventually straightened up, the excess fluid dribbled onto her chin, her jaw, then down her neck. She made no effort to wipe it away.

Arthur struggled not to focus on the droplets — their fascinating –

Uh…

— descent. Instead he went over and switched off the oven. He opened the back door. He waved his arms around a little.

‘We met on the road, this morning,’ he said, trying to keep things casual, ‘when your tyre got a puncture.’

Katherine had grabbed her cigarettes from the counter-top. Her hands were shaking.

‘Oh God yes,’ she murmured emphatically, not even looking at him, ‘you’re a lovely walker.’

‘You have a fold-up bike,’ he said, slightly embarrassed, inspecting the marks across the back of her shoulders –

Friction burns

Blood prints

‘I do’, she readily agreed, her low voice quavering. She turned to face him as she lit up. ‘Smoke?’

‘Why not?’ he found himself saying –

You’ve given up

She was still wearing peach, in many layers –

Or was that apricot?

‘Please shut the fucking door,’ she whispered, hugging herself and shivering, ‘before I freeze my bony arse off.’

The house was improbably hot. The kitchen was still smoky. But he closed the door anyway.

She’d lit up a fag for him and made as if to pass it over. He reached out a hand for it. She dropped it onto the floor. Purposefully.

‘I am very… ’ she said, smiling at him alluringly (as if she’d finished this sentence and not just left it hanging), ‘and not only that,’ she continued, ‘but painfully… ’

He bent over to retrieve the cigarette, uncertain how to respond to her. When he straightened up, though, holding it firmly, she casually dropped the other.

‘… disappointed,’ she concluded, with a sigh.

It rolled towards the cabinets. He bent down again, automatically.

When he’d plucked it from the tiles (they were warm under his fingers — he rested his palms there, for a second) and stood up again, holding a cigarette in both hands now (what better way to give up giving up?), he noticed — with a kind of alarm, but also a kind of… a kind of thudding… delight, was it? — that she’d removed a prodigious cross-section of her copious silky layers. They’d slid to the floor, as if of their own volition.

She was now all but naked, except for an old-fashioned bra (which looked like it was made from a combination of cream-coloured tent fabric and some coordinated boot-laces) and a pair of loosely-fitting, almost contemporaneous (1920s? ‘30s? — what did he know of historical trends in female undergarments?) cami-knickers. The knickers hung off her hips revealing…

What was the word for the nape, the dimple of no-flesh, the cleft that lay so desirably underneath the knuckle of a girl’s hip?

What was the name for that?

Her body was hairless. She was white as a maggot. Her breasts — inside those hockey-shoe-lace-cricket-white contraptions –

Oh shit

— deliriously full and slack.

Arthur closed his mouth. It had fallen open. He took a puff on a cigarette.

Its fire crackled into him –

Why am I here again?

Back in this effortless, hungry, instinctive place I so confidently believed I’d left behind me?

‘I have some terrible knots,’ Katherine said, perching her marbled hip onto the corner of the table –

The whiteness, like a joint of flesh, all pearled in death; all plucked, un-hung…

The grain of old pine underneath

Its ancient creak

The shower of grey-black feathers

A Still Life—

Corbieres—

They were calling it…

Arthur stole another puff –

They were calling it…

She was pointing to her brassiere. The laces were all…

This has to happen

— he moved closer, like a man passionately engaged by a fascinating dilemma — a puzzle… They were all… all co… co… co… coagulated.

A kind of miniature bodice, knotted to the fore — a tangle of closed-openings — an impossibility.

He put out his hands to untie them; clumsily, at first — a blind man reaching for the kettle cord; a schoolboy wiping down the classroom blackboard…

These huge brown hands

How could they achieve anything useful here?

He drew his face in close, was now down on his knees, miraculously…

The smell of… of violence from the tiny pleats in her belly. The clefts between…

Made the hairs on his…

No –

No

— the smell of Violets —

Spring flowering so sweetly-mauve in the moist shelter of shady corners —

Uh…

— and cigarettes.

Where had he put them?

But the tangle was too… too important. He stared even harder at it. His nose was very nearly… and his fingers… the pale skin — when he brushed it, inadvertently — hot as seared chicken, straight from the spit of frying –

The tangle…

His fingers pulled and teased and twisted and wound and interwound. Then his teeth were pulling too, but only very gently, and the laces were dampened and the ancient moth-smelling, cricket-pad, english-lawn-green-wax-rubbing cotton and the flesh just to the left of it — and to the right of it — and the damper flesh, pinkened by the pressure of fabric just under –

The tightness…

They were suddenly on the…

Tiles hot below the scrape of pale and the knickers loose as butter-fabric slipping with the ineluctable pleat of…

Five fingers each with… She had five fingers and they had that pressure-warm-push-and-determined force of… of… Snout

Busy as any kind of sharp-nosed wild white woodland creature you might care to mention in the ice-snow-cold of winter with the searing-hot-scarlet of… of…