Nicola Barker - Behindlings

Snow Fox!

Teeth!

Fur!

Claw!

Arthur Young — Man of History — lay there, pulsating, whipped and panting, eyes without irises purple-flowering, calm as a log split and crashed into the moss-sodden forest of infinite languor, while she bit and tunnelled and dug him over.

•  •  •

‘We worked on the markets together,’ Wesley said. ‘Have you ever been to Bow? It’s in the East of London. An infernal shit-hole, point of fact, but I almost considered making my permanent home there… until things … uh…

Caught up

They always catch up

Josephine shook her head (perhaps a little too quickly). ‘I don’t know it,’ she lied, then changed tack slightly, ‘I’ve never been there,’ she modified.

Of course she’d heard of it. She’d read the name, frequently; the famous old Roman Road Market, Bow… The Story of the Freeing of the Eels. The first Wesley story. It was the start of everything. It was all but legendary.

She blinked. She felt her heart banging. She saw her breath condensing, right there, just in front of her.

Here he was, in person, and it wasn’t so much a story, to him, as a bundle of memories, none really connecting. And he was telling it to her now. Haltingly.

She held her breath, staring at him –

Please don’t let me spoil anything

‘I’ve never been there,’ she carefully repeated, ‘I don’t know London well.’

She was down to her grey, thermal vest — thankfully still dry in patches — and some matching grey, calf-length leggings. Her feet were bare.

‘Your feet…’ Wesley told her, inspecting them dispassionately –

Like tiny, dried-out bat’s claws

Long-toed

Tender

‘seem to have fared worse than the rest of you. Ears aside…’

Pink as a piglet’s with the sun shining behind them

‘and your neat hands, obviously.’

Neat hands

The windows were already steamed to capacity. Wesley had discovered an old blanket in the back. She didn’t remember ever having seen it there before –

Can this really be my car?

The blanket was covered in dog hair. It smelled of stale sick. Wesley didn’t care. He was towelling her dry with it. She might as well have been an itinerant pony or a muck-drenched lurcher for all the pains he took to preserve her dignity. And when he got down to her toes, he threw aside the blanket and smacked her feet

— hard — until she could feel it.

Only when she gasped (three times, four) did he stop, with a smile, and without apology.

He made her put on his jumper and his jacket –

The smell of them…

Like juniper and off-milk and pipe-smoke-tangerine-old-pelt-grandfather

— then he wrapped up her legs — like a tortilla — in the blanket.

There was no room inside that tiny car for anything. He flipped her seat back, lay back himself, pulled her feet onto his lap, rubbed them.

‘So why didn’t you?’ she asked, still shivering.

‘Why didn’t I what?’

He leaned forward, scrabbled around inside his coat pocket and removed a sweet, some matches and a cigarette stub.

He unfurled the sweet and popped it into her mouth.

He lit the cigarette for himself.

She pushed the sweet –

Barley sugar

— into her cheek, ‘Why didn’t you make a home there?’

Wesley obviously disliked this question.

‘I was involved in a dispute,’ he muttered, ‘with a foreman on a job… And you know what?’

She shook her head.

‘I should probably go out and find you some dock leaves, later…’ he opened his door and tossed the spent match into the gutter. ‘For the cuts,’ he added.

‘In Bow?’ she persisted.

He slammed the door shut.

‘Nope,’ he gave up evading her, ‘Holloway. He fell off a ladder. Broke four ribs. So I ended up working on the markets in the East with this character called Trevor…’

Wesley inspected his cigarette, his bad hand still resting casually on her foot.

She felt his hand there. In that moment she was her foot.

‘Trevor was the potter you mentioned earlier…’ he lifted his bad hand and pulled open the ashtray on the dash –

Hand gone

‘He wasn’t the world’s most conscientious co-worker — not back then — but we were solid together for almost a year. It was alright for a while. Got a little…’ Wesley paused, ‘claustrophobic,’ he tapped the ash off his stub then rested his hand — without thinking — on her foot again –

Hand back

Jo shivered. Wesley misconstrued it as the cold, and began rubbing, distractedly, ‘Anyhow I got involved in some other stuff — at a pie and mash shop, releasing a few eels — and I fucked the situation up…’

He sniffed. He was starting to feel the cold himself. He grimly hunched his shoulders against its steady encroachments, continued talking to try and keep his mind off the breeze whistling through the crack in his side-window.

‘A long old while after, Trev pulled himself together and became a potter. At first just casual labour in one of the big Staffordshire factories — in the warehouse or something — then he gradually worked his way up. Got involved in some of the actual… the hands-on… the creative stuff…’

Wesley was distractedly rubbing his own arm with his smoking hand. Jo quickly pulled some of the blanket free and placed it, demurely, across his knees.

‘What happened then?’ she tentatively asked.

Wesley accepted the blanket without comment. He adjusted its placement slightly. He dragged on his cigarette.

‘We met again — years later — while I was Loitering near there. He looked me up. He was fairly desperate — and angry about some of the things that’d gone wrong — pissed off about… had a gambling problem. Marriage was…’

Wesley shrugged, choosing not to specify the exact locus of Trevor’s irritability, ‘So we walked down to Devon together. Started talking about trying to do something special with all the stuff he’d learned in Staffordshire. Setting up our own pottery, maybe. Something old-fashioned, because Trev’s traditional to the core, but in the loveliest… in a very primitive… he has this overwhelming… an innocence. A real innocence. And that makes him hot-headed sometimes, which is a pity. A few weeks in each other’s company and we end up almost killing each other.’

Wesley shot her a look. He hadn’t made eye contact with her since he’d climbed into the car.

‘Was he violent?’ Jo whispered, frightened that if she spoke too loudly she might kill the story.

Wesley cleared his throat. Drew on his cigarette.

‘We built this traditional Anagama kiln,’ he continued, ‘or a round-about version of it; approximately four-hundred-and-fifty cubic feet in diameter…’ he exhaled, using both hands to outline its shape, ‘takes a couple of months to fill, ten days to pack, five days to fire, a week — at least — to cool…’

‘And this was Trevor’s idea?’

Wesley shifted in his seat, ‘You can flog it as art — that’s the clever thing — and folk’ll swallow it whole, because the entire set-up’s so fantastically arse about face…’

Wesley smiled at the thought. It was the first time she’d seen him smile properly — ever. She gazed at the smile, proprietorially.

‘For most potters,’ Wesley explained, ‘the clay is the crucial factor, the moulding, the glaze, the artistry. And that’s how it was for Trev, initially. He’d developed this really precise streak — never had it when we worked on the markets — don’t know where it came from, really. But it wasn’t right for him. It was part of the problem. He needed…’ Wesley pondered, for a moment, ‘… to exorcise it. Which is why the new techniques have been so liberating. Because now it’s not all about creating the perfect object so much as creating the most legitimate process… ’