Nicola Barker - Behindlings

Inside was an inscription;

For Wes, (it said, in a beautiful hand; real green ink) For laughing and feeling,

Stevie

Two kisses.

Katherine raised her brows at this, almost jealously, and as she flipped through it again something fell out — a picture. A photo. She picked it up from her lap and gazed at it. She blinked and stared harder.

A little girl. Oddly familiar. Katherine gazed up at the ceiling for a moment, then back down at it, as though testing herself: small girl, dark haired, wearing an alice band, not smiling, serious-seeming, thin, sickly-looking.

It was the same –

Wasn’t it?

— almost the same photograph Arthur had shown them during dinner (perhaps taken at the same sitting, on the same occasion? Christmas? Birthday?). The same little girl, she was certain.

Katherine scrutinised the photo closely again. Nodded to herself, frowning. Idly turned it over. On the back was written — in pen, but very neatly — This is the daughter. 9 yrs. Birthday Jan 7th. Lives with the mother.

Now that was definitely –

Hmmn

— more than a little strange. She gazed over briefly to the letter she’d tossed down onto the floor –

A well-wisher

— then slipped the picture into the front pocket of her dressing gown. Almost surreptitiously. She closed the book gently and put it down. Took a deep breath. Exhaled it, slowly. Snapped back to the task in hand.

The second volume — this one a paperback — was called Ravens in Winter by Bernd Heinrich. She paged through it (one field biologist’s struggle to uncover the mysteries of raven behaviour in Canada or North America or somewhere). The book was marked by a series of feathers. She drew every feather out, one by one. They were all perfect. All iridescent. A deep blue-black-green (hard to see it properly in the muted light), with the occasional sidelong smear of white –

Magpie

Whatever else?

Next to each feather — in the book’s margins — she discovered that Wesley had scribbled a series of comments — seemingly unconnected to the text — in pencil.

NB. Contact: (one such comment read) Michael Hitchens; re. Goodwin; then a phone number. There were other numbers too. Other names. Another scribble said In Madagascar an acceptable unit of time is ‘rice-cooking time’, or shorter; ‘the frying of a locust’. Toffler (TTW).

There were plenty of these cryptic comments (all saying Toffler TTW afterwards — Katherine presumed Toffler was a person — a writer — a seer of some kind).

Somewhere else Wesley had written: Edward Albee: ‘the permanent transient’.

Elsewhere; Support the GPO! In big letters.

‘ Social decay is the compost-bed of our civilisation’, then after, in capitals, BUT THAT’S SO FUCKING PRAGMATIC!

Katherine grabbed her dictionary again. Under Pragmatic(al) she read; meddlesome, positive, dictatorial (she snorted, irritably). Then later; doctrine that the conception of an object is no more than the conception of its possible practical effects.

She slammed the dictionary shut and threw it at her cupboard. She continued to inspect Wesley’s Raven book, crossly.

Next to another feather marker was written: J oseph Williamson; King of Edge Hill. Tunnels. Must see. Then further on: Time: circular or linear?

As she read, Katherine carefully returned each feather to its original position. Towards the back, her eyes suddenly tightened as she struggled to decipher an especially interesting but rather badly written scribble. She stared at it for a long while. Eventually she made out…

Korsikov;

Alcohol abuse.

Short term memory-Liver-Testicular

She straightened her neck, flipped her second plait over her shoulder, growled, slotted away the last feather and sat still for a long while, rocking — almost imperceptibly — and quietly musing.

Finally, she grabbed hold of the third book — gazed at the cover — Ah

Now this was more like it — Bottersnikes and Gumbles by S.A. Wakefield. A slim children’s story about some squidgy but very pliant creatures called…

She frowned… called…

Gumbles

(Now why did that mean something to her? Why was that ringing an alarm bell, somewhere?)

She inspected the picture. A small, white and rather adorable koala-type animal… Her forehead cleared. She grinned.

And they were relentlessly bullied and manipulated, these… these Gumbles (and kept in old tin cans) by an angry but regal pointy-red-eared creature called Chank who lived in a dump with his furiously lazy Bottersnike compadres. Fully illustrated.

Katherine collapsed back onto her pillows with Wesley’s flask in her spare hand, emitted a gentle burp, licked the remaining slick of spirit from her lips and commenced reading.

Of course this was Wesley’s child. He’d known it — he told himself (if a touch unconvincingly) –

An instinct, call it…

— from the very first moment, the first instant he’d laid eyes on her.

Wesley’s own little Sasha. The freak-girl who lived among the deer at her grandparents’ Norfolk-based Menagerie-cum-Garden Centre.

She looked like him, too. Arthur shot her a sly glance. But not exactly. He’d seen pictures of the mother (blonde, angry, angular) and she appeared to resemble that side of the family in no way whatsoever.

The mother was a hard-nut. Had gone to the papers — several times — during all the maintenance complications the previous year. Seemed to actively enjoy unburdening on the subject of her ex-lover. Told everything and yet — Arthur’s brow rose, minutely — nobody could ever tell quite enough, could they?

He visualised the page on the website;

Uh…

Food:‘When we lived by the sea in the little bed and breakfast in Hunstanton, we’d cook macaroni cheese from the tin on our tiny cooker — share a bowl of it — curled up in bed together.’

Hygiene:‘He was never all that big on changing his clothes or dressing up or having a bath. He’d swim in the sea, though, all the time. Even in winter. He was like a seal. Or a machine. He never seemed to feel the cold.’

Sex:‘He was straight down the line, but sometimes he liked me to bite and pinch. Once he’d lost his hand we didn’t really sleep together any more — he lost interest, but I was heavily pregnant by then, with Sasha.’

And of course:

Wildlife:‘At first — when he raised his hand — I thought he was going to hit me. But then he turned and pushed his fingers into the cage instead. It was dark… very dark. There was a scream. But it wasn’t him. It was the bird, the owl. This horrible… this unforgettable squealing noise. Like an animal in terrible pain.’

At this point Iris turns towards her fiancé for support. He takes her hand and squeezes it, comfortingly. The small, dark girl — Wesley’s daughter — sits by the window, apparently lost in her own childish world, smiling at a sparrow on the lawn, playing with her hair…

‘He said it was…’ Iris’s voice falters, ‘he tried to pretend it was me — when we talked about it, after — but it wasn’t. It wasn’t. It was the bird. And later on, Derek — the keeper — said that Wes’d asked to feed that particular owl himself over the previous couple of weeks — said he’d been paying it a lot of personal attention.