Behindlings (34 page)

Bo smirked on, defiantly, while Anna inspected her smallest digit. ‘I’m actually being
ludicrously
overgenerous,’ she sighed, ‘that’s so typical of me.’

Bo honed in on Jo again, totally unconcerned by Anna’s assault on him, ‘I
did
see you Following. You were in the Library earlier.’

Jo said nothing.

‘Playing with the big boys now, are we, Bo?’ Anna snorted, ‘trying to grub yourself up a piddling exclusive for your pathetic little Canvey rag? Oh
Diddums…
’ she chucked him under his prodigiously square chin, ‘that’s so
sweet.
’

‘You wished you knew what I know, Officer,’ Bo snapped, draining his bottle with a swagger, every inch the cool hack-sleuth.

‘Meaning?’ Anna gazed down at him, sympathetically.

‘Just what I say,’ he placed the empty bottle next to Jo’s stool, almost touching her ankle with his hand before slowly drawing it away, ‘I have a contact.’

‘Who?’

‘You’ll need to
beat
that information out of me.’

He winked at her.

‘Ted. The estate agent,’ Anna sighed. ‘No beating necessary.’

Bo rocked back on his heels.

‘How the…?’

‘Oh come on. You’ve been breaking his balls since all that graffiti rubbish with the Turpin girl. And I saw him tonight with Wesley. He’s right up to his puny, ginger neck in it.’

Jo suddenly stood up. Her coat fell to the floor. ‘I need…’ she put her hand to her face, her cheek, ‘I must… I need the toilet…
Here…
’

She thrust the untouched beer at Bo and launched herself off –like an ill-constructed canoe hurtling down a particularly treacherous stretch of white-water –towards the
Ladies.

‘Was it something I said?’ Bo murmured, grabbing Jo’s coat and lounging against her stool to swig on her beer. He looked around him, cleared his throat, then casually slipped his hand into one of her front pockets, withdrawing some car keys and a couple of sweet wrappers.

‘I didn’t see you do that,’ Anna warned him, lighting up another cigarette and tossing the empty packet onto the floor.

Bo pushed his hand in again.

‘Tell me,’ Anna asked him, exhaling a little self-consciously and then turning her face into the light, ‘do you see anything… anything out of the ordinary… just…’

She touched her cheek, where Jo had touched hers only a minute before, and where a good hour earlier, Wesley had touched his.

‘Just
there?
’

Bo frowned, drew slightly closer, adjusted his angle so as not to cast her in shadow, and stared.

Twenty-four

All he needed was a pen and some paper to prove his point to her.

Ms Katherine Turpin (the female in question) was wedged tightly (and inexplicably –and no one dared ask why, exactly) between her fridge and her kitchen cabinets; bottle in hand, fag on her lip, flat on her arse and maintaining the constant –if physically unfeasible –angle of 63 degrees.

She’d consumed the best part of a litre of apricot brandy and she hadn’t even peed yet (or expressed the slightest urge –Wesley couldn’t for the life of him work out how she’d managed it; her bladder must’ve been fashioned from industrialised rubber) but she was still successfully projecting (due, in the main, to her scabrous barrage of vocal comebacks) a perfectly passable simulation of trenchant clear-headedness –

Trenchant

– Wesley smiled –

That was her

That was Katherine

One wing had fallen off (the wire emerging from beneath her bra-strap, concluding in a lethal point ten inches behind her, etching random diagrams into the cupboard’s pale melamine) and she was sitting squarely and heavily on what remained of the other.

Ted had picked up the fallen wing and was holding it on his lap –sometimes tucking and straightening, sometimes just stroking. Wesley was flitting around between them like a lunatic gnat; hypothesising –self-justifying –scheming –cooking.

The heron’s cadaver was now plucked and cut, the breasts
(and every other passably edible scrap) seared in fat, thrown into a stewing pot with thyme, bayleaf –Wesley carried his own fire-dried supply in his rucksack –a spoonful of Marmite and a litre of water.

In her fridge –when he’d chanced to look, hoping for something healthy or hearty as (he erroneously believed) would befit a part-time sprout cultivator –he found only her extensive collection of high quality organic chocolate (plain, some flavoured with lavender, cardamom, chilli and juniper).

‘Fairtrade,’ Katherine told him, raising a single, imperious finger above the door which eclipsed her, ‘I get it posted.’

Wesley casually scrutinised a finely-embossed wrapper. ‘
Whizz-
o,’ he murmured.

‘
Huh?
’

She squinted up at him (looking like a Greek marble sculpture after a very major earth tremor), ‘Seventy fucking
percent
pure cocoa solids.
Organic.
’

Wesley gave the chilli bar a tentative sniff. He withdrew, grimacing.

‘Beat
that.
’

He just smiled.

‘
Give
it here.’

Katherine put down her brandy, took the cigarette out of her mouth, looked around for an ashtray, couldn’t find one so pushed it clumsily through the bottle’s lip. Its burning tip fizzed out quietly inside the two remaining inches of liquor. She reached out her hand, then suddenly changed her mind.

‘Is there a cup?’ she asked. ‘Or a mug? Teddy?’

Ted looked up. A blue mug of water sat on the table at his elbow. He drained it and passed it to her.

‘Thanks.’ She tipped the last few remaining drops out onto the floor, conducted a fastidious inspection of the mug’s interior and then vomited cleanly into it. She filled it to the rim, stopped, to order, then passed the mug back to Ted again, wiping her mouth on the pale curve of flesh inside her right arm.

‘Chocolate,’ she instructed loftily.

Wesley held out the bar. She took it, unwrapped a corner and nibbled on it, daintily.

‘I’m the man who became a social outcast for sleeping inside the body of a horse,’ Wesley told her, ‘and even I could teach you a thing or two about the social graces.’

Ted felt the mug’s enamel warming, inexorably, beneath his finger-pads. His gorge rose.

‘Where’s… where’s Saks, Ted,’ Wesley suddenly switched tack, ‘is it far from here?’

Ted stood up and walked over to the sink. ‘It’s just…’ his voice shook a little as he removed the washing up bowl, carefully tipped the contents of the mug down the plughole, and then turned on the tap to rinse it, ‘a couple of doors down from the Agency. Opposite the Leisure Centre. It’s an American bar. They sell food and… and… and beer.’

‘Of course. Now I remember.’

‘You slept
inside
a horse?’ Katherine was gazing up at him. ‘Was it dead already?’ She was obviously unfamiliar with this story.

‘I found the animal,’ Wesley explained, bored.
Why all these explanations?

(He didn’t
want
to backtrack any more, he longed to
consolidate.
Why did nobody ever want to consolidate with him? The repetition was so… so dull, so boring… so
repetitious.)

‘It was dying,’ he continued, ‘I sat with it until it stopped breathing and then I ate some of it. I was starving. Later on I climbed inside it to keep warm. It’s a basic survival technique. I was alone on the Yorkshire Moors. It was snowing.’

Wesley turned and peered into the depths of the fridge again where –apart from the chocolate –he saw a blue-tinged loaf of Jamaican tea bread (unused), a plastic bag of celery (half-rotted), a carrot, two jars of Dijon mustard, half a cold omelette on a paper plate, a handful of butter (he stuck his finger in, sucked on it –
hmmn,
unsalted) reduced to ghee and left mouldering in a saucer.

‘A dead
horse?
’

Katherine was finding this concept difficult to digest.

‘Aren’t you worried about your daughter?’ Ted asked, still running the tap, thinking about her out there –like Wesley had been –in the cold and the dark.

Katherine’s head jerked up, but it might’ve been the chilli in her chocolate bar.

‘
What?
’

The tone of Wesley’s voice implied a very strong warning. This was patently not the kind of question he wanted to be asked. He instinctively raised his hand to his cheek, then realised what he was doing and pulled it away again so violently that he slapped the door of the fridge with it.

Ted noticed –out of the corner of his eye –and flinched –

The bad hand

A bad sign

‘I just… I only wondered…’

Pond

Pond

‘It wasn’t
my
horse,’ Wesley addressed Katherine again, ‘and I didn’t kill it. But when I cut into it, the flesh was still warm. I got arrested two days after. Charged with theft. Two lesser charges of cruelty.’

‘If you… if you…’ Ted continued, indomitably, ‘if you were putting on an
act,
by any chance –I mean for the Police…’

Wesley straightened his damaged hand, then knuckled it. The good hand rushed towards it, as though in some kind of complex damage-limitation manoeuvre.

‘If you…’ Ted finally glanced over properly, his forehead creasing, ‘I mean if you were… putting it on or something… it was very…’ he paused, his throat tightening, ‘
convincing,
’ he almost gibbered.

‘Did I possibly detect…’ Wesley spoke directly into the scandalously empty salad compartment, trying to push the dead horse from his mind –

The flop of the intestine

The stink

The steam

‘Did I inadvertently pick up a tiny smattering of
sexual
tension back there, Ted? Between you and the young officer? Is that why you’re asking? Is that what you’re really interested in?’

An instinct to be cruel –deep within him –to purge –

Fine to brag about the horse

But it was different in fact

Nearly died in that cold night
Not brave
Not outrageous
Not clever…

Oh that beautiful pony

Velvet belly –

New-dead –

Not clever or funny

No

Only–

Only pathetic

Like the judge had said

Nobody ever remembered the bad…

Brother Christopher
Bright summer morning
Such blackness inside of it
So much dark inside of it

Remember the warm –

Daughter

The warm –

Horse

The warm –Christopher

Warm –velvet –closeness

Wesley suddenly pushed the nails on his good hand into the flesh on the palm of his bad. Five nails. Felt them cutting. Celebrated the wound –

The absence
The absences

Blood –

Blood

Over

Ted looked up, bemused, ‘But she’s not…’

‘Not the
woman,
stupid,’ Wesley interrupted harshly.

Ted’s face was a picture –

Shocked

Hurt

Wesley immediately felt better. He reached into the fridge and grabbed the carrot and the celery.

Ted hung his head. His chest caved. He blushed. He pushed his fist into Katherine’s blue mug –

Pushed

Wesley shoved the carrot and celery under his elbow, opened a jar of mustard, sniffed, saw a moss-green coating of mould around the top of the glass…

Ouch

– a sudden, stinging impact in the region of his ear. A rubber band. Katherine had yanked it deftly from her hair, taken aim and fired. He glared at her.

She was smiling. Dark chocolate on her teeth.

‘You’re just like the rest of us,’ she said.

‘Pardon?’

‘Just the same. Yes you are.’

He shrugged, listlessly, ‘Did I ever say I wasn’t?’

‘You didn’t
say
it,’ Katherine mused, ‘but you certainly
think
it. You need to believe you’re decent –deep inside –but sometimes you worry that you’ve lost the facility –on your travels. And you may well be right.’

He pondered this for a moment, ‘But it’s not
about
decency,’ he said thickly, ‘is it?’

He wasn’t asserting so much as asking. Her answer plainly mattered to him.

Katherine shrugged, tipped forward slightly, inspected her skirt –

Drunk

‘Nothing is immaculate,’ he suddenly quoted, ‘until it is consumed or distressed.’

‘
Wuh?
’

She looked up again.

‘It’s from a song.’

Katherine struggled to pull herself out of her niche. Couldn’t manage it. Wesley bent down, grabbed the band from the place it’d landed and dropped it, dismissively, into her lap. ‘
I welcome hurt,
’ he whispered.

Katherine positioned the band between her fingers again and aimed it at him.

‘Don’t you fuck with Ted,’ she said –her tone was menacing –‘that’s
my
job.’ She hiccuped. Wesley turned back to the fridge. He suddenly felt like he’d been staring into that fridge forever.

‘To use a device like this,’ he grumbled, ‘in the middle of fucking winter. Where’s the
sense
in it?’

‘Oh bugger off,’ Katherine mumbled, staring through the lip of the bottle to inspect the floating stub of her cigarette –

Apricot

Liquid

Burned sugar

‘We’ll have to run down to that bar at eight,’ Wesley told Ted, his voice gentler than previously. ‘I arranged to meet somebody. He said he’d take a squint at your computer.’