Behindlings (14 page)

He was thin. Pale skinned. Unhealthy looking. He hawked expertly then swallowed noisily. He was a boy with a minor sinus problem.

Eileen peered over at him, then back at Wesley again. There was a piece of paper –just to the left of their elbows –lying on the counter: Wesley’s
Library Membership Application Form.
It was only partially filled in. Eileen reached out her hand for it. ‘We’ll be needing your current address,’ she said, ‘and your date of birth, obviously.’

Wesley grabbed the form and the pen he’d been using previously.

‘Do you like music?’ he asked, scribbling away diligently.

‘Music?
Hmmn.
Yes, I suppose I do,’ Eileen answered, idly watching the small group in the corner: the man with no shoes whom she’d seen in there earlier, and the girl, the girl with short hair.

‘I play the banjo. You should come and listen. I use the
Clawhammer
technique, due to my, uh…’

He lifted his right hand. Eileen’s eyes widened.

‘I’ll be playing later, about three-ish, once I’ve hiked around the Island’s perimeter. On the private fishing pier near the Gas Storage Terminal…’

He glanced up, ‘I’d love to see you there.’

He pushed the slip of paper towards her.

Under DATE OF BIRTH (Eileen focussed in on it, with a slight start), Wesley had written:

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly

Then an inch or so lower, in the margin,
What is essential is invisible to the eye.

Eileen glanced up at him, perplexedly. But he was staring over towards the fiction section, at the small crowd pulling books from the shelves there. Then suddenly he was bending down to stroke the dog, then stepping back, then smiling, nodding, turning, walking, opening the door. Quick as anything. Quick as… Without even… without…

Eileen’s gaze flew to the section marked ADDRESS and it was then that her half-quizzical-smile froze; c/o, it said,
c/o Ms Katherine Turpin,
followed by a horribly familiar Furtherwick Road number.

Ms Katherine…

What?

The smile remained stuck; stiff at its corners.

Patty cleared his throat. Then he cleared it again, even louder. Eileen put down the form, her expression smeared with joy and fear, hope and hunger.

‘I want to join this library,’ the small boy said (he was a simple boy and Eileen’s Otherwiseness meant nothing to him), ‘but I’m rubbish at writing things.’

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly,

What is essential is invisible to the eye

The Little Prince.
Antoine De Saint-Exupéry. Her favourite book, her favourite writer, her favourite person in the whole wide world, ever ever
ever.

Eileen deftly slid Wesley’s slip under the counter –her face still a casualty ward of mixed emotions –then turned towards the child and asked if she could help him. As she listened dutifully to his answer, she dazedly twisted her wedding band on her neatly-painted finger; her soft, sweet, lavender eyes slowly clouding over.

Ten

Hmmmmn

Dewi chewed solemnly on a heavily-salted tomato sandwich as he peered through his living room window, his dust-iced skin zebraed by the sharp stripes of winter light which gushed, unapologetically –like hordes of white-frocked debutantes flashing their foaming silk petticoats in eager curtsies –between the regimented slats of his hand-built shutters.

He chewed methodically, his muscular jowls working –deliberately, repetitively –his dark eyes staring out, unblinking. He was waiting for Katherine. But he was thinking about Wesley.
Wesley.

Wesley ‘the joker’. Isn’t that what they called him? Or Wesley ‘the wild card’. Or Wesley… Wesley ‘the
maverick
’ (that was a popular one, just currently). But there were others, too, and plenty of them: ‘The Scholarly Beadle’ (a pretty pitiful soubriquet, all things considered), ‘The Post-Millennial Prankster’ (and people actually got
paid
to write this crap?).

Wesley.

Dewi stopped chewing. He swallowed, slightly prematurely, experiencing some difficulty; gulping. He sniffed. He swallowed again, then picked a tomato pip from his molar with his finger. The pip was dislodged. He bit down hard upon it. He crushed it.

But weren’t these people –these mild-mannered commentators, these hacks, these pen-pushers, these thoroughly indulgent, head-shaking, lip-biting, gently tutting people, these
mollycoddlers
to a man –weren’t they all forgetting something? Something important?

Weren’t they forgetting –I mean he didn’t want to
piss
on their fucking
chips
or anything –but weren’t they forgetting the damage? Yes. As blunt as that. Plain as that.
Boring
as that: The damage –The devastation –The pain –The
destruction.

(Tedious truths, Dewi was the first to acknowledge –truths invariably were, weren’t they? –but truths just the same. Indubitably.)

Caught up –as they obviously were –in all the fun of it (the waggishness, the roguery), couldn’t they at least show a pretence of concern over the possibility that they might, in some small way, be in serious danger of overlooking the crucial, the more salient, the rather
less
salubrious issues?

Wesley the
Heartless.
That was more like it. Just the kind of monicker he was really crying out for (didn’t it at least mean something?), or Wesley the Careless. Wesley the
Killer
(so much more fitting than the Beadle thing). Or Wesley the
Bastard
(Hell yes. Even better).

Good
Gracious.
Dewi’s hands were suddenly shaking. He tried to relax them, forming tight fists one moment, flexing them the next. He glanced down, anxiously. As his head dipped he was momentarily blinded by a gush of light. He flinched. He blinked. He straightened up, immediately. His eyes scanned the road again. To the left of him. To the right.

Could it really have been Wesley? He frowned. But
seriously…
Could it really? Back in Canvey again? The
actual
Wesley? Here? Large as life? In the flesh?

But how was that possible? More to the point, how would he
dare?
And what on earth might his reasons be? (To gloat? To crow? To strut? To swagger?)

Wesley
back?
No. Never. The more he thought about it the more… the more crazy it seemed, the more… well, ridiculous. Ludicrous.
Inconceivable.

Dewi’s frantic eyes briefly desisted from their anxious scanning of the roadway, relaxed, refocussed, then suddenly –quite unintentionally –caught an oddly disquieting glimpse of their own violent expression in the window’s clear reflection. He flinched, then looked sideways, almost shiftily.

This was not like him.

This is not… This is not
like
me, he told himself, This is… this is…

Inconceivable?
But was it? Was it really? His right shoulder jerked upwards, in a tiny spasm, towards his dust-slicked ear-lobe. Yes.
Yes.
Absolutely. It
had
to be. Because over the past two years Wesley –or the idea, the concept, the very
notion
of Wesley –had somehow acquired a marvellous, a fabulous, an almost… yes, an almost
mythological
significance for him.

The way he saw it, Wesley was an absolute one-off. He was the genuine article. He was out there, on a limb (teetering, maybe, but clinging on, determinedly). He was unique. He was unparalleled. He was completely and totally and utterly unprecedented.

Even so, this phenomenal –no –this
extraordinary
singularity as Dewi (perhaps somewhat naively) perceived it, was patently not apprehended by him as any kind of virtue. Quite the contrary. For when Dewi actually imagined Wesley –when he conjured up an image of him, inside his mind –Wesley was not configurated, not defined, not
delineated
quite as your average, ordinary, every-day mortal should be.

Within the deliciously wholesome confines of Dewi’s imaginings, Wesley took on the form of something infinitely less, and yet –quite paradoxically –something immeasurably
more
than your average, commonplace, rough-hewn homosapien. Because for Dewi, Wesley was actually an absolute, undisputed, honest-to-goodness
monster.
A monster in all the traditional senses: small-brained, big-jawed, heaving, sweating, baying, howling, gesticulating, clawing, gnashing…

The vilest, the cruellest, the most unapologetically lawless, coarse, despicable and licentious creature. A horned demon. Fork-tailed. Fanged. Cloven.

But that wasn’t… that couldn’t… even
that
didn’t encompass… it didn’t…

Because when Dewi tried to visualise Wesley, the initial image he generated rarely remained constant. It switched. It varied. It altered. It disintegrated. It
morphed
(morphed? Was that the proper, modern word for it?).

Inside Dewi’s agitated imaginings, Wesley was not merely
bestial,
he was more… so much more complicated than that. More
terrible. And infinitely less predictable. He saw many forms. He was a Shape-Shifter. He was a Changeling. He was a Centaur, or possibly a Gorgon, or maybe even a Satyr. Yes…

Yes. That was it. A
satyr.
With hooves. With muscular thighs. Curling hair. A pan-pipe…

A pan-pipe?

No… No. The image was changing. It was disintegrating again. It was vacillating, reconfigurating…

Either way, Wesley was something decidedly foul but strangely intangible, something thoroughly ancient but heinously ungodly. He was the anti-everything. He was the unthinkable.

For Dewi –and he was hardly a man alone in this particular respect –life held many uncertainties (could he afford this month’s rent? Did his saw need greasing? Was he allergic to walnuts? Were his plug-holes blocked up again?), yet among all of these manifold uncertainties there remained one thing –and one thing only –of which he was profoundly certain. No –tell a lie –there were two things, but the first of these was simply a given: that he loved Katherine Turpin; that he loved her truly, unselfishly, and to distraction –that she was a Queen to him.

And the second thing? It was related to the former, inextricably. The second thing Dewi knew for certain was that even if –by a very large stretch of the imagination –he was able to grasp the notion of Wesley’s actual physical
being –
his mortality –he was still totally incapable of comprehending the idea of Wesley as a moral
entity –
incapable, in effect, of believing in Wesley’s
humanity.

Because Wesley was not like other men. He lacked something. He missed an essential quality (gentleness? benevolence?
decency?).
He was not a proper person. He was a pitiful creature. He was lost. He was damned. He was hollow. He was empty.

To all intents and purposes, Wesley did not really exist. Not morally-speaking, anyway. He was a vacuum. He was struck-out. Deleted. He was nothing.

Dewi shoved a thick strand of hair from his eyes, noticing, idly (as he pulled his hand away), how the film of dust on his fist had been severed by a thick slick of tomato juice; his four knuckles split into two. Neatly riven. Dissected. He paused for a moment, breathing deeply.

And yet… And yet if it really had been Wesley he’d seen –all things taken into account and everything –if it really
had
been him, then what could he seriously expect to
gain
from this strange and unexpected Second Coming? What more could he take from them –realistically? Hadn’t he taken enough the first time around? Hadn’t he stripped them bare? Hadn’t he humbled and humiliated them
then
sufficiently?

What more could he take, damn him?

Dewi placed the remainder of his sandwich down onto the window ledge. His stomach was churning. And time was passing. He shifted his weight. He wiped his mouth. He glanced at his watch. Twelve twen… Twelve
twenty-one?

What?

Two whole minutes later than she ever was, normally?

Sweet Katherine

Not that he kept tabs or anything.

Twelve… twelve… twelve twenty-two already?

By twelve twenty-three Dewi had already run several times through every conceivable option:

A delay at work

A random conversation

A breakdown

An accident

Or was it something more insidious? Something to do with the Estate Agent? With Ted? Sharp-suited, sandy-coloured Ted. Or with the kid in her garden? Or the boy-girl? Or the ruined old fellow with the little dog? Or the notebook-clutching fool in the plastic hat? The Followers. The Behindlings.

He clenched his teeth in frustration. He’d guessed they’d be back. He’d predicted it. After the book initially came out –almost two years ago now –they’d come then (not in hordes, not in their hundreds, but in dribs and in drabs, in gangs, in clutches. Just enough of them, basically, to bug, to chafe, to niggle him).

And they’d continued to come. Predictable as bad weather. Twice as persistent. Men, mostly. Sad cases. Trouble-makers. Wolves in sheep’s clothing. Saintly sinners yearning to share something (experience? Pity?
Semen?).

And the locals joked about it, to start off with. Then the
neighbours started complaining. But Katherine? She didn’t seem to notice, or if she did (and she must’ve) then she never spoke out about it, never let on to anyone, just pretended she didn’t care, just lived her life, same as ever, quietly, firmly, impassively.

That was Katherine.

Oh
God,
he’d wanted to hurt Wesley, then. To damage him. Because he couldn’t comprehend it. He couldn’t understand how a stranger could be so cruel. So cavalier. So careless. It was more –so much more –than just the fact of the matter, it was the basic, fundamental bloody principle of the thing.