Behindlings (17 page)

She took a step back, took another swig of schnapps, swallowed, blew hard on the tail (dust floated off, and up, and away into the ether) then turned, still harrumphing, and sped out of the garden.

Dewi gazed after her.

Lamb’s tail,
he meditated, scratching his huge chin with his big fingers, softly, gently, perturbedly.
A tail of lamb.

She caught Ted on the trot. He’d just pulled his jacket on, was primed to go, standing –for a second –behind the door, and refilling some perspex property-detail holders with a bunch of brand new, freshly-printed photocopies. He’d only just that minute finished producing them –his final job of the morning. He was almost out of there –for lunch –it was almost
lunchtime

– it was very nearly –he had…

Bugger

Pathfinder –thankfully –was busy on the phone arranging a viewing when Katherine burst in, smacking the door purposefully
–forcefully –
into Ted’s pliant and unassuming buttocks. He yelped. He was living on his nerves and his nerves were still jangling.

‘
You!
’ Katherine growled warningly through the glass door, leaving a hot puff of condensation on the glass (obscuring her angry mouth, momentarily), brandishing the bottle at him. Then she side-stepped and let go –allowing the door to close with its own momentum –and stood before him, breathing heavily.

Ted turned to face her, still managing to retain the air of a man behind glass –a specimen –pinned-flat, stiff, dumb. He was frightened. Katherine hung like a white moth before him; tiny, fragile, sheeny, but ineluctably befanged. A
biter.

‘It’s just… it’s only…’ he began limply.

‘Oh no you
don’t,
’ Katherine grabbed his lapel and menaced him with the bottle again, ‘not with
Dumbo
sitting over there like a big, fat fart at a fucking wedding.
Outside.
’

She yanked him through the door with her, then pushed him hard against the window.

‘Where the
hell,
’ she asked coolly (her breath steaming in the cold again), ‘is my middle mango animal? What have you done with him? And why did you stroke Mr Angry Tiger? I
told
you never to stroke him, didn’t I? Didn’t I tell you never to stroke him?’

‘You told me,’ Ted managed, nodding, ‘you
did
tell me, yes, on more than one occasion, Katherine.’

‘Don’t use my name in that patronising way,
Ted,
’ she snapped, ‘and another thing,’ she held up the lamb’s tail, menacingly. She waggled it at him, almost comically. But she wasn’t smiling.

‘Lamb’s
fucking
tail.’

‘You’ve been drinking,’ Ted said.

‘So do you really think I’m a cunt, Teddy? Is that
honestly
what you think of me?’

Ted’s eyes widened. ‘A drunk?’ he asked, horrified, honestly mis-hearing, ‘do I really think you’re a
drunk?
’

‘Read my lips, Ted. Do you really think I
-am-a-cunt?
Do you honestly think I
-am-a-whore?
’

Ted stared at Katherine, open-mouthed. ‘A
cunt?
’

He whispered the word, plainly appalled by it. ‘I don’t think I… I don’t…’

Katherine’s pale eyes tightened. She grew thoughtful for a moment.

‘No. No it’s not really
you,
is it? It’s not Ted. The cunt thing. It’s not a
Ted
thing. You’re right. So it was somebody else? Then who
was
it? Who was in my house? Who did you take there? Was it the journalist? Was it him again? Was it the tennis champion? Has he been bugging you? Has he been threatening you? Did he force you to take him over? Has he been up to his mischief in my house? Did
he
stroke Mr Angry Tiger? Was it him?’

‘Uh’, Ted didn’t quite know which question to answer first. They all seemed equally unappealing. Katherine scowled at his silence. She had no
time
for silences. She growled at him.

‘You’re
confusing
me,’ Ted whimpered plaintively, ‘with all these… these questions. The point is…’

‘
Tell
me the point.’

Katherine took a swig of schnapps, then stamped her foot like a small, short-tempered white pony as she swallowed.

‘
Yargh.
’

Too strong.

‘I thought you’d given up drinking.’

‘And I thought you were my friend, Teddy. But you stole my mango creature. And you think I’m a cunt. Although in point of fact cunt isn’t really your thing, is it? Cushion covers are your thing. And property details. And suits. And bits of… bits of lint, and no fucking sex and
Deep Heat…
’ She shrugged, resignedly, ‘… so be it.’

‘You have a new tenant,’ Ted interrupted her, ‘I got someone in
for you. But not… but not… It’s just… well they got… they… they looked around this morning.’

‘Fuck off.’ Katherine flipped Ted’s tie out from under his waistcoat and blew a boozy raspberry at the cat on it. She didn’t like cats.
Sylvester
particularly.

‘No. I’m serious. I got you a lodger. But the problem is…’

‘Who is she?’

Katherine yanked at the tie, pulling Ted forward slightly. Ted put up a hand to straighten the tie. Katherine slapped it away. ‘That’s partly…’ he started.

‘I need a fag. Hold this.’

Katherine passed Ted the schnapps bottle, stuck the tail between her teeth and felt around inside her jacket pocket.

‘The problem is, it isn’t…’

Ted watched her, anxiously. Her mouth was full. That had to be a good thing.

‘It was Wesley. It was
him.
Wesley. It was all a little con… confusing.’

‘Who?’ Katherine spoke through the tail, not concentrating properly, her teeth showing prettily. ‘Who’s Wesley?’

Ted swallowed, nervously, ‘The one who wrote… the one with…’

‘
Wesley?
’ Katherine looked up, sharply, her spectral eyebrows rising dramatically. She stopped fiddling. She removed the tail from her mouth. ‘You jest, surely?’

‘Uh. No. No, I’m not joking. I wouldn’t…
uh…
’

‘Shit.’

Katherine frowned. She sounded nonplussed. Her eyes slid furtively down the High Street. She glanced at the people as if she’d only just…

There were plenty of them. People she knew, mostly, doing their shopping. Coming out of the chippy. The Wimpy. The Post Office. The Wine Bar. The pub. Some she didn’t know.

She glanced at the traffic, on the road. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She straightened her hat and her silky cardigans. Then she looked up at Ted again, noticed the schnapps bottle still clutched between his fingers, grabbed it back from him,
cleaned the lip with her palm, fastidiously (as if he’d been drinking from it, surreptitiously), took a quick swig, then stuck her thumb inside like a fleshy cork and held the bottle dangling loosely from her hand that way.

Ted watched on, anxiously. She swallowed and swung her hand a little. The bottle swung too. He thought she might drop it –make a mess on the pavement, outside the agency –or disconnect her thumb at the joint with the sheer weight of the bottle, maybe; pull it out of its socket.

Sure enough –four seconds later –the thumb came loose with a familiar clicking. Ted cringed.
Urgh.
He
hated
the way she did that. Her strange double-jointedness. It was just
so…

‘When do I meet up with him?’ she asked.

‘Well he said he’d come to the house at around three, but I told him I’d have to…’

‘
Yeeeach.
’ She flapped her hand at him –cutting him dead –turned on her heel and walked off. Five steps later, however, she paused, spun around, pointed the tail at him, ‘And
you…
’ she told him ominously, before snatching the tail back and marching off at top speed, that sour half-sentence still hanging in the cold midday air, still ringing in his head like a small pebble in a milk bottle, rolling and bouncing down a steep, cobbled hill.

Ted gently expelled a modest, acid-based burp as he tucked in his tie again and stared helplessly after her, his face a detailed study in forlorn disquietude.

One thing at least, he thought, was absolutely for certain: nobody could exit better than Miss Katherine Turpin.

Thirteen

It was a fourteen mile round trip, all told; a slog, a solid four hours’ worth, if he was lucky. And the weather was shitty (the sky sheeted up and promising, if not snow, then sleet), and his waterproof mac was in his back-pack, and his back-pack was hidden inside the small thicket where he’d been sleeping – a cramped, hollow, shallow indentation, but
dry,
and trimmed with spiky blackthorn, the lower branches still drooping (inexplicably, for so late in the season) with hard, slightly-shrunken, damson-coloured berries.

Sloes

Their fierce juice had stained his hands, his elbows, the nylon fabric of his sleeping bag. It’d seeped practically everywhere. He’d scrubbed it off, at dawn, in the river, stopping himself from gasping by cursing until his tongue was cut, finally, by his gappy teeth chattering –

Cold

Wesley glanced behind him.

In actual fact he was pretty keen to investigate the blackthorn’s holistic and nutritional potential. The sloes were edible but disgusting (he knew they flavoured gin –and wonderfully –but this didn’t say much about their dietary capabilities). He needed to consult a good herbal dictionary (in the library, perhaps –next time, maybe). He made a quick mental note of it. Slotted it away.

Fourteen miles. A
solid
four hours. But he still didn’t start immediately. At first he simply meandered awhile; planned ahead a little; strolled part-way down the High Street, past the Post Office, the estate agency (no one of note inside except for a short, squat, ruddy-faced creature who was sitting squarely at a desk
and devouring the contents of a large jar of stuffed green olives with his stubby white fingers while appearing not in the least bit discomforted by the awful fact of having some kind of foul, ginger-skinned rodent clambering across his bleary-seeming but greed-enlivened physiognomy. This miserable creature –Wesley deduced –was none other than the fabulously bewhiskered Pathfinder).

He wandered on further, past the haberdasher’s and the grocer’s, the chip shop and the Wimpy until he stood –just fleetingly –outside Saks; a small, unpretentious, slightly dilapidated wine bar.

Inside Wesley was able to discern only two people, in total (two men, more precisely, sitting on stools in the gloom by the counter, sharing a quiet yet amicable beer together), both of whom –he stared even harder –were wearing customised shirts and caps, so probably worked there.

But he appreciated the look of this place –its scruffy, subterranean, almost saloon-like aura –and on a blackboard outside, in badly-formed lettering, he read a list of attractions including
pool and darts and satellite and pub grub and music.

Wesley paused, weighed up these enticements, looked for a lunch board (couldn’t see one), carefully considered their refuse disposal procedure, frowned, cracked his knuckles, then slowly walked on again.

He instinctively strolled seawards (it was a knack he had. His Dad had been a marine. The sea was in his blood –in his bones –in his spleen. He had a salt water compass concealed deep inside of him), heading back up the Furtherwick, past Mango-stone Katherine’s, past the pale-green bungalow with the ungainly verandah (no one about currently, no man-moose, his nose glued to the shutters, no perceptible stirrings inside whatsoever).

Wesley paused for a second. What did it
mean,
this curiously huge verandah? What did it say? Was this a practical individual? Was this an exceptionally public person? Or a private man living –uneasily, perhaps –in the public arena?

Or was the verandah symptomatic of some kind of internal burden: whacked up, thrown together,
externalised,
to some degree? A carbuncle? A weight? A trial? A problem?

Was it something additional? Something tacked on?

Hmmn

Did it represent a man with an overriding, an inflated, a
disproportionate
interest in some particular issue? Some particular
person,
maybe? A sad man? A silly man? A nosy man?
Ah screw it anyway.

Wesley strolled on past a brand new hotel; a conversion, but smart looking.
[Fancy.
Things had certainly started looking up in this Godforsaken armpit of a town lately. Although when the Great Floods came, it’d be the first damn place to go under –sea defences or no sea defences –fuck the whole sodding
lot of
them.)

Other houses, in plenty (Not enough trees though, not nearly enough proper trees. Oh God he missed the trees. He
missed
them. The sky so fucking huge –like an empty, grey soup-bowl –a vast china meat platter.
Horrible)
then past the car showroom and onwards.

Hang on. Hang
on.
Wesley stopped abruptly –
Yukka

– in a pot, across the road, in the entrance to a small house with a stone clad frontage; just to the right of the driveway.

He immediately crossed over.
Two yukkas.
Even better. A big one –planted directly into the soil next to the neat, gravel driveway (suffering from a little frost damage by the look of it; these plants demanded sheltered conditions, a greenhouse or a length of fleece - at the very least –during this time of year), and a smaller one –a cutting of the bigger, presumably –just behind it, in a large, dark-green, ornamental pot.

Right. Wesley glanced around –

Damn

– the bloody
dog.
Where did he come from, all of a sudden? Had he trailed him, unseen, all the way from the library? (God knows, he was slipping. Was he losing it completely? Was he going
blind
or was it only hunger? Had to eat something. This was getting crazy… )