Behindlings (42 page)

‘I’m not wo-working for anybody,’ she chattered.

‘Except yourself,’ he sneered.

He was just as cruel as she’d anticipated.
Hateful.
It was what she’d wanted. She needed punishing. Pain was her motivator.

‘Get back in the car and start up the engine,’ he ordered.

Jo shuffled around the Mini, pulling her sleeve down, miserably. She opened the door, climbed stiffly inside, pressed down the pedals, turned the key in the ignition.

The car squealed, unresponsively.

She tried again.

A third time.

Wesley slammed down the bonnet. He circled the car, twice (like a predator negotiating a rival’s territory), then he yanked the door open on the passenger side and clambered in.

‘Any talking about specifics,’ he warned her, sticking his seat into recline (but sitting bolt upright in it) ‘about the Loiter, the letter, the Turpin girl, and I’m straight out of here.’

He slammed his door shut, pulled off his waterproof, his jacket and his sweater.

‘Fuck the battery,’ he said, pushing back her hood, yanking off her wet scarf and tossing it onto the back seat, ‘put on the bloody heater.’

‘Just keep ringing,’ Ted said, backing off slowly down the neat, brick pathway and colliding with a conifer (clipping it with his shoulder and starting – not a little comically, Arthur felt – like he’d been cornered, unexpectedly, by an irritable green ogre) then continuing to ease himself – still backwards, still slowly – across the parquet-style driveway (like he was a big saloon car, or an improbably large Pleasure Cruiser on an impossibly small river) carefully maintaining eye-contact – for the best part – so Arthur wouldn’t get all jittery (perhaps) or lose his nerve and follow him – like a lost kitten – all the way back to the agency again, ‘she might’ve fallen asleep or something, but she’s bound to answer eventually…’

He paused, on the roadway, ‘I’m sorry I can’t stay any longer, it’s just…’ He pointed, dumbly –

Glazier

‘Simply tell her who you are and that you’ve arranged to meet up with Wesley here. She’ll be fine about it, honestly. Contrary to what people like to say about her, Katherine can often be very…’ he bit his lip, ‘very
accommodating,
’ he murmured faintly (as if suddenly –or not so suddenly –having serious doubts about the overall situation, his unenviable part in it, the actual implications of what he was saying), then smiling (a little weakly), turning, waving, and promptly scarpering.

Arthur frowned. Accommodating?
Contrary
to her reputation? He pulled the rucksack off his shoulder, tipped back his hat, pushed his finger towards the bell, made contact and sat on it.

Ted had him all wrong. He felt no anxiety about meeting Miss Turpin. He had a very distinct idea of how she would be: sallow-skinned, auburn haired, thick-set, defeated. Like a young Pat Phoenix but without the fight. Like a rough-cut Liz Taylor circa
Virginia Woolf,
fluffy-slippered, sullen, puffy, mined, fag-ended.

He had no particular concerns about the thought of encountering her. He believed himself an expert in the laws of human behaviour.

He was tough as hide. He could handle anything.

Katherine finally answered during Arthur’s third resounding climax of Sinatra’s
My Way
(no frills or flourishes in his particular rendition –marginally slower, perhaps, than the more famous original; on the good side of monotonous, the cusp of funereal).

Arthur’s jaw went slack as she opened the door –

Good God

Who would’ve…?

That husky-mouthed, milky-faced, heavy-smoking, fold-up-biking…

That vicious…

She barely glanced at him, though, as she ushered him –rather crabbily –within.

‘
Hate
that damn song,’ she muttered, clutching her ear –
What was it with the ear?

But it wasn’t so much the
ear –
it soon transpired –as her whole strange, pale head in all its fabulous entirety. She was savagely hung over.

The hallway –Arthur put his hand to his nose, instinctively, his eyes prickling –was full of smoke.

‘I fell asleep,’ she croaked. ‘It feels like the bell’s been sounding off for hours.’

‘Is something burning?’ he asked, closing the door, putting down his rucksack (there were bags and bottles everywhere) glancing around him –slightly aghast at the mess –and then following her, carefully, down the corridor.

‘Your guess is as good as mine.’

She suddenly stopped and turned and stared up at him, ‘What brought you here, exactly?’ She scratched her head, vaguely, ‘I can’t for the life of me…’

‘Wesley,’ he promptly answered, ‘we’re meant to be meeting for dinner. He went off with the police about an hour ago…’ Arthur glanced at his watch, ‘in fact closer on two.’

‘Was it about the librarian?’ Katherine asked, frowning doubtfully, turning back around, still not focussing properly. ‘Or was it about his daughter?’

‘His…’ Arthur stopped in his tracks, ‘…
pardon?
’

Katherine rubbed her right eye, yawned, started walking again.

‘The daughter,’ she repeated, over her shoulder, ‘like earlier… when the police…’

She paused a second time, and shook her head (as if something had come loose inside her skull and the consequent rattle was truly provoking her) ‘… and talking of earlier, didn’t we meet before? I’m experiencing a disturbing
déjà…
’

She walked on, coughing, without waiting for an answer.

He followed her into the kitchen where the smoke was billowing (much to Katherine’s disinterest, and Arthur’s horror) in graceful plumes through the occasional crack in the oven’s perished rubber lining. The floor was covered in feathers and paper. No –stranger still –in feathers and
origami.

A heron’s wing was hung over the back of a chair by a piece of wire.

Katherine pointed to this wing, rather querulously, ‘Dinner,’ she announced, placing her hand onto her belly, ‘in case you weren’t yet acquainted with the menu.’

She went over to the sink, turned on the cold tap, ran it for a while, bent over and drank from it. When she eventually straightened up, the excess fluid dribbled onto her chin, her jaw, then down her neck. She made no effort to wipe it away.

Arthur struggled not to focus on the droplets –their fascinating –

Uh…

– descent. Instead he went over and switched off the oven. He opened the back door. He waved his arms around a little.

‘We met on the road, this morning,’ he said, trying to keep things casual, ‘when your tyre got a puncture.’

Katherine had grabbed her cigarettes from the counter-top. Her hands were shaking.

‘Oh God yes,’ she murmured emphatically, not even looking at him, ‘you’re a lovely walker.’

‘You have a fold-up bike,’ he said, slightly embarrassed, inspecting the marks across the back of her shoulders –

Friction burns

Blood prints

‘I do’, she readily agreed, her low voice quavering. She turned to face him as she lit up. ‘Smoke?’

‘Why not?’ he found himself saying –

You’ve given up

She was still wearing peach, in many layers –

Or was that apricot?

‘Please shut the fucking door,’ she whispered, hugging herself and shivering, ‘before I freeze my bony arse off.’

The house was improbably hot. The kitchen was still smoky. But he closed the door anyway.

She’d lit up a fag for him and made as if to pass it over. He reached out a hand for it. She dropped it onto the floor. Purposefully.

‘I am
very…
’ she said, smiling at him alluringly (as if she’d finished this sentence and not just left it hanging), ‘and not only that,’ she continued, ‘but
painfully…
’

He bent over to retrieve the cigarette, uncertain how to respond to her. When he straightened up, though, holding it firmly, she casually dropped the other.

‘… disappointed,’ she concluded, with a sigh.

It rolled towards the cabinets. He bent down again, automatically.

When he’d plucked it from the tiles (they were warm under his fingers –he rested his palms there, for a second) and stood up again, holding a cigarette in both hands now (what better way to give up giving up?), he noticed –with a kind of alarm, but also a kind of… a kind of thudding…
delight,
was it? –that she’d removed a prodigious cross-section of her copious silky layers. They’d slid to the floor, as if of their own volition.

She was now all but naked, except for an old-fashioned bra (which looked like it was made from a combination of cream-coloured tent fabric and some coordinated boot-laces) and a pair of loosely-fitting, almost contemporaneous (1920s? ‘30s? –what did
he
know of historical trends in female undergarments?) cami-knickers. The knickers hung off her hips revealing…

What was the word for the nape, the dimple of no-flesh, the cleft that lay so desirably underneath the knuckle of a girl’s hip?

What was the name for that?

Her body was hairless. She was white as a maggot. Her breasts –inside those hockey-shoe-lace-cricket-white contraptions –

Oh shit

– deliriously full and slack.

Arthur closed his mouth. It had fallen open. He took a puff on a cigarette.

Its fire crackled into him –

Why am I here again?

Back in this effortless, hungry, instinctive place I so confidently believed I’d left behind me?

‘I have some terrible knots,’ Katherine said, perching her marbled hip onto the corner of the table –

The whiteness, like a joint of flesh, all pearled in death; all plucked, un-hung…

The grain of old pine underneath

Its ancient creak

The shower of grey-black feathers

A Still Life–

Corbieres–

They were calling it…

Arthur stole another puff –

They were calling it…

She was pointing to her brassiere. The laces were all…

This has to happen

– he moved closer, like a man passionately engaged by a fascinating dilemma –a puzzle… They were all… all co… co… co…
coagulated.

A kind of miniature bodice, knotted to the fore –a tangle of closed-openings –an impossibility.

He put out his hands to untie them; clumsily, at first –a blind man reaching for the kettle cord; a schoolboy wiping down the classroom blackboard…

These huge brown hands

How could they achieve anything useful here?

He drew his face in close, was now down on his knees, miraculously…

The smell of… of
violence
from the tiny pleats in her belly. The clefts between…

Made the hairs on his…

No –

No

– the smell of
Violets –

Spring flowering so sweetly-mauve in the moist shelter of shady corners –

Uh…

– and cigarettes.

Where had he put them?

But the tangle was too… too important. He stared even harder at it. His nose was very nearly… and his fingers… the pale skin –when he brushed it, inadvertently –hot as seared chicken, straight from the spit of frying –

The tangle…

His fingers pulled and teased and twisted and wound and interwound. Then his teeth were pulling too, but only very gently, and the laces were dampened and the ancient moth-smelling, cricket-pad, english-lawn-green-wax-rubbing cotton and the flesh just to the left of it –and to the right of it –and the damper flesh, pinkened by the pressure of fabric just under –

The tightness…

They were suddenly on the…

Tiles hot below the scrape of pale and the knickers loose as butter-fabric slipping with the ineluctable pleat of…

Five fingers each with… She had five fingers and they had that pressure-warm-push-and-determined force of… of…
Snout

Busy as any kind of sharp-nosed wild white woodland creature you might care to mention in the ice-snow-cold of winter with the searing-hot-scarlet of… of…

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 –