Behindlings (69 page)
She shook her head, opened her mouth…
‘Shut up,’ he raised his wounded hand, ‘
enough.
’
‘If you’d only just…’
Still she persisted.
‘No.’ Wesley pointed behind her. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘
there’s
everything you need to know.
There’s
all your answers…’
At first she thought it was a trick, that he was going to swipe her or shove her or run off. She hesitated. But then she turned, very slowly…
In the distance; Doc. The young kid. Hooch.
‘You’re running away,’ she said miserably.
‘No. I’m just running. I
like
to run.’
He clutched at his stomach again. She saw that his nose was dripping, that he was shaking.
‘You want to stop,’ she said calmly, ‘and you can.’
‘I can never stop walking,’ he whispered, drawing close to her, staring at her cheek, her ear, as if he longed to touch her there. ‘Not now, not ever.’
She turned, tried to speak. He stopped her. ‘The boy is dead,’ he said softly. ‘He is
dead.
Nothing we can do can bring him back. Doc has nothing left now but the Following. It’s his mission. It’s my
legacy.
He will die behind me. On his feet, struggling. On duty. In service. I am…’ he almost laughed at his own verbosity, ‘I am the Colonel of his undoing. I am his reaper. That’s my obligation. It’s the law. It is written. I can’t… I can’t… I
can’t…
’
He couldn’t even say it.
‘Which boy?’ she asked flatly.
‘What?’ he did a double take, was immediately furious. ‘This is the end, Bean, aren’t you even listening?’
‘Your brother,’ she said, ‘Christopher.’
Wesley’s left hand lunged towards his right.
But she stopped it. She grabbed a tight hold of it.
‘No,’ she said, ‘he’s
gone.
Your brother is gone. Christopher is
dead.
You can’t bring him back, but you can… you
can
stop.’
He slapped her face. His fingerless hand.
Hard.
She released his other, in shock, clutched at her cheek.
‘I’m a vessel,’ he said, falling backwards, reeling away from her, ‘they inhabit me. They find a home in me. I give them breath. I give them meaning. I am…’ he started laughing, indicated down towards his body, almost tripping with self-disgust, ‘there’s nothing
left
of me. I’m what remains on the beach after the high tide. I am the flotsam. I am gathered up. I am spat out. I am redundant, surplus,
debris…
’
‘
Rubbish.
’
‘Exactly!’
He pointed at her, howling.
She frowned, ‘That’s not what I…’
But he’d turned and was walking again. With wide strides. Joyously. Like a whistling lumberjack in a mature pine plantation. Like a cowboy in spurs at the start of a long cattle drive.
‘
I am the fucking,
’ he suddenly yelled, then started running.
She knew she’d never catch him, then.
‘
I AM THE FUCKING.
’
He was abandoned
He was delirious
He was un-stopped
He was
begun
Then a car pulled over, onto the hard shoulder. Two men piled out of it. She had never seen them before. But they were entirely at their ease here. They were familiar. They set their faces, established their paces. And suddenly they were Following. They were…
I am the FUCKING
She could hear him, still shouting, and then clapping his hands and laughing.
And soon the boy drew adjacent with her – then Hooch – then Doc – just one shoe on his foot – the little dog – they drew abreast of her, they drew ahead of her, they pulled away from her.
The
fucking…?
She shook her head.
The fucking
what?
She stood. She stood and waited –
Just waited
– frowning.
She waited for an end to it –
She waited for a conclusion –
She waited for a rounding off – a flattening out – a consummation – She waited for a termination – an ultimation – a comeuppance (
Oh God, yes, please, anything
) – a noun – a verb – a full… a full… a full… a full… a full…
Stop
About the Author
Nicola Barker
lives and works in east London. She was the winner of the David Higham Prize for Fiction and joint winner of the Macmillan Silver Pen Award for
Love Your Enemies,
her first collection of stories. Her second story collection,
Heading Inland,
received the John Llewellyn
Rhys/Mail on Sunday
Prize. Her novel
Wide Open
won the IMPAC Prize in 2000. She is one of Granta’s ‘Best Young British Novelists’ of the decade.
Further praise for
Behindlings:
‘Barker’s work always has linguistic gusto and self-awareness; it is always anarchic and lovingly perverse, taking its readers with relish down unrecognizable roads and challenging narrative. With
Behindlings,
Barker, already a story-maker of astonishing energy, finds even more freedom of form. Imagine an Ealing comedy, but rewritten by a Surrealist.
Behindlings
has the energetic verve of
Five Miles from Outer Hope
and the remarkable lyrical strangeness of
Wide Open.
There is a playful immediacy, a swiftness and lightness of style and an almost Dadaist liberation here which shifts the writing on to a new level and into a new and true originality. Plot, in fizzing, exploded pieces, is all surface, and dialogue, full of half words, forgotten syntax and unended phrases, is as messy as talk is in life. This is the sort of novel which changes things – transforms closed narrative into openness, quirky Englishness into startling passion, and the Essex Estuary, with its modern wastelands and left-over oil terminals, into something poetic. An earthy, hilarious, romping runaway,
Behindlings
acts in itself as an argument for narrative originality and against all forms of homogeneity. It is marvellously inventive, a cornucopia of cornucopias all the way to its brilliant non-ending – its refusal to end. It is a new kind of book, and an intense kind of joy.’
ALI SMITH,
TLS
‘Written with the exuberant, violent energy of a Saturday morning cartoon show, laced with the easy bits of Wittgenstein. Behindlings are like trainspotters – they’re hobbyists, insulated by their enthusiasm. They are the stuff of pure farce. They allow Barker to reinvent, joyously, the cogs, gears and mechanics of the genre. She knows, as Wodehouse also knew, how to rev up the language, even break into a kind of poetry. She knows the funniest gags are sometimes just statements of the obvious, what people can see. Sheer wit and energy make
Behindlings
an excellent candidate for a cult novel – and not just a very good novel about a cult.’
MICHAEL PYE,
New York Times
‘Barker’s twisted take on people and reality is as intriguing as a half-remembered dream, her writing grabs you, twisting you into a skein of voices, rhythms and personalities which drags you along in its bewildering, bumpy wake. Like all the best storytellers, Barker begins
in medias res,
plunging the reader into confusion, challenging us to make sense of the overspill of information. Barker lets her bizarre, beguiling creation wander off into the mist, unknowable and untameable. Wesley is a great fictional creation. Never explained, never fully described, he is a down-at-heel hero, a rucksack carrying refusenik whose rebellion against capitalism and consumption has caught the public imagination, making him an icon of independence to the disaffected of the twenty-first century. If there are any rules left in novel writing, Barker breaks them all. Beautifully. I think she’s brilliant.’
Scotsman
‘Fucked up, fucked off and totally, weirdly brilliant.’
EITHNE FARRY,
Elle
‘
Behindlings
has an almost dream-like quality, as it tells the tale of a crusty Pied Piper figure who, by some indefinable magnetism, has acquired a cult following in deepest, dullest Essex. People are obsessed with Wesley – they are, in his words, his “behindlings”. They make Canvey into a literary Royston Vasey, a portrait of small-town torpor that’s so acutely observed it becomes surreal. An exquisite diversion and, more importantly, a true original.’
Arena
‘
Behindlings
is a magnificent novel and arguably Barker’s best to date.’
The List
‘Barker’s narrative draws us in with the disturbing, surreal touch of a latter-day Lewis Carroll without a hint of literary cloning, generating her own distinctive voice. The stark Essex landscape, chillingly described, is host to grim and displaced lives. Unexpiated actions of emotional betrayal hint at more serious matters of morality and conscience under Barker’s fearless imagination. At the end, of course, winner cannot take all, for there are no winners in this compelling novel.’
Sunday Times
‘She’s wayward, and uninterested in what conventionally passes for publishable work. There’s a lurid but skeletal quality to her writing – as if you get something deep in the feeling, and something decorative in the writing, and an unnerving space between. This is a kind of perfectly English work of art. It has a slinky, teasing exactness in the writing.’
Telegraph
‘Always a visceral writer, never one to be restrained by decorum, taste or euphony, here she explores power, hunger and attraction ever more sharply.’
Independent on Sunday
‘Demotic, chancy prose, which bubbles with cranky metaphors and enjoyably perverse ideas. Barker has created a unique world – vivid, stylish and bracing.’
Financial Times
‘Barker’s Canvey Island represents a world at once familiar and bizarre – a bleak huddle of takeaways and dreary days, bungalows with chipped paint and fading furnishings in a contemporary landscape that aches with grim nostalgia; retro-land without the glamour of irony perhaps. This is an intriguing satire on the nature of celebrity and the current confused state of our culture. Playful, dark, comic and cruel.’
Scotland on Sunday
‘Wonderfully surreal. Barker’s seemingly limitless imagination keeps you guessing until the end of this highly original read.’
Red
By the same author
Love Your Enemies
Reversed Forecast
Small Holdings
Heading Inland
Wide Open
Five Miles from Outer Hope
The Three Button Trick (Selected Stories)
With special thanks to
Mr Alvin Toffler
for his widely celebrated genius,
to Mr Vic Chesnutt
for his unabashed lyricism, and to
Bill Menniss
(proprietor of the incomparable Landgate Books, Rye), for laughing so mercilessly at my origami.
Flamingo
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Published by Flamingo 2003
Previously published in Great Britain by Flamingo 2002
Copyright © Nicola Barker 2002
Nicola Barker asserts the moral right to be
identified as the author of this work
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
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EPub Edition © OCTOBER 2011 ISBN: 978-0-007-39703-7