Behindlings (2 page)

Don’t follow him.

Jo froze. Her professional smile malfunctioned. ‘Did you just say something?’

She spoke over her left shoulder, her hackles rising. The assistant’s brown eyes widened, ‘Me? No. Nothing.’

Josephine walked quickly and stiffly to the door, put out her hand, grasped the doorhandle, was about to turn the handle, was
just
about to turn it, when, Oh God, how
stupid.
She simply couldn’t help herself. She spun around again.

‘You’ve got me all wrong,’ she wheedled defensively, her head held high but her voice suddenly faltering on the cusp of a stammer, ‘I’m hon… I’m honestly
really
only out shopping.’

It was barely 8 a.m. A pale and freezing January morning on Canvey Island.

Outside the distant fog horns blew, like huge metal heifers howling and wailing in an eerily undefined bovine agony.

Don’t follow him.

Two

Broad as the whole wide ocean, I,
Empty as the darkest sky,
False as an unconvincing lie,
Invisible as thin air.

Others found me in the sweet hereafter –
Look hard,
Look harder,
You’ll find me there.

‘Behindlings.’

Arthur Young spoke this word quietly in his thin but rather distinctive pebble dash voice, and then abruptly stopped walking.

His companion (who was strolling directly behind him) veered sharply sideways to avoid a collision. But although he executed this sudden manoeuvre with considerable agility, he still managed to clip Arthur’s scrawny shoulder as he crashed on by.

‘What did you just say?’

He hurtled around to face him, slightly exasperated, his arms still flapping with the remaining impetus of their former momentum. Arthur stood silently, his eyes unfocussed, massaging his bony shoulder with a still-bonier hand, frowning. He was apparently deep in thought.

They were pretending to hike through Epping Forest together, but they weren’t fooling anybody. A local woman walking a recalcitrant basset had already turned her head to stare after them,
curiously. And a well-muscled young man on a mountain bike had peered at them intently through his steamed-up goggles.

‘That’s the special name he invented for the people who follow him,’ Arthur finally elucidated. ‘He calls them
Behindlings.
’

After a second almost indecently lengthy pause he added, ‘We’ve actually been walking for almost an hour now…’ he tentatively adjusted his baseball cap, ‘and whether you choose to believe it or not,’ he continued tiredly, his gentle throat chafing and rasping like a tiny, fleshy sandblaster, ‘I’m really quite… I’m honestly quite
weary.
’

His companion –a portly but vigorous gentleman who was himself sweating copiously inside his inappropriately formal bright white shirt and navy blue blazer –also paused for a moment, pushed back his shoulders, and then slowly drew a deep and luxurious lungful of air.

He looked Arthur up and down. His eyes were as bold, bright and full of fight as a territorial robin’s, but his overall
expression –
while indisputably combative, perhaps even a touch contemptuous –was not entirely devoid of charity.

That said, his immediate and instinctive physical assessment of the strangely angular yet disturbingly languid creature who stood so quietly and pliantly before him (speckled as a thrush by tiny shafts of morning light pinpricking through the dark embroidery of the thick forest canopy), plainly didn’t inspire him to improve his long-term, critical evaluation one iota.

Arthur.
Thin. Gaunt. Frayed at his edges; on his cuffs, at his collar. Wearing good but old clothes: nothing too remarkable, at first glance… Well, nothing, perhaps, apart from an ancient brown leather waistcoat (carefully hidden away under his waterproof jacket) with rotting seams and bald patches, a strange, waxy garment which effortlessly conjured up entire spools of disparate images: visions of a primitive world; the sweet, mulish stink of the traditional farmhand, the implacable fire and sulk of the Leveller, the fierce piety of the knight, the rich, meaty righteousness of Cromwell.

It was a curious thing. Ancient. Aromatic. Romantic. Almost a museum-piece.

Although superficially loose-limbed and listless, Arthur was
actually exceedingly precise in both his movements and his manner. He was gentle but absolute. He was unforgiving. His mouth was unforgiving. The deep furrows from his nose to the corners of his lips were unforgiving. His hair –trapped under an old, plain, khaki-coloured baseball cap –was thinning. His skin was tight. They had not walked quickly but he seemed exhausted.
Shrivelled.

They inhabited entirely different worlds. His companion was ripe and unctuous; as grand and imposing as a high-class, three-tiered wedding cake. And although –in view of his recent exertions –his icing had a slight tinge of parboiledness about it, he remained, nevertheless, disconcertingly well-configurated.

After a moment he drew a clean cotton handkerchief from his blazer pocket, mopped his brow and then exhaled heartily. For some reason he seemed inexplicably enlivened by Arthur’s frailty. Buoyed-up by it.

‘So you finally stopped drinking?’ he asked.

Arthur twitched, then smiled, uneasily, ‘Yes. I finally stopped.’

‘And your family? Your wife?’

Arthur glanced up into the sky. It was a cold, clear day. It was midwinter. Everything was icy. His lips. His teeth. His fingertips.

‘I never married.’

His companion frowned. This was not the answer he’d anticipated. He’d imagined he knew everything he needed to know about Arthur. He’d investigated. He’d peeked, poked, connived, wheedled. The rest –the polite enquiries, the stilted conversation, the walk, even –was little more than mere etiquette. He continued to inspect Arthur closely –yet now just a fraction more aggressively –with his hard, round eyes.

‘There was something in your background…’ he began slowly, carefully unfastening his blazer, ‘which I never knew before, and it was something which absolutely
intrigued
me.’

‘Really?’ Arthur was unimpressed but he was nervous, and nerves alone rendered him obliging. As he spoke, he noted –with a sudden feeling of inexplicable dismay –how his companion’s plump thumbnail was split down its centre. Sharply. Cleanly. Cracked open like a germinating seed.

‘I did a little nosing around. It appears you once had a famous relative who wrote a book about walking. Or farming…’

‘Both,’ Arthur sounded off-kilter, ‘a very ancient, very distant relative.’

He tried to make it sound insignificant.

‘Well I found it fascinating. And you have his name?’

‘Yes. But that’s just a coincidence. My parents had no particular interest in either history or travel.’

Arthur cleared his throat nervously, then tried his utmost to change the drift of their conversation by suddenly peering over his shoulder and into the undergrowth, as if to imply that something infinitely more engaging might be silently unfolding, right there, just behind them, partially hidden inside that deep and unwelcoming curtain of winter green. Perhaps a badger might be passing. Or a woodpecker –lesser-spotted –undulating gracefully through the boughs just above them.

It didn’t work.

‘Your father…’ his companion paused, as if temporarily struggling to remember the details, ‘I believe he was a foreman with Fords at Dagenham?’

Arthur nodded, mutely, closely scrutinizing his own middle and index fingers. He wished there was a cigarette snuggled gently between them. He would kiss it.

‘And your mother worked on the cold meats counter in the Co-op… But you did. You had an interest.’ Almost imperceptibly, his companion’s mellifluous voice had grown much flatter, and was now maintaining a casual but curiously intimidating monotone. ‘Which was why you attended agricultural college in the early seventies, before undertaking what, in retrospect, might’ve seemed a slightly ambitious attempt to retrace the exact footsteps of the original Arthur Young, but a whole… now what would it be, exactly…? A whole
two hundred
years later.’

Arthur said nothing. What might he add? The forest shouldered in darkly around him. A short distance away he thought he could hear horses. His companion noticed something too. He glanced off to his left, sharply.

‘They’re on an adjacent track,’ Arthur murmured, cocking his head for a moment then walking to the edge of the path and sitting
down on a wide, clean, newly-cut tree-stump. His companion remained standing, as before.

‘So I
retraced,
’ Arthur eventually volunteered, and not without some small hint of bile, ‘I re-visited, I re-appraised. I intended to publish a book, but things didn’t quite pan out. I found myself working for a London bank, and then, like you, in the confectionery industry. It wasn’t…’ he had the good grace to shrug apologetically, ‘a particularly
sweet
experience. I encountered some…’ he stumbled, ‘a
portion
of bad luck. I became unwell.
Unfit.
I received a pension. I still receive it. And you…’ he struggled to enlarge his focus, ‘you probably got promoted after I left?’

‘Yes. I had your old job in marketing for a while. Then I moved up a level.’

Arthur nodded. He inspected his hands again. They were looking –he had to admit it –just a little shaky.

‘If you don’t mind my saying so,’ his companion suddenly observed, his voice worryingly moss-lined and springy, ‘you got your breath back awfully quickly, for such an avowedly
unfit
man.’

‘What?’ Arthur’s sharp chin shot skywards a few seconds after he spoke, in a slightly farcical delayed reaction. His companion chuckled, ‘I’m not here about the
pension,
silly…’

His fastidious tone made Arthur feel grubby. It was a nasty feeling, but extremely familiar.

‘Apparently,’ the glare of his companion’s hard smile continued unabated, ‘you sometimes like to walk distances of up to two hundred and fifty miles during an average seven day span. Although last week, for some reason, you only clocked eighty-nine.’

Arthur was silent. In the weak morning light his sunken jowls glimmered like the writhing grey flanks of a well-hooked bream. The truth engulfed him.

‘Can you guess what it is that really gives you away?’

Arthur didn’t speak. He didn’t move. He couldn’t. He was a neatly snapped twig. He sat, rigid, hardly breathing, blankly appraising his several scattered parts from some crazily random yet inconceivably distant vantage point. From a cloud. From a swift’s eye.

‘Your
shoes.
High quality walking boots. Well worn to the extent
that any moderately inquisitive person might easily find themselves wondering why it could be that a man claiming long-term disability allowance should be wearing such fine, strong, functional footwear.’ ‘I was given them,’ Arthur whispered.

‘No,’ his companion interjected calmly, ‘you have a private deal with a large shoe manufacturer. I believe the formal term is
sponsorship.
’

Arthur gazed down at his boots. He could smell his own guilt as patently as the shrill tang of disinfectant bleeding from the pine needles crushed under his soles.

‘Which was actually rather…’ his companion pondered for a moment, ‘rather
audacious
on your part, come to think of it.’

Arthur considered this. He considered the word.
Audacious.
He paused.
Audacious.
Yes. He drew a deep breath. His back straightened. His chin lifted again. He stopped pretending.

‘So,’ he said, his voice hardening, ‘does moving up a level –I believe those were your words –does moving up mean that you’re to be held wholly responsible for that boy drowning recently?’

His companion stiffened; his beam faded. ‘He wasn’t a
boy.
He was twenty-eight
bloody
years old. Don’t you read the papers?’

Arthur shrugged. He looked down, modestly, his insides warming. His companion walked to the opposite side of the path, leaned against a Scots Pine and then peered up tentatively into its branches, as if expecting to see a wild little monkey dangling among its boughs.

Arthur strung his fingers together. His confidence burgeoned.

‘I did read the papers,’ he muttered eventually, but without any hint of brashness, ‘I read about the Treasure Hunt. I followed the clues.’

‘
No,
’ his companion interjected, unable to help himself. ‘No. Not a Treasure Hunt exactly…’

‘Oh God. But how… how
imprecise
of me,’ Arthur’s mean lips suddenly served up the thinnest of grins, ‘and how
stupid.
Of course not. You called it a Loiter, didn’t you? A
Loiter,
’ Arthur unstrung his fingers and then hung them, instead, slack and loose between his bony thighs, ‘because our good friend Wesley invents special words for things, doesn’t he? He thinks words
make
things special.
He wants every action to be particular, to be… to be individual in some way. And you know what?’

No time for a response; Arthur rushed on, regardless, ‘I honestly –I mean I
honestly –
believe that Wesley is actually self-obsessed and arrogant and
vain…
and
vain…
’ Arthur lunged after this word hungrily, and when his mouth finally caught up with it, his tongue literally wriggled with the physical pleasure it accorded him, ‘and
vainglorious
enough to seriously think that this curiously irritating custom of his –this silly habit, this novel facility –gives him some kind of special premium on originality. Not just that, either, but on… but on
morality
itself, even… You know? Some kind of God-given… some kind of…’