Behindlings (68 page)

Keen

Jealous

Josephine dropped the bike with a clatter. ‘Doc’s been in an
accident,
’ she observed stridently, then paused, speculatively, ‘although whether it’s entirely accurate to actually
call
it that…’

She had his attention. Wesley stopped, turned to the boy. ‘I need to talk to this person,’ he explained, ‘but we can still meet up in Tilbury. Around six. Outside the pub. Like we discussed.’

The boy nodded. ‘I’ll bring your rucksack,’ he said, ‘I know where the house is. I’ve got the address.’

He tapped his back trouser pocket. The labrador drew closer – sniffed – as if there might be something for him in it. Wesley leaned down and patted the labrador’s smooth, wide head. ‘There you go, Coops,’ he said, then straightened up, smiled, ‘I’d appreciate that, Peter. Thanks.’

Used the name

The boy shrugged, grinned, called the dog, moved off. As he passed her by, he shot Josephine a small, sharp look.

Wesley observed her reaction to it (the angry blush) as they stood and faced each other, unable to speak at first thanks to a powerful blast on the bullhorn of a juggernaut.

Wesley waved his bad arm, tiredly – like a thoroughly world-weary celebrity of the roadway. Two consecutive horns sounded. He grimaced.

‘Didn’t take you long,’ she said eventually, tipping her head towards the kid, struggling –

Battling

– not to sound like her nose was out of joint.

He was a tart. A
flirt.
What else did she expect?

‘You may not be aware of this fact,’ Wesley murmured, ‘but I don’t
often
speak
to the people Following. It’s my…’ he paused, ‘it’s my tick, my
trademark.
’

His tone was ironic, but he was obviously serious.

‘You’re pathetic,’ she observed coolly, holding her neat chin up.

Wesley turned side-on and stared into the hedgerow, as if determined to prove it.

‘So did he survive?’ he asked idly.

Doc

She could’ve sworn she saw hope –

A glimmer of it

– in his profile.

‘Do you secretly wish he hadn’t?’ she asked, shocked.

Wesley chuckled at her reaction, ‘Of
course
I do, stupid.’

He seemed buoyant. Unhindered.

She was infuriated by his frivolousness, but she wouldn’t –

Couldn’t

– give in to it.

‘So you’ve set up some kind of company,’ she began, calmly, ‘to buy out Arthur Young and control the Following. You got the confectionery people to help you – part of the original deal, I imagine – used them as intermediaries because Arthur Young has some kind of long-standing grudge…’

Wesley raised his eyebrows, watched a sparrow flit out of the hedgerow and onto a muddy furrow in the bare field behind. ‘It’s always been a labour of
love
with Arthur,’ he interrupted, ‘and that’s part of his charm.’

‘So you signed an exclusive advertising deal with him under the guise of a company called Gumble Inc,’ Jo continued smartly, refusing to be drawn by him, ‘beguiled him, hoodwinked him, gained his trust. Then, once you were certain that you’d managed it, you withdrew. You knew all about his sick kid – that he really needed the money – that he was desperate…’

Wesley shook his head, tolerantly, ‘You’ve got it all back to front, Bean; I contacted the confectionery people
because of
Arthur Young. He used to work for them. They still pay him a pension. He suffers from an illness related to an extreme form of alcoholism…’

‘You sent a letter to Katherine,’ she continued tenaciously (ignoring his intervention, simply determined to disgorge her own side of the story, before it either imploded, evaporated, or totally eluded her), ‘warning her off Arthur because you knew for a fact that she’d do exactly the…’

‘Flattered as I am by your
unshakeable
conviction in my boundless ingenuity,’ Wesley muttered, adjusting his damp trainers as they hung around his shoulders, ‘even I can’t understand why I’d’ve bothered to do that. My agenda has always been to keep Arthur Young at a distance. To draw him closer would’ve been counterproductive…’

‘You have some kind of
deal
with the confectionery people,’ Josephine battled on. ‘I don’t understand all the ins and the outs of it, but you’re intending for Hooch or Shoes to pick up the prize on Goodwin and then to re-invest the profits into Gumble. You’re planning to fleece them. It’s going to be your great revenge on them, your ultimate coup…’

‘What?’ Wesley gasped in pretend shock. ‘To make money out of… out of
myself?
’ He threw up his hands. ‘But that’s absolutely
scandalous,
Bean.’

She didn’t respond, at first.

‘Perhaps you prefer the idea of me,’ Wesley continued, provocatively, ‘as some kind of limp commodity which other people can simply pick up or drop or exploit, at will, whenever they feel like it?’

She looked confused, momentarily, so he pushed home his advantage, ‘But can’t you see the irony in that, Josephine? Can’t you understand – even after everything you’ve been through with Katherine – can’t you understand how
demoralising
it is to have other people consciously exploiting your mistakes, your energy, your weaknesses in that way?’

Josephine stared at him, her brown eyes narrowing slightly, ‘You
knew
Katherine wrote the graffiti?’

He shrugged, bored, ‘Who else would’ve cared enough to do it?’

‘So all that stuff in the book was just… just
bullshit?
’

‘No,’ he smiled. ‘It was a gift. I gave her exactly what she wanted. I
magnified
her self-hatred. I tested it. That’s my flair – or as Hooch would say – my… my
knack.
’

‘That’s cold,’ Josephine murmured, shaking her head.

‘It’s disgusting,’ he nodded, ‘but so what?’

He turned away from the hedgerow and glanced covetously up the road again. She could tell she was losing him, and that once he was lost, she would never get him back.

‘You
love
the Following,’ she murmured, ‘you pretend to hate it but the truth is that you
thrive
on it. Hooch was right, you’re terrified of letting anybody get too close. It isn’t grand or magical, it’s just pointless, slightly neurotic and not a little sad.’

He shook his head, smiling contemptuously.

‘You’re out of your depth, Bean,’ he warned her.

‘If you did actually hate it as much as you profess to,’ she said (refusing to be warned), ‘then all you’d actually have to do is to
stop.
But for some crazy reason…’

He stiffened. She suddenly had his full attention – couldn’t be entirely certain
why,
exactly, but she took a chance, anyway…

‘Just
stop.
’

She said it again. This word seemed to have a remarkable effect upon him. He finally made eye contact with her. His eyes were burning. She saw him reach out his good hand towards his bad.

‘I can’t.’

He turned and began walking again. She followed.

‘Why can’t you?’

He ignored her.

‘
Why
can’t you?’

She grabbed his arm. He lurched away from her, pulling his arm free. ‘
Why the fuck should I?
’ he yelled, then immediately struggled to kerb his temper, as if he’d let something loose, given something away. ‘It’s my
right
to keep going,’ he said emphatically.

He walked on. But he was shaken. She could tell by his uneven gait, the way he swung out both of his arms with a disproportionate vigour.

‘I regret mentioning the gas canister,’ he suddenly spluttered, ‘everything was fine before…’ He shook his head and walked even faster, as if trying to escape this unhappy fact. ‘But when I saw the girl,’ he told a passing bus, ‘and she looked so… she looked… something just… this
fury
…’ He put his hand to his neck.

‘Which gas canister?’

She was struggling to keep his pace. She was confounded.

‘
Which
girl? Your daughter?’

He stopped walking. ‘I like you,’ he said, drawing a deep breath, ‘and it’s incredibly sweet, this need you have, to tidy everything up. It’s very…’ he struggled, ‘very
quaint.
And I’m sure it’s an extremely
helpful
quality – up to a point – in terms of your medical career, your finances and all the rest of it. But as a
philosophy,
as a way of
life,
’ he stared at her, incredulously, ‘it’s just… it’s fucking
tripe.
It’s
shit.
Because things don’t automatically fall into place, Bean. Things don’t automatically make sense or add up…’

‘
I
don’t care what my weaknesses are,’ she said staunchly, ‘I still think I deserve better than that.’

He was silent for a moment, as if struggling against the overpowering urge to indulge her. ‘What you need to understand,’ he explained, giving in, momentarily, ‘is that there was an
integrity
to that Loiter…’ he paused, ‘and a
sacrifice
on my part…’ he paused again, ‘because I felt nothing but
sympathy for
Arthur’s situation, and I knew – I understood perfectly well – why he… why…’ Wesley tipped his head stiffly to one side, as if – contrary to his words – he
didn’t
really understand; couldn’t… hadn’t… didn’t
want…

He closed his eyes, shrugged, ‘I played a joke. I taught someone a lesson. It was years ago. I was vulnerable. I needed to prove a point. I took it too…’

He opened his eyes again, as if already dismissing this theory. ‘But when the boy died,’ he rapidly continued, switching his focus, almost burbling in his desire to be done with explaining, ‘I knew I was fucked. The whole joke had turned sour. That the thing I’d done to help, that the move I’d made to… to…’

He scowled – as if still in dispute with himself on this matter –

‘But life
is
sour, and jokes are…’ he stopped himself, shrugged, ‘I saw what it did to the Old Man. He was a bad father. He
knew
he was. He cared too much. It ate him up.’

‘The point is,’ Josephine interrupted gently (as if flattered or satisfied in some way by the neatness of it all, the way the puzzle had slowly started to fit), ‘that he got what he wanted. His son won. Just like you said. Because when he died, Doc finally took notice, and that was all he’d ever really…’

Wesley scowled. ‘The Loiter’s become a compromise,’ he said coldly, ‘and I won’t compromise the Following just because a large
Corporation is afraid of a little negative PR.’

Josephine frowned, ‘But you’re going along with it.’

‘Really?’ he cocked his head to one side. ‘Who told you that?’

He smiled at the look of shock on her clean face, ‘I’m blackmailing the company. I see the drowning as an
opportunity.
I’m demanding major environmental concessions to keep quiet about the whole affair.’

Josephine tried to make sense of this.

‘They don’t believe I’ll jeopardise the feelings of the Old Man,’ Wesley shrugged, ‘but they’re wrong.’

He shrugged again. It gave him away.

‘But they’re
right,
’ Jo contradicted him, ‘you
wouldn’t
jeopardise his feelings.’

‘So I came down to Canvey,’ he continued, ignoring her, ‘to shake them up. But they called my bluff. They sent Arthur Young in as a warning. I don’t know how they managed it, what they’ve told him or how it’ll affect the situation…’

Josephine frowned, shook her head, ‘I’m still not…’

‘I set up Gumble to launder the cash I was paid with for the
Loiter.
I fed it into the Behindling site through sponsorship. I thought if Arthur made enough money through the Following that he might finally re-evaluate his feelings on the situation. He could help his kid, rebuild his relationship with Bethan, go off and do his
own
walking, his
own
writing…’

Josephine smiled, ‘You thought he might give the whole thing up…’

Wesley smiled straight back at her.

‘But you were wrong.’

He nodded, ‘And then the company re-activated Gumble to try and win me over. Started all this buy-out bullshit, involved Hooch, Shoes – superficially to protect Doc…’

‘If Arthur doesn’t sell, would they hurt him?’

‘Maybe,’ Wesley scratched his ear, ‘depends how badly they want to fuck me over.’

‘But they sent that letter,’ Josephine jumped in, ‘implying all kinds of stuff about…’

Wesley looked tired, ‘Things can’t always fit together like a jigsaw, Bean. And nor should they.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’d be a kind of
hell
if they did.’ He began walking again.

‘If Arthur found out that you were behind Gumble,’ she said, ‘that you knew about him, about his kid, that you’d given him the money, that he’d turned down the chance to make everything right out of… out of what? Some pathetic sense of… of
spite?
That you
knew
he had, that you were suddenly enjoying some kind of serious moral
advantage
over him…’

‘Arthur needs to hate me,’ Wesley interrupted. ‘If he gives up the site…’

‘And what if he
can’t
hate you any more?’ she butted in. ‘What then…?’

Suddenly – and with no prior warning – Wesley turned and strolled casually into the middle of the highway. Two cars narrowly avoided colliding, trying to avoid him. He bent down. He picked something up. He was fearless. It was terrifying.

When he returned to where she was standing she saw a snail held between his fingers. He placed it gently into the long grass.

‘You’ve got to stop,’ she said.

That word again.

‘Why?’

He was buzzing, full of an uncontrollable exuberance. He laughed at her expression, clutching his stomach. ‘D’you have something
invested
in making me give up, Bean?’ he asked cruelly. ‘D’you think this is love? D’you think we should move in together? That I should get a proper job? Settle down? Get serious? Relinquish everything and betray everyone, after one single, dismal, meaningless
fuck?
’