Behindlings. Nicola Barker
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half-shrugged.
As her shoulder shifted he noticed –and it was difficult not to –that instead of a dress she seemed to be wearing some kind of long, antique undergarment. Not see-through. But fragile. An apricot colour. Over that, two pastel-coloured silky pearl buttoned cardigans, half-fastened, and over these, a thin brown coat featuring a tiny but anatomically complete fox-fur collar.
As he watched, she shoved her hand into the pocket of her flimsy coat and withdrew some Marlboros. She offered him the packet.
‘Smoke?’
Arthur shook his head. She shrugged, knocked one out and stuck it between her lips, feeling around deep inside her other pocket for a light. She withdrew a large box of kitchen matches, opened the box and carefully removed one. It was at least three inches in length. She struck it and applied its bold flame to her cigarette, inhaling gratefully, then blew it out while still keeping the cigarette in place. A complex manoeuvre.
Arthur continued to gaze at her. For some reason he found the blowing pleasurable. He watched closely as she replaced the remainder of the match back inside the box again.
She was possibly the palest woman he had ever seen. Her hair was bright white. Shoulder-length. Thin. Straight. Most of it shoved under a small, round hat fashioned from what looked like dark raffia. With cherries. The kind of hat old women wore in fairytales.
But she was still young, if jaded; crinkling gently at her corners, like a random, well-worn page of an ancient love letter. She had disconcertingly pale blue eyes. Eyes the colour of the exact spot where the winter sky brushed the sea. Eyes the colour of the horizon, he supposed. Trimmed with white lashes, and topped by two haughty brows. A phantasm’s brows; cold and high and light and spectral. Barely there. Just a suggestion of hair.
Puffy underneath… the eyes. He thinly smiled his recognition. Oh yes. A drinker. He knew the signs. And he warmed to her, then, but it was a warmth imbued with a profound contempt.
‘It’s portable,’ he noted.
She nodded, and spoke with the cigarette still dangling, ‘Yes. An absolute bloody miracle of engineering.’
Her tone troubled him. ‘How far?’ he asked.
‘What?’
Smoke trickled ineluctably into her right eye. The eye filled with water. She blinked it away.
‘I said how far?’ he repeated, pointing ahead of them. ‘Canvey.’
‘Oh. Far enough.’
He nodded sympathetically, looking down the road again, then he checked his watch. It was only eleven-fifty.
‘Second hand?’ she asked curtly. ‘Pardon?’
‘Do you have a second hand?’
‘Uh…’ he finally caught up with her, ‘yes…’ he blinked, ‘yes I do.’
‘Give me the exact time.’
He checked his watch again then paused for a moment. ‘It’s now eleven fifty-one,’ he said, ‘precisely.’
‘Right.’ She began to fold up the bike. Her hands flew from wheel to seat to crossbar, inverting, twisting, unscrewing. She knew what she was doing. Her hands were small and bony and chalky, but she was impressively adroit. It was quickly done.
‘Finished,’ she exclaimed, slamming the seat down and tapping it smugly, ‘and the time now?’
He inspected his watch. ‘Eleven fifty-one and twelve seconds,’ he said.
She smiled, then stopped smiling. ‘Dammit,’ she cursed, ‘I forgot the sodding pump.’
She grabbed the pump and clipped it into position.
‘The manufacturers say it should take twenty seconds,’ she explained, standing up and dusting off her knees, ‘but I can halve it.’
‘Right. Good. I’m actually heading towards Canvey myself,’ Arthur informed her, deigning not to comment further on the fold-up phenomenon but staring down the road fixedly. He loved the road. He loved roads.
‘On foot? Are you crazy?’ she scowled over at him. Smoke in her eye again. ‘It’s a piss-ugly walk. Nothing to see.’
‘I like to walk,’ he said, ‘I like the fact of walking.’
He found the pale flash of her lashes fascinating.
‘It’s miles.’
‘I know exactly how far it is.’
She spat on her hands and rubbed them together. Then she thought of something and stopped what she was doing.
‘I get it,’ she said, a teasing tone suddenly hijacking her low voice as she removed the cigarette from her mouth and held it, half-concealed, inside her moist, milky palm, ‘you’re one of those…’ she scrabbled for the word, ‘those following people. A Back-ender. You walk places.’
‘Behindling,’ Arthur corrected her, looking disgruntled, but nonetheless refraining from either denying or affirming her assumptions.
She chuckled dryly (sounding, Arthur couldn’t help thinking, like a territorial squirrel: a base, clicking, gurgling), then she focussed in on him again, ‘It’s been all over the local papers because of the clue mentioning Canvey in that stupid, chocolate bar treasure-hunt thingummy.’
‘The Loiter,’ Arthur interjected impassively.
She nodded. ‘Clue three, I believe. Daniel Defoe once called it Candy Island,’ she grimaced, ‘whoever the fuck he is.’
‘Robinson Crusoe,’ Arthur’s eyebrow rose disdainfully, ‘he wrote it.’
‘Oh…’ she shrugged, ‘and what with that poor man dying, obviously.’
‘Don’t hike across beaches if you can’t understand the tides,’ Arthur counselled, somewhat unsympathetically, ‘especially in Anglesey. The water’s always been treacherous there. Everybody knows it.’
‘Good point,’ she concurred, ‘you heartless bastard.’ Then she smiled, casually up-ended her cigarette, softly blew onto the smoking tip of it and carefully inspected the glowing embers below, her knuckles peppered with flecks of ash.
Several long seconds passed before she replaced the cigarette between her lips, grabbed hold of the bike, carried it to the edge of the pavement and stuck out her pale thumb. Now she was hitching. Now she was done with him.
Heartless. Yes. Bastard. Yes. Arthur took these two words on board –not even flinching –and packed them neatly into his mental rucksack. ‘Good luck,’ he said, yanking up his actual rucksack, settling it comfortably between his two lean shoulders and walking on again.
Katherine Turpin turned and stared after him, her chin high, her lips skewed, her characteristically disdainful expression seeming, for once, oddly ruminative.
He was raddled. Yes. Emaciated. Yes. A rope. A bad thumb. An oar. An old oar. But even she had to admit that he walked, well, beautifully. An oiled machine; his legs snapping in and out with all the smooth, practical precision of a trusty pair of ancient, large-handled kitchen scissors.
There goes a man, she thought idly –cocking her hitching thumb a couple of times like she was striking a flint or popping a cork –there goes a man who should always keep moving.
‘He’ll head straight for the library.’
Doc threw out this apparently random observation towards Jo so pointedly, and with such clear intent, that had his words transmogrified into a volleyball they’d have hit her square between the eyes. They’d have fractured her nose. It was a fine nose.
‘I said the library,’ he reiterated, ‘and that’s an absolute bloody certainty.’