Behindlings. Nicola Barker
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paused, then spoke, all at once, in a guilty rush, ‘I found out that he lost his hand after he fed it to an owl. But I don’t think you should write about that. It seemed very personal.’
Bo grimaced, ‘Old news. Everybody already knows about the sodding hand.’
‘They do?’ Ted felt inexplicably disappointed.
‘What planet are you living on, Rivers? How could you have missed out on all that fuss in the papers early last year about his long-term evasion of Child Support payments?’
‘He has a child?’
‘A girl. Nine years old. Lives in Norfolk on a kind of crazy Fen zoo. Keeps reindeer. A total freak.’
‘And the owl?’
‘That’s where the fucking owl lived, you moron.’
‘Oh.’ Ted mulled this over, then stared up at Bo again, a newly-burnished respectfulness shining in his brass-brown eyes, ‘So what other stuff have you unearthed about him during your investigation?’
Bo shoved his hand into his mac pocket and withdrew a crumpled roll of paper. He tossed it down onto Ted’s desk. Ted reached out, picked it up and unfurled it. The sheet was a computer print-out containing a huge list of biographical facts about Wesley, as well as a selection of articles amassed and reprinted from a variety of sources.
1994, Ted read randomly, Wesley (at this juncture operating under the pseudonym Parker Swells – for further information see www.parkerswells.co.uk) completes a B-Tec in Business Studies with honours at the (as then was) North London Polytechnic (for student reports, course details, interviews with significant lecturers etc. see section entitled wes:b-tec/northlondon). He applies for several jobs in the field of banking. It is during this time that he meets a woman called Bethan Ray, becomes sexually involved with her and then steals a priceless antique pond from her garden. He is subsequently charged with theft and mental cruelty.
Ted stopped reading. He frowned then firmly folded the sheet over. ‘But how can you be sure it’s all true?’
‘Of course it’s true,’ Bo snatched the sheet back again, ‘and if it isn’t, who gives a fuck? I’m not here,’ he spoke loudly, initially, then lowered his voice slightly as the kettle clicked off in the cloakroom, ‘to tell you about Wesley, or to discuss some pathetic book you might’ve read at school, or to chat about the nature of truth or the underlying problems of technology…’
He drew a deep breath, ‘I am here, however, to find out, to accrue, to glean information. And you are here to give it to me. Unless, that is…’ Bo’s eyebrows rose suggestively. His silence spoke volumes. Ted squirmed a little under the weighty pressure of all this quiet insinuation, but still he said nothing.
‘I mean that is the understanding between the two of us, currently?’
‘Yes,’ Ted finally murmured, breaking eye contact to inspect his desktop, ‘it’s just that… in retrospect…’ he picked up the ruler and bent it virtually double, ‘in retrospect it seems like I wasn’t very well primed. Perhaps I should’ve been more aware of certain things –special areas of interest –to do with the competition. That kind of stuff.’
‘The Loiter.’
‘What?’
‘The Loiter. So where did you take him?’
‘Pardon?’
Ted looked up, guiltily. Bo was pressing his hands down hard onto his desk. He had knuckles like horse chestnuts.
‘I said where did you take him?’
‘It didn’t mention,’ Ted asked, swallowing nervously, his shoulders hunching, ‘on the internet?’
‘No. It listed the Furtherwick Road –this address, presumably –but that was all. The information’s always fairly sketchy. Everybody has stuff they want to keep to themselves. Even the informants. That’s the…’ he thought for a while, ‘… I guess that’s the irony.’
‘Well, we just…’ Ted paused, ‘we just walked down the road a way… we had a look around… took in the sights… uh #x2026;’ he cleared his throat, ‘looked at the school and stuff…’
‘You didn’t view any houses?’
‘Houses?’ Ted almost squawked. ‘No. Absolutely not. Absolutely no way did we view any houses. No,’ he crossed his legs, then his fingers, under the table, ‘it was all just… well, just simple lay of the land stuff, really… he needed to find his bearings… he said he wanted to… to mooch around… he said he was interested in geography… and pigeons… and birds’ feet, generally…’
As Ted laboriously belched up these unedifying informational gobbets (he had evasion written all over him. He was too genuine by a mile. Honest as a humble bunny. More honest), Mr Leo Pathfinder, in all his neat and tidy well-groomed glory, could be observed –a new moth, glistening, fresh from its pupa –silently emerging from the cloakroom behind them.
He pushed the door wide and posed dramatically in its sweep, his hair preposterously bouffant, his moustache quivering, his index finger raised and pressed firmly to his smiling lips in gentle warning.
Bo –who was facing him –saw Leo immediately, yet gave Ted no intimation of his silent re-entry. His eyes barely flickered from their minute inspection of Ted’s benign physiognomy.
‘I don’t know…’ Ted continued, now utterly immersed in what he was saying, ‘I mean I’m not certain if it’ll help you, but early on, when we were still in the office, Wesley told me some fascinating stuff about pigeon farming. He said that people prefer to cling to the idea that factory farming is a very modern thing, but in actual fact the Romans used to keep pigeons –and I mean literally thousands of them –inside these huge, nasty, airless…’
Bo said nothing, just continued to stare at him, focussing on his nose, especially. Ted took his silence as a sign of encouragement and so kept on talking.
Behind him, meanwhile, Pathfinder was on the move. He began to tiptoe, exaggeratedly (holding up his hands, as if scalded, lifting his feet in a crazy goose-step, like a deviant Lipizzaner), very quietly, very deliberately, over from the far wall.
‘Sometimes they’d clip their wings and break their legs so that the birds couldn’t move around too much. I mean if you can only imagine…’
Four foot away. Three foot. Two.
Then all at once, like an industrial rubberized, burgundy-bewhiskered Zebedee, Leo sprang –emitting an ear-splittingly wild yet eerily pitch-perfect yodel –and landed, seconds later, with both his hands, stiffened into a terrifying, claw-like rictus, clamped down hard onto poor Ted’s shoulders.
Ted jolted, he bucked, his eyes popped.
‘WAH?’
He kicked himself backwards –his swivel chair pivoting –and as he spun, his jaw jerked insanely like a low-budget skeleton on a funfair ghost-train. The wheels continued rolling and twisting. Twice he almost toppled, nearly taking Pathfinder with him. Leo was agile though, and sprang out, sideways.
‘YES!’ he bellowed.
The chair finally stalled –it stopped spinning –but Ted’s jowls continued juddering, his usually sallow complexion now the exact same hue as a sweet potato skin.
‘Oh fuck me, Ted, your face,’ Bo cackled, bending forwards and placing both his hands flat onto the desk again.
‘Was it good?’ Leo panted, scurrying around to Bo’s side to get a better look. ‘Did I kill him?’
Ted’s breath came in nasty gasps as his hands, white knuckled and shaking, clung onto his knees. His cheeks were hollow, his tie skewed. The material on his trousers, several