Behindlings

In general Arthur was not a man particularly prone to random feelings of arbitrary optimism (well if not never, then at least rarely. He was a solitary creature. And glum, habitually). Heck. He was just tired. That was it. Definitely. And he needed his medication.

Or a stiff, stiff brandy

Good Lord. How easily, how smoothly that’d slipped out of him. Five long years, dry as the Sahara. A stiff brandy? With his liver? What a curiously reckless, what a crazily inappropriate, what a stupid, what a stupid, what a stupid… A stiff brandy?

Arthur Young took a tremulous half-step out onto the truncated pier. It groaned under him, but it did not give. It was secure. Not so the handrail which crumbled like ripe Stilton under his fingertips. Woodworm. He placed both his feet together. He pushed back his shoulders. And then, in a single, smooth motion, he reached out his arm and threw the key –the string –the tag –up, up up into the foggy air.

There!

He diligently supervised its multiple adventures –its brief spiralling rise, its determined fall (like a sycamore seed, a helicopter blade, an injured grouse on the wing), its eventual splash-landing, its half-hearted floating, its gradual submerging –with a strong, with a wicked, with a powerful sense of satisfaction.

There

It did not matter a damn. He smiled blearily, his lips numbed by the cold, his cheeks damp and stinging. It did not matter one iota. He took a deep, steady breath and stared firmly ahead of him. No key. No keys. Because this was a door already open.

Nine (#ulink_04aecc06-5467-5455-a18e-7e3972cc8422)

‘It has to be the start,’ Wesley declaimed passionately, his two elbows practically indenting the soft pine counter-top, ‘it just has to be the beginning of a whole, new, completely comprehensive language of mammals.’

He was holding forth in Canvey’s rather small but surprisingly high-ceilinged, semi-pre-fabricated library, to a charming and comely woman who wore a pale blue nylon twinset –effortlessly exuding the kind of easy stylishness rarely attributed to artificial fibre –some ludicrously playful kitten heels –not the heels, surely, of a dedicated librarian? –a heavy, calf-length beige skirt –sharply pleated to the front and the rear –a coral necklace –her ten wildly impractical false nails painted the exact-same peachy-coral colour –and a mop of blonde hair set in solid tribute to Angela Dickinson circa 1964. A woman in her late fifties.

This lucky female was standing on the opposite side of the waist-high, well-buffed library counter, over which her hypnotically pointed mamillae asserted their powerful dominion with such thrust and determination that it was as much as Wesley could do not to push his flattened palm onto them (simply to ascertain whether they’d cave or resist… Oh let them resist… But let them cave… Lord, why was sex always so fucking contrary?).

She was almost certainly the chief librarian, although she wore no formal indication to this effect about her person. No tag, no badge, no pin or anything. Just had an aura of inexplicably kindly authority.

‘And you honestly think coughing is central to this new language?’ she asked playfully, her lavender eyes twinkling behind a large pair of expensively cumbersome, baby-blue-framed glasses. She was charmed by Wesley’s conversation. But she was incredulous. Both responses in equal measure. Wesley always found this combination to be a happy mixture. He provoked it knowingly.

His ravaged olive-paste eyes twinkled straight back at her (was she a real pointy woman –like the wonderful, huge-hearted, exquisitely-well-starched kind who starred in all the best films of the 1950s –or was this riveting display purely the result of a lower back problem and an ill-fitting brassiere?).

Wesley tried not to stare. But it was a struggle. The breasts reared up at him like angry cobras, they pointed like cheeky schoolgirls without any manners. Oh.

‘What else?’ Wesley smiled, struggling to keep atuned to the flirty meander of their conversation, ‘I mean I’m no linguist or anything –this is purely an instinctive reaction –but what else unifies all creatures quite so absolutely as a sharp, hard cough, when you really come to think about it?’

He paused, then added, his voice dropping, but still showing a certain flash of sangfroid, ‘Apart, I suppose from those other three great unifiers: the fart, the burp, the sneeze.’

The chief librarian snorted, then covered her neatly-painted lips with her neatly-painted hand to try and mask it, pushed her glasses straight and shrugged, somewhat coquettishly. Her name was Eileen, and at root, at heart, she was incorrigibly Otherwise. (Otherwise? She was a mish-mash, a mosaic, a medley.)

Eileen was Otherwise (plainly and simply): she was the bird in the hand worth two on the bush, she was the silk purse from a sow’s ear, she was the stitch in time who saved nine –she was all of these things and more in her Littlewood’s underwear and skin-tone support stockings (only the merest hint of French eau de Cologne, but with industrial quantities of Harmony, for good measure, enveloping and supporting her bright, blonde hair).

Eileen.

An English rose, but with solid, Irish foundations. A refined and elegant lady –undisputedly –but with an accent steeped to its well-turned shins in the coarse, muddy burr of the Estuary. Blissfully miserable. Softly tough. Strictly gentle. Horribly lovely.

Irish parents: Siobhan and Flannery. Walthamstow born and bred. A north-east Londoner, an east-seventeen-teen, then twenty-something, then faltering, gingerly, on that awful ravine of thirty (thirty!) when in 1975 her whole damn family –aunts and uncles, nephews, nieces –upped and shifted, en masse, to Canvey.

She’d already served a full ten year sentence inside the Love Penitentiary: marriage – maximum security –to a wretch called Patrick, who smoked Silk Cut and worked as a plasterer (a devoutly Catholic union. Messily divorcing. They’d had no children. Eileen, it turned out, was hopelessly barren).

Poor Eileen: a planner, a dreamer, a lover, a traveller, yet still somehow –but how? How the heck had she managed it? –still living bumper-to-bumper with the people who’d raised her. Same house, same job, same prospects as her mother. 1975. Everything just as she’d dreaded it.

Needed a change of direction –but nothing too violent, or challenging –so when the whole street migrated (staggering, as one, to this tried but untested gumboot territory), Eileen packed her bags, hitched up her skirts and clambered (broke a nail, bruised a knee) onto the back of the bandwagon. Joined the exodus. Started a brand new life for herself, next to the Estuary.

I mean there were new houses here, weren’t there? And jobs promised. There were plans and stratagems, designs and sophistry. Multiple incentives for the poor, the keen, the needy. A social experiment, they called it, to shore up the demoralised Canvey community after the chronic floods of ‘53. To re-populate, re-invigorate, rejuvenate. New schools, new shops, new industry, new bridge, new… new library.

‘But where did it come from?’ Eileen asked, placing her own two elbows onto the counter in a perfect duplication of Wesley’s (their funny bones now very nearly touching. Her 24-carat gold charm bracelet sliding down her arm a-way –Wesley liked charms, and he liked Eileen; she was cute and obliging as a baby wallaby –her breasts pushed together, the underwire creaking like the straining bow on an ancient, sea-tossed, strong-timbered lobster smack).

She stood so close she could smell his breath, sweetly flavoured, as it was, with rum and raisin. With toffee (he’d offered her one. She’d refused. It’d looked slightly soggy and was frosted with lint. And there was a No Eating policy in the library. No Food. No Dogs. No Noise. No Running. Standard library requirements. Eileen –while soft-centred –was a terrible stickler).

Wesley ate the toffee anyway and grinned at Eileen, passing the sweet from one cheek to the other. He knew just what it meant to duplicate body language. It was always a good sign. He glanced at her left hand –wedding band –then snapped back to attention.

‘I was actually in Cornwall,’ he explained, ‘in the middle of nowhere, out walking, when this sheep coughed from behind a nearby hedge. I almost jumped out of my skin. I thought it was a person –the cough was so… so human. It was creepy. But once I realised… well, an absolute revelation…’

While Wesley was speaking, the library’s swing doors swung wide behind him. He felt a gust of cold air but did not turn to face it, merely watched all the action gradually unfolding inside the high-polished reflection of Eileen’s two, wide lenses.

Doc… The girl (the new girl –Miss Whisky-Eyes, Miss Sticky-Finger)… Patty… Shoes… then Hooch, five seconds later… Another person; a woman with a baby (in a pushchair); Hooch held the door open for her. Wesley automatically counted her among them (he’d had mothers and babies Following before, but only very briefly. It wasn’t especially workable, or healthy, for that matter).

The woman paused as the door slammed behind her, then peeled off to the right, splitting from the others –Good. That was better.

The rest slowly filtered past him, one by one, glancing nervously around them, nobody speaking, feet shuffling, weatherproof jackets squeaking, noses streaming…

Then he heard the girl. ‘Fiction,’ she whispered. ‘Over there, I reckon.’

Shortly after, Hooch (a muffled boom –like heavy-artillery practice at a firing range, five-plus miles away) murmured, ‘I told you so,’ then sniggered obnoxiously.

The girl led the rest of them into the far left-hand corner (she’s been here before, Wesley surmised, slotting this fact away for later). They all followed her, except for Patty, who slid the flat of his grubby hand along the counter-top –savouring the high-polished gloss and the squeak of his palm on it –then stopped and waited.

Wesley’s lips tightened. He found the boy irritating. Children never understood the way of things. Following especially. The rules. The protocol. Didn’t have the subtlety.

Eileen was still talking –

Bugger

– he tuned in again, but too tardily to catch the gist of it.

‘… unless it’s a two way thing, ’ she finished, ringingly, her bright eyes engaging his, demanding a quick response from him.

Bollocks

Wesley immediately threw all his eggs into one, small basket.

‘Cat person,’ he exclaimed trenchantly, pointing the middle and index fingers on his good hand at her (like he was aiming a friendly gun –the kind that fired out a flag emblazoned with the word Bang or Gotcha). He acted as if the need to recognise this simple truth –this unifying attribute, this cat-fact –surpassed virtually everything.

Eileen frowned, thrown slightly off kilter, ‘Uh… no. No. I’m allergic, actually.’ She shrugged. She was not impressed. But she was briefly distracted.

‘Ah.’

(Fuck. That was clumsy.)

Wesley glanced down. Dennis was sitting on his right foot. ‘Hello there Dennis.’