Behindlings. Nicola Barker
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NICOLA BARKER
Behindlings
For dear Charles Edward Johnson, who slammed his way out of that damn velvet factory – smashing the glass door behind him – never, ever to look back again. And for his beautiful, blue-eyed wife, Betty, who, at the grand old age of 84, discovered that the pylons could love one another.
CONTENTS
Wesley glanced behind him. Two people followed, but at a sensible distance. The first was familiar; an old man whose name he knew to be Murdoch. Murdoch, Wesley remembered, had been robust, once. He’d been grizzled. Huge. Frosty. A magnificent, clambering, prickly pear of a man. He’d been firm and strong and resolute. Planted; a man-tree, if ever there was one.
Recently, however, Murdoch’s body had begun to curve, to arc (they all called him Doc, although he hadn’t even seen the inside of a hospital until his sixty-third year –he was a home birth, people invariably were, back then –when necessity dictated that a small reddish hillock, a mole, on his right shoulder blade, should be surgically removed. He was a scaffolder, by trade).
But the curving was nothing medical. It went deeper. And along with this