Behindlings. Nicola Barker
he hates being Followed,’ Doc interjected, smiling (as if the thought of Jo messing up was somehow completely irresistible to him), ‘and he never speaks to the people Following. That’s the whole point. It’s the rule. We are the Behindlings. Wesley actually coined our name as a kind of swearword, as an insult, but we don’t treat it that way; we quite like it. It unites us. It…’
‘It legitimises us,’ Hooch interrupted.
The others all nodded in unison at this, but Jo was still frowning, so Doc expanded further, ‘Wesley thinks you have to be backward to follow things. I’m talking organised religion, football teams, brand names. Anything at all. He’s a free spirit. People call him an anarchist –in the papers and so forth –but he despises labels; even that one…’
‘Especially that one,’ Shoes butted in, before instinctively tipping his head towards Doc and drawing a couple of steps back again.
‘The funny part about it,’ Doc continued, ‘is that people are drawn to him. They can’t help themselves. They like what he stands for –although he constantly bangs on about not standing for anything. And he has this strange way about him –a kind of simple charm –an innocence. Add to that all the pranks, the trickery, the mischief-making… and not forgetting the confectionery Loiter…’ Doc paused, ‘Wesley’s an angry man, make no mistake about it. We’ve all felt the brunt of it in one way or another.’
Hooch grunted, gently, under his breath, as if this comment had an especial significance for him, personally. Shoes just sighed, tellingly.
‘He’s high-minded and he’s unpredictable, and most important of all: he’s a trouble-maker, and trouble-makers value their privacy. So he resents our eyes. We irritate him. In point of fact,’ Doc grinned widely, ‘he loathes the watching.’
‘Poor Wesley’s hiding from the truth,’ Shoes interrupted.
The others all looked askance at this.
‘What truth?’ Jo indulged him.
‘The truth that he needs Following. Because –let’s face it –he is the very thing he’s so set upon despising. At root he’s the contradiction. He’s the puzzle. That’s what nobody understands. But we do…’ Shoes looked around him, detecting scant support in the others’ faces. ‘Well I do,’ he qualified.
‘Shoes is very philosophical,’ Doc sighed, ‘but no good at deciphering things. And terrible with maps. So we all try and help him out, time allowing.’
‘I do tend to go my own way, intellectually,’ Shoes averred.
Patty –who’d finished his doughnut several minutes previously –now made a meal out of scrunching up the paper bag and drop-kicking it towards the hippie. It hit Shoes squarely on the thigh. Shoes’ wide face rippled piously, then he stretched out his left foot, picked up the bag with his toes and tossed it straight back to him. ‘Put it in a bin, lad,’ he said.
‘Aw, fuck it man!’ Patty exclaimed, full of bravado, but he took the bag and shoved it hard into his jacket pocket.
‘Wesley also said,’ Hooch told Doc, inspecting his notebook again, ‘that she wouldn’t find what she was looking for here.’
There was a pause. Hooch eyed Jo closely, ‘What are you looking for, exactly?’
Jo did not answer this question immediately. She was still gazing at Shoes’ feet. Then her focus shifted gradually onto Patty’s coat pocket. Her mind was working differently. It was working lengthways, horizontally.
‘Love.’
Her face brightened. ‘Love,’ she repeated.
‘Love?’ Doc echoed querulously.
‘Yes,’ Jo grinned. ‘Love. I was just thinking…’ she counted off the words, one by one, onto her fingers, ‘Wesley… the library… Louis L’Amour… love.’
They all stared at her, blankly. ‘Clue One,’ she said, ‘remember? Look for love.’
‘Okay… Okay…’ Hooch laboriously drawled out his vowels as he wrote down the letters, ‘Looking for love, you say? L… o… v… e. And your full name is?’
He glanced up. Four backs, one tail. All emphatically retreating.
‘If you must know,’ Ted whispered furtively, his nimble fingers fiddling with the small gold buckle on his lizard-skin watch strap, ‘I was with him less than fifteen…’
He stopped speaking, turned abruptly and craned his neck anxiously towards what seemed –at first glance –to be a thoroughly unobtrusive door, standing slightly ajar to the rear of the office.
‘… but when we finally parted company,’ he eventually continued (having lost his drift but plainly having found –to his satisfaction –that the coast was now marginally clearer), ‘it was in the general, and I mean the very general vicinity of the local library.’
While Ted spoke, his spine remained corkscrewed, yet his words –for all their undisputed softness –were propelled from the corner of his mouth and over his shoulder with astonishing accuracy and fidelity; as if he were delivering a tricky golf shot across a sloping green, but using only the gentlest putt of breath.
Under the circumstances, Ted’s extraordinary wariness was not only prudent, it was positively necessary, for beyond that inoffensive door stood no less a man than Leo Pathfinder, his boss; a bluff and exuberant creature, a mischievous imp, often fondly referred to locally as ‘the little pitcher with big ears.’
The unerring accuracy of this description (although, in truth, Leo was no jug-head) had necessitated –during the years Ted had been employed under Leo’s tutelage in the dark world of estate agenting (now numbering almost six) –his gradual adoption of certain basic ruses and stratagems, all cultivated with the fundamental aim of trying to maintain –in his life and in his affairs –some paltry semblance of inner peace and personal privacy.
Ted’s skill as a whisperer, the occasional retreat of even his most expressive features into the protective shelter of The Deadpan, his timely adoption of a slightly forced naiveté; each of these little mannerisms and humble quirks regularly assisted him in his heroic struggle to maintain some tiny semblance of emotional independence in the ravening face of Leo’s all-consuming curiosity.
It was, without doubt, a supremely humble and irksome existence, yet Ted had always been made most painfully aware (by none other, in fact, than Mr Leo Pathfinder himself), that it could never be deemed proper or fair-minded or sporting for a grown man to overstate the magnitude of his work-a-day woes.
While life with Leo could be tough, humiliating, sometimes even physically dangerous (an unfortunate incident involving Ted’s left sinus and a badly directed veterinary thermometer being a case in point), Ted was hardly –and this truth was undeniable –a prisoner of war.
Leo was a blow-hard. He was gregarious. He was sociable to the point of immoderation (able to call, at any time, on the active support and keen participation –in his convoluted Ted-related devilry –of numerous visiting Estate Agenting Executives, the man who ran the sandwich round, the cleaner, certain suggestible clients, the local bookmaker, the bingo caller…) and while it would be erroneous to label him a consistent man, he was, nevertheless, quite revoltingly methodical.
Fortunately there were sometimes small hiatuses, brief pauses, little breathing spaces from the relentless pressure of Leo’s obsessively systematic observations –there had to be –and these Ted celebrated with all the blissful fervour which a ninety-year-old man might exhibit on discovering –after many years of drought –a