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Jo sighed, frustratedly, then slowly turned back around to face the counter again, her expression blank. Three long seconds ticked by. ‘Oh… uh, sorry… coastal marine biology,’ she concluded, then smiled distractedly.
‘That’s it,’ the assistant nodded, ‘Dioxin pollution. I remember now. And you were great.’
‘Well thank you.’
Jo’s money tinkled into the appropriate compartments. Fifty. Ten. Two. She took a small step backwards.
‘And I know this might sound a little bit peculiar,’ the assistant continued, plainly undeterred by Jo’s blatant inattentiveness, ‘but you actually have a real…’ she paused, thoughtfully, ‘a real knack.’
Jo inhaled, but not –she hoped –impatiently, ‘It’s only a system. Everything depends upon identifying the precise angle of the womb…’ she flapped her free hand around in the air (a furiously migrating Italian finch, caught in the cruel swathes of a huntsman’s netting) in order to try and demonstrate, ‘and then the rest is all just basic common sense, really. Your GP should get hold of my pamphlet. It’s available free from the Health Authority. Tell him to send off for it.’
She smiled brightly and turned to leave. Jesus Christ, she was thinking, how absolutely fucking excruciating. To be caught out. Like this. And here of all places.
The assistant, for her part, smiled back at Jo, nodded twice, perfectly amiably, then slammed the till shut. Nothing –at least superficially –out of the ordinary there. But as the coins in their compartments shifted and jangled in a brief yet acrimonious base-metal symphony, Jo could’ve sworn she heard something. Something else. Something beyond. Something extra. Three words. Half-muttered. Virtually inaudible over the surrounding clatter.
Don’t follow him.
Jo froze. Her professional smile malfunctioned. ‘Did you just say something?’
She spoke over her left shoulder, her hackles rising. The assistant’s brown eyes widened, ‘Me? No. Nothing.’
Josephine walked quickly and stiffly to the door, put out her hand, grasped the doorhandle, was about to turn the handle, was just about to turn it, when, Oh God, how stupid. She simply couldn’t help herself. She spun around again.
‘You’ve got me all wrong,’ she wheedled defensively, her head held high but her voice suddenly faltering on the cusp of a stammer, ‘I’m hon… I’m honestly really only out shopping.’
It was barely 8 a.m. A pale and freezing January morning on Canvey Island.
Outside the distant fog horns blew, like huge metal heifers howling and wailing in an eerily undefined bovine agony.
Don’t follow him.
Two (#ulink_ab57cad7-71e1-5a8a-9947-55be8c898aed)
Broad as the whole wide ocean, I, Empty as the darkest sky, False as an unconvincing lie, Invisible as thin air.
Others found me in the sweet hereafter – Look hard, Look harder, You’ll find me there.
‘Behindlings.’
Arthur Young spoke this word quietly in his thin but rather distinctive pebble dash voice, and then abruptly stopped walking.
His companion (who was strolling directly behind him) veered sharply sideways to avoid a collision. But although he executed this sudden manoeuvre with considerable agility, he still managed to clip Arthur’s scrawny shoulder as he crashed on by.
‘What did you just say?’
He hurtled around to face him, slightly exasperated, his arms still flapping with the remaining impetus of their former momentum. Arthur stood silently, his eyes unfocussed, massaging his bony shoulder with a still-bonier hand, frowning. He was apparently deep in thought.
They were pretending to hike through Epping Forest together, but they weren’t fooling anybody. A local woman walking a recalcitrant basset had already turned her head to stare after them, curiously. And a well-muscled young man on a mountain bike had peered at them intently through his steamed-up goggles.
‘That’s the special name he invented for the people who follow him,’ Arthur finally elucidated. ‘He calls them Behindlings.’
After a second almost indecently lengthy pause he added, ‘We’ve actually been walking for almost an hour now…’ he tentatively adjusted his baseball cap, ‘and whether you choose to believe it or not,’ he continued tiredly, his gentle throat chafing and rasping like a tiny, fleshy sandblaster, ‘I’m really quite… I’m honestly quite weary.’
His companion –a portly but vigorous gentleman who was himself sweating copiously inside his inappropriately formal bright white shirt and navy blue blazer –also paused for a moment, pushed back his shoulders, and then slowly drew a deep and luxurious lungful of air.
He looked Arthur up and down. His eyes were as bold, bright and full of fight as a territorial robin’s, but his overall expression – while indisputably combative, perhaps even a touch contemptuous –was not entirely devoid of charity.
That said, his immediate and instinctive physical assessment of the strangely angular yet disturbingly languid creature who stood so quietly and pliantly before him (speckled as a thrush by tiny shafts of morning light pinpricking through the dark embroidery of the thick forest canopy), plainly didn’t inspire him to improve his long-term, critical evaluation one iota.
Arthur. Thin. Gaunt. Frayed at his edges; on his cuffs, at his collar. Wearing good but old clothes: nothing too remarkable, at first glance… Well, nothing, perhaps, apart from an ancient brown leather waistcoat (carefully hidden away under his waterproof jacket) with rotting seams and bald patches, a strange, waxy garment which effortlessly conjured up entire spools of disparate images: visions of a primitive world; the sweet, mulish stink of the traditional farmhand, the implacable fire and sulk of the Leveller, the fierce piety of the knight, the rich, meaty righteousness of Cromwell.
It was a curious thing. Ancient. Aromatic. Romantic. Almost a museum-piece.
Although superficially loose-limbed and listless, Arthur was actually exceedingly precise in both his movements and his manner. He was gentle but absolute. He was unforgiving. His mouth was unforgiving. The deep furrows from his nose to the corners of his lips were unforgiving. His hair –trapped under an old, plain, khaki-coloured baseball cap –was thinning. His skin was tight. They had not walked quickly but he seemed exhausted. Shrivelled.
They inhabited entirely different worlds. His companion was ripe and unctuous; as grand and imposing as a high-class, three-tiered wedding cake. And although –in view of his recent exertions –his icing had a slight tinge of parboiledness about it, he remained, nevertheless, disconcertingly well-configurated.
After a moment he drew a clean cotton handkerchief from his blazer pocket, mopped his brow and then exhaled heartily. For some reason he seemed inexplicably enlivened by Arthur’s frailty. Buoyed-up by it.
‘So you finally stopped drinking?’ he asked.
Arthur twitched, then smiled, uneasily, ‘Yes. I finally stopped.’
‘And your family? Your wife?’
Arthur glanced up into the sky. It was a cold, clear day. It was midwinter. Everything was icy. His lips. His teeth. His fingertips.
‘I never married.’
His companion frowned. This was not the answer he’d anticipated. He’d imagined he knew everything he needed to know about Arthur. He’d investigated. He’d peeked, poked, connived, wheedled. The rest –the polite enquiries, the stilted conversation, the walk, even –was little more than mere etiquette. He continued to inspect Arthur closely –yet now just a fraction more aggressively –with his hard, round eyes.
‘There was something in your background…’ he began slowly, carefully unfastening his blazer, ‘which I never knew before, and it was something which absolutely intrigued me.’
‘Really?’ Arthur was unimpressed but he was nervous, and nerves alone rendered him obliging. As he spoke, he noted –with a sudden feeling of inexplicable dismay –how his companion’s plump thumbnail was split down its centre. Sharply. Cleanly. Cracked open like a germinating seed.
‘I did a little nosing around. It appears you once had a famous relative who wrote a book about walking. Or farming…’
‘Both,’ Arthur sounded off-kilter, ‘a very ancient, very distant relative.’
He tried to make it sound insignificant.
‘Well I found it fascinating. And you have his name?’
‘Yes. But that’s just a coincidence. My parents had no particular interest in either history or travel.’
Arthur cleared his throat nervously, then tried his utmost to change the drift of their conversation by suddenly peering over his shoulder and into the undergrowth, as if to imply that something infinitely more engaging might be silently unfolding, right there, just behind them, partially hidden inside that deep and unwelcoming curtain of winter green. Perhaps a badger might be passing. Or a woodpecker –lesser-spotted –undulating gracefully through the boughs just above them.
It didn’t work.
‘Your father…’ his companion paused, as if temporarily struggling to remember the details, ‘I believe he was a foreman with Fords at Dagenham?’
Arthur nodded, mutely, closely scrutinizing his own middle and index fingers. He wished there was a cigarette snuggled gently between them. He would kiss it.
‘And your mother worked on the cold meats counter in the Co-op… But you did. You had an interest.’ Almost imperceptibly, his companion’s mellifluous voice had grown much flatter, and was now maintaining a casual but curiously intimidating monotone. ‘Which was why you attended agricultural college in the early seventies, before undertaking what, in retrospect, might’ve seemed a slightly ambitious attempt to retrace the exact footsteps of the original Arthur Young, but a whole… now what would it be, exactly…? A whole two hundred years later.’
Arthur said nothing. What might he add? The forest shouldered in darkly around him. A short distance away he thought he could hear horses. His companion noticed something too. He glanced off to his left, sharply.
‘They’re on an adjacent track,’ Arthur murmured, cocking his head for a moment then walking to the edge of the path and sitting down on a wide, clean, newly-cut tree-stump. His companion remained standing, as before.
‘So I retraced,’ Arthur eventually volunteered, and not without some small hint of bile, ‘I re-visited, I re-appraised. I intended to publish a book, but things didn’t quite pan out. I found myself working for a London bank, and then, like you, in the confectionery industry. It wasn’t…’ he had the good grace to shrug apologetically, ‘a particularly sweet experience. I encountered some…’ he stumbled, ‘a portion of bad luck. I became unwell. Unfit. I received a pension. I still receive it. And you…’ he struggled to enlarge his focus, ‘you probably got promoted after I left?’
‘Yes. I had your old job in marketing for a while. Then I moved up a level.’
Arthur nodded. He inspected his hands again. They were looking –he had to admit it –just a little shaky.
‘If you don’t mind my saying so,’ his companion suddenly observed, his voice worryingly moss-lined and springy, ‘you got your breath back awfully quickly, for such an avowedly unfit man.’
‘What?’ Arthur’s sharp chin shot skywards a few seconds after he spoke, in a slightly farcical delayed reaction. His companion chuckled, ‘I’m not here about the pension, silly…’
His fastidious tone made Arthur feel grubby. It was a nasty feeling, but extremely familiar.
‘Apparently,’ the glare of his companion’s hard smile continued unabated, ‘you sometimes like to walk distances of up to two hundred and fifty miles during an average seven day span. Although last week, for some reason, you only clocked eighty-nine.’
Arthur was silent. In the weak morning light his sunken jowls glimmered like the writhing grey flanks of a well-hooked bream. The truth engulfed him.
‘Can you guess what it is that really gives you away?’
Arthur didn’t speak. He didn’t move. He couldn’t. He was a neatly snapped twig. He sat, rigid, hardly breathing, blankly appraising his several scattered parts from some crazily random yet inconceivably distant vantage point. From a cloud. From a swift’s eye.
‘Your shoes. High quality walking boots. Well worn to the extent that any moderately inquisitive person might easily find themselves wondering why it could be that a man claiming long-term disability allowance should be wearing such fine, strong, functional footwear.’ ‘I was given them,’ Arthur whispered.
‘No,’ his companion interjected calmly, ‘you have a private deal with a large shoe manufacturer. I believe the formal term is sponsorship.’
Arthur gazed down at his boots. He could smell his own guilt as patently as the shrill tang of disinfectant bleeding from the pine needles crushed under his soles.
‘Which was actually rather…’ his companion pondered for a moment, ‘rather audacious on your part, come to think of it.’
Arthur considered this. He considered the word. Audacious. He paused. Audacious. Yes. He drew a deep breath. His back straightened. His chin lifted again. He stopped pretending.
‘So,’ he said, his voice hardening, ‘does moving up a level –I believe those were your words –does moving up mean that you’re to be held wholly responsible for that boy drowning recently?’
His companion stiffened; his beam faded. ‘He wasn’t a boy. He was twenty-eight bloody years old. Don’t you read the papers?’
Arthur shrugged. He looked down, modestly, his insides warming. His companion walked to the opposite side of the path, leaned against a Scots Pine and then peered up tentatively into its branches, as if expecting to see a wild little monkey dangling among its boughs.
Arthur strung his fingers together. His confidence burgeoned.
‘I did read the papers,’ he muttered eventually, but without any hint of brashness, ‘I read about the Treasure Hunt. I followed the clues.’
‘No,’ his companion interjected, unable to help himself. ‘No. Not a Treasure Hunt exactly…’
‘Oh God. But how… how imprecise of me,’ Arthur’s mean lips suddenly served up the thinnest of grins, ‘and how stupid. Of course not. You called it a Loiter, didn’t you? A Loiter,’ Arthur unstrung his fingers and then hung them, instead, slack and loose between his bony thighs, ‘because our good friend Wesley invents special words for things, doesn’t he? He thinks words make things special. He wants every action to be particular, to be… to be individual in some way. And you know what?’
No time for a response; Arthur rushed on, regardless, ‘I honestly –I mean I honestly – believe that Wesley is actually self-obsessed and arrogant and vain… and vain…’ Arthur lunged after this word hungrily, and when his mouth finally caught up with it, his tongue literally wriggled with the physical pleasure it accorded him, ‘and vainglorious enough to seriously think that this curiously irritating custom of his –this silly habit, this novel facility –gives him some kind of special premium on originality. Not just that, either, but on… but on morality itself, even… You know? Some kind of God-given… some kind of…’
Arthur’s fingers were now twitching so violently as he struggled, a second time –and failed, quite notably –to find the word he was searching for, that he actually looked as if he was playing scales on an invisible Steinway (right there, in the forest), or practising something impossibly fast and fiddly by Liszt or Stravinsky.
And while he continued to grasp –helplessly –for this infernal word that evaded him so absolutely, his eyes –previously glazed and grey –seemed to moisten and widen (their pupils dilating), his cheeks (previously sallow and sunken) grew ripe as sugared plums in an autumnal pudding (a crumble, a fool, something tart, something hot, something sticky), until he looked like a man who’d swallowed down a large lump of gristle much too quickly –without chewing properly.
But Arthur was still breathing. He was not halted or suffocated or silenced by what was happening. He was still vital. He was still active and still functioning. If anything, he’d been galvanised. He’d been enlivened. He’d been pinched –slapped –spanked –thrashed by an intoxicatingly hard whack of righteous propriety. An exquisitely addictive, high-minded, bare-fisted, low-church-style sanctimony. His rage was not only pious, it was borderline biblical – it was Abraham’s wife Rachel, trapped, temporarily, in a violently impotent maternal frenzy.
Arthur’s companion (still leaning against his tree), observed Arthur’s long, lean fingers racing, the deep colour in his cheeks –his lips –and a tiny quirk of satisfaction began to lift his brow a way. Yet before it was completely risen, before it could settle, unequivocally, Arthur’s fingers abruptly stopped their fluttering. They fell back between his knees again. He suddenly grew still, the colour draining from his face –at speed –as if somehow repenting the too sensual flush of its former flowering.
‘The sad truth of the matter…’ finally his voice re-emerged from the icy depths of his sudden stasis, ‘the sad truth is that Wesley’s been brainwashed by his own publicity. Brainwashed to the point that he actually, honestly believes in all that rubbish he’s been spooning out over the years. All the lies. All the humbug. All the ridiculous chic… chic… chicanery.’
Arthur stumbled, quietly, on his final delivery. But even this stutter couldn’t trip him up. It couldn’t silence him. Not utterly.
‘The bald truth is that he’s watched too much bad TV,’ Arthur spoke almost regretfully, inhaling again, eventually, with some difficulty. ‘Yes. That, and he’s been lucky. He’s landed on his feet a few times when by rights he shouldn’t have. He’s milked his opportunities. And finally, to top it all off, he’s jumped –and so… so wholeheartedly, with such flagrant, such obvious, such embarrassing rapaciousness – onto this whole, madly convoluted, New Age environmental bandwagon. All that ludicrously pat Third Wave jumble. All that Alvin Toffler “Small is Beautiful” crap.’
Arthur sniffed, somewhat haughtily, ‘I mean it’s all been very timely. No point denying it. And he’s certainly taken the opportunity to read up on a little bit of pretentious French philosophy. He’s sharpened his act. He’s honed it. And I’m sure…’ Arthur’s voice was growing louder, his hands were picking up tempo again, were playing again –The Death March now, real-time, then double-time, then just plain madly, ‘I’m certain he thinks he’s a thoroughly modern hero. Like something from Rousseau. Or Nietzsche. Or, better still, an anti-hero. In fact I’m positive he thinks he’s a genius. And there are plenty of fools out there more than happy to go along with his delusions. But not me. I’m not one of them. Because he isn’t a genius, and I’ll keep on saying it. He isn’t a genius. Far from it. He’s puerile. He’s a shithead and a fathead and a peacock. He’s… He’s…’
Arthur stopped again, mid-flow, swallowed hard, twice, as if to keep something down, to push it back, ripped off his baseball cap (as if longing to keep his fingers distracted) and then continued talking, but glancing up now; connecting, engaging, projecting, speaking more carefully, more plainly, ‘A Loiter,’ he rotated his cap in his hand, pulling gently at the lining, as if testing its solidity. ‘It’s a movement –a violation, of sorts –but slow and calm and casual. It’s an invasion, isn’t it? Or an infringement? A trespass. It’s slippery. It’s untrustworthy. It’s stupid and it’s pointless. In actual fact it’s just like… it’s just like Wesley. It expresses him perfectly.’
Arthur shook his head, slowly, as if in wonder, ‘A Loiter.’ He rolled the word around on his tongue, ‘It’s actually quite pathetic, when you really come to think about it. It’s unformed. It’s adolescent… And yet,’ he looked up, keenly, ‘didn’t the company end up adopting the phrase? Didn’t you adopt it, I mean personally?’
Arthur’s companion grimaced, as if taken aback by his pointed ferocity, but then he shrugged, ‘We might’ve used it in the initial publicity, for a price, but –and let me emphasise this fact quite categorically –in this particular context it had nothing whatsoever to do with either mischief or risk. That was our proviso. And obviously there had to be a worthwhile prize at the end of it all, an incentive, a reward…’
‘So you called in Wesley,’ Arthur, in turn –even against his better judgement –seemed drawn into himself again, ‘a man infamous as a prankster, as a joker. An out-and-out wildcard. Someone with enough of a reputation for piss-taking to make your average level-headed businessman run a mile. Which –oh dear God –inevitably, from your corner, must’ve made the whole deal feel so shocking, so seductive, so exquisitely… well, transgressive.’
‘Yes. We called him in,’ his companion quickly interrupted Arthur’s unhelpful little river of adjectives, as if in the vain hope of somehow re-routeing it, ‘and initially –I’ll make no bones about it –to start off with, at least, it did all feel rather…’ he paused, nearly sneering, ‘rather audacious. Yes. So we called him in. And eventually –with a little prompting, obviously –he came.’
Arthur didn’t have to try too hard to picture it. ‘At first…’ he placed his cap onto his knee and scratched at his prickly, wheat-coloured chin, ‘knowing Wesley –I mean his type – he was probably fairly reticent. You presumably had your work cut out in persuading him. But you obviously,’ he smiled tightly, ‘you patently rose to the challenge.’
His companion simply shrugged his aquiescence.
‘And in so doing,’ Arthur continued, barely restraining his anger at the very notion, ‘I can only suppose that you told him…’ he held up his hands and counted off each of the virtues he subsequently listed, one by one, on his bony fingers, ‘how much you admired his boldness, his imagination, his integrity, his amazing knack for acquiring publicity. And of course he has his followers –a large and wonderfully gullible ready-made assembly…’
‘Of course. The Behindlings.’
‘And if I know Wesley…’ again, Arthur was forced to qualify himself, ‘I mean if I did know him, I imagine he would probably have demanded complete control. Absolute autonomy. Because only Wesley can hold the reins.’
‘So we hand them over,’ his companion continued, amiably, ‘we give him his autonomy. We let him work out a route, prepare clues…’
‘And it’s all terribly secretive.’
‘Terribly.’
‘But then two short weeks after you release the third clue…’ ‘Yes.’
