Читать книгу Behindlings - Nicola Barker - Страница 12

There’s lamb and lynx and lion, Yet no fowl and no fish, either, Left on my terra firma. So wait awhile – Malinger – And if you stay a loser, Then plant your feet firmly on Daniel’s Candy To find a pill that’s sweeter still, A sugar far more bitter

Suddenly…

Huh-huh

HAH!

… having a little trouble…

Huh-huh

HAH!

… inhaling…

Huh-huh

Tired.

HAH!

Huh-huh

He was tiring. Had to regulate his…

HAH!

… breathing…

Huh-huh

Slow things down…

HAH!

… a little…

Almost always happened…

Huh-huh

… five hours…

Huh-huh

… in…

HAH!

Arthur checked his watch. Four and three…

Huh-huh

… quarters…

HAH!

Approximately.

Huh-huh

He checked it again. Four…

Huh-huh

… hours fifty…

HAH!

Precisely. There you go. Just as he’d predicted. Five hours. Only ten…

Huh-huh

… minutes…

Huh-huh

… under. Not bad going. Simply had to regulate…

Huh-huh

Had to focus. Had to stop pushing. Just…

HAH!

… cruise…

Huh-huh

… awhile. Just cruise. Just…

Okay.

Okay

Yes.

HAH!

And…

Phew!

… better.

Candy Island? Jeeeesus! (Pulse was racing. Chest pumping.

Heart banging like… heart throbbing like… fragile-pink-shuddering-hairless-newborn-rodent… Stop! … rat… Stop!… fieldmouse… Stop –HAH! – thinking!)

Huh-huh

Candy? What the heck was that all about, anyway? Yes he knew it was a nod to Defoe (Arthur hawked, then expertly spat the dense yet compact globule over his shoulder) but the actual meaning of the reference…

Huh-huh

… as Defoe used it, originally?

Of course – and this was the worst part – Wesley himself probably didn’t have the first…

HAH!

… idea about the phrase’s basic etymology. He was so damn slap-happy, so relentlessly superficial. A cunning magpie. A stinking plagiariser. And so determinedly cheerful about it. Such a blissful bloody…

HAH!

… philistine.

Arthur bent down abruptly to tighten one of his shoelaces –so abruptly, in fact, that the weight of his rucksack almost toppled him. He quickly stiffened his legs, his thighs, stretched out his arms; palms pushed forward –grumbling furiously –rapidly re-located his centre of gravity, tapped the ground lightly with his fingertips –just to make certain –then yanked hard at the lace and firmly re-tied it.

Wasn’t the poor –Huh-huh –lace’s fault, was it!

Defoe? A preposterous seventeenth century opportunist, a loose cannon, an incorrigible hypocrite. And that –let’s face it –was putting it politely.

Candy.

Candy…

Arthur stood up. His face glistening. He grimaced. He re-adjusted his back-pack. He walked on again.

Presumably there was some vague historical connection with the sugar industry, but in truth he was pretty uncertain as to the finer details. I mean wasn’t everybody? He was fairly sure, though, that Defoe hadn’t ever been explicit about the origin of this phrase in his copious writings, or its actual…

Phew! Deep breaths. Deep, deep… One-two. One-two. Yes. That was better. That was…

… meaning. And if it had another source –Shakespeare? Chaucer? Dick bloody Francis? – Arthur was buggered if he knew what it might be. He was a specialist, dammit. A Specialist. He was the first to admit it, and proudly. Not for him the comprehensive route, the broad-based background in everything from the novels of Jane Austen to the origins of world debt to the nesting habits of the black-headed gull (Arthur Young, a Generalist? Never!).

Arthur Young was partial, he was a pundit, a boffin, a connoisseur. He was –and there was nothing wrong in it, either –he was… he was particular.

There

(But hang on a second. Hang on a minute. Because… because wasn’t this his area? The seventeenth century? Farming methods. Livestock quotas. The consequences of enclosure. All the rest of that miserable, desiccated, dry-as-a-bone malarkey? Wasn’t this his speciality? Wasn’t…? Ah, fuck it. Fuck…)

Something was very wrong here.

One-two. One-two.

Shetland ponies

Hah!

Industrial landmarks

Hah!

Machinery dating back to the industrial revolution

Hah!

Walking. Walking. Walking.

HAH!

Just the same (so put this in your ruddy pipe and smoke it), he’d painstakingly re-scrutinized the relevant chapters of the book in question the previous evening (Defoe’s excessively lauded A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain) for any other direct reference to Canvey, just in case something tiny might’ve slipped his mind. But it hadn’t. HAH!

It hadn’t. Thankfully. So he took the phrase to be a topical seventeenth century reference, something throw-away, incidental, insignificant…

Left knee was creaking a little. There was a lesson in that, wasn’t there! Yup. Shouldn’t have bent over so violently.

He did know, though, from what little he’d retained from his own long distant researches –and not forgetting those of his esteemed relative; his great, great, great… how many greats was it? Six? Seven? Sod it –that they’d farmed sheep on the island, originally. The fat-tailed variety.

And they’d made special, extremely strong, exceedingly coarse, border-line-loathsome cheeses. From goat’s milk. Sent them, posthaste, to the London slums. Corroded their mean and impoverished palates with them.

Anything else? He struggled to remember. He’d last walked this route way back –way, way back –in 1973. A long time ago now. He calculated the numbers. Good God. As long ago as that? His thin lips tightened. His shoulders hunched-up, dispiritedly.

1973. A world away. They’d still had a swing bridge then –to gain access…

The swing bridge!

Ah yes. He remembered it. And he also remembered –that very same instant –a rather scraggy, slightly worthy, ludicrously keen, ridiculously independent, squeaky-clean, still, still, still just-teenage Arthur (remember?), precocious as a kitten. Square as… well, square. Eyes like a leveret. Wide. Round. Credulous.

He’d been a babe in bloody arms! Fresh as a peach. Prickling with idealism. Literally prickling…

Left turn now. Left turn. Shoulders back. Head up. Keep deep… Keep breathing

Before then –the 1930s, was it? When the bridge was built? (This date stuck in his mind for some inexplicable reason) –they’d used rowing boats. And you could walk over, if you were careful, at low tide. There were stepping stones (and casualties).

What was the name of the silly boy who drowned in Anglesey? Warren, was it? Warren Summer? Warren Sum-n-er. Yes. Warren Sumner… That was him. Yes. Good.

No

Colin.

It was Colin Sumner.

It was Colin.

Arthur still retained most of his short-term memory.

Okay, not all of it, by any means, but at least some things remained intact. No matter what the… No matter. Some important… it was still working, still ticking over, still turning, despite everything.

Canvey. The bridge. The swing bridge.

Hmnnn. Air suddenly feels cooler. Brisker. Moister

Local people –as he remembered –had been almost unnaturally fond of this fine but patently rather antiquated construction.

The swing bridge.

He couldn’t properly recall what they’d called the damn thing… It did have a name… Now that was a challenge. He knew –or at least he felt, instinctively –that it’d had a person’s appellation. A man’s name. Something like Peter. The Peter Bridge. No. No, Colin. The Colin Bridge. What?

You’re thinking about the dead kid. You’re confusing…

How about Cannon?

Cannon – heavy armament –brand of camera –TV detective –bridge?

No. Arthur paused for a moment, placed his two hands onto his skinny hips and racked his brains… Cannon… Calvin… Colvin… The Colvin bridge. Of course. Of course.

And it was quite like Colin…

The Colvin Bridge; demolished the very same year he visited (it was flooding back, suddenly. Memory worked that way; damming up, the pressure building, building… then something giving; the wall –the buffer –the block –the nothing… then information –the news –the facts –the evidence –the data… a mass of it –an agony – gushing right past him in relentless torrents. Useless stuff, mostly. Rubbish –guff –padding).

In February. 1973. That was when it finally fell. So it must’ve been approximately this time of year when he’d visited, originally, because the bridge was still there, but no longer swinging. No longer working. January… Weird.

Arthur shook himself out of his reverie and walked onwards. He glanced around him. The fields were crammed with geese and peewits…

He re-analysed his route, carefully recollecting each and every single individual part of it: The road. The A road. Shouldered by potato fields. The water tower. The Pizza-Hut. The Texaco. The KFC…

Chickens. Yes. He’d seen some. And buntings. Bungalows. Big sheds. Old pubs a-plenty but with brand new faces. All tucked and lifted. Freshly painted.

And the pylons –hundreds of them –stretching out their metal fingers, deftly knitting the obliging winter white into a brazenly scratchy patchwork of wire and whizz and buzz. Marching towards the coast. A relentless army. In thundering formation.

Then –

Ah yes…

– the gradual flattening. The browning out, the bleaching. The stubby trees hunched up like pinched and twisted spinsters against the relentless slow-rolling lashes of sea breeze. The bushes, up on their toes, flaring, hissing, like angry yellow cats: lichen-ridden, feral, stray, bony, stricken. The landscape, sour and dry-grassed and mean and sulky. Low. Yanked back from the sea. Nearly dry, still resentful. Still sucking.

More roads. More mud. Tarmac. Roundabouts. More tarmac… ?-ha! Golf. There had to be, didn’t there? (Nothing grand. Just putting.)

The cuts, the banks, the creeks…

Then finally, the refineries. Balanced on the coastline like a clutch of steel reptiles. Like iguanas, nodding complacently –perhaps in friendship, possibly in challenge –towards the hoary, pewter, slate-smashed sea. Dry-clawed, shining, harsh, bulbous, slithering, contained, pristine.

Heavenly cities. Silver-streaked. Honed, funnelled, tanked-up, stripped-back, chiming and whistling (what was this? Home time? Lunch time? Some terrible emergency?). Like Dorothy’s Oz –once, twice, three times over –cursed and wizarded by crazy, metallic, sky-high titfers, neat smoke billowing in strictly circumscribed plumes (a celebratory cigar, smoked gingerly at a birth or a wedding), the odd, random bellow of industrial cantanker.

Arthur paused a while and looked about him. He was here, now, wasn’t he? He had arrived. This was Canvey. No. This was Benfleet. He was in neither one place nor the other. He was on the outer perimeters of both. One foot in either.

He pulled a map from his pocket. A piece of paper had been attached to it by a small silver clip (with another, rougher, less detailed map on top penned in thick black felt-tip). He glanced over towards the half-floating, mud-ridden clutter of the main marina. Low tide. Or low-ish –

Hmmn

Benfleet station, just behind him –

Check

The new bridge. Brick built in ‘73 –

Check

No name. Or none to be seen (did they never bother naming bridges any more, once the hopeful sixties were over?).

He set off again, crossed this unexceptional edifice –swamped in day-glo banners, for some reason; high tides? Tall ships? –took a sharp right beyond the main body of the marina, then abandoned the big road and trip-trapped back across a lesser tributary (if you wanted to string your fingers around the slim waist of the torrent, then this brief, thin segment was plainly the place to do it) over a perilous-seeming, tiny, hand-built wooden walkway, through an empty field full of broken bottles –aluminium cans, rotting paper, empty plastic canisters –and up onto the seriously-raised, neatly-grassed bank of Benfleet Creek… Curling like an adder. Man-made. Well-maintained. Quite deliciously –quite deliciously – prescriptive.

Arthur followed the creek, striding good-naturedly along its slithery ribbon. He side-winded. There were herons here, and things –if possible –were even plainer. Quieter. Sssssshhhh!

Scrub-land. Mudland. Sodden pasture. Everything just as it should be, by his reckoning –

Right.

He inspected his map again. He glanced up. Meadow pipits. And slime. Plenty of it. The tide still out, but dribbles of brown liquid trickling in like strong ground coffee through a cheesecloth filter. The earth still soggy. His boots –he grimaced –growing increasingly muddy. He walked on, heavily.

Sometimes there were horses; shaggy-maned, winter-coated, tethered by old rope to broken fences (holding nothing out, holding nothing in), exhaling fierce jets of steam at his silent passing. Head-tossing. Foot-stamping. Whinnying. Lip-smacking. Wanting attention. Wanting words, signs, whispers, kisses, anything. Just a sign. Or release, maybe. But Arthur walked on, determinedly, tightly bound as an Egyptian mummy.

Things grew wilder. He slipped and tripped through a sudden abundance of teazel and bramble, but kept his garments pristine all the while, never snagging. He ducked under the flyover…

Ah yes. The flyover. This was definitely…

Uh…

An innovation

Wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?

He passed beneath it, bent double, his back-pack troubling him. The soil underfoot, he noted, still recoiling from the shock of the thunderous cacophony above. Sheep-stepped, hoof-pocked, shit-splattered. Groaning.

Out the other side. He straightened –

Ouch!

He creaked a little. Over a small stile. Onwards. And on, and on, river-winding, cold-cutting, cheeks smarting, until finally, finally, he paused again. He peered about him. He stamped his feet.

He took in the vista. He had not seen another soul in well over an hour (he’d seen the cars, whizzing past him, but that counted for nothing).

Below where he stood lay a scruffy, mud-splattered wharf-like construction. A pier. A mean, wooden finger, pointing rudely towards nowhere. One boat attached to it, but not floating. A permanent craft, of some ungodly denomination. A stilted canal-boat. A hutch.

His hands were blue with the cold. He’d removed his gloves earlier, when he’d met up with…

Pale eye. Snowy owl. Ivory woman.

His mind flipped rapidly through a curious assortment of disparate images.

Cruella de Ville. Coconut macaroons. French poodles. Bambi.

Cold. It was bloody cold Goddammit. And misty now. He blew on his fingers. He inspected the stricken-seeming craft from a distance. He put his hand into his coat pocket. He pulled out a key (a small key attached to a piece of string, attached, in turn, to an old-fashioned luggage label with spidery black writing on it.

He did not read the writing.).

The air was damp now; quiet yet weighty: full-bellied with the snarl of speeding cars in the distance. He found the combination pleasing. Silence. Humming. A goose flew past him. Eye-level.

Wha?!

He jumped. Canadian. He heard its wings pumping. A clean sound. Its round eye appraised him. He shrugged to himself, almost embarrassedly.

Then, carefully –as was his way, invariably –placing one foot gingerly next to the other, walking sideways; hunched-over, knees bent; he made his way gradually down the bank (the Sea Wall, he supposed they’d call it, locally, but not concreted here, like on the coast-line proper), through the grass and the slime, without slipping –never slipping –towards this moon-craft. This wreck. This strange, scruffy, humble, chipped and creaking, something-and-nothing berth-dock-anchor. This mooring.

The mist will grow thicker, he reasoned –once he’d finally reached the boat; seeing the door hanging loose on its hinges, a window, cracked, smelling gas from somewhere, leaking, possibly–the mist will grow thicker–

It must

–and gently soft-focus this stricken craft for me…

How ridiculous these thoughts are. How utterly out of character. But he’d always loved the fog. He loved what it represented, what it implied, what it stood for.

So what does it stand for, exactly?

Arthur shrugged off these thoughts just as quickly and efficiently as he shrugged off his rucksack (the latter with possibly a fraction more difficulty –his shoulders were killing him) and then smiled up benignly at the sodden, cloud-smitten sky. These were sweet fancies. They were not typical –

What the hell is this curious light-headedness about, anyway! Excitement! Depression! Overbreathing?

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.