‘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 small but sweetly intrepid erection floating daintily in the tired suds of a hot bath.
As part and parcel of their daily lives, both Ted and Leo spent certain portions of their working day taking out clients to view vacant properties. For Ted these were periods of inconceivable joy and quietude.
Leo was also an atrocious timekeeper –generally preferring
to start his day some considerable time after the early hour clearly specified in his contract of employment –and this represented yet another small but nonetheless significant boon in the microscopically-observed drama of Ted’s exquisitely benighted existence.
Last, but by no means least, there was Leo’s moustache; his wild whiskers –his soup-strainer –his bold and brave and beautiful barbel.
To employ the commonplace lingo and designate the moustache as merely ‘a Handle-Bar’ would be to do it a deep injustice. Leo’s moustache was a hugely ornate and flamboyant structure, almost burgundy in colour, which stretched voluptuously from the deep channel separating his nostrils, dipped like a sumptuous summer swallow over each cheek and concluded its dramatic journey in a saucy, curling, upward flourish (the kind of gesture a haughty waiter might employ on lifting the finely embossed silver lid from a succulent tureen of baked lambs’ livers) only a whisper from the dainty lobe of either ear.
Leo’s moustache was so grand and so mesmerising in its scope and its audacity that it could always be depended upon to make friends squint, strangers gawp, dogs growl and babies squeal. Unfortunately (as with all this world’s artifacts of peerless pulchritude: The Golden Gate Bridge, The Cistine Chapel), Leo’s barbel was confoundedly difficult to preserve in all its hirsute glory.
And so it was –on that relentlessly icy winter morning –that while Ted surreptitiously struggled to accurately describe the general whereabouts of Wesley to his mysterious interlocutor, Leo was quietly holed-up inside the office’s tiny back cloakroom, deeply engrossed in the brief but complex daily ritual of combing out and re-waxing his moustache.
Fortunately this process always necessitated –Ted knew not why –the boiling of a kettle, and above its steamy whining he calculated that Leo could probably detect little from the office area beyond the repetitive mutter of distant voices sparring. Even so, as he finally turned to apprehend his fact-seeking friend across the clean, smooth span of his low-quality, high-glossed MDF desk, his gentle face remained cruelly bleached by a pale fog of unease.
‘Oh I know perfectly well where Wesley is,
locationally,
it’s more his state of mind that interests me.’
The man who spoke was known as Bo because his surname was Mackenzie, and the calf-length gaberdine mac was his main sartorial preference (even during climatic conditions generally thought inappropriate to the wearing of protective garb).
In all other respects though –excluding the mackintosh and the nickname –he bore absolutely no resemblance to
Columbo
the TV detective. He was not an ingenious sleuth. He had little grasp of irony. He was an improbably tall ex-tennis pro with perfectly straight eyes, badly receding black hair (which he grew long to the rear, hoisting it up neatly into a glossy ponytail) and a pathological inability to dither: the kind of inability, in fact, only ever possessed by the successful gambler (who’ll always call a spade a spade, except, of course, when he doesn’t), the pulpiteer and the bully.
He and Ted went way back. They’d attended school together. And after, when Bo’s legendary backhand had buckled (during a much-publicised Canvey-based charity mixed-doubles match with a popular local lady councillor, a post-menopausal pop singer and a lesser-known royal biographer) he’d funnelled his considerable energies into the fertile field of major and minor-league sports journalism.
Unfortunately, Bo’s imagination in print (and, alas, also out of it) had always been rather cruelly curtailed by the rudimentary stylistic limitations of serve and return. But Bo was not now, nor ever had been, the kind of man to allow a scandalous want of talent to impede his indomitable physical encapsulation of spunk and grit and zeal.
‘But
how
do you know where he is?’ Ted asked (diligently ignoring the question about Wesley’s state of mind). ‘How could you possibly know he was in the library?’
Bo scowled, ‘Internet, stupid.’
He waggled his right foot. On the floor just next to it stood a small, rectangular, fabric-coated bag containing his laptop and a choice combination of other high-tech journalistic gadgetry.
‘Really?’ Ted’s innocent eyes widened. ‘You’re saying it actually
records where Wesley is, from moment to moment, right there, on your portable computer?’
‘Yes,’ Bo growled, ‘how the heck would I know otherwise?’
‘You’re saying he’s…’ Ted paused as the true horror of the situation descended upon him, ‘he’s
bugged?
’
Bo snorted, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. It’s nothing like that. People keep tabs.
His
people. They watch him. They ring in. They help each other. It’s a voluntary thing.’
‘Good Lord,’ Ted mulled this over for a minute, ‘that’s terrifying.’
‘How?’ Bo was uncomprehending.
‘How what?’
He took a deep breath, ‘How is it terrifying that Wesley’s on the internet? Everything’s on the fucking internet. That’s precisely what it’s there for.’
Ted smiled sagaciously, ‘Remember
1984?
’
‘All too clearly. The year I lost my virginity.’
Ted stopped smiling, ‘You lost your virginity at
ten years
of age?’
Bo looked unremorseful. ‘
I
was two years younger,’ he expanded nonchalantly, ‘than your dear friend Katy Turpin, who kindly plucked my cherry from me.’
Ted’s colour rose slightly. ‘Anyhow,’ he rapidly continued, ‘I didn’t mean the year, I meant the novel.
1984.
We read it at school. The film starred John Hurt.’
Bo shrugged.
‘John
Hurt,
’ Ted reiterated. ‘He was in
The Elephant Man.
He was nominated for an Oscar.’
Bo stared at Ted in scornful bemusement, ‘
The Elephant Man?
What the
fuck
does a film have to do with anything?’
Ted picked up a bendy ruler from his desktop and manipulated it between his two hands, carefully. ‘A
book,
’ he murmured gently, ‘it was a book, originally.’
Bo looked up coolly so that he might make a meal out of inspecting the ceiling fan, but instead found himself blinking into a rather uninspiring strip light. After a couple of seconds he focussed in on Ted again. Ted had suddenly acquired a fluorescent white stripe across his nose.
‘
God,
Rivers,’ in his pique Bo returned temporarily to the reassuring cruelty of formal class lingo, ‘why I ever even gave you the time of day at school still remains a monumental fucking mystery to me.’
Ted said nothing. Bo, he mused, had clearly forgotten the exact nature of their scholastic interactions. Maybe this blip indicated some deep psychological problem involving malfunctioning synapses? Or perhaps –and more probably –the simple act of forgetting helped him to sleep a little sounder during the long, bleak hours of the early morning (although, frankly, Bo did not –he had to admit –look in any way like a man who had ever suffered from a shortage of shut-eye. He was devastatingly vital; spruce as a fine Swiss pine).
On considering Bo’s spruceness –and its implications in terms of any illusions he may’ve clung to relating to the existence of a fair and vengeful deity –Ted’s throat involuntarily contracted and his mind turned briefly to Wesley’s story about the supposed cruelty of ancient Roman pigeon farming. He wondered whether Bo might jump for this scrap –did it qualify as newsworthy? –but before he could speak, Bo spoke himself.
‘So does
he
think it’s frightening that he’s on the internet?’
‘Uh…’ Ted’s brain fizzed. He put down the ruler and fingered his tie, ‘I don’t know. I didn’t ask him. How could I? I only just this second found out about it.’
‘Oh come
on,
Rivers,’ Bo hissed impatiently, ‘after spending well over an hour in his company, even a cretin like you must’ve unearthed
something
printworthy.’
Ted tried to think for a moment, ‘I found out…’
He paused, then spoke, all at once, in a guilty rush, ‘I found out that he lost his hand after he fed it to an owl. But I don’t think you should write about that. It seemed very personal.’
Bo grimaced, ‘Old news. Everybody already
knows
about the sodding hand.’
‘They do?’ Ted felt inexplicably disappointed.
‘What planet are you living on, Rivers? How could you have missed out on all that fuss in the papers early last year about his long-term evasion of Child Support payments?’
‘He has a child?’
‘A girl. Nine years old. Lives in Norfolk on a kind of crazy Fen zoo. Keeps reindeer. A total freak.’
‘And the owl?’
‘That’s where the fucking owl lived, you moron.’
‘Oh.’ Ted mulled this over, then stared up at Bo again, a newly-burnished respectfulness shining in his brass-brown eyes, ‘So what other stuff have you unearthed about him during your investigation?’
Bo shoved his hand into his mac pocket and withdrew a crumpled roll of paper. He tossed it down onto Ted’s desk. Ted reached out, picked it up and unfurled it. The sheet was a computer print-out containing a huge list of biographical facts about Wesley, as well as a selection of articles amassed and reprinted from a variety of sources.
1994,
Ted read randomly,
Wesley (at this juncture operating under the pseudonym Parker Swells – for further information see www.parkerswells.co.uk) completes a B-Tec in Business Studies with honours at the (as then was) North London Polytechnic (for student reports, course details, interviews with significant lecturers etc. see section entitled wes:b-tec/northlondon). He applies for several jobs in the field of banking. It is during this time that he meets a woman called Bethan Ray, becomes sexually involved with her and then steals a priceless antique pond from her garden. He is subsequently charged with theft and mental cruelty.
Ted stopped reading. He frowned then firmly folded the sheet over. ‘But how can you be sure it’s all true?’
‘Of
course
it’s true,’ Bo snatched the sheet back again, ‘and if it isn’t, who gives a fuck? I’m not here,’ he spoke loudly, initially, then lowered his voice slightly as the kettle clicked off in the cloakroom, ‘to tell you about Wesley, or to discuss some pathetic book you might’ve read at school, or to chat about the nature of truth or the underlying problems of technology…’