He straightened up and pressed the wide silver button on the hand dryer, activating it.
‘Hold the wound under here,’ he advised, ‘to dry it out. I’m just going for a slash…’ He disappeared into a cubicle, but didn’t close the door.
Jo walked over to the dryer. She held her hands under it. Her wrist. The wrist was bleeding, the blood still mixing and diluting with what remained of the tap water.
It was stinging now. A good two hours since she’d cut it. Had tried to start her car. Had tried to flee. Had failed, abysmally –
Damp in the pistons
Dried them
Dripping blood
Snivelling
Sat inside there for an hour
The pain singing
Motherfucking Mini
‘Remember how I told you…’ Shoes’ voice emerged affably from the cubicle, over the splash of urine hitting the pan, the purr of the machine, her own breathing, ‘that I had your name tattooed on my…’
‘Pardon?’
Shoes popped his head around the door, halting his flow of urine to order.
‘My arse. Remember I told you earlier how I had your name tattooed on it? Do you remember that?’
Jo held her slashed arm under the dryer. The cubicle was at an exact halfway point between the handbasins and the door. She felt the wounds instinctively tightening as the blood released its moisture. They weren’t as bad as all… as all… saw much worse every half-hour on her training stints in Casualty.
She nodded. She did remember about the name, her name, tattooed on…
‘I do remember,’ she said –
Too left-field for any kind of reason
‘So what d’you make of it?’ he continued smiling.
Had he been drinking, maybe?
Silly question
‘I didn’t…’ Jo frowned, ‘I wasn’t…’
‘Well I’m currently in a good position to prove it,’ Shoes said, ‘would you like that, Josephine Bean? Would you like to see the proof of the pudding?’
‘
Uh…
’ Jo blinked.
‘Would you?’
This is just silly
Need a nurse’s curt voice
Need to call on all those old…
Defences
All that…
‘Go ahead,’ she said. Utterly obeisant.
‘Well you’ll have to excuse…’
Shoes indicated delightedly to his lower regions (not so much an excuse as an outright celebration), finished urinating, shook himself clean, hitched up his trousers –but not fully, just to the base of his sumptuous shudder of buttocks –emerged from the cubicle and walked casually towards her.
He was in an awkward state of semi-arousal (yet seemed to find no embarrassment in it), but that wasn’t the worst part. He had… he…
Every kind of genital piercing known to man
And then some
Balls like two pin-cushions. Punched and peppered. Sleepered and studded. The shaft a complex silver lattice-work, base to tip.
On his belly –
That belly
That magnificent tub of manly blubber –
Hanging, swaying
Regal as an obese bantam after a henhouse seduction -
– she saw (among the many tattoos, one in
particular,
a badly-drawn hangman; still pink with new-infection: the gallows completed, the rope, the body –the head, the torso, the legs and the feet –everything, in fact, but the right hand, which was missing.
Underneath, two words, seven letters and five –
G – – D – I – /S – – S
Jo stared at these letters, her mind struggling to make sense of it –
Why am I…
How thoroughly…
‘That’s not it.’ Shoes looked down at himself, relishing his work-of-art status, completely at ease with it. He turned around and pointed.
His arse was bare at the back –not just naked, but without any notable embellishments except for a further two words, written in a faded blue ink at the precise point where his momentous buttocks joined into the base of his spine: YOUR NAME
Jo stared at these two words for a few seconds –
Your name
Shoes peeked over his shoulder, ‘Get it? I have
your…?
’
Jo nodded. She wasn’t quite smiling.
Shoes yanked up his trousers (they were elastic-waisted –his penis caught on the waistband and flipped high before being tightly enveloped).
‘See you back in the bar,
gorgeous,
’ he whispered, clicking his fingers, swishing his hips, and sashaying pertly away from her.
Ted was struggling valiantly to convince a twenty-four hour glazier that it would be worth his while driving over from Benfleet (on the night of his Twelfth Wedding Anniversary, as luck would have it) to undertake the pointless-seeming task of installing a mirror, while Arthur (a prodigiously ironic expression tightening one corner of his lips and feeding through, automatically, to the outer edge of his adjacent eye) tapped away diligently at the virus-ridden computer.
The agency lights had been cautiously turned off again (a detail which hardly aided Arthur’s quiet endeavours) but he was a competent touch-typist and seemed a skilful technician –if not exactly the genius that Wesley had proclaimed him.
The room was coolly bathed by a spooky-seeming, almost-undulating, semi-aquatic blue-grey glow (generated, in its entirety, by the defective hardware), yet both men seemed quite at their ease floating around inside this dreamy liquidity.
‘Lucky you kept the back-up disks to hand,’ Art murmured, once Ted’s abortive-sounding conversation had finally concluded (Ted saw his words emerging in a series of shimmering air pockets, which trickled from his mouth and then hung, vibrating gently, just above his head), ‘there’s nothing too bad gone on here, really. It’s only a question of…’ he tapped. He tapped again. ‘… feeding it all in. Setting it all up again. You should let me show you how, then you could easily do it yourself next time.’
Ted paddled over and stood at his shoulder.
‘There won’t be a next time,’ he gurgled.
He was certain of it.
‘I don’t know how much general information you were keeping on the desktop…’ Arthur mused, still tapping.
‘A whole stack of it,’ Ted affirmed, not appreciating –at first –the negative implications of Arthur’s musings –
Gone
All gone
Drifted clean away…
‘You didn’t copy any of it onto a spare
floppy
by any…?’
He glanced up. He clocked Ted’s expression –
Drowning
He looked down again.
Tap tap
‘I’m dead in the water,’ Ted pronounced miserably.
Arthur rapidly switched tack, ‘So will the glazier be coming over later?’
‘Much later. He’s taking his wife out to dinner. It’s their wedding anniversary.’
Arthur grimaced, sympathetically, ‘And the carpenter? For the door?’
‘That’d be Dewi. I left him a message…’
‘
Great,
’ Arthur suddenly exclaimed, ‘your mouse is finally up and running, now we’re
really
getting somewhere…’
‘But I have the distinct feeling,’ Ted continued, ‘that he might be otherwise engaged this evening.’
Tap tap…
Tap tap tap…
‘Why’s that, then?’ Arthur glanced up distractedly.
‘He’s the big fellow who clouted Wesley.’
‘
Ah.
’
‘In love with Katherine. Works mainly in flooring. Did these floors…’ Ted tapped his foot (the sound held back, trapped in liquid, then echoing eerily, seconds later), ‘did them rather beautifully, in actual fact.’
Ted leaned across Arthur’s shoulder and inspected the screen more closely. ‘The worst part,’ he said, still sounding suitably traumatised by the whole experience, ‘was the way the information just kept on… kept on
spurting.
There was this real sense of… of viciousness… a
redness.
Then everything just went
click.
Dead.’
‘I think you might’ve…’ Arthur suddenly reached down to his feet and felt around blindly, ‘I think you might’ve unplugged it, inadvertently. The socket’s extremely overloaded down there. You should definitely consider getting a second adaptor…’ he straightened up again, ‘… but we’re working through it. Don’t worry. And it all seems pretty much… pretty much…
uh…
’
He was frowning at the screen. An arbitrary snatch of debris was floating past them;
HOUSE FOR SALE: Semi-detached, quiet cul-de-sac, all local amenities, three bedrooms, no chain
Then another –
UNUSED GASOMETER for Auction: 5th February; Set in 2 1/2 acres. Road access available. No planning permission as yet for full residency. Suit artist as studio or other
Then –
Splat!
Ted blanched as a man –a square-headed soldier –beamed out of the screen at them with seven giant marbles packed under his foreskin (an eighth –held jauntily –between his thumb and forefinger).
‘
Gracious,
’ Arthur murmured, ‘I guess that’s one way of keeping active during those long winter nights in Kosovo.’
‘It’s not… it belongs
Ted couldn’t muster up the moral fibre.
Tap tap tap…
Tap
‘If the virus arrived in an email attachment…’ Arthur paused, speculatively, ‘you should definitely put in some work to try and stop it getting any further.’
‘It wasn’t an email,’ Ted said.
Arthur turned sharply, mid-procedure (a series of ripples spreading out dramatically behind him), ‘You downloaded this thing from the web?’
Ted rubbed an uneasy shoe –still spotlessly clean –onto the back of its opposite calf.
‘From a Wesley site, actually,’ he admitted, feeling himself, his surroundings, the
atmosphere,
mysteriously dry up.
Arthur almost smiled.
‘How very…’
He shrugged –
Appropriate
He didn’t seem shocked (Ted was relieved to note –I mean there were
rules
in this business, weren’t there? And not just Following rules, either, but fundamental codes of common… of common…)
‘So which site was it, exactly?’
Arthur was back at work already. Ted frowned, ‘I thought there was only…’
Tap tap…
Hiatus
‘Nope. There are several.’
… Tap
‘The main one, then. The big one. The one all the Followings use, and the newspaper people…’
‘Behindlings.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Behindlings.’
‘Yes…
Yes,
precisely.’
Arthur grabbed a pen and scribbled an address down. He showed it to him.
‘This lot are notoriously shonky.’
Ted stared at it, frowning. He shook his head.
Arthur adjusted the pen and began writing out another.
‘Nope,’ Ted said, grabbing the pen himself, the paper, pressing down on the desk and writing out the address he’d used in bold, clear lettering.
‘Here.’
He pushed it over.
Arthur took the pad, glanced at the address, shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, pushing it away, ‘you must’ve got that wrong.’
Ted half-smiled, ‘Which is
exactly
what Wesley said when the police questioned him about it earlier.’
Arthur twisted around on his stool –all pretence of indifference suddenly gone, ‘I don’t understand. Did Wesley put you up to this? Because please don’t think for a
minute
that you can fuck with me and get away with it.’
He was prodigiously emphatic.
Ted stepped back, nervously. It hadn’t dawned on him… It hadn’t occurred to him that this person might be… I mean after the interlude with the would-be doctor and everything…
‘Don’t be frightened,’ Arthur said (even his tone –its demand for calm –seeming intimidating).
‘I’m not…’ Ted stuttered –
Think of the pond
The lilies
The hiss of bullrushes
‘And I’m not
wrong,
either. The local constabulary accessed the site this afternoon –probably round about the same time I did –and they were burned by it too. That’s what they said.’
This site?’
Arthur held up the pad again. He pointed.
‘Yes. I think they had a suspicion that Wesley himself might be behind it. But he obviously wasn’t by the way he…’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Arthur snapped, ‘this site has absolutely
nothing
to do with Wesley.’
Ted paused, took stock, then shook his head, slowly. ‘I’m not being ridiculous,’ he discurred, ‘and it has
everything
to do with him.’
Arthur took this gentle rebuff on the chin. ‘So what did Wesley have to say about the site being down?’ he asked, reviving his sympathetic side, softening his tone slightly.
‘He said there had to be a mistake. Same as you did. And he seemed…’ Ted paused, ‘I’m not very…’ he scratched his head, ‘I’m not terribly
familiar
with all this Wesley… all the rules and the etiquette and everything…’
‘That’s why he chose you, presumably,’ Arthur mumbled.
Chose?
Ted considered this concept, momentarily.
To be chosen
‘Do you at least know
why
the police were visiting him?’ Arthur was feeling around inside his pocket for his phone. ‘Was it about the site or about the Loiter? Did he mention?’
Ted seemed to experience some difficulty in answering.
Arthur found his phone, tried to turn it on –realised that it was
turned on already –swore –then attempted to call up his text messages.
‘It’s
important,
Ted…’
Had to use the name
‘Was it about the competition, perhaps?’
‘No. No it was… it was nothing…’
Ted watched on as Arthur jabbed away at his phone, unsuccessfully.