Mr. In-Between (18 page)

Perhaps the Tattooed Man was like an
idiot savant
on a cosmic scale. The Newtonian dream of the rational mind: to be able, by observation of the position and properties of all particles in the universe in one freeze-framed micro-micro-second, to predict all future states and by informed intervention model them to one's own design.

Perhaps the Tattooed Man had been responsible for the death of Cathy and the child.

Jon's head snapped up. A bright fork of pain ran the length of his spine.

The floor seemed to recede beneath him, the walls to rush away. The world expanded and grew diffuse.

For the first time since adolescence, he seriously considered whether he might be insane and whether the company of madmen might not make madness the norm.

‘It's Jon, isn't it?'

He forced his eyes to focus. First there was a black shape like a gaseous bat hanging in a haze before him. Bit by bit, particle by particle, it solidified into the shape of a priest, like a hole punctured through the white projection of the waiting room, through to the nothingness beneath.

‘You look like a rip in the air,' said Jon.

‘I beg your pardon?' the priest said. It was then that Jon recognised him. It was Chapman, who had consigned Cathy to the grave.

Jon repeated what he'd said.

The priest stooped before him, actually reached out and took Jon's chin in his hand. ‘What on earth happened to you, Jon? Have they seen to you yet? You look like you need looking after.' He took the flutter of Jon's eyelids as a negative. ‘That's the way it is, these days,' he said. ‘Unless you're practically dead on arrival, you have to wait.'

‘I suppose that's why you're here,' Jon heard himself say. ‘Waiting for those who are almost dead on arrival. Holding out for the carrion.'

Chapman's face creased into something not dissimilar to curiosity, although it had about it an intensity that lit his ice-blue eyes predatory yellow. Perhaps it was apprehension, although Jon surmised that he might be hallucinating this. Certainly the angle of the walls seemed subtly to have shifted and somebody seemed to have turned up the lights. Chapman's clothing was of a profound, impossible blackness.

‘Something along those lines,' Chapman said, as if he were not listening to himself, answering a question he had not quite heard or not quite registered. ‘Do you mind if I sit?'

Jon wanted to fall against the priest's chest but was kept rigid by the pole that seemed to have been inserted along his spine. He had to speak through clenched teeth, so what he had to say sounded more like a threat than he had intended. ‘Do you mind,' he asked, ‘if I make a confession?'

Chapman seemed to him as unmoving and observant as something basking on a rock. ‘Are you a Catholic?'

‘Do I have to be?'

‘Not
absolutely,
no. But confession is—' he bit his lower lip, ‘—well, is not a thing to be entered into lightly. It's not a convenient means to vent one's anguish, however profound it might be.'

‘Who says there's any anguish?' His jaw was so stiff that Chapman had to sit uncomfortably close to hear his words. Jon could feel the wiry tickle of the priest's beard touching the skin of his face. ‘I was only asking.'

He could feel priest gazing at him steadily and intently, taking advantage of Jon's immobility. Taking advantage, for all Jon knew, of the twisting, half-glimpsed shapes that danced in the periphery of his vision, for which the black of the priest's garb acted as a convenient screen.

A set of double doors burst open and Jon was able briefly to observe the bustle of doctors and nurses clustering noisily but calmly around a trolley which they proceeded to wheel away to God knew where, there to do God knew what to God knew who to God knew what eventual purpose.

The priest had yet to drop his gaze.

‘Do you think …' muttered Jon. He could not stop the sentence once it had started. It was a sentence whose prepositions were unfamiliar, whose concerns were not his own, whose words were not part of his vocabulary, ‘that as intellectual currency the Newtonian idea of a mechanistic universe is entirely devalued, or do you think that there will come a new theory to unite classical and quantum physics? Does God play dice with the universe?'

The priest shifted a little in his seat, as if unaware that he had witnessed an example of glossolalia. ‘I'm not sure,' he said. ‘I'm not sure it matters. Science speaks a different language from theology.'

‘And if He did,' continued the possessive dybbuk that seemed to have annexed control of Jon, ‘would He win? Or would He accept some handicap to make things fair? And who would calculate the handicap? I mean, who
could
?
Although I am of course willing to accept the
a priori
assumption that God would not cheat. I'm fully happy as far as that's concerned.'

Chapman ran a hand through his hair, which was a little too long to be merely unkempt. It bordered on the intellectually dandyish, an unforgivable affectation. He continued to examine Jon from just beyond the edge of his vision. ‘I find a quantum God rather unsatisfying,' he said, after a long pause for consideration. Jon suspected that it was not the discussion at hand upon which he ruminated. ‘Even a little threatening if the truth were told. On the other hand I'm afraid that the purely mechanistic universe proposed by Newton tends by implication to rather do away with the necessity of the God I pray to and feel to be immanent in the world. If the universe were like a huge spinning top set in motion at the beginning of time and space, left to unwind itself to some inevitable conclusion, then some sticky theological problems arise. So I don't know. I really wouldn't like to say. I'm something of a cosmological agnostic. Does that answer your question?'

Jon forced a dry laugh. ‘And what about the devil?' he said next. ‘What about old Nick?'

The priest placed a hand on Jon's knee and squeezed once. Again Jon suspected an ulterior motive. It was as if Chapman were checking that he was of solid flesh.

‘That old chestnut,' he said.

‘What does that mean?'

Chapman turned and sat back in his chair so that they sat like acquaintances in a cinema, watching the barely maintained order of the casualty ward. Jon could see him only as the vaguest of black hazes in the very corner of his eye, like a blind spot caused by the pressure of a spreading tumour.

‘I'll tell you what I believe,' Chapman suggested. His intonation had changed slightly. He emphasised certain consonants as if pressing them bitterly with his tongue through gritted teeth. ‘I believe that, through the Grace of God's love and the Holy Sacrament, there is no individual in creation who is beyond salvation. However, I'm equally convinced that evil exists in the universe as a power independent of the individual or individuals in which it is manifested.' From some possibly secret pocket he removed a pack of cigarettes, one of which he lit. ‘I believe in the existence of actual, objective, evil,' he continued. ‘As to the nature of that evil, I can only say, with all due caution, that I remain to be convinced by Augustine's thesis that it is merely an absence, the lack of goodness, in the same way darkness is merely the absence of light. From what experience I have …'

‘Oh, yes?' said Jon. ‘What experience might that be?'

The priest's voice hardened further, not unkindly. ‘Nothing special,' he said then corrected himself. ‘Nothing unique. Nothing that every human being has not in some way encountered in their lifetime.'

‘I see,' said Jon, apparently satisfied. He asked the priest if he might have a cigarette. Chapman lit one and placed it in the corner of Jon's mouth.

Someone, somewhere, screamed. The priest tensed and Jon was visited by a passing fancy that it had not been a patient at all, but a young doctor burned out by pressure and nicotine and sleeplessness and amphetamine sulphate, peering into one hideous cavity too many, unable to contain his despair for a moment longer. When whoever it was screamed again, Jon was almost sure: he could even picture the doctor. Less than thirty, white cotton shirt with a soft collar and a desperately cheerful tie. Messy curly hair. He had handfuls of the curtain in his hand, the curtain which frighteningly efficient nurses had drawn about the intimate suffering of whoever it was, of whatever sex, of whatever age that lay dehumanised on the trolley.

Jon felt all the madness he imagined himself to have faked rising within him, as if something genuinely insane had lurked within him all this time and had somehow manoeuvred him into releasing it. Now it was free, he imagined that it would exhaust him, that it would twist the world into distortions so subtle he could not see them, but progressively, by degrees and degrees. With the cunning of many years spent planning and waiting it would manipulate what he saw until he had no choice but to surrender to the greater validity of the malevolent spirit he had assumed to be a creature of his imagination. Something seemed to be gripping him, attempting to throw him from the chair and make him take the priest about the neck and squeeze him until he was dead.

He noticed that the priest was leaning forward. ‘I beg your pardon?' he said.

Jon could barely force out the words, ‘I think I might need help,' he said. ‘I think I'm losing control.'

Chapman leaned closer still. He revealed himself to be other than the man Jon had thought him to be. His hand closed around Jon's wrist and squeezed with something like concern. Jon was astonished to realise that the priest had not been hiding vengeful thoughts at all. He seemed to be seeing the world all wrong. In stepping from it he seemed to have forgotten how properly to interpret it.

‘In what way, Jon?' asked the priest. ‘Please. You can speak to me. You can trust me.'

Jon smoked the cigarette to a stub without moving it from the corner of his clenched lips. ‘Do you know what I am?' he said. ‘Do you have any idea what I am?'

Chapman placed his hand flat across Jon's chest. ‘I believe you need help,' he said.

‘What sort of help is there for someone like me?'

‘Professional help,' the priest said, without removing his hand. ‘Psychiatric help.'

‘Spiritual help?'

The priest paused and regarded him with a scrutiny that defied pretence. ‘Of course,' he said. ‘Of course, if need be.'

Whatever it was in him that he fought, it spurted within him to form an expanding, steely ball of hatred for the priest. It narrowed his eyes to pinpricks. The priest instinctively retreated a little. Jon shifted in the seat and faced him. ‘Do you know what I am?' he hissed, in an invidious whisper. ‘I'm a fucking demon, you charlatan, you cunt.' All this in a rushed whisper so quiet it registered on no other ears, recited like somebody imparting urgent intelligence in a businesslike hurry, as if there was little time and perhaps much danger. ‘I'm a fucking demon,' he repeated. ‘I kill people I've never met who have done me no harm and receive a satisfaction the like of which you wouldn't begin to understand or believe …'

The priest tried to take Jon's wrists in his own: he wore an urgent, determined face. The struggle, which, in the larger chaos of the ward, had gone unnoticed or unremarked, had further dishevelled his hair and knocked his collar askew. ‘Jon,' he insisted firmly. ‘Jon.
Jon.
Jon. Come on. Come on.'

But Jon continued the confessional monologue with abandoned relish. ‘I've been cast out,' he insisted. ‘I've been thrown into limbo. I have been absolved of the responsibility of my own sins. Hell's closed to me. So's heaven. Isn't that freedom, Father Chapman? Haven't I been granted a certain freedom? Do you have any idea how much blood is on my hands?'

The priest persisted. ‘
Jon.
Stop now. Stop. That's enough. No more.' He took Jon by the wrists. ‘Listen to me. The doctors are going to come for you shortly. I expect that they'll keep you in tonight. I'll come back tomorrow and we'll talk. We'll talk then. When you've rested. Please. I promise.'

Chapman stood and began slowly to back away. He fixed Jon with the benevolent intensity of his scrutiny before disappearing through a set of double doors that Jon imagined were reserved for the use of staff. He pictured the priest talking quietly and hurriedly to a harried doctor, the way the doctor first frowned then sagged wearily. As he did, a sense of what he had just done was visited upon him. The hallucinatory aspect of the ward seemed to have faded. He wondered if was true that he had spoken to a priest.

A nurse came for him, helping him into a wheelchair, in which she pushed him to a small, faintly odorous cubicle bordered on three sides by a curtain which hung suspended from a rail by stainless-steel rings.

He was attended first by a nurse who loosened the surgical collar and examined the trauma at back of his neck. She probed him with firm fingers whose businesslike efficiency rather belied her gentleness. When he winced and sucked in a sharp breath, she said softly, ‘I know, I know. It must be ever so sore.' She asked if he would mind removing his clothes. He replied that he would rather not.

She told him that he would make her job a lot easier if he would do as she asked. He looked at the bright light which hung from the sickly green ceiling. He seemed to have surrendered any illusion of control over his own life. He motioned for the nurse to help him slip his shirt from beneath the surgical collar they'd given him. Because movement was causing him some pain it was she who undid the buttons and slipped the shirt from his shoulders. He helped as best he could by slowly wriggling free his shoulders. She took a half-step back. She looked at him for a moment. He could not hang his head, although he wished to.

She excused herself and stepped between the curtains. ‘I'll only be a moment.'

She was lying or perhaps mistaken. Jon listened to her low murmur, its hurried insistence. After the passage of a very few minutes—remarkably few, he supposed, for a busy casualty ward—two new nurses slipped through the orange curtains to attend him. He didn't see the first nurse again. They were accompanied equally scant minutes later by an undoubtedly personable but somewhat condescending man in rather pretentious half-moon spectacles whose very nature—whose very transparent
approachability—
bespoke stratospheric superiority. He spoke with academically soothing depersonalisation. ‘Mr Bennet,' he said. From a breast pocket he removed a disposable pen. He leaned in so that Jon could hear the in- and out-take of his breath. ‘Let's have a look at you, shall we?' He spoke with the relaxing, intimate burr of a Scottish Anglican.