Mr. In-Between (23 page)

It took over an hour to walk to Andy's. There were silent streets then the brief, flickering bacchanalia of backstreet nightclubs and snooker halls ejecting customers to the harsh mercy outside. He saw the Greek, Chinese and Asian owners of late-night take-aways steeling themselves for the racial and physical humiliations that accompanied their nightly commerce. He was affected by their ability to do so. He stepped over pools of vomit, dogshit, discarded chips and through at least one violent altercation between three men around which hovered four women of varying age screaming encouragement. He passed between two of the combatants even as one brought down a broken bottle towards the face of the other, slipping between them as effortlessly as smoke through a crack in a door. He did not seem to have disturbed the tableau in any way. He was filled with a sense of incalculable well-being.

His cigarettes had become stale, like relics preserved by desert tombs with crumble when exposed to the air. After passing through the night-club district, he paused to queue at a twenty-four-hour petrol station. A group of young drunks in off-the-peg suits or jeans and expensively distressed leather jackets loudly jostled one another. The last three or four of them turned to taunt a gangling young man in army-surplus parka and long dreadlocks and his similarly attired girlfriend, who wore orange tights and purple boots. She managed, somehow, to look both overweight and undernourished. She and her boyfriend fought to ignore the drunks in front. He busied himself constructing a miserly, thin roll-up. She gazed glassily ahead. A car drew up, uncomfortably loud, repetitious music pulsating from its windows, a sampled drum break and a one-line chorus. From the car emerged a man in a suit he should have been unable to afford. He scanned the queue, the proud angle at which he held his head defying comment, and pushed in front of the young black man who stood directly before Jon. The young black turned and expressed his exasperation not at Jon, but at whoever was behind him. One of the drunken young men in front unzipped his fly, appeared for a moment to be unable to find his penis, then pissed in a high arc which terminated on the wall of the garage shop outside which they queued. His friends laughed and scattered and one expressed his approval by delivering a rich fart. The dreadlocked couple exchanged a brief but eloquent glance.

Presently Jon bought his cigarettes and moved on. The streets became darker, the lamp-posts smaller and more infrequent. The pavement was bucked and cracked by erstwhile frosts, and in the front gardens of identical houses lay the rusting hulks of cars and the skeletal remains of motorcycles. Now and again a security light blinked on as he walked by, startled awake by his passing. He passed patches of scrubby grassland where had been erected climbing frames and roundabouts, decayed and vandalised now into obsolescence, although one such fractured construction doubled as a convenient bench for a gang of luminously moon-faced children of indeterminate sex who silently shared between them a bag of glue and a couple of inexpertly rolled joints.

A man hunched deep into his jacket collided with Jon's shoulder as he passed. Jon could not be sure if the action was deliberate. Other than this he saw no one, although he sometimes heard voices emanating from the houses he passed, and twice a distant scream that might have been rollicking teenagers, and equally likely something worse. Once he was disturbed from his reverie by an aeroplane passing so low overhead he feared it might crash; he twisted beneath it as it passed, and wondered at the everyday acceptance of so unlikely a thing.

It was two thirty a.m. when he stopped outside Andy's house. No lights were on. He watched the house's blank windows for long minutes before admitting that Andy was not yet home. Andy kept new hours now.

Jon looked briefly left and right, then bent at the knees and folded himself into his coat, a localised pool of shadow in the deeper shadow thrown by a domestic hedge.

He might have drifted off to sleep. His calves screamed with cramp when the car disturbed him. He bit his tongue against crying out, held back his breath. The car was a fifteen-year-old Jaguar, whose bodywork was in need of some attention although its engine was mellow and smooth.

Three men emerged from it, two with a small degree of difficulty and one with a great deal of protestation from the tiny space at the rear. All wore suits. One of the men was Andy, although clean-shaven and considerably thinner. He wore a suit well, although even from across the street Jon could detect the faint trace of an overdose of aftershave. The man emerging from the back seat was Derek Gibbon, his suit so well fitted to his odd frame that clearly he employed a skilful tailor. The third man, who seemed to take an age to wholly unfurl himself from the car, like a bat stretching its leathery wings, was Olly, the driver whose face Jon had slashed.

They conversed in throaty whispers, softly laughing. Andy produced and jingled a set of house keys. Olly patted his breast pocket. Gibbon murmured something to him and they laughed as they entered the house.

Jon watched the downstairs lights come on, then heard the faint sound of a stereo or television.

He sat, took in the longed-for breath and stretched out his legs across the pavement. His ankles hung over the gutter. He massaged blood into his thighs while smoking a cigarette. Then he stood and approached the house. He stopped outside the living-room window. There was no gap in the curtains through which to peer. He put his ear to the cold glass, keeping a routinely watchful eye on the street. He heard voices and occasional laughter above the music. (It was American rap, for which Andy had previously no taste and which Jon could not help considering juvenile. Olly liked it. It was a big thing with Olly.) He could not hear what was being said, or guess what was being laughed at, although the laughter had a particular tone that he recognised. It was the secret, pornographic laughter of men alone late at night. Women were inevitably its core subject. Jon found himself wondering what Cathy would have thought if she could overhear this, overhear her husband laughing in precisely that tone. He wondered at the humiliation and shock she would have suffered, at the embarrassment and shame for not being able to stop listening. He winced for her. He hurt in his stomach.

He felt the subtle vibrations that testified to somebody approaching the window. He slipped back into the shadows and skirted the borders of the house with neither ostentatious caution nor casual confidence. He assumed that he would not be heard in much the same way that a fakir, wandering across a bed of hot coals, assumes that he will not burn.

He looked in through the kitchen window. Through the window into the kitchen he had bought as a desperate gift.

It was the same kitchen, spotless and ordered and new, but on the door of the fridge, the very fridge above which he had stashed his coat as Cathy and her friends sat at that very table discussing the bottle of Southern Comfort he had bought, was pinned a pornographic calendar. It hung from a small magnet in the shape of an upper case A.

He strode with a firmer stride to the front of the house. Pausing only to light another cigarette, he pounded three times on the door.

He felt it go quiet inside. He felt the three men exchange glances. If Andy knew these men well enough to socialise with them, then he knew by now that an unannounced visitor at such an hour was not an event in which to rejoice. He hoped Andy was scared. He hoped Andy's eyes followed Olly's hand as it slid inside his jacket and for luck briefly touched the butt of the small pistol he kept there, pearl-handled and ostentatious. He hoped Andy had never been more scared than he was just at that moment, that frozen and indivisible instant.

One of them turned the music down. He heard voices: one exclamatory, another monosyllabic, voicing consent with a muffled grunt. Olly explaining to Andy what to do. Andy agreeing, pale-faced and desperate to piss. He heard the creak of floorboards, two men walking in careful time attempting to sound like one. Stopping.

‘Who is it?' Andy's voice. Half an octave deeper than usual.

In the distance a siren.

Jon savoured the idea of Olly and Andy exchanging a glance of terrible apprehension.

Then he said, ‘Open the door. It's Jon.'

Even as he heard Andy exhale with relief, he could sense Olly tensing, Andy's hand moving automatically to the latch, Olly's cool hand closing about his wrist. Andy's eyes widening suddenly, remembering what he had been told about Jon.

What had he been told about Jon?

Jon scuffed his feet. ‘Are you going to let me in or what?'

Andy opened the door. Olly stepped from behind it, retreating a step in order for it to open wide enough to admit him. The light reflected on his spectacles so that Jon could not see his eyes. Although Olly's eyes were not Jon's concern, this did not make him comfortable.

Andy had not only lost fat but added muscle. His neck was beginning to disappear into his shoulders. His jawline had become square and firm. Jon hated to look at him. He stepped aside, allowing Jon to squeeze past his bulk and the cloying Paco Rabanne and into the house. As he entered he pretended to gaze through the glare on the lenses of Olly's spectacles, right through to the delicate orbs beneath. Jon smiled and Olly took an automatic, precautionary step back. His fingers went briefly to the scar that traced one side of his face. Jon stopped for a moment. He gazed at Olly from under his brow and felt his mouth split wide in a feral and predatory grin.

‘How's your face?' he said. ‘The smile suits you.'

The reflection on Olly's spectacles shifted as he tilted his head in sardonic acknowledging silence.

Jon laid an ushering hand on Andy's shoulder. He felt him tense, as if his flesh crawled.

‘I think Olly had best wait out here,' Jon said.

Olly opened his mouth. He was silenced by Jon's intervention. ‘He probably needs the toilet anyway. Don't you need the toilet, Olly?'

Olly went half-way to raising an index finger. Before he could reply Jon had guided Andy through to the living room and closed the door. Against the far wall stood Gibbon. If it would have been possible to get further away from Jon whilst being, as obviously commanded, in the same room, he clearly would have done so. Although he attempted a casual demeanour, a can of Stella Artois clasped in one ginger paw, it looked as if he was trying to push himself through the wall and into the garden. Jon rather liked Gibbon.

He nodded. ‘Hello again, Derek.'

Gibbon lifted his can in salute. Jon could see that his hand was trembling. ‘How you doing, Jon?'

‘Not bad,' he said. ‘Yourself?'

‘Soldiering on,' said Gibbon. ‘You know. Like you do.'

Jon agreed with a sympathetic nod. ‘I'll tell you what, Derek,' he said. ‘How about popping into the kitchen and making us all a mug of tea? There's a TV in there, I think.' For the first time he addressed Andy. ‘There is a TV in there, isn't there?'

Andy said, ‘You know there is.'

Jon knew there was.

‘So you might find some late-night sport if you're lucky.'

‘Right,' said Gibbon, raising the can. ‘Yeah. Right. Nice one.' He began to shuffle away.

‘You can leave the beers,' said Jon, ‘if you like.'

Yeah, right,' repeated Gibbon. He was muttering ‘nice one' even as he closed the kitchen door behind him.

Jon waited until he heard the television being turned on, the distant, primary coloured blare of chatline adverts. Then he turned to Andy. ‘Sit down.'

Andy looked back at him. Jon realised that his pupils were too wide for the one hundred and fifty watt glow in which they stood. He walked to the coffee table, picked up a can of beer, sparked it, and took a couple of sips. ‘Sit down,' he repeated.

Andy sat down. He put his hands in his lap in a curiously infantile gesture.

Jon opened the living-room door. ‘You can come in, now, Olly,' he said, ‘but only if you promise to be good.'

Olly stalked in on daddy-long-leg limbs. In the middle of the room he stopped. His hand went for his jacket. Jon looked briefly to Andy, who clearly was quite aware of what Olly kept tucked away in there.

‘Never mind that,' said Jon with indulgence. ‘You keep hold of your spud gun. I know how much it means to you.'

As the gun hand froze, then began slowly to withdraw, Jon watched not Olly but Andy.

‘Gibbon's making a cup of tea,' said Jon and inclined his head.

Olly shook his narrow head and stalked through to the kitchen.

Jon drained the last of the beer and opened another. Andy sat in an armchair gazing dead ahead, unblinking. With exaggerated
laissez-faire,
Jon dropped his weight on to the sofa opposite him, withdrawing the cigarettes from his breast pocket. He offered one to Andy, shrugged at the refusal, and lit one for himself. He drew deep on it. He put his feet on the coffee table.

‘I expect you think Olly's pretty fucking hard,' he suggested, exhaling. ‘I bet the first time he showed you his gun you thought he was Charles fucking Bronson.' He leaned forward confidentially. ‘I'll tell you something. Remember that weird kid with the bowl haircut who always stank of stale piss? Remember we caught him pulling the legs off spiders with one hand and tossing off with the other? That's Olly. That's what Olly is. He's one of those kids grown up.' He raised his eyebrows. ‘Do you know what I mean?'

Andy shifted and grunted. He gazed dead ahead as if scanning the horizon for distant land.

‘Olly's all right,' he said. ‘He's a good bloke.'

Jon tapped ash on the edge of the table. Andy noted the disrespect.

‘He'd cut you open for fifty pence, Andy,' he insisted. ‘The man's a prick. The man doesn't deserve the breath he draws. He doesn't deserve to be allowed through your door.'

Andy muttered, ‘It's
my
fucking house.'

Jon laughed and sat back. He spilled ash down his lap and lazily brushed it away.